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NUCLEAR
A weekly summary of international news
Nuclear chickens come home
Leading the Weapons Hunt in Iraq
Israel seeks to avoid Middle East disarmament fest
U.S. and South Korea Try to Redefine Their Alliance
U.S. Explores Protection of Airliners From Missiles
A Very Special Relationship
MILITARY
Pakistan seizes arms cache hidden on Afghan border
Iraq's future
Cuba Says Guantanamo Prison a Concentration Camp
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Suspicious Passengers Questioned In France
Leaks Probe Is Gathering Momentum
Anthrax terror
Prioritizing bioterror defenses
Fight terrorism with intelligence, not might
ENERGY AND OTHER
An Energy Source That Never Winds Down
ACTIVISTS
Israel troops fire on peace rally
Her path to peace is in harm's way
-------- NUCLEAR
A weekly summary of international news relevant to the nuclear energy industry.
WNA News Briefing
23 December 2003
http://www.world-nuclear.org/nb/nb03/latestnews.htm
[NB03.51-1] Finland: A contract to construct a European Pressurised Water Reactor (EPR) at the Olkiluoto site has been signed between utility Teollisuuden Voima Oy (TVO) and a Framatome ANP and Siemens AG consortium. Framatome ANP will supply the nuclear island for the turnkey project, while Siemens will supply the turbine island. The estimated overall cost of constructing the Olkiluoto-3 reactor is put at some EUR3 billion (US$3.7 billion). The reactor will have a capacity of some 1600 MWe and is scheduled to start commercial operation in the first half of 2009. The next phase in the project is the submission of the construction licence application to the Council of State. (TVO, 18 December; AREVA, 18 December; see also News Briefing 03.47-3)
[NB03.51-2] Namibia: The Rossing uranium mine is scheduled to close by 2007 under phase 1 of the project. Extensive studies on a phase 2 extension of the open pit are now complete, but the current uranium price, exchange rate and the operation's production cost need to improve significantly before a commitment to the second phase is made. Unless significant improvements in the mine's cost and income position have been reached by mid-2004, the mine could even close earlier than 2007, Rossing warned. (Rossing Uranium Ltd, 17 December; see also News Briefing 03.11-4)
[NB03.51-3] A US District Court judge rejected a request from Global Nuclear Services & Supply Ltd (GNSS) for a preliminary injunction to stop Russia's Techsnabexport (Tenex) from terminating its HEU feed contract with GNSS. GNSS wanted the court to require Tenex to continue supplying it with HEU feed while the contract case undergoes arbitration in Sweden. The judge ruled that the contract between GNSS and Tenex falls under Russian sovereignty and is not subject to legal jurisdiction in the US. GNSS plans to file an appeal the decision. (Nuclear Market Review, 19 December, p2; Ux Weekly, 22 December, p4; see also News Briefing 03.49-6)
[NB03.51-4] US: Uranium hexafluoride (UF6) gas leaked from a chemical process line for almost an hour at ConverDyn's Metropolis conversion facility on 22 December. UF6 gas contains low levels of radioactivity. No injuries were reported at the plant, but three people offsite were taken to hospital. 25 people offsite were temporarily evacuated, while another 75 people had to remain in their homes. The facility will remain offline until the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) determines that it can safely resume operation. (Ux Weekly, 22 December, p4; see also News Briefing 03.38-2)
[NB03.51-5] Russia: TVEL Corp has signed a US$200 million contract to supply Slovakian nuclear power plants with nuclear fuel. The contract covers fuel supplies starting in October 2005 through to 2010. (Nuclear Market Review, 19 December, p2; see also News Briefing 03.47-2)
[NB03.51-6] US: Nuclear generating capacity is expected to increase 0.2% from 98.7 GW in 2002 to 102.6 GW in 2025, according to a preliminary 2004 forecast by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The forecast includes 3.9 GW from uprates of existing plants. The EIA still predicts there will be no new nuclear reactors built before 2025. In last year's forecast, the EIA predicted that nuclear capacity would reach a peak of 100.4 GW in 2006 before declining to 99.6 GW in 2025. Total US consumption of electricity is expected to increase from 3675 billion kWh in 2002 to 5485 billion kWh in 2025, while carbon dioxide emissions are forecast to rise from 5729 million tonnes in 2002 to 8142 million tonnes in 2025. The EIA's final forecast will be published in January. The preliminary forecast is available on the EIA's website (www.eia.doe.gov). (Nucleonics Week, 18 December, p7; Ux Weekly, 22 December, p4; see also News Briefing 02.48-5)
[NB03.51-7] US: The Catawba-1 nuclear power reactor has been named as the sole unit to be considered by Duke Energy for burning four mixed-oxide (MOX) fuel lead test assemblies produced from surplus weapons-grade plutonium. The company had originally applied for permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to burn the four test assemblies at either its Catawba or McGuire nuclear power plants, but in September requested that its application for the tests to be limited to the Catawba plant. The licence, if granted, will be in the form of an amendment to Catawba's existing operating licence. Duke hopes to have the licence amendment in place by the end of 2004. If the tests are successful, batch loading of the MOX fuel could start at both the Catawba and McGuire plants in late 2008 or 2009. Initially, about 20% of the reload will be MOX fuel, but this could be increased to 40% as the company gains operating experience with MOX. (NucNet News, 335/03, 17 December; see also News Briefing 03.35-12)
[NB03.51-8] Canada: Commercial production has recommenced at Bruce Power's Bruce A-4 nuclear power reactor, Cameco Corp announced. Jerry Grandey, Cameco's president and CEO, said 'this is a significant milestone, bringing clean, reliable electricity to Canada's largest electricity market and another step toward achieving our vision as Cameco grows in the nuclear energy business'. Cameco indirectly holds a 31.6% interest in Bruce Power, which leases and operates the Bruce nuclear power plants. (Cameco, 22 December; see also News Briefing 03.46-6)
[NB03.51-9] US: Shareholders in British Energy (BE) have approved the sale of the company's 50% interest in AmerGen Energy Co LLC to Exelon Generating Co LLC. The deal - which will give BE some US$277 million in cash - is expected to close within the next few days. The proceeds are expected to be used to repay outstanding sums made available to BE under the UK government credit facility. (British Energy, 22 December; see also News Briefing 03.50-4) Meanwhile, the unplanned outage at BE's Heysham A nuclear power plant will have to be extended from mid-December until sometime in the first quarter of 2004. Both reactors at the plant shut down on 28 October following failure of a seawater cooling pipe within the turbine hall. Following inspections, BE has decided to extend the outage in order to replace further pipework. (Financial Times, 17 December, p2; Nucleonics Week, 18 December, p8; see also News Briefing 03.47-4)
[NB03.51-10] Japan: A further one-year delay in the construction of the Shimane-3 nuclear power reactor has been announced by Chugoku Electric Power after the company submitted a modification of its original application to the Ministry of Economy, Trade & Industry (METI). Construction of the 1375 MWe advanced boiling water reactor (ABWR) will not now start until March 2005, with commercial operation of the unit now scheduled for March 2011. (NucNet News, 338/03, 19 December; see also News Briefing 03.13-8)
[NB03.51-11] Armenia: The possibility of constructing a new reactor at the Metsamor nuclear power plant in order to meet growing energy demand in the country up to 2020 is being considered by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). IAEA specialists and Armenian energy companies have conducted research, which is expected to be published soon. (Ux Weekly, 22 December, p5; see also News Briefing 02.44-11)
[NB03.51-12] US: The barge carrying the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) from the decommissioned Connecticut Yankee nuclear power plant began its journey to the Barnwell Disposal Facility on 18 December. The barge will travel down the Savannah River to the Savannah River Site, where the RPV will be transferred onto a heavy haul transporter for shipment to Barnwell, where it is expected to arrive on 1 January 2004. (SpentFUEL, 22 December, p4; see also News Briefing 03.50-10)
[NB03.51-13] Iran signed Additional Protocol to its safeguards agreement under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iran's representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Akbar Salehi, signed the Additional Protocol on 18 December at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. The document - which allows the IAEA to conduct more intrusive inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities and to conduct inspections at much shorter notice - must still be ratified by Iran's parliament. (Financial Times, 19 December, p13; SpentFUEL, 22 December, p3; Ux Weekly, 22 December, p5; see also News Briefing 03.50-15)
[NB03.51-14] Libya has agreed to disclose and dismantle its programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) after nine months of secret negotiations, the US and UK said in a surprise announcement. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has agreed to allow international inspectors to verify and eliminate any existing programmes. The country has also agreed to join treaties curbing nuclear and chemical weapons and to destroy all missiles with a range greater than 300km. Libya reportedly admitted it was developing a nuclear fuel cycle intended to support nuclear weapons development. The country's nuclear programme was said to be more advanced than was previously believed. Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), announced plans to visit Libya next week to 'kick start' inspections in the country. He said the inspections would help define what actions would be needed to eliminate any nuclear weapons programme. (Daily Telegraph, 20 December, p1; Financial Times, 20 December, p1; International Herald Tribune, 23 December, p1; see also News Briefing 03.46-14)
[NB03.51-15] France: The European Commission (EC) has ruled that Electricite de France (EdF) must repay the French government EUR1.2 billion (US$1.5 billion) in 'unjustified operating aid'. However, the EC approved the government's proposal to cancel EdF's unlimited state borrowing guarantee by the end of 2004 and its plan to reform the pension plan for the French electricity and gas sector. In a separate decision, the EC said it would also take the Italian government to the European Court of Justice for restricting foreign investment in energy companies, referring to a 2001 decree that was tailored to preventing EdF from controlling Italian utility Edison. (Nucleonics Week, 18 December, p1; see also News Briefing 02.28-8)
[NB03.51-16] A decision on the siting of an experimental nuclear fusion reactor has been postponed by the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) project. Officials from the countries involved in the project - the USA, China, Russia, South Korea, the European Union (EU) and Japan - were divided on whether to build the reactor at Cadarache, France or Rokkasho, Japan. The matter is likely to be deferred until mid-February 2004. (International Herald Tribune, 22 December, p2; Ux Weekly, 22 December, p6; see also News Briefing 03.49-15)
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear chickens come home
Praful Bidwai
December 26, 2003
Hindustan Times
http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_508741,00120002.htm
When the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government detonated a series of nuclear explosions five-and-a-half years ago, supporters of the Bomb celebrated. They rationalised the sudden reversal of India's policy of 50 years' standing - decided upon in dark secrecy in coordination with the RSS and without the promised strategic review. They also devoutly prayed that Pakistan would follow suit. Their perverse logic - Pakistan's blasts would 'rationalise' India's tests.
Home Minister L.K. Advani, to the strategic hawks' chorus, taunted, teased and chided Pakistan into demonstrating its nuclear prowess. On May 18, he belligerently threatened it with a 'pro-active' Kashmir policy in the changed 'geo-strategic' environment. On May 28, Islamabad obliged him. The strategic hawks' apologia and rationalisations duly followed. Pakistan 'needs' nukes for 'security'. It already had the capability; it only brought it out. (So the 'capability' moved from the laboratory to the battlefield, with likelihood of use.) Nuclear weapons would induce 'stability', 'maturity' and sobriety into India-Pakistan's volatile relations. (So that's why Kargil happened!)
This dream scenario left no room for proliferation, leaks, strategic miscalculation, for deterrence breaking down in crises. Reality repeatedly dented these rosy assumptions: witness the nuclear brinkmanship and threat-mongering in 1999 and, more scarily, in the 10-month-long eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation last year. There isn't, can't be, a stable India-Pakistan nuclear-deterrent equation. A holocaust here is likelier than anywhere else in the world.
Now we know 'mature' Pakistan is deeply implicated in selling its nuclear secrets. In the Nineties, it exchanged its uranium centrifuge know-how for North Korea's Nodong missile. Pakistan's stamp is marked on Iran's search for nuclear capability and Libya's attempt to acquire the Bomb. According to well-documented reports in The New York Times and the Washington Post, at the centre of these shady transactions is the Father of the Pakistani Bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who heads Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) and his close aides, Mohammed Farooq, Yasin Chohan and Sayeed Ahmad.
These revelations follow Iran's disclosures about its uranium enrichment programme to the International Atomic Energy Agency and Libya's talks with US and British officials before declaring that it would abandon its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programme. Under western pressure, Pakistan detained these scientists and allowed them to be interrogated by US and European officials. Khan's interrogation reportedly uncovered evidence linking KRL with Iran's 1987 purchase of centrifuge designs from Pakistan. Libya's primitive nuclear programme too had 'common elements' with past patterns of technology leaks from Pakistan.
Confronted with this evidence, the Pakistani government itself began interrogating Farooq and Chohan five weeks ago. It confirms they are being 'debriefed', but denies Khan has been interrogated: he "is too eminent a scientist..." Khan is a national hero - whom our Ramannas, Chidambarams and Kakodkars must envy. But that didn't prevent Pervez Musharraf from sacking him from KRL three years ago - under US pressure.
Deeply embarrassed, Islamabad is trying to make a distinction between the official nuclear programme and "certain individual scientists", "who may have breached... strict export control procedures by making unauthorised... contacts" with foreigners. For the moment, Washington is playing along, saying it believes Pakistan's denials - despite new disclosures. The pretence is that all clandestine transactions took place before Musharraf's 1999 coup.
The real issue is much larger - and worrisome. All manner of shady operators and jehadi fanatics have penetrated the core of the Pakistani State: its institutions' integrity has eroded. It's not established that Khan, Farooq & Co. have jehadi sympathies like fellow-scientist Bashiruddin, who ran a pro-Taliban charity. But they could well do.
It's easy to predict our hawks' holier-than-thou response to this. India is different. Pakistan stole its nuclear technology. Ours is totally indigenous. Their proliferation record is dark. Ours is impeccable. There is a difference between India and Pakistan. But it's narrower than
believed. Pakistan undoubtedly thieved centrifuge designs. But India too has bought, borrowed or stolen nuclear technology and materials from sources as diverse as the US, Norway, China, Canada, Britain, France, the Soviet Union. We cheated Canada and America when we reprocessed spent fuel from the CIRUS reactor which they designed, built and furnished with heavy water. This was the source of our 'indigenous', 'peaceful' 1974 test!
On WMD proliferation too, India's record is smudged. An Indian firm, NEC Engineers Pvt. Ltd, supplied chemical-weapon precursors to Iraq. And this paper reported (Oct. 23) that Y.S.R. Prasad, the former chairman of the Nuclear Power Corporation, took up a post-retirement assignment in Iran in 2000 to help build its atomic infrastructure.
Pakistan's nuclear jehadis are doubtless evil. But what of our Hindutva warriors, including some in the scientific, defence and information technology establishments? Let's face it. Nuclear weapons are a hideous liability. We must abolish them to become secure.
-------- iraq / inspections
Leading the Weapons Hunt in Iraq
December 26, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/26/opinion/26FRI2.html?pagewanted=print&position=
It is understandable that David Kay, the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq, may want to bail out before the search for weapons of mass destruction has reached a conclusion. The search team has turned up little of significance so far, its work has been slowed by a lack of security, and some of its staff and budget is being diverted to help in the struggle against Iraqi insurgents. A job that Mr. Kay hoped to wrap up relatively quickly now looks as if it will stretch into next fall.
The prospect must be discouraging for a person like Mr. Kay, who was a staunch believer that Iraq had retained such unconventional weapons. If Mr. Kay really does leave early, as press reports suggest, it will be important to find a credible successor to continue the hunt and resist any pressures to exaggerate the findings just before the fall elections.
Mr. Kay's performance has drawn mixed reviews. Some critics complain that his first interim report and statements painted minor finds as major threats and buried strong evidence that Iraq had been contained by United Nations weapons inspectors. But Mr. Kay and his search team had the integrity to report conclusions that undermined the administration's chief rationale for going to war.
The surprise in his first report was not the revelation that no actual weapons of mass destruction had been found. That was obvious from daily news reports. Rather it was the team's judgment that Iraq did not even have active programs to make chemical or nuclear weapons and had been pursuing missiles that could threaten only nearby countries, not the United States.
Despite the recent slowing of the hunt, it will be important to continue the search until the team can reach definitive conclusions. If there are any caches of weapons out there or any blueprints for making them, they must be secured before they fall into dangerous hands.
If there are no unconventional weapons in Iraq, it will be important to prove that fact as conclusively as possible as a yardstick for measuring faulty intelligence.
Our hope is that the administration will take the opportunity presented by Mr. Kay's possible departure to enlist the help of U.N. inspectors, who have long experience in Iraq, a huge databank generated by previous inspections and ties to some Iraqi scientists that the American team may lack.
The administration may be loath to approach an organization it has denigrated, and the United Nations may be reluctant to send personnel into a dangerous environment. But surely some degree of cooperation could assist in the search and give the findings more credibility.
-------- israel
Israel seeks to avoid Middle East disarmament fest
By Aluf Benn
Fri., December 26, 2003
Haaretz
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/376176.html
The American effort to neutralize security threats gradually in the Mideast has recently produced some marked improvements in Israel's strategic environment. Iraq has been conquered, Iran was forced to expand international supervision of its nuclear facilities, Libya promised to dismantle its nonconventional weapons, and Jerusalem believes that Syria will be next in line. The Arab world, led by Egypt, has responded with the expected demand that Israel also join the regional disarmament fest. The equally predictable response from Israel stressed its lack of faith in its enemies' promises, and insisted that the danger has not yet passed. But if the Iranians and Libyans keep their word, Israel is likely to encounter growing skepticism about its need for wide security margins, and be asked to do its bit toward changes in the region.
The United States has made it clear that it does not intend to deal with Israel's nuclear capabilities now. "I don't think there will be a change in policy toward Israel in the nuclear field," a senior American official said this week. "The Arabs will raise the issue, and Israel will need to find a way to explain its policy. But we understand that as long as Israel is facing Arab rejectionism from so many directions, the way to deal with this is via quiet discussions."
According to this official, the U.S. will adhere to its long-standing policy of urging all countries to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), but will in practice recognize Israel as a special case. Washington and Jerusalem have an understanding dating back to 1969 that as long as Israel maintains "ambiguity" and does not openly declare itself a nuclear power, the U.S. will not force it to join the NPT (which would mean destroying its nuclear capabilities). Though the UN General Assembly demands every year by a large majority that Israel must sign the treaty and dismantle its capabilities - the latest such decision passed this month by a vote of 162-4, with 10 abstentions - these resolutions have merely declarative value.
Former U.S. president Bill Clinton promised two former prime ministers, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, that the U.S. would ensure that Middle East arms control initiatives did not impair Israel's strategic deterrence capabilities. Netanyahu's letter arrived in 1998 and Barak's in 1999; the latter included a slight improvement in the form of an explicit commitment to the maintenance of an independent Israeli deterrence capability. Government sources said that Israel has neither requested nor received a similar promise from current President George Bush.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said in an interview with the daily Ma'ariv three months ago that Israel cannot cut back on the development of "special measures," an Israeli euphemism for strategic deterrence.
"Looking ahead, these things are very important ... It is impossible to expect that the U.S. will remain here [in the region] forever," he said. In other words, while Sharon appreciates America's activity in the region, he does not see this as a substitute for independent deterrence capabilities.
Though the U.S. appears unlikely to pressure Israel to join the NPT, it could revive a different initiative that was frozen some years back: an effort to develop a new international treaty halting the production of fissionables - plutonium and highly enriched uranium - which are the key components of nuclear weapons. The initiative, which Israel terms the "cutoff treaty," is meant to restrain the nuclear programs of Israel, India and Pakistan, none of which are NPT signatories. When Clinton first raised this idea, Netanyahu objected vehemently, saying that Israel would not agree to such an impairment of its national security, and eventually the issue was dropped.
Now, Washington is reexamining the cutoff treaty, and is apparently considering a less strict version that would be largely declarative in nature. Signatories would be required to promise not to produce fissionable materials in the future, but they would not have to declare existing stockpiles, and there would be no supervisory regime. However, it is not clear whether the U.S. will decide to go ahead with this softer version - or whether it will be able to muster support for it if it does.
The official Israeli position is that the cutoff treaty should be subsumed under the establishment of a nuclear-free Middle East at some point in the future when this becomes possible - meaning after Israel has achieved a comprehensive peace with all countries in the region. The question is whether, in light of the new strategic environment created by the American occupation of Iraq and Libya's declaration, Israel will continue to be able to postpone all discussions of its nuclear capabilities until this end-of-days scenario materializes.
-------- korea
U.S. and South Korea Try to Redefine Their Alliance
By NORIMITSU ONISHI
December 26, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/26/international/asia/26KORE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
SEOUL, South Korea - As the United States embarks on a realignment of its global military bases, the shift will perhaps be felt most intensely here in South Korea, where American soldiers continue to play a central role even as South Koreans themselves are rethinking their relations with Americans.
Unlike their counterparts in Japan, most of whom are relatively isolated in Okinawa, most of the 37,000 American troops here are still stationed, half a century after the end of the Korean War, in the country's two most high-profile locations: along the demilitarized zone with North Korea and in the heart of Seoul, the capital.
Under a Pentagon plan, the troops would be moved and consolidated in bases south of here. Both sides are emphasizing that the plan, put in motion as the North Korean nuclear threat remains unresolved, would not diminish America's capacity or commitment to defend South Korea.
Citing advances in military technology and changes in the political environment, the South Korean foreign minister, Yoon Young Kwan, said in an interview, "If we consider those two changes, it is natural for us to try to make some kind of adjustment in military allocation of personnel and resources."
"The important issue is U.S. commitment, and I think that commitment is stronger than ever," he said.
Still, during a visit in November by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the two sides did not decide on a timetable and failed to agree on plans to relocate the Yongsan military garrison in Seoul. What is more, the important subject of reducing the force size was not raised, nor was the topic of what this all meant for the United States-South Korea security alliance.
"Are Washington and Seoul truly committed to the alliance?" said Scott Snyder, a Korea expert in Seoul with the Asia Foundation, an American research institute. "It's the unspoken issue behind these talks over the U.S. troops. Is this the beginning of the reconfiguration of the alliance? Or is this the first step in the dismantling of the alliance?"
These moves are being considered against a changing backdrop here and in the region. South Korea's economic ties with China, now its leading trading partner, are growing rapidly. As a budding rival to the United States for influence in Northeast Asia, China has assumed a new muscular diplomacy, most notably in the continuing six-nation talks to resolve the North Korean crisis.
Here, a new generation of South Korean leaders, backed by young voters, is more independent-minded and less beholden to the United States. This is the so-called 386 generation - a reference to a computer chip and to those in their 30's, who went to college and fought in the pro-democracy movements in the 1980's and were born in the 1960's. They regard the United States less as the country that fought in the Korean War than as the country that backed past military dictators.
"The older Koreans tend to be more nervous about any changes in the U.S. troops here," said Kim Il Young, the author of "U.S. Forces in Korea" and a university professor. "The younger generation believes more in self-reliance and independence. It feels that in the long term, South Korea should strike a balance between the United States and China and adopt a more neutral position toward the United States."
In Seoul, the National Security Council's deputy director, Lee Jong Suk, 45, is said to embody many of the 386 generation's views. The council, unlike the more traditionally minded Foreign and Defense ministries, is said to have the greatest influence on President Roh Moo Hyun on foreign policy matters.
The differences in opinions, officials here say, were manifested most clearly in the discussion over sending troops to buttress the American-led forces in Iraq. Officials in the Foreign and Defense ministries were said to have pushed for several thousand combat and noncombat forces to be sent to Iraq, whereas the National Security Council argued for fewer. In the end, President Roh said he would dispatch only 3,000 noncombat troops.
Under the half-century-old alliance, American soldiers have acted as a "tripwire" along the border to deter an attack from North Korea. An attack from North Korea would have killed American soldiers and guaranteed American retaliation and involvement in the war.
Under the new strategy, with troops concentrated toward the south, the American forces would be better able to survive an attack and - given the existence of new long-range, precision weapons - respond more effectively. The troops would also be able to move quickly to other countries in the region.
Mr. Yoon, the foreign minister, said discussions would have to take place to reach a consensus on how to transform the alliance "from cold war to post-cold war."
"Even after we achieve that goal," Mr. Yoon said, "I think the alliance should remain important as a cornerstone on which we can build any kind of peaceful and stable international relationship among Northeast Asian countries."
-------- missile defense
U.S. Explores Protection of Airliners From Missiles
By MATTHEW L. WALD
December 26, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/26/national/26MISS.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 - With two recent attacks on big airplanes leaving Baghdad International Airport, experts on civilian aviation are debating how civilian airliners outside the battle zones could be protected from shoulder-fired missiles.
The Department of Homeland Security is planning to announce soon that it has selected two or three teams of bidders to explore how to put military-style antimissile technology on airliners. But airline experts have been questioning whether on-board systems are adequate. After an attack on an Air Force C-17 as it flew out of Baghdad on Dec. 9, those questions have increased.
The Air Force said that one engine on the four-engine C-17 exploded because of "hostile action," but has not confirmed that it was a missile. The plane returned to the airport.
It was the first combat-related damage to a C-17, the Air Force said. The incident raised questions with civilian experts because the C-17, built by Boeing, is one of the younger planes in the Air Force inventory, and would presumably have been equipped with a system that detects missiles and then either drops decoy flares or deploys a laser to blind incoming missiles, the two technologies in broad use.
"If a C-17 so equipped was hit, it's some bad news for the civil world," said Langhorne M. Bond, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration from 1977 to 1981. But Mr. Bond said that it might not have had any antimissile defenses.
An Air Force spokesman said that for "operational reasons," he would not say what equipment the C-17 carried. Civilian experts say that over the years, the Air Force has put a variety of systems on those planes. In addition, they said, some are so prone to false alarms that pilots have been known to turn them off.
A few days before the C-17 was hit, a civilian wide-body jet was hit by a missile. On Nov. 22, a DHL cargo plane was hit on departure, a vulnerable time because the engines are working near maximum thrust, and emitting an easy-to-spot heat trail. It did not have an antimissile system.
The DHL plane was an Airbus A-300, a type in common use for carrying passengers. It, too, successfully returned to the airport, although aviation experts said it had a narrow escape. According to Aviation Week & Space Technology, the missile destroyed the plane's hydraulic systems, and the crew could maneuver the plane only by independently varying the speed of its two engines.
In response to the missile threat, in September the Department of Homeland Security asked contractors for proposals to equip civilian planes with military antimissile technologies. Twenty-four responded, and the department invited five of them to present their technologies.
Of the five, two or three are expected to get contracts early next month for $2 million each, to work on their proposals for six months. Then the department would select some number of those three for another $45 million contract for development of prototypes and testing, industry participants said.
The whole program would take 18 to 24 months. Michelle Petrovich, a spokeswoman for the department, said that at the end of the period, the department would decide whether to deploy the technology, invest in new research and development or take some other path.
"This is an extremely aggressive timeline," Ms. Petrovich said.
Security experts have taken the threat of missiles more seriously since November 2002, when terrorists tried to shoot down an Israeli Boeing 757 as it took off from Mombasa, Kenya.
The technologies that the companies are trying to adapt for civilian use are based on those in use on military aircraft, but in some cases are more modern. For example, the Avisys Corporation, of Austin, Tex., which says it has installed antimissile technology on aircraft that carry foreign heads of state, and Arinc, of Annapolis, Md., which specializes in various kinds of aviation-related electronics, have proposed a system that will use two kinds of sensors, to cut down on the false-alarm rate. One is a system that looks for light in the ultraviolet spectrum that is emitted by a missile's plume. The other is doppler radar that calculates the speed of an incoming missile, as well as its direction. The idea is to eliminate false alarms, according to the designers.
The system releases flares that burn on contact with air. But the flares burn at a relatively low temperature, so they are nearly invisible from the ground, so opponents with missiles would not know they were in use, said Ronald A. Gates, president of Avisys. Proponents say the system would sell for about $500,000 per airplane and would be easy to maintain, because not much can go wrong with the flares.
Lockheed Martin Maritime Systems and Sensors, of Akron, Ohio, is one of three groups of companies to propose a system that uses an onboard laser. Cary Dell, a spokesman for the company, said that with a laser, "it's always available and there's nothing to replenish." If a plane relies on expendable flares, Mr. Dell said, "there's a limit to the load of expendables you can put into a system."
Lockheed Martin's system was developed over the last two years at the Air Force's White Sands test range in New Mexico, and is not yet on any planes, Mr. Dell said. It would meet the government's goals for price and weight of $1 million per plane and no more than 1,000 pounds, he said.
But the airlines remain unenthusiastic. "There have been no tests to show that this technology can be transferred from military jets to commercial airliners," said Douglas Wills, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, the trade group of the major airlines.
Most military planes can evade missiles because they can maneuver like high-performance sports cars, Mr. Wills said. In contrast, he said, a commercial jet "is like the Greyhound bus of the sky."
Mr. Wills said that there was no single solution, but that the government should be offering bounties for shoulder-fired missiles, to dry up the black market. And the government should be securing the areas around airports, he said.
-------- us politics
A Very Special Relationship
Review By Amos Elon,
NY Times Book Review
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16873
Support Any Friend:
Kennedy's Middle East and the Making of the US-Israel Alliance
by Warren Bass
Oxford University Press, 336 pp., $30.00
Israel and the Bomb
by Avner Cohen
Columbia University Press, 470 pp., $21.00 (paper)
1. The alliance between the US and Israel, which has been tighter than ever under the Bush administration, is often thought to have started under President Johnson following the 1967 war. Johnson was pleased with Israel's success in defeating two Soviet clients, Syria and Egypt, in only six days and he proceeded to grant Israel unprecedented political, economic, and military support. The closing of the Suez Canal, which forced Soviet supplies to North Vietnam to take the long route around Africa, was another bonus in Johnson's eyes.
It is true that Johnson officially disapproved of Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem and of the other measures it took in violation of international law. But US protests were perfunctory and soon ceased altogether. The US became Israel's major supplier of the latest sophisticated weapons. Israeli generals were predicting one hundred years of peace. In Jerusalem in 1971, I heard the foreign minister, Abba Eban, entertain his guests with the story of his visit to the White House during the Johnson administration. "Mister Eeeban," Johnson said, "aa'm sure glad to see you! Just the other day ah was sittin' in the Oval Room scratchin' my balls thinkin' about Israel!" Johnson promised Eban to supply Israel with the most up-to-date fighter planes, air-to-air missiles, and tanks, all of them otherwise available only to NATO members.
In the two books under review, Warren Bass, a senior fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations, and Avner Cohen, an expatriate Israeli working at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, show that Johnson was not the first to break the US embargo-imposed by Harry Truman in 1948-on supplying major weapons to Israel. It was Kennedy who did so, although he had at first opposed deliveries of major weapons. At the same time, and even though nuclear proliferation was one of Kennedy's principal concerns throughout his brief presidency, he failed to prevent Israel from going nuclear. Both books are well documented from material recently released by Israeli and American archives, and tell stories that should be read.
Some claim that had he lived longer, Kennedy would have again tried to slow down the arms race. Lyndon Johnson felt less strongly about nuclear proliferation. "The Kennedy administration, we can now see," Bass writes with the benefit of hindsight, "constitutes the pivotal presidency in US-Israel relations." Already in his inaugural address, Kennedy had promised-rashly some would claim later -"to support any friend...to assure the survival and success of liberty." In Israel's case this meant that Kennedy eventually authorized the sale to Israel of Hawk surface-to-air missiles and other sophisticated weapons. Kennedy, according to Bass, did not take this step out of altruism or because of pressure from the Israeli lobby. I was Ha'aretz's Washington correspondent through much of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations and I think Bass is right in saying that in 1962, AIPAC, the Israeli lobby, was not the powerful force it is today-it was still a small organization. It had some influence on Congress but little in the White House.
Dean Rusk's well-known opposition to recognizing Israel in 1948 and Douglas Dillon's opposition in 1960 to arming Israel did not prevent Kennedy from naming Rusk his secretary of state and Dillon secretary of the treasury. Myer (Mike) Feldman, Kennedy's legislative assistant in the Senate, became his staff envoy to the Jews; but Feldman was not given an intelligence clearance, and had no part in making policy. His job was to read all outgoing State Department cables regarding Israel and make sure that Kennedy knew where American Jews stood on any issue. But Kennedy, Bass insists, "made his own calls from there." Bass also cites an exchange between Kennedy and Phillips Talbot, his assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs, who urged Kennedy not to subject the national interest to domestic political considerations. "The trouble with you, Phil," Kennedy replied, "is that you never had to collect votes to get yourself elected to anything."
Today, few remember how relatively chilly and reserved US relations with Israel had been before Kennedy. The interests of oil companies and the concerns of State Department "Arabists" made those relations awkward during the 1950s. The CIA was more friendly since the agency made use of Israel's intelligence sources in Eastern Europe and the USSR. Mossad agents, for example, had been the first outsiders to get the full text of Khrushchev's secret speech on Stalin's crimes. Jerusalem is possibly the only foreign capital with a public monument honoring James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's controversial chief of counterintelligence. (It is behind the King David Hotel.) But Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles were angry with Israel for its collusion with England and France in the 1956 Suez war. When the Israeli government expressed concerns about its security, the response remained cool. At a time of heavy Soviet arms shipments to Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, the administration continued Truman's arms embargo. It rejected all Israeli requests for aircraft and tanks. Though Israel was, perhaps, the only UN member state whose immediate neighbors openly threatened to dismantle it, the administration rejected Israeli requests to join NATO or receive a US security guarantee. "I am sorry. We know Israel is a friend. But we don't want it to become our only friend in the region," Eisenhower's then secretary of state, Christian Herter, told me in 1960. All this seemed to be changing under Kennedy.
For no clear reason, Bass's book is dedicated "to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin, O Captain! my Captain!" Six pages later, however, there is an epigraph that reflects the book's main thesis:
Oh, well, just think of what we'll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me.
-John F. Kennedy
2. Kennedy came into office determined to make a fresh start in US relations with the new, revoltionary Arab regimes, particularly Nasser's Egypt. He inherited many troubles in the Middle East. The Baghdad Pact, in which several Muslim nations supported the US in the cold war, was breaking down. Egypt, Syria, and Iraq were increasingly looking like Soviet satellites. The conservative Arab monarchs felt they were dangerously exposed to the threat of Nasser's socialist pan-Arab nationalism. The US had opposed the 1956 Suez war, but this gave it little additional influence in Cairo. Kennedy came into office convinced that Eisenhower's "eight years of drugged and fitful sleep" had needlessly opened major rifts with both Israel and Egypt. Under Eisenhower, third-world nationalists like Sukarno, Nehru, and Nasser had been regarded as Communists in disguise. Kennedy hoped to be more creative and to give himself a wider range of choices in the Middle East. "JFK was playing chess in the Middle East, not checkers," says Bass. He wanted to bring Egypt into the Western orbit.
The beginning seemed promising- but only in Washington. Kennedy's opening gestures to the Arab countries had the support not only of longtime Arabists but also of liberals like Undersecretary of State Chester Bowles and advocates of economic "development" like Walt Rostow and Senator William Fulbright. Kennedy also played with the idea of doing something about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Mike Feldman was skeptical that King Ibn Saud would be helpful, but he also thought that Kennedy had a real opportunity to change Nasser's position. Kennedy began with personal letters to the main Arab leaders, asking for their cooperation in making peace. Their replies were so acerbic that Kennedy sent a testy note to his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, asking whose idea it had been "for me to send the letters."
The most acrid response came from King Ibn Saud, which Rusk described as venomous and downright insulting. There was something unrealistic- even naive-in all this, reminiscent of FDR's comment during a meeting with the Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann in 1940: "What about the Arabs?" he asked. "Can't that be settled with a little baksheesh?"[1] or his view after the Tehran conference of 1943 that a friendly chat with Ibn Saud about the Jews on board a warship in the Red Sea would resolve the issue.
Kennedy wanted to be friends with them all, with Nasser but also with his nemesis, the king of Saudi Arabia, as well as with Israel's David Ben-Gurion. He also wanted to please the American Jews who had overwhelmingly voted for him. What is clear is that Nasser did not respond to his friendly approaches, perhaps because he was trapped in his own feuds with the Arab monarchists and his dream of uniting the Arab world in a socialist republic under his rule. King Hussein of Jordan and King Saud of Saudi Arabia tried to counter Nasser's pan-Arab nationalism by claiming he was soft on Israel.
Like FDR two decades earlier, Kennedy was overconfident about his abilities to conduct personal diplomacy. He used flattery as well as offers of economic assistance. His Middle East advisers assured him that this was the way business was done in the region. During the nearly three years of the Kennedy administration, US aid to Egypt amounted to $500 million, double what it had been during the previous thirteen years under Truman and Eisenhower. But, Bass writes, nothing came of it, "not because the New Frontier had failed to offer Nasser a tempting opportunity, but because Nasser would prove incapable of taking full advantage of it."
Kennedy, however, was the first US president who realized that the Palestinians were a major element if not the root cause of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Yet he never thought about them as people with national aspirations. He spoke, as Israeli leaders did, about dealing with the "refugee" problem. It was not to be the first or the last time that an American president underestimated the depth of the Palestinians' resentment over their displacement as well as Israel's determination to hold on to the territory it had seized.
On the Palestinian issue, Kennedy was no more realistic than the Israelis were. He put Ben-Gurion on notice that America was resolved to deal with the "refugee" problem, but the discussions in Washington of how to do so were sometimes frivolous. At one session in the White House reported by Bass, Rusk asked Feldman whether it was possible to go ahead with a plan-proposed by Joseph E. Johnson of the Carnegie Endowment -to resolve the refugee problem. Could the plan be pursued "without getting into numbers," i.e., how many Palestinian refugees would be repatriated to Israel and how many would be resettled in the Arab countries?
"Oh, yes, yes," Feldman replied.... Based on Johnson's regional soundings, "it's our best guess that not more than one in ten would take repatriation." The Israelis accepted that, he added.
"What did they figure?" Kennedy asked. "It's like a Negro wanting to go back to Mississippi, isn't it?"
The room filled with chuckles. "It's different," Feldman replied with a laugh, "because it's as if the dominant doctrine [among Palestinians] were Black Muslim doctrine in a sense...."
One of Ben-Gurion's biographers has described his first meeting with John F. Kennedy as equally superficial in tone. Kennedy said to him: "I was elected by the Jews of New York. I have to do something for them. I will do something for you." Ben-Gurion did not appreciate being treated like a Brooklyn politician and answered testily, "You must do whatever is good for the free world."
Nevertheless, Bass is convinced that Phillips Talbot's fears of antagonizing Arabs were overstated. He shows that Kennedy's opening to Israel came only after an intensive attempt to court Nasser was rebuffed by the Egyptian leader himself. To the chagrin of many of his supporters in the State Department, Nasser launched a disastrous war on Yemen, which he himself soon called his "Vietnam." At one point his forces used poison gas and threatened neighboring Saudi Arabia as well. The dramatic collapse of Nasser's ambitious union of Egypt with Syria only made him adopt more radical policies. Egyptian agents tried to kill King Hussein of Jordan. Arab conservatives led by Saudi Arabia and the American oil lobby worked against Kennedy's attempted rapprochement with Nasser and derailed it.
It was at this point that the US changed its previously cool relations with Israel and swung toward the close alliance that continues today. Relations with Egypt further worsened during the Cuban missile crisis when Khrushchev mistakenly calculated it would be profitable (as he had found during the Suez war) to use the threat of nuclear missiles. The Egyptian press sided with Cuba. Kennedy's attempts at improving the situation of Palestinian refugees came to an end. He secretly taped the decisive meeting on this issue. Up to this point the sale of Hawk missiles had been tied to Israeli concessions on the repatria-tion or compensation of Palestinian refugees. On December 27, 1962, Golda Meir, Israel's foreign minister, met Kennedy in Palm Beach. He told her that Joseph Johnson's plan was dead. America, he said, "has a special relationship with Israel in the Middle East really comparable only to that which it was with Britain over a wide range of world affairs." To Meir's delight, the President added: "I think it is quite clear that in case of an invasion the United States would come to the support of Israel."
By expanding the limits of what State Department Arabists had considered "thinkable with Israel" and reaching the limits of what was "doable with Egypt," Kennedy, Bass writes, "set the parameters for America's Middle Eastern policy for decades to come." No previous American president had ever spoken like this. The meeting with Meir took place more than a year after the discovery by the US of a secret French-built nuclear reactor near Dimona in southern Israel, which had aroused concern in Washington that Israel was trying to build an atom bomb. But according to Avner Cohen, who cites the American note-taker in his 1998 book Israel and the Bomb, Kennedy, at his meeting with Meir, only briefly alluded to America's opposition to nuclear proliferation. "Mrs. Meir reassured the President that there would not be any difficulty between us on the Israeli nuclear reactor."
Soon, however, Israel had its sharpest clash in years with the United States over the "delicate subject," as the Israeli press continued to refer to the new nuclear reactor. Kennedy now seriously suspected that its purpose was to produce weapons, but Israel ultimately had its way. In retrospect, as Bass suggests, the negotiations over the secret Israeli reactor, which went on for years, seem only to have fur-ther cemented the growing US-Israeli alliance.
3. To understand how this happened, one must go back to Kennedy's first day in the White House, when Christian Herter, Eisenhower's secretary of state, warned him that the next two countries likely to develop nuclear weapons would be Israel and India. He advised Kennedy to insist on early inspection of the top-secret nuclear facility near Dimona, which had recently been spotted by a U2 overflight. Avner Cohen's study, "a bombshell of a book," as a reviewer in Ha'aretz called it, was the first to reconstruct the story of the Israeli nuclear project whose existence the Americans were slow to confirm. Cohen's superb book is based on previously unpublished documents, and gives a detailed account of the motives of the Israeli officials who supported the project. Their reasoning, according to Ben-Gurion (whom Cohen quotes), was that in order to "ensure that another Holocaust would not be inflicted on the Jewish people, Israel must be able to threaten a potential perpetrator with annihilation."
A Hebrew translation of Cohen's book was published in Israel in 2000. If it had originally been submitted to an Israeli publisher, I doubt it would have passed military censorship. When he visited Israel soon after his book was published in the US, Cohen was interrogated for fifty hours by Israeli security agents, who, he told me, took no action against him but tried to discourage him from pursuing his nuclear inquiries further. The manuscript of his new book, Israel's Last Taboo, written in Hebrew, in which he criticizes Israel's failure to confront the nuclear question squarely, has been submitted to Israeli military censorship and remains under scrutiny after five months. The nuclear installation at Dimona is still largely a taboo subject that until recently was referred to only indirectly.
The Israeli writer Tom Segev, perhaps the most brilliant analyst of recent Israeli history, rightly stated that Cohen's book "will necessitate the rewriting of Israel's entire history." It has become a source for works such as Idith Zertal's recent The Nation and Death, a path-breaking analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust has been used in Israel not only to equate Palestinians with Nazis and justify the West Bank occupation and the building of settlements there but also to provide the rationale for nuclear weapons systems. After the Six-Day War, Zertal writes, Israel's security problems were "experienced and conceptualized" not on the basis of the real balance of power between armies in the Middle East, but in the "context of the holocaust during the Second World War."[2]
That it had taken the Americans so long to figure out what was happening at the Dimona installation two dozen miles south of Beer Sheba is astonishing in itself and a telling fact about the efficacy of several vaunted intelligence organizations. The secret was not well kept. Numerous Israeli academics and inhabitants of nearby towns, especially Beer Sheba, knew about the new nuclear project from its beginnings in the late 1950s. In Israel, according to Cohen, several rich businessmen were asked for contributions to the costs. So were a number of prominent American donors to Jewish and Israeli causes who were approached by Abe Feinberg, a Democratic activist from New York, chairman of the American Bank and Trust Company, and a trustee of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
On a French liner sailing from Haifa to Marseille an Austrian acquaintance of mine happened to share a table in the dining room with a French engineer who told him that he had spent a couple of years working on a large project at Dimona. Asked what he had been doing there, the Frenchman answered: "Qu'est-ce qu'on fait à Dimona? On fait la bombe!" On his next visit to Israel, the Austrian met Treasury Minister (later premier) Levi Eshkol and asked directly: "Does Israel have an atom bomb?" Eshkol, a man with an earthy sense of humor, said, "I can't tell you if we have a bomb," but passing into Yiddish, as he often did, he added, "ober wir sanen stark schwanger" ("but we are heavily pregnant").
At about the same time, at the opening of Beer Sheba University in December 1960, Ben-Gurion himself hinted that a powerful new Israeli nuclear reactor would become operative within a year or two at Dimona. The Dimona site had first been seen from the air as early as 1958 but had not aroused the interest of the CIA; nor did the highly conspicuous presence of French scientists, engineers, technicians, and their families, employees of a well-known French engineering firm specializing in building large nuclear reactors. In 1960, a visiting American nuclear scientist told Ogden R. Reid, the Eisenhower administration's ambassador in Tel Aviv, that the Israelis had succeeded in building at Dimona a reactor not dissimilar from those used to build De Gaulle's bomb. For the first time, the embassy formally asked Israel about Dimona and apparently did not object to the answer that it was a textile plant. It took the CIA seven more months to realize that Israel was secretly building an enormous nuclear reactor.
In an interview with Kennedy in the White House, Reid, who had just left Israel, advised Kennedy to accept at face value the assurances of both Ben-Gurion's and the French governments that the purpose of the Dimona plant was entirely peaceful. This was also the view of the CIA, although not of Dean Rusk. Kennedy tended to accept Rusk's view. He spoke harshly about Israel with his aides. The size of the new reactor appeared to undermine Israel's claim that it was intended only for peaceful purposes. In March 1961, when CIA agents estimated its actual power at forty megawatts, Kennedy told James Reston of The New York Times that Ben-Gurion was a "wild man"; he was not going to compromise with him on this matter. He had given an emissary from Ben-Gurion thirty days to allow a thorough inspection of the new nuclear plant. The thirty days passed but Ben-Gurion was still stalling. Reston told me the story but did not publish it. I cabled a veiled version of it to Ha'aretz, but the dispatch did not pass military censorship.
My publisher, no doubt influenced by the powerful, almost tribal, sense of national solidarity that dominated Israel at the time, asked me to concentrate on other subjects. The tension between the two governments became more acute. Abe Feinberg and Mike Feldman flew to Israel and told Ben-Gurion that if he agreed to inspection, a meeting with Kennedy could be arranged that might save the project. In April, Ben-Gurion still would not agree to an "inspection" but said he would allow two American scientists to "visit" the controversial site on a Sabbath when most of the employees of the reactor would be absent. Israeli officials, according to Cohen, made sure the "visitors"-two American nuclear physicists-would find nothing suspicious. They were not allowed to bring instruments or to take measurements or pictures. The two scientists gave Dimona a clean bill.
Not long after this, Kennedy met with Ben-Gurion in New York. Kennedy agreed to supply Israel with surface-to-air Hawk missiles. The Dimona reactor was mentioned only in passing. Kennedy did not condition the sale of Hawk missiles on any guarantee that the US could inspect the plant at Dimona. (At least two inspections a year were needed to make sure Dimona was not producing weapons-grade plutonium). I saw Ben-Gurion emerge from Kennedy's suite at the Waldorf and he looked visibly relieved. The record, now available, shows that Kennedy was still very skeptical of Israeli assurances. But with the visitors' report in hand he did little more than remind Ben-Gurion that it was not enough for a woman to be virtuous, she must also have the appearance of virtue. For this reason Kennedy asked that future inspections might include experts from "neutral" countries and that their reports might be passed on to Nasser.
Ben-Gurion consented to this in principle but no further details about future visits were discussed. The first Hawk missiles were installed around Dimona. Kennedy continued to wrangle with Israel over the installation there, pressuring the government to allow twice-yearly inspections. Israel never consented. Much of the relevant material in the US archives is still closed to scrutiny. Yet there seems enough to show that Kennedy was growing impatient with Israel's evasiveness, and with Ben-Gurion's stalling tactics. In the year before the 1964 presidential campaign started, Kennedy seems to have felt he could put domestic political considerations aside in his dealings with Israel. The tone of his letters to Ben-Gurion became more threatening. Not since Eisenhower had forced Ben-Gurion in 1957 to evacuate the occupied Sinai peninsula (which, in an emotional speech in Sharm el Sheik, Ben-Gurion had already rashly annexed) had an American president been so blunt with an Israeli leader. In Kennedy's last letter, written in May 1963, he warned that
[this government's] commitment and this support [of Israel] would be seriously jeopardized...if it should be thought that this Government was unable to obtain reliable information on a subject as vital to peace as the question of Israel's effort in the nuclear field.
Until this point, Ben-Gurion had gone from evasion to evasion; upon receiving Kennedy's threat, Ben-Gurion resigned. Some claimed that he knew well that Israel would have to give in to Kennedy's pressure but preferred that his successor, the dovish, pliable Levi Eshkol, a man he disliked, do so. Others claim that the real reasons for his resignation were domestic, rooted in a longstanding struggle between Ben-Gurion and the old guard of the Labor party. The truth remains elusive to this day.
How Kennedy would have acted had he not been assassinated also remains unclear. But under Eshkol, a deal was struck that allowed both sides to save face. The foreign minister, Golda Meir, argued that Israel must tell Lyndon Johnson the truth about Dimona and explain why. Eshkol hesitated, apparently still intimidated by Ben-Gurion, who was ready to accuse Eshkol of endangering vital national security interests. Eshkol preferred to muddle through by never allowing more than one ineffectual "visit" a year to Dimona.
Lyndon Johnson felt less strongly about nuclear proliferation than Kennedy had. The inspections never became biannual, and after a few years they were suspended entirely. Johnson and his successors arrived at an agreement with Israel by which Israel announced that it would not be the "first" to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East. In return Israel received a flow of US conventional weapons that would enable it to defend itself without using nuclear weapons. This policy would later be described in Israel as one of "ambiguity" or "opacity." According to Cohen, "opacity" meant a state of affairs in which a government never officially announces that it has indeed gone nuclear but in which the evidence that it has done so is nevertheless strong enough to influence the perceptions and actions of potential enemies.
"Opacity" continues to this day. By 1967, according to Cohen, Israel possessed its first rudimentary nuclear weapons. The BBC, drawing on the analysis of the Federation of Atomic Scientists, recently reported that Israel may now possess as many as two hundred nuclear bombs. A report on the MSNBC Web site estimates that Israel has produced enough plutonium to construct between one hundred and two hundred nuclear bombs and that it could also have by now some thirty-five tactical and strategic thermonuclear devices, as well as the long- and short-range missiles to deliver them.[3] The policy of "opacity" has so far prevented a serious public debate in Israel over what is still called obliquely the "nuclear option." The issue has only once been raised in parliament-by an Arab deputy who addressed a near-empty house.
Israel never signed the non-proliferation treaty originally sponsored by the US. It continues to say only that it will not be the first country in the Middle East to introduce atomic weapons. Israel's recent history vividly illustrates the limits of overwhelming power. "Opacity" did not prevent the 1967 war or the Arab surprise attack in 1973; nor did it prevent the two Palestinian uprisings since or the recent wave of suicide terrorists. On the other hand, when a former Dimona technician named Mordechai Vanunu revealed in the London Sunday Times what he claimed to have seen there, he was kidnapped in Rome, taken to Israel, and given an eighteen-year prison sentence, without parole. His term is nearly over by now. He spent more than eleven years in an isolation cell, an unusually harsh and heartless punishment, and I have seen reports that he nearly lost his mind.
On the eve of the Six-Day War, a few liberal and international-minded Knesset members, led by the Labor poli-tician Eliezer Livneh and the prominent conservative Salman Abramowitz, called for a general Middle Eastern nuclear disarmament agreement. After the war, Abramovitz joined Likud and Livneh became a militant of the Greater Israel Movement. The initiative died. Today, only Egypt advocates a nuclear-free Middle East. Israeli doves, precisely because they favor withdrawal from occupied territories to the less secure pre-1967 borders, are now among the most ardent advocates of the "nuclear option." Notes
[1] Peter Grose, Israel in the Mind of America (Knopf, 1983), p. 139.
[2] Idith Zertal, Hauma wehamareth (Tel Aviv, 2003), pp. 163-165.
[3] See the BBC report at news.bbc.co.uk /1/low/world/middle_east/892941.stm and the MSNBC report at www.msnbc .com/news/wld/graphics/strategic_israel_dw.htm.
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Pakistan seizes arms cache hidden on Afghan border
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AFP)
Dec 26, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031226122646.k138rjza.html
Security forces on Friday seized a large arms cache dumped in a dry drain in a remote town on the Afghanistan border apparently for subversive acts in Pakistan, officials said.
The arsenal included eight Russian made ground-to-ground missiles, 19 rocket launchers and 20 shells, senior administration official in the northwestern tribal zone of Bajaur, Jabbar Shah, told reporters.
"The weapons dumped in a drain were covered by grass in the Nakhtar village of Bajaur," Shah said. He said the seizure was made on a tip off.
The cache belonged to unidentified "terrorists" who wanted to transport it to Pakistani cities to carry out acts of sabotage, Shah said.
Pakistani security forces continued to comb the rugged tribal terrain along the Afghan border following information that more arms and ammunition were stockpiled in the area, he added.
No arrest were reported.
-------- iraq
Iraq's future
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 26, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
A Defense Department briefing, called Iraq Security Forces Status Report, lays out a schedule to get Iraq's total security force up to 221,700, possibly by the end of 2004. The numbers:
•The police force: 60,000 today to 71,000 by August.
•The Facilities Protective Service: 36,000 to 50,000 by September.
•Iraqi Border Police: 11,600 to 25,700, possibly by the end of the year.
•Iraqi Civil Defense Corps: 7,000 to 40,000 by April.
•New Iraqi army: 635 to 35,000 by July.
There are roughly 130,000 American troops in Iraq. The number could slide to about 120,000 next spring as the Pentagon executes a massive exchange, pulling out three Army divisions and replacing them at the same time.
-------- prisoners of war
Cuba Says Guantanamo Prison a Concentration Camp
By REUTERS
December 26, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-cuba-usa.html?pagewanted=print&position=
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba has charged the United States with running a concentration camp at the Guantanamo base on the eastern tip of the island, in the government's first attack on use of the facility to hold terror suspects.
``In the territory illegally occupied by the Guantanamo naval base, hundreds of foreign prisoners are subjected to indescribable abuses,'' said a statement passed by parliament earlier this week and broadcast by the state-run media on Friday.
Communist-run Cuba's National Assembly said prisoners were isolated and denied the right to communicate with their families or to prepare an adequate defense.
``Some of the few freed have spoken of the horrors of this concentration camp,'' said the statement, appealing to lawmakers throughout the Americas to halt U.S. human rights violations related to the war on terror.
President Fidel Castro's government surprised observers when after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington it offered logistical support to Washington as it transformed the base at Guantanamo into a prison for suspected Taliban soldiers from Afghanistan.
Since Castro came to power in a 1959 revolution the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay has been a flash-point of hostilities between the two countries.
Castro insists the area is illegally occupied by the United States which leases it under a pre-revolution agreement.
Castro refuses to cash U.S. checks for use of the base, which he keeps in a desk drawer to show visitors and reporters.
Havana, up to now, has refrained from criticizing Washington's use of the naval base even as international unease with conditions there mounts.
The United States has kept more than 600 people from several countries captive for nearly two years at Guantanamo following the undeclared war against the Taliban government in Afghanistan and al Qaeda. Earlier this month, a U.S. appeals court ruled that they can not be held indefinitely and cannot be denied lawyers.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Suspicious Passengers Questioned In France
13 Were to Fly to L.A., Have Been Released
By John Mintz and John Burgess
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30985-2003Dec25?language=printer
U.S. government officials said yesterday they believe some of the passengers boarding one of the three Air France flights from Paris to Los Angeles that were canceled this week because of security concerns might have intended to hijack it and crash-land in Las Vegas or another city along its flight path.
Police in Paris questioned 13 people who had checked in for two Air France flights that were canceled Christmas Eve because of a terrorism warning from U.S. authorities, but no evidence of wrongdoing was found, the French Interior Ministry said. All 13 were released.
But U.S. officials said they are suspicious about some of the passengers who did not show up at the airport to claim their seats on the ultimately aborted Flight 68 from Paris to Los Angeles. One of those who did not appear for the Christmas Eve flight apparently is a trained pilot, one U.S. official said.
"We still have an interest in talking to those people who didn't show up," said one U.S. official knowledgeable about the investigation. "There might be more to come on this."
Despite French statements suggesting some of the American fears about the Air France flights were unfounded, U.S. government officials said they believe they might have averted a terrorist attack by arranging for the flights' cancellation. Officials said they feared that al Qaeda operatives planned to hijack one of the flights and use the plane as a missile to attack a site on or near its route.
Moreover, U.S. officials said intelligence indicators suggest that al Qaeda might have set other terrorist operations in motion that do not involve aviation and are not centered in California. As on other occasions when terrorist fears are heightened, U.S. officials said their main concern is that al Qaeda might use a chemical or biological weapon, or a radiological "dirty" bomb.
"Our fear is that other things are going on" that have nothing to do with jetliner flights in or out of U.S. airports, said one U.S. official briefed on high-level intelligence. "The concern is that there still could be a lot of activity that was underway."
Another government official with access to the classified reports said U.S. security officials "are really concerned something major will happen" despite the cancellation of the three incoming and three outgoing Air France flights between Paris and Los Angeles on Christmas Eve and yesterday. One scenario embraced by a number of U.S. security officials is that al Qaeda operatives were in the final stages of planning an attack in this country, and were awaiting final direction from al Qaeda superiors to proceed.
"Government people hope that by deploying, they'll shut down whatever might have been in motion," the official said.
In Paris, French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin announced last night that Air France would operate its normal schedule today. . "The grounded flights can be resumed," he said in a statement.
U.S. officials have said they passed on to the French government names of travelers they suspected might try to commandeer the planes on the Paris-Los Angeles route in a terrorist attack.
Seven of the questioned people had checked in at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for Air France Flight 68 on Christmas Eve, according to a French official. He identified them as four Americans, one German, one French and one Belgian.
The people were taken aside and questioned extensively by police, the official said. Their baggage was searched. But no sign of terrorist connections was found, he said, and all had been released by 7 a.m. Paris time yesterday. Six other passengers who showed up for Flight 70 to Los Angeles were also questioned and released.
The French official played down the Air France cancellations, calling them a "nonevent." He added, "There is no danger. . . . And if there was any, specific measures would be taken."
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. civilian and military air traffic controllers on the ground scrutinize the routes flown by commercial and other aircraft to ensure they do not diverge from their flight plans. Under protocols that are strictly enforced, pilots who depart from their assigned routes are contacted by radio, and if their explanations engender suspicions, military combat aircraft could be launched to intercept them.
For this reason, U.S. officials believe it is unlikely -- though not inconceivable -- that terrorists would try to divert an Air France Paris-to-Los Angeles flight to a city far from its flight path, such as New York. The Air France flights in question cross the Hudson Bay and eastern Canada before dipping down to airspace over Minnesota, and then taking a sharp southwestern swing toward Southern California.
"The only big city near this route is Las Vegas, which they would consider a nice, attractive target," one informed government official said. But officials said Los Angeles could have been the target, too.
The al Qaeda network has long considered Las Vegas to be one of its top targets for a strike because it sees the city as a citadel of Western licentiousness, U.S. officials said. Government officials said they have known for some time that al Qaeda is interested in striking at Las Vegas.
In response to these fears, Las Vegas was one of the cities where the Department of Homeland Security in recent days installed a number of outdoor air-handling sensors designed to detect biological pathogens that might be released by terrorists. The other cities where new Biowatch sensors were installed are in California, officials said.
Before this week 31 cities across the nation, including several in California, have had several hundreds of the sensors in place since March, when the U.S. invasion of Iraq prompted an orange alert.
Government officials said they also partly based their decision to raise the alert status earlier this week on the statements of an individual knowledgeable about al Qaeda operations who apparently is offering fresh information that is deemed credible.
The cooperation -- and possible chafing -- between France and the United States in the investigation is notable because France led the European opposition to the war in Iraq, and relations with the United States remain strained. But both governments have highlighted continuing cooperation against terrorism.
The Interior Ministry official said the cancellations were good publicity for that relationship. Spokesmen for both governments said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell thanked French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin for France's help in responding to the U.S. warnings.
Both governments have worried that terrorists would try to mount a high-profile attack to disrupt the holiday season.
France is also wary of a repeat of a security slip that in December 2001 allowed Richard Reid, a British citizen, to board a Miami-bound American Airlines flight in Paris with explosives concealed in his shoes. Reid was overpowered by passengers and crew members as he attempted to light fuses of the bombs and is now serving a life sentence in the United States.
In the past two days, about 700 passengers were stranded by the flight cancellations, according to Veronique Brachet, a spokeswoman for Air France.
At Los Angeles International Airport, where security is as tight as it has ever been since the Sept. 11 attacks, some of the incoming flights of Air Tahiti Nui and Aeromexico were being given special attention, aviation sources said. Upon landing, the jets were ordered to taxi to a remote gate, where passengers were questioned and their belongings searched before they were bused to an immigration terminal.
Staff writer Sara Kehaulani Goo and special correspondent Caroline Jolivet contributed to this report. Mintz reported from Washington and Burgess from Paris.
-------- justice
Leaks Probe Is Gathering Momentum
By Mike Allen and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 26, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30842-2003Dec25?language=printer
The Justice Department has added a fourth prosecutor to the team investigating the leak of an undercover CIA officer's identity, while the FBI has said a grand jury may be called to take testimony from administration officials, sources close to the case said.
Administration and CIA officials said they have seen signs in the past few weeks that the investigation continues intensively behind closed doors, even though little about the investigation has been publicly said or seen for months.
According to administration officials and people familiar with some of the interviews, FBI agents apparently started their White House questioning with top figures -- including President Bush's senior adviser, Karl Rove -- and then worked down to more junior officials. The agents appear to have a great deal of information and have constructed detailed chronologies of various officials' possible tie to the leak, people familiar with the questioning said.
The Justice Department has added a prosecutor specializing in counterintelligence, joining two other counterintelligence prosecutors and one from Justice's Public Integrity section.
Agents investigating the matter have been increasingly apparent at CIA headquarters in Langley over the past three weeks, officials said. "They are still active," a senior official said.
But sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame, who was exposed as a CIA officer by unidentified senior administration officials for a July 14 column by Robert D. Novak.
Wilson, a prominent critic of the administration over Iraq, has said that was done to retaliate against him for continuing to publicize his conclusion, after a 2002 mission for the CIA, that there was little evidence Iraq had sought uranium in Africa to develop nuclear weapons.
Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.
CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting.
"It has been circulated around," one official said. CIA and State Department officials have refused to discuss the document.
On Oct. 28, Talon News, a news company tied to a group called GOP USA, posted on the Internet an interview with Wilson in which the Talon News questioner asks: "An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
On Monday, the Senate minority leader and the ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee sent a letter to Attorney General John D. Ashcroft demanding more information about the probe. "We request that you provide us with an overall status of the investigation, including the number of people the Justice Department has interviewed, the number of briefings you have received, the general types of information you are briefed on, what conditions you have placed on the scope of these briefings to ensure the independence of this investigation, and whether you have discussed this case with senior administration officials outside the Justice Department," wrote the senators, Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and Carl M. Levin (Mich.).
The senators said that it is an apparent conflict of interest for Ashcroft to be briefed on the subject, and again requested a special counsel to prosecute the case, which Ashcroft has so far opposed.
FBI agents have told people they have interviewed that they may be asked to testify before a grand jury, according to sources close to the case. That could indicate that prosecutors believe they have a case, or it could be a routine method of getting testimony on the record even though no indictment is ever sought.
White House officials profess to be unconcerned about the outcome of the investigation. Some administration officials said they believe charges will eventually result, although it could be as long from now as 2005. A Republican legal source who has had detailed conversations about the matter with White House officials said he "doesn't get any sense at all that they're worried or concerned, or that they're covering up."
Still, the White House is eager for the findings to emerge soon, or wait until after the November election. "The only fear I've heard expressed is that the investigation will be too slow or too fast and will kick into a visible mode in a way that is poorly timed for the election," the Republican said. "If they prosecuted someone tomorrow, I don't think the White House would care. And they can do it in December 2004. They just don't want it to become an issue in the election."
FBI agents showed up unannounced last week at the home of a private citizen who was believed to have some knowledge of White House handling of Plame's identity, according to a source involved in the investigation. The source refused to identify the person who was interviewed, but said it was a man who had only peripheral knowledge of the case and had discussed it with officials in the White House.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is also preparing a report that is likely to cover both Wilson's mission to Niger and the subsequent leak of Plame's name. The report is still months from completion, officials said.
Capitol Hill aides in both parties said Wilson had badly hurt his credibility with his apparently enthusiastic participation in a spread in the January issue of Vanity Fair that includes a glamorous photo of him and his wife outside the White House, a scarf and dark glasses shielding her. In another photo in the magazine, she shields her face with the front section of The Washington Post as he eats breakfast barefoot on their deck with the Washington Monument in the distance.
Wilson is quoted as saying he is "appalled at the apparent nonchalance shown by the president of the United States on this." The article includes Wilson's steamy account of his early romance with Plame. Congressional aides said the article bolstered the contention of Wilson's critics that no one had done more than him to draw attention to Plame, and that the couple had eagerly contributed to their celebrity.
Wilson, in an interview, defended his participation in the glossy magazine's article. "The Republicans are going to say anything to deflect attention from the crime, which was exposing a CIA operative," he said, adding that his wife's "cover was completely blown" before the article appeared.
"My only regret about the Vanity Fair photo is that after all my wife and I have been through on this, that she had to be clothed as generic blonde in order to deal with the genuine concern that some wacko on the street might easily identify her," he said. "It was just in the interest of personal security."
Staff writers Walter Pincus and Susan Schmidt contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Anthrax terror
Inside the Ring
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 26, 2003
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
The CIA has been quietly building a case that the anthrax attacks of 2001 were in fact the result of an international terrorist plot.
U.S. officials with access to intelligence reports tell us the information showing a terrorist link to the anthrax-filled letters sent by mail in the weeks after the September 11 terrorist attacks is not conclusive. But it is persuasive.
Asked to comment, a U.S. official said, "There is no evidence at this point to suggest a foreign terrorist link or connection. But the matter is still under investigation and we're not ruling anything out."
Some officials think the intelligence is at least as valid as the FBI's "mad scientist" theory, which has produced dead ends so far for the G-men after more than two years of investigation. This theory says a U.S. biological weapons scientist with access to highly refined anthrax powder stole some and used it to awaken the U.S. government to the threat of deadly anthrax.
Former weapons scientist Stephen Hatfill was identified by the Justice Department as a "person of interest" in the probe. Mr. Hatfill has stated repeatedly that he had nothing to do with the anthrax mailings. He is suing the federal government for investigating him.
The deadly letters were sent to two U.S. senators and several news outlets in October and November 2001. They ended with the phrases, "death to America, death to Israel, Allah is great." Five persons were killed after inhaling anthrax spores and 22 others were sickened but survived.
The spores were analyzed and found to be a virulent form known as the Ames strain. Also, the spores were milled into extremely fine powder, making it easier to disperse in the air.
Investigators were hoping the Iraq Survey Group would come up with documents or evidence indicating that Iraq might have acquired the Ames strain. But U.S. officials said so far there are no signs of Ames-type anthrax in Iraq, either from samples or documents recovered from the Iraqi intelligence service. The service was in charge of weapons of mass destruction development.
A report last month to the U.N. Security Council by its Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission concluded that traces of anthrax recovered from a bomb in early 2003 were of the same strain Iraq declared in 1991 it had weaponized. Those were not the Ames strain, U.S. officials said.
----
Prioritizing bioterror defenses
December 26, 2003
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20031225-122348-7529r.htm
The largest threat to national security is too small to see - the microbes and viruses of bioterrorism. Biological agents are almost an ideal weapon for terrorists because of the relative ease with which they can be made and dispersed. It is little wonder that al Qaeda operatives have tried to acquire them. It is probably just a matter of time before they do.
Vice President Dick Cheney said recently that one of his greatest concerns is that terrorists will acquire "a biological weapon of some kind, or even a nuclear weapon." Advisers to Mr. Cheney have played critical roles in a systemic examination of the gaps in the nation's bioterrorism defenses - and their potential policy patches - currently being prepared by the White House. Numerous senior officials have contributed to the classified report, which is being directed by retired Gen. John Gordon of the Homeland Security Council. The study is expected to be finished soon, and its recommendations should give better direction to agency personnel and help in establishing priority for agency budgets.
It is encouraging that the administration understands the gravity of the bioterrorism threat. However, several recent studies have revealed that there is a long way to go.
A study issued last week by the Trust for America's Health found spotty progress. It discovered that states have better communications capabilities, improved bioterrorism response plans and better-equipped laboratories than they used to. However, it also found that red tape has hindered states from fully drawing on federal bioterrorism funds, that only two states are fully prepared to distribute and administer emergency treatments from national stockpiles, and that many states will soon be facing a shortage of trained pubic health personnel.
Similar concerns were raised by the final report of the Gilmore Commission, which was issued last Monday. The commission warned that the momentum to protect the country against terrorism may have waned. It made a wide range of recommendations for improving bioterrorism preparedness, such as simplifying the funding applications process and improving communications among first responders, government representatives and law enforcement officials.
Communications problems prevented first responders from properly responding to the biological and radiological attacks simulated in Chicago and Seattle last May. An unclassified summary of a study of the exercise was released earlier this week. In addition to troubled communications, the report also found that stockpiles of treatments were not utilized effectively because emergency responders were confused about how to access and distribute them.
In some ways, those findings are a sign of progress, since the purpose of Gen. Gordon's highly classified assessment was to discover and deal with such difficulties. Clark Kimerer, the head of operations for the Seattle Police Department, said, "We found, literally, hundreds of fixable things."
While it is critical for such gaps in the nation's biodefenses to be found, it is, of course, even more critical that they be filled as fast as America's war footing allows. Like soldiers already under enemy observation, policy-makers must redouble their efforts to prepare for the fire that might come at any moment. Minutes lost in preparedness now might well be paid for in blood and lives later.
----
Fight terrorism with intelligence, not might
By Sara Daly
Christian Science Monitor,
December 26, 2003 edition
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1226/p13s01-coop.html
ARLINGTON, VA. - In this season of code-orange alert, good intelligence rather than military might is the best way to protect our homeland. Information gathering is the most powerful weapon in the struggle to dismantle terrorist networks and prevent attacks.
The United States and other nations are hunting down small and often unconnected groups and individuals who hide their identities and surface only briefly to carry out terrorist attacks.
Much emphasis in the fight against terrorism has been placed on military capabilities. We have come to expect that planes, tanks, helicopters, and heavily armed soldiers will be used to protect America and defeat our enemies.
But calling out the Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines in full battle gear to combat terrorism on a day-to-day basis is rarely a successful strategy at home or abroad. There's no question America has the military might to crush an enemy on the battlefield - but in fighting terrorism, the primary challenge is finding the enemy on a battlefield that has no boundaries.
If the job is done right, successful prevention of terrorism depends on gathering accurate information and stopping something from happening - often without public awareness. It is only the failure to prevent attacks that is felt, and along with it a profound sense that we are ultimately powerless to protect ourselves.
The terrorists are, by definition, in the business of terrorizing us, and want to make us feel helpless and hopeless in the face of their attacks. They want us to believe attacks come randomly and without warning, so that we don't even try to predict the unpredictable. They hope that by making us adopt defeatism as a philosophy, they can defeat us.
In fact, there is plenty we have done and can do to combat terrorism. Recent terrorist events perpetrated by Al Qaeda and Islamic extremist groups sympathetic to Al Qaeda have similar patterns that can be identified by intelligence agencies working hand in glove with local police and security services in the US and around the world.
One of these recent patterns is for Al Qaeda to devolve more authority to local Islamic extremist groups in places like Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey to carry out attacks against US and allied targets.
In some cases, the individuals involved in the attacks are unknown to local police - Al Qaeda often seeks out anonymous individuals. But in other cases, the individuals responsible for attacks are known to the police in the areas where they operate and have a history of terrorist activity. Al Qaeda relies on these more experienced operatives to pull off a successful attack.
This is where the local police can play the most crucial role in preventing future attacks. In most cases, the police are already aware of the activities of local extremist groups with established records of advocating and carrying out violent acts, and often know the players involved because of their past participation in terrorist activity.
Monitoring the activities of local extremists in individual countries - such as travel in and out of the country and involvement in criminal enterprises - can be carried out through physical surveillance and other methods of monitoring permissible under legal boundaries. This can give local police the upper hand.
By doing this, law-enforcement agents will not be able to prevent every terrorist attack, but they will make terrorists' job a lot harder by dismantling networks and fostering a hostile operating environment. We know from past experience that faced with this situation, terrorists will either cease conducting attacks in that location and restrategize, or move their operations completely.
Solid police work is crucial not only in following up on leads after an attack has occurred, but in preventing future attacks. Efforts by police to identify operational patterns and the individuals in communities involved in terrorist activity will go a long way toward undermining terrorists' ability to instill a sense of randomness and fear.
The "war" on terrorism is really more comparable to the long and continuing battle against crime waged by police departments around the world. The leading role in this antiterrorism battle isn't played by GI Joe, but by Dick Tracy.
• Sara Daly is a former CIA counter-terrorism analyst now working as a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
An Energy Source That Never Winds Down
Friday, December 26, 2003
Washington Post; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31109-2003Dec25?language=printer
The best news about New York City's planned Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center site [front page, Dec. 20] is that its wind generators will provide 20 percent of the building's electricity. I hope this high-profile project will draw greater attention to the potential of wind to become a major source of cheap, clean and renewable energy in the United States.
A new wind farm on the Washington-Oregon border is generating electricity at a record low cost of 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour. The Department of Energy's Web site reports that North Dakota alone has enough latent wind energy to produce 36 percent of the electricity needed by the "lower 48 states." Add Kansas, Texas and a few more Midwestern states to that mix and we could generate all the electricity we need, plus the hydrogen to run fuel-cell cars.
The farmers of the Great Plains, many of whom struggle to make ends meet, are living beneath an untapped bountiful resource of wind energy that blows night and day above their "amber waves of grain."
What are we waiting for?
PATRICIA McARDLE
Arlington
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israel troops fire on peace rally
Israel's security barrier is proving highly controversial
Friday, 26 December, 2003,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3349753.stm
Israeli soldiers have opened fire on a demonstration in the West Bank, injuring two peace activists.
The incident took place when about 100 protesters demonstrated near the Palestinian village of Mahase against the barrier Israel is constructing.
One Israeli man and one foreign woman were wounded.
The Israeli army said troops opened fire when demonstrators tried to cut through a security fence, but said only one live shot was fired.
One of the demonstrators, Jonathan Faulk, told the Israeli Haaretz newspaper that soldiers opened fire with no warning, adding that the soldiers' lives were never in any danger.
The demonstrators came from peace groups including the International Solidarity Movement.
Israel says it is building the barrier to prevent terrorist attacks. However, the Palestinians say it will cut hundreds of thousands of their people off from their livelihoods.
The United Nations has condemned the barrier as illegal.
----
Her path to peace is in harm's way
Orange County activist Radhika Sainath, 25, goes to West Bank danger spots in the name of nonviolence.
By DENNIS FOLEY
The Orange County Register
Friday, December 26, 2003
Radhika Sainath knows she isn't bulletproof.
But she says she's had cocked and loaded M-16 rifles pointed at her head.
She isn't impervious to tear gas.
But she says she has experienced its choking effects dozens of times.
She was raised comfortably in Newport Beach.
But she has been jailed and interrogated more than once in Israel.
All, she says, in pursuit of peace.
Sainath, 25, recently returned from Israel, where for most of the past year she has worked as a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement amid the war-zone conditions of the West Bank, contested by Israel and Palestinians.
She believes it is her responsibility - inspired by stories from her parents of Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent movement to achieve independence in their home country, India - to go where violence is a daily threat to demonstrate the power of nonviolence.
That's why she's been working in the West Bank villages, organizing demonstrations and hoping her presence will lessen the chances that civilians are harmed as Israelis and Palestinians clash.
"I think it's really important that people do their part to change the world," she said last week via cell phone from Tel Aviv. "If people just sit in their living rooms or on the beach and don't pay attention to what's happening in the world around them and how the government and their tax dollars are affecting people on the outside, they have responsibilities for what the government is doing."
SINCERE BUT MISGUIDED?
The Israeli government calls volunteers like Sainath sincere in their beliefs, but misguided.
"They have good intentions. They believe they are fighting for a good cause. But they are being cynically used by a Palestinian-led organization," said Zvi Vapni, Israel's deputy consul general in the Los Angeles Consulate.
"It's really a shame when their lives are endangered. We are sorry for their families."
Some volunteers have been killed by placing themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians.
Earlier this year, U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie was buried by an Israeli bulldozer as she got between it and a home that Israelis were knocking down because they believed it was being used by those they consider terrorists, such as suicide bombers.
Corrie's death was "an unfortunate accident," said Justin Levi, director of media relations for the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles.
"They were told not to be there. They were told it was unsafe," he said.
As Israelis literally build walls around Palestinian villages, Sainath said she believes the risks of serving the cause of nonviolence as a means to independence are worth it.
GETTING PEOPLE INVOLVED
"My experiences have solidified my belief in nonviolence as a powerful tool against injustice," she said. She has been among scores of volunteers who have put themselves in harm's way on Israel's West Bank and Gaza territory amid the suicide bombings, military reprisals and daily events that can erupt into violence.
Volunteers have been called human shields, but Sainath prefers to say she "accompanies" Palestinian civilians in the hopes she can protect their rights.
Like the students and teachers she accompanied home from school when curfews had been imposed. Or the Palestinian farmers she accompanied to harvest olives in their fields, which had been declared off-limits by authorities.
"She was a very good organizer, very good with people and very level-headed," said Flo Razowsky, a volunteer from Chicago who worked for months as Sainath's partner in the area around Tulkarem, a city of about 80,000.
"There's not anyone who wouldn't get nervous with tanks around and constant gunfire, but she thought it was important to stay calm. She helped people to not be afraid. And she worked very hard to get women involved, because the women are strong but not heard very often. And, hopefully, their presence at demonstrations lessens the violence."
Sainath believes the volunteers have been able to reduce violence by their presence.
"As an American, you often are treated so much better here," she said. "I can often go through checkpoints without as much difficulty. I've seen a wide range of attitudes from individual Israeli soldiers.
"Some say, 'Oh, you're from California. That's cool.' Other times, they get angry and think we are here to make trouble. Some ask if we are Muslims. Others say what a good job (the United States) did in Iraq."
The Israeli government, she believes, doesn't want its image to be one of harming peace demonstrators.
ARRESTED THREE TIMES
Still, she was arrested three times in Israel - twice, Vapni said, for "interfering."
The third time was Dec. 4, when she was picked up by Israeli immigration police in Tel Aviv.
The events that led to her most recent arrest began in November 2002, one month after she went to the northern West Bank.
She was seized by Israeli soldiers after a demonstration against a security fence being built near the village of Jayyous. She says she was detained for more than four days without being informed of charges against her and without being allowed to contact her attorney.
She sued for false imprisonment, which led her to re-enter the country last month for court proceedings.
She said she figured she would not have been let into the country again, so she changed the spelling of her name to get an entry visa.
After her court testimony, she took a bus with friends to a restaurant. She was arrested as she got off the bus.
She was confined to a friend's Tel Aviv apartment until she left eight days later. APPLYING TO COLUMBIA "She had been arrested twice before. She had been expelled. She was on a list. She came back under a different name. We are being very generous to allow her to leave again," Vapni said. While banned from Israel and awaiting word from her lawyer on her civil suit against the government - she asked for about $12,000 in damages for emotional distress - she's looking ahead.
She plans to continue human-rights work and to apply to Columbia University, perhaps to study international law, she said.
For a little while, she will enjoy her visit home. Her parents, who declined an interview request, respect her decisions to be in the front lines, despite concern for her safety, she said.
"It's really nice to be back in a place that is not under occupation," she said over chai tea at the Fashion Island Starbucks. "It's nice to be able to drive to Fashion Island without being stopped by soldiers."
CONTACT US: (714) 285-2862 or dfoley@ocregister.com
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