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NUCLEAR
Libya weapons: nice start, now the tough cases
Nuke War Survival Expert Kearny Dies
Bulgarian court approves sale of state firm overhauling only nuclear plant
Nuclear weapon 'brochure' adds to US dilemma over Musharraf
Web of trails leads to Pakistan
Restoring a nuclear-energy policy
US refuses to bow to North Korean nuclear demands
Pyongyang visit highlights US-S. Korea divide
North Korea for Dummies: Basic Facts Good People Should Know
Saudi nukes
Britain invites Libyan FM to Britain to discuss weapons
US plays down row with IAEA over Libyan weapons inspections
The Despot and His Demons
No more nuclear surprises
U.S. Keeps Libya Sanctions in Place
U.S. Refuses to Lift Sanctions on Libya
Pakistan: Libya Nuclear Report Unsubstantiated
Pantex to shift focus
Nuclear rogues being brought to heel, US believes
MILITARY
Afghan Delegates Approve Charter Following Bitter Debate,
Afghan Council Gives Approval to Constitution
Highlights of the Afghan Pact
NATO Takes Over Mission in Afghanistan
Romania offers to supply weapons to Iraq
Britain: Troops to Stay in Iraq for Years
British Official Sees No Early Exit for Troops From Iraq
Blair Pays Surprise Visit to Soldiers in Iraq
Army Outsourcing Put on Hold
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Former arsenal declared free of chemical weapons
Secret police force to be set up in Iraq
Kurdish Region in Northern Iraq Will Get to Keep Special Status
IDF offers foreign armies: pay per training
Israel OKs Work Permits to Palestinians
Israel Plans to Dismantle 2 Small Settlement Outposts
Russia hopes new NATO chief keeps Moscow relations a priority
3 soldiers discharged for prisoner abuse
Iran to launch satellite with own rocket within 18 months
Bush Plays with Fire: Launching a Dangerous Space Policy
Lockheed Built Communications Satellite Begins Operations For USAF
Rover Unfurls, Opening New Stage in Exploring Mars
A Triumphant Landing on Mars
Protect us from the protectors
Military Split On How to Use Special Forces In Terror War
USS Midway to Become San Diego Museum
Lab Helps With Military Aircraft Problems
America's Abominable Record in Okinawa
U.S. frees Reuters, NBC staff detained in Iraq
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
High Court May Broaden Terror War Review
Justices to Plunge Into Legal Issues Raised by War on Terror
News Groups Seek to Open Secret Case
In Security Push, U.S. Begins Fingerprinting at Airports
Cities in revolt over Patriot Act
Al-Jazeera Airs Audiotape Allegedly of Bin Laden
ENERGY
Wind and Solar Energy Find Homes on the Range
ACTIVISTS
Israeli colonel resigns over army's 'immoral' actions
San Francisco Chronicle Settles with Anti-War Reporter
Palestinian Aid Groups Refuse U.S. Money
-------- NUCLEAR
Libya weapons: nice start, now the tough cases
Whatever the reasons for Qaddafi's decision to give up his weapons programs, Iran and especially North Korea are going to be harder to bring into the fold
Monday, Jan 05, 2004, Page 9,
By Michael R. Gordon
Taipei Times
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, WASHINGTON
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/edit/archives/2004/01/05/2003086470
Undoing a weapons program is one of the rarest of decisions for an absolute leader.
After South Africa's apartheid government was replaced by black majority rule, South Africa astonished the world by disclosing that it had developed six nuclear weapons and then allowing the UN nuclear inspections agency, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to disarm it. That decision, in effect, was the result of a naturally occurring "regime change."
Libya's important and welcome decision to abandon its unconventional weapons programs is all the more interesting since the same government that got Libya into the business of developing forbidden weapons has now ordered the change of course.
But the larger issue is whether North Korea and Iran can be similarly disarmed and, if so, how best to go about it.
Libya never got very far down the nuclear road and its weapons programs were not enough of a worry to rate inclusion in the "axis of evil" proclaimed by US President George W. Bush in his State of the Union speech in 2002 (Iraq, Iran and North Korea made the cut).
`Threatening military force is not an option. War on the heavily armed Korean Peninsula would be a calamity. No Asian ally is prepared to back a policy of confrontation.'
While Libya had acquired centrifuges on the black market, it had not yet assembled them into a large-scale cascade for producing highly enriched uranium. When it came to a nuclear arsenal, Libya was abandoning a distant -- but still dangerous -- dream, not a real ability.
North Korea and Iran are much tougher cases and ultimately a far more important test of the Bush administration's efforts to roll back weapon programs through a mixture of force and diplomacy, rather than the more traditional reliance on weak international treaties and policing.
US intelligence agents project that North Korea has already got one or two nuclear weapons and the ability to expand this presumed nuclear arsenal. Iran has also been working energetically toward developing a nuclear weapons capacity, US intelligence says. It remains to be seen if the signing this month of an agreement on international inspections will eventually halt those efforts.
The turnabout by the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi -- and the secret British and US diplomacy that encouraged it -- amount to just one step on the road to stopping proliferation, and the question is how to take the next ones.
From the start, the Bush team has said that their policy toward Iraq was about more than just Iraq. The Bush administration began the year with an audacious doctrine that held that removing former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from power would send a cautionary message to weapons proliferators and help remake the Middle East.
As it heads into an election year, the Bush administration has highlighted the role that US power may have played in changing the Libyan leader's mind. Top Libyan officials, by contrast, have pointed to economic considerations.
The possibility of ending decades of punishing economic sanctions might indeed have led Qaddafi, who has ruled for 34 years and wants to stay in power, to chart a new course even if the Iraq war had not occurred.
Still, it may be that the US invasion of Iraq reinforced the message that the pursuit of forbidden weapons did not strengthen his government. The administration of former US president Ronald Reagan, after all, ordered Air Force F-111s and Navy A-6s to bomb Libya in 1986 after concluding that Libya was behind an attack on US servicemen in Europe.
There is no indication of a similar change of heart in North Korea, where there are indications that North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has drawn a very different lesson from the Iraq war. Having seen how the leader of Iraq was transformed into a prisoner, North Korea appears to have concluded that the best protection against a US intervention is a nuclear arsenal, the bigger the better.
Instead of renouncing its nuclear program, North Korea has in the past year advertised its supposed advances in making nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has turned particularly to China -- as well as to Russia, South Korea and Japan -- to try to advance diplomacy, but has in effect found itself with little leverage.
Threatening military force is not an option. War on the heavily armed Korean Peninsula would be a calamity. No Asian ally is prepared to back a policy of confrontation. With most of the US Army preoccupied with Iraq and Afghanistan, the US simply lacks the military muscle to marshal a credible threat.
In talks, North Korea has proved to be frustrating and possibly untrustworthy. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has oscillated between a hard-line policy of waiting for North Korea's collapse and trying to engage the North in bargaining.
If there is hope of replicating the Libyan reversal it may be in Iran.
First, Iran has not yet developed nuclear weapons. So it would be giving up a prospective, and not actual, ability. Second, a diplomatic process is already under way.
Gary Samore, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London and a former proliferation expert on the National Security Council under former US President Bill Clinton, notes that Iran has responded to diplomatic pressure -- from Europe and the US -- and temporarily suspended its previously clandestine efforts to enrich uranium at its Natanz site.
What is needed now is a permanent solution, one in which Iran will permanently forgo efforts to produce nuclear weapons materials by enriching uranium or producing plutonium.
European nations have offered Iran access to fuel supplies for a peaceful nuclear program if it gives up its ambitions to develop nuclear weapons.
Whether the US would be party to such a deal and whether Iran would embrace it, Samore notes, are unclear.
"In the case of North Korea the Libya model is unrealistic," he said in a telephone interview. "It is not plausible that the North Korean regime, given their perception of the world, will give up their missiles and chemical, biological and nuclear programs in exchange for better relations. They view them as essential for their survivability. The best you can do is to achieve limits."
If there is a chance to repeat the Libyan experience, he notes, "the test will come in Iran."
-------- accidents and safety
Nuke War Survival Expert Kearny Dies
January 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-BRF-Obit-Kearny.html
MONTROSE, Colo. (AP) -- Cresson Kearny, an expert on jungle warfare and the author of a best-selling manual on how to survive nuclear war, has died after several years of declining health. He was 89.
Kearny died Dec. 18 in this southwest Colorado town, where he has lived since 1954, daughter Stephanie Kearny said Monday.
His book, ``Nuclear War Survival Skills,'' includes instructions on how to build a fallout shelter and a radiation meter. The book, first published in 1979, had sold more than 600,000 copies by the mid-1990s.
Stephanie Kearny said her father's copyright ensures that anyone can publish the book, and he refused to receive royalties.
Kearny was born Jan. 7, 1914, in San Antonio. He went on to study at Princeton University and Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar.
Before the United States entered World War II, Kearny developed specialized jungle equipment, training and tactics for American soldiers, and units of the Special Forces still use a book he wrote in 1996 as part of their training, Stephanie Kearny said.
-------- europe
Bulgarian court approves sale of state firm overhauling only nuclear plant
SOFIA (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105213219.c1yjl8ej.html
Bulgaria's highest court on Monday authorised the sale of the state company charged with renovating its only nuclear plant to a controversial firm, the privatisation agency said.
A jury of the Supreme Administrative Court overruled the suspension of the sale of Atomenergoremont -- which is modernizing the Kozloduy plant -- by another jury three months ago, calling that ruling unjustified.
The October decision cited the risk of contravening a law protecting state secrets if the firm was sold to Energy Company, which in June launched an offer to take over 70 percent of the company.
The Bulgarian press has reported that alleged drug baron Konstantin Dimitrov, murdered in Amsterdam in December, had been one of Energy Company's shareholders.
Kozloduy provides more than 45 percent of Bulgaria's electricity.
The plant has six reactors but the two oldest ones were shut down at the end of 2002.
Two other Soviet-era 440-megawatt reactors are due to be shut down in 2006 under an agreement with Brussels made during the course of Bulgaria's accession negotiations with the bloc, which it hopes to join in 2007.
That would leave the plant with only two 1000-megawatt reactors.
The EU has demanded that both of these be modernised.
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear weapon 'brochure' adds to US dilemma over Musharraf
By Alec Russell in Washington
05/01/2004
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$P12QXAIG11T4BQFIQMFCFFOAVCBQYIV0?xml=/news/2004/01/05/wpak05.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/05/ixnewstop.html
Pakistan faced embarrassment yesterday with the publication of a sales brochure from its top-secret nuclear facility, apparently hawking technology and components to would-be nuclear powers.
The brochure from the AQ Khan Research Laboratories, the centre of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme, has an official-looking seal on the cover saying "Government of Pakistan". Its publication in The New York Times yesterday undercuts Islamabad's claims that any transfer of its nuclear technology to rogue states has been the work of individuals.
It also highlights the dilemma of President George W Bush's administration over how to tackle a country that is an ally in the fight against global terrorism and yet also increasingly appears to be at the centre of the murky world of nuclear proliferation.
Pakistan last month conceded that its technology and expertise may have helped the nuclear programmes of "rogue" states, including Iran and North Korea and possibly Libya, but blamed this on individuals motivated by "ambition or greed".
Yesterday's leak, on the eve of important talks between India and Pakistan, prompted speculation in Pakistan that it was deliberately timed to put pressure on President Pervaiz Musharraf to make concessions over the long-running dispute over Kashmir.
The brochure carries a photograph of the "father" of the Pakistani nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and will once again draw attention to the shadowy international marketing role of the mastermind of Pakistan's three-decade-old nuclear project.
Mr Khan was formerly a leading figure at the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, where Pakistan's own bomb was developed. This has been linked to the transfer of nuclear expertise and technology to Iran in the 1980s and 1990s and North Korea as recently as 2002.
Pakistan's foreign ministry said last month that Mr Khan was one of four nuclear scientists being "debriefed" after Iran told the United Nations nuclear watchdog that it obtained uranium enrichment centrifuges, a vital part of nuclear weaponry, from Pakistan in the late 1980s.
Mr Khan, who is believed to have visited North Korea 13 times since 1997, is a hero in Pakistan and his history of religious statements has led to his lionisation by the Islamist parties that snap at Gen Musharraf's heels.
"All Western countries," Mr Khan was once quoted as saying, "are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam."
According to The New York Times, before Pakistan tested its first bomb in 1998, Mr Khan and his colleagues began publishing papers on making and testing uranium centrifuges that in the West would have been deemed highly classified.
Administration officials have long repeated claims by their Pakistani counterparts that their nuclear export industry, if it ever existed, is now over.
But the publication of the brochure further undermines the credibility of those assurances.
Mr Bush has made the fight against nuclear proliferation a goal of his presidency but, like his three predecessors, has shrunk from criticising Pakistan for fear of destabilising an ally. He has never cited Pakistan's laboratories in the context of proliferation and publicly remains stalwart in his support for Gen Musharraf.
----
Web of trails leads to Pakistan
2004-01-05
New York Times
By David E. Sanger & William J. Broad
http://www.etaiwannews.com/Taiwan/2004/01/05/1073267371.htm
The Pakistani leaders who denied for years that scientists at the country's secret A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories were peddling advanced nuclear technology must have been averting their eyes from a most conspicuous piece of evidence: the laboratory's own sales brochure, quietly circulated to aspiring nuclear weapons states and a network of nuclear middlemen around the world.
The cover bears an official-looking seal that says "Government of Pakistan" and a photograph of the father of the Pakistani bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan. It promotes components that were spinoffs from Pakistan's three-decade-long project to build a nuclear stockpile of enriched uranium, set in a drawing that bears a striking resemblance to a mushroom cloud.
In other nations, such sales would be strictly controlled. But Pakistan has always played by its own rules.
As investigators unravel the mysteries of the North Korean, Iranian and now the Libyan nuclear projects, Pakistan - and those it empowered with knowledge and technology they are now selling on their own - has emerged as the intellectual and trading hub of a loose network of hidden nuclear proliferators.
That network is global, stretching from Germany to Dubai and from China to South Asia, and involves many middlemen and suppliers. But what is striking about a string of recent disclosures, experts say, is how many roads appear ultimately to lead back to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta, where Pakistan's own bomb was developed.
In 2002 the United States was surprised to discover how North Korea had turned to the Khan laboratory for an alternative way to manufacture nuclear fuel, after the reactors and reprocessing facilities it had relied on for years were "frozen" under a now shattered agreement with the Clinton administration. Last year, international inspectors and Western intelligence agencies were surprised again, this time by the central role Pakistan played in the initial technology that enabled Iran to pursue a secret uranium enrichment program for 18 years.
The sources of Libya's enrichment program are still under investigation, but those who have had an early glance say they see "interconnections" with both Pakistan and Iran's programs - and Libyan financial support for the Pakistani program that stretches back three decades.
Until two weeks ago, Pakistani officials had long denied that any nuclear technology was transferred from their laboratories. But now that story has begun to change, after the Pakistani authorities, under pressure, began interrogating scientists from the laboratory about their assistance to other nuclear aspirants. Two weeks ago, Khan himself was called in for what appears to have been a respectful, and still inconclusive, questioning.
Responding to requests relayed through associates, Dr. Khan has recently denied that he aided atomic hopefuls. But American and European officials note that in the 1980's he repeatedly denied that Pakistan was at work on an atomic bomb, which it finally tested in 1998.
While American intelligence officials have gathered details on the activities of the creator of the Pakistani bomb and his compatriots for decades, four successive American presidents have dealt with the issue extremely delicately, turning modest sanctions against Pakistan on and off, for fear of destabilizing the country when it was needed to counter the Soviets in the 1980's, much as it is needed to battle terrorism today.
Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations organization charged with monitoring nuclear energy worldwide, contends that the recent nuclear disclosures show that the system put in place at the height of the cold war to contain nuclear weapons technology has ruptured and can no longer control the new nuclear trade.
"The information is now all over the place, and that's what makes it more dangerous than in the 1960s," ElBaradei said.
The biggest hurdle in making a nuclear weapon is not designing the warhead, but getting the right fuel to create an atomic explosion. One route is to extract plutonium from nuclear reactors and reprocess it to produce more fuel, known as creating a fuel cycle. The other is to extract uranium from the ground and enrich it.
The key to the technology is the development of centrifuges. These hollow tubes spin fast to separate a gaseous form of natural uranium into U-238, a heavy isotope, and U-235, a light one. The rare U-235 isotope is the holy grail: it can easily split in two, releasing bursts of nuclear energy.
But making centrifuges is no easy trick. The rotors of centrifuges, spinning at the speed of sound or faster, must be very strong and perfectly balanced or they fly apart catastrophically.
To produce bomb-grade fuel, uranium must pass through hundreds or thousands of centrifuges linked in a cascade, until impurities are spun away and what remains is mainly U-235 . The result is known as highly enriched uranium.
Khan returned to Pakistan in 1976 after working in the Netherlands, carrying extremely secret centrifuge designs - a Dutch one that featured an aluminum rotor, and a German one made of maraging steel, a superhard alloy. He was charged with stealing the designs from a European consortium where he worked.
"The designs for the machines," said a secret State Department memo at the time, "were stolen by a Pakistani national."
The steel rotor in the German design turned out to be particularly difficult to make, but it could spin twice as fast, meaning it produced more fuel.
Khan's accomplishments turned him into a national hero. In 1981, as a tribute, the president of Pakistan, General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, renamed the enrichment plant the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories.
Khan, a fervent nationalist, has condemned the system that limits legal nuclear knowledge to the five major nuclear powers, or that has ignored Israel's nuclear weapon while focusing on the fear of an Islamic bomb. "All Western countries," he was once quoted as saying, "are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam."
In the years before Pakistan's first test in 1998, Khan and his team began publishing papers in the global scientific literature on how to make and test its uranium centrifuges. In the West, these publications would have been classified secret or top secret.
The scientific papers were soon followed by sales brochures. Much of the gear marketed by the Khan laboratory was critical for anyone eager to make Albright, who is the president of the Institute for Science and International Security, an arms control group in Washington, has concluded that China was an early recipient of Pakistan's designs for centrifuges. China had used an antiquated, expensive process for enriching uranium, and the technology Khan held promised a faster, cheaper, more efficient path to bomb-making.
But that was just the start. Evidence uncovered in recent months shows that around 1987 Pakistan struck a deal with Iran, which had tried unsuccessfully to master enrichment technology on its own during its war with Iraq. The outlines of the deal - pieced together from limited inspections and documents turned over to the I.A.E.A. in October - show that a centrifuge of Pakistani design finally solved Iran's technological problems. That deal was "a tremendous boost," Albright and his colleague, Corey Hinderstein, said in a draft report on the Iranian program. "The possession of detailed designs could allow Iran to skip many difficult research steps," they added.
The Iranian documents turned over to the I.A.E.A. make no reference to Pakistan itself; they only point to its signature technologies.
"We have middlemen and suspicions," said a Western diplomat with access to the documents. "There is a Pakistani tie for sure, but we don't know the details."
Iran's program fooled the I.A.E.A., which caught no whiff of it during 18 years of inspections. But Pakistan's role was also well hidden from American intelligence agencies.
"We had some intelligence successes with Iran, we knew about some of their enrichment efforts," said Gary Samore, who headed up nonproliferation efforts in the Clinton administration's National Security Council. "What we didn't know was the Pakistan connection - that was a surprise. And the extent of Pakistan's ties was, in retrospect, the surprise of the 1990's."
The Iranians were hardly satisfied customers. They had gotten Pakistan's older models and were forced to slog ahead slowly for two decades, foraging around the world for parts, building experimental facilities involving a few hundred centrifuges, but apparently failing to produce enough fissile material for a bomb.
If the Iranians were the turtle, the North Koreans proved the hare. Around 1997, a decade after the Pakistani deal with Iran, Khan made inroads with the government of Kim Jong Il, as it sought a way to make nuclear fuel away from the Yongbyon plant and the prying eyes of American satellites. Khan began traveling to North Korea, visiting 13 times, American intelligence officials said.
During those visits, North Korea offered to exchange centrifuge technology for North Korean missile technology, enabling Pakistan to extend the reach of its nuclear weapons across India.
Again, American intelligence agencies missed many of the signals. They knew of an experimental program, but it took evidence from South Korea to demonstrate that North Korea was moving toward industrial-level production. Then in the summer of 2001, American spy satellites spotted missile parts being loaded into a Pakistani cargo plane near Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. The parts were assumed to be the quid pro quo for the nuclear technology.
Last spring, a few months after the deal was revealed in The New York Times, the State Department announced some sanctions against the Khan laboratory but cited the illegal missile transactions. The State Department said it had insufficient evidence to issue sanctions for a nuclear transfer, a move some dissenting officials suspected was a concession to avoid embarrassing General Musharraf, who had denied that any nuclear transfers ever occurred.
A Congressional report on the Pakistan-North Korea trade notes that over the years "Pakistan has been sanctioned in what some observers deem, an `on again, off again' fashion," mostly for importing technology for unconventional weapons, and later for its 1998 nuclear tests. Those sanctions, which were also issued against India, were waived shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the United States suddenly needed Pakistan's cooperation.
It is unclear whether the Pakistan-North Korea connection has been cut off. But new evidence suggests that North Korea is still racing ahead. In April, a ship carrying a large cargo of superstrong aluminum tubing was stopped in the Suez Canal after the German authorities determined that it was destined for North Korea. The precise size of the tubes, according to Western diplomats and industry reports, suggested that they were intended for making the outer casings of G-2 centrifuges, the kind whose rotors are made of steel, and that Dr. Khan wrote about.
The C.I.A. estimates that by 2005, if unchecked, North Korea will begin large-scale production of enriched uranium.
But so far, American intelligence agencies say they are uncertain where North Korea's centrifuge operations are. On Friday, North Korea said it would allow a delegation of American experts into the country this week.
Halting nuclear trades
Early in 2003, Bush established a coordinating group inside the White House to oversee the interception of shipments of unconventional weapons around the world. So far, Washington has drawn more than a dozen nations into a loose posse to track and stop shipments, and Germany, Italy, Taiwan and Japan have executed seizures.
But the first interceptions - and the trail of parts and agreements they reveal - have only pointed to the mushrooming size of the secondary market in parts.
Even more worrisome are the kinds of exchanges that do not move on ships and planes, what Ashton B. Carter, who worked in the Clinton administration on North Korean issues, calls "substantial technical cooperation among all members of the brotherhood of rogues."
North Korean engineers have been sighted living in Iran, ostensibly to help the country build medium- and long-range missiles. But the growing suspicion is that the relationship has now expanded beyond missiles, and that the two nations are warily dealing in the nuclear arena as well.
"We're debating the evidence," said one administration official.
The latest nuclear disclosures came after the United States spotted a German-registered ship headed for Libya through the Suez Canal, with thousands of parts for uranium centrifuges. The interception in October of that shipment, American officials say, tipped the balance for the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi, forcing him to agree in December to disclose and dismantle his own nuclear program.
Inspectors are still investigating where Libya's components came from, focusing on manufacturers in Europe and what ElBaradei calls "interconnections" between the Libyan program and Iran's.
The intercepted shipment came from Dubai, a place of great importance in Khan's secretive world. It was a Dubai middleman claiming to represent Khan who in 1990, on the eve of the Persian Gulf war, offered Dr. Khan's aid to Iraq in building an atom bomb. And it was a Dubai middleman whom Khan blamed for supplying centrifuge parts to Iran, said a European confidante of Dr. Khan's who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Ties between Libya and Pakistan go back years. In 1973, when Pakistan was just starting its nuclear program, Libya signed a deal to help finance its atomic efforts in exchange for knowledge about how to make nuclear fuel, said Leonard S. Spector of the Monterey Institute of International Studies' Center for Nonproliferation Studies. From 1978 to 1980, he added, Libya appears to have supplied Pakistan with uranium ore. But Libya appears to have made much less progress than the Iranians had.
ElBaradei estimates that 35 to 40 nations now have the knowledge to build an atomic weapon. In place of the nonproliferation treaty, which he calls obsolete, he proposes revising the world's system to place any facilities that can manufacture fissile material under multinational control.
"Unless you are able to control the actual acquisition of weapon-usable material, you are not able to control proliferation," he said in recent interview. But Bush and the leaders of the other established nuclear states are reluctant to renegotiate a stronger treaty because it will reopen the question of why some states are permitted to hold nuclear weapons and others are not.
For now the world is left watching a terrifying race - one that pits scientists, middlemen and extremists against Western powers trying to intercept, shipload by shipload, the technology as it spreads through the clandestine network. Bush remains wary of cracking down on a fragile Pakistan, for fear pressure could tip the situation toward the radicals.
Some in the administration say they think other nations may follow Libya's calculations and abandon their programs voluntarily. But there are doubters.
"Its a fine theory," a top nonproliferation strategist in the administration said recently. "The question for 2004 is whether the mullahs or Kim Jong Il buy into it."
-------- japan
Restoring a nuclear-energy policy
Japan Times:
Jan. 5, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?ed20040105a1.htm
The Atomic Energy Commission's latest white paper, announced late last year for the first time in 5 1/2 years, is a reminder of the troubled condition of Japan's nuclear power industry. The report's publication had been delayed because of a series of irregularities and accidents that came to light in recent years, such as reactor coolant leakages and test data fabrications.
No wonder public confidence in nuclear safety has plummeted, perhaps to the lowest level since the commission was created in 1956. The report is only too right to emphasize the importance of restoring the public's trust in nuclear energy. One chapter -- "Nuclear energy policy in a new age" -- focuses on grass-roots efforts to win the hearts and minds of local residents.
The report, however, adheres to the current policy, which calls for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel and for establishing the "nuclear fuel cycle" in which plutonium is extracted for use as fuel. But it is difficult to believe that maintaining the status quo is the way to address public concerns about nuclear safety and other problems.
Perhaps a new policy initiative is needed to break the stalemate in the current nuclear energy program. As the report points out, public understanding and support is essential for a successful implementation of policy. A first step in this direction would be to conduct a broad and deep public debate on the range of possible options.
Problems are many. The fast-breeder reactor, the center of the nuclear-fuel cycle project, now looks more like a mirage. The prototype reactor "Monju" is in mothballs due to an accident that occurred in the cooling system in 1995. Remodeling plans are up in the air because of a local court injunction. The AEC's scenario for building a post-Monju demonstration reactor in the runup to commercial operation has already collapsed.
In theory, the fast-breeder reactor is said to be at least 100 times more fuel-efficient than the existing light-water reactor. The report describes the fast breeder as "one of the most potential technological options for resolving future energy problems." It would be unwise, however, to pursue a dream that may not come true, without regard to technical difficulties and development costs.
The "pluthermal" program, designed to burn plutonium in existing reactors, is also stalled. In the background are a series of irregularities at power companies, such as fabrications of fuel data and coverups of technical defects. Experts say it will take several years before the program gets under way.
The reprocessing project is in trouble, owing to technical and other faults at a reprocessing plant now under construction at Rokkasho, Aomori Prefecture. The plant is expected to go on stream in 2006, a year behind schedule. In the meantime, spent fuel in storage is reaching capacity at some plants.
Problems are also involved in the underground disposal of high-level radioactive waste. One problem is that it is difficult to find disposal sites, particularly because Japan is densely populated. Another is the enormous cost of storing such waste deep in the ground.
No doubt the nuclear energy industry -- which supplies a third of the nation's electricity needs -- faces formidable challenges. Establishing the nuclear fuel cycle seems all but impracticable because it involves too many problems. Costwise, nuclear energy's advantage over other types of energy could disappear if the costs of the fuel cycle and waste disposal are included.
Market liberalization, meanwhile, is pushing down electricity prices. For example, the price of pluthermal fuel -- mixed oxides of plutonium and uranium -- is estimated to be at least 50 percent higher than that of ordinary fuel. Established power companies already face competition from newcomers.
Sluggish power demand, along with market decontrol, is also cutting into the competitiveness of costly nuclear power plants. In fact, two construction projects -- one in Suzu, Ishikawa Prefecture, and the other in Maki, Niigata Prefecture -- were canceled recently.
The AEC has played an important role in maintaining the principle of peaceful use of nuclear energy. Now, however, the commission finds itself in a difficult position. Unless it deals positively with current problems and criticisms concerning its basic policy, its very raison d'etre could be called into question.
What is needed now is a comprehensive analysis of all factors related to nuclear energy policy, such as safety, supply stability, environmental conservation, economic advantage, systemic sustainability and nuclear nonproliferation. The AEC, whose lineup is set for a substantial reshuffle this year, will have plenty of work to do in the year ahead.
-------- korea
US refuses to bow to North Korean nuclear demands
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105221141.yk55ffq5.html
The United States on Monday volleyed back a North Korean warning that "the ball is in the US court" over a nuclear showdown, bluntly telling Pyongyang it would get no rewards just for showing up at six-nation crisis talks.
Amid signs that the meeting, originally pencilled in for Beijing in December, may now slip into next month at the earliest, Washington rammed home its view that a solution to the crisis must be discussed at talks, not before them.
"We are continuing to state pretty categorically, that we're not going to offer incentives for North Korea to return to the negotiating table," said State Department deputy spokesman Adam Ereli.
"We are prepared to resume talks without preconditions. No other party has set preconditions.
"We urge the North to drop its preconditions and move to another round of talks where all parties can seek to achieve progress on the issues of concern."
In its latest rhetorical blast ahead of the talks, North Korea said earlier that it was ready to resume crisis talks at an early date if Washington agreed ahead of time to reward it for re-freezing its nuclear weapons facilities.
Pyongyang's ruling Workers' Party newspaper Rodong Sinmun said that without a prior agreement, the talks could be even scrapped altogether.
"The six-way talks may be resumed at an early date or may be delayed or scuttled depending on how preparations are made for their resumption," the newspaper said in a commentary carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.
"(The) ball is in the US court."
A senior South Korean official meanwhile said that talks that should have taken place in Beijing in December, may now be pushed back to next month.
President Roh Moo-Hyun's National Security Advisor Ra Jong-Yil said that scheduling challenges were posed by the extended holiday season in Russia that lasts well into January and Lunar New Year celebrations in China in late January.
Moscow also said it seemed "unlikely" that a new round of talks will be held this month.
Russia and China are six-way talks participants along with the United States, Japan and the two Koreas.
The North Korean commentary reflected demands made in a North Korean foreign ministry statement a month ago that referred to agreement on "first-phase actions" including the lifting of sanctions against North Korea and a resumption of energy aid in return for the nuclear freeze.
North Korea agreed in 1994 to mothball its Yongbyon nuclear complex, 90 kilometres (50 miles) north of Pyongyang, under a nuclear freeze agreement with the United States, but fired up the facilities after the latest nuclear crisis erupted in October 2002.
Washington has said that Pyongyang must verifiably dismantle its nuclear programs before it can accept concessions, and that it is only willing to discuss "sequencing" of steps to aid Pyongyang at the six nation talks not before them.
Signs that the schedule for talks may slip again came as two US delegations are heading for North Korea this week at the invitation of the communist state in an indication that Pyongayang is eager to engage Washington.
The US government has distanced itself from the delegations amid reports that one of the teams made up of academics and a scientist -- the other is from Congress -- is scheduled to become the first American group to visit Yongbyon since international inspectors were kicked out a year ago.
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Pyongyang visit highlights US-S. Korea divide
By Donald Kirk
The Christian Science Monitor
January 05, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0105/p04s01-wosc.html
SEOUL - The two great hopes for South Korea after a year of nuclear crisis and economic uncertainty were that the economy would flourish and North and South Korea would resolve their differences, opening the way to trade and personal contacts.
By the end of 2003, South Korea appeared far closer to realizing the first ambition than the second. If prospects for resolution of differences with North Korea did not appear altogether bleak, they were not high despite Chinese success in getting the North to agree to a second round of multilateral talks early in 2004.
The visit this week of a high-level US delegation to Pyongyang strikes at the differences between the Bush administration and critics, including many South Korean offiicals, who prefer a more conciliatory tack in dealing with the government of Kim Jong Il.
US officials clearly view the visit as an attempt to play on hopes for reconciliation in advance of the next round of talks, while ignoring demands for verifiable abandonment of the North's program. The State Department's deputy spokesman, Adam Ereli, signaled official distaste, saying that the mission was "independent of the administration."
The delegation - which includes Sig Hecker, former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Jack Pritchard, dismissed last year as the State Department's point man on the North - arrives Tuesday in Pyongyang in hopes of visiting the nuclear complex at Yongbyon.
The CIA estimates that North Korea processed enough plutonium there to produce two nuclear warheads before the facility was shut down under the 1994 Geneva framework agreement.
North Korea said last year that it had resumed reprocessing plutonium after expelling two IAEA inspectors at the end of 2002.
At issue is how to respond to Pyongyang's admission, in October 2002, of a separate program to build nuclear warheads from highly enriched uranium - a revelation that caused the collapse of the 1994 agreement.
The North, for its part, wants the US to remove it from the list of nations supporting terrorism and lift its trade embargo. But it is also calling for resumption of monthly shipments of heavy fuel oil, suspended in late 2002, and compensation for suspension of a project - under the 1994 accord - to build twin lightwater reactors for energy.
Impasse on vital issues does not mean that no agreement will emerge. South Korean officials hope that Bush, in the runup to the 2004 election, might be susceptible to a compromise. Similarly, they hope Mr. Kim might be willing to deal to avoid more severe problems after the election.
In the meantime, the South Korean government is counting on spreading economic influence in the North through special industrial zones at Kaesong, northwest of the truce village of Panmunjom, and at Sinuiju, across the Yalu River from the Chinese city of Dandong, though chances of the latter seem remote since the Dutch-Chinese entrepreneur named by Mr. Kim to run it was arrested on corruption charges in China.
But for many South Koreans, corruption scandals at home have overshadowed concerns about their neighbor to the north.
President Roh Moo Hyun, inaugurated last February as successor to Kim Dae Jung, who forged the "sunshine" policy of reconciliation with North Korea, suffered severe embarrassment from squabbles over corruption in which a number of his top aides were arrested. The conservative opposition, which had a majority in the National Assembly, suffered scandals as well.
These issues dominated the headlines, giving the impression that members of all parties have been accepting and giving bribes and that top aides are likely to be targets for investigations.
One concern is that political unrest will undermine the government at a time when leftists are still able to marshal support against the US-Korean alliance and the government's agreement to send 3,000 troops to Iraq. The economy, moreover, was roiled by the increasing numbers of Koreans falling behind on credit payments.
Yet Korea is still thriving at the beginning of 2004. The figures show new records last year in terms of trade surplus, foreign trade, and industrial output. And while economic growth for 2003 increased by less than 3 percent, forecasters estimate the economy will increase by 5 or 6 percent in 2004, more than that of almost any other country in the region.
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North Korea for Dummies: Basic Facts Good People Should Know
By GARY LEUPP
January 5, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp01052004.html
The surprise announcement on January 2 is that North Korea has invited a delegation of U.S. nuclear experts to visit its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon. Perhaps the North Koreans want to show the world that they have what they've been saying they have---enough plutonium for half a dozen atomic bombs. And perhaps they will repeat what they've been saying all along: that they will give it all up in exchange for a serious U.S. promise not to attack and kill them. (Now is that inscrutable or what?)
Colin Powell's State Department has been working with China, Russia, Japan and South Korea to negotiate the dissolution of North Korea's nuclear weapons program. But on December 12, Vice President Cheney appeared to want to sabotage that effort, telling those attending a high-level meeting in Washington that he wants to defeat Pyongyang, not talk with it. According to a Knight-Ridder report, Cheney stated: "I have been charged by the President with making sure that none of the tyrannies in the world are negotiated with. We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it." That's just nonsense, of course; while tyrant Eduard Shevardnadze was in power in the Republic of Georgia, the U.S. contentedly negotiated with him about oil pipeline construction and the handling of Islamic terrorism in the Pankisi Gorge. (Meanwhile Georgia received more U.S. aid per capita than any country but Israel.) Tyrants Musharraf, Mubarak, Karimov, etc. negotiate with Washington all the time; Muammar Qadhafi just negotiated the end of his nuclear program after months of talks with the U.S. Washington chats with Evil comfortably and routinely, in businesslike fashion.
Anyway, two weeks after Cheney's statement, White House spokesman Trent Duffy told reporters, "The US stands ready to resume the six-party talks [including North Korea] at an early date and without preconditions, and we are working with others to do so." So maybe the Bushites are sincere about negotiating, or maybe they're not; they're divided among themselves. The odiously influential Richard Perle, and former Bush speech writer David Frum, have just published a book, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, which declares that as a premise for negotiations with the U.S., Pyongyang must completely and immediately abandon its nuclear weapons program. So it's hard to know what's going on. But the plan currently under discussion, drafted by the Chinese (who seem to really not want nukes on either half of the Korean peninsula) calls for Pyongyang to freeze and dismantle its nuclear weapons program, in return for security guarantees and economic aid. In contrast, Cheney's statement called for North Korea to dismantle its very self under the threat of U.S. attack. More specifically, Cheney set conditions difficult for a sovereign state to accept: first North Korea, having been labeled "evil" by Washington since Bush's first State of the Union speech (and conflated with dissimilar Iraq and Iran as part of what thinking people consider a ludicrously contrived "axis of evil") must dismantle its nuclear weapons program, and make itself more vulnerable to the defeat Cheney has specifically threatened. Only then will the Bush administration talk to Pyongyang about maybe issuing some statement promising not to mount an attack. Beijing quite reasonably urges Washington to be more "realistic" and "flexible" in dealing with North Korea.
The Chinese, unfortunately, aren't talking to the world's most flexible regime. These particular imperialists responded to frantic efforts by the Iraqi regime to prevent war (including the offer, secretly made last December, to accept hundreds of FBI or military arms inspectors from the U.S.; give special oil concessions to U.S. firms; and to cooperate with any U.S.-authored Middle East peace plan) with the demand that Saddam admit (whether true or not) that he possessed weapons of mass destruction, place himself in U.S. military custody, and order his military to surrender to the U.S. without a fight. That's diplomacy, neocon style. It requires the enemy to declare, "Yes, you're right, I'm evil," and then to grovel and capitulate. It takes into account that the foe will not do that, but his truculence can then be represented to the American people as a desire to evilly provoke their own good selves into war.
Nine months ago, John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, advised North Korea (and Iran and Syria) to "draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq" (Reuters, April 9, 2003). (Fear us, and obey!) He called the Pyongyang regime a "hellish nightmare" and actually stated, "The end of North Korea is our policy." (Mr. Bolton wants to end North Korea, period. So why bother with diplomatic speech, and why negotiate anything at all?) Bolton is a leading neocon, and (with Cheney) adviser to the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs, which promotes aggressive assertion of U.S. military power in the Middle East and everywhere. His career includes a stint of service to extreme anticommunist war hawk Barry Goldwater. A friend of the former Senator Jesse Helms, he strove to thwart African-American voter registration in the 1980s. He has led the Bush administration's opposition to the International Criminal Court. The North Korean regime, responding to his attacks on it, have pithily described Mr. Bolton as "human scum."
Now, I'm no big fan of the Dear Leader, Kim Jong-il, and the regime he heads. But neither am I a fan of selective vilification and simplistic thinking. If the Bush administration is in fact planning for war with North Korea (madness, but the neocon faction at least seems to think it's doable), it will continue to depict Pyongyang in the worst possible light. Just as it cherry-picked information to build a case for war with Iraq, it will distort the historical record on North Korea. So what follows is a very brief presentation of what I think are the points about that history most relevant to the current crisis.
1. The Korean peninsula, peopled by one of the world's most homogeneous ethnic groups, and united from the seventh century through 1945, is now divided into two nations due primarily to the actions of the Truman administration and the U.S. military. This is something upon which South and North Koreans agree. The facts are laid out well by historian Bruce Cumings in his magisterial two-volume work, The Origins of the Korean War. Korea was a Japanese colony from 1910 to 1945. As the Japanese prepared to surrender to the Allies, they did what they did elsewhere in Asia: they turned over power to local people in the hope that the western powers wouldn't colonize, or continue to colonize, Asian nations. (One of the principle outcomes of the Pacific War was that it indeed helped produce the end of colonial administrations in the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, etc.) Leaders of self-governing people's committees opposed to Japanese occupation formed the "Korean People's Republic" in Seoul on September 6, 1945. It had a broad-based leadership ranging from right to left. When Lieutenant General John R. Hodge, leader of the U.S. occupation of Korea, arrived in Inchon soon thereafter, he ordered Japanese authorities to remain at their posts, refused to acknowledge the newly-formed republic, and indeed even banned all reference to it. The U.S. would be in charge of what was seen as a defeated enemy nation. This attitude produced widespread resentment and resistance in Korea. (Compare contemporary occupied Iraq.)
2. As the war was drawing to an end, the Soviet allies of the U.S. advocated independence for a unified Korea as soon as possible. Truman for his part suggested a trusteeship of decades, citing the case of the Philippines. The Soviets by prior arrangement in the closing days of the war declared war on Japan and moved troops into Manchuria, Korea, and islands north of Hokkaido. They could easily have seized the entire Korean peninsula. Instead they consulted with the U.S. State Department, and agreed to pause at the 38th parallel, where they awaited the arrival of U.S. forces to accept the Japanese surrender in the peninsula's southern half. (Rather accommodating behavior, I'd say.) The Red Army handed power over to the Korean Workers' Party, headed by Kim Il-sung, a legendary guerrilla leader who had fought the Japanese in Manchuria (where there is a large ethnic Korean population).
3. In the South, U.S. Occupation authorities installed Korean nationalist leader Syngman Rhee as president. His dictatorial rule met with resistance from the people's committees, which while quite independent, sympathized with the leadership in the north. That leadership demanded the reunification of the peninsula, and withdrawal of foreign troops; but U.S. authorities, noting the North was becoming part of an expanding communist bloc, became committed to the establishment of a separate South Korean republic, This, like then-occupied Japan and Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China, would maintain an anti-communist alliance with the U.S. Following the collapse of U.S.-Soviet negotiations about Korean reunification, the Republic of Korea was formed in the south, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea in the north, in May 1948. The Soviets withdrew their troops from the peninsula; the U.S. continues to this day to maintain a large force in the south. (Washington's man Rhee was overthrown in a student-led uprising following a rigged election in 1960.)
4. On June 25, 1950 North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel in an effort to establish Pyongyang's control over the whole peninsula. They took Seoul three days later, easily. They met with little resistance from their southern compatriots, and indeed, found much support. But the U.S. was not prepared to see the reunification of Korea on Pyongyang's terms. With some support from its allies, and the fig leaf of U.N. authorization (the Soviet ambassador was absent when the Security Council vote was taken, and Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Taiwan held the China seat), it counter-attacked. As U.S. troops approached the Yalu River (the natural border between Korea and China), forces from the newly established People's Republic came to the assistance of DPRK forces, doing much damage to the overextended Americans. The war ended in a stalemate, after the death of about four million people, three years later. The pre-war border has been maintained under armistice conditions. North Korea continues to insist that the South is occupied by the U.S., and that the U.S. has thwarted the reunification desired by all Koreans. Historically, the U.S. official position has been that South Korea is a democracy (even under successive brutal dictatorships, those of Rhee, Park Chung-hee, Chun Doo-hwan, etc.), while the North is an evil totalitarian communist state. Vice President Cheney's position, as noted above, is that North Korea must be defeated, and only following that defeat reconnected with the good, pro-American, capitalist, democratic South.
5. The South is an economic powerhouse today; its GDP is double that of the Netherlands. But it is subject to crises, like that of 1997, and it is of course dependent on international capital and can't have a really independent foreign policy. The South Korean economy becomes increasingly globalized, and under foreign control. The North Korean economy, meanwhile, is in miserable shape. While Pyongyang long pursued, officially, the policy of juche (self-reliance), it was badly hit by the implosion of the USSR and collapse of its bloc. Natural disasters, like the 1996 floods that destroyed most of the rice crop, have caused homelessness and starvation. But should any aver that this fate is the inevitable result of the North Korean system itself, Cumings notes that in 1980, infant mortality in the north was lower than in the south. Life expectancy was higher. Per capita energy usage was double that in the south (Boston Globe, Dec. 21, 2003).
6. Of the two Koreas, the first to begin a systematic effort to acquire nuclear weapons was the South. Park Chung-hee's regime was obliged to abandon its nuclear program under quiet pressure from the Carter administration in the 1970s. The North Koreans may have produced two nuclear weapons by 1992. In 1994, the Clinton administration negotiated a deal by which Pyongyang suspended its nuclear weapons program in exchange for oil and the foreign-sponsored construction of two cool-water reactors. But the U.S. didn't follow up on the agreement, and North Korea resumed its program. Having withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty last January, it now develops that program legally, arguing (sensibly) that it's necessary for self-defense. As the U.S. once argued, followed by the USSR, Britain, France, China, Pakistan and India. Nuclear Israel would argue similarly if it talked about its program, which it doesn't as a matter of policy. (The U.S. currently conveys the impression that any nuclear newcomer commits a fundamentally evil act in acquiring this technology. But putting things in perspective, one must observe that each new nuclear state merely follows in the footsteps of those who first developed nuclear weapons and used them, with unapologetic efficacy, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)
7. Recent South Korean presidents have followed a policy of "sunshine diplomacy" towards the North. President Kim Dae-jung visited Pyongyang and met with Kim Jong-il in 2000. When George W. Bush came to power and met with Kim in 2001, he indicated, much to the latter's chagrin, that the U.S. had no interest in his "sunshine diplomacy" but wished to aggressively confront North Korea.
8. The majority of people in South Korea currently believe that the United States is a greater threat to them than North Korea, and there is even considerable sympathy in the South for the North's nuclear strategy. Many feel that their compatriots across the border are being bullied by the power responsible for the peninsula's division; they say they don't fear the North or believe its weapons will be deployed against them. They're Koreans, after all, victimized historically by Japanese and Americans, Chinese and Russians, far more than by one another.
As I say, I'm no fan of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il (nor for that matter the current South Korean leader Roh Moo-hyun). The North Korean leader is most often defined as a "Stalinist," although I'm not sure that's fair to Joseph Stalin. It's absurd to call him a "Maoist." (Maoism stresses the vulnerability of the socialist project, and the very real possibility of the restoration of capitalism, which of course has happened in the PRC. North Korean official Marxism depicts the present North Korean state as an invulnerable worker's paradise, which can't be undermined because History won't let such reversals happen.) The official North Korean ideology looks to me as a peculiar mix of Confucianism, passionate nationalism, and undigested Marxism-Leninism. Filial devotion to the house of Kim Il-sung, national Father, is central to the ideology. Thus both Washington and Pyongyang are benighted by simplistic, dogmatic approaches to reality. But the will for war seems much greater on the one side than the other.
Will the visit of non-government U.S. nuclear experts to North Korea stymie the neocons' effort to defeat North Korean "evil"? Will it produce an agreement without regime change, to their chagrin? Bruce Cumings told the Boston Globe, "If the Iraq war had gone quickly and successfully to a conclusion, we would have had a major crisis with North Korea this fall [2003]. It was quite apparent that the Bush administration felt that North Korea was next on its list if the Iraq war went well." Paraphrasing Cumings: dogged resistance to invasion and occupation by Iraqis, fighting on the battlefield Bush calls the "center" of the "War on Terror" has well served the Korean people, on the other end of Asia, who do not want to be on that list and (like Syrians, Iranians, Cubans, Libyans, and most people) do not want Americans killing them. At this point the State Department (Bolton excepted) seems inclined to back off from further killing, because the various repercussions make it nervous. But the neocons piloting the Defense [sic] Department are as eager as ever to affect an End to Evil, and nothing said or shown in Yongbyon this week will likely curb their wild will to victory.
Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Comparative Religion. He is the author of Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa, Japan and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900.
He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu
-------- mideast
Saudi nukes
January 05, 2004
Washington Times
By Richard L. Russell
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040104-102921-9166r.htm
American and international attention is focused on the nuclear weapons programs of the recent past in Iraq and Libya and of the present in North Korea and Iran. American officials would be wise not to restrict their fields of vision to these targets, lest they miss otherpotentialnuclear weapons aspirants. One such candidate is Saudi Arabia, which is seldom mentioned as a problem country regarding nuclear weapons. Much like the movie Casablanca, the "usual suspects" are more readily trotted because they are at odds with American national interests nearly across the board, while Saudi Arabia shares many interests with the United States.
The Saudis have a pool of strategic interests that likely put them at odds with American counterproliferation policy. Riyadh's major regional rivals are capable, or soon will be, of threatening the Saudi kingdom with nuclear brinkmanship; Israel has the most formidable nuclear weapons capabilities in the region; Iran appears bent on acquiring nuclear weapons; and Iraq might resurrect a nuclear weapons program after the Americans depart Baghdad. The Saudi royals might also worry that the United States could become a threat to the kingdom. The Saudis, for example, might consider a scenario in which relations between Riyadh and Washington deteriorate into conflict over the methods and means to combat al Qaeda. The Saudis realize that their conventional military capabilities-notwithstanding their modern weapons inventories-would be hard-pressed to defend against the larger military manpower pools in Iran or Iraq or against the sophisticated technological capabilities of the Israeli or the American militaries. In short, the Saudis would be strategically sensible to look to nuclear weapons as a potential "quick fix" to keep rivals at bay.
The Saudis already have in place a foundation for building a nuclear weapons deterrent. In the mid-1980s, they clandestinely negotiated the purchase of about 50 to 60 Chinese CSS-2 missiles. The Chinese and Saudis were able to complete the deal before American intelligence was wise to the relationship. The Saudis paid handsomely, with about $3 billion to $3.5 billion dollars for the Chinese missiles capable of reaching up to about 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles). The CSS-2s had been armed with nuclear warheads when they were operational in the Chinese force structure, but Riyadh and Beijing claim that the missiles delivered to Saudi Arabia were armed with conventional warheads and rebuffed U.S. requests to inspect the missiles. The CSS-2 missiles, however, are too inaccurate to be militarily effective with conventional munitions, but more than accurate enough for the delivery of nuclear weapons. It is well past time for Washington to renew calls for independent inspection of the Saudi missiles to ensure that they are armed as the Chinese and Saudis claim, and that ballistic missile modernization efforts are not underway.
Even if the Chinese refrained from selling nuclear warheads to the Saudis as part of the missile deal, Beijing and Riyadh could look to Islamabad to work around their ostensible commitments to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Chinese are suspected of past provision of nuclear weapons designs to Pakistan, and the Pakistanis might be able to tap their Chinese-honed nuclear weapons expertise to design a warhead suitable for the Saudi CSS-2s. Recent public exposures of Pakistan's willingness to provide expertise to the nuclear weapons programs in North Korea, Iran and possibly Libya show that Islamabad's view toward nuclear weapons proliferation equates to "show me the money." Riyadh was willing to pay the Chinese lucratively for the CSS-2s and no doubt would be similarly generous in subsidizing Pakistan's nuclear weapons program in exchange for nuclear warheads.
Recent high-level official travels between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan lend some evidence of ballistic missile and nuclear weapons cooperation. Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah traveled to Pakistan in October 2003 and reportedly secured a secret agreement with President Pervez Musharraf, under which Pakistan will provide the Saudis with nuclear weapons technology in exchange for oil. The crown prince sent one of his sons to Pakistan in May 2002 to view a Pakistani ballistic missile test. And earlier still, Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan in May 1999 visited a Pakistani uranium enrichment facility. American intelligence officials are dismissive of "stories" of Saudi-Pakistani nuclear cooperation, citing the "absence of evidence."
Such a conclusion implies reasoning along these lines: If a tree falls in the forest and doesn't land on a CIA agent's head, the tree didn't fall. Unfortunately, the CIA's failure to detect the Saudi-Chinese missile deal, much like its more recent failure in 1998 to anticipate the Indian nuclear test that set off the arms race in South Asia, shows that trees are falling throughout the nuclear proliferation forest, but that the CIA's agents are too few and far between not to get hit on their heads. American intelligence has to work with a blend of humility in the face of raw intelligence shortcomings-especiallyfromhuman sources-and an analytic toughness to push intelligence collectors to fill gaps to ensure that Saudi nuclear weapons mounted on ballistic missiles will not come to be just another entry on a longer list of intelligence failures.
Richard L. Russell is an adjunct assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.
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Britain invites Libyan FM to Britain to discuss weapons
London (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105171630.vv312myp.html
British Foreign Minister Jack Straw announced on Monday that he had invited his Libyan counterpart Abdelrahman Shalgam to London for talks on weapons of mass destruction.
Straw did not give a precise date for the Libyan minister's visit.
Last month Libya surprised the international community by announcing it was giving up any ambitions it had of acquiring weapons of mass destruction and would allow UN inspections of its nuclear sites.
Even if Libya had not yet developed nuclear weapons, "it was on the way to doing so," Straw told lawmakers in the lower house, the House of Commons.
Straw said Britain would help Libya dismantle its arms programmes and ease the country's return to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Vienna-based UN nuclear watchdog.
"We have, I believe, established a relationship of trust which has enabled Libya first to renounce terrorism and now to renounce the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction," he said.
Britain now had "corresponding responsibilities to enable Libya to come fully into the mainstream of the international community," he added.
Libya's pledge on December 19 came after nine months of secret talks with London and Washington.
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US plays down row with IAEA over Libyan weapons inspections
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105202801.eqyp86nn.html
The United States on Monday moved to play down a row with the UN's nuclear watchdog over how Libya's vow to abandon weapons of mass destruction will be verified.
After days of private verbal sparring between Washington and the International Atomic Energy Agency over the verification process, the State Department said the US and IAEA roles were not incompatible.
At the same time, however, deputy spokesman Adam Ereli said the agreement worked out between the United States, Britain and Libya -- which led to Tripoli's surprise December 19 renunciation of weapons of mass destruction -- gave some specific authority to Washington and London.
"We do not see any conflict between the responsibilities of the IAEA and the initiative underway by the UK and the United States with Libya," Ereli told reporters.
"I would say that the US government is working with the British and Libyan governments and the IAEA to determine how best we all together can assist Libya in getting rid of its WMD programs," he said.
"On the question of who's doing what, that also is something that we're working out with both the IAEA and the British," Ereli said.
He acknowledged that under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and related agreements, including an additional NPT protocol allowing for snap inspections that Libya has agreed to sign, the IAEA had responsibility for verifying Libya's compliance with its commitments.
But, he stressed that the nature of three-way US-British-Libyan deal -- sealed after months of secret negotiations -- gave special responsibilities to the United States and Britain.
"As far as our role goes, we've got a political agreement with Libya under which we will need to help ensure and expedite the removal of all weapons-related aspects of Libya's nuclear program," Ereli said.
"We plan to continue working closely with the IAEA in facilitating complete verification by it," he said.
The turf battle between Washington and the Vienna-based IAEA over Libya emerged late last week in the aftermath of a surprise visit to Tripoli by IAEA chief Mohamad ElBaradei and comments from agency officials that it would take full charge of inspecting Libyan facilities.
Senior US officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, then took issue with both ElBaradei's visit and the IAEA's insistence of responsibility, suggesting that the body was not adequately equipped to complete the verification.
One senior State Department official noted Friday that the IAEA did not have the necessary expertise to investigate Libya's chemical and biological weapons programs, which are also covered by Tripoli's agreement with the United States and Britain.
Vienna-based diplomats said on Saturday that US Secretary of State Colin Powell had called ElBaradei in a bid to soothe the tensions
"Everyone is making an effort to be more civil," said one. "It is in everybody's interest to ratchet the rhetoric down a notch."
The spat has carried echoes of earlier US-IAEA clashes on Iran and Iraq.
ElBaradei contradicted US claims that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction and that there was proof Tehran was trying to acquire nuclear arms.
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The Despot and His Demons
Suddenly, Kaddafi wants to make nice and give up his big nuclear ambitions. Score one for Team Bush
By Michael Hirsh
Jan. 12 issue
Newsweek
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3868586/
Muammar Kaddafi ranks high in that small pantheon of world leaders who inspire both horror and humor. The Libyan dictator has sponsored or supported some of the worst acts of terror in memory, most notoriously the 1988 downing of Pan Am 103. But Kaddafi, with his mop of curly black hair and antic behavior, also tends to put one in mind of Chico Marx. Even his allies in the Islamic world often dismiss the erratic Libyan's behavior as odd. After the Arab League summit last March, when Kaddafi shouted that Saudi Arabia was "making a deal with the Devil" by relying on American protection, Al-Riyadh newspaper wrote that he "needs to be treated by psychiatrists."
Suddenly, however, a coldly calculating Kaddafi may have figured out how to get what he has long been denied: acceptance by the community of nations. And he's eagerly cutting a deal with "the Devil," Washington, to do so. He's even turning into an eager stool pigeon against his former rogue cronies, providing critical clues in the unfolding international detective story of WMD proliferation. Since Kaddafi agreed two weeks ago to dismantle his WMD program, U.S. officials say the Libyans may yield more intel than the Iranians and even Pakistan, a key Washington ally but also a leading culprit in the spread of nuclear know-how. Presumably under Kaddafi's orders, Libyan officials are divulging names of companies and individuals who are part of the nuclear "black market" referred to last week by Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency. "This is a very sizable chunk of yarn that, as we pull it, is going to unravel in other places," says one happy senior administration official.
Destroying the black market-an ever-changing array of middlemen from Germany to Sri Lanka-may be impossible. But Washington can claim progress in identifying major sources for centrifuges, the rogue technology of choice for enriching uranium to make bombs. In Libya as in Iran, much of the evidence trail seems to be leading back to the father of Pakistan's nuclear-weapons industry, A. Q. Khan, "the Johnny Appleseed of centrifuges," in the words of Harvard expert Matthew Bunn. Khan is suspected of having stolen centrifuge designs from Urenco, a European consortium where he worked in the 1970s. Investigators believe that most centrifuge designs on the black market stem from that theft. Khan, whose aides have been questioned but who still serves as an adviser to President Pervez Musharraf, is "the most promiscuous proliferator of nuclear technology in the world," says a senior U.S. official. Bush administration officials say Kaddafi's apparent cave-in vindicates their new, tougher approach to WMD proliferation-and is a clear payoff from the decision to invade Iraq. Though he had been trying to negotiate a peace with the West for years, Kaddafi volunteered to dismantle his WMD program just days after Saddam Hussein's very public capture. That delighted administration hawks whose major goal in confronting Saddam was to demonstrate to rogue dictators everywhere what their fate might be if they pursued nukes. Another Bush administration program announced last May-the 11-nation Proliferation Security Agreement, intended to interdict suspect ships on the high seas-also may have influenced Kaddafi. The program's first success came in October, when it stopped a German cargo vessel carrying centrifuge parts to Libya.
Still, Kaddafi may be seeking some wiggle room. Last week Libyan officials suggested they expected the fast lifting of U.S. sanctions. Washington insists Kaddafi has a long way to go before he is "let out of the penalty box." "This is far from a done deal," said a senior Bush official who suggested that Kaddafi's attempt to secretly import centrifuges in October-eight months after he first began negotiating with the United States-indicated he wanted to keep some nuclear capacity as "a residual insurance policy."
U.S. officials were upset last week that ElBaradei traveled to Libya on his own and commented that Kaddafi was far from a nuclear weapon. One Bush official told news-week the statement was "rash." IAEA officials, saying they did better than U.S. intelligence in assessing Saddam's prewar nuclear program, were upset that Washington didn't consult with them.
But it may be time for the administration to make its peace with the IAEA, the United Nations and other international organizations. Washington depends on the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is overseen by the IAEA, to isolate the rogues. To Washington's delight, ElBaradei has begun to talk about revising the NPT to bar uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing, even for civilian use. U.S. officials are discussing a new role for major nuclear suppliers, including Washington, whereby they will supply "safe" fuel for civilian plants instead. If there is any method to the madness of rogue tyrants like Kaddafi, such international cooperation may be the only way to counter it.
With Zahid Hussain in Pakistan and Mark Hosenball in Washington
----
No more nuclear surprises
NYT/IHT
Monday, January 5, 2004
http://www.iht.com/articles/123605.html
Now that Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi has opened Libya's previously secret nuclear facilities, the world is learning just how much of the machinery for making bomb fuel he had been able to assemble without international detection. Over a period of many years, Libya tapped into an international underground market for specialized steel tubes and uranium enrichment centrifuges that has been scandalously easy to enter and shockingly difficult to close down.
Even the newly strengthened provisions of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty cannot guarantee that other countries will not attempt similar end runs. And they may not follow Libya's lead and abruptly come clean before they begin producing nuclear bombs.
A far more stringent and enforceable set of controls on nuclear equipment exports is urgently needed. The treaty loophole that several countries have exploited to begin nuclear weapons programs under the guise of civilian power generation must be closed. That route must be blocked by prohibiting uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing outside countries with well established and carefully monitored nuclear technology industries.
Libya began its nuclear activities with a civilian power program in the 1970's and then secretly added a weapons element in the 1980's. Over the next two decades, it seems to have clandestinely acquired the equipment needed for enriching uranium into bomb fuel component by component, whenever willing sellers could be located.
Before the Gulf War, Iraq, too, started a nuclear weapons program under the guise of nuclear power development. Now Iran claims, unconvincingly, that its newly uncovered uranium enrichment facilities are meant to provide fuel for reactors generating electrical power.
North Korea has not bothered pretending. When its uranium enrichment and plutonium separation plants were found, it simply withdrew from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and declared it was building nuclear weapons.
That still leaves most of the world adhering to the treaty, except India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. But the essentially voluntary inspections required under the treaty's original provisions are clearly inadequate. A tougher, more intrusive inspection system was added in the 1990's, but so far fewer than half of the treaty's participants have signed up for it and fewer than a fifth have ratified it. Iran and Libya have now agreed to submit to intrusive inspections. But these work only when regulators are tipped off to problems. In Iran, the tip came from an opposition group; in Libya, it came from Qaddafi.
To supplement this imperfect system, strong new measures are needed to crack down on exporters of the kind of equipment Libya secretly purchased. That will require imposing stiff penalties on governments found to allow such exports, even if the exporters are private companies operating outside the law.
Governments are more likely to police rogue exporters if they know they themselves will be penalized. The nuclear power loophole must also be closed. If a country is legally allowed to develop the means to produce bomb-grade uranium through a variant of the enrichment process used to make reactor fuel and can extract bomb-grade plutonium from reactor byproducts, it can build nuclear weapons whenever it likes.
There is no legitimate reason for countries to develop such capacities if they can be sure of reliable outside fuel supplies. Reactor fuel production should be limited to the few advanced countries that already have fully transparent nuclear technology industries. Other countries should have a guaranteed right to purchase all the reactor fuel they need, provided they accept intrusive inspections and return nuclear byproducts.
These steps will greatly decrease the risk of nasty nuclear surprises like those delivered by Iran and Libya. They should be taken without delay.
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U.S. Keeps Libya Sanctions in Place
January 5, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/africa/06WIRE-NUKE.html
ST. LOUIS, Mo., Jan 5 - The Bush administration said on Monday it would keep in place U.S. sanctions against Libya but held out hope of improved relations if it follows through on promises to eliminate its chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
"As Libya takes tangible steps to address those concerns, the United States will in turn take reciprocal tangible steps to recognize Libya's progress," Bush said in a statement issued by the White House during his visit to St. Louis.
--------
U.S. Refuses to Lift Sanctions on Libya
January 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Libya.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush refused to lift U.S. sanctions against Libya on Monday, saying Moammar Gadhafi must take concrete steps to fulfill a pledge to scrap his chemical and nuclear weapons programs.
Bush said he was keeping in force a declaration of national emergency first issued by President Reagan in 1986 when the United States blocked Libyan assets in the United States, accusing Gadhafi's regime of sponsoring terrorism.
The U.S. sanctions have denied Libya access to hundreds of millions of dollars in property and bank assets, according to U.S. estimates.
Bush, in a written notice, said Libya's promise last month to abandon weapons of mass destruction marked ``an important and welcome step toward addressing the concerns of the world community.''
``As Libya takes tangible steps to address those concerns, the United States will in turn take reciprocal tangible steps to recognize Libya's progress,'' Bush said. ``Libya's agreement marks the beginning of a process of rejoining the community of nations, but its declaration of December 19, 2003, must be followed by verification of concrete steps.''
The declaration of national emergency has been renewed every year since 1986.
Bush said that ``the crisis between the United States and Libya that led to the declaration of a national emergency ... has not been fully resolved, although there have been some positive developments.''
The United States abstained from voting last year when the United Nations Security Council acted to end U.N. sanctions against Libya. The U.N. acted after Libya agreed to compensate families of the victims of the Pan Am 103 bombing and to take responsibility for the actions of Libyan officials in the bombing.
Explaining Monday's decision to keep U.S. sanctions in tact, Bush said the United States has ``serious concerns'' about other Libyan policies and actions, including Libya's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, Libya's role with respect to terrorism, and Libya's poor human rights record.
The White House noted that while Bush is keeping the sanctions in place, he has the power to modify or end the declaration of national emergency whenever he believes it appropriate.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan: Libya Nuclear Report Unsubstantiated
January 5, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-libya-nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan said on Monday a British newspaper report that said Pakistani scientists sold plans to make nuclear bombs to Libya appeared unsubstantiated, but any official complaint would be investigated.
Pakistan admitted late last year that scientists involved in its atom bomb program may have been driven by ``personal ambition or greed'' to export technology to Iran, but insisted the government had no part in any such deals.
The London Sunday Times quoted Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, son of Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, as saying that Libya had spent $40 million on nuclear components from various black-market dealers, including Pakistani scientists.
A senior Pakistani official, who did not want to be identified, said the government had received information in the past that some scientists had sold nuclear technology to Iran and these charges were being investigated.
``If any such complaint is officially received in relation to Libya, that will be also be examined and investigated. So far they seem more like totally unsubstantiated allegations.''
On Monday, an Arabic newspaper said Saif al-Islam Gaddafi had denied a section of the Sunday Times report that said Libya would allow U.S. and British troops to be based there after Tripoli agreed to abandon weapons of mass destruction programs.
Libya, long on a U.S. list of sponsors of terrorism, said last month it was abandoning plans to build an atomic bomb and other weapons of mass destruction. It now wants trading benefits, including an end to U.S. sanctions.
Analysts say Gaddafi senior is grooming Saif al-Islam to succeed him.
Pakistan said last month it was determined to get to the bottom of allegations that nuclear technology may have been transferred to Iran.
It said it began questioning scientists from a state-run laboratory set up by the father of its bomb program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, in November after approaches by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency and information from the Iran's government pointing ``to certain individuals.''
Among those questioned was Khan himself, who is revered as a national hero for developing a nuclear bomb tested in 1998 to match that of rival India.
No details of the investigations have been made public.
Late last year Washington said Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf had assured it his government had not -- at least ``in the present time'' -- provided any nuclear secrets to countries like Iran and North Korea.
Past allegations of Pakistani technology transfers, not only to Iran but also to North Korea, have been an embarrassment for the White House, which relies on Pakistan as a key ally in its battle against al Qaeda and allied Islamic militants.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Pantex to shift focus
Monday, January 5, 2004
By Jim McBride,
AMARILLO GLOBE-NEWS jim.mcbride@amarillo.com
http://www.amarillonet.com/stories/010504/new_pantexfocus.shtml
The Pantex Plant dismantled more than 11,000 nuclear weapons during the last decade, but its focus now will shift to modernizing warheads and bombs in the U.S. stockpile, according to an article in this month's Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
A January segment of the Bulletin, famous for its nuclear clock highlighting the dangers posed by nuclear weapons, focuses on the Pantex Plant.
The Bulletin's Nuclear Notebook is produced by Robert S. Norris and Hans M. Kristensen of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a group that has criticized U.S. nuclear weapons policies.
"We estimate that from 1945 to 1990, the United States produced at several sites approximately 70,000 nuclear weapons of approximately 70 types for more than 120 weapons systems," the article says.
The article estimates that in 1959 and 1960, the United States churned out 28 warheads each work day.
"By 1967, the stockpile reached a historic high with approximately 32,000 warheads of 30 different types, from sub-kiloton land mines (atomic munitions) to multi-megaton strategic bombs," the article states.
The authors estimate the United States has dismantled approximately 60,000 weapons and that about 21,500 weapons remained in the U.S. stockpile at the end of the Cold War.
"More than 11,000 nuclear warheads were disassembled and disposed of during the 1990s, leaving about 10,400 in the current stockpile. Only a few hundred more are slated for dismantlement," the article says.
The Globe-News was unable to reach Pantex officials for comment, but Pantex Site Office Director Dan Glenn said in a recent interview that the National Nuclear Security Administration does not publicly discuss the numbers of weapons dismantled at Pantex.
More than 12,000 plutonium cores from weapons, dubbed pits, now are stored at Pantex.
About 7,000 pits are slated for conversion into reactor fuel under a fledgling U.S. program, and another 5,000 will be kept at Pantex as a strategic reserve, according to Nuclear Notebook.
The authors noted Pantex recently reached some milestones in its weapons work and wanted to review Pantex's weapons work, Kristensen said.
Earlier this year, Pantex officials announced they had repackaged 8,000 plutonium pits into new, safer storage drums and completed dismantlement of the final nuclear artillery shell in the U.S. arsenal.
Kristensen said Pantex has played a large role in nuclear weapons dismantlement but will continue to store large amounts of plutonium and modernize older weapons in the next decade.
"On one hand, Pantex has had, in the '90s, this aura of dismantlement; on the other hand, it's now shifting more toward focusing on upgrading the remaining nuclear weapons that are in the arsenal," he said, noting Pantex is a possible candidate for plutonium processing work.
The authors of the Nuclear Notebook reviewed numerous government reports and documents to prepare their review.
"It's a long archaeological work, if you will, of several decades of going through congressional testimonies, budget hearings, all that stuff, basically getting pieces of information out about what has been produced in the past and what has been dismantled in the past, and basically adding up the numbers," Kristensen said. "That brings us to that estimate of the current stockpile."
-------- us politics
Nuclear rogues being brought to heel, US believes
January 5, 2004
Boston Globe
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/04/1073151210961.html
Officials say a carrot-and-stick approach is changing attitudes, Bryan Bender reports from Washington.
Bush Administration officials believe Iran and North Korea are showing a new readiness to negotiate on their nuclear programs, possibly creating an opportunity to resolve differences that have existed since President George Bush labelled Tehran and Pyongyang members of an "axis of evil" two years ago.
The Administration credits its own tough policies - on display in Iraq - with forcing concessions, including Iran's acceptance last year of international arms inspectors and new signals from North Korea last week that it might be willing to end its nuclear weapons program.
Washington has softened its approach in recent months to dealing with regimes it once derided as tyrannical. It signalled approval on Friday for a private US delegation to visit North Korea's most secretive nuclear plant and was talking directly to Tehran last week about earthquake relief, although diplomatic relations were severed more than two decades ago.
Along with the recent agreement by Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi to forgo weapons of mass destruction - the result of nine months of secret negotiations - the US overtures to Iran and North Korea seem to represent a shift in Mr Bush's approach to preventing the spread of catastrophic weapons and terrorism, policy analysts said.
"There is a clear message that we are willing to use force to remove these dangers, but are willing to negotiate solutions and provide rewards for good behaviour," said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons proliferation specialist at the non-partisan Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. "We may be coming to the right combination here."
Iran agreed last month to more intrusive inspections of its nuclear program and has struck a decidedly conciliatory note towards Washington after the massive earthquake that has killed at least 30,000 in Bam. US aid teams quickly dispatched by the White House in a symbolic gesture are working under the leadership of the Revolutionary Guard, the powerful security arm of Iran's ruling clerics.
North Korea last week seemed willing to provide US specialists with access to its most secretive nuclear site at Yongbyon - which has been closed to international monitors for more than a year - and has been receptive to a new round of six-nation negotiations. After isolating North Korea for much of the first two years of the Bush Administration, Washington held a first round of talks with North Korea last September and is planning to reconvene the discussions with North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia early this year.
But fierce differences remain. Administration officials cautioned against predictions of imminent victories for US policy. Iran continued to support terrorist groups that opposed Israel, they said, and harboured members of the al-Qaeda network. On New Year's Day, Mr Bush said he appreciated the new openness but said Tehran "must turn over al-Qaeda (members) in their custody".
North Korea's intentions remain unclear. Washington thinks Pyongyang is continuing to sell nuclear and missile technologies to the highest bidder, including a failed deal with the former Iraq regime.
Nevertheless, the Administration thinks the time is right to begin dealing with these governments. As well, countries developing weapons of mass destruction are coming under increased international pressure, according to Administration officials, international security specialists, and former diplomats.
Some credit goes to the muscular US approach. The mix of carrots and sticks is increasingly a part of Administration policy.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Delegates Approve Charter Following Bitter Debate,
Assembly Clears Path To Democratic Elections
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54653-2004Jan4.html
After three weeks of raw emotional debate and intense private negotiations, members of a constitutional assembly in Afghanistan agreed yesterday on a new charter for the volatile postwar nation, clearing the way for its first democratic elections in 25 years.
The 502 delegates accepted a political system with a strong president and a weaker parliament, similar to the version sought by President Hamid Karzai and backed by the Bush administration, despite vehement objections from ethnic minority leaders and Islamic fundamentalists at the historic meeting.
"There is no winner or loser. . . . This is the success of the whole Afghan nation," Karzai told members of the assembly, or loya jirga, shortly after they stood en masse to endorse the new constitution in a huge white tent on a university campus in Kabul, the capital.
President Bush praised the outcome in a statement from Washington, saying the new constitution "lays the foundation for democratic institutions" in Afghanistan and will thus "help ensure that terror finds no further refuge in that proud land."
The adoption of the charter comes two years after U.S. and Afghan forces routed the extremist Islamic Taliban movement. It clears a major hurdle in the political transition that was mandated by the United Nations in late 2001. The government now hopes to hold presidential elections this summer, and Karzai is widely viewed as the favorite.
But the loya jirga, composed of delegates from across the ethnic and political spectrum, came close to collapsing several times after it opened Dec. 14. Repeated bitter confrontations among delegates laid open deep fissures in Afghan society on such issues as religion, women's rights and regional dialects. Several contentious issues were left unresolved in order to salvage the assembly.
In comments yesterday, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, was critical of the obstructionist role regional Islamic militia leaders had played during the assembly, and he said there would be little point in holding elections this summer if adequate security measures were not instituted throughout the country.
As a result of compromises between Islamic hard-liners and moderate government reformists, the final charter did not include a reference to sharia, or Islamic law, saying only that no Afghan law "can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions" of Islam. But some observers said the strength of religious law would depend partly on who controls the Supreme Court.
The 162-article constitution grants men and women equal rights, a dramatic advance in a conservative rural society in which women have traditionally been subjugated to decisions by their male relatives, with little access to legal protections.
"There are still some problems with the constitution, but the process was very positive, because people came together despite their differences and came to an agreement without violence," Nader Naderi, a spokesman for the Independent Afghan Human Rights Commission, said in a telephone interview from Kabul yesterday. "This is a major change in the traditional way of doing politics in Afghanistan."
The loya jirga, which lasted 22 days, erupted in ugly confrontations several times and nearly collapsed toward the end. Delegates from ethnic Tajik political groups, including former Islamic militia leaders, repeatedly denounced the process and charged that Karzai was manipulating the constitution to establish a dictatorship.
Women at the meeting complained that they were given no leadership role, and chaos erupted during the Dec. 17 session when one female delegate angrily protested that "criminals" from Islamic militias should not be allowed to participate. Militia leaders in turn denounced her as a communist, and several threatened to attack her.
Finally the assembly chairman, an elderly former Afghan president, Sebqatallah Mojadedi, lost his temper and tried to throw the female delegate out of the tent, saying her vote was worth only half a man's anyway.
In the past week, as major issues were gradually resolved, new stumbling blocks emerged over what status, official or otherwise, should be given to the country's various regional ethnic languages, and whether government officials should have the right to hold dual citizenship.
The meeting nearly collapsed again Saturday over the language issue, but after intense private negotiations involving U.N. and U.S. diplomats, a compromise was reached. The government agreed to designate both Dari and Pashto, the major dialects, "national languages," and to refer to the minor dialects of Uzbek and Turkmen as "official" languages in their respective regions.
The sensitive issue of dual nationalities for officials, which was raised by government opponents to undermine several of Karzai's top aides who hold both U.S. and Afghan citizenship, was reportedly postponed for future parliamentary debate.
"I'm extremely happy," Qayum Karzai, a delegate and the president's brother, said by telephone yesterday from Kabul. "I wish it had not taken so long, and that the last three days had not gone into such emotional issues, but the most important parts of the constitution, the presidential system and the principles that matter, are still intact."
President Karzai said repeatedly before and during the assembly that Afghanistan needed a strong presidential system. Otherwise, he argued, it would bog down in the same kinds of bitter ethnic disputes that led to ruinous civil war in the early 1990s. He scaled back some of the executive powers he had initially demanded in order to win support from opponents at the meeting.
But some observers said that the vehement public confrontations at the assembly could cast a pall over plans for national elections, and that delegates from both major ethnic groups -- Pashtuns and Tajiks -- feared that they had made too many concessions.
Perhaps the best illustration of the depth of ethnic divisions was the fight over the national anthem, which Pashtuns and Tajiks adamantly argued should be in their respective dialects. Under a compromise agreement, the anthem will be sung in Pashto, but will refer to other ethnic groups and include the phrase, "Allah is great."
There was no formal final vote on the charter, which the exhausted delegates approved yesterday merely by rising to their feet in silence for 30 seconds.
----
Afghan Council Gives Approval to Constitution
January 5, 2004
New York Times
By CARLOTTA GALL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/asia/05AFGH.html?pagewanted=all&position=
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 4 - Delegates at a national meeting approved a new Constitution for Afghanistan on Sunday, concluding three weeks of often tense debate. Their decision heralded a new era of democracy after a quarter-century of war.
"There is rain coming, and flowers are growing from my body," said the chairman of the grand council, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, reciting a poem.
"I am so happy the ending is so pious and beautiful," he added, his voice cracking as he apologized for any failings in the result.
For the first time, Afghans have set up a democratic presidential system, with a directly elected president and a two-chamber national assembly; elections are to be held in just six months. An independent judiciary is also being organized.
In a carefully balanced wording, the country will be renamed the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, combining democracy and religion. There is to be a system of civil law, but no law will be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of Islam.
The 502 delegates from all over Afghanistan who have been assembled in a vast white tent in Kabul Polytechnic approved the Constitution by acclamation. They said prayers, then rose and stood in silent respect.
The new bedrock of the government was welcomed by Afghan human rights and women's activists as offering the prospect of the rule of law in the ravaged country. Diplomats and foreign experts who have been here to observe the process also praised it for being coherent and even forward looking for the region.
In Washington, President Bush welcomed the new Constitution, saying in a statement that it would "help ensure that terror finds no further refuge" in Afghanistan. The Americans hope the new arrangements will provide a stronger government that can help Afghanistan rebuild after the war that defeated the Taliban government that had befriended Osama bin Laden.
The United Nations special representative here, Lakhdar Brahimi, who helped in last-minute mediation, was the first to congratulate the assembly. "Is the Constitution perfect? Probably not," Mr. Brahimi told delegates. "Will it be criticized? I feel it will be, inside Afghanistan and outside Afghanistan. But you have every reason to be proud and see this as a new source of hope."
There had been long battles in the assembly and committee rooms over the three weeks right up to the last moment, but delegates over all said they accepted the final draft. The grand council, or loya jirga, added some checks and balances to the presidential powers, giving the Parliament a veto over senior appointments and over some policy decisions, and it gave broad language rights to the ethnic minorities in their own regions.
In addition, women were given recognition as equal citizens, and 25 percent of the seats of the lower house of Parliament were set aside for them.
President Hamid Karzai arrived to congratulate the assembly, his helicopter drowning out the discourse as it circled to land. Security was so tight that the president did not drive the one mile from his office.
But his mood was elated as he talked about a future of unity, prosperity and the rule of law, and celebrated an Afghanistan where a poor boy like himself could grow up to be president, and where tribal and ethnic rivalries could become a thing of the past.
"It is a Constitution of all the country," he said. "None of you is the loser; none of you is the winner. It is a success for us all, for all the people of Afghanistan."
He praised the policy that identifies all the country's various ethnic groups as parts of the nation, and has allowed them the freedom to use and teach their languages in the areas where they are the majority. "That was a great initiative," he said.
"It's the first time in the history of Afghanistan that we take a step for the real power of the people," Mr. Karzai said. "In this Constitution, you gave the right for other languages to be studied, and it's a good creation for all the people."
The American ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, called it "one of the most enlightened constitutions in the Islamic world."
But Mr. Brahimi acknowledged that the three weeks had been bruising. "This is a huge success for the people of Afghanistan," he said. "But in the process there were a lot of bruises, not just for the Pashtuns but others as well. It is up to everyone to make sure they build on it."
Mr. Brahimi said that despite Sunday's accomplishment, the biggest challenges lie ahead. He lamented the insecurity that ordinary Afghans experience as a result of warlords and their armies and corrupt commanders and the police. Delegates gave him loud applause.
Many interviewed said the most important thing now was the disarmament and demilitarization of the country.
"On the whole it is a good Constitution," said one delegate, Abdul Latif Amiri, from Kandahar. "It will change things if implemented, but at the moment it is not possible to implement it as there are still arms all over the country."
The ethnic divisions that obstructed the loya jirga were resolved with persuasion but also some strong-arm negotiations in private.
Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of the Uzbeks and a warlord with a notorious reputation, pushed hard for the language rights of the Uzbek and Turkman people and succeeded. But Mr. Karzai announced that the government had exacted a promise from him in return: that he allow the thousands of Pashtuns displaced from the north in the last two years to return to their homes, and to free the remaining hundreds of Taliban prisoners being held in General Dostum's hometown, Shiberghan.
The Pashtuns held an emotional meeting Sunday morning as leaders urged the rank and file to accede to the convention's decision not to designate Pashto as the sole national language.
It had that status in past constitutions, providing a source of pride for the Pashtuns, the traditional rulers of Afghanistan.
"We have all been forced to accept it," Hamidullah Tarzi, a delegate from the southern city of Kandahar, said after the meeting. "It's as if we have taken poison, but for the unity of our country we accept it."
Mr. Karzai praised his fellow Pashtuns for dropping their language demand, saying: "World power comes from unity, not from discord, but unity, valor and courage. You have displayed it."
He then congratulated the Uzbeks on their new status, speaking in their language.
--------
Highlights of the Afghan Pact
January 5, 2004
New York Times
Agence France-Presse
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/05ABOX.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 4 - These are among the major points of the Constitution agreed to on Sunday:
¶Afghanistan is an Islamic republic with Islam as its "sacred religion."
¶Followers of other religions are free to perform religious ceremonies in accordance with the provisions of the law.
¶No law shall be contrary to the beliefs and practices of Islam.
¶Men and women have equal rights and duties before the law.
¶The president will be elected by the Afghan people, with two vice presidents, nominated by presidential candidates.
¶A national assembly will consist of two houses: a Wolesi Jirga or "house of people" and a Meshrano Jirga or "house of elders."
¶The president will appoint ministers, the attorney general and central bank governor with the approval of the Wolesi Jirga.
¶Pashto and Dari are the official languages, with other languages to be considered official languages in the areas in which they are spoken.
----
NATO Takes Over Mission in Afghanistan
Tuesday, January 6th, 2004
(AP)
http://www.afghannews.net/news.php?topicid=2682
KUNDUZ, Afghanistan - NATO-led peacekeepers took over a peace-building mission in northern Afghanistan on Tuesday, the first step in a plan for the alliance to expand into the country´s troubled provinces ahead of summer elections.
Troops from Germany, the first nation to respond to U.N. and Afghan calls to provide more troops, took control from the United States of the operation based in Kunduz, 150 miles north of Kabul. Germany is deploying an initial 170 troops, though the number is expected to rise to over 200 later this year.
Other NATO nations are expected to take over provincial reconstruction teams, freeing up the U.S. military to focus on battling Taliban insurgents in the south and east.
The teams are supposed to provide security in key urban centers, reassuring aid workers and pacifying local militias who still control much of the country.
Six already are dotted around the country - including teams operated by Britain and New Zealand - and the U.S. military is opening five more in towns across a troubled band of territory along the Pakistani border.
Some 5,500 international peacekeepers, mostly Canadians and Germans, are patrolling the capital. NATO has agreed in principle to expand into a string of key regional capitals, but member nations have been slow to come forward with more men or equipment.
-------- arms
Romania offers to supply weapons to Iraq
BUCHAREST (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105183305.hkpbedq1.html
Romania proposed Monday to supply the new Iraqi army with weapons, the state secretary for Romania's arms industry said.
"We have submitted a proposal to equip the future Iraqi army with artillery ammunition and Kalashnikov rifles at competitive prices," Decebal Ilina said, adding that "a formal offer will only be made when the United States opens the bidding process."
"Theoretically we should stand a good chance of securing such a contract considering that we have contributed to the international stabilisation force in Iraq," he said.
According to Ilina, Romania can supply military equipment to Iraq "according to demand and at low cost."
"A market like Iraq, which is not necessarily seeking to acquire top of the line weaponry, is just what a producer like Romania needs because we are faced with low demand."
Romania supported the US-led invasion of Iraq and has 700 soldiers stationed in the country as part of the post-war international stabilisation force.
-------- britain
Britain: Troops to Stay in Iraq for Years
By ED JOHNSON
Associated Press Writer
Jan 5, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
BASRA, Iraq (AP) -- British forces are likely to remain in Iraq for several more years, a top British official said Monday, a day after Prime Minister Tony Blair made a surprise visit to troops headquartered in Basra.
Also Monday, the military said a bomb exploded near a U.S. military convoy west of Baghdad, injuring three soldiers, and another American soldier was shot and wounded when a foot patrol was ambushed northwest of the capital.
The violence Sunday underscored remarks by Blair that the U.S.-led coalition must "get on top of the security situation" in Iraq as the country prepares for self-rule. Blair was in the southern city of Basra on Sunday for an unannounced visit to the 10,000 British troops serving in Iraq, the vast majority stationed in and around Basra in southern Iraq.
Since the start of war in Iraq in March, 54 British troops have been killed. The latest were two British soldiers who died after a New Year's Day traffic accident in Baghdad, the Ministry of Defense announced Monday. There was no evidence of hostile fire in the accident early Thursday.
In London, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said he could not be precise about when British troops might withdrawal after the planned transfer of power this summer from the coalition to an Iraqi authority.
"I can't give you an exact time scale," Straw said. "It's not going to be months for sure. I can't say whether it's going to be 2006, 2007."
Straw, in an interview with British Broadcasting Corp. radio, also said he had no reason to believe power would not be transferred by July 1, as agreed by the occupation authority and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
But he added that considerable numbers of British troops would likely remain in Iraq long beyond that date, despite the ongoing anti-coalition insurgency.
Blair's top envoy in Iraq, Sir Jeremy Greenstock, warned Sunday that rebels likely will stage bigger and more sophisticated attacks.
"The opposition is getting more sophisticated, using bigger bombs and more sophisticated controls. We will go on seeing bigger bangs," Greenstock told reporters after meeting with Blair.
Blair said: "The important thing is to realize we are about to enter into a very critical six months. We have got to get on top of the security situation properly and we have got to manage the transition. Both of those things are going to be difficult."
On New Year's Eve, a car bomb killed eight people celebrating in an upscale restaurant in Baghdad. On Dec. 27, coordinated strikes including four car bombs struck the southern city of Karbala, killing 19 people, including seven coalition troops, and wounding some 170.
Overnight, two mortar shells exploded in the vicinity of the coalition headquarters in the southern city of Nasiriyah, causing no damage or injuries; on Sunday, insurgents ambushed a U.S. foot patrol in Tikrit, injuring one American soldier; and a bomb exploded as a U.S. convoy was passing in Beiji, wounding three U.S. soldiers.
All four injured soldiers were evacuated to combat support hospitals for treatment, the military said.
Witnesses reported that gunmen wounded coalition-appointed lawyer Mohammed al-Jawadi and his son in the northern city of Mosul on Monday morning. Sources at the local hospital said al-Jawadi, the general prosecutor of a newly established court to fight corruption, was in critical condition, but his son's life was not in danger.
Greenstock said he thought 75-80 percent of attacks were being carried out by loyalists of ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and the rest by foreign terrorist groups that were putting in place "cell structure." Blair, a staunch ally of the United States whose popularity plummeted amid allegations his government overstated the threat from Saddam Hussein, used his visit Sunday to reiterate charges that preceded the U.S.-led invasion.
Saddam's Iraq, he said, embodied the dual threats facing the world from the "incredibly dangerous" terrorism that is "a perversion of the true faith of Islam" and brutal and repressive regimes that use weapons of mass destruction.
--------
British Official Sees No Early Exit for Troops From Iraq
January 5, 2004
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/europe/05CND-BRIT.html?hp
LONDON, Jan. 5 - Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said today that British troops would stay in Iraq for years, perhaps as late as 2007, to help restore that country's security and stability.
In an interview on BBC radio, Mr. Straw said he could not offer a precise time for the withdrawal of the troops. "I can't say whether it's going to be 2206, 2007," he said, but added, "It's not going to be months, for sure."
American and British officials have been vague about how long troops will be stationed in Iraq, speaking only of a long-term commitment to the country. Making his case for an extended military stay, Mr. Straw said that it was essential for coalition forces to remain in Iraq for years to come to oversee that country's rehabilitation.
But Mr. Straw noted that any decision to maintain troops in Iraq for the long haul must be agreed to by Iraq's new government.
Comparing the situation to the one in Afghanistan, where foreign troops have been stationed for two and a half years, Mr. Straw said that coalition forces would play a vital role in helping Iraq form and foster a new political process.
"If we were suddenly to pull out, there would be unquestionably a security vacuum that would no only put lives at risk and cause a loss of life but would also be a setback for the political process," he said.
His remarks came one day after Prime Minister Tony Blair paid a surprise morale-lifting visit to British troops in Basra.
Mr. Straw said that coalition forces continued to work toward a July 1 deadline for handing power over to the Iraqi authorities. "It is one of the things that has helped gradually to change the political environment in Iraq," he said. "People can now see it is only now less than seven months that there is going to be a time, very shortly, where Iraqis will be responsible for their own security and their own governance."
Asked whether he believed that Osama bin Laden had made the audiotapes that were broadcast on Sunday by the Arab satellite network Al Jazeera, Mr. Straw said that it was a safe assumption but that he had no confirmation.
On the tape, a man purporting to be Mr. bin Laden urges Muslims to continue their jihad against the enemies of Islam, particularly those in Iraq.
"My message is to incite you against the conspiracies, especially those uncovered by the occupation of the crusaders in Baghdad under the pretext of weapons of mass destruction," the speaker said.
Mr. Straw said that "there is no question" that Al Qaeda and its networks are still operating and that Mr. bin Laden is still alive.
"Searching for him remains a key issue," the foreign secretary said.
--------
Blair Pays Surprise Visit to Soldiers in Iraq
Briton Reaffirms Case for War; U.S. Troops Seize Arms From Kurdish Parties
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54052-2004Jan4.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 4 -- British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who faces political troubles at home because of his crucial backing for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, made an unannounced trip to southern Iraq on Sunday to visit British troops and repeat his justification for going to war.
Blair told some of the 10,000 British soldiers in Iraq that the defeat of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was necessary in the wider campaigns against terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
"This conflict here was a conflict of enormous importance because Iraq was a test case," Blair said. "If we backed away from that, we would never be able to confront this threat in the other countries where it exists."
While U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have so far failed to discover stores of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons despite months of searching, Blair has in no way softened the impassioned support for war that has made him an invaluable U.S. ally.
Blair's day-long trip to Iraq was his second since the fall of Hussein's government and followed President Bush's surprise appearance in Baghdad on Thanksgiving. During Blair's visit Sunday, he also met in Basra with the top U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, who briefed him on political developments in the country and activities of the U.S.-led provisional administration.
The occupation authority is beginning the unwieldy process of transferring sovereignty to an Iraqi government in time to meet a July 1 deadline.
The potential pitfalls in that process were underscored Sunday when U.S. military officials disclosed that soldiers in the northern city of Kirkuk had raided the offices of two Kurdish political parties that play an important role in supporting U.S. transition efforts.
Sgt. Robert Cargie said troops from the Army's 4th Infantry Division had raided the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) on Saturday morning after receiving intelligence that they had violated restrictions on the possession of weapons. Cargie said soldiers found assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades and rockets in the KDP offices, where they arrested a senior party member. Assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades were found in the nearby PUK headquarters.
Kirkuk, an oil-rich city, has been tense since demonstrations Wednesday ended in gunfire, leaving five people dead. Iraqi authorities disagree over who fired the shots.
The violence erupted when hundreds of Arabs and ethnic Turkmens marched toward the PUK offices during a protest against the proposed creation of an autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq, with Kirkuk as its capital. The initiative is part of plan being discussed by the U.S.-led occupation and the Iraqi Governing Council to establish a federal system in the country.
Bremer recently traveled to the northern city of Irbil for talks with the KDP leader, Massoud Barzani, and his PUK counterpart, Jalal Talabani, about plans for the political transition, including the creation of a federal system, according to Dan Senor, a spokesman for Bremer. Under a Nov. 15 accord, U.S. and Iraqi officials agreed that the law governing the transfer of sovereignty would provide for a federal system.
"Federalism is one of the principles that is to be enshrined in this interim administrative law. How that manifests itself is to be worked out between the coalition and the Governing Council," Senor said.
On Saturday, a demonstration in the southern city of Samawah also turned violent, prompting forces from the U.S.-led alliance to move into the streets and restore calm, according to Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt. As protesters rallied outside the local governor's house, an unidentified gunman fired into the crowd and fled into a nearby building. Troops surrounded the building while Iraqi police arrested 20 to 30 suspects, Kimmitt said at a news conference on Sunday.
He also said that another gunman assassinated a local councilman in a town near Basra on Saturday. During the past week, suspected insurgents have carried out an average of slightly more than one attack a day against Iraqi civilians and security forces, Kimmitt said. U.S. and allied troops come under attack about 22 times a day, he said.
Meanwhile, U.S. forces and Iraqi police are investigating the shooting death of three Iraqis, including a child, found in a vehicle Saturday morning on a road near the central city of Tikrit, Kimmitt said.
-------- business
Army Outsourcing Put on Hold
Plan for Jobs Came to Halt After White's Resignation
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54561-2004Jan4.html
The Army has indefinitely suspended plans to contract out as many as 214,000 military and civilian positions, an effort begun last year by then-Army Secretary Thomas E. White as a way to focus more of the military's resources on national defense.
The plan, known as the "Third Wave" within the Pentagon, could have affected about one in six Army jobs around the world. It would have provided a major boost to the Bush administration's effort to move large blocks of government work into the private sector if it could be done better and more cheaply by contractors.
But the initiative came to a standstill in April when White resigned after a two-year tenure marked by strains with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Air Force Secretary James G. Roche has been nominated to be the new Army secretary, but the Senate has not confirmed him. His plans for the initiative are unclear.
Even before White left, progress on the initiative had slowed as top officials coped with requests from lower-level managers that thousands of positions be exempted from the process.
"The Third Wave is on hold right now," Army spokeswoman Jennifer Gunn said late last month. "When former secretary White left, it was put on hold, and nothing has been done or sent up to the Army leadership about it. At this time, there is nothing going on."
In an Oct. 4, 2002, internal memo explaining the initiative, White wrote that the Army needed to direct as many resources as it could to anti-terrorism efforts and let support jobs go to the private sector. On the line were the jobs of 58,727 military personnel and 154,910 civilian employees who perform such support functions as accounting, legal counsel, maintenance and communications.
The Army, which conducted two other rounds of privatization in the 1980s and 1990s, employs about 1.3 million people, including 222,000 civilians.
The plan was philosophically in keeping with President Bush's directive two years ago that agencies increase the amount of work not "inherently governmental" that could be put up for competition between the public and private sectors. If the private sector demonstrates that it can do the jobs more efficiently, agencies are supposed to turn the work over to contractors.
In an October report, the Office of Management and Budget found that federal agencies are actively studying at least 103,412 jobs throughout the government to see whether contractors could do them better and more cheaply. In all, agencies have identified 434,820 jobs that are ripe for competitive sourcing studies over the next few years, according to the report.
Federal employee unions, no fans of the larger Bush initiative, denounced the Army plan last year as a thinly veiled attempt to do away with their jobs only to benefit defense contractors. John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest federal employee union, said recently that the Pentagon should abandon the Third Wave altogether.
"Perhaps the reality of fighting the war in Iraq and having to depend on so many unreliable contractors for logistics has sobered up officials who in the past seemed virtually intoxicated by thought of an almost wholly privatized Defense Department," Gage said in a statement.
Some analysts also have raised questions about the Defense Department's capability to adequately manage its growing workforce of contract personnel.
White, however, presented his plan as sound management in his memo.
"The Army must focus its energies and talents on our core competencies -- functions we perform better than anyone else -- and seek to obtain other needed products or services from the private sector where it makes sense," he wrote.
That process is likely to continue even if the Third Wave does not.
Rumsfeld sounded a similar theme in pushing Congress to rewrite personnel laws at the Defense Department last year so that managers would have more power to hire, fire and reassign workers. In an appearance last month before the National Conference of State Legislatures, Rumsfeld said Congress had granted the department new personnel authority that would permit officials to shift more than 300,000 service members out of jobs that could be done by civil servants or contractors.
The new law "is going to enable us to do a much better job using the civilian workforce and the contracting workforce rather than using military people for tasks that need not be performed by military people," he said.
--------
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page E04
Washington Post
States News Service
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54822-2004Jan4?language=printer
Lockheed Martin's Maritime Systems and Sensors Division of Manassas won a $117.2 million contract from the Navy's Sea Systems Command for level-of-effort supporting the acoustic rapid commercial off-the-shelf insertion program.
Digital System Resources Inc. of Fairfax won a $36.62 million contract from the Navy's Sea Systems Command for engineering and technical services and production in support of the multi-purpose processor program.
Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co. of Newport News, Va., won a $29 million contract from the Navy's Sea Systems Command for advance planning for the USS Enterprise extended selected restricted availability.
EG & Technical Services of Gaithersburg won a $25.14 million contract from the Navy's Fleet and Industrial Supply Center for engineering, technical and logistics services.
Chemonics International Inc. of Washington won a contract valued at up to $25 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for environmental services.
NovaScreen BioSciences Corp. of Hanover, Md., won a $12.95 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for innate immune receptors and adjuvant discovers.
Raytheon Technical Services Co. of Norfolk won a $7.66 million contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for repair parts for the sidewinder missile, SPS-49 radar system, USC-38 and WSC-6 communication system and four other weapons systems.
Advanced Resource Technologies Inc. of Alexandria won a $7.07 million contract from the Navy's Surface Warfare Center for agency-wide support services for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
EMC Corp. of McLean won a $5.65 million contract from the Department of Defense for data replication and mirroring, data storage, hierarchical storage management, enterprise storage network services, and related engineering, project management and operations and maintenance.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke, Va., won a $5.33 million contract from the Air Force for hardened night vision goggles.
Wisnewski Blair and Associates LTD of Alexandria won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Integrated Management Services Inc. of Arlington won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Z Inc. of Silver Spring won a contract valued at up to $5 million from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Northrop Grumman's Electronic Systems Division of Belcamp, Md., won a $4.62 million contract from the Army Communications-Electronics Command to acquire logistic support services for maintenance of the Airborne Reconnaissance Low Multifunction aircraft fleet.
Marine Hydraulics International Inc. of Norfolk won a $2.91 million contract from the Navy for work on the USS Anzio (CG-68).
Futures Group International of Washington won a contract valued at up to $2.5 million contract from the General Services Administration's Federal Supply Service for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Global Infotek Inc. of Reston won a $1.7 million contract from the Navy's Information Technologies Support Services for dynamic quarantine of worms.
Leonard Resource Group Inc. of Alexandria won a $1.5 million contract from the Labor Department's Employment Training Administration for community connections.
NES Government Services of Virginia Beach won a contract estimated at $1.34 million from the Air Force for health-care provider services at the 48th Medical Group, Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England.
Quest Diagnostics Inc. of Chantilly won a $1.28 million contract from the Veterans Affairs Department's Medical Center, Augusta, Ga., for reference laboratory services.
Northrup Grumman Corp. of Baltimore won a $1.2 million contract from the Army for maintenance and logistical support for the Tactical Exploitation Ssystem.
Norfolk Shipbuilding and Drydock Corp. of Norfolk won an $894,454 contract from the Navy for work on the USS Bulkeley (DDG-84).
Mantech Aegis Research Corp. of Falls Church won a $567,179 contract from the Air Force Materiel Command for air operations center strategy visualization tools.
McLean Contracting Co. of Glen Burnie, Md., won a $398,000 contract from the Homeland Security Department's Coast Guard for replacement buildings.
RCG Inc. of Herndon won a $387,000 contract from the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for professional, administrative and management support services.
Bay Electric Co. of Newport News, Va., won a $380,403 contract from the Homeland Security Department's Coast Guard to relocate an operations center.
Heckler and Koch Defense Inc. of Sterling won a $308,952 contract from the Defense Supply Center for magazine assemblies.
THR Enterprises Inc. of Norfolk won a $195,814 contract from the Department of Homeland Security's Coast Guard Civil Engineering Unit for building repairs.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $196,327 contract from the Defense Supply Center for diesel engine governors.
Medsource Consultants Locums of Fairfax won a $99,530 contract from the Veterans Affairs Department for psychiatrist locum tenens.
AeroAstro Inc. of Ashburn won a $98,875 contract from the Army Aviation and Missile Command for defense research and development services.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $95,743 contract from the Defense Supply Center for camouflage vehicle covers.
Tabet Manufacturing Co. of Norfolk won a $90,625 contract from the Defense Supply Center for permanent magnet loudspeakers.
General Cable Industries Inc. of Fairfax won an $89,000 contract from the Defense Supply Center for electrical wire.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won an $85,904 contract from the Defense Supply Center for rotary actuators.
Mistral Inc. of Bethesda won a $62,004 contract from the Defense Supply Center for push-pull control assemblies.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $61,500 contract from the Defense Supply Center for solenoid valves.
Centech Group Inc. of Arlington won a $59,742 contract from the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command for fuel-burning equipment units.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- chemical weapons
Former arsenal declared free of chemical weapons
Wednesday, January 07, 2004
By Robert Weller,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-07/s_11785.asp
DENVER - A site once branded as the most polluted square mile in America, where sarin gas and other weapons of mass destruction were manufactured for decades, has been declared free of chemical weapons.
The Rocky Mountain Arsenal, 10 miles north of Denver, once represented 60 percent of the nation's chemical weapons production capacity, but is now on its way to becoming a federal wildlife preserve.
The federal Superfund site has undergone a $2.2 billion cleanup aimed at transforming it into a wildlife preserve.
The Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has certified that the site is both free of weapons and no longer has production facilities, said Charles Scharmann, program manager for cleanup of the facility that produced chemical weapons for the Army.
"It is a significant milestone for us," he said Tuesday.
It has been more than 30 years since chemical weapons were manufactured at the site and destruction of weapons began in the 1970s.
Destruction of the production facilities began in the 1990s and was completed recently, Scharmann said. The international organization toured the site in October.
The Army acquired the 17,000-acre site in 1942 when it was still farmland, and produced mustard gas and other weapons. Federal officials once called it the most polluted site in the nation.
These days, the site is a sanctuary for nearly 300 species, including deer, coyotes, bald eagles, and white pelicans.
The Environmental Protection Agency is preparing to remove the site from the Superfund program.
-------- iraq
Secret police force to be set up in Iraq
By Julian Coman Washington
January 5, 2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/04/1073151210964.html
Nine months after the end of Saddam Hussein's regime and his feared intelligence force, Iraq is to get a secret police force again - courtesy of Washington.
The Bush Administration will fund the agency in its latest bid to root out the Baathist loyalists behind the insurgency in parts of Iraq. The force will cost up to $US3 billion ($A4 billion) over the next three years.
Its ranks will comprise Iraqi exile groups, Kurdish and Shiite forces - and former agents who are now working for the Americans. CIA officers in Baghdad will play a leading role in directing their operations.
A former US intelligence officer said: "If successfully set up, the group would work in tandem with American forces but would have its own structure and relative independence. It could be expected to be fairly ruthless in dealing with the remnants of Saddam."
Although officially banned by the ruling Coalition Provisional Authority, militia groups are already patrolling in Iraq, resulting in an increasing death toll of top former Baathists.
The US hopes to organise the various groups into one force with the local knowledge, motivation and authority to hunt down resistance fighters. According to Washington, the new agency could number 10,000. Initially, salaries will be paid by the CIA, which has 275 officers in Iraq. The force is intended to have a crucial role in post-Saddam Iraq.
"The presence of a powerful secret police ... will mean that the new Iraqi political regime will not stray outside the parameters that the US wants to set," said John Pike, an expert on classified military budgets at the Global Security organisation. "To begin with, the new Iraqi government will reign but not rule."
--------
NORTHERN REGION
Kurdish Region in Northern Iraq Will Get to Keep Special Status
January 5, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/middleeast/05KURD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - The Bush administration has decided to let the Kurdish region remain semi-autonomous as part of a newly sovereign Iraq despite warnings from Iraq's neighbors and many Iraqis not to divide the country into ethnic states, American and Iraqi officials say.
The officials said their new position on the Kurdish area was effectively dictated by the Nov. 15 accord with Iraqi leaders that established June 30 as the target date for Iraqi self-rule. Such a rapid timetable, they said, has left no time to change the autonomy and unity of the Kurdish stronghold of the north, as many had originally wanted.
"Once we struck the Nov. 15 agreement, there was a realization that it was best not to touch too heavily on the status quo," said an administration official. "The big issue of federalism in the Kurdish context will have to wait for the Iraqis to resolve. For us to try to resolve it in a month or two is simply too much to attempt."
The issue of whether Iraq is to be divided into ethnic states in a federation-style government is of great significance both inside the country and throughout the Middle East, where fears are widespread that dividing Iraq along ethnic or sectarian lines could eventually break the country up and spread turmoil in the region.
Administration and Iraq officials insist that leaving the Kurdish autonomous region intact does not preclude Iraq's consolidating itself without ethnic states in the future when Iraq writes its own constitution. Indeed, the Bush administration plans to continue to press Iraq not to divide itself permanently along ethnic lines, officials say.
But after June 30, if all goes according to plan, the United States will be exerting such pressure not as an occupier but as a friendly outside power that happens to have 100,000 troops on the ground. Many experts fear that once a Kurdish government is formalized even temporarily, it will be hard to dislodge.
The original timetable for the transfer of sovereignty to Iraq called for self-rule to start in late 2004 or 2005 - after a constitution was written under American guidance. Under that timetable, American officials say, it would have been easier to influence a future government's makeup, not just on its federal structure but also on such matters as the role of Islamic law.
The new, earlier deadline, intended to ease Iraqi hostility to the occupation and to undermine support for continuing attacks on American troops, has forced the United States to scrap many of its other earlier plans for the future of Iraq.
Originally, for example, the United States had hoped to proceed with the privatization of state-owned businesses established by Saddam Hussein. That hope is now gone as well, American officials concede, in part because of security dangers and possible future legal challenges to any sell-off carried out by an occupying power.
Last summer, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, told an economic forum in Jordan that Iraq would soon start privatizing more than 40 government-owned companies making packaged foods, steel and other items. "Everybody knows we cannot wait until there is an elected government here to start economic reform," he said.
Now Mr. Bremer says repeatedly that such decisions must await Iraqi self-rule.
The precise terms of the future status of the Kurdish region in the transitional government, which is expected to last until the end of 2005, remain a matter of sharp dispute among members of the Iraqi Governing Council, the group handpicked by the American-led occupation that helps guide Iraq's future.
The five Kurdish members of the council are pressing their own draft of a planned temporary constitution - known as the "transitional law" - that would give the Kurdish area wide authority over security, taxation and especially revenues from its own oil fields, according to Iraqi and American officials. Their draft would call for the Kurdish area to be a part of Iraq, and cede at least some powers to Baghdad, most likely in areas like currency and security forces.
The Kurdish region has enjoyed basic autonomy since 1991, when the United States followed the first Persian Gulf war by establishing a no-flight zone there to prevent Mr. Hussein's military from attacking.
"The status quo, with substantial Kurdish autonomy, will to a certain degree remain in place in the transitional period," said an administration official. "That is the view across-the-board of the Iraqi Governing Council. But clearly the Kurds are trying to get more than that."
The Bush administration has many times stated its opposition to a permanent arrangement of ethnic states in Iraq, fearing that the country might eventually become another Lebanon, where power is parceled out according to religion.
While visiting the Kurdish region in September, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that while he sympathized with Kurdish aspirations and understood that their leaders did not want to break away from Iraq, he was opposed to a separate Kurdish province or state as such.
"We would not wish to see a political system that is organized on ethnic lines," Mr. Powell said. "There are other ways to do it that would not essentially bring into the future the ethnic problems that have been there all along. They understand that, and we'll have different models to show them."
In Baghdad, a 10-member subcommittee of the Iraqi Governing Council is now wrestling with its own "models" of how to define the Kurdish area's powers. The committee is trying to meld its own draft with one put forward by the Kurds, officials said. The subcommittee chairman is Adnan Pachachi, a former Iraqi foreign minister who is a Sunni Muslim.
"There is a substantial agreement that the status quo in the Kurdish region would be maintained during the transitional period, with an important caveat," said Feisel Istrabadi, a law professor at DePauw University and senior legal adviser to Dr. Pachachi. "No one is conceding any ethnic or confessional grounds as the basis for any future federal state."
Mr. Istrabadi, who is in Baghdad helping Dr. Pachachi's committee draft the transitional law to take effect after June 30, said most Iraqis would oppose the establishment of ethnic states. He said such an arrangement would be inappropriate given that Iraq does not have the history of ethnic or sectarian strife that has led to partition of states in other parts of the world.
Some experts have suggested that Iraq should be divided into a Kurdish enclave in the north, a Sunni one in the center and a Shiite one in the south. But this idea has little support at the Iraqi Governing Council and none with the United States.
"You know what the largest Kurdish city in Iraq is?" asked Mr. Istrabadi. "It's Baghdad. It isn't like you could draw a line in Iraq and say the Kurds live here or the Assyrians, the Chaldeans, or the Turkomans or the Shiites or the Sunnis live there. In the supposedly Shiite south, there are a million Sunnis in Basra."
The Kurdish region is dominated by two feuding political parties that have been struggling to form a unified government in order to strengthen their hand in pushing for a federalist system that would give them broad autonomy into the future.
At present, Iraq is divided into 18 states, known as governorates, of which three are Kurdish in the mountainous area of the north. A permanently unified Kurdish state stirs worries especially in Turkey and Iran, where there are large and restive Kurdish minorities.
-------- israel / palestine
IDF offers foreign armies: pay per training
By Amos Harel
05/01/2004
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/379404.html
The IDF is offering foreign armed forces training sessions in the training center for field units in the Ze'elim base. The move is intended to improve the relations with friendly states' armies as well as bring income into the IDF's empty coffers. The IDF has been operating the Tactical Training Center (TTC), an advanced base for training brigade and company headquarters, in Ze'elim for more than five years. The TCC enables simulating battles between various units, under electronic supervision and documentation enabling a thorough scrutiny of the troops' activity.
The TTC is considered one of the best training centers in the world. "There is no reason for foreign armies not to train here. We've already approached a few armies on the matter. The Americans also open their training facilities in Germany to other armies, which pay them a million dollars to train there," a senior officer told Haaretz.
The IDF is planning to build a model of a city in Ze'elim, to enable training for combat in densely populated urban territory.
In March, the IDF will be holding an international conference that will focus on urban warfare. Dozens of representatives from foreign armies have been invited. Several have already accepted. Senior General Staff officers are scheduled to give speeches at the conference and field officers will share their experiences and conclusions from recent fighing in the territories.
----
Israel OKs Work Permits to Palestinians
The Associated Press
Sunday, January 4, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A53445-2004Jan4?language=printer
JERUSALEM - Israel on Sunday reauthorized work permits for 29,000 Palestinian laborers from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, weeks after revoking the permits following a suicide bombing in Israel, the army said.
Israel has frequently clamped suffocating restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza since Israel-Palestinian fighting broke out three years ago. These restrictions have dealt a heavy blow to the Palestinian economy, which is heavily dependent on jobs in Israel.
Under international pressure to make life easier for Palestinians, Israel had granted about 33,000 permits in recent months, the army said. The permits allow the workers to enter Israel for jobs in construction, restaurants and other professions.
Those permits were revoked after a Dec. 25 suicide bombing near Tel Aviv that killed four Israelis. Sunday's decision restored most of those permits, allowing 19,000 Gaza residents and 10,000 Palestinians from the West Bank to work in Israel.
While the permits bring some relief to the Palestinians, the number of workers remains far below the estimated 150,000 Palestinians who used to work in Israel before the outbreak of violence in September 2000.
Unemployment and poverty are rampant in the Palestinian territories, and the international community - led by the United States - increasingly has pressured Israel to ease the restrictions.
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Israel Plans to Dismantle 2 Small Settlement Outposts
January 5, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/international/middleeast/05MIDE.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Jan. 4 - Israel, which is facing sharp criticism for its settlement-building policies, announced Sunday that it would dismantle two small West Bank outposts and sought to play down a previously announced plan to expand settlements in the Golan Heights.
The actions were seen as an effort to address the international criticism about Jewish settlements, but settlement opponents described the moves as cosmetic.
The stalled Middle East peace plan calls for Israel to take down dozens of settlement outposts erected since Prime Minister Ariel Sharon came to power in March 2001.
Mr. Sharon's government has moved slowly, demanding that Palestinians act first to meet their peace plan obligations by breaking up militant factions carrying out violence against Israel.
The Israeli government announced last week that it planned to take down four West Bank outposts, and added two more to the list on Sunday.
One of them, Havat Maon, has been torn down twice by Israeli governments in the last four years, only to be rebuilt by the settlers, and is now home to two families. The other is uninhabited, consisting of a mobile home used for religious study and worship, said Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements.
"The government is now under more pressure to deal with this issue," said Dror Etkes, a spokesman for the group. "But this is not real progress. It is not directed at the larger outposts that have real infrastructure."
Israel has taken down about 10 outposts since work on the peace plan began in June, but several have been re-established. More than 50 are now in place, Peace Now said.
Settlers have filed legal appeals and say they will resist efforts to take down the outposts. On several occasions, hundreds of settlers have converged on the isolated hilltop outposts and scuffled with Israeli security forces as they dismantled mobile homes and makeshift structures.
The government has not said when it will dismantle the six outposts, but Israeli news reports said it could happen soon.
Palestinians regard the settlements as one of the main obstacles to the creation of a Palestinian state. Israel has built about 150 formal settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the unauthorized outposts sprang up in recent years.
Israeli officials sought Sunday to clarify the government's plans for settlers in the Golan Heights, where 18,000 Israelis live on land that Israel captured from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war.
A debate erupted last week when Agriculture Minister Yisrael Katz said the government had decided to build homes for 900 families in the Golan, which could add several thousand residents to the Israelis already living there.
An official in the prime minister's office said Sunday that the 900 housing units would be built in existing Golan settlements, with some intended as tourist cottages, while others would be available to families moving there. The official described the building as part of a plan to develop tourism and agriculture in a region that has been suffering economically.
Israel's deputy prime minister, Ehud Olmert, denied that the government had approved a major building plan in the Golan. "All news about a comprehensive expansion of the Israeli buildings in the Golan Heights is untrue," he said. "There is no such program. The government has not approved it."
Syria, which has called for renewed peace talks on the Golan, said the Israel action would undermine attempts to resolve the dispute over the territory. The United States has also sought a clarification of Israel's intentions there.
In another development on Sunday, Israel said it would permit 29,000 Palestinian workers and businessmen to commute each day from the West Bank and Gaza.
Before fighting began anew three years ago, up to 150,000 Palestinians entered Israel daily. Israel reduced the number to a few thousand as part of an effort to halt Palestinian attacks. The number has been rising over the last few months as the level of violence has decreased.
Also, an Israeli military court sentenced five Israeli teenagers to a year in prison for refusing to perform the military service required of most Israelis after they finish high school.
In the last two years, some military reservists have refused to serve in the West Bank and Gaza and have received short prison sentences, usually of a month or less. But this case was considered unusual because very few Israeli teenagers have refused their initial period of service, which is three years for men and about two years for women.
-------- nato
Russia hopes new NATO chief keeps Moscow relations a priority
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040105165755.ehswoh1a.html
Russia congratulated former Dutch foreign minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer Monday as he took over as chief of NATO and said it hoped relations with Moscow would be a priority for the new leader of the alliance.
"Moscow is counting on the new secretary general making the development of Russia-NATO relations a priority," the foreign ministry said in a statement.
"We also hope that Jaap de Hoop Scheffer will continue the policy of his predecessor Lord Robertson in developing a political dialogue and practical cooperation between members of the Russia-NATO Council," the statement said.
"That would correspond to the interest of strengthening stability and security in our common Euro-Atlantic space," it said.
Russia has watched warily as the Atlantic alliance has expanded eastwards ever closer to its borders following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The bloc already includes former Soviet satellites like Poland and at an Istanbul summit in June will welcome the former Soviet Baltic republics into the fold.
Conceived as a Cold War fighting bloc to stand against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, NATO has been battling to transform itself into a relevant force in the post-September 11 world.
De Hoop Scheffer took over the helm of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Monday in Brussels, pledging to act with "vigour" at a crucial time for the alliance, as it faces key challenges in Afghanistan and possibly Iraq.
He succeeded straight-talking Scotsman George Robertson as secretary general and is the third Dutchman to lead the alliance during its 55-year history.
Keeping US-Europe relations on an even keel will be a key priority, he said, while adding that bolstering a NATO-led peacekeeping force in Afghanistan must be the alliance's "primary focus" for the moment.
De Hoop Scheffer knows NATO well, having worked in the Dutch delegation to the organization in the 1980s.
-------- prisoners of war
3 soldiers discharged for prisoner abuse
Detainees in Iraq were repeatedly kicked, miitary says
The Associated Press
Jan. 05, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3878877&p1=0
KUWAIT CITY - The U.S. Army discharged three soldiers for abusing prisoners at a detention center in Iraq, a U.S. military spokesman said Monday.
advertisement The three soldiers, all from Pennsylvania, were scheduled to face court martials this month but opted instead to submit to a nonjudicial hearing, in which their conduct was judged by a commander without a jury, Lt. Col. Vic Harris said.
Brig. Gen. Ennis Whitehead III, the acting commander of the 143d Transportation Command, found the three soldiers had maltreated prisoners at Camp Bucca, southern Iraq, on May 12. He demoted two of the soldiers and ordered that all three forfeit their salaries for two months. All three were also discharged.
The general found that Master Sgt. Lisa Marie Girman, 35, of Hazelton, Pa. knocked a prisoner to the ground, "repeatedly kicking him in the groin, abdomen, and head, and encouraging her subordinate soldiers to do the same," Harris said.
Girman received an "other-than-honorable conditions" discharge.
Staff Sgt. Scott A. McKenzie, 38, of Clearfield, Pa., was found to have dragged a prisoner by his shoulders and then to have held his legs apart "and encouraging others to kick him in the groin while other U.S. soldiers kicked him in the abdomen and head," Harris said.
McKenzie was also found to have thrown the detainee face-down to the ground and have stepped on "his previously injured arm."
Back in the U.S. The general also found McKenzie made "a false sworn statement to a special agent of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division."
McKenzie was demoted to sergeant and received a "general, under honorable conditions" discharge.
Spc. Timothy F. Canjar, 21, of Moscow, Pa., was found to have made a false statement to the army's criminal investigators and to have held a detainee's legs apart "while others kicked him in the groin," in addition to "violently twisting his previously injured arm and causing him to scream in pain."
Canjar was demoted to private - a rank two lower than specialist - and received a "general, under honorable conditions" discharge, Harris said.
The findings were handed down at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait on Dec. 29. The three soldiers have now returned to the United States.
A fourth soldier was charged in the same case, but Sgt. Shawna Edmondson, 24, requested and received an "other-than-honorable" discharge from the military last year rather than face a court martial.
-------- space
Iran to launch satellite with own rocket within 18 months
TEHRAN (AFP)
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/2004/040105153101.d12rjcuc.html
Iran's defence minister said Monday that the Islamic republic would put its own satellite into orbit with an Iranian-made launch system within 18 months, the official news agency IRNA reported.
"Within 18 months Iran will launch its own satellite. Iran will be the first Islamic country to enter the stratosphere with its own satellite and its own, indigenous launch system," Defence Minister Ali Shamkhani was quoted as saying.
"The aerospace capacity of the Islamic republic is one of the main means of deterrence for the country, and is acquired through cooperation between the defence industries and universities," he added.
The minister did not say what type of satellite would be launched.
"There was a time when the Persian Gulf was a source of threats against the Islamic republic, but today with the power we have obtained this region can no longer be used against us by any non-regional power," IRNA quoted him as saying.
Shamkhani's comments are believed to be the first time a senior Iranian official has put a timescale on the country's space programme, and his comments could spark fresh alarm over the extent of the Islamic republic's ballistic missile capability.
Tehran finalised its testing of the Shahab-3 missile in June 2003. The missile is thought to be capable of carrying a 1,000 kilogramme (one-tonne) warhead at least 1,300 kilometers (800 miles) -- therefore bringing arch-enemy Israel within range.
Six Shahab-3 missiles were paraded in Tehran in September during the festivities marking the outbreak of the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and one of them carried a banner declaring "We will wipe Israel from the map".
The Shahab-3 is believed to be derived from technology acquired from North Korea and Pakistan.
But the defence ministry has since moved to allay international fears by asserting it intends to tweak the Shahab-3 and not develop longer-range missiles for military purposes.
----
Bush Plays with Fire: Launching a Dangerous Space Policy
From: "Global Network" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
Date: Mon Jan 5, 2004
George W. Bush is playing with fire. He is expected to soon make a major space policy announcement that could include a return mission to the moon, the establishment of permanent bases on the moon, and an aggressive program to take humans to Mars. Estimates for these space projects range from $50 - $150 billion. That is of course before cost overruns set in.
In order to make the trip to Mars feasible (the normal year-long trip would take a toll on any human being because of space radiation) Bush is expected to commit to using a nuclear rocket - what is now known as "Project Prometheus," named after the God of Fire. The nuclear rocket would cut in half the amount of time it would take to get to Mars, and would have military applications as well. The Bush administration a year ago announced the Nuclear Systems Initiative, a $3 billion research and development effort to expand the number of launches of deadly nuclear powered systems into space.
NUCLEAR DANGERS
One scientist who has publicly expressed grave concern about the Nuclear Systems Initiative is Dr. Michio Kaku, Henry Semat Professor of Theoretical Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center. According to Dr. Kaku, "The exploration of outer space is indeed one of humanity's great adventures. Perhaps one of the greatest risks facing this ambitious program is the use of dangerous, unproven technologies which could backfire, eroding public confidence in the space program."
"One such dangerous technology is the nuclear rocket, which is now seriously being reconsidered after being rightly rejected for the past several decades. The recent disaster involving the Columbia shuttle crew was bad enough. If it had contained a nuclear rocket, it would have been the death blow to the space program. Having radioactive uranium reactor parts sprayed over Texas and much of the southwest would have doomed the entire space program. The nuclear booster rocket has gone through many stages of development in the past, and all of them have been cancelled with good cause."
WHY THE MOON?
The U.S. never signed the 1979 Moon Treaty that was created at the United Nations to prevent a rush of land claims and military bases on the planetary body. In fact, in a 1959 U.S. Army study entitled "The Establishment of a Lunar Outpost" the once secret plan stated that "The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential U.S. interests on the moon; to develop techniques in moon-based surveillance of the earth and space.to serve as a base for exploration of the moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the moon if required." The Army study went on to conclude that with U.S. bases on the moon the U.S. could "extend and improve space reconnaissance and surveillance capabilities and control of space."
Scientists have discovered valuable resources on the moon including helium 3, a fuel that is seen as a replacement for the dwindling supply of fossil fuels back here on Earth. In a New York Times op-ed, written by science writer Lawrence Joseph in 1995, he says that "If we ignore the potential of this remarkable fuel; the nation could slip behind in the race for control of the global economy, and our destiny beyond." In the piece Joseph asks, "Will the moon become the Persian Gulf of the 21st Century?"
Again in a New York Times op-ed piece called "A New Pathway to the Stars," space writer Timothy Ferris wrote on December 21, 2003 that "Another possible energy source of the future - nuclear fusion reactors burning clean, safe helium 3 - has its own lunar connection. Helium 3, rare on Earth, is abundant on the moon. When fusion reactors start coming on line, lunar entrepreneurs may stand to make the kind of money their predecessors raked in during the gold rush and the oil boom."
Harrison Schmitt, the former Apollo astronaut who also served a term as U.S. Senator from New Mexico, is not ignoring the issue. In an op-ed published in the aerospace industry publication Space News entitled, "The Moon Treaty: Not a Wise Idea," Schmitt stated "The mandate of an international treaty regime would complicate private commercial efforts and give other countries political control over the permissibility, timing and management of all private commercial activities.The strong prohibition on ownership of 'natural resources' also causes worry."
The ideas of U.S. control of the moon have interesting origins. In the book Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, author Jack Manno told the story of former Nazi Maj. Gen. Walter Dornberger (the man who recruited Werner Von Braun to come to work for Hitler to build the V-1 and V-2 rockets.)
After the end of World War II the U.S. military recruited Von Braun and 1,500 other Nazi scientists to come to the U.S. under the top secret Operation Paper Clip. Von Braun, along with Dornberger and 100 others from the German rocket team, were brought to create the U.S. space program at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Dornberger eventually became a Bell Aviation Corporation Vice-President and helped the company make enormous profit building helicopters for the war effort in Vietnam.
Before a congressional hearing in 1958, Dornberger insisted that America's top space priority out to be to "conquer, occupy, keep and utilize space between the Earth and the moon."
Interestingly enough this same theme reemerged in a 1989 study written for the U.S. Congress by John Collins. The study, published in book form was called Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years and the forward to the book was signed by seven leading political leaders at the time including Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL).
Congressional staffer Collins reported that the U.S. would need to have military bases on the moon in order to control the pathway, or "gravity well," between the Earth and moon. "Military space forces at the bottom of Earth's so-called gravity well are poorly positioned to accomplish offensive/defensive/deterrent missions, because great energy is needed to overcome gravity during launch. Forces at the top, on a space counterpart of 'high ground,' could initiate action and detect, identify, track, intercept, or otherwise respond more rapidly to attacks." Collins went on to conclude that with U.S. bases on the moon, "Armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments on return." Obviously the author was envisioning the day when aerospace corporations would be hard at work "mining the sky" for profit.
NO COMEPTITORS IN SPACE
The Bush administration and his aerospace allies have been in a state of despair ever since China launched her first man into space in 2003. China has also publicly proclaimed that they hope to send a man to the moon in the near future. Imagine if some other nation, besides the U.S., was able to set up bases and mining colonies on the moon or began mining gold from asteroids. This would never be allowed.
Within hours after Chinese "taikonaut" Yang Liwei made his historic venture into space, the U.S. military was warning of severe consequences. Speaking at a space conference, Lt. Gen. Edward Anderson, deputy Commander of U.S. Northern Command, told the assembled that, "In my view it will not be long before space becomes a battleground."
Speaking at the same conference, Rich Haver, Vice-President for intelligence strategy at Northrup Grumman Corporation, responding to a question about the implications of China's space voyage said, "I think the Chinese are telling us they're there, and I think if we ever wind up in a confrontation again with any one of the major powers who has a space capability we will find space is a battleground."
STAKES ARE TOO HIGH
The prospects for eventual profit and control of the new space frontier are too high to be left to chance. Clearly, since the end of World War II, the U.S. military has been planning and is now vigorously developing space technologies that will give them control of the pathways on and off the planet Earth.
Just as the Spanish Armada and British Navy were created to protect the "interests and investments" in the new world, space is viewed today as open territory to be seized for eventual corporate profit.
The United Nations, to their credit, created the Moon Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty as ways to circumvent the warlike tendencies of humankind as we step out into the cosmos. These treaties hoped to ensure that conflict over "national appropriation" of the planetary bodies could be avoided. Maybe for once earthlings could join hands as we launched into space and explored the heavens for the good of all humankind.
The U.S. appears to be heading in the direction of creating enormous danger and conflict with the current Nuclear Systems Initiative that will expand nuclear power and weapons into space - all disguised as the noble effort to hunt for the "origins of life" in space. Only a lively and growing global debate about the ethics and morality of current space policy will save us from lighting the harsh fires of Prometheus in the heavens.
Bruce K. Gagnon Coordinator Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space PO Box 652 Brunswick, ME 04011 (207) 729-0517 (207) 319-2017 (Cell phone) http://www.space4peace.org
----
Lockheed Built Communications Satellite Begins Operations For USAF
SpaceDaily
Jan 05, 2004
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/milspace-comms-04a.html
Sunnyvale - In late December a U.S. Air Force/Lockheed Martin team successfully completed on-orbit checkout and testing of the Defense Satellite Communications System (DSCS) spacecraft that was launched on Aug. 29, 2003 from Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla. Aboard a Delta IV rocket. The satellite, the last of 14 DSCS III spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin, has now begun its controlled drift to its operational location.
Designated DSCS III B6, the satellite is a super high-frequency (SHF) communications spacecraft that features Service Life Enhancement Program (SLEP) upgrades designed to provide improved and uninterrupted secure voice and high data rate communications to its Department of Defense users coordinated by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA). Additional SLEP upgrades on B6 will provide increased downlink power and improved connectivity to its antennas.
This satellite joins the 13 other DSCS satellites on-orbit, including DSCS A3, which was launched successfully on March 10, 2003, and is operational. The very first DSCS III spacecraft was launched on Oct. 30, 1982 aboard a Titan 34D launch vehicle from Cape Canaveral and is currently used for testing. Air Force Space Command, Schriever Air Force Base, Colo., operates the DSCS constellation for the Department of Defense.
"This spacecraft is the final vehicle delivered to the Air Force in an outstanding program spanning decades of excellence and mission success," said Leonard F. Kwiatkowski, vice president, Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Sunnyvale.
"Since its' inception, the program has had an extraordinary team of dedicated, talented individuals who have been focused on delivering the best quality communications spacecraft to the military. Congratulations to the entire Air Force/Aerospace/DISA/Lockheed Martin team on successfully completing the DSCS constellation."
Each DSCS III satellite has a design life of 10-years, although more than half of the DSCS satellites on-orbit today have far exceeded their design life expectancy and continue to perform with outstanding results.
The DSCS constellation supported military operations during Operation Iraqi Freedom and will continue to provide vital communications links to U.S. and Allied Forces around the globe well into the future.
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Rover Unfurls, Opening New Stage in Exploring Mars
January 5, 2004
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/science/05MARS.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 4 - The robotic rover Spirit is on the surface of Mars, its arrival Saturday night the suspenseful beginning to a new stage in the exploration of the geology and perhaps biology of the planet that has long fascinated its neighbors on Earth.
Relieved by their long-awaited success, flight controllers and scientists became increasingly ecstatic on Sunday as the 400-pound Spirit raised its camera and antenna mast and began transmitting black-and-white picture postcards of its landing place on a broad plain in Gusev crater, near the Martian equator.
The first successful landing on Mars since 1997 had touched down almost exactly on target. At last, for NASA officials and engineers the memory of the embarrassing failure of the Mars Polar Lander in 1999 had been exorcised. Their spacecraft was on Mars, standing upright and facing south.
All around the arid surface were rocks that scientists suspected once held an ancient lake. But no boulders were in sight that could be impediments to the six-wheel rover's movements. Whirling dust devils left tracks where they had scoured the surface, exposing underlying rock. Nature, it seemed, had thoughtfully cleaned off the rocks for the robotic visitor.
Some of the the rocky, pitted surface made flight controllers shudder. A touchdown a few feet one way or the other could have ended much less happily. But some of the spots appealed to scientists as places the rover may be sent to investigate. A depression more than 60 feet in the distance tantalized geologists. And beyond a scattering of craters were low hills on the far horizon.
"We hit the sweet spot," exclaimed Dr. Steven W. Squyres of Cornell, the mission's principal science investigator. "We are in the place we absolutely wanted to be in Gusev crater."
From an analysis of pictures the spacecraft took as it was descending to the surface, scientists and navigation engineers determined that Spirit landed close to the center of its target, an ellipse about 42 miles long and 3 miles wide. Gusev (pronounced GOOSE-ev) is a 4-billion-year-old crater about the size of Connecticut.
"It may be a dry lake bed," Dr. Squyres said, "but it's really been chewed up by cratering."
With more of its instruments and antennas deployed and checked out, the spacecraft began taking some color pictures Sunday. But the photographs were not expected to be transmitted to Earth and made public until Monday. The color pictures are to be pieces of a panoramic mosaic of the landing site in three-dimensional color. The mosaic, Dr. Squyres said, "will be a truly spectacular image."
Jennifer Trosper, the mission manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory here, said it would be another nine days before the rover rolled into action for at least three months of surface exploration. There are tests to perform, batteries to charge with solar energy and pictures to be studied in planning the first traverses over the alien topography. The rollout delay was expected.
Matt Wallace, an engineer planning the rover's surface operations, said that an immediate goal was to establish direct communications between Spirit and Earth with the craft's more powerful antennas, which are capable of high-speed radio transmissions of data and pictures. Most of the early transmissions have been relayed through two spacecraft orbiting Mars, Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey.
Flight engineers also wanted time to analyze Spirit's descent and landing data to see if there were lessons to be learned and procedures to alter before the next attempt to land on Mars, on Jan. 24. A twin of Spirit, a rover named Opportunity, is scheduled to touch down on the opposite side of the Martian equator, in a region called Meridiani Planum.
The two spacecraft in the $800 million mission were sent to two different regions for a single purpose: to study the planet's rocks and sediments for signs that Mars once had an abundance of water and could have harbored some forms of life. From earlier photography, the Gusev site appears not only to be a dried lake bed but also to have a drainage valley running into and out of the crater. The Meridiani basin appears to be rich in gray hematite, an iron oxide mineral that usually forms in association with water.
The three previous landing successes were two Viking spacecraft in 1976 and Mars Pathfinder, with its robotic rover, Sojourner, in 1997. When the Mars Polar Lander disappeared trying to touch down near the Martian southern polar region two years later, the loss prompted a management shake-up at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and cancellation of a landing that had been scheduled for 2001.
More money and more rigorous testing went into the current missions. The rovers are about 15 times larger than Sojourner. Each is capable of traveling about 125 feet a day; Sojourner managed little more than a daily three feet.
But first Spirit had to reach the Martian surface in one piece. The seven-month flight from Cape Canaveral, Fla., was smooth. It was the final six minutes that filled the control center here with apprehension.
"It was nerve-racking," said Rob Manning, the manager of descent operations.
Navigation engineers had good news: Spirit's aim on Mars was almost perfect, requiring no last-day course corrections. A dust storm on the other side of Mars from the Gusev crater was slightly raising the heat of the global atmosphere, making it somewhat thinner. Flight controllers released the parachute slightly earlier to give it more time to brake its descent.
It was afternoon at the Gusev landing site when Spirit made its first move 15 minutes before touchdown. The craft cast off the module that supported its operations during the cruise from the Earth. Then Spirit turned so that its heat shield faced the angle of descent and maximum frictional temperatures.
Meanwhile, Spirit was being reeled in by Martian gravity, reaching a maximum speed of more than 12,000 miles an hour. Its on-board computer was in complete charge. Between Earth and Mars, one-way radio signals take almost 10 minutes.
Spirit plunged into the upper Martian atmosphere at an altitude of 73 miles, with six minutes to touchdown. The landing site was 437 miles downrange.
Mr. Manning said that except for one brief disruption, flight controllers never lost the radio signal from the craft "all the way through the descent, and everything happened when it was supposed to happen."
About two minutes to touchdown, the parachute opened at an altitude of 5.3 miles. Signals from the craft indicated it was decelerating as expected and that the parachute had indeed deployed. The heat shield was jettisoned. Then the rover's cocoon of airbags inflated, with only eight seconds to touchdown. Radar locked on the surface, and retrorockets fired final braking thrusts.
Then the moment came at 11:35 p.m. Eastern time on Saturday. There was no immediate signal from Spirit. That was expected, but still a cause for anxiety. Then the commentator in mission control reported, "We have signs of bouncing on the surface of Mars."
Later, pouring Champagne, Sean O'Keefe, head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, was jubilant. "This is a big night for NASA," Mr. O'Keefe said. "We are on Mars."
--------
A Triumphant Landing on Mars
Beset by Past Tragedy and Failures, NASA Officials Rejoice
By Kathy Sawyer
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A01
ttp://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54681-2004Jan4?language=printer
PASADENA, Calif., Jan. 4 -- NASA's Spirit rover bounced into perfect position on Mars to collect a rich harvest of knowledge about the planet and whether life might ever have formed there, jubilant project managers said Sunday after analyzing initial bursts of data and images.
The flawless landing late Saturday brought relief and international praise to a space agency that recently has been staggered by tragedy and failure -- the destruction of the space shuttle Columbia and seven astronauts almost a year ago and the loss of an entire generation of Mars probes during the 1999 U.S. attempt to explore the Red Planet.
Spirit is facing south, in good condition and nearly level, with a mere 2-degree tilt from perpendicular to what shows every indication of being an ancient lake bed lightly sprinkled with rocks and etched with the snaking trails of tornado-like Martian "dust devils," elated scientists reported.
This was the fourth successful Mars landing in the history of space exploration. The previous three were also American -- two Viking craft in the 1970s and Pathfinder in 1997. A British team is still listening for a signal from Beagle 2, which was to have landed at another Martian site on Christmas Day.
"There are probably several hundred people here for whom it's the best day of their lives," said John Callas of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, manager of the rover science team, just before 3 a.m. Eastern time Sunday. He expressed a degree of incredulity that was echoed by many involved with the project. "Things are not supposed to go this well. We are caught off guard."
Spirit's handlers quickly began readying their roving robotic field geologist, still crouched inside the lander, to stand up and roll off onto the Martian surface -- a complex process scheduled to take a week or so. The lander's "deck," from which the rover must step off onto the Martian soil, is a comfortable 15 inches from the ground, surface operations manager Jennifer Trosper reported.
The purpose of the Spirit mission, as well as that of a sister lander-rover package called Opportunity scheduled to land on the far side of the planet in three weeks, is to search for signs that the frigid and seemingly barren planet once was warmer and wetter, with liquid water persisting over periods long enough for life to have evolved. If the crater where Spirit sits is, as scientists believe, the site of an ancient lake, there should be sediments that preserve a record of conditions that prevailed when they were deposited, scientists said.
"For the first time in history, we are in a place [on Mars] where we believe water existed for long periods of time, and we have the instruments to prove that theory," said Edward J. Weiler, NASA's chief space scientist. "That's a critical new capability that we've never had before."
Also, he noted, Earth has now established its first communications network with another planet. Spirit is using NASA's orbiting Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey spacecraft to relay information, an alternative that complements the direct transmissions from Earth to the surface via the space agency's Deep Space Network.
"This is a big night for NASA," Administrator Sean O'Keefe told a news conference after Spirit confirmed its safe landing. "We're back. . . . And we're on Mars!"
A crowd of well-wishers and dignitaries cheered the team leaders, particularly project manager Pete Theisinger, who seemed overcome with emotion. "You have no idea how this feels," he said. "We've got a good system, and we're alive on the surface. That gives us real good hope, a harbinger of things to come, that we're going to be very, very successful here."
Rob Manning, who led the descent and landing team, noted what it took to get Spirit to this point. "It looks pretty easy, but I want to remind you that we required eight thrusters to turn the vehicle, we had two cooling pumps that had to work, we had 37 pyrotechnic devices that included . . . two thermal batteries, eight cable cutters, three gas generators, one mortar cannon and actually in this case, five or so solid rocket motors," he said. "We had four sensors, a star scanner, a sun sensor, a radar altimeter, two [inertial measurement units] . . . a descent camera, two radios, one computer and a lot of software and airbags."
And, he added in amazement, "they worked!"
Within a few hours of its touchdown in Gusev Crater, just south of the Martian equator, Spirit punctuated its triumphant first day on Mars with a flood of black and white images of its new surroundings, showing not only rocks but also a few intriguing depressions in the distance and hills or promontories on the horizon.
"It's a glorious place," lead rover scientist Steven W. Squyres of Cornell University said of Spirit's new home.
Engineers were still working to pinpoint the craft's exact location on the surface, he said, but judging from overview images taken from orbit and by an onboard camera during the descent, the vehicle landed within a few miles of its original target and in the most desirable spot in the landing zone. Squyres said, "We have hit what the science team believes to be the science sweet spot of Gusev crater."
The spot seems tailor-made for the rover, he said. "Our vehicle was built to drive . . . to explore" and "we see enough rocks that we can do great science with them but not so many that they're going to get in our way. So we're going to be able to really motor around this place."
In addition, winds and dust devils appear to have scoured the local terrain of the dust layer that cloaks much of Mars. "The rocks to a great extent really look swept clean," Squyres said, indicating that the rover's geological instruments will have a better chance to study pristine examples of sediment from the theoretical vanished Martian lake.
Given the thinness of the Martian atmosphere and Spirit's 390-pound heft, he said, the devils present no danger to the vehicle. In fact, Spirit may try to capture an image of one.
Spirit spent much of Sunday sleeping -- powered down to save its energy through the chilly Martian night. But its handlers were expecting the arrival overnight of even better images taken in color by Spirit's mast-mounted high-resolution panoramic camera with humanlike stereo vision. The new images should be 14 times as sharp as the initial snapshots, which were taken by a camera designed mainly to serve as an engineering and navigation aid.
The team will focus over the next few days on checking the health of Spirit's scientific instruments after the violent descent and impact, as well as on collecting the color images of the terrain to help plan where to send the robotic emissary once it has rolled off the landing platform, managers said.
The project involves mental time shifting. The initial phase of the landing occurred through the midnight hours Eastern time, which was late evening for the Mars team in California and mid- to late-afternoon on Mars. Some members of the rover team have adjusted their sleep cycle to rise regularly with the Martian dawn at Gusev crater. A Martian day, known as a "sol," is about 24 hours and 40 minutes long.
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Protect us from the protectors
For intelligence chiefs, the war on terror has become good business
Peter Preston
Monday January 5, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/columnist/story/0,9321,1116237,00.html
Attention all passengers thinking of taking another BA223 to Washington. Mr Michael Howard is your main man. "I believe that red tape, bureaucracy, regulations, inspectorates, commissions... came to help and protect us - but now we need protection from them," he says, as one core belief among many. Just so. Now protect us from the department of homeland security.
This US monster, prime pronouncer of orange alerts and airport delays, is a bureaucracy like any other. It makes voracious claims for money like any other (up $14bn, to over $30bn, on security spending since 9/11). It wallows in jargon like any other.
Welcome, for instance, to the new "interagency grants and training website on the DHS website at www.dhs.gov/grants. This website provides information on homeland security and public safety grant opportunities offered by the DHS and other federal departments and agencies and a link to the Compendium of Federal Terrorism Training for State and Local Audiences, an interagency site for training opportunities available to state and local emergency personnel".
Pour many more billions into the CIA. Pour extra billions into the FBI. Pour in shedloads of cash everywhere, and what have you got? A beast with a life and dynamic of its own. But also, significantly, a beast beyond question or criticism. For this is a secret "war", isn't it?
Nobody, of course, is onside for terrorism. Everyone wants its scourge destroyed. The acrid stench from the twin towers lingers. But there's a difference between cheerleading and question-asking, a difference between blank acceptance and mind engagement.
Howard Dean, the Democrats' prospective 2004 champion, is reckoned to have made a public gaffe when he wondered whether the US homeland was safer now than it was just after 9/11. Yet he and Mr Howard, discussing first principles, would be bound to embrace each other.
Howard believes that the "people should be big and the state should be small". Dean, from the small state of Vermont, is tough on bureaucratic sprawl. But meanwhile, the US deficit balloons - while the homeland bureaucracy that Tom Ridge, an underwhelming old politician, controls, does its full grow-like-topsy turn. And incoming flights over the holiday, from Paris, Heathrow, Mexico City and the rest, go into a holding pattern without explanation or human consideration.
Got a tip? Apparently. Got a specific steer or an arrest warrant? Apparently not. There are intercepts that spread alarm, but orange is still the colour of very general intelligence - following the lead set by CIA director George Tenet, who explicitly believes that if you think something may be up, but don't know what it is, then you press every alert button in sight so that al-Qaida thinks you know more than you do and backs away. The result - happy Christmas, happy New Year! - is a constant warning bell ringing, a continuous cringe of public apprehension turned to weariness by repetition. But is it any longer good politics?
The difficulty, for any reasonable politician, lies in getting the balance right. People - ordinary people, ordinary voters - see a threat. They couldn't do otherwise after 9/11, or Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul and the rest. One day, London or St Louis may be the next target. We pay our taxes; we expect protection. Yet we also have ordinary lives to live. We expect a sense of proportionality.
Here, then, is one sure theme for 2004. Howard Dean has raised it already. Michael Howard - if he truly believes that people "should be masters of their own lives", not "nannied or over-governed" - might well follow suit. Simply: what is the threat out there, and what are the means to confront it? What should we "the masters" be told, and what should be done in our name?
Time for a grown-up debate. Britain has had a bit of one already and will have a bit more shortly, post-Hutton, as the WMD testimony of our joint intelligence chiefs comes under renewed scrutiny. Did they all vamp it up to suit their bureaucratic, back-covering selves? But the basic argument has barely begun in America. So Saddam was a fount of terrorist threats, so he's locked away: hurray!
Hang on a moment, though. Why - quite apart from Baghdad mayhem - is Dulles closed on a whim and an executive order? Why do orange lights keep flashing? Why is that sky marshal toting his gun? Why was there such a scant sense of homeland security in the holiday headlines? Where has all the money gone? At which point political wisdom, ancient and modern, comes into play.
There's a real problem with terrorism, to be sure. Never put that out of your mind. Always give it due weight. But don't forget what becomes of those "who came to protect and help us". If you're running a department of homeland security and you always need more funds (because, brother, it's a big, big department), then you have a problem. Success is preventing any more attacks - success also means nothing happening, which means you've got a lower profile that makes more budget-busting increases difficult to come by.
Thus there's every reason to go about your business with manifest display. One thing, uncynically, goes with another. The more flights cancelled, the more you're obviously doing your job. And your commander-in-chief, descending on Buckingham Palace with a security army the size of the Household Cavalry, is unlikely to disagree in election year: he, after all, created your department in the first place.
Who says that the right can't create gargantuan bureaucracies too? Who says that Nanny Muddle and her friends always know best? Transparency sucks. And BA 2004, now standing in a remote part of the airport, has a whole lot of understanding left to do.
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Military Split On How to Use Special Forces In Terror War
By Gregory L. Vistica
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54655-2004Jan4?language=printer
With Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pressuring the Pentagon to take a more aggressive role in tracking down terrorists, military and intelligence officials are engaged in a fierce debate over when and how elite military units should be deployed for maximum effectiveness.
Under Rumsfeld's direction, secret commando units known as hunter-killer teams have been ordered to "kick down the doors," as the generals put it, all over the world in search of al Qaeda members and their sympathizers.
The approach has succeeded in recent months in Iraq, as Special Operations forces have helped capture Saddam Hussein and other Baathist loyalists. But in other parts of the world, particularly Afghanistan, these soldiers and their civilian advocates have complained to superiors that the Pentagon's counterterrorism policy is too inflexible in the use of Special Forces overall and about what units are allowed to chase down suspected terrorists, according to former commandos and a Defense Department official.
In fact, these advocates said the U.S. military may have missed chances to capture two of its most-wanted fugitives -- Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, and Ayman Zawahiri, deputy to Osama bin Laden -- during the past two years because of restrictions on Green Berets in favor of two other components of the Special Operations Command, the Delta Force and SEAL Team Six.
They said several credible sightings by CIA and military informants of Omar entering a mosque this spring in Kandahar, Afghanistan, were relayed to U.S. forces at nearby Firebase Gecko, where a Green Beret team was ready to deploy. But rather than send in the Green Berets, who were just minutes from the mosque, commanders followed strict military doctrine and called on the Delta Force, the team of commandos whose primary mission is to kill and capture targets such as Hussein.
In the several hours it took the Delta unit, based hundreds of miles away near Kabul, to review the information and prepare for the raid, Omar vanished, said the sources, all of whom advise Rumsfeld's senior aides.
Other informants reported spotting Zawahiri in a medical clinic in Gardez, Afghanistan, in the spring of 2002. Green Berets five minutes away were ordered to stand down so SEAL Team Six, another of the hunter-killer teams, could storm the clinic and capture or kill Zawahiri, according to the sources. But too much time elapsed during preparations, and Zawahiri escaped. The Special Operations Command declined to comment on the reports.
Separate Missions
Both incidents spotlight the ongoing debate over how best to employ Special Operations forces in the global war against terrorism. Special Operations forces refer to a range of soldiers from the Army, Navy and Air Force who are specially trained for sensitive missions, typically secret in nature and frequently involving rescues or assaults on high-value enemy targets.
The military's policy, in practice, mandates using only "Special Mission Units," such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six, to apprehend or assassinate specially targeted individuals. It precludes other Special Forces such as Green Berets -- who are trained primarily to work with indigenous fighters -- from pursuing the most sought-after targets when opportunities arise.
Some experts on counterterrorism contend that it takes the Special Mission Units too long to deploy for unanticipated raids. Some believe equal, if not more, emphasis should be placed on Special Operations forces to develop relationships with local villagers who supply the bulk of valuable information, which is known as counterinsurgency work. In the past year, poor intelligence has often led to the wrong targets being killed or captured.
"For all of the Special Mission Units' efforts, how many high-value targets did they get in Afghanistan?" asked one adviser, a civilian advocate of aggressive unconventional warfare with the Special Operations Command. "None."
Supporters say units such as Delta are the only ones trained specifically to carry out the apprehension or assassination of high-value targets.
"By doctrine and training, targets like that belong to the Special Mission Units," said Richard H. Shultz Jr., a scholar at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a Pentagon consultant. "That's what they are for."
The Pentagon's official position is that there is no conflict between the two approaches. Marshall Billingslea, formerly the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, said both approaches are being followed and both are vital to achieving success against terrorist organizations. "The hearts and minds element is essential," Billingslea said.
But according to a classified Defense Department policy briefing on the war against the al Qaeda terrorist network and Baathist insurgents in Iraq, the Bush administration is moving away from work with insurgents and favoring more direct-action strikes.
Rumsfeld has long been enamored of the idea of expanding the role of Special Operations forces in fighting terrorists. He has dramatically boosted the budget of the forces and last year ordered the Special Operations Command to draft a strategy to send hunter-killer teams after terrorist cells.
He is considering expanding their role even more. Among proposals under review is to send the Special Mission Units into areas such as Somalia and Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, where little government authority exists and terrorists congregate, seemingly safe from the long arm of the United States, said officials who are reviewing the plan or have been briefed on it.
"There have been briefings about various operations against various targets," a State Department official said. "We're prepared to go into these areas," he said, but in a careful way.
'Black' or 'White'?
Over the years, such proposals have faced roadblocks, including a shortage of resources, legal questions on Capitol Hill about assassinations, intelligence shortcomings and worries about the political willpower of some officials at the State Department and Pentagon.
According to four officials who have seen it, a top-secret report by Shultz, the Pentagon consultant, contends that despite reliable intelligence on those responsible for the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, Special Mission Units were never sent to kill or capture the terrorists responsible.
"It was very, very frustrating," retired Gen. Peter Schoomaker told Shultz. "It was like having a brand-new Ferrari in the garage, and nobody wants to race it because you might dent the fender," said Schoomaker, a former head of the Delta Force who is now the Army's chief of staff. "We were never instructed to mount a serious operation against bin Laden, never."
It was not because of President Bill Clinton's reluctance to deploy the secret units, concluded Shultz, who would not discuss the classified study. Rather, the Pentagon's civilian leaders and generals repeatedly came up with what the report called "showstoppers" to dissuade the White House from launching each mission.
Officials in Billingslea's old office who spoke on background about the study said they are watching that such an attitude does not sabotage the current plans.
Rumsfeld's "manhunter" plan, as described in memos, is more daring than efforts against terrorist networks during the Clinton years, according to those who have seen it or have been briefed. Rumsfeld's plan calls for sending Special Mission Units into a number of countries throughout the world.
The capture of Hussein may increase support for Rumsfeld's global vision for the hunter-killer teams. But this worries some in the Special Operations forces community who see more emphasis on direct action and less on unconventional warfare.
Special Operations forces are divided into two distinct but complementary kinds of combat teams: those involved in direct action -- the "black" Special Mission Units such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Six -- and those that support unconventional warfare, the "white" Green Berets and, on occasion, other SEAL platoons.
Although they are capable of killing or capturing terrorists, Green Berets and other "white" units traditionally work to win the trust of local villagers by living and eating with them and taking on their customs and garb. They are also called "force multipliers" because a few Green Berets can turn insurgent groups such as Afghanistan's Northern Alliance into a more lethal fighting force. Building such relationships takes time, but the payoff is the ability to solicit the kind of intelligence that enables operations.
But "Delta envy" now permeates the ranks, especially among younger soldiers who realize early in their careers that the "kick down the door approach" is what Washington wants, said one civilian advocate of unconventional warfare. "All they want to do is strike missions," he said.
The better policy, he recently told Rumsfeld's senior aides, is to focus more on counterinsurgency rather than assassinations and snatches.
"We want to know where the high-value targets are in Afghanistan and Iraq," he said. "Who has that information? People at the neighborhood and village level."
A top-secret report by the Defense Intelligence Agency that began circulating in November for senior executives in the intelligence community points out that a "hearts and minds" campaign may have more benefits, particularly in Iraq, than the approach now being followed.
"One of the ways to success in Iraq is . . . creating relationships with the heads of tribes in villages to counter the influences of [Saddam's] Fedayeen and radical sheiks," said an administration official who cited passages from the report. "The strategy would take time and appropriate resources," the report said, according to the official.
In locating Hussein, Army officers partly followed this approach, interrogating distant members of the former Iraqi president's tribe. But this was more of a police tactic, rather than using Special Forces to build goodwill with local Iraqis to garner intelligence.
Following Convention
In Afghanistan, Special Operations forces face different problems. Officials with the Special Operations Command, some of whom have made multiple trips to Afghanistan, said little emphasis is being placed on unconventional warfare.
Not only are the Special Forces excluded from major raids, any mission that takes them farther than two miles from a firebase requires as long as 72 hours to be approved, said several officials. When Special Forces do deploy, which is infrequently, say officials who have interviewed troops there, they are required to travel in armed convoys, a practice that alerts the enemy. They also have been ordered to stop assisting militias that helped topple the Taliban to avoid competing with the new national army Afghanistan is trying to organize.
A good example to follow, said several officials, was set by a Green Beret team operating along the Afghan-Pakistani border last year. The team drove an abusive warlord out of the region, helped to establish a town council, and rebuilt schools and roads.
With the help of some Afghan workers, they cut up several 40-ton tanks captured from the Taliban into large chunks of steel. The Afghans sold it last year at a market for enough money to build a much-needed medical clinic.
The villagers repaid the Army team many times over with valuable information, which led to the closure of routes used by the Taliban and al Qaeda to infiltrate parts of Afghanistan, according to Defense Department sources.
But this ingenuity violated at least the spirit of the Pentagon's kill-and-capture-only policy.
"This type of indirect approach does not fit with the current kick-down-the-door mentality," said one official, a 30-year Army veteran and retired Special Forces officer who has made multiple trips to Afghanistan to interview troops. "Their focus is to capture and kill. It's easier, it's quick, and more glamorous," he said. "Based on what I saw, clearly no, it's not working."
Meanwhile, the Special Forces and others continue to debate whether the emphasis on Special Mission Units is, at times, counterproductive. When Omar and Zawahiri were sighted, for example, it might have been more productive to let the Green Berets scout the mosque and the medical clinic to determine the accuracy of the information.
"Did we know with 100 percent certainty that it was Zawahiri and Omar?" asked the official with the Special Operations Command. "How would you know that if you never went into town? We never got to take a look."
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USS Midway to Become San Diego Museum
January 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Midway-Museum.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- The storied aircraft carrier USS Midway is headed for a permanent home along San Diego Bay's Navy Pier as the nation's biggest museum devoted to carriers and naval aviation.
Tugs are pulling the 74,000-ton decommissioned warship from a naval graveyard off Washington state where the Midway has spent the past 10 years. The ship is due in a few days and, once outfitted with aircraft and other memorabilia, will become the San Diego Aircraft Carrier Museum, with a spring opening planned.
The Midway will be the nation's fifth and largest aircraft carrier museum. The others are the Intrepid in New York; the Yorktown in Mount Pleasant, S.C.; the Lexington in Corpus Christi, Texas; and the Hornet in Alameda, Calif.
Museum backers raised $8 million and spent more than a decade clearing regulatory hurdles.
``Someday, we'd like to be talked about in the same breath as Sea World and the zoo,'' said Scott McGaugh, a museum spokesman. ``It's remarkable to think San Diego has almost a 100-year history with the Navy and yet has no naval aviation museum.''
The Midway was the world's largest warship when it was launched in March 1945, less than six months before the Japanese surrender in World War II. The ship got its name from the Battle of Midway, the turning point of the Pacific war in which U.S. forces defeated a Japanese fleet in 1942 near the mid-Pacific atoll.
The Midway served three combat tours in Vietnam and launched warplanes over Iraq in 1991. The ship saw many firsts, including the first jet takeoff from a carrier and the dawn of naval missile warfare when a captured German V-2 rocket was launched from its deck.
The Midway was decommissioned in 1992 as the longest-serving carrier in U.S. Navy history. About 200,000 sailors and airmen called the Midway home over the years.
On the Net:
www.midway.org
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Lab Helps With Military Aircraft Problems
January 5, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Oak-Ridge-Aircraft.html
OAK RIDGE, Tenn. (AP) -- Researchers from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory have helped develop a device that can predict problems with fuel pumps on military aircraft.
The instrument measures the current being drawn from motors and associated changes in electrical systems, enabling mechanics to detect if components are wearing down and subject to failure.
The Oak Ridge researchers worked with the U.S. Air Force's Logistics Center at Warner Robins, Ga., to develop the device for the C-141 Starlifter transport plane.
The effort with the C-141 was successful, and the lab now is working with the Aging Aircraft Office at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio to determine how the instrument can be used with other military aircraft.
``By looking at the frequency signature (of electrical lines), you can tell something about what's going on with the mechanical equipment that it is driving,'' said Don Welch, an engineering researcher at ORNL for the past 22 years and co-developer of the instrument used for the C-141 tests.
The original technology was developed 20 years ago at the Oak Ridge lab to evaluate motor-operated valves that control cooling water in nuclear power reactors.
Over the years it has been applied to other projects, such as diagnosing conditions of the rotor and gear train in helicopters, portable power generators, Army ammunition delivery systems, electric vehicle motors and propellant control valves used by NASA.
The Air Force became interested three years ago after an ORNL team made a presentation to military engineers about lab technologies.
The C-141 has 20 fuel pumps, but if even one is bad, that can be cause to ground the plane, Welch said.
``Applying this tool is a crucial first step in identifying operating fuel pumps that are on the verge of failure,'' he said.
The military sponsors were eager to reduce the downtime of the C-141 transport plane, a workhorse in the Air Force stable.
Airplanes are often taken out of service because the necessary spare parts aren't available when components fail, and ordering parts takes time.
The Oak Ridge technology can provide advance warning of problems and help reduce the replacement-parts waiting game.
The Air Force now is funding an effort to develop a ``universal electrical signature analysis system'' that could be used as a troubleshooter for multiple aircraft parts.
On the Net:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/
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America's Abominable Record in Okinawa
By Chalmers Johnson,
1-05-04
Nation Institute
http://hnn.us/articles/2867.html
Mr. Johnson's newest book is The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (Metropolitan Books).
America's 703 officially acknowledged foreign military enclaves (as of September 30, 2002), although structurally, legally, and conceptually different from colonies, are themselves something like microcolonies in that they are completely beyond the jurisdiction of the occupied nation.1 The United States virtually always negotiates a "status of forces agreement" (SOFA) with the ostensibly independent "host" nation, including countries whose legal systems are every bit (and perhaps more) sophisticated than our own.
In Asia, the SOFA is a modern legacy of the nineteenth-century imperialist practice in China of "extraterritoriality"-the "right" of a foreigner charged with a crime to be turned over for trial to his own diplomatic representatives in accordance with his national law, not to a Chinese court in accordance with Chinese law. Extracted from the Chinese at gun point, the practice arose because foreigners claimed that Chinese law was barbaric and "white men" engaged in commerce in China should not be forced to submit to it. Chinese law was indeed concerned more with the social consequences of crime than with establishing the individual guilt or innocence of criminals, particularly those who were uninvited guests in China.
Following the Anglo-Chinese "Opium War" of 1839-42, the United States was the first nation to demand "extrality" for its citizens. All the other European nations then acquired the same rights as the Americans. Except for the Germans, who lost their Chinese colonies in World War I, Americans and Europeans lived an "extraterritorial" life in China until the Japanese ended it in 1941 and Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang stopped it in 1943. But men and women serving overseas in the American armed forces still demand that their government obtain as extensive extraterritorial status for them as possible. In this modern version, extrality takes the form of heavy American pressure on countries like Japan to alter their systems of criminal justice to conform with procedures that exist in the United States, regardless of historical and cultural differences.
Rachel Cornwell and Andrew Wells, two authorities on status of forces agreements, conclude, "Most SOFAs are written so that national courts cannot exercise legal jurisdiction over U.S. military personnel who commit crimes against local people, except in special cases where the U.S. military authorities agree to transfer jurisdiction."2 Since service members are also exempt from normal passport and immigration controls, the military has the option of simply flying an accused rapist or murderer out of the country before local authorities can bring him to trial, a contrivance to which commanding officers of Pacific bases have often resorted. At the time of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001, the United States had publicly acknowledged SOFAs with ninety-three countries, although some SOFAs are so embarrassing to the host nation that they are kept secret, particularly in the Islamic world.3 Thus, the true number is not publicly known.
U.S. overseas military bases are under the control not of some colonial office or ministry of foreign affairs but the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and a plethora of other official, if sometimes secret, organs of state. These agencies build, staff, and supervise the bases-fenced and defended sites on foreign soil, often constructed to mimic life at home. However, not all overseas members of the military have families or want their families to accompany them; therefore, except in Muslim countries, these bases normally attract extensive arrays of bars and brothels, and the criminal elements that operate them. The presence of these bases unavoidably usurps, distorts, or subverts whatever institutions of democratic government may exist within the host society.
Stationing several thousand eighteen-to-twenty-four year-old American youths in cultures that are foreign to them and about which they are utterly ignorant is a recipe for the endless series of "incidents" plaguing nations that have accepted U.S. bases. American ambassadors quickly learn the protocol for visiting the host foreign office in order to apologize for the behavior of our troops. Even in closely allied countries where English is spoken, local residents get very tired of sexual assaults and drunken driving by foreign soldiers. During World War II, the British satirized our troops as "over-paid, over-sexed, and over here." Nothing has changed.
The SOFA as Unequal Treaty
Okinawa, Japan's most southerly prefecture and its poorest, has been the scene since 2001 of a particularly fierce confrontation between Washington, Tokyo, and Naha over the Japanese-American SOFA and its use by American authorities to shield military felons from the application of Japanese law. To many Japanese and virtually all Okinawans, the SOFA represents a rebirth of the "unequal treaties" that Western imperialists imposed on Japan after Commodore Perry's armed incursion in 1853. On November 15, 2003, in talks with Japanese officials in Tokyo, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that he planned "to press anew for the Japanese government to relent on a long-standing U.S. demand for fuller legal protections for members of its military force accused of crimes while serving in Japan."4 Most American press accounts avoided details about what this enigmatic comment might mean, including whether the American defense secretary was equally concerned about legal protections for Japanese citizens forced to live in close proximity to American soldiers and their weapons and warplanes.
As of November 2003, the United States had stationed in Japan some 47,000 uniformed military personnel, not counting 14,000 sailors attached to the Seventh Fleet at its bases at Yokosuka (Kanagawa prefecture) and Sasebo (Nagasaki prefecture), some of whom are intermittently at sea. In addition there were 52,000 American dependents, 5,500 civilian employees of the Department of Defense, and 23,500 Japanese working for the U.S. forces in jobs ranging from maintaining golf-courses and waiting on tables in the numerous officers' clubs to translating Japanese newspapers for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).5 This large contingent was deployed at ninety-one bases on Japanese soil, of which thirty-eight are located in Okinawa, where they occupy some 23,700 hectares or 19 percent of the choicest territory of the main island. Okinawa is host to some 28,000 American troops plus an equal number of camp followers and Defense Department civilians. The largest contingent of U.S. forces in Okinawa consists of 17,600 Marines, followed by Air Force pilots and maintenance crews at the huge Kadena Air Force Base, the largest U.S. military base in East Asia. Even without these unwelcome guests, Okinawa is an overcrowded island with an indigenous population of 1.3 million in a land area smaller than Kauai in the Hawaiian Islands.
The Marines are spread out in huge forbidding enclaves from the headquarters of the 3rd Marine Division at Camp Foster (the 3rd Division is the only one of America's three Marine divisions located outside the continental United States) to Camp Hansen in Kin village, Camp Courtney in Gushikawa, Camp Schwab in Nago, and the Marine Corps Air Station Futenma located in the dead center of Okinawa's second largest city, Ginowan, where it takes up fully a quarter of the city's land area. All have been there since the battle of Okinawa in the spring and summer of 1945 or the height of the Cold War in the 1950s.
There is nothing particularly unusual about this manifestation of American military imperialism in Okinawa except for its concentration. It offers scenes that are easily reproduced in Germany, Italy, Kosovo, Kuwait, Qatar, Diego Garcia, and elsewhere, including more recently Afghanistan, Central Asia, and Iraq. However, one distinguishing feature of the Okinawan bases is how much money the Japanese government pays to support them-some $4.25 billion a year out of a total annual cost of approximately $7.6 billion It does so in part to keep American soldiers well out of sight of mainland Japanese -- much as the Tokugawa Bakufu quarantined Dutch merchants on the island of Deshima -- because fully enfranchised Japanese citizens would not tolerate them. It also hopes to keep them happy living in the Japanese equivalent of Puerto Rico, a culturally heterogeneous part of the country that Japan forcibly annexed in 1879 and that has long been subject to official and popular discrimination by mainland people and authorities. The Japanese press refers to these base-support payments as the omoiyari yosan (sympathy budget), meaning sympathy for the poor Americans who cannot afford their expansive foreign policy. The SOFA covering American forces in Japan says that the United States will cover all costs of the deployments (art. xxiv) but since 1978, when the omoiyari yosan came into being, the Japanese government has in fact paid more than half. No other nation offers such lavish "host nation support" to the United States.6
The result is that the Marines, who have not a clue about Okinawa's history or culture and are given little or no instruction by their officers, live far more comfortably than they would in Oceanside, California, home of the First Marine Division's headquarters at Camp Pendleton, or Jacksonville, North Carolina, locale of the Second Marine Division's headquarters at Camp Lejeune. Facilities being built in Okinawa over just the past two years using Japanese money include a "luxury hotel" at Camp Foster, two new family-living towers with 68 two-and-three bedroom apartments each, a 4,700 square foot youth center, a "state of the art" theater complex for the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force's band, and a 33,024 square foot "community services building" that includes an arts and crafts hobby shop, an "entertainment center," an auditorium, broadcast facilities, and a photo lab.7
Criminal Law Under the SOFA
The Japanese-American Security Treaty of 1960, which replaced the original pact that was signed along with the peace treaty in 1951, is a short, relatively straight-forward document of ten, normally one-sentence articles. It authorizes the SOFA -- "the status of the United States armed forces in Japan shall be governed by a separate agreement" (art. vi) -- which is a much longer, extremely complex legal document of some twenty-eight quite dense provisions. The text of the Security Treaty is readily available, usually as an appendix to books on Japan's international relations; the text of the SOFA is so hard to come by it is virtually classified. Japanese citizens must search widely to find a decent translation. Its official title is "Agreement Under Article VI of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States of America and Japan, Regarding Facilities and Areas and the Status of U.S. Armed Forces in Japan, January 19, 1960." It has never been modified.8
Among its salient features is article iv: "The United States is not obliged, when it returns facilities and areas to Japan on the expiration of this Agreement or at an earlier date, to restore the facilities and areas to the condition in which they were at the time they became available to the United States armed forces, or to compensate Japan in lieu of such restoration." To many Japanese and all local government officials this is a deeply resented invitation to the U.S. military to pollute anything it wants to and evade responsibility for cleaning it up. The U. S. military's record on environmental protection is abominable.
Art. ix (2) says, "Members of the United Sates armed forces shall be exempt from Japanese passport and visa laws and regulations," meaning that American servicemen accused of crimes in Japan can be spirited out of the country without facing legal obstacles. Article x (1) is truly hated by most Japanese: "Japan shall accept as valid, without a driving test or fee, the driving permit or license or military driving permit issued by the United States to a member of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, and their dependents." Okinawans pay a high price in crashes and hit-and-run accidents because of this clause, especially after 1972, when driving on the left hand side of the road was restored on the island. Art. xiii (1) aggravates art. x: "The United States armed forces shall not be subject to taxes or similar charges on property held, used or transferred by such forces in Japan." The current (conservative) governor of Okinawa, Keiichi Inamine, contends that U.S. military personnel pay less than one-fifth of what Japanese citizens pay for the public services they receive and that if the tax rate on their vehicles were equal to what ordinary citizens pay, Okinawa's income would increase by ¥780 million.9 It should be noted that none of these clauses exists in any of the SOFAs with NATO countries.
By far the greatest SOFA-related popular outrage in Japan concerns art. xvii, which covers criminal justice. This one article is over two pages long and contains twelve complex subclauses. Opinion in Okinawa is virtually universal that it should be thrown out, whereas the U.S. military clings desperately to its every stipulation and in 2003 even threatened to rescind a slight concession it made after the abduction and rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan school girl on September 4, 1995, by two Marines and a sailor from Camp Hansen. The offending words are contained in art. xvii (3) (c): "The custody of an accused member of the United States armed forces or the civilian component over whom Japan is to exercise jurisdiction shall, if he is in the hands of the United States, remain with the United States until he is charged." This means that Japanese authorities investigating a crime committed in their country cannot have exclusive access to a suspect held by the U.S. military until Japanese prosecutors have actually indicted him in court. It also means that the Japanese police are hobbled in carrying out an investigation and that prosecutors may thus be reluctant to indict an American serviceman because of insufficient evidence. Press reports following the September 4, 1995 rape that the three military suspects were lolling around the pool at Camp Hansen eating hamburgers while the child victim (her name has been protected by Okinawa Women Act Against Military Violence, an organization that came into being after her assault) was in the hospital led to the largest anti-American demonstrations in Japan since the Security Treaty was signed in 1960. All servicemen in Okinawa know that if after committing a rape, a robbery, or an assault, they can make it back to the base before the police catch them, they will be free until indicted even though there is a Japanese arrest warrant out for their capture.
Japanese criminal law gives the police twenty-three days during which they can hold and question a suspect before either charging or releasing him. During this period a suspect meets alone with police investigators who attempt to elicit a confession, the king of evidence (shôko no ô) in the minds of all Japanese prosecutors and most citizens. The Japanese believe in a lengthy process of reasoning with a suspect to cause him to see the error of his ways and leading him to try to restore the harmony of the society by acknowledging publicly what he has done. Japanese judges treat guilt established in this way much more leniently than it would be in an American criminal proceeding (except for the American practice of plea-bargaining). On the other hand, a suspect in a Japanese courtroom who refuses to cooperate or who continues to asserts his innocence in the face of material evidence and witnesses is likely to receive a harsh sentence. During the period of interrogation, a criminal suspect is not permitted to consult an attorney, be released on bail, or seek a habeas corpus hearing. In Japan, a criminal suspect who is arrested and charged is much more likely to be found guilty than in the United States, but the Japanese police and courts are much less likely to arrest or convict an innocent suspect.10
The American military contends that these procedures, which are a long-standing part of Japanese culture and apply to all suspects arrested in Japan, not just American servicemen, could lead American soldiers to make false confessions and thus constitute violations of their "human rights." In refusing to turn over suspects to the Japanese police before indictment, the U.S. military relies on another part of the SOFA's art. xvii, namely clause (9): "Whenever a member of the United States armed forces, the civilian component, or a dependent is prosecuted under the jurisdiction of Japan he shall be entitled: (a) to a prompt and speedy trial; (b) to be informed, in advance of the trial, of the specific charge or charges made against him; [and] (c) to be confronted with the witnesses against him." These requirements do not apply to an investigation prior to an indictment, but the U.S. military contends all the same that Japan does not live up to this clause and that Japanese criminal justice as a whole does not meet American standards. The Americans seem to have resurrected the old defense of extrality in China: no "white man"-or American soldier-should be subjected to the laws of an alien society where respect for human rights allegedly differs from ours.
This argument does not carry much weight in Okinawa (or anywhere else for that matter, given the U.S.'s abysmal record of protecting the human rights of foreigners). Every time there is a new instance of a sexually violent crime in which the prime suspect is an American soldier, the victim Okinawan, and the military refuses to turn him over until a Japanese court has issued an arrest warrant, there are calls from the governor, unanimous votes in the prefectural assembly, and street demonstrations demanding a total rewrite of the SOFA.
Until the rape of September 4, 1995, the United States had never turned over a military criminal suspect to Japanese authorities prior to his being indicted. In the wake of that incident, however, pressure mounted on the United States to become more flexible if it hoped to keep its troops in Okinawa. Even then, after the American ambassador to Japan, former vice president Walter Mondale, publicly denounced the suspects as "monsters," the defendants' American lawyers accused Mondale of making it impossible for the three alleged rapists to get a fair trial in Okinawa. In February 1996, President Clinton and Prime Minister Hashimoto met at an emergency summit in Santa Monica, California, to think of ways to defuse Okinawan anger. Finally, the U.S. made a concession. In a meeting of the Joint Committee authorized by art. ii(1)(a) of the SOFA, the United States agreed in future cases to give "sympathetic consideration" (kôiteki kôryô) to Japanese requests that a military culprit be handed over to Japanese authorities before indictment if they are suspected of "especially heinous crimes." The latter category was left undefined but generally means murder and rape cases.
Despite this new "flexible application" of the SOFA, rather than its wholesale revision, the United States has rejected all subsequent requests for early hand-over except one, a 1996 case in which a sailor pleaded guilty to American authorities for the attempted murder (slitting the throat) and robbery of a 20-year-old Japanese woman.11
The Three Rapes
Governor Inamine's predecessor as chief executive of Okinawa prefecture was Masahide Ota, a retired university professor, prolific writer on the history of the Ryukyus, and devoted anti-base activist (he is today a Socialist member of the upper house of the Diet). By contrast, Inamine is a conservative and comes from a deeply conservative, not to say reactionary, background (he was president of Ryukyu Petroleum before standing for office). He ran against Ota's record of protest against the American military occupation and claimed that he could reopen friendly relations with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and the U.S. military. Nonetheless, in the five years since he was elected in December 1998, Inamine has drawn increasingly closer to Ota's positions and has become well known for browbeating the incumbent Marine lieutenant general in charge of the huge Marine deployments on the island for incompetence in maintaining troop discipline.12
In talking about the excessive crime rates among American servicemen in Okinawa, Inamine likes to use the metaphor of points and lines-taken from the title of a well known mystery novel of the same name by Seichô Matsumoto. The American high command always characterizes each rape or murder committed by an American serviceman as an isolated "point"-an exceptional "tragic occurrence" committed by a one-in-a-million "bad apple," for which the American ambassador and commanding general profusely apologize. According to Inamine, Okinawans see not points but lines: the 58-year-long record of sexual assaults, bar brawls, muggings, drug violations, drunken driving accidents, and arson cases all committed by privileged young men who proclaim they are in Okinawa to protect the people from the dangers of political "instability" elsewhere in East Asia. During Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's visit to Okinawa in November 2003 -- the first visit of a secretary of defense since Bush I's secretary, Dick Cheney, was there thirteen years previous -- he said to the governor, "This region has been at peace during the existence of our bilateral security treaty [which has] greatly benefited our two nations."13 Rumsfeld evidently overlooked both the Korean and Vietnamese wars, which occurred during this period-and Okinawa's role as a staging area.
For his November 16, 2003, meeting with Rumsfeld, Inamine invited in the Japanese and foreign press (it was the only open meeting Rumsfeld held during his trip to Japan) and conspicuously delivered a seven-point petition outlining Okinawa's grievances, including a demand for a fundamental review of the SOFA. Inamine later acknowledged that he was deliberately discourteous and that Rumsfeld was "visibly angered," but he explained that since the American and Japanese governments took Okinawa completely for granted, he had to use this "rare occasion" to make the people's case.14
The governor's petition included the information that, according to Okinawan prefectural police records, during the thirty-year period since Okinawa reverted to Japan's administration (1972-2002), American troops, Pentagon civilians, and military dependents committed 5,157 crimes in Okinawa, of which 533 were the "heinous" crimes of murder and rape. This works out to 17.7 heinous crimes per year or 1.5 per month.15 In a famous study comparing rates of military sexual assault leading to court martial around the world from 1988 to 1994, the Dayton Daily News found that Okinawa had a rate of 4.12 per 1,000 U.S. military personnel compared with Camp Pendleton's 2.0, Camp Lejeune's 1.75, San Diego's 1.09, and Norfolk, Virginia's 0.80. Inamine stressed that this situation has not changed. In fact, since fiscal year 1996, just after the major Okinawan rape incident, the number of crimes committed by servicemen grew at a rate of 1.3 times per year.16
The transformation of Governor Inamine into a resolute advocate of the need to rewrite the SOFA started the moment he came into office. Three major rape cases that occurred on June 29, 2001, November 2, 2002, and May 25, 2003, hardened his views and precipitated an open confrontation between the Japanese and American governments over the "human rights" of American soldiers in Japan. This dispute has been negotiated at the ministry of foreign affairs/state department level, at the deputy secretary and secretary of defense/chief of the defense agency level, and in a summit telephone call between President Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi. The confrontation may ultimately precipitate the removal of some or all Marines from Okinawa, since the positions of both governments appear unlikely to change.
The Sergeant Timothy Woodland Case
Around 2:30 AM, June 29, 2001, in a parking lot within the so-called American Village entertainment and shopping plaza in the town of Chatan, just outside Kadena Air Force Base, several off-duty servicemen observed Air Force Staff Sergeant Timothy Woodland, 24-years-old, of the 353rd Operational Support Squadron at Kadena with his pants down to his knees having sex with a 20-year-old Okinawan woman on the hood of a car. Several of them later testified that they heard the woman yell "No! Stop!" although they said they thought she was saying no to other men standing around. Marine Lance Corporal Jermaine Oliphant said in court that he saw Woodland rape the woman as she struggled to get away. The defense contended that Oliphant said this because he was a Marine and the Air Force sergeant was his rival. When Woodland finished, he fled the scene in a car with a military license plate.17
On July 2, following a complaint by the woman, the Japanese police issued a warrant for Woodland's arrest on suspicion of rape and sodomy. After vacillating for four days, on July 6, the American authorities turned him over to the custody of the Japanese-before prosecutors had obtained an indictment. It was only the second time the Americans had ever surrendered one of their men before indictment, and they were very reluctant to do so. But as Hiroshi Honma, professor of international law at Hosei University, observes, "If the local community's negative reaction is strong, they [the U.S. military] will turn over suspects. And, if not, they won't turn over the suspects."18
The local and national Japanese communities reacted strongly to this incident. Numerous groups in Okinawa denounced the licentiousness and lack of discipline of the American troops, and in Tokyo, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House of Representatives, irritated over the four-day delay in turning over Woodland, voted unanimously for a revision of the SOFA. It said that the case itself and the U.S. military's response "gave great concern and shock to the people of Okinawa, and the people of Japan are feeling indignation." In response, chief cabinet secretary Yasuo Fukuda said that Japan would not seek a revision of the SOFA but would instead ask for a faster, less contentious application of the existing agreement.19 The American Embassy had informed Fukuda that the United States was adamantly opposed to opening up the whole SOFA for revision.
The American view was that in turning Woodland over to the Japanese they were violating his human rights, and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld said that he was afraid of setting a precedent. Thom Shanker of the New York Times reported, "One Pentagon official said the United States was concerned that if Sergeant Woodland were transferred to the local authorities before being indicted, he would have no guarantee of having a lawyer or even an interpreter with him during questioning, and that the authorities could conduct their questioning in any manner and for any length of time."20 In fact, Woodland was interrogated by the police for thirty hours without eliciting a confession. He contended that the sex on the morning of June 29 was "consensual" and pleaded not guilty to the charges. Some observed that Woodland was merely behaving like any suspect in an American court trying to sway a jury, but that he instead infuriated the Japanese court, where judges, not juries, try criminal suspects. Most Okinawans thought it highly unlikely that consensual sex would have taken place on the hood of a car with several other men looking on. But American soldiers did not agree. Several of them argued in print that the victim was merely an "Amejo" (American girl) or a "night owl" and that, as one put it, "Every Japanese girl I have dated or known as a friend has stated that she is intrigued by having sex in public." Another soldier referred to the victim as "a miniskirt-wearing little 'yellow cab' who couldn't remember what her name was. . . . Most of these trashy tramps can't think far enough ahead to order fries with their Big Mac." Even Foreign Minister Makiko Tanaka blamed the victim for having been out so late, drinking in a bar frequented by American servicemen.21
Presiding Judge Soichi Hayashida was having none of this. On March 28, 2002, he found Woodland guilty, declaring that the "testimony offered by the victim is highly trustworthy," and sentenced Woodland to two years and eight months in prison.22 Okinawan residents welcomed the verdict but said the sentence was too light. The Okinawan Prefectural Assembly adopted a resolution seeking revision of the SOFA, demanding that the U.S. military should automatically hand over suspects upon request from the Japanese government. Woodland went to prison near Tokyo with the fifteen other American servicemen serving time in Japanese prisons. There the dispute over implementation of the SOFA rested until less than eight months later another serious rape case erupted in Okinawa -- and this time the Americans refused to turn over the suspect.
The Major Michael J. Brown Case
Major Brown is 41 years old, a nineteen-year veteran of the Marine Corps. In November 2002 he was attached to the headquarters of the Third Marine Expeditionary Force at Camp Courtney, a large deployment in central Okinawa of some 4,400 Marines. It was his second tour of duty in the Ryukyus. Brown is a "mustang," that is an officer who came up from within the ranks. He enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1984 from his home in Menard, Texas, advanced to the rating of private first class, and was then selected to receive a university education at federal expense. He attended Texas A&M and was commissioned a second lieutenant on May 29, 1991. He was promoted regularly and achieved the rank of major on March 1, 2001. In 2002, Brown was living off base in the nearby community of Gushikawa with his American wife, Lisa, and two young children.
No one involved in his case can remember an officer being in trouble with the Okinawan police before, certainly not during the past decade. We know a good deal about his background, attitudes, and opinions concerning the honesty and competence of Japanese police and judges, Okinawans in general, the American ambassador to Japan Howard Baker, President George W. Bush, and others because of a web site he created -- "Free Major Brown," (www.majorbrown.org/index.htm) -- which stores many relevant articles and documents as well as long, rambling diatribes of his from prison.
On November 1, 2002, upon completion of his day's work, Brown went to the Camp Courtney officers club. It was karaoke night and Brown says he enjoys this activity. He spent the evening with fellow officers and their wives (not including his own wife), drinking, playing pool, and crooning into a microphone with recorded accompaniment. When the club closed at midnight he decided to walk to his home two miles away via an auxiliary rear gate to the base. When he discovered that the gate he had in mind was locked for the evening, he had to walk back to the main gate. He had also forgotten his coat at the club and was getting cold. He admits he was intoxicated.
According to his own account, as he was walking to the main gate of Camp Courtney around 1:00 AM on November 2, 2002, he was offered a ride home by Victoria Nakamine, a 40-year-old Filipina barmaid and cashier at the officers club. She is married to an Okinawan. What happened next is in dispute. Brown says that once they left Camp Courtney in her car they stopped on a quiet road and had a heated argument about the proper route to take. Both agree that he grabbed Nakamine's cell phone from her, apparently in order to prevent her from calling for help, and threw it into the nearby Tengan River.
According to Brown, she was now infuriated with him and in order to get even walked back to the main gate and told the military police that he had twice tried to rape her. The MPs replied that since the incident occurred off base, they would have to call the Okinawan prefectural police. Gushikawa policemen came to the scene and took her complaint that Brown had molested her and tried to rip her clothes off. She said she'd fought him off and gotten out of the car but that when she returned to see if he had calmed down, he seized her phone and again tried to assault her. She claims she fought ferociously to fend off his attack. He then ran away to his home and she drove to the main gate of Camp Courtney to report him. Brown is ambiguous: in some accounts he says they just had a loud and unpleasant argument, in others he claims that Nakamine made sexual advances to him. He has repeatedly claimed that "I was seduced by the woman and when I would not go along with the seduction, she got angry and filed the complaint."23 American guards at the main gate claim that Nakamine did not appear disheveled and was fully dressed. On the other hand, Richard DeWald, the American civilian manager of the officers club and Nakamine's boss, corroborates her version of events. He identified Brown to the police as the person Nakamine gave a ride to, since she did not know his name.
Proceeding cautiously, the police delayed for a month before acting on Nakamine's complaint. Finally, on December 3, 2002, the Naha District Court issued a warrant for Brown's arrest on a charge of attempted rape and destroying private property (the cell phone).24 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Tokyo asked the Marine Corps to turn him over. After delaying for two days, the U.S. Embassy curtly announced that it had decided to retain custody of Major Brown, declaring "The government of the United States has concluded that the circumstances of this case as presented by the government of Japan do not warrant departure from the standard practice as agreed between the United States and Japan."25 The Okinawan press has speculated that the Americans did not consider a failed rape a "heinous crime." This U.S. intransigence did not go down well with anyone except perhaps members of the Marine Corps.
On December 6, a large number of police raided Brown's home and office and carried off anything that looked promising, in the process frightening his wife and children.26 Prime Minister Koizumi said that the U.S.'s refusal was all right with him, but his foreign minister, Yoriko Kawaguchi, was less accommodating. She asserted that Japan would have to get a clarification of what was included under the 1995 "sympathetic consideration" agreement and that the case was frustrating because even under a flexible administration of the old SOFA, the United States retained all discretion to cooperate or not to cooperate.27 Okinawa governor Inamine declared that "Yet more trouble was caused by a U.S. serviceman, despite our repeated requests to the U.S. military for disciplinary and preventive efforts. . . . It is a heinous crime infringing upon the human rights of a woman, and it is unforgivable in that it was committed by a serviceman who is required to act as a leader. It is extremely regrettable and causes me to feel strong indignation." The Okinawa prefectural assembly unanimously adopted a protest resolution demanding that the Americans hand over Brown. Most significantly, a newly formed liaison group of all fourteen governors of prefectures in which American bases are located urged the Liberal Democratic Party "to secure a true Japan-U.S. partnership through a revised Status of Forces Agreement."28
Finally, on December 19, 2002, Naha prosecutors indicted Brown and, in strict accordance with the SOFA, the U.S. handed him over the same day.29 From that point on Brown, with the help of his family, waged an unprecedented campaign of legal maneuvers and inflammatory publicity charging, among other things, that the Japanese criminal justice system is unfair and that American officials were willing to see him railroaded in order to keep their bases in Japan and obtain Japanese cooperation for George Bush's pending invasion of Iraq.
One of Brown's first acts was to obtain an American lawyer, Victor Kelley of the National Military Justice Group, who on March 7, 2003, filed a petition in federal court in Washington DC for an emergency writ of habeas corpus. Kelley argued that in turning over Brown to the Japanese the U.S. government violated his Constitutional rights as an American citizen "to be free from compulsory incrimination, the right to the effective assistance of counsel, and the right to a reasonable bail." He added, "[In Japan,] due process has no meaning. The Japanese 'conviction' rate is nearly 100 percent. To be indicted is to be convicted. The presumption of innocence is a mockery of justice. Almost without exception, all are convicted; no one goes free." The relief requested was to "order the Respondent [i.e., the United States of America] to . . . request the Government of Japan to give 'sympathetic consideration' [and] waive its right to exercise primary jurisdiction in this matter" and "order the Respondent to exercise primary jurisdiction in this case." This is a perfect example of the logic of extraterritoriality as it was enunciated in China 150 years ago. Needless to say, the Washington court did not grant the writ but simply by filing it, Brown was building up a case.30
Brown also sought to apply political pressure. He obtained the support of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) and of his representative, Congressman Lamar Smith, Republican of the Texas 21st District. Both of them informed the secretary of defense of their deep concern that Brown was not being treated fairly. Brown also raised the political stakes by urging his friends and fellow Marines to write to their elected representatives, suggesting that they say, "It is way past time for President Bush to intervene and no longer allow the Japanese government to persecute this innocent Marine."
Brown's running commentaries from prison were widely distributed to Marines on Okinawa. Among his many points, he alarmed them with the argument that "There has never been a case in Japan where a U.S. serviceman has been arrested and later found to be innocent." As time wore on he began to lash out at everyone he could think of, from Marine Corps legal officers to ordinary Okinawans -- viz. "I would love to see the Okinawans get their land and their island back and I would love to see the U.S. servicemen leaving that island and spending their money elsewhere. At least then, the slimy Okinawan officials couldn't get their hands on our guys anymore. This solution would make us all happy, right? The Okinawans obviously don't want us there. They don't want our soldiers funding their local economy. They don't want the jobs our bases provide. They don't like the exorbitant fees we pay them to rent their lands. They don't want us as a deterrent for their enemies. And, they don't want us as neighbors."31 This kind of rhetoric was surely more balm for Brown's wounded ego than an effective defense strategy, but it did seem to influence the high command to inform politicians and state department officials of the military's dissatisfaction with the flexible administration of the SOFA.
From Brown's point of view, the big break in the case came May 13, 2003, when in open court Victoria Nakamine testified, "I wanted to withdraw my complaint. I cannot speak Japanese very well. I signed my written statement, but I didn't understand what was written." She said further that on May 1 she had submitted a letter to the court stating, "I said I wanted to withdraw my complaint, but the police officers and prosecutors wouldn't listen to me." This was a serious development. Hiroyuki Kawakami, deputy chief prosecutor at the Naha District Public Prosecutors Office, commented, "This is an offense subject to prosecution only on complaint from the victim, so it's unlikely that a criminal case can be established in defiance of the victim's intent."32 In response to this development, on May 17, the court released Major Brown on ¥10 million bail but with the provisos that his passport be taken from him, he be confined to base at Camp Courtney, and that he not try to leave Okinawa. This action was unusual. Japanese courts accept defendants' requests for bail in only 14.6 percent of cases.33 The court was obviously influenced by Nakamine's recantation.
However, it should be understood that criminal trials in Japan are normally adjudicated by a panel of three judges, not by juries, and that these judges regard themselves -- and are so regarded by the public-as highly experienced experts on whether or not someone is telling the truth. They are not subject to American-style rules of evidence, and they can and want to hear anything and everything about a case, including hearsay evidence, gossip, and rumor. One of the admirable elements of Japanese law, compared to American practice, is the judges' rule that the testimony of a woman who claims to be a victim of a sex crime should be given more weight than that of the offender. In the Brown case, presiding judge Nobuyuki Yokota decided that Nakamine's original statement to the police was believable and that she had probably withdrawn it under pressure from her employer and the society in which she lived. He ordered Brown's trial to proceed.
Brown now erupted. In a letter to American Ambassador Baker he charged that "There is collusion between the court and prosecutor" and that the Gushikawa police had framed him by writing Nakamine's complaint for her and obtaining her signature even though she acknowledged that she does not read Japanese. He also instructed his attorney to appeal first to the Okinawa branch of the Fukuoka High Court and then to the Supreme Court that the three judges in his case be dismissed because they were patently prejudiced against him. Neither appeal succeeded, but it kept Brown's case in the newspapers and contributed to the American Embassy's worries about the cultural conflicts embedded in the SOFA.34
By the summer of 2003, Brown's web site had received more that 68,000 hits, and inquiries from Congressional staff assistants about the fairness of Japanese justice were routine at the State Department. Moreover, the war in Iraq was having an influence. Given the rising casualty rate among American troops, the Pentagon increasingly felt it had to protect the "human rights" of military personnel so that their morale would not be damaged. The Asahi Shimbun quoted a U.S. government official as saying, "American soldiers are in Okinawa to defend Japan. They're even prepared to die if necessary. And yet, when something happens, they [the Okinawans] will treat U.S. military personnel as criminals right away."35
It was in this context that yet another brutal rape and beating of an Okinawan woman occurred, further inflaming popular sentiment against the bases. The U.S. government knew that it had to turn over the suspect fast, but it also decided that the time had come to force Japan to modify its criminal procedures in ways that conform more to American norms. This fateful decision produced a Japanese-American deadlock.
The Lance Corporal José Torres Case
Kin is a small, central Okinawan village with many once-unspoiled beaches facing south toward the Bay of Kin and the Pacific Ocean. The Marine Corps uses the beaches today to practice amphibious landings and for recreation by the troops and their families. The huge expanse of Camp Hansen and its contingent of 5,800 Marines dominates the village. In 1995, Kin was the scene of the abduction, beating, and gang rape of a 12-year-old schoolgirl that launched the greatest Okinawan movement to date to get rid of the Americans. It is also where, until 1995, the Marine Corps regularly fired 155 mm. shells over the town in artillery practice, denuding and setting fires in the nearby forested hills. They stopped only when all of Okinawa erupted in rage after the 1995 rape. It is inconceivable that the Marines would (or would be allowed to) behave as they do in Kin anywhere in the United States or on the Japanese mainland. At the same time, many elderly residents of Kin are supported by rent payments the Japanese government still makes for land the U.S. military seized at bayonet point in the late 1950s to build Camp Hansen.
In one of his less inspired commentaries, Major Brown gave us his thoughts about Kin on his web site: "The sole purpose of Kin Town is to entertain GI's. It's basically a playground for young, horny men stationed thousands of miles from home. And, even though prostitution is supposed to be against the law in Okinawa, Kin Town exists with the full knowledge and support of Okinawan officials and U.S. Military officials. GI's go to the bars and drink like fish, get into fights, and pay mama-sans for the company of young ladies. Deals are made for hand-jobs, blow-jobs, full, unadulterated sex, and just about anything in-between."36 As someone who has been in Kin and interviewed local officials about the impact of the base and the military "training" exercises, I should add that this description is true only of the few blocks directly in front of the main gate of Camp Hansen. It is lined with about 200 bars and nightclubs.
At around 3:15 AM on Sunday morning May 25, 2003, a 21 year-old Camp Hansen Marine, Lance Corporal José Torres, left a Kin Village bar with a local 19 year-old woman, had sex with her in a nearby alley, and hit her in the face breaking her nose. A female friend of hers went to the Camp Hansen main gate and reported Torres, whom the MPs at once took into custody. On June 12, the local police opened an investigation, and on June 16, they obtained a warrant for Torres arrest for rape and battery. The same day, the Japanese government in Tokyo asked the U.S. Embassy to hand him over. The newly arrived U.S. ambassador, Howard Baker, apologized for the incident and urged Marine Lt. Gen. Wallace C. Gregson, commander of all Marine forces in Okinawa, to comply rapidly. Gregson vacillated but he did call on Governor Inamine to express "regret." Inamine replied "I expect that [the United States] will hand over the suspect to Japan as soon as possible, without wasting a minute or even a second."37 Baker said that he was trying to forestall mounting Japanese demands for a full revision of the SOFA. In Phnom Penh, attending a meeting of the ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Regional Forum, Secretary of State Colin Powell also apologized to Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi. On June 18, two days after the arrest warrant was issued, the Marines turned Torres over. At first he claimed that the sex was "consensual" -- that the victim was a prostitute he had hired -- but on July 8, after prosecutors had indicted him, Torres confessed to charges of raping and beating the woman. On September 12, the Naha District Court sentenced Torres to three-and-a-half years in prison for his crime.38
SOFA Negotiations
This case, as banal and routine as it was in the context of the vast array of military sex crimes in Okinawa, was nonetheless the last straw for both the Japanese and American governments. It led them into hardened positions that seem likely to be resolved only by some American pretext such as a "global force reform" and the withdrawal of significant numbers of Marines from Okinawa.39 On the Japanese side, there was a lot going on in addition to the Torres case that kept the issue of the SOFA and Japan's sovereignty before the public. Major Brown's trial was continuing; in March, a drunken Defense Department employee from Camp Hansen drove his car head-on into another, killing the Okinawan driver; on May 7, another Marine was arrested for mugging a store clerk who was walking home; the wife of a Marine assigned to Camp Foster punched and tried to strangle an Okinawan woman in the restroom of an Okinawa City bar; and on May 31 -- the day after they were paid -- five drunken Marines were arrested between 1:00 and 3:00 AM for failing to pay a ¥4,800 cab fare, trespassing on the premises of a private home, and damaging the glass entrance to the civic hall in Okinawa City. Okinawa City lies directly outside Kadena Air Force Base; once known as Koza, the town changed its name in 1972, after the Ryukyus reverted to Japanese administration, because Koza had become synonymous with incessant bar brawls and race riots among American servicemen.40
During June 2003, Governor Inamine and his deputy governor set out on a "pilgrimage" to the thirteen other prefectures that host U.S. military facilities and asked each governor to cooperate with his campaign to force the central government to revise the SOFA. All the governors agreed. Inamine's biggest success was gaining the endorsement of Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara, a popular right-wing politician with a long record of hostility to the American bases.41 Ishihara commented, "America's international strategy cannot be implemented without the bases in Japan. We are doing them a big favor here. . . . A half century has passed since the end of World War II, but Japan remains in an inferior position. It is strange to anyone who looks at it."42 This kind of remark from a man said to be in line for the prime ministership and mayor of the world's largest city put real pressure on the national government to end its obsequiousness toward the Americans.
However, just as the Japanese side was fortifying its position, the Americans also decided to toughen their stance. In turning over Torres to the Japanese police, the American Embassy stated that it wanted immediate negotiations to ensure that American servicemen "will be treated in a fair and humanitarian manner while in the local police's custody."43 The U.S. said that when it agreed in 1995 to give "sympathetic consideration" to requests for pre-indictment turnovers, it had asked as a quid pro quo that Japan give U.S. servicemen special treatment because of the differences between the American and Japanese legal systems. The U.S. government now demanded that Japan quit stalling on new rules governing implementation of the SOFA-and that it do so within 45 days. The Asahi Shimbun said that the Americans were influenced by the Major Brown case, noting that Brown had never wavered from his not guilty plea and that in his on-going trial, he had refused to speak in his own defense because he believed that he could not get justice in Japan.
The Asahi also commented on the refusal of the United States to join the new International Criminal Court, which had just gone into operation in The Hague, as a sign that the Bush administration was determined to set new rules for the world, not just for Japan. It noted the U.S.'s refusal to abide by many international laws it had helped enact, its invasion of Iraq without legal sanction, and its belief that it was so powerful that it could act more or less as it pleased in international affairs. The Asahi quoted Professor Masaaki Gabe of the University of the Ryukyus, probably Japan's best informed commentator on the base problems: "Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz and other U.S. officials in the present administration believe that American justice will pass muster anywhere in the world, and they do not necessarily give priority to the bilateral relationship with Japan." According to Gabe, the U.S.'s difficult military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan caused it to put a higher priority on its own troops' morale than on Okinawa's endless complaints about military misbehavior.44
The Japanese agreed to the requested negotiations and convened talks on July 2, 2003, in Tokyo. The two delegations were led by Yasumasa Nagamine, counselor of the Foreign Ministry's North American Affairs Bureau, together with officials from the Ministry of Justice and the National Police Agency, and by Brian Mohler, director of the Office of Japanese Affairs at the State Department. The United States asked that a U.S. government official and an American-selected interpreter, for which it was willing to pay, be assigned to every military suspect turned over to the Japanese to ensure that he understood the questioning and was not tricked into confessing. The Ministry of Justice and the National Police Agency said that this request was an impossible interference in Japan's settled ways of investigating crimes. The U.S. replied that in most of its SOFAs with other countries it turns over military suspects only after they have been indicted and that it was already giving Japan "preferential treatment." After two days the talks deadlocked. A second attempt to reach agreement was scheduled for a Pentagon meeting on July 11.
The resumed talks in Washington were no more productive than those in Tokyo. The main issue clearly centered not on the interpreter, since the Japanese already supply foreigner detainees with good interpreters, but on the presence of an American official, perhaps an attorney, in all interrogation sessions. Japan argues that, "In our country, a lawyer is not allowed to attend investigations under normal circumstances and nothing in the SOFA says that Japan has an obligation to let persons connected with the U.S. government attend investigations by Japanese authorities."45 Japan's negotiators also said that measures taken by American authorities to maintain discipline and prevent sex crimes in Okinawa had been insufficient. The U.S. side replied that if there was no progress in the consultations, the U.S. government would not agree in the future to turn over U.S. military suspects before indictment. All the two sides could agree upon was to meet and try again on July 24 at U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters in Honolulu.
In Honolulu, the American delegation was headed by Richard P. Lawless, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asian and Pacific Affairs, a former National Security Council staff member in the Reagan administration and before that a CIA operational agent. He is said to speak Korean. The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs made clear that it was prepared to accept the American requests, but that the Justice Ministry and Police Agency were dead set against it. The talks ended in failure, with negotiators on both sides saying that the issue would have to be referred to a higher political level.
Sometime between July 25 and 29, to the great consternation of Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, President Bush telephoned Prime Minister Koizumi and talked over the matter. The result was that Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Teijiro Furukawa ordered senior officials in the Foreign and Justice ministries to produce a compromise. At a fourth round of talks in Washington on July 31, Japan therefore agreed to allow a U.S. government representative to be present during interrogations of military suspects, but only in cases of "heinous crimes." Such a U.S. governmental presence would be authorized in the name of Japanese-American "investigative cooperation," not "human rights;" the Japanese side could, at its discretion, ask the U.S. official briefly to leave the room at critical points in the interrogation; and the U.S. side would be involved in the selection of interpreters. The U.S. government rejected this compromise, saying it would not tolerate any conditions being placed on U.S. officials and that it wanted them present for all charges, not just heinous crimes. With the failure of the negotiations, the 1995 agreement on "sympathetic consideration" became a dead letter. A Pentagon source explained that U.S. had no choice in the matter since its military forces would be demoralized if their human rights could not be assured.46
In the months since Japan and the U.S. gave up on the SOFA, there have been endless rumors that the United States is planning a substantial reform of its basing policies in East Asia. In South Korea, possibly the most anti-American democracy on earth today, there have been major street demonstrations calling for a revised SOFA or, more pointedly, for all American forces to leave the country. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced plans to move the U.S.'s Yongsan Base from the old Japanese military headquarters in downtown Seoul to some remote area and to relocate the 2nd Infantry Division, based close to the demilitarized zone with North Korea, to undisclosed locations south of the Han River. Senator Daniel Inouye (D.-Hawaii) hinted to a delegation of LDP politicians that the U.S. might move some Okinawa-based Marines to Hawaii as a way of revitalizing the Hawaiian economy. Many consultations between the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage have dwelt on "streamlining the U.S. military presence in Okinawa." The Japanese press has observed that in the past this subject was usually brought up by the Japanese side in a pro-forma way but that after the United States declared its "war on terror" and invaded Afghanistan and Iraq, it has shown greater interest in doing something about it.47
During early November, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld toured Japan, Okinawa, and South Korea. He noted that the presence of thousands of U.S. troops on Japanese soil was a source of friction and that "Perhaps the toughest of those tensions is the question of whether to extend fuller legal protections to U.S. service members accused of crimes."48 On November 27, 2003, President George W. Bush said in an official statement that "Beginning today, the United States will intensify our consultation with the Congress and our friends, allies, and partners overseas on our ongoing review of our overseas force posture."49 The administration has indicated that nations such as Germany, Japan, and South Korea could see a significant decrease in the U.S. military presence as the Pentagon focuses more on the "war on terror."
It is, of course, difficult to know whether or when any of this will come to pass. Okinawa has been an American military colony for the past fifty-eight years, and throughout that period the rape of local women by American soldiers has been the dominant metaphor of America's imperial presence. It would be deeply ironic if the misbehavior of Sergeant Woodland, Major Brown, and Corporal Torres finally brought about the liberation of Okinawa.
Notes
1. The number of 703 U.S. military bases located in other people's countries is from the Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Installations and Environment), Base Structure Report (A Summary of DoD's Real Property Inventory) (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, 2003), www.defenselink.mil/news/Jun2003/basestructure2003.pdf. The figure for 2001 was 725. For details and analysis of these reports, see Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), pp. 151-60. The figure 703 seriously underestimates the actual number since it omits secret intelligence bases, those disguised by national identities (e.g., Royal Air Force bases in Britain), those omitted in order to avoid embarrassment to foreign governments, and most of the bases in the Balkans, Persian Gulf, and Central Asia acquired in recent American wars.
2. Rachel Cornwell and Andrew Wells, "Deploying Insecurity," Peace Review 11:3 (1999), p. 410.
3. William Arkin, "U.S. Air Bases Forge Double-Edged Sword," Los Angeles Times, January 6, 2002.
4. Robert Burns, Associated Press, "Rumsfeld Holds Range of Talks in Tokyo," November 16, 2003.
5. Global Security Organization, "U.S. Forces, Japan," <www.globalsecurity.org/military/agency/dod/usfj.htm>; Thom Shanker, "Okinawans Ask Rumsfeld to Thin Out Troops," New York Times, November 17, 2003.
6. For details on the omoiyari yosan, see Glenn D. Hook, Julie Gilson, Christopher W. Hughes, and Hugo Dobson, Japan's International Relations (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 134.
7. David Allen, "Ten-year Makeover Is Under Way at Okinawa's Camp Foster," Stars and Stripes, January 2, 2002.
8. A text of the SOFA can be found on the web site of Okinawa-related materials maintained by Dr. John Purves, <www.niraikanai.wwma.net/pages/archive/sofa.html>.
9. Keiichi Inamine, "The Anger of Okinawa Residents Is Magma Ready to Explode," Ronza, October 2003 (in Japanese).
10. On these issues, see Shigemitsu Dandô, Japanese Criminal Procedure, B. J. George, Jr., trans. (South Hackensack, NJ: Fred B. Rothman & Co., 1965); Chalmers Johnson, Conspiracy at Matsukawa (Berkeley; University of California Press, 1972); and David T. Johnson, The Japanese Way of Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
11. Thom Shanker, "U.S. and Japan Discuss Transfer of American Rape Suspect," New York Times, July 6, 2001.
12. David Allen and Chiyomi Sumida, "General Gets Earful from Okinawa Governor," Stars and Stripes, August 13, 2003.
13. "Inamine Meets Rumsfeld: Perception Gap Not Closed Despite Direct Appeal on Base Issues," Asahi Shimbun, November 17, 2003, p. 2.
14. "Okinawa Governor Urges Rumsfeld to Reduce U.S. Bases," Japan Today, November 20, 2003.
15. Thom Shanker, "Okinawans Ask Rumsfeld to Thin Out Troops, New York Times, November 17, 2003.
16. See Chalmers Johnson, Blowback (New York: Metropolitan, 2000), pp. 41-42; and Tomoko Daiji, "Close-up Column: Crimes Committed by U.S. Troops and Information Disclosure," Mainichi Shimbun, January 22, 2003, p. 3.
17. David Allen, "Friend of Accused Testifies in Rape Trial on Okinawa, Stars and Stripes, November 10, 2001.
18. "U.S. Serviceman Turnover: SOFA Revision Not Touched Again," Asahi Shimbun, June 19, 2003, p. 35.
19. "Japanese Parliament Panel Seeks Review of U.S. Forces Pact," Agence France Presse, July 10, 2001.
20. Thom Shanker, "U.S. and Japan Discuss Transfer of American Rape Suspect," New York Times, July 6, 2001.
21. Sheila K. Johnson, "Another Okinawa Outrage," Los Angeles Times, July 8, 2001; and Johnson, "Blame Misplaced in Okinawa Rape Case," Japan Times, August 2, 2001.
22. "Airman Gets 32 Months for Rape in Okinawa," Japan Times, March 29, 2002; Howard W. French, "Airman's Rape Conviction Fans Okinawa's Ire Over U.S. Bases," New York Times, March 29, 2002; and Komako Akai, "Woodland Convicted of Rape, Sentenced to 32 Months in Japanese Prison," Stars and Stripes, March 28, 2002.
23. "Attempted Rape Incident in Okinawa: U.S. Military Suspect's Statement: 'I Was Seduced,'" Tokyo Shimbun, December 9, 2002, p. 8. Also see "Case History" and "The Incident" on the Free Major Brown web site; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Statement by Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoriko Kawaguchi Concerning Charges Against a U.S. Marine Major of Attempted Rape," December 3, 2002, http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2002/1203.html ; "U.S. Officer Named in Rape Bid on Filipina in Japan," Agence France Presse, December 5, 2002; "U.S. Suspect in Rape Case 'Intoxicated,'" Kyodo, December 8, 2002; and "Criminal Case Involves Officer," Okinawa Times Weekly, December 7, 2002.
24. "USMC Major Charged with Attempted Rape in Okinawa," Asahi Shimbun, December 4, 2002, p. 39; and Elaine Lies, "Japan Calls for Crackdown on U.S. Military Crime," Reuters, December 4, 2002.
25. Teruaki Ueno, "U.S. Refuses to hand Over Marine in Japan Rape Case," Reuters, December 5, 2002; and "Attempted Rape in Okinawa: U.S. Refuses to Turn Over Suspected U.S. Serviceman," Asahi Shimbun, December 6, 2002, p. 39.
26 "Police Raid Home of Accused Marine," Associated Press, December 7, 2002.
27. "MOFA Expresses Regret to U.S. Envoy," Asahi Shimbun, December 4, 2002, p. 39; "Foreign Minister Kawaguchi to Ask for Improvement in SOFA Operation to Allow Handing over of U.S. Military Personnel even in 'Attempted' [Rape] Incidents," Mainichi Shimbun, December 6, 2002, p. 1; "Attempted Rape in Okinawa: Prime Minister Says Pre-indictment Turnover of Suspect Unnecessary," Yomiuri Shimbun, December 7, 2002, p. 4; "Japan Won't Press for Marine Rape Suspect," Japan Times, December 7, 2002; and "U.S. Rejection of the Handover of U.S. Marine Major Exposes U.S. Upper hand Regarding SOFA; Japan Must Conduct National Debate by Taking Okinawa's Voice to Heart," Yomiuri Shimbun, December 17, 2002, p. 13.
28. "Japanese Court Seeks Arrest of U. S. Marine," Associated Press, December 3, 2002; "Japan Protests Over Alleged Rape Attempt," Agence France Presse, December 3, 2002; "Okinawa Prefectural Assembly Adopts Resolution Protesting U.S. Refusal to Hand Over Marine Corps Major," Asahi Shimbun, December 11, 2002, p. 38; and "Governors Call for Revision to SOFA," Japan Times, February 13, 2003.
29. "Japan Prosecutors Indict U.S. Marine on Rape Attempt," Reuters, December 19, 2002; and "Marine Handed Over to Local Authorities over Attempted Rape," Nihon Keizai Shimbun, December 20, 2002, p. 43.
30. The text of the petition is available on the "Free major Brown" web site. The petition was filed in Washington, DC, on the logic that George W. Bush is the petitioner's commander-in-chief and he resides in Washington.
31. "Free Major Brown" web site, s.v. "Previous Updates."
32. "U.S. Serviceman's Attempted Rape Case in Okinawa: Victim Testifies in Court, 'I Wanted to Withdraw My Complaint,'" Nihon Keizai Shimbun, May 14, 2003, p. 35.
33. "U.S. Marine Accused of Attempted Rape Is Granted Bail," Kyodo, May 17, 2003; Hiroshi Matsubara, "Detention Process Questioned," Japan Times, September 21, 2001.
34. David Allen, "Japanese Court Dismisses Motion to Disqualify Panel in Brown Case," Stars and Stripes, October 23, 2003; and Allen, "Japan's High Court Rejects Brown Appeal," Stars and Stripes, November 16, 2003.
35. "Judicial Friction Seen over SOFA: USMC Major Consistently Asserts Innocence in Attempted Rape," Asahi Shimbun, July 16, 2003.
36. "Free Major Brown" web site, "update" of June 16, 2003.
37. "Endless Crimes Involving U.S. Servicemen Fuel Fear in Okinawa," Asahi Shimbun, June 17, 2003, p. 39.
38. "U.S. Marine Held in New Okinawa Rape Case," CNN, June 12, 2003; "Okinawa Prefectural Police Questioning U.S. Marine on Voluntary Basis on Charges of Assaulting 19-year-old Woman," Nihon Keizai Shimbun, June 12, 2003, p. 17; "U.S. Serviceman Questioned in Okinawa on Charge of Rape Amid Loud Calls for 'Review of SOFA,'" Tokyo Shimbun, June 13, 2003, p. 27; "U.S. Envoy Expresses Regret," Asahi Shimbun, June 13, 2003, p. 39; Mark Oliva, "Okinawa Police Continue to Investigate Marine," Stars and Stripes, June 15, 2003; Saikazu Nakamura, "Sexual Assault Incident in Okinawa: Arrest Warrant for U.S. Serviceman Issued," Mainichi Shimbun , June 16, 2003, eve. ed., p. 8; Ministry of Foreign Affairs, "Statement by Minister for Foreign Affairs Yoriko Kawaguchi Concerning Alleged Rape Resulting in Injury Committed by a U.S. Marine Lance Corporal," June 16, 2003, http://www.mofa.go.jp/announce/announce/2003/6/0616.html ; "Government Asks U.S. at Joint Committee to Turn Over U.S. Marine Rape Suspect to Japan Before Indictment," Nihon Keizai Shimbun, June 17, 2003, p. 39; "U.S. Marine Rape Incident: Chief Cabinet Secretary Asks U.S. Ambassador to Turn the Suspect Over to Japanese Side," Asahi Shimbun, June 18, 2003, p. 4; and "Marine Sentenced to Jail for Rape," Reuters, September 14, 2003.
39. See, e.g., Martin Sieff, "Bush Pushes Global Force Reform," United Press International, November 25, 2003.
40. "Drunk U.S. Base Worker Kills Man in Okinawa Car Crash," Mainichi Daily News, March 17, 2003; David Allen and Chiyomi Sumida, "Two Americans in Custody After Incidents on Okinawa," Stars and Stripes, May 7, 2003; and "Five U.S. Marines Arrested over Series of Incidents in Okinawa," Tokyo Shimbun, June 1, 2003, p. 27. Also see Okinawa-shi Heiwa Bunka Shinkô-ka, ed., Koza: hito, machi, koto (Koza: People, Town, Events) (Okinawa-shi: Okinawa-shi Yakusho, 1997).
41. See Shintaro Ishihara, The Japan that Can Say NO (New York: Simon & Schuser, 1991).
42. "Governor Inamine's Nationwide Pilgrimage to Form Alliance to Force Central Government to Move on Revision of the Japan-U.S. Status of Forces Agreement," Asahi Shimbun, June 14, 2003, p. 33; and "Inamine Asks Ishihara for Cooperation on Sofa Revision," Tokyo Shimbun, June 14, 2003, p. 3.
43. "SOFA: U.S. Hints at Refusing Suspect Turnover," Asahi Shimbun, July 3, 2003, p. 1.
44. "Judicial Friction Seen over SOFA: USMC Major Consistently Asserts Innocence in Attempted Rape," Asahi Shimbun, July 16, 2003.
45. "Talks on SOFA Legal Procedures," Sankei Shimbun, July 4, 2003, p. 5; and Yoichi Toyota, "SOFA Talks: Japan, U.S. Confront over Official Presence at Police Questioning of U.S. Military Suspects," Tokyo Shimbun, July 12, 2003, p. 2.
46. "Editorial: SOFA Revision Needed After All," Asahi Shimbun, June 20, 2003, p. 2; "SOFA Talks to Focus on Interpreter, Lawyer; U.S. Stresses Human Rights in New Rules," Asahi Shimbun, June 20, 2003, p.3; "Japan, U.S. Meet over GI Justice," Christian Science Monitor, June 30, 2003; David Allen and Chiyomi Sumida, "Japanese Leaders Want Comfier SOFA," Stars and Stripes, July 21, 2003; Hiroyuki Sato, "SOFA Talks: Japan-U.S. Views Remain at Odds," Asahi Shimbun, July 26, 2003, pp. 3, 4; "SOFA: Government to Allow U.S. Officials to be Present During Questioning of U.S. Suspects by Japanese Police," Sankei Shimbun, July 30, 2003, p. 2; Taro Kono (LDP member of the House of Representatives), "If the U.S. Is Asking More of Japan, Will the U.S. Tread More Lightly in Turn?" Christian Science Monitor, August 1, 2003; "U.S., Japan Disagree on Justice for Troops," Reuters, August 1, 2003; and "Inability to Reach Agreement on SOFA Assurances Will Affect the Japan-U.S. Alliance," Nihon Keizai Shimbun, August 3, 2003, p. 2.
47. "Thoughts on USFJ-Changing Alliance," Mainichi Shimbun , July 29, 2003, p. 3; and "SOFA Talks: Japan Compromises, U.S. Remains Tough," Mainichi Shimbun, August 3, 2003, p. 3.
48. Robert Burns, Associated Press, "Rumsfeld Holds Range of Talks in Tokyo," November 16, 2003.
49. Bryan Bender and Shane Green, "U.S. Signals Rethink on Bases Overseas," Sydney Morning Herald, November 27, 2003 (reprinted from The Boston Globe ); and "U.S. Force Realignment: Okinawa's Burden Alleviation Expected to Be Small," Nihon Keizai Shimbun, November 27, 2003, p. 2.
Justice: Prosecuting Crime in Japan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
For the rest of the footnotes click here.
Chalmers Johnson is author of Blowback. His new book, The Sorrows of Empire, will be published by Metropolitan Books on January 1
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. frees Reuters, NBC staff detained in Iraq
(Reuters)
05 Jan 2004
http://www.reuters.com/locales/newsArticle.jsp?type=worldNews&locale=en_IN&storyID=4075466
BAGHDAD - Three Iraqis working for Reuters and one employed by the U.S. network NBC were released on Monday after being detained by American soldiers since last week.
Reuters made contact with its staff after their release and NBC confirmed its freelance journalist had also been freed.
The Reuters team -- Baghdad-based cameraman Salem Ureibi and a Falluja-based freelance cameraman and driver -- appeared shaken and exhausted after their three-day detention.
They were held near Falluja, west of Baghdad, on Friday close to where a U.S. Kiowa helicopter had earlier been shot down. One pilot was killed and the other was wounded in the crash.
Reuters driver Alaa Noury, who was working with the Reuters team near the crash site, said they had been fired on by U.S. troops earlier as they filmed in the area. They drove away at speed and were unhurt.
After they came under fire, Noury returned to Baghdad with the footage filmed at the scene. The rest of the Reuters team continued working nearby, before they were detained.
Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the senior U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, said on Friday guerrillas posing as journalists had fired on American paratroopers guarding the crash site and four were later detained.
On Sunday, he said an investigation was under way to ascertain exactly what happened in the incident.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
High Court May Broaden Terror War Review
GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press
Mon, Jan. 05, 2004
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7635365.htm
WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court will announce this month whether it will broaden a review of the Bush administration's imprisonment of terror suspects.
The court already overrode the objections of the administration in November to take an appeal that asks whether foreigners held at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, may contest their captivity in American courts.
Now justices will decide whether to hear the appeal of U.S.-born terrorism suspect Yaser Esam Hamdi. The government won its argument in a lower court that Hamdi may be kept incommunicado and without access to a lawyer or U.S. courts, even though he is a citizen.
A second case awaiting the justices' return from the holidays is a challenge to the government's policy of withholding names and other details about hundreds of foreigners who were detained in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The appeals come before the justices after a series of setbacks for the White House, most recently rulings last month from appeals courts in San Francisco and New York that sided with alleged enemy combatants.
"It's bollixed their strategy a little bit," said Timothy Lynch, a lawyer with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.
The government had won several lower-court rulings that gave it momentum and time to interrogate suspects like Hamdi without interference from courts, Lynch said.
The Supreme Court is reviewing one of the government's earlier victories, in the Guantanamo Bay case, and will hear arguments in the spring. The court has a chance to intervene in two others: involving Hamdi and immigrant information.
Hamdi has been in custody for two years, since being captured during fighting in Afghanistan. He was brought to the United States and has been held in a naval brig in South Carolina.
At the same jail is Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member accused of plotting to detonate a so-called dirty bomb. Padilla's attorneys won a victory on his behalf last month in the New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The second ruling was in favor of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.
"It's taken two years for these cases to percolate. It's like it is springtime. The bulbs are producing flowers. They're popping up all over the place," said Mary Cheh, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University.
Cheh joined legal experts and former prisoners of war in urging the Supreme Court to review Hamdi's appeal. They said in a filing that the U.S. military could mistakenly arrest journalists or aid workers in another country, and those people would have no way to prove their innocence.
The government maintains that the detentions of terror suspects, without legal rights, are necessary for national security.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said last month that detainees are being treated well, but "let's keep in mind we're talking about enemy combatants who were involved in planning and plotting to harm American citizens."
Scott Silliman, director of Duke University's Center for Law, Ethics and National Security, said that government lawyers are hoping the high court decides against reviewing more terror cases for now.
A loss at the high court in any of the enemy combatant cases, he said, "will have a crippling effect on the current legal strategy for dealing with terrorists."
The Pentagon, in a surprise move, announced in December that it would let Hamdi see an attorney because it was finished interrogating him. The Supreme Court could still use his appeal to decide if such detentions are unconstitutional.
On Friday, a coalition of journalism organizations and media companies asked the Supreme Court to let them join an appeal in another terror-related case. The news groups are siding with an immigrant in Florida whose challenge to his detention after the Sept. 11 attacks was handled in secret. At issue is the secrecy of the proceeding for Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel. The Bush administration had a Monday deadline to file its own arguments in the case.
ON THE NET
Supreme Court: http://www.supremecourtus.gov/
----
Justices to Plunge Into Legal Issues Raised by War on Terror
By Charles Lane
Monday, January 5, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54560-2004Jan4.html
After a month-long holiday break, the justices of the Supreme Court will gather in their private conference room Friday to resume what has quietly developed into a potentially historic term.
Last year's two most memorable rulings -- the court's decisions declaring state bans on sodomy unconstitutional and race-conscious university admissions permissible -- defined the individual rights of American citizens within their own society. But key cases on the court's docket for early 2004 will, to some extent, define the human rights of both Americans and non-Americans.
That is because the justices will, for the first time, consider key elements of the Bush administration's aggressive assertion of executive authority in the global war against terrorism. The results will help determine not only the court's power vis-à-vis the executive branch, but also the place of the U.S. judiciary, and of the U.S. Constitution, in the international sphere.
Along with these debates over the substantive meaning of national safety and individual liberty, the court will tackle an emotionally charged case about how Americans honor the flag that symbolizes those values: a California atheist's challenge to the words "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance.
"The spring certainly will produce a series of blockbuster decisions that'll have the nation's attention," said Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer who practices regularly before the court. "And they could even create issues for next year's elections, because they involve questions of patriotism and terrorism and the role of government that are absolutely fundamental."
In their first closed-door conference of the new year, the justices on Friday will take up a plea from an attorney representing the father of Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen of Saudi origin who has been held incommunicado by U.S. military authorities since he was captured in late 2001 while fighting for the Taliban.
The lawyer, Frank W. Dunham Jr., argues that Hamdi has a constitutional right to dispute the charges against him in federal court. But last year a Richmond-based federal appeals court upheld his detention, deferring to the Bush administration's argument that the president, as commander in chief, has the authority to declare Hamdi an "enemy combatant" and hold him for the duration of the war.
In the same conference, the court will look at an appeal by the Center for National Security Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit organization that heads a group of civil liberties and Arab American organizations seeking the names, nationalities and other information about hundreds of people detained by the government during its investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The groups say that disclosure is required by the First Amendment and the Freedom of Information Act. They have been supported by friend-of-the-court briefs filed by The Washington Post Co. and other media organizations.
Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court in Washington agreed with them that the names of the detainees should be released, but she ruled that all other information could be protected as part of an ongoing criminal investigation -- as the Bush administration had argued. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit then ruled that even the names could be withheld.
The question of whether the court will agree to hear the Hamdi case has been clouded by the fact that the administration recently offered Hamdi some access to an attorney. But the court has agreed to hear what may be an even more momentous test of presidential power in wartime: the case of 16 foreigners accused of membership in al Qaeda or the Taliban who are detained at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Their families are demanding a chance for the men to contest the charges in a U.S. court -- a demand that one federal appeals court has rejected and another has upheld. That case, to be argued in April, again presents a claim that the Constitution guarantees even the nation's alleged enemies some form of legal procedure, in contrast with the administration's assertion of wide authority to safeguard national security.
The court will also hear a challenge to the government's authority to seize criminal suspects abroad and deliver them for trial in the United States. The case was brought by a Mexican citizen, but it has potential implications for the war on terrorism because the United States is working -- often secretly -- with the intelligence, police or irregular forces of other countries to round up al Qaeda suspects around the globe.
Finally, there is a strong chance that the court will be presented with an appeal by the Bush administration of a ruling last month by the federal appeals court in New York, which said that the Constitution prohibits the incommunicado detention of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen captured in Chicago and declared an enemy combatant for his alleged role in a "dirty bomb" plot.
The court's plunge into the legal issues raised by the war on terrorism did not come precipitously -- the justices have rejected pleas to hear some terrorism-related cases. Yet it is a role that several of the justices, conscious of the court's crucial rulings on civil liberties in conflicts such as World War II and the Civil War, seem to have been anticipating almost since Sept. 11.
Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in fact, published a book in 1998 on the tension between liberty and security during wartime, concluding that the laws "speak with a muted voice" during wartime.
In October 2001, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, recalling that "tears just rolled down my cheeks" on a visit to Ground Zero in New York, spoke to a group of lawyers in Nebraska about the court's part in ensuring that restrictions of civil liberties not go too far.
Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, disturbed at what he saw as the "moral relativism" of some young people in the face of the attacks, launched a national program of speeches and meetings with high school students and lawyers on the theme of freedom after Sept. 11.
Justice Stephen G. Breyer has touched on the subject publicly several times, including a recent speech in which he observed that the United States can learn from the "intermediate solutions" that Israeli courts have devised to human rights dilemmas raised by that country's war against terrorism.
And last September, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg told a group of more than 500 female attorneys in Oklahoma that "the issue is whether we will be able to hang on to the liberties and freedoms that have made our country a beacon to the rest of the world."
--------
News Groups Seek to Open Secret Case
January 5, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/national/05SCOT.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 4 - A coalition of news and legal organizations is seeking public access to information about a post-Sept. 11 detention case now before the Supreme Court that has been handled with unusual secrecy both there and in the lower federal courts.
The case, which the justices have not yet agreed to review, is an appeal filed by the Federal Public Defender's office in Miami on behalf of Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, an Algerian-born resident of South Florida and one of more than 1,000 Arab men swept up and imprisoned following the terrorist attacks of 2001.
Because all the lower-court records, including the actual decisions, are sealed, there is little public information about the case, M.K.B. v. Warden, No. 03-6747. It was filed at the Supreme Court in June using only Mr. Bellahouel's initials.
A brief to be filed at the court on Monday by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press on behalf of 23 media organizations and other groups, including the American Immigration Lawyers Association, requests the court's permission to intervene in the case.
If granted, the unusual request would give the organizations - which include The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN - the status of parties, with a direct stake in the outcome, rather than simply "friends of the court." Their brief tells the court that they would then argue that all information about the case should be made public except for material that is classified or "truly required for national security purposes" to be kept secret.
Much of the information available now comes from a series of articles in The Miami Daily Business Review, which learned about the case in March when it was pending before the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta. The clerk's office of the appeals court inadvertently and briefly listed the case on a public docket. Previously, not even the existence of the case had been made public.
The publicly available version of the Supreme Court petition omits many details, including even the identities of the lower courts, and includes blank pages. The justices received complete versions.
After Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told the court that the government would have no response to the petition, the court directed the government to respond.
Mr. Olson's brief is due at the court on Monday. It is likely that none or at most a small part of the brief will be publicly available.
Mr. Bellahouel worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Delray Beach, Fla., that the Federal Bureau of Investigation says was patronized by at least two Sept. 11 hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi.
During his five-month imprisonment at the Krome Detention Center in Miami, Mr. Bellahouel was taken to Alexandria, Va., to testify before the grand jury that was investigating Zacarias Moussaoui.
The government has not charged Mr. Bellahouel with any terrorism-related crimes and apparently does not regard him as a threat. He has been free on a $10,000 immigration bond since March 2002 and faces possible deportation for having overstayed the student visa on which he entered the country to attend Florida Atlantic University in 1996. His wife is a United States citizen.
While in custody, Mr. Bellahouel sought release through a petition for a writ of habeas corpus filed in Federal District Court in Miami. Judge Paul C. Huck closed all proceedings in the case, which was never listed on the court's public docket. The 11th Circuit then maintained the secrecy, holding an argument behind closed doors last March 5 and issuing its decision under seal on March 31.
For that reason, the substance of the case remains publicly unknown. The question that Kathleen M. Williams and Paul M. Rashkind of the Federal Public Defender's office in Miami have brought to the Supreme Court, at least in the public part of their filing, is whether the lower courts "failed to comply with the court's common-law and First Amendment jurisprudence governing public access to court filings and proceedings" by cloaking the entire case in secrecy without justifying the need to do so.
"Although the right to access is not absolute, the right of the public to litigate its entitlement to access must be absolute if the public is to have means to effect its right of access," the petition asserts.
The Reporters Committee request to intervene asserts that the media organizations' "strong First Amendment interests may not be adequately represented" by Mr. Bellahouel because, given his immigration situation, he may be motivated to settle the case rather than press the public-access argument.
-------- homeland security
In Security Push, U.S. Begins Fingerprinting at Airports
January 5, 2004
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/05/national/05CND-SECU.html?hp
The United States began finger-printing and photographing foreigners at airports and seaports today in a nationwide program that Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said was intended to keep borders open and the country more secure.
The new entry procedures were launched at 115 airports and at cruise ship terminals at 14 seaports, Mr. Ridge told a news conference in Atlanta this morning.
The program involves taking digital photographs and prints of the two index fingers of foreigners traveling to the United States on a visa. A test-run of the program at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport since November 17 has screened 20,000 travelers, Mr. Ridge said, yielding "21 hits" on the Federal Bureau of Investigation's criminal watch list, including people with prior convictions of statutory rape, drugs and visa fraud.
"It is part of a comprehensive program to ensure that our borders remain open to visitors but closed to terrorists," Mr. Ridge said.
The Bush administration began an aggressive approach to defending American airspace when the nation was put on orange or "high" alert on Dec. 21. Since then, at least seven international flights have been canceled because of security concerns.
But administration officials have said no arrests had been made in connection with any of the more than a dozen international flights subjected to rigorous scrutiny, and they have acknowledged that they are uncertain whether they have succeeded in foiling a terrorist plot.
As a result, the Bush administration has faced questions from American allies about the reliability of the intelligence information that has led to the recent rash of flight cancellations.
Mr. Ridge said the new national program would "facilitate legitimate travel and trade" while allowing customs and border protection officials to focus on "at-risk" travelers and allowing immigration officials to confirm identities of passengers and ensure that they are adhering to visa policies.
He said the finger-scanning and photographing would only add 15 seconds to the entry process. "We are adding an important layer of security," Mr. Ridge said.
The program, known as "U.S.-Visit," is the first in a series of steps that American officials will take at borders this year.
It is meant to continue in the United States the security and visa measures started at consulates overseas, said Asa Hutchinson, Undersecretary of Border and Transportation Security of the Department of Homeland Security.
"When the visitor gets to our border, we use the same biometrics - these digital `fingerscans' - to verify that the person at our port is the same person who received the visa or to see if we have learned new information about any involvement in terrorism or crime," the undersecretary said in a statement.
Citizens from 28 countries will be exempt from the new program, mostly European nations whose citizens are allowed to come to the United States for up to 90 days without visas.
But Mr. Ridge told CNN that in October this year, everyone will be required to present machine-readable passports and other forms of biometric identifiers - physical characteristics unique to each individual - to verify identity.
"For the time being it is a matter of policy," he said. "We are going after those countries where they need visas."
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it also started a pilot test today of exit procedures for passengers holding visas, using automated kiosks at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and at Miami cruise terminals, in which foreign visitors are required to confirm their departure.
Asked about the numbers of flights delayed to the United States because of security concerns, Mr. Ridge said, "I think we will probably see more and more of this in the future as long as the intelligence pushes us in that direction."
British Airways canceled a flight to the United States on Friday, grounding a flight from London to Washington.
On Sunday, the British transportation minister, Alistair Darling, said travelers will face security-related flight delays and cancellations "for many years to come" and Prime Minister Tony Blair renewed warnings of terror attacks, according to remarks published by The Associated Press.
"You know the terrorist threat is real right around the world at the present time," Mr. Blair told reporters while flying home from a visit to Iraq. "Nobody is immune from it; you have to remain vigilant."
-------- justice
Cities in revolt over Patriot Act
January 05, 2004
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040104-113441-7305r.htm
The number of Americans coming under scrutiny of the Patriot Act is growing significantly, and so is the number of Americans calling on Congress to repeal or modify the law.
Hundreds of city and county governments across the nation last year initiated the grass-roots effort by passing resolutions declaring they would not cooperate with the federal government in enforcing the law, which they claim undermines civil liberties.
Those voices grew louder last week when the nation's oldest and largest national group of elected municipal government officials, the National League of Cities (NLC), passed a resolution at its annual meeting calling for Congress to repeal parts of the act.
"Cities and towns need a partnership with the federal government on homeland security issues that makes sure we have the resources we need to get the job done but also preserves the liberties that Americans hold dear," Charlie Lyons, NLC president and Arlington, Mass., selectman, said in a written statement.
The NLC members represent 18,000 cities with 225 million residents.
The concerns listed by the NLC mirror those expressed by civil liberties and national librarian organizations, as well as some Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill pushing legislation to overhaul the act, which became law in the month after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Critics question the law's broad powers, such as allowing law enforcement to perform "sneak and peek" searches without notification or anyone present, and permitting FBI officials to obtain records from libraries while prohibiting librarians from notifying the persons involved.
Justice Department officials defend the Patriot Act as a needed tool in the war on terrorism, and say criticism of its use is overblown.
After the American Library Association last year attacked a provision allowing the review of library records, Attorney General John Ashcroft declassified information to show the act had never been used to look at library records.
The resolution passed by the NLC urges the president and Congress to amend the Patriot Act "to restore and protect our nation's fundamental and inalienable rights and liberties."
The group also cited the following concerns:
•The secretary of state is given broad powers to designate domestic groups as "terrorist organizations" and the attorney general has power to subject immigrants to indefinite detention or deportation even if they have committed no crime.
•Public universities are required to collect information on students who may be of interest to the attorney general.
•Law enforcement officials are given broad access to sensitive mental health, library, business, educational and financial records.
Many Americans are encountering the Patriot Act when opening bank accounts. The law requires financial institutions to run the names of customers through the Office of Foreign Asset Control database, which lists people who are known terrorists or who associate with known terrorists.
New bank customers are asked how many wire transactions they expect to make each month. If the reply is five or more, the customer would be reported to the federal government.
The Patriot Act also gives the Treasury Department authority to order financial institutions to search private accounts and transaction records and report suspicious activity.
This information program administered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) is used by federal law enforcement agencies and in 2003 provided data for 64 terrorism financing cases and 124 money-laundering investigations.
"The program enables federal law enforcement agencies, through FinCEN, to reach out to over 29,000 financial institutions to locate accounts and transactions of persons that may be involved in terrorism or money laundering," said a statement posted on FinCEN's Web site.
-------- terrorism
Al-Jazeera Airs Audiotape Allegedly of Bin Laden
Voice Urges Muslims to Step Up Attacks on West
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 5, 2004; Page A2
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54631-2004Jan4.html
As airline delays mounted because of terrorism jitters, an Arabic-language television channel yesterday aired a new audiotape in which a man claiming to be Osama bin Laden urged Muslims to step up the armed struggle against the West.
The message broadcast on al-Jazeera referred specifically to the Dec. 14 capture of ousted Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, suggesting the tape had been recorded recently. A CIA spokesman, who asked not to be named, said it was likely to take a day or so before it could be determined whether the recording was real.
If confirmed as authentic, the tape would be the first from the al Qaeda leader since the Bush administration raised the national threat level to orange on Dec. 21, indicating a high risk of terrorist attack. Terrorism experts have noted that bin Laden often times his pronouncements to coincide with a new spate of attacks.
U.S. intelligence officials concluded that an alleged bin Laden tape aired last month by another Arab television station, al-Arabiya, was a rebroadcast of earlier material. In the new 47-minute tape, the speaker refers to several time-specific events, including Hussein's capture and a Dec. 1 "Geneva accord" between unofficial Israeli and Palestinian negotiators outlining a possible Middle East peace deal.
The speaker sharply attacks Arab governments for failing to resist U.S. policies in the Middle East and for "stopping financial aid" to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He calls on Muslims to continue jihad, or holy war, "to check the conspiracies that are hatched against the Islamic nation."
Ibrahim Hilal, al-Jazeera's editor in chief, told the Associated Press he is confident the tape is authentic. "It is bin Laden's superb and special Arabic language that is very hard to emulate," he said.
Western governments, meanwhile, remained on high alert against terrorist attacks, with particular attention being paid to flights into Washington and Los Angeles. A total of 13 flights on British Airways, Air France and Aeromexico have been canceled or delayed since New Year's Eve because of security fears.
"The terrorist threat is real right around the world at the present time," British Prime Minister Tony Blair told reporters as he flew back from a brief visit to British troops in Iraq. "Nobody is immune from it; you have to remain vigilant."
Takeoff for British Airways Flight 223 from London's Heathrow Airport to Dulles International Airport was delayed for the second straight day yesterday as U.S. authorities cross-referenced the names of the 241 passengers with a terrorist watch list, said airline spokesman John Lampl. The same flight was canceled Thursday and Friday after intelligence intercepts suggested it might be the target of a terrorist attack.
British Transport Secretary Alistair Darling told the BBC that the decision to delay or cancel the flights was justified based on intelligence warnings. "We are going to have to get used to increased security at airports," Darling said. "From time to time that will be noticeable, and at other times maybe things will be going on behind the scenes."
U.S. officials confirmed a report in Newsweek magazine that the FBI had demanded that hotel owners in Las Vegas provide names of everyone who booked rooms over the New Year's holiday so they could be checked against a master list of suspected terrorists. A senior law enforcement official said the FBI used both administrative subpoenas and more informal national security letters to extract the information.
Las Vegas is one of several cities that have been on high alert because of intelligence information suggesting it could be the target of a new attack.
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo declined to comment on any specific case, but said: "We are going to commit all available legal resources to protect the American people from a terrorist attack."
The purported bin Laden audiotape described the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq as the beginning of an American "occupation" of Persian Gulf states for their oil. Western intelligence experts believe the al Qaeda leader is hiding in the mountainous border regions of southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, after escaping from U.S. bomb attacks on his Tora Bora hideout in December 2001.
Staff writers Dana Priest, Dan Eggen and Jamie Stockwell contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Wind and Solar Energy Find Homes on the Range
DENVER, Colorado, (ENS)
January 5, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-05-09.asp#anchor7
Events in the annual National Western Stock Show, Rodeo and Horse Show started Saturday in Denver and will continue nearly all month through January 25.
In the midst of events such as the sheep shearing contest, the first ever bucking bull sale, the miniature horse performance classes, and the international yak meat seminar, farmers and ranchers can participate in workshops on clean, renewable energy systems available today.
On January 10, 17 and 25, engineers from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) will host workshops called Solar, Wind and Biomass Energy for Farm, Ranch and Home.
The consumer oriented workshops will offer an introduction to solar, wind and biomass energy systems, which can provide economical ways to produce electricity and hot water. The workshop will also describe how energy efficiency combines with renewable sources to provide clean, low cost energy.
"In many cases, renewable energy systems provide the cheapest and most reliable way to meet the electricity needs of farms and ranches," said NREL engineer John Thornton. "Installing a solar or wind energy system is often cheaper than running a new power line if electricity is needed one-quarter mile or more away from an existing power line."
Solar, wind or biomass generated power can provide hot water for home and farm use, or pump water for livestock.
Powering automatic gate openers, aeration fans in grain storage bins and automatic supplement feeders is cost efficient with renewable systems, as is powering security and task lighting or as well as entrance signs.
Using renewables helps protect farmers and ranchers from electricity price spikes, brownouts, rolling blackouts and other grid related reliability and supply security issues. They can avoid the high costs of extending power lines to remote locations.
The workshops are free with admission to the Stock Show and will be offered 10 am to noon, January 10 in the NWSS Livestock Building and January 17 and 25 in the Beef Palace Auction Arena.
NREL, which is based in nearby Golden, Colorado will sponsor an exhibit for the duration of the Stock Show with free literature on solar, wind and biomass energy in the Hall of Education.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Israeli colonel resigns over army's 'immoral' actions
By Justin Huggler in Jerusalem
05 January 2004
Independent (UK)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=478389
A reservist colonel in the Israeli army has resigned his commission in protest at his army's "immoral conduct" in the occupied territories. In a searing open letter to the army's chief of staff, Lt-Col Eitan Ronel, a veteran of 1973's Yom Kippur War, the invasion of Lebanon, and the first Palestinian Intifada, returned his officer's commission.
His resignation came even as five teenage conscripts were yesterday sentenced to a year in prison each for refusing to serve in the Israeli army "as long as it acts as an army of occupation". Scores of reservists have refused to report for duty for similar reasons, and many of them have been sentenced to prison terms, but Lt-Col Ronel, 51, is believed to be the first Israeli officer to resign his commission in protest.
In his letter to the chief of staff, Lt-Col Ronel, who was released from active reserve duty two years ago, wrote that for him, the final straw had been when Israeli soldiers opened fire last week on unarmed protestors demonstrating against the "separation fence" Israel is building in the West Bank. Among the injured was an Israeli civilian, Gil Naamati, whose case provoked a storm of controversy in Israel.
"A country in which the army disperses demonstrations of its citizens with live gunfire is not a democratic country," Lt-Col Ronel wrote. "An army that educates its soldiers that such a crime is conceivable has lost all its borders.
"I saw this deterioration, stage after stage: the blind eye that was turned to the abuse of detainees in violation of the army's orders; the blind eye that was turned to soldiers' gunfire on unarmed Palestinian civilians; the blind eye that was turned to the settlers' unlawful behaviour towards Palestinian civilians; the oppression of the population; the roadblocks; the curfew; the closure; the blind eye the army turned towards humiliation and abuse; the searches and arrests; the use of live fire against children and unarmed people."
Lt.-Col. Ronel continued: "Stage by stage, the value of human life has diminished. Step after step, the values on which we were raised-the purity of arms, the value of human life, the dignity of human beings as being created in the image of God-have become a scornful travesty. And now we have reached the next stage: soldiers shoot at Israeli civilians in a demonstration, in keeping with the regulations for opening fire...This is an educational, ethical and moral failure.
"This is your failure," he told the chief of staff, "[the failure] of the army commanders. If I had any faith in you, I would say to you-clean out the stables, take responsibility, resign. My faith in you is gone. You have failed. You and your predecessors have corrupted my army, our army. I do not want to be a part of such an army. You gave me the ranks, to you I return them."
Lt-Col Ronel's decision will resonate deeply in a country where military service is at the heart of society, and achieving senior military rank is considered a great mark of distinction. It comes after a group of reservists pilots, including a highly decorated war hero, refused to fly any further missions to assassinate Palestinian militants over the occupied territories, because of the civilian casualties involved - which provoked a furore.
Though directed at the chief of staff, Gen Moshe Ya'alon, Lt-Col Ronel's criticisms will also be seen as criticisms of Ariel Sharon, under whose premiership most of the abuses he refers to have taken place. Gen Ya'alon himself recently spoke out against the government's military tactics in the occupied territories, saying they were counter-productive and fostered Palestinian hatred of Israel.
The Israeli army spokesman's office said the army had not received Lt-Col Ronel's resignation letter yet, but that military officials had seen it on the internet. "At issue is an individual who is using his rank and position to voice a political position and is trying to involve the army in politics," a spokesman said.
----
San Francisco Chronicle Settles with Anti-War Reporter
Mon Jan 5, 2004
(Reuters)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040105/us_nm/media_chronicle_dc
SAN FRANCISCO - The San Francisco Chronicle said on Monday it had reached a financial settlement with a former journalist it fired after he was arrested during an anti-war protest last year.
The Chronicle, the largest daily circulation newspaper in northern California, announced the settlement in its pages without detailing the deal with former technology columnist Henry Norr.
The newspaper, which is owned by the Hearst Corp., said it fired Norr for assuming a public role in a political issue that could create the appearance of an ethical conflict. Norr was fired in April after his arrest at an anti-war rally in San Francisco the previous month.
"When a reporter brings about that ethical conflict, as occurred here, the unfortunate but necessary result is a separation," according to a statement by Chronicle managing editor Robert Rosenthal that appeared in the newspaper.
Norr told Reuters he could not discuss specific financial details of the settlement, but said he remains in the Chronicle's pension plan and has health care benefits through the newspaper's retirement plan.
Norr, 57, is no longer legally disputing his termination but remains critical of the decision to dismiss him.
The former technology columnist, who had been with the Chronicle for four years, said his views against the war in Iraq were well known at the newspaper before his arrest and did not affect his coverage of personal technology.
"Nobody had seen a conflict between being a personal technology writer and being against the war," Norr said. "It's not like some exotic activity to go to an anti-war demonstration, at least not around here.... Where is the conflict? To say that you're against the war, that somehow biases your coverage of personal technology?"
----
Palestinian Aid Groups Refuse U.S. Money
By MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH
The Associated Press
Monday, January 5, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57058-2004Jan5?language=printer
RAMALLAH, West Bank - Palestinian aid groups have refused to accept money from the U.S. government because of a requirement they sign a pledge the money would not be used for terrorism, organizers said Monday.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has given Palestinian groups $1.3 billion in the past decade and is a key source of funding for the cash-strapped organizations.
But USAID enacted the anti-terrorism pledge requirement at the end of 2002 for new grants given worldwide.
Specifically, USAID demanded that groups worldwide sign a document pledging not to "provide material support or resources to any individual or entity that advocates, plans, sponsors, engages in or has engaged in terrorist activity."
The Non-Governmental Organization Network, an umbrella group that includes 89 Palestinian aid groups, is leading the effort against signing the document.
Many Palestinian aid groups have refused to sign, arguing it allows the United States to determine what is a terrorist organization. They also fear that they might unwittingly fund projects of some of the 25 groups that the USAID identifies as terrorists like Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
"Identifying most of the Palestinian factions as terrorist groups is unacceptable," said Siam Rashid of the NGO network. "The other issue is that any activity could be identified as a terrorist activity."
Some of the groups, like Hamas, run social welfare programs, though the violent Islamic group is also responsible for most of the 106 suicide bombings against Israelis during three years of violence.
The Palestinian Red Crescent, which used to receive about $300,000 a year in aid, refused to sign and gave up its funding, said deputy director Faiq Hussein.
"We would like to take funds from them, but without any conditions," Hussein said.
On Monday, the NGO network held meetings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to urge members to continue the protest and to inform them about alternative funding - such as through Europe and Japan, which don't require similar pledges.
A few Palestinian towns and aid groups, desperate for funds, have signed the USAID document, but they have done so quietly for fear of negative reaction.
USAID spokeswoman Monica Pataki said the organization has not decided how to deal with the Palestinian refusal.
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------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
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