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NUCLEAR
More Deadly Than Gas
America and Depleted Uranium - Infatuation or Deliberation?
The Exploitation of the American Soldier, Part II
Nuclear-armed rivals meet, keep details private
Pakistan Denies Nuclear Transfer Report
NORTH KOREA Offer to end nuclear program
North Korea Offers to Freeze Nuke Program
U.S. Group Off to N.Korea, May Visit Nuclear Plant
U.S. Welcomes N.Korean Offer on Nuclear Power Program
U.S. Plans Three - Way Talks on Libya Nukes
Syria Says Having WMD 'Natural' to Counter Israel
Pakistan Called Libyans' Source of Atom Design
Pakistan Denies Nuclear Transfer Report
U.S. Official: Libya Had Pakistani Nuclear Know - How
Cheney is a quiet force behind Bush presidency
MILITARY
With Future Charted, U.N. Envoy Departs
Bomb Kills at Least 10 Afghans in Kandahar
US privatises its military aid to Georgia
Muslim areas get martial law
Warships are first casualty as spending cuts hit Navy
British Aide Sees Long Iraqi Stay
Firms Tied to Officials Win Iraq Deals
Army Sides With Halliburton on Iraq Fuel
Firms to Make Anti - Missile Plans for Jets
Iraq Police Fire on Protesting Ex-Soldiers
Feeling Besieged, Iraq's Sunnis Unite
Israel to Take No Action Against Soldiers
A Visit to Israel
Sharon Jeered as He Talks of Giving Up Settlements
Syria declares right to weapons
We won't scrap WMD stockpile unless Israel does, says Assad
Syria says Iraqi Kurdish entity crosses "red line"
Iran to restore relations with Egypt
Egypt Muzzles Calls for Democracy
Afghanistan tops NATO chief's agenda
U.S. intelligence used for propaganda
Army Delays Discharge for Some G.I.'s in Afghanistan and Mideast
Army Orders More Troops To Remain In Service
Medals Couple Two Conflicts
Killings of Journalists Soared in 2003
U.S. Frees Journalists
Critics Attack Efforts to Link Bush and Hitler
Anti-Bush Ad Contest Includes Hitler Images
Information Warfare or Yesterday's News?
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
No Word From Bush On Forms in Leak Probe
Senator Urges White House on Leak Probe
Pilots resist armed officers
U.S. Begins Screening Program for Monitoring Foreign Visitors
U.S. Taking Photos and Fingerprints Of Visitors
Pilots and Officials in Europe Balk at Push for Guns on Jets
AOL to Add Spyware Detection to Service
Why Did Attorney General Ashcroft Remove Himself
Police to Guard 12 City Schools Cited as Violent
U.S. Requests Secrecy In 9/11 Detainee's Case
C.I.A. Says Newest Audiotape Is Probably From bin Laden
Letter Bombs Sent to Europe Aides
ENERGY
Volkswagen, ADM team up to develop biodiesel fuel
US energy secy heading to Asia on 4-nation trip
OTHER
Earth's magnetic field is fading
Tribal ways clash with agribusiness
3 Top Enforcement Officials Say They Will Leave E.P.A.
Key EPA Official Resigns
In Stem-Cell Law, Supporters See Opportunity for New Jersey
ACTIVISTS
Anti-draft advisory vote on ballot
Green Party "Terrorists"
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
More Deadly Than Gas
Tuesday, January 6. 2004
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=604
When this war ends, George Bush will have caused the poisoning of hundreds of thousands more humans than he said Saddam Hussein poisoned. By Frederick Sweet
In its 110,000 air raids against Iraq, the US A-10 Warthog aircraft launched 940,000 depleted uranium shells, and in the land offensive, its M60, M1 and M1A1 tanks fired a further 4,000 larger caliber also uranium shells. The Bush administration and the Pentagon said, there is no danger to American troops or Iraqi civilians from breathing the uranium oxide dust produced in depleted uranium (DU) weapons explosions.
DU is the waste residue made from the uranium enrichment process. This radioactive and toxic substance, 1.7 times as dense as lead, is used to make shells that penetrate steel armor.
Last July, two military DU weapons experts Dr Doug Rokke and George A. Parker, veterans of the Gulf War, issued a public warning against using these radioactive weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. [for full text, see: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/01/50000.html] Rokke had been U.S. Army's DU team health physicist and U.S. Army's DU Project Director. Former British Army Sgt. Parker had been with the 1st Field Laboratory Unit, Biological-Warfare Detection Unit at Porton Down in Great Britain. His job had been management in the Gulf War of troop protection against weapons of mass destruction.
Dr. Rokke warned:
"Depleted uranium munitions (DU) have been used effectively in combat since 1973. Their destructive capabilities are absolutely superior to any other known munitions that can be fired by tanks, armored vehicles, aircraft, and rifles. In addition the ADAM and PDM, which are land mines, are essentially conventional explosives wrapped in shell containing uranium or a 'dirty bomb.' Although DU munitions are an excellent weapon, they leave a path of death, illness, and environmental contamination. The radiological and chemical toxicity are due to uranium, plutonium, neptunium, and americium isotopes within each DU bullet. We also have all of the inherent contamination from the equipment, terrain, and facilities that were destroyed."
"Upon the completion of the ground combat phase of the Gulf war, I was assigned by Headquarters Department of the Army and consequently the U.S. Central Command to clean up the depleted uranium contaminated U.S. equipment and provide initial medical recommendations for all individuals who were or may have been exposed as a consequence of military actions."
"Our initial observations of the DU contamination can be summed simply by three words 'OH MY GOD!' Although my mission was limited to U.S. personnel and equipment all affected persons and equipment should have been processed identically. They were not! Although I and U.S. Army physicians assigned to the 3rd U.S. Army Medical Command issued immediate verbal and written medical care recommendations those still have not been complied with for not only all U.S. and coalition military DU casualties but for Iraqi military personnel and especially noncombatants, women and children, who were exposed to DU munitions contamination."
"A United States Defense Nuclear Agency memorandum written by LTC Lyle that was sent to our team in Saudi Arabia during March 1990 stated that quote: 'As Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD), ground combat units, and civil populations of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq come increasingly into contact with DU ordnance, we must prepare to deal with potential problems. Toxic war souvenirs, political furor, and post conflict clean up (host nation agreement) are only some of the issues that must be addressed. Alpha particles (uranium oxide dust) from expended rounds is a health concern but, Beta particles from fragments and intact rounds is a serious health threat, with possible exposure rates of 200 millirads per hour on contact.' end [of] quote."
Referring to Dr. Rokke's comments, Sgt. Parker concluded:
"I am now aware that armed forces personnel are considered as disposable items. Something to be used abused and then discarded when broken. Further more, when made ill by the use of politically sensitive weapons such as DU they are an expensive embarrassment to be silenced when voicing concerns."
"It is my sincere and heart felt belief that until such time as the UK and US governments can properly care for ill and dying veterans of war, they should refrain from deploying members of the armed forces overseas."
Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, an opponent of DU weapons use since 1996, again raised his call for a ban on the use of these weapons in 2001. Since then DU weapons conferences, ironically, in Baghdad in 1999 and Gijon, Spain in 2000 had demanded a ban on DU use. "This new outbreak of leukemia among European [NATO] soldiers has reinforced what we said before," said Clark from New York in January 2001. "Is it acceptable by any human standards that we would permit one shell of depleted uranium to be manufactured, to be stored, to be used? No! Stop it now!"
According to a May 2003 article in the Christian Science Monitor, the first partial Pentagon disclosure of the amount of DU used in Iraq, a US Central Command spokesman admitted that A-10 Warthog aircraft -- the same planes that shot at the Iraqi planning ministry -- fired 300,000 bullets. The normal combat mix for these 30-mm rounds is five DU bullets to 1 -- a mix that had left about 75 tons of DU in Iraq.
A Monitor reporter had seen only one site where US troops had put up handwritten warnings in Arabic for Iraqis to stay away. A 3-foot-long DU warhead from a 120-mm tank shell had been found to produce radiation at more than 1,300 times background levels.
Many scientists believe that uranium oxide dust inhaled or ingested by troops in the Gulf War is the cause, or a contributing cause, of the "Gulf-War Syndrome". Of the approximately 697,000 U.S. troops stationed in the Gulf during the war, more than 100,000 veterans are now chronically ill. Cancer rates in southern Iraq have increased dramatically. For example ovarian cancer in Iraqi women of the southern region has fully increased by 16-fold.
More recently, Bush's and the Pentagon's reassurances were vigorously challenged by nuclear physicists and physicians at a scientific meeting, the World DU/Uranium Weapons Conference held in Hamburg, Germany during October 2003. New data suggest that orders of magnitude more Americans and Iraqis may have been poisoned by uranium from depleted uranium (DU) weapons explosions than Kurds had been killed by Saddam's gas in 1988. Review in Hamburg of the long term medical effects from DU exposures during the 1990s in Kosovo, Sarajevo, southern Iraq and from American veterans of the Gulf War reveal a frightening reality.
Conference scientists criticized as decades obsolete the Pentagon models used for reassuring the public about the long-term effects of inhaling uranium oxide particles from DU weapons. Citing the Pentagon model, the official 2003 Conference Statement concluded: "The knowledge on which this [Pentagon] model is based is faulty and outdated. This is like comparing [someone] sitting in front of a fire with [them] eating a hot coal."
According to the Conference, the mobility of the ceramic uranium oxide particles from DU weapons explosions is due to their re-suspension in dry weather. Measuring isotope ratios of U-238 and Pa-234m/Th-234 in water and air measurements by UNEP in Kosovo, Bosnia and Montenegro has showed this. Uranium oxide particles are available for inhalation long after the war is over. Anyone in the general area of their prior use is at risk, several years after their use or contamination. This had been proven by urine measurements in Kosovo in 2001. All of the people sampled showed contamination from DU. This was also shown by urine tests of Gulf War veterans made 10 years after their exposure.
After the Gulf War, Iraqi and international epidemiological investigations enabled the environmental pollution due to using this kind of weapon to be associated with the appearance of new, very difficult to diagnose diseases (serious immunodeficiencies, for instance) and the spectacular increase in congenital malformations and cancer. This had been found both in the Iraqi population and also among several thousands of American and British veterans and in their children, a clinical condition now called Gulf War Syndrome. Similar symptoms to those of the Gulf War have been described for a thousand children living in Bosnia where American aviation similarly used DU bombs in 1996, the same as in the NATO intervention against Yugoslavia in 1999.
It is estimated that already some 300 tons of radioactive debris from DU weapons had been deposited in target areas during the 2003 Iraq War, affecting over 250,000 Iraqis. By comparison, Saddam Hussein -- who Bush had called an evil murderer -- only gassed about 5,000 Iraqi Kurds in 1988. But by Bush launching his war on Iraq with DU weapons of mass destruction, he multiplied the casualties to the Iraqis, and also to American troops, by factors of hundreds relative to the infamous gassing of the Kurds. Therefore, by the time American troops leave Iraq Bush will very likely have poisoned hundreds of thousands more humans than he had accused Saddam Hussein of poisoning.
Agree? Disagree? Suggestions?. Click on "post comment" below and tell us what you think.
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. You can email your comments to Fred@interventionmag.com
----
America and Depleted Uranium - Infatuation or Deliberation?
by B.J. Sabri
Dissident Voice
January 6, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Sabri0106.htm
"We need to involve the world, the globe, because we're talking about freedom not just for the United States, not just for Iraq, but indeed freedom for people around the world." [1] (Emphasis added)
-- Bill Frist, Senate Majority Leader
Is it reasonable to include different subjects such as the U.N.'s role in the occupation of Iraq, the U.S. hyper-imperialistic agenda, and radioactive "depleted" uranium (RDU) all in one argument? Because the invasion of Iraq is the first hyper-imperialistic experiment in supposedly civilized times aimed at imposing enslaving colonialism on that country through ruses and fascist barbarity, the answer is yes, if we treat them as connected pathways leading to the supremacist ideology, expansionist imperialism, and military choices of the United States, and by default Israel.
However, to include all these separate subjects, particularly the U.N., in one argument, and then insert the issue of radioactive "depleted" uranium used by the U.S. in its wars of aggression seems rather questionable. This is true, especially knowing that the U.N. never endorsed its use in the wars it authorized, such as the Gulf War (1991), where the US used semi-spent but still radioactive nuclear material for the first time since it dropped its nuclear bombs on Japan during WWII. Nevertheless, aside from subtle technicalities, the inclusion of the U.N. is valid: since the U.N. authorized that war, it is, therefore, responsible for all of its destructive consequences on Iraq and its people. Besides, after that war, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. became the sole arbiter of Iraq's fate, while the rest of the UN was just watching, approving, or engaging in shameless bureaucratic masturbations in front of the US genocidal posture toward Iraq that lasted for 13 years, continued through invasion, and now is protracting under occupation.
In addition, before and after the temporary rupture between imperialist powers inside the U.N. consequent to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, the distinction between U.S. impositions and U.N. resolutions has become so irrelevant to the point of transforming the U.N. into a postscript placed at the end of an American text. Under this transformation, if we indict one, we must indict the other. This is especially true when it comes down to the crime of using radioactive material in military operations. After the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was unthinkable that the power that detonated the first and last atomic bombs in history would intentionally re-use radioactive material again in its aggression against small nations with no capability for retaliation.
The culpability of the U.N. system in relation to the American use of RDU is flagrant and requires no verification -- it never condemned its use in battle. Consequently, we ended up with a paradox whereby two imperialist states (the U.S. and the U.K.) preaching on the immorality of WMD and claiming a self-given mandate to ban them, deliberately used them against their designated enemies! This conveniently and ideologically structured dualistic attitude toward the use of WMD resembles an association of paid assassins giving solemn public seminars on the virtues of nonviolence and the value of human life.
When we inveigh against the U.N. for its silence on the use of RDU, we have to remember that treating this organization as if it were an independent entity, and including it in all situations requiring criticism, is unfair. That is because we already know that the Security Council controls the U.N.; we also know that the U.S. controls the S.C.; therefore, the S.C. could not criticize the use of radioactive shells. This leaves us with the General Assembly, i.e., if the S.C. could not condemn the use of RDU, maybe the General Assembly could have taken that assignment instead. That did not happen either, as even the General Assembly remained silent like a stone. Moreover, we know that the U.N. is not in the business of codifying what weapons its members can or cannot develop. In addition, we would be naïve to believe that the U.N. is capable of devising any rule regulating the use of any weapons. Interestingly, if the U.N. cannot make big members agree to clean up or prohibit the use of landmines, how can we expect it to enforce a ban on the use of "dirty bombs" (RDU shells) whose use is, so far, an exclusive American and British privilege, until they sell them or give them to someone else...
At this point, we have to introduce a powerful contradictory element in the conspiracy of silence as exercised by European powers regarding the U.S. use of RDU in its war of aggression in Yugoslavia-Kosovo: NATO (a ninety-nine percent Western-European military alliance with a one percent share belonging to Turkey) which launched that war under U.S. command had no say on the U.S. decision to employ RDU on European soil!
Two things emerge from this contradiction. First: NATO, where three of its members are also permanent members of the S.C., has used (through the U.S.) RDU ammunitions; therefore, NATO cannot condemn itself, consequently NATO members of the S.C.: the U.S., the U.K., and France are not going to condemn the use of RDU elsewhere. It follows that the U.N., being an expression of hegemonic powers and not a collective will of all nations, cannot outlaw, prohibit, or condemn the use of radioactive material. Second, the only time we heard European states complain about RDU was after the U.S. used it in Yugoslavia. The complaint was not accidental -- many NATO troops started to show the effects of radioactive contamination! What happened later was even more remarkable -- a few days after the European short-lived outcry, the U.S. denied that DU is noxious to humans. Suddenly, the matter ended in the wastebasket and no one heard about it anymore! As for radioactive contamination of the local population . . . not even a word!
This has two important implications: (1) if Western European governments and respective nations are unconcerned to the point of complacency about the use of RDU on nearby Eastern European soil, and do not care that some of their citizens are sick because of it, why should they care about Yugoslavians, Kosovars, or Iraqis!? (2) Emphatically, the lack of world condemnation against the use of RDU munitions in Iraq (1991) and in Yugoslavia/Kosovo (2000) paved the way for the U.S. to use them again in Iraq.
To sum it up, the use of radioactive "depleted" uranium (RDU) in war is not only a monument to the appalling moral failure of the United States, but also a solid demonstration of the genocidal intent and criminality of three successive presidents: George H. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush. The charge of genocidal intent and criminality is not baseless. George H. Bush used it in Iraq knowing that it would kill in two ways: (1) instantaneously by carbonization, and (2) slowly by progressive systemic diseases. William J. Clinton refused to clean it up in Iraq, and, then used it in Yugoslavia. George W. Bush, wanting to surpass the record of his two predecessors and to demonstrate his "unflinching" determination to wage his war of "civilization", unleashed more radioactive material on Iraq than ever before.
Consequently, is there any military rationale for using RDU twice in Iraq, particularly knowing that its use had already wreaked havoc on the health of the Iraqi population since 1991 and that its side effects would last for many generations to come?
The answer requires some elaboration. If six B-2's (stealth bombers) flying at 50,000 feet of altitude where most traditional surface-to-air missiles can only reach 40,000 to 42,000 feet (if they are accurate), can destroy an entire country, then why use RDU? If U.S. bombers, cruise missiles, and conventional bombs can destroy an emaciated and unarmed enemy such as Iraq, then why use radioactive munitions to subdue an enemy that had already surrendered even before the start of hostilities?
Originally, the U.S. designed "depleted" uranium shells as an anti-tank weapon, considered effective against a hypothetical overwhelming Soviet tank attack on Western Europe, because the shells could easily pierce through the outer shield of heavily hardened vehicles thus killing and carbonizing their inhabitants inside. The first phase of the latest U.S. aggression on Iraq, however, consisted only of aerial bombardment of Baghdad, while a land invasion was proceeding from south (Kuwait) to north and from West (Jordan) to center. A scant look at the opposing forces would immediately reveal that the use of RDU shells was unnecessary because the few decrepit Iraqi tank divisions remaining from the Gulf War could not have posed any danger for the invaders, even in the case of a limited intense ground war. What reinforces the notion against that use is the fact that during a 13-year war of attrition, the U.S. had already devastated what remained of vital Iraqi military infrastructures and ground air defenses thus making a ground war a useless option. To conclude, my position is that there were no military rationales or advantages, none whatsoever, to use radioactive uranium on Iraq.
Consequently, is the U.S. experimentation with mass killing by RDU or other means due to: (1) overkill because of stringent military requirements or (2) infatuation with killing as an integral part of imperialistic wars, and (3) rational and deliberate calculation because of "hidden" purposes, ideological aberrations, or prospects for building an unchallenged hyper-imperialistic empire?
First, the overkill theory is inapplicable here for one reason: if there is no resistance capable of stopping an overpowering attack, killing more or less enemy soldiers cannot effect or change the outcome of war. That leaves us with the other two theories - infatuation and deliberation. However, discussing these two theories in relation to the use of radioactive material or other destructive conventional weapons is not straightforward and requires a few analytical premises to distinguish meaning, contextual applicability, and intentionality. Moreover, even if we can find a comprehensive explanation for these three theories, we may not be able to fit it in all situations. How can we resolve this dilemma?
Let us start by first addressing the concept of killing as an underlying and unifying factor between these two unrelated notions. If infatuation means an extreme irrational fondness of something, and deliberation is a rational and predetermined decision to act in a certain way, then how does killing as a unifying factor between these two opposing notions work, and how does it apply vs. the use of unconventional weapons or conventional but with an unconventional potency? If the purpose of war is the mass killing and destruction of an adversary nation, and if ideological rationales buttress that war, as in the case of the U.S. (where every recent U.S. president thrives to designate an adversary, wage war against his nation, and then build a presidential library to display his trophies), then mass killing becomes ideological too!
Conclusively, if one makes wars deliberately, then killing is deliberate. If war and killing are deliberate, then what is the condition under which killing can become either infatuation or deliberation? Can it be both?
Unless it is accidental, and regardless of motive, the killing of another person has always been a deliberate action meant to end the life of an adversary through extreme violence, be it through strangling, poisoning, stabbing, shooting, etc. No culture in history has glamorized and glorified killing more than American popular culture where the motion picture industry made "killing" a form of family entertainment.
Filmmakers and writers compete to create scenes where the killer invents extraordinary gruesome means to inflict the most horrible acts of fictional killing including eating internal organs. An example of this was when a macabre film, depicting a psychopathic killer who eats the liver of his victims with a side dish of fava beans accompanied by the pleasure of drinking Italian wine, had earned for its makers millions of dollars and Oscars to the two leading actors. The success of a film devoid of any artistic, philosophical, or literary values had one incontrovertible meaning -- the viewers enjoyed the storyline.
The question remains, "is the enjoyment derived from watching or reading fictional mayhem, killing, or infliction of physical harm comparable to, or can it transmute to enjoyment of real acts of violence? The answer is uncertain because of the unreliability of any sampling due to denials and other factors. There are, however, strong indications that the culture of violence is endemic in nature where physical pain and suffering become glamorous and camouflaged as entertainment such as in "bull riding" (animal cruelty), "boxing" (human cruelty).
It is not farfetched to assert that in a culture such as this, the possible ecstasy derived from the killing of real people is no different from the ecstasy that comes from reading or seeing an imaginary killing, as both, provide a sense of sadistic pleasure for those who imagine it and those who actually do it. In real terms, when American opinion polls approve phrases used by politicians and opinion makers such as, "Hunting down the 'terrorists' and killing them", then the passage from the imaginary to the real is a matter of natural transition. In particular, pay attention to the word, "hunting", which now, among other things, means a form of sport or game, which in turn gives pleasure! In this case, both, individual and mass killings, in any war, aside from being a means to defeat an enemy, are also an exteriorized pleasure derived from ending a human life through violence where the license to kill erases both the sense of guilt and the boundaries that separate between fiction and reality of the act of killing itself.
A question: do you think that the mentality and culture of the U.S. military and civilian leadership are different from the mentality and culture that created them?
If you are skeptic, let us read what one of the assistants of Robert McNamara (a former "Defense" Secretary) told Solly Zuckerman (a former scientific advisor to the British Ministry of "Defense") about how the US would have attacked the Soviet Union during the 1960's.
Says the assistant, "First we need enough Minutemen to be sure that we destroy all those Russian cities. Then we need Polaris missiles to follow in order to tear up the foundations to a depth of ten feet, maybe helped by Skybolt. Then, when all Russia is silent, and when no air defenses are left, we want waves of aircraft to drop enough bombs to tear the whole place up down to a depth of forty feet to prevent the Martians recolonizing the country. And to hell with fallout" [2] [Emphasis added].
If you think that was only a hallucination by a disturbed assistant, and are still skeptic, then please link to the following audio-video clip (special thanks to political writer Kim Petersen for catching it) and shown by CNN where you can see the actual killing of an Iraqi and the ecstasy of the American soldiers who killed him. [3] There are many other examples of pleasurable killing in U.S. wars. A few of these include the My Lai massacre in Vietnam where Charlie Company massacred 504 defenseless villagers [4] [5]; American earthmovers burying over 8,000 Iraqi soldiers alive without giving them the chance to surrender (1991) [6], and when American soldiers, after raping a young Vietnamese woman, stuck dynamite in her vagina and then blew her to pieces [7]. Note: while the My Lai massacre, where U.S. soldiers dismembered and cut off heads and limbs of Vietnamese men and women came out to the surface and made news headlines, the burying of over 8,000 Iraqis alive remains obscure!
The expectation that one person, one thousand, or more would die consequent to a violent action, especially in war, has a very specialized attribute: because it is premeditated, it comes with a definitive psychological component derived from the inner certainty that the act of killing is satisfying as it is equivalent to the sensation of a "mission accomplished." Satisfaction entails a very specific meaning -- pleasure. A pilot that bombards a defenseless city repeatedly on different days passes beyond the stage of duty to a sense of pleasure where an emerging psychological rapture makes the person who is experiencing the sensations that precede the bombardment, calm on the outside but perturbed on the inside...this sensation cannot be but trepidation. Fear is not valid in the Iraqi example, as Iraq had no effective air defense. If the same pilot would bombard Moscow, then fear could be a component because Russian air defense are well equipped and capable of shooting him down.
Although trepidation is an undefined sensation of anxiety and not pleasure, nevertheless it manifests itself as a pleasurable expectation that people will die because of bombardment. A repeated pleasurable expectation is a form of infatuation and that is for one good reason. Because the pilot is killing people under orders, therefore, he is a paid professional killer; because he kills repeatedly, he is a professional serial killer; and because he is a serial killer, he is infatuated with killing regardless whether it is a professional killing or due to the emergence of killer instincts. Let me explain. The more people (soldiers or civilians) the pilot kills, the more he experiences pleasure along the following sequence: he attacked, killed, and survived! Further, as the killing increases proportionally to the number of attacks he is conducting, so is his physiological arousal that now goes beyond the normal threshold required to accomplish a hazardous job to include a pleasure for being able to inflict death with impunity! Keep in mind that during the killing, the pilot does not see death actually happening beneath him, but he, certainly, can sense and visualize it . . . It was part of his indoctrination.
Nevertheless, all the above is not conclusive as far as establishing a relation where killing is consequent to obeying military orders is actually infatuation with the act of killing itself; the fact remains that the behavior of a superpower determined to inflict horrendous casualties among its invented adversaries, definitively denotes homicidal tendencies that could have an affinity with pleasure. Finally, the infatuation with the idea of killing during war happens regardless of its origin, i.e., consequent to an order, because soldiers kill out of sadism, psychopathic tendencies, deranged sense of patriotism, fear, racism, or just killing for the pleasure of killing. What differentiates US wars from wars by other nations is that the notion of mass killing and total destruction of adversaries has become an object of desire, and an ideological prize as well. To prove this, US war generals always threaten others with sending them back to the "stone age"!
The passage from the pilot or soldier examples to the ruling classes may follow different paths but it is essentially identical to them in one sense -- interior psychological satisfaction of mass killing as a synonym of victory or even national or personal achievement. Robert McNamara exemplified this when his department invented the tabulation of ratios between the number of U.S. soldiers killed in battle and the number of their killed adversaries. To add to the national pride of the U.S., the tabulations went back in history to include examples of the American-Indian wars.
Since we excluded overkill as a motive, and having tentatively established infatuation with killing as a possible underlying factor in the use of radioactive material, now we have to consider the third alternative -- "deliberation".
In part six, we shall discuss whether "deliberation" is at the origin of the U.S. employment of radioactive "depleted" uranium in Iraq.
Next, part 6: Deliberation, or Isaac Newton and the Naughty Apple
B. J. Sabri is an Iraqi-American anti-war activist. He can be reached at: bjsabri@yahoo.com.
Other Articles by B. J. Sabri
- Splendid Failure of Occupation, Part 4 of 22: Annan and the Vocabulary of Deception
- Splendid Failure of Occupation, Part 3: Annan, the UN, and Other Stories
- Splendid Failure of Occupation, Part 2: Can We Explain the War on Iraq by Reading Israel?
- The Splendid Failure of Occupation: Part 1
- Beyond Empty Triumphalism
- The Hyper-Imperialist Paradigm, Part One
- The Hyper-Imperialist Paradigm, Part Two
- The Hyper-Imperialist Paradigm, Part Three
- The Hyper-Imperialist Paradigm, Part Four
- Reporting from the Colonialist Side of the Brain
- Thomas Friedman: The Insidious Prophet of Petty Fascism
- Nomen Nudum, Or, Hyper-Imperialists On a Rampage
- Which Prototype is Bush Following: Nero, Holagu, Malthus, Hitler, or Sharon?
- From Guernica to Baghdad Via Dresden and Hiroshima
- Barbaric Era, Year 2003
- When Hercules is Intoxicated, Furious, and Unchained
- War on Iraq and the Pregnant Chads Factor
- Nuclear Blues and the Iraqi Question
NOTES
[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A48816-2003June29?langauge=printer
[2] Solly Zuckerman, Nuclear Illusion & Reality
[3] http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5365.htm [4] http://freespeech.org/americanstateterrorism/vietnamgenocide/Mylai.html
[5] http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20021111.html
[6] http://jeff.paterson.net/aw/aw4_buried_alive.htm
[7] William Gibson, The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam
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The Exploitation of the American Soldier, Part II
The Vietnam Example, Guinea Pigs and Systemic Abuse
by Manuel Valenzuela
Dissident Voice.org
January 6, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Valenzuela0106.htm
"[What "Bring 'em on"] showed the world was that the Commander in Chief has not an ounce of compassion for the men and women that he sent into harm's way." -- Dennis O'Neil, BringThemHomeNow.org , 11/19/03
"I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-classed muscle man for Big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street...." -- Smedley D. Butler (1881-1940), Major General (U.S. Marine Corps)
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it." -- Abraham Lincoln
"No government power can be abused long. Mankind will not bear it." -- Samuel Johnson
The Vietnam Example
To fully understand the epidemic that is the exploitation of the American Soldier one need look no further than the 250,000 to 500,000 homeless veterans that on any given day wonder the streets of the United States. Up to half a million veterans, mostly those who fought in the terror-filled jungles of Vietnam, have been forgotten in time, left to fend for themselves lost among concrete jungles and steel-glass canyons. Forgotten by a government that sent them across the globe to fight the evildoers of the moment, namely Communists, most men fought in ghastly battles, witnessed appalling atrocities, experienced death firsthand and saw gruesome injuries that scarred them for life.
War is hell, and soldiers do not easily escape from these flames of enveloping terror when returned home. The repulsion of what they were forced to both see and perpetrate in the name of freedom, liberty, democracy and the American way left many as psychologically fragile as fine china. For years veterans have had to deal with knowing they were part of war, that most evil of human endeavors, that brings out the worst in the human condition. Many returned impregnated with the horrible demons of what they witnessed on the battlefield, perpetually unable to exorcise the wretched memories of their testosterone-stressed-filled adventure in death and destruction.
Millions returned home after a bitter defeat, with 58,000 of their comrades devoid of their once beaming energy, packed in body bags, their bullet or shrapnel ridden corpses testament to the ultimate sacrifice that to this day has lost all purpose and whose pain still lingers in the minds of millions of young boys now turned middle-aged veterans who fought a war without meaning, in a land lost in time for an ideology that could not evolve with reality. Today the scars, both mental and physical, remain entrenched, making up to half a million once young and brave soldiers homeless indigents of unjustified hopelessness, unable to escape the awfulness of what was forced upon them by a system and a cabal of elites whose only purpose was defending their ideology, increasing and maintaining their power and enriching their pockets.
Vietnam is perhaps the best but by no means the only example of what happens when those in power are left to their own devices and unleash the torture called war onto young conscripts, confident, brave and unafraid, mostly low and working class, sent to destroy, kill and expand the power and wealth of a few exploiters of human flesh.
We only need to see how the biggest, and perhaps only winner of the Vietnam War, the military-industrial complex (MIC), enriched itself tremendously through years of warfare, death and destruction, using soldiers to carry out its assembly-line, profit-making scheme of immoral business ventures born out of the misery of millions that fattened up shareholder wealth and ingrained into government the growing and unfettered power of the MIC. Through the millions of tons of bombs dropped, instruments of war produced (helicopters, tanks, munitions, etc..) and the perpetual stream of profit from waging such a prolonged war the MIC's power grew. Today the MIC and government are one and the same, and wars are but part of the business of making profit. This is a reality we have been made blind to.
Unfortunately, our soldiers are the mechanisms by which the MIC, the Leviathan and the government elites unleash and spread their evil wrath onto the world. Soldiers have become pawns, the instruments that pull triggers, aim weapons, push buttons and destroy infrastructure, the human brain necessary to operate the MIC's collection of apparatuses of destruction and death. They are expendable, of course, easily replaced by the next wave of caste or government instituted drafts. War is a boom to the MIC, of huge importance to its oligarchy. There is vast profit and power to be made in war, just ask today's defense contractors, and the biggest war profiteer in the Iraq war, Halliburton, of Dick Cheney fame.
These entities survive and prosper by manufacturing an unending flood of instruments of death, by supplying the vast resources necessary to conduct war. And the stream of these products smeared in blood must never be allowed to run dry which is why blood must continue to be spilled. Machines of war must be created, used and destroyed, only to be manufactured again and again, shipped out to be used and recycled in a vicious circle of malevolent profit making. Think about it, who really profits and gains from war? It is today but a business to the United Corporations of America, and the reason fear has been metastasized into our psyches during the last couple of years. Chasing ambiguous boogie-men, today's version of evildoer, assures the Leviathan of perpetual war, hence perpetual profit and exploitation. Enemies must exist in order to continue building the war machine, and fear is the tool the oligarchy has created that affects our emotions of insecurity, thereby making us passive citizens following Bush and his cabal of charlatans from war to war.
Many of today's forgotten homeless veterans struggle to survive frozen winters outside and blizzards of mental anguish inside, self-medicating themselves with drugs or alcohol, the only escapes from the permanent state of turmoil their minds live in. The horrors of war cannot be released; the human brain is too fragile and susceptible to the brutalities of man fighting man, of man killing his own kind, of being witness to the shouts, screams, suffering and death of men, women and children as they are bulldozed into the realm of lifeless cadavers.
War is that most ignoble of human creations in which lower classes fight each other to the death for the benefits of the few elite-greed-infected bastards that blink not an eye at the death and maiming of those young "plebians" they sent to war in far away lands to fight those same brothers being exploited by the powerful on the other side. In the end, victory or defeat matters not to the dead and injured who have gained nothing and lost everything, returning home to an easily forgetful government that throws veterans into the bowels of indifference, tossing away the key and washing its hands clean of the human catastrophe it created.
Sacrificed for the benefit of a few at the top, today's Vietnam, Korean and Gulf War Veterans, and those the war has made homeless in particular, are a perfect example of the utter disregard and exploitation of the American Soldier by both government and society. Those men who are forgotten, sacrificed, thrown out into the street and left for dead, fed to the hungry wolves of misery, slowly decimated from within are the creation of the man-mad pillager of lives called warfare. In essence, their lives are sacrificed for the betterment of Leviathan's oligarchs and government cabal of miscreants.
A government that without remorse allows those veterans who fought its battles and its wars to freeze during frigid winters and pick food out of garbage bins in order to survive is a disgrace and a monument to ineptitude. Sacrificing lives, body and mind for the perceived good of the nation our soldiers return home, to a world that has been transformed, a reality that has been altered and an indifferent government that has no more use for them. Rather, they become but a mosquito to the Leviathan and power junta, a nuisance aimlessly roaming the streets, surrendering their remaining pride in order to beg for pennies. Like ghosts they live among us, invisible at night they hide from the unkind winter temperatures in cardboard-made sleeping boxes, appearing by day on sidewalks, palms extended, watching the world they were once part of pass them by.
To survive the stresses of battle is not to survive the wars that follow, where a surviving soldier must reintegrate himself or herself back to society, family, work, finances and the life that once was. The true struggle begins, that which is stronger than any enemy: the battle with oneself to overcome what the mind cannot purge. Flashbacks of battles won and lost, of deaths seen and avoided, memories of comrades maimed and killed, stresses that are manifested from the will to survive in a state of self-preservation and the ever recurring sounds, tastes and smells of war attack the mind, making reintegration back into society oftentimes a futile and complex undertaking. The clash inside commences, that violent whirlwind that morphs together memories and stresses of war and of the life that previously existed, creating a vortex of self-destruction that leads to a veteran's complete loss with self, and the new reality that has become his living hell. Post-traumatic stress disorder may erupt in the aftermath of war or in years subsequent, exploding out and releasing those demons that have been festering inside waiting to envelope the veteran with their claws of memories past and nightmares present.
From moral law-abiding citizen, young, energetic and full of hopes and dreams, where virtue and respect for humanity is ingrained, soldiers are methodically transformed into programmed automatons of carnage, devastators of lives and lands and efficient killing machines without remorse for the consequences of their actions. This creates a quagmire in the mind as one must shift and abandon what was once believed to be sacred, namely the value of human life, and replacing it instead with the indoctrinated duty to kill and destroy. Thus, the soldier is torn until his first battle and first kill, after which time the sacredness of human life morphs into one of self-preservation and thirst for extinguishing the enemy. The military's lethally trained soldier has now become its cog of violence and war; the alteration from youthful dreamer to destroyer of dreams is finalized.
Many who survived did and do return to a semblance of normalcy, able to reintegrate and continue living seemingly fruitful lives. Their inner demons are minor. Yet many do not, and are forced to confront their all-encompassing mental demons without the assistance of the same government that helped foster them in the first place. And so, the exploitation having been completed, their purpose achieved, the veteran is discarded and abandoned, forgotten and left to cope with the scars of the "glorious" and "freedom fighting" war he was sent to fight. Meanwhile, those who supplied his instruments of death and destruction reap the profits, the Leviathan enriches itself and those at the top like Bush, born with a silver spoon up their ass and with no understanding or empathy for those born in the lower echelons of the caste system get to pat themselves on the back, congratulating themselves on the newfound power and riches added to their portfolio of exploitation.
That was Vietnam, a blood infested swamp of hell that resulted in defeat and in the collective destruction of millions of American soldiers, in life, limb and mind, sacrificed in the jungles of south-east Asia from which the demons of war were exhumed and returned embedded with our soldiers like a potent pathogen bent on unleashing self-destruction from within. Forgotten once brave and decorated soldiers have become, pariahs in society, walking aimlessly in their own worlds of escape, once fruitful and promising lives laid to waste, forced to loiter, beg and pick trash, fighting their inner selves and the demons of war while their government begins implementing the vicious cycle of decimation onto a new generation of young, brave and cocky men and women. This is what becomes of those who fight the wars of the oligarchy and powerful; this is the sacrifice they must make, ruining their lives, minds and futures fighting their fellow man. This is how they are repaid for their services. This is the reality of soldiers turned veterans, of the devastation of war and the effects of the violence we are capable of unleashing onto the world. The example that is Vietnam is discarded by the elite, only to be repeated today, tomorrow and into the future with each regeneration of the assembly-line we call human procreation. This is Iraq. This is us.
In the military it is one's duty to never leave anyone behind. When it comes to homeless, injured, amputated and mentally destroyed veterans, however, it seems to be the modus operandi. It is the exploitation of the American Soldier.
Today, many experts fear the next great wave of homeless vets and psychologically ravaged citizens are in Iraq fighting for their lives. The next generation of exploited men and women is systematically being converted into mentally fatigued, overtly-stressed and physically scarred individuals that will return home with the horrors of what they have seen and done in the desolate deserts of Mesopotamia ingrained into their now fragile minds. This is the sacrifice made; this is the reality of Bush's war.
Through the physical and mental loss of our loved ones our government declares victory. Through the devastation unleashed onto humanity Bush tries to assure re-election. Through the alteration and usurpation of our soldier's lives and minds Bush claims triumph over evil; through their enslavement to the Leviathan and government oligarchy he claims to further assure our freedoms and liberties. In the end, evil is unleashed under our name, our freedoms and liberties are eroded more every day and we come closer to becoming the slaves and serfs of yesteryear as the war the Leviathan has spawned against us and our loved ones grows in intensity.
Guinea Pigs Dressed in Camouflage
Forced Vaccinations and Experiments
It cannot be emphasized enough how soldier lives are destroyed or seriously altered by the government and its war activities. Just recently, a court order was imposed banning the forced anthrax vaccination of troops by the military that in many soldiers was causing sickness and maladies. Brought to the courts by a group of soldiers, the court in essence found that the military was experimenting its unproven vaccine on troops who were being used as guinea pigs. The Pentagon in not deterred, however, as it has gone back to court seeking to have the ruling applied only to those who were part of the complaint, in essence seeking to continue the vaccination plan to all other members of the armed forces. Soldiers are being pressured and punished if they refuse vaccination, and many have not been told by the military of the court ruling.
Throughout the decades the military has performed such "experiments" on soldiers through vaccinations, inoculations, experiments, poking and prodding, trying to uncover the effects of chemical and biological warfare on humans. Under the guise of the Cold War, from 1955 to 1975 the government used the military to experiment on tens of thousands of soldiers, oftentimes without consent or knowledge, exposing them to radiation, biological contaminants, blister and nerve agents and psycho-hallucinatory drugs such as PCP.
These experiments, with our soldiers being used as guinea pigs, only serve to damage the well-being of military men and women in an attempt to see what the effects and damage will be if the vaccine is applied to the general population. Our soldiers are being poked and prodded, serving as an experimental group, studied over time to see what health effects manifest themselves and what dangers are to be expected, and avoided. Guinea pigs dressed in camouflage are no different than guinea pigs living in cages. Enlisted to serve in both war and as samples of experimental exploitation, the American Soldier is but a slave serving the dark interests of those who lack humanity.
A definite pattern begins to emerge over decades of abuse and exploitation of soldiers, and that is the extent by which the military will expose its own to the evils it has created with a disregard that is nefarious and criminal in nature. This pattern has not stopped, it gets covered up or stone-walled when confronted, and it continues on its pervasive pattern of criminality and indifference that like an unstoppable tank runs over the lives of so many members of the armed forces who believed they would never be betrayed by a government they swore to serve and defend. What follows are but a few examples of this systemic pattern of behavior.
Hydrogen and Atomic Bomb Testing
The exploitation of the American Soldier for the benefit of the government is an ingrained part of the system. Soldiers have been used as guinea pigs for decades, oftentimes used as subjects sacrificed for the evils of mankind. A perfect example is that era, beginning in the aftermath of World War II and continuing until the early 1960's, when our government began testing atomic and hydrogen bombs. Soldiers would be called into these areas, such as the Nevada desert, and placed in strategic locations throughout the fallout area of the blast, oftentimes in very close proximity to the mushroom cloud that ensued. Once the experimental bomb was detonated soldiers would have to withstand the powerful blast winds and concussion, thereby being exposed to radiation levels never before experienced by man. Guinea pigs in camouflage, exposed and tested, in all likelihood studied and analyzed to determine radiation's effects on humans.
This exploitation resulted in numerous cancers, diseases, perpetual health problems and birth defects. The progeny of these soldiers have also been made to suffer through genetic birth defects. Men from all branches of the armed forces were subjected to these tests, many larger in power than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Numbering over 100 in the course of two decades, these tests and the ensuing health effects, many of which have taken over 20 to 30 years to develop in soldiers and their children, have also affected citizens living downwind and in close proximity to the tests. In total about 900 bombs were detonated in the Nevada deserts from 1950 to 1963, unleashing 178 times more radioactive fallout than the accident at Chernobyl.
For years the Pentagon and government have stonewalled, withheld, suppressed and covered up attempts at uncovering and exposing these truths. Over 300,000 military men and women and 100,000 civilians were used as guinea pigs during the course of the tests. For soldiers, to try and decline forced participation meant court martial, dishonorable discharges, treason and jail. For all involved, it has meant a life of suffering at the hands of the government. Meanwhile, the exploitation of the American Soldier continued.
Agent Orange
The Vietnam War provides us with another example of criminal exploitation of soldiers by our government leaders with that famous herbicide chemical named Agent Orange. Sprayed by C-123 cargo planes over the conifer jungles of Vietnam where American troops abounded in order to defoliate and clear the thick green cover of foliage and flora that offered protection to the Viet Cong, the chemical was oftentimes inhaled and absorbed by soldiers, both American and Vietnamese, penetrating their lungs and/or skin and disseminating throughout the body. Up to 19 million gallons of Agent Orange and other herbicides were dispersed from 1961 to 1971. Agent Orange was poison, designed to kill plant life in order to facilitate the further destruction of Vietnamese land and people. American troops were exposed to this devil's concoction and the results were disastrous.
Upon returning home, Vietnam veterans began dying of disease, most notably cancer. To this day, those still alive suffer horrendous pain from the aftereffects of Agent Orange, the chemical the military unleashed onto its own. Children of soldiers exposed have been born diseased or deformed. Hundreds of thousands were exposed over the course of a decade, never imagining that the chemical they thought was helping them survive would later decimate and destroy their lives, and that of their children.
Agent Orange's effects have not been relegated to American Soldiers, however. Vietnamese soldiers have suffered the same diseases, have died in larger numbers, and their children continue to suffer the consequences of American indifference. Absorbed into the countryside, the herbicide has filtered into soils and water tables, devastating farming and large populations. Vietnamese children have and continue being born retarded, deformed, sick and dead. In Vietnam, Agent Orange has become a WMD, and it has ruined both lives and land to this day.
Gulf Wars I & II and Depleted Uranium (Gulf War Syndrome)
More recently, the introduction of Depleted Uranium (DU) as a key component of America's military arsenal has created a present wave and future catastrophe of disease and death among US troops, most notably those that served in the first Gulf War. DU, made of nuclear waste and used in military shells, munitions, missiles, bullets and tank armor, has made of Iraq a nuclear dump that has ruined the environment. Hundreds of tons of DU material has been used in both Gulf Wars, Kosovo and Afghanistan, releasing into the environment minute particles of vaporized uranium that linger in the environment and in the air, penetrating into water tables, food supplies and cities. The usefulness of DU, its inexpensive production, troop armor protecting strength and target penetrating ability, had made this weapon a useful instrument of war - if the aftereffects are not taken into consideration.
It is estimated that anywhere from 8,000 to 10,000 American veterans who served in Gulf War I have died of mysterious diseases and maladies, most notably cancers, neurological disorders and immunodeficiency illnesses and diseases. It is estimated that 40,000 to 80,000 more will die in the next twenty to thirty years as the effects of DU run their course. Only about 150 members of the military died during the actual fighting in Gulf War I.
Half of the 700,000 troops used in Gulf War I have reported serious illnesses, however, with many suffering chronic illness. Hundreds of thousands suffer from the so-called Gulf War Syndrome. There is a strong indication, and indeed a growing likelihood, that the use of DU by the military is the primary culprit. Most of these veterans are in their late twenties and early thirties, in the prime of their health, cleared as healthy before the war in military conducted medical physicals. Added to these diseases is the growing evidence that DU is responsible for the large number of genetic birth defects, gross mutations of fetuses, miscarriages and stillborns arising from veterans of Gulf War I.
The implication for veterans of Gulf War II and Afghanistan is mind boggling. The example of Gulf War I and its health related implications is but a small ripple compared to the coming tidal wave approaching Gulf War II veterans and our society. Estimates say that the US and Britain used five times more DU munitions in 2003 than used in 1991. When up to 350 tons of DU munitions was used by the Pentagon in 1991, the ramifications for the present and future health of American soldiers is worrisome at the least and calamitous at worst.
The same diseases, cancers and fetal deformities and miscarriages being discovered by our soldiers are widespread throughout the population of Iraq and now Afghanistan as well. Coincidence? Not likely. Of course the environmental disaster DU has unleashed will eventually disappear, in 4.5 billion years. Meanwhile, Iraq's population has shown steep increases in cancers and genetic birth defects, numbers never before seen in such quantities for a sample nation, except perhaps in post WWII Japan. It is not a far-fetched statement to say that Iraq and its citizens will be devastated for generations to come. The government purposefully allowed the use of uranium rich DU munitions, exposing both soldiers and civilians to one of the worst weapons of mass destruction. Make no mistake, Iraq and Afghanistan are now nuclear dumps, their citizens are dying in incredibly large numbers and the US government, along with corporate media complicity, is covering up this growing pandemic that would rightly outrage the entire planet if it was exposed for the war crime that it is. We must stop the use of our own WMD's on both land and man before we ask others to stop theirs.
The government has remained quiet on the subject but a growing landslide of evidence is pointing to the morbid conclusion that in Gulf War I and now II the US military and government, in order to pro-rate American deaths from "during the war," (in essence minimizing death during the war) to a gradual death rate in the immediate decades "after the war," and in order to prevent large numbers of casualties that would inevitably alienate the American public, -- think "Vietnam Syndrome" - used DU armor and munitions, knowing full well its dangers to troops and innocent civilians, deciding the slow and clandestine death of troops after the war was better than thousands of casualties that had been expected during it. This happened in 1991, and, with more than a decade to correct its actions, the Pentagon instead relied more heavily on DU in 2003 when mounting evidence showed the effects of DU on humans. Can we dare bring to light and investigate this criminal exploitation by those at the top of our loved ones?
Soon, American troops will return from Iraq, and deep within them will grow an embedded poison, a weapon of mass destruction that will linger inside their bodies until the day arrives that DU decides to begin its evil process of annihilation. We must keep on eye on these veterans because many will die, many will give birth to the most deformed babies you will ever see and the government/military will speak not a word. The cover-up and stonewall will be methodical, both by government and the corporate media, for the implications of what is happening to our soldiers and Iraq's citizens will send shockwaves throughout the world. Payments of this criminal deceit may run into the hundreds of billions, devastating entire industries. An objective investigation would most likely lead to the incarceration of those at the top and expose this nation for the evilness of its wars. Thus, the DU enigma will never see the light of day, and veterans will be swept underneath the rug of disregard, gathering cobwebs as more and more veterans die off.
The evils of DU are visible in Iraq, they are visible in Gulf War I veterans and they will soon be visible in many of the men and women today serving in the cradle of civilization. Nuclear war was unleashed on Iraq and Afghanistan by our military. In the end, it is our own sons and daughters that must pay the price for this most wicked of actions, this most unmoral of wars. And we have our own government to thank for the coming decimation that will in the next few years and decades devour our loved ones and the children they bear.
Systemic Abuse of Veterans and Soldiers
As soldiers struggle to survive in the desert sands of Iraq the Bush administration is waging its own war at home against them and their families. In order to help pay for the enormity that has become the Iraq quagmire, Bush has cut or held down numerous soldier and veteran benefits and services. Bush has cut off access to the VA's health care system for approximately 164,000 veterans. The President is also trying to cut off $1.5 billion in military family housing and medical facility funding in his 2004 budget, a 14 percent reduction. The White House also opposes a proposal to give National Guard and Reserve members access to the Pentagon's health-insurance system. The General Accounting Office has estimated that one of every five Guard members has no health insurance.
The war by Bush against members of the armed forces continues as the White House tried to roll back recent increases in monthly imminent-danger pay, from $225 to $150, and family-separation allowance, from $250 to $100, for troops being shot at in combat zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Thanks to the administration, the military's pay raise for men and women in desperate need of better wages was a paltry 4.1 percent hike for higher ranks and a 2 percent raise for the lower ranks, a raise that does not even cover the rise of inflation. The White House labeled as "wasteful and unnecessary" a very modest proposal to double from $6000 to $12,000 the gratuity given to families of those soldiers that die on active duty, an amount that would not cover a year of expenses and that does not even surpass the poverty line for a small family.
The White House budget for Veterans Affairs cut $3 billion from VA hospitals even with the large number of casualties returning from Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. VA spending today averages $2,800 less per patient than nine years ago. Bush has raised VA prescription drugs co-payments for veterans more than 200 percent even at a time when veterans of Korea and Vietnam begin aging and see themselves in greater need of medicines. With hundreds of thousands of Gulf War I veterans suffering various chronic illnesses and diseases, this move further erodes the necessary mechanisms needed to live a life with the least amount of pain.
Further proof of the war being waged against members of the armed forces is Donald Rumsfeld's plan to shut down 19 commissaries, military-run stores that offer discounted food and merchandise that helps low-paid enlisted troops and their families get by, with the possibility of closing down 19 more. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is also trying to determine whether or not to shut down 58 military-run schools for the children of soldiers. Listed above are but a few of the tactics used by the Bush administration to strangulate soldiers, veterans and their families. Expected to fight and sacrifice lives, they are now being forced to sacrifice benefits and pay, education and healthcare. How much more can be asked of our sons and daughters before they and the nation begin wondering what Bush is doing? They deserve better, perhaps not Bush's silver spoon but definitely some dignity and appreciation.
These moves by the Bush administration have lacerated those tools members of the military and their families need in order to live their lives with a semblance of meaning. Bush is in essence shackling soldiers and their families to a collective chain of apathy and exploitation. As these men and women head into combat zones, willing to sacrifice limb, mind and life, their benefits, pay and services are being decimated by the same man putting their lives on the line. It is a slap in the face to at the same time send soldiers to die abroad while slashing their benefits at home. It is a slap in the face to all veterans who courageously served their country in battle only to have their benefits reduced. And the person responsible is a chickenhawk who escaped his duties and now smirks and struts while terrified, maimed and killed soldiers return home, telling the world to "bring it on," in essence challenging the world to kill those men and women he sent to fight his war.
The exploitation of the American Soldier is methodical and arrogantly shameful. It is enslavement and oppression. It is the continuation of a mercenary army created to fight for and defend the interests of the Leviathan and the oligarchy. The illusions of "fighting for freedom," "our way of life," and our "democratic principles" is but a mirage designed to hide the real reasons behind Bush's wars. Through propaganda the American people are being lied to and misled down the path of perpetual war. Through the use of fear and terror Bush propels the Leviathan's war agenda, scaring the populace into acquiescing to exporting terror abroad and importing the erosion of freedoms and liberties at home.
Meanwhile, the Leviathan's hostile and open war against Americans continues without us realizing what is being done to us. Blindly we believe what is shown; ignorantly we follow what is said. We no longer question authority nor self-educate ourselves. To many Americans Bush is the second coming of Christ, a most trusted man of honor and integrity. Reality, however, is altogether different. His policies are completely the opposite of Christ's teachings. The worst president in history is destroying this nation, and he is bringing us all down with him. The rise of the fascist state of Amerika begun in 2000 will accelerate in 2004 and become a possible reality in 2005 with a further degrading of our rights, democracy and liberties, the acceleration of a police state and the complete usurpation of government and our representatives by the Leviathan and its puppet in the White House.
All this will be accomplished thanks to the invasive and systematic cloud of fear the administration has released into the fabric and environment of this country. The instilling of fear into an ever jumpy and paranoid nation by the administration is the ultimate WMD, (weapon of mental deception) destroying our once free and open society, scaring us into submission and making of us fearful citizens devoid of a once vibrant energy. If we do not stop fearing the illusion of evil Bush has indoctrinated us with, we will soon really have something to fear, and that is the terror of living in a fascist state.
In order to continue their perpetual profit-and-power-pillaging-war fighting ghosts and goblins the MIC, Leviathan and oligarchy will unleash a government enacted draft after the election of George W. Bush in 2004. Large troop numbers - at present not available through the "all volunteer" army - are needed to quench the three-headed monster's greed-infested appetite for power and resources. All governmental and state action taking place today is clandestinely leading to this most ominous circumstance, one need only open his/her eyes. As is usually the case, those in the lower castes will become the great majority of draftees, brought out of their reservations and turned into mercenaries of the oligarchy.
Trained to become lethal killers of humanity, our sons and daughters will be dehumanized, exposed to the inhuman emotions of war and battle, death and blood. Spread to those regions our feudal lords deem strategic and necessary, our soldiers will decimate both land and man, becoming both a plague of locusts devouring everything in its path and a malignant virus hemorrhaging the planet. The Evil Empire, now openly and arrogantly waging war throughout the world, no longer acting clandestinely to determine geopolitical destinies as it has done for decades, will need vast amounts of cannon fodder and armies to guard the many lands, interests and resources of the Pax Amerikana and the United Corporations of Amerika.
The exploitation of the American Soldier will increase, the draft will take from our homes those young lives we most cherish. Conscripted to serve the Leviathan and oligarchy, trained to kill their fellow exploited man with the MIC's instruments of death, our young loved ones will die and suffer. They will become maimed, both physically and mentally, scarred for life, becoming the disposable refuse our government throws into its landfills.
The story of the American Soldier is a story of ceaseless exploitation, of ceaseless sacrifice to the interests of the elite oligarchs and of ceaseless bravery in the face of ceaseless obstacles. No longer fighting for freedoms or liberties or in defending our borders or ways of life, soldiers now fight for the profits, resources, power and ideology of the Leviathan and oligarchs. The poor continue to be subjugated; they continue to fight like the serfs and slaves of old for the interests of the elite few.
The story of the American soldier is the story of human war, of the rich and powerful using the poor in the continual cycle of exploitation. It is the story of humanity, of civilization, and of the unrelenting and time honored tradition which by our indifference to act we inherently decide to live in. Through our passivity and unwillingness to force change we are condemning ourselves to the coming future that awaits us. A future that has been both our past and our present, and inevitably, the continuation of what has been, and what seems to remain. The symptoms of our disease, it seems, cannot be cured, and slowly our sickened and palpitated society chains itself to its cold and dreary death bed awaiting the inevitability of our lives.
Manuel Valenzuela is social critic and commentator, activist, writer and author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel to be published in 2004. His articles appear bi-weekly on axisoflogic.com. He welcomes comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net.
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear-armed rivals meet, keep details private
January 06, 2004
By Dan Morrison
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093623-1553r.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf met for the first time in two years yesterday, raising cautious hopes that a recent thaw in tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals would lead to talks about the flash-point region of Kashmir.
The leaders last met in 2001 during a failed summit in India. Since then, relations have been marked by a near-war in 2002, an escalating arms buildup and continuing Indian accusations that Pakistan is supporting terrorist attacks against its more powerful neighbor.
"We should understand the difficulties we face and must find a way out together," Mr. Vajpayee told reporters before his meeting with Gen. Musharraf.
Officials took pains to avoid revealing what Gen. Musharraf, Mr. Vajpayee and a group of aides said during the 65-minute meeting at the presidential palace.
"The two leaders discussed the positive impact of the recent confidence-building measures and hopes that their momentum would be maintained," Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said. "I want to make clear that I have not revealed the content of their discussions, only the context in which they were held."
"Both leaders welcomed the recent steps toward the normalization," Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha said.
There were, however, hints at broader cooperation. India's national-security adviser, Brajesh Mishra, arrived in Islamabad unannounced on Thursday for talks with senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials.
The Musharraf-Vajpayee meeting took place on the sidelines of the regional summit of seven South Asian leaders. Pakistan's information minister, Sheik Rashid, said Gen. Musharraf and Mr. Vajpayee had agreed to talk again.
There was no public mention of Kashmir, India's only Muslim-majority state, which India and Pakistan have fought two wars over since 1947.
India accuses Pakistan of supporting Islamic militants responsible for a regular toll of attacks in Indian-administered Kashmir and elsewhere in India.
"For India, Kashmir is an integral part of India," said Arif Jamal, a Pakistani expert on the Islamic militant movement in Kashmir.
"For Pakistan, it is a jugular vein."
The current warming began in April, when Mr. Vajpayee said he wanted to give peace one last try.
Gen. Musharraf last month indicated flexibility on Pakistan's major demand: That India let Kashmiris vote on whether they wish to remain a part of India, join Pakistan or become independent.
----
Pakistan Denies Nuclear Transfer Report
By PAUL HAVEN
Associated Press Writer
Jan 6, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan on Tuesday denied a report that its scientists gave high-tech centrifuge design technology to Libya, the latest allegation linking the U.S. ally's nuclear program to Washington's bitterest enemies.
The alleged technology transfer to Libya took place after Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pledged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that he would rein in his nuclear scientists in an effort to keep their expertise from falling into the hands of rogue regimes or terrorists, The New York Times said in a story in Tuesday editions.
There's no evidence the Pakistani government knew its scientists were selling information, but the alleged technology transfers raised doubts about Musharraf's ability to make good on his promise, the Times said.
"This is total madness. The report is absolutely false, and there is no truth in it," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press.
A senior official at Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity, also denied government involvement, but stopped short of rejecting the charge of nuclear transfers outright.
"Pakistan should not be blamed for any individual's wrongful act," he said. "We do not know who has been helping Iran, North Korea or Libya."
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Libyan government was being "very forthcoming" just weeks after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi pledged to give up nuclear weapons development.
"The next step is to make sure we have a clear understanding of what Libya possesses, make sure it matches up with what we think they possess and what they tell us they possess," Powell said, adding that the United States would work with the U.N. nuclear agency and other experts.
Powell said he didn't have enough information to comment on the charges of whether Pakistani scientists shared nuclear technology, saying, "We will be examining all of this."
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the International Atomic Energy Agency will take the lead in monitoring Libya's progress in destroying weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration wants the monitoring done by a team of American and British experts.
"It was the atomic agency that sent in a team to follow through, it is the atomic agency that is going to inspect to ensure that Libya is really going to be rid of weapons of mass destruction," Annan said in New York.
A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to discuss the allegations involving Pakistan and Libya, but stressed that a black market in such components stretched across Europe and Asia.
"Certainly all fingers are pointing at Pakistan," the diplomat said. "But I don't think it's just Pakistan that needs to be concerned."
In December, Pakistan's government said it was questioning a number of its nuclear scientists on suspicion that "ambition and greed" may have led them to sell their knowledge to Iran. Islamabad denied government involvement in the plot and said any leaks were limited to Iran.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, was among the scientists questioned after officials received documents from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency about Iran's nuclear program, officials say.
But Pakistani officials say Khan is not a suspect. He was seen Tuesday sitting with other dignitaries at a convention center where Pakistan is hosting the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Musharraf had "made his assurances" to President Bush that he would rein in Pakistani scientists.
"We fully expect President Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to follow through on those assurances," McClellan said Tuesday.
Still, the White House spokesman added, "We recognize it's always difficult to control the activities of rogue individuals whose motives are personal gain. We are working with many nations to overcome that issue."
Centrifuges can be used to enrich uranium for use in a nuclear device. Hundreds of centrifuges are needed to make enough material for a nuclear weapon. Each requires high-precision tubing that is difficult to produce.
The Iran link with Pakistan technology was disclosed after Tehran agreed to come clean about its nuclear program. Libya agreed in December to scrap its nuclear program and open itself to full inspections.
A diplomat with knowledge of the Iran investigation recently told the AP on condition of anonymity that U.S. intelligence also had "pretty convincing" evidence of a link between Pakistan and North Korea's weapons program, something Islamabad denies.
Pakistan has long been suspected of proliferation during its 30-year effort to build nuclear weapons as a deterrent against neighboring rival India. The two nations tested their first nuclear weapons in 1998.
Associated Press reporters Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Nick Wadhams in New York contributed to this report.
-------- korea
NORTH KOREA Offer to end nuclear program
January 06, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
SEOUL - North Korea offered today to refrain from producing nuclear weapons as a "bold concession" in trying to rekindle six-nation talks on the standoff over its nuclear-weapons programs. Pyongyang also said it was willing to halt its nuclear activities for peaceful purposes.
The move comes as the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas scramble to arrange a new round of negotiations, with South Korea and Russia saying they are unlikely this month.
North Korea has said before it is willing to freeze its "nuclear activities" in exchange for U.S. aid and being delisted from Washington´s roster of terrorism-sponsoring nations.
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North Korea Offers to Freeze Nuke Program
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea offered on Tuesday to freeze its nuclear program, including weapons and energy development. Secretary of State Colin Powell called the offer ``positive'' as a U.S. delegation traveled to the isolated communist nation, possibly to tour a disputed nuclear plant.
The moves came as the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas scrambled to arrange a new round of negotiations on Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program, with South Korea and Russia saying they are unlikely this month.
North Korea has said before it is willing to freeze its ``nuclear activities'' in exchange for U.S. aid and being removed from Washington's list of terrorism-sponsoring nations.
On Tuesday, it specified it would not test or produce nuclear weapons and even stop operating its nuclear power industry ``as first-phase measures of the package solution.''
In a commentary carried by the official KCNA news agency, North Korea called the offer ``one more bold concession'' aimed at resolving the international standoff.
Powell said in Washington, ``It was an interesting statement. It was a positive statement. They, in effect, said they won't test, and they implied that they would give up all aspects of their nuclear program, not just weapons program.''
He said he hoped the North Korean proposal ``will allow us to move more rapidly toward six-party framework talks.''
The Bush administration has said it wants evidence that North Korea is beginning to dismantle its nuclear weapons programs before it delivers any concessions.
Meanwhile, the unofficial delegation of Americans, which included a former government official, a nuclear expert and a retired academic, flew from Beijing to North Korea, possibly to tour the communist country's disputed nuclear plant at Yongbyon.
``It's a very private visit. We're not representing the U.S. government or anyone else,'' said Jack Pritchard, once a member of former President George H. W. Bush's National Security Council staff and a one-time State Department official.
Members of the group refused comment on reports they might visit the Yongbyon complex.
A South Korean Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity they were to stay in the North from Tuesday to Saturday. Another pair of Americans, both congressional staffers, also were scheduled to visit Pyongyang this week.
The Yongbyon complex is at the heart of the standoff, and there has been no outside access to the facility since North Korea expelled U.N. nuclear inspectors at the end of 2002.
On Tuesday, North Korea said its first-step proposal should be the focus of preparations for new talks.
``If the United States keeps ignoring our efforts and continues to pressurize the DPRK to scrap its nuclear weapons program first while shelving the issue of making a switchover in its policy toward the DPRK, the basis of dialogue will be demolished and a shadow will be cast over the prospects of talks,'' KCNA said.
DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
Powell said he is convinced that the six nations that participated in talks last year -- the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan -- want to hold another round.
South Korea's Unification Ministry, which handles affairs with North Korea, says North Korea has at least three nuclear reactors.
Last year, it restarted a five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon. An unfinished 50-megawatt reactor also stands at Yongbyon, and a 200-megawatt one is located just northeast of the site at Taechon.
A U.S.-led international consortium had been building two 1,000-megawatt light-water reactors on the country's east coast. But that project was suspended last month amid the nuclear standoff.
North Korea's neighbors agreed to help build the light-water reactors because they are more difficult to convert to weapons use. North Korea's offer to suspend all nuclear activities, even those for peaceful purposes, could be aimed at easing their suspicions.
Traveling to North Korea with Pritchard were Sig Hecker, a nuclear specialist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and John W. Lewis, professor emeritus of international relations at Stanford University.
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U.S. Group Off to N.Korea, May Visit Nuclear Plant
January 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - A group of prominent Americans set off for North Korea Tuesday where it may be allowed to visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex, believed to be part of a suspected North Korean nuclear arms program.
A visit to Yongbyon would mark the first time outsiders have been allowed into the complex since U.N. inspectors were expelled a year ago at the start of the latest U.S.-North Korean confrontation over North Korean nuclear ambitions.
The USA Today newspaper reported Friday the group would visit Yongbyon. A South Korean official confirmed the report.
But the leader of the unofficial delegation, which set off from Beijing, said they did not have a final schedule for the five-day visit.
``It's like going to Disneyland and knowing what rides you're going to go on. We're not going to be able to tell you, we'll know what we've seen when we get back,'' said John Wilson Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.
``There's no point speculating at this stage,'' he said.
Charles ``Jack'' Pritchard, a former State Department envoy for North Korea who now works at the Brookings Institution think-tank, and Sig Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1985 to 1997, are accompanying Lewis as private citizens.
Also on the trip are two U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides, Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi.
The United States suspects North Korea may have resumed reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods from Yongbyon into plutonium for use in nuclear weapons.
The United States said in October 2002 North Korea had admitted to a clandestine uranium enrichment program to build nuclear weapons, which U.S. officials say violated a 1994 agreement by the North to freeze its nuclear program.
North Korea subsequently said it would restart its reactor at Yongbyon to generate electricity, disabled surveillance cameras at the complex and expelled U.N. inspectors, leading to U.S. fears that it had resumed a nuclear arms effort.
The U.S. government has said it is not involved in the trip, but the State Department said it would not be surprising if there were discussions with the group members, and an exchange of information and views upon their return.
It is unclear why the Americans are being allowed into North Korea, which is in the middle of the standoff with their government and several of its neighbors over whether to resume six-way talks on abandoning its nuclear ambitions.
The six parties -- China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia -- met in August but a date for new talks has not been set.
South Korea said Tuesday the next round may be put off until February or later because of major holidays in Russia and China this month.
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U.S. Welcomes N.Korean Offer on Nuclear Power Program
January 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
WASHINGTON/SEOUL (Reuters) - The United States said on Tuesday a North Korean offer to freeze its nuclear power industry was a positive step that it hoped would lead to a fresh round of six-way talks on ending Pyongyang's suspected atomic weapons programs.
North Korea's explicit offer to suspend its nuclear power program as well as to refrain from testing or making nuclear weapons went further than a Dec. 9 statement in which Pyongyang generally offered to freeze its ``nuclear activities.''
Pyongyang made the offer as a private U.S. delegation that included congressional aides, former U.S. officials and an Asia scholar flew to North Korea hoping to visit the Yongbyon nuclear complex at the heart of the country's nuclear program.
Washington hopes to persuade Pyongyang to accept the total, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its suspected nuclear arms program through six-way talks among U.S., Chinese, North and South Korean, Japanese and Russian officials.
With prospects for talks in January appearing to recede, Pyongyang called on Washington to accept an offer to freeze its nuclear arms program, throwing in for the first time the ``bold concession'' of offering to suspend nuclear power generation.
Powell told reporters he believed all six nations wanted to return to the table after their August talks in Beijing ended inconclusively and said he was encouraged by the latest North Korean statement released by its KCNA official news agency.
The KCNA statement said: ``The DPRK is set to refrain from test and production of nuclear weapons and stop even operating nuclear power industry for a peaceful purpose as first-phase measures of the package solution.'' DPRK is the abbreviation of North Korea's formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
``It was an interesting statement. It was a positive statement. They in effect said they won't test and they implied that they would give up all aspects of their nuclear program, not just (their) weapons program,'' he said.
``This is an interesting step on their part, a positive step, and we hope that it will allow us to move more rapidly toward the six-party framework talks,'' Powell added. ``I'm encouraged by the statement the North Koreans made.''
In a sign it may not be easy to resume six-way talks, a KCNA commentary said U.S. policy -- which demands the irreversible dismantling of North Korea's nuclear arms program rather than a freeze -- ``will destroy the foundation of the dialogue and cast a dark shadow'' over hopes for new talks.
As the two sides exchanged their statements, the unofficial U.S. delegation flew to North Korea to begin a five-day tour that the visitors hope will include a visit to Yongbyon.
A trip to the nuclear complex would mark the first time outsiders had been allowed into the plant since U.N. inspectors were expelled a year ago at the start of the latest North Korean nuclear crisis.
A U.S. newspaper and South Korean officials have said the group would visit Yongbyon, but North Korea has yet to confirm that and the head of the delegation said he was not certain.
``It's like going to Disneyland and knowing what rides you're going to go on. We're not going to be able to tell you. We'll know what we've seen when we get back,'' said John Wilson Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University.
Charles ``Jack'' Pritchard, a former State Department envoy for North Korea now at the Brookings Institution think tank, and Sig Hecker, director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory from 1985 to 1997, are accompanying Lewis as private citizens.
Also on the trip are Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi. Washington says the visitors are not going on behalf of the Bush administration.
-------- mideast
U.S. Plans Three - Way Talks on Libya Nukes
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Libya.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration plans three-way talks with Britain and Libya as a prelude to U.S. and British analysts making an onsite survey of Libya's nuclear weapons program.
Libya announced on Dec. 19 it would abandon its quest for weapons of mass destruction. ``The next step is to make sure we have a clear understanding of what Libya possesses,'' Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday.
In the meantime, Powell told reporters in his first public appearance since cancer surgery three weeks ago, the United States intends to aggressively pursue reports that Libya obtained much of its nuclear technology from Pakistan.
``We know that there have been cases where individuals in Pakistan have worked in these areas,'' Powell said. He credited President Pervez Musharraf with ``moving aggressively to investigate all of that.''
In Islamabad, Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed vehemently denied that Pakistan's government helped Libya acquire centrifuge design technology critical for producing nuclear weapons, and said any such allegations were a smear campaign against his country.
But Pakistani officials have acknowledged recently that individual scientists may have sold their nuclear knowledge to Iran. And a senior official at Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, speaking on condition of anonymity, stopped short Tuesday of dismissing recent reports of nuclear transfers to Iran and Libya. The official said Pakistan should not be blamed for any individual's wrongful act.
A series of U.S. meetings with British officials, which began last week with a trip to London by Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, will culminate with top-level Libyans joining the conversation after additional U.S.-British meetings, a senior U.S. official told The Associated Press in Washington.
Then U.S. and British analysts will go to Libya, working on a parallel track with the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose estimate of the Libyan program is considered understated by some senior Bush administration officials.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tuesday that the IAEA would take the lead in monitoring Libya's progress in destroying weapons of mass destruction, in apparent contradiction with the U.S. position.
``It was the atomic agency that sent in a team to follow through, it is the atomic agency that is going to inspect to ensure that Libya is really going to be rid of weapons of mass destruction,'' Annan said in New York.
U.S. intelligence has uncovered an elaborate network of technology assistance to Libya, including the shipment of thousands of pieces of equipment for processing enriched uranium.
A shipment was intercepted in early October and diverted to Italy. There may have been other interceptions under a program initiated last May, but senior U.S. officials declined to provide any details on grounds any such information was secret.
Bolton plans to travel to Singapore to discuss the interdiction program with officials there. Singapore participated in talks at the State Department last month.
Britain, which took the lead in pressuring Libya to dismantle its nuclear weapons program, has invited the Libyan foreign minister, Abdelrahman Shalqam, to London. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said Monday the reason was to discuss ``the process of implementing the decision by Libya to dismantle its weapons program.''
Whether Musharraf could have been unaware of the proliferation of sensitive technology is unclear. A senior U.S. official, in disclosing forthcoming talks with top-level Libyans, declined to say whether Musharraf knew about any transfers by Pakistani nuclear scientists.
But Powell said he had talked to Musharraf about proliferation several times and was not reluctant to pursue the problem with him.
Also, Powell said, ``to the extent we can help him with information we will.''
Musharraf's support for the U.S. campaign to counter the al-Qaida terror network and to stop Pakistani extremists from crossing into the Indian-held portion of Kashmir is considered vital.
``This is a story still unfolding,'' White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday in fending off questions about possible Pakistani sales of equipment to Libya.
McClellan said Musharraf had assured President Bush he would try to restrain Pakistani scientists. At the same time, McClellan said it was difficult to control ``rogue individuals.''
A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to discuss the allegations involving Pakistan and Libya, but stressed that a black market in such components stretched across Europe and Asia.
Associated Press writer Munir Ahmad contributed to this report from Islamabad.
--------
Syria Says Having WMD 'Natural' to Counter Israel
January 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-syria-assad.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was quoted by a British newspaper on Tuesday as defending his country's right to acquire weapons of mass destruction so long as it faced ``aggression'' by Israel.
Assad was speaking in an interview with the Daily Telegraph, which said he came closer than ever before to admitting that the Arab state had such weapons, a U.S. charge Damascus has repeatedly denied in the past.
``We are a country which is (partly) occupied and from time to time we are exposed to Israeli aggression,'' the newspaper quoted Assad as saying when asked about the U.S. allegations.
``It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves. It is not difficult to get most of these weapons anywhere in the world and they can be obtained at any time.''
Israel seized the Golan Heights from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war. Last October, the Israeli air force bombed an alleged training camp for Palestinian militants near Damascus, its first air strike inside Syria in almost three decades.
Assad reiterated Syria's call for a ban on weapons of mass destruction throughout the Middle East including Israel and urged the international community's support.
Israel is believed to have about 200 nuclear warheads but the Jewish state's policy is not to discuss the issue.
Syria used the final days of its membership of the U.N. Security Council, which ended on December 31, to push for a ban on nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in the Middle East.
The Syrian proposal, which sought to spotlight Israel's suspected nuclear arms, was cold shouldered by the United States and Britain, both permanent members of the Council with veto power.
``Unless this applies to all countries, we are wasting our time,'' said Assad, whose country is yet to sign an international treaty that bans chemical weapons.
Syria has come under fresh U.S. pressure over its alleged arms stockpiles since Libya's announcement last month that it would abandon secret efforts to build an atomic bomb and chemical weapons.
The Daily Telegraph quoted Assad as saying Libya's decision to allow international inspectors to supervise the dismantling of weapons of mass destruction programs was a ``correct step.''
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Called Libyans' Source of Atom Design
January 6, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/middleeast/06NUKE.html?hp
TRIPOLI, Libya, Jan. 5 - Pakistan was the source of the centrifuge design technology that made it possible for Libya to make major strides in the last two years in enriching uranium for use in nuclear weapons, Bush administration officials in Washington and other Western experts said Monday.
The officials emphasized that they possessed no evidence that the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf - a crucial ally in the pursuit of Al Qaeda - knew about the transfer of technology to Libya, which helped finance Pakistan's early nuclear weapons program three decades ago. Many of the centrifuge parts that Libya imported, and which Italy intercepted in October, were manufactured in Malaysia, according to experts familiar with the continuing investigation.
The timing of the transfer of the centrifuge design from Pakistan calls into question General Musharraf's ability to make good on his vow to President Bush that he would rein in Pakistani scientists selling their nuclear expertise around the globe. The general made that pledge shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks in the United States. Yet the main aid to Libya appears to have come since those attacks, suggesting that Pakistani scientists may have continued their trade even after the explicit warning.
"It has all the hallmarks of a Pakistani system," a senior official in Washington said. "These guys are now three for three as supplier to the biggest proliferation problems we have," the official added, referring to previously disclosed Pakistani aid to the nuclear programs of North Korea and Iran.
Libya agreed on Dec. 19 to dismantle its nuclear program and open itself to full inspections, which have already begun. But on Monday Mr. Bush issued a statement saying American economic sanctions against Libya would continue until it takes "concrete steps" to disarm.
The president pointed the way to a lifting of sanctions, however. "As Libya takes tangible steps to address those concerns," Mr. Bush said in a statement to Congress, "the United States will in turn take reciprocal tangible steps to recognize Libya's progress."
The United States and Britain have declined to identify publicly the sources of uranium enrichment technology shipped to Libya. They still will not discuss the origin of many of the parts that Libya obtained from middlemen and dealers. Those shipments are often hard to trace; the ship containing the Malaysian-made components in October picked them up in Dubai, a major transshipment point for both legitimate and banned technology.
One Western diplomat said Monday that some Pakistani nuclear scientists operated as though they were running "Nukes 'R' Us."
Still, a senior Bush administration official said it would be wrong to say the Pakistani government was involved in the shipment.
"This is intellectual property," the official said, "and the technology of uranium enrichment is out there on the black market." He added that to say the government of General Musharraf was involved would be like saying "an American drug smuggler arrested on the border was working for the United States government."
While Washington has waxed eloquent over the Libyan decision to disarm, some officials are concerned that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the Libyan leader, could change his mind, especially if the United States does not to act on an implicit pledge to lift the economic sanctions.
To speed disarmament, the United States, Britain and Libya have agreed to begin negotiations later this week in London to work out detailed plans to verify and dismantle Libya's nuclear, chemical and other weapons programs.
Senior Western officials said Monday that over the weekend, the United States and Britain agreed on a common approach after a visit to London by John R. Bolton, the under secretary of state in charge of nonproliferation matters.
Separately on Monday, the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said in the House of Commons that he had invited the Libyan foreign minister, Abdelrahman Shalqam, to come to London "soon" to discuss "the process of implementing the decision by Libya to dismantle its weapons programs." After the mechanics of a disarmament plan are worked out, Mr. Straw said, it will then be Libya's responsibility to report separately to the international agencies that will undertake the long-term monitoring of military laboratories in Libya to ensure that it does not renege on its pledges to give up illicit programs.
"We have committed ourselves to helping with the preparation" of Libya's submissions to the international treaty agencies, Mr. Straw said, "and to helping dismantle the programs Libya has agreed to destroy."
Mr. Straw's statement appeared to be a carefully calibrated division of labor among the main players in Libya's disarmament, and spoke of relevant international agencies playing a part, at least after initial talks.
Earlier comments from senior Bush administration officials had suggested that there was an effort by Washington to sideline Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency, which he heads, from playing a key role in setting out a plan for dismantling Libya's nuclear program.
Monday's statements in London and by a senior American official suggested that Mr. ElBaradei would initially play a subordinate role as Britain and the United States move swiftly to inventory the full scope of Libya's illicit weapons programs and then take a prominent role in their dismantling.
In his statement to the Britsh commons today, Mr. Straw alluded to the coming negotiations in London that will be carried out by diplomats from the three countries along with Central Intelligence Agency experts, British intelligence officers and Mr. Kussa, a Western official said.
"Britain and the United States will now be taking forward the practical issues of verification and of the dismantling of these weapons in partnership with Libya" and the international agencies that monitor the treaties banning the spread of nuclear and chemical weapons.
However, a senior Bush administration official said by telephone from the United States that personnel from the I.A.E.A. and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will not be present for the London talks.
Patrick E. Tyler reported from Tripoli, Libya, for this article and David E. Sanger from Washington.
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Pakistan Denies Nuclear Transfer Report
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan on Tuesday denied a report that its scientists gave high-tech centrifuge design technology to Libya, the latest allegation linking the U.S. ally's nuclear program to Washington's bitterest enemies.
The alleged technology transfer to Libya took place after Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pledged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that he would rein in his nuclear scientists in an effort to keep their expertise from falling into the hands of rogue regimes or terrorists, The New York Times said in a story in Tuesday editions.
There's no evidence the Pakistani government knew its scientists were selling information, but the alleged technology transfers raised doubts about Musharraf's ability to make good on his promise, the Times said.
``This is total madness. The report is absolutely false, and there is no truth in it,'' Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press.
A senior official at Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity, also denied government involvement, but stopped short of rejecting the charge of nuclear transfers outright.
``Pakistan should not be blamed for any individual's wrongful act,'' he said. ``We do not know who has been helping Iran, North Korea or Libya.''
In Washington, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the Libyan government was being ``very forthcoming'' just weeks after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi pledged to give up nuclear weapons development.
``The next step is to make sure we have a clear understanding of what Libya possesses, make sure it matches up with what we think they possess and what they tell us they possess,'' Powell said, adding that the United States would work with the U.N. nuclear agency and other experts.
Powell said he didn't have enough information to comment on the charges of whether Pakistani scientists shared nuclear technology, saying, ``We will be examining all of this.''
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the International Atomic Energy Agency will take the lead in monitoring Libya's progress in destroying weapons of mass destruction. The Bush administration wants the monitoring done by a team of American and British experts.
``It was the atomic agency that sent in a team to follow through, it is the atomic agency that is going to inspect to ensure that Libya is really going to be rid of weapons of mass destruction,'' Annan said in New York.
A Western diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to discuss the allegations involving Pakistan and Libya, but stressed that a black market in such components stretched across Europe and Asia.
``Certainly all fingers are pointing at Pakistan,'' the diplomat said. ``But I don't think it's just Pakistan that needs to be concerned.''
In December, Pakistan's government said it was questioning a number of its nuclear scientists on suspicion that ``ambition and greed'' may have led them to sell their knowledge to Iran. Islamabad denied government involvement in the plot and said any leaks were limited to Iran.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, was among the scientists questioned after officials received documents from the U.N. nuclear watchdog agency about Iran's nuclear program, officials say.
But Pakistani officials say Khan is not a suspect. He was seen Tuesday sitting with other dignitaries at a convention center where Pakistan is hosting the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Musharraf had ``made his assurances'' to President Bush that he would rein in Pakistani scientists.
``We fully expect President Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to follow through on those assurances,'' McClellan said Tuesday.
Still, the White House spokesman added, ``We recognize it's always difficult to control the activities of rogue individuals whose motives are personal gain. We are working with many nations to overcome that issue.''
Centrifuges can be used to enrich uranium for use in a nuclear device. Hundreds of centrifuges are needed to make enough material for a nuclear weapon. Each requires high-precision tubing that is difficult to produce.
The Iran link with Pakistan technology was disclosed after Tehran agreed to come clean about its nuclear program. Libya agreed in December to scrap its nuclear program and open itself to full inspections.
A diplomat with knowledge of the Iran investigation recently told the AP on condition of anonymity that U.S. intelligence also had ``pretty convincing'' evidence of a link between Pakistan and North Korea's weapons program, something Islamabad denies.
Pakistan has long been suspected of proliferation during its 30-year effort to build nuclear weapons as a deterrent against neighboring rival India. The two nations tested their first nuclear weapons in 1998.
Associated Press reporters Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Pakistan, and Nick Wadhams in New York contributed to this report.
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U.S. Official: Libya Had Pakistani Nuclear Know - How
January 6, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-libya-usa-pakistan.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Libya obtained nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan, a key U.S. anti-terror ally, but there was no sign Pakistan's government was involved, Bush administration official said on Tuesday.
The White House said Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf, whose country is nuclear-armed, had given earlier assurances Pakistan was not participating in any ``proliferation activity'' regarding unconventional weapons. But a White House spokesman said ``rogue individuals'' may be hard to control.
``We fully expect President Musharraf and the government of Pakistan to follow through on those assurances,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters. ``We recognize that it's always difficult to control the activities of rogue individuals whose motives are personal gain. We are working with many nations to overcome that issue.''
McClellan declined to confirm a report in the New York Times that Pakistan was the source of centrifuge design technology that allowed Libya to make advances toward a nuclear weapon over the last two years.
Another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the report but said he was not certain of the timing of the transfer. He said there was no sign of Pakistani government involvement.
The disclosure comes at a sensitive time for U.S. relations with both countries, and Washington's suggestions discounting a Pakistani government role are in line with previous Pakistani denials that it aided proliferation.
Pakistan supported the U.S. effort to topple the Taliban government in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, which were blamed on the Afghan-based al Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden. Musharraf has faced two assassination attempts in the last month, and suspicions have focused on al Qaeda and other militants.
EARLIER CONCERNS
But Western diplomats have expressed concern previously about the possibility Iran and North Korea obtained nuclear technology from Pakistan.
Libya last month said it would abandon its unconventional weapons programs and allow international inspections, and Bush said on Monday that if Libya follows through on its pledges, Washington would take ``tangible steps'' to improve relations.
A congressional foreign policy aide said the report of a Pakistan source for Libyan nuclear technology did not come as a surprise, but it was unclear whether Congress would take any action.
He said even though Musharraf may not be directly responsible for the technology, people ``representing institutions of the government'' may have played a role.
Pakistan on Monday described as unsubstantiated a British newspaper report that Pakistani scientists sold nuclear weapons plans to Libya. But a Pakistani government official said 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.
-------- us politics
Cheney is a quiet force behind Bush presidency
Story by Randall Mikkelsen
REUTERS USA:
January 6, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23324/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Dick Cheney has worked behind a veil of secrecy to become one of the most powerful U.S. vice presidents, regarded as a driving force behind the Iraq war and the Bush administration's industry-friendly energy policy.
Cheney, a longtime Bush family confidant who was Defense Secretary in the first Gulf War, headed the search committee for George W. Bush's vice presidential candidate in the 2000 presidential campaign before Bush tapped him for the job.
A history of four heart attacks, including one shortly after the contested presidential election in November 2000, did little to diminish Cheney's drive or authority. "It's good enough," Cheney, 62, told the Dallas Morning News in 2003, referring to his heart.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, Cheney worked out of sight for long stretches in what the White House called an "undisclosed location."
He remained largely in the background as he helped prepare the Bush administration for the Iraq war. He gave a few high-impact public speeches that helped nudge the process along and has been a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's conduct of the war and its aftermath.
The company he headed before becoming vice president, the Halliburton energy and construction firm, won big reconstruction contracts after the war. Cheney defended himself against Democratic charges of cronyism by saying he had severed his ties to the company and had nothing to do with the contracts.
Cheney appealed to the Supreme Court in his fight against a court order to disclose his contacts with energy-industry officials when he headed Bush's energy-policy task force. Environmental activists seeking the disclosure said they were cut out of the process and the resulting policy was tailored for the oil, coal and nuclear power industries.
PINSTRIPES AND COWBOY BOOTS
Cheney is a courtly figure who embodies former President Theodore Roosevelt's maxim to speak softly but carry a big stick. He blends pinstripe elegance with cowboy boots and a voice so quiet a listener might have to lean forward to catch his words, only to find they express a sobering hard line.
"There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us," Cheney said in an August 2002 speech that sounded the call for an Iraq war at a time other members of the Bush administration appeared to be waffling.
Bush took a U.S.-led coalition to war against Iraq despite U.N. opposition in March 2003 and Baghdad fell in early April. Nine months later, U.S. occupying forces had yet to find any of the weapons Cheney had accused Iraq of amassing.
For Cheney, who helped plan and execute the 1991 Gulf war, the march to the 2003 Iraq war was set in motion by the Sept. 11 attacks. Long after others had ruled out the notion that Saddam may have helped the al Qaeda network plan the attacks, Cheney held open the possibility, leaving it to Bush to finally acknowledge after the war there was no evidence of a link.
News reports said Cheney worked aggressively to marshal intelligence supporting his case against Iraq, and critics accused him of hyping dubious information.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Cheney was working in the White House while Bush was in Florida as four commandeered passenger jets crashed into the World Trade Center's twin towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.
'WE'VE BEEN TARGETED'
Whisked to a White House bunker by Secret Service agents, Cheney recommended that Bush approve the downing of a passenger airliner if necessary to prevent an attack on a target such as the U.S. Capitol. He advised the president to delay his return to Washington for fear that "we've been targeted."
For weeks afterward, Cheney worked in a secret location and minimized his joint appearances with Bush to guard against the possible loss of both elected executives in a single attack.
Early the next year, he borrowed Bush's Air Force One to tour Middle Eastern countries, in search of support for a potential Iraq invasion. But he did not get far with leaders who said resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a higher priority.
Cheney seemed like the quintessential safe choice when Bush, then Texas governor, picked him as his running mate.
But Democrats swiftly focused on a number of votes Cheney cast when he represented Wyoming in the House of Representatives, including a vote against the release of black South African leader Nelson Mandela, and votes against popular gun control and environmental and education funding measures.
No sooner was that controversy behind him than Cheney found himself assailed for accepting a $35 million retirement package from Halliburton, the world's largest oil-field service company which he joined as chief executive in 1993.
Cheney said he would give up any stock options remaining after taking office as vice president. That would cost him around $3.5 million, a small proportion of the options he cashed.
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, on Jan. 30, 1941, Richard Bruce Cheney got his undergraduate and master's degrees in political science from the University of Wyoming.
He is married to the former Lynne Ann Vincent, herself a well-known conservative voice on cultural issues and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. They have two daughters, Elizabeth and Mary.
Mary Cheney worked for her father's campaign in 2000 after serving as a liaison to the gay and lesbian community for the Coors Brewing Co. Although Cheney has refused to discuss his daughter's sexuality, he has put himself on the moderate side of his party on the issue of government recognition of same-sex relationships.
He said during the 2000 vice presidential debate the issue should be a state, rather than federal, matter, and "we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
KABUL JOURNAL
With Future Charted, U.N. Envoy Departs
January 6, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/asia/06KABU.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 5 - As Afghanistan's constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, concluded over the weekend, one of its main architects, the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, was preparing to bow out after two years in the job.
Mr. Brahimi, 70, an Algerian diplomat and former foreign minister, has been a loyal ally to the Afghans since brokering the Bonn accords in December 2001 for a new Afghan order after the Taliban. A personal friend of President Hamid Karzai - who granted him Afghan citizenship - Mr. Brahimi has served here twice. He was the United Nations special envoy from 1997 to 1999, during the Taliban years, and in his current role is in charge of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, to help steer the transition to a peaceful and democratic state.
With a new Constitution in place - one of the major steps laid out in Bonn - he took his leave in a speech to the loya jirga on Sunday. "If I don't, then I will be called a warlord for refusing the instructions of the central government," he joked, referring to United Nations headquarters. "I leave, but my heart will stay here."
It was time to go, he said in a recent interview. "This is not a job for a 70-year-old man."
Yet he proved his usefulness to the last. He had delayed his departure several times as the loya jirga faltered, and then almost fell apart. Nearly half the delegates boycotted a vote on amendments on Thursday, and tensions were rising as the assembly split along ethnic lines.
That put the rest of the transition in jeopardy, from the United Nations-run disarmament and demobilization program to elections that, under the Bonn accords, would take place in six months.
Mr. Brahimi spoke to the delegates boycotting a vote, entering the tent from the side door, slightly hunched in his overcoat. They had shouted down every other official, including their own faction leaders, but had asked for him to mediate. After a day of meetings Friday, delegates were saying that Mr. Brahimi had succeeded in breaking the logjam.
He seems almost more Afghan than the Afghans, receiving guests for breakfast recently at his Kabul residence wearing a long-sleeved, green silk Afghan coat of the type President Karzai favors. He was mulling over a selection of carpets in the hall. "Can I sell you a carpet?" he asked.
Mr. Brahimi's signature has been a "light footprint" - allowing the proud Afghans maximum sovereignty. He said in the interview that his main goal had been to build the institutions of democracy that would help Afghanistan move forward, rather than forcing rapid change.
But as his departure approaches, he has been more outspoken, calling for more aid and greater efforts from both the government and outside groups to prevent the country from slipping back into turmoil. He sternly warned Afghan leaders to stop corrupt commanders and police officers who prey on ordinary people.
In a memorandum to the government and foreign diplomats, he called for a second Bonn conference to consider outstanding issues - a program of national reconciliation, a more inclusive government and a revision of financing and political priorities.
He addressed security issues, saying that parliamentary elections, scheduled for next year, would be "well nigh impossible" as the threat from Taliban insurgents made large parts of the Pashtun areas inaccessible. But he remains unhurried about the general pace of progress. With a chuckle he recalled a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at the United Nations Security Council. "Colin Powell said to me, `The message is speed, speed, speed,' and I said, `It has to be slow, slow, slow.'
"There is now a very well-meaning and welcome Western interest in supporting democracy everywhere, but they want to do it like instant coffee," he said. "It doesn't happen that way."
Mr. Brahimi said his short-term objectives were to "give the country a state that is fairly well organized, and give the people a sense that they can have justice, and you have done a lot for all the other things you talk about, in particular democracy." Elections, he said, should come at the end of the process, not the beginning.
"Two years is a very, very short time," Mr. Brahimi said when asked why so many of the warlords and armed factions remained in power. Afghanistan is still absorbed by the culture of the war of liberation against the Soviet occupation, he said. That so many former resistance fighters became delegates at the constitutional loya jirga was to be expected, he said.
"These people carry real power for a variety of reasons," he said, and the loya jirga would have looked unrepresentative if at least some of them had not taken part.
Many aspects of Afghanistan's situation are beyond Mr Brahimi's control. President Karzai has adopted a policy of working with the warlords rather than forcing a confrontation. The American military, the strongest influence in Afghanistan, is still working with many of them against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Mr. Brahimi has had to carve out his own space. "I think we have found a reasonable modus operandi," he said of relations with the American military. "There is a reasonably large space where the role of the U.N. - perhaps even the leading role - is recognized."
Another obstacle is that the Taliban were not at Bonn, and never accepted defeat, he likes to point out. On many issues, though, Mr. Brahimi argued, time is the healer. Women would gain a better position here only through education, he said. "Instead of demonstrating against the burka," he said of advocates of women's rights, "why not give tables and chairs to schools for girls."
"The burka will disappear in its own time," he added. "No matter how long and how many demonstrations you have, it will not take one burka off of the face of women."
--------
Bomb Kills at Least 10 Afghans in Kandahar
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-Bombing.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- A bomb attached to a bicycle killed at least 10 people, most of them children, on a road regularly used by U.S. troops in this southern city Tuesday, underlining the violence still plaguing Afghanistan two years after the fall of the Taliban.
Up to 58 people were wounded, several of them seriously, officials said.
An Associated Press reporter saw wrecked bicycles, blood and shattered glass from a passing truck strewn across the street in the east of the city, which was quickly sealed off by dozens of Afghan and U.S. soldiers.
Eight of the dead were children, aged 7-15, apparently among a crowd that gathered after another bomb went off at the same site a few minutes earlier.
``I was playing football when I heard the first bomb, and a lot us rushed to see what happened. Then the second one went off,'' said Saami Khan, 15, who had been struck by shrapnel in the face and chest and was recuperating in a Kandahar hospital.
A soldier, Amanullah Popolzai, said authorities arrested a man spotted running away from the scene shortly before the explosion. The man, who appeared to be an Afghan, was caught trying to hide in a nearby home.
``This was the work of the Taliban. The man looked like he was a Talib fighter,'' Popolzai said.
Deputy Police Chief Salim Khan said the arrested man was taken to an Afghan military headquarters just 100 yards from the scene for interrogation.
U.S. troops regularly use the road where the bomb exploded, but it was unclear if they or soldiers from the Afghan base were the intended targets.
In the capital, Kabul, President Hamid Karzai interrupted celebratory talks with delegates from a convention that has just ratified a new post-Taliban constitution to condemn the attack as ``barbarism.''
``These enemies of Afghanistan, who hide in the darkness to launch attacks on innocent civilians, must be eliminated, and they will be eliminated,'' said his spokesman, Jawid Luddin.
Khan said the truck driver and a male passer-by were also killed by the bomb, which he said was attached to one of the bicycles.
He put the number of wounded at 23, with at least two of those most badly hurt taken to the U.S. military base at Kandahar Air Field for treatment.
Luddin, however, put the total of people wounded at 58.
``Most of them were children who had just come out of school,'' he told the AP. ``It's an act of barbarism.''
Khan said another bomb had also detonated nearby a few minutes earlier, causing no injuries.
Southern and eastern Afghanistan have been plagued with a stream of shootings, kidnappings and bomb blasts against civilians as well as soldiers, many of the them claimed by Taliban.
The violence threatens the timetable for national elections supposed to take place in the summer, and has all but halted badly needed rebuilding across a huge swath of the country along the Pakistani border.
Kandahar, the focus of an ambitious U.S. plan to deploy hundreds of troops and reconstruction workers in the run-up to the vote, has seen several attacks.
On Monday night, gunmen attacked the office of the United Nations refugee agency in Kandahar, throwing a grenade and firing shots but causing no injuries.
A bomb ripped through a bustling bazaar in the city a month ago, wounding 20 Afghans.
Three days earlier, on Dec. 3, two U.S. soldiers were wounded when a suspected member of the Taliban threw a grenade at their parked vehicle in a Kandahar square.
The latest bombing comes two days after a constitutional loya jirga, or grand council, meeting in Kabul ratified a charter supposed to underpin a new state strong enough to put an end to a quarter-century of fighting.
But the three-week convention was marred by an ugly ethnic split, complicating U.N. efforts to disarm regional warlords, who frequently fight each other, in order to ensure the voting is fair.
In the latest factional fighting police said a senior commander in Zabul province, just to the northeast of Kandahar, was shot and killed Monday by security forces loyal to the governor.
The United States is training a new Afghan National Army to curb the warlords. But only about 7,000 soldiers -- out of an eventual force of 70,000 -- have been deployed.
The 11,000-strong American military force still depends heavily on local militias as it pursues Taliban and al-Qaida guerrillas in the south and east.
-------- arms
US privatises its military aid to Georgia
Nick Paton Walsh in Tbilisi
Tuesday January 6, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/georgia/story/0,14065,1116716,00.html
The Pentagon is to privatise its military presence in Georgia by contracting a team of retired US military officers to equip and advise the former Soviet republic's crumbling military, embellishing an eastward expansion that has enraged Moscow.
After a Georgian appeal for support to the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, during a visit last month, a team of 20-30 private defence consultants are already in Tbilisi. Their employer, a Washington security firm, Cubic, has a three-year $15m contract with the Pentagon to support all aspects of the Georgian ministry of defence.
A senior western diplomat said: "One of the goals is to make the army units capable of seizing and defending a given objective. The consultants will work with US defence liaisons in the US Tbilisi embassy and the European command in Stuttgart." He said the programme could continue for much longer than three years.
About 60 US military trainers arrived in Georgia in the summer of 2002 to help the dilapidated military deal with the perceived threat of terrorists linked to al-Qaida hiding in the Pankisi gorge, on the border with Russian Chechnya.
The "train and equip" programme, which left the Kremlin silently fuming at a Pentagon presence on its southern border, was supposed to end this year.
Georgia has long sought a US base on its soil. "Our desire was to continue the train and equip programme, and [Mr Rumsfeld's response to our request] was this idea," Tedo Japaridze, the foreign minister, told the Guardian.
A Georgian security official said the Cubic team would also improve protection of the pipeline that will take Caspian oil from Baku to Turkey through Georgia. Georgia has already expressed its gratitude by agreeing to send 500 troops to Iraq.
The western diplomat said the US was also considering creating in Georgia a "forward operational area", where equipment and fuel could be stored, similar to support structures in the Gulf.
The two moves would combine to give Washington a "virtual base" - stored equipment and a loyal Georgian military - without the diplomatic inconvenience of setting up a permanent base in a country where Moscow already has two controversial bases.
Under an international agreement, the Russian facilities should be dismantled within three years. But Mr Japaridze said: "We have been having that discussion for five years, so it is quite surreal." The Kremlin has said it will withdraw by 2011.
The diplomat said there remained 80-100 Chechen militants in the Pankisi gorge. He said "a handful" of them were international terrorists linked to al-Qaida, and that they could move across the borders, particularly into Azerbaijan. Georgian officials have long insisted that the gorge is no longer a problem.
Meanwhile, it has emerged that President George Bush secretly wrote to Eduard Shevardnadze in the week after his resignation as Georgia's president, thanking him for his historic decision that brought a bloodless end to weeks of mass protest.
A source close to the ex-president said: "The letter was personal. It said he had made a very good choice, and that the new leaders lacked experience and could benefit from his." Mr Japaridze confirmed the letter was "personal in nature".
-------- asia
Muslim areas get martial law
January 06, 2004
By Richard S. Ehrlich
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093638-4465r.htm
BANGKOK - Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said yesterday he will enforce martial law in Thailand's mainly Muslim south, where insurgents this week have seized weapons, burned schools and attacked police outposts, killing four soldiers and three policemen.
Authorities said it was still not clear whether the two days of attacks were the work of Muslim insurgents angry about Thai troops in Iraq, or sophisticated criminals creating an atmosphere of confusion and intimidation in which they can commit illegal acts.
Martial law was already in existence in the region, but will now be strictly implemented because "ordinary jurisdiction will not work," said government spokesman Jakrapob Penkair in an interview.
The wave of violence started Sunday, when about 30 raiders attacked an armory in Narathiwat province, killing four soldiers and stealing more than 100 American-supplied M-16 assault rifles, an army spokesman said.
Assailants set fire to about 20 schools in the province and destroyed several police posts in what appeared to be related attacks.
Yesterday, the insurgents exploded two bombs in the city of Pattani, killing three policemen and injuring several others, Mr. Jakrapob said. Two other bombs were discovered before they could be detonated.
The spokesman said it was "too early" to tell who was responsible, but suspicion fell on the banned Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO), which boasted in May that Thai security forces were "falling like leaves" as Muslims fought to free the south from Bangkok's rule.
Muslims make up only 4 percent of the population in Thailand, which is 95 percent Buddhist, but are a majority in the extreme south of the country along the border with Malaysia.
Yesterday's attacks came as hundreds of troops scoured the region searching for the perpetrators of Sunday's raids, which demonstrated the insurgents' ability to stage synchronized guerrilla operations.
The assailants drove a pickup truck into the Thai army's camp at Narathiwat Ratchanakarin and opened fire, killing four soldiers guarding a weapons stockpile.
The attackers fled, scattering spikes on the road to deflate pursuers' tires, and blocked the route with felled trees containing booby traps amid the branches, according to Thai news reports.
The assailants also splashed gasoline on about 20 schools and ignited them - a tactic favored over the past decade by Muslim separatists, who complain that Islamic subjects are given short shrift in the education system.
But Mr. Jakrapob insisted the attackers were "robbers" who had no ideological motivation.
Other authorities, convinced the attacks could not have been carried out without detailed knowledge of the military camp, suggested that corrupt officials may have played a role.
"It is inconceivable that a civilian could have sneaked inside the camp and sent information to the bandits," said Deputy Prime Minister Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, a retired general. He described the attack as "well-planned."
Yesterday's violence began with a blast in a police guard booth in Pattani that killed one policeman and injured three others, Mr. Jakrapob said. An hour later, another bomb exploded in a police station in a city park, severely injuring another policeman.
"Police found more bombs planted near a department store," and while trying to defuse one of them, "we lost two more policemen," Mr. Jakrapob said.
Thai news media speculated that the attacks may be related to the nation's support of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have angered Islamists across Asia.
More than 420 Thai troops are in Iraq, and President Bush recently upgraded Thailand to "major non-NATO ally" status.
Muslim ethnic Malays have conducted hit-and-run skirmishes against Thai security forces for centuries, seeking to end what they regard as "racist" Buddhist domination.
PULO Deputy President Lukman B. Lima, in a rare dispatch from exile in Sweden, charged in May that Bangkok "illegally incorporated" the far south into Thailand 100 years ago and now rules it with "colonial" repression while "committing crimes against humanity in the area."
Bangkok denies all complaints of intentional mistreatment of Thailand's Muslims and insists separatist guerrillas are "bandits" enriching themselves while spewing religious and political rhetoric.
-------- britain
Warships are first casualty as spending cuts hit Navy
By Michael Smith, Defence Correspondent
06/01/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$3KCJNPUQTRRPPQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2004/01/06/navy06.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/06/ixnewstop.html
The Royal Navy is to lose at least four destroyers in the next three months, taking the number of surface warships to below that of the French navy for the first time since the 17th century.
It will now have only 28 escort ships compared to the French navy's 32 and will no longer be able to mount major operations unless it is fighting alongside either the Americans or the French. HMS Cardiff will be mothballed well before its decommission date
Four Type-42 destroyers are to be mothballed as part of a series of cuts over the coming months as the MoD struggles to keep within Treasury-imposed limits on its budget.
They are only the first of a number of cuts foreshadowed by last month's defence White Paper but will be a deeply demoralising blow for the Navy. At the height of its power in the mid-19th century it was the size of the seven next biggest navies combined and even as the US and German navies grew at the start of the 20th century it remained twice as large as its nearest rival.
The Opposition denounced the assumptions behind the cuts as "lunacy". Nicholas Soames, the shadow defence secretary, said: "It is a genuinely very bad decision and a slap in the face for the Navy.
"These are vital air defence ships. Our whole military doctrine is based on expeditionary warfare. This will expose the fleet to considerable hazard."
The Liberal Democrats said the cuts were the result of "poor management and over-deployment of UK forces". Paul Keetch, the party's defence spokesman, said they would leave the Navy dependent on the US navy "every time it puts to sea".
The four warships to be axed are Newcastle, Cardiff, Glasgow and Liverpool. They are the oldest of the surviving Type-42 destroyers but Glasgow and Liverpool were not due to be decommissioned until 2010. Cardiff was due to go in 2008 and Newcastle in 2007 when the first of the Navy's new destroyers, the Type-45, is expected to enter service. It cuts the number of destroyers to seven.
The loss of their air defence capability compounds the difficulties caused by the decision to scrap the Fleet Air Arm's Sea Harriers, leaving the fleet with no air cover until the introduction of the Joint Strike Fighter in 2012.
But it also means that the Government will be forced to drop its commitment, made in the 1996 Strategic Defence Review, to keep 26 destroyers and frigates available for operations at all times.
The maximum number of destroyers and frigates the Navy could now keep at sea, at a time when the war on terror is dramatically increasing its workload, would be 23.
The Type-42s' Sea Dart missiles play a vital role in escorting and protecting the carriers and amphibious fleet.
But for the past six months they have also been assigned to support units from the Special Boat Service carrying out anti-terrorist duties around the British coast and the North Sea oil platforms.
Senior Navy sources said that more Type-42 destroyers, as well as at least two of the Navy's minehunters and even some Type-23 frigates, which date only from the early 1990s, could also be axed.
Ministers appeared to see the loss of the four destroyers, each of which has a complement of 266 men, as an easy way of virtually eradicating the Navy's manning shortfall of 1,200, the sources said.
But one senior Navy officer with 20 years service said he was sickened by the way in which the fleet was being cut ship by ship. The defence White Paper had sent the wrong message to young sailors and many were ready to quit.
He said: "Hoon doesn't realise, and probably doesn't care, but many youngsters see no future in the Navy and are getting out. When I ask them: 'Why are you leaving?', they say: 'Why stay?' The Navy is just getting smaller and smaller, and that means less opportunity.
"We need to retain these destroyers until the new ones arrive, the replacements are not expected to arrive for another three years, getting rid of these ships will leave us with a handful of destroyers."
The MoD said that it could not go further than it had in the White Paper which said air defence and escort vessels were "less likely to be at a premium" and reductions in the number of older ships "will be necessary".
--------
British Aide Sees Long Iraqi Stay
January 6, 2004
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/middleeast/06BRIT.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, Jan. 5 - The British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said Monday that British troops would stay in Iraq for years, perhaps as long as 2007, to help restore the country's security and stability.
In a BBC radio interview, Mr. Straw said he could not offer a precise timeline for the pullout of troops. "I can't say whether it's going to be 2006, 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 it was essential for forces to remain in Iraq for years to come to oversee the country's rehabilitation. But he said Iraq's new government must agree to any decision to maintain troops there for the long haul.
Comparing the situation with the one in Afghanistan, where troops have been stationed for two and a half years, Mr. Straw said the troops 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 not 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 a day after Prime Minister Tony Blair paid a surprise visit to British troops in Basra. At the same time, Britain is awaiting a report by a senior judge, Lord Hutton, on whether the intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons was embellished by Mr. Blair and his aides in order to make a case for war.
Mr. Straw said occupation forces would continue to work toward the July 1 deadline for handing over power to Iraqi authorities.
-------- business
Firms Tied to Officials Win Iraq Deals
Jan 6, 2004
(AP)
By MATT KELLEY
http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20040106/D7VTITQ00.html
A U.S. soldier secures the area after their supply truck came under roadside explosive attack,... Full Image
WASHINGTON (AP) - A partnership of giant companies with ties to U.S. officials has been awarded a $1.8 billion Iraq reconstruction contract, the government said Tuesday.
The Bush administration also announced plans to open bidding on an additional $5 billion in Iraq reconstruction work.
But Pentagon and State Department officials acknowledged they had not worked out a bureaucratic squabble over which agency would ultimately oversee more than $18 billion in reconstruction funding approved by Congress last fall.
The team of Bechtel National Inc. and Parsons Corp. won the deal for major reconstruction projects in Iraq, said Gordon West of the State Department's U.S. Agency for International Development. The two California firms will be responsible for rebuilding Iraq's electricity and water systems, as well as roads and schools, West said.
Bechtel already has a similar reconstruction contract with USAID, which could be worth up to $680 million by the end of next year. That contract, unlike the latest one, was not awarded through competitive bidding.
Bechtel executives gave thousands of dollars to President Bush's 2000 campaign, and two of the company's top executives serve on advisory boards for the White House and Pentagon.
Democrats have criticized Bechtel's no-bid contract, calling it an example of Bush administration cronyism. Administration officials say politics has had nothing to do with decisions to award contracts. West said the Bechtel-Parsons partnership beat bids from two other firms, which he was legally barred from naming.
Separately, Parsons has an $89 million contract with the U.S. military to oversee disposal of Iraqi munitions at three sites. The company also has teamed with Bechtel to build facilities for the Army to dispose of large portions of the U.S. chemical weapons arsenal.
Last September, Parsons announced it had hired two former top Energy Department officials to help the company land Energy Department contracts. Parsons also hired a recently retired Air Force major general to work in its defense contracts operation.
Retired Navy Adm. David Nash, who oversees reconstruction contracts for the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which reports to the Pentagon, also announced plans Tuesday to start the bidding process for an additional 17 Iraq reconstruction contracts worth $5 billion. Nash said he hoped to have those awarded by early March.
The Parsons Corp. which won the reconstruction contract is not related to Nash's former employer, Parsons Brinckerhoff.
Bidding on the $5 billion in projects had been delayed for more than a month while administration officials reviewed how to structure them. For example, because the United States has decided to turn over sovereignty to Iraqis by this summer, plans to spend $100 million on developing democracy in Iraq shifted to plans for $400 million in such spending, an administration official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"We wanted to make sure things are correct before we go forward, because this is a lot of money," Nash said.
Part of the review involved a dispute between the Pentagon and USAID - which is part of the State Department - over which agency would ultimately oversee Iraqi reconstruction contracts. That has not been resolved, Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said Tuesday.
USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios said he had had cordial discussions of the issue with L. Paul Bremer, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority.
"Are there disagreements over details? Yes, there are, but I have to tell you, I think sometimes they are a little exaggerated, frankly," Natsios said. "There has not been very much disagreement with him (Bremer) on any of this stuff.
"We work for Jerry Bremer. AID in Iraq works for Jerry Bremer," Natsios said. "He makes the decisions. He gives the orders."
Nash said the CPA was holding $4.6 billion of the $18.6 billion appropriated by Congress for future Iraqi reconstruction work. Di Rita said that was to give the United States flexibility to deal with unforeseen developments.
"You can't spend $18.6 billion in six months anyway," Di Rita said.
The United States is continuing its ban on bids by companies from nations that opposed the Iraq war, Di Rita said. The ban had angered allies such as France, Germany and Canada whose firms were cut out from the competition.
Di Rita said the ban was under continued review.
"The continued assessment on how the money is going to be spent isn't going to end until reconstruction ends," he said.
----
Army Sides With Halliburton on Iraq Fuel
MATT KELLEY
Associated Press
Tue, Jan. 06, 2004
http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/7644679.htm
WASHINGTON - The Army apparently has sided with Halliburton in a dispute over the company's charges for fuel delivered to Iraq.
The Army Corps of Engineers official overseeing the contract wrote to superiors last month that Halliburton followed correct procedures and got the best price for the gasoline supplied by a Kuwaiti company. But a corps spokesman said Tuesday the corps had not totally exonerated Vice President Dick Cheney's former company of allegations of overcharging.
Pentagon auditors have questioned whether Halliburton subsidiary KBR overcharged the Army by more than $60 million for gasoline it shipped from Kuwait to Iraq. Halliburton has denied wrongdoing and said it saved the Army more than $100 million by suggesting buying some of the fuel for Iraq more cheaply in Turkey.
The decision to back the company's assertion on the fuel-supply issue was first reported in Tuesday's editions of The Wall Street Journal.
The fuel from Turkey cost more than $1 per gallon less than the fuel KBR bought from the Kuwaiti supplier, the Altanmia Marketing Co. Halliburton says it had no choice but to pay the higher price because Altanmia was the only fuel supplier approved by the Kuwaiti government.
"We believe KBR delivered fuel to Iraq at the best value, the best price and the best terms," Halliburton spokeswoman Wendy Hall said.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency said Tuesday it was waiting for Army contract managers to certify that Halliburton paid the best price for the fuel. The agency will issue its ruling on the issue after getting the information from the Army, the DCAA said in a statement.
While the Army hasn't told the Pentagon auditors of its findings, a contract manager backed Halliburton's arguments in a memo to his boss Dec. 19.
Contracting officer Gordon Sumner wrote that KBR "obtained adequate price competition" for the fuel and "continued to negotiate the best price possible." Sumner wrote that Halliburton had tried to get a cheaper price but Altanmia and the Kuwaiti government refused.
Sumner's memo recommended that Halliburton's future deliveries of Kuwaiti gasoline and kerosene be exempt from U.S. rules requiring the submission of cost information. Kuwaiti law prevents the disclosure of such information, Sumner wrote.
Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers approved that exemption the same day.
Auditors from the DCAA said KBR may have overcharged the Army by $61 million for fuel it bought from Altanmia and delivered into Iraq between April and October. President Bush said last month he expected Halliburton to repay the money if it was found guilty of overcharging.
Critics say Halliburton had no reason to hold down costs because of the way the Army pays for the company's services. The contract guarantees Halliburton will be reimbursed for all of its expenses, plus an additional profit equal to between 2 percent and 7 percent of those costs.
In other words, if Halliburton overcharged by $61 million, its profits from that overcharging would be between $1.2 million and $4.3 million.
Democrats have seized on the dispute to criticize the Bush administration for its ties to Halliburton and have called for more investigations of the company. Cheney quit as head of the company in 2000 to become Bush's running mate and Halliburton executives donated thousands of dollars to Bush's campaign.
"Instead of cutting off the contract and launching an investigation into this sweetheart contract, Halliburton gets a pass," Sen. Frank Lautenberg, D-N.J., said Tuesday. "It has become clear that taking care of corporate cronies at the expense of the public's trust is the priority of the Bush-Cheney administration."
Cheney and Pentagon officials say the vice president has no control over the awarding of contracts. The contract to deliver gasoline to Iraqi citizens is part of Halliburton's contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry. The contract grew out of Halliburton's deal to provide emergency logistical services to the Army.
Halliburton continues to supply fuel to Iraq's civilian market under the Army contract while another Pentagon agency, the Defense Energy Support Center, prepares to take over that job. The Army hopes to replace Halliburton's contract to rebuild Iraq's oil industry through a competitive bid process which should be complete later this spring.
ON THE NET
Halliburton: www.halliburton.com
----
Firms to Make Anti - Missile Plans for Jets
January 6, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Airlines-Missiles.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Bush administration said Tuesday it has chosen three companies to develop plans for anti-missile systems to defend U.S. commercial planes against shoulder-fired rockets.
BAE Systems, Northrop Grumman and United Airlines will get $2 million each to determine whether existing technology could be used to counter the terrorist threat, said Charles McQueary, the Homeland Security Department's undersecretary for science and technology.
The companies, selected from a pool of 24 that sought the contracts, lead teams that will work on adapting defenses already used on military planes and Air Force One. All will test infrared jammers that redirect heat-seeking rockets away from aircraft engines.
Asa Hutchinson, Homeland Security's undersecretary for border and transportation security, said the announcement doesn't reflect any specific concerns. The intelligence community has no credible threat information involving shoulder-fired rockets, he said.
The first, six-month phase of the project calls for the companies to develop plans for using the anti-missile technology and to analyze the economic, manufacturing and maintenance issues for placing systems on civilian aircraft.
One or two contractors then will be chosen to conduct more rigorous testing for up to 18 months. After that the Homeland Security Department will recommend to Congress and the administration how to proceed.
Lawmakers who sponsored a bill to equip all domestic airliners with anti-missile devices -- estimated to cost $10 billion in all -- said two years is too long to wait for the government to decide.
``The threat is simply too severe to allow bureaucrats to set their own timetables to make use of those protections,'' said Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., who sponsored the House version of a bill by Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
Boxer said under the Bush administration's timetable, no planes will have the systems before 2006. ``That is not good enough,'' she said.
Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of Soviet-style SA-7s -- heat-seeking rockets that can hit low-flying aircraft within a range of three miles -- are said to be available on the weapons market worldwide.
Concerns about terrorists using lightweight rocket launchers to take down commercial airliners were raised in November 2002 when terrorists fired two SA-7 missiles which narrowly missed an Israeli passenger jet after it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. Officials concluded that al-Qaida probably was behind the attack, which coincided with a bomb blast at a nearby hotel.
The missiles don't always take down their target. In November, a shoulder-fired missile struck a DHL cargo plane at Baghdad International Airport, forcing it to make an emergency landing at the airport with its wing aflame. All three crew members were unhurt.
The Bush administration has been reluctant to pursue the technology, citing the cost and noting that other security measures adopted since the Sept. 11 attacks have diminished the threat.
Hutchinson said the administration increased security around airport perimeters and worked with other countries to keep the anti-aircraft missiles out of terrorists' hands.
It's estimated that it would cost about $1 million per plane to install anti-missile systems. There are about 6,800 planes in the U.S. commercial fleet.
Airlines say the government should cover the costs for installing the devices.
BAE, which will work with Delta Air Lines and Honeywell International, has worked on anti-missile technology for military aircraft for many years. Spokesman Burt Keirstead said it will focus on ensuring that the civilian versions have low false alarm rates. Reliability is essential to airline efficiency, Keirstead said.
United Airlines will lead a team of 11 defense companies to derive an infrared countermeasure from a system used by aircraft that carry heads of state. The system was developed by AVISYS Inc., one of the 11 contractors.
Northrop Grumman declined to name the airline it is working with to adapt its infrared countermeasure, which protect the Air Force's C-17 cargo plane.
``We already have the technology, we already have proven the system can defeat these missiles, we just need to make it friendly for commercial airline operations,'' said Jack Pledger, director of infrared countermeasure business development for Northrop Grumman.
Parney Albright, Homeland Security assistant secretary, said that won't be easy. He said the difference between maintaining a military and civilian anti-missile system is akin to the difference in the servicing engines of a race car and family sedan.
On the Net:
Homeland Security Department: http://www.dhs.gov
-------- iraq
Iraq Police Fire on Protesting Ex-Soldiers
(AP)
Jan 6, 2003
By NABIL AL-JOURANI
http://apnews1.iwon.com/article/20040106/D7VTA0G80.html
Iraqi police arrest a man in the city of Basra, some 550 kilometers south of Baghdad, Monday, Jan.... Full Image
BASRA, Iraq (AP) - Iraqi police opened fire Tuesday on hundreds of stone-throwing former Iraqi soldiers demanding monthly stipends promised by the U.S.-led coalition, and reporters saw at least four protesters shot in the southern town of Basra.
Protesters marched on the Central Bank and then tried to force their way in to get money, pelting the building with stones and then turning on police who first tried to stop them by wielding batons. Police then opened fire.
British forces arrived on the scene and calmed the situation, using loudspeakers to say in Arabic "You will get what you deserve, but not in this way." They did not fire, even after one was hit in the leg by a stone.
At the hospital, officials said one ex-soldier had been killed, and relatives said they had come to collect the body of 40-year-old Abbas Kadhim, a non-commissioned officer. Hospital officials said they were treating three wounded men.
A spokesman for the British force based in Basra said he had reports of gunshots at the scene of the protest but did not know the source of the fire.
Coalition spokesman Dominic d'Angelo said police and British forces based in Basra had been sent to try to calm demonstrators outside the Central Bank building. He said he had no more information.
The soldiers said they had not been paid a monthly stipend equivalent to $50 since September.
The Coalition Authority had been dogged by protests by ex-servicemen after it disbanded Iraq's military in May, leaving more than 250,000 ex-soldiers destitute. In one incident in June, U.S. forces killed two demonstrators when a protest turned violent. Later, authorities agreed to pay monthly stipends of $50 to $150 to rank-and-file troops of the former Iraqi Army.
----
Feeling Besieged, Iraq's Sunnis Unite
Once-Dominant Minority Forms Council To Counter Shiites and Negotiate Future
By Alan Sipress
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57103-2004Jan5?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Jan. 5 -- Iraq's minority Sunni Muslims, who enjoyed a favored place under former president Saddam Hussein and now complain of discrimination, have formed a national council to press their interests with U.S. occupation forces and counter the threat of domination by rival Shiite Muslims.
Founders of the shura, or consultative, council said its establishment a week ago is unprecedented in the history of Iraq's Sunnis, reflecting their dramatic reversal of fortune following Hussein's ouster. By forming a body representing a cross-section of Sunnis, they said, they hope to offer the U.S. government a central interlocutor for discussing their future and that of Iraq.
So far, the Sunnis have mostly been sources of trouble for U.S. forces. Attacks against U.S. and allied forces have been centered in the largely Sunni region north and west of Baghdad known as the Sunni Triangle, and U.S. commanders have described the insurgency as an exclusively Sunni endeavor.
Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S. administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the U.S.-led occupation authority was still learning about the Sunni body but would welcome a constructive dialogue. "If the shura council seeks to engage in a cooperative relationship with shared principles of promoting democracy and nonviolence, then the [occupation authority] will be ready to respond," Senor said.
But the formation of the Sunni council could also complicate U.S. plans for transition to Iraqi sovereignty by July 1, because the Sunnis would be in a stronger position to resist these efforts. The council, for instance, is demanding that the next Iraqi government be selected by direct election rather than through local caucuses, as U.S. officials prefer.
The shura council was set up during a conference at Baghdad's largest mosque, Umm al Qurra, a structure known before the U.S. invasion as the Mother of All Battles Mosque. Though the initiative for a national council emerged shortly after Baghdad's fall in April, officials involved in its development said the project accelerated in recent months as fears mounted that the Sunnis' leadership role in Iraq was being eclipsed by the majority Shiites, especially on the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
"After the war, there was a large political and social vacuum," said Mohammed Ahmed Rashid, an activist with the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which is involved in forming the council. "We think the American military mistakenly believed that the Shiites constituted a large majority in Iraq, and for that reason gave the Shiites a bigger slice of control on the Governing Council and in the political life of the country."
Hussein's capture last month also removed the focus of many Sunnis' political aspirations. It also eliminated the shadow the former president cast over many Sunni areas even after his ouster.
The shura council includes equal representation from each of the three main currents within the Sunni Muslim community: the politically oriented Muslim Brotherhood, the religious puritans of the Salafi movement and the adherents of the mystical Sufi tradition. Within each group, half the seats are allocated for ethnic Arabs and half are divided between ethnic Kurds and Turkmen. Dozens of other council members are drawn from professionals, intellectuals, tribal leaders and other civic groups.
The council does not plan to exclude former members of Hussein's government unless they were involved in criminal activities, Rashid said. "Those who had leadership positions in the Baath Party will not have leading positions in our organization. But we can cooperate with them and make use of their efforts," he said.
Activists involved in the insurgency against U.S. occupation will also be eligible to join the council, though the council's position on the uprising remains unclear, Rashid said. He explained that Iraqis retained the right to resist the occupation, adding that the council supported all peaceful means to oppose it. He said council members have reserved judgment on whether to back armed resistance.
The council's primary goal, he said, is to play a role in drafting an Iraqi constitution and forming a new government, including the election of a president. By unifying their community, Sunni leaders would have more leverage with occupation officials and the Governing Council.
"We established the council to demand that the rights of Sunnis be equal to those of others, especially the Shiites, and to limit the outside interference in the political life of Iraq," Rashid said.
Despite sharp differences over other issues, Sunnis involved in the shura council said they agreed with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Shiite cleric, about his demand that a new transitional government be chosen through direct elections, which would place power in the hands of the Shiites, according to many political observers. But Rashid said elections, monitored by international observers, would actually demonstrate that the U.S. administration had underestimated the Sunni population.
U.S. officials say about one-fifth of Iraq's 24.7 million inhabitants are Sunni Arabs and three-fifths are Shiite Arabs. Sunni activists, however, claim the total Sunni population, including ethnic Kurds and Turkmen, is equivalent to that of the Shiites.
Bremer has been negotiating with Sistani for weeks over a plan that could accommodate the cleric's call for elections while retaining a role for provincial caucuses. At the same time, in the absence of a recognized Sunni authority, U.S. officials have been trying to develop a strategy to win over local tribal leaders in predominantly Sunni areas, aiming to allay their fears that the transition plan is a recipe for Shiite domination.
U.S. efforts to engage Sunnis more broadly have been hamstrung by the absence of major political parties or religious authorities that could speak for the community. By contrast, Iraqi Shiites have long had political parties and religious scholars representing most of their adherents.
Shura council members said they were open to direct talks with Bremer, adding that they had already begun informal contacts with the provisional administration.
In pressing for a transitional government, however, shura council leaders said they did not intend to work through the ruling structure in Baghdad headed by the Governing Council, which they dismissed as a tool of U.S. occupation that substantially underrepresents Sunnis. The 25-member council includes five Sunni Arabs, whose credibility among their coreligionists is questioned by many.
If direct talks are to proceed between the shura council and the occupation authority, the two sides must overcome mutual suspicion. Last week, U.S. troops and Iraqi security forces arrested several shura council members during a raid on a major Baghdad mosque, according to Fakhri Kaisy, a council spokesman. He accused the U.S. military of seeking to thwart Sunni efforts to organize politically. "It looks as if the American people want to erase the Sunni people from the history of Iraq," he said.
U.S. military officials said the operation was based on intelligence that the mosque was a center of resistance activity, adding that they discovered a cache of weapons, ammunition and explosives. U.S. officials said they did not know whether commanders were aware that shura council members were meeting in the mosque at the time.
While keeping one eye on the United States, the shura council is also looking to limit the influence of the Shiites and their backers in neighboring Iran, which is largely Shiite. Rashid said the shura council would press for legal restrictions on the immigration of Shiites from Iran who he said had been passing themselves off as Iraqi citizens. Another priority would be to prevent Iraq from joining a security alliance with either Iran or Turkey. Rashid said Iraq must remain in the Arab League, which consists overwhelmingly of countries governed by Sunnis.
Rashid said the council was also determined to resist an agreement between U.S. and Iraqi officials to introduce a federal system that would grant enhanced autonomy to the Kurdish north, calling such an act the first step toward partition of Iraq.
Underpinning the formation of the shura council is a belated realization among many Sunnis that developments have turned against them and that, unlike the Shiites, they were not prepared for the overthrow of the Hussein government.
Over the centuries, Shiites have traditionally looked to their top clerics for leadership, creating a widely recognized authority apart from the state. But many Sunnis saw Hussein's ruling Baath Party, which filled its upper ranks with Sunnis, as their primary political organization. That fit with the traditional Sunni view that even an unjust leader, as long as he is Muslim, deserves obedience because the alternative could be anarchy, according to Harith Dhari, a Sunni cleric.
"A political vacuum in the eyes of Sunnis is more despicable than an unjust ruler. The state we are in right now confirms the truth of that," said Dhari, who played a central role in establishing the shura council. "Before, we had a government that gave us law and order. After the American occupation, each group in Iraq is pursuing its own interest and trying to secure its own welfare."
The Sunnis have paid a high price, he said. U.S. forces, acting on what Dhari called misinformation supplied by the Sunnis' rivals, have been raiding Sunni homes in pursuit of insurgents and filling prisons with Sunni suspects. At the same time, he said, militias affiliated with Shiite political parties have assassinated scores of respected Sunnis. Shiite party leaders have denied their followers played any role in such killings.
"We never needed a body like the shura council before. But now we need it to look after our political, social and religious affairs," Dhari said.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel to Take No Action Against Soldiers
The Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57797-2004Jan6?language=printer
JERUSALEM - No action will be taken against Israeli soldiers who shot and wounded a Jewish-Israeli protester during a demonstration over a controversial West Bank barrier, the army said Tuesday.
The shooting caused an outcry in Israel and sparked calls for the military to reevaluate its rules of engagement and the way it deals with unarmed protesters.
During a demonstration 10 days ago, troops fired at a group of peace protesters who tried to cut through a fenced portion of the barrier, moderately wounding an Israeli demonstrator in his legs and lightly injuring an American protester.
Israel says the barrier - made up of concrete walls, razor wire, fences and trenches - is meant to keep suicide bombers out. Palestinians condemn the barrier, which dips deep into the West Bank in some areas, as a land grab.
While the incident appears to be the first time that Israeli troops had opened fire on Jewish protesters, critics say the army regularly uses live ammunition to disperse Palestinian protesters.
In a statement released Tuesday, the army said the incident and its results were "serious ," but no disciplinary steps would be taken against the soldiers who opened fire.
"Given all the factors involved, including the fact the soldiers felt they were under a real threat, the lack of accessible riot control gear and the rules of engagement the force was operating under, there was no deviation from the normal rules of engagement," the statement said.
However, the army said it would reevaluate the rules of engagement for dealing with protesters near the barrier, in particular rules for opening fire with live ammunition.
----
A Visit to Israel
by Alan Bock,
January 6, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/bock/b010604.html
While I was pleased finally to have been able to visit Israel, and I certainly know a little more than I did before about how to place events in Jerusalem in context, I would not want to suggest that a visit of four or five days makes me an expert; in fact my dislike of those who want to claim expertise based on whirlwind visits is rather intense. I've been reading, writing and talking to presumed experts on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis for more than 20 years, and a visit to Jerusalem didn't change my perceptions radically. Nonetheless, I garnered a few impressions that might interest readers.
Full disclosure. The conference at which I spoke was sponsored by the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace, which is one of the constellation of organizations sponsored by Rev. Sun Myung Moon. My experience with their organizations is that they have not tried to censor or proselytize me once they figured out I was unlikely to be a convert. But they do have what I consider an unusual theology, and I know some people consider any contact with them to be suspicious. So take this with whatever ration of salt seems appropriate.
CULTURE SHOCK
Perhaps the first dose of culture shock came from seeing so many young Israelis - I'm well beyond the age when 18 to 20-year-olds look like sallow kids to me - in uniform with their machine guns, walking the city streets as casually as you please. I've long believed that an armed society is a polite society anyway, so perhaps I should have had nothing but positive feelings. But for an American it was a bit - not unnerving, exactly, because a moment's reflection was enough to dispel actual nervousness, but just a little surprising.
The most unsettling experience for me was visiting Bethlehem - at least getting there. I remember back in 1998, talking to Sir Martin Gilbert, who had just put out a history of Israel in time for the 50th anniversary of the state. At the time, he said to me, when he visited Israel and wanted to go to Bethlehem or some of the other cities in the West Bank, it was not much more complicated than crossing from one state to the other in the United States.
There were Israeli policemen on one side of the border checkpoint, Sir Martin said, and Palestinian police on the other side, but the process was generally fairly uneventful and friendly. His point was that when it came to facts on the ground, whatever the legal technicalities, there were already two states in place. He figured (or hoped) then that it wouldn't take all that long for what was a fact on the ground to be translated into legal recognition of two states.
Of course, that was before the Bill Clinton's Camp David attempt to secure himself a legacy and the subsequent Intifada. A year ago Bethlehem was under occupation by Israeli troops. Now it is controlled by the Palestinians. The result is that tour buses have to stop at the border checkpoint and all the passengers then walk across the border and get on a Palestinian tour bus. The driver and tour guide, as they explained, are not allowed to cross at this point in time because they are Israeli citizens, so they stay with the bus until the passengers return.
All this struck me as almost as sad as the horde of Palestinian kids begging for small change as soon as you move into Palestinian territory. The guide on the Palestinian bus helpfully explained that something like 80 percent of Bethlehem's economy is based on tourism, when you include all those who make souvenirs and grow olive trees to be carved into trinkets of various degrees of sophistication. For the past two years tourism around the Christmas season has declined precipitously, in part because of these uncomfortable security provisions. So Bethlehem is hurting.
LITTLE DISCOMFORT
Even though Israel is on the State Department's official list of places Americans should think twice about before visiting, I felt little discomfort or fear walking around Jerusalem or even taking tour buses. You can't help remembering, of course, that buses have been targets for suicide/homicide bombers. But there hadn't been any attacks for several months, and one comforted oneself by believing - hoping? - that if Palestinian bombers wanted to take out a bus it would more likely be one regularly used by Israelis than one that was obviously a tour bus for foreigners.
So those of us at the conference swallowed whatever fears we might have had and took the tour buses anyway. And aside from the discomfort at the border checkpoint on the way to Bethlehem, none of us experienced any problems.
Or maybe it was all those dewy-faced youngsters casually shouldering their machine guns that gave us a sense of security, whether false or genuine. Whatever the reason, walking to the shopping mall or just walking around gave me little or no sense of fear or trepidation. An Arizona state legislator who attended an event in Gaza, however, told me he heard bullets whizzing, not quite overhead but close enough for discomfort, from a source unidentified, when his group stopped to look at what they thought were ordinary sights.
Jerusalem is still a beautiful city and inspiring to be in, in its way. What is striking is how many of the sites that have resonance, for Jews, Muslims, and Christians, are so close together. The most striking example, of course, is the Western Wall (we were told they no longer call it the "wailing wall") which is just below the Dome of the Rock and Al Aqsa mosques. Here the two great religions seem inextricably intertwined yet irreparably separated in an almost tragic fashion.
It is almost impossible to go very far in Jerusalem, however, without coming across a synagogue, church or mosque with some historical significance. The Mount of Olives and the Garden of Gethsemane are cheek-by-jowl, and from the Mount of Olives on a reasonably clear day you look out on the arid vastness of the Judean desert. The Via Dolorosa in the Old City seems almost the same as when Jesus walked it on the way to the crucifixion, although it has changed over the centuries.
Several of us were at the Al Aqsa Mosque - on the grounds, where tourists are allowed and encouraged, rather than inside - just a few hours before the Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Maher, was attacked by Muslims after a visit with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. (If you ever get a chance to see close-up pictures of the golden-domed Dome of the Rock, please note and appreciate the beautiful and colorful mosaics on the walls, which don't show up in long-distance photographs.) It was odd - a little discomfiting, a little thrill-of-recognition - to see the event covered so closely by CNN International and Israeli TV and to reflect on the ironies.
Mr. Maher had come to try to reestablish some kind of relations with Israel and perhaps ease the Palestinian conundrum if possible. But when he went to the mosque Palestinian worshippers began cursing him and throwing shoes at him. Israeli security people, who ordinarily don't go into the mosque, had to help rescue him from people who thought he was selling out to Israel. Apparently he wasn't actually hurt in the incident, but if the TV pictures are at all reliable (one should wonder in most circumstances) he was seriously shaken by the incident.
Sadness and irony. Can hostilities that lead to such incidents ever be resolved?
UNRESOLVED PROBLEMS
This is strictly impressionistic and based on limited experience over a couple of days (including time spent watching Israeli, Jordanian and Turkish television with various degrees of incomprehension). But it still seems to me that resolution is a long way off. At least on the Israeli side (this is based on walking streets and a few conversations so it's hardly scientific or representative) people seem resigned to the inconveniences of living in a garrison state and find ways to make the best of it. You can find discussions of the longer-range implications and the inherent instability of the current situation in newspapers, but people adjust.
I had a fairly long conversation with a black Imam from a mosque in Detroit one evening after he had spent more time walking in the Old City than I had. He saw some Palestinian street merchants - old ladies, probably somebody's grandmother - trying to sell a few vegetables and treated roughly by Israeli military people. The young kids with their rifles kicked the old lady's little box of vegetables all over the street and laughed about the incident. The Palestinian men, he told me, stayed in the alleyways, able to do nothing to help the old woman, but obviously frustrated and challenged-but-helpless in the manhood department. He could see how this frustration would become rage and perhaps a determination to do something violent in the future.
This was a second-hand account, of course, and from a man who was notably affected and saddened by the incident. He might have exaggerated it, he was still so upset, but I seriously doubt if he made it up. It didn't shake his own determination that religious leaders should work toward finding ways to achieve something resembling reconciliation in the Holy Land, but it impressed on him just how difficult this work was likely to be.
CHANGING HANUKKAH
We were in Jerusalem during Hanukkah, and our hotel was filled each night with black-hatted Hasidic Jews and their families, lighting another candle, praying, singing and dancing. This was certainly the most intense, sustained and exuberant celebration I've seen of Hanukkah.
An article in the Jerusalem Post, however, suggested that Israeli attitudes toward Hanukkah might be about to change. The writer noted that for many centuries Hanukkah had been a relatively minor festival in the Jewish calendar. It was given a larger emphasis in the United States, of course, as a way to develop a "Jewish Christmas" for young people who might feel left out. In Israel, however, the reason for an increased emphasis on Hanukkah was different. Hanukkah celebrates Judah Maccabee, a warrior hero who eventually was successful enough to force recognition of Jewish uniqueness in the Hellenizing old Seleucid empire.
Zionists and others in Israel, which has felt at least potentially besieged since the beginning of its modern existence, have found it useful to emphasize a warrior hero from the Jewish past. The Post article suggested, however, that with increasing Israeli discomfort over the occupation of the West Bank - a significant number of Israelis apparently see it not just as inspiration for terrorism but as just plain wrong, let alone the demographic implications if the area were ever to become incorporated into Israel and lead to Jews becoming a minority in Israel - Hanukkah might become less important in Israel than it has been. This was an aspect I hadn't thought about.
I'm still processing my impressions of this trip. Among the convictions it reinforced for me, however, is that real people are involved in this conflict, real people whose lives will be affected by the next military or diplomatic moves. This makes the chutzpah of Americans (and others) who think they can come waltzing in with road maps and other "solutions" to be imposed from the outside all the more unconscionable. The Israeli-Palestinian impasse is tragic to a fault. But reconciliation, if it is to come, will have to come from them rather than from George W., Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair or any other foreign leader.
--------
Sharon Jeered as He Talks of Giving Up Settlements
January 6, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/middleeast/06MIDE.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Jan. 5 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was showered with catcalls on Monday from his own right-wing party during a speech in which he said he would take down some Jewish settlements and permit the formation of a Palestinian state if the two sides reached a peace agreement.
But Mr. Sharon again warned that he was prepared to set a security line unilaterally that would separate Israelis and Palestinians if they could not make progress under the current peace plan, which is stalled.
Mr. Sharon first outlined a disengagement plan on Dec. 18, and his address on Monday to 3,000 members of the Likud Party's central committee in Tel Aviv emphasized the same themes. "If the Palestinian Authority proceeds with democratic reforms and puts an end to terrorism and incitement to violence, the State of Israel will meet its obligations and allow the creation of a Palestinian state," he said, drawing boos.
Under such a deal, Israel would have to give up some Jewish settlements, he added, prompting even more heckling.
But if Palestinian violence continues, "we will diplomatically and physically separate from them until they change their ways," he said. "We will mark a security line that will prevent any entrance to our grounds."
Mr. Sharon has not divulged details of a unilateral plan, but any security line is likely to be based on the barrier that Israel is building in the West Bank. Under the route currently approved by the government, about 15 percent of the West Bank would be on the Israeli side of the barrier, according to calculations by the United Nations.
Palestinians reiterated their opposition to any unilateral Israeli moves. "Israel keeps building the settlements and keeps building the wall," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. "On the ground, it's the same. It's business as usual."
The Israeli and Palestinian prime ministers have been trying to arrange a meeting for two months, but no date has been set, and the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said he saw little prospect for meaningful discussions.
"I am sorry to say destruction continues, aggression continues, bombardment continues, and I don't think that in this situation, that any meeting will have significant results," Mr. Qurei said.
Still, Mr. Erekat said he was continuing his efforts to plan a meeting.
Violence continued Monday when Israeli troops shot dead a 17-year-old Palestinian in Nablus, on the West Bank, according to Palestinians. The Israeli military said soldiers were patrolling the city when they encountered stone-throwing youths, and shot a Palestinian who had a firebomb.
In the southern Gaza Strip, the army said, it uncovered two Palestinian tunnels in Rafah, along the border with Egypt. One was used to smuggle weapons across the border; the other traveled under a road used by military vehicles, which the Palestinians were presumably planning to attack, the Israeli Army said.
-------- mideast
Syria declares right to weapons
January 06, 2004
By Benedict Brogan
LONDON DAILY TELEGRAPH
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093703-9439r.htm
DAMASCUS, Syria - Syria is entitled to defend itself by acquiring chemical and biological deterrents, President Bashar Assad said yesterday as he rejected American and British demands for concessions on weapons of mass destruction.
In his first major statement since Libya's decision last month to scrap its nuclear and chemical programs, he came closer than ever to admitting that his country possessed stockpiles of such weapons. Speaking to the Daily Telegraph, Mr. Assad said any deal to destroy Syria's chemical and biological capability would come about only if Israel agreed to abandon its undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Since Saddam Hussein's capture and Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's decision to dismantle his programs, Mr. Assad has risen toward the top of America's target list.
The White House and the British prime minister's office have been waiting for Mr. Assad's response to Col. Gadhafi's appeal for other Arab leaders to follow his example or risk inflicting a "tragedy" on their people.
Mr. Assad spoke for more than 90 minutes at his discreet villa, which he prefers to the grand palace overlooking Damascus built by his father, the late Hafez Assad.
Asked about American and British claims that Syria had weapons-of-mass-destruction capability, he stopped short of the categorical denial that had been his government's standard response.
Instead, he pointed to the Israelis' recent attack on Palestinian bases in Syria and the occupation of the Golan Heights as evidence that Syria needed a deterrent.
"We are a country which is [partly] occupied, and from time to time, we are exposed to Israeli aggression," he said. "It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves. It is not difficult to get most of these weapons anywhere in the world, and they can be obtained at any time."
Mr. Assad said Col. Gadhafi's surprise decision to allow international inspectors to supervise the dismantling of weapons-of-mass-destruction programs was a "correct step."
He called on the international community to support the proposal that Syria presented to the United Nations last year for removing all weapons of mass destruction from the Middle East, including Israel's nuclear stockpile.
"Unless this applies to all countries, we are wasting our time."
Mr. Assad tempered his refusal to compromise on weapons of mass destruction by holding out the prospect of joint patrols with America along the Syria-Iraq border to prevent the passage of arms and fighters.
Acknowledging pressure from the United States and Britain to crack down on Palestinian extremists based in Syria, he said their offices had been closed and their activities curtailed. The groups could no longer "do anything military from these places. They are closed."
Mr. Assad repeated Syria's offer to resume negotiations with Israel over the occupation of the Golan Heights, which were interrupted when a deal was in sight nearly a decade ago.
----
We won't scrap WMD stockpile unless Israel does, says Assad
The Syrian president talks exclusively to Benedict Brogan in Damascus
06/01/2004
UK Telegraph Group
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$3KCJNPUQTRRPPQFIQMGCFF4AVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2004/01/06/wsyria06.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/06/ixnewstop.html
Syria is entitled to defend itself by acquiring its own chemical and biological deterrent, President Bashar Assad said last night as he rejected American and British demands for concessions on weapons of mass destruction.
In his first major statement since Libya's decision last month to scrap its nuclear and chemical programmes, he came closer than ever before to admitting that his country possessed stockpiles of WMD. Bashar Assad yesterday: 'It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves'
Speaking to The Telegraph, Mr Assad said that any deal to destroy Syria's chemical and biological capability would come about only if Israel agreed to abandon its undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Since the capture of Saddam Hussein and Col Muammar Gaddafi's decision to dismantle his WMD programme, Mr Assad has risen towards the top of America's target list.
The White House and Downing Street have been waiting for his response to Col Gaddafi's appeal for other Arab leaders to follow his example or risk inflicting a "tragedy" on their people.
President Assad spoke for more than 90 minutes at his discreet villa, which he prefers to the grand palace overlooking Damascus built by his father, the late Hafez Assad.
Asked about American and British claims that Syria had a WMD capability, he stopped short of the categorical denial that has been his government's stock response until now.
Instead, he pointed to the Israelis' recent attack on alleged Palestinian bases in Syria and the occupation of the Golan Heights as evidence that Syria needed a deterrent. "We are a country which is [partly] occupied and from time to time we are exposed to Israeli aggression," he said. "It is natural for us to look for means to defend ourselves. It is not difficult to get most of these weapons anywhere in the world and they can be obtained at any time."
Mr Assad said that Col Gaddafi's surprise decision to allow international inspectors to supervise the dismantling of WMD programmes was a "correct step".
He called on the international community to support the proposal that Syria presented to the United Nations last year for removing all WMD from the Middle East, including Israel's nuclear stockpile.
"Unless this applies to all countries, we are wasting our time."
It is the worst kept secret in the Middle East that Damascus has one of the largest stockpiles of chemical agents in the region.
The latest CIA report on weapons of mass destruction says: "Syria continued to seek CW-related expertise from foreign sources [this year]. Damascus already held a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin but apparently tried to develop more toxic and persistent nerve agents. It is highly probable that Syria also continued to develop an offensive BW [biological weapon] capability."
Mr Assad tempered his refusal to compromise on WMD by holding out the prospect of joint patrols with America along the Syria-Iraq border to prevent the passage of arms and fighters.
Acknowledging pressure from the US and Britain to crack down on Palestinian extremists based in Syria, he claimed that their offices had been closed and their activities curtailed. The groups could no longer "do anything military from these places. They are closed".
But he risked infuriating the West by stepping up his defence of Palestinian suicide bombers. He said the attacks had become "a reality we cannot control" and blamed them on "the Israeli killings, the Israeli occupations".
Despite his passionate advocacy of the Palestinian cause and his use in the past of inflammatory language about Israel and Jews, he denied hating them. "If you hate, you cannot talk about peace," he said.
Mr Assad repeated Syria's offer to resume negotiations with Israel over the occupation of the Golan Heights which were interrupted when a deal was in sight nearly a decade ago. But he said that an agreement was impossible as long as Israel insisted on starting negotiations from scratch rather than picking up where they left off.
Tony Blair, speaking on a flight back from Iraq before news emerged of the Assad interview, repeated his hope that Syria would follow Libya's example.
He said: "We offer Syria the possibility of a partnership for the future. But it is important that they realise that the terms are very clear and have been set out by ourselves and the Americans many times.
"You can see very clearly with what happened just before Christmas in respect of Libya that it is important to say to countries that may have engaged in such programmes: 'Look, there is a different way of dealing with this.'
"It can be dealt with diplomatically if people are prepared to do so, but it does have to be dealt with."
For publishers wishing to reproduce photographs on this page please phone 44 (0) 207 538 7505 or email syndicat@telegraph.co.uk
---
Syria says Iraqi Kurdish entity crosses "red line"
06 Jan 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L05664951.htm
DAMASCUS, Jan 5 - Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned neighbouring Iraq in remarks published on Monday against creating any Kurdish or other ethnic entity.
"This is a red line and should be (seen as such) by all countries in the region, especially Iraq's neighbours," he said in an interview with CNN Turk television reported by the official Syrian news agency.
Assad, whose country like Iraq and Turkey has a Kurdish minority, was answering a question about Syria's stance towards the creation of any form of Kurdish entity in Iraq -- an issue U.S. authorities say is up to Iraqis alone.
"Any division of Iraq will not affect Iraq or Turkey alone as some do believe. This would have an impact on all (of Iraq's) neighbours," said Assad, who starts a state visit to Turkey on Tuesday, the first there by a Syrian head of state.
Analysts say Turkey and Syria share the concern that the creation of a Kurdish state in northern Iraq could ignite secessionist aspirations among their Kurdish minorities.
Syria has traditionally sought to blend its minorities, both ethnic and religious, under a national unity umbrella. The official position of Syrian Kurdish groupings is not to pursue sectarian goals, but to safeguard their cultural identity.
"If Iraq is not united, the occupation will not end and without Iraq's unity there will not be stability for Iraq or our countries," Assad said.
U.S.-backed Iraqi Kurds deny statehood is their aim.
Syria has angered the United States through its stern opposition to the U.S.-led war that toppled former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
----
Iran to restore relations with Egypt
January 06, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20040106-100741-4745r.htm
TEHRAN, Iran, Jan. 6 -- Iran expects to restore full diplomatic relations with Egypt, an Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman announced Tuesday.
"Relations with Egypt must now be restored because this will help the Palestinian people and this is the wish of all Palestinian groups," Hamid Reza Asefi said.
Meanwhile, the City Council of Tehran changed the name of a street formerly commemorating the assassin of former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, the official IRNA news agency reported.
In line with a request of the Foreign Ministry, Tehran's Khaled Islambouli Street had been renamed to Intifada (Uprising) Street, the report said.
Iran severed its diplomatic ties with Egypt in 1980, a year after Cairo struck the Camp David peace deal with Israel and gave asylum to Iran's exiled shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
----
Egypt Muzzles Calls for Democracy
Reformers Say Billions in U.S. Aid Prop Up Authoritarian Rule
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57219-2004Jan5?language=printer
CAIRO -- The atmosphere in Courtroom 5 was relaxed, even cordial, as Ashraf Ibrahim entered the defendants' cage. While a dozen black-bereted policemen looked on impassively, friends and relatives took turns chatting with the 35-year-old computer programmer, a political activist, who was dressed in a white prison jumpsuit. Some even posed for photographs. Men in grease-stained waiter's jackets navigated the packed room selling soft drinks and snacks, delivering Ibrahim a steaming glass of tea through a small hole gouged out of the steel mesh between the iron bars.
Then the judge and prosecutors entered, and the room seemed to freeze.
Ashraf Ibrahim and four fugitive co-defendants, the chief prosecutor read aloud, were in court this December morning to face charges of plotting to overthrow the government, belonging to a banned communist organization and sending false reports to international organizations -- offenses punishable by up to 15 years' imprisonment under Egypt's harsh state security laws.
After the judge rejected a defense attorney's plea that his client should be freed on bail because he had done nothing more than videotape police brutality at a demonstration, Ibrahim was dispatched back to his cell in Cairo's notorious Mahkoum Tora security prison, where he has been held since April.
In what was widely regarded as one of his most important speeches of 2003, President Bush proclaimed in November that it was time for the United States to support democracy in the Middle East. He said the establishment of a free Iraq would be "a watershed event in the global democratic revolution." And he called upon Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country and the second-biggest recipient of U.S. military and economic aid, to be in the vanguard.
"The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East, and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East," Bush declared.
U.S. officials insist they are seeing slow but positive changes in human rights conditions here. But rights advocates, opposition politicians and analysts interviewed here paint a darker portrait: of an authoritarian government that tightens or loosens the screws of repression depending upon how it perceives threats, that is obsessed with its Islamic opposition and feels harassed by human rights activists, and that wields a powerful state security apparatus that operates under far-reaching emergency laws and often deals brutally with opponents.
And they contend that, contrary to Bush's pronouncements, U.S. aid -- nearly $2 billion per year over the past two decades -- has propped up an unpopular government, its army and police, and helped suppress democracy.
Once the most influential Arab nation, Egypt has struggled in recent decades with a stagnant economy, political violence from Islamic militants and the vicissitudes of highly centralized one-man rule. Its president, Hosni Mubarak, is 75 and has showed signs of ill health recently, and he is grooming his son to succeed him.
Opponents are hoping the succession will be an opportunity to transform the government and the economy, and some critics agree that the government has eased its grip on dissent. But state power is quick to assert itself when challenged. Ashraf Ibrahim and his supporters in Egypt's small but vocal human rights community say the real reason he was arrested was because he helped organize raucous demonstrations in March against the war in Iraq that were far larger than anyone had anticipated and had shaken and embarrassed the authorities. "They didn't expect so many people," Ibrahim said in a brief interview before the proceeding began. "That's why they want to punish us now."
In a Big Prison
On Nov. 6, the day Bush gave his speech, authorities returned the bruised body of Saad Sayed Qutb, a 43-year-old accountant, to his family. Qutb, a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, died in a local hospital after three days in custody. The Brotherhood accused authorities of torture, making Qutb the 14th alleged torture victim to die in Egyptian jails in the past two years.
"How could anyone in Egypt believe what Bush said?" asked Essam Erian, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Sudden disappearances and brutal interrogations are one way the government deals with dissidents, according to activists. Another is to keep them on edge about their legal status. The Brotherhood is the foremost Islamic political movement here and, like all religious groups, it is banned from entering parliamentary politics, although 17 of its followers serve as independents. For years it has operated through a network of mosques, charitable institutions, labor unions and professional associations. Sometimes the authorities crack down on the Brotherhood; other times they encourage its participation.
Erian, a clinical pathologist by trade, frequently appears on television to speak for the movement. He spent five years in prison in the mid-1990s -- a time when the government virtually decapitated the Brotherhood by imprisoning some of its most promising younger leaders -- and said he knows he could be arrested again at any time. "I came out of a small prison, now I'm in a big one," he said.
There are constant reminders of the limits under which Erian lives. He was scheduled last month to attend a conference in Kuwait City, hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on Middle Eastern democracy and the role of Islamic groups. Egypt refused to allow him to leave the country and Kuwait rejected his request for a visa. "I was banned by both countries from speaking about democracy," he said.
The influence of the Brotherhood, founded in the 1920s, can be found throughout the Muslim world. Its leaders insist they are committed to nonviolence and democracy, but the group has long been the breeding ground for more radical factions, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which became a central component of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. Egyptian Islamic Jihad waged a holy war against the state in the early 1990s. Militants attacked police stations, banks, hotels and government offices, assassinating scores of policemen and officials. The climax was the massacre of 62 people, most of them foreign tourists, in Luxor in 1997.
The government responded with a harsh crackdown, killing hundreds of fighters and arresting thousands more. Torture was widespread, according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Backed by $1.3 billion in annual military aid from the United States, the security forces eventually prevailed. A senior Egyptian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the trauma still affects the way the government deals with political dissent.
"What we do not want is a situation where the fundamentalists could come to power," he said. "We are trying to strike a balance between reform and security. The human rights situation is gradually improving, although perhaps not as fast or as far as some people would like."
Hafez Abu Saada has a $40,000 dilemma. The head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights received a grant from the U.S. government-funded National Endowment for Democracy in July to help his group monitor rights abuses here and produce its annual report. It is a big chunk of his annual budget of $100,000, but Abu Saada needs approval from the Ministry of Social Affairs before he can touch the money.
Six months have passed with no word. If Abu Saada taps the funds, he and his board of directors could face six months in jail. It's no idle threat: Five years ago Abu Saada was arrested, held for a week and charged with receiving money from foreign sources in order to defame Egypt's international reputation. He was never tried, but the charges could be reinstated at any time, he said.
"One of the goals of the government is to always keep you under pressure," Abu Saada said. "You learn to live with it."
An Egyptian Canary
Groups like Abu Saada's do not have widespread popular support here, but they serve as a sort of canary in the Egyptian mine shaft -- when the atmosphere turns more repressive, they are usually the first to feel it.
In recent years, critics acknowledge, the government has allowed an increased level of public debate and dissent. But as always, there are strings attached. Last year, officials enacted legislation requiring registration of all nongovernmental organizations and giving the Social Affairs Ministry the power to put any group out of business by rejecting its registration.
Two groups -- the New Women's Research Center and the Land Center for Human Rights -- have been rejected. Aida Seif El Dawla, a psychiatrist and human rights activist who helped found the women's center, said the ministry had ruled that the center was a threat to public order because it planned to lobby lawmakers to allow victims of torture or domestic abuse to sue their tormentors. "The public order is obviously very fragile," she said.
In facing a government with such broad powers, it doesn't always help to win in court. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a democracy advocate, won a stunning legal victory last year when a judge overturned his conviction and that of the staff of his Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies on charges he had embezzled money, received foreign funds without permission and tarnished Egypt's image.
But while the case is finished, the government's campaign against him is not. In recent weeks, Ibrahim has come under a vitriolic attack in the Egyptian press. Newspapers have accused him of conspiring with the Bush administration to undermine Egypt's international image. "Saad Eddin Ibrahim in Washington to incite against Egypt and the Arab World" read one front-page headline.
The newspapers also said Ibrahim -- who holds joint U.S.-Egyptian citizenship -- had received $2 million from U.S. aid funds earmarked for Egypt as a payoff for his betrayal. At least four members of the Ibn Khaldun board have resigned in recent weeks. Some of Ibrahim's old allies in the human rights movement are quietly distancing themselves from his cause, fearing he has grown too close to the United States.
Government officials contend they have no role in the press reports, but Ibrahim said he believes elements in the state security forces are orchestrating a campaign of character assassination. And he fears he may become a target for far worse. When in prison, he met inmates who had been convicted of the attempted assassination of Naguib Mahfouz, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, in 1994.
"They told me they had not read a line by Mahfouz but they were incited, told he was against Islam, he was a heretic or a traitor," Ibrahim said. "And now I'm called a traitor. These things cannot be taken lightly."
One newspaper accused Ibrahim of writing Bush's Nov. 6 address on democracy, while another claimed the speech was inspired by Israel and its American supporters in order to undermine Egypt and other Arab states.
Anger Over Iraq War
Virtually all of the two dozen independent analysts, government officials, lawyers and journalists interviewed here in December were deeply angry about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, as well as the Bush administration's unflagging support for Israel. Few said they believed Bush truly wants democratic elections here, which would inevitably produce a government far more hostile to U.S. foreign policy than the current one. Several pointed to the U.S. practice of "rendition" -- the surreptitious shipment of an unknown number of suspected Arab terrorists to Egypt and other countries where police routinely practice torture -- as proof of U.S. bad faith on human rights issues.
Egyptian officials, who have always wielded a veto over which private organizations are allowed to receive U.S. aid, are unhappy about an American proposal to earmark $20 million for democratization. Mubarak, at a news conference, insisted that Egypt was the region's only real democratic state. "We do not need any pressure from anyone to adopt democratic principles," he declared.
The first day of the antiwar demonstrations last March was largely peaceful. But things got out of control the next afternoon, when thousands of worshipers poured out of the 1,000-year-old al-Azhar mosque after Friday prayers, chanting slogans and throwing stones and shoes at riot police. The police used long narrow clubs and metal pipes to beat back the crowd. More than 800 people were arrested and hundreds more were beaten, including two opposition lawmakers. Someone set a firetruck ablaze under the 6th of October Bridge, stopping traffic and causing panic on the bridge.
The protests were estimated to be the largest in this country since the bread riots of 1977, and they brought to the surface popular disaffection with the government. Demonstrators chanted against Mubarak and his family, as well as the United States and Israel. Ashraf Ibrahim, who for the past three years had been organizing small but vocal demonstrations on behalf of the Palestinian uprising, said he was stunned by the size of the crowd. He used his video camera to record scenes of police brutality.
Three weeks later, the authorities struck back, raiding Ibrahim's home and confiscating his computer and video camera, and arresting a dozen activists. Ibrahim, who was away at the time, turned himself in when he returned in mid-April. He has been held ever since.
'I Was Only Talking'
At his hearing Dec. 6 in the southern district of Cairo courthouse, Ibrahim was represented by Abu Saada and human rights advocate Ahmed Seif El Islam. Many of the stalwarts of the rights community came to observe, including Seif Dawla and representatives of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as did a handful of Western diplomats, among them a representative of the U.S. Embassy.
Looking at the crowded courtroom from the defendants' cage, Ibrahim expressed gratification -- and amazement that the government had singled him out for punishment.
"I am not a terrorist," he said. "I was only talking." Maybe, he added with a shy smile, "that is why they are afraid of me."
-------- nato
Afghanistan tops NATO chief's agenda
January 06, 2004
By Paul Ames
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093623-9893r.htm
BRUSSELS - Dutchman Jaap de Hoop Scheffer began work as NATO secretary-general yesterday insisting the alliance must focus on expanding its peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan before considering a military role in Iraq.
The former Dutch foreign minister, who replaces Britain's George Robertson in NATO's top job, also stressed the importance of backing up political decisions, an apparent reference to the reluctance of allied governments to provide resources for the wider Afghan mission.
"The primary focus at the moment should be on Afghanistan," Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said as he arrived at NATO headquarters.
"About Iraq, we'll see and await and ... if possible, influence political developments there, but first let's focus on Afghanistan," he told reporters.
Responding to appeals from the United Nations and the Afghan government, NATO agreed late last year to expand its 5,500-member peacekeeping operation beyond the capital, Kabul, and into other provincial cities.
Last month, the United States proposed that NATO take a direct role in Iraq. The alliance already is providing communications and other logistical support.
"Iraq will certainly be on the agenda at a certain stage, but let's take the events step by step," Mr. de Hoop Scheffer said. He added that a decision would depend on political developments in the coming months.
The most likely alliance role would involve taking command of the 9,500-strong multinational division currently run by Poland in central Iraq as part of the U.S.-led occupation force.
Regarding Afghanistan, Mr. de Hoop Scheffer urged the allies to "meet requirements on the ground."
NATO already has taken charge of a German-led operation in the northern city of Kunduz, but its ability to further extend the mission has been called into doubt by the unwillingness of allied governments to commit sufficient specialist troops and equipment even for the limited Kabul mission.
"NATO cannot afford to lose" in Afghanistan, the new NATO secretary-general said.
The Kabul operation, which began in August, was NATO's first operation outside Europe or North America. It was seen as a clear sign that the alliance has moved beyond its Cold War role to confront threats from terrorism, failed states or regional crises.
NATO's swift agreement to take on the Afghan mission also was touted as an indication that the allies had overcome the divisions over Iraq that pushed them into deep crisis early last year.
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer's caution over NATO's role in Iraq reflects concern that the alliance would risk military overstretch and continued differences between allies who support the U.S.-led occupation and those such as France and Germany who opposed the war.
Key decisions on the alliance's next steps are expected at a summit in late June when President Bush joins other NATO leaders in Istanbul.
-------- spies
U.S. intelligence used for propaganda
By Melvin A. Goodman
MinutemanMedia.org
January 06 2004
Topeka Capital-Journal
http://www.cjonline.com/stories/010204/opi_goodman.shtml
The worst intelligence scandal in U.S. history has shaken the Bush administration's credibility and promises to complicate U.S. foreign policy. A full accounting is required, but the congressional oversight process isn't responding to the challenge. Earlier this month, U.S. military forces quietly released nearly all the Iraqi scientists and technicians who had any connection with Iraq's programs for weapons of mass destruction. This move indicated that the United States believes that there is nothing to gain from interrogating these individuals and that there are no such programs in Iraq.
Several months ago, weapons inspector David Kay acknowledged the presence of no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, thus discrediting the U.S. case for war. Kay is CIA Director George Tenet's personal emissary. His report documents the CIA's intelligence failures.
Evidence of further corruption within the policy and intelligence communities that marked the run-up to war against Iraq is mounting. The White House campaign to compromise a CIA operative's work and credentials to punish her husband, a war critic, and to intimidate others, reflects the desperation within the administration.
The only institutions chartered to investigate these matters -- the Senate and House intelligence committees -- need to get to the bottom of the intelligence failures that allowed the 9/11 attacks, led the country into war with Iraq, and the compromised the CIA agent. The president's case to go to war was based in part upon a forged document, but the chairmen of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Pat Roberts (R-KS) and former CIA agent Porter Goss (R-FL), haven't demanded a counter-intelligence investigation of the forgery and oppose an investigation of the White House's misuse of sensitive intelligence information.
The committees also haven't explored the dubious intelligence that the Pentagon produced for the White House to make the case for war. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld created an undersecretary of defense for intelligence and used this position to shape intelligence to support the case for war. The secretary also established an Office of Special Plans that collected its own intelligence from Iraqi exiles in order to bolster the case, and distributed this intelligence to the policy community. This office was quietly disbanded in August, but the committees have not sought testimony from its senior members.
The Pentagon continues to circulate specious intelligence on Iraq. The Office of Special Plans' former director supplied the Senate intelligence committee with a memorandum describing so-called contacts between Iraq and al Qaida. The memorandum, which was immediately leaked, compromised sensitive sources of the National Security Agency, a violation of Federal law, and contained no new authoritative intelligence.
Meanwhile, the independent Kean Commission, which the Bush administration initially opposed, has had no more success in getting sensitive intelligence from the White House. The only member challenging the White House, former Senator Max Cleland, suddenly resigned to take a position with the Export-Import Bank.
These events have serious consequences for U.S. interests. The distortion of evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction makes it more difficult to gain international cooperation in the war against terrorism and the campaign to prevent the spread of such weapons. Any success in stopping the strategic weapons programs of Iran and North Korea, as well as in capturing al Qaida operatives, requires international support.
At the very least, the policy and intelligence communities are facing a situation comparable to that of 55 years ago, before President Harry S. Truman created the National Security Council, the Department of Defense, and the CIA. As in the late 1940s, the international environment has been recast, the threats have been altered, and the role of credible intelligence has never been more important.
If steps are not taken to redesign the institutions for national security, particularly within the intelligence community, we will face more "preemptive" war and even more terrorist operations within the United States. At the very worst, we may be confronting a subversion of the constitutional limits on executive power and a campaign of deceit aimed at the Congress and the American people.
Melvin A. Goodman, a senior fellow at Center for International Policy -- www.ips-dc.org -- and a Foreign Policy In Focus analyst, is co-author of the forthcoming "Bush League Diplomacy: How the Neoconservatives are Putting the World at Risk" (Prometheus Books, 2004).
-------- us
Army Delays Discharge for Some G.I.'s in Afghanistan and Mideast
January 6, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/politics/06MILI.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - The Army is preparing an order that would require about 7,000 troops now in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan to remain on duty through the end of their deployments this spring, even if they could otherwise leave the service before then, an Army personnel officer said Monday.
Once these troops return to their bases, they may also be required to remain in the service for up to 90 days while they complete their formal separation from the Army, said the personnel officer, Col. Elton R. Manske.
Another order, previously announced, already prevents active-duty and reserve troops rotating into Iraq and Kuwait this year from leaving the Army before serving 12 months on the ground, plus a similar 90-day period after they return.
Colonel Manske said the measures were being taken to maintain the cohesion of Army units on duty in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan as new troops move in. About 110,000 troops, a vast majority from the Army, will be deployed to Iraq and Kuwait by the end of May to replace the approximately 123,000 troops there now. Fresh forces also are scheduled to replace the approximately 11,000 American troops currently in Afghanistan.
The Army, stretched by these deployments, also began a program on Jan. 1 to offer re-enlistment bonuses of up to $10,000 to those serving in Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan.
--------
Army Orders More Troops To Remain In Service
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57094-2004Jan5.html
About 7,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan who were planning to retire or otherwise leave the service in the next few months are getting new marching orders: Stay put.
The Army is expanding on what it calls a "stop loss" order to keep soldiers in uniform -- even those who have met their contractual service obligation or are scheduled to retire -- during a rotation of tens of thousands of troops that begins this month and is scheduled to finish in May.
Col. Elton Manske, chief of the Army's enlisted division, said yesterday that the move was deemed necessary to maintain the cohesion and combat effectiveness of units now operating in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The order affects all Army units scheduled to return from Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan in coming months. Soldiers will be required to remain with their unit until it gets to its home base, and for a maximum of 90 days afterward, he said.
The order mirrors one already in place for the units that are scheduled to deploy to those three countries to replace the units there now.
Manske said the Army also is using a more common management tool to keep soldiers in uniform: It is offering bonuses of up to $10,000 for soldiers in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan who reenlist for three years or more.
The expanded "stop loss" order has yet to be implemented. Manske said it is expected to take effects "within days," but he gave no specific date. The use of "stop loss" reflects the difficulty the Army is having in keeping enough soldiers to meet the Army's worldwide commitments.
Before the war in Afghanistan, "stop loss" authority had rarely been used. It is seen by many as being in conflict with the principle of an all-volunteer military in which enlisted personnel sign contracts for a specific period. It was first used in the 1991 Gulf War.
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Medals Couple Two Conflicts
Critics Seek Separate Awards for Afghanistan, Iraq Fighting
By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57172-2004Jan5.html
Many troops who have fought in Iraq and Afghanistan are expressing disappointment within military circles that the Bush administration has decided against awarding separate campaign medals for service in each country in favor of a single decoration covering service in the global war on terrorism.
Reacting to the troops' dismay, critics are pushing to have the decision reversed, saying the administration is subtly using the single campaign medal to buttress its contention that the war in Iraq was undertaken as part of the worldwide battle against al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.
"There were two separate campaigns, one against the Taliban and bin Laden forces [and one] to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction," said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee. "The purposes were different, the campaigns were different, they were carried on differently. They're distinct from each other."
One defense source said troops share Skelton's view "by a wide majority," adding that "politics aside, separate campaign ribbons seems to make sense."
"The decision not to issue separate medals seems to be the work of people who do not appreciate the importance of the values that help form a strong military culture," added retired Army Col. John Antal, a former tank commander, who edits a magazine devoted to military history. "Politicians should be very careful when they tinker with the system that reinforces the critical values that help make our military the most capable in the world."
But Pentagon officials say the issue is closed. President Bush's authorization of the Global War on Terrorism Expeditionary Medal, they say, is appropriate, given the nature of the worldwide battle against terrorists and in terms of precedent in previous conflicts.
Bush also authorized creation of the Global War on Terrorism Service Medalto recognize those who provided support in the conflict from outside the theater of operations and those who participated in operations to protect the homeland, called Operation Noble Eagle.
Bush authorized the awards March 12, a week before the war began in Iraq, on the recommendation of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The awards, a Defense Department spokesman said, provide "flexible and tangible recognition for those serving in the current war against terrorism, a war that spans the globe and includes many diverse campaigns."
The defense official said there is ample precedent for awarding soldiers a single medal "for their contributions in many different locations," citing a single decoration, the Southwest Asia Service Medal, for operations associated with the 1991 Gulf War and its aftermath. The official also cited the campaign medals awarded for service in either the Pacific or European theaters of operation in World War II, not service in particular countries. That level of service was instead denoted by individual bronze stars worn on the theater ribbon for service in particular campaigns.
Similarly, commanders in the global war on terrorism, the official said, will be authorized "to award individual battle stars for those who participate in particular combat engagements."
But Antal said the World War II precedent does not support a single decoration for the global war on terrorism. "Imagine how silly it would have appeared in World War II," he said, "if we did not issue European Theater of Operations and Pacific Theater of Operations ribbons but instead issued a generic 'war against fascism medal.' "
-------- propaganda wars
Killings of Journalists Soared in 2003
by Jim Lobe
January 6, 2004
Inter Press Service
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe010604.html
The news was not good for journalists in 2003, as media workers were killed, jailed and censored at much higher rates than a year earlier, according to reports by two watchdog groups.
More journalists were killed in the line of duty in 2003 than in any other year in almost a decade, reported Paris-based Reporters Sans Frontieres (Reporters Without Borders) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) in New York.
RSF counted 42 journalists slain in 2003, while CPJ concluded in a separate report that the total death toll was 36. Both groups said the count was about twice as high as in 2002 and that the war in Iraq was the primary reason for the increase.
But arrests of journalists and media censorship also soared during the year, according to RSF, which attributed the trend to new laws and tactics adopted by a number of governments around the world as their contribution to the post-9/11 U.S.-led anti-terrorism campaign.
Nineteen journalists were killed in Iraq, 13 of them in hostile actions, according to CPJ, which stressed that the country remains dangerous not only for foreign journalists but for residents as well.
"The war that began in March posed many hazards for journalists, but seasoned war correspondents tell us that even in the postwar period Iraq remains the most dangerous assignment they have ever had," said CPJ Director Ann Cooper.
"It has been particularly troubling to see at least four journalists killed as a result of U.S. military actions in Iraq," she added, noting that her group continues to demand a full public accounting by the Pentagon for those incidents.
RSF, which blamed the deaths of five journalists on US fire in Iraq, charged that in none of the cases "did (the US military) hold any investigation worthy of the name."
"Added to the traditional dangers of war are the unpredictable hazards of bomb attacks, the use of more sophisticated weapons - against which even the training and protection of journalists is ineffective - and belligerents who care more about winning the war of images than respecting the safety of media staff," according to RSF.
Both groups agreed that death in Iraq was the highest in any one country since 24 journalists were killed in Algeria in 1995, at the height of a brutal war between the government and Islamists. In that year, 49 journalists were killed worldwide, according to RSF.
In addition to the 13 journalists killed by hostile acts in Iraq last year, another six died from illness or traffic accidents while covering the war. A French journalist and his Lebanese interpreter working for British ITN television also mysteriously disappeared in southern Iraq on the third day of the conflict.
In the Middle East's other major conflict, two journalists were killed by Israeli army gunfire in the Occupied Territories, bringing to six the number of journalists killed since the Palestinian Intifada began three and a half years ago.
To date, no action has been taken against those who did the shooting, although the Israeli army has said it is conducting an investigation into the death of British documentary filmmaker, James Miller.
Nearly all of the journalists killed outside the Middle East were deliberately targeted, often in direct reprisal for their reporting, according to CPJ.
In the Philippines, CPJ reported five journalists killed for covering local corruption or criticizing public officials, while RSF said seven had been killed. In either case, it was the highest death toll for journalists since the 1980s, when the country was wracked by turmoil and at least two insurgencies.
In Colombia, traditionally the most dangerous country in the world for journalists, three reporters were murdered as a direct result of their work, while a fourth was killed in a shoot-out.
In Russia, Aleksei Sidorov, editor-in-chief of an independent publication known for its reporting on organized crime and government corruption, was stabbed to death outside his home. His predecessor was also murdered in a case that has never been resolved..
Two journalists were killed in Nepal and Indonesia, while the death toll in India was three professionals, including the head of a local press agency who was killed in his Kashmir office, RSF said.
In Iran, the Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi was murdered after her arrest in Teheran, where she was covering the opposition student movement. After initially denying responsibility, the government has begun a prosecution.
Other killings of journalists took place in Burma, Cambodia, Cote d'Ivoire and Guatemala, according to the two groups.
RSF reported that 124 journalists were in prison worldwide due to their work as of Jan. 1, 2004, out of the 766 who were arrested over the course of 2003. Countries with the largest number of journalists behind bars included Cuba with 30, Burma (17), Eritrea (14) and Iran (11).
Of the 30 Cuban journalists, 27 were arrested in a roundup of dissidents last March. All received sentences of between 14 and 27 years, in what RSF called "Stalinist-type trials."
The Eritrean prisoners were arrested by the government shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. Their detention essentially ended the independent press in that East African country.
Assaults and threats against journalists remained stable during 2003 compared to the previous year, RSF said in its report, which noted that more than 200 journalists were physically attacked or received death threats from politicians, religious extremists or local criminal gangs in Bangladesh.
Assaults and attacks were also common in the Americas, particularly in Haiti, Venezuela and Guatemala, according to RSF.
Censorship also rose sharply during 2003, it said. In Zimbabwe, the country's sole independent daily, the Daily News, was closed in mid-September by the government, which also expelled the last foreign correspondent based there. RSF also cited governments in Gabon, Rwanda and Swaziland for censoring media workers.
The group called censorship in Iran "severe," and noted that authorities in Algeria had harassed independent newspapers, while self-censorship dominated media coverage of the Iraq war, in particular throughout the Middle East.
As for constraints on the Internet, RSF noted that China "remains by far the world's largest prison for Internet-users," with six cyber-dissidents jailed this year, bringing to 48 the number who were in prison in connection with their use of the technology on Jan. 1, 2004.
The group noted that Vietnam, which just issued a lengthy sentence to another Internet journalist, is following China's example. Nine cyber-dissidents are now behind bars there.
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U.S. Frees Journalists
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/middleeast/06JOUR.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 5 - The American military on Monday released three Iraqi employees of the Reuters news agency and an Iraqi cameraman working for NBC who were detained last week, a military official said.
The four were detained Friday near Falluja, west of Baghdad, after insurgents shot down a helicopter, killing one G.I. and wounding another.
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ADVERTISING
Critics Attack Efforts to Link Bush and Hitler
January 6, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/politics/campaigns/06ADS.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - It sounded like a fun way to expand participation in this year's presidential election, at least for those opposed to re-electing President Bush. The left-leaning Internet group MoveOn.org sponsored a contest, "Bush in 30 Seconds," inviting people to submit television advertisements about Mr. Bush, with the best to be determined by a vote of visitors to the site.
But two of more than 1,500 submissions have outraged Republicans and leading Jewish groups for comparing Mr. Bush, in profile and policy, to Hitler.
"This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said in one of several statements he issued. He urged the nine Democrats running for president to repudiate the advertisements.
Wes Boyd, a MoveOn.org founder, fired back, saying Republicans were "deliberately and maliciously" misleading the public by asserting that MoveOn.org had sponsored the advertisements. "None of these was our ad," Mr. Boyd said in a statement. "Nor did their appearance constitute endorsement or sponsorship by MoveOn.org Voter Fund."
On Monday, MoveOn.org said more than 100,000 visitors to the site had selected 15 finalists, none of them the Hitler advertisements. A panel of celebrities and political experts has been asked to pick a winner, which will be televised.
Mr. Boyd conceded that the advertisements were "in poor taste," and said he "deeply regretted" that they had "slipped through."
Mr. Gillespie and Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League and the Simon Wiesenthal Center criticized MoveOn.org for posting advertisements that showed Hitler morphing into Mr. Bush. One asserted, "What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003."
"Their lack of discretion cheapens the level of political discourse in America." said Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League.
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Anti-Bush Ad Contest Includes Hitler Images
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
Howard Kurtz
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57136-2004Jan5.html
One ad begins with Adolf Hitler making speeches, until a picture of President Bush appears. Another also uses Nazi and Bush images, with the tag line: "What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003."
The videos appeared on the Web site of MoveOn.org's Voter Fund as part of a nationwide contest for an anti-Bush television ad on which the liberal group plans to spend a considerable sum. The Hitler spots were among more than 1,500 submissions; MoveOn members have selected 15 finalists. The Hitler ads "lost miserably," said Eli Pariser, the fund's campaign director.
Pariser said: "Anyone in the public could submit an ad. We didn't want to censor. If it didn't have big legal problems, we were going to let it through and let our members vote on it." Later, however, Voter Fund President Wes Boyd said the group's officials "deeply regret" that the ads "slipped through our screening process."
The group's guidelines call for "really creative ads" to help viewers "understand the truth about George Bush," he said. "We're not going to post anything that would be inappropriate for television."
The Republican National Committee pounced on the Hitler ads yesterday, posting them online. "This is the worst and most vile form of political hate speech," Chairman Ed Gillespie said, demanding that MoveOn "apologize for posting the ads." Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said that "to compare Hitler to an American president is not only ludicrous, but defames the Holocaust."
Pariser said, "Except for a few hundred people, no one would have seen it if the GOP hadn't picked it up and put it on their Web site."
--------
Information Warfare or Yesterday's News?
Pentagon media contractor loses battle for Iraqi audiences
By Pratap Chatterjee
CorpWatch
January 6, 2004
http://www.corpwatch.org/issues/PID.jsp?articleid=9508
Photo: Cartoonist: Khalil Bendib
http://www.corpwatch.org/upload/article/h-saic.jpg
Zainab Abdul Hameed trudges back from her daily visit to the oil ministry in Baghdad. She is waiting for news on two fronts but has nothing to report today. Her assignment is to check on the electricity situation but she is also waiting to hear if she still has a job.
"No news today, but maybe tomorrow," she tells us cheerfully. Nine months after the ousting of Saddam Hussein, Iraq's basic infrastructure is a shambles despite billions of dollars spent to fix it: Baghdad continues to suffer through ten hours of power cuts a day.
"We are free to report whatever we want," says Hameed. "It's not like under Saddam Hussein when we had to report what the government told us to say."
To get back to work at the Iraqi Media Network's Al Iraqiya radio and television station, run by a California-based multinational named Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), Hameed has to walk through a maze of barbed wire, concrete barricades and three body searches run by the Florida National Guard and ISI, a private Iraqi security company.
Her office is on the third floor of the Baghdad convention center where the United States military holds press conferences about the occupation of her country. The fact that the Al Iraqiya's main office is right above the military is no coincidence - the military is their only funder but the reporters say that the money is about to be cut off.
At the final checkpoint outside the entrance to the corridor of offices that houses Al Iraqiya's offices, she passes a television that is almost always tuned to either Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya, the popular Middle Eastern satellite channels that are their main rivals.
Surveillance for Sale
In the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, 2002, San Diego-based Science Applications International Corporation generated $6.1 billion in revenue and ranked number 294 on the Fortune 500 list of the largest U.S. companies. Founded in 1969 by physicist J. Robert Beyster, formerly a nuclear scientist with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, it is an employee-owned, decentralized company.
The company made a fortune during the dot com boom by buying Network Solutions, the Web domain name keeper, for $4.5 million in 1996 and selling it for $3.1 billion before the bubble popped.
But SAIC's biggest source of income is surveillance especially for the United States spy agencies: it is reportedly the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency (NSA) and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some 5,000 employees (or one in eight employees) have security clearances. Beyster himself has one of the highest top-secret clearances of any civilian in the country.
"We are a stealth company," Keith Nightingale, a former Army special ops officer, told a magazine named Business 2.0. "We're everywhere, but almost never seen."
Today two of SAIC's most valuable products are: TeraText and Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) data-mining programs that are used by intelligence agencies to sift the immense volumes of data they now collect by monitoring phone calls, faxes, e-mails, and other types of electronic communications.
TeraText can process two billion documents every four seconds by identifying patterns and connections between names, terms, and ideas. For example, a CIA analyst might type in a request for all documents mentioning the name "Paris" the word "sleeper," and the term "plane" a possible code for a suicide bombing attack, organize the search by language, by time of day, and instantly retrieve all places in which the terms appeared in, say, a single sentence. LSI uses artificial intelligence that allows it to make judgments for abstract relationships among intercepted texts and public documents, and can find even less distinct patterns.
SAIC became home to former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay who went to SAIC as a vice president from 1993 to 2002. Last year he was hired by the CIA to return to Iraq and head the search for weapons of mass destruction.
Critics note that the company has a revolving door with the spy agencies: NSA veteran William B. Black Jr. retired from the intelligence agency in 1997, went to SAIC for three years and returned to the NSA as deputy director in 2000. Two years later, SAIC won the $282 million job of overseeing the latest phase of Trailblazer, the most thorough revamping in the agency's history of its eavesdropping systems.
SAIC has dozens of other government contracts: it trains air marshals for the Federal Aviation Administration, works with Bechtel to run the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump in Nevada on Western Shoshone traditional lands (despite major protests from the Native Americans), The Army hired the company to destroy old chemical weapons at Aberdeen Proving Ground, the National Cancer Institute uses SAIC to help run its research facility in Frederick, the Transportation Security Administration asked it to dispose of scissors and pocket knives confiscated from air travelers and SAIC's unmanned Vigilante helicopters, equipped with Raytheon's low-cost, precision-kill rockets, are to undergo testing by the Army.
Not all of its surveillance work is for the United States military The company has installed a location-based Global Positioning System tracking service for BellSouth's 14,000 installation and maintenance vehicles and today its latest contract is to run security for the upcoming Athens Olympics from a zeppelin that will hover over the city. "Yesterday's Information"
In the streets of Basra and Baghdad we ask people if they watch Al Iraqiya and the answer is almost invariably no. What is most surprising is that we get the same answer from people who hate Saddam Hussein and support the Americans, almost everybody gets their news from Al Jazeera or Al Arabiya.
"Al Iraqiya has no news. Just yesterday's information," is the common refrain. Chagrined reporters at the Al Iraqiya agree because of strict rules that ban them from reporting material that might incite violence.
Management says that this is simply not true. We meet with Alaa Fa'ik, an Iraqi American from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is the second in command at the Iraqi Media Network. He is dressed casually in a sweater, with short-cropped grey hair and glasses, with a military issued badge on a blue strap hanging round his neck that identifies him as a SAIC employee.
"I am not in competition with Al Jazeera, let them do whatever they want to do. In fact most Iraqis don't have satellite dishes. Those that do found the remote control to be a new toy. Now they are returning to us because they trust us to tell the truth. Freedom has to be exercised with responsibility and we will not allow Saddam Hussein to use this as a platform," he says.
However despite the fact that not everybody can afford a satellite dish, a recent government survey that shows that one in four Iraqis watch Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya compared to less than one in ten for Al Iraqiya.
Fa'ik also denies that the military has stifled their reporting.
"Yes, we are getting money from the Department of Defence. That is from you and me, the taxpayer. Are you reporting the fact that the ministry of education is funded by the United States government, the ministry of health is funded by the United States? I don't understand why when it comes to the media, you say, no, no, no. So who is going to fund it?"
"The United States government took the responsibility of helping Iraq put foundations for democracy and change. So for them to support an independent Iraqi television should be welcomed. Every penny spent on this project has been worthwhile, despite the fact that I work here, really we are going to put an independent television, not controlled by the state. In Iraq, in the Middle East, this is a new concept for a station to be sponsored by the government but independent of the state," he said. New Territory
This "concept" was proposed to the Pentagon in January, two months before the war began. At the time the Pentagon had hired SAIC to run a secret "government in exile" of Iraqi Americans in Virginia to plan the running of the country if Saddam Hussein was ousted. SAIC quickly spun off a committee of five Iraqi-Americans to plan this new media outlet, including Fa'ik.
Critics today point out that SAIC had zero experience in operating either a radio or television station although perhaps the company convinced the government that it had experience in military media management. It's website offers a nine point program of "Information Dominance/Command and Control", starting with 'Battlefield Control' and ending with 'Information Warfare/Information Operations'.
Indeed intelligence experts say that it is the largest recipient of contracts from the National Security Agency and one of the top five contractors to the Central Intelligence Agency, two of the top spy agencies in the United States. (see sidebar)
Following fuzzy TV broadcasts from United States Air Force's EC-130E 'Commando Solo' psyops (psychological operations) planes and the radio broadcasts, IMN went on the air with radio April 10 and television May 13. Faik himself worked on the first radio broadcasts to Southern Iraq from Kuwait.
"For me as an Iraqi American, I am on the two sides of the coin, as an Iraqi, I want the American money. As an American I want to like to help build an independent media, this is a concept that is new to the whole Middle East. This is an experiment, if it succeeds, it is going to set new rules for the media in the Arab world," he told CorpWatch. Internal Frustration
But others who worked for SAIC from the beginning say that the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA, the United States-led occupation government) has caused the experiment to fail. Don North, a correspondent in Vietnam, Washington and the Middle East for ABC and NBC News, called Al Iraqiya "Project Frustration" when he quit in July.
"IMN has become an irrelevant mouthpiece for CPA propaganda, managed news and mediocre programs. I have trained journalists after the fall of tyrannies in Bosnia, Romania and Afghanistan. I don't blame the Iraqi journalists for the failure of IMN. Through a combination of incompetence and indifference, CPA has destroyed the fragile credibility of IMN," he wrote recently.
North says that a $500 request for a satellite dish to downlink the Reuters news feed was refused and a $200 request for printing a training manual that he put together in Arabic for reporters was turned down.
North was not the only senior staffer to quit. The first news director, Ahmad Al Rikaby, proudly told Baghdad Bulletin: "I opened my eyes to a family who were fighting Saddam Hussein and became part of this fight -- I always wanted to speak freely in Iraq but never had a chance to do so. The project of creating free media in Iraq is an honor, a dream." But he too resigned when the CPA re-hired staff troublemakers or Baathists (Saddam Hussein's political party) that he had fired.
Meanwhile those reporters who stayed on were ordered to cover daily CPA news conferences, interviews and photo opportunities while being paid the equivalent of $120 a month, leading to major strikes by the reporters.
Today even the Pentagon appears to have realized that the concept of a military funded independent radio and television station has failed or that SAIC has done a bad job because the rumors among the staff are that they will lose the contract by the end of the month. Military officials deny that they have made a final decision but admit that a major new effort is in the works.
Later this month, the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which oversees all United States non-military propoganda efforts such as the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Free Asia (RFA), Radio and TV Marti, is to launch a new Middle East Network (MEN), with more than $100 million in government funding, which promoters say will resemble CNN, MSNBC and the Discovery Channel.
"We will be on two fronts," Norman J. Pattiz, chairman of the BBG's Middle East committee, told TV Week recently. "We will be on satellite across the Middle East, but will also provide a targeted product that will be available terrestrially only within Iraq, which will focus on Iraq."
The new network, serving 22 countries, will be based in Springfield, Virginia, will initially broadcast 12 to 15 hours a day. It will have a broadcast center in Dubai and news bureaus in Amman, Jordan; Cairo, Egypt; Kuwait City, Kuwait; Baghdad, Iraq; and Jerusalem. It has an arrangement to use the resources and video footage of the Associated Press from the region and around the world.
SAIC has applied to run MEN but most observers think that they are unlikely to get the job given their poor track record after almost a year of planning and operations.
Pratap Chatterjee is Program Director/ Managing Editor of CorpWatch.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
No Word From Bush On Forms in Leak Probe
FBI Tactic Encourages Reporters to Talk
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57169-2004Jan5.html
ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE, Jan. 5 -- White House press secretary Scott McClellan declined to say Monday whether President Bush thinks his aides should sign forms that would release reporters from any pledges of confidentiality regarding the leak of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame.
A senior administration official said investigators have begun asking several Bush aides to sign the FBI forms after the reorganization of the three-month-old probe, to be overseen by U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago instead of by officials at Justice Department headquarters.
The forms could put pressure on White House officials as well as journalists, who would be told that the source wants reporters to answer the FBI's questions rather than assert any journalistic privilege. Time magazine reported that Karl Rove, Bush's senior adviser, was among the recipients of the forms.
McClellan said Bush has directed his aides to "cooperate fully in this investigation." Citing an ongoing investigation, however, he would not say whether the president thinks that extends to signing the forms.
"That's asking a specific question about matters that should be directed to the career officials at the Department of Justice," McClellan said. "The president has always said that leaking classified information is a serious matter, and certainly no one wants to get to the bottom of this more than he does."
The investigation is aimed at pinning down who in the government revealed Plame's identity, which was printed by columnist Robert D. Novak on July 14. The formal investigation began Sept. 30, and Bush has expressed doubt that the leaker will be found, citing the number of people who could fit Novak's description of his source: a "senior administration official."
One government official familiar with such investigations called the forms a "quintessential cover-your-rear-end" move by investigators. "It provides political cover, because you can say you tried everything, and this is a very politically charged environment," the official said. "There's no other value to it."
Staff writer Susan Schmidt in Washington contributed to this report.
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Senator Urges White House on Leak Probe
January 6, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Leak.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Democratic senator called on the White House Tuesday to require staffers to cancel reporter confidentiality agreements so the journalists might tell investigators whether a Bush administration official leaked a CIA operative's name.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan responded to the request, saying, ``It would be unfortunate if people are seeking to politicize a serious matter like leaking classified information for partisan gain.''
In a letter sent to White House chief of staff Andrew Card, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., argued that the White House staff has only ``partially cooperated'' with Justice Department investigators by turning over phone and e-mail records.
Signing confidentiality waiver forms could persuade reporters to disclose their confidential sources, possibly helping investigators find out if an administration official leaked the name of Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA officer, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July.
Plame is married to former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, who has said he thinks his wife's identity was disclosed to discredit his assertions that the administration exaggerated Iraq's nuclear capabilities to build a case for war.
``Professional prosecutors handling the investigation into this national security breach have determined that they would be aided by these waivers of confidentiality,'' Schumer said. ``Full cooperation requires that these staffers comply with this reasonable request from law enforcement.''
McClellan declined to say whether the White House, or he personally, had been asked to release reporters from confidentiality agreements. ``If there are specific requests being made of individuals, we would not necessarily know what those requests are,'' McClellan said.
As he has done for days, McClellan referred specific questions to the Justice Department.
``The White House has done everything it has been asked to do,'' McClellan said. ``The president made it very clear that he wants the White House to cooperate fully in this investigation. If anyone has information relating to the investigation, they should provide that information to the officials in charge.''
Schumer said ``full cooperation'' requires freeing journalists from their obligations to protect their sources. ``I hope you will do so as soon as possible,'' Schumer said in his letter to Card.
Schumer said that in the late 1990s when Republican congressional leaders were looking into whether White House officials were leaking information about members of Congress, then White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles informed news organizations that the White House was waiving all confidentiality rights regarding such leaks.
The senator said that while this would be a positive move, he thinks it would be better if White House staffers signed individual waivers. ``The only way that will happen is if you order it of your employees,'' Schumer said. ``I encourage you to do so in the strongest possible way.''
The FBI has interviewed more than three dozen Bush administration officials. A leaker could be charged with a felony.
Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself last week from the inquiry to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Democrats, including Schumer, had called on Ashcroft to step aside from the investigation. U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald of Chicago, a career prosecutor, is leading the probe.
-------- homeland security
Pilots resist armed officers
January 06, 2004
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093657-6688r.htm
LONDON - British Airways met with pilots yesterday to discuss their objections to the use of armed sky marshals on flights to the United States. As they met, a British Airways flight to Washington was delayed for the third straight day because of U.S.-requested security checks.
The British Association of Air Line Pilots said deploying armed officers on aircraft is likely to endanger lives, and one British charter operator, Thomas Cook Airlines, said it would cancel flights if sky marshals were to be on board.
Like the association, "we want to see captains remain in full control of the aircraft at all times," said a spokesman for the airline, which operates vacation flights to Florida and crosses U.S. airspace en route to the Caribbean.
The pilots association has said it may be willing to accept sky marshals and cockpit restrictions under protest, but it was seeking assurances, including legal and financial indemnity, in case of shootouts.
The association also wants measures saying that pilots will be in command at all times and will know the identities and seating locations of sky marshals.
A spokesman for British Airways, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that "in principle, where appropriate, with agreed procedures in place, we'd be comfortable" with armed sky marshals on aircraft.
U.S. officials have sought to get armed sky marshals deployed on some flights.
British Transportation Minister Alistair Darling, who was to meet with representatives of the pilots association today to discuss the issue, dismissed as "complete rubbish" a suggestion that London-to-Washington flights had been canceled to pressure British Airways into accepting sky marshals.
British Airways Flight BA223 from London's Heathrow Airport to Washington Dulles International Airport was delayed yesterday at the request of U.S. officials.
About 200 passengers sat in the aircraft on the tarmac for more than three hours while the airline awaited clearance from U.S. authorities.
The daily Flight BA223 - one of three that the airline operates each day to Washington - also was canceled Thursday and Friday on government advice and was held up for U.S.-requested checks for three hours on Saturday and Sunday.
Mr. Darling said "exceptional circumstances" relating to security had forced the cancellation of the flights and that most flights were proceeding as usual. Neither the airline nor British officials would provide details of the threat.
-------
U.S. Begins Screening Program for Monitoring Foreign Visitors
January 6, 2004
By ABBY GOODNOUGH and ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/national/06SCRE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
MIAMI, Jan. 5 - United States immigration officers began fingerprinting and photographing tens of thousands of foreign visitors required to have visas on Monday, in what federal authorities described as a sophisticated new security measure to monitor who enters the country and how long they stay.
A total of 115 airports with international flights, including several in Canada, Ireland and the Caribbean with United States customs booths, introduced the extra layer of screening on Monday, along with cruise ship terminals at 14 major seaports. Though the travel industry had feared significant delays as the program got under way, the Department of Homeland Security, which is administering it, said that the problems were minimal and that the procedure added perhaps a minute at most to immigration processing.
The screening program began as American officials remained acutely concerned about potential terrorist threats on foreign airliners, particularly those from Britain. Since Christmas Eve about a dozen flights have been grounded or delayed over fears that terrorists had plotted to commandeer jetliners.
Officials said Monday that they were concentrating on flights between London and Washington as possible targets for terrorists, but that they had concluded that a critical danger period on United States-bound flights from France and Mexico had now passed.
Intelligence leads have pointed to potential attacks "around New Year's and beyond" on British Airways flights between London and Dulles International Airport outside Washington, an administration official said. Those flights were canceled for two straight days last week because of security concerns, and were delayed for a third day on Monday.
An American official said part of the concern over the London-Dulles flights was driven by intercepted communications that contained phrases believed to refer to British Airways Flight 223, the London-Dulles flight that has been the focus of the heaviest American and British security. Last Wednesday, Flight 223 was escorted to Dulles by American fighter planes, and flights on Thursday and Friday were canceled.
Officials said delays and possibly cancellations on the London-Washington route were likely to continue indefinitely.
In contrast, concern has lessened over international flights into Los Angeles from Paris and Mexico City. Those routes, like the London-Washington flights, were the subject of intense concern for much of the last two weeks, but officials said intelligence developed through electronic eavesdropping and other means narrowed the prospect of attacks to the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
American officials said that they believed the fingerprinting program would strengthen border protection over the long haul, but that they did not expect it to have any immediate impact on the recent efforts to deter another terrorist attack since the country went to high alert.
At airports around the country Monday, some international visitors said the additional screening procedures were slowing down customs lines, as inspectors struggled with new digital fingerprint scanners and cameras on tripods.
Citizens of 27 countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and most European nations, are exempted from the program if they are visiting as tourists for fewer than 90 days.
But if citizens of those countries are traveling here on work or student visas, or for more than 90 days, they are subject to the new procedures. They, along with all residents of other countries - about 24 million travelers a year, including some repeat visitors, the Department of Homeland Security said - must be fingerprinted and photographed under the new rules.
Between 5:30 a.m. and 6 p.m. Monday, 27,420 foreigners were fingerprinted and photographed under the new program, department officials said.
"So far it's going well," Robert C. Bonner, the commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said of the program, which the government calls the U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology. "We are going to monitor wait times very closely just to make sure there aren't any extraordinary horrid delays."
The new procedures allow customs officials to immediately verify visitors' identities, check their criminal backgrounds and determine if they are on watch lists of suspected terrorists and other criminals. The photographs of most visitors and fingerprints of some will already be on file from when they applied for visas in their home countries. Eventually, every foreigner subject to the new rules will be electronically fingerprinted before traveling here, said Bill Strassberger, a department spokesman.
In a news conference at Hartsfield International Airport in Atlanta, Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said 21 foreigners were found to be on watch lists in a two-month pilot of the program. Some were using false documents and were wanted for crimes like rape, he said.
On Monday, customs inspectors had found three visitors to be on watch lists as of 6 p.m. But Dennis Murphy, director of communications for the Department of Homeland Security, said that upon further investigation, all three were cleared of suspicion.
In interviews, several dozen visitors arriving at airports around the nation said the new procedures were generally swift. Some, though, including a group of Korean high school students arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, said the new technology made their wait much longer.
"The people that were doing this were confused themselves," said Jae-Yong Kim, 16, who was on his way to the Northfield Mount Hermon School in Northfield, Mass.
Mr. Bonner said the fingerprinting and photographing were supposed to take an extra 10 to 15 seconds, the average time the procedures added in the trial run at Hartsfield International. All customs officials have been trained to use the scanners and cameras, Mr. Strassberger said, and new inspectors are gradually being added to help with the procedures and other new security measures.
Some travelers interviewed said they did not mind and even welcomed the added measures, while others denounced them as an invasion of privacy. Julio Mendoza, a 25-year-old student who was arriving at Miami International Airport from Buenos Aires, said he resented the new procedures, especially after waiting hours to clear security at the airport in Argentina.
"As an international student coming to the United States to better my education, I don't appreciate having my fingerprints recorded and my photograph taken," Mr. Mendoza said as he left customs. "I am not a criminal. I am not a terrorist. I feel like I am being treated as one."
But Holder Kunst, who arrived at Logan International Airport in Boston from Frankfurt, was unfazed.
"It doesn't bother me at all," said Mr. Kunst, 32, a German who runs a marketing company in Boston. He said the digital imaging was surprisingly fast, adding, "It would have bothered me a lot more if it was the old-fashioned fingerprinting, using ink."
The American Civil Liberties Union said Monday that the new procedures would only increase confusion among immigrants who have been bewildered by the many security requirements adopted after the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The new program is "a large privacy violation waiting to happen, with records garnered under the program likely retained even after you've become a citizen," said Timothy Edgar, a legislative counsel for the A.C.L.U.
The Department of Homeland Security said the fingerprints and photographs would be stored in government databases and be available to customs, immigration and law enforcement officials, "only for official business and on a need-to-know basis."
Another new measure, meant to ensure foreigners do not stay longer than their visas allow, will require them to check out at automated airport kiosks, scanning their travel documents and repeating the fingerprint process. The kiosks are to be in place by year's end. A similar program is to be in place at the nation's 156 land-border crossings by the end of 2005. American homeland security officials plan to continue extra security measures on Air France and Aeromexico flights in question, but officials said they expected the flights to operate without interruption. Numerous Air France and Aeromexico flights to Los Angeles were canceled or delayed after the United States raised its risk alert on Dec. 21.
With the New Year's holiday having passed without incident, "things are a little more tempered," an F.B.I. official said. "The anxiety's not as high as it was. The intelligence we're receiving is not as strong as it was before the holiday."
But counterterrorism officials remain concerned that operatives from Al Qaeda or related groups may seek to use means of attack other than airliners or pick a time other than the holiday period.
While some travelers bemoaned the new rules, just as many said they were thankful.
"Any measures America feels it has to take in order to prevent any future terrorist attacks are worth losing a few minutes over," said Gerardo Molina, 54, a lawyer arriving in Miami from Santiago, Chile. "Hopefully the rest of the world will catch on and do the same."
--------
U.S. Taking Photos and Fingerprints Of Visitors
Some Foreigners Face New Policy Upon Arrival
By Sara Kehaulani Goo and Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A57313-2004Jan5?language=printer
The United States began fingerprinting and photographing foreigners arriving at U.S. airports and ports yesterday in an effort to track down wanted criminals and suspected terrorists and identify visitors who overstay visas.
The U.S. Visit program, which debuted at 115 airports and 14 seaports yesterday, aims to keep records on more than 24 million foreigners who enter the United States each year largely from Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. It does not apply to 28 nations, including Japan, Australia, Singapore and many countries in Europe. Under some circumstances, though, citizens from exempt countries are still subject to the new rules.
The program has attracted a wide range of critics. Airports worry that it will exacerbate immigration lines. Civil libertarians raise privacy concerns that the government will use the data for purposes beyond tracking visas and criminals. A Brazilian judge said the system discriminates against certain foreigners and has ordered officials in his country to begin photographing and fingerprinting American visitors.
Some travelers who were fingerprinted and photographed at airports across the country yesterday said the security procedures were swift, and most said they were resigned to the new rules. "I don't really mind," said D.C. resident Salome Nnanga, a native of Ethiopia. "I think it's a very, very good idea to protect the country."
Homeland Security Department Secretary Tom Ridge said yesterday that the U.S. Visit program is the beginning of a larger government effort to better track people crossing U.S. borders.
"I think you're seeing . . . just the first step in a series of steps so we get a fully integrated record of who comes into the country and who leaves," Ridge said on NBC's "Today Show."
Many nations have agreed to a U.S. request to later this year begin phasing in passports encoded with identification details such as a fingerprint and photograph. This summer, the U.S. government plans to launch a vast computer screening program that checks the identity of all airline passengers before departure and color-codes them based on the threat they pose to the aircraft.
The government's big security projects have been targeted by some groups, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, which has launched a major campaign to advertise their concerns about the privacy issues related to the programs.
The U.S. government "is applying a broad, dragnet approach to security that views everyone as a potential terrorist," said Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU. Instead, Edgar said, officials would be better off improving their intelligence and communication networks to focus on the "small number of terrorists who are likely to do us harm."
Customs and Border Protection officials say photographing and fingerprinting foreign passengers will add an estimated 10 to 15 seconds to processing time. Passengers arriving at customs and immigration checkpoints at Dulles International Airport yesterday placed their left and right index fingers on a glass scanner that captured their fingerprints. Then, a digital camera snapped a photo of their faces.
Ruth Gantenbein, an airline passenger traveling on a visa from Switzerland, said she barely knew her picture was being taken and was surprised at how quickly it all went. "If it helps security, it's okay. My name is already in a database," she said. "It wasn't bad at all. Maybe if it was ink, it would be a little different. But I have nothing to hide."
Nishal Ramphal went through immigration in New York, where she was fingerprinted, before heading on to Los Angeles on South African Airlines. "As much I hate to admit it . . . you see some justification for some kind of profiling," said Ramphal, 29. "But it's pretty overt."
Not everyone agreed that the new measures were necessary.
"It's like being a prisoner," said Pedro Quinto, a 26-year-old student from Mexico who arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. "It's really fast but I don't like the idea."
Foreign visitors under age 14 and over age 79 are exempt from the new procedures. Later this year, Homeland Security plans to begin checking photos and fingerprints of foreign travelers before they leave the United States. The system is being tested at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.
Some leaders are skeptical that the U.S. Visit program will do much to improve security. Only 10 percent of foreign visitors will be tracked by the program and foreigners entering the country by land will not be subject to the new scrutiny, according to Rep. Jim Turner (D-Tex.), the ranking member of the House select committee on Homeland Security. "The US VISIT system has potential, but much more needs to be done to make it an effective counterterrorism tool," Turner said in statement.
The $710 million U.S. Visit program was mandated by Congress in 2000 and was accelerated by passage of the USA Patriot Act, which required that the program include passenger fingerprints or other identifying elements. Homeland Security officials said the fingerprints and photographs will make it more difficult for passports to be stolen.
"If we have your information in the system, it protects you as a passenger from someone being able to use your documentation," said Homeland Security spokesman Mike Milne.
Data on foreign passengers will be compared to information in several government databases of criminals and terrorists. Then the State and Homeland Security departments will store it securely and sort it by date of arrival and departure, nationality, and other identifying characteristics.
The information collected will be available to U.S. consular offices, U.S. Customs and Border Protection offices, special agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, staff members who handle adjudications at the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, and, on a need-to-know basis, state and local law enforcement agencies.
Homeland Security privacy officer Nuala O'Connor Kelly said that the agency has not decided how long it will keep the passenger information and that agencies within the department may keep it for different periods.
Airports said they have been pleased with the U.S. Visit program so far, but the American Association of Airport Executives said the government needs to ensure that Customs and Border Protection will provide enough staff to handle the new procedure, especially at peak travel times.
"There's significant concern that if enough people experience enough delays, people are going to just decide not to come," said Todd Hauptli, an airports lobbyist in Washington.
Staff writers Steven Gray, Kimberly Edds in Los Angeles and Kari Lydersen in Chicago contributed to this report.
--------
Pilots and Officials in Europe Balk at Push for Guns on Jets
January 6, 2004
By HEATHER TIMMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/national/06PILO.html
LONDON, Jan. 5 - Pilots unions and some transportation officials across Europe are balking at the Department of Homeland Security's demand that flights into the United States carry armed sky marshals, refusing to let guns on planes in some cases or to fly aboard flights needing sky marshals.
Government authorities in Denmark, Sweden and Portugal have said in recent days that they will not let armed guards on planes at this time, though they may change their minds in the future. Some pilots unions, meanwhile, have condemned the order, saying it should never have been issued without agreement from other aviation authorities.
"In principle, our regulations do not allow any sort of firearms on board, and therefore, for now, we have no plans to put air marshals on planes flown by Portuguese carriers," Joaquim Carvalho, head of security for the country's civil aviation body, INAC, said in a telephone interview from Lisbon. Instead, the agency would prefer to increase security measures on the ground before considering air marshals or canceling flights, Mr. Carvalho said.
The Swedish Civil Aviation Administration has agreed to cancel flights that the United States authorities see as being enough of a security risk to require an armed guard, said Jan Lindqvist, an agency spokesman in a telephone interview from Stockholm. Denmark's transport minister, Flemming Hansen, said he would negotiate with the United States authorities about additional security measures at airports, but that he would not authorize armed guards. That is "a very bad idea," he told The Copenhagen Post.
In Britain, where handguns are illegal and even most police officers are not armed, the idea has been particularly unpopular. British pilots seemed to have cemented an agreement with British Airways during a meeting on Monday that could thwart the United States demand on the country's largest airline. The union was "pleased to note that it remains B.A.'s intention not to operate a flight where there is a cause for concern," the union's general secretary, Jim McAuslan, said in a statement after the meeting. The British government has previously said that it will allow a sky marshal on a flight only when there is a specific threat.
On Tuesday, the British union will meet with Alistair Darling, Britain's transport secretary, to discuss the sky marshal plan.
The International Federation of Airline Pilots' Association, a global union for pilots, has been another critic. The Department of Homeland Security's demand is "is an unacceptable use of government authority," the union said in a statement on Sunday. The union said the decision was ill-thought out, insensitive to local attitudes toward firearms, and potentially counterproductive.
Unions are particularly concerned that undercover sky marshals could be put on planes without their knowledge, and that planes' captains would no longer have authority during flights. They are asking that pilots and crews be given the choice not to fly on planes that have marshals.
Some transportation officials who immediately opposed the measure said their attitudes could change in the future. "Faced with a concrete situation of a heightened risk on a specific flight - for example, a TAP flight from Lisbon to New York - we would have to weigh the other two possibilities: cancellation or putting marshals on board," the Portuguese official, Mr. Carvalho, said. "But we would have to ponder the risk very carefully."
Tony Smith contributed reporting from Portugal for this article.
-------- internet
AOL to Add Spyware Detection to Service
January 6, 2004
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/technology/06spy.html
America Online will give its customers built-in software to detect and remove "spyware," hidden tools that can monitor Web surfers' online habits for marketing purposes, company executives said yesterday.
The AOL move, which is to be announced today, steps up a battle between consumers and makers of so-called adware and spyware, which have become increasingly popular marketing tools for advertisers seeking to reach Internet users in a variety of ways that many consider unduly intrusive.
The spyware-removal program that AOL will use is made by another company, Aluria Software. It will be bundled with the next version of AOL's software, which will be released soon. AOL customers using older software will be able to download the program separately, executives said.
The AOL software will work automatically on the customer's computer, scanning it once a week and identifying the adware and spyware packages it finds, the company said. Users will then decide whether they want to remove the products.
"We're trying to inform and empower the consumer," said Jeff Kimball, vice president for new products at AOL, which is a unit of Time Warner. "If you want it, that's your choice. If you don't, here's a simple and easy way to get it out of your life."
Jerry Grasso, a spokesman for Earthlink, a competitor to AOL, said the company welcomed the initiative. "We applaud any Internet service provider that's trying to help their customers better protect their Internet experience," he said. "We, of course, did it last quarter."
Earthlink's software, however, must be activated by users.
Microsoft's MSN operation offers spyware protection as part of its security software for subscribers to its premium online services, a spokesman for the company said.
Microsoft will also offer "baseline" spyware detection tools in the next upgrade, or service pack, for its Windows XP operating system.
The AOL announcement could affect the business of companies that sell antispyware products, but the top executive of one company said he was not concerned.
"It's nice to see big players taking spyware seriously," said Ed English, the chief executive of Intermute, which makes products to detect and remove adware and spyware.
"I think this will help educate the public," he said, "that there is a serious threat out there affecting their computers."
But Mr. English added that he thought scanning on a weekly basis, as AOL is planning, might not be effective against spyware.
"If you wait a week,'' he said, "your information has already been taken, and sent out on the Internet."
At least one online advertising company said that the AOL move would not interfere with its business. Avi Naider, the chief executive of WhenU, said that he did not know whether his company's software would be picked out by AOL.
He said, however, that his company disclosed its practices and already gave consumers, who receive free software and offers of deals in return for viewing ads, the ability to remove the software.
Nearly 100 million people have WhenU software on their machines, Mr. Naider said.
"We're very confident that this type of product will not have a significant effect," he said. "I cannot say the same for other companies that do not abide by the standards we have set in the marketplace."
-------- justice
Why Did Attorney General Ashcroft Remove Himself From The Valerie Plame Wilson Leak Investigation?
Signs that a Key Witness May Have Come Forward
By JOHN W. DEAN
Tuesday, Jan. 06, 2004
Findlaw
http://writ.news.findlaw.com/dean/20040106.html
Recently, Attorney General John Ashcroft removed himself from the investigation into who leaked the identity of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson. Since the announcement, there has been considerable speculation as to why this occurred, and what it means.
Some think the move suggests the inquiry will be scuttled -- and Ashcroft is ducking out early to avoid the heat. But that seems unlikely. The new head of the investigation, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, is a high profile, well-respected U.S. Attorney, who runs one of the more important offices in the country, Chicago's. Fitzgerald is also a close friend of Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who announced his appointment. It seems unlikely that Fitzgerald was brought in merely to kill the case.
Others believe that Ashcroft's decision to remove himself suggests that the investigation must be focusing on people politically close to Ashcroft, and that Ashcroft thus pulled out because he knew he would be criticized whatever he did. That is certainly possible.
But as I will explain, I have a slightly different take on what has occurred and why. Here is what the latest positioning of the tea leaves tells me.
The Recent Progress of the Plame Investigation
All signs indicate that the Plame leak investigation has been gaining steam.
As readers may recall, it was in a July 14 column that journalist Robert Novak revealed that Valerie Plame Wilson was a CIA covert agent. As I discussed in a prior column, the leak is potentially a felony, and could violate several laws.
According to The Washington Post, on December 23, minority leader Thomas Daschle, and the ranking Democrat of the Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, sent Ashcroft a letter. The letter demanded a status report on the Plame investigation, and urged the appointment of a special counsel. So Democrats have kept the heat on, but that does not strike me as the probable reason for Ashcroft's decision.
On December 26, the Post reported that the investigation was, in fact, gaining momentum, and the Justice Department had added a fourth prosecutor "specializing in counterintelligence" (which I translate as meaning he had all the security clearances needed to work on a case like this). It also reported that "FBI agents have told people they have interviewed that they may be asked to testify before a grand jury." Empanelling a grand jury empowers prosecutors both to serve subpoenas, and to gather testimony under oath.
On December 30, Deputy Attorney General Comey held a press conference to announce that Ashcroft had removed himself from the investigation. Comey said that the investigation would instead be headed by Fitzgerald. Of note to me, was Comey's comment that "this has come together really in the last week" -- meaning, apparently, the week of December 22-26 -- the Christmas holiday week during which the FBI raised the prospect of a grand jury.
As Comey explained, given Fitzgerald's U.S. Attorney status -- which will be continuing concurrent with his "special counsel" status -- there will be no interruption in the investigation. Comey noted that if Fitzgerald "needs to issue a subpoena involving the media, for example, or if he wants to grant immunity to somebody," he will not have to obtain approval of the Justice Department. (The reference to the media certainly hints at subpoenaing Novak's phone records, or calling him before the grand jury -- again suggesting progress in the inquiry.)
On January 2, NBC News reported that the FBI was focusing on the White House as the probable source of the leak. It also reported that the FBI had asked White House staffers "to sign a form releasing reporters from any promises of confidentiality they may have made to their sources."
Not only does none of this activity indicate an investigation that is being scuttled, but it clearly implies something noteworthy has happened in the investigation.
The New Phase Of the Investigation
Not wanting to hype the situation, all Comey said was that Ashcroft withdrew because, in an "abundance of caution," he "believed that his recusal was appropriate based on the totality of the circumstances and the facts and evidence developed at this stage of the investigation." He added later in the press conference that the "recusal is not one of actual conflict of interest that arises normally when someone has a financial interest or something. The issue that he was concerned about was one of appearance."
What facts would raise a serious questions of the appearance of a conflict of interest here? I'd bet that the investigation is focusing on at least one target whom Ashcroft knows more than casually, or works with regularly. After all, Novak did identify his sources as two "senior Administration officials."
What explains the timing of Ashcroft's removal? Recall that the removal occurred as a result of events occurring in the same week the Post reported that the FBI had told potential witnesses they might have to face a grand jury.
Some of those witnesses very probably hired lawyers as soon as they heard the news. Especially likely to hire a lawyer would be a middle-level person with knowledge of a leak by a higher-up. And such a lawyer would likely have gone immediately to the prosecutors to make a deal.
Who might the lawyer be? It's pure speculation, but former D.C. United States Attorney Joe diGenova, or his wife and law partner, Victoria Toensing, are likely candidates. Toensing, as chief counsel of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence worked on one of the laws that may have been violated -- the law protecting the identities of undercover agents. Who better to defend a leaker who might be subject to a law, than the person who drafted the law?
Moreover, Toensing was quoted in a recent Washington Post story explaining that it is possible that any leak "could be embarrassing but not illegal" -- suggesting that a leaker might have a possible defense. (Unfortunately for the leaker, however, as I noted in an earlier column, more than one law may have been broken.)
When the lawyer -- diGenova, Toensing, or someone else -- went to the government seeking immunity for his or her client, Ashcroft would have heard that the middle-level person was offering to finger the high-level leaker. At that point, he would have realized he himself knew the high-level leaker; and decided to recuse himself from the case, and let Fitzgerald take over.
After all, as Comey pointed out at the press conference announcing Fitzgerald's appointment, Fitzgerald -- as a U.S. Attorney -- would not have to consult with anyone at the Justice Department before making an immunity deal. Accordingly, Fitzgerald could "flip" the middle-level person -- offering him or her immunity to testify against his or her superior -- without the permission, or even knowledge, of Comey, let alone Ashcroft.
If There Is a Knowledgeable Witness, What Next?
If there is a witness willing to testify against one -- or both -- of the leakers in exchange for immunity, what then? It seems likely that Fitzgerald will move very quickly to find out if there is indeed a case to be made against the leakers. To bolster his case, he may call Novak and others to the grand jury or, as noted above, subpoena Novak's (and others') phone records over the relevant period. Even Ashcroft himself could in theory be called to the grand jury.
If this case does not make headlines in 90 to 120 days, it will be quite surprising. There has been too much high level action and Comey, a presidential appointee, knows that politically it would be better for Bush & Company to have the matter flushed out within the next few months, than to have it arise just before the November election. Needless to say, this could be an interesting year for the White House, with more than reelection to worry about.
-------- police
Police to Guard 12 City Schools Cited as Violent
January 6, 2004
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/nyregion/06SCHO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
A task force of 150 police officers will help impose order on 12 of New York City's most violent schools under an initiative announced yesterday by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to curb school violence.
Together, the 12 schools enroll less than 3 percent of the city's 1.1 million schoolchildren. But through Nov. 30, they accounted for 13 percent of serious crimes reported this school year and 11 percent of all incidents in the city schools, officials said.
The list of schools, compiled over the winter break by the Department of Education, the Police Department and the teachers' and principals' unions, includes 10 high schools and two middle schools, concentrated in Brooklyn and the Bronx. Poverty rates at the schools range from below 20 percent at Canarsie High School in Brooklyn to nearly 90 percent at Junior High School 22, the Jordan L. Mott School, in the Bronx.
"For too long, we've slowly found ourselves sinking further and further into a pit where anything is tolerated, where the teachers don't have a safe environment, where the teachers can't do their job and the students can't learn," Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference at City Hall. "We brought crime down in the city; everybody said it couldn't be done. There's no reason why we can't bring crime down in the schools."
The Department of Education has been under intense pressure from the teachers' and principals' unions to address the issue of school violence, and union leaders praised Mr. Bloomberg's action yesterday. But the mayor took on the issue only after reports that the suspension system had broken down in the course of his restructuring of the school system and that, as a result, violent students were languishing in the very hallways and classrooms where their offenses occurred.
City officials said the 12 schools named yesterday were trouble spots last year, when they had on average six times as many assaults as other city middle and high schools and nearly seven times as many weapons incidents. Their attendance rates are below average and their suspension rates are generally above average, although officials said that in some cases, low suspension rates prompted concerns. Several of the schools are severely overcrowded.
In about a month, Mr. Bloomberg said, the Police Department will create the task force, which will initially focus on the 12 schools. The schools, which he called impact schools, will also get more unarmed school safety officers, he said. In the meantime, each school received one or two additional police officers, and yesterday, the schools were flooded with other officers from existing police task forces.
The mayor made little mention of cost, saying only that no resources would be pulled from other schools. "Anything we do to help these schools is going to be done with incremental resources, and I'll find ways to pay for it," he said.
Edwin Diaz, 14, a freshman at one of the 12 schools, Washington Irving High School in Manhattan, said he and other students were called into an auditorium yesterday and were informed of the new security measures by a school safety officer.
"He said it's going to be like a police precinct in here from now on," Edwin said. He did not object.
"It's necessary because there are people who bring weapons to school," he said. "It's not a safe environment."
As soon as the list of schools was released, it generated questions about how they were selected.
In a telephone conference call, Deputy Mayor Dennis M. Walcott and John Feinblatt, the city's criminal justice coordinator, described a fluid list that would change with time. All 12 schools were among the 15 percent with the most incidents this year, last year or both, they said. Within that larger group, schools were chosen based on other, qualitative factors.
City officials offered these examples:
ĥAt South Shore High School in Brooklyn, there have been 10 reported robberies this year, more than three times as many as last year during the same period. The number of assaults nearly doubled, to 22.
ĥAt Adlai E. Stevenson High School in the Bronx, there were 14 assaults, up 55 percent over the same period last year, and the number of suspensions, 142.4 per 1,000 students, is far higher than the citywide high school average of 55.5 per 1,000.
ĥAt Far Rockaway High School in Queens, the suspension rate of 198 students per 1,000 is almost four times the citywide high school average. This year, there have been twice as many low-level incidents, particularly marijuana possession and disorderly conduct, as last year by this time.
Starting today, teams including police captains and Education Department supervisors will examine the 12 schools to suggest other changes.
For the schools, being placed on the list was a black mark, even as it offered a promise of relief.
Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, for instance, was placed on the list largely because it is severely overcrowded this year and had severe problems last year, when there were 23 felony and misdemeanor assaults, according to information provided by the city.
A Columbus official objected to the school's placement on the list but said the school was trying to put a "positive spin" on things.
"We're getting additional staffing that we've been asking for all year long," the official said.
Nonetheless, being on the list stung. "You never want to be on a bad list," the official said.
Officials cautioned against labeling the 12 schools the city's most dangerous.
Mr. Bloomberg also gave more detail yesterday about citywide school safety measures that he touched upon in December. From now on, he said, students who seriously injure others or are caught with weapons will be removed from school immediately and placed in a Second Opportunity School, he said. The department, he said, will also push to have students who have been suspended three times removed from their schools permanently and placed elsewhere.
At the news conference, Mr. Bloomberg was joined by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and others, including Ernest Logan, a vice president of the principals' union, and Randi Weingarten, the head of the teachers' union.
Ms. Weingarten called the initiative "a good step," describing the 12 schools as "very good schools" to start focusing on. But in a telephone interview later in the day, she said she would have preferred to see as many as 30 schools on the list.
She added: "During the break, there was more consultation about what the first impact schools should be than I've ever had with this administration. That says to me that they're taking it seriously."
At Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn, which city officials said showed a major increase in low-level incidents like disorderly conduct as well as assaults, reaction to the increased security was mixed.
Andrew McFarlane, 17, said he was `kind of uncomfortable' with the increased police presence.
"Every move you make, you feel like you're being watched," he said.
Faris Ahmad, 16, said that while it was embarrassing to have the school on the list, the increased security "makes me feel very safe."
"I'm totally with it," Faris said.
Stephen Fanti, a social studies teacher who has worked at Sheepshead Bay for 17 years, said he hoped the mayor's initiative would help.
"There are too many students in an uncontrolled environment," Mr. Fanti said. "I love the school and I'd like to see the problems resolved. I'd like to get off that list."
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Requests Secrecy In 9/11 Detainee's Case
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 6, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57164-2004Jan5.html
The Bush administration yesterday asked the Supreme Court to let it keep its arguments secret in a case involving an immigrant's challenge of his treatment after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel wants the court to consider whether the government acted improperly by secretly jailing him after the attacks and keeping his legal fight secret. He is supported by more than 20 journalism organizations and media companies.
Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson told justices in a one-paragraph filing that "this matter pertains to information that is required to be kept under seal."
Justices sometimes are asked to keep parts of cases private because of national security concerns or other reasons, but it is unusual for an entire filing to be kept secret.
The court will decide later whether to consider Bellahouel's appeal and at the same time whether to allow the secret filing. Justices will be able to review the government's private arguments.
Bellahouel, an Algerian waiter who worked in Florida, came under scrutiny because hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi dined where he worked before the Sept. 11 attacks.
He was among hundreds of foreigners detained after the hijackings. The government has refused to release names and other information on them, citing national security concerns.
Lower courts kept the existence of the case secret. Bellahouel, who is free on $10,000 bond, is known in court papers only as M.K.B. Because of a mistake at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit in Atlanta, records in the case were briefly made public. A Miami legal newspaper reported Bellahouel's identity and said that he was released after five months, and after he had been taken to Alexandria, Va., to testify before a federal grand jury.
The case is M.K.B. v. Warden, 03-6747.
-------- terrorism
C.I.A. Says Newest Audiotape Is Probably From bin Laden
January 6, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/politics/06TAPE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - The Central Intelligence Agency said Monday that the latest tape-recorded message that purports to be from Osama bin Laden was probably authentic.
The audiotape, broadcast Sunday on the Arabic-language satellite channel Al Jazeera, referred to recent events, including the Dec. 13 capture of Saddam Hussein. The judgment that the voice on the tape was probably that of Mr. bin Laden provides the latest indication that the leader of Al Qaeda is still alive, after more than two years in which he has been the target of an American-led manhunt.
The C.I.A. opinion was based on a technical analysis, an agency official said, and is consistent with other judgments in recent months that have authenticated earlier messages purporting to be from Mr. bin Laden.
Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said in a CBS television interview on Monday that "preliminary assessments says this is the voice of Osama bin Laden."
In the latest message, the speaker believed to be Mr. bin Laden urged Muslims to keep fighting a holy war in the Middle East, and he denounced the American-led war in Iraq as the beginning of an "occupation" of Persian Gulf states for their oil.
The speaker urged Muslims to "continue the jihad to check the conspiracies that are hatched against the Islamic nation."
Al Jazeera broadcast some 17 minutes of the audiotape while showing a still photograph of Mr. bin Laden. Besides mentioning Mr. Hussein's capture, the message referred to recent developments in the quest for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
"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. He also denounced "the deceptions of the road map and the Geneva initiative," references to efforts by the United States and the Europeans to promote an Israeli-Palestinian peace.
In the last year, at least a half-dozen messages purporting to be from Mr. bin Laden have been broadcast or published by Arabic-language media. All have called on his followers to continue their efforts to combat the United States and its allies in the Arab world, whom Mr. bin Laden assails as infidels.
Since the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, which were carried out by his followers, Mr. bin Laden has used videotaped and audiotaped messages as his main avenue of communication with the outside world. In the past, American officials have expressed concern that some of the messages may contain encoded language instructing followers to carry out particular terrorist attacks or other action.
--------
Letter Bombs Sent to Europe Aides
January 6, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/international/europe/06LETT.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, Jan. 5 - Letter bombs sent from Bologna, Italy, exploded Monday in the offices of two senior members of the European Parliament - one British and one German - but no one was hurt.
At least one other suspicious letter was seized in Brussels, said Alison Suttie, a press officer for the president of the European Parliament.
Officials speculated that the explosions were related to a series of letter bombs sent from Bologna to European officials and organizations late last month. They were sent to Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, and to Jean-Claude Trichet, the head of the European Central Bank. Europol, the European Union police agency, and Eurojust, a crime-fighting agency, received nearly identical bombs.
The first one to explode Monday had been sent to Brussels to Hans-Gert Pöttering, the German head of the European People's Party. It caught fire, but no one was hrut.
A second letter bomb was later opened by a staff member in the Manchester office of Gary Titley, the leader of the Labor Party in the European Parliament.
Ms. Suttie said all three letters were postmarked Dec. 22.
A third letter, which failed to explode, was sent to a Spanish deputy of the European People's Party, José Ignacio Salafranca Sánchez-Neyra.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Volkswagen, ADM team up to develop biodiesel fuel
REUTERS USA:
January 6, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23321/story.htm
CHICAGO - Automaker Volkswagen AG (VOWG.DE: Quote, Profile, Research) and grain processor Archer Daniels Midland (ADM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) yesterday said they formed research venture to develop and use biodiesel fuels for the auto industry.
Biodiesel refers to fuel mixtures made by combining diesel petroleum with soybean oil or other vegetable oils and fats.
Biodiesel, which can power conventional diesel engines, substantially reduces emissions of carbon monoxide and particulate matter, the companies said in a statement.
The pact is the first between one of the world's leading automakers and a global agribusiness company to develop next-generation clean renewable fuels, they said.
"This agreement represents Volkswagen's commitment to introducing clean burning and renewable fuels into the automotive industry," said Bernd Pischetsrieder, chairman of the board of management of Volkswagen AG.
ADM Chairman and Chief Executive G. Allen Andreas said: "Advances in biodiesel will benefit the automotive industry, the driving public, farmers and the environment as a whole."
Volkswagen is one of the world's largest producers of passenger cars and Europe's largest automaker. ADM is the largest U.S. producer of corn-based ethanol and the largest U.S. processor of soybeans, the main source of biodiesel.
Biodiesel has become the fastest growing alternative fuel in the United States, largely without incentives, but it is still more costly than petroleum diesel, according to the National Biodiesel Board.
The United States currently consumes about 20 million gallons of biodiesel each year, up from 500,000 gallons in 1999. More than 350 fleets, ranging from school buses to military installations to National Parks, now use biodiesel.
A report prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture concluded that an additional 100 million gallons of biodiesel demand would increase revenue for U.S. soybean farmers by more than $112 million, NBB said.
A tax incentive of one penny per percentage point of blended biodiesel was included in the latest U.S. energy bill that stalled in the U.S. Congress last November.
-------- energy
US energy secy heading to Asia on 4-nation trip
REUTERS USA:
January 6, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23328/story.htm
WASHINGTON - U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham leaves for Japan on Tuesday for his first stop on a four-nation Asian trip to hold energy security talks.
Abraham will travel to Tokyo and Osaka, Japan; Beijing; Manila, Philippines, and Sydney and Melbourne, Australia.
He will meet with his counterparts and U.S. industry representatives to promote U.S. Energy Department initiatives.
In Tokyo, Abraham will hold discussions on energy security, investment, technology and nuclear development with Senior Vice Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Gioji Sakamoto along with other senior government officials and Toshiba Corp. (6502.T: Quote, Profile, Research) Chairman Taizo Nishimuro.
He will also address Japan's major industrial association, the Keidanran, and meet with U.S. business executives in Japan. While in Osaka, Abraham will meet with the chairman of the Federation of Electric Power Companies, Yohsaku Fuji, to discuss restructuring electricity markets and investment in energy infrastructure.
In Beijing, Abraham will meet with Vice Premier Zeng Peiyan and will hold talks with Science and Technology Minister Xu Guanhua, National Development Reform Commission Chairman Ma Kai, and the chairman of China's Atomic Energy Authority, Zhang Huazhu.
He will also cohost the opening of a U.S.-China energy efficient demonstration building, sign the Beijing Olympic Protocol, and tour a nature reserve, funded by ConocoPhillips (COP.N: Quote, Profile, Research) .
In the Philippines, Abraham will meet with President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and with Philippine Energy Secretary Vincente Perez to commemorate the joint Department of Energy, U.S. AID and Philippine Department of Energy program to promote the use of cleaner-burning fuels in vehicles and to promote reforms of the power sector.
In Australia, Abraham will join Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources Ian McFarlane and leaders of Australian liquefied natural gas companies to discuss expanding natural gas trade between the U.S. and Australia and removing barriers to increased LNG commercial opportunities.
He will also meet with Environment and Heritage Minister David Kemp and participate with him in the Hydrogen, Renewable Energy and Business in Climate Action Partnership Roundtable.
-------- environment
Earth's magnetic field is fading
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Environment News Network
By Suzanne Ubick and Kathleen M. Wong, California Academy of Sciences
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-06/s_11634.asp
Earth may be headed for one of its periodic polar flips, which could lead to the reorientation of compasses within the next few thousand years. Scientists reported at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco that Earth's magnetic field has been fading since the mid-19th century. A 10 percent weakening in the planet's magnetism over the last 150 years has reduced the field's protective effect against cosmic radiation and damaged satellites in low orbit. Earth's previous field flips appear to have had few effects on life. The researchers expect the field to disappear almost completely within the next 1,500 years before it reemerges in the opposite direction. The last flip occurred about a million years ago. The flip could cause short-term damage to the ozone layer, but should not present a serious threat to Earth's inhabitants. Scientists caution that long-term changes, including lulls, in the strength of the magnetic shield are normal, and that it may yet return to full force.
----
Tribal ways clash with agribusiness
January 06, 2004
By Michael Astor
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040105-093632-4077r.htm
QUERENCIA, Brazil - The paved highway petered out more than 100 miles back, but roadside billboards still sprout across a landscape of interminable green fields, proclaiming the presence of multinational agribusiness giants like Cargill and Bunge.
In town, ranchers in cowboy hats, recently transplanted from Brazil's prosperous south, rub shoulders with Amazon Indians as streams of tractor-trailers kick up dust hauling fertilizer in and huge tree trunks out.
Nowhere is the double-edge thrust of soybeans more apparent than in this dusty boomtown on the rain forest's southern edge.
"The farmers are cutting down everything to make way for soy, and that's good business for me," said Ivo de Lima, a lumber man who moved here recently.
But to the horror of environmental activists, soybeans are claiming increasingly bigger swaths of rain forest. The Amazon lost some 10,000 square miles of forest cover last year alone - 40 percent more than the previous year.
"After cattle ranching, soybeans are the main driver of Amazon destruction," said Roberto Smeraldi of Friends of the Earth Brazil.
With soybean prices at a five-year high thanks to a smaller-than-expected crop this year in the United States, Brazilian farmers are rushing into the jungle to take advantage of cheap land.
The front line of the soybean advance is in Querencia, a municipality of nearly 6,800 square miles that includes the Xingu National Park - a near pristine slice of rain forest where 14 Indian tribes live in much the way they have for thousands of years.
Indians say the soybean boom is beginning to change all that.
"The soy is arriving very fast. Every time I leave the reservation, I don't recognize anything anymore because the forest keeps disappearing," said Ionaluka, a director of the Xingu Indian Land Association.
The area around Xingu lost about 500 square miles of forest last year.
Indians fear deforestation will dry up the rivers that run through the Xingu reservation and the chemicals used to keep lizards and insects off crops will poison their fish.
There is no evidence that deforestation is drying up the Xingu River or that pesticides have killed a single fish, but the Indians say the soybean boom is just starting and they want to protect themselves before it's too late.
"Our Xingu is not just what's here. It's a very long thread, and when it rains the soy brings venom down the same river that passes by our door," said Jywapan Kayabi, a chief at the Capivara Indian village.
Mr. Kayabi said the effects of deforestation are apparent in the region's rivers. In 1994, a large deforestation project 200 miles away muddied waterways, making it impossible to fish in the traditional way with bow and arrows.
Satellite photos reveal that the southern half of the 10,800-square-mile reservation is almost completely surrounded by farm fields.
Environmentalists fear that is a picture of the Amazon's future.
Soybean producers are lobbying to pave roads through the jungle, and Cargill recently opened a major port in the Amazon River city of Santarem.
Critics say that if left unchecked, soybean cultivation eventually will eat up large swaths of rain forest and wreck the environment.
Gov. Blairo Maggi of Mato Grosso state, who also is one of the world's largest soybean producers, calls those fears unfounded. He says damage can be kept to a minimum if the state's strict environmental rules are followed, and he says environmental groups have created unnecessary worry.
"Behind the environmental concerns are economic interests," Mr. Maggi said. "They are trying to impede or slow the growth of Brazilian production."
Mr. Maggi said that ideally 40 percent of his state's 349,807 square miles will be devoted to agriculture and 60 percent will be preserved.
The state does have strict environmental regulations as well as Brazil's most advanced system for monitoring and preventing Amazon forest destruction, but critics question whether they will be enforced. The state remains Brazil's leader in agricultural burning and forest fires.
Brazil's federal environment minister, Marina Silva, says soybean production doesn't have to spell the end of the rain forest.
"In Mato Grosso alone there are 12 million acres of abandoned land," Mrs. Silva said. "You just make an effort to intensively use those areas that are already devastated and avoid advancing into areas that still have forest cover."
--------
3 Top Enforcement Officials Say They Will Leave E.P.A.
January 6, 2004
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/politics/06EPA.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 5 - Three top enforcement officials at the Environmental Protection Agency have resigned or retired in the last two weeks, including two lawyers who were architects of the agency's litigation strategy against coal-burning power plants.
The timing of the departures and comments by at least one of the officials who is leaving suggest that some have left out of frustration with the Bush administration's policy toward enforcement of the Clean Air Act.
"The rug was pulled out from under us," said Rich Biondi, who is retiring as associate director of the air enforcement division of the agency. "You look around and say, `What contribution can I continue to make here?' and it was limited."
Cynthia Bergman, a spokeswoman for the agency, said of the departures, "This is an office of several hundred employees - and to have one political appointee and two career employees leave is not indicative of unrest or departmentwide frustration."
In August, the administration changed air pollution rules to give utility companies more leeway to modernize their power plants without having to upgrade their pollution control equipment. That change prompted the agency's enforcement division to drop investigations into about 50 power plants for suspected violations of the Clean Air Act. Last month, however, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked the administration from enforcing the new air pollution rules.
The head of the agency's enforcement division, J. P. Suarez, announced his resignation on Monday to take a job as general counsel at a division of Wal-Mart, Sam's Club, in Arkansas. Mr. Suarez has been at the agency for 18 months. The E.P.A. announced in November that it was going to suspend investigations into utilities after the administration loosened the sections of the Clean Air Act that govern aging coal-burning power plants.
In the last two weeks, Bruce Buckheit, the head of air enforcement division, and Mr. Biondi, his deputy, who had worked at the agency since 1971, retired.
The two, who took a buyout offered to senior agency employees, join other top enforcement lawyers who have resigned or retired. Eric Schaeffer, the former head of civil enforcement, resigned in spring 2002 with a scathing letter criticizing the administration's enforcement of the Clean Air Act. Sylvia K. Lowrance, the acting assistant administrator for enforcement and a career enforcement official, retired in August 2002.
"We will see more resignations in the future as the administration fails to enforce environmental laws," Ms. Lowrance said.
Mr. Suarez said on Monday in an interview, "While Bruce and Rich bring tremendous experience to their job, we are blessed with talent that will pick up where they left off."
Mr. Buckheit is considered a driving force behind the agency's pursuit of utilities that started in the Clinton administration.
"It is a huge loss for clean air enforcement as Bruce was one of the most energetic and passionate Clean Air lawyers in the country," said Peter Lehner, the head of environmental litigation for the New York attorney general's office, which has joined in several of the lawsuits against power plants.
The suits used a once-obscure provision of the Clean Air Act, known as new source review, which says that power plants, refineries and other industrial boilers had to install pollution controls if they modernized in ways that increased emissions generally. But "routine maintenance was exempt." The power companies protested the suits, saying the Clinton administration was misinterpreting the law.
Nonetheless, Mr. Buckheit had reached agreements with some electric companies, including Virginia Electric Power and Cinergy, by 2000. Many other negotiations stalled, however, after the Bush administration came into office.
Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force urged the administration to study industry complaints about federal enforcement actions. Last summer, Virginia Electric Power, now known as Dominion Power, completed an agreement to install $1.2 billion in pollution controls.
Mr. Suarez joined the E.P.A. in 2002. Before, he had been director of the New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement.
--------
Key EPA Official Resigns
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 6, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57095-2004Jan5.html
The Environmental Protection Agency's chief enforcement officer announced yesterday that he will leave office later this month, marking the latest in a series of departures by senior regulatory enforcement officials from the agency.
John Peter Suarez, the EPA's assistant administrator for enforcement and compliance assurance, said he is resigning to take a job as general counsel to a division of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. His departure comes at time of uncertainty and turmoil in the agency's enforcement division.
In November, the Bush administration said it would close pending investigations of 70 power plants suspected of violating the Clean Air Act, following the EPA's August decision to ease enforcement rules. Then, late last month, a federal appeals court blocked the administration from implementing the new rules, which would allow aging coal-fired power plants to upgrade their facilities without installing costly anti-pollution equipment.
The effort to soften enforcement rules has been controversial within the EPA and was a factor in the resignations of several career senior enforcement officials, including Eric Schaeffer and Sylvia Lowrance. Just last month, Bruce Buckheit and Rich Biondi of the air enforcement division retired from their posts.
Suarez, 39, a former New Jersey gaming enforcement official and prosecutor who came in with former EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, said his resignation was prompted by "a great job opportunity" and had nothing to do with dissatisfaction with administration policies. He said Mike Leavitt, the new EPA administrator, had encouraged him to stay.
Suarez also said the agency last year achieved "dramatic increases in environmental and public health benefits" through enforcement efforts.
-------- genetics
In Stem-Cell Law, Supporters See Opportunity for New Jersey
January 6, 2004
By LAURA MANSNERUS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/06/nyregion/06STEM.html
TRENTON, Jan. 5 - A bill authorizing research using stem cells from human embryos, signed into law on Sunday by Gov. James E. McGreevey, will help make New Jersey a center for scientists and biotechnology companies in the rapidly developing field, medical researchers and patient advocates said on Monday.
New Jersey is the second state - California was the first - to give official approval to such research, which supporters say holds the promise of new treatments for those with certain degenerative diseases, like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, and spinal cord injuries.
"This will be a marvelous impetus to research, to attracting researchers who know they are in a supportive environment," said Dr. Ira Black, the chairman of the neurosciences department at the Robert Wood Johnson Medical School of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
But Roman Catholic and anti-abortion groups expressed bitter disappointment over the legislation, which they fought for a year before it was approved by the Assembly on Dec. 15. The opponents contend that it will permit the development of human clones from stem cells.
Stem cells are created in the first few days after fertilization, and can be induced to grow into different types of tissue. Many researchers believe that they could transform medicine by allowing scientists to grow new cells to treat many injuries and illnesses. But critics of the research object that the cells are harvested by destroying embryos, which come from in vitro fertilization clinics.
The New Jersey Catholic Conference, in a statement issued on Monday, said it was "deeply distressed" by the law and added, "Research that relies on the destruction of some defenseless human being for the possible benefit to others is morally unacceptable."
The law does not explicitly authorize practices that were not already legal, but it gives assurance to researchers who have been hesitant since President Bush announced in 2001 that federal funds could be used only for projects using cells from several dozen colonies, called lines, that had already been developed from donated embryos.
Legislation to forbid embryonic stem-cell research has been introduced in several states and in Congress.
"If you were a biotech, would you invest millions of dollars and jobs in a state that might outlaw what you're doing?" asked Michael Manganiello, the vice president for government relations at the Christopher Reeve Paralysis Foundation, named for the actor, who lobbied intensely for the legislation.
Dr. Black said that when California enacted its law more than a year ago, several prominent researchers moved there from other states.
The New Jersey law does not provide any state funds for stem-cell research, but researchers expect it to encourage private investment. Soon after California's law was enacted, Stanford University received an infusion of private funds for a major stem-cell research center.
Researchers say that New Jersey, the center of the nation's pharmaceutical industry, had already drawn the kind of smaller biotechnology companies that are likely to undertake stem-cell research.
Dr. Bill Stevenson, a Drexel University medical school administrator who until recently was the vice president for research at the University of Medicine and Dentistry, said big drug companies "would be less substantial players in this than the smaller biotech companies, which are better poised to move quickly."
The new law also explicitly approves a process known as therapeutic cloning, in which DNA from an adult cell is transferred to an unfertilized egg and is replicated in the stem cells that are generated. Scientists believe that such cells will prove more effective than other stem cells in treating disease because they can generate tissue matching the donor's.
But abortion opponents say that the law does not limit the uses of the new embryos or forbid their implantation.
"Instead of closing the door to reproductive cloning, it actually opens the door." said Marie Tasy, the legislative director of New Jersey Right to Life.
Ms. Tasy said the bill was "pushed through in a lame-duck session just before the holidays, when no one would notice," at the behest of the biotechnology industry.
"There's big money to be made there," she said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Anti-draft advisory vote on ballot
LIBERTARIANS: If it is OK'd, task force will study issue of registration.
By ANNE AURAND
Anchorage Daily News
January 6, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/draft.html
Voters in April can consider whether Anchorage men should be excused from registering for the federal military draft.
Scott Kohlhaas, Alaska Libertarian Party chairman, and supporters collected enough petition signatures to get the question on the April 6 ballot. Petitioners got about 10,000 signatures; the minimum necessary was 6,352.
Virtually all American males between 18 and 25 must sign up for Selective Service.
The ballot initiative, if approved, would create a task force "to study the effects of" making Anchorage exempt. The study would consider national security, government funding and other issues related to draft registration, Kohlhaas said.
The volunteer, appointed task force -- likely composed of military, government and citizen representatives, Kohlhaas said -- would report on its findings and conclusions and would figure out how to invoke a local exemption.
Anchorage's mayor would write a letter to the Selective Service saying that Anchorage residents disapprove of registration requirements.
Such exemptions haven't happened anywhere else, but Kohlhaas hopes a local anti-draft message will start in Anchorage and spread. The Libertarians hope Anchorage's election will kick off a national anti-draft movement.
"It's going to make us stronger in terms of an anti-draft movement," he said. "People against it are organizing. That's important."
Kohlhaas said Libertarians are planning a similar statewide ballot initiative for 2006. He said registration wastes money, considering the draft hasn't been used in 30 years.
"This is not anti-military at all. This is about the draft," he said. "We're encouraging the all-volunteer force."
A city attorney approved the language that will appear on the ballot. But, Mayor Mark Begich said, local laws allow almost anything on the ballot so long as it's an advisory; approving the initiative wouldn't change any laws.
The mayor said Kohlhaas really should be petitioning the congressional delegation since registration is a federal law.
"It doesn't make any sense," Begich said. "I'm not sure what the purpose is here."
Begich said he would not support using any city funds to help pay for the local study. If the initiative is approved, "we'd just forward election results over to the Selective Service. I'll pay for the stamp."
Selective Service Draft Registration Freeze Initiative
Daily News reporter Anne Aurand can be reached at aaurand@adn.com or 257-4591.
--------
Green Party "Terrorists"
By Frederick Sweet,
Intervention Magazine
January 6, 2003
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14884
Writing about his no-fly nightmare in the Fairfield County Weekly, art dealer Doug Stuber, who had run Ralph Nader's Green Party presidential campaign in North Carolina in 2000, was pulled out of a boarding line and grounded. He was about to make an important trip to Prague to gather artists for Henry James Art in Raleigh, N.C., when he was told (with ticket in hand) that he was not allowed to fly out that day.
Asking "why not?" he was told at Raleigh-Durham airport that because of the sniper attacks, no Greens were allowed to fly overseas on that day. The next morning he returned, and instead of paying $670 round trip, was forced into a $2,600 "same day" air fare. But it's what happened to Stuber during the next 24 hours that is even more disturbing.
Stuber arrived at the airport at 6 a.m. and his first flight wasn't due out until nearly six hours later. He had plenty of time. At exactly 10:52 in the morning, just before boarding was to begin, he was approached by police officer Stanley (the same policeman who ushered him out of the airport the day before), who said that he "wanted to talk" to him. Stuber went with the police officer, but reminded him that no one had said he couldn't fly, and that his flight was about to leave.
Officer Stanley took Stuber into a room and questioned him for an hour. Around noon, Stanley had introduced him to two Secret Service agents. The agents took full eye-open pictures of Stuber with a digital camera. Then they asked him details about his family, where he lived, who he ever knew, what the Greens are up to, and other questions.
At one point during his interrogation, Stuber asked if they really believed the Greens were equal to al Qaeda. Then they showed him a Justice Department document that actually shows the Greens as likely terrorists - just as likely as al Qaeda members. Stuber was released just before 1 PM, so he still had time to catch the later flight.
The agents walked Stuber to the Delta counter and asked that he be given tickets for the flight so that he could make his connections. The airline official promptly printed tickets, which relieved Stuber, who assumed that the Secret Service hadn't stopped him from flying. Wrong! By the time Stuber was about to board, officer Stanley once again ushered him out the door and told him: "Just go to Greensboro, where they don't know you, and be totally quiet about politics, and you can make it to Europe that way."
In Greensboro, after Stuber showed his passport he was told that he could not fly overseas or domestically. Undeterred, he next traveled an hour-and-a-half to Charlotte. In Charlotte, the same thing happened. Then Stuber drove three hours to his home after 43 hours of trying to catch a flight.
Stuber said he could only conclude that the Greens, whose values include nonviolence, social justice, etc., are now labeled terrorists by the Ashcroft-led Justice Department.
Questions about how one gets on a no-fly list creates questions about how to get off it. This is a classic Catch-22 situation. The Transportation Security Agency says it compiles the list from names provided by other agencies, but it has no procedure for correcting a problem. Aggrieved parties would have to go to the agency that first reported their names. But for security reasons, the TSA won't disclose which agency put someone on the no-fly list.
Frederick Sweet is Professor of Reproductive Biology in Obstetrics and Gynecology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
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