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NUCLEAR
Bloggers aside, expert rips dangers of depleted uranium
What They Don't Want You to Know
The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm
Staff of Czech nuclear plants preparing strike on January 20
Iraq Mortar Shells Contain Blister Agent
U.S. Delegation Visits N. Korean Nukes
N.Korea Shows U.S. Delegation 'Nuclear Deterrent'
Group of Private U.S. Experts Visits North Korea Nuclear Plant
Experts: N. Korea has long road ahead
Pyongyang asserts hard arms stance
Group of Private U.S. Experts Visits North Korea Nuclear Plant
Russia hesitant to seize materials terrorists desire
Pentagon rescues Berkeley lab's atom smasher
Strike by Operations Staff Looms at Indian Pt. Nuclear Plant
O'Neill: Iraq Planning Came Before 9 / 11
Saddam's Ouster Planned In 2001?
MILITARY
State Department claims Russia provided Iraq with war aid
Japanese minister in Kuwait, will inspect air force unit
Report: Pentagon Auditors Altered Files
Taiwan Sees Military Balance Tipping to China
The Story Behind Saddam's Arrest
Governing Council Parties Are Said to Back Broad Autonomy for Kurds
Arab-Kurd Compromise Nears
What price a life?
Cuba tightens its control over the Internet
Syria Role On Iraqi Arms Is Studied
Trial to open of Dutch ex-NATO official charged with money laundering
German defence minister sees Russian NATO membership ahead: interview
7 Killed as Rebels Hit Philippine Power Plant
Hussein Given P.O.W. Status
Pentagon Calls Hussein a POW
The Other Guantánamos - Britain's Dark Places
Guantanamo families accuse Blair of blocking release
Soft treatment fails to get Saddam to talk
Paranoid shift
U.S. Seeking Backing of U.N. Chief for Iraq Plan
America to pull its tank units out of Germany
Stretched US pilots may quit military
What They Don't Want You to Know
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justices to Hear Case of Citizen Held as Enemy
High Court to Weigh Detention of Citizens
Threat Level Lowered to Yellow
Terror Threat Is Lowered to 'Elevated,' Ridge Says
U.S. and Brazil Fingerprinting: Is It Getting Out of Hand?
U.S. Negotiating to Release Many Held at Guantánamo
British Detainees' Extradition Possible
ACTIVISTS
Hundreds demonstrate for release of jailed Israeli conscripts
Troops fire on protesters in Iraq, killing 6
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Bloggers aside, expert rips dangers of depleted uranium
January 10, 2004
Rocky Mountain News
Bruce McNaughton Denver
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_2565644,00.html
This is great. Turns out scientists were wrong to claim that exposure to depleted uranium munitions are harmful. News media critic Dave Kopel's "top of the heap" Web logger, Walter, says so ("Blogs unearth dubious sources," Jan. 3). So go back to sleep, all you worried military wives, parents and sufferers of Gulf War Syndrome.
This means that nuclear scientist and former chief of the Nuclear Sciences Division at the Armed Forces Radiobiology Institute, Dr. Asaf Durakovic, who as a U.S. Army colonel served as a unit commander in Operation Desert Shield, was wrong when he said: "Depleted uranium enters the body via inhalation, ingestion and absorption. Uranium is water soluble and can be transported throughout the body. The alpha particle released by decay of the uranium atom gives up a large amount of energy in a distance no longer than a couple of microns. Causing breaks and ionization of molecules, it is capable of destroying proteins, enzymes, RNA, and damaging DNA in many different ways, including double-strand breaks."
The darned doctor goes on to claim that depleted uranium causes kidney damage, leukemia, emotional and mental deterioration, as well as genetic damage that can be passed from generation to generation.
Now, folks, who you gonna believe, some darned alarmist director of Uranium Medical Research Center (www.umrc.net) or Dave Kopel's favorite right- wing blogger? Thought so.
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What They Don't Want You to Know
by John Pilger
January 10, 2004
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/pilger2.html
The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories," which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one man's torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had had anything to do with "outing" Dr. David Kelly.
Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favorite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges." Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging," the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon - by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he [Bush] came..."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion are "normalized."
In "The Banality of Evil," Edward S. Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'... There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."
Current "normalizing" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this? The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk," of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism," omitting to mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister's desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalizers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgment" - and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Center, witnesses living next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defense, which has admitted that British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops "will have access to biological monitoring." Iraqis have no such access and receive no specialist medical help.
According to the non-governmental organization Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant," according to a US State Department official - just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalizers are anxious that this terror is again not recognized (the BBC confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi resistance) and that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed by the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has attacked the antiwar movement for not joining Bush's "war on terror." He says "the left" must join Bush's campaign, even his "preemptive" wars, or risk - that word again - "irrelevance." This echoes other liberal normalizers who, by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions" - such as the bombing to death of some 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists known as "commanders."
Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA reports that the Bush administration is harboring thousands of foreign torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century," according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Britain supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail of blood. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965-66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorizing the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalizers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgment and blunder, never of high crime. Fueled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism," inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail to recognize historically the "national security state" that he and Bush are erecting as a "necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern fascism," he said, "should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."
Bush, Blair and the normalizers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr. to "take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside." So successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.
Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the United States helping Saddam against them. US forces prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything for Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East Said Aburish, "except join the fight on his side." Bush Sr. did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta": Saddam without Saddam.
Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam's security network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade. A CIA-run and -paid Gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under Saddam. "What is happening in Iraq," writes Rai, "is re-Nazification... just as in Germany after the war."
Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his government has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 11 September hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk fighter-bombers.
Bush and Blair have been crowing about Libya's capitulation on weapons of mass destruction it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as Scott Ritter has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of buying time than through any spirit of true cooperation" - as Bush and Blair have undermined the very international law upon which real disarmament is based. On 8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of resolutions on disarmament. The United States opposed all the most important ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK Defense Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if necessary."
This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the British government collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive" atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the unthinkable was normalized. Today, history is our warning that, once again, the true threat is close to home.
John Pilger was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent, film-maker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work in Vietnam and Cambodia. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.
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The Tiny Victims of Desert Storm
When our soldiers risked their lives in the Gulf, they never imagined that their children might suffer the consequences--or that their country would turn its back on them.
Life Magazine photo essay,
January 10, 2004
Photography by Derek Hudson
Text by Kenneth Miller
Reporting by Jimmie Briggs
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf01.html
Jayce
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Jayce Hanson's birth defects may stem from his father's Gulf War service. But like hundreds of other families, the Hansons face official stonewalling--and a frightening future.
Flying kites with his sister, Amy, he displays a fierce determination. "He's a problem solver," says his father, Paul. Jayce suffers from a syndrome similar to that of the thalidomide babies of the 1950s. But his mother, Connie, took no drugs.
He gets ear infections constantly, but he never really cries. You know how most children scream when they get earaches? Maybe he's immune to pain." -CONNIE HANSON
Jayce is remarkably agile. He can feed himself marshmallows (above) or shimmy quickly across a floor. But learning to walk on prosthetic legs (right) is terribly difficult without arms to use for balance. Jayce's mother, Connie (left), holds up a mirror to help him with coordination. A devout Christian, she faces her family's troubles stoically. "I accept what God has given us," she says, "and try to make the best of it."
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"[The veterans] need to keep the pressure on because . . . the companies who stand to be found liable will be in there lobbying." -ADM. ELMO ZUMWALT JR.
Kennedi
From outside, the evil that has invaded Darrell and Shana Clark's home is invisible. Set on a modest plot in a San Antonio subdivision, equipped with a doghouse and a swimming pool, the house is a shrine to the pursuit of happiness--a ranch-style emblem of the good life Darrell and 700,000 other U.S. soldiers fought for in the Persian Gulf four years ago.
Inside, the evil shows itself at once. It has taken up residence in the body of the Clarks' three-year-old daughter, Kennedi.
On a Saturday afternoon, Darrell and Shana huddle in their paneled living room. They are in their mid-twenties, robust and suntanned, but their eyes are older. Kennedi toddles about, pretending to snap pictures. You see the evil's imprint when she lowers the toy camera: Her face is grotesquely swollen, sprinkled with red, knotted lumps.
Kennedi was born without a thyroid. If not for daily hormone treatments, she would die. What disfigures her features, however, is another congenital condition: hemangiomas, benign tumors made of tangled blood vessels. Since she was a few weeks old, they have been popping up all over--on her eyelids and lips; in her throat and spinal canal. Laser surgery shrinks them, but they return again and again. They distort her speech, threaten her life. And, inevitably, they draw the stares of strangers. "When people see her," says Shana, "they say, 'Ooh, what happened to your baby?'"
Neither Shana nor her husband can answer that question conclusively, but they suspect that Kennedi's troubles have their origins in the Gulf, where Darrell served as an Army paratrooper. During operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, he faced a mind- boggling array of environmental hazards. Like an estimated 45,000 of his comrades, he has developed symptoms--in his case, asthma and recurring pneumonia--linked to an elusive affliction known as Gulf War syndrome. And like a growing number of Gulf War veterans, some of whom remain apparently healthy, he has fathered a child with devastating birth defects.
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf02.html
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Researchers have been probing Gulf War syndrome since late 1991, when returning soldiers reported a spate of mysterious maladies. Conclusions have been slow to arrive. Last June the federal Centers for Disease Control (CDC) confirmed that Gulf vets were unusually susceptible to a dozen ailments--from rashes to incontinence, hair loss to memory loss, chronic indigestion to chronic pain. But in August a Pentagon study concluded that neither the vets nor their loved ones showed signs of any "new or unique illness." Veterans' advocates disputed that finding, as did the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, which declared that the report's "reasoning . . . is not well explained." And while there is, as yet, no absolute proof that Gulf vets' babies are especially prone to congenital problems, patterns of defects have begun to emerge--patterns unlikely to result from chance alone.
During the past year, LIFE has conducted its own inquiry into the plight of these children. We sought to learn whether U.S. policies put them at risk and whether the nation ought to be doing more for them and their families. We also aimed to determine whether, as some scientists and veterans allege, the military's own investigation is deeply flawed.
The future of this country's volunteer armed forces--institutions dependent on citizens' willingness to serve, and therefore on their trust--may rest on the answers to such questions. Certainly, soldiers expect to forfeit their health, if necessary, in the line of duty. But no one expects that of a soldier's kids.
"Adults are worse than children as far as staring," says mom Shana. Kennedi's dad, Darrell, tested positive for radiation exposure, but unless his testes are dissected no link to her condition can be proved.
http://www.life.com/Life/essay/gulfwar/gulf04.html
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Lea
Spina bifida cripples her legs. Her upper body is so weak that she can't push herself in a wheelchair on carpeting. To strengthen her bones, she spends hours in a contraption that holds her upright. Brothers Nathan (in tree) and Joey, both born before the war, are healthy. "The boys care a lot about Lea'," says her mom, Lisa. "Every time she goes to the hospital, their schoolwork suffers."
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"Just about our whole world is centered around Lea'," says Lisa Arnold. Huge medical bills--and the unwillingness of insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions-- force the family to live in poverty to qualify for Medicaid.
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Lea Arnold was not born to a soldier, but she might as well have been: Her father went to the Gulf as a civilian helicopter mechanic with the Army's 1st Cavalry Division. On a Wednesday morning, Lea' lies naked in her parents' bed, in a small house off a gravel road in Belton, Tex. A nurse looms over her, brandishing a plastic hose.
"Don't hurt me," wails Lea.
"I'm not going to hurt you, sweetie," says the nurse. "You need to peepee."
As the nurse administers the catheter, Lisa Arnold--a sturdy woman who carries her sadness on broad shoulders--tells the story of her daughter's birth. "The doctor said, 'Well, she's got a little problem with her back.' They let me hold her for a minute, and then they took her to intensive care." Lea' had spina bifida, a split in the backbone that causes paralysis and hydrocephalus, or water on the brain. She needed surgery to remove three vertebrae. "They told us that if she lived the next 36 hours, she'd have a pretty good chance of surviving. Those 36 hours . . . it's kind of indescribable what that's like."
Three years later, Lea' has grown into a redhead like her mother, with the haunted face of a medieval martyr. She cannot move her legs or roll over. A shunt drains fluid from her skull. "She tells me every night that she wants to walk," says Richard Arnold, a soft-spoken ex-Marine.
Richard, who had fathered two healthy children before he went to war, was working for Lockheed in the Gulf. But he bunked in the desert with the troops--and that meant swallowing, inhaling and otherwise absorbing some very dicey stuff. According to a 1994 report by the General Accounting Office, American soldiers were exposed to 21 potential "reproductive toxicants," any of which might have harmed them as well as their future children. They used diesel fuel to keep down sand. They marched through smoke from burning oil wells. They doused themselves with bug sprays. They handled a toxic nerve-gas decontaminant, ethylene glycol monomethyl ether. They fired shells tipped with depleted uranium. Other teratogens--materials that cause birth defects--may have been present too. One possibility is that desert winds bore traces of Iraqi poison gas.(POISON IN THE DESERT and POISON IN THE AIR)
Some physicians who have treated Gulf vets believe they may be suffering from a general overload of chemical pollutants--and that their body fluids are actually toxic. (Indeed, many veterans' wives are sick; a few complain that their husbands' semen blisters their skin.) "It was a toxic environment," says Dr. Charles Jackson, staff physician for the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Tuskegee, Ala. Other doctors, while agreeing that chemicals or radiation may have caused birth defects, think the vets' ills came from a germ--an unknown Iraqi biological warfare agent, perhaps, or some form of leishmaniasis, a disease carried by sand flies.
Government scientists generally discount these theories. "The hard cold facts" are simply not there, says Dr. Robert Roswell, executive director of the Persian Gulf Veterans Coordinating Board. But one hypothesis elicits even his respect. "The one argument that does deserve further study [concerns] the combination of pyridostigmine bromide with pesticides."
Pyridostigmine bromide--or PB--is a drug usually prescribed to sufferers of myasthenia gravis, a degenerative nerve disease. But animal experiments have shown that pretreatment with PB may also provide some protection from the nerve gas soman. The U.S. military therefore gave the drug to most Americans in the Gulf. Darrell Clark, for instance, took it, and Richard Arnold--now racked with chronic joint pain--probably did: "I took everything the First Cavalry took."
Cedrick
His five-year-old sister, Larissa, must be careful when they play together: A fall could dislodge the shunt in his head and lead to brain damage. Cedrick's handicaps have left his parents, Steve and Bianca, terrified of having more children.
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The Defense Department may have been taking a big chance with PB. In earlier, small-scale safety trials, Air Force pilots had reported serious side effects, including impaired breathing, vision, stamina and short-term memory. (Many soldiers would experience such symptoms during the Gulf War.) Even more alarming, PB was known to worsen the effects of some kinds of nerve gas (see POISON IN THE MIX). Nonetheless, as war threatened, the Pentagon persuaded the Food and Drug Administration to waive its prohibition on testing a drug for new purposes without the subjects' "informed consent." FDA deputy commissioner Mary Pendergast defends that ruling: "You can't have your troops being the ones to decide whether they'll take some step to keep themselves healthy."
If PB did cause lasting problems, the reason could be the way it interacts with bug spray. In 1993, James Moss, a scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, found that when cockroaches are exposed to PB along with the common insect repellent DEET--used in the Gulf--the toxicity of both chemicals is multiplied. Moss says he pursued his experiments in spite of orders to stop. His contract wasn't renewed when it expired last year, and the researcher claims he was blackballed. (USDA Secretary Dan Glickman says Moss's "temporary appointment" was up and Moss knew it.) Since Moss's study, two others--one by the Pentagon itself, the second by Duke University--have found neural damage in rats and chickens exposed to another chemical cocktail, this one a mixture of PB, DEET and permethrin, an insecticide. Permethrin, however, was probably used by no more than 5 percent of U.S. soldiers in the Gulf.
Pentagon officials deny that any PB-DEET mixture could have caused birth defects in male Gulf vets' children. "I'm not aware that a male can be exposed to a chemical agent, and then two years later his sperm creates a defect," says Dr. Stephen Joseph, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. But some chemicals, such as mustard gas, have been shown to affect sperm production for even longer periods. Clearly, further research is needed to determine whether a PB-and-bug-spray combo can behave the same way.
Casey
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Army Sgt. Brad Minns is pretty sure he didn't take PB, but he did take a vaccine meant to save his life if Iraq resorted to germ warfare. He fears that this medication caused his chronic fatigue--and that his Gulf War service ultimately blighted his baby's life at the root.
In their bungalow at Fort Meade, Md., Brad and his wife, Marilyn, list their son's tribulations. Casey was born with Goldenhar's syndrome, characterized by a lopsided head and spine. His left ear was missing, his digestive tract disconnected. Trying to repair his scrambled innards, surgeons at Walter Reed Army Medical Center damaged his vocal cords and colon, say Brad and Marilyn. (Ben Smith, a spokesman for Walter Reed, says, "A claim has been filed by the family, and until it's resolved [the case] is in the hands of the lawyers.") Now 26 months old, Casey speaks in sign language. His parents feed him and remove his wastes through holes in his belly. Otherwise, he's a regular kid, tearing about the sparsely decorated room, shoving pens, books, scraps of paper into his mouth. Marilyn follows, tugging them out again.
"He's a little terror," says Brad, with the weariest of smiles.
A military policeman posted mainly at an airfield in Saudi Arabia, Brad, along with 150,000 other American soldiers, took a vaccine--on his commander's orders--against weapon-borne anthrax. A second vaccine, against botulism, was administered to 8,000 soldiers. A staff report issued last December by the Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs concluded that "Persian Gulf veterans were . . . ordered under threat of Article 15 or court-martial, to discuss their vaccinations with no one, not even with medical professionals needing the information to treat adverse reactions from the vaccine." The Senate report noted that the particular botulinum toxoid issued "was not approved by FDA." Other details from the survey: Of responding veterans who had taken the anthrax vaccine, 85 percent were told they could not refuse it, and 43 percent experienced immediate side effects. Only one fourth of the women to whom it was administered were warned of any risks to pregnancy. Of all responding personnel who had taken the antibotulism medicine, 88 percent were told not to turn it down and 35 percent suffered side effects. None of the women given botulinum toxoid were told of pregnancy risks. "Anthrax vaccine should continue to be considered as a potential cause for undiagnosed illnesses in Persian Gulf military personnel," said the report in one of its summations. And in another: "[The botulism vaccine's] safety remains unknown."
Born with organs out of place, he suffered further damage in surgery, says his father, Brad. Now Casey's chest has stopped growing, leading to fears that he may need an operation at some point to preserve function in his lungs.
Michael
In a conference room at the Womack Army Medical Center in Fort Bragg, N.C., Melanie Ayers is addressing a support group for parents of Gulf War babies. "Sometimes," she says, "I wish I'd gone into a corner and stayed naive." Pixie-faced and preternaturally energetic, Ayers, 30, dates her loss of innocence to November 1993, when her five-month-old son died of congestive heart failure. Michael, who was conceived after his father, Glenn, returned from action as a battery commander in the Gulf, sweated constantly--until the night he woke up screaming, his arms and legs ice-cold. His previously undetected mitral-valve defect cost him his life.
After Michael's death, Melanie sealed off his bedroom; she tried to close herself off as well. But soon she began to encounter "a shocking number" of other parents whose post-Gulf War children had been born with abnormalities. All of them were desperate to know what had gone wrong and whether they would ever again be able to bear healthy babies. With Kim Sullivan, an artillery captain's wife whose infant son, Matthew, had died of a rare liver cancer, Melanie founded an informal network of fellow sufferers.
Surrounded by framed photos of decorated medics and nurses, a dozen of those moms and dads have come to share their worries, anger and grief. Kim is here. So is Connie Hanson, wife of an Army sergeant; her son, Jayce, was born with multiple deformities. Army Sgt. John Mabus has brought along his babies, Zachary and Andrew, who suffer from an incomplete fusion of the skull. The people in this room have turned to one another because they can no longer rely upon the military.
"A lot of the parents have had anxieties about coming forth with their concerns," says Dr. Sharon Cooper, the Womack Center's director of pediatrics. Cooper is one military official who, rather than taking an adversarial stance, is dedicated to helping Gulf veterans and their families cope. Many vets speak of Army physicians who dismiss physical ailments as symptoms of stress, even as fabrication. They cite an internal report by the National Guard, leaked to the press last year, which revealed that hundreds of Gulf vets had been wrongly discharged as a money-saving measure--let go with a supposedly clean bill of health, although ongoing medical problems entitled them to remain in the service for treatment. A second report, issued by the GAO earlier this year, scores the Veterans Administration for being routinely tardy with its payments to ailing vets. "When you send a veteran off to do dangerous work, I think his complaints deserve respect," says West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller. "The phrase I've used is 'reckless disregard.' There's a stark pattern of Defense Department recklessness."
For vets with afflicted babies, the runaround can be just as bad. Military doctors often ignore signs of inborn disorders, say Gulf War parents, or refuse to discuss them frankly. And when they do talk about birth defects, the doctors--and Pentagon bureaucrats--are quick to cite a statistic that drives these parents wild: At least 3 percent of American babies are born with abnormalities. To which Melanie Ayers responds: "I'd like to put my child's picture in front of them and say, 'Glance at that once in a while to make sure you're telling me the truth.'"
"There's a stark pattern of Defense Department recklessness." -SEN.JAY ROCKEFELLER
Indeed, the truth may not be as simple as "at least three percent" implies. On a blazing Saturday afternoon, flanked by his parents, three-year-old Cedrick Miller is dangling his feet in an apartment-complex pool in San Antonio. Flossy-haired and shy, he looks younger than his age. Cedrick was born with his trachea and esophagus fused; despite surgery, his inability to hold down solid food has kept his weight to 20 pounds. His internal problems include hydrocephalus and a heart in the wrong place. But it's clear from one look that something else is awry.
Cedrick suffers, like Casey Minns, from Goldenhar's syndrome. The left half of his face is shrunken, with a missing ear and a blind eye. His mother, Bianca, says that when a prenatal exam showed the defects, "everything we'd hoped for just crashed. What had Cedrick done to deserve this?"
Steve Miller, a former Army medic, thinks chemicals damaged his sperm. He believes statistical evidence is at hand. "With Goldenhar's," he says, "we have clustering."
Clustering is the term epidemiologists use when an ailment strikes one group of people more than others--and the phenomenon can be a key indicator that something more than chance is causing birth defects. The Association of Birth Defect Children says it has found the first cluster of defects in the offspring of U.S. Gulf veterans: 10 babies with severe Goldenhar's syndrome, a condition that usually strikes one in 26,000, according to ABDC executive director Betty Mekdeci. (Another case has surfaced in Britain, where 600 vets complain of Gulf-related illness.) The ABDC, which has gathered data on 163 ailing Gulf War babies so far, is tracking four more possible clusters--of victims of hypoplastic left heart syndrome, of atrial-septal heart defect, of microcephaly and of immune-system deficiencies. Significantly, not one of the parents in the ABDC survey has a family history of these types of birth defects. Or as Mekdeci puts it, "There have been no relatives with funny ears."
The difficulty in proving conclusively whether clusters are occurring is that no one--not Mekdeci, not the Pentagon--knows how many babies have been born to Gulf vets. The Defense Department's own survey of 40,000 birth outcomes, initial results of which are due in late October, is the largest study yet, but far from complete since it relies on data only from military hospitals. The Pentagon's Dr. Joseph says the forthcoming report will include "by far the best and most comprehensive information available." Maybe it will, but many still question whether Defense Department scientists are really seeking the hard answers. Earlier this year Dr. Joseph told LIFE that, although trained as a pediatrician, he was entirely unfamiliar with "Goldhavers or Gold Heart--whatever." It's precisely that kind of response that enrages veterans with afflicted babies.
Along with the ABDC and Defense Department surveys, more than 30 other studies of Gulf vets and their children are under way. One that is no longer ongoing, by the Senate Banking Committee, folded last year when committee chair Don Riegle retired. Of the 400 sick vets who had already answered committee inquiries, a startling 65 percent reported birth defects or immune-system problems in children conceived after the war.
Although Riegle is gone, there are a few others in Washington fighting for afflicted Gulf War families. One is Rockefeller, but in recent months he has lost clout. After last year's GOP landslide, he was ousted as chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, which produced the 1994 report on PB and vaccine use in the Gulf. The new chair, Alan Simpson (R--Wyo.), plans no action "until the hard science is in," says an aide.
Then there is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the point person for an administration that, by pushing through a 1994 law mandating benefits for vets with symptoms, has cast itself as a friend of Gulf War syndrome sufferers. On August 14, at the opening session of the presidential advisory committee on the syndrome, she declared, "Just as we relied on our troops when they were sent to war, we must assure them that they can rely on us now."
Whatever White House fact finders discover, there's no guarantee that Gulf War babies will get government help. As it stands, a soldier's children receive free medical care only as long as a parent remains in the service. For parents who return to civilian life, the going can be grim. Moreover, the government's record on earlier military health grievances is hardly reassuring. Soldiers unwittingly used in radiation experiments in the 1950s, for instance, had to fight the VA for compensation until the 1980s. And Vietnam veterans claim that scientists manipulated evidence to hide the ravages of Agent Orange. "The CDC actually skewed the data," says retired Navy Adm. Elmo Zumwalt Jr., who blames his son's fatal cancer on the defoliant. Vietnam vets won a $180 million settlement from Agent Orange manufacturers, but not until 1984. Gulf vets, says Zumwalt, "need to keep the pressure on, because in the case of Agent Orange--and I'm sure it'll occur with Desert Storm syndrome--the companies who stand to be found liable for any harmful effects will be in there lobbying."
A few Desert Storm families have been relatively lucky--the Clarks, for instance, whose daughter has been granted free treatment through November of 1996, thanks to an Air Force doctor who recommended her as a subject for study. But others have been denied insurance coverage for "preexisting conditions." They are being driven into poverty; some join the welfare line so Medicaid will help with the impossible burden. "You could be a millionaire, and there's no way you could take care of one of these children," says Lisa Arnold.
Betty Mekdeci thinks Congress should set up a special insurance fund for families like the Arnolds. "The very least we owe these folks is to provide them with a guarantee of care," she says. "I'd be glad to pay the extra taxes to do it.""
"I'm angry, frustrated and sad," says Darrell Clark. "It's unfortunate that no one will speak up and say, 'Maybe we made a mistake. How can we help you get on with your lives?'"
Packed into an airplane-shaped swing at his grandmother's house in Charlottesville, Va., Jayce Hanson is getting on with his life as best he can. A cherubic, rambunctious blond, he's the unofficial poster boy of the Gulf War babies--seen by millions in People. Jayce is the center of attention here, too, as his father pushes the swing and a photographer snaps his picture. But since his last major public appearance, he has undergone a change: His lower legs are missing.
Now three years old, Jayce was born with hands and feet attached to twisted stumps. He also had a hole in his heart, a hemophilia-like blood condition and underdeveloped ear canals. Doctors recently amputated his legs at the knees to make it easier to fit him with prosthetics. "He'll say once in a while, 'My feet are gone,'" says his mother, Connie, "but he's been a real trouper."
During the war, Paul Hanson breathed heavy oil smoke; he stopped taking PB pills early, because they made him dizzy. Now he suffers regularly from headaches, nausea, tightness in the chest. Still, he is optimistic for his son.
"Jayce is very bright," says Paul. "He doesn't realize his limitations. But when he grows up and says, 'Why am I not like everybody else?' we'd like to be able to explain it to him."
-------- europe
Staff of Czech nuclear plants preparing strike on January 20
PRAGUE (AFP)
Jan 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040110175300.scvflbw2.html
Trade unions representing staff of the Czech Republic's two nuclear plants, at Dukovany and Temelin, are preparing a strike on January 20 to press demands for pay rises, they announced Saturday.
Unionists are asking for an annual rise of 12.5 percent, more than twice the amount offered by the Czech electricity company CEZ (Ceske energeticke zavody), which has proposed a five-percent hike.
"The strike will show employees' unity," said Temelin union chief Frantisek Haman after a union meeting.
Before a final decision on any industrial action CEZ management and unionists are to pursue their talks for a settlement in the next days.
The Temelin plant is located just 60 kilometers (36 miles) across the border from Austria and for years has been the center of controversy between the two countries.
Austria has denounced security measures at the plant and is concerned about its impact on the environment.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraq Mortar Shells Contain Blister Agent
January 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Mortar-Shells.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Danish and Icelandic troops have uncovered a cache of 36 shells buried in the Iraqi desert, and preliminary tests showed they contained a liquid blister agent, the Danish military said Saturday.
The 120mm mortar shells were thought to be leftovers from the eight-year war between Iraq and neighboring Iran, which ended in 1988, said U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt.
The shells were found by Danish engineering troops and Icelandic de-miners near Al Quarnah, north of the city of Basra where Denmark's 410 troops are based, the Danish Army Operational Command said in a written statement.
The shells were wrapped in plastic but had been damaged, and they appeared to have been buried for at least 10 years, the statement said.
It said British experts did a preliminary test and said the shells contained ``blister gas,'' but did not elaborate.
Before the war, the United States alleged Iraq still had stockpiles of mustard gas, a World War I-era blister agent that is stored in liquid form. U.S. intelligence officials also claimed Iraq had sarin, cyclosarin and VX, which are extremely deadly nerve agents.
``We're doing some preliminary tests to ensure that if they do contain any kind of blister agent that we can dispose of them properly,'' Kimmitt said.
The Danish military emphasized that the tests were not definitive. In the weeks after the Iraq war, the U.S.-led coalition found several caches that tested positive for mustard gas but later turned out to contain missile fuel or other chemicals.
Other discoveries turned out to be old caches that had already been tagged by United Nations inspectors and were scheduled for destruction.
Saddam Hussein's regime used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers during that war and killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a chemical attack on the northern city of Halabja in 1988.
President Bush said the United States was going to war to destroy Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but a nine-month search by a succession of U.S. teams has failed to find any current stockpiles of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
The lack of evidence has led critics to suggest the Bush administration either mishandled or exaggerated its knowledge of Iraq's alleged arsenal.
In October, Dutch marines found several dozen artillery shells from the 1991 Gulf War in the southern Iraqi town of Samawah, but the shells contained no biological or chemical agents. Samawah is 100 miles west of the southern region where the Danes discovered shells Saturday.
-------- korea
U.S. Delegation Visits N. Korean Nukes
January 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
BEIJING (AP) -- An unofficial delegation of Americans who visited North Korea said Saturday they saw the country's disputed Yongbyong nuclear facility but said they couldn't give details until information about their trip was reported to Washington.
The visit came as the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas were trying to arrange a new round of talks on ending the standoff over the North's nuclear program.
The five-member American delegation was allowed to see all of the sites they had requested, said one member, John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor emeritus of international relations.
``We did go to Yongbyon,'' Lewis told reporters after arriving at Beijing's Capital Airport from Pyongyang. He was referring to the nuclear facility that has been closed to outsiders since North Korea expelled U.N. inspectors at the end of 2002.
However, the Americans said they wouldn't give any more details about the visit, which began Tuesday, until two delegation members who are on the staff of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee had reported to Washington.
Lewis stressed that the trip was a private effort aimed at improving understanding of North Korean issues.
``We are a private delegation,'' he said. ``We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors.''
North Korea has been under international pressure to give up its nuclear weapons programs. But the communist regime is digging in with its hardline rhetoric, heralding tough negotiations.
On Friday, the communist state said that it would be foolish for the United States to expect it to follow the example of ``some Middle East countries,'' an apparent reference to Libya's decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman hinted that the recent decisions by Libya and Iran to allow intrusive inspections of their suspected weapons programs would not affect its strategy.
``The United States is hyping recent developments in some Middle East countries, the cases orchestrated by itself,'' the spokesman said, without citing Libya and Iran by name. ``It is seized with hallucination that the same would happen on the Korean Peninsula and some countries echo this 'hope' and 'expect' some change.''
In comments carried by North Korea's official KCNA news agency, he said North Korea ``has never been influenced by others and this will not happen in the future.''
``To expect any 'change' from the DPRK stand is as foolish as expecting a shower from clear sky,'' the spokesman said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. ``It is the historical truth that peace is won and defended only with strength.''
Last month, Libya said it was giving up its weapons of mass destruction after months of secret talks with the United States and Britain. Washington said it hoped other countries would follow Libya's example, which was designed to get the United States to lift sanctions.
Iran also agreed last month to allow international inspections of its nuclear programs, though it insists those activities are peaceful.
Earlier this week, North Korea said it would freeze its nuclear programs in exchange for U.S. aid and removal from Washington's roster of nations that sponsor terrorism.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has called the offer a ``positive step'' and said prospects for resuming negotiations had improved. South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan said the offer would help create an atmosphere favorable to a fresh round of talks.
For months, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas have been attempting to arrange a new round of six-nation negotiations on the nuclear crisis. The first round in August ended with little progress.
Washington has rejected the North's proposals in the past, saying it wants North Korea to begin dismantling its nuclear weapons programs before it delivers any concessions.
The crisis flared in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 deal requiring the North to freeze its nuclear facilities. Washington and its allies cut off free oil shipments, also part of the 1994 accord.
--------
N.Korea Shows U.S. Delegation 'Nuclear Deterrent'
January 10, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea said on Saturday it had shown a visiting U.S. delegation its ``nuclear deterrent'' and hoped this would provide a basis for a peaceful settlement of the row with the United States over its nuclear activities.
The U.S. group, which flew to Beijing on Saturday after a five-day visit to North Korea, were the first outsiders allowed into the Yongbyon nuclear complex since U.N. inspectors were expelled a year ago.
``As everybody knows, the United States compelled the DPRK (North Korea) to build a nuclear deterrent,'' the official North Korean news agency KCNA, monitored in London, quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
``We showed this to (delegation head John) Lewis and his party this time.
``...if the visit of Lewis and the nuclear specialist and their party helped the U.S. even a bit to drop its ambiguous view on the DPRK's nuclear activities, it would serve as a substantial foundation for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue between the DPRK and the U.S. in the future,'' he added.
Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and others on the unofficial delegation told reporters in Beijing they did not wish to comment on what they saw or discussed with officials until they had briefed the U.S. government.
But Lewis said North Korea's Foreign Ministry had allowed the U.S. visitors to do everything they had requested.
The United States suspects North Korea may have resumed reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods into plutonium for use in nuclear weapons and has been trying, along with its allies, to reconvene talks with North Korea to end the suspected program.
The North Korean official quoted by KCNA gave no details of the state of development of the country's nuclear deterrent. But he said Pyongyang wanted to end uncertainty which was hindering efforts to settle the nuclear dispute.
The aim of the Yongbyon visit was ``to give the Americans an opportunity to confirm the reality by themselves and ensure transparency, as speculative reports and ambiguous information about the DPRK's nuclear activities are throwing hurdles in the way of settling the nuclear issue,'' the spokesman said.
The U.S. group included a nuclear specialist, a former State Department envoy for North Korea and two U.S. Senate aides. One of them, Foreign Relations Committee aide Frank Jannuzi, characterized the trip as ``a good visit, a productive visit.''
INCONCLUSIVE TALKS
China hosted an inconclusive round of six-party talks on the nuclear issue in August with the United States, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia.
In Tokyo a leading Japanese daily reported on Saturday that China had offered North Korea $50 million in aid if it took part in the next round of talks.
The Asahi Shimbun quoted diplomatic sources in Washington as saying the offer was made by Wu Bangguo, chairman of China's parliament, during a visit to North Korea in October, and was likely to take the form of financial aid rather than oil or food.
This week, North Korea offered to freeze its nuclear activities, a move that has raised hopes for a second round of talks, which analysts say may happen in February.
China's special envoy for Korean nuclear issues and another top Asian affairs diplomat will travel to Washington early next week for consultations on the next round of talks.
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.
Lewis said the delegation had met military, Foreign Ministry, economic and science officials. Jannuzi said the touchy subjects of human rights and Japanese abducted by North Korea were among a range of issues discussed.
--------
Group of Private U.S. Experts Visits North Korea Nuclear Plant
By JIM YARDLEY
January 10, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/asia/10KORE.html
BEIJING, Saturday, Jan. 10 - A private delegation of American experts arrived here Saturday morning after a five-day visit to North Korea in which they said they had interviewed a range of top officials and visited the nuclear plant at Yongbyon.
"We did go to Yongbyon," John W. Lewis, a Stamford University professor who led the delegation, said at an impromptu news conference at the Beijing airport. "We are a private delegation. We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors."
American intelligence experts say they believe that some spent nuclear fuel at Yongbyon may have been reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
Professor Lewis declined to provide details about the visit because he said members of the delegation wanted first to brief the United States government.
But he said he and others in the group were likely to speak publicly about their trip in the coming days.
Professor Lewis is the director of the center for International Security and Cooperation, a group that promotes discussions on security issues. He said his delegation had been invited by the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
He was joined at the news conference by Dr. Siegfried Hecker, an expert on nuclear weapons and a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Professor Lewis said two senior staff aides to members of the Senate Foreign Relations committee had also accompanied the delegation to Yongbyon.
He said the North Korean government had allowed the delegation to interview a range of scientific, military and economic officials and had granted all requests it made for the trip.
----
Experts: N. Korea has long road ahead
By Jeremy Kirk,
Stars and Stripes Pacific edition,
Saturday, January 10, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=19749
YONGSAN GARRISON, South Korea - North Korea's offer this week to suspend its nuclear weapons program in exchange for U.S. incentives appears to be the most positive sign the reclusive country has put forth in years, analysts say.
But academics differ on whether the moves are genuine or if the closed country is merely fishing for a good deal while the United States focuses on Iraq.
"Any negotiations are going to be very difficult," said David Garretson, a lecturer at the University of Maryland's Asian Division. "They are going to be tough as nails."
North Korea has demanded it be pulled off a U.S. list of nations sponsoring terrorism; it also wants the United States to sign a nonaggression pact prior to nuclear program discussions. The United States has demanded an end to the North Korea's nuclear program and a thorough verification program before economic and security guarantees can be offered.
So who makes the first move?
"If you read the real message behind the lines, both sides want the other side to give up first," said Kim Tae-hyo, a professor at the Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security under the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The United States wants to deal with the North Korean nuke issue multilaterally, but August talks in Beijing with Japan, Russia, the two Koreas, and China flopped and no further meetings are scheduled.
An unofficial delegation of five Americans arrived Tuesday in North Korea for a five-day visit aimed at continuing dialogue. The group includes a former Los Alamos National Laboratory director, two congressional aides, a former State Department envoy to North Korea and a Stanford University professor.
The delegation may be able to gauge North Korea's attitudes and feelings toward new six-party talks, Kim said.
Wednesday, the official North Korean news agency encouraged the United States to respond to its offer, blaming it for the current crisis.
"Had the Bush administration abandoned its hostile policy towards the DPRK and not singled out it as part of an 'axis of evil,' a target of its preemptive nuclear attack, the nuclear issue would have not reached such a serious phase," the agency wrote.
While North Korea appears to step forward, their sincerity is questionable, Kim said. Any promise to cease weapons development and nuclear research would have to be verified through inspections, and it's unknown to what extent North Korea would reveal their capacities and their facilities, Kim said.
North Korea likely still wants to be part of the "nuclear club," said Mark Monahan, a professor of Asian studies at the University of Maryland. "I don't think they want to change that. I don't think they have given up that goal."
While the CIA estimates North Korea may have produced a handful of nuclear weapons and has depleted uranium stores that could produce dozens more, information is scarce because of the country's isolation. Satellite photographs show an active facility at Yongbyon running since the 1960s, but the aerial shots reveal little, Monahan said.
"We have a paucity of information," Monahan said.
U.S. Forces Korea commander Gen. Leon J. LaPorte told USA Today last month that "Intelligence is problematic for us. It's a very closed society. Things we might know about another country, we don't know about North Korea."
Nonetheless, the country's nuclear bluster is "enough to make anyone nervous," Garretson said.
North Korea broke a 1994 deal that would have given it two light-water nuclear reactors in exchange for stopping its nuclear program. The country allegedly told a U.S. diplomat in October 2002 that it had an active nuclear weapons program, in violation of the agreement.
The Bush administration has used a carrot-and-stick policy against North Korea, but the White House and Defense Department will likely remain skeptical of any sudden moves, Monahan said. The war against Iraq, the opening of Libya's weapons programs and Iran's move toward international inspections may have caused an "overspill" that's influencing North Korea, Garretson said.
"I do think overall the administration would like to show it is engaged with North Korea," Garretson said. "On the other side, the North Koreans are sensing what they can get."
----
Pyongyang asserts hard arms stance
January 10, 2004
By Jae-suk Yoo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040109-112555-2750r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea yesterday said it would be foolish for the United States to expect it to follow the example of "some Middle East countries," an apparent reference to Libya's decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
North Korea has been under international pressure to give up its nuclear weapons programs. But the communist regime is digging in with its hard-line rhetoric, heralding tough negotiations.
Yesterday, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman hinted that the recent decisions by Libya and Iran to allow intrusive inspections of their suspected weapons programs would not affect its strategy.
"The United States is hyping recent developments in some Middle East countries, the cases orchestrated by itself," the spokesman said, without citing Libya and Iran by name. "It is seized with hallucination that the same would happen on the Korean Peninsula and some countries echo this 'hope' and 'expect' some change."
Meanwhile, a U.S. delegation reported today that it has visited North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex, the first time outsiders have been allowed into the plant since United Nations inspectors were expelled a year ago.
"We did go to Yongbyon," Stanford University professor John Lewis, a member of the delegation, told reporters in the Chinese capital upon the team's return from the North Korean capital.
Members of the delegation said that North Korean officials allowed them to visit the secretive Yongbyon nuclear facility and had "honored" all their requests.
"We were invited by the foreign ministry. We sent them a list of all our requests and they honored all of those requests and we made additional ones, they honored all of those," Mr. Lewis said.
He and another member of his delegation, nuclear scientist Sig Hecker, would not go into details of the five-day visit.
Mr. Hecker said he felt obliged to brief the U.S. government first.
Earlier, the North Korean spokesman, in comments carried by North Korea's official KCNA news agency, said North Korea "has never been influenced by others and this will not happen in the future."
"To expect any 'change' from the DPRK stand is as foolish as expecting a shower from a clear sky," the spokesman said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. "It is the historical truth that peace is won and defended only with strength."
Last month, Libya said it was giving up its weapons of mass destruction after months of secret talks with the United States and Britain. Washington said it hoped other countries would follow Libya's example, which was designed to get the United States to lift sanctions.
Iran also agreed last month to allow international inspections of its nuclear programs, though it insists those activities are peaceful.
Earlier this week, North Korea said it would freeze its nuclear programs in exchange for U.S. aid and removal from Washington's roster of nations that sponsor terrorism.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has called the offer a "positive step" and said prospects for resuming negotiations had improved. South Korean Foreign Minister Yoon Young-kwan said the offer would help create an atmosphere favorable to a fresh round of talks.
Yesterday, officials said a Chinese delegation will visit Washington next week to discuss arrangements for the next round of talks. Fu Ying, head of the Foreign Ministry's department of Asian affairs, who has been the main contact with Washington over the talks, will meet U.S. officials Tuesday, the State Department said.
--------
Group of Private U.S. Experts Visits North Korea Nuclear Plant
January 10, 2004
By JIM YARDLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/asia/10KORE.html?pagewanted=all
BEIJING, Saturday, Jan. 10 - A private delegation of American experts arrived here Saturday morning after a five-day visit to North Korea in which they said they had interviewed a range of top officials and visited the nuclear plant at Yongbyon.
"We did go to Yongbyon," John W. Lewis, a Stamford University professor who led the delegation, said at an impromptu news conference at the Beijing airport. "We are a private delegation. We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors."
American intelligence experts say they believe that some spent nuclear fuel at Yongbyon may have been reprocessed into weapons-grade plutonium.
Professor Lewis declined to provide details about the visit because he said members of the delegation wanted first to brief the United States government.
But he said he and others in the group were likely to speak publicly about their trip in the coming days.
Professor Lewis is the director of the center for International Security and Cooperation, a group that promotes discussions on security issues. He said his delegation had been invited by the North Korean Foreign Ministry.
He was joined at the news conference by Dr. Siegfried Hecker, an expert on nuclear weapons and a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Professor Lewis said two senior staff aides to members of the Senate Foreign Relations committee had also accompanied the delegation to Yongbyon.
He said the North Korean government had allowed the delegation to interview a range of scientific, military and economic officials and had granted all requests it made for the trip.
-------- russia
Russia hesitant to seize materials terrorists desire
January 10, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040109-085154-4217r.htm
Russia is reluctant to join an 11-nation U.S.-led effort to seize illegal shipments of nuclear and other proliferation materials that could fall in the hands of terrorists, senior U.S. officials said yesterday.
Even though discussions are still in their initial stage, the officials said the Russians are not yet convinced of the legality and merits of the plan, known as the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and proposed by President Bush in the spring.
"They are not ready to join the process," a senior State Department official who asked not to be named told reporters. "They are interested but are raising a lot of questions."
Russia, which has a big navy despite its decline since the Soviet Union's collapse more than a decade ago, would be an "important player" in the PSI, the official said.
"It would add political weight as one of the founding member of nonproliferation regime," he said.
The PSI, which Mr. Bush put forth in a speech during a European trip, is designed to intercept on the high seas shipments of illicit arms and other proliferation materials from states and other actors Washington regards as supporters of international terrorism.
In addition to the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and Australia joined the effort.
Singapore has recently expressed an interest in being part of the process and invited John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security who oversees the PSI's implementation, to visit the tiny state this week.
Russia, which was not invited to be among the initial members and to which the PSI was not even mentioned in a substantive way until President Vladimir Putin met with Mr. Bush at Camp David in September, might have felt left out, some administration officials said.
"We haven't had real discussions with the Russians yet, and I don't think their position is solid and firm, so I wouldn't describe the picture as gloomy," one official said in reference to Moscow's joining the PSI in the future.
"Russia is part of the problem and part of the solution," the official added, in a hint of the country's questionable proliferation behavior following the decline of the Soviet Union. Since the Soviet collapse, sensitive technology and unemployed scientists from Russia are believed to have been used for some other nation's nuclear programs.
"It's no secret that we have imposed sanctions on Russian companies and individuals," the official said.
Several U.S. officials said the Bush administration did not reach out to Moscow at the beginning of the PSI process, choosing instead to engage like-minded countries on proliferation issues.
The United States has also accused Russia of helping Iran's nuclear program, which both Tehran and Moscow insist is only for peaceful purposes.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Pentagon rescues Berkeley lab's atom smasher
The 88-inch Cyclotron was to be mothballed over Christmas
By Ian Hoffman,
Tri-Valley Herald
http://www.trivalleyherald.com/Stories/0,1413,86%7E10671%7E1882684,00.html
The Pentagon is rescuing an atom-smashing machine at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from the budget ax to test electronics for military and spy satellites.
Under the Bush administration's 2004 budget, the Berkeley lab's 88-inch Cyclotron, a workhorse for nuclear physicists from the 1960s through the 1980s, was to be mothballed over Christmas.
But scientists at the nonprofit federal Aerospace Corp. persuaded the Defense Department to keep the cyclotron working, as well as its small crew of engineers and scientists, until at least September 2005.
"Without this, we would now be closed," said Claude M. Lyneis, head of the magnetically driven accelerator since 1991. "The president's budget was absolutely clear. We were done."
In a new agreement, the U.S. Department of Energy will use $3 million slated for decommissioning the cyclotron instead to keep it running, and the U.S. Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office will add $2 million a year.
The lab now will take on more of a job that its cyclotron has handled for 20 years -- showering satellite parts with charged particles that mimic the effects of cosmic radiation. Scientists place a processor, memory chip or power transistor in a target chamber and flood it with millions of atoms.
Lyneis said the beam easily switches between boron, nitrogen, argon, krypton and xenon for what he called an "ion cocktail."
They test for the rate of single malfunctions, when an energized particle blasts into a circuit and gives the wrong answer or command.
The parts tend to be commercial, even if destined for classified missions, so the tests are unclassified, Lyneis said.
In 2003, Aerospace Corp. scientists tapped the cyclotron for 1,000 hours of beam to test satellite parts for the U.S. Air Force and the National Reconnaissance Office.
That testing could double under the new agreement between the Defense and Energy departments.
The Air Force operates several satellite constellations, including the Global Positioning System that provides precise coordinates for military forces and targets on the ground. The NRO is a joint CIA-Defense Department agency that is the nation's lead provider of spy imagery and analysis.
The rest of the cyclotron's operation, about 2,700 hours a year, will be devoted to the needs of nuclear scientists at Berkeley lab and students at the University of California, Berkeley.
"It is a change of mission, but actually I'm fairly optimistic," Lyneis said. "One of our missions is education of students in physics. This gives us that opportunity."
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com
-------- new york
Strike by Operations Staff Looms at Indian Pt. Nuclear Plant
January 10, 2004
By LISA W. FODERARO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/nyregion/10nuke.html
Maintenance and operations workers at the Indian Point nuclear power plant were making preparations for a possible strike in the event that negotiations between their union and Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the plant's owner, do not yield a new contract within eight days.
While Entergy expressed confidence that a walkout would be averted, a spokesman for Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America said the two sides were far apart on basic issues like salaries and health benefits.
Last month, workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize a walkout, and this week union members were signing up for picket duty.
"Given the status of the talks, I would say they are on a collision course with a strike," said Steve Mangione, a spokesman for Local 1-2. "They are miles apart on the key issues and still very far apart on issues that are usually settled by now."
The contract, set to expire at midnight Jan. 17, affects 276 workers at the Indian Point 3 nuclear reactor. The contract for an additional 282 workers at the adjacent Indian Point 2 reactor will not expire until June, and those workers would not participate in a walkout, union officials said.
There would be no impact on the security of the plant, in Buchanan, N.Y., Entergy officials said, because the security force, which guards the two reactors against terrorism or other crimes, is not covered by the contract.
Entergy has a plan in place to keep Indian Point 3 running in the event of a walkout. The plan calls for the substitution of management personnel for the maintenance and operations workers.
Jim Steets, an Entergy spokesman, said the company could also borrow employees from any of the other nine nuclear power plants the company owns, including Indian Point 2.
In the meantime, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is devising its own strategy to deal with a possible walkout. The agency has two inspectors monitoring operations at Indian Point during the normal day shift, said Neil A. Sheehan, a spokesman. In a walkout, the number of inspectors would increase to provide round-the-clock coverage, he said.
Mr. Sheehan said the agency had reviewed Entergy's contingency plan and considered it acceptable. Labor walkouts at nuclear power plants are not common, he said, but they do occur.
Last summer, for instance, there was a 76-day walkout by electrical workers at the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey Township, N.J., Mr. Sheehan said.
And in 1983, workers staged a walkout for nine weeks at Indian Point 2 when that reactor was owned by Con Edison, according to Mr. Steets, and the plant operated continuously during the walkout.
"They did exactly what Indian Point would do if they had a walkout," Mr. Sheehan said of the owners of the Oyster Creek plant. "They deferred a lot of work and they had managers who were trained to handle the key responsibilities, including the job of control-room operator."
Still, union officials questioned the ability of managers to step into the shoes of workers with years of experience.
According to Mr. Mangione, in recent weeks management-level employees at Indian Point 3 have shadowed operations and maintenance workers for two 12-hour shifts.
"They are basically getting a 24-hour crash course in how to run a nuclear power plant," Mr. Mangione said. "The elected officials should be very concerned that Entergy is playing Russian roulette with public safety. No matter what they say, they cannot guarantee the safe operation or the security of Indian Point."
Entergy officials sounded confident that if a walkout were to occur, the plant would continue operating without incident.
"We've been preparing for the possibility of a strike for quite some time," Mr. Steets said. "Many of the management staff have performed these duties before."
-------- us politics
O'Neill: Iraq Planning Came Before 9 / 11
January 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Bush-ONeill.html
CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq just days after President Bush took office in January 2001 -- more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.
``From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,'' O'Neill told CBS's ``60 Minutes'' in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
The official American government stance on Iraq, dating to the Clinton administration, was that the United States sought to oust Saddam.
But O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he asserted was the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.
``For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap,'' according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.
The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale-strike against the United States.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But, he said, Saddam ``was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11.''
``It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people,'' McClellan said in Texas, where the president is staying at his ranch.
O'Neill's interview was part of his effort to promote a new book about the first half of Bush's term, ``The Price of Loyalty,'' for which O'Neill was a primary source.
The administration began sending signals about a possible confrontation with Iraq even before Sept. 11, 2001.
In July 2001, after an Iraqi surface-to-air missile was fired at an American surveillance plane, Bush's national security adviser put Saddam on notice that the United States intended a more resolute military policy toward Iraq.
``Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration,'' Condoleezza Rice said at the time.
Yet Secretary of State Colin Powell said in December 2001, after the terrorist attacks in Washington and New York, that ``with respect to what is sometimes characterized as taking out Saddam, I never saw a plan that was going to take him out.''
According to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush administration began examining options for an invasion in the first months after Bush was inaugurated.
--------
Saddam's Ouster Planned In 2001?
(CBS)
Jan. 10, 2004
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml
The Bush Administration began laying plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan. 11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
According to CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi National Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not surprised by O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS News that the Bush administration opened official channels to the Iraqi opposition soon after coming to power, and discussed how to remove saddam. The group opened an office in Washington shotly afterwards."
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he says the president seems to be wavering about going forward with his second round of tax cuts. "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
O'Neill is also quoted in the book as saying the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."
"It's revealing," said Stahl on The Early Show Friday. "I would say it's an unflattering portrait of the White House and of the president -- and specifically, about how they make decisions."
A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings he attended. And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening...It was mostly a monologue."
On Friday, a White House official tried to brush off O'Neill's assessment of President Bush's decision-making policies. "It's well known the way the president approaches governing and setting priorities," says Spokeman Scott McClellan. "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities, and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
CBS News Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
In fact, a senior administration official tells CBS News it would have been irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own area of expertise.
Another senior administraiton official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?"
Separately, McClellan added Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business of book reviews, it appears the world according to Mr O'Nneill is more about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we're achieving on behalf on the American people.
"The president is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on building on the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to make the world safer and a better place."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
State Department claims Russia provided Iraq with war aid
By Paul Richter and Kim Murphy
Los Angeles Times
Saturday, January 10, 2004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001833846_goggles10.html
WASHINGTON - U.S. officials say they have found evidence corroborating the Bush administration's allegations that Russian companies sold Saddam Hussein high-tech military equipment that threatened U.S. forces during the invasion of Iraq last March.
A senior State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said yesterday that Russian companies exported night-vision goggles and radar-jamming equipment to Iraq. The evidence includes the equipment itself and proof that it was used during the war, according to the official. The official declined to elaborate on what the proof is.
Such exports would violate the terms of United Nations sanctions against Iraq.
While insisting that the matter is "now in the past," the official acknowledged the issue "is still a sensitive one."
The issue burst into public view March 24, four days after the invasion began, when President Bush called Russian President Vladimir Putin to voice his concern about the use of goggles, jamming equipment and advanced anti-tank missiles. The White House said at the time that it had "credible evidence" that the equipment came from Russian companies.
The goggles and jammers were of special concern to the United States because U.S. forces, seeking to wage war over great distances with low casualties, rely on night-vision devices and high-tech missile and aircraft guidance systems.
The goggles use heat sensors to enable infantrymen to continue operations even in the dead of night; the jammers block signals from satellites that guide cruise missiles and "smart" bombs.
Putin staunchly denied the charges. But the allegation added friction to a relationship that was already under strain at the time because of Russia's vocal opposition to the U.S.-led invasion.
Yevgeny Khorishko, press secretary for the Russian Embassy in Washington, said yesterday that though the allegations were first raised before the war, "we have never received real proof from the American side that Russian firms were involved in the delivery of this equipment."
In raising the issue last year, U.S. officials contended that although the hardware was allegedly sold by private companies, the Russian government could have taken steps to oversee and interdict the traffic. They maintained at the time that the gear had been sold relatively recently, and with an understanding that it could be used in such a war.
During the war, U.S. military sources gave differing accounts on how much the Russian-made equipment affected U.S. forces. Some military officials were quoted as blaming jamming gear for sending missiles off course and into Iran and Saudi Arabia, and claiming that Russian-made Kornet anti-tank missiles destroyed at least two American M1-A1 tanks, the first time such tanks had been destroyed in battle.
But other officials contended they had little effect during the rapid sweep to Baghdad.
Some Russian arms-industry executives and military analysts asserted that the charges about the jamming equipment were made only to explain away the inaccuracy of the U.S.-made "smart bombs."
Some argued, too, that the U.S. allegations were pointless, because the hardware could have been legitimately sold to other countries and then exported to Iraq without the knowledge of Russian authorities.
"It's always unclear as to what extent governments know about what companies are doing in their turf," a U.S. intelligence official said yesterday.
High-tech military equipment is a top export for Russia. Though the country's military budget has shrunk dramatically, its military industry exports about $5 billion annually in tanks, planes, small arms and other equipment, which end up - directly or through transshipment - in dozens of countries.
-------- asia
Japanese minister in Kuwait, will inspect air force unit
KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
Jan 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040110110857.m1tczqnu.html
Japanese Environment Minister Yuriko Koike arrived here Saturday on a two-day visit for talks with Kuwaiti officials and to inspect an air force unit stationed in the emirate, the Japanese embassy said.
The Japanese minister was due to meet with Prime Minister Sheikh Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, Defense Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Mubarak al-Sabah and other officials in charge of the environment.
Koike is due to visit a unit of Japanese air force personnel who are stationed at Kuwait's Ali al-Salem Air Base some 80 kilometres (50 miles) northwest of the capital and close to the border with Iraq.
The first unit of the Japanese air force arrived in Kuwait last month to set the stage for a humanitarian mission in war-battered Iraq.
The second batch of airmen is expected in Kuwait early next week.
The units will be preparing for the arrival of Japanese troops in the coming few weeks.
The Japanese air force unit will operate from Kuwait to transport goods and humanitarian aid to southern Iraq as part of a Japanese reconstruction programme.
On December 9, Japan's cabinet formally approved a controversial plan to send troops to Iraq on a humanitarian mission, in the first such deployment since 1945.
Under the plan, troops will be sent to the southeastern Iraqi province of Muthanna to provide medical services and water supplies, restore war-damaged buildings and transport material, but not weapons.
-------- business
Report: Pentagon Auditors Altered Files
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 10, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Watchdog-Fraud.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Pentagon auditors spent 1,139 hours altering their own files in order to pass an internal review, say investigators who found that the accounting sleuths engaged in just the kind of wasteful activity they are supposed to expose.
When the auditors in the New York City office learned well in advance which files a review team would check, they spent the equivalent of more than 47 days doctoring the papers and updating records from several audits, the Defense Department's inspector general concluded. Administrative staff, audit supervisors and other employees also participated in the scheme.
The fabrication at the Defense Contract Audit Agency ``certainly violates the spirit and intent'' of government auditing standards and rules on ethical conduct, according to the inspector general's report obtained by The Associated Press.
The fabrication was discovered in 2001, but the report on it was not disclosed until Tuesday.
The defense agency, which audits government contracts, is the same one that recently reported that Vice President Dick Cheney's former company, Halliburton, may have overcharged the Army as much as $61 million for gasoline in Iraq.
The audit agency ran up some charges of its own when its auditors worked on altering the records.
The task of rewriting the files was so daunting that auditors came in from other offices to help make the changes, costing taxpayers more than $1,600 in travel expenses.
The agency ``is supposed to be the watchdog for defense contracts,'' said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a constant critic of government waste. ``Altering audit work papers could undermine the accuracy of the Pentagons cost reports. Falsifying official reports is a crime, and those involved must be held accountable.''
To stop any fabrications in the future, the review teams only give 48 hours advance notice of the files they want to inspect. The advance time under the old policy was much longer.
Discipline was proposed for the manger who directed the alterations, but was never imposed because the official resigned, the report said.
Daniel Tucciarone, executive officer of the audit agency, said a second senior management official who ``had not been forthcoming and acted inappropriately to conceal information'' was punished.
Tucciarone told the AP that the agency took ``appropriate disciplinary action in all cases'' but added that federal privacy law prevented him from releasing such information about individual employees.
The revisions were so pervasive that the work continued even after the review team arrived to inspect the auditors' files. The New York branch manager directed a senior auditor to delete electronic backup files of original documents, the inspector general said.
The report said agency employees believed that ``upgrading'' the working papers was a normal and acceptable practice and that they did not try to hide what they were doing.
The inspector general uncovered the file deletions following a tip to a fraud, waste and abuse hot line.
This is not the first time that Pentagon anti-waste investigators were found to have altered documents.
The AP reported in 2001 that the inspector general's office itself destroyed documents and replaced them with fakes to avoid embarrassment in a review of its work.
On the Net:
Defense Contract Audit Agency http://www.dcaa.mil/
-------- china
Taiwan Sees Military Balance Tipping to China
January 10, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-taiwan-china.html
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taipei sees the military balance in the Taiwan Strait tipping in Beijing's favor as early as next year, but believes China will not have the confidence to attack the self-ruled, democratic island for another five years.
Amid simmering tension over Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian's plan to hold the island's first ever referendum during presidential elections in March, Deputy Defense Minister Chong-Pin Lin said he was not ruling out conflict.
China sees the referendum as a provocative move by Taiwan toward independence and has threatened war, but Lin said the island could deal a bloody blow to invading Chinese troops.
He vowed Taiwan's 400,000-strong armed forces would fight back and Taiwan was preparing for a swift attack by the ever-modernizing People's Liberation Army (PLA), the world's largest standing army at 2.5 million troops.
``The PLA may start to surpass what we have in 2005 or between 2005 and 2008,'' Lin, 61, told Reuters in an interview late on Friday at the defense ministry in Taipei.
But Lin said the military balance tipping in the mainland's favor -- what he called a ``crossover'' -- was unlikely to embolden mainland commanders completely.
``The simple fact of a crossover is insufficient to make the leaders in Beijing feel 100 percent confident in winning a war,'' said the former Taiwan policymaker on China.
The years ``2010 to 2015 (will be) when the PLA will have such a supremacy in both qualitative and quantitative comparison of forces that it may feel confident to move,'' said Lin, whose late father was Taiwan's first air force commander-in-chief.
Lin did not directly address the controversy surrounding Chen's referendum, which is likely to call on China to dismantle almost 500 missiles aimed at Taiwan.
Rising tension has pushed President Bush to warn both sides not to change the political status quo.
Washington switched diplomatic ties to Beijing from Taipei in 1979, but is Taiwan's main arms supplier and trading partner.
While conceding that the PLA may be speaking in a ``louder voice'' in the wake of the planned referendum, Lin said China's civilian leadership was unlikely to unleash the military.
UNIFICATION WITHOUT FIGHTING
For China, Lin said, economic development was more important than unification. Alternatives to war included diplomatic isolation, increasing Taiwan's economic dependence on the mainland, and winning the hearts and minds of ordinary Taiwanese.
``The highest ideal of Beijing leaders is to achieve unification without fighting,'' he said. ``Beijing's leaders consider it unwise to resort to the military option right now.''
But Lin said Taiwan was not dismissing the possibility of war. ``We cannot afford to be so complacent,'' he said.
Taipei and Beijing split in 1949 after civil war, but trade, investment and tourism have blossomed since the late 1980s.
China has a quantitative military edge over Taiwan with the mainland's jet fighters outnumbering the island's 10-1. China has up to 70 submarines compared with four for the island.
But Taiwan is armed with advanced U.S. and French jet fighters and frigates, giving the island an advantage in any conventional conflict, military analysts say.
``We do have a lot of capability to cause a lot of damage to the invading enemy and we are also improving our capability,'' Lin said.
``We are preparing for a scenario...a PLA with advanced weapons invading Taiwan in a very rapid manner,'' he said. ``Something like decapitation, as we saw in the war in Iraq.''
China menaced Taiwan with war games and missile tests from 1995 to 1996. If China rattled sabres again after the March 20 polls, Lin said the island ``will fight back right away.''
``We will not fire the first shot,'' he said. But ``if there is bloodshed in our population, it is our duty to protect our people, to defend our territories.''
Though he said war was not imminent, the civilian deputy minister said China increasingly saw taking back Taiwan as ``more a strategic necessity than a historical mission.''
If Taiwan is not returned to the fold, Lin said China feared it would be vulnerable to foreign attack along its southeastern coast and an emerging Japanese military power.
``Five years before, they would consider unification with Taiwan a messianic mission of history, a sacred undertaking. It was more hot-blooded than otherwise,'' he said.
``But in recent five years or so, more and more PLA writers have talked about taking Taiwan in a cold-blooded calculation.''
-------- iraq
The Story Behind Saddam's Arrest
by Ritt Goldstein
January 10, 2004
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/goldstein1.html
U.S. accounts have portrayed Saddam's capture as a triumph of their high-tech innovation and old-fashioned ingenuity, but reports in the Middle East and off-the-record interviews reveal a version of events decidedly different from those already known.
Since the announcement of Saddam Hussein's capture by the United States Dec. 14, conflicting accounts of events have been heralded as truth, first by the United States, then by the Kurds. But as often, the truth seems to lie somewhere in between, and contains some unheralded facts.
Foremost among those unsung facts is the capture by the U.S. 4th Army of a member of the al Muslit family - trusted relatives and lieutenants of Saddam - by US forces in July. This spawned a fateful chain of events leading to the former dictator's reported betrayal and drugging in a plan reportedly inspired by the United States and pursued by his betrayer.
But while Kurds from the Iraq-based Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) were said to be acting as go-betweens with US authorities, they pursued a triumph of their own and essentially snatched control of Saddam from the hands of his captors. This they did with suspected Iranian related support.
The critical arrest in July was that of Adnan Abdullah Abid al Muslit, widely known to be one of Saddam Hussein's closest bodyguards and collaborators.
Just a week prior to the July arrest, the respected German daily Suddeutsche Zeitung (SD) had reported that U.S. forces believed Saddam was traveling with a group of three men. The surname al Muslit first surfaced then.
SD mentioned Khalil Ibrahim Omar al Muslit as the name of Saddam's driver. It said his brothers were the other two bodyguards with Saddam. And so the capture of Adnan Abdullah Abid al Muslit became an apparent key to future events.
Those events were first reported Dec. 18. The Jordanian newspaper Al-Arab Al-Yawm said that Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al Muslit - one of Saddam's bodyguards - had drugged the former dictator and given information to US forces leading to Saddam's capture.
The significance of the report went virtually unnoticed. But the fact of "pressure" on captives and their families has been widely reported.
The Al-Arab article said Mohammed Ibrahim Omar al Muslit contacted the US forces through a relative. The drugging plan was described as a US inspired outgrowth of this. Kurdish sources have been reported as acknowledging that Saddam's own people were key to their having him.
Several recent reports have suggested that the Kurds caught Saddam, but questions remained over just how they managed to "get him."
A Kurdish presence had been reported in the Tikrit area where Saddam was arrested. A member of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was quoted in The Guardian newspaper of Britain as confirming that presence.
This Kurdish presence materialized about two to three weeks before Saddam's capture, about the time he was reportedly drugged by al Muslit. Muslit seems to have captured Saddam some time after mid-November, intelligence sources indicate.
Kurdish sources named the leader of this Kurdish group of about 50 as Kosrat Rassul, head of the PUK intelligence unit that was instrumental in the operation. Rassul is also deputy to Jalal Talabani, member of the IGC, and PUK head.
News of Saddam's arrest was first released by the Iranian News Agency (IRNA). Several accounts agree that the information was given to them by Talabani.
Separately, an independent footnote to the Iranian media coverage was provided in the reported remarks of an Iraqi resistance leader, illustrating another thread running through the story.
Asked to comment on Saddam's capture, the resistance leader Jabbar al Kubaysi was quoted as saying: "Without the help of Iranian intelligence the arrest would not have been possible." Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi denied the Islamic Republic's involvement. But for many, questions remain.
Rassul is reported to have developed contacts with some of the key leaders in Tikrit area, placing himself in a position to negotiate with them. A drugged Saddam was the object.
Notably, it was Rassul who had arrested former Iraqi vice-president Taha Yassin Ramadan. The PUK was also reported to have been instrumental in locating Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay.
The Sunday Express published in London Dec. 21 reported that Kurdish forces had held Saddam for an indefinite period.
Quoting an unnamed senior British intelligence officer, the Sunday Express report says Saddam - on whose head the United States had placed a 25 million dollar bounty - was then held captive by the PUK, which bargained with the United States before arranging to hand over the drugged dictator.
The Express article said that Saddam was not captured "as a result of any American or British intelligence."
But earlier, almost simultaneous with US news of Saddam's taking Dec. 14, a report by a group said to have close links to Israeli intelligence surfaced.
This group, DEBKAfile, has a considerable reputation for occasionally revealing accurate facts. But DEBKA's information has also sometimes proven inaccurate, giving rise to conjecture that their reporting occasionally mixes in "facts" the Israeli intelligence community wishes to publicize.
Within a few hours of the announcement of the capture, DEBKA put out a report that Saddam had been held for two weeks or more. The scenario it painted went on to reconcile several of the capture accounts, particularly the connection between Kurds and the captors.
DEBKA said Saddam's own people initiated action against him some time after mid-November. It said Kurds from the PUK were acting as negotiators with them on behalf of the United States, with the reward being an issue for Saddam's captors. Credit for the Kurds followed.
At the same time another group, conceivably an Iranian-affiliated group, could have sought intelligence on Saddam's location and provided support, according to diplomatic and intelligence sources. It is also believed that this option provided a way to "short-cut" the negotiating process, allowing Saddam to be taken directly.
Iranian interest in bringing Saddam to justice is widely acknowledged, and Talabani's PUK was known to possess good links with Iran and its intelligence apparatus.
--------
POLITICS
Governing Council Parties Are Said to Back Broad Autonomy for Kurds
January 10, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/middleeast/10KURD.html
KIRKUK, Iraq, Jan. 9 - The major political parties of the Iraqi Governing Council agreed at a meeting with Kurdish leaders on Thursday evening and Friday morning that the northern Kurdish region should keep much of the autonomy that it has held for the last 12 years, a senior Kurdish official said.
That includes allowing the region to remain together as one political body in a federalist system rather than dividing it up into several provinces, as some American officials had proposed, said the Kurdish official, Barham Salih, prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of two governing political parties in the Kurdish area.
Support of Governing Council members for broad Kurdish autonomy conflicts with the plans of the Bush administration, which is seeking to force Kurdish leaders to compromise on their demands for autonomous powers under the new government. L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, has met twice with Kurdish leaders, including Mr. Salih, in the last eight days to ask them to withdraw some requests, only to be rebuffed.
The issue of Kurdish autonomy has emerged as the most volatile one confronting American officials as they try to create a transitional government in Iraq by July 1. There is enormous reluctance by some senior White House officials to divide a federal Iraq along ethnic lines. Close regional allies of the United States like Turkey and Saudi Arabia have also chafed at this idea, for reasons related to their own concerns over ethnic and religious nationalism.
Mr. Salih, who attended the two-day meeting, said in an interview that the two main Kurdish parties were willing to accept the fact that they would not enjoy all the powers they had held since after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, when the United States and Britain declared northern Iraq a no-flight zone and protected the area from Saddam Hussein's forces.
The Kurds are ready to cede matters of foreign, monetary and national defense policy to the Iraqi national government, Mr. Salih said. Kurdish militiamen might become part of the national military, though they would answer to Kurdish authorities, he added.
"There was absolutely no dissension" from the need to "respect and defend many of the elements of the status quo in Kurdistan, including the governing structure of the Kurdish region," Mr. Salih said.
He added that leaders at the meeting discussed the future of Kirkuk, a city rich in oil and agricultural land 150 miles north of Baghdad and just south of the Kurdish region. The Kurdish parties have demanded control of the city of 1 million people. Some attendees supported a Kurdish proposal that would leave the decision of who governs Kirkuk up to a popular vote, Mr. Salih said.
Because of Kirkuk's natural resources and ethnic divisions, a vote would almost certainly stir enormous unrest throughout Iraq. The city's population is composed largely of Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens.
The outcome of a popular vote is hard to predict because no accurate census has been done since 1957. The 173rd Airborne Brigade, which controls the area, estimates that the population is 35 percent Arab, 35 percent Kurd, 26 percent Turkmen and 4 percent other, though those numbers are just rough guesses, said Maj. Douglas Vincent, a spokesman here for the occupation forces. The numbers are changing day by day, as Kurds move into the area and many Arabs move out.
The meeting took place in the area of Erbil, the capital of the half of the Kurdish region controlled by the Kurdish Democratic Party.
Several representatives could not be reached Friday for comment. In recent interviews, some prominent Governing Council members have said they favor a federal system in Iraq, with the Kurdish region remaining as one autonomous body.
"There will be a special structure for Kurdistan, and some kind of federal structure for Iraq, but we haven't gone into the details of that structure," said Adnan Pachachi, the head of the Governing Council.
--------
Arab-Kurd Compromise Nears
Deal Would Allow Ministate Within Iraq After U.S. Leaves
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4843-2004Jan9.html
After two days of talks between Arab and Kurdish leaders in Iraq, a compromise is taking shape that would allow the minority Kurds to keep their ministate within a united Iraq after the U.S. occupation ends, according to Iraqi and European officials.
The tentative compromise, if confirmed by the Iraqi Governing Council and the United States, could defuse the hottest issue dividing Iraqis as they begin debate on how to distribute power in a new Iraqi government scheduled to take control June 30.
The formula for a new federal state in Iraq effectively allows both sides to achieve their primary objectives. The Kurds, who have maintained their own state for the past dozen years, would turn over control of foreign policy, national defense and monetary policy to the central government, while they would retain autonomous rule in the northern area, Kurdish officials said yesterday.
But some Arab leaders and U.S. officials are particularly concerned about Kurdish proposals during the talks to address two ongoing flashpoints -- internal security and the status of oil-rich Kirkuk. Both are potentially explosive problems that have long plagued relations among Iraq's rival ethnic groups.
During talks in the mountainous Kurdish resort of Salahuddin, Kurdish leaders told members of the Governing Council that they are not prepared to accept any arrangement that will allow a new Iraqi army to enter their territory.
"We cannot ever allow the Iraqi military to come into the north. It has to be subject to approval by the Kurdish parliament. We have 83 years of history when the Iraqi military was a tool of repression," Barham Salih, prime minister of the northern area ruled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, said in a telephone interview. Kurds were the primary victims of Saddam Hussein's chemical weapons, and he destroyed more than 80 percent of the Kurdish villages in the north and killed more than 180,000 Kurds.
The Kurds, who have long relied on their own pesh merga militias, have instead proposed that they create a national guard to provide security in the north. It would be drawn from all population groups in the region, including the pesh merga militias and minority Turkmens. While it would be recognized as an arm of national defense policy, it would be led by the Kurds, Kurdish officials said.
This arrangement could set off alarms in neighboring Turkey, which has its own restive Kurdish population and has long been concerned about an independently armed Kurdish population in an autonomous region of Iraq.
The other potential controversy is a Kurdish proposal to resolve the status of oil-rich Kirkuk, historically a predominantly Kurdish area that was "Arabized" by Hussein during a decades-long ethnic cleansing campaign to drive out the Kurds. Hussein offered financial and other incentives to Arab families who disinterred ancestors and brought their bodies for reburial in Kirkuk, aimed at further establishing Arab claims to the area, according to international human rights groups.
The Kurds have proposed a compromise where "Arabization" and ethnic cleansing would be reversed by negotiating a "fair and legal process" that would allow the return of original inhabitants, Kurdish and Iraqi sources said. After that lengthy process was completed, Kirkuk's residents would vote in a referendum to decide whether the area should be part of the Kurdish provinces or the Arab part of the country, the sources said.
"There has to be a compromise by all sides. Our claim to Kirkuk is based in history, geography and population, and we want to incorporate it into our region. But we'll adopt a democratic way for people to decide what they want, rather than simply say the area is ours. This is a major concession," Salih said.
But U.S. officials cautioned that weeks of discussion lie ahead before these issues -- only a small part of the broader Transitional Administration Law, which is the precursor to a new constitution -- are resolved.
"There needs to be a thorough discussion and transparent debate on the important issues facing Iraqis, including federalism. Whatever the solutions the Iraqis arrive at needs to be arrived at by all Iraqis as well as by the U.S.-led coalition. This remains a very fluid situation," a senior administration official said yesterday.
The discussions will continue between the Kurds and a U.S. working group over the next two or three days, Kurdish and U.S. officials said. Kurdish leaders Jalal Talabani and Masoud Barzani are then expected to go to Baghdad for talks with the full Governing Council.
The U.S.-led coalition is expected to announce this weekend a round of town hall meetings throughout Iraq to widen public discussion on specifics of the new law, which is to be concluded by Feb. 28, U.S. officials said.
-------- israel / palestine
What price a life?
The Israeli army shot my son, and the toll continues to rise
Jocelyn Hurndall - tomhurndall.co.uk
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4833294-103677,00.html
In the pensive hours of the night, I am struck by the varying values that mankind chooses to allot to life - as was my son Tom.
Earlier this month, I read with mixed feelings the news that local Palestinian militia had dynamited an Israeli defence force watchtower in the town of Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. It was from this watchtower, which has been responsible for untold misery to many innocent families in Rafah, that Tom was shot in the head last April. At the time he was trying to help Palestinian children to safety. He now lies in a vegetative state in a hospital in London with no hope of recovery.
This week we learned that the Israeli soldier who has been arrested for the shooting is alleged to have smoked cannabis with his battalion. As last year was drawing to a close, a phone call from the British Foreign Office informed me that, under interrogation, this soldier has confessed to shooting my son, knowing he was an unarmed civilian. He claimed that the shot was meant as a "deterrent". From what? From rescuing children? Had he been so conditioned that an act of humanity could only inspire in him such a violent reaction?
I felt no sense of relief then but, for the first time, allowed myself to feel increasing anger. The IDF's inability to differentiate between friend and foe, truth and untruth, and to see themselves as they are seen, is clear to all.
I read the observations recorded in Tom's Middle-East journals. They show a young man determined to be open-minded, to understand and, above all, to make a difference. He had come to understand, as we do now, the customary illegal, inhuman retribution exacted by the IDF from this particular watchtower on the local community, little realising how it was to leave him a thread away from death.
It seems that life is cheap in the occupied territories. Different value attached to life depends on whether the victim happens to be Israeli, international or Palestinian. This has been exemplified recently by the reaction of the Israeli public to the shooting of an Israeli peace activist, fresh out of his three-year military police service, demonstrating against the illegal "security" fence. Two days later an announcement was made that a military police inquiry was to be held into the shooting. Questions were raised in the Knesset. This is in stark contrast to the six months of campaigning that it took for an inquiry to be launched into the shooting of Tom.
There have been thousands of killings in Palestine since the intifada, with only a handful having the benefit of an investigation. Now, a three-week occupation of Nablus (the largest city in Palestine) has left a further 19 people dead and dozens of homes and buildings destroyed, leaving scores of innocent people homeless, all on a pretext of searching for a terror suspect.
When will those responsible accept that it is illegal to collectively and obsessively punish a whole community? Has the hard-nosed Sharon government made connections between the horror of the Holocaust and the current brutal incursions? Countless insightful Israelis, Palestinians and people the world over have done so. Is it surprising that Israel was voted the most dangerous threat to world peace in a recent European Union poll?
It hurts me to hear the deafening silence of our own government. How can there have been no statement of condemnation or condolence for the innocent victims of Israel's mindless violence from our own prime minister, Tony Blair? The silence was only broken when on Christmas day the United States president "strongly condemned" the actions of the suicide bombers responsible for killing four Israeli soldiers at a bus stop just outside Tel Aviv. Does this double standard not underline the lack of regard in which both the British and US governments hold Palestinian life?
So I have questions to ask of Tony Blair. Does he regard the children of Palestine as children of a lesser god? Does he accept that such inaction is tantamount to complicity in the process of destroying any peace initiative in the Middle East? Mr Blair, you know now that an Israeli soldier has confessed to shooting in cold blood an unarmed British citizen who was trying to shepherd children away to safety. When will you be ready to openly condemn these actions?
· Jocelyn Hurndall is on the committee of the Thomas Hurndall Foundation, which campaigns for justice for the Palestinian people
-------- latin america
Cuba tightens its control over the Internet
January 10, 2004
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/business/20040109-092615-6068r.htm
HAVANA - Cuba tightened its controls over the Internet yesterday, prohibiting access over the low-cost government phone service most ordinary citizens have at home.
The move could affect hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Cubans who illegally access the Internet from their homes, using computers and Internet accounts they have borrowed or purchased on the black market.
Cuba's communist government already heavily controls access to the Internet. Cubans must have government permission to use the Web legally and most don't, although many can access international e-mail and a more limited government-controlled intranet at government jobs and schools.
Now Cubans will need additional approval to access via the nation's regular phone service. Because few Cubans are authorized to use the Internet from home - only some doctors and key government officials are allowed - the new law amounts to a crackdown on illegal users.
The law states that the move is necessary to "regulate dial-up access to Internet navigation service, adopting measures that help protect against the taking of passwords, malicious acts, and the fraudulent and unauthorized use of this service."
As for foreign companies and individuals, most are authorized to use the Internet in Cuba, usually via a more expensive telephone service charged in American dollars and already off-limits to most Cubans.
E-net, the Internet service of the Cuban telephone company Etecsa, told customers in a letter yesterday that the new law would take effect late today. It affects all other Internet service providers in Cuba as well.
E-net is the largest of a handful of Internet providers in Cuba - all of them heavily monitored and controlled by the government.
E-net customers who do not have the dollar phone service can keep accessing the Internet with the ordinary phone service with special cards sold at Etecsa offices, the letter says.
-------- mideast
Syria Role On Iraqi Arms Is Studied
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5102-2004Jan9.html
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice reeled off a list of White House grievances against Syria yesterday and said the administration is investigating a report that Iraq stashed weapons of mass destruction across the border in Syria.
Rice, briefing reporters in advance of President Bush's trip to Mexico next week, said the United States will "tie down every lead" about any possible disposition of unconventional weapons by Iraq, including the possibility that some were smuggled into Syria. U.S. forces have searched for months without finding Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, a failure that has bedeviled the White House.
Rice said the United States has "a number of issues that we'd like to talk to . . . the Syrians about." These include "the borders with Iraq and what may have happened in the past there and what may be continuing to happen there; Syrian support for terrorism in Damascus, particularly support for Hezbollah and Hamas, and their relationship with Lebanon in that regard," she said.
As for the possibility that Syria hid chemical and biological weapons for Iraq, Rice said: "I don't think we are at the point that we can make a judgment on this issue. There hasn't been any hard evidence that such a thing happened. But obviously we're going to follow up every lead, and it would be a serious problem if that, in fact, did happen."
Administration officials have been expressing increasing frustration with Syria and have said the country "is on the wrong side in the war on terror." U.S. officials believe some key leaders of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party escaped into Syria, which has a Baathist Party regime and remains on the State Department's list of state sponsors of terrorism. The administration also has complained that Syria has let foreign fighters cross the border with Iraq to attack U.S. troops; Damascus has denied that.
Rice was asked about reports claiming that Hussein used ambulances to smuggle chemical and biological weapons to three sites hidden in Syria in the months before the U.S. invasion in March. News services said the claim was made yesterday on Britain's independent Channel 5 News by a Syrian dissident, Paris-based human rights campaigner Nizar Nayyouf, who said he had been given the information by a senior source inside Syrian military intelligence he had known for two years.
Rice said she "can't dismiss anything that we haven't had an opportunity to fully assess," but she said the administration has no "indications that I would consider credible and firm that that has taken place."
The smuggling report followed an interview this week in which Syrian President Bashar Assad told London's Daily Telegraph that he would not abandon his country's suspected chemical and biological programs unless Israel gives up its undeclared nuclear arsenal.
-------- nato
Trial to open of Dutch ex-NATO official charged with money laundering
THE HAGUE (AFP)
Jan 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040110144542.8900mb7w.html
The trial of former NATO official Jan Willem Matser accused of trying to launder 200 million dollars from drug-trafficking will start before the Dutch courts on Monday.
Matser, 50, Eastern Europe advisor for former NATO secretary-general George Robertson, was arrested in February 2003 in Belgium and later transferred to the Netherlands.
Dutch prosecutors have provisionally charged Matser and another three men of money laundering, fraud, forgery and criminal conspiracy. The other suspects, two Dutch nationals and an Italian, will also be on trial Monday.
The complicated case centres around allegedly false bank bonds from Colombia sent to Matser by his co-accused, a convicted Italian drugs dealer identified only as Pietro F.
F. is suspected of sending the proceeds through Colombia to launder them in Europe and Romania with the help of Matser.
According to the prosecution, Matser was planning to cash the false bonds in the Netherlands and use them for investments in Romania.
Sources in Romania, where Matser had many contacts as part of his job as NATO's Eastern Europe advisor, say he told of his plans to invest heavily in Romanian banks, tourism and infrastructure.
The former NATO employee was allegedly involved with Tender, a conglomorate of thirty companies in the fields of logistics, oil and mining, run by tycoon Ovidiu Tender.
According to Dutch daily NRC-Handelsblad Matser said he would buy Tender when he cashed in on the Columbian securities. His arrest in February was frontpage news in Romania.
Matser has maintained his innocence and denies he knew that the Colombian securities were false, according to NRC-Handelsblad, which had access to prosecution documents.
"The fact that the bonds were false only surfaced after I was arrested," the newspaper on Saturday quoted him as saying during police questioning.
Matser's lawyers are expected to argue that because the securities were false there was no money in Colombia and thus no money laundered by their client.
The trial is scheduled to last three days with hearings Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.
----
German defence minister sees Russian NATO membership ahead: interview
BERLIN (AFP)
Jan 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040110181417.zzlm27ay.html
Russia will "one day" have to join NATO, German Defence Minister Peter Struck told Germany's Bild am Sonntag newspaper to be published Sunday.
The fact that his Russian counterpart Igor Ivanov informs the Atlantic alliance of its future plans for the Russian army is "already big progress", Struck said.
"Formerly several spies would have been needed" to obtain such information, the German minister added.
NATO was conceived as a Cold War fighting bloc to stand against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
But "since May 2002, the alliance and Moscow have been working closely together in the Russia-NATO council", Struck told the paper.
Consequently "Moscow is associated with NATO decisions such as the fight against terrorism, resolution of regional crises or even the control of armaments," he said.
Russia congratulated former Dutch foreign minister Jaap de Hoop Scheffer on Monday as he took over as chief of NATO and said it hoped relations with Moscow would be a priority for the new leader of the alliance.
Russia has watched warily as the Atlantic alliance has expanded eastwards ever closer to its borders following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The bloc already includes former Soviet satellites like Poland and at an Istanbul summit in June will welcome the former Soviet Baltic republics into the fold.
-------- philippines
7 Killed as Rebels Hit Philippine Power Plant
January 10, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Philippines-Rebel-Attack.html?pagewanted=all
MANILA, Philippines (AP) -- Three rebels and four soldiers died Saturday when the guerrilla New People's Army attacked a power plant south of the capital, the military said. The attack came days after a rebel official warned of increased attacks to punish the government of President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo for its close ties to the United States.
About 50 New People's Army guerrillas attacked government troops guarding the power plant in Calaca about 2 a.m., armed forces spokesman Lt. Col. Daniel Lucero said. Air force Maj. Restituto Padilla said three government troops were killed in the gunbattle and a fourth died later in a hospital. The rebels also wounded six on the government side.
Rebel fighters fired at least two volleys of light anti-tank rockets at the detachment guarding the power plant.
Padilla said his forces recovered the bodies of three rebels, but a spokesman for the New People's Army, Gregorio Rosal, said he was only aware of two casualties.
After government reinforcements arrived, the rebels fled and were being pursued, Lucero said.
Shortly after the incident, another group of rebels ambushed a convoy of soldiers sent to reinforce a detachment in the nearby town of Balayan. There were no reports of casualties.
Lucero said the rebels intended to destroy the power plant, about 50 miles south of Manila, and cause a widespread blackout on the main Philippine island of Luzon.
``They intended to paralyze the livelihood of the people ... and they would just be alienated from the masses,'' Lucero said.
The rebel spokesman told DZRH radio the attack was ``in response to the directive of the party to intensify tactical offensives'' and to punish the soldiers based in the area for human rights violations.
``The attack was directed at the detachment,'' Rosal said. ``In truth they did not do anything to (the facility),'' he said.
Rosal on Tuesday vowed to intensify attacks ahead of May elections in hopes of bringing down Macapagal. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Philippine guerrillas became a target of the U.S.-led global war on terror when Washington placed them on its list of terrorist organizations and urged nations to help wipe them out by denying them refuge and money.
-------- prisoners of war
CAPTIVE
Hussein Given P.O.W. Status
January 10, 2004
New York Times
By DOUGLAS JEHL
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/middleeast/10SADD.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - The Defense Department said Friday that it had designated Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war, a legal status that sets standards for how he is treated and allows the International Committee of the Red Cross to see him.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said Mr. Hussein "is an enemy prisoner of war, and he'll continue to be an enemy prisoner of war unless and until his status is determined to be otherwise."
A Red Cross official, Christophe Girod, said his organization had been talking with Pentagon officials about getting access to Mr. Hussein, under the rights granted to prisoners of war by the Geneva Conventions. He said his organization had received "no negative signal" in response, but had not yet been promised access.
At the same time, senior American officials said the Federal Bureau of Investigation had become increasingly involved in questioning Mr. Hussein, signaling that the authorities now view him as a potential defendant in a legal proceeding as well as an intelligence source.
While the Central Intelligence Agency remains in overall control, the F.B.I. involvement reflects C.I.A. reluctance to allow covert officers to take part in interrogations that could force them to appear as court witnesses. In contrast, F.B.I. agents are trained to interview suspects in preparation for prosecutions.
Since Mr. Hussein's capture on Dec. 13, American officials have for the most part clamped a tight lid on information about him. Four members of the Iraqi Governing Council were allowed to see him briefly to help confirm that he was, in fact, Saddam Hussein. And some people have seen photographs of his jail cell at an undisclosed location in Iraq, reporting that it appears to be a windowless room with a shower and floor-to-ceiling white tile walls.
One American official described the interrogation of the former Iraqi dictator as "a chess game" with him in which agents would seek admissions about his role in assassinations, mass killings and other abuses of power, knowing that he had little incentive to speak candidly.
A prosecution of Mr. Hussein would not necessarily rely on information from his interrogation. A large body of documentary material and witnesses, supporting charges of atrocities by his government over two decades, has already been assembled by human rights groups and the United States government.
The Bush administration has said Mr. Hussein will eventually be turned over to a new Iraqi government, and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell reiterated that pledge on Friday, saying Mr. Hussein would be "put on trial with international observers participating."
In a television interview with an Israeli reporter, Mr. Powell also said, "We are certainly treating everybody in our custody in accordance with basic rights and expectations of international agreements that we have."
Ruth Wedgwood, an expert on the Geneva Conventions who is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, said a declaration of prisoner-of-war status would impose some strictures on the manner in which Mr. Hussein could be interrogated.
The Geneva Conventions prohibit both unpleasant and unequal treatment of prisoners, Ms. Wedgwood said, meaning for example that Mr. Hussein could not be threatened with punishment or promised improved conditions in return for cooperation.
As for Mr. Hussein, Ms. Wedgwood said, "Frankly, he's such a hard-core thug that he's going to tell you what he wants to, and not otherwise."
"It's mostly a political decision," she said. `Thug though he is, treating him as opposing commander in chief may have some positive reception in the Arab world."
American commanders in Iraq have said for weeks that Mr. Hussein would be treated as a prisoner of war while legal experts determined his status.
On Friday, a senior Defense Department official said that a review by administration lawyers that was completed this week had determined that it was important "to be precise about his status" and that Mr. Hussein did indeed meet that qualification.
After releasing photographs of a disheveled Mr. Hussein shortly after his capture, American military and civilian officials provided some details about the early hours of his time in custody. But little additional information emerged until Friday, when American and British officials said his C.I.A. interrogators had been taking a gentle approach in their questioning of him, consistent with the plans to treat him as if he was a prisoner of war.
Mr. Hussein has refused to cooperate with American interrogators, and has provided little or no useful information to them. Still, the officials said they were hopeful that he might begin to cooperate, and they said the documents found with him at his hiding place near Tikrit were continuing to yield rich intelligence dividends, providing clues about the organization of the Iraqi insurgency.
One alternative to declaring Mr. Hussein a prisoner of war would have been to identify him as an unlawful combatant, according to military officials. That status - the one assigned by American officials to suspected terrorists being held at Guantánamo Bay and other locations around the world - would leave him without protection under the Geneva Conventions.
Assigning Mr. Hussein prisoner-of-war status would also require that he be repatriated to a new Iraqi government after the United States declares an end to hostilities, Mr. Girod of the Red Cross said.
A Defense Department spokesman, Maj. Michael Shavers of the Air Force, said it was a matter of Mr. Hussein's military role.
"The bottom line is that Saddam Hussein was the leader of the old regime's military forces, and therefore he was a member of the military, and he was captured," Major Shavers said. "That makes him an enemy prisoner of war."
The first details about Mr. Hussein's interrogation were provided by a British official who spoke on condition of anonymity at a briefing in London. American officials in Washington, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, provided general corroboration of that account.
Since Mr. Hussein's capture, American commanders in Iraq have said it has become easier to obtain information from Iraqis about the insurgency. But attacks against American targets have continued.
Mr. Powell declined to say when Mr. Hussein might be turned over to Iraqi custody, but he suggested that it could happen as early as July, when a a provisional Iraqi authority is to be installed.
"We believe the credibility of the new Iraqi government will be measured by how they handle this horrible dictator," Mr. Powell said.
----
Pentagon Calls Hussein a POW
Declaration Formally Binds U.S. to Geneva Conventions
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4844-2004Jan9.html
The Pentagon announced yesterday that Saddam Hussein, whose legal status had been in question since his capture last month, is indeed an enemy prisoner of war.
The announcement carried implications for the treatment of the former Iraqi leader and the circumstances under which he may eventually be brought to trial.
"Saddam's status is that he is an enemy prisoner of war," Larry DiRita, the Pentagon's top spokesman, told reporters late yesterday. "The lawyers have determined that."
DiRita and other defense officials said the legal determination will change little in the way Hussein has been handled since U.S. forces found him on Dec. 13 hiding in a covered hole in the ground on an Iraqi farm near the city of Tikrit. U.S. authorities have said he is being treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war. "From a practical standpoint, it really doesn't do anything," one senior defense official said of yesterday's announcement.
But the official declaration of Hussein's status does make it a formal U.S. responsibility to abide by the Geneva rules.
Among other things, those rules stipulate that prisoners not be subjected to intimidation or insult and not be turned into a public curiosity. The accords also entitle prisoners to proper food, freedom to practice religion and monthly pay depending on rank.
Additionally, prisoners must be allowed visits by representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross to check on the conditions of captivity. An ICRC spokesman in Washington said yesterday that the organization has approached U.S. authorities in Baghdad about gaining access to Hussein.
The conventions will not prevent Hussein from facing trial on war crimes charges. But they require that any such proceedings be handled by an international tribunal or an occupying power -- in this case, the United States. This provision could frustrate U.S. plans to turn Hussein over to an Iraqi court on charges of genocide and other atrocities.
Although the Pentagon's announcement came several weeks after Hussein's capture, officials familiar with the department's internal deliberations said the general counsel's office had reached an early consensus that Hussein deserved prisoner-of-war status.
"There was a presumption that given his former position as president and commander in chief of Iraq's military, and the fact that he was captured in an armed conflict, he was an enemy prisoner of war," the senior official said.
But until yesterday, the Pentagon had maintained that the issue was still under review. As recently as Tuesday, when Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was asked about Hussein's status at a Pentagon news conference, he said the Pentagon's lawyers had good reasons for Hussein not having been declared a prisoner of war.
Yesterday, aides said Rumsfeld had spoken without the benefit of an updated legal briefing. He received one yesterday.
Defense officials left open the possibility that Hussein's status could be reevaluated and changed in the light of new information that might emerge about his activities, particularly his role in the insurgency that has sprouted since President Bush declared the end of major hostilities last May. A finding, for instance, that Hussein had been involved in unlawful combat action could lead U.S. authorities to drop his prisoner-of-war status.
U.S. authorities continue to interrogate Hussein at an undisclosed location in Iraq, with the CIA taking the lead role. No reports have surfaced publicly of any useful information that he has volunteered.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, in an interview with CBS News yesterday, said the Bush administration has yet to decide when to hand Hussein over to Iraqi authorities. "We want the Iraqis to be full partners in this, and we believe the credibility of the new Iraqi government will be measured by how they handle this horrible dictator," Powell said.
----
The Other Guantánamos - Britain's Dark Places
by Kareem Fahim
January 7 - 13, 2004
Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0401/fahim.php
It's a different island but a disturbingly familiar tale of suspended rights and justice denied.
Human rights groups are calling two high-security British prisons that hold at least 14 terrorism suspects the United Kingdom's version of Camp Delta, the detention lockup on the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay.
The detainees at Belmarsh and Woodhill prisons are all foreign nationals and asylum seekers, and many have been imprisoned without trial for two years. Arrested after 9-11, the suspects are held on the basis of evidence neither they nor their lawyers have seen. Their advocates say that the majority are North African, and that immigration violations play no role in their detentions. The men, say their lawyers, are kept alonein their cells for up to 22 hours a day.
In the last few weeks, testimony from one of the suspects has sparked a vigorous debate on the detentions.
"They prevented us from going to Friday prayers," Mahmoud Abu Rideh, a Palestinian, wrote to The Guardian. Abu Rideh, who his lawyer says is a past victim of Israeli torture, was recently transferred from London's Belmarsh to a high security psychiatric hospital after he attempted suicide.
"Every 24 hours there is only one-hour walk in front of the cells and half an hour walking inside a cage. You do not see sun. You cannot tell whether it is night or day. Everything is dark."
Abu Rideh's lawyer, Gareth Peirce, who also represents a number of other detainees, said in a recent statement that all the suspects are political refugees, and that a number of them are torture victims. " 'National security' has a seductive ring," she said. "It frightens off political disagreement." The detainees are considered "Category A" prisoners, or men who pose an exceptional risk should they escape. Conditions in Belmarsh for such prisoners are harsh, and have come under fire from rights groups in the past. The September 11 detainees there include a polio victim who has been denied the use of his wheelchair, and a man who has no arms and must rely on other prisoners for assistance.
The British government has told the detainees that they are free to return to their home countries. For men who fear persecution at home, their lawyers say, this is a Hobson's choice. The government admitted during the appeals process that it does not have enough evidence to try the detainees. And international law prohibits the U.K. from forcibly returning anyone to countries where they might face torture.
Further, the detentions mean the families of the suspects are forced into seclusion. "Once the stigma [of 'terrorist'] is attached," notes Livio Zilli of Amnesty International, "it's very, very powerful."
So they remain in limbo, despite recent recommendations by a government panel that seem to provide a tunnel out. The report by the Privy Counselor Review Committee notes that if the men are released, surveillance on them could be increased, or they could be electronically "tagged" to keep track of their movements. One lawyer for the detainees says either of these options is preferable to indefinite imprisonment.
The suspects at Belmarsh and the handful confined at Woodhill in Milton Keynes, are being held under emergency anti-terrorism laws passed in Britain three months after September 11. There has been surprise at the length of the detentions in the U.K., where criticism of the Bush administration and its war on terror has been widespread.
"[The detentions] undercut our moral authority," says Clive Stafford Smith, an English American lawyer who is representing British detainees held at Guantánamo's Camp Delta in a case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. "Unfortunately, they've painted enough of a pretext of due process," Smith says. "It's been a slow thing to create pressure."
Abu Rideh's letter comes amid calls for the British government to work harder for the release of nine Britons held at Guantánamo Bay. Last month, rumors floated that some of the men there would be freed for Christmas. According to published reports, British Home Secretary David Blunkett blocked the release out of fear that there was insufficient evidence to get convictions in trials in the U.K.
The U.S. government has indicated that a British trial is a precondition of the men's release from the base in Cuba.
A spokesman for Blunkett told the Voice that he believes that the Guantánamo detainees "should receive a fair trial with proper appeal procedures or they should be released."
But for the men in Belmarsh, the rules are different, and in this respect, a recent British anti-terrorism law and its consequences will be familiar to Americans. As with the thousands of detainees held here after September 11, the effect of the law is that noncitizens are subject to a different set of judicial standards than citizens when it comes to suspicions of terrorism.
Britain's version of the Patriot Act is called the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA), legislation that Amnesty has charged creates a "shadow criminal justice system." Section 4 of ATCSA gives the British government broad powers to arrest and indefinitely detain foreigners it suspects are terrorists. There is no right to trial in the new legislation, and no obligation to present evidence to the detained or their lawyers.
Further, critics charge, there have been indications that the British government has been willing to consider evidence against terrorism suspects secured by foreign governments using torture. The recent Amnesty report on the ATCSA relates the testimony of a British MI5 agent, who, during an appeal hearing for the Belmarsh men, revealed that MI5 finds it possible that evidence extracted under torture could be reliable. The appeals court hearing the case seemed to agree.
"It may well appear that to admit such evidence would result in unfairness," the appeal judgment read. "But it does not in our view justify the conclusion that information obtained by a third party by methods which breached Article 3"-of the European Convention on Human Rights, which prohibits torture-"is inadmissible."
The detainees held at Belmarsh lost their most recent appeal for release.
One of Natalia Garcia's clients said he feels like he has been "buried alive." The man, whose identity and nationality cannot be revealed because of a court order, was taken from his home in December 2001. For three months following his imprisonment, he wasn't allowed to contact either his family or a lawyer. His wife is now supported by state welfare.
"It's hard to imagine the psychological effects of this kind of imprisonment," says Garcia, who represents two terrorism suspects held at Woodhill prison. "There's an allegation against you, and it's totally vague. You are suspected of fundraising for a certain group, or 'support activities.' But they never say what the activities are, or where the funds are. So, all you can say is 'no.' "
Garcia says that while most of the evidence against her clients is discussed in closed court sessions, the sessions that are public are "riddled with inaccuracies."
In one instance, she says, the authorities produced a surveillance report of a meeting that took place at the home of a suspect.
"It was 10 to 15 men," she said, "but they failed to take into account that this was Eid, a Muslim religious festival, when everybody gets together to celebrate. The men had all dropped off their wives who were celebrating at another house. It was a perfectly normal social celebration. We pointed it out in a hearing, and the court acknowledged it."
Garcia says that because of the secrecy surrounding the detentions, she feels powerless to represent her clients properly. "They don't have real access to solicitors," she said. "We're like window dressing."
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Guantanamo families accuse Blair of blocking release
By Robert Verkaik, Legal Affairs Correspondent
10 January 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/story.jsp?story=479785
Families of the British detainees held in Guantanamo Bay have accused the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary of blocking their sons' early release from prison.
The claim was made after a senior American official told reporters that his government had dropped its demand that all nine Britons should stand trial if they were repatriated.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, the US Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues, said that if Britain could safely "manage" the terrorist risk the men are alleged to pose then it would not be necessary to charge them with criminal offences.
He said seven of the nine British suspects had been assessed as posing a "medium risk" in terms of future terrorist activity. The remaining two were described as "high risk."
Louise Christian, solicitor for three of the nine families, identified the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, as the only obstacle to the men's release.
"I think the US has been prepared to release them without a trial but the British Government has been acting as an obstacle to them being returned," she said. "It's been the case for some time that the Government is opposed and the feeling has been that David Blunkett is the reason."
Ms Christian said that she suspected Mr Blunkett was concerned that he may be criticised if the suspects, who have been held for two years, were not charged with criminal offences in this country.
These fears were partly confirmed when the shadow Foreign Secretary, Michael Ancram, yesterday demanded that all detainees face the "full rigour of the law" when they are sent home.
In a letter to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, he suggested that they should be put on trial for treason.
His letter said: "We agree, however, with Pierre-Richard Prosper ... that, if returned and if there is sufficient evidence, they should face the full rigour of the law in this country."
Mr Prosper indicated that in the cases of Feroz Abbasi, from Croydon, and Moazzam Begg, from Birmingham, the Americans were not prepared to soften their stance. He said they had been classified as "high risk" and needed more stringent management that could only be guaranteed if they were tried by the Americans.
But Ms Christian said it would be an "absolute betrayal" by the British Government if any of the detainees were treated separately and sent before the US military commissions.
Azmat Begg, 65, a retired bank manager and father of Moazzam Begg, blamed the Prime Minister for the failure to help his son.
"It has nothing to do with the Americans. Mr Bush said last year: 'It's nothing to do with me, it's to do with Mr Blair'. I think they want to keep my son in Guantanamo because of all the noise I have been making about his detention."
Mr Begg said the letters he had received from Guantanamo Bay suggested that his son was not in a "presentable condition" to be released. "He's complained about marks and bruises on his body and something to do with his fingernails, which may be evidence of torture."
Mr Begg said he was shocked that the Americans had categorised his son as a high-risk terrorist.
"How can it be that he is high-risk detainee? My son couldn't hurt a fly. He lived in this country for 35 years and did nothing wrong. Suddenly he's capable of destroying the White House or harming the President. They've been investigating for two years but haven't come up with any evidence against him."
The Americans have suggested that if the British can place the detainees under close police surveillance this might satisfy them that the British were "managing the threat."
Mr Begg said his son would "happily" comply with any legal request to control his movements in this country.
The British prisoners
CATEGORY 1: HIGH-RISK
Moazzam Begg, 35, from Birmingham, was seized by Pakistani security forces in Islamabad in February 2002 and handed to the US military.
Feroz Abbasi, 23, from London. Captured by US forces in Afganistan in December 2001. Born in Uganda and came to Britain when he was eight.
CATEGORY 2: MEDIUM-RISK
Shafiq Rasul; a 24-year-old law student from Tipton, West Midlands, was captured by the Northern Alliance, and handed to the US in Afghanistan in December 2001
Asif Iqbal, 20, a parcel depot worker from Tipton. Held in Afghanistan. He went to Pakistan with his father, Mohammed, to find a wife.
Ruhal Ahmed, 20, from Tipton. Captured in Kandahar. Asif Iqbal and Rhuhel Ahmed were classmates in Tipton.
Jamal Udeen, a website designer, aged 35, from Hulme, near Manchester. Arrested in Afghanistan. Claims he was travelling and got caught up in the fighting.
Tarek Dergoul: a 24-year-old former care worker from east London. Arrested in Afghanistan.
Martin Mubanga, 29, a motorcyle courier from west London. His father is a Zambian government official. It is believed he was handed over to the US by Zambia.
Richard Belmar, 24, who attended a Catholic school in north London, and converted to Islam in his teens, after his elder brother. He worshipped at Regent's Park mosque, close to his home in Maida Vale, London.
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Soft treatment fails to get Saddam to talk
Captive dictator has full PoW rights, Pentagon reveals
Jonathan Steele, and Luke Harding in Baghdad
Saturday January 10, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1119951,00.html
Saddam Hussein has been formally declared an enemy prisoner of war, but is still resisting pressure to help his American interrogators after three weeks in custody.
The former dictator, captured almost a month ago, is being given all the rights due him under the Geneva conventions on enemy prisoners of war, a Pentagon spokesman said.
According to British officials, the US administrator in Iraq, Paul Bremer, told Tony Blair in Basra last week that Saddam was being treated gently in an effort to coax him into talking, but that he was "not offering information of an operationally useful kind".
"They are taking their time, trying to get him to talk so that he can feel comfortable that he can talk in captivity," a British official reported him saying.
But Mr Blair was told that documents found in a briefcase in the house near where Saddam was found had helped the US forces to track Iraqi insurgents. The results of his capture were "greater than expected", the prime minister was told.
The UN confirmed yesterday it would not oppose Washington's plan to hand power to an unelected Iraqi government.
Rather than direct elections, the US wants "caucuses" of handpicked "notables" in each of the 18 provinces to choose a transitional national assembly, which would then appoint a government.
In the predominantly Sunni town of Baquba at least six people were killed and 39 injured yesterday by a bomb hidden in a bicycle outside a crowded Shia mosque which exploded as worshippers left after Friday prayers.
The attack was almost certainly the work of Sunni extremists, and appears to be the latest sectarian incident between Iraq's two main religious communities. Baquba is a centre of Iraqi resistance. American troops have carried out numerous raids there, arresting dozens of suspected insurgents.
Shia leaders are unhappy with the plan for transferring power in June, which the US worked out with the Iraq governing council.
Calling for direct elections, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the senior Shia cleric, said this week that the US plan would not "ensure in any way the fair representation of the Iraqi people".
Supporters of direct elections say they could be held on the basis of the existing Iraqi census and the food ration cards which Iraqis had under the old UN oil-for-food programme. US and British officials say there is no time to organise them properly.
Abdel Aziz Hakim, a senior Shia who headed the governing council last month, wrote to Mr Annan 10 days ago offering a compromise whereby the UN would examine the options and judge their feasibility.
The offer was sensitive, since the US has made it clear that it wants to cut the UN out of the Iraq issue until a new government is formed. Its plan for the transfer of sovereignty made no mention of a UN role.
Barely concealing his annoyance shortly after the plan was announced in November, Mr Annan told reporters: "There have been some questions about whether this was an omission or a message.
After lengthy debate at its New York headquarters, he has accepted that the UN can do little, especially as concern for the security of its own staff is still strong.
In a reply to the governing council's current chairman, Adnan Pachachi, Mr Annan wrote this week that it would be too ambitious to expect the UN "to become involved to a significant extent" in Iraq before the end of June.
Privately, UN officials accept Washington's line that early elections would be ill-prepared.
Security has been a serious issue for the UN since a lorry-bomb destroyed its Baghdad headquarters last August, killing Sergio Vieira de Mello, the head of mission, and 21 other people.
It was the most devastating attack in the UN's 58-year existence. All non-Iraqi staff were withdrawn in October and the UN now runs what is left of its Iraq operations from Cyprus and Jordan.
An early task for the new Iraq government will be to make plans for a constitution and elections held on its basis in 2005.
The US seems willing to give the UN a role once the occupation is formally over. "Our position is that we should prepare for a role after June. It's not practical before," a UN official said last night.
Britain is confident that a sovereign Iraqi government would invite US and British troops to remain as part of a multilateral force approved by the UN security council.
"It would leave the US in overall theatre command rather like Afghanistan," a British official said. "The Iraqi government could always abrogate the agreement but they would have to to take the security consequences."
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Paranoid shift
By Michael Hasty
January 10, 2004
Online Journal
http://www.onlinejournal.com/Commentary/011004Hasty/011004hasty.html
Just before his death, James Jesus Angleton, the legendary chief of counterintelligence at the Central Intelligence Agency, was a bitter man. He felt betrayed by the people he had worked for all his life. In the end, he had come to realize that they were never really interested in American ideals of "freedom" and "democracy." They really only wanted "absolute power."
Angleton told author Joseph Trento that the reason he had gotten the counterintelligence job in the first place was by agreeing not to submit "sixty of Allen Dulles' closest friends" to a polygraph test concerning their business deals with the Nazis. In his end-of-life despair, Angleton assumed that he would see all his old companions again "in hell."
The transformation of James Jesus Angleton from an enthusiastic, Ivy League cold warrior, to a bitter old man, is an extreme example of a phenomenon I call a "paranoid shift." I recognize the phenomenon, because something similar happened to me.
Although I don't remember ever meeting James Jesus Angleton, I worked at the CIA myself as a low-level clerk as a teenager in the '60s. This was at the same time I was beginning to question the government's actions in Vietnam. In fact, my personal "paranoid shift" probably began with the disillusionment I felt when I realized that the story of American foreign policy was, at the very least, more complicated and darker than I had hitherto been led to believe.
But for most of the next 30 years, even though I was a radical, I nevertheless held faith in the basic integrity of a system where power ultimately resided in the people, and whereby if enough people got together and voted, real and fundamental change could happen.
What constitutes my personal paranoid shift is that I no longer believe this to be necessarily true.
In his book, "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower," William Blum warns of how the media will make anything that smacks of "conspiracy theory" an immediate "object of ridicule." This prevents the media from ever having to investigate the many strange interconnections among the ruling class-for example, the relationship between the boards of directors of media giants, and the energy, banking and defense industries. These unmentionable topics are usually treated with what Blum calls "the media's most effective tool-silence." But in case somebody's asking questions, all you have to do is say, "conspiracy theory," and any allegation instantly becomes too frivolous to merit serious attention.
On the other hand, since my paranoid shift, whenever I hear the words "conspiracy theory" (which seems more often, lately) it usually means someone is getting too close to the truth.
Take September 11-which I identify as the date my paranoia actually shifted, though I didn't know it at the time.
Unless I'm paranoid, it doesn't make any sense at all that George W. Bush, commander-in-chief, sat in a second-grade classroom for 20 minutes after he was informed that a second plane had hit the World Trade Center, listening to children read a story about a goat. Nor does it make sense that the Number 2 man, Dick Cheney-even knowing that "the commander" was on a mission in Florida-nevertheless sat at his desk in the White House, watching TV, until the Secret Service dragged him out by the armpits.
Unless I'm paranoid, it makes no sense that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sat at his desk until Flight 77 hit the Pentagon-well over an hour after the military had learned about the multiple hijacking in progress. It also makes no sense that the brand-new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff sat in a Senate office for two hours while the 9/11 attacks took place, after leaving explicit instructions that he not be disturbed-which he wasn't.
In other words, while the 9/11 attacks were occurring, the entire top of the chain of command of the most powerful military in the world sat at various desks, inert. Why weren't they in the "Situation Room?" Don't any of them ever watch "West Wing?"
In a sane world, this would be an object of major scandal. But here on this side of the paranoid shift, it's business as usual.
Years, even decades before 9/11, plans had been drawn up for American forces to take control of the oil interests of the Middle East, for various imperialist reasons. And these plans were only contingent upon "a catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor," to gain the majority support of the American public to set the plans into motion. When the opportunity presented itself, the guards looked the other way . . . and presto, the path to global domination was open.
Simple, as long as the media played along. And there is voluminous evidence that the media play along. Number one on Project Censored's annual list of underreported stories in 2002 was the Project for a New American Century (now the infrastructure of the Bush Regime), whose report, published in 2000, contains the above "Pearl Harbor" quote.
Why is it so hard to believe serious people who have repeatedly warned us that powerful ruling elites are out to dominate "the masses?" Did we think Dwight Eisenhower was exaggerating when he warned of the extreme "danger" to democracy of "the military industrial complex?" Was Barry Goldwater just being a quaint old-fashioned John Bircher when he said that the Trilateral Commission was "David Rockefeller's latest scheme to take over the world, by taking over the government of the United States?" Were Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt or Joseph Kennedy just being class traitors when they talked about a small group of wealthy elites who operate as a hidden government behind the government? Especially after he died so mysteriously, why shouldn't we believe the late CIA Director William Colby, who bragged about how the CIA "owns everyone of any major significance in the major media?"
Why can't we believe James Jesus Angleton-a man staring eternal judgment in the face-when he says that the founders of the Cold War national security state were only interested in "absolute power?" Especially when the descendant of a very good friend of Allen Dulles now holds power in the White House.
Prescott Bush, the late, aristocratic senator from Connecticut, and grandfather of George W Bush, was not only a good friend of Allen Dulles, CIA director, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, and international business lawyer. He was also a client of Dulles' law firm. As such, he was the beneficiary of Dulles' miraculous ability to scrub the story of Bush's treasonous investments in the Third Reich out of the news media, where it might have interfered with Bush's political career . . . not to mention the presidential careers of his son and grandson.
Recently declassified US government documents, unearthed last October by investigative journalist John Buchanan at the New Hampshire Gazette, reveal that Prescott Bush's involvement in financing and arming the Nazis was more extensive than previously known. Not only was Bush managing director of the Union Banking Corporation, the American branch of Hitler's chief financier's banking network; but among the other companies where Bush was a director-and which were seized by the American government in 1942, under the Trading With the Enemy Act-were a shipping line which imported German spies; an energy company that supplied the Luftwaffe with high-ethyl fuel; and a steel company that employed Jewish slave labor from the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Like all the other Bush scandals that have been swept under the rug in the privatized censorship of the corporate media, these revelations have been largely ignored, with the exception of a single article in the Associated Press. And there are those, even on the left, who question the current relevance of this information.
But Prescott Bush's dealings with the Nazis do more than illustrate a family pattern of genteel treason and war profiteering-from George Senior's sale of TOW missiles to Iran at the same time he was selling biological and chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein, to Junior's zany misadventures in crony capitalism in present-day Iraq.
More disturbing by far are the many eerie parallels between Adolph Hitler and George W. Bush:
A conservative, authoritarian style, with public appearances in military uniform (which no previous American president has ever done while in office). Government by secrecy, propaganda and deception. Open assaults on labor unions and workers' rights. Preemptive war and militant nationalism. Contempt for international law and treaties. Suspiciously convenient "terrorist" attacks, to justify a police state and the suspension of liberties. A carefully manufactured image of "The Leader," who's still just a "regular guy" and a "moderate." "Freedom" as the rationale for every action. Fantasy economic growth, based on unprecedented budget deficits and massive military spending.
And a cold, pragmatic ideology of fascism-including the violent suppression of dissent and other human rights; the use of torture, assassination and concentration camps; and most important, Benito Mussolini's preferred definition of "fascism" as "corporatism, because it binds together the interests of corporations and the state."
By their fruits, you shall know them.
What perplexes me most is probably the same question that plagues most paranoiacs: why don't other people see these connections?
Oh, sure, there may be millions of us, lurking at websites like Online Journal, From the Wilderness, Center for Cooperative Research, and the Center for Research on Globalization, checking out right-wing conspiracists and the galaxy of 9/11 sites, and reading columnists like Chris Floyd at the Moscow Times, and Maureen Farrell at Buzzflash. But we know we are only a furtive minority, the human remnant among the pod people in the live-action, 21st-century version of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."
And being paranoid, we have to figure out, with an answer that fits into our system, why more people don't see the connections we do. Fortunately, there are a number of possible explanations.
First on the list would have to be what Marshal McLuhan called the "cave art of the electronic age:" advertising. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Karl Rove, gave credit for most of his ideas on how to manipulate mass opinion to American commercial advertising, and to the then-new science of "public relations." But the public relations universe available to the corporate empire that rules the world today makes the Goebbels operation look primitive. The precision of communications technology and graphics; the century of research on human psychology and emotion; and the uniquely centralized control of triumphant post-Cold War monopoly capitalism, have combined to the point where "the manufacture of consent" can be set on automatic pilot.
A second major reason people won't make the paranoid shift is that they are too fundamentally decent. They can't believe that the elected leaders of our country, the people they've been taught through 12 years of public school to admire and trust, are capable of sending young American soldiers to their deaths and slaughtering tens of thousands of innocent civilians, just to satisfy their greed-especially when they're so rich in the first place. Besides, America is good, and the media are liberal and overly critical.
Third, people don't want to look like fools. Being a "conspiracy theorist" is like being a creationist. The educated opinion of eminent experts on every TV and radio network is that any discussion of "oil" being a motivation for the US invasion of Iraq is just out of bounds, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a "conspiracy theorist." We can trust the integrity of our 'no-bid" contracting in Iraq, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a "conspiracy theorist." Of course, people sometimes make mistakes, but our military and intelligence community did the best they could on and before September 11, and anybody who thinks otherwise is a "conspiracy theorist."
Lee Harvey Oswald was the sole assassin of JFK, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a "conspiracy theorist."
Perhaps the biggest hidden reason people don't make the paranoid shift is that knowledge brings responsibility. If we acknowledge that an inner circle of ruling elites controls the world's most powerful military and intelligence system; controls the international banking system; controls the most effective and far-reaching propaganda network in history; controls all three branches of government in the world's only superpower; and controls the technology that counts the people's votes, we might be then forced to conclude that we don't live in a particularly democratic system. And then voting and making contributions and trying to stay informed wouldn't be enough. Because then the duty of citizenship would go beyond serving as a loyal opposition, to serving as a "loyal resistance"-like the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, except that in this case the resistance to fascism would be on the side of the national ideals, rather than the government; and a violent insurgency would not only play into the empire's hands, it would be doomed from the start.
Forming a nonviolent resistance movement, on the other hand, might mean forsaking some middle class comfort, and it would doubtless require a lot of work. It would mean educating ourselves and others about the nature of the truly apocalyptic beast we face. It would mean organizing at the most basic neighborhood level, face to face. (We cannot put our trust in the empire's technology.) It would mean reaching across turf lines and transcending single-issue politics, forming coalitions and sharing data and names and strategies, and applying energy at every level of government, local to global. It would also probably mean civil disobedience, at a time when the Bush regime is starting to classify that action as "terrorism." In the end, it may mean organizing a progressive confederacy to govern ourselves, just as our revolutionary founders formed the Continental Congress. It would mean being wise as serpents, and gentle as doves.
It would be a lot of work. It would also require critical mass. A paradigm shift.
But as a paranoid, I'm ready to join the resistance. And the main reason is I no longer think that the "conspiracy" is much of a "theory."
That the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that the murder of John Fitzgerald Kennedy was "probably" the result of "a conspiracy," and that 70 percent of Americans agree with this conclusion, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That the Bay of Pigs fiasco, "Operation Zapata," was organized by members of Skull and Bones, the ghoulish and powerful secret society at Yale University whose membership also included Prescott, George Herbert Walker and George W Bush; that two of the ships that carried the Cuban counterrevolutionaries to their appointment with absurdity were named the "Barbara" and the "Houston"-George HW Bush's city of residence at the time-and that the oil company Bush owned, then operating in the Caribbean area, was named "Zapata," is not "theory." It's fact.
That George Bush was the CIA director who kept the names of what were estimated to be hundreds of American journalists, considered to be CIA "assets," from the Church Committee, the US Senate Intelligence Committe chaired by Senator Frank Church that investigated the CIA in the 1970s; that a 1971 University of Michigan study concluded that, in America, the more TV you watched, the less you knew; and that a recent survey by international scholars found that Americans were the most "ignorant" of world affairs out of all the populations they studied, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That the Council on Foreign Relations has a history of influence on official US government foreign policy; that the protection of US supplies of Middle East oil has been a central element of American foreign policy since the Second World War; and that global oil production has been in decline since its peak year, 2000, is not "theory." It's fact.
That, in the early 1970s, the newly-formed Trilateral Commission published a report which recommended that, in order for "globalization" to succeed, American manufacturing jobs had to be exported, and American wages had to decline, which is exactly what happened over the next three decades; and that, during that same period, the richest one percent of Americans doubled their share of the national wealth, is not "theory." It's fact.
That, beyond their quasi-public role as agents of the US Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve Banks are profit-making corporations, whose beneficiaries include some of America's wealthiest families; and that the United States has a virtual controlling interest in the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, the three dominant global financial institutions, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That-whether it's heroin from Southeast Asia in the '60s and '70s, or cocaine from Central America and heroin from Afghanistan in the '80s, or cocaine from Colombia in the '90s, or heroin from Afghanistan today-no major CIA covert operation has ever lacked a drug smuggling component, and that the CIA has hired Nazis, fascists, drug dealers, arms smugglers, mass murderers, perverts, sadists, terrorists and the Mafia, is not "theory." It's fact.
That the international oil industry is the dominant player in the global economy; that the Bush family has a decades-long business relationship with the Saudi royal family, Saudi oil money, and the family of Osama bin Laden; that, as president, both George Bushes have favored the interests of oil companies over the public interest; that both George Bushes have personally profited financially from Middle East oil; and that American oil companies doubled their records for quarterly profits in the months just preceding the invasion of Iraq, is not "theory." It's fact.
That the 2000 presidential election was deliberately stolen; that the pro-Bush/anti-Gore bias in the corporate media had spiked markedly in the last three weeks of the campaign; that corporate media were then virtually silent about the Florida recount; and that the Bush 2000 team had planned to challenge the legitimacy of the election if George W had won the popular, but lost the electoral vote-exactly what happened to Gore-is not "theory." It's fact.
That the intelligence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was deceptively "cooked" by the Bush administration; that anybody paying attention to people like former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, knew before the invasion that the weapons were a hoax; and that American forces in Iraq today are applying the same brutal counterinsurgency tactics pioneered in Central America in the 1980s, under the direct supervision of then-Vice President George HW Bush, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That "Rebuilding America's Defenses," the Project for a New American Century's 2000 report, and "The Grand Chessboard," a book published a few years earlier by Trilateral Commission co-founder Zbigniew Brzezinski, both recommended a more robust and imperial US military presence in the oil basin of the Middle East and the Caspian region; and that both also suggested that American public support for this energy crusade would depend on public response to a new "Pearl Harbor," is not "theory." It's fact. That, in the 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously approved a plan called "Operation Northwoods," to stage terrorist attacks on American soil that could be used to justify an invasion of Cuba; and that there is currently an office in the Pentagon whose function is to instigate terrorist attacks that could be used to justify future strategically-desired military responses, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That neither the accusation by former British Environmental Minister Michael Meacher, Tony Blair's longest-serving cabinet minister, that George W Bush allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen to justify an oil war in the Middle East; nor the RICO lawsuit filed by 9/11 widow Ellen Mariani against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the Council on Foreign Relations (among others), on the grounds that they conspired to let the attacks happen to cash in on the ensuing war profiteering, has captured the slightest attention from American corporate media is not a "theory." It's fact.
That the FBI has completely exonerated-though never identified-the speculators who purchased, a few days before the attacks (through a bank whose previous director is now the CIA executive director), an unusual number of "put" options, and who made millions betting that the stocks in American and United Airlines would crash, is not a "theory." It's fact.
That the US intelligence community received numerous warnings, from multiple sources, throughout the summer of 2001, that a major terrorist attack on American interests was imminent; that, according to the chair of the "independent" 9/11 commission, the attacks "could have and should have been prevented," and according to a Senate Intelligence Committee member, "All the dots were connected;" that the White House has verified George W Bush's personal knowledge, as of August 6, 2001, that these terrorist attacks might be domestic and might involve hijacked airliners; that, in the summer of 2001, at the insistence of the American Secret Service, anti-aircraft ordnance was installed around the city of Genoa, Italy, to defend against a possible terrorist suicide attack, by aircraft, against George W Bush, who was attending the economic summit there; and that George W Bush has nevertheless regaled audiences with his first thought upon seeing the "first" plane hit the World Trade Center, which was: "What a terrible pilot," is not "theory." It's fact.
That, on the morning of September 11, 2001: standard procedures and policies at the nation's air defense and aviation bureaucracies were ignored, and communications were delayed; the black boxes of the planes that hit the WTC were destroyed, but hijacker Mohammed Atta's passport was found in pristine condition; high-ranking Pentagon officers had cancelled their commercial flight plans for that morning; George H.W. Bush was meeting in Washington with representatives of Osama bin Laden's family, and other investors in the world's largest private equity firm, the Carlyle Group; the CIA was conducting a previously-scheduled mock exercise of an airliner hitting the Pentagon; the chairs of both the House and Senate Intelligence Committees were having breakfast with the chief of Pakistan's intelligence agency, who resigned a week later on suspicion of involvement in the 9/11 attacks; and the commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the United States sat in a second grade classroom for 20 minutes after hearing that a second plane had struck the towers, listening to children read a story about a goat, is not "theoretical." These are facts.
That the Bush administration has desperately fought every attempt to independently investigate the events of 9/11, is not a "theory."
Nor, finally, is it in any way a "theory" that the one, single name that can be directly linked to the Third Reich, the US military industrial complex, Skull and Bones, Eastern Establishment good ol' boys, the Illuminati, Big Texas Oil, the Bay of Pigs, the Miami Cubans, the Mafia, the FBI, the JFK assassination, the New World Order, Watergate, the Republican National Committee, Eastern European fascists, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the United Nations, CIA headquarters, the October Surprise, the Iran/Contra scandal, Inslaw, the Christic Institute, Manuel Noriega, drug-running "freedom fighters" and death squads, Iraqgate, Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction, the blood of innocents, the savings and loan crash, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the "Octopus," the "Enterprise," the Afghan mujaheddin, the War on Drugs, Mena (Arkansas), Whitewater, Sun Myung Moon, the Carlyle Group, Osama bin Laden and the Saudi royal family, David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and the presidency and vice-presidency of the United States, is: George Herbert Walker Bush.
"Theory?" To the contrary.
It is a well-documented, tragic and-especially if you're paranoid-terrifying fact.
Michael Hasty is a writer, activist, musician, carpenter and farmer. His award-winning column, "Thinking Locally," appeared for seven years in the Hampshire Review, West Virginia's oldest newspaper. His writing has also appeared in the Highlands Voice, the Washington Peace Letter, the Takoma Park Newsletter, the German magazine Generational Justice, and the Washington Post; and at the websites Common Dreams and Democrats.com. In January 1989, he was the media spokesperson for the counter-inaugural coalition at George Bush's Counter-Inaugural Banquet, which fed hundreds of DC's homeless in front of Union Station, where the official inaugural dinner was being held.
Permission to reprint is granted, provided it includes this autobiographical note, and credit for first publication to Online Journal.
-------- un
DIPLOMACY
U.S. Seeking Backing of U.N. Chief for Iraq Plan
January 10, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/10NATI.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 9 - The United States moved Friday to secure backing from Secretary General Kofi Annan for the American plan to transfer authority to Iraqis this summer, and to persuade him to send United Nations staff members back to Baghdad promptly.
The American ambassador, John D. Negroponte, met Mr. Annan late Friday after consultations in Washington to spell out what role the United Nations could play and what security assurances the American-led alliance could provide.
The United States is eager for the imprimatur a United Nations presence in Iraq would give the allied forces but has resisted Mr. Annan's repeated demands for "clarity" over exactly what its workers would be asked to do and how safe they would be from attacks like those that drove the organization out of Iraq this fall. A bomb at the United Nations offices in Baghdad on Aug. 19 killed more than 20 staff members. Mr. Annan pulled all non-Iraqi staff members out of the country in October.
In actions that have alarmed Washington, individual Iraqi leaders have been seeking United Nations intervention in the current transition plan, a Nov. 15 agreement that calls for regional caucuses leading to the appointment of a provisional government by July 1.
They would like to see elections occur before that date, but Mr. Annan, in a gesture welcomed by the United States, sent word on Thursday night that elections could not be organized so hastily and that the United Nations would not intrude on the security arrangements.
His statement came in a response to a Dec. 28 letter from Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, a leading Shiite Muslim who served last month as president of the Iraqi Governing Council. A powerful Shiite leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani, has complained that Washington's plans do not ensure broad representation of Iraqis.
Mr. Negroponte declined to discuss what proposals had come up, but he said there would be further conversations about security.
Also under discussion was a meeting in New York that Mr. Annan has scheduled for Jan. 19 with members of the Iraqi Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority.
The council has agreed to send three members - Mr. Hakim, December's president; Adnan Pachachi, the current one; and Massoud Barzani, next month's president - but there has been no response yet from the Coalition Provisional Authority, which represents the United States and other occupying forces.
Mr. Negroponte told reporters that the United States would be "appropriately represented."
Britain, the Americans' principal ally in Iraq, is sending Sir Jeremy Greenstock, Britain's envoy to Iraq and its former ambassador to the United Nations.
The Bush administration is reluctant to open up the transition process to the scrutiny of the Security Council, some of whose leading members have been vocal opponents of the war and last year blocked approval of military action.
The Americans are wary because of word that Mr. Annan has also scheduled the monthly lunch of the 15 Security Council members for Jan. 19 and suggested that the visitors from Iraq would be invited.
An ambassador of one of the five permanent members of the Security Council said the Americans' worry was misplaced, adding, "We are all now united in the desire to bring peace and stability to Iraq."
-------- us
America to pull its tank units out of Germany
By David Rennie in Washington
10/01/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$KGZINBASKT3AXQFIQMGCFFOAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2004/01/10/wgerm10.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/10/ixworld.html
The United States plans to withdraw its heavy armoured formations from Germany next year, in the largest reshaping of the European military landscape since the end of the Cold War, it emerged yesterday.
The historic plans are part of a drive to turn the American military into a more flexible, rapid reaction force. US General James Jones and Bulgarian General Nikola Kolev
They have been in gestation since long before the Iraq war, and Washington officials insist they are not punishing Germany for opposing the toppling of Saddam Hussein.
The decision to move all US armour home marks the end of the Cold War era when huge tank armies backed by millions of troops and thousands of aircraft readied for war in the heart of Europe.
Following the withdrawal of Russian troops from Germany, in 1994, America's pull-out would leave Britain the last foreign power with heavy armour on the plains of Germany. Britain maintains a force of some 23,000 troops there.
Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's top policy official, told German counterparts last month that America will start pulling out heavy ground forces late next year, eventually withdrawing up to 40,000 men from Germany by 2006, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Units will return to the US, although Washington plans new bases in Poland, Bulgaria and the Baltic States through which troops would move to future trouble spots.
Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, has led an aggressive campaign to reshape the military for the new, less predictable, conflicts of the war on terror.
The changes aim to close many of the sprawling bases that span the globe from Germany to South Korea - many of them mini-Americas, complete with schools, hospitals, shopping centres and suburban housing estates.
Instead, Mr Rumsfeld wants troops to rotate through a global network of small bases, deploying to hot spots at short notice, and picking up equipment and supplies pre-positioned at storage sites.
Although many Germans will cheer the departure, there is no concealing the impact the American pull-out will have on their nation, politically, economically and even psychologically.
The rumble of American armour has been a backdrop to life in Germany since 1945. The two units earmarked for withdrawal - the 1st Armoured Division and the 1st Infantry Division - are steeped in European history.
The "Old Ironsides", as the 1st Armoured is known, landed in North Africa in 1942, fought German forces the length of Italy, and entered Germany as part of the allied occupation in 1945.
The "Big Red One", or 1st Infantry, fought the Kaiser's armies in the First World War under General Pershing, and helped drive Hitler's troops from France and Belgium.
Some important US facilities will remain in Germany, including the giant Ramstein air base, the US European Command headquarters in Stuttgart and a military hospital near Hamburg.
Russia has raised concerns about the arrival of large numbers of US troops in Poland and the Baltic states, ostensibly because such arrivals might violate Cold War era treaties on American troop strengths in Europe.
The Pentagon believes that careful juggling of European bases will avoid breaking those treaties.
----
Stretched US pilots may quit military
By Eric Rosenberg in Washington
January 10, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/09/1073437475904.html
Another US helicopter has crashed in Iraq, killing all nine soldiers on board and fuelling Pentagon fears that some of the military's most experienced pilots might quit after prolonged deployments to dangerous hot spots like Afghanistan and Iraq.
With the first of 118,000 US troops leaving for Iraq in a rotation aimed at replacing war-weary soldiers, analysts said the US military is overstretched by deployments in Iraq and elsewhere. They said this was forcing the Pentagon to keep thousands of soldiers and reservists in uniform long beyond their release dates, with potentially dangerous effects on morale.
"There is no question that the force is stretched too thin," said David Segal, director of the Centre for Research on Military Organisation at the University of Maryland. "We have stopped treating the reserves as a force in reserve. Our volunteer army is closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history."
At least 14 US helicopters have crashed in Iraq since the war supposedly ended last May, claiming some 58 lives and underscoring the vulnerability of an essential cog in US military operations there.
On Thursday a Black Hawk crashed near Falluja in western Iraq. Officials declined to specify what caused the crash, but witnesses said rocket fire brought it down.
General E. J. Sinclair, commander of the US Army Aviation Centre at Fort Rucker, Alabama, said last week that continuous foreign assignments were "going to cause some problems".
He illustrated his concern by describing the plight of a senior US Army aviator who watched from afar while his newborn daughter grew into her toddler years. The army major has seen his daughter for 12 days in the past two years.
"I can't bring him back in my right mind and tell him after a month or two he has to go to Korea for a year-long assignment without his family. But that's what's happening," General Sinclair said.
Exacerbating the problem is a sharp increase in deployment times. The army announced last northern summer that US troops in Iraq would be there for one year, up from the typical six-month deployment.
Retention concerns are especially acute in the service's aviation branch because of the extra investment in time and money required to train pilots to fly helicopters such as the Apache, Black Hawk and Chinook.
The US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, and US commanders concede that the 1.4 million members of the US armed forces, which have been cut by about a third since the end of the Cold War, are stretched by deployments in South Korea and Europe as well as post-2001 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But Mr Rumsfeld says he has seen no evidence so far in a large continuing Pentagon study to support calls from analysts and some army officials to boost the service's strength by 20,000 to 500,000 troops.
Signs of strain are appearing, however. Mr Segal said the National Guard ended last year at about 10,000 below its recruitment target and he predicted there would be more severe recruitment and retention problems next year.
To stem losses, the army has started offering re-enlistment bonuses of up to $US10,000 ($12,900) to soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait.
At the same time, it is preventing soldiers who are rotating home from retiring or handing in their notice for up to 90 days after returning to their home bases.
Hearst Newspapers, Reuters, Agence France-Presse, The Washington Post
-------- propaganda wars
What They Don't Want You to Know
by John Pilger
January 10, 2004
New Statesman
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger4.html
The disaster in Iraq is rotting the Blairite establishment. Blair himself appears ever more removed from reality; his latest tomfoolery about the "discovery" of "a huge system of clandestine weapons laboratories," which even the American viceroy in Baghdad mocked, would be astonishing, were it not merely another of his vapid attempts to justify his crime against humanity. (His crime, and George Bush's, is clearly defined as "supreme" in the Nuremberg judgment.)
This is not what the guardians of the faith want you to know. Lord Hutton, who is due to report on the Kelly affair, will provide the most effective distraction, just as Lord Justice Scott did with his arms-to-Iraq report almost ten years ago, ensuring that the top echelon of the political class escaped criminal charges. Of course, it was not Hutton's "brief" to deal with the criminal slaughter in Iraq; he will spread the blame for one man's torment and death, having pointedly and scandalously chosen not to recall and cross-examine Blair, even though Blair revealed during his appearance before Hutton that he had lied in "emphatically" denying he had had anything to do with "outing" Dr. David Kelly.
Other guardians have been assiduously at work. The truth of public opposition to an illegal, unprovoked invasion, expressed in the biggest demonstration in modern history, is being urgently revised. In a valedictory piece on 30 December, the Guardian commentator and leader writer Martin Kettle wrote: "Opponents of the war may need to be reminded that public opinion currently approves of the invasion by nearly two to one."
A favorite source for this is a Guardian/ICM poll published on 18 November, the day Bush arrived in London, which was reported beneath the front-page headline "Protests begin but majority backs Bush visit as support for war surges." Out of 1,002 people contacted, just 426 said they welcomed Bush's visit, while the majority said they were opposed to it or did not know. As for support for the war "surging," the absurdly small number questioned still produced a majority that opposed the invasion.
Across the world, the "majority backs Bush" disinformation was seized upon - by William Shawcross on CNN ("The majority of the British people are glad he [Bush] came..."), by the equally warmongering William Safire in the New York Times and by the Murdoch press almost everywhere. Thus, the slaughter in Iraq, the destruction of democratic rights and civil liberties in the west and the preparation for the next invasion are "normalized."
In "The Banality of Evil," Edward S. Herman wrote, "Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way rests on 'normalization'... There is usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by one set of individuals... others working on improving technology (a better crematory gas, a longer burning and more adhesive Napalm, bomb fragments that penetrate flesh in hard-to-trace patterns). It is the function of the experts, and the mainstream media, to normalize the unthinkable for the general public."
Current "normalizing" is expressed succinctly by Kettle: "As 2003 draws to its close, it is surely al-Qaeda, rather than the repercussions of Iraq, that casts a darker shadow over Britain's future." How does he know this? The "mass of intelligence flowing across the Prime Minister's desk," of course! He calls this "cold-eyed realism," omitting to mention that the only credible intelligence "flowing across the Prime Minister's desk" was the common sense that an Anglo-American attack on Iraq would increase the threat from al-Qaeda.
What the normalizers don't want you to know is the nature and scale of the "coalition" crime in Iraq - which Kettle calls a "misjudgment" - and the true source of the worldwide threat. Outside the work of a few outstanding journalists prepared to go beyond the official compounds in Iraq, the extent of the human carnage and material devastation is barely acknowledged. For example, the effect of uranium weapons used by American and British forces is suppressed. Iraqi and foreign doctors report that radiation illnesses are common throughout Iraq, and troops have been warned not to approach contaminated sites. Readings taken from destroyed Iraqi tanks in British-controlled Basra are so high that a British army survey team wore white, full-body radiation suits, face masks and gloves. With nothing to warn them, Iraqi children play on and around the tanks.
Of the 10,000 Americans evacuated sick from Iraq, many have "mystery illnesses" not unlike those suffered by veterans of the first Gulf war. By mid-April last year, the US air force had deployed more than 19,000 guided weapons and 311,000 rounds of uranium A10 shells. According to a November 2003 study by the Uranium Medical Research Center, witnesses living next to Baghdad airport reported a huge death toll following one morning's attack from aerial bursts of thermobaric and fuel air bombs. Since then, a vast area has been "landscaped" by US earth movers, and fenced. Jo Wilding, a British human rights observer in Baghdad, has documented a catalogue of miscarriages, hair loss, and horrific eye, skin and respiratory problems among people living near the area. Yet the US and Britain steadfastly refuse to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct systematic monitoring tests for uranium contamination in Iraq. The Ministry of Defense, which has admitted that British tanks fired depleted uranium in and around Basra, says that British troops "will have access to biological monitoring." Iraqis have no such access and receive no specialist medical help.
According to the non-governmental organization Medact, between 21,700 and 55,000 Iraqis died between 20 March and 20 October last year. This includes up to 9,600 civilians. Deaths and injury of young children from unexploded cluster bombs are put at 1,000 a month. These are conservative estimates; the ripples of trauma throughout the society cannot be imagined. Neither the US nor Britain counts its Iraqi victims, whose epic suffering is "not relevant," according to a US State Department official - just as the slaughter of more than 200,000 Iraqis during and immediately after the 1991 Gulf war, calculated in a Medical Education Trust study, was "not relevant" and not news.
The normalizers are anxious that this terror is again not recognized (the BBC confines its use of "terrorism" and "atrocities" to the Iraqi resistance) and that the wider danger it represents throughout the world is overshadowed by the threat of al-Qaeda. William Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has attacked the antiwar movement for not joining Bush's "war on terror." He says "the left" must join Bush's campaign, even his "preemptive" wars, or risk - that word again - "irrelevance." This echoes other liberal normalizers who, by facing both ways, provide propaganda cover for rapacious power to expand its domain with "humanitarian interventions" - such as the bombing to death of some 3,000 civilians in Afghanistan and the swap of the Taliban for US-backed warlords, murderers and rapists known as "commanders."
Schulz's criticism ignores the truth in Amnesty's own studies. Amnesty USA reports that the Bush administration is harboring thousands of foreign torturers, including several mass murderers. By a simple mathematical comparison of American and al-Qaeda terror, the latter is a lethal flea. In the past 50 years, the US has supported and trained state terrorists in Latin America, Africa and Asia. The toll of their victims is in the millions. Again, the documentation is in Amnesty's files. The dictator Suharto's seizure of power in Indonesia was responsible for "one of the greatest mass murders of the 20th century," according to the CIA. The US supplied arms, logistics, intelligence and assassination lists. Britain supplied warships and black propaganda to cover the trail of blood. Scholars now put Suharto's victims in 1965-66 at almost a million; in East Timor, he oversaw the death of one-third of the population: 200,000 men, women and children.
Today, the mass murderer lives in sumptuous retirement in Jakarta, his billions safe in foreign banks. Unlike Saddam Hussein, an amateur by comparison, there will be no show trial for Suharto, who remained obediently within the US terror network. (One of Suharto's most outspoken protectors and apologists in the State Department during the 1980s was Paul Wolfowitz, the current "brains" behind Bush's aggression.)
In the sublime days before 11 September 2001, when the powerful were routinely attacking and terrorizing the weak, and those dying were black or brown-skinned non-people living in faraway places such as Zaire and Guatemala, there was no terrorism. When the weak attacked the powerful, spectacularly on 9/11, there was terrorism.
This is not to say the threat from al-Qaeda and other fanatical groups is not real; what the normalizers don't want you to know is that the most pervasive danger is posed by "our" governments, whose subordinates in journalism and scholarship cast always as benign: capable of misjudgment and blunder, never of high crime. Fueled by religious fanaticism, a corrupt Americanism and rampant corporate greed, the Bush cabal is pursuing what the military historian Anatol Lieven calls "the classic modern strategy of an endangered right-wing oligarchy, which is to divert mass discontent into nationalism," inspired by fear of lethal threats. Bush's America, he warns, "has become a menace to itself and to mankind."
The unspoken truth is that Blair, too, is a menace. "There never has been a time," said Blair in his address to the US Congress last year, "when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day." His fatuous dismissal of history was his way of warning us off the study of imperialism. He wants us to forget and to fail to recognize historically the "national security state" that he and Bush are erecting as a "necessary" alternative to democracy. The father of fascism, Benito Mussolini, understood this. "Modern fascism," he said, "should be properly called corporatism, since it is the merger of state, military and corporate power."
Bush, Blair and the normalizers now speak, almost with relish, of opening mass graves in Iraq. What they do not want you to know is that the largest mass graves are the result of a popular uprising that followed the 1991 Gulf war, in direct response to a call by President George Bush Sr. to "take matters into your own hands and force Saddam to step aside." So successful were the rebels initially that within days Saddam's rule had collapsed across the south. A new start for the people of Iraq seemed close at hand.
Then Washington, the tyrant's old paramour who had supplied him with $5bn worth of conventional arms, chemical and biological weapons and industrial technology, intervened just in time. The rebels suddenly found themselves confronted with the United States helping Saddam against them. US forces prevented them from reaching Iraqi arms depots. They denied them shelter, and gave Saddam's Republican Guard safe passage through US lines in order to attack the rebels. US helicopters circled overhead, observing, taking photographs, while Saddam's forces crushed the uprising. In the north, the same happened to the Kurdish insurrection. "The Americans did everything for Saddam," said the writer on the Middle East Said Aburish, "except join the fight on his side." Bush Sr. did not want a divided Iraq, certainly not a democratic Iraq. The New York Times commentator Thomas Friedman, a guard dog of US foreign policy, was more to the point. What Washington wanted was a successful coup by an "iron-fisted junta": Saddam without Saddam.
Nothing has changed. As Milan Rai documents in his new book, Regime Unchanged, the most senior and ruthless elements of Saddam's security network, the Mukha-barat, are now in the pay of the US and Britain, helping them to combat the resistance and recruit those who will run a puppet regime behind a facade. A CIA-run and -paid Gestapo of 10,000 will operate much as they did under Saddam. "What is happening in Iraq," writes Rai, "is re-Nazification... just as in Germany after the war."
Blair knows this and says nothing. Consider his unctuous words to British troops in Basra the other day about curtailing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. Like so many of his deceptions, this covers the fact that his government has increased the export of weapons and military equipment to some of the most oppressive regimes on earth, such as Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Nepal. To oil-rich Saudi Arabia, home of most of the 11 September hijackers and friend of the Taliban, where women are tormented and people are executed for apostasy, go major British weapons systems, along with leg irons, gang chains, shock belts and shackles. To Indonesia, whose unreconstructed, blood-soaked military is trying to crush the independence movement in Aceh, go British "riot control" vehicles and Hawk fighter-bombers.
Bush and Blair have been crowing about Libya's capitulation on weapons of mass destruction it almost certainly did not have. This is the result, as Scott Ritter has written, of "coerced concessions given more as a means of buying time than through any spirit of true cooperation" - as Bush and Blair have undermined the very international law upon which real disarmament is based. On 8 December, the UN General Assembly voted on a range of resolutions on disarmament. The United States opposed all the most important ones, including those dealing with nuclear weapons. The Bush administration has contingency plans, spelt out in the Pentagon's 2002 Nuclear Posture Review, to use nuclear weapons against North Korea, Syria, Iran and China. Following suit, the UK Defense Secretary, Geoffrey Hoon, announced that for the first time, Britain would attack non-nuclear states with nuclear weapons "if necessary."
This is as it was 50 years ago when, according to declassified files, the British government collaborated with American plans to wage "preventive" atomic war against the Soviet Union. No public discussion was permitted; the unthinkable was normalized. Today, history is our warning that, once again, the true threat is close to home.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Justices to Hear Case of Citizen Held as Enemy
January 10, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/national/10SCOT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - The Supreme Court, significantly expanding its review of the Bush administration's treatment of those deemed "enemy combatants," agreed Friday to hear a challenge by an American of Saudi descent, Yaser Esam Hamdi, to his open-ended confinement at a military brig in South Carolina.
A federal appeals court ruled last year that regardless of citizenship, a person "captured in a zone of active combat" in a foreign country could not gain access to court to contest the factual basis for his detention. Mr. Hamdi was fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001, the government says, when his unit surrendered to the Northern Alliance, with which American forces were aligned. He has been held for two years without charges and, until last month, without access to a lawyer.
In the decision last year, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., accepted a two-page declaration by a Pentagon official as a "sufficient basis" for concluding that Mr. Hamdi's confinement was within the president's constitutional authority as commander in chief.
"No further factual inquiry is necessary or proper," the appeals court said.
The appeal consequently raises important questions not only about the rights of detainees but also about the authority of the federal courts to monitor the executive branch's determinations to classify an American citizen as an enemy combatant. An appeal that the Supreme Court had already agreed to hear, on behalf of 16 foreigners detained as enemy combatants at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, raises similar issues of judicial authority and access to courts.
Both cases will be argued in April, possibly along with an appeal that the Bush administration informed the court this week it would soon file in a case involving Jose Padilla, another United States citizen deemed an enemy combatant. With rulings expected by early summer, there is a sense that after a lengthy hiatus during which the Supreme Court remained on the sidelines, events are moving quickly toward answering the legal questions raised by the administration's assertive responses to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The Hamdi case in particular "has been the rallying cry for all those people concerned about how far the president can go," Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and director of its Center for Health and Homeland Security, said in an interview Friday.
"The court," Professor Greenberger added, "has taken the case that goes to the very heart of the nationwide debate about whether the administration has gone too far."
Frank W. Dunham Jr., the federal public defender who filed the appeal on Mr. Hamdi's behalf, said in his brief that "by permitting the military to act as the judge of its own cause," the appeals court had "emboldened the executive branch, weakened the judiciary and threatened the elemental constitutional protections of the citizen."
The Bush administration strongly opposed the appeal, Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696, telling the justices that the appeals court had properly understood that "fundamental separation-of-powers principles," as well as "the time-honored military practice of detaining captured combatants in wartime," dictated a very limited judicial role in reviewing the determination of Mr. Hamdi's status. Mr. Hamdi was "an archetypal enemy combatant" in any event, the government's brief said.
After the court's action Friday, the administration issued a statement declaring that "the Justice Department will vigorously defend the president's authority to capture and detain enemy combatants."
The Supreme Court's decision to hear the appeal over the administration's opposition mirrored its action two months ago when, in the Guantánamo case, it granted the detained foreigners' appeal despite - or perhaps because of - the administration's assertion that those detainees' status was a question "constitutionally committed to the executive branch" with which the federal courts should not interfere.
It is clearly too soon to say whether by accepting these cases the court was sending a signal about their ultimate resolution. Though the administration's critics were quick to read favorable tea leaves in the latest development, it is equally plausible to assume that justices across the ideological spectrum simply concluded that the cases raised issues of historic dimension meriting the court's consideration. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who wrote a book about civil liberties in wartime, "All the Laws but One," published in 1998, is clearly fascinated by the subject.
At the same time, it is evident that the administration went to unusual lengths to dissuade the court from accepting the Hamdi case. On Dec. 2, the day before the administration's reply to Mr. Hamdi's initial brief was due at the court, the Pentagon announced that "as a matter of discretion and military policy," it would now give him access to a lawyer, a development that Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson then noted in the administration's brief.
Mr. Dunham, the public defender, replied in a subsequent brief that this concession meant little because the appeals court's conclusion that Mr. Hamdi "could not challenge the facts upon which his detention is based effectively eliminated any litigation-related basis for communication" with a lawyer - in other words, under the appeals court's view of the case, there would be little if anything for a lawyer to do.
Then this week, with the justices scheduled to take up the Hamdi appeal for the first time at their weekly conference on Friday, Solicitor General Olson filed a supplemental brief asking the court to defer its consideration in order to give him time to file an appeal for the government in the Jose Padilla case.
In that case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled last month that the government lacked authority to hold Mr. Padilla in military custody. He was arrested in May 2002 after arriving at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on a flight from Pakistan and was initially held as a material witness on suspicion of involvement in a plot to detonate a "dirty bomb" in the United States.
The Second Circuit did not challenge the Fourth Circuit's decision in the Hamdi case, concluding instead that having been seized on American soil rather than in a combat zone, Mr. Padilla was in a different situation and could not be detained as an enemy combatant. In his supplemental brief this week, Mr. Olson told the justices that because the Second Circuit decision "incorrectly resolves issues of extraordinary public significance," the government would file a Supreme Court appeal by Jan. 20, well short of the 90 days permitted by the court's rules and in time for an April argument.
While the administration urged the court to wait for the Padilla appeal and to accept that case instead of the Hamdi case, it is quite likely that the justices will hear and decide both.
--------
High Court to Weigh Detention of Citizens
'Enemy Combatant' Case Is Accepted
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4716-2004Jan9.html
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will decide whether the Constitution authorizes President Bush to order the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens captured abroad fighting for terrorist groups, a much-debated element of his legal strategy in the war on terrorism.
In a brief order, the justices rebuffed Bush administration requests to turn down the appeal of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an alleged Taliban fighter who was taken into custody by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in late 2001. Hamdi, who was born in the United States to Saudi parents but who left the country when he was 3, has been held as an "enemy combatant" by the U.S. military without access to a lawyer or other outside contact since.
A Richmond-based federal appeals court ruled in the administration's favor last year, accepting its view that the judicial branch should not second-guess the executive in military matters.
But the Supreme Court's action yesterday was the latest sign that the justices may disagree, and that they believe it is time to exercise oversight on the executive's conduct of the fight against terrorism. Only a month ago, they brushed aside strong Bush administration opposition and agreed to rule on an appeal by foreign terrorism suspects being held at a U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And the court's announcement came just two days after Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson asked the justices to postpone a decision on whether to hear the Hamdi case for about 10 days, until the administration submits its brief in the related case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen captured in the United States and being held as an enemy combatant.
Choosing instead to enter the debate over civil liberties and national security on its own timetable, the justices showed again that they take an expansive view of the court's independent capability -- and responsibility -- to resolve large national issues.
"They could well be recoiling against the assertion of unreviewable executive authority," said Michael J. Glennon, an expert on constitutional law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. "All these cases seem to point in that direction."
Justice Department spokeswoman Monica Goodling said the department will "vigorously defend the president's authority to capture and detain enemy combatants," because "it is crucial in times of war."
Hamdi's case began in the fall of 2001, when, the administration says, he surrendered -- while armed -- to pro-U.S. Northern Alliance forces during a battle near Kunduz, Afghanistan.
The administration says he told U.S. interrogators that he was a Taliban fighter. He was ordered transferred from Northern Alliance to U.S. military custody, moving from Afghanistan to Guantanamo in January 2002.
Soon after, U.S. officials discovered that Hamdi had been born in Louisiana. Uncertain of the legal implications of his claim of U.S. citizenship, they ordered him sent to a naval brig in Norfolk. He is now being held in a brig at Charleston, S.C.
On June 11, Hamdi's Saudi father filed in a Virginia federal district court a petition for his release. Attorney Frank W. Dunham Jr. has noted that the government's claim that Hamdi was a Taliban fighter is based on "hearsay" from the Northern Alliance, which has been accused of delivering falsely accused men to U.S. authorities in exchange for cash bounties.
U.S. District Judge Joseph G. Doumar ruled that the government will have to reveal more information to justify holding Hamdi, but a three-member panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, based in Richmond, overruled him, concluding in a unanimous opinion that, since it was "undisputed" that Hamdi was captured in an overseas combat zone, the courts had no right to inquire more deeply into the executive branch's case against him.
The full 4th Circuit court voted 8 to 4 not to rehear the case, but the panel's opinion was attacked by two dissenting judges, one of whom considered it too deferential to the administration and one who considered it not deferential enough.
Judge Diana Gribbon Motz wrote that Hamdi's role as a Taliban fighter was not, in fact, "undisputed," but rather the very question Hamdi wanted to address in court.
Judge J. Michael Luttig agreed with Motz that Hamdi's status was a matter of dispute, but he said the issue was irrelevant because the president's authority to designate enemy combatants should not be limited to undisputed cases. What little law there is on the question of whether a U.S. citizen captured fighting for U.S. enemies is entitled to his constitutional rights is derived in large part from a series of relatively obscure cases from World War II, and its applicability to current circumstances is bitterly disputed, both by the parties in Hamdi's case and by legal experts.
"These are very difficult questions," Glennon said. "Hamdi was captured abroad. What does that say about the rights of a German POW captured in the Battle of the Bulge who claims to be a U.S. citizen and wants access to the federal courts?"
The case is Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, No. 03-6696. The court will hear the oral argument in late April, and a decision is expected by July.
-------- homeland security
Threat Level Lowered to Yellow
But 8 Airports Are Among Facilities Kept on High Alert
By Sara Kehaulani Goo and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A4753-2004Jan9?language=printer
The Bush administration yesterday brought an end to nearly three weeks of intensive nationwide security measures aimed at averting a feared terrorist attack, lowering the general threat level from "orange" to "yellow" while keeping eight airports and other unspecified facilities on high alert.
The move signaled a major departure in the government's homeland defense strategy, which for more than two years has focused on broad and generalized warnings requiring heavy expenditures of time and money by local police and industries across the country. The new strategy is focused instead on vulnerable targets, including airports, in a handful of major cities that remain at a higher risk of terrorist attack, officials said.
While Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and other federal officials refused to publicly name them, sources said airports that remain the focus of attention include those in Washington, New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas.
The latest alert featured the most visible security measures since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, resulting in the cancellation of 16 international flights and impinging on the activities of millions of Americans over the Christmas and New Year's holidays.
The FBI interviewed scores of passengers on specific flights, military jets routinely accompanied some airliners as they flew through U.S. airspace, and the United States announced it would require the presence of armed guards on some foreign flights. U.S. officials said they were concerned that terrorists were targeting specific routes from London to Washington and from Paris and Mexico City to Los Angeles. One outside researcher estimates that the alert, which began Dec. 21, may cost federal and local governments as much as $3 billion, although federal officials say the real number will be much lower.
Lawmakers and homeland security experts welcomed the announcement of a more tailored approach, calling it an important step toward a more coherent defense strategy. Congress is currently considering legislation that would force the Bush administration to adopt a system more narrowly focused on specific regions or industries thought to be at risk.
"I'm very pleased to see the department moving in this direction," said Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security. "The level of readiness will remain high particularly in those sectors such as aviation that intelligence suggests are likely targets. But the entire country will not be treated the same from the Northwest to the Southeast and everywhere in between."
But the "yellow-and-a-half" decision, as some security officials called it, also resulted in a new round of confusion, as federal officials asked that security be lowered in some areas while being maintained in others. Many local and state officials worried that they would not be reimbursed by the federal government for the specific areas they were asked to keep protected.
"I don't know whether we want to say anything to the public about it because it does distress a certain segment of the traveling public," said one official whose airport was kept on the higher alert. "But the bottom line is that you can't hide it" because airline passengers will notice additional police, bomb-sniffing dogs and vehicle inspections, he said.
Ridge said there is enough flexibility in the current alert system to communicate quietly with local officials who need to ramp up security in specific areas, as the agency's risk assessments have become more sophisticated.
"You could understand from a mayor's point of view, it has to be an extreme set of circumstances when you say to the general public, stay out of -- you know, raise the threat level in this particular region or city," Ridge said.
In Washington, the D.C. police department yesterday reduced some high-tech security measures that were in effect under the orange alert. But police departments in the area agreed to keep up patrols around water supplies, bridges and other infrastructure, according to a law enforcement official.
Reagan National and Dulles International airports said they would maintain random inspections of vehicles approaching terminals and other additional security measures, as they have done under code orange. A Baltimore-Washington International Airport spokesman said he could not comment on security issues.
The current intelligence does not warrant heightened alert for entire cities or regions, but more specific infrastructure within certain areas, such as nuclear power plants, bridges and water-treatment facilities, a Homeland Security spokesman said.
Three officials in different departments also said there has been no significant decrease in "intelligence chatter" from suspected terrorists seeking to harm U.S. interests. Rather, these officials said, the alert was lowered in part because defenses have been sufficiently tightened at airports and other high-risk targets.
"The threat itself hasn't changed, we're still worried about airplanes, et cetera," said one intelligence official. "What has changed is the environment the terrorists are trying to operate in."
Also, officials believe they have narrowed the threat somewhat to a number of facilities and locations, rather than the entire country. Some sources said intelligence agencies have noted a particular concern over Jan. 23, the first day of hajj, the annual season for pilgrimage to Mecca.
Officials had been considering lowering the level for several days. On Thursday, the Defense Department, without announcement, lowered the threat level at military facilities in the United States from significant to high.
Ridge said the past three weeks under the stepped-up alert were a result of "probably the most significant convergence of multiple reporting streams about potential attacks, simultaneous attacks against the country." U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials said it is impossible to be certain if the heightened precautions enacted on Dec. 21 thwarted a terrorist attack. FBI officials said no terrorist suspects were arrested as a result of the alert.
"It may be weeks or months before we can talk to you about being able to specifically confirm the notion that the actions taken did deter and disrupt an attack," Ridge said yesterday.
Authorities repeated warnings that interrogations of al Qaeda prisoners and electronic intercepts of terrorist conversations during the time leading up to the alert had indicated that serious plans were in the works.
"We can almost never say quantitatively that we have averted a plot," one FBI official said. "We still don't know exactly what the plot was. But from what we had at the time, we believe there were attempts to do something with an airline and with these high-profile cities."
Staff writers Spencer S. Hsu, Allan Lengel and Dana Priest and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
--------
Terror Threat Is Lowered to 'Elevated,' Ridge Says
January 10, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/national/10TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - The Bush administration lowered the terrorist threat status on Friday to "elevated" after nearly three weeks at high alert. Officials said they would continue heightened security for industries like aviation, banking and energy that are regarded at risk of attack.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told reporters that intelligence officials had seen a reduction of terrorist threats in recent days and that the administration believed it was safe to lower the level to "elevated," or yellow, level, the midrange in the five-step color program.
The administration put the nation on high-risk alert on Dec. 21, after intelligence officials detected an alarming increase in credible threat reports based on electronic eavesdropping of suspected extremists, e-mail monitoring, intelligence from informants and other factors.
The administration was particularly concerned about the prospect that terrorists might hijack a flight from London, Mexico City or Paris. Numerous flights were canceled or disrupted. One flight to Los Angeles from Mexico City two weeks ago turned around in midair after American officials said they were not satisfied that passengers had been properly screened.
Many threats were pegged to Christmas and New Year's. Mr. Ridge said that with the holidays having passed without incident, the administration believed that it was safe to return the status to yellow. A law enforcement bulletin also cited "a decrease in specificity and intensity" of the threats.
Mr. Ridge added: "We have not let our guard down. Yellow still means that we are at an elevated risk of attack. And we will maintain particular vigilance around some critical resources and locales."
That added vigilance will mean "literally thousands of security professionals" to provide added protection at specific locations, Mr. Ridge said. He would not disclose the particular sites, saying, "We don't want to broadcast to everybody where we're going to be doing this."
Law enforcement officials said the sectors that would be subjected to added security included transportation and banking, along with energy providers like nuclear reactors and hydroelectric plants. Local law enforcement officials around the country were asked on Friday to review security at particularly sensitive sites, even as they lowered the threat status.
Officials in New York said the city would remain at high, or orange, alert, the only locale in the nation to do so. Amid fluctuations in the national level, the city has stayed at orange since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, because it has been a frequent target for terrorists. The Police Department has stepped up security at bridges, tunnels and other possible targets in recent weeks. Officials also sought to tighten security in the financial sector, including banking. Federal officials have long been concerned that terrorists might use computer sabotage or other means to try to disrupt financial markets.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said the city was remaining at orange because "we are the logical target."
"That's both the good news and the bad news," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We represent to the whole world, I think, the things that the terrorists find so frightening: a society that is open to everybody, and everybody's ideas, and actually works. That's what they're scared of."
A senior police official said New York planned to keep patrols and readiness roughly the same as they have been. "We are going right through to the beginning of February" with plans for heightened security, the official said, noting that the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, ends at the start of next month.
In New York, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the police would largely retain a heightened posture through the Hajj period. Officials have identified it as a time for increased concern about attacks.
"There will be some adjustment and a reduction in some of the overtime-covered posts," Mr. Kelly said. "But essentially we will doing the same thing, because there has been no significant change in the information."
Federal officials, in calls to governors and mayors around the country, asked for heightened security at several dozen "critical infrastructure" sites, administration officials said. Of particular concern, an official said, were sites in Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York and Washington, because of intelligence on threats.
William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York for this article.
---------
U.S. and Brazil Fingerprinting: Is It Getting Out of Hand?
January 10, 2004
By LARRY ROHTER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/international/americas/10BRAZ.html?pagewanted=all
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jan. 9 - With Brazil and the United States holding fast to their insistence on photographing and fingerprinting visitors from the other country, what began as a minor dispute last week is now threatening to sour relations between the two countries, the most populous in the Western Hemisphere.
The dispute grew out of a security program the United States began this week, which applies to all foreigners entering the country who are required to have visas. Comparing the American action to "the worst horrors committed by the Nazis," a judge in a remote interior state ordered that all Americans arriving in Brazil be subjected to the same treatment.
Judging by radio call-in programs and newspaper columns and letters to the editor, the measure has proved popular here, with Brazilians praising their government for standing up to Washington. But that sentiment makes it politically costly for President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a left-leaning former labor leader who took office last year, to cede to Washington's insistence the program be curtailed.
"The barriers to American visitors erected at ports and airports have served thus far to inflate the national ego," O Globo, the principal daily here, cautioned in an editorial today. "But with the complaints of Secretary Colin Powell and the tension in contacts between the Foreign Ministry and Washington, this could take on the dimensions of an undesired diplomatic crisis."
Initially, the United States appeared indifferent to the Brazilian action. But on Wednesday, Washington's tone hardened, with the State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, noting that the American procedure took "just seconds," compared with delays of up to nine hours for some Americans arriving here, and suggesting that the Brazilian policy was purposely discriminatory. "It's not being applied to all people the way our system is," Mr. Boucher said. "We regret the way in which the new procedures have suddenly been put into place that single out U.S. citizens for exceptional treatment."
Brazilian diplomats and government officials are exempted from the American inspection program. In contrast, embassy staff members said, United States diplomats here have been photographed and fingerprinted even after presenting their diplomatic passports, and even a visiting senator, Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican, was forced to comply with the procedure.
Mr. Boucher's complaints were followed by a telephone call by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell to his Brazilian counterpart, Celso Amorim. Officials of both governments said the focus of the conversation was the meeting of Western Hemisphere heads of state in Mexico next week. But they added that the fingerprinting dispute was also discussed and was likely to be addressed again when President Bush and Mr. da Silva meet next week.
In a statement Wednesday, the Brazilian Foreign Ministry said it was seeking to "assure proper treatment" for its citizens arriving in the United States and invoked the principle of reciprocity, which it said was a "basic element of international relations." On Thursday, Mr. Amorim told reporters that Brazil had grounds to complain of discrimination because "27 countries are exempt from this measure" and Brazil deserved to be among them.
The United States has identified the border region where Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay come together as a haven for Islamic terrorists. There is also a flourishing traffic in counterfeit and contraband passports; on Wednesday, for instance, a Brazilian police officer about to board a plane in São Paulo was arrested with 36 blank Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Mexican passports.
Brazilian officials, however, have contested American warnings about that situation and maintain that their country does not confront any threat of terrorism. Brazil's critics here said that would seem to eliminate any need to build files on American tourists. But federal police officials say fingerprinting is necessary because American visitors could be involved in the prostitution of children or wildlife smuggling.
The new Brazilian policy has already begun to affect tourism from the United States. According to the tourist association here in the city that is the primary destination of the more than 600,000 American tourists who visit Brazil each year, an American corporation canceled an excursion for 240 of its employees, and cruise ship and air charter lines are thinking of doing the same.
The mayor of Rio, César Maia, this week appealed the original court ruling, calling the new policy "infantile." But a judge here turned down his request, saying she lacked the legal authority to revoke the decision of a judge in another state.
The federal government, which does have the power to challenge the policy for a limited time, has not yet filed suit asking that the judge's ruling be overturned. In remarks to Brazilian reporters on Thursday, Mr. Amorim said that such a step should properly occur "within an assemblage of concepts that will permit better treatment for Brazilians in the United States."
-------- prisons / prisoners
U.S. Negotiating to Release Many Held at Guantánamo
January 10, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/politics/10GITM.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 - A senior State Department official said the administration was negotiating the release of many of the prisoners at the Guantánamo Bay naval base to the custody of their home governments over the next several months, according to a transcript released Friday.
Pierre-Richard Prosper, the ambassador for war crimes, in a briefing on Thursday with British reporters, said that the United States was in discussions with several governments over releasing a large number of the 660 prisoners. In the transcript, Mr. Prosper said the prisoners had been put in three categories, corresponding to the danger they were thought to represent. The discussions involve those in the middle category, which he defined as posing "a medium threat."
That group, he said, includes those individuals "where we are prepared to work on some sort of arrangement to transfer them back home for either detention and prosecution or other actions, monitoring, whatever it may be." In the briefing, Mr. Prosper emphasized that each of the cases would be evaluated separately.
Those in the top category, he said, were the most dangerous and would go before military tribunals. Individuals in the lowest category were deemed largely harmless and could be released, he said, as have been some 84 Guantánamo prisoners to date.
In determining whether individuals in that second category could be sent back to their home countries, Mr. Prosper said the United States would consider factors like whether they would be properly prosecuted, or at least monitored. He said the United States did not want to be in a position "where a dangerous person is released and is on the next airplane into the next tall building around the world."
Mr. Prosper said that in the negotiations with other countries, the United States understood it could not demand convictions.
"But what we're asking for, what we're saying is, these are dangerous people, they're engaged in dangerous activity," he said. But, he added, the administration was asking if the countries that will receive the detainees have the "capabilities to put them through a process that allows for the managing of the threat and the detention, the investigation, prosecution."
The detentions at Guantánamo Bay have been a major irritant in relations between the United States and several of its allies, notably Britain. There are nine British citizens at Guantánamo, two of whom have been designated as eligible for prosecution by military tribunal.
Mr. Prosper declined to discuss the Britons specifically, but the English journalists' questions were mostly about those nine prisoners. In the resulting articles, Mr. Prosper was quoted as having said that seven of the nine might soon be released for trial in Britain. State Department officials said that was inaccurate, however, saying that Mr. Prosper had not yet given any specific plans for the British prisoners.
--------
British Detainees' Extradition Possible
U.S. Negotiating Terms With London
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 10, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4714-2004Jan9.html
The Bush administration is willing to consider the extradition to Britain of some British citizens now detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.S. officials said this week. But Washington wants assurances in advance that they will be detained, prosecuted or monitored by the British government after their release, the officials said.
Since U.S. troops in Afghanistan took the nine British men -- most of them of Arab descent -- into custody on suspicion of involvement in terrorism, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and other British officials have pressed Washington for assurances that they will be accorded due process in any U.S. criminal trials.
British officials, responding to widespread criticism at home of the unlimited duration of the U.S. detentions, have also raised the possibility that at least some of their citizens could eventually be returned and tried in Britain.
Other countries have sought similar promises since Washington said it plans to try some of the more than 660 foreign citizens detained at Guantanamo Bay in military tribunals that provide more limited rights to defendants than civilian courts do. Two of the Britons have been designated as defendants in such tribunals, although Washington has ruled out -- at London's request -- a potential death penalty.
A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition that he not be named, said British officials are divided over whether they can or should meet a series of U.S. demands that the British guarantee that anyone repatriated will not participate in terrorist activities, either by ensuring that they are jailed or by promising to monitor them in some way. Negotiations over the terms of the British detainees' potential extradition are unlikely to be wrapped up before the British government reaches a decision on how far it is prepared to go, the official said.
The British government has not commented on the talks in any detail, but Blair told the British Parliament on Wednesday that negotiations are continuing and that he hopes to be able to say "shortly how . . . the issue is going to be handled."
However, the U.S. ambassador for war crimes issues, Pierre Prosper, who has been involved in the negotiations, told British reporters in London on Thursday that any U.S. decision on extraditing British or other citizens from Guantanamo for trial in their home countries is likely to be at least "a few months away."
Prosper said that, after extensive interrogations, the U.S. military has sorted them into three groups: those who pose a high threat and will continue to be detained or prosecuted in U.S. military tribunals; those who pose a medium threat and could be transferred to their home countries after Washington receives appropriate assurances from the governments there; and those who pose little or no threat and can be released without condition.
At least 84 detainees have been released to date, with 80 judged to be in the "no threat" category, U.S. officials have said. Four were extradited to Saudi Arabia for continued detention there, the officials said.
Prosper said the British detainees fall into the first two categories. "One or more poses a significant threat," he said. "There's definitely some hardened cases among the British group." To allow their extradition, Washington is not looking for "ironclad guarantees" that the detainees will be convicted at trials in Britain, Prosper said. But "we want to know . . . the likelihood of reaching a prosecution" that will provide "greater comfort that the threat can be managed," he said.
Prosper said that in discussions with Britain and other countries whose citizens are among the detainees, the issue of how much legal authority those nations have "is a live question and . . . a factor." But he denied that Washington is demanding that Britain change its laws to meet U.S. criteria.
Though some of the Guantanamo detainees have been held for more than two years, no trials have been scheduled. Several Australian detainees have been permitted to see a lawyer, and the Bush administration has predicted that at least one trial will begin in the first half of this year.
The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to review the legality of the detentions.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Hundreds demonstrate for release of jailed Israeli conscripts
HAIFA, Israel (AFP)
Jan 10, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040110161602.u0cehgf3.html
Hundreds of Israeli peace activists demonstrated Saturday for the release of five national service conscripts, jailed for refusing to serve in the army because of the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
Around 400 Israelis gathered on a hill overlooking the "number six" military prison where the men are being detained near the northern port of Haifa, organisers told AFP.
They held aloft placards denouncing "service in an occupation army" and calling for the release of the "conscientious objectors". They later dispersed without incident.
The demonstration was organised by various Israeli pacifist groups and parents of the jailed soldiers.
A military court in Jaffa, near Tel Aviv, jailed the five soldiers, all aged around 20, after the judges overruled their refusal to serve in the army on grounds of conscience.
Unlike the others in Israel's growing refusenik movement, the five refused to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) in any sphere, not just in the occupied Palestinian territories, on grounds of conscience.
But the judges said their plea was "politically motivated" and therefore ruled that they should not be treated as conscientious objectors.
The five were already on remand for a year, serving three months behind bars and another nine months in an open prison.
All 18-year-old male Israelis are conscripted into the army for three years, and women for 21 months.
Only Orthodox Jews are exempted on religious grounds and only women can opt for community work instead of military service.
----
Troops fire on protesters in Iraq, killing 6
1/10/2004
Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-01-10-iraq-protestors_x.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) - British soldiers and Iraqi police clashed Saturday with armed, stone-throwing protesters in southeastern Iraq, killing six people. U.S. officials acknowledged American soldiers mistakenly killed two Iraqi policemen after they failed to identify themselves to a patrol.
In Baghdad, a senior U.S. military officer confirmed that preliminary reports showed that a U.S. Army medevac helicopter that crashed last week near Fallujah, killing all nine soldiers aboard, was shot down.
And north of the capital, the U.S. military said it was investigating allegations that soldiers killed four Iraqi civilians who tried to pass a convoy this month in Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown.
The shooting of the policemen occurred Friday after paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade responded to a report of "family fighting" in Kirkuk, about 150 miles north of Baghdad.
Paratroopers spotted two men firing into a house, said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division. The men, who were wearing long coats, fled as the troops approached and were joined by a third man, she said.
"The soldiers verbally warned the three to stop and then fired warning shots," Aberle said. "The men refused to comply and the soldiers took a defensive position and fired," killing two of them and detaining the third.
All three were found to be Iraqi policemen, Aberle said. The U.S. military is investigating why they refused to identify themselves.
Saturday's trouble in Amarah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, started when hundreds of Iraqis angry over the lack of jobs in town gathered in front of the office of the U.S.-led coalition to demand work.
As the protesters grew agitated, shots rang out from the crowd, a British military spokeswoman said. At the same time, she said troops "received reports of small explosions in the crowd."
Iraqi police, believing they were under attack, opened fire into the crowd but did not hit any of the protesters, she said. But witnesses said the police killed some of the protesters.
British soldiers moved in with armored vehicles to support the police, and protesters hurled at least three explosive devices at them, she said.
One man "who was in the process of throwing a device" was shot dead by the soldiers, the spokeswoman said.
The crowd dispersed but later some of them returned and lobbed two explosive devices at the armored cars. Soldiers shot one of the attackers and apparently wounded him, she added. Three other devices were thrown at the soldiers before tensions eased.
Six people were killed and at least 11 wounded, according to Dr. Saad Hamoud of the Al-Zahrawi Surgical Hospital. The British said they had reports of five deaths and one injury. There were no casualties among police or soldiers.
In Baghdad, U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told reporters that "preliminary reports indicate" that the Black Hawk medevac helicopter that crashed Thursday south of Fallujah was probably "brought down by ground fire."
Iraqi witnesses said they saw a missile strike the second of two medevac helicopters as they flew over an area known for resistance against to the U.S.-led occupation.
The nine deaths aboard the helicopter brought to 494 the number of American service members who have died since the Iraq war began March 20.
Elsewhere, Danish soldiers uncovered a cache of mortar shells Saturday in southern Iraq and preliminary tests are underway to determine whether they contain chemical agents, U.S. officials said.
The 30 to 40 120mm mortar shells, which may have been left over from the Iran-Iraq War, were found buried in the desert south of Baghdad and were wrapped in plastic bags and some were leaking a mysterious fluid - leading officials to suspect chemical weapons, according to the U.S. command.
Allegations that Saddam maintained chemical and other weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. orders was cited by the United States as the main reason for launching the Iraq war. No such weapons have yet been found.
In Tikrit, the U.S. military said it was investigating allegation that U.S. troops opened fire on a taxi Jan. 3, killing four Iraqi civilians. Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division, declined to provide any details of the investigation.
The lone survivor, Ibrahim Allawi, says troops raked his car with gunfire as he tried to pass a convoy. Police found Allawi and the others, including a 7-year-old boy, in the bullet-riddled car.
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