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NUCLEAR
Japan lags in NGO activities
Germany buys anti-radiation pills for people near nuclear plants
Khatami: U.S. Must Accept Iran Right to Nuke Power
Tehran rejects U.S. overture for dialogue
Khatami: U.S. Must Accept Iran Right to Nuke Power
North Korea bares nukes
Visitors See North Korea Nuclear Capacity
U.S. Delegation in Seoul After Visit to North Korea
N. Korea Displays 'Nuclear Deterrent'
Nevada Nuclear Waste Case Set for Court
TVA tests waters for more nuclear power
O'Neill: Plan to Hit Iraq Began Pre-9/11
MILITARY
Iraqi shells tested for gas
Troops find 'chemical weapons' in Iraq
China Makes Itself Clear on Hong Kong
Baker Backed Loans That Added to Iraq Debt
U.S. Military Searches for Gulf War Pilot
U.S. Soldiers Kill 2 Members of Iraqi Police in Gun Battle
Challenge for Bootstrap General Is Winning Over the Wary Iraqis
Insurgents Downed Copter in Iraq,
Leadership Says Palestinians Reserve Right to Declare State
NATO Seeks Bosnia Serb War Crimes Suspect
Saddam as POW concerns Iraqis
Setback for space program
Hutton: spy chiefs face reform over Iraq fiasco
Drugging the Troops
In a Logistical Ballet, U.S. Is Bringing In Fresh Forces to Iraq
2 Journalists Are Sentenced in Pakistan
Perle's pulp fiction
5 Journalists Won't Name Sources
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judges Order City to Release More Records About 9/11
Higher Threshold for Death Penalty Is Sought
Terror Policy: Between Fear and Freedom
Strangers in a strange land
Hill Cool to Bush Immigration Plan
OTHER
Move to Ban Altered Crops Is Focused on California
ACTIVISTS
Demonstrations Resume in Iraq, Day After Deadly Clash
Three groups of conscientious objectors to work together
More Than 100,000 Protest Sharon Plan
Hiroshima Bomber and Victims: This Is Your (Puppet's) Life
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Japan lags in NGO activities
Kyodo News
January 11, 2004
Japan Today
http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=comment&id=520
When an influx of Iraqis fled to an Iraqi-Jordanian border area last January in anticipation of U.S. military action against their country, a team of Japanese nongovernmental organization (NGO) members went there to offer medical services.
The team was organized and dispatched by the NGO Japan Platform in cooperation with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Several thousand people had already flooded into the refugee camps.
"At last, the UNHCR had recognized us as a member of the international aid community," Chimaki Kurokawa, secretary general of Japan Platform, said. Previously, European and U.S. NGOs were unrivaled in giving such assistance.
Although Japan has been taking steps to boost cooperation with NGOs, it appears to have failed to catch up with the times in a world in which the idea of NGOs playing a part in diplomacy and settling problems has taken root.
NGOs in Japan seem to have difficulty surmounting the convention that only the Foreign Ministry can do diplomacy.
There are more than 300 nonprofit private organizations across the country engaged in activities centering on international cooperation, such as aiding refugees, development assistance, environmental conservation and working on resolution of problems of global scale.
NGOs of various countries gained the attention of the international community through the roles they played, particularly after the end of the Cold War in the 1990s and after.
The French medical aid group Medicins Sans Frontieres received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1999 for its work in helping people in areas wracked by military conflict.
The Japanese medical aid group AMDA, based in Okayama Prefecture, western Japan, proposed a cease-fire in the Afghan civil war to allow it to distribute polio and other vaccines but the Sept 11, 2001 attacks on the United States made its effort fruitless.
Japanese groups have been expanding their activities, but Foreign Ministry officials say the number of NGOs winning high marks internationally is small.
The reason is they pale in terms of scale, funds and capacity.
The government has worked out comprehensive NGO support measures in the past few years, raising the budget for assistance to 3 billion yen in fiscal 2000 and extending money for Japan Platform's establishment in 2000.
The Foreign Ministry appointed Mitsuhiro Saotome last year as its first ambassador in charge of NGO affairs and increased the budget to 7 billion yen in fiscal 2003.
The ambassador said NGOs are the first groups to become active in emergencies and the importance of their role is growing.
He also said there has been progress in cooperation between NGOs and the ministry.
However, Yasuhisa Shiozaki, a ruling Liberal Democratic Party member of the House of Representatives, says Japan should carry out a sweeping reform of its official development assistance (ODA) program, noting, "ODA accounted for 0.9% of the aid outlays in fiscal 2003 compared with 40% for the United States in the aid outlays at the time of around 2000."
Nobuhiko Suto, a lower house member of the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, who once involved in NGO activities, said, "The problem is deeply rooted is the Foreign Ministry's structure of regarding NGOs as mere subcontractors."
Michiya Kumaoka, a representative of the Japan Volunteer Corps, visited Iraq in August and has since been pointing out the worsening security situation and the health problems caused by depleted uranium shells used by the U.S. forces in that country.
However, there has been no indication of the government taking note of the Kumaoka's reports.
Masashi Kimura, secretary general of Greenpeace Japan, said his group has collected opinions of citizens concerning the Iraq war and made suggestions to the government.
However, the Foreign Ministry has completely refused to accept them, he said.
The riots and disruption of the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle in 1999 by some NGO members was a major turning point for the Foreign Ministry to give active support to NGOs in Japan.
A senior ministry official said the government was pressed to "tame" NGOs so that the Group of Eight summit in 2000 in Okinawa would not be thrown out of gear.
Greenpeace's Kimura called such an official stance "putting the government above the people."
The government demonstrated its plan to cooperate with NGOs in reviewing an outline on its ODA program in August.
However, a Foreign Ministry official said, "I would not be surprised if the government takes the teeth out of the outline since Japan is a country whose prime minister says, 'it's nothing to speak of even if the government fails to safeguard a public promise."
The official appears to believe the ministry's conviction that it is the key player in aid measures remains unchanged.
-------- europe
Germany buys anti-radiation pills for people near nuclear plants
BERLIN (AFP)
Jan 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040111164235.3sourdwz.html
Germany has bought 137 million potassium iodide tablets to protect people living near nuclear power plants from radiation exposure in case of disaster, the environment ministry said Sunday.
A ministry spokesman said the move was unrelated to current terrorism fears but was based on a recommendation by radiation protection authorities.
Potassium iodide is thought to protect the thyroid gland from absorbing radiation.
News magazine Der Spiegel reported in an advance copy of its Monday issue that Germany planned to establish seven centers across the country in which people in a radius of up to 100 kilometers (60 miles) could be treated in case of a nuclear emergency.
The majority of the tablets would be available at such centers.
Germany has agreed to phase out its 19 nuclear power plants over the next two decades due to safety concerns.
-------- iran
Khatami: U.S. Must Accept Iran Right to Nuke Power
By REUTERS
January 11, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iran-usa-nuclear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mohammad Khatami called on the United States Sunday to accept Tehran's right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes if it wants to see an improvement in ties between the two countries.
Cooperation between Tehran and Washington on relief aid to victims of last month's earthquake in southeastern Iran led to some signs of rapprochement between the two arch foes with U.S. officials suggesting a resumption of a dialogue with Iran.
But Tehran has so far rebuffed the U.S. offer to re-start limited talks broken off by Washington last May, arguing U.S. officials must first change their attitude toward Iran.
Khatami singled out U.S. criticism of Iran's nuclear program. Iran says its nuclear facilities are geared to producing electricity, not bombs and last month signed an international protocol binding it to snap inspections of its nuclear facilities.
``They have wrongly accused us of having nuclear weapons,'' Khatami told reporters after a cabinet meeting in Tehran.
``We have signed the additional protocol and if the Americans have good will now they should take back their words and also accept our legal right to have peaceful nuclear technology under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.''
President Bush this month praised Tehran for allowing U.S. humanitarian aid to be sent to earthquake victims but at the same time reiterated long-standing accusations that led him to label Iran an ``axis of evil'' member in 2002.
``The Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over al Qaeda (members) that are in their custody and must abandon their nuclear weapons program,'' Bush said.
Khatami said he hoped that U.S. earthquake relief for Iran, which included a waiver on banking restrictions to speed the flow of donations, ``proves to be a strong indication of fundamental change in U.S. policies and that they take back the baseless comments they have made about us.''
--------
Tehran rejects U.S. overture for dialogue
January 11, 2004
By Ali Akbar Dareini
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040110-115102-5355r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran rejected a U.S. overture for talks between the estranged nations, saying yesterday that Washington must first end its hostile policy toward the Islamic state.
The Bush administration indicated Friday it wants to talk with Iran about its nuclear program, human rights and terrorism in the Middle East. But Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said the Iranians weren't swayed by what they view as a lopsided proposal.
"Right now there are no plans to commence a dialogue," Mr. Kharrazi told a news conference yesterday.
President Bush has branded Iran as part of an "axis of evil" along with North Korea and Iraq under the Saddam Hussein regime, but Washington sent aid to Iran after a deadly earthquake last month and has expressed hopes for a diplomatic opening.
Iran accepted U.S. help following the quake that killed more than 30,000 people in the ancient city of Bam, but it turned down a U.S. proposal for more aid to be brought in by a high-profile team led by Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, who formerly was president of the American Red Cross.
Iran has accused Washington of grandstanding on the aid with no change of heart over the long-standing differences between the two sides. The two countries broke ties after radicals seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 and Americans were held hostage for 444 days.
"What is important is mutual respect and the principle of equality, in a healthy atmosphere without violence," Mr. Kharrazi said. "For this to happen, the United States must change its policy toward Iran."
Meanwhile, Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul met with Mr. Kharrazi yesterday over mutual concerns that Iraqi Kurds could exploit the evolving situation in Iraq to establish an independent Kurdish state.
Earlier this week, Syria's president visited Turkey and also backed the Turkish position.
Mr. Kharrazi and Mr. Gul said their countries both oppose any independent Kurdish state.
If Iraq is divided, "the problems of the Middle East are going to double," Mr. Gul said.
"For us, the territorial integrity of Iraq is very important," Mr. Kharrazi said.
Turkey has a history of disputes with Iran and Syria, but the three governments are finding common ground in the perceived threat from the Kurds.
Iraq's Governing Council has said Kurdish demands for an autonomous region should be decided when an elected Iraqi assembly is installed in 2005. The prospect of an autonomous Iraqi Kurdish province scares Turkish and Syrian leaders, who fear it would encourage separatist sentiment among their own Kurdish populations.
----
Khatami: U.S. Must Accept Iran Right to Nuke Power
January 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-usa-nuclear.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's President Mohammad Khatami called on the United States Sunday to accept Tehran's right to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes if it wants to see an improvement in ties between the two countries.
Cooperation between Tehran and Washington on relief aid to victims of last month's earthquake in southeastern Iran led to some signs of rapprochement between the two arch foes with U.S. officials suggesting a resumption of a dialogue with Iran.
But Tehran has so far rebuffed the U.S. offer to re-start limited talks broken off by Washington last May, arguing U.S. officials must first change their attitude toward Iran.
Khatami singled out U.S. criticism of Iran's nuclear program. Iran says its nuclear facilities are geared to producing electricity, not bombs and last month signed an international protocol binding it to snap inspections of its nuclear facilities.
``They have wrongly accused us of having nuclear weapons,'' Khatami told reporters after a cabinet meeting in Tehran.
``We have signed the additional protocol and if the Americans have good will now they should take back their words and also accept our legal right to have peaceful nuclear technology under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.''
President Bush this month praised Tehran for allowing U.S. humanitarian aid to be sent to earthquake victims but at the same time reiterated long-standing accusations that led him to label Iran an ``axis of evil'' member in 2002.
``The Iranian government must listen to the voices of those who long for freedom, must turn over al Qaeda (members) that are in their custody and must abandon their nuclear weapons program,'' Bush said.
Khatami said he hoped that U.S. earthquake relief for Iran, which included a waiver on banking restrictions to speed the flow of donations, ``proves to be a strong indication of fundamental change in U.S. policies and that they take back the baseless comments they have made about us.''
-------- korea
North Korea bares nukes
January 11, 2004
By Jae-suk Yoo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040111-121955-4116r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea said yesterday that it showed its "nuclear deterrent" to an unofficial U.S. delegation that visited the disputed Yongbyon nuclear complex, which had been closed to outsiders since the North expelled U.N. inspectors more than a year ago.
A member of the delegation, which included nuclear experts and former government officials, said the five Americans were allowed to see everything they requested, but it was not clear if the "nuclear deterrent" was a bomb. Delegates said they could give no further details until they reported to Washington.
The delegation visited Yongbyon during negotiations to arrange a new round of six-nation talks on ending the standoff over the North's suspected nuclear-weapons program, which Pyongyang says is necessary to defend the country against a U.S. invasion. The first round of talks in August ended without much progress.
"As everybody knows, the United States compelled [North Korea] to build a nuclear deterrent," the official KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.
"We showed this to Lewis and his party this time," the spokesman said, referring to one of the delegates, John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor emeritus of international relations.
The delegates, who returned to Beijing yesterday, would not say how much time they spent at Yongbyon. Mr. Lewis said they met North Korean military, foreign affairs, scientific and economic officials, but he would not identify them or talk about what they discussed.
"We are a private delegation," Mr. Lewis said. "We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors."
U.S. officials believe the North already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months. North Korea never has confirmed or denied having atomic weapons.
[The London Daily Telegraph, citing Western diplomats, reported yesterday that North Korea is believed to have developed material for as many as four nuclear devices at the Yongbyon complex.]
The U.S. delegation was the first group from outside the reclusive communist country to visit the Yongbyon plant since the expulsion of U.N. inspectors at the end of 2002.
"The delegation's visit to the facility was not an inspection, but a visit at the invitation" of North Korea, the spokesman said.
The visit was to "ensure transparency as speculative reports and ambiguous information about the DPRK's nuclear activities are throwing hurdles in the way of settling the pending nuclear issue," he said, referring to North Korea's official name, Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
"Transparency serves as a basis of realistic thinking and, at the same time, a basis for solving the issue," he said.
Besides Mr. Lewis, the delegation included Sig Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico; Jack Pritchard, a former staff member of the National Security Council and a former State Department official; and two staff members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The start of the visit last Tuesday coincided with the North's announcement that it would not test or produce nuclear weapons and would even stop operating its nuclear-power industry, in exchange for concessions from Washington. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the offer positive.
However, on Friday, Pyongyang suggested that such negotiations might be tough, warning against expecting the North to follow "some Middle East countries" - an apparent reference to Libya's decision to renounce weapons of mass destruction. Libya announced such a decision last month after talks with the United States and Britain.
Washington said it hoped other countries would do the same.
"To expect any 'change' from the DPRK stand is as foolish as expecting a shower from clear sky," a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. "It is the historical truth that peace is won and defended only with strength."
Meanwhile, Japan's Asahi Shimbun newspaper said yesterday that China had offered North Korea $50 million in aid to take part in a new round of six-party talks.
China's No. 2 leader, Wu Bangguo, presented the offer to North Korean leader Kim Jong-il during a visit to the capital, Pyongyang, in October, the newspaper said, citing unidentified sources. It said North Korea would get the money only after the conclusion of the talks.
The nuclear standoff flared in October 2002, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret nuclear-weapons program in violation of international agreements.
American monitoring ships in the Sea of Japan first detected heightened levels of krypton gas in the atmosphere last March - an indication that reprocessing had started again after an agreement the North Koreans made in 1994 to cease activities at Yongbyon broke down. In late 2002, North Korea claimed that it had finished reprocessing 8,000 spent plutonium rods that were being stored at Yongbyon, enough to build up to six more nuclear weapons.
"The current estimate is that North Korea has reprocessed enough plutonium for up to four bombs," a Western diplomat who specializes in the region told the Telegraph.
--------
Visitors See North Korea Nuclear Capacity
January 11, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/asia/11NUKE.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10 - North Korea declared Saturday that it had shown what it called a "nuclear deterrent" to an unofficial delegation of visiting Americans, but officials familiar with their visit to the North's main nuclear site said they had seen the facilities to produce bomb fuel rather than an actual weapon.
The members of the delegation, speaking in Beijing, declined to give a description of the facilities they inspected until they had a chance to brief the Bush administration, probably next week. But officials who have received sketchy reports say the tour was clearly intended to signal to the United States that President Bush's efforts to dissuade North Korea from moving forward with its nuclear program had failed, and that officials in Washington should accept the fact that North Korea is an undeclared nuclear power, much as it accepts that Pakistan and Israel are nuclear-weapons nations.
"This was all about saying, `See, we've got it, so treat us with some respect,' " said an official familiar with the trip to Yongbyon, the facility two hours north of Pyongyang, the capital.
It is at Yongbyon - where international inspectors were ejected a year ago - that North Korea has an extensive complex of nuclear reactors, a facility to reprocess spent nuclear fuel into bomb-grade fuel and a testing area to detonate the high explosives that would fit into a warhead.
The delegation included John W. Lewis, a Stanford University professor emeritus; Jack Pritchard, a former State Department official with long experience dealing with North Korea who resigned last year after he expressed his dissatisfaction with Mr. Bush's approach to the country; and Dr. Siegfried Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico. Dr. Hecker has high-level security clearances and long experience with nuclear weapons, and it is his judgments that the administration wants to hear, officials in Washington said Saturday.
The Central Intelligence Agency has long concluded that North Korea obtained enough plutonium to build one or two nuclear weapons in the late 1980's or early 1990's, and it told Congress last summer that the North had the designs to build a reliable weapon even without conducting a test. But one of the mysteries has been how much bomb fuel the North produced in 2003, once inspectors were ejected and its plutonium reprocessing facilities were started up. The consensus of American intelligence officials is that the reprocessing is incomplete, but that the North probably made enough fuel last year for two or three more weapons.
"That's the issue that we hope Hecker will shed some light on," a senior official said.
But several experts have noted that even if the visitors had been shown the reprocessing facility, it would be difficult to determine how much material was reprocessed last year. The delegation did not have the kind of sophisticated equipment that the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations' nuclear monitoring agency, usually carries during full-fledged inspections.
Inviting the delegation appears to be part of North Korea's strategy in advance of another meeting with the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, which was to have taken place last month. It has been delayed, in part because North Korea and the United States could not agree on a proposal for a communiqué that would be issued after the meeting; the communiqué would point the way toward some combination of a nuclear freeze and gradual disarmament by the North, and diplomatic and economic benefits for the country from Washington and its allies.
"At this point, the Chinese have pretty much given up on holding a meeting with a pre-agreed outcome," said an Asian official involved in the process. "They are now just trying to put a meeting together."
In a statement issued on its official news service, the North Koreans, using the initials for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, said: "As everybody knows, the United States compelled the D.P.R.K. to build a nuclear deterrent. We showed this to Lewis and his party this time."
But the North Korean account did not describe what kind of "deterrent" it had shown them, and American officials said it appeared to involve something well short of an actual weapon. There is little doubt that the North has the ability to build the weapon, so the major issue is whether it now has access to a steady supply of fuel.
In Beijing as he returned from North Korea, Mr. Lewis said his group had met officials from North Korea's Foreign Ministry, along with those with scientific and economic portfolios. But he declined to identify them and added: "We are a private delegation. We were not there to negotiate. We were not there to be inspectors."
The North Korean statement said the visit had ensured "transparency as speculative reports and ambiguous information about the D.P.R.K.'s nuclear activities are throwing hurdles in the way of settling the pending nuclear issue." On Friday, in a similar statement, North Korea declared that it would not follow the path of Libya, which recently agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities and allow inspectors into the country, Still, at various moments North Korean officials have suggested that for the right price, they might do just that.
On Tuesday, for instance, North Korea announced that it would suspend testing or production of nuclear weapons and even stop operating its nuclear power industry, in exchange for energy aid and other concessions from the United States. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell called the statement "positive," but other administration officials dismissed it as far short of what the United States needs: full disarmament and inspection rights all over North Korea.
In part, that inspection is necessary because North Korea is believed to have at least one more nuclear fuel-production facility, one that makes enriched uranium. But American officials are uncertain of its location, and the visiting delegation was not shown it.
--------
U.S. Delegation in Seoul After Visit to North Korea
January 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Two U.S. delegations arrived in South Korea on Sunday, after a surprise inspection of North Korea's nuclear facilities, for further consultations on a lengthy nuclear crisis.
John Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and other nuclear specialists have became the first outsiders allowed into North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex since U.N. inspectors were expelled a year ago.
Two of the group, Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi, both Senate foreign relations committee aides, flew into Seoul, but they declined to comment on the inspection upon their arrival at the Incheon airport, a Reuters photographer said.
The unofficial U.S. delegation is scheduled to meet South Korea's foreign ministry officials on Monday to brief them on the results of their five-day visit to North Korea, news agency Yonhap reported.
Government officials could not be reached for comment.
The United States is committed to a fresh round of six-party talks and a diplomatic solution to the nuclear issue, Secretary of State Colin Powell told Japan's NHK national television in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
``President (George W.) Bush, along with the other leaders, is looking for a diplomatic solution, and he has made that clear,'' Powell said in the interview, conducted early on Saturday. ``I believe that is possible.''
Powell's comments were dubbed in Japanese.
``I am fairly confident that the talks will be held in the not-too-far future,'' he said, adding that the foundation was now being laid for talks that would show real progress and not be just an exchange of opinions.
North Korea said on Saturday it had shown a visiting U.S. delegation its ``nuclear deterrent'' and hoped it would provide a basis for a peaceful settlement of the row with the United States over its nuclear activities.
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 resume talks with North Korea to end the suspected program.
The Washington Post reported on Sunday that North Korea might have shown a visiting U.S. delegation what the communist state described as reprocessed plutonium, ahead of the proposed six-way talks, involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia, to resolve the crisis.
``The world is now watching whether the U.S. has a true will to settle the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula on the principle of simultaneous actions and peaceful co-existence,'' the north's mouthpiece, news agency KCNA, reported on Sunday.
Last week, North Korea offered to freeze its nuclear activities in a move that has raised hopes for a fresh round of talks, which analysts say may happen in February.
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.
--------
N. Korea Displays 'Nuclear Deterrent'
Freeze Possible, U.S. Team Is Told
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6721-2004Jan10.html
An unofficial delegation of U.S. experts visiting North Korea last week examined what the Pyongyang government said was its "nuclear deterrent," apparently providing the first confirmation that Pyongyang has produced the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.
U.S. officials said they have received only initial details of the visit, and they cautioned that they do not yet know the full extent of the facilities and materials examined by the delegation. But one official said the delegation had been shown what the North Koreans described as recently reprocessed plutonium.
According to this account, North Korean officials told the experts they were prepared to "freeze" the program to resolve the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions.
U.S. intelligence has long estimated that North Korea during the 1980s had obtained enough weapons-grade plutonium for one or two weapons, but that analysis was largely based on guesswork. Moreover, U.S. analysts have not been able to confirm North Korea had obtained additional plutonium from 8,000 spent fuel rods after ousting U.N. inspectors a year ago from its Yongbyon nuclear facility. No outsiders -- before this delegation -- have visited Yongbyon since the inspectors left.
Two key questions for U.S. officials have been whether North Korea has obtained a steady supply of fissile material for bombs and whether the administration's diplomatic efforts in the past year have restrained Pyongyang from pressing ahead with its nuclear program.
The experts -- a group that included former U.S. officials, congressional aides and a former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico -- told reporters they visited Yongbyon, which is 50 miles north of Pyongyang and contains nuclear reactors and a reprocessing facility. They refused to speak in detail about the five-day trip when they arrived in Beijing yesterday, saying they would disclose their findings to the U.S. government.
But, in a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the official North Korean news agency, Pyongyang said it had shown its "nuclear deterrent force" to the group, which was headed by Stanford University scholar John W. Lewis.
"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 [North Korea's] nuclear activities, it would serve as a substantial foundation for a peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue between [North Korea] and the U.S. in the future," the statement said.
"The permission given by [North Korea] to visit the facility was aimed to give Americans an opportunity to confirm the reality by themselves," the statement added.
Siegfried Hecker, a metallurgist who headed Los Alamos from 1985 to 1997, plans to testify publicly about the trip Jan. 20 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a senior Senate staffer said yesterday. Lewis and another team member, Charles L. Pritchard, may also testify. Pritchard resigned from the State Department in August after failing to persuade the administration to negotiate directly with North Korea.
U.S. officials said the visit appears designed to pressure the Bush administration as the United States and its allies struggle to arrange a second round of six-nation talks to resolve the crisis. North Korea has repeatedly said it would freeze its program -- as it did during the Clinton administration -- but the Bush administration has insisted it agree to a verifiable and irreversible dismantling of its nuclear programs, including a clandestine effort to produce highly enriched uranium.
"We know exactly what the North Koreans are doing with these guys," said a senior administration official. "It's the same old game."
The Foreign Relations Committee is also pressing administration officials to testify on the status of the six-nation talks, the Senate aide said.
China, which is hosting the talks, has spent weeks trying to get the United States and North Korea to agree in advance on the text of a statement that would be issued after the talks are completed.
A delegation of Chinese officials is traveling to Washington this week carrying yet another draft that would attempt to merge the North Korean concept of a freeze and U.S. insistence that the programs be dismantled. But U.S. and Asian officials said the Chinese appear ready to abandon the effort to arrange a statement in advance, raising the possibility the talks will end in acrimony.
North Korea, for instance, appears to have barely budged from the offer it made last month to freeze its nuclear programs. The proposal included a suspension of its peaceful nuclear power programs, but diplomats noted that North Korea has no peaceful nuclear programs.
The divide between the United States and North Korea is illustrated by a statement provided by a senior North Korean diplomat recently to the Center for National Policy, a Washington-based nonpartisan think tank. The diplomat, Li Gun, outlined what he called "the order of simultaneous action."
First, the United States must resume shipments of heavy oil and greatly expand food aid, and in exchange North Korea would renounce nuclear intentions. Once the United States provided security assurances in writing and provides energy compensation, North Korea would freeze its facilities and allow inspections of its nuclear material. North Korean missiles would be restrained after the United States and Japan establish diplomatic relations with North Korea. Finally, North Korea's programs would be dismantled only after the United States and its allies finished building light-water reactors in North Korea -- a program suspended by the Bush administration.
By contrast, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said last week that North Korea must issue a statement declaring it will verifiably and permanently end its nuclear programs before the United States would offer its ideas for security assurances, let alone begin discussing energy or economic aid.
Correspondent Philip P. Pan in Beijing contributed to this report.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Nevada Nuclear Waste Case Set for Court
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 11, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Yucca-Mountain-Court.html?pagewanted=print&position=
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/7686491.htm
LAS VEGAS (AP) -- Nevada officials say a federal appeals court hearing this week on a collection of lawsuits will give the state its best chance to block the government's plans to entomb nuclear reactor waste under a mountain just 90 miles outside Las Vegas.
``Part of our strategy has always been the court,'' said U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a leader of the state's fight against the Yucca Mountain project.
Reid said he hopes the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will ``kill it, change direction or slow it down.''
For 25 years, the state has lacked the political clout to stop the Yucca Mountain project, failing in Congress and with the White House.
The public debate will culminate in oral arguments before the appellate panel Wednesday on a case involving six state lawsuits against the federal government. A ruling is likely this summer.
``This is the state's best chance,'' said Bob Loux, Gov. Kenny Guinn's top anti-Yucca aide. ``There's still the licensing arena if we fail, but the playing field is certainly more level in the legal arena than in the political arena.''
Nevada is challenging Environmental Protection Agency radiation limits for areas around the site, Nuclear Regulatory Commission licensing rules, Energy Department environmental standards for studying and recommending the site, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham's recommendation, and President Bush's approval.
The nuclear energy industry also is suing the government, saying it missed a 1998 deadline for finding a place to store the spent fuel accumulating at 103 commercial reactors and various industrial and military sites around the country.
The Energy Department would spend 25 years filling tunnels inside the mountain with metal casks containing 77,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel. The site would then be sealed. Scientists expect it would remain radioactive for at least 10,000 years.
Opponents say the Yucca Mountain area is prone to earthquakes, and that even in the desert, enough water would seep through the mountain over 100 centuries to corrode the metal containers and let deadly radioactive material escape.
Nevada argues that one state shouldn't have to bear the burden of being the nation's nuclear waste dump.
``The analogy we draw is that it's as if the president decided to wage war in Iraq and only send people from Nevada to do the fighting,'' said Martin Malsch, a McLean, Va., lawyer representing Nevada.
If the courts uphold the $58 billion project it would still need a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license. The Energy Department says it will apply for the license this year and open the dump in 2010.
The agency insists Yucca Mountain is safe, and will provide a long-overdue repository for the nation's most highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel.
``If we didn't think so, we would not have made the decision to move ahead,'' Energy Department spokesman Joe Davis said.
Amid terrorism concerns, it makes more sense to store high-level nuclear waste 1,000 feet below a desert mountain than in aboveground sites that amount to ``stationary targets'' in 39 states, Davis said.
On the Net:
Yucca Mountain project: http://www.ymp.gov
Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management: http://www.ocrwm.doe.gov
Nevada Office of Nuclear Projects: http://www.state.nv.us/nucwaste
Nuclear Energy Institute: http://www.nei.org
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov
-------- tennessee
TVA tests waters for more nuclear power
The unused plant in Bellefonte, Ala., is a prime location for expansion.
By NAOMI SNYDER
Tennesseean Staff Writer
Sunday, 01/11/04
http://www.tennessean.com/business/archives/04/01/45348069.shtml?Element_ID=45348069
BELLEFONTE, Ala. - At the Bellefonte plant in northern Alabama, unused cooling towers loom 500 feet over the landscape.
Roped-off turnstile doors draped in cobwebs lead to a wide foyer and a reception desk where no one ever sits.
The Tennessee Valley Authority hasn't given up hope on this nearly complete but never used nuclear power plant. It still spends about $2.8 million a year maintaining the plant, where construction was halted in 1988.
Despite overbuilding nuclear power plants in the 1970s and '80s, which cost the utility billions, TVA has not abandoned its dreams for more nuclear power. The public utility, whose electricity ultimately reaches some 8.3 million customers in the Tennessee Valley region, was the first in the country to decide to restart an unused nuclear unit when its board committed $1.8 billion in 2002 to rebuild a reactor at its Browns Ferry plant near Athens, Ala.
It also is in talks with other utilities on construction of the country's first new nuclear plant in decades, pinning its hopes on bringing that plant to Bellefonte.
''TVA is committed to a diverse mixture of generation that makes sense for the ratepayers,'' TVA Chairman Glenn McCullough said. ''The nuclear power industry has proven in recent years that nuclear power is safe and reliable.''
The TVA has three operating nuclear power plants that produce about 25% of its power. It reapplied last week for a 20-year extension on its license for the Browns Ferry nuclear reactors.
Hoping for a future low-cost energy supply, and an easier way to meet clean air requirements, the utility is working to restart a third unit at its Browns Ferry plant. And it is in the midst of a cost study with General Electric and Toshiba to develop a new type of boiling water reactor to use at its Bellefonte site, looking for a way to bring that nuclear plant online.
TVA also is in talks with other utilities interested in starting the country's first nuclear power plant in almost 20 years. Those utilities, Entergy Corp., Dominion, and Exelon Corp., have applied for early site permits at some of their current plants.
Industry officials said plants won't necessarily be built there, but the companies are taking a look at the possibilities by starting the regulatory process early.
Entergy has applied for Port Gibson, Miss.; Dominion has applied for North Anna Power Station 40 miles north of Richmond, Va.; and Exelon has applied for Clinton Power Station in central Illinois.
TVA officials, who haven't applied for any permits, have their eyes on Bellefonte.
''We think we have an excellent site,'' said TVA board member Bill Baxter, who said there's an increased interest in nuclear power at TVA.
Bellefonte looks good to TVA because it already has gone through the permitting process, and the plant itself is almost complete.
Partnering with other utilities to build a plant could minimize the cost and, therefore, the risk.
It's too early to say whose site would work, said Marilyn Cray, Exelon's vice president of nuclear project development.
Exelon was one of several utilities, including the TVA, that met with the Department of Energy last month to talk about licensing a new reactor.
If the TVA teamed with investor-owned utilities to build a nuclear plant, it would be the first such partnership for the more than 60-year-old federal corporation.
TVA's relationship with nuclear power has been rocky.
The utility launched an ambitious nuclear power program in the 1960s, by some accounts the largest nuclear construction program in the world.
As it added more debt, Congress continued to increase its debt limit. The costs continued to escalate. By 1977, two of its plants tripled in cost over their original estimates, and two others were double their original estimates, according to Edwin Hargrove, who wrote the book Prisoners of Myth: The Leadership of the Tennessee Valley Authority.
The cost was passed on to consumers.
TVA increased rates 88% between 1978 and 1984, according to business professors Dennis Logue and Paul MacAvoy in a report published earlier this year.
They said TVA grew fourfold from being a $4.8 billion utility to a $19.4 billion one during the construction phase for its nuclear program, compared to an industry average of threefold.
Of the 17 units under construction, eight were eventually canceled.
As did other utilities at the time who overbuilt, TVA had overestimated demand. The energy crisis and an economic downturn in the 1970s lowered the need for electricity. New regulatory requirements after the partial meltdown of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania added new costs to plants under construction.
TVA spent about $26.7 billion on its nuclear program, which now is valued at about $11.1 billion. (Part of that is the $4 billion TVA estimates is the value of the unused Bellefonte plant).
Even the plants that did get built had some problems.
In 1975, a worker burning a candle to test for air leaks started a fire at Browns Ferry that burned uncontrolled for seven hours. Although no one died, and there was no release of radiation, it certainly didn't make the plant look good.
Questions about whether TVA could meet the government's requirements led TVA to shut down the plant in 1985. It was reopened in the '90s.
The disaster that was TVA's nuclear construction program during the '70s and '80s has created some skeptics.
MacAvoy and Logue said TVA's governance structure failed to act quickly enough to address problems and stop the overconstruction. The TVA has little oversight about its decisions, which mostly are left to Congress to second-guess. The two professors advocate privatizing TVA.
''They have not had a long history of good decision making,'' Logue said.
Stephen Smith, the executive director of the Knoxville-based Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, has followed TVA for decades.
''TVA has an institutional bias towards nuclear power that continues to get them into trouble,'' he said.
Smith doesn't want to see any new nuclear plants built, citing safety and environmental concerns, and he thinks TVA's plans to invest nearly $2 billion in Browns Ferry will harm the organization.
TVA and the industry are moving ahead.
''A lot of people in the industry are very nervous about those mistakes,'' said Jack Bailey, TVA's power and operation planner. ''You have to be very thorough.''
Bailey said forecasting techniques are better now, and TVA won't be diving into the construction of six or seven plants at once.
Federal licensing also has improved, encouraging TVA and other utilities to think the process will be easier and cheaper.
McCullough also takes pains to emphasize that TVA will be careful this time around.
He said TVA spent $20 million conducting a thorough analysis of bringing Browns Ferry Unit 1 back online.
Browns Ferry's new unit is expected to cost about 2.7 cents per kilowatt hour when it comes on board in 2007, while high natural gas prices lately have driven up the cost of that power to 5 cents per kilowatt hour, he said. (TVA's actual natural gas generation is small).
Plus, the high cost of clean air regulations have made coal, which generates more than 60% of TVA's power, more costly. A new coal plant cost about 4 cents per kwh.
TVA used clean air regulations to justify a recent wholesale rate increase of 7.4% for residential and commercial customers. (Industrial customers got a 2% decrease because TVA said they were paying too much and needed help generating jobs).
The performance of the nuclear reactors has improved, and they are now winning industry awards for efficiency and quality management.
''TVA has learned some lessons along the way,'' McCullough said.
And although TVA would like to use the old Bellefonte site, it has no immediate plans to do so and will remain cautious, he said.
''We wouldn't do anything until it's justified from an economic and environmental point of view,'' he said.
Why does the closed Bellefonte Nuclear Plant cost $2.8 million to operate each year?
After spending $4.6 billion to build the plant, construction was stopped in 1988 with one reactor unit 88% finished and another 57% done.
To keep the plant from deteriorating and to protect it, TVA has 28 employees there who keep the building, generators and turbines in good shape, periodically giving them a dry run so they can be used or sold.
Bellefonte also has a switchyard for transmission lines running through north Alabama and 12 megawatts of diesel power generation that runs occasionally.
-------- us politics
O'Neill: Plan to Hit Iraq Began Pre-9/11
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6632-2004Jan10.html
CRAWFORD, Tex., Jan. 10 -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill charged in remarks released Saturday that President Bush began planning to oust Saddam Hussein within days of taking office and before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Providing firsthand testimony bolstering a longtime contention of White House critics, O'Neill told Lesley Stahl of CBS News for a segment to be broadcast on "60 Minutes" Sunday night that preparations to oust Hussein long predated Bush's articulation of his preemption doctrine in June 2002, when he said the United States must strike looming enemies before the worst threats emerge.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said, according to CBS. "For me, the notion of preemption -- that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do -- is a really huge leap."
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean said the revelation underscores the continuing importance of examining "the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war."
A senior administration official said O'Neill's "suggestion that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq days after taking office is laughable. Nobody listened to him when he was in office. Why should anybody now?"
However, other administration officials did not deny that contingency plans were made for a post-Hussein Iraq, and pointed out that "regime change" had been the official policy of the United States since President Bill Clinton said in 1998 that containment of the Iraqi president was no longer sufficient and a change of leadership was necessary.
O'Neill gave the interview in connection with Tuesday's publication of "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind, who interviewed O'Neill after he was fired by Bush in December 2002. Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, talked to O'Neill nearly daily for a year beginning in 2003. O'Neill is quoted in the book as saying that in early discussions at a National Security Council meeting he attended, no official questioned why Iraq should be invaded.
"It was all about finding a way to do it," O'Neill said. "That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' "
According to a CBS news release, Suskind says in the book that O'Neill and other White House insiders gave him documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was examining options for removing Hussein and planning for the aftermath, including such details as peacekeeping troops and war crimes tribunals.
Suskind said one Pentagon document discussed contractors in 30 or 40 countries that might be interested in Iraq's oil.
The Treasury Department issued a statement saying officials there had not provided any classified documents to O'Neill. Administration officials expect to conduct investigations.
-------- MILITARY
-------- chemical weapons
Iraqi shells tested for gas
January 11, 2004
REUTERS NEWS AGENCY
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040111-122008-3112r.htm
BAGHDAD - Danish troops have found dozens of mortar rounds buried in Iraq, which initial chemical-weapons tests show could contain blister gas, the Danish army said yesterday.
The tests were taken after Danish troops found 36 120-mm mortar rounds on Friday in southern Iraq. The Danish army said the rounds had been buried for at least 10 years.
"All the instruments showed indications of the same type of chemical compound, namely blister gas," the Danish Army Operational Command said on its Web site.
"However, this will not be confirmed until the final tests are available," it said in a statement. Results of the final tests are likely to be ready in about two days.
Blister gas, an illegal weapon that ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein said he had destroyed, was extensively used against Iranians during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
Although it can kill if it enters the lungs, it is used mainly to weaken infantry by making the skin break out in excruciatingly painful blisters.
Four different types of instruments were used on three of the mortar rounds, the army said in its statement, adding that 100 more rounds could be buried at the site.
Icelandic bomb specialists working with the Danish soldiers said the rounds had been found concealed in road construction, Iceland's Foreign Ministry said.
It said a mobile U.S. chemical-research laboratory had been sent to help.
After Danish troops found the suspicious mortar shells, they asked British specialists to analyze them, a Danish official had said earlier. "The first inspections have shown that the mortars contain some liquid," he said.
In Baghdad, the U.S. military said the mortar rounds were found buried 45 miles south of Amarah, north of Basra.
"Most were wrapped in plastic bags, and some were leaking," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt told a news conference, adding that it was likely the weapons were left over from the Iran-Iraq war.
The Danish army statement said local Iraqis had confirmed that the 36 mortar shells had been buried for at least 10 years at the site 12 miles north of Qurnah.
Several hundred Danish soldiers are working with a British-led multinational force responsible for security in southern Iraq.
The U.S. administration had cited the threat of illicit weapons of mass destruction as a principal reason for launching war on Iraq in March last year. But no such weapons have been found so far.
The United States, earlier this month, pulled out from Iraq a 400-member military team specializing in the disposal of weapons of mass destruction, which analysts saw as a sign the administration believes it is less likely that such weapons would be found.
But the White House played down the move, saying that the group focused on hunting weapons was remaining in Iraq.
----
Troops find 'chemical weapons' in Iraq
NICHOLAS CHRISTIAN,
Sun 11 Jan 2004
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=36112004
DOZENS of mortar rounds containing chemical weapons have been found buried under a road in southern Iraq, it was revealed last night.
Tests of a suspicious liquid that was leaking from the shells found that it was a form of blister gas, which include mustard gas.
Deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was supposed to have destroyed all chemical weapons, but it is thought that the munitions had been buried for at least 10 years and might date back to the Iran-Iraq war, which ended in 1998.
Danish soldiers discovered the cache of 36 120mm mortar rounds buried 45 miles south of the town of Amarah, not far from Basra, on Friday.
Amarah was the scene of a violent riot yesterday in which British troops and Iraqi police shot dead at least five people.
The Ministry of Defence said the soldiers had opened fire in self-defence after coming under attack from a crowd of several hundred people armed with grenades, guns and stones.
News of the chemical weapons find came after British and Icelandic scientists carried out tests on a liquid that was leaking from the mortar shells. Initial results suggest the substance is a form of blister gas.
The Danish Army Operational Command said last night: "All the instruments [used in testing] showed indications of the same type of chemical compound, namely blister gas."
It is thought likely to take about two days for confirmation of what the liquid contains.
Four different types of instrument were used on three of the mortar rounds, the army said in its statement, adding that 100 more rounds could be buried at the site.
Icelandic bomb specialists working with the Danish soldiers said the rounds had been found concealed in road construction, Iceland's Foreign Ministry reported. It said a mobile US chemical research laboratory had been sent to help.
In Baghdad, the US Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt told a news conference: "Most were wrapped in plastic bags, and some were leaking."
He added that it was likely the weapons were left over from the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war. Blister gas, an illegal weapon, was extensively used against the Iranians during the conflict.
Mustard gas, one of the best known of the blister agents, can remain toxic in the soil for decades. Although it can kill if it enters the lungs, blister gas is used mainly to weaken infantry by making the skin break out in excruciatingly painful blisters.
The US administration had cited the threat of illicit weapons of mass destruction as a principle reason for launching war on Iraq in March last year. But no such weapons were found.
The United States earlier this month pulled out from Iraq a 400-member military team specialising in the disposal of weapons of mass destruction, in what the New York Times said was "a sign that administration might have lowered its sights" and viewed it as less likely that such weapons would be found. But the White House played down the move, saying the group focused on hunting weapons was remaining in Iraq.
Meanwhile, yesterday's violence in Amarah marked the end of a long period during which British troops have managed to keep control without resorting to lethal force.
The crowd had initially seemed peaceful when it gathered to protest about a lack of jobs in the town.
But the protesters grew agitated and began throwing stones at the provincial government's headquarters. Almost all of the windows were reported to have been smashed.
A British army spokesman said Iraqi police, believing they were under attack, opened fire into the crowd but did not hit any of the protesters. However, witnesses claimed the police had killed some of the protesters. British troops in armoured vehicles were then sent to provide support for the civilian police officers.
The Ministry of Defence said in a statement: "A number of hand-held devices - believed to be three hand grenades - were thrown by members of the crowd at two British Army vehicles.
"The soldiers identified one Iraqi male who was in the process of throwing a grenade and they returned fire. It is believed this individual was killed."
Some three hours later, two more explosive devices were thrown at a British army vehicle, the statement said, and again troops fired at a man.
"This individual was removed by the crowd, believed wounded," the MoD added.
Three more devices were thrown at soldiers before calm returned, the statement said, adding that there were no British casualties.
"It is our understanding that there have been six casualties - five fatalities and one injured. We believe that Coalition forces killed one and injured one, both in self-defence," the Ministry of Defence concluded.
Dr Saad Hamoud, of the Al-Zahrawi Surgical Hospital, said six people were killed and at least 11 wounded. There were no casualties among police or soldiers.
Meanwhile, Iraqi officials expressed fears yesterday that a US Pentagon decision to confer prisoner of war status on Saddam Hussein would prevent them from putting the ousted leader on trial.
The Geneva agreements say PoWs can be tried for crimes against humanity only by an international tribunal or the occupying power, which in Iraq is the United States.
"I am surprised by this decision," said Dara Nor al-Din, a former appeals court judge and member of Iraq's US-backed Governing Council.
"We still consider Saddam a criminal and he will be tried on this basis. This new move will be discussed thoroughly in the Governing Council."
US officials in Baghdad sought to reassure Iraqis that no deal was made to keep them from trying the former dictator.
-------- china
Analysis
China Makes Itself Clear on Hong Kong
Beijing Now Openly Delaying Reform
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6621-2004Jan10.html
BEIJING -- Minutes after Hong Kong's chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, finished his annual policy address Wednesday, mentioning in passing that he had postponed setting a timetable for democratic reform, the Chinese government made certain everyone understood what had just happened.
In a statement issued by the official New China News Agency, a government spokesman said China had told Tung it wanted him to "conduct thorough consultations with relevant departments of the central government" and "only afterwards finalize relevant work arrangements on this issue."
In other words, for the first time since more than 500,000 people participated in a huge anti-government rally in Hong Kong on July 1, China's Communist leaders stepped out of the background and made clear that they intended to control the pace of political change in Hong Kong.
By going public, China's leaders confirmed what many already suspected: Beijing is making key decisions in Hong Kong now, despite its promise of maximum autonomy for the former British colony. They have opened a new chapter in the mainland's relationship with the territory, one that makes them direct participants, and potential targets, in the decades-old fight over whether the people of Hong Kong should be able to elect their own leaders.
China's move has already forced Hong Kong's pro-democracy opposition to consider a change in tactics in its campaign for direct elections to select the chief executive in 2007 and the entire legislature in 2008.
Until now, pro-democracy activists have directed their anger at Tung, the unpopular shipping tycoon appointed by Beijing to run the city after its handover to Chinese rule 1997. But now that China's leaders have made it clear Tung is following their orders, the opposition must decide whether to attack Beijing.
Leaders of the pro-democracy movement have been reluctant to do so in the past, seeking to assure the Chinese leadership they are demanding elections only for Hong Kong, not the rest of the country. During the July 1 demonstration, the largest in China since the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, and in subsequent rallies, the crowds chanted for Tung and his ministers to resign, but there was hardly any mention of Chinese President Hu Jintao or his Politburo colleagues.
The emphasis on Tung reflects public opinion in Hong Kong, where Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao are viewed kindly as potential reformers. But it also represents a pragmatic calculation by the democracy movement: China's leaders have the final say on political reform in Hong Kong, so it is best not to antagonize them.
Under Hong Kong's constitution, agreed on by China and Britain, direct elections can be introduced after 2007 only if two-thirds of the legislature, the chief executive and the central government agree. Pro-democracy activists had hoped that by mobilizing the public, they could win over the legislature, pressure Tung into going along and then present Beijing with the difficult choice of rejecting a proposal that enjoyed broad support in Hong Kong.
By seeking a direct role in the process now, the Chinese government was saying it had lost confidence in Tung's ability to prevent that from happening, said Allen Lee, a member of China's national congress who is sometimes consulted by Beijing about the territory's affairs.
Lee said China's leaders blamed Tung for the huge protests in July, which took them by surprise and forced Tung to withdraw a stringent internal security bill that they wanted passed. "They don't want that to happen again. They really doubt C.H. Tung can manage these political reforms for them," he said. "They're worried about another groundswell of public opinion demanding elections in 2007."
Christine Loh, a former legislator who supports democratic reform, said Tung had failed both the Hong Kong people and the Chinese government. "It's no secret that Beijing is concerned about the pace of political reform, so what we needed was someone who could explain and allay Beijing's fears," she said. "Now Tung's incompetence may have created a no-win situation for everybody. People will feel more frustrated and continue to demonstrate, and Beijing's fears will remain and perhaps get worse."
The pro-democracy movement appears divided about what to do next. Some members are calling for protests to put pressure on Beijing, but most are continuing to focus their criticism on Tung. Another large demonstration is expected on July 1, the anniversary of Hong Kong's handover to China and of the mass rally last year, followed by a showdown during legislative elections in September.
For the first time, 30 of the 60 seats in the Legislative Council will be filled by direct elections, up from 24 four years ago. Small business and professional groups that tend to favor the Chinese government will choose the other 30 lawmakers. Pro-democracy candidates now control 22 seats, and if they can win eight more, they will be able to block legislation and perhaps force Beijing into negotiations about political reform.
Martin Lee, one of the leaders of the Democracy Party, said the Chinese government's latest move appeared aimed at helping its candidates before the election. By delaying the reform process, Beijing makes it easier for them to avoid taking a position on whether universal suffrage should be used to choose Tung's successor in 2007.
China's leaders have carefully avoided saying they oppose universal suffrage for Hong Kong, in part because they are worried such a statement would affect voters in Taiwan, analysts said. The island's pro-independence president, Chen Shui-bian, is up for reelection in March and has argued that Hong Kong's experience under Chinese rule demonstrates the danger of unification with the mainland.
In addition, some in the Communist leadership have looked at Chen's strident, anti-China rhetoric and are worried that candidates in a democratic Hong Kong might behave similarly, according to one person who has been consulted by Beijing. Others are worried that democratic ideals might undermine the party's grip on power in the mainland, he said.
But China's leaders have not reached a consensus on how to answer Hong Kong's demands for elections in 2007, said Allen Lee, the deputy in the national congress. If the democrats win control of the legislature, he said, Beijing might consider a compromise that allows elections but gives them some control over how candidates for chief executive are nominated.
Asked Wednesday whether the Chinese president has told Tung he opposed direct elections in 2007, Hong Kong's chief secretary, Donald Tsang, replied: "Not specifically."
-------- iraq
Baker Backed Loans That Added to Iraq Debt
January 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Baker.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Now assigned the task of reducing Iraq's debt, presidential envoy James A. Baker III once gave crucial support for continuing a billion-dollar loan program to Saddam Hussein's government that accounts for most of the money Iraq still owes the United States.
As secretary of state in 1989, Baker urged the Agriculture Department to offer $1 billion in loan guarantees for Iraq to buy U.S. farm products after Iraq said it would reject a smaller deal.
``Documents indicate he intervened personally to make sure that Iraq continued to receive high levels of funding,'' said Joyce Battle, Middle East analyst for the National Security Archives, a foreign policy research center with a vast collection of declassified documents from the era.
Only half the guarantees were provided before the program was suspended amid allegations of improprieties and deterioration of relations with Iraq in the months before the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
The guarantees were an important part of the first President Bush's effort to improve relations with Iraq in hopes of boosting commercial ties and gaining leverage with a powerful and strategically important nation.
U.S. officials were well aware at the time that Saddam had used chemical weapons against Iran and Iraqi Kurds. Iraq also was believed to have biological and nuclear weapons programs and to be harboring terrorists -- reasons the current Bush administration has used to justify toppling the Iraqi leader.
But in 1989, Baker and other officials hoped incentives might change Saddam.
``That turned out to be unsuccessful, but I don't think it was necessarily a bad approach to try,'' said John H. Kelly, who led the State Department's Near Eastern Affairs bureau under Baker.
After invading Kuwait, Iraq defaulted on its debt to the United States; the debt has grown to more than $4 billion. That includes $1.9 billion in principal and $1.1 billion in interest on Agriculture Department-guaranteed loans.
``The Iraq loss was certainly a shock to the system because of the magnitude,'' Clayton Yeutter, agriculture secretary at the time, said in an interview. He said the Iraq experience taught officials to be careful about guaranteeing too much debt for a single nation.
The U.S. debt is a small part of Iraq's overall $120 billion debt. Baker is now traveling the world as Bush's envoy, seeking relief for Iraq.
The United States began providing loan guarantees to Iraq in the 1980s. Iraq was at war with Iran and the United States wanted to prevent advances by Iran's clerical government.
When the first President Bush took office in 1989, the Iraq-Iran war was over and Iraq was not a U.S. priority, Baker wrote in his 1995 memoirs, ``The Politics of Diplomacy.''
To the extent it was considered, however, there were reasons to seek better relations.
Iraq was a major oil supplier. It was the ninth largest customer of U.S. agricultural goods, with most purchases backed by U.S. loan guarantees. U.S. companies were competing with foreign rivals for postwar business opportunities. Iraq was then the most powerful Arab country, and the United States hoped it might help Middle East peace efforts.
Some U.S. officials and members of Congress opposed attempts to improve relations, given Iraq's record of gassing of Kurds and other abuses. The State Department's human rights bureau described Iraq's record as abysmal, and its director, Richard Schifter, argued against any assistance.
But some U.S. officials saw signs of change. Iraq appeared willing to discuss chemical weapons and human rights issues. Also, Iraq agreed in March 1989 to pay $27 million to the families of 37 sailors killed by a 1987 Iraqi missile attack on the USS Stark.
Bush spelled out his policy in a national security directive from Oct. 2, 1989: ``The United States government should propose economic and political incentives for Iraq to moderate its behavior and to increase our influence with Iraq.'' The policy left open the possibility of punitive measures if incentives failed.
``We were under no illusions about Saddam's brutality toward his own people or his capacity for escalating tensions with his neighbors,'' Baker wrote. ``We fully recognized at the time that it was entirely possible any carrots we offered him would fail to produce the desired result.''
Baker tried to improve relations. In March 1989, he assured an Iraqi diplomat that he would take a personal interest in Iraq's request for expanded loan guarantees from the Export-Import Bank. Later, when Congress barred Iraq from participating in bank programs, the State Department drafted a waiver to override the sanctions. Bush signed the waiver in January 1990.
The big issue, however, was the agricultural loan guarantees, which provide producers and lenders with assurances that loans will be repaid. The guarantees helped Iraq obtain financing to buy U.S. farm products.
By 1989, Iraq had been receiving about $1 billion a year in guarantees. The Agriculture Department proposed reducing that to $400 million for 1990, with the possibility of more money later. Officials were concerned about Iraq's creditworthiness, about corruption in the Iraq loan program and about a brewing scandal involving unauthorized loans to Iraq by the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro.
Angered by the cut, Iraq said it would reject the guarantees. At an Oct. 6, 1989, meeting with Baker, Foreign Minister Tariq Aziz ``made it clear this was not a sign that the U.S. wanted improvement in relations,'' a State Department cable said then.
If Iraq were cut off, some U.S. officials feared Saddam would default on the existing debt. Other officials, though, questioned expanding Iraq's already large foreign debt.
Kelly and Abraham Sofaer, the State Department counsel, proposed a $1 billion program for Iraq, divided in two parts, with safeguards to prevent misuse. Sofaer recalled that the Stark settlement was an important consideration.
``It wasn't a quid pro quo, but it was a positive reaction to a positive development,'' he said in a recent interview.
Baker supported the proposal and called Agriculture Secretary Yeutter, who agreed to back the plan. The $1 billion package was approved days later at an interagency meeting.
Baker then wrote to Aziz, saying the guarantees reflected ``the importance we attach to our relationship with Iraq.''
Iraq received the first $500 million, but never the rest. Relations quickly deteriorated. By April 1990, the United States was angered by Saddam's threat to use chemical weapons against Israel, his criticism of the U.S. role in the Gulf and other issues.
The multiagency group suspended the second part of the loan program in May 1990. Declassified documents do not cite the worsening relations, but rather allegations of abuses in the loan program.
On the Net:
Documents related to the Iraqi agricultural loan guarantees:
http://datacenter.ap.org/wdc/bakerdoc1.pdf and
http://datacenter.ap.org/wdc/bakerdoc2.pdf
--------
U.S. Military Searches for Gulf War Pilot
January 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Missing-Pilot.html
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. (AP) -- Military search crews have returned to the site where Navy pilot Michael Scott Speicher's fighter jet crashed 13 years ago, while captured Iraqi officials, including Saddam Hussein, are being questioned about the fate of the missing flier.
U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., who has worked to get answers for Speicher's family and friends, said crews are actively looking for the Jacksonville man, whose plane went down Jan. 17, 1991, about 100 miles north of the Saudi Arabian border.
The FA-18 Hornet was the first jet shot down in the 1991 Gulf War in Iraq.
Navy officials said crews have checked more than 50 sites, including hospitals, prisons, security archives, homes and the crash site, said Lt. Mike Kafka, a Navy spokesman. ``The Navy remains extremely interested in information regarding Capt. Speicher,'' he said.
Nelson said he was heartened when he heard Saddam and other high-level Iraqi officials had been questioned about Speicher, although Saddam has denied knowledge of Speicher's fate.
Kafka said all detained officials and hundreds of lower-level officials, civilians, defectors and refugees have been questioned.
``Sooner or later, somebody is going to talk,'' said Nelson, who believes Speicher could still be alive. ``I hope so. With each passing day, it diminishes that possibility.''
Recently, crews revisited the crash site for the first time since 1995. At that time they found the canopy, wings, unexploded ordnance, but the cockpit was missing. Nelson said he could not comment on what, if anything, was found in the second search.
Some believe Speicher was killed when a surface-to-air missile knocked his fighter jet from the sky. There was evidence, however, that he ejected from his damaged aircraft.
Speicher was 33 when he was shot down. He held the rank of lieutenant commander at the time; he has since been promoted to captain. His wife, Joanne, has remarried and his children are now teenagers.
His status changed from missing in action to killed in action, but in 2002 it was changed again to missing-captured. A marker has been placed on an empty grave at Arlington National Cemetery.
``We hold out hope that Scott is still alive,'' Speicher's cousin, Teresa Engstrom of Minneapolis, said in an e-mail. ``Failing that, I would hope that the family and all those wonderful supporters can at least know what happened.''
On the Net:
Friends Working to Free Scott Speicher:
http://www.freescottspeicher.com/
--------
U.S. Soldiers Kill 2 Members of Iraqi Police in Gun Battle
January 11, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 10 - American soldiers killed two Iraqi police officers and detained a third man in a gun battle on Friday night in the volatile northern city of Kirkuk, military officials said Saturday.
The soldiers did not realize they were firing on police officers, said Maj. Gordon Tate, a spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which controls much of the area. It is the second time in three weeks that American soldiers have killed Iraqi police officers in the area.
In the southern town of Amara on Saturday, the Iraqi police fired into a crowd of stone-throwing protesters angry over the lack of jobs, killing 6 people and wounding 11, The Associated Press reported, citing reports of witnesses and a hospital doctor. There were conflicting reports about whether people in the crowd fired first, the report said.
The firefight in Kirkuk began at 8:30 p.m. on Friday, when soldiers from the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which is stationed at a base at the edge of Kirkuk, went to a home in the city to check a report that two families in the area were fighting, Major Tate said. The soldiers saw two men in long coats shooting at a house. The men ran and the soldiers chased them, Major Tate said.
When the soldiers caught up to the two men and a third "unidentified individual," Major Tate said, they told the men to stop and fired warning shots. The men refused to obey the soldiers, who then took up "defensive positions," he added.
The soldiers fired on the men, killing one, wounding a second and capturing the third. The wounded man was treated but died on the way to a hospital, Major Tate said.
On Dec. 20, American soldiers killed three members of the Iraqi police and wounded two others at 2 a.m. outside Kirkuk, Agence France-Presse reported. The soldiers had apparently mistaken the officers for guerrilla fighters.
The 173rd Airborne has stepped up patrols in Kirkuk after a flare-up in ethnic tensions in recent weeks. On Dec. 31, a protest by Arabs and Turkmens against Kurdish demands to fold Kirkuk into the autonomous Kurdish region in the north turned violent. People in the crowd fired on the headquarters of one of the country's two main Kurdish parties, and Kurdish fighters shot back, killing four people.
The Kurdish demand for autonomy and government control of Kirkuk, which is rich in oil and agricultural land, has become one of the most divisive political issues in Iraq.
Nushirwan Mustafa, the deputy to Jalal Talabani, who represents the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan on the Iraqi Governing Council, recently urged Kurdish members of the Council to quit if the American and Iraqi ruling authorities do not grant broad autonomy to the Kurdish region, according to a report on Saturday in Azzaman, a prominent Arab newspaper.
The report cited an essay written by Mr. Mustafa called "The Kurds and the Law of Governing the Iraqi State in the Interim Period." Mr. Mustafa could not be reached for comment.
In the essay, Mr. Mustafa said Kurdish leaders should not wait for general elections for a transitional government to take place before securing a federalist system that will allow the Kurdish area to retain powers it has held since 1991.
In another development on Saturday, the United States military said it had concluded after a preliminary investigation that the Black Hawk helicopter that crashed in central Iraq two days ago killing all nine soldiers on board had been shot down by guerrillas.
--------
Challenge for Bootstrap General Is Winning Over the Wary Iraqis
January 11, 2004
By JOHN F. BURNS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/middleeast/11GENE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ABU SAIDA, Iraq, Jan. 9 - Aboard a Black Hawk helicopter skimming at 100 feet across a landscape of palm groves and semidesert north of Baghdad, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez gazed out at lone shepherds and donkey carts and villagers staring back passively at the airborne flotilla hastening northward across Iraq's horizons.
Then the headset crackled, and General Sanchez, 52, who commands the 38-nation alliance of occupation forces in Iraq, summarized his thoughts in a way that encapsulated America's challenge here nine months after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. "They don't want us here, but they don't want us to leave, either," he said. "That's our dilemma; that's the problem we have to solve."
General Sanchez began life at the bottom of the American pyramid, going to work as a dry cleaner's delivery boy at the age of 6 to augment welfare payments that supported his Mexican-American family in Rio Grande City, Tex., a few miles from the border that his paternal grandfather first crossed in the early 1900's. Now, addressing "the problem we have to solve," he is into his eighth month as commander of 125,000 American troops in Iraq, the most coveted and challenging field command for any American officer since the Vietnam War.
A month ago, General Sanchez's troops captured Mr. Hussein, the most auspicious moment in the occupation since the Iraqi dictator's statue was toppled in Baghdad on April 9. The general was in an Army medical clinic about three hours later when Mr. Hussein was brought in by helicopter, manacled and hooded, from his underground spider hole near Tikrit. That, the general said, with the quietness that is one of his trademarks, brought "a certain sense of accomplishment."
A day spent with General Sanchez on Friday was taken up with a trip to Abu Saida, about 60 miles northwest of Baghdad, to visit 90 men in a tank company of the Fourth Infantry Division that garrisons the town. The journey showed the patterns of light and dark that American troops endure everywhere across Iraq.
Here in Abu Saida, every rooftop is watched for insurgent spotters who infiltrate the town from the south and wait for a chance to launch a rocket-propelled grenade or stage a sniper attack. In the palm groves beyond the town, insurgents lurk, waiting to strike American tanks. To reach the town, the general's Black Hawk, flying 24 hours after another Black Hawk was brought down by rocket fire near Falluja killing all nine aboard, traveled at an extra-low altitude, following a weaving path.
At Abu Saida, even the base the Americans have set up on the edge of town is called Forward Operating Base Comanche, with echoes of a fort in Indian country. The base commander, Capt. Ralph Overland, 28, from Phoenix, is on his second stint with Company C of the Third Battalion of the division's Second Brigade; he was seriously wounded by rifle bullets to his leg during a raid on an insurgent hideout in Abu Saida last summer and had been evacuated back to the United States.
Captain Overland is at once a soldier hunting insurgents, and a sort of proxy mayor receiving petitions from scores of townspeople every day. The Americans are helping to rebuild schools and clinics and water pumps and roads, restoring electricity and training about 250 men to serve in the new Iraqi police force and the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps. It is a difficult mix, captured in one of his exchanges with General Sanchez at a briefing before the general's helicopter trip.
"When you go out after the enemy, are you shooting to kill or capture?" the general asked at a briefing with officers. Captain Overland replied: "If they have weapons, we shoot to kill, sir. We kill 'em." He repeated, "If they engage us, we kill them, sir."
The brigade commander, Col. David Hogg, 45, of Omaha, moved forward to emphasize the need for harsh soldiering to counter the hazards in Abu Saida, and General Sanchez nodded. "That's as it should be," the general said.
But he moved swiftly on to what he calls the key to American success here - on one hand, pushing back the insurgents and relieving the pressures on Iraqis, who are victims of the insurgent attacks in far greater numbers than Americans; on the other, showing the path to a better future for all Iraqis with practical improvements in everyday life. At Abu Saida, the American troops have spent $150,000 on improvements, and have approval to spend at least $535,000 more.
"It's about gaining and retaining the consent of the people," General Sanchez said to the officers who gathered in front of a satellite map of the Abu Saida area in the dim interior of the command post. "That's what we're here for, fighting a war, and building a nation."
It is a task that General Sanchez believes is within grasp. In a conversation at his headquarters in the Republican Palace in Baghdad a few days before the trip to Abu Saida, he said that despite the scale of warfare that has disappointed and even shocked many Americans, allied forces here could fail only if the political will of the United States faltered. "I really believe that the only way we are going to lose here, is if we walk away from it like we did in Vietnam," he said. "If the political will fails, and the support of the American public fails, that's the only way we can lose."
Flight Over the Desert
On the flight to Abu Saida, General Sanchez's Black Hawk was flanked by two Apache attack helicopters bristling with Hellfire missiles on outriggers, infrared sensors rotating in the aircrafts' noses for any sign of insurgents below. Heading east out of Baghdad, then northeast, on a path calculated to lessen the risk of ground fire, the cluster of helicopters flew over a landscape that is a monument to what American troops have accomplished, and failed to accomplish, in Iraq.
Below, stark in their ruins, stood the National Olympic Committee headquarters, used by Uday Saddam Hussein, the dictator's oldest son, who was killed by American troops in July, as a center for torture, rape and murder; the complex of buildings that make up the General Security Directorate, command center for the most brutal of Mr. Hussein's secret police agencies, taken over now as an American base; and the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, obliterated in August and October by suicide bombers who succeeded in driving both organizations from Baghdad.
Other buildings visible from the helicopter were ministries and clinics and warehouses looted and burned when American troops failed to stop the rampage that followed the capture of Baghdad. This was the Iraq that General Sanchez and L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American civilian administrator, inherited. Last summer was a low point of the American experience here, when Iraqis who cheered the toppling of Mr. Hussein's statue began to say they might have been better off if the Americans had never come.
Out into open country, the helicopter passed over villages bustling with commerce, booming here under the occupation, even as most Iraqi men remain out of work; over green fields of spring wheat and chimney-high above mud-walled homes smoking from the clay ovens Iraqis use to bake bread. General Sanchez, chatting on the headset with a fellow officer about their sons' college graduations in June, paused. On the helicopter's flank, workmen were stringing cables from utility towers, restoring electricity that collapsed during the April looting. "That's the first time I've seen that; that's great," he said.
The conversation with the general in Baghdad suggested that much that informs his approach to the challenges here went back to his childhood, growing up among the poorest of the poor in south Texas. His father, a welder, was divorced from his mother when the son was still in elementary school; she worked as a hospital caretaker to support five children. The general, as a boy, commuted among odd jobs, helping to pay the family bills.
In time, the boy became the first in his family to graduate from high school. While his older brother went to Vietnam as a staff sergeant with the Air Force, he won an R.O.T.C. scholarship to Texas A & I University in Kingsville, and went on to join the Army. He speaks with no trace of bitterness about his origins.
"I guess I never realized then that I was that poor," he said in the conversation before the trip to Abu Saida. "Pretty well everybody else in the Hispanic community was on welfare, too. We just thought we were fortunate because we were in America."
In Rio Grande City, high school counselors advised him to follow his father into welding, but General Sanchez said he learned as an R.O.T.C. cadet at school that the Army offered an escalator out of poverty. Still, because he was a Hispanic-American who had not been to West Point, his early Army career was a struggle at times, he said.
"It was a totally different military then," he said. "It was the aftermath of Vietnam, and there was a lot of racial stuff within the ranks."
One year, when he was a lieutenant, a senior officer preparing his efficiency report told him he would get 15 points less than fellow officers who were West Point graduates, General Sanchez said. "But I accepted that, and told myself, `I'll just have to work harder.' " Asked if any of the West Pointers in that group became generals, he paused, then replied: "I don't know of any others who made it to general officer. I think one of them made it to colonel."
An Advancing Career
An important chance in his more recent career came when he served in Kosovo in the late 1990's with Gen. John P. Abizaid, now the chief of Central Command based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar, with overall responsibility for the effort in Iraq. General Sanchez arrived in Iraq after Mr. Hussein's overthrow as a major general commanding the First Armored Division, responsible for the war in Baghdad. Within weeks, he was promoted to lieutenant general and given command of the American-led alliance.
Among the low points since then was the loss of 81 American soldiers killed by insurgent attacks in November. The high point, unquestionably, was the capture of Mr. Hussein on Dec. 13. General Sanchez, following the operation from a command center at Baghdad airport, said he and other officers approached the operation that night as routine, because American troops had been close to Mr. Hussein "many times" without snaring him.
He said a radio call from Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division, had brought news that Mr. Hussein had been captured. "General Odierno said, `Sir, I think we've got Saddam; now we're looking for his tattoo,' " General Sanchez recalled. The issue proved inconclusive, other officers said, since the Americans found a surgical scar, not the defiant eagle that was the tattoo worn by senior Baath Party officials.
Then, the general flew to another military facility - where, he would not say - and waited for Mr. Hussein to be brought in. "It seemed like forever," he said. After three hours, he found himself in a military clinic watching the now-identified Mr. Hussein being processed. "As I stood and watched him, it was a feeling of disbelief, that a man could be as evil as Saddam was and reduced to that," he said. "Along with that, there was a certain sense of accomplishment at what our soldiers had achieved."
Mr. Hussein, he said, was "talkative" in the clinic, but General Sanchez chose to say nothing. "I'm not sure he even knew who I was, since I had my flak jacket on, and that covered my name," the general said. "I felt that it was inappropriate for me as the senior officer in the country to engage in a discussion."
Meeting G.I.'s and Iraqis
As the sun went down in Abu Saida, General Sanchez set off for a walk. The town lies on the eastern edge of the Sunni Triangle, which runs north and west of Baghdad and is the center for 90 percent of all attacks on American troops. But unlike most settlements nearby, Abu Saida has a large Shiite Muslim majority. Captain Overland, briefing General Sanchez, said most of the insurgents who had attacked American forces in the town were Sunni Muslim groups infiltrating from the south.
Outside the American headquarters, the general clambered on a tank to chat with crewmen who, like others in the American garrison at Abu Saida, have been retrained as infantrymen for patrols and firefights. As he talked with the crewmen, one, Specialist Hector Quijada, 20, from the Bronx, stepped forward and spoke in Spanish. The two, the general and the specialist, then spoke quietly for several minutes.
Afterward, Specialist Quijada said he and his family migrated to the United States four years ago, settling in New York, where his father worked in a plastics factory. What he wanted the general to know, he said, was that he was a hero among Mexican-Americans and among the specialist's friends in his hometown of Cancún. "I told him that the people of Mexico always talk about General Sanchez - everybody gets excited about him," he said.
With the muezzin at a nearby mosque calling the faithful to evening prayers, General Sanchez began his tour of the town, setting out past kebab stands, generator repair shops and bazaar stalls piled high with oranges and lentils and spring onions. People in the street watched uneasily, uncertain who the visitor was. A few applauded. "America good!" they said.
At the end of the main street, a man in a black cloak and a kaffiyeh, the red checked headdress favored by many men in the Iraqi countryside, stepped forward speaking a pidgin English. "Mister!" he said. "I want talk to you, mister!" The man was Muhammad Hussein, a 60-year-old retired headmaster, and he launched into a litany of Abu Saida's expectations of America: more money for schools, the repair of roads torn up by tanks, an improvement in his own pension of a penny a month.
Then Mr. Hussein paused, in the gathering darkness, and asked courteously who the visitor was. "We don't know you, sir," he said.
"My name is General Sanchez, and I have come to Abu Saida to say hello," the general replied. Mr. Hussein seemed momentarily taken aback, then pressed ahead. "Then you take me to Baghdad, I talk to you in Baghdad, I want to speak only to you, we settle problems of Iraq," Mr. Hussein said.
General Sanchez, anxious American bodyguards urging him to move on, replied with a rolling laugh. "I'm not sure I could take you in my helicopter; that's against regulations," he said. Mr. Hussein, smiling broadly, shook the general's hand, and the American party moved on.
--------
Insurgents Downed Copter in Iraq,
Army Says U.S. Troops Kill 2 Policemen, 4 Taxi Passengers in Separate Incidents in North
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6607-2004Jan10.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 10 -- A U.S. Army helicopter that crashed this week west of Baghdad, killing four crew members and five passengers, was shot down by insurgents, U.S. officials said Saturday.
The death toll in Thursday's incident involving a UH-60 Black Hawk was the highest in a military helicopter crash in Iraq since November, when a pair of Black Hawks collided over the northern city of Mosul. Seventeen soldiers died in that incident.
"The investigation has not concluded, but preliminary reports are that the helicopter was shot down by ground fire," said Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman. The military's statement bolstered witness accounts that some sort of rocket brought down the Black Hawk. U.S. officials declined Saturday to speculate about what kind of weapon was used.
The helicopter was shot down near Fallujah, a center of anti-U.S. resistance in central Iraq, where support for deposed president Saddam Hussein has been strong.
An Iraqi official familiar with intelligence information said recent attacks on U.S. helicopters in the Fallujah area, which lies on a main road from Syria and Jordan, lent credence to reports that foreign fighters have infiltrated Iraq and form an effective, if small part of the Iraqi resistance. "Some of this equipment requires maintenance and know-how, and this likely comes from outside," the official said.
Hussein was captured on Dec. 13, but the Black Hawk crash added to evidence suggesting that Iraqi guerrillas still have both the will and the wherewithal to carry out spectacular acts of violence. Kimmitt said attacks on U.S. forces currently averaged 17 per day.
American forces are aggressively pursuing tips on locations of guerrilla hide-outs and rounding up scores of suspects, U.S. officials say. In the past few days, however, the get-tough policy has resulted in deadly mistakes. In the northern town of Kirkuk, soldiers shot and killed a pair of Iraqi policemen who had been involved in a domestic dispute and who fled when soldiers approached, according to Maj. Josselyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the 4th Infantry Division.
"The soldiers pursued them, shouting warnings and firing warning shots, but the men did not respond," Aberle said. One man died immediately after being shot by U.S. troops; the other died before reaching the hospital.
In Tikrit, soldiers fired on a taxi as it passed a military convoy, killing four passengers, including a 7-year-old boy. Lt. Col Steve Russell, a battalion commander with the 4th Infantry Division, called the shooting a "human tragedy."
"I believe we have a moral obligation to find out what occurred," Russell told reporters.
In southern Iraq, populated by Shiite Muslims who have generally been friendly to the U.S.-led occupation, Iraqi police and British troops fired on a group of armed rioters in the town of Amarah, witnesses said. At least four civilians died, hospital officials said.
Members of the crowd, who had been protesting joblessness, stormed the mayor's office, then his house and then the house of his brother. The mayor fled, and his whereabouts were unknown.
As occupation troops continued searching for recently developed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, the Danish military on Saturday reported finding artillery shells containing a suspicious liquid that could be a chemical blistering agent.
Initial tests, which have yet to be confirmed, were taken after Danish troops found 36 120mm mortar rounds on Friday hidden in southern Iraq, the Reuters news agency reported. The Danish army said, however, that the rounds had been buried for at least 10 years.
Meanwhile, U.S. and Iraqi officials unveiled new Iraqi postage stamps that, for the first time in decades, did not carry Hussein's portrait. The motif was along the theme of transportation. Different denominations were decorated with a horse and carriage, a tram, a rubber boat for traversing the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, camels and a canoe floating among reeds.
Iraqi officials reacted with alarm to the Bush administration's designation of Hussein as a prisoner of war. Iraqi leaders have said that they want to conduct Hussein's trial, but under the Geneva Conventions, a POW can be tried only for war crimes by the occupying power or by an international tribunal.
"Iraqi legal bodies will determine Saddam's status," said Justice Minister Hashim Abdul-Rahman Shibli.
Dan Senor, the spokesman for the civilian body that administers Iraq, said Hussein's POW designation does not prejudge who eventually tries him. "His final status has not been determined," said Senor, who repeated President Bush's pledge that Iraqis will have a "leadership role" in trying Hussein.
-------- israel / palestine
Leadership Says Palestinians Reserve Right to Declare State
January 11, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/middleeast/11MIDE.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Jan. 10 - A top Palestinian political group said Saturday that Palestinians reserve the right to declare a state if no Middle East peace deal can be reached, a move that mirrors Israeli talk of possible unilateral action.
Peace efforts have long been based on the premise that all major steps must be taken by mutual agreement. But with talks stalled, both sides have warned that they could abandon discussions and attempt to reach their aims without a formal deal.
The Palestine Liberation Organization's executive committee, which is headed by Yasir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, met late Friday night and issued a statement early Saturday saying the Palestinians had "the right to declare an independent democratic Palestine on all the territories that were occupied" since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.
That would include all of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians want to establish a capital.
The Palestinian move comes three weeks after Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said that if the Middle East peace plan did not produce progress in the coming months, his government would be prepared to take steps on its own to separate Israelis and Palestinians.
Mr. Sharon's government is already building a separation barrier in the West Bank, saying it is intended to prevent Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks. Palestinians have been fiercely critical of the barrier, which runs through West Bank land the Palestinians want for a future state.
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, stressed that the Palestinians remain committed to the peace plan, known as the road map, which envisions a comprehensive political settlement that would end decades of conflict and establish a Palestinian state.
But Mr. Erekat said the Israelis were threatening to "bury the two-state solution by building the wall in the West Bank and confining us to towns that are prisons."
"If Israel continues this, they will not have a partner on our side," Mr. Erekat said.
On Thursday, the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, said that if there was no agreement creating a Palestinian state, the Palestinians might eventually push to become citizens of a single Jewish-Arab state.
Such a development is seen as highly unlikely. But some Palestinian politicians and academics have raised the issue recently in the belief it could put pressure on Israel.
Under current demographic trends, Arabs will, in a few years, outnumber Israeli Jews in the combined areas of Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and Arabs would therefore be the dominant political force if there were a single state with equal voting rights for all.
Israeli officials, meanwhile, dismissed the recent Palestinian statements as empty threats.
"It would be a major mistake on their part to go for a unilateral state," said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Mr. Sharon. "They are threatening themselves, not us."
The United States opposes unilateral action by either side and has sought to encourage the parties to resume top-level contacts that broke down in August amid ongoing violence.
Mr. Sharon and Mr. Qurei both say they are willing to meet, but no talks have been arranged since the Mr. Qurei became prime minister three months ago.
-------- nato
NATO Seeks Bosnia Serb War Crimes Suspect
By RADUL RADOVANOVIC
Associated Press Writer
Jan 11, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/B/BOSNIA_NATO?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) -- NATO-led peacekeepers searched the house of Bosnia's most-wanted war crimes fugitive, Radovan Karadzic, in a sweep Sunday of a town that was a wartime Bosnian Serb stronghold, a spokesman said.
It was the second day of searches in the eastern town of Pale, following what officials said was a tip that a war crimes suspect - identified Sunday as Karadzic - was hiding in the town.
"We searched two premises this morning, including the house of Radovan Karadzic, but found no evidence that he was there," Lt. Matthew Brock, a spokesman the peacekeeping force in Bosnia, told The Associated Press.
Karadzic's wife, Ljiljana, was present and "cooperative and accompanied the soldiers while in the house," Brock added, saying that the troops also looked for documentation that could lead them to Karadzic's whereabouts. It was not immediately known whether the troops found any leads.
Brock said the sweep of Pale, launched early Saturday, was aimed at finding Karadzic and another most-wanted suspect, Ratko Mladic. About 80 peacekeepers in 30 vehicles along with local police were deployed throughout the town, 10 miles east of Sarajevo. Troops acting on a tip that Karadzic might have been injured before the raid searched all medical facilities in Pale, set up checkpoints and searched vehicles.
The troops also searched the Orthodox church in Pale during the night.
Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb wartime leader, and Mladic, his military commander, have been indicted for genocide and war crimes, including the 1995 slaughter of up to 8,000 Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica.
Pale was the seat of the Bosnian Serb government during the 1992-95 war, which pitted Bosnia's Muslims, Croats and Serbs against each other, killing about 260,000 people.
Since the end of the war, peacekeepers have conducted several searches in Pale in attempts to find the two most-wanted suspects who are believed to be hiding in eastern Bosnia and in neighboring Serbia-Montenegro.
-------- prisoners of war
Saddam as POW concerns Iraqis
January 11, 2004
By Hamza Hendawi
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040110-113518-1679r.htm
BAGHDAD - Iraqi officials expressed anxiety yesterday that a Pentagon decision to declare Saddam Hussein a prisoner of war might prevent them from putting the ousted dictator on trial. The international Red Cross, however, said POW status does not preclude a war crimes prosecution.
U.S. officials in Baghdad sought to assure Iraqis that no deal was made to keep them from trying the ousted dictator for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Iraq will have a "substantial leadership role" when Saddam faces justice, said Dan Senor, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition authority.
"There is no need for concern by anybody because the ultimate designation [of Saddam´s status] will be determined down the road," Mr. Senor told a news conference yesterday.
On Friday, Pentagon spokesman Maj. Michael Shavers said the Defense Department's top civilian lawyers determined that Saddam - held in U.S. custody and under CIA interrogation since his capture last month - is a prisoner of war because of his status as former commander in chief of Iraq's military.
POW status under the Geneva Conventions grants Saddam certain rights, including access to visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross and freedom from coercion of any kind during interrogations.
In Geneva, Ian Piper, a spokesman for the International Red Cross, said handing Saddam over to the Iraqis for trial would not conflict with the 1949 Geneva Conventions on the conduct of warfare, as long as he is granted due process.
It is up to the United States to determine how Saddam is to be tried, Mr. Piper said.
"The status means that he's recognized as a formal combatant and therefore cannot be accused for having waged war," Mr. Piper said. But he added that Saddam's prisoner of war status "does not give him immunity from accusations of crimes against humanity."
Mr. Piper said that national courts have the power to try people who break international war crimes conventions.
Saddam's capture brought a sense of relief to many Iraqis who suffered under his 23 years of iron-fisted rule. No Red Cross representatives have yet seen Saddam.
The United States has said it plans to hand Saddam over to the Iraqis for trial. But that is not expected to happen before sovereignty is handed back to an Iraqi government by July 1.
Saddam's POW designation raised concerns among many Iraqis that it would keep him out of an Iraqi court - and made some suspicious that the Americans want it that way.
"I am surprised by this decision," said Dara Nor al-Din, a former appeals court judge and member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council. "We still consider Saddam a criminal, and he will be tried on this basis. This new move will be discussed thoroughly in the Governing Council."
Iraq's justice minister, Hashim Abdul-Rahman, called the Pentagon comments "mere views" and insisted that Iraqis themselves would determine Saddam's fate.
"The only thing I do know is that Iraqi bodies will decide Saddam's status," Mr. Abdul-Rahman said. "We will determine his legal status when the Iraqi authorities take over this issue."
Mr. Senor sought to play down the significance of the Pentagon comments.
"It is a confirmation of what the United States government has said all along and that Saddam Hussein will be treated under the Geneva Conventions until determined otherwise," he said.
-------- space
Setback for space program
January 11, 2004
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/10/1073437526328.html
Japan's space agency has said a hole in the nozzle of a booster is to blame for the failed launch of a rocket carrying two spy satellites to monitor North Korea, it was reported yesterday.
In November, Japan had to destroy its sixth H-2A rocket just 10 minutes after lift-off as one of its two rocket boosters failed to separate from the fuselage in the second phase of the flight.
The space agency pointed out the hole in the nozzle caused a fuel gas leak, preventing the booster from separating from the main rocket body, Kyodo News agency reported.
A spokesman for the space agency could not be reached for confirmation.
The failed launch of the H-2A rocket, which is central to Japan's space program, could cast a shadow over the country's ambitions to lead Asia's space race, especially following China's successful manned space flight in October, experts have warned.
Japan has sent up five domestically developed H-2A rockets and aims to double its payload capacity in about four years under a Y20 billion ($A243 million) project.
The fifth launch of the H-2A rocket in March carried the nation's first spy satellites to monitor North Korea.
Japan's spy satellite project, worth Y250 billion ($A3.04 billion), was intended as a response to North Korea's firing of a suspected Taepodong ballistic missile over Japan into the Pacific Ocean in August 1998 - a move that sent shockwaves around the region.
-------- spies
Hutton: spy chiefs face reform over Iraq fiasco
Peter Beaumont and Gaby Hinsliff
Sunday January 11, 2004
UK Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/politics/story/0,6903,1120483,00.html
A massive shake-up of the way the Government handles secret intelligence in order to prevent its creeping politicisation is to be launched in the wake of the Hutton inquiry.
The radical reforms will overhaul the role of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), which drew up the infamous dossier on Iraq's banned weapons of mass destruction that lies at the heart of the judicial inquiry.
They emerged amid fresh uproar triggered by Alastair Campbell, the Prime Minister's former director of communications, who claimed yesterday that 'there was no naming strategy' to identify weapons scientist David Kelly as the likely source of the BBC's allegations last year that Downing Street spiced up the dossier.
In an outspoken defence of his actions in advance of Lord Hutton's findings, Campbell dismissed revelations that he had requested 15 changes to the dossier being drawn up by JIC chairman John Scarlett.
Insisting that while 'we can dance on pinheads till the cows come home', he said the changes - which critics argue dramatically strengthened the dossier - were not hugely significant: 'It does not represent in quotes a "sexing-up" or a "transformation". It is me saying, "This is less clear than that," or, "This is expressed slightly differently to where you've expressed it here."'
However, his comments - pounced on yesterday by the Tories, who accused him of spinning himself out of trouble in defiance of his own evidence to Hutton - drive a coach and horses through Downing Street's previous policy of shunning comment on the affair so as not to pre-empt the inquiry.
Last night, a poll for the Mail on Sunday found only one in four voters believes Tony Blair told the truth in saying he had not authorised the leaking of David Kelly's name: almost half blamed the Government most for Kelly's death, followed by the Commons select committee who questioned him, with the BBC well behind.
To prevent such politically damaging rows in future, officials are now planning widespread changes to the JIC, the group of intelligence officials, Ministers and senior civil servants that advises the Prime Minister on material produced by MI5, MI6, the Defence Intelligence staff and GCHQ.
They will insist on a sharp separation between material as presented to the JIC by the intelligence services, and its presentation to the public, erecting 'Chinese walls' between the secret services and spin doctors.
So-called 'ownership' of the intelligence product would rest with the intelligence services, ensuring it continued to be viewed in context rather than cherry-picked for political effect.
Ownership of the dossier was a key issue in the Hutton inquiry: while emails stressed it lay with John Scarlett, critics have argued that he had grown too close to Campbell.
The reforms would also rule out purely political appointees who are neither Crown nor civil servants - such as Campbell - sitting on the committee.
'The idea is that intelligence should be seen in the context in which it was gathered,' said one familiar with the suggested reforms. 'It should be logical and procedure-based, and its veracity should be tested more.'
A second proposal includes ensuring the committee is chaired by a senior civil servant rather than member of the intelligence services, Foreign Office or Ministry of Defence.
Liam Fox, the Conservative Party co-chairman, said Campbell's self-defence was belied by extracts from his own diaries, submitted to the Hutton inquiry, revealing how he and Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon had 'wanted to get it out that someone had broken cover' and that 'the biggest thing needed was the source out'.
'What are they trying to cover up?' Fox demanded last night. 'Alastair Campbell should now therefore clarify which set of statements is correct - his statement that "what we wanted was the name out" or his statement in a newspaper that "there was no strategy".'
The row will encourage the Tories, who plan to build on last week's dramatic ambush of the Prime Minister by Michael Howard over whether he had authorised the identification of David Kelly.
They have collated many apparent inconsistencies in testimony from key figures, including Campbell, which they hope to highlight in the run-up to the report's publication later this month.
Testifying to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, Campbell suggested he had seen JIC intelligence assessments while working on the dossier. Yet, giving evidence to Hutton, he said that he had not. His access to highly secret material was signifi cant because he had said he was involved purely in presentation, rather than in analysing the material itself.
Blair was facing growing pressure last night to promise a vote on the Hutton report when it is debated in the Commons, to give MPs a chance to pass their own verdict.
'If they were that confident they would want to have a vote,' said Oliver Heald, Shadow Leader of the Commons. 'The whole thing reeks of a government running scared.'
Downing Street refused to say yesterday whether there would be a vote. But one senior source said it would depend on the findings: 'What do they think we might be voting on?'
Last night it emerged Lord Hutton had complained in a letter to the Tory MP Peter Lilley of being sent notes made by Private Secretaries which were 'sparse and of no relevance'. He was also not given the transcript of Blair's in-flight press conference last July during which he denied leaking David Kelly's name.
The spotlight will turn this week to the role of the BBC, with the publication of a blueprint under which its governors would be elected rather than made up of political appointees in order to prevent bias.
Broadcasters may face criticism from Hutton over their handling of the dossier story, including whether governors were fully briefed on possible flaws in it before backing the BBC against Downing Street.
A book to be published by the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank on Tues day, part-funded by the BBC, will call for the governors to be chosen by an electoral college of interested parties instead.
'There is a pressing need to make regulation more transparent,' said author Jamie Cowling. 'We don't think it is appropriate to appoint the board of governors because there is a possibility that, precisely because they are appointed, they feel it more necessary to demonstrate their independence from Government.'
Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, who will attend the report's launch, is reviewing the BBC's charter and is expected to study the blueprint closely.
The Tories will pile on the pressure tomorrow by introducing measures as a backbench Commons Bill to protect the Civil Service from interference.
They are also demanding assurances that they will receive Hutton's report 24 hours before it is published.
-------- us
Drugging the Troops
Many U.S. soldiers are being treated with a malaria drug that can cause psychotic episodes. Is this a good idea?
WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Martha Brant Newsweek
Jan. 11, 2004
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/Default.aspx?id=3918713&p1=0
Jan. 9 - My bad drug trip happened back in the mid-1990s. I was on call for the Department of Defense press-pool rotation. In the event of pressing military action, this pool of reporters would be activated and sent somewhere top secret. I never really expected to be mobilized, but I kept a bag packed and my pager at my bedside just in case. It went off one morning about 4:30.
Bleary eyed and still believing this was just a test to make sure the pool actually gathered, I made my way to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. To my shock, we were really going somewhere but the Pentagon wouldn't say where. The military plane was on the tarmac and reporters were getting shots and taking a malaria pill called Lariam.
Lariam is the military's antimalaria drug of choice. In fact, it was developed for U.S. soldiers back in the 1970s. Lariam has been FDA approved since the late 1980s, so everyone from tourists to Peace Corps volunteers can now take it. There are several advantages to the drug over other treatments: it works in countries where mosquitoes are resistant to chloroquine treatment and you only have to take it once a week rather than daily.
The problem is Lariam-also known by its generic name, mefloquine-can cause serious neuropsychiatric side effects. It says so on the label. Let me tell you about mine. I had the weirdest dreams of my life on the stuff. It was almost as if I was hallucinating. I took just one pill during the weeklong DOD trip, which ended up being to the headwaters of the Amazon River in Iquitos, Peru, for drug interdiction. And I was supposed to take the drug for a month or so when I got back. That's when the nausea and dizziness started. I ended up deciding that malaria was better than feeling so sick and I stopped taking it. Soldiers, of course, have little choice but to follow orders and take the drugs they're given. Few know exactly what they're taking anyway. I asked one member of the Third Infantry Division recently what medication he took in Iraq and he said: "red pills." Unfortunately, soldiers are often on the front lines of drug research. That was the case with the controversial anthrax vaccine, which some soldiers have started to reject. Could Lariam be next?
According to the military, some 45,000 Lariam pills were prescribed to soldiers from October 2002 to September 2003. Even though Iraq is not a cholorquine resistant country (and it's desert, not jungle), many soldiers took Lariam during Operation Iraqi Freedom. That has some scientists and activists worried. "What the hell is the Army doing? We're giving this drug to people with guns!" says Susan Rose, whose group Lariam Action USA tracks bad Lariam experiences.
Most soldiers report no ill effects from the medication. But a few blame the drug for erratic behavior. Sgt. Georg-Andreas Pogany from Fort Carson, for example, believes Lariam triggered a panic attack in Iraq. He says that he was sleepless, vomiting and shaking and that he panicked after seeing a mangled body. As a result, he refused a direct order and was initially charged with cowardice. Now he faces dereliction of duty and his lawyer plans to argue that Lariam and combat stress were responsible. After the war in Afghanistan, three other soldiers from Fort Bragg blamed Lariam for a far worse crime: they killed their wives. The Army looked into it and determined that Lariam was not clearly involved. They pointed to two other murders on base; the aggressors had not been deployed and were not taking Lariam. But the three who were on Lariam all committed suicide. Whether their action stemmed from guilt or some side effect from Lariam has been buried with them.
In fact, very little is known about how soldiers react to Lariam. "Under stress you have a greater probability of having neuropsychiatric events. Combine that with drugs ...," says Dr. John Guerigian, a former FDA medical officer. But he knows of no study of how Lariam affects soldiers who are under extreme stress. Roche Pharmaceuticals, which makes Lariam, has been gradually making its warning label more and more specific. The company now warns of "rare cases" of suicide on its label as well as incidents of aggression, psychosis and depression. That's not to mention confusion, anxiety, nausea, dizziness and other vestibular problems that have been reported-and not just by me. "The company has a duty to investigate the safety profile of Lariam especially when a very large population of our boys and girls over there are given this drug," Guerigian says.
But for now, the FDA has only required Roche to remind doctors to tell patients about these side effects. Soldiers will be lucky if they are even told what they are taking.
----
In a Logistical Ballet, U.S. Is Bringing In Fresh Forces to Iraq
January 11, 2004
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/middleeast/11TROO.html?pagewanted=all
KUWAIT, Jan. 5 - In long neat rows, as far as one can see, hundreds of American armored personnel carriers, artillery pieces, trucks and other machines of war are parked at this sprawling port, ready to load onto transport ships for the trip home from the conflict in Iraq.
To make room for their new cargo, each of the 900-foot vessels pulling into berths here must first disgorge more than 1,400 Bradley fighting vehicles, Humvees and other replacement equipment that will soon roll north.
More than 240,000 soldiers and marines are to move into and out of Iraq from now to May, testing the military's ability to handle a major logistical feat while battling the Iraqi insurgency. From remote camps in northern Iraq to the port here, this swapping of forces amounts to the United States military's largest troop rotation since World War II.
It is a movement of hundreds of convoys synchronized by computerized programs that monitor a two-way flow of tanks, trucks and other equipment. Remote sensors track the day-by-day progress of matériel from the moment it leaves bases in Iraq to the time it rolls into predetermined parking spaces aboard one of the giant seven-story cargo ships now arriving here - as well as the other way around.
"It's kind of like a ballet with the Green Bay Packers," said Brig. Gen. Jack Stultz, a senior Army logistician here. He is responsible for orchestrating the movements of what will be as many as 3,000 vehicles a day along an 800-mile stretch into and out of Iraq.
During this rotation, about 110,000 fresh troops will flow into Iraq to replace 125,000 who have been there for about a year. The first 200 returning soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division arrived home this week in Fort Campbell, Ky. Soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division were also heading home, to Fort Bragg, N.C.
At the peak period of overlapping forces, commanders will be able to capitalize on having as many as 200,000 troops in Iraq. But the rotation also poses new risks as American officials say they fully expect guerrillas to try to exploit the transition to new, less experienced troops.
"The shifting focus of their attacks is relentless," said Maj. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, the senior Army officer here overseeing the troop rotation. "But this will not be a period of vulnerability."
As the logisticians wrestle with how to feed, house and transport all the troops on the move, combat commanders say they are preparing to ensure that the frontline-unit transition is seamless. That means transferring to incoming units information about the insurgents and their structure, as well as operational matters and the personal relationships with tribal and religious leaders that have been cultivated during the past months.
"These are three priorities that have to be transferred without a hiccup," said Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the First Armored Division in Baghdad, which will hand off much of its area to the First Cavalry Division, from Fort Hood, Tex.
"We're going to have to work very hard getting them spooled up on the personalities, the sheiks, the tribes, the bad guys, the cells, the infrastructure, the economic projects and the Iraqi security forces," said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division.
General Petraeus said there would also be an aggressive campaign in the Iraqi news media, including television call-in programs, to counter any efforts by the guerrillas to portray the troop rotation as the United States abandoning the Iraqi people.
For incoming units, the process will start at the Ash Shuaiba port, where as many as three or four 900-foot-long Navy transport ships may be unloading at any time. Troops will be flown in to drive their equipment to large staging camps in the desert. They will then spend several days training in the desert before pushing up into Iraq.
The process works in reverse for returning troops. The Army plans to leave about 15 percent of its equipment behind, notably high-priority vehicles like armored Humvees and some communications equipment. The rest will be driven south in armed convoys, washed off, inspected and loaded onto the ships, now empty.
The 101st Airborne is flying about 30 of its Apache gunships back to Fort Campbell on C-17 cargo planes, but most of the division's 250 helicopters will be flown from its headquarters in Mosul, Iraq, to Kuwait, taken apart, wrapped in plastic to avoid shipping damage and put on the vessels. The division has more than 6,000 vehicles and trailers heading home.
"The key to this whole operation is that no cargo stays in any situation longer than 12 hours, otherwise it's backing everything up," said Maj. Faris Williams, the Army's top operations officer at Ash Shuaiba, where nearly 100 cargo ships are to unload or pick up trucks, combat vehicles and other equipment over the next five months.
Incoming units have been brushing up on lessons that soldiers now in Iraq have passed along, from cultural sensitivity training to maintenance tips.
"It's about as complex an operation the Army has had in many, many years," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the head of the III Corps, said in a telephone interview from his headquarters at Fort Hood.
General Metz is expected to arrive in Iraq later this month and will assume daily operational control of the mission, allowing Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American officer in Iraq now, to focus on strategic military and political issues.
The units going home include the First Armored Division, based in Germany; the 101st Airborne Division; and the Fourth Infantry Division, from Fort Hood.
Incoming units include the First Cavalry Division; the First Infantry Division, from Germany; and 25,000 marines from several bases. In addition, several thousand National Guard and Reserve forces will be flowing in.
-------- propaganda wars / press
2 Journalists Are Sentenced in Pakistan
January 11, 2004
New York Times
By AMY WALDMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/international/asia/11STAN.html?pagewanted=all
KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 10 - A judge sentenced two French journalists to six months in prison on Saturday for violating visa restrictions by traveling to an area near the border with Afghanistan without permission.
The journalists, Marc Epstein and Jean-Paul Guilloteau, who work for the French weekly L'Express, along with a Pakistani colleague, Khawar Mehdi Rizvi, were arrested here on Dec. 16 after completing a report on Taliban groups operating along the border with Afghanistan.
Mr. Rizvi has been held at an unknown location since that time. Abdur Rauf Chaudry, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry, said by telephone on Saturday that "he is with the security agencies and he is being interrogated." He said that Mr. Rizvi would be produced before a court "when it is essential," and that it would be "premature" to say which agencies were interrogating him.
The sentence was immediately suspended for one week, and the reporters were allowed to return to their hotel, where they have been under house arrest. Their lawyer entered an appeal that will be heard on Monday. Mr. Chaudry said it was possible that the higher court would not press the case, "and they will be free to go. We are trying this."
The judge, Nuzhat Ara Hakvi, sentenced each of the two French journalists to six months in prison and a fine of $1,750 for traveling without permission to the Quetta region, in western Pakistan. Last year, the government began restricting foreigners' travel to the areas around Quetta and Peshawar.
State-run news organizations have said the journalists were planning a report on how Taliban rebels had set up training camps inside Pakistan near Quetta, which lies about 30 miles from Afghanistan, The Associated Press reported.
Pakistani officials have accused the journalists of staging their film of Taliban activities. "All the Taliban were fake, it was all managed, there were no Taliban," Mr. Chaudry said.
The press-freedom group Reporters Without Borders warned that this case could act as a deterrent.
"If the authorities want to warn the international press that it is forbidden to investigate the situation on the border with Afghanistan, they couldn't have done it better," Robert Ménard, the organization's secretary general, wrote in a letter to the Pakistani foreign minister, Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri.
Reporters Without Borders said interviews on state television that were meant to show that the three journalists had fabricated their report were themselves fabricated.
----
Perle's pulp fiction
Was Richard Perle's self-regarding 1992 thriller just a prequel to the Iraq war?
By Mark Schone,
1/11/2004
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2004/01/11/perles_pulp_fiction?mode=PF
THOUGH IT'S HARD to recall now, there have been times during the past 25 years when conservative intellectuals were not drawing government salaries. Whenever they are out of power, they pay the bills by giving speeches, staffing right-wing think tanks, and pouring their Manichaean daydreams into pulp fiction.
Conservatives are prolific novelists, if not good ones. Since Sept. 11, 2001, reporters have handled the "factual" statements of the Bush camp with kid gloves, but literary critics long ago donned rubber gloves to dispose of his brain trust's admitted inventions. The ick factor is high, because these Friends of Bill Bennett aren't writing books of virtue. They're putting their steamy, bodice-ripping ids on paper. Why, for example, is there S&M in "1945," Newt Gingrich's 1995 fantasia about the World War II? "She rolled onto him," pants Newt (or, one hopes, ghostwriter William Forstchen), "and somehow was sitting athwart his chest . . . `Tell me or I will make you do terrible things."'
Sometimes these scenes appear to give a disturbing hint of what the authors may want outside the bedroom as well. Lynne (Mrs. Dick) Cheney's satirical third novel, "The Body Politic," concerns a Republican vice president who dies of a heart attack during sex with his mistress. His wife takes his job. "The Body Politic" was first published in 1988, around the time of Dick Cheney's third heart attack. It was rereleased during the recount drama in November 2000, right before the veep-to-be's fourth.
In such company, Richard Perle's out-of-print 1992 novel, "Hard Line," is notable for its chastity. There is no sex at all -- which is merciful, since this is the most thinly veiled of romans clef.
The glowering, caterpillar-browed Perle, a former assistant secretary of defense under Reagan, has long been known as the Prince of Darkness for his ber-hawkish views. He is also a gourmet chef. These days, when he isn't devouring coq au vin at his vacation home in Provence, he's serving on the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian advisory panel to the Pentagon. Harvard professor Michael Waterman, the menschy hero of "Hard Line," is also a right-wing, Frenchified foodie with a No. 2 position at Defense, a house in Chevy Chase and a wife whose name begins with L. In early 2001, the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann visited Perle at home and realized that the gurgling French stewpots in the lavishly appointed kitchen were straight out of the book.
What Lemann did not know at the time was just how realistic "Hard Line" would prove to be. The novel was meant as a roman clef of the Cold War. But it prefigures, in detail, the Bush administration's rationale for the invasion of Iraq.
When the book was published, reviewers recognized it as Perle's
It is how Perle's alter ego saves the world that is so unnerving. The Reagan character is about to give away the store -- even the Strategic Defense Initiative -- when a breathless Waterman breaks in. He tells the president that Alexi Marensky, dissident scion of an important Russian family, has learned that Novikov has no intention of honoring an arms ban. The Soviets plan to hide 400 missiles, and components for hundreds more, in an operation code-named Deep Sleep.
The president's eyes went wide. "What?"
"I know it sounds fantastic, Mr. President. But that's what Alexi Marensky says. And I believe he's telling the truth."
The scenario described is eerily similar to how, 10 years after "Hard Line," Perle became one of the intellectual authors of the invasion of Iraq. For Alexi Marensky, insert Ahmed Chalabi, scion of an important Iraqi family. Chalabi, the Iraqi exile whose National Congress was supposed to ride to power on the heels of the Marines, has been close to Perle since they were introduced by neoconservative godfather Albert Wohlstetter in 1985. In the `90s Chalabi began telling Perle, and through him Perle's neocon cronies, that Saddam Hussein was hiding an enormous stockpile of weapons of mass destruction. In 1998, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, and Paul Wolfowitz joined Perle in signing a letter to President Clinton demanding regime change in Iraq.
With a new Republican president, Perle and friends got jobs in Washington, and they got their war. But first, just as in "Hard Line," they had to override the objections of the weak-kneed appeasers of Foggy Bottom. In the book, the lead heavy at State even knows the Commies are hiding weapons, but tries to cover it up. The whole novel drips with contempt for those who would negotiate with evil, as the following exchange between Waterman and his sidekick, Parisi, indicate.
[Parisi] waggled his eyebrows in a full Groucho. "And do we get to screw the exalted Department of State?"
"Whenever possible" . . ..
"Then it's irresistible."
The parallels between Perle's book and our present reality go on and on, and range from the trivial to the troubling. The secretary of defense, la Rumsfeld, is a Midwesterner with glasses who wrestled for an Ivy League college. The fictional Perle, Michael Waterman, loves talking to reporters off the record, especially an "old friend" named Ove Anders. This past fall, Dana Milbank of The Washington Post named Perle (long said to be a confidant of Washington Post columnist Robert Novak) as the prime leak suspect in Novak's outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame. The leaker's identity has been taken up by an independent prosecutor.
What matters most, however, is the plot of "Hard Line." It's been swallowed whole by a man who doesn't read books, much less write them. With Bush at the helm, it's Richard Perle's novel -- we're just living in it.
Mark Schone is a senior contributing writer at Spin Magazine.
----
5 Journalists Won't Name Sources
Wen Ho Lee Is Suing U.S. Over Leaks From Spy Probe
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6804-2004Jan10.html
Five journalists have defied a federal judge's order and refused to disclose the names of confidential sources who provided information about former nuclear weapons scientist Wen Ho Lee, the reporters' representatives said Friday.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson on Oct. 9 ordered the journalists at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Associated Press and Cable News Network to reveal who in the government may have disclosed derogatory information to them about Lee, who was a chief suspect in an espionage case.
Lee has sued the Energy Department and the FBI to recover damages for alleged harm to his reputation caused by leaks of confidential information from the espionage investigation.
In recent depositions before Lee's attorneys, the reporters declined to reveal their sources, citing the need to ensure the free flow of information to the public. The journalists include Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press, Jeff Gerth and James Risen of the New York Times, and Pierre Thomas, a former CNN reporter who now works for ABC News.
Brian A. Sun, an attorney for Lee, said Friday that the next step would be for Lee to again seek relief from the judge, possibly by requesting that Jackson find the reporters in contempt of court.
"We think we have more than adequately demonstrated that we are entitled to this information under Supreme Court case law, and Judge Jackson agreed with our position," Sun said.
According to a partial transcript of Drogin's deposition, given Thursday, the reporter said journalists cannot go back on their word and still hope to do their jobs.
"I have thought long and hard about this, and unlike you attorneys here in the room, I do not have subpoena power or anything else to gather information," he said. ". . . I have the word that I give to people to protect their confidentiality. If I violate that trust, then I believe I can no longer work as a journalist."
Charles D. Tobin, an attorney for Thomas, said: "On a few instances, he was asked to identify confidential sources for stories that he reported four years ago. In most instances, he honestly could not recall who the sources were. In all other instances, he honored his commitments to his sources and respectfully declined to identify them in any way."
Lee's attorneys have told The Washington Post that they plan to question reporter Walter Pincus, but a deposition has not been scheduled, said Mary Ann Werner, vice president and counsel for The Post. Pincus and The Post were not parties to Jackson's Oct. 9 order.
In early 1999, several news organizations named Lee, who worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory, as the chief suspect in an alleged espionage probe. Lee eventually pleaded guilty to a single felony count of copying classified documents onto computer tapes without authorization. The FBI, however, acknowledged that it botched the investigation by focusing on Lee to the exclusion of others, and in 2000 dropped 59 counts of felony espionage against him.
Lee's lawsuit alleges violations of the Privacy Act, which bars disclosure of certain personal information by government agencies.
A Justice Department spokesman declined comment Friday, citing the policy against commenting on ongoing litigation.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judges Order City to Release More Records About 9/11
January 11, 2004
By MICHAEL BRICK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/nyregion/11TAPE.html
A state appeals court has ordered New York City to grant expanded public access to records about its response to the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001.
In a ruling issued Thursday by the Supreme Court's Appellate Division in Manhattan, a panel of judges ruled unanimously that personal feelings expressed by firefighters in interviews conducted by the Fire Department must be disclosed.
But the judges upheld a lower court's ruling that several other portions of the records - including opinions of firefighters and 911 operators - could be withheld from the news media under exemptions to the state Freedom of Information Law.
Michael A. Cardozo, corporation counsel for the city, said in a statement issued Friday that "the decision protects the privacy of the victims of the attacks of Sept. 11, as well as the privacy of their families and survivors."
Lawyers for The New York Times and for families of some 9/11 victims are considering appealing aspects of the decision allowing the exemptions.
The case centers on requests by The Times for access to transcripts of calls to the 911 emergency line, radio dispatches and interviews of firefighters.
The city sought to withhold portions of the records based on exemptions to the law including those for law enforcement matters, personal privacy and records of government employees giving advice to superiors.
-------- death penalty
Higher Threshold for Death Penalty Is Sought
January 11, 2004
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/nyregion/11DEAT.html
Lawyers for a convicted killer on death row are asking New York's highest court to make it harder for prosecutors to win death sentences, just as some prosecutors are growing impatient with the court, which has yet to approve a single execution.
In written arguments in a death penalty case to be considered by the New York Court of Appeals on Wednesday, the state's Capital Defender Office argues for the first time that the state Constitution requires a special rule for death penalty cases. That rule would mean that to convict someone of capital murder, the standard of proof would be greater than "beyond a reasonable doubt," the standard for conviction in criminal cases in this country for centuries.
In its place, the lawyers said, the court should require prosecutors to prove a defendant's guilt "beyond any doubt" to justify an execution. The proposal is opposed by prosecutors and is just one of scores of claims made on behalf of a death row inmate, Angel L. Mateo, who confessed in 1996 to four Rochester killings. Lawyers who follow the court say it is unlikely the judges will adopt the proposal in Mr. Mateo's case.
But experts on capital punishment say the fact that the proposal has reached New York's highest court reflects the shifting ground in legal battles over the death penalty nationally. Spurred by DNA exonerations, defense lawyers are increasingly tailoring arguments to take advantage of what they see as growing public concern about the possibility that innocent people might be put to death. The idea of increasing the level of certainty required for conviction is one of a handful of proposals to modify capital punishment that have gained attention around the country in the last few years. Some of its proponents are death penalty supporters who say the only way to shore up public support for execution is to try to ensure that only those who clearly deserve the ultimate punishment are put to death.
"I am certainly no shrinking civil libertarian," Frank Keating, a Republican and the former governor of Oklahoma, said in an interview, "but I think if you're going to take somebody else's life, you need to be convinced to a moral certainty."
Mr. Keating, who was also a senior Justice Department official in the Reagan administration, unsuccessfully sought to change Oklahoma's death penalty law to require proof "to a moral certainty" while he was governor in 2001.
James S. Liebman, a Columbia Law School professor who has written widely on the death penalty, said the proposal to increase the standard of proof in death penalty cases has been endorsed by some influential criminal law experts since the 1960's. He said the idea, which he favors, "is a very logical outgrowth of the view that we can have a death penalty and make it reliable."
But some prosecutors say the proposal would block all death penalty cases because it is not possible to remove all doubt. "Even if the crime was committed on videotape, somebody could always come up with a doubt," said the district attorney in Schenectady, Robert M. Carney.
The district attorney in Utica and the president of the New York State District Attorneys Association, Michael A. Arcuri, said, "If that standard is adopted, we will not have a death penalty in New York."
Still, some lawyers say changes in the law are often won in incremental battles that can take many years. Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor who has worked on death penalty cases, said the proposal to increase the standard of proof could become more persuasive as court battles unfold. "Arguments gain traction in the legal system over time," he said.
This is not the first time similar arguments have reached courts around the country. In a dissent in a death penalty case in 2002, a New Jersey Supreme Court justice, James H. Coleman Jr., said there was a special need for reliability in capital cases. He said some facts in the cases should be proved to a degree greater than "beyond a reasonable doubt." The same standard "used to determine whether an individual should be found guilty or innocent of possession of a marijuana cigarette," he wrote, "should not be used in determining whether an accused can be executed."
As in many debates about the death penalty, proponents of raising the legal standard differ on how it should be done. Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School who favors capital punishment, said one problem with current law is that it makes jurors' decisions about whether to impose death formulaic, leading to accusations that too many people are sentenced to death.
He said it was important that prosecutors should prove person guilty of a murder charge by the traditional "reasonable doubt" standard. To raise the standard in that part of a capital case, he said, would make convictions impossible.
But Mr. Blecker, who is writing a book arguing in favor of the death penalty, said that when jurors then determine whether to sentence someone to death, they should be required to meet a higher standard. He said the standard should be proof to a moral certainty that a defendant deserves to die.
That, he said, would return credibility to the death penalty by ensuring that only "the worst of the worst" are sent to death row. Currently, he said, the law permits jurors to impose death too freely. "The law," he said, "should require you to be angry enough at the defendant to want him to die."
The Court of Appeals has already reviewed two death sentences since New York's death penalty law took effect in 1995. It overturned both sentences on narrow grounds. Lawyers who have watched the court say they consider a similar ruling likely in the case of Mr. Mateo, who was sentenced to death for one of the four murders.
In a confession, he wrote, "I think I should get the death penalty for the things I did."
-------- homeland security
COLOR CRAZED
Terror Policy: Between Fear and Freedom
January 11, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/weekinreview/11lich.html?pagewanted=all&position=
IN the days of relative calm before the nation went to "code orange" last month, Asa Hutchinson, the Bush administration's point man for border protection, was being briefed once a day on whatever terrorism threats were lurking.
But the anxiety level ratcheted up substantially in mid-December when intelligence officials began picking up ominous tidbits indicating that a big attack might be in the works. Once the country went to orange, or high alert, on Dec. 21, Mr. Hutchinson's daily updates became almost hourly. Everything from the status of grounded Air France flights to suspicious passenger names and fragments of classified terror data flew past his desk.
"It's all been a little bit surreal, just because of the level of intensity we've seen in these last few weeks and the urgency of it and the drama as it unfolds,'' said Mr. Hutchinson, an under secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. "There's a constant pressure mentally because you realize people's lives are at issue - not just their safety, but their convenience when you have hundreds of people sitting on a runway for hours."
The events of the last three weeks - the code orange alert, grounded planes, fighter plane escorts, warnings of hijackings and, on Friday, a stand-down to a nationwide code yellow - have been a jolting reminder for many Americans about their own fragile sense of security.
Indeed, in a war perhaps unlike any other the United States has ever fought, waged largely on its own turf against an enemy that is invisible and without a state, the quandary Mr. Hutchinson faces is one the entire country has wrestled with in the last few weeks: How far can America go to make itself feel safe again? And how much are Americans willing to give up in the way of freedoms and convenience to get there?
For every new border protection program - like the fingerprinting of many foreign visitors, initiated last week - civil libertarians and Arab-American groups express concern about ethnic profiling. For every dire government warning about the threat of terrorism, skeptical allies raise questions about the strength of the intelligence the United States has used to justify its concerns. And for every plane grounded by the threat of terrorism, travelers or airline officials want to know who is going to foot the bill.
A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in fact, placed the cost of the stepped-up security for the code orange alert at a billion dollars a week. Tom Ridge, the secretary for homeland security, said he believes the final cost will end up being much lower than that, but he acknowledged that the potential toll on people day to day is a real concern.
"We always want to put safety first, but we also want to minimize the inconvenience," he said last week in moving the country back down to a yellow alert.
The last three weeks have seen a spasm of aggressive initiatives by the Bush administration to secure the borders and help quell rising public concerns. Officials issued an emergency order demanding that foreign carriers put armed marshals on planes, if necessary. They sent military fighter planes to escort overseas flights thought to be at risk.
They began fingerprinting and photographing tens of thousands of foreign visitors. They picked three companies to develop military antimissile technology to protect airliners. And they gave local police forces more than 1,000 radiation detection devices to help spot possible threats at events over the holidays, like the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
The result, administration officials said, is that the public should rest easier knowing the country is safer from terrorists today than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
But not everyone is convinced. In a report released Thursday by the World Economic Forum and Gallup International, a majority of Americans surveyed - 53 percent - said they feel the country is less safe today than it was 10 years ago.
"What I see doesn't give me any sense of comfort," said Charles G. Slepian, an aviation security specialist who is chief executive officer of the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center, a private group in New York.
"What I see is an admission that the government doesn't trust the security measures we have, and we've had to start doing things like grounding planes and denying landing rights because we're unprepared for the threats we've seen the last few weeks," he said.
If there is a sense of skittishness on the part of counterterrorism officials, it is because they say the threats are both real and growing. In the nightmares they see, the next big attack on American soil could come from almost anywhere: a hijacked international airliner crashed into a power plant or a landmark; a radiological "dirty bomb" detonated on a downtown street; a crude nuclear device smuggled into a port; or perhaps a crop duster loaded with dangerous chemicals.
American officials regard Al Qaeda as a foe that is as crafty as it is dangerous. Expeditions in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, for instance, revealed translations of American newspaper articles that discussed security vulnerabilities in federal government buildings. And Al Qaeda has proven resilient as well, with its agents suspected in a series of recent attacks despite the capture of numerous leaders.
To combat the threat, American intelligence has become increasingly aggressive in collecting bits of terrorism information from around the world - eavesdropping on suspected extremists, checking e-mail, assessing trends. The aim, officials say, is to avoid the types of missed warning signs that preceded Sept. 11.
The more information that is developed, the more skittish officials are likely to become. With the United States pumping an additional $41 billion into counterterrorism and homeland security this year, its efforts have no doubt produced a surge in threat reports for officials to assess - the same type of reports that led the Bush administration to raise alert levels last month.
But some critics wonder whether the whole process has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with an apparatus that has an incentive to report terrorist threats, based on solid information or not.
"Fear is a tough thing to combat," said Timothy Edgar, an American Civil Liberties Union official who believes some of the Bush administration's principal counterterrorism measures have gone too far. "The idea that we're facing very specific threats against the United States has gotten a lot of people upset. But the reality is that it's very hard for any of us to judge why we went to code orange in the first place."
-------- immigration / refugees
Strangers in a strange land
January 11, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/specialreport/20040111-121951-9116r.htm
Immigration has had more impact on the face of America than any other social, political or economic influence. But the history of United States' immigration policy can best be described in one word: schizophrenic.
Immigrants from around the world, seeking political freedom and economic stability in the United States, have been welcomed, recruited and embraced. Some have become corporate leaders. A few have been elected to high office.
Others have been ostracized, condemned, targeted for arrest and even killed.
And while the American public consistently has called on the country's elected officials to enact stricter immigration controls, Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill and in the White House have sought to broaden America's immigrant base through new laws, along with various amnesty and guest-worker programs for illegal aliens already in the country.
On Wednesday, President Bush proposed a new guest-worker program, which could see the legalization of millions of the illegal aliens now in the United States. Immigration experts and others said the proposal, if approved by Congress and fully implemented, would further change the face of America.
Mr. Bush's proposal has enraged proponents of stricter immigration enforcement, who believe the federal government in the wake of the September 11 attacks should be bolstering security along U.S. borders and tracking down and deporting the millions of illegal aliens already here.
They say guest-worker and amnesty programs reward lawbreakers, granting permanent status to those who have entered the country illegally, while discriminating against those who seek legal immigration.
Supporters of Mr. Bush's plan say it allows employers to hire the workers they need, gives illegal aliens now in the country a chance to legalize their status, and will improve relations with Mexico.
Rep. Jeff Flake, who is co-sponsoring a guest-worker bill with fellow Arizonan Republicans Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jim Kolbe, credited the president with presenting a "rational and realistic vision" of immigration reform.
"President Bush has got it right," Mr. Flake said. "A comprehensive temporary-worker program will dramatically improve the situation at our borders."
Liberalized immigration laws and guest-worker and amnesty programs continue to be pushed by what immigration experts call the "elites" - members of Congress, top business and labor union executives and various religious leaders.
It has been those so-called "elites," according to the immigration experts, that have had the most immediate impact on the country's vast immigration system, beginning most prominently in 1965 when Congress passed the landmark Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended a "national origins quota system."
James W. Ziglar, former commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), now an agency within Homeland Security, said the 1965 law "changed our immigration policy dramatically," opening the U.S. border to immigrants from Asia and Latin America.
"But the law lacked the flexibility we needed to accommodate our own society," Mr. Ziglar said.
"With Mexico, a labor source, on our border, it contained no quota difference for that country than it did for other countries in distant parts of the world," he said. "And if you don't deal with a problem, you're going to end up with a problem."
The problem the new law created, Mr. Ziglar said, was increased illegal immigration by Mexican nationals and others looking to follow relatives and friends who had immigrated legally to the United States for jobs - a wave of humanity that continues today.
"We have 8 [million] to 12 million illegal aliens in the country today, and a government grappling to figure out what to do with them," he said.
It is an ongoing debate with no likely resolution, as the war on terrorism focuses the country's attention on border security.
"Few government policies can have so profound an effect on a nation as immigration," said Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the District-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). "Large numbers of immigrants and their descendants cannot help but have a significant impact on the cultural, political and economic situation of their new country.
"But America's immigration policy is and has been in chaos, complete incoherence," Mr. Camarota said. "We have never put up the money it takes to either run such a system or to guarantee enforcement. We have created a very large immigration system, but not the infrastructure it takes to manage it in any coherent way."
Mr. Camarota noted that the rate of increase in legal U.S. immigration, coupled with a dramatic rise in the number of illegal aliens coming annually to the United States, "does seem to be without precedent in recent years," adding that efforts have to be made to overhaul the system and reduce the total numbers.
"Because legal immigration is so large, it has helped drive illegal immigration," he said. "The bigger the legal population, the bigger the illegal population. This chaos will continue until you restore integrity to the system, bring the numbers down and then decide, in a careful way, what increases are warranted."
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the country's foreign-born population in March 2002 was 32.5 million, about 11.5 percent of the total U.S. population - 52.2 percent of whom were born in Latin America. This compares to 19.7 million foreign-born residents in 1990, 14 million in 1980 and 9.5 million in 1970, according to Census Bureau records.
In addition, between 8 million and 12 million illegal aliens are believed to be living in the United States, mostly Mexican nationals, with anywhere from 1 million to 3 million more expected this year, according to U.S. border enforcement officials.
Rules changed
Described at the time as part of a "sweeping overhaul" of America's immigration system, the 1965 act eliminated the country of origin as the basis for approving a person's legal entry to the United States, changing America's immigrant population from one predominantly European, nearly 90 percent, to Latin American and Asian, which now make up about 77 percent.
Beginning in the 1820s and running through 1890, a period known as the "era of mass immigration," immigrants - attracted by reports of economic opportunity and religious and political freedom - came to the United States mainly from Great Britain, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands.
Between 1890 and 1910, the vast majority of new immigrants were from Austria, Hungary, Italy and Russia. In 1924, the government enacted legislation that for the first time set limits on the number of people who could legally immigrate to the United States from specific countries. The limits were based on the number of people from those countries already living in America.
Mr. Camarota said the 1965 law came on the heels of the civil rights movement, passed by a Congress concerned that existing U.S. immigration laws discriminated against Asians and Hispanics. He said the lawmakers responded to their "new civil rights sensibilities," but failed to anticipate the "enormous desire of immigrants to come to America" - particularly those from Mexico.
"The difference between the standard of living in the United States and almost everywhere else is so vast that the desire to come to this country is equally vast," he said.
According to a recent Justice Department report, of the 1,063,732 persons who immigrated legally in 2002 to the United States, 219,380 were from Mexico, 71,105 from India, 61,282 from China, 51,308 from the Philippines and 33,267 from Vietnam. Those five countries accounted for 41 percent of the nation's legal immigrants.
Road signs warn motorists of illegal aliens who run across California Route 905 in an attempt to enter the United States from Mexico.
ROD A. LAMKEY JR. (THE WASHINGTON TIMES)
Illegal immigrants
Illegal immigration, according to law-enforcement authorities and immigration experts, continues to affect the face of America - aided, in part, by various guest-worker and amnesty programs authorized by both Republican and Democratic administrations over the past 20 years.
Since 1986, Congress has passed seven amnesty proposals, targeting more than 5.7 million illegal aliens.
Dan Stein, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), said amnesty and guest-worker programs - like the one proposed last week by Mr. Bush - encourage additional illegal immigration.
Mr. Stein also noted that when legal migration numbers are high, illegal immigration totals also increase. He said FAIR, with 70,000 members nationwide, has sought enhanced border security, an end to illegal immigration and the establishment of legal immigration levels it believes are "consistent with the national interest" - about 300,000 a year.
"As history has proven conclusively, amnesties do not solve the problem of illegal immigration. They encourage even more illegal immigration. The message that is disseminated loudly and clearly throughout the world is that it's time to start lining up for the next amnesty program," he said.
"Once a pattern of dealing with illegal immigration through amnesty programs is established, there will be no end to the number of people prepared to get in on the deal," he said.
Considered key among government efforts to revamp its immigration system was the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA), a "one-time-only" deal passed by a Republican-controlled Senate, a Democratic-controlled House and approved by President Reagan as part of a compromise package between those who wanted to reduce illegal immigration and others who wanted to "wipe the slate clean" by granting legal residency to illegal aliens already in the country.
IRCA also mandated "employer sanctions," or fines, for those who knowingly hired illegal aliens. The sanctions, still on the books, rarely have been enforced.
But the 1986 law resulted in amnesty for 2.7 million illegal aliens, mostly Mexican nationals, who had lived and worked in the United States for anywhere from 90 days for agricultural workers to a year for others. In addition, it also granted legal residency to 160,000 spouses and children of those aliens.
Law-enforcement authorities and immigration experts said the act also increased illegal immigration, as others sought to find a way into the United States to take part in the plan - many through the use of easily attainable fraudulent documents.
According to a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, the total net cost of the IRCA amnesty - the direct and indirect costs of services and benefits to the formerly illegal aliens, minus their tax contributions - after 10 years was more than $78 billion.
Mahmud Abouhalima, a leader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing by al Qaeda terrorists, was legalized as a seasonal agricultural worker as part of the 1986 amnesty law.
Mr. Ziglar said it is unlikely the debate over immigration will ever be resolved, because U.S. sentiment about the role newcomers play in society will likely "ebb and flow with events and with the strength or weakness of the U.S. economy."
But he believes the country must first determine if it is committed to its heritage as a nation of immigrants and as a refuge for those escaping oppression and seeking opportunity, or if such a commitment is relevant or necessary in today's America.
He said questions also need to be addressed on how to control the flow of illegal aliens across America's borders, what to do about the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens in the country, and whether granting them amnesty was a reward for breaking the law.
And while continuing to address the threat of terrorism, Mr. Ziglar also said Congress and the White House must decide how the United States protects the civil liberties of its citizens and noncitizens while securing them from the threat of a terrorist attack.
"What we are witnessing today regarding immigration policy is not new. There is no issue today that hasn't been debated throughout history," he said. "In good times, we oversee a fairly easy immigration policy. In tougher times, immigration becomes an issue and a problem.
"It is, however, one of the most important issues this country must address, and soon."
--------
Hill Cool to Bush Immigration Plan
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 11, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6606-2004Jan10.html
President Bush's proposal to give temporary legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants is running into stiff resistance from both left and right on Capitol Hill and stands little chance of enactment this year, according to supporters and opponents.
While this assessment is based on early responses, with the lobbying effort barely begun, some lawmakers say the measure's only chance of passage this year would require an all-out push by the president, and even that might not be enough. Many liberal Democrats say the plan does not go far enough in helping immigrants attain U.S. citizenship. And many conservative Republicans, especially in the House, say it goes too far in rewarding foreigners who broke the law to enter the country.
In light of these divisions, consensus may be difficult if not impossible in the politically charged atmosphere of a presidential and congressional election year, congressional and other sources said.
Under the proposal, which has yet to be drafted in legislative form, an estimated 8 million undocumented immigrants in the United States would be eligible for temporary legal status for three years, renewable for an unspecified period, provided they are employed and Americans cannot be found for the jobs. Employers could bring in new workers under the same conditions. But these temporary workers would not automatically qualify for permanent residency status or citizenship, and Bush said he expects them to eventually return home.
It usually takes several years to pass major immigration bills, which are legally complex and politically sensitive. Moreover, they generally are drafted on a bipartisan basis, which is difficult in an election year.
Because of these factors, even GOP congressional leaders appear skeptical about prospects this year.
"Democrats are not going to want to give Bush a victory in an election year, and there is some significant opposition from conservative Republicans," a senior House Republican leadership aide said. "This makes it very difficult to do in an election year." The aide estimated as many as 50 House Republicans could vote against the proposal.
"It's something we're going to try to do, but it's going to be tough," said an aide to GOP leaders in the Senate, which is regarded as more open to liberalizing immigration rules.
Foes were even more dubious about prospects. "Based on the conceptual plan as laid out, it's highly unlikely it will ever see the light of day" in Congress, said Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Calif.), an outspoken critic of Bush's proposal.
Only if Bush lobbies fervently for the proposal -- and is willing to expend some political capital during his campaign -- does it stand a chance of passage before the November elections, several congressional sources suggested in interviews last week. A more likely scenario, according to immigration strategists, is that one or both chambers may begin work on the proposal, but votes would be deferred.
"I would anticipate some very interesting hearings on the issue and some important preliminary action, but no action on the House and Senate floors until 2005," said Randel Johnson, a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which favors the Bush proposal.
"Immigration reform is never easy," and this will be no exception, said Cecilia Muñoz, vice president for policy with the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Hispanic civil rights group. "It all depends on how much political capital that Bush is prepared to invest in it."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who sponsored a broader proposal but spoke favorably of Bush's initiative, also said that a major presidential push -- including a demand for action by August in next week's State of the Union message -- is essential for passage this year. "The administration sets the agenda," he said.
Some strategists in both parties believe Bush may be content to use the proposal in his reelection campaign to court Latino voters, rather than push it to a vote this year. But McCain said such a strategy could backfire. "The Hispanic community will have expectations raised," he said, "and if the Republican-dominated Congress can't act . . . it could be damaging to Republicans."
Muñoz expressed a similar view. "I'm not sure the Latino electorate will buy nice ideas in the absence of action," she said.
So far, the White House has given little if any indication of how forcefully Bush would lobby for the proposal. In the past, the extent of his engagement has included a full-court press for tax cuts and considerably less involvement for other bills.
Nor is it clear how far Republican leaders in Congress would go in pushing for quick action. Democrats said they believe the issue does not enjoy a high priority with GOP leaders, in part because it is so divisive in their caucuses. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has said he is optimistic about the bill's prospects. But House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.), while stopping short of declaring opposition, said he had "heartfelt reservations" about a program that "seems to reward illegal behavior."
Democrats say they will offer an alternative, probably along the lines of a bipartisan bill being drafted by Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) that includes a path to permanent resident status.
Any new immigration bill must be bipartisan, a Senate Democratic aide said. "If it's only political, a lot of Democrats are going to be unwilling to make concessions," the aide said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- genetics
Move to Ban Altered Crops Is Focused on California
January 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/national/11GENE.html
UKIAH, Calif., Jan. 10 (AP) - The center of the nation's anti-biotechnology movement can be found these days here in Mendocino County, a quirky region with a strong streak of independence.
Farmers and businesses in this Northern California county are trying to persuade voters to pass a measure on March 2 that would prohibit genetically modified plants and animals from being raised or kept in the county.
"I believe that genetic engineering at this stage is the biggest uncontrolled biological experiment going on in the world today," said Els Cooperrider, an owner of the Ukiah Brewing Company, a brew pub that uses only organic ingredients in its beer and food and has become the headquarters of the campaign.
The industry counters that the negative effects are nonexistent, pointing out that not a single stomachache has been reported since the Food and Drug Administration first approved genetically engineered crops for human consumption 10 years ago. Moreover, they say that crops genetically engineered to resist weeds and bugs enable farmers to decrease pesticide use. Genetically modified organisms being experimented on include tomatoes, corn and soybeans, salmon, pigs and cows.
Supporters of the measure say success could galvanize similar movements from Hawaii to Vermont. Failure could be the biggest setback for opponents of genetically engineered crops since the 2002 defeat in Oregon of a proposal to require labeling of all food with such ingredients.
In 2001 and 2002, 158 pieces of legislation relating to biotechnology were introduced in 39 states, according to the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology. Maryland, for example, imposed a five-year ban on gene-engineered fish in 2002.
Many coffee growers in Hawaii are campaigning to ban outdoor genetic engineering experiments of coffee plants for fear of accidental cross-pollination.
"We are following this real closely," Nancy Redfeather, an organic-coffee grower near Kona, Hawaii, said of the Mendocino County campaign. "It's extremely relevant to what we're trying to do."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Demonstrations Resume in Iraq, Day After Deadly Clash
January 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
AMARAH, Iraq (AP) -- Waves of protesting Iraqis marched against British soldiers, hurling stones and setting off homemade explosives in the southeastern city of Amarah on Sunday, a day after clashes killed six protesters and wounded at least 11.
Meanwhile, Iraq's top Shiite Muslim cleric Sunday hardened his opposition to a U.S. plan to select a provisional national assembly -- a possible further complication in American efforts to hand over power to Iraqis by July 1.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani demanded the assembly be directly elected -- saying a body chosen by local caucuses, as forseen by the Americans, will not have legitimacy. ``This will, in turn, give rise to new problems and the political and security situation will deteriorate,'' he said in a statement released by his office.
Sistani also demanded the assembly approve a draft constitution and proposed agreements governing the continued presence of U.S. and other coalition troops in Iraq beyond July 1. Sistani's views are widely respected by Iraqi Shiites, and his opposition forced the Americans to change their transition plans once already.
Elsewhere, U.S. troops in Tikrit arrested a Saddam loyalist Sunday suspected in last month's shooting of an American soldier who was saved by his flak jacket. The shot soldier was among the troops arresting the man, an alleged member of Saddam's Fedayeen paramilitary movement.
In the southern city of Amarah, screaming protesters -- some armed with sticks and shovels -- rushed in waves against British troops guarding the city hall. The British drove the crowd back from the compound, which also houses the U.S.-led occupation force and the 1st Battalion of Britain's Light Infantry.
Booms and flashes of light exploded in the crowd, believed to be from homemade bombs of tin cans packed with explosives and nails and lit with candlewicks.
Soldiers blocked roads and periodically pushed demonstrators back, sometimes with batons, sometimes marching in unison behind riot shields and, against younger protesters, simply shoving them with their hands.
``Yesterday there were more adults with much more violent intent,'' said British Maj. Johnny Bowron. We are trying to permit a peaceful protest but prevent loss of life or damage to property.''
Tensions in Amarah, 200 miles southeast of Baghdad, erupted Saturday after hundreds of Iraqis gathered to protest that authorities had not kept a promise to give them jobs.
They stoned the town hall, shattering windows. Shots rang out, makeshift bombs were thrown and the British and Iraqi police opened fire. Hospital officials said six people were killed. The British put the death toll at five -- with no casualties among soldiers or police.
Before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam's security forces were the biggest employer in the city of 400,000. On Sunday, demonstrators sent a representative to talk to British and Iraqi officials, who promised them 8,000 jobs, according to witnesses. But protesters said a similar promise made weeks before had not been fulfilled and the clash ensued. No Iraqi police were visible at the scene Sunday.
The raid on the Tikrit home of the alleged Saddam loyalist was prompted by a neighbor's tip, according to Lt. Col. Steve Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army's Texas-based 4th Infantry Division.
The soldier allegedly shot by the Iraqi, Sgt. Jeffrey Allen of Leitchfield, Ky., made the arrest, Russell said. Russell described the Iraqi man, whose identity was not revealed, as a member of Saddam's former Fedayeen paramilitary fighters.
Allen was shot twice in the back on Dec. 30 during a patrol in Tikrit but was saved by a protective plate in his flak jacket, Russell said.
In the northern city of Mosul, four mortar shells exploded at the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan office Sunday morning, damaging the building but causing no injuries, according to party officials who were there at the time.
Two other explosions blasted near the U.S.-led coalition office in the northern oil city of Kirkuk, but police said they appeared to be percussion bombs ``aimed at terrorizing.''
Also Sunday, authorities said the body of an Iraqi working with the U.S.-led coalition was found in the southern city of Basra, along with another man not associated with the coalition. Insurgents opposed to the U.S.-led occupation have targeted soldiers as well as civilians and Iraqi police working with the occupiers.
In Baghdad, two Estonian soldiers suffered minor injuries when a grenade was thrown at their patrol on Saturday, according to Estonian army spokesman Peeter Tali.
On Saturday, the Danish military said its engineering troops and Icelandic de-miners found artillery shells near Quarnah, north of Basra, which may contain chemical blister agents. The shells were wrapped in plastic but some had leaked and they appeared to have been buried for at least 10 years, the statement said.
The shells were sent for further testing to determine if they contained chemical weapons, banned in Iraq under U.N. resolutions.
Before the war, the United States alleged Iraq still had stockpiles of mustard gas, a World War I-era blister agent stored in liquid form. U.S. intelligence officials also claimed Iraq had sarin, cyclosarin and VX, which are extremely deadly nerve agents.
Lack of evidence in a nine-months search since then has led critics to suggest the Bush administration either mishandled or exaggerated its knowledge of Iraq's alleged arsenal.
Saddam's regime used chemical weapons against Iranian soldiers and killed an estimated 5,000 Kurdish civilians in a chemical attack on the northern city of Halabja in 1988.
----
Three groups of conscientious objectors to work together
By Lily Galili,
Haaretz Correspondent
11/01/2004
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/381464.html
Three organizations of Israel Defense Forces reservists who refuse to serve in the territories are expected to join forces and work together. The announcement from the groups - signatories of "The Courage to Refuse" letter, which was signed by officers and soldiers refusing to serve in the territories, signatories of the pilots' letter, who refuse to participate in attempts to assassinate senior wanted men in the Gaza Strip and West Bank, and the 13 reservist soldiers and officers in the IDF's elite Sayeret Matkal unit also refusing to serve in the territories - is expected to take place at a joint demonstration the three movements are planning at the Kissufim junction on Friday.
The joint activity will be a public expression of the process that has been taking place behind the scenes in recent months. Senior members of "Courage to Refuse," which began two years ago and is headed by David Zonshine, were involved in assisting in the organization of the groups of pilots and Sayeret Matkal soldiers.
The movements share political and ideological similarities. Members of the three groups define themselves as Zionists, with a concern for the army and Isralei society. All three also restrict their refusal to service in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. (For example, they are willing to serve along the northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah operates.) They differ from the "Yesh Gvul" movement, whose signatories include anti-Zionists, and which supports the five high school seniors recently sentenced to one-year in prison for refusing to be drafted in the army.
Supporters of "Courage to Refuse" and signatories of the pilots' letter took part in a demonstration Saturday opposite Prison 6, in support for the five conscientious objectors who began their year-long sentence this week. 500 people, including the parents of the conscientious objectors, took part in the demonstration, which was organized by "Yesh Gvul."
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More Than 100,000 Protest Sharon Plan
Sunday, 11-Jan-2004
LAURIE COPANS,
Associated Press Writer (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/cw/Aisrael-settler-protest.RLii_EJB.html
TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) -- More than 100,000 settlers and their backers on Sunday protested the Israeli prime minister's plans to evacuate Jewish settlements as part of a peace agreement or a unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian areas.
The demonstrators filled a Tel Aviv square to listen to ministers from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's own Cabinet heap criticism on him. Some threatened to leave the ruling coalition of he carries out the plan.
Sharon has warned that in a peace deal, Israel would not be able to retain all of its settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. He has also said some settlements would be moved if peace efforts collapse and Israel moves unilaterally to draw its own boundary with Palestinian areas.
Gathering in Tel Aviv's Rabin square, named for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin who was assassinated there by a Jewish extremist after a peace rally, the crowd carried signs protesting against Sharon and his plan.
Tel Aviv police chief Yossi Sedbon said police estimates put the crowd at 120,000 people.
Among the protesters were many members of Sharon's own Likud party, including a dozen lawmakers.
"Uprooting settlements rips apart the nation," read one sign. "Sharon -- resign, we don't want you any more," said another.
Housing Minister Effi Eitam of the pro-settler National Religious Party accused the prime minister of weakness. "In the battlefield there is no disengagement plan; you know that would be running away," he said
"We won't dismantle settlements and we won't expel Jews," Eitam said to the cheers of the crowd. "We will not be a party to dismantling settlements."
The settlers and their supporters believe they have a God-given right to live wherever they want within the biblical land of Israel, which includes the West Bank. Palestinians say the settlements are an encroachment on land they claim for a future state.
"All of Zionism is based on the belief that we have a right to this land," Likud lawmaker and parliamentary speaker Reuven Rivlin told AP.
"I came to demonstrate for the land of Israel. I am against the dismantling of settlements, I am against the disengagement plan and I will vote against it in the Knesset (parliament)," Rivlin said.
Organizers said all the lawmakers present had signed a pledge not to support legislation that would uproot settlements or create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza.
Protester Micha Cohen, 35, said he had come to the demonstration with his two small children "because for us the struggle is for their future ... we see settlements as important places that should not be evacuated."
Many of the protesters were teenagers bused in by their schools and youth movements.
"Sharon can't ignore such a big group of people," said settler leader Pinchas Wallerstein. "There is no doubt that it will be much harder to dismantle settlements after this."
Also in the crowd was a small group from the outlawed Jewish extremist group Kach, waiving the group's yellow flag and calling for the expulsion of the Arabs.
"The best thing is to throw (the Arabs) out. But the government won't do that, they are clowns," said one 17-year-old Kach member who identified himself only as David and said he was originally from California.
Security at the event was heavy, with 1,300 police guarding against possible attacks. All protesters entering the square had to first pass through a metal detector. Police, wary of the number of guns carried by settlers, posted signs reading "If, God forbid, there is a terror attack, it is absolutely forbidden to use personal weapons. "
Police also cordoned off a memorial to Rabin, fearing it could be defaced during the demonstration.
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Hiroshima Bomber and Victims: This Is Your (Puppet's) Life
By DAVID RAKOFF
January 11, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/11/arts/theater/11RAKO.html
In 1955, a group of 25 Japanese girls and young women who had been disfigured by the effects of the atomic blast in Hiroshima were flown to New York City to undergo reconstructive surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital. They were accompanied on their trip by the Rev. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, a Methodist minister in Hiroshima.
The performance artist and director Dan Hurlin first heard of the Hiroshima Maidens, as they were touted in the press, from a friend, the historian David Serlin, who came upon their story while researching a book. Mr. Hurlin couldn't get it out of his head.
What struck him in particular was a detail that seems a fabrication straight out of Kurt Vonnegut, or would, but for the existence of archival television film: while in New York, Tanimoto, along with his wife and children and some of the women, appeared on the television show "This Is Your Life." There they met face to face with Capt. Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that had dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima 10 years before.
According to Mr. Hurlin, Lewis was not initially told that he would be meeting with survivors; before the taping began, he realized what the producers had in mind and fled the studio. He was later found at a bar.
Despite that interruption, the encounter proceeded as planned. A brief clip of the program, which survives in a Hiroshima documentary titled "After the Cloud Lifted," shows a monumentally awkward meeting, with all parties civil and subdued.
Lewis is a barrel-chested man in a light-colored jacket, his prominent brow casting his eyes in shadow. He describes the events of Aug. 6, 1945, while Tanimoto nods as if in commiseration: "At 8:15 promptly, the bomb was dropped," he says. He goes on: "Shortly after, we turned back to see what had happened. And there, in front of our eyes, the city of Hiroshima disappeared. I wrote down later," and here Lewis rakes his fingertips across his forehead as he fights for composure, his voice almost faltering: " `My God. What have we done?' "
Mr. Hurlin was "slack-jawed with amazement" at the story. "I started to think about cultural reconciliation," he explained recently by e-mail. "It was never really clear to me how countries - Germany, for instance - can collectively `face their past.' " As he puzzled over that issue, he started to formulate a play. ("I have three or four ideas percolating all the time," he said. "The idea that bubbles to the surface most often is the one I often end up making.")
He filled up nearly two notebooks with sketches and ideas, read widely and immersed himself in visual research, studying the work of Japanese wood block printmakers like Hiroshige and Hokusai, and the Japanese influence on the mid-20th-century architecture and furniture of Charles and Ray Eames. And in search of an 8-millimeter copy of the complete "This Is Your Life" broadcast, in July 2001 he went all the way to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.
He didn't find the film, but he did meet Michiko Yamaoka, one of the surviving Maidens. Mr. Hurlin was already immersed in the development of the play, but his conversations with Ms. Yamaoka helped shape the material.
The result, "Hiroshima Maiden," is built around two characters: the Pilot, based on Lewis, and Michiko, somewhat loosely based on Ms. Yamaoka. The play opens on Wednesday at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it is scheduled to run through Feb. 1. Ms. Yamaoka - who, just 15 years old in 1945, is now in her 70's - will be on hand for select performances and will answer questions from the audience.
"Hiroshima Maiden" is the first of his pieces in which Mr. Hurlin does not appear. Live actors of any sort, in fact, are incidental to the production. It is performed in the style of bunraku, the centuries-old Japanese puppet theater. "Puppets are a better mirror of our own selves," Mr. Hurlin - who teaches puppetry, along with dance and performance art, at Sarah Lawrence College - explained in an interview last month at a diner in Dumbo. "They're immediately more engaging to me than a live actor. You watch an actor wipe his nose and think nothing of it. You see a puppet do it and you say, `I know that!' What surprises everyone is how expressive they are. But what's really going on is an act of projection. The audience will use their imaginations to fill in the missing steps. Performance is a two-way street. It's what you read into it."
Such universality might account for a proliferation of Object Theater pieces ("the new, cool puppetry parlance," according to Mr. Hurlin): the Broadway musical "Avenue Q" and Paula Vogel's play "The Long Christmas Ride Home"; the films "Being John Malkovich" and "Illuminata." Mr. Hurlin confessed to some wariness on this point. "I'm a little sheepish saying all this because I'm fairly new to the form. Forgive me for rolling my eyes. I'm worried that puppetry is becoming the new black, but I am thankful that it's on the radar."
In traditional bunraku, the voices of the puppets are spoken and sung by the Tayu, a narrator who also provides exposition and commentary. The Tayu in "Hiroshima Maiden" will not tell the story of Michiko and the Pilot, but rather a seemingly unrelated narrative of an American boyhood from 1955. Anything but a consoling look back at that era, it bears out, instead, the first line of the program notes, written by Mr. Serlin: "Americans love nostalgia but they hate history."
The Tayu describes a world suffused with anxiety: the Boy opening his eyes during Duck and Cover drills at school; mesmerized by the flashing ambulance lights at a traffic accident; obsessing over the myth of the Medusa and the fate of all those who gaze upon her. Every new experience is fraught with pitfalls and humiliations, there for the witnessing. Even the antics of Lucy Ricardo are almost too much for the Boy to bear ("He can watch any episode three quarters of the way through. He can watch her come up with a great cost-saving idea . . . or even how to get a job in a candy factory. . . . But what he can't stand to watch is what happens when her plan is put into action. He doesn't want to see that. Who would want to see that? That's not funny. It's embarrassing.")
The wages of seeing are a longstanding theme in Mr. Hurlin's work. His previous two pieces fell under the collective title "Everyday Uses for Sight." One dealt with looking as a form of refuge, telling the story of how as a young boy, in an effort to avoid the town bullies, Mr. Hurlin stayed inside, paging through art books. "The other piece," he said, "was about looking as danger, equating architecture with sex. When I was growing up in Jaffrey, N.H., I got the neighborhood boys" - those same bullies, a few years later - "to build me a clubhouse with a sunken living room. There was some voyeurism involved. I was hoping that the hot day would make them take their shirts off. They never did, but," he added, triumphant, "they dug me that sunken living room."
"Hiroshima Maiden," then, might be a meditation on looking as knowledge. Not the knowledge that brings power or peace of mind, but rather the grim, unasked-for knowledge of a terrible, incontrovertible truth.
The moral consequences of seeing and the fact that one cannot "unsee" something are made concrete throughout "Hiroshima Maiden." The play's many arresting stage pictures are annotated, designated and diagrammed as if one were looking through a book - an anatomy text, atlas or technical manual - rather than watching live theater. The puppeteers employ all manner of props to direct and focus the gaze of the audience: arrows on sticks point to an otherwise ignored detail; empty wooden squares on long handles frame a puppet's hand or foot; when a tiny, glinting speck skitters across the floor, catching the Pilot's attention, another puppeteer stretches an elastic from the minuscule object to a large white circle printed with the silhouette of an ant. It's like a blow-up of the "Area of Detail" on a map. The ravaged face of the puppet Michiko is subjected to the harsh stares of others. Black-and-white sightlines painted on sticks extend from the eyes of the spectators toward her, as rigid and invasive as daggers.
In rehearsal, Mr. Hurlin confers with his cast of nine. The group is a mix of Caucasian and Japanese, as well as professional puppeteers and dancers. "Dancers make great puppeteers," he said. "They have a sense of the body and how to move it, which gives them a greater sense of the physiology of how to move a puppet. Plus, they're better ensemble players."
Since the bunkaru puppets in the production are manipulated by three people - one operating the head and right arm, another on the left arm and the third moving the legs - seamless ensemble work is important.
They are conferring about the play's final scene, making suggestions and talking over one another in a friendly free-for-all, standing around the play's 3-and-a-half-foot-high co-stars, for the moment inanimate. "What is your ideal ending image?" asks one of the puppeteers.
"That they're seeing each other for the first time and can't take their eyes off of one another," Mr. Hurlin replies.
The cast members experiment with having a puppeteer stand between the two characters, holding one of the black-and-white sticks demarcating sight lines.
Eventually, they opt for a similarly black-and-white length of elastic stretched from the eye of one puppet to the other. Michiko and the Pilot are taken up by their respective teams of three puppeteers. They circle each other in silence, the line of their mutual, unwavering stares connecting them. Even surrounded by 10 live people, it is as if they are the only two onstage.
David Rakoff is the author of "Fraud," a collection of essays.
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