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NUCLEAR
Git along, you mad little doggie
Radioactive bridges?
'Fog of war' plan to protect N-plants
Bush unveils deeper US-India space, nuclear cooperation
Duds of mass destruction
U.S. and Japan to Forge Nuclear, Hydrogen Bonds
Pressure mounts on North Korea over atomic weapons programmes
North Korea offers to freeze nuclear reactors
U.S. Team Analyzing N. Korean Nuke Visit
U.S. Team Digesting N. Korea Nuclear Info
U.S. Aides to Present N.Korea Trip Details Jan. 20
US gathers Libya arms team
On the Nuclear Edge
Nuclear power isn't an answer
Nevada looks to court to block nuclear dump
Rural concerns fuel debate over Nevada nuclear site
New Uranium Plant to Be Built in Ohio
O'Neill criticizes 'disengaged' Bush
Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001,
War-gate - The scandal that could bring down a President
Bush Sought to Oust Hussein From Start, Ex-Official Says
MILITARY
U.S. toll in Afghan military campaign hits 100
Russian official denies US claims of Moscow arms sales to Iraq
US presses accusations over Russian arms sales to Iraq
Pentagon Probes Defense Contractors' Hiring-WSJ
Pentagon to investigate military officials hired by defense firms
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
China Warned Against Using U.S. to Pressure Taiwan
Iranian Council Bars Thousands From Vote
Protesters attack British troops over joblessness
U.S. Soldier Killed, 2 Are Wounded, in Baghdad
Once-Ruling Sunnis Unite to Regain a Piece of the Pie
Iraqis Revise Policy on Ex-Baath Members
Top Shiite Cleric Hardens Call for Early Iraqi Vote
Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem
Sharon Dismisses Worries of Loss of Jewish Identity
Expectations Are Low at Americas Conference
SAUDIS ACKNOWLEDGE AL QAIDA INFILTRATION
Syria Rejects Peace Talks With Israel
U.S. Using Turkey Base For Troop Rotations
Bush Launches a Dangerous Space Policy
U.S. Firm to Run Iraqi TV
Truth about Iraq known; fallout isn't
Top Bosnian War Crimes Suspect Again Eludes NATO Searchers
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Justices Refuse to Review Case on Secrecy and 9/11 Detentions
U.S. to Push Airlines for Passenger Records
New System for Air Security Moves Forward
BOILING SLOWLY LIKE A FROG IN A POT
Saudi Arabia unveils huge weapons discovery
Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope
ENERGY
Altamont Wind Operators Sued Over Bird Deaths
POWER CUTS FEARED AS SCOTLAND GOES GREEN
OTHER
Salvage Logging on Big Oregon Burn Termed Radical
ACTIVISTS
10,000 Pakistani activists gather ahead of India's World Social Forum
Iranian Reformers Protest Election Ban on Liberals
Thousands March in Haiti
Iranian Reformers Protest Move Barring Many From Reelection
Enola Gay, Just War, and Mass Murder
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Git along, you mad little doggie
By Tom Blackburn,
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Monday, January 12, 2004
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/content/auto/epaper/editions/monday/opinion_0410f983f561118c00b7.html
Genetic testing confirmed that the mad cow they found last month was Canadian, not a good, red-blooded American cow. Hot diggedy dog; our cows still are Number One.
The Department of Agriculture would know that, of course, because it tests 0.0006 percent of the cattle slaughtered for food in this country for bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or "mad cow disease." That's 20,000 out of 36 million. Japan tests 100 percent, and Europe tests all the older animals.
So our cows may be Number One, but the United States is far from Number One in testing. Around Number 40, maybe. The tests would cost 2 or 3 cents per pound. Stanley Prusiner, the neurologist who won a 1997 Nobel Prize for discovering the protein that causes BSE, thinks it's a good idea.
Absence of testing makes the assurances of beef safety from the Department of Agriculture and the beef industry something less than applied science. It's closer to crossed fingers and closed eyes.
We are in the season when Democratic presidential candidates' words are parsed for gaffes and bloviated over on radio and television for three hours daily. It's more important to parse our leaders' words. A candidate promises; administration officials do. On mad cow, they clearly have no way to know if what they say is true, but they say it anyway. Which is a polite way to avoid saying that they lie. Saying that all is well, when manifestly they are making it worse, is a hallmark of this administration.
The average person has enough to think about without doing his or her own research on BSE -- whether and how it's related to a similar brain-rotting disease that is rare in humans but turned up more frequently after beef raisers began feeding cattle parts to their herds. For some things, we have to rely on government and experts. That implies relying on government to rely on experts.
Dr. Prusiner told Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman that she should be testing every cow. The secretary's spokeswoman, Julie Quick, said, "We welcome as much scientific input and insight as we can get on this very important issue." But much of the input they welcome is from corporate science, and boils down to, "It would cost too much money."
The same money that buys elections buys science. Everything seems to be for sale. Scientists would be much further along in understanding and dealing with climate change if they didn't have to waste so much time refuting flat-Earthers who set out to prove that climate is unaffected by oil exploration, SUV sales, decapitating mountains for coal and the other interests that pay for their research.
The same kinds of conflict account for the otherwise odd lack of interest in studying the possible health effects on soldiers and civilians from the artillery shells made with depleted uranium that we used in Iraq.
The White House Office of Management and Budget last month set out its own standards for "peer review" of science that contains "significant regulatory information," as if impact on the budget can produce different results than scientists otherwise would obtain. Money corrupts; big money corrupts big-time.
We are the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us against. When Dwight Eisenhower was young at the start of the last century, disinterested, objective science was expected to find the truth about issues that bear on the quality of people's lives. At the start of this century, truth is negotiable. The worried bystander can't expect much of it.
In a decision-making position, Ms. Veneman weighs the inputs of good science from a Nobel Prize laureate at the University of California at San Francisco against junk science from the corporations that sell us our food. The junk science comes from the electoral "red states." What is an appointee to do, especially one who probably will go to work for one of the junk-science producers when she leaves office?
She works for an administration that was convinced that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction but is having a hard time finding any. The same administration was convinced there was no mad cow disease in the United States, but there was.
That it came from a Canadian cow is no consolation. In a country of immigrants, everything that is somewhere else gets here eventually. We shouldn't be surprised. But we should take precautions. What's a normal precaution in Japan is controversial here.
On questions relating to health and welfare, the current administration consistently prefers the soft social science of election maps over the hard natural sciences. But you can't fool Mother Nature, not even if your contributors ask you to and focus groups say it's OK.
tom_blackburn@pbpost.com
----
Radioactive bridges?
The Campaign Against Depleted Uranium,
Bridge 5 Mill, 22a Beswick Street,
Ancoats, Manchester, M4 7HR Tel./Fax.: +44 (0)161 273 8293
E-Mail info@cadu.org.uk
Website: http://www.cadu.org.uk
Blackened, destroyed tanks and armoured vehicles hit by and thus contaminated by depleted uranium (DU) weapons in the March invasion of Iraq, are being melted down in a huge smelting facility near Basra, in southern Iraq under the auspices of the British Army and being turned into pre-fabricated bridges, litter bins and even pots and pans¹, believes the Independent¹s veteran Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk. He told the .......... that the story in Basra is plausible and consistent I believe it to be true, but I can¹t prove it¹, since due to time restrictions and travel complexities in current circumstances: I did not get to the facility.¹
Depleted uranium is a .... radioactive waste and, as such, should be deposited in a licensed repository¹ states the US Army Environmental Policy Institute (AEPI) (June 1995.) After the 1991 Gulf war, tanks hit with depleted uranium were taken to a nuclear decontamination facility at Barnwell, North Carolina, built only for the purpose of dealing with vehicles damaged and contaminated by DU in the war. Those which could not be decontaminated were sent to a special secure landfill site owned by Chem Nuclear or to the US Department of Energy¹s similar Savanna River Site. The Barnwell Manager at the time, Roger Johnson, talked of the vast amount of radioactive and toxic material affecting vehicles.¹Something that takes only four days can produce a lot of material.¹
The U.K. Atomic Energy Authority spokesman said at the time he was astonished by the use of DU. The UKAEA was so alarmed they self initiated¹ a Report which they sent to the Ministry of Defence in April 1991, warning of a health and environmental catastrophy - and that if a residual fifty tonnes of DU dust, resultant from the impact of weapons remained, they estimated that there could be an excess half a million potential deaths¹ from cancer Œin the region¹ within ten years. That three hundred and twenty tons was left, has been confirmed by the Pentagon. Some scientists say it could be nine hundred tons. The most recent conflict has, cite Reports, left at least a further two thousand two hundred tonnes. The UKAEA paper states "... DU can become a long term problem if not dealt with and .. a risk to both the military and civilian population¹ the UKAEA¹s calculations indicate a significant problem.¹ Further, localised contamination of vehicles and soil may exceed permissable limits and these could be hazardous to both clean up teams and the local population. Inhalation of DU dust particles can lead to unacceptable body burdens (putting) the public at risk. DU can also be a danger if taken into the body by ingestion or through a cut. Furthermore if DU gets into the food chain or water, then this will create potential health problems.¹ DU remains radioactive for four and a half billion years.
Basra¹s cancers and birth defects, linked by experts to the use of DU in 1991 are at epidemic levels. The effects of the further use last year has yet to be assessed. The implications, for the population and especially for those working in the smelting plant and breathing in the DU dust can only be imagined. DU if ingested or inhaled has the potential to generate significant medical consequences¹, states the AEPI short term effects of high doses can result in death, whilst long term effects of low doses can result in cancer.¹
Llew Smith MP (L. Blaenau Gwent) has tabled a question to the Defence Secretary asking: "what methods are being used to decontaminate Iraqi tanks and other military equipment disabled or destroyed by the use of depleted uranium munitions in the southern sector of Iraq under British military control.?" It is due for reply from 8 January.
Professor Malcolm Hooper, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sunderland and a Government Advisor on Gulf war illnesses says: 'Taiwan springs to mind, where radioactive material was used in building structures and deaths and illnesses were so great, they had to be demolished. I would be very unhappy about using these materials, it would be a disater for workers, a disaster for those living in the vicinity and it would be a real toxic brew also containing mercury, cadmium' and numerous other lethal pollutants.
A spokesman foir the Ministry of Defence told the .......... that they had no knowledge of tanks being melted down as a method of disposal, cooenting: 'there are illegal smelting facilities all over Basra', suggesting contacting their Basra Headquarters, who could not be reached by the time of going to press.
Robert Fisk comments cynically: "It makes sense. Maybe Iraqi housewives who live through nights of power cuts can now spot their household utensils glowing quietly in the darkness of the kitchen."
-------- europe
'Fog of war' plan to protect N-plants
Ben Aris in Berlin
Monday January 12, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4833780-103532,00.html
The German government has proposed using an instant "fog shield" to protect its vulnerable nuclear power stations from airborne terrorist attacks.
The German environment ministry is considering installing special equipment around the country's 18 nuclear power stations which would throw up a wall of artificial fog in seconds if threatened by a hijacked plane.
The fog shield is supposed to disrupt a plane's navigation equipment and hide the power station from view.
Last week an environment ministry spokesman confirmed reports in the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung that Germany's nuclear power stations were inadequately protected from airborne suicide attacks.
The government commissioned a nuclear power plant security survey shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks in America. It found that eight of the country's oldest power stations would melt down if even a small jet crashed into them, causing a major nuclear disaster in the heart of Europe.
The concrete shells surrounding the cores of the seven newer pressurised water plants can resist the impact of a small plane, but none of the plants could resist a direct impact by a targeted commercial passenger plane.
Authorities have beefed up security and air traffic control supervision, and the results of the government's survey have been given to managers of the nuclear power plants.
However, the study found that encasing the nuclear core with more reinforced concrete was impractical. Ursula Hammann, the Green party environmental policy spokesperson, called the fog machine idea another "hapless initiative," and said: "Only a total exit from nuclear energy will bring real safety for the population".
After taking power the government delayed campaign promises to phase out nuclear power quickly and now plans to close the last station in 20 years' time. A review of the fog machine idea is expected by the end of March.
· German defence minister Peter Struck received many death threats after he sacked a top general for alleged anti-semitic remarks, according to Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
Mr Struck sacked special forces commander General Reinhard Guenzel after he wrote a letter to a Christian Democratic Union MP, Martin Hohmann, praising his "courage" for a speech suggesting the actions of Jews in the 1917 communist revolution in Russia were comparable to those of the Nazis.
-------- india / pakistan
Bush unveils deeper US-India space, nuclear cooperation
MONTERREY, Mexico (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112222734.a43j1d7m.html
US President George W. Bush announced Monday that the United States and India would deepen cooperation on civilian nuclear activities, civilian space programs and high-technology trade.
In a statement released on the margins of the Summit of the Americas here, Bush said he and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee had also agreed "to expand our dialogue on missile defense."
"Cooperation in these areas will deepen the ties of commerce and friendship between our two nations, and will increase stability in Asia and beyond," the president said.
The two nations will take "a series of reciprocal steps," including expanded engagement on nuclear regulatory and safety issues, missile defense, and seek ways to enhance cooperation in peaceful uses of space technology, said Bush.
On the high-technology trade front, the two sides will tighten restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of weapons of mass destruction.
Bush called the expanded cooperation "an important milestone in transforming the relationship between the United States and India. That relationship is based increasingly on common values and common interests."
"We are working together to promote global peace and prosperity," he said. "We are partners in the war on terrorism and we are partners in controlling the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them."
In Washington, a senior State Department official said the "strategic partnership" agreement was the result of discussions begun between Bush and Vajpayee in 2001 but stressed that it would be at least months and maybe years before it would come to meaningful fruition.
"My guess is this is going to take some months if not some years to play out because there is a lot of work to be done to fill out the details here," the official told reporters on condition of anonymity.
To benefit, India must enact or tighten up its export control laws to ensure that Indian firms do not transfer sensitive technology to suspect nations, groups or individuals, the official said.
"What we're offering is contingent on specific steps on the part of India to protect against diversion or unauthorized use of any US exports and to address our broader export control concerns," the official said.
The official said the agreement was unrelated to recent progress on India's resuming a dialogue with nuclear rival Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, over which the two countries have fought to of their three wars.
And the official insisted that the deal did not constitute tacit US approval or acceptance of India's nuclear weapons or ballistic missile programs.
"This is not about diminishing in any way our concern about India's nuclear weapons or ballistic missile programs," the official said, adding that US assistance to such developments was precluded.
"We won't, in any of the things that may come in this program, do anything to support India's nuclear weapons of ballistic program," the official said.
The official said the United States had informed the Pakistani government about the agreement before the White House made the announcement and that Washington was offering Islamabad a similar dialogue on missile defense.
Although Monday's agreement was years in the making, the official said it did not come with any presumption that domestic US laws on the transfer of sensitive technology would be changed, making the effect of the deal uncertain.
-------- iraq / inspections
Duds of mass destruction
01-12-2004
Cincinnati Post
http://www.cincypost.com/2004/01/12/editb01-12-2004.html
In the early days of television, there was a science-fiction serial called "Captain Video" that featured flapping sets and toy rockets visibly suspended by string.
The production budgets were so low that dialogue often went something like: "This may look like a Boy Scout flashlight, but actually it's a Venusian death ray."
And that, post-Gulf War I, pretty much sums up Saddam Hussein's program of weapons of mass destruction and explains why U.S. searchers have been unable to find any real evidence of it, according to a comprehensive piece in the Washington Post.
After 12 years of sanctions and the surprisingly effective U.N. arms inspections, Iraq's once ambitious and serious efforts to build weapons of mass destruction were a sham.
"The remnants of Iraq's biological, chemical and missile infrastructure were riven by internal strife, bled by schemes for personal gain and handicapped by deceit up and down the chain of command," concluded the Post.
What had happened was that Iraq's scientists were going through the motions of designing and building weapons, even though they didn't have the tools, parts, materials and software to actually do so.
Saddam was not someone you said no to. He wanted weapons programs, and the cowed scientists pretended to give them to him. He wanted to shoot down U.S. jets, so Iraq's top nuclear scientist kept his team together -- greatly increasing U.S. suspicions of a covert nuclear program -- to design an electromagnetic gun, a technology, said the Post, "decades away from use as a practical weapon." And one of Iraq's top rocket scientists busied himself designing a long-range missile that was likely to break up on launch and unable to come within a mile of its target if it flew.
And there were motives for the programs other than keeping Saddam happy.
"What you had to have was a project -- the more expensive the better, because the more you can buy, the more you can graft out of it. You'd have difficulty believing how much that explains," said George Healey, a nuclear physicist and arms inspector in Iraq.
President Bush and Britain's Tony Blair were not the only ones misled about Iraq's capacity to build and deploy weapons of mass destruction. So was Saddam Hussein.
-------- japan
U.S. and Japan to Forge Nuclear, Hydrogen Bonds
TOKYO, Japan, (ENS)
January 12, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-12-05.asp
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, in Japan for the first stop of a four nation trip through the Asia-Pacific region, called Friday for increased cooperation between the United States and Japan on challenges arising from growing energy demand and energy security requirements. Abraham said the United States prefers Japan over Europe to host an experimental nuclear fusion power reactor.
During an address to the national business federation Keidanren in Tokyo, Abraham said both countries will bet their energy futures on hydrogen and nuclear power - both fission and fusion.
Hiroshi Okuda, chairman of the Nippon-Keidanren, is also chairman of the Toyota Motor Corp. (Photo courtesy Keidanren) "Both our countries rely upon a strong nuclear power component in our fuel mix," Abraham said. "Nuclear power provides roughly one-fifth of America's electricity needs, and nearly one-third of Japan's. We must deal with a similar array of political and regulatory challenges to ensure that safe and clean nuclear energy continues to play a critical role."
Abraham said it is "critical" that the United States and Japan do what it takes to "make sure nuclear energy remains an internationally accepted form of energy."
"You and I know that nuclear power is safe. It is reliable. It is efficient. It is affordable," the secretary said. "Yet, we have to make it even safer, even more reliable, even more efficient, and even more affordable."
"That means developing a fuel cycle that costs less overall, is more environmentally benign, and more proliferation resistant," said Abraham.
He urged Japanese business leaders to approach "the public discussion over nuclear power prepared to make the case that it is critical to dealing with global issues of climate change, the environment, and energy and economic security."
Japan and the United States are each partners in the Generation IV International Forum, an international consortium that is designing the next generation of nuclear reactors. "We are pooling scientific expertise and sharing ideas in order to design the nuclear reactors of the future," Abraham said, "and I expect that significant technological breakthroughs are not too far off."
Conventional nuclear power plants generate energy by means of splitting atoms, known as nuclear fission.
Generating energy by means of nuclear fusion, the process that powers the Sun, is a dream both countries are trying to fulfill through ITER, a $5 billion international project to build an experimental nuclear fusion reactor.
Since the year 2000, scientists and engineers from Canada, Europe, Japan, Russia have been planning to construct a fusion reactor. The stated goal is to demonstrate the scientific and technological feasibility of fusion energy for peaceful purposes.
In February 2003, the United States and China joined the negotiations. At the end of May 2003, the Republic of Korea also joined the negotiations.
But at an ITER ministerial meeting in Washington, DC in December, Canada gave notice that it will no longer participate in the ITER project.
Concerning the ITER construction site, the parties were deadlocked with Japan, Korea and the United States for the Japanese site, and Europe, Russia and China for the European site. The decision is now probably deferred until mid-February.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (Photo courtesy Independent Petroleum Association of America) "One of science's most impenetrable mysteries - understanding and harnessing fusion - offers the prospect of a limitless source of clean energy for the world," Abraham said told the Japanese business gathering on Friday.
"I am proud to say the United States strongly supports building ITER in Japan," Abraham said. "From a technical standpoint you have offered the superior site."
The location Japan has proposed is Rokkasho, a nuclear complex in Aomori Prefecture in northeast Japan, where a MOX nuclear fuel fabrication facility is being built to power Japanes nuclear power plants. Made from mixed uranium and plutonium oxides, the fuel is known as mixed oxide or MOX fuel. The Rokkasho plant is being built by Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd. with financing from major Japanese electric power companies and the nuclear industry for the purpose of processing spent fuel from Japanese light water reactors and manufacturing it into MOX fuel.
But two independent research organizations are calling on the government of Japan to abandon the Rokkasho Nuclear Processing Plant. The groups, one based in Japan and the other in the U.S., say the plant is clearly uneconomic and poses unacceptable safety and proliferation risks.
"The plutonium fuel from this plant would be the most expensive in the world, by far," said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, a nonprofit organization based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Abandoning the Rokkasho plant right now would economically be the wise thing to do."
But Secretary Abraham told the business gathering that in his view Rokkasho is "superbly situated to receive the large materials needed for ITER," and Japan has the scientific talent to carry out the project. "What's more," Abraham said, "the local community clearly welcomes this project and has always gone out of its way to encourage the siting of ITER in Rokkasho."
"Fusion power produces no troublesome emissions, it is safe, and has few, if any, proliferation concerns," he said. "It creates no long-term waste problems. Moreover, fusion plants could produce hydrogen - our ultimate freedom fuel - to power hundred of millions of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in the U.S. and abroad."
Abraham said called hydrogen a fuel with "special promise," and said President George W. Bush is "particularly excited" about hydrogen, which could "improve our energy, economic, and environmental security," and "truly revolutionize the world in which we live."
The energy secretary said President Bush has pledged the United States' full involvement in the international effort to go from a world where our cars and trucks run on petroleum to one where they run on hydrogen powered fuel cells.
"This is, at heart, a radical idea ... all the more so for a President who, in an earlier career, worked in the oil industry," he said. "But President Bush sees in hydrogen the possibility of not just solving, but transcending, the old problems and old public policy debates surrounding energy."
In November, the United States hosted the first meeting of the International Partnership for the Hydrogen Economy, which Japanese representatives attended.
We already know how to power cars using hydrogen fuel cells, Abraham said, mentioning working prototypes that "perform flawlessly," like the Nissan X Trail, the Honda FCX, or Toyota's Highlander Fuel Cell Vehicle - all Japanese made automobiles.
Now the challenge is to make fuel cell vehicles affordable so that consumers will not opt for models that run on fossil fuels because they cost less.
"One challenge, then, is to lower the cost of fuel cells by a factor of ten," Abraham said. "Similarly we must lower the cost of hydrogen production, which is approximately four times too high today."
Storage of hydrogen onboard cars and trucks is still blocked by technical hurdles, said Abraham, and "we must surmount the overarching obstacles to developing a hydrogen based delivery and refueling infrastructure. The International Hydrogen Partnership is the way to do this."
International cooperation is the key to overcoming these obstacles, Abraham said, "strengthening ties, fortifying friendships, and buttressing alliances to take common approaches to shared challenges."
-------- korea
Pressure mounts on North Korea over atomic weapons programmes
By Hans Greimel in Seoul
12 January 2004,
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=480300
United States officials arrived in Seoul yesterday as pressure mounted on Washington to accept North Korea's offer to freeze its atomic weapons programmes.
The delegation has already been shown the North's main nuclear complex at Yongbyon in a suspected attempt by the Communist regime to convince the US that it possesses nuclear weapons and to strengthen its negotiating powers.
Washington has previously rejected North Korea's offer of a freeze. But the US called Pyongyang's latest proposal a "positive step forward" and South Korea has welcomed the plan. Russia and China are trying to broker a compromise whereby a freeze would have to be in place before negotiations could begin. Chinese diplomats are expected to float the proposal next week in Washington.
The US delegation said it was shown everything it asked to see at the nuclear facility in Yongbyon, but would not give details. The Washington Post reported yesterday that the group had been shown recently reprocessed plutonium.
Jack Pritchard, a member of the delegation, urged Washington to accept Pyongyang's offer before North Korea strengthened its nuclear arsenal. Mr Pritchard, a former US State Department official, wrote in The Korea Herald on Friday: "It is urgently important that the United States stop the programme now before Pyongyang becomes a limited nuclear weapons state."
North Korea says it will freeze its nuclear programmes, if Washington lifts sanctions, resumes shipments of heavy oil and removes the North from the US State Department's list of terrorism-sponsoring countries. The US has demanded that North Korea first dismantle its nuclear programmes.
Two experts from the delegation, Keith Luze, a Republican aide, and Frank Jannuzi, a Democrat, were scheduled to meet South Korean Foreign Ministry officials today.
----
North Korea offers to freeze nuclear reactors
SEOUL (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112113349.xuxtt2k4.html
North Korea offered Monday to freeze its nuclear reactors producing weapons grade plutonium if compensated by the United States, its official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.
If the Bush administration was willing to compensate, North Korea "is willing to freeze its nuclear activities based on the graphite-moderated reactors as a starting point for the denuclearization of the country," KCNA said quoting a foreign ministry spokesman.
North Korea has recently made a series of overtures over the long-running nuclear standoff with the United States in an indication of Pyongayang's willingness to negotiate with Washington.
North Korea has previously admitted that it fired up the reactors at its main nuclear complex at Yongbyon, 90 kilometers (50 miles) north of Pyongyang, intensifying the latest nuclear crisis that began in October 2002.
The 15-month standoff started when the United States accused North Korea of running a secret uranium-enrichment program violating a 1994 nuclear safeguard accord to mothball the Yongbyon plant.
Washington soon halted its fuel oil shipments to the energy-strapped communist country. In retaliation, Pyongyang said it reactivated the Yongbyon complex.
North Korea has since claimed that it reprocessed 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods, which would yield enough plutonium for up to six nuclear bombs. But the North's claims have been met by scepticism here and in Washington.
The North's latest overture followed a visit last week to Yongbyon by two non-government US delegations, the first outsiders allowed in the nuclear complex since international monitors were expelled more than a year ago.
North Korea said Saturday it showed its "nuclear deterrent" to the unofficial US delegations, but stopped short of elaborating what was exactly shown.
US newspapers said Sunday the delegations seemed to have seen reprocessed plutonium, an ingredient for making nuclear bombs, although Keith Luse, a US Congress delegate, referred to the US and North Korean reports as speculative and warned against drawing "premature" conclusions.
Last week, North Korea proposed to refrain from producing and testing nuclear weapons in what it said was a "bold concession" to the United States, in return for concessions from Washington.
Diplomatic efforts to open the second round of six-nation talks aimed at resolving the nuclear crisis have so far failed amid differences over the scope of negotiations.
The first round -- which brought together the United States, North Korea, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea -- ended inconclusively in Beijing last August.
But Chinese State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan, who once served as foreign minister, told visiting Japanese lawmakers in Beijing that he expected the next round to resume in February, according to Japanese newspapers.
Tang has reportedly said the nuclear crisis would not be resolved unless economic aid including energy is provided to the impoverished country.
-----
U.S. Team Analyzing N. Korean Nuke Visit
By SOO-JEONG LEE
Associated Press Writer
Jan 12, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KOREAS_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- A U.S. team that visited North Korea's secretive nuclear plant was unable to say how far the North has come in developing a nuclear weapons and needs to further analyze what they saw, a South Korean official said Monday.
Two Congressional staffers who were on the American delegation met with South Korean officials to discuss the visit to the Yongbyon nuclear facility, where the North said it showed them its "nuclear deterrent" - though what exactly they saw still has not been made public.
The two staffers told the South Koreans that "they cannot say that anything was proven or verified during their trip," said Wi Sung-lac, a director-general at the South Korean Foreign Ministry.
"They said many things were unclear and they needed more discussions and analysis before coming to their own assessment," he said.
Republican aide Keith Luse and Democratic colleague Frank Jannuzi - of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - have so far refused to give details on what the team saw, saying it would be premature to draw conclusions.
The delegation, which included former Los Alamos Laboratory director Sig Hecker, was the first outsider visit to the Yongbyon facility since U.N. inspectors were ejected in late 2002.
The five U.S. delegates held discussions with North Korean nuclear scientists, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan and Lt. Gen. Ri Chan Bok, the North Korean military's point man at talks with the U.S.-led United Nations Command in Seoul, Wi said.
Luse said more details would be made public at a Jan. 20 hearing of their Senate committee.
"We have had a full day of meeting with South Korean officials," Jannuzi said after meeting Unification Ministry official Park Chan-bong. "We have had very fruitful consultations and discussions. We hope that our visit here helps to continue the tradition of strong coordination between Washington and Seoul and contribute to the success of six-party talks."
On Monday, a spokesman of North Korea's Foreign Ministry reiterated that the country was willing to freeze its nuclear activities at Yongbyon in return for oil supplies and economic aid from the United States.
North Korea has said agreement would be a first step in restarting talks between the United States, Russia, China, Japan and the two Koreas that are aimed at persuading North Korea to dismantle any nuclear weapons and its weapons-development program.
"If the Bush administration is willing to agree to 'freeze in return for compensation' as the first step of package-deal solution of the nuclear issue, we are willing to freeze the nuclear activities stemming from our graphite-moderated reactor," the spokesman told the North's official news agency KCNA, which was monitored by South Korean news agency Yonhap.
A graphite-moderated 5 megawatt reactor is the core of the Yongbyon nuclear complex. It generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium. North Korea restarted the reactor after expelling U.N. monitors at the end of 2002.
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the Washington Post reported the group had been shown recently reprocessed plutonium, the fuel for atomic weapons. The material had not been placed in an atomic bomb, and North Korea intimated it was willing to freeze its weapons development to resolve the crisis, the paper said.
The U.S. aides met Monday with officials from South Korea's Unification Ministry, the arm responsible for North Korean affairs. They were to later meet Foreign Ministry officials before leaving South Korea on Tuesday.
A first round of six-nation talks ended in Beijing in August without much progress.
North Korea has said it will freeze its nuclear programs as a first step in resolving the nuclear dispute, if Washington lifts sanctions against the country, resumes shipments of heavy oil and takes North Korea off the U.S. State Department's list of terrorism-sponsoring countries.
Bristling at the freeze, the United States has demanded that North Korea first verifiably begin dismantling its nuclear programs before receiving any concessions.
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U.S. Team Digesting N. Korea Nuclear Info
January 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- U.S. Congressional aides who visited North Korea's secretive nuclear plant said they have a lot of information to digest before they can say how far the communist country has come in its nuclear weapons development, a senior South Korean official said Monday.
Republican aide Keith Luse and Democratic colleague Frank Jannuzi, both staffers for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, met with South Korean officials to discuss last week's trip to the Yongbyon nuclear complex.
``They said they cannot say that anything was proven or verified during their trip,'' said Wi Sung-lac, head of the South Korean Foreign Ministry's North American Affairs Bureau.
``They said many things were unclear and they needed more discussions and analysis before coming to their own assessment.''
The visit -- by five U.S. delegates including Luse and Jannuzi -- was the first by outsiders since the North expelled U.N. inspectors in late 2002. The North said it showed the team its ``nuclear deterrent'' -- though what exactly they saw still has not been made public.
The delegates, including former Los Alamos Laboratory director Sig Hecker, held discussions with North Korean nuclear scientists, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan and Lt. Gen. Ri Chan Bok, the North Korean military's point man at talks with the American-led United Nations Command in Seoul, Wi said.
``The North Koreans reiterated that they will freeze their nuclear activities only in return for compensation, and they expressed their willingness for dialogue,'' he said, quoting the Congressional aides.
South Korea expected more information from the U.S. delegates after they report to their superiors in Washington, Wi added.
Luse said more details would be made public at a Jan. 20 hearing of their Senate committee.
``We have had a full day of meeting with South Korean officials,'' Jannuzi said. ``We hope that our visit here helps to continue the tradition of strong coordination between Washington and Seoul and contribute to the success of six-party talks.''
Also Monday, North Korea's Foreign Ministry reiterated that the country was willing to freeze its nuclear activities at Yongbyon in return for oil supplies and economic aid from the United States.
The United States has demanded that the North begin dismantling its nuclear programs before receiving any concessions.
The crisis flared in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 deal requiring the North to freeze its nuclear facilities. Washington and its allies cut off free oil shipments, also part of the 1994 accord.
North Korea responded by ejecting U.N. monitors and restarting a reactor at Yongbyon that generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium.
Citing unnamed U.S. officials, the Washington Post reported the U.S. group had been shown recently reprocessed plutonium, the fuel for nuclear weapons. Luse and Jannuzi denied the report, Wi said.
The visit came as the United States, China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas are trying to arrange a new round of talks on ending the standoff over the North's nuclear program. A first round of six-nation talks ended in Beijing in August without much progress.
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U.S. Aides to Present N.Korea Trip Details Jan. 20
January 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Two members of a U.S. delegation briefed South Korean officials Monday about their tour of North Korea's nuclear facilities, but later told reporters they would disclose details of the trip to the U.S. Senate next week. North Korea reiterated an offer made last week to freeze its nuclear program as a first step in making the Korean peninsula nuclear free, but said it wanted a package deal including compensation for suspending its nuclear activities.
The two accompanied John Lewis, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and other experts who were the first outsiders allowed into North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex since U.N. inspectors were expelled a year ago.
Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi, both Senate foreign relations committee aides, flew into Seoul Sunday after their five-day unofficial visit to the reclusive communist North.
They declined to answer reporters questions about what they had seen at Yongbyon after briefing officials of South Korea's unification and foreign ministries.
Luse said details of the team's visit would be presented to a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Jan. 20.
``At that hearing, we anticipate full disclosure of our visit to Yongbyon and other details of our trip to Pyongyang,'' he said.
``At this point in time, there really is nothing more we can say.''
South Korean Foreign Ministry official Wi Sung-lac told reporters after meeting Luse and Jannuzi ``it is too early to define what their visit means'' for efforts to resolve the 15-month-old crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions.
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 six-way talks with North Korea to end the nuclear row.
The six parties involved in the talks -- the two Koreas, United States, China, Japan and Russia -- met inconclusively in Beijing in August.
North Korea said Saturday it had shown the U.S. delegation its ``nuclear deterrent'' and hoped it would provide a basis for a peaceful settlement of the row with the United States.
But Luse told reporters: ``It is premature, it is simply speculation to draw conclusions from any comments from DPRK (North Korea) officials or any comments from unnamed persons in Washington.''
TALKS IN FEBRUARY?
Japan's Nihon Keizai Shimbun quoted China's State Councilor Tang Jiaxuan as saying he expected the next round of six-party talks to be held in February.
Tang, a former Chinese foreign minister, told a delegation of senior Japanese ruling party officials, the talks looked likely next month because North Korea and the United States appeared to be getting closer to overcoming their differences.
North Korea's state media marked the first anniversary of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty with a commentary Sunday blaming the United States for ignoring its overtures for a resolution of 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 Sunday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell told Japan's NHK national television in an interview that aired Sunday the United States was committed to the next round of talks and he was confident it would be held in the ``not-too-far future.''
Last week, North Korea offered to freeze its nuclear activities in a move that has raised hopes for a fresh round of talks. Monday, KCNA quoted a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying the offer was contingent on a U.S. ``willingness to agree on compensating for the DPRK's freeze.''
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.
-------- mideast
US gathers Libya arms team
By Robin Wright
January 12, 2004
The Age - Washington Post
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/11/1073769455561.html
The United States is preparing to send up to a dozen diplomats and intelligence officers to Libya to establish a US mission that will help oversee the dismantling of its programs for weapons of mass destruction.
US officials said the move would create the first US diplomatic presence in Libya since May 1980, when a dozen American staff members closed the embassy and slipped out just before the building was sacked and burned.
The planned return to Libya follows last month's surprise announcement that the Government of Muammar Gaddafi conceded it had been trying to develop the world's deadliest weapons and was now pledging to destroy them in an effort to regain acceptance from the international community.
"This will not be an embassy," said one US official. "There's no real planning for that yet. But there is a belief that we have to have a group of people on the ground basically as a special mission to help this (disarmament) process over the long term."
US personnel, led by a State Department arms control expert with the rank of ambassador, could set off for Tripoli by the end of next week, although logistics were still being worked out, officials said.
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On the Nuclear Edge
by Seymour M. Hersh
New Yorker
Issue of 1993-03-29 Posted 2004-01-12
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive02
[In the past few weeks, news reports have revealed troubling information about the possible export of Pakistani nuclear technology to countries such as Iran and Libya, and about the role played in the transfers by Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, who is known as the father of the Pakistani bomb. There have long been questions about Dr. Khan, who has, whenever possible, avoided the public eye. In this piece from 1993, Seymour M. Hersh takes a prescient look at Pakistan's nuclear proliferation, and at Dr. Khan.]
On May 30, 1990, President Mikhail Gorbachev of the Soviet Union arrived in Washington for his second summit meeting with President George Bush. The Cold War was over, and the publicly announced agenda reflected that fact: the two world leaders would concentrate their talks on the future of unified Germany and on renewed negotiations to reduce long-range nuclear weapons. Most Americans were increasingly upbeat about the prospects for world peace. A Times/CBS public-opinion poll of more than eleven hundred Americans taken a week before the summit showed that fewer than one in five believed nuclear war to be likely by the year 2000-far fewer than those interviewed in earlier polls.
There was a fearful irony in the poll, because in the days before Gorbachev's visit the Bush Administration became convinced that the world was on the edge of a nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India, as both nations continued their tug-of-war over control of the state of Kashmir, on India's northern border, whose status has been in dispute since the collapse of the British Empire in India, in 1947. During months of increasing tension, India had massed two hundred thousand troops, including paramilitary forces, in Kashmir, and had deployed five brigades of its most sophisticated attack unit, the Indian Army Strike Corps, fifty miles from the Pakistani border in the south. Pakistan, against which the much larger India had fought-and won-three wars since 1947, openly deployed its main armored tank units along the Indian border and, in secret, placed its nuclear-weapons arsenal on alert. There would be no repeat of the disastrous two-week war of December, 1971, when Pakistan, outgunned and outgeneraled, was dismembered by an Indian blitzkrieg and lost what is now Bangladesh.
The American intelligence community, also operating in secret, had concluded by late May that Pakistan had put together at least six and perhaps as many as ten nuclear weapons, and a number of senior analysts were convinced that some of those warheads had been deployed on Pakistan's American-made F-16 fighter planes. The analysts also suspected that Benazir Bhutto, the populist Prime Minister of Pakistan, had been cut out of-or had chosen to remove herself from-the nuclear planning. Her absence meant that the nation's avowedly pro-nuclear President, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, and the Pakistani military, headed by Army General Mirza Aslam Beg, had their hands, unfettered, on the button. There was little doubt that India, with its far more extensive nuclear arsenal, stood ready to retaliate in kind.
Since the last week of May was summit week, President Bush and his top aides were preoccupied with Gorbachev and crucial questions about his status inside the Soviet Union. A full understanding of what could happen in South Asia during those days was thus most vivid to the men and women running American intelligence, who knew that Pakistan had long been America's ally in the clandestine war against the Soviet Union. As early as 1950, the Pakistani government had effectively ceded remote areas of its northern provinces to the Central Intelligence Agency and to the National Security Agency-the larger and still more secretive group that, from its headquarters, at Fort Meade, in Maryland, is responsible for communications intelligence. It was from northern Pakistan that the N.S.A. eavesdropped on the Soviet nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan; it was Pakistan that provided secret bases for America's U-2 spy flights; and it was Pakistan that served as a key jumping-off point for intelligence gathering and anti-Soviet activities by the C.I.A.
Pakistan was rewarded for its support with large amounts of American military and economic aid. The American intelligence community, to protect its investment and its continuing operations, spent many millions of dollars to recruit agents and to install technical equipment to learn as much as possible about the inner workings of its ally. Those agents and that equipment enabled America to ascertain, in the early spring of 1990, that Pakistan had gone nuclear, and that its leadership was fully prepared to use the weapons, if necessary, in a war against India.
Two of the men most deeply involved in the May, 1990, crisis recently agreed, for the first time, to discuss in on-the-record interviews what had happened. Richard J. Kerr, an even-tempered, low-key career intelligence officer, who, as deputy director of the C.I.A., coördinated the intelligence reporting in May of 1990, described the confrontation in stark terms: "It was the most dangerous nuclear situation we have ever faced since I've been in the U.S. government. It may be as close as we've come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening than the Cuban missile crisis." Kerr retired as deputy director last year, after thirty-two years in the C.I.A.
At the height of the American concern, President Bush called on Robert M. Gates, a former longtime C.I.A. official who was then serving in the White House as the deputy national-security adviser, to fly on his behalf to Islamabad and New Delhi and negotiate a stand-down between the two perennial enemies. Gates's career at the C.I.A. had been mired by his closeness to William J. Casey, Ronald Reagan's controversial C.I.A. director, who led the nation into the Iran-Contra morass. After Casey's death, in early 1987, Reagan failed in an attempt to install Gates at the top of the C.I.A., and the young Casey protégé-he was forty-three years old at the time-was eventually moved into the White House job. His performance as deputy national-security adviser finally won him respect throughout the bureaucracy. Gates told me that he, too, knew that a holocaust was at risk in May. "The analogy we kept making was to the summer of 1914," he said, referring to the inadvertent outbreak of the First World War. "Pakistan and India seemed to be caught in a cycle that they couldn't break out of. I was convinced that if a war started, it would be nuclear."
An enduring mystery is why the essential details of the India-Pakistan confrontation have remained a secret for almost three years, especially since it was the intervention of President Bush's personal White House envoy that defused what looked to be inevitable warfare. Stopping a nuclear exchange seemed made to order for the public-relations machinery of the White House. A few newspaper and television reports since 1990-most notably in the Sunday Times of London and the Los Angeles Times and on NBC's "Nightly News"-have given some details of the India-Pakistan nuclear crisis, but the reports, whose sources were not named, were debunked by the Bush Administration as exaggerations. Similarly, many officials assured me, in the course of my reporting for this article, that, as a retired Under-Secretary of State put it, "there was a lot of oversell going on."
An obvious explanation for the high-level quiet revolves around the fact, haunting to some in the intelligence community, that the Reagan Administration had dramatically aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb. President Reagan and his national-security aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of dollars' worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but Congress made breaking the law more costly in 1985, when it passed the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the amendment was proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz, Democrat of New York), providing for the cutoff of all military and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally export or attempt to export nuclear-related materials from the United States.
A second law passed that year, known as the Pressler Amendment (for Senator Larry Pressler, Republican of South Dakota), also affected the continuous flow of hundreds of millions of dollars annually in American aid to Pakistan. This legislation calls on the President to certify every year that Pakistan does not have nuclear weapons. Without such certification, Pakistan could not get any foreign aid. The certification process became farcical in the last years of the Reagan Administration, whose yearly certification-despite explicit American intelligence about Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program-was seen as little more than a payoff to the Pakistani leadership for its support in Afghanistan.
Thus, many of the men and women in the American intelligence community who in May of 1990 found themselves monitoring what appeared to be the prelude to a nuclear exchange knew that the political leadership of the United States, flagrantly violating the law, had permitted Pakistan to buy restricted items inside the United States for its nuclear arsenal. Some of these officials, who are still working in the government, emphasized in interviews that many more nuclear-related goods were clandestinely bought inside the United States by Pakistan than by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This information was simply not known outside the Bush Administration early last year, when the American media and Congress became obsessed with Iraqi high-tech purchases.
There is indisputable evidence that Pakistan has been able to escape public scrutiny for its violations of the law because senior officials of the Reagan and the Bush Administrations chose not to share the intelligence about nuclear purchases with Congress. The two Republican Administrations obviously feared that the legislators, who had voted for the Solarz and Pressler Amendments, would cut off funds for the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It was yet another clash between a much desired foreign-policy goal and the law-a clash of the kind that emerged most publicly in the Iran-Contra scandals of the mid-nineteen-eighties, when the Reagan Administration diverted funds from illicit arms sales to the Iranians to get around a congressional ban on arming the Nicaraguan Contras.
The government's ability to keep the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America secret is the more remarkable because for the past four years the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department have been struggling with an internal account of illegal Pakistani procurement activities, given by a former C.I.A. intelligence officer named Richard M. Barlow. Barlow, now thirty-eight years old, was hired by the C.I.A. in 1985 and quickly became one of the agency's top experts on Pakistan's nuclear program. In 1987, he was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan's nuclear-purchasing activities. He resigned a year later, after senior agency officials attempted to bar him from working on Pakistan. In 1989, Barlow, then working as a proliferation analyst in the office of the Under-Secretary of Defense for Policy, was forced to resign, under threat of firing, in what he alleges was retaliation for his persistent investigations into nuclear smuggling and his heated objections to yet another misleading congressional briefing on Pakistan. His allegations, initially written off as the mutterings of a malcontent, lately have been taken with increased seriousness by government investigators. In a recent interview, Sherman Funk, the Inspector General of the State Department, described Barlow as "one of the most brilliant analysts I've ever seen," and depicted his forced resignation as an injustice.
Barlow, who is currently a consultant for the intelligence community, agreed early this year to discuss his allegations in an interview, after initially attempting, he said, to work within the system. His allegations of a State Department and C.I.A. conspiracy to shield Pakistani nuclear-related purchases from members of Congress have severely tested the government's system of oversight by Inspectors General. As of today, there have been no fewer than five I.G. reports dealing with Barlow, two of them in the Defense Department, with only Sherman Funk confirming some of his essential allegations. But Funk has recently urged his Defense Department colleagues to reopen their inquiries.
Barlow's complaints of government wrongdoing got a boost when Paul C. Warnke, who served as an Assistant Secretary of Defense under President Lyndon Johnson and as director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Carter Administration, reviewed the case and agreed to represent Barlow on a pro-bono basis. "He was doing his job as best he could, and was penalized for doing his job," said Warnke, who is now a partner in the law firm of Howrey & Simon. "I don't think that's the way the government should operate. It's as simple as that." Warnke and a law-firm partner, James C. Duff, have assembled evidence indicating that the Defense Department's I.G. report included mischaracterized-and perhaps fabricated-testimony. Their information has been turned over to the Senate Armed Services Committee, and on March 17th Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, a committee member, formally asked the Pentagon to reopen its investigation.
In interviews for this article over a three-month period, many of Barlow's former C.I.A. and State Department colleagues confirmed his essential allegation-that the full story of the Pakistani purchases was deliberately withheld from Congress, for fear of provoking a cutoff in military and economic aid that would adversely affect the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan. In addition, senior members of Congress, including Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, who is the chairman of the Governmental Affairs Committee, and former Representative Solarz, who was the chairman of the Asian and Pacific Affairs Subcommittee of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, acknowledged that they had not been formally briefed, as required by law, about any significant Pakistani procurement except for one publicly known case, which in 1987 forced President Reagan to invoke-and then waive-foreign-aid sanctions against Pakistan.
Furthermore, Senator Glenn, the former astronaut, who is widely respected inside the government for his discretion-he is a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence-said that he had been told nothing about the nuclear scare in 1990. "They should have told me," he said, citing legislation that compels the executive branch of government to keep him and other ranking members of Congress "fully and currently informed" on all proliferation-related activities.
It isn't difficult to understand why Glenn had not been briefed, even in camera: he has been one of the most persistent public critics of Pakistan's nuclear ambitions and of the failure of the Reagan and Bush Administrations to do something about them. Glenn told me he knew that many of his colleagues in the Senate and the House had viewed nonproliferation as a secondary issue, especially when they saw a chance to take on and defeat the Soviets on the battlefield, as in Afghanistan. "I always thought in terms of the bigger picture-the nonproliferation treaty," Senator Glenn said, referring to the 1968 international agreement, signed and ratified by the United States, to halt the spread of nuclear weapons. "We made a commitment that we'd cut off aid to transgressors, and we had to keep faith with those Third World people who signed with us. I didn't think I had any option but to press for enforcement of the law against Pakistan." He was in the minority on that issue all through the Reagan and Bush years, he said. "The Administration would always come to me and say how important it is to keep the arms flowing through to Afghanistan. I'd take my case on nonproliferation to the floor and lose the vote."
Richard Kerr and Robert Gates still decline to discuss specific intelligence about the nuclear crisis in May of 1990, but a detailed account of what the American intelligence community knew-and did not know-about it has emerged in scores of interviews with Americans who were closely involved in the crisis management, and also with some Pakistani and Indian military and government officials who had direct knowledge. Most of those men and women who agreed to be interviewed did so after being promised anonymity.
One surprising consensus was that the 1990 confrontation had its beginnings in a large-scale Indian military exercise, code-named Brass Tacks, that started near the end of 1986. Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister of India, and there was a new and aggressive Indian Army leader, General Krishnaswami Sundarji. Gandhi and Sundarji agreed to stage the largest military exercise in modern Indian history, involving all branches of the armed forces and as many as four hundred thousand troops, starting in December. The exercise would take place not in India's far north, where the always tense state of Kashmir is situated, but in the desert area of Rajasthan, a few hundred miles to the south, and roughly a hundred miles from the Pakistani border, which-as the Pakistan government was sure to note-was an ideal location from which to launch a cross-border operation into the Pakistani state of Sind that could cut Pakistan in half.
Another feature of the exercise was a decision by General Sundarji to integrate India's special weapons, including tactical nuclear bombs, into the day-to-day field maneuvers of the troops. American analysts concluded that the Indian operations, which at their height involved more than a thousand armored vehicles, were as large as some exercises carried out in Western Europe by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, who was also the Army chief of staff, viewed the Indian maneuvers as a direct threat, and ordered his armored units to move to the front, where, by mid-January, the two armies stood within firing range along an extended border area. At the height of the buildup, the Indian leadership decided to provide full-scale briefings to the Indian media about the Brass Tacks exercise, in which General Sundarji declared that they were non-provocative-there had been no public discussion of the huge troop movements until then-and the crisis abated.
The American intelligence community understood that the Indian operation was potentially more dangerous than anyone in the public or the media realized. For one thing, there was evidence that General Sundarji, with the encouragement of some of the more hawkish elements in the Indian government, had toyed briefly with the possibility of simply moving his armies, which had gone into the field with extra fuel and ammunition, across the border and dismembering Pakistan. There was little question that the smaller and less mobile Pakistani Army would be unable to stop the Indian advance, and thus the landlocked Pakistan of the north, including the capital of Islamabad, could be cut off from the nation's main port, at Karachi, on the Arabian Sea. "This is the Pakistani nightmare," an Indian military analyst told me. At this point, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, a German-educated metallurgist, who has directed Pakistan's nuclear-weapons laboratories at Kahuta since the nineteen-seventies-he is known to some as the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb-gave a stunning interview to an Indian reporter, in which he explicitly claimed that Pakistan had the bomb. "What the C.I.A. has been saying about our possessing the bomb is correct," he was quoted as saying. "They told us Pakistan could never produce the bomb and they doubted my capabilities, but they now know we have it." His government did not want to use the bomb, Khan added, but "if driven to the wall there will be no option left." His remarks created instant embarrassment and controversy in Washington-the Reagan Administration had reported only a few months earlier that there was no evidence of a Pakistani nuclear bomb-and Dr. Khan recanted his remarks within days, claiming that the reporter had tricked him into giving the interview.
Dr. Khan's goal was not to embarrass the United States but to convey a not very subtle message to the Indians: any attempt to dismember Pakistan would be countered with the bomb. Two days after the Khan interview was published, Prime Minister Gandhi publicly criticized the United States for failing to stop Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program, and for continuing to supply Pakistan with economic and military aid. As tensions diminished in the spring of 1987, there was one very troubling legacy for the American intelligence community: studies showed that the main intelligence services for both sides-India's Research and Analysis Wing and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate-had exaggerated their reports to their senior leadership. It was clear that, in a crisis, both raw and isi were eager to provide incendiary intelligence without being sure of its reliability. Such eagerness could become deadly.
By 1987, the American intelligence community had become exceedingly proficient at learning what could be learned about another nation's nuclear ambitions. From the early days of the Cold War and the first U-2 aerial-reconnaissance flights, special teams of analysts had learned to look for clues to nuclear proliferation. One telltale sign was the pouring of a thick concrete floor on an isolated construction site, which the Israelis had done in mid-1958 at Dimona, the site of their future nuclear reactor in the Negev Desert. C.I.A. and N.S.A. analysts immediately understood that Israel, public denials to the contrary, was going after a nuclear-weapons arsenal.
Sometimes the American analysts ignored the vast array of technical intelligence and relied on simple common sense. The C.I.A. had learned the advisability of continually monitoring the intellectual debate inside any nation suspected of being on the verge of going nuclear. Analysts correctly concluded that India had gone nuclear in the mid-nineteen-seventies, when its officer corps suddenly stopped publishing articles and essays on what had been a long-standing and occasionally vituperative argument about the strategic and tactical implications of such a move.
In Pakistan, the United States had done more than monitor an intellectual debate or spy on a suspected nuclear facility. For nearly two decades, the N.S.A. had maintained an extensive "watch list" of high-tech companies in Germany and Switzerland whose telexes and facsimile transmissions were routinely intercepted and translated for signs of nuclear trafficking with Pakistan, which was known to be an illicit purchaser of nuclear materials from the West. The constant spying paid off. C.I.A. operatives managed to come up with a complete set of the floor plans for an ambitious Pakistani uranium-enrichment plant at Kahuta, twelve miles west of Islamabad, while the plant was under construction. The plans showed that the hot, or radioactive, work areas at Kahuta had been built as many as five stories underground, to guard against a surprise Indian bombing raid. Furthermore, once Kahuta was operational the C.I.A. found a way to obtain firsthand information, in detail, about nuclear-weapons work there.
Pakistan, apparently in response to India's Brass Tacks exercise, aggressively expanded its efforts in 1987. American satellites watched that year as a thick concrete floor was poured for what would become a second uranium-enrichment site-at Golra, also near Islamabad. It became known to West German intelligence that Pakistan had violated German law by buying a small plant for purifying and storing tritium gas. Tritium is a by-product of the irradiation of lithium-6 in a reactor; when tritium is inserted in a warhead, it provides additional neutrons at the moment of fission-in essence, jump-starting the weapon when it reaches critical mass. The result is a larger explosive yield with smaller amounts of enriched material-more bang for the buck.
There was widespread agreement inside the American intelligence community in 1987 that Pakistan had enough enriched uranium to put together perhaps six nuclear devices. But was it in a form that could actually be used in a warhead? In more precise terms, the unresolved question was this: Had Dr. Khan's men converted enriched-uranium hexafluoride gas (UF6) into a metal? The question resulted in the design of a highly sensitive C.I.A. operation, which produced irrefutable evidence that Pakistan was capable of manufacturing weapons-grade enriched-uranium metal at a facility near Islamabad-but not at Kahuta. The metal could then be machine-tooled to fit into a warhead small enough to hang under an F-16 wing.
Despite such evidence, the Reagan and Bush Administrations certified Pakistan in 1987, 1988, and 1989 as not having a nuclear weapon, the rationale being that there was no specific evidence that Pakistan had indeed done what it was known to be capable of doing. "There is no question that we had an intelligence basis for not certifying from 1987 on," Richard Kerr told me. The public American rationale for certification was that the continued flow of American weapons and ammunition to Pakistan would reassure its leadership that it could rely on conventional arms, and thus have no need to go nuclear. It was a very thin argument, as everyone involved knew. The C.I.A.'s role in all this, Kerr said, was merely to supply the political leaders with the best available information and for them to carry on from that point.
On August 17, 1988, President Zia, ten Pakistani generals, and Arnold L. Raphel, the United States Ambassador to Pakistan, were killed in the crash of Zia's Air Force C-130 a few miles north of the garrison town of Bahawalpur. General Beg, Zia's successor as the Army chief of staff, was known to be at least as deeply committed to Pakistan's nuclear project as Zia, but was also viewed as being much less dependent on the United States. So was Pakistan's new acting President, the seventy-three-year-old Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who had been Pakistan's Finance Minister and was then head of the Senate. Zia and President Khan had been among the most enthusiastic political and financial supporters of Abdul Qadeer Khan's expensive operations at Kahuta over the previous decade. Beg and President Khan emerged from the trauma of the Zia crash with firm control over the Pakistani nuclear project, and they maintained their control even after the general elections in November of 1988-the first democratic elections in Pakistan in eleven years-which led to the formation of a populist government headed by Benazir Bhutto. Ms. Bhutto's father, former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was hanged in 1979, after being convicted of murder (in a much disputed trial), is widely credited with being the founder of the Pakistani nuclear project, but the American intelligence community simply does not know whether Benazir Bhutto was ever permitted full access to her nation's nuclear secrets.
A galvanizing moment for the new Pakistani leadership came in June of 1989, four months after the Soviet Union began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, thereby handing the United States and its Pakistani allies a major Cold War victory. With the Soviets gone, President Bush and James Baker, the Secretary of State, decided that the United States could no longer ignore the evidence of the Pakistani bomb. The question of what Ms. Bhutto knew, or didn't know, about the bomb would be resolved when she paid a scheduled state visit to Washington in June; at that time she was provided with a detailed briefing by William H. Webster, the C.I.A. director. To dramatize the extent of American knowledge, Webster arranged for Ms. Bhutto to be shown a mockup of a Pakistani nuclear bomb. A day later, at a private meeting with President Bush, Ms. Bhutto was told that the United States would certify Pakistan as not having a nuclear weapon in 1989, but that no certification would be available in 1990-not unless she could assure the White House that her government would not take the final step of producing nuclear-bomb cores. To soften the blow, the President told her that he would authorize the sale of sixty more F-16s-planes desperately needed by Pakistan, whose Air Force was outmatched by India's. She would have something to take back to the generals.
Ms. Bhutto, who was bitterly attacked in Pakistan last winter for her criticism of her country's nuclear program, did not wish to be interviewed for this article. But Mark A. Siegel, a former Carter Administration official and close Bhutto associate, who served as Pakistan's American lobbyist in 1989 and 1990, described her feelings of disbelief upon being briefed by Webster. "The briefing was more detailed" than any information that she, as Prime Minister, had been provided, Siegel said. "It also showed that the military was doing it behind her back." Nonetheless, the ardently pro-American Ms. Bhutto went before a joint session of Congress and, to thunderous cheers, categorically promised that "we do not possess nor do we intend to make a nuclear device," adding, "That is our policy."
The tough, albeit late, new American policy toward a nuclear-armed Pakistan, as it was relayed by President Bush to Ms. Bhutto, did not play well in Islamabad. "The Paks understood us better than we understood ourselves," one informed American official explained. "They knew that once the Soviets were whipped in Afghanistan we wouldn't need them anymore. Would we unilaterally defend Pakistan? Never. Our relationship with Pakistan was to counter the Soviet-Indian relationship. The Pakistanis knew that time was limited. And that's why they went balls out on the nuclear program. Benazir never had a chance. If they held back the bomb from us, they could have held it back from her as well. It was too serious."
The official added that General Beg and his colleagues understood, as did the American intelligence community, that Pakistan could never stand up to a full-scale Indian assault. "The only way for the Pakistanis to deal with the Indians is to be able to take out New Delhi," he said. "There's no way that sending ten F-16s with conventional bombs is going to do it. Only the nukes could strike back."
Not surprisingly, General Beg's relationship with Robert B. Oakley, the new American Ambassador, had none of the warm rapport that had existed between President Zia and Ambassador Raphel. Beg and Oakley, one American recalled, were constantly at odds by 1990, and would "literally yell at each other." The C.I.A. eventually concluded, in a highly classified personality profile, that General Beg was more closely attuned to the Islamic world than to the West. He was viewed, one American said, as "a fifty-year-old Muslim aristocrat who suddenly became very religious . . . and thought Iran was a savior." In an interview, Oakley recalled that Beg's tilt toward Iran had destroyed their relationship. "Beg came back in February of 1990 from Teheran and told me, 'I'm greatly reassured,'" Oakley said. "He was pleased as punch. He said, 'Now we're in good shape. With the support from Iran promised me, we will win in case of war over Kashmir.'" The Pakistani General said as much in a meeting a few weeks later with General H. Norman Schwarzkopf, head of the United States Central Command, which has military responsibility for the Middle East and parts of South Asia. Beg's "pro-Iranian kick was scary to us," Oakley said. Oakley was interviewed a few days after his return from Somalia, where he served until early this March as the United States special envoy.
Another American who has been involved in nuclear intelligence for many years told me that his reservations about Pakistan and "an Islamic bomb" transcended General Beg: "What if they decide they truly want to be a player on the world stage? Look at the Pakistani ego. They want to be with the Big Boys-China, the United States, the Soviet Union. Pakistan is deadly serious."
Dr. Khan's few public statements have been unsettling to many American policymakers. "Western countries had never imagined that a poor and backward country like Pakistan would end their [nuclear] monopoly in such a short time," Khan told a Pakistani newspaper in 1984. "As soon as they realized that Pakistan had dashed their dreams to the ground, they pounced at Pakistan and me like hungry jackals and began attacking us with all kinds of accusations and falsehood. . . . How could they tolerate a Muslim country becoming their equal in this field. . . . All Western countries including Israel are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam. . . . All these activities are part of the crusade which Christians and Jews have been carrying on against Muslims for about one thousand years."
India's military leadership has been worried for years about the combination of a new crisis in Kashmir and the Pakistani bomb. In a study published in 1979, D. K. Palit, a retired Indian major general, noted that the liberation of largely Muslim Kashmir could be "regarded as a jihad, a holy war of Islam, which would justify the threat of the use of the Islamic bomb against India." What was unnerving was "not that having acquired a minimum capability Pakistan would automatically launch an invasion across our border, using nuclear weapons to bomb Indian targets," Palit wrote. "Even an unstable military government would seek a more sophisticated scenario than that." Much more frightening was the possibility that Pakistan "could declare that it intended to use its nuclear weapons in a defensive capacity only, that is, as a deterrent to an Indian attack on Pakistani territory." In that case, Palit wrote, India's conventional deterrent against a preëmptive Pakistani attack on Kashmir-its threat of a counteroffensive with the vastly superior Army, Navy, and Air Force-"would not be credible."
Major General Palit's concerns and assumptions came into play in 1990, as Pakistan and India engaged in their near-war over Kashmir. That western Himalayas area, filled with caverns, mountains, lush valleys, gorges, rivers, rapids-and twice as many Muslims as Hindus-was the only state in the South Asian subcontinent not allowed to vote on self-determination in 1947, after Britain's withdrawal from its Indian empire triggered widespread religious rioting between Muslims and Hindus. Kashmir, which is about the size of Utah, was to remain under Indian control, but continued religious warring and demands for independence led the United Nations to arrange a ceasefire in 1948, providing for two-thirds of Kashmir to be a self-governing entity within the Indian Union, and for Pakistan to be nominally in control of the remaining third. The United Nations mandate also called for a plebiscite to allow the people of Kashmir to decide their own fate, but India has not permitted the election to take place, insisting that Pakistan must first withdraw its troops from Kashmir. Pakistan refused to do so unless India also withdrew its troops. India has taken advantage of the decades-old impasse to steadily increase its military and political control over its area of Kashmir, bringing itself into direct conflict with those Kashmiris who insist on independence.
Kashmir is still categorized by the United Nations as an occupied territory whose final fate is yet to be determined-a status similar to that of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in the Middle East. As the birthplace of the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Kashmir remains an emotional battleground for India, which is determined to hold on to the area by force. India views the loss of the predominantly Muslim area as a potential threat to the country's status as a secular nation. Pakistan has responded to the tenacious Indian hold on Kashmir by engaging in a large-scale covert effort to foment revolution, in part through the systematic use of insurgents. Neither India nor Pakistan is willing to see an independent Kashmir; the two nations have repeatedly gone to war to keep control of the territory. In the view of American intelligence, the weak governments in place in Pakistan and India in May of 1990 were willing to run any risk-including nuclear war-to avoid a disastrous military, and thus political, defeat in Kashmir.
There is no evidence that the Pakistani leadership or its intelligence services had advance knowledge of or were in any way involved in the initial uprising in Kashmir, which was triggered in January of 1990 when Indian police opened fire and killed fifty pro-independence demonstrators who were protesting what they viewed as the latest of India's "puppet" governments. But Pakistan did move quickly to exploit the unrest. By early spring, the Pakistanis were known to be operating at least thirty camps in their territory for the training of Kashmiri Muslims and were prepared to aid them in slipping across the border. Mass Muslim-led demonstrations of more than a hundred thousand people were organized in Srinagar, the capital of Kashmir, to protest Indian rule. India blamed its enemy, Pakistan, for its problems, although there was evidence that the protests were in part indigenous. India responded to the angry protests with a heightened police and military presence throughout Kashmir, and that led, almost inevitably, to brutal repression and shootouts. Between January and late April, as civilian control ebbed, hundreds of Kashmiris were shot dead in the street. India moved its crack Strike Corps into Rajasthan, within fifty miles of the border, and once again, as in 1987, there were fears in Islamabad of a preëmptive Indian attack to cut off southern Pakistan from the north. Pakistan moved its 1st and 2nd Armored Corps toward the border.
The American intelligence community noticed an intense increase in Pakistani radar activity early in the year. Earlier reports showed that the Pakistani Air Force, working closely with officials from Pakistan's nuclear-weapons program, had stepped up its F-16 training to practice what seemed to be the dropping of a nuclear bomb. Further intelligence, from Germany, reported that the Pakistanis had designed a nuclear warhead that could be fitted under the wing of an F-16, and that the design had gone through a series of wind-tunnel tests. Pakistan was also reported to have learned to program its in-flight computer system to provide the correct flight path for a nuclear-bomb run.
The language from New Delhi and Islamabad heated up. In mid-March, Ms. Bhutto visited a training camp inside the Pakistani-controlled part of Kashmir and pledged nearly five million dollars in support of "freedom fighters"-a phrase clearly aimed at provoking the Indian leadership. A few weeks later, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, India's new Prime Minister (he defeated Rajiv Gandhi in national elections in November of 1989, with the aid of the militant Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P.-the Indian People's Party), publicly warned Pakistan in a speech to the jingoist Indian Parliament that it "cannot get away with taking Kashmir without a war." Singh added that India would not allow Pakistan to achieve nuclear superiority. One leader of the B.J.P. went further and suggested to cheering members of Parliament that in case of war "Pakistan ceases to exist."
Sometime in the early spring of 1990, intelligence that was described as a hundred per cent reliable-perhaps an N.S.A. intercept-reached Washington with the ominous news that General Beg had authorized the technicians at Kahuta to put together nuclear weapons. Such intelligence, of "smoking gun" significance, was too precise to be ignored or shunted aside. The new intelligence also indicated that General Beg was prepared to use the bomb against India if necessary. Precisely what was obtained could not be learned, but one American summarized the information as being, in essence, a warning to India that if "you move up here"-that is, begin a ground invasion into Pakistan-"we're going to take out Delhi." Washington suddenly joined Islamabad and New Delhi in realizing that a crisis had developed. "I began to scream that what's going to happen is Brass Tacks all over again," Ambassador Oakley recalled. He had been serving on the National Security Council during the confrontation in 1987, which was resolved by the direct intervention of two strong leaders, Pakistan's President Zia and India's Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. "Rajiv and Zia are gone, and this time they won't stop," Oakley said he warned Washington in 1990. "We'd better move before the momentum builds."
Washington decided to augment the available technical intelligence. The orbiting flight paths of American satellites were adjusted to increase the hour-to-hour overhead coverage of South Asia. The joint American-British listening post in Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, which monitors both Pakistan and India, was provided with additional electronic-eavesdropping requirements (a move known at N.S.A. field stations as "tasking") and ordered to increase its coverage. Sometime in May, as conditions inside Kashmir worsened, an orbiting American satellite relayed photographs of what some officials believed was the evacuation of thousands of workers from Kahuta.
An American analyst who participated in White House situation-room meetings throughout the crisis described what happened next: "We thought the reason for the evacuation of Kahuta was that they expected a retaliatory attack by India, in response to a Pakistani first strike. We were keyed to an offensive ground strike"-into the Pakistani state of Sind-"by the Indians. The Pakistanis were going to cut it off with a nuke. We thought they'd go for Delhi."
At this point, the American analyst recalled a secret meeting he had had with Abdul Qadeer Khan during an international energy conference in Europe in the mid-nineteen-eighties: "I was told by Khan in no uncertain terms 'Never again. Whatever else occurs, even if we tell you we've terminated'"-ceased working on the nuclear bomb-"'I can tell you that I will not be allowed to terminate, because we must continue to show the Indians that we have the ability to never again be defeated at their hands.'"
There was further evidence that May of Pakistani intent: "We'd spotted a facility in the mountains"-in Balochistan, in southwestern Pakistan. "If there was a nuclear-storage facility, that had all the signs of being it." The Pakistani military were conducting high-explosive tests near the suspected storage facility. Such tests, which had been monitored by the United States since the mid-nineteen-eighties, were an essential element of the nuclear-weapons process; nuclear fission is achieved by triggering precise, simultaneous explosions inside a warhead, which instantly compress the core of enriched uranium or plutonium. Initially, the test area seemed to be a normal facility, the analyst recalled, except that the Pakistani military protected it with an unusually high degree of security. Eventually, the intelligence community learned from a source inside Pakistan that A. Q. Khan had gone to the site for a visit-Khan was under constant surveillance-and the test site and its nearby storage area were considered to be nuclear-related. If the Pakistanis had manufactured more than a few weapons-there was talk in the White House that spring of as many as ten warheads-and if they truly expected a preëmptive Indian attack, the weapons would have to be dispersed to Pakistani Air Force bases.
Just as expected, satellite and other intelligence later produced signs of a truck convoy moving from the suspected nuclear-storage site in Balochistan to a nearby Air Force base. "There were moving secure zones all over the convoy route," the analyst said, similar to the way, years ago, that the American military cleared the highways in front of its convoys carrying nuclear weapons. Once the Pakistani convoy reached the airfield, the pattern was repeated. "They had beefed up security," the analyst said. "People who normally worked on the flight line are all of a sudden sealed out of the area. They're not allowed to be there. All of this simple stuff becomes important. We've watched the Pakistanis go through normal alerts and drills, and you can tell the difference. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to understand what's going on, because you're dealing with the military, who work in set patterns. This is low-level human-intelligence crap. No big deal. We're watching for things to happen that never happened before. Their big mistake was putting on more security than they needed."
Eventually, the intelligence community picked up a frightening sight, the analyst recalled: "They had F-16s pre-positioned and armed for delivery-on full alert, with pilots in the aircraft. I believed that they were ready to launch on command and that that message had been clearly conveyed to the Indians. We're saying, 'Oh, shit.' We've been watching the revolution in Kashmir, the internal problems in India, and we look at the Pakistani pre-positioning. These guys have done everything that will lead you to believe that they are locked and loaded."
The Pakistani government had told Washington that it had intelligence-whose reliability was suspect, as was all Indian and Pakistani intelligence in moments of crisis-indicating that India was prepared to send its army across the border. "We were holding a session in the National Security Council conference room in the White House basement," the analyst said. "And one of our guys"-a senior military man who had served as defense attaché with the United States Embassy in New Delhi-"said we ought to focus on getting the Paks to hit Tarapur, not Delhi." A large reactor at Tarapur, north of Bombay, was known to be one of India's main sites for the chemical extraction of weapons-grade plutonium. "In other words, he wanted to do a tit for tat: Kahuta for Tarapur. It was the old limited-war issue: If they do a strike, what could we do to get them to neutralize each other?"
Former Ambassador Oakley, in his interview with me, depicted the intelligence analysts in Washington as being overwrought about the imminence of war and a nuclear exchange. "We never had any hard indications that any nuclear warheads had been delivered to an airbase. You could guess that," Oakley said. "isi was putting out all sorts of messages, but we had no evidence that a nuclear exchange was imminent." In his view, Oakley added, full-scale war between Pakistan and India would not break out until early fall, the end of the rainy season. "Once it began, there was a strong likelihood they would have gone all the way," he said. "I don't blame people [in Washington] for being nervous. That's the way intelligence analysts are supposed to work. But the evacuation of Kahuta is not necessarily evidence of war," he said, because "Pakistan has always been afraid" of a preëmptive Indian raid on the nuclear-weapons center.
One American nuclear-intelligence expert subsequently described Oakley's comments as a "classic case of what we were dealing with" in reporting to the State Department and the White House on an ally's nuclear-weapons program: "It's a warning situation, but they want smoking guns for everything. The guy is saying, 'Wait until the bombs are dropped on New Delhi.'"
Richard Kerr was also persuaded by the intelligence that the chances of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan were great. "There's no question in my mind that we were right on the edge," the former C.I.A. deputy director recalled. "This period was very tense. The intelligence community believed that without some intervention the two parties could miscalculate-and miscalculation could lead to a nuclear exchange."
The fears of the intelligence community were impossible to ignore, even amid the crunch of a summit week. It was at this point that President Bush ordered a White House airplane sent to Moscow to pick up Robert Gates-who was part of a high-level advance team preparing for the summit-and fly him to the rescue. One involved official asked rhetorically, "Why Gates? Because he went carrying the President's personal imprimatur: 'He's my top adviser on nuclear matters. I'm sending my No. 1 career intelligence official. He knows. He can't be bullshitted.'"
In his interview with me, Gates was quick to acknowledge that he was not an expert on India or Pakistan and had no personal relationship with the leadership of either country, but had indeed been sent to South Asia as the President's man, carrying special messages to President Khan in Islamabad and to Prime Minister Singh in New Delhi. "The President wanted somebody who could go discreetly and without an entourage," Gates said. "Somebody who spoke for him." Gates was being briefed as he was moving into action-standard operating procedure for a senior White House aide-and not until he actually began the mission, he said, "did I have a full sense of the danger." He added, "These guys"-in India and Pakistan-"felt their country was at stake."
The major reason for his initial lack of alarm, Gates recalled, was the ho-hum attitude in Moscow toward the India-Pakistan standoff. Before leaving Moscow, he and Secretary of State James Baker "asked the Soviets to weigh in with the Indians," their longtime ally-a step that would have been automatic in the Cold War days. But the Soviets "basically pooh-poohed" the notion that there was a crisis, Gates said. "It eventually became clear that they were not going to weigh in, because they didn't want to expend the political capital and they didn't have the information" that Washington had.
The high-powered mission began on an ominous note: Gates and his companions, who included Richard N. Haass, the ranking National Security Council aide for the region, and John Kelly, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near East and South Asian Affairs, were stood up by Benazir Bhutto. President Bush had written a private note to the Pakistani Prime Minister, with whom he had established a good rapport the previous year, and the Gates team was expecting confirmation of a meeting place during a refuelling stop at Athens. Ms. Bhutto's reign as Prime Minister had sharply disappointed many of her supporters in Pakistan and elsewhere; they saw little evidence that she had the ability to run the government. There also were heated complaints of nepotism and corruption in her administration. Many Americans assigned to the Embassy in Islamabad and as military attachés sided with General Beg and President Khan in their intense power struggle against Ms. Bhutto. The infighting was often very ugly. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, its most clandestine intelligence agency, was known to have bugged many of Ms. Bhutto's meetings, and even videotaped her in private moments with her husband. Copies of some of that material had made their way to the large and very active C.I.A. station in Islamabad, whose agents-not unnaturally-discussed them with at least a few colleagues throughout the world. Many of these men, a well-informed congressional aide explained, saw Ms. Bhutto "as a nuisance," and not-as did many in Congress-as someone capable of giving Pakistan "a chance for democracy."
Ms. Bhutto's popularity at home had revived with her ardent support for the Kashmiri freedom fighters, as she described the Kashmiri Muslims in a series of jingoistic speeches that spring throughout Pakistan. As Gates set out on his mission, she was in Yemen, one of her stops on an extensive tour of the Gulf states, to drum up Islamic backing for her nation's demand for elections in Kashmir. She did not meet Gates, and even today he remains angry and perplexed about her slight. "First, they had said 'Let's meet in Cairo,'" Gates recalled. "I got word in Athens that we'd meet someplace else. She yanked my chain for four or five hours. Finally, she said, 'Why not come to Yemen?' I said, 'Screw it.' It was clear that she did not want to talk about it. She knew what I had to say."
Gates's main worry as he headed for South Asia was the essential instability of both governments, which he feared were "too weak to stop a war," he said. "There was the view that both sides were blundering toward a war, and we were afraid that it would go nuclear. And who knew what the consequences would be?" In addition to taking along Presidential letters urging restraint, Gates was authorized to tell the leadership in Islamabad and New Delhi that the United States was prepared to share its most sensitive satellite intelligence with both sides, so they would simultaneously be able to verify troop withdrawals-if they could be agreed upon-from border areas.
Gates said that he had made no effort to be especially tactful during his meetings with General Beg and President Khan, who were, after all, representing a loyal Cold War ally and a key partner in the Afghanistan war. "I'm not much of a diplomat," he told me. "We simply wanted to show them that they were bungling toward a war. The idea was to go in and voice our concerns, and also to show that we knew what we were talking about. I gave an explicit briefing to both sides-in excruciating detail." He said that he told the Pakistanis, "'Look, I'm not here to solve the Kashmir problem or discuss regional arms control. I'm here because we think there is a short-term problem that we want to defuse.' I looked straight at Beg and said, 'General, our military has war-gamed every conceivable scenario between you and the Indians, and there isn't a single way you win.'" It was a tough message for a proud and bellicose Army chief of staff. Beg said nothing, and Gates detected no visible response. "He was very cool," Gates said. "That was the high point."
Gates was also accompanied by Oakley, who recalled, "The essential goal of the meeting was to get the message"-that Pakistan could not win a war with India-"to President Khan. It was quite clear that Khan had not been given a full briefing" on the risks of war by Beg, "who sat there looking smug. Khan became quite sober," Oakley said, after Gates warned him that if war breaks out "Don't expect any help from us."
One of General Beg's military colleagues subsequently gave me a blunt account of the Gates presentation. According to the officer, Gates angrily let the Pakistani government know that the United States had hard evidence that "we'd crossed the line" and developed nuclear warheads. The American criticism prompted a bitter protest from President Khan. He accused the United States of being hypocritical in its sudden concern over Pakistani nuclear intentions. "Now, after the Afghanistan war is over, you are squeezing us," Khan was quoted as telling Gates. "You're telling me what's going on. Don't you also know what's going on in India and Israel? It's a double standard." Pakistan's fear, as it was said to have been relayed to Gates, was that a full-scale ground assault by India could dismember the nation within two weeks, as had happened in 1971, leaving the leadership with, in the Pakistani officer's words, "no option but to go nuclear." In the Pakistani officer's account, Khan and Beg did seek, with no success, a United States commitment to reward Pakistan for not using nuclear weapons in case of all-out war with India, by providing a full-scale airlift of conventional arms and ammunition, as had been done to bolster Israel in the early days of the 1973 Mideast war.
Both sides agreed, however, that the defining moment of the meeting came when Gates told the Pakistani leadership, "You guys are going to have to stop supporting terrorism in Kashmir." President Khan then gave the American envoy what he needed for his trip to New Delhi: he assured him that the Pakistani training camps for Kashmiri insurgents would be shut down.
The Pakistani concession turned out to be essential, for as Gates left Islamabad events in Kashmir took a drastic turn for the worse. On May 21, 1990, Maulvi Muhammad Farooq, the senior Muslim cleric of Kashmir, was assassinated in his home by unidentified gunmen. Farooq was a moderate, who had campaigned peacefully for an independent Kashmir-an option rejected by both Pakistan and India. More than a hundred thousand mourners took to the streets of Srinagar, and Indian security forces, panicked, opened fire. As many as a hundred people were killed, and tension rose among both the Pakistani and the Indian forces on the border. Perhaps because of this renewed tension, Gates emerged from his May 21st meetings with the leadership in New Delhi with what he termed "a strong sense of their worry about the nation's fragility. They were worried about Pakistani meddling in Kashmir, and worried about the future of their secular state," he told me. "They talked of their concern about Hindu fundamentalism juxtaposed with Islamic fundamentalism-and the dangers both of those movements posed."
Gates said his message to the Indians-presented in separate meetings with top officials-was essentially the same as the one he gave the Pakistanis: "You guys got to lay off each other." In India's case, that meant stopping its infiltration into the Pakistani border state of Sind, and taking immediate steps to improve the human-rights situation in Kashmir. From the Indian point of view, Gates said, "It was the first time an American had come out and treated Pakistan and India as equals." The Indians responded with a significant concession: they agreed to let American military attachés of the United States Embassy go to the front in Kashmir and Rajasthan and see for themselves that no imminent invasion of Pakistan was in the works. The American attachés duly reported that the Indian units, including its vaunted Strike Corps, were in the process of closing down their exercises. That information was quickly relayed to the Pakistani leadership, and over the next few days both armies moved their troops away from the borders and both foreign ministries opened discussions on confidence-building measures. By the end of June, the crisis was over.
In its aftermath are the inevitable questions about Pakistan's nuclear status-who knew what, and when? Oakley insisted, as did many former members of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, that the essential facts about Pakistan's inevitable emergence as a nuclear power were known fully in the late nineteen-eighties to the United States Congress, whose members "acquiesced"-as Oakley put it-in continued foreign aid to Pakistan because of the Afghanistan war and the enormous personal popularity of Prime Minister Bhutto in the United States. Oakley's point seemed to be that passive approval by Congress of bad policy somehow justified bad policy. In an interview, a former top-level Reagan Administration official went further and questioned the integrity of those members of Congress who publicly supported the Solarz and Pressler Amendments: "All this morality horseshit. We were caught in a dilemma, and I didn't know how to solve it: there was no way to stop the Pakistanis. Pakistan had been fucking around for years on the bomb. They weren't going to depend on us. What do you expect of the Pakistanis? All this talk about breaking the law-it's just a morality play. Of course everybody in Congress knew. The Administration was carrying out a popularly based policy in Afghanistan. If we'd cut off the aid to Pakistan, would we have been able to withstand the political heat from Congress?"
Nonetheless, one intelligence expert who has closely followed the nuclear situation from Washington, when asked to reflect on the India-Pakistan crisis, said that it might be time for the senior policy people in the White House, the State Department, and the C.I.A. to learn that there are "people outside"-such as those perennially disregarded arms-control officials responsible for the nation's nuclear-nonproliferation agenda-"who also understand the rules." He went on, "This crisis demonstrates that the question of 'Who out there can toss one of these?' may be the truly fundamental question for the next generation."
The expert's fears have no reverberations, for the near nuclear war in South Asia has remained an unknown event-a crisis that wasn't a crisis-with no lessons learned. In the fall of 1990, after Ms. Bhutto's ouster, senior officials of the State Department handed Sahibzada Yaqub Khan, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, a letter demanding that his nation destroy the nuclear-bomb cores known to be in existence. The American solution to the potential for a nuclear holocaust was to try to put the genie back in the bottle, as had been done throughout the nineteen-eighties.
There were other signs of business as usual. President Bush continued his policy of invoking the Pressler Amendment and not certifying Pakistan to be nuclear-free in 1991 and 1992, as he had in 1990, but he also permitted Pakistan to buy American-made arms from commercial firms, thus nullifying the impact of the law. Pakistan and India, while still refusing international inspection of suspected weapons facilities, continue today to publicly deny, as they did throughout the nineteen-eighties, that they have nuclear weapons.
In a political-science honors thesis written in 1980, Richard Barlow, who was then a senior at Western Washington University, in Bellingham, Washington, analyzed the relationship between the collection of intelligence about Pakistan and the failure of American policymakers to stop Pakistan from going nuclear. The problem, he concluded, was not a lack of information about Pakistan's intent, but "a clear-cut failure of policy perpetuated by the consumers of intelligence." Correcting that failure would become his mission in government.
In 1985, after having worked two years for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Barlow made it to the big leagues-he was hired as a proliferation-intelligence officer by the C.I.A. Barlow was smart, he was committed, and he had a tremendous capacity for absorbing information-traits found in the best analysts of the intelligence community. Barlow looked the part: slender, with hazel eyes, light-brown hair, and a movie star's profile. And yet he also was very much unlike the public image of hard-nosed C.I.A. men; he was openly enthusiastic, and exuded an energetic reverence for his work and its responsibility. "He brought the agency a unique skill," Richard Kerr, who was the C.I.A.'s deputy director for intelligence in 1985, acknowledged. "He was an investigative analyst. It was a different kind of skill from the kind we had historically used. We're doing more of it now."
Barlow quickly came to learn that there was solid information sitting in C.I.A. files that was not being acted upon. While rummaging through old State Department cables, he realized the significance of a case involving a California couple who had exported dozens of high-speed cathode-ray oscilloscopes and special cameras to Hong Kong, where they were picked up by Pakistani agents. Barlow knew that the devices were also widely used in nuclear-weapons development to calibrate the uniformity of compression on a nuclear core-the implosion that triggers chain reaction-from the explosives inside the warhead. There could be no other use, he reasoned, for the export of so many exquisitely engineered devices. He found an overlooked link between the purchase, which was shipped through Hong Kong, and the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, which, as the C.I.A. knew, was then playing a major role in the development of a nuclear bomb. There were consultations with Justice Department attorneys and the Commerce Department, whose agents were nervous but pleasantly surprised to get help from someone in the C.I.A. Barlow even personally briefed federal prosecutors on the technical aspects of the case, enabling them to make clear-without violating national security-that the high-speed oscilloscopes were of great importance to Pakistan's nuclear-weapons work.
Even as Barlow began his digging, some senior State Department officials were worried that too much investigation would create what Barlow called "embarrassment for Pakistan and trigger the Solarz Amendment, which would cut off all aid." Protecting the Afghanistan war had emerged as a major policy of the State Department's Bureau of Near East and South Asia Affairs, which was responsible for Pakistani policy. It was also considered essential by the C.I.A.'s clandestine-operations directorate, whose officers were deeply involved in the "covert" war that, as everyone in Washington understood, wasn't covert at all.
Nonetheless, at a high-level meeting in mid-1986 Barlow was designated the C.I.A.'s delegate to the Nuclear Export Violations Working Group (N.E.V.W.G.), a newly formed top-secret panel that brought together the policy, law-enforcement, and intelligence communities in an effort to stop illegal American exports to Pakistan and other non-nuclear nations. Barlow took his work seriously, and volunteered-with the approval of Fred McGoldrick, the director of the State Department's Office of Nonproliferation and Export Policy, and the chairman of the N.E.V.W.G.-to help set up an undercover operation in an effort to stop yet another planned Pakistani purchase of nuclear-related materials. The State Department's Near East Bureau was not told of the planned operation, for fear that the officers there would tip off the Pakistanis, as they had done in the past, by sending a formal diplomatic protest (known as a démarche) to the Pakistani government. "We were sure they'd manage to screw it up," one N.E.V.W.G. member said of the Near East Bureau. "They were more guilty of clientitis than anyone." Barlow and his law-enforcement colleagues were convinced that the State Department's intent in sending the démarches, which were inevitably ignored, was simply to signal Pakistan that the cops in America knew what was going on.
McGoldrick, who is still chairman of the working group on nuclear-export violations, agreed to the delay in informing his colleagues in the Near East Bureau of the pending operation. "The only thing we had going for us"-he and other working-group members-"was the Pressler and Solarz Amendments," McGoldrick said. "The absolute imperative in this building was to get the Russians out of Afghanistan. I can't quarrel with that. But it has to be done in accordance with the law. There were many more reports of covert procurement"-of nuclear-related goods-"in the case of Pakistan than with Iraq. For all the hoopla, Iraq didn't take all that much out of here."
As McGoldrick's panel reached more deeply inside the Pakistani operations in the United States, the atmosphere grew tense. At one point, Barlow recalled, the C.I.A.'s Dick Kerr summoned senior State Department officials to a meeting and initiated a pointed discussion about the steady flow of démarches and highly classified internal American intelligence analyses between Washington and Islamabad.
In his interview with me, Kerr acknowledged that the Near East Bureau had been extremely active, just as Barlow and others alleged. "What they were doing it for was to persuade the Pakistanis to stop," he said. The Near East Bureau "was trying to change Pakistan's behavior," he went on. "They didn't want the relationship to break."
Others in the United States government had a less benign view of the State Department's approach to Pakistan. "We still have cases on Pakistan and we still don't tell State about it," a senior Customs Service official told me recently, in anger. "The State Department constituted a security problem for us. One of the things about being a dumb gumshoe is that we didn't have to worry about foreign policy. The law is the law-and the law is the only thing I go by." The Customs Service official, who is still in the government, praised Barlow for "telling it the way it was at a time State was jerking me around," and said, "The guy was as topnotch as any I met. He laid it on the line."
Some superiors and peers, on the other hand, viewed Barlow as single-minded and difficult to control. "The most dangerous problem we have in our business is zealotry-people who have a mission," Richard Kerr said. "Richard bordered on that. When others disagreed with his analysis, he made it a matter of integrity, as opposed to a matter of judgment."
The N.E.V.W.G.'s undercover operation led to a highly publicized arrest, in Pennsylvania, in July of 1987, of a Pakistani-born Canadian named Arshad Z. Pervez: he was seized while attempting to buy twenty-five tons of a specially strengthened steel for use-as Barlow knew-in Pakistan's uranium-enrichment program. There was now little doubt about Pakistan's nuclear intentions. The arrest created a furor among those members of Congress committed to nonproliferation, including Senator Glenn and Representative Solarz. Congress, obviously more concerned about safeguarding aid for the Afghanistan war than about stopping the spread of nuclear weapons in South Asia, nonetheless approved a foreign-aid package of four hundred and eighty million dollars for Pakistan in December. A dismayed John Glenn subsequently told the Times that the threat of nuclear proliferation "is a far greater danger to the world than being afraid to cut off the flow of aid to Afghanistan," and added, "It's the short-term versus the long-term." In January, six months after the arrest of Pervez, President Reagan finally invoked the Solarz Amendment, as he was compelled to do under the law, and then immediately waived its provisions, clearing the way for the American aid. The President was telling Pakistan that it could have its money-and its bomb.
Barlow received official praise for his work on the Pervez case, and spent hundreds of hours coördinating the inevitable array of disputes between the intelligence, foreign-policy, and law-enforce- ment communities. He was offered (and rejected) a job as a special agent by the Customs Service and given a note of personal commendation, relayed to Kerr by Abraham Sofaer, the State Department's legal adviser. By mid-1987, Barlow had emerged as the government's leading expert on illegal Pakistani procurement.
He produced an extensive analysis for the Department of Justice and the Customs Service on the hundreds of documents found in Pervez's apartment. He was brought into a sensitive case involving possibly illegal State Department approval of licenses to the Pakistani Embassy in Washington for equipment whose export had previously been denied-for nuclear-proliferation reasons-by the Commerce Department. There were many other cases in which high-tech goods, approved for export by Washington, turned out to have a significant application to Pakistan's nuclear program.
After Pervez's arrest, Representative Solarz, who was obviously concerned about the violation of his amendment, requested a top-secret briefing by the C.I.A. and the State Department on Pakistani bomb procurement. Barlow was assigned to accompany David W. Einsel, the C.I.A.'s senior nonproliferation officer, to the briefing. It would be Barlow's first appearance before Congress.
Before going, Barlow was instructed by Charles Burke, his immediate superior in the C.I.A., to tell the truth, if asked. Barlow recalled having no anxiety about the briefing. "I assumed Congress had been briefed by State on the extent of Pakistani procurement activity in the United States," he said. But that briefing marked the beginning of his nightmare. "I wish I had called in sick," he told me.
Barlow had worked closely with Einsel, a retired Army major general, who had been brought to the agency in 1985 by William Casey, and he knew that Einsel had seen the highly classified reports and analyses that were available on Pakistan's extensive nuclear-related procurement activities inside the United States. "I knew his state of knowledge," Barlow recalled. "I knew exactly what he knew. Einsel's testimony was highly evasive, and deliberately so."
Barlow was disturbed because Solarz made it clear that he had a broad definition of what constituted a violation of his amendment. "I don't care if the Pakistanis ordered it"-American-made equipment-"by mail order from abroad, or if they went to Germany to buy it," Barlow quoted Solarz as saying. "As far as I'm concerned, that's a violation." At one point, Barlow said, Solarz turned to him and asked a direct question: "Have there been other cases?" "I said to myself, 'You don't know?' He started interrogating me like a prosecutor. I was told to tell the truth and did."
Barlow testified that, indeed, the C.I.A. did know of "scores" of other Pakistani attempts to violate American export law. He also tried to tell the subcommittee something else it did not know: that the United States government had evidence directly tying one of Pervez's collaborators, a retired Pakistani general, to Pakistan's government and its nuclear-weapons project. At that point, Barlow said, "Einsel shut me up and I was never allowed to get into specifics."
A senior government official who was outside the hearing room (he had not been cleared to attend the briefing) recalled what happened next: "I was outside when Robert Peck"-the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs, who died last year-"rushed out and said to me, 'You've got to testify. That s.o.b. Barlow is telling them all sorts of things, and you've got to straighten it out.' I went in to the hearing, but I didn't know what to say." He had credibility with Solarz and his subcommittee, the official acknowledged. Solarz declared that he was "appalled" at the extent of the intelligence reports. "I told him that not all intelligence reports are accurate," the official said. He understood that his function was to somehow expunge Barlow's testimony-to smooth it over-and he did his job. "I cooled it out," he said. The official made it clear that it was not his proudest moment in government service: "I didn't know what I was getting into."
Einsel, who retired to Ohio in 1989, characterized as "nuts" Barlow's allegation that he withheld information from Congress. "There is always information that is in process, that's ongoing," the former general said in a telephone interview. "You generally give Congress evaluated answers-not all the rumors that are flying. That's where he and I get off on a tangent. The man was obsessed with passing on his latest rumors to the Hill, and whether they proved correct didn't matter to him. That's the problem."
After his testimony, Barlow became a marked man in some offices inside the Central Intelligence Agency. "It upset me very much that I was forced to be involved in something like this," he told me later. "I had no idea that Congress had not been informed of the cases." There was an almost immediate payback. "Einsel went crazy," Barlow said. "I was told that my personal behavior at the hearing had been unprofessional. I was accused of being unpatriotic and almost scuttling the Afghanistan program. I was viewed as being disloyal."
Within days, the C.I.A.'s nonproliferation office was being pressured by Einsel and the State Department's Near East Bureau to fire Barlow or, at the least, remove him from the Pakistan account. Six weeks later, Barlow's formal job description was rewritten to remove him from any responsibility for Pakistan. Richard Kerr intervened and told him to "continue doing what I'm doing," Barlow recalled. Not long after that, however, he was again offered a job with the Customs Service. A year later, he accepted the job and resigned from the C.I.A., with mixed feelings. "I still think it's the best agency in the government," he said.
In early 1989, Barlow was forced to change jobs again-this time for personal reasons-and joined the Pentagon's Office of Non-Proliferation Policy. There were renewed contacts with the N.E.V.W.G., whose anti-Pakistani activities had dropped off precipitously the year before, and renewed contacts with law-enforcement officials. Barlow was once again chasing Pakistani nuclear procurement.
The Office supervisor, Gerald G. Oplinger, who was a longtime government expert on nonproliferation, also had his bureaucratic problems with Barlow. "He was smart, with a photographic memory," Oplinger said. "A very persistent guy who doesn't kowtow and who doesn't like to do scutwork." There was also no question that Barlow was knowledgeable and capable, and Oplinger, before retiring from the government in April, recommended him for promotion. Oplinger knew that Barlow had enemies from his days in the C.I.A., the bitterest of whom were those members of the clandestine service who had been involved in the Afghanistan war.
Barlow went about his business without incident, so he thought, until July of 1989. Then he learned that the United States government was once again distorting intelligence on Pakistan's nuclear capability. He had prepared a comprehensive analysis on Pakistan's nuclear capability for Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney and other senior officials. The paper cited what Barlow and many others in the intelligence community understood to be persuasive data showing that the F-16 aircraft previously delivered to Pakistan had been modified to deliver nuclear weapons. Barlow's paper was complemented by a separate Defense Intelligence Agency study, which reached the same conclusion.
All this gave the government a big problem. President Bush, after his June meeting with Benazir Bhutto, had agreed to sell sixty of the aircraft, a sale of a billion six hundred million dollars that the Pentagon-and Pakistan-badly wanted. But that sale hinged on the Pentagon's assurances to Solarz's subcommittee that the Pakistani government would not modify the F-16s for nuclear delivery. Furthermore, Barlow was involved just at that time with investigating four major criminal cases involving senior officers of the Pakistani Army who had attempted to make illegal purchases in the United States or abroad of American-made nuclear-related materials, including highly enriched uranium. One of the cases involved evidence showing that Pakistan was attempting to obtain dual-use items for its nuclear program by claiming that the materials were to be used for its F-16 fleet. The State Department's Near East Bureau had learned of Barlow's activity only a few days before.
On August 2, 1989, Arthur Hughes, a newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, testified before the Solarz subcommittee that the F-16s to be sold to Pakistan would be stripped of nuclear wiring before delivery. To deliver a nuclear bomb, therefore, Hughes said, "it first would be necessary to replace the entire wiring package of the aircraft." Hughes assured Solarz, in response to a question, that the F-16s to be sold to Pakistan were not nuclear-capable unless the nuclear wiring, or some modification of it, was replaced.
Barlow knew that the Hughes testimony was totally contrary to the analyses that had previously been prepared. The fact that the Pakistani Air Force had practiced low-level F-16 delivery of nuclear weapons was widely known throughout the American intelligence community. The primitive delivery system required very little in the way of electronics or special wiring. Barlow informed his superiors, including Gerald Brubaker, his immediate supervisor, of his problems with the testimony, and urged that it be corrected.
Two days later, Brubaker called Barlow into his office and, with no warning, handed him a letter of termination. He stood accused, as he did not know at the time, of being a national-security risk to the United States. He was stripped of all his classified clearances and given three weeks to clear out of his office. Barlow decided to fight the dismissal. He spent the next eighteen months assigned to a Defense Department personnel pool, under surveillance by Pentagon security officers. He learned later that the "national-security risk," according to classified documents released to him under the Freedom of Information Act, was the fear of Brubaker and his superiors that Barlow would go, without authorization, to Representative Solarz and tell him the truth. "Would I have done it?" Barlow recently said, in astonishment. "Hell, no. I was trained to work within the system." Nonetheless, over the eighteen months, Pentagon investigators, on the pretext that they were dealing with a national-security threat, began looking into his personal life, his finances, his taxes, and false allegations that he had been fired from the C.I.A. and from the Customs Service.
Barlow has repeatedly stated that Gerald Brubaker and other officials made a concerted effort in 1989-as he was looking for other government and private-sector jobs-to impugn his reputation by spreading lies about his general reliability. Brubaker and the other officials named by Barlow categorically deny those charges. Barlow remains convinced, he said, that his firing and other adverse actions against him stemmed from his refusal to stop working with federal law-enforcement agents to investigate Pakistan's illegal nuclear-related purchases in the United States.
Brubaker, in a telephone interview, maintained that Barlow's dismissal resulted solely from his "poor performance," and not from a government-wide conspiracy to do him in because of his stand on Pakistan. "He is incompetent and insubordinate-period," Brubaker said. "He didn't do what he was told, and he has parlayed this into a bigger issue."
Two documents obtained by Barlow under the Freedom of Information Act challenge Brubaker's assertions. An internal Pentagon memorandum shows that Brubaker-whose personal antagonism toward Barlow was widely known-did not complain of insubordination at the time of the firing but instead "expressed concern" that Barlow would provide "classified information" to Congress. A handwritten notation made four days later shows that Barlow's top-secret clearances were to be suspended because he was a potential "national security" threat.
In May of 1990, after an eight-month investigation, the Pentagon determined that the security charges against Barlow were false. In a formal memorandum, Barlow was told that "after thorough investigation . . . any question of your trustworthiness for access to sensitive information was resolved in a manner completely favorable to you." His top-secret security clearances were reinstated, but the Pentagon did not restore his clearances to compartmentalized intelligence, without which no intelligence officer can do his job. Barlow remained on duty in the personnel pool, arranging civic luncheons and obtaining computers for public schools in Washington. In August, the Defense Department offered Barlow and his attorneys a settlement of twenty-six thousand dollars. Acceptance would mean that Barlow could not take his complaints to Congress or to any executive agency. There was an impasse. Donald Mancuso, the director of the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, then offered Barlow a chance to become a special agent, or a consultant, if he agreed to disclose any potential criminal wrongdoing about which he had firsthand knowledge. He agreed to do so-reluctantly, he said-and thus became, in the eyes of many of his former colleagues, a whistleblower. He told Mancuso everything he knew about the C.I.A., the State Department, and the Pentagon coverup of Pakistan's nuclear-purchasing activities in the United States. Barlow was interrogated for two weeks, and his allegations were referred to the Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Not surprisingly, all the initial I.G. reports absolved their agencies of any criminal wrongdoing, but pressure to reopen the case is currently being put on the Pentagon by Sherman Funk, the State Department I.G., as well as by Senator Bingaman, of New Mexico. Further doubts about the efficacy of the Pentagon's inquiry have been raised in a sworn affidavit from Gerald Oplinger obtained by Barlow's attorneys, Paul Warnke and James Duff. In its I.G. report, the Pentagon had accused Oplinger of deliberately inflating his annual evaluation of Barlow in order to avoid "an unpleasant personnel situation." In his affidavit, Oplinger angrily responded, "This is a serious charge, and devoid of merit." He further noted that one of the Pentagon I.G.'s reports, prepared by Navy Captain O. M. Horstman, was said to be based on an interview with him. "The fact is," Oplinger wrote, "I have never been interviewed by Horstman nor by anyone identified to me" as representing Horstman's office.
In his interview with me, Richard Kerr acknowledged that Barlow's essential allegation was true: David Einsel did not give "full briefings to the Hill" on Pakistan's procurement activities. "I think Einsel fretted too much over how far to go, and he did not know all the details," Kerr said. He added that Barlow's "knowledge on Pakistan was greater than anyone else's in the agency," and that "there was an inability of Einsel to connect to others on the staff." The former C.I.A. deputy director added, generously, "I don't think it was an attempt to conceal the facts, but a difference of opinion over what to share."
Such talk of absolution does little to soothe Barlow, who has suffered through what he calls a "Kafkaesque hell" since August of 1989. "There was no legitimate national-security issue involved" in his dismissal, Barlow said, in explaining why he was continuing to press the issue. "If you let the Pentagon get away with this, any time they want to destroy someone who is threatening their interest all they have to do is to instruct his superior to tell Security that the person has an alleged intent to engage in classified whistleblowing, and unleash the machinery."
No judicial proceeding can repay Richard Barlow for his lost years, his shattered career, and his lost self-esteem. And Congress can do little today about testimony that wasn't presented in 1987 or 1989-or about testimony that was manipulated.
Stephen Solarz, who lost his congressional seat last November, after nine terms, acknowledged that he and others who cared about nonproliferation had been constantly trying to balance that concern with a desire to support President Reagan in the Afghanistan war. "There were legitimate concerns that the Afghan war might spill over to Pakistan, and I felt we needed to give the President flexibility," Solarz told me recently. "I didn't want us to be in a worst-case scenario in case the Soviets moved across the border. I thought I was being responsible at the time." What he could not understand, he added, was how irresponsible the Reagan Administration had been. "If what Barlow says is true, this would have been a major scandal of Iran-Contra proportions, and the officials involved would have had to resign," Solarz said. "We're not dealing with minor matters. Stopping the spread of nuclear weapons is one of the major foreign-policy issues of the nation-not to mention the law of the land."
And not to mention the fact that in May of 1990 some of the bombs that were not stopped in the Reagan and Bush years were almost put to use. And that there are many more still out there. And that India, frightened and besieged today by terrorist bombings and growing Hindu fundamentalism, remains always willing to fix the blame for its troubles on Pakistan.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear power isn't an answer
By WENONAH HAUTER,
Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program at Public Citizen
January 12, 2004
Knoxville News
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/perspectives/article/0,1406,KNS_2797_2569541,00.html
Lee Martin wrote in a recent opinion piece in the Business section ("U.S. needs nuclear power" Jan. 5) that "in a free market economy, the most economical method of total production ultimately wins." But nuclear power is not economically viable.
It continues only because of enormous government subsidies, typified by the $4 billion handout in the current energy bill and a generous taxpayer-backed insurance scheme. This contradiction betrays an argument littered with half-truths and dubious claims.
Even the Department of Energy admitted that "economic viability for a nuclear plant is difficult to demonstrate." Martin asserts that nuclear power costs less than other power sources, but this is only true if one looks at day-to-day operating costs and ignores other expenses such as construction and waste disposal. A recent French study found that the same investment planned for a new nuclear plant could create double the energy and almost five times as many jobs if spent on wind power.
Twice, Martin claims that nuclear power causes no air pollution. In 1998, the Better Business Bureau recommended that ads by the nuclear industry that made similar pollution-free assertions were misleading and should be taken off the air. Uranium enrichment involves the creation of dangerously radioactive uranium hexafluoride gas, which several weeks ago leaked in such quantities from a plant in Illinois that entire neighborhoods were evacuated at 3 a.m.
Carbon-14 and iodine-131 are routinely released into the air from nuclear plants. And from construction to waste disposal, nuclear plants require burning of fossil fuels. The average nuclear plant has to operate for at least 10 years before it generates as much energy as is required to build and fuel it.
Claims that "operational and proven repositories for waste products" address that problem are similarly wrong. There are no permanent operational repositories for spent fuel from reactors.
The proven repository referenced is Yucca Mountain, which is anything but proven. The government's independent oversight panel has repeatedly found serious flaws with the proposed design, which isn't even finished. A half-dozen court cases filed by Nevada will be heard this month, and a Supreme Court battle is likely; a victory in any of the six could nix repository plans. Even if the Yucca repository is built, it's too small to handle future waste inventories.
Other points that Martin should have clarified: U.S. energy independence won't be a result of nuclear power; most imported oil is used to fuel cars, which won't run on nuclear power anytime soon. Assertions that wind and solar can only meet 2 percent of our energy needs contradict a recent Washington Post article that stated wind farms on "(t)he plains of North Dakota alone could supply one-third of the nation's demand for energy." And while France might be adding reactors, Germany just announced plans to end use of nuclear power.
There's no doubt that demand for energy in the United States will increase in coming decades. But Martin never once mentions the cheapest and most effective methods for meeting higher demand: energy efficiency and conservation.
Wenonah Hauter is the director of the Critical Mass Energy and Environment Program at Public Citizen, a national, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization based in Washington, D.C. More information may be found at www.citizen.org/cmep.
-------- nevada
Nevada looks to court to block nuclear dump
January 12, 2004
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040112-123602-9971r.htm
LAS VEGAS - 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 90 miles outside Las Vegas.
"Part of our strategy has always been the court," said U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat, a leader of the state's fight against the Yucca Mountain project.
Mr. Reid said he hopes that 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 the Environmental Protection Agency radiation limits for areas around the site, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's licensing rules and the Energy Department's environmental standards for studying and recommending the site.
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 at industrial and military sites.
The Energy Department would spend 25 years filling tunnels with metal casks containing 77,000 tons of spent nuclear reactor fuel. The site then would be sealed. Scientists expect it to remain radioactive for at least 10,000 years.
----
Rural concerns fuel debate over Nevada nuclear site
By Ed Koch
January 12, 2004
The Associated Press
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Jan/01122004/utah/128376.asp
CALIENTE, Nev. -- On a slow Monday afternoon at the Knotty Pine Restaurant, co-owner Mel Robinson waits on two customers.
Asked about the Energy Department's recently announced preferred route that would bring trains carrying nuclear waste through the small town near the Utah border, Robinson says she believes that the federal government will win that fight and that folks need to accept it, as well as a high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain.
Federal government officials "have to make it as safe as possible and hopefully we will get some benefits from the government such as an enhanced fire department and some good-paying jobs for people around here who really need them."
Caliente's business district, 150 miles north of Las Vegas, is hurting. The street is full of closed stores -- Vasu Video, Carl's Burgers, the Nevada Club -- and buildings with boarded windows.
A few doors down from the Knotty Pine lives one of the town's most vocal antinuclear activists, Marge Detraz.
While others dined at the Knotty Pine, she prepared to go to the county seat, Pioche, to blast the Lincoln County Commission at its first meeting since the route was announced Dec. 23 for "selling out" to the federal government on the repository. Advertisement
The Energy Department, which plans to open the high-level waste dump at Yucca by 2010, has chosen as its preferred route a yet-to-be-constructed, 319-mile rail line that would begin outside Caliente and wind north of the Nevada Test Site and west of the Nellis Air Force Range to its destination. The cost to build it is estimated at $881 million.
Rural matters: On a bitterly cold Monday morning in Pioche, a historic mining town 23 miles from Caliente, residents go to the Silver Cafe for breakfast. None of the restaurant's half-dozen patrons plan to join Detraz at the Lincoln County Courthouse down the street for the County Commission meeting.
At the Lincoln County Commission chambers, a small basement room in the two-story courthouse, the five commissioners -- Chairman Spencer Hafen, Tim Perkins, Tommy Rowe, Ronda Hornbeck and Hal Keaton -- and several county workers outnumber the audience.
It quickly becomes apparent how such a poor entity could welcome the opportunity to pick the federal government's deep pockets in exchange for allowing nuke waste to be transported over its grounds.
But a consultant who is paid $171,000 a year out of $699,000 in Lincoln County's Energy Department oversight funds does not have the best of news on that option.
Mike Baughman, president of the Carson City consulting firm Intertech Services Corp., tells the commission that transportation fee increases could be imposed on the federal government to get more money for Lincoln County's needs, but the county cannot broker the deal -- only the state.
In addition, a raise in Nevada's $150-per-train or truck shipment rate would have to show a corresponding hike in costs for Lincoln County, such as to have additional emergency response equipment and other safety measures, Baughman said.
The increase of fees "cannot be an underwriter of a general fund," Baughman said. "We must show that we are incurring the costs."
Nothing is mentioned about the state of Nevada's chilly relationship with the federal government over the nuclear issue.
That battle, which has simmered for 20 years, became all-out war in 2002, when Congress approved Yucca as the site to entomb 77,000 tons of radioactive waste produced by the nation's nuclear power plants and the military over the vehement objections of Nevada leaders.
Limited options: Robinson, who did not attend Monday's commission meeting, noted that while Las Vegans can afford to fight an all-or-nothing battle over Yucca Mountain, Lincoln County residents cannot afford to fight the feds and lose what little they have. Bargaining for concessions is their only logical option, she and others say.
Karlynn Chatwin, manager of the bar and casino at the Knotty Pine, says the nuke train could pump up business in her town.
"We are pretty recessed here -- we need something," says Chatwin, a native Las Vegan and a Lincoln County resident of 10 years. "Children grow up here and leave because there is nothing for them.
Chatwin knows what she would like to get.
"I believe one of the concessions should be that the federal government pays to put our children through college," she says. "Parents here certainly cannot afford to do it."
Standing firm: Back at the commission meeting, Detraz begins by berating the commissioners for their regular 4-to-1 votes.
Keaton, who opposes nuclear waste, is on the losing end.
Hafen warns her to stick to the agenda item and present her Yucca Mountain update. Detraz instead criticizes council members, including Hafen, for attending "secret meetings" with Energy Secretary Margaret Chu and other DOE officials.
In November some of the commissioners met with Energy Department officials in Amargosa Valley and in December at McCarran International Airport.
Detraz is cut off by Hafen as she reads the third of three newspaper clippings to support her claims.
During the break Hafen, a land surveyor by profession, denies doing anything illegal.
"Our job is to protect the health, welfare and safety of the people of Lincoln County," Hafen said. "Nobody here shouted, 'Bring [nuclear waste] here! Bring it here!' But part of addressing the issue is to look at the best proposal the DOE will bring to the table."
-------- ohio
New Uranium Plant to Be Built in Ohio
By JOHN McCARTHY
Monday January 12, 2004
Associated Press
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3616870,00.html
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) - Ohio has been chosen over Kentucky for a $1.5 billion plant that will use updated technology to enrich uranium for power plant reactors, the company building the plant announced Monday.
The facility at the shuttered Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, which previously had been used for uranium processing, will employ 500 and will be operating by the end of the decade, USEC Inc. President Nick Timbers said.
USEC had considered building the plant at either Piketon or Paducah, Ky. The company owns plants at both sites that have produced enriched uranium using the old method of gaseous diffusion. The new plant will use centrifuge processing, a more efficient technology already in use in several other countries.
Construction is expected to begin in 2006. Piketon is about 65 miles south of Columbus.
The new plant will produce enriched uranium faster than any other centrifuge facility, the company said. When it's fully operational, it will produce enough uranium each year to fuel 30 power plants, each providing electricity to a city the size of Memphis, Tenn., or El Paso, Texas.
The new facility will replace the 1,350-employee Paducah plant, which would continue operating until 2010.
The company halted uranium production at Piketon in 2001 and cut 530 jobs as it consolidated operations at Paducah. The Ohio plant was kept on standby with 1,200 workers maintaining it and doing environmental cleanup.
Centrifuge processing is not new to the Portsmouth plant. The Energy Department spent $3 billion to develop the technology there two decades ago, but that project was abandoned.
Timbers said the Piketon site was chosen largely because using buildings and infrastructure remaining from that earlier project will reduce costs. The Bush administration has pledged to spend $70 million this year to clean the existing buildings.
Another advantage for Ohio was that the Paducah plant is close to the New Madrid earthquake fault, which could require additional expense.
USEC shares rose 14 cents to close at $8.55 on the New York Stock Exchange.
On the Net:
http://www.usec.com
-------- us politics
O'Neill criticizes 'disengaged' Bush
January 12, 2004
By James G. Lakely
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040112-123622-7485r.htm
CRAWFORD, Texas - President Bush's summit in Mexico today threatens to be overshadowed by recent criticism from former Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill.
Mr. O'Neill characterized the president's leadership as "disengaged" and said there was no "real evidence" to justify deposing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
In an interview broadcast on CBS' "60 Minutes" yesterday, Mr. O'Neill elaborated on remarks he made to author Ron Suskind that described Mr. Bush presiding over a typical Cabinet meeting as "a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
Mr. O'Neill, who said he is going public with his opinions because he thinks the Bush administration has been too secretive, also agreed to an interview for this week's edition of Time magazine.
He told Time that from what he had heard at sensitive National Security Council meetings, he was not convinced that Saddam was in possession of weapons of mass destruction - a main justification by the administration for attacking Iraq.
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," Mr. O'Neill told Time.
Mr. O'Neill told "60 Minutes" that the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive action against countries deemed threatening to the United States is "a really huge leap" and that the president started making plans to depose Saddam "from Day One."
Mr. Bush fired Mr. O'Neill as Treasury secretary in December 2002 for insufficiently promoting the president's economic agenda, especially his broad tax cuts.
The White House downplayed the significance of Mr. O'Neill's comments.
"Obviously, the White House is not in the business of offering book reviews," said White House spokesman Ken Lisaius yesterday. "It seems from various reports in the press that there seems to be an attempt by some to justify their own opinions rather than looking at the reality of the achievements of this administration."
Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans said yesterday on CNN's "Late Edition" that the presidential leadership style Mr. O'Neill described is foreign to him.
"I can't tell you of the number of meetings that I have been in with [Mr. Bush] ... he is asking the tough questions and then making the tough decisions, and doing it in a very decisive kind of way."
The Democrats vying for their party's presidential nomination were quick to use Mr. O'Neill's remarks to criticize Mr. Bush.
Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean said the flap underscores the continuing importance of examining "the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war."
Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts said Mr. O'Neill has leveled "very serious charges" that indicate that Mr. Bush "lied to the American people."
Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri said yesterday on CBS' "Face the Nation" that he also found Mr. Bush "hard to help" on important matters such as the war on terrorism. Mr. Gephardt added that the president "has no curiosity" about the opinions of others.
Mr. O'Neill's "comments about the president's personal leadership involvement are really disconcerting," said Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.
However, Mr. Lieberman, among the most pro-war of the candidates running for the Democratic nomination for president, said Mr. Bush "did the right thing" in liberating Iraq.
Mr. O'Neill's critical comments are a sharp contrast to his diplomatic words upon leaving the administration.
"I'm determined not to say any negative things about the president and the Bush administration," Mr. O'Neill told Pittsburgh television station KDKA on Jan. 12 last year. "They have enough to do without having me as a sharpshooter."
Mr. O'Neill told "60 Minutes" that he would be "really disappointed" if the Bush White House reacted angrily to his comments.
"Why would I be attacked for telling the truth?" Mr. O'Neill said.
----
Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001, says ex-treasury secretary
By Andrew Gumbel, in Los Angeles
12 January 2004
Independent Digital (UK)
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=480363
The Bush administration started making detailed plans for the invasion of Iraq within days of coming to office, with the President himself anxious to find a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a high-ranking former cabinet member said yesterday.
The revelation is the latest in a string of potential embarrassments for the White House offered by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who has gone on the record for a new book looking at his bumpy two years at the centre of US power, The Price of Loyalty.
Mr O'Neill said invading Iraq was "topic A" at the very first meeting of President George Bush's National Security Council, 10 days after his inauguration on 20 January 2001, and continued to be an abiding theme in follow-up meetings.
"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq," said Mr O'Neill, who was a participant in all the meetings and provided voluminous minutes and other documents to the book's author, Ron Suskind. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying 'Go find me a way to do this'."
Mr O'Neill is the first cabinet member to implicate directly Mr Bush in planning a war against Iraq so early in his presidency. One of the documents passed to Mr Suskind was a secret dossier from the first few weeks of the administration entitled "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq". The disclosure will provide further ammunition for to Bush critics who believe the administration cynically exploited the 11 September terror attacks to launch an aggressive policy of global military interventionism that neo-conservative hawks such as Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Donald Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had been advocating for years.
It makes clear that hints of a link between Saddam and the 11 September attacks, repeatedly made by administration officials in the run-up to the war but never substantiated, were a political convenience, not the driving motivation behind the invasion. And it also poses a considerable challenge to the official version of history, which has sought to portray Mr Bush as undergoing a near-religious conversion after 11 September from a meek peacetime leader to a man with a global mission to stamp out evil.
Mr O'Neill, who spoke to CBS's60 Minutes news programme yesterday, said he was surprised nobody at the NSC meetings asked questions such as "Why Saddam?" or "Why now?" "For me," he added, "the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is really a huge leap."
It has been clear for some time that the neo-conservatives in the administration were pushing such unilateralism. Mr Bush came to office pledging the opposite - an aversion to so-called "nation-building" and the commitment of US troops to world trouble-spots.
The former treasury secretary gives a unflattering portrait of the President in the book and in follow-up interviews, describing him as disengaged from the issues and apparently uninterested in dialogue with advisers. In cabinet meetings, Mr O'Neill said, the President was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people" - having nothing to say and allowing others to fix the agenda.
----
War-gate - The scandal that could bring down a President
by Justin Raimondo
January 12, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/justin/index.php?articleid=1579
In the run-up to war the sheer volume of lies produced by this administration was meant to overwhelm Congress, the media, and the people with its inventiveness. In a veritable frenzy of prevarication, the War Party came up with some real whoppers - and one howler that has not only come back to haunt them, but which very well may prove to be their undoing.
In his State of the Union address, George W. Bush made the claim that Iraq had sought to procure the means to assemble nuclear weapons in "an African country." This assertion puzzled former U.S. ambassador to Gabon Joseph C. Wilson, who had been sent to Niger earlier in 2002 by the CIA on a mission to track down rumors that Saddam's agents had sent an emissary there in search of weapons grade uranium. Ambassador Wilson used his connections to get word to National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice that her assertions that the Niger uranium claim was based on facts garnered somewhere in the bowels of the bureaucracy was in error. The message he got back was: thanks, but no thanks.
Wilson went public with his charges that the administration had relied on information it knew to be false to make the case for war. The administration struck back swiftly, and with potentially deadly accuracy: in addition to contacting columnist Robert Novak, two top White House officials called at least six Washington journalists, denigrating Ambassador Wilson as the beneficiary of "nepotism" because his wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA agent working on nuclear nonproliferation. Not only did Wilson have a political agenda, they charged, but it was only through her good offices that he was sent to Niger. As one source told the Washington Post:
"It was unsolicited. They were pushing back. They used everything they had."
But this volley backfired almost immediately. Robert Novak's now infamous column, in which he identified Plame, citing administration sources, caused a furor. Would the War Party stoop to this - outing and potentially endangering an undercover CIA agent, and all her contacts - in their zeal to discredit their enemies?
For months, John Ashcroft sat on this investigation, and very little was heard of it. Then, suddenly, he recused himself, and gave the job to one of his subordinates, who promptly appointed a special counsel: Patrick J. Fitzgerald. As someone familiar with Fitzgerald's reputation in law enforcement circles put it:
"I'm sure the word is going out that the bulldog has arrived in town."
Investigators have already compiled a large file of evidence, as the New York Times reports:
"Including notes of White House meetings, calendars, phone records and datebooks that officials have said provided telling clues about who within the administration may have had access to Ms. Plame's identity."
While federal agencies have been instructed not to destroy any records that might be helpful in the investigation, the Times informs us that "the White House is the only agency at which investigators are known to have demanded that investigators actually turn over records." Let's hope Bulldog Fitzgerald lives up to his street name, and fast. I can already hear the sound of shredders working overtime.
A question leaps out at us in the wake of Ashcroft's recusal: why now?
News reports have it that FBI officials started out at the top, and worked their way down, interviewing high-ranking White House officials and then moving in on their subordinates. Whatever physical evidence has been turned over so far consists entirely of material garnered from the White House - and that was enough to trigger the recusal and a decision to proceed.
They must have found something.
There is some speculation about whether or not a crime has actually been committed: under the terms of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, the leaker must know an agent is working undercover. But the reality is that the investigation alone will destroy its targets, with lots of collateral damage to the War Party.
Who would target Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame, seeking to discredit the former and destroy the career of the latter? And why? The political implications of these questions are potentially enormous. The answers could not only discredit the neocon network in Washington, but also drag down the Bush administration into a domestic quagmire from which there is no extrication. As former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said in an interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week:
"On the intelligence, what the president said [about Iraq seeking uranium in Africa] raises an interesting issue, which hasn't been followed by the news media sufficiently. The documents on which that statement of the president was based were fabrications. We got them from the British. We asked the British, where did you get these documents? They told us they got them from the Italians. Now, did the Italians fabricate them? And if so, for what purpose? Or did someone else give them to the Italians?
"I think we have to pursue that, because the fact of the matter is, our intelligence not only has been poor, but we have been manipulated in the intelligence area by sources which give us intelligence, in order to influence us."
Manipulated - by whom? And for what? The significance of the Fitzgerald inquiry is that, before it's over, we'll likely have answers to both questions.
Critics of this war have long maintained that the nation was pushed, shoved, and rushed into war by a cabal with its own agenda. In uncovering the culprits, this investigation is bound to unearth the network of Washington warmongers who retaliated with such swift treachery when Joe Wilson hit them, unexpectedly, in a weak spot. Their vulnerability is due to the fact that the source of the President's State of the Union assertion that Saddam was seeking uranium in "an African country" turned out to be a crude forgery. One crime leads to the detection of yet another, perhaps greater crime: and that is how regimes are sometimes brought down. It's happened before, you know.
At a time when the methods and quality of intelligence-gathering by federal agencies is in the spotlight, it isn't just the Democrats who are eager to find out what's gone wrong with the process. A lot is at stake. How did a forged document get by so many people and land, as it were, on the President's desk as "fact"? The answer is going to be politically explosive.
What is astonishing, in view of the ongoing investigation, is the boldness of this claque, as they fight like cornered rats, spitting and hissing at their tormentors. The Washington Post reports that, while the investigation into the outing of agent Plame is heating up,
"Sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame....
"Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.
"CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting."
The classified document "has been circulated around," according to the Post. So the same people who leaked Plame's undercover status - and passed off forged "evidence" of Saddam's nuclear ambitions as authentic - are now adding the theft of classified documents to the growing list of their crimes.
What's amazing is that this kind of a leak would be engineered through such an obvious front group. The latest swipe at Wilson and Plame was executed by a right-wing (neocon) news agency, Talon News, whose parent group is called "GOP USA." They somehow bamboozled Wilson into doing an interview, in the course of which they asked him:
"An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
"GOP USA"? I mean, how obvious can you get?
What's interesting is that if "Talon News" somehow got its hot little hands on a document that purported to be the minutes of a meeting of CIA officials, it was almost certainly a fake. Like the Niger "yellow-cake" forgeries, which contained the names of officials who could not have been parties to the purported transaction, the phony INR document puts an individual where he couldn't have been. A consistent incompetence seems to be the hallmark of our serial forger.
But is it really incompetence - or is there a method to this kind of sloppiness? After all, the reader of the Talon News interview with Wilson couldn't have known that the "internal government memo" was a fake, and, disseminated widely enough, without the CIA disavowal, it could have a real effect on Wilson's credibility - or at least conjure up sufficient doubts to cloud the issue considerably. And that's what propaganda - especially war propaganda - is all about.
A lie is put out there, and before it's debunked yet another variation on the same lie is already in circulation. This kind of rapid-fire dissimulation was very effective in the run-up to the Iraq war. Now that their lies are coming back to haunt them, the War Party is using the same methods to defend themselves and minimize the damage.
In lashing out with the sort of viciousness that is characteristic of the neoconservative cabal, the leakers made a mistake that could eventually prove fatal to their ambitions. The trial of, say, Richard Perle - or any one of a number of neocon operatives with known links to Robert Novak - will put the War Party in the dock. In the course of such a trial, the truth about this war, and the liars who needlessly provoked it, is bound to come out. No matter what the defendants are formally charged with, the indictment and conviction of these people as criminals would be a huge victory for the cause of peace.
I can hardly wait for the legal proceedings to begin! I'll sit right in the front row, like Madame DeFarge in A Tale of Two Cities, knitting in the shadow of the guillotine, waiting patiently for justice to be done. Oh, how fitting for the neo-Jacobins to succumb to such a fate! And what a show this promises to be: a show trial, to be exact, albeit a much fairer one than they have in store for Saddam.
Perhaps the accused can get Ramsey Clark to take up their defense: after all, he took Slobodan Milosevic and Lyndon LaRouche as clients. Why not Scooter Libby? Failing that, the obvious choice is Glenn Reynolds, the famous law professor whose prolific blogging shows how much time he has on his hands. He might even do it pro bono, provided he gets to blog the trial from the courtroom.
This is going to be fun. Will Bulldog Fitzgerald brave the blizzard of disinformation, haul the conspirators in front of a grand jury, and pry the truth out of them? Go for it, Bulldog!
Alan Dershowitz infamously endorsed the use of torture to get information out of terrorists if there is a high probability that we can prevent another terrorist attack with the information we receive (or something to that effect). Without endorsing Dershowitz's proposal - and taking his premise of the overriding importance of averting an imminent threat as our own - one could make the argument that Fitzgerald has every right to torture the truth out of the Usual Suspects, on the grounds that, if we don't, they'll lie us into yet another war.
They're already debating whether to go to war with Syria, and the neocons have come out with their election year manifesto, declaring that we need to take the fight not only to Syria, but to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and - chillingly - North Korea. The neocons, and their nestlings inside the Defense Department and other federal agencies, are nothing if not brazen. What they need is a good smack upside the head. Let us hope and pray that Bulldog Fitzgerald doesn't pull his punches.
As the neocons "stovepiped" lies straight up to the White House, bypassing the normal filtering process provided by the CIA, the DIA, and other intelligence-gathering agencies, someone knowingly put a forgery into the intelligence stream - and then tried to cover it up. As is usual in cases of this type, the cover-up is just as bad, if not worse than the original crime, and leads to the detection of the perpetrators. From Watergate to War-gate, the pattern repeats itself - the first time as tragedy, the second as a (delightful) farce.
--------
Bush Sought to Oust Hussein From Start, Ex-Official Says
January 12, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/politics/12ONEI.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - President Bush was focused on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq from the start of his administration, more than seven months before the terrorist attacks that he later cited as the trigger for a more aggressive foreign policy, Paul H. O'Neill, Mr. Bush's first Treasury secretary, said in an interview broadcast on Sunday.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr. O'Neill said in an interview with the CBS program "60 Minutes."
Mr. O'Neill, who was dismissed by Mr. Bush more than a year ago over differences on economic policy, said Iraq was discussed at the first National Security Council meeting after Mr. Bush's inauguration. The tone at that meeting and others, Mr. O'Neill said, was "all about finding a way to do it," with no real questioning of why Mr. Hussein had to go or why it had to be done then. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap," Mr. O'Neill said.
Mr. O'Neill gave the interview to "60 Minutes" to promote a new book, "The Price of Loyalty," by Ron Suskind. Mr. O'Neill cooperated extensively on the book, turning over 19,000 documents from his two years as Treasury secretary, including transcripts of National Security Council meetings, Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes."
Mr. O'Neill also gave an interview to Time magazine, which quoted him as casting doubt on the strength of the evidence Mr. Bush cited in making the case for war with Iraq.
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," Mr. O'Neill told Time, speaking of his tenure in the administration. "There were allegations and assertions by people. But I've been around a hell of a long time, and I know the difference between evidence and assertions and illusions or allusions and conclusions that one could draw from a set of assumptions.
"To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else," he continued. "And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence."
Mr. O'Neill, a former chairman of Alcoa, served in the Nixon and Ford administrations and was close to Vice President Dick Cheney and Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman. Mr. O'Neill had a rocky tenure as Treasury secretary. His departure came after he made it clear he differed with the White House over the need for more tax cuts. In his typically blunt style, he made no effort at the time to pretend he was not angry and hurt over being forced out.
But the account of his service to Mr. Bush, as given to Mr. Suskind, whose book is to be published Tuesday, is the first by a former senior Bush administration official. It is sure to fuel questions from Mr. Bush's political opponents about the administration's rationale for invading Iraq, and to focus new attention on Mr. Bush's management style and the balance in the White House between politics and policy.
A White House spokesman, Ken Lisaius, said on Sunday night that the administration "simply is not in the business of doing book reviews."
Mr. Lisaius said the book and the interviews appeared to be "an attempt to justify the former secretary's own opinions instead of the results this administration has achieved on behalf of the American people."
In the interviews and in excerpts from the book, Mr. O'Neill described Mr. Bush as hard to read and seemingly disengaged from the details of many policy debates. He portrayed Mr. Cheney as unwilling to serve the role of honest broker during those debates.
In the interviews on Sunday, Mr. O'Neill did not describe in depth the early discussions about removing Mr. Hussein from power. Mr. Suskind told "60 Minutes" that he had documents dating from before Sept. 11, 2001, showing planning for the aftermath of a war with Iraq, covering peacekeeping forces, war crimes tribunals and Iraqi oil fields.
Since the Clinton administration, the official position of the United States, backed by bipartisan votes in Congress, has been to call for "regime change" in Iraq. Even before taking office, Mr. Bush had spoken to exiled Iraqi opponents of Mr. Hussein about his desire to drive the Iraqi leader from power.
But the administration has disclosed few details of its early thinking about war with Iraq and did not publicly raise the prospect of such a war seriously until August 2002.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. toll in Afghan military campaign hits 100
1/12/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-01-12-afghanistan_x.htm
KABUL, Afghanistan - A U.S. soldier died over the weekend after a traffic accident near Kabul, becoming the 100th American casualty since the U.S.-led military campaign began in Afghanistan two years ago. Army Sgt. Rich Wind patrols south of Kandahar; an accidntal death brings the U.S. casualty toll in Aghanistan to 100. By Sardar Ahmad, AFP
In contrast, the American death toll in Iraq passed the 100 mark in early April - only weeks after the U.S.-led invasion was launched. A total 495 U.S. service members have died in Iraq, most in the intense guerrilla war that followed the end of regular fighting, declared May 1.
Afghanistan has faced increasing attacks by Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters - though they have caused more Afghan deaths than American. In the southwestern province of Nimroz on Monday, dozens of suspected Taliban fighters attacked a police checkpoint and killed four policemen, a provincial governor said.
The U.S. military said the latest American death came when the soldier was involved in a vehicle accident southwest of the Afghan capital Friday night and died as a result of his injuries the next morning. The soldier was not identified.
"His death underscores the dangers inherent in Operation Enduring Freedom and our condolences go out to his family," the statement said, without giving further details.
There are far fewer American troops fighting in Afghanistan than the 130,000 stationed in Iraq. U.S. troops make up the majority of the 11,700-strong coalition forces hunting al-Qaeda rebels and remnants of the Taliban regime that was ousted from power in Afghanistan in late 2001.
According to the U.S. Department of Defense Web site, as of Friday morning there had been 30 U.S. casualties from hostile fire since the Afghan operation began in October 2001 and another 69 "non-hostile" casualties.
The soldier's death Saturday would bring the total to 100.
Capt. Bruce Frame, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command in Florida, said that the Pentagon figures showing 100 dead were "official" and that they were more accurate than any others because they included soldiers who may have died long after they were reported injured.
Frame said, however, that the U.S. military had only tallied 97 deaths in the Afghan mission, and that the breakdown of how they died was different as well. He said his tally included 38 killed in action and 59 who died in non-hostile incidents.
Maj. Pete Mitchell, another U.S. Central Command spokesman, said it was unlikely that the unofficial total included Saturday's fatality, as it usually takes several days for the Pentagon to notify next of kin and authorize an increase in the tallies.
That would put the army's figure at 98. Frame said the discrepancy could be as a result of updated information used in the Pentagon tally that was not included in the Central Command number.
Two CIA contractors were killed in an Oct. 25 ambush as they tracked terrorists operating near Shkin, about 100 miles south of Kabul. And Johnny "Mike" Spann, the first American killed in combat in Afghanistan, in November 2001, was also a CIA employee.
It was unclear if CIA agents were included in either of the totals.
U.S.-led forces began their campaign to oust the Taliban after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and after the hardline Islamic militia refused to hand over al-Qaeda leader and suspected mastermind of the terror plot Osama bin Laden, who had used Afghanistan as a base.
Bin Laden has evaded capture and is believed to be hiding someplace along the rugged, poorly defined border between Afghanistan and Pakistan - where many of the tribal population on both sides of the frontier sympathize with the Taliban.
And in recent months, Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters and guerrillas loyal to renegade warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar have stepped up their campaign against the coalition and the U.S.-backed Afghan government.
Rebels have waged frequent attacks on security forces, government officials and aid workers, particularly in the lawless south and east of the country.
The attacks have cast doubts over whether Afghanistan, which earlier this month adopted a new constitution after two decades of war and civil strife, will be stable enough to hold general elections in June as planned.
-------- arms
Russian official denies US claims of Moscow arms sales to Iraq
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112113626.snnzja6y.html
A Russian official Monday rejected US claims that Russian firms had supplied Saddam Hussein's regime with sophisticated military technology and that the equipment was used to try to thwart the US-led invasion of Iraq.
"Information, fed to some American and British media, of supposed 'secret' deliveries by Russia to Iraq of military goods is no more than a broken record that was used in the first days" of the war in Iraq, an unnamed government official told Russian news agencies.
On Saturday, a senior US official said that discoveries made during the war, as well as in the months since Baghdad fell in April, "corroborated" US allegations that Russian firms sold satellite jamming devices as well as night-vision goggles to Baghdad in violation of UN sanctions.
And that official said Moscow's denials of the allegations -- made in the early days of the war -- had been inadequate and had done considerable damage to US-Russia relations.
"Those were very difficult issues, and we never received entirely satisfactory explanations of the evidence that we obtained in the heat of the war," the official told reporters at the State Department on Friday.
"The most I can say is we have corroborated some of that evidence," the official said on condition of anonymity. "The issue is still a sensitive one."
Russia along with Germany and France fiercely opposed the US-led invasion of Iraq.
----
US presses accusations over Russian arms sales to Iraq
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112194700.50b0xug3.html
The United States said Monday it is pursuing allegations that Russian firms sold sophisticated military technology to Saddam Hussein's Iraq which Moscow has angrily rejected.
"We continue to look into this case," said deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli. "We gave Russia a lot of data to establish the veracity of our contentions.
"We will continue our dialogue with Russia on this issue and would note that cooperation in other areas has continued," he told reporters when asked about weekend reports that cited senior US officials as claiming to have found proof of the allegations.
Ereli would not comment on the reports, but reiterated allegations made by the White House and State Department in the early days of the Iraq war in March that Russian firms had sold equipment to Baghdad in violation of US law and UN sanctions.
"We had information that sensitive Russian-made military equipment had been sold to Iraq before the war and posed a threat to US forces there," he said.
"We told the Russians we took the matter very seriously and we raised the issue with the government numerous times at senior levels," he said, hinting that Moscow's explanations to date had not met US concerns. "This is a subject of ongoing discussion," Ereli said. "There are a variety of explanations. Our concern ... is to ensure that measures are in place so that this kind of proliferation doesn't happen again."
Earlier Monday, Russian officials decried the weekend reports that quoted senior US officials as saying Washington's allegations had been "corroborated" by discoveries in Iraq.
Deputy Prime Minister Boris Alyeshin told the Interfax news agency that "the government is not aware of cases" where Russian firms had sold arms to Iraq.
"We follow international principles on such matters... I think it's impossible to carry out large deals like this without the government's knowledge," Alyeshin said.
He also criticized the United States for going public with the accusations before informing the Russian side.
"In these cases, it would be nice to share such data with us," he said. "Only in this manner can one build cooperation."
On Friday, a senior US official said that discoveries made during the war, as well as in the months since Baghdad fell in April, "corroborated" US allegations that Russian firms sold satellite jamming devices as well as night-vision goggles to Baghdad.
That official said Moscow's denials of the allegations -- made in the early days of the war -- had been inadequate and had done considerable damage to US-Russia relations.
"Those were very difficult issues, and we never received entirely satisfactory explanations of the evidence that we obtained in the heat of the war," the official told reporters.
"The most I can say is we have corroborated some of that evidence," the official said on condition of anonymity. "The issue is still a sensitive one."
-------- business
Pentagon Probes Defense Contractors' Hiring-WSJ
Mon January 12, 2004
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=AQLZS2QAF4ZKICRBAEKSFEY?type=domesticNews&storyID=4108029
NEW YORK - The Defense Department has launched an inquiry into high-level military officials who have taken jobs at defense contractors over the past few years, prompted by ethical problems at Boeing Co., the Wall Street Journal said on Monday.
Citing people familiar with the matter, the paper said the probe is expected to focus on Boeing first and then expand quickly to the hiring practices of other big military suppliers.
The inquiry stems from Boeing's firing of Michael Sears as chief financial officer in November for violating company policy by discussing a job offer with Darleen Druyun, who served as the Air Force's No. 2 acquisition official before joining the company in January. She was also let go, before she had recused herself from Boeing-related negotiations.
Investigators are seeking to determine whether dozens of other Defense Department officials complied with federal requirements to refrain from participating in certain program decisions both before and after moving to the private sector, the paper said, citing people familiar with the details.
Boeing officials could not be reached immediately for comment.
----
Pentagon to investigate military officials hired by defense firms
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112112255.d58pvi4b.html
The Pentagon is investigating whether several high-level military officials hired by major defense contractors violated conflict of interest rules by taking part in decisions, the Wall Street Journal said Monday.
The inquiry will focus on Boeing initially but is likely to look at other big defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Carlyle Group, the paper said, quoting people familiar with the matter.
"Investigators want to determine whether dozens of other Defense Department officials complied with federal requirements to refrain from participating in certain program decisions both before and after they made their moves to the private sector," the Journal said.
In December, the Pentagon suspended a multi-billion dollar tanker aircraft contract with Boeing following revelations about the company's improper recruitment of an Air Force official.
Boeing fired the official in question, former head of Air Force purchasing Darleen Druyun, and chief financial officer Mike Sears, in late November. CEO Phil Condit resigned shortly thereafter.
Boeing is also facing an investigation in St Louis, Missouri for allegedly using foreign titanium in F-15 fighter jets and other Pentagon programs, which is against US law, the Journal said.
It is also under investigation and facing possible penalties for obtaining Lockheed Martin documents when the two firms were competing for a Pentagon contract.
----
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page E09
States News Service
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8636-2004Jan11?language=printer
AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley, Md., won a $35.03 million contract from the Army's Aviation and Missile Command for the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle.
Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. of Baltimore won a $30.21 million contract from the Navy's Facilities Engineering Command for complete renovation of Chauvenet Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy.
Anteon International Corp. of Fairfax won a $15.7 million contract from the Army for environmental support services.
SOC Enterprises of Arlington won an $8.2 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for a call center and warehousing and fulfillment services.
ICF Consulting of Fairfax won a contract valued at up to $6 million from the General Services Administration for strategic planning for technology programs and activities, development and analysis.
Battelle Memorial Institute's Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation of Baltimore won a $5.36 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department's National Cancer Institute for the Agricultural Health Study at the North Carolina Field Station.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of Belcamp, Md., won a $4.62 million contract from the Army's Communications-Electronics Command for contractor, logistical and support services.
Marine Hydraulics International Inc. of Norfolk won a $2.27 million contract from the Navy for work on the USS Porter (DDG-78).
Exeter Government Services of Rockville won a contract valued at up to $290,000 from the General Services Administration's Federal Systems Integration and Management Center to provide leadership and support to the Marine Corps' Information Technology Steering Group.
Avionics Specialties of Charlottesville, Va., won a $281,400 contract from the Naval Inventory Control Point for indicator test sets.
Wartsila Lips of Chesapeake, Va., won a $222,348 contract from the Navy for seal assemblies.
National Academy of Sciences of Washington won a $180,000 contract from the Navy for core support for the Ocean Studies Board.
Militec Inc. of Arlington won a $99,000 contract from the Defense General Supply Center for lubricating oil.
Intellitech Microsystems Inc. of Gambrills, Md., won a $98,500 contract from the Army's Aviation and Missile Command for defense research and development.
Nurad Technologies Inc. of Baltimore won a $91,920 contract from the Defense Supply Center for antennas.
American Association for the Advancement of Science of Washington won a $73,451 contract from the Air Force's Air Education and Training Command for Internet science camps.
Sabra, Want & Associates Inc. of Baltimore won a $57,939 contract from the Homeland Security Department's Coast Guard for the design of an entryway.
Advantec Solutions' Manufacturing Division of Silver Spring won a $54,250 contract from the Defense Industrial Supply Center for tie-down assemblies.
These contracts were awarded by the federal government to companies in Maryland, Virginia and the District. For more information, call States News Service at 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- china
China Warned Against Using U.S. to Pressure Taiwan
January 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-taiwan-china.html
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian warns China in his new book against using the United States to pressure it, saying the strategy could backfire and further alienate the island, according to excerpts seen on Monday.
But he also proposes that Taiwan and China set aside differences, stop passing messages through the United States and exchange envoys after the elections, the mass circulation United Daily News said.
Publication of ``Believing in Taiwan'' comes two months before presidential elections with tension simmering between Taiwan and China, which regards the island as a breakaway province that must one day be brought back to the fold -- by force if necessary.
``Beijing's policy toward Taiwan is to usebusinessmen to besiege the (Taipei) government, use economics to promote unification and use force to prevent independence,'' according to the book, Chen's second since he became president and ended more than five decades of one party rule in 2000.
``Now, we should add one more -- use the United States to pressure Taiwan,'' according to excerpts of a chapter on relations with China provided by Chen's campaign office.
``How can this divide-and-conquer strategy win the hearts of the Taiwan people? (I) fear it will only increase hostility and confrontation and fortify Taiwan's political identity and national identity,'' says the excerpt from the book, which goes on sale later this week.
China gave unusual VIP treatment to Taiwan business leaders last month, granting them a rare audience with Chinese President Hu Jintao.
Trade and tourism between the two political rivals have blossomed since detente began in the late 1980s. Taiwan investors have poured up to $100 billion into China.
DAGGER IN A SMILE
Chen likens China's policy toward the island to ``hiding a dagger in a smile,'' the Taiwan Daily quoted the book as saying.
The United States switched diplomatic recognition to Beijing from Taipei in 1979 -- accepting Beijing's ``one China'' policy -- but remains Taiwan's main arms supplier and diplomatic ally.
At the same time, the United States and China are major trade partners and share strategic interests -- China hosted six-party talks to resolve the North Korea nuclear crisis and backed the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
During a visit to Washington by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in November, President Bush bluntly criticized Taiwan for threatening to upset the ``status quo'' with China, an apparent reference to Chen's plan for the island's first referendum.
China sees the referendum as a provocative move toward statehood. The two sides split at the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
Chen's book says China's opposition to the referendum, which is likely to call on China to dismantle nearly 500 missiles aimed at the island, reflects its fears about Taiwan's democracy.
Chen plans to hold the referendum in an apparent bid to boost to his re-election chances. He trails in surveys after unemployment hit a record high and the economy slipped into recession during his four-year watch.
Last week Taiwan indefinitely postponed sending a delegation to the United States to seek Washington's blessing for the referendum in what appeared to be a setback for Chen.
Beijing has ignored Chen since his election because he refuses to embrace its cherished ``one China'' principle, which dictates that both Taiwan and the mainland are part of one country.
-------- iran
Iranian Council Bars Thousands From Vote
January 12, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Jan. 11 - A new power struggle engulfed Iran's government on Sunday when a hard-line Islamic religious authority disqualified half the 8,200 candidates in parliamentary elections next month, provoking outrage among reformers who accused their conservative rivals of trying to steal the vote.
Rejected candidates included a brother of the reform-minded president, Mohammad Khatami. More than 80 current members of the 290-seat Parliament were rejected, including two prominent feminists, two deputy speakers and six leaders of important parliamentary commissions. Many had been outspoken critics of Iran's strict Islamic religious political system and its treatment of dissenters and diverse views.
The religious authority, the 12-member Guardian Council, had disqualified some candidates in previous elections and had blocked many reform bills passed by Parliament in recent years. But the number of disqualifications for the Feb. 20 elections represented the most drastic action the council has taken against reformers in the country's parliamentary history. Nearly 60 reformist members of Parliament held a sit-in at Parliament on Sunday to protest the action. Ali Shakourirad, a lawmaker on the disqualified list, told reporters that the group intended to continue the sit-in until the disqualifications were reversed. If not, he said, "we will take further steps in our protest."
The Iranian Student News Agency reported that governors general around the country had said in a letter to President Khatami that they would resign if the disqualification of candidates was not reversed. "Clearly if there are no results within a week, governor generals see no reason to continue their jobs in conditions in which they cannot provide free elections, which is one of the fundamental rights of citizens," the news agency quoted them as saying.
President Khatami urged supporters to react calmly, but he was clearly angered by what outside political analysts called a brazen effort by religious conservatives to neutralize Iran's reform movement.
"There are legal means to react to this problem, and I hope these legal means will solve the problem," President Khatami told reporters after a cabinet meeting.
"We must not do anything to cause tension but we have the right to say what we have to say and to protest," he said. "One political faction must not consider its right more than what it deserves, and it should not eliminate another faction in order to win in elections."
Mohsen Mirdamadi, head of Parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, who was among those disqualified, told the Islamic Republic News Agency that the Guardian Council's move was a "bloodless coup." He said President Khatami's younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, and some others were disqualified because the council had concluded they did not support the rule of the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The ayatollah has the power to change the Guardian Council's decision. It remained unclear late Sunday whether President Khatami would appeal directly to him or take some intermediate action first.
Other rejected candidates included six from the ethnic Kurdish region of Iranian Kurdistan. Jalal Jalali, a parliamentarian from Sanandaj, in the center of that region, was quoted by the Etemad newspaper as saying Kurds would boycott the elections if their candidates could not run.
The six clerics of the Guardian Council are picked by Ayatollah Khamenei. The council is responsible for vetting election candidates and approving Parliament's laws to make sure they are compatible with Islamic law and the Constitution.
There was no public explanation by the council for its decisions on each of the disqualified candidates. But Iranian newspapers reported Sunday that a majority of disqualifications were made because the candidates opposed Iran's religious government or were members of illegal opposition groups. The newspapers said some were disqualified because they had criminal records.
The election had been seen as a test of the public's attitude toward the reform movement in Iran. The council's disqualification actions could lead to voter apathy, some political commentators said.
"We must not forget the fact that the Islamic Republic has received its legitimacy in the past 25 years from voters' turnout in elections, and if people refrain from voting this time the system's 25-year-old legitimacy would be questioned," wrote a journalist, Badrolsadat Mofidi, in the Shargh newspaper on Sunday.
-------- iraq
Protesters attack British troops over joblessness
January 12, 2004
By Nadia Abou el-Magd
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040111-112635-2664r.htm
AMARAH, Iraq - Unemployed Iraqis pelted British troops with stones yesterday while a top Shi'ite Muslim cleric demanded that the country's next parliament be elected rather than chosen by local caucuses, as planned by the Americans.
Also yesterday, a U.S.-backed politician said a purge of members of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party had pushed 28,000 Iraqis from their jobs, with a similar number expected to follow.
In the southern city of Amarah, waves of protesters - some armed with sticks and shovels - rushed British troops guarding the city hall a day after clashes killed six protesters and wounded at least 11.
The British drove the crowd back from the compound, which also houses the U.S.-led civil administration and the 1st Battalion of Britain's Light Infantry. Booms and flashes of light from makeshift bombs exploded in the melee.
"We are trying to permit a peaceful protest, but prevent loss of life or damage to property," said British Maj. Johnny Bowron.
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. Demonstrators said yesterday that they were looking to avenge those killed Saturday. There were no reports of additional injuries.
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 ago had not been fulfilled.
Before the U.S.-led invasion, Saddam's security forces were the biggest employer in this city of 400,000.
The comments yesterday by Iraq's top Shi'ite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani, could complicate American plans to hand over sovereignty to the Iraqis by July 1.
Ayatollah al-Sistani, whose views are highly influential among Iraq's Shi'ite majority, said the U.S. plan to have regional caucuses select members of a provisional national assembly would give birth to an illegitimate government.
"This will, in turn, give rise to new problems, and the political and security situation will deteriorate," the ayatollah said in a statement released by his office in the holy Shi'ite city of Najaf, south of Baghdad.
Ayatollah al-Sistani demanded that the assembly be elected directly, adding that credible elections could be held in Iraq within months.
He also balked at American plans to seek quick approval for the continued presence of foreign troops in Iraq through the U.S.-picked Governing Council. The ayatollah said only an elected government could sign off on the presence of U.S. troops beyond July 1.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of former high-level Ba'athists are set to lose their jobs, said Governing Council member Ahmed Chalabi, who leads a committee aimed at ridding Iraq of the influence of Saddam's party.
For Mr. Chalabi, the idea of reconciliation with top Ba'athists is a nonstarter.
"How can you reconcile those laying dead in mass graves with those who killed them? We can only talk about forgiveness," Mr. Chalabi told reporters.
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U.S. Soldier Killed, 2 Are Wounded, in Baghdad
January 12, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12CND-IRAQ.html
A soldier with the First Armored Division was killed and two were wounded today when a roadside bomb exploded in central Baghdad, the United States Central Command said.
The death brings to 343 the total number of American troops killed in hostile action since the war against Iraq began, according to official United States figures.
Also today, American troops killed seven men in a gun battle with an armed gang trying to steal fuel from a pipeline near the town of Samarra, a United States Army spokesman said.
The killing in Baghdad by an improvised explosive device was the first reported combat fatality since last Thursday, when nine soldiers died when their Black Hawk helicopter was shot down in the village of Nuaymiya, near the restive town of Fallujah.
Attacks by insurgents have continued apace since the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of coalition operations, said at a news conference in Baghdad today that in the past week there had been an an average of 17 attacks a day against coalition forces. This is down from an average of 30 attacks a day before Mr. Hussein was captured.
General Kimmitt added that "the coalition conducted 1,768 patrols, 24 offensive operations, 32 raids and captured 114 anti-coalition suspects in the past 24 hours."
A patrol led by an Iraqi citizen led American troops late Sunday to a group of about 40 armed men trying to siphon off fuel from a pipeline about 11 miles south of Samarra, the Army spokesman, Sgt. Robert Cargie of the Fouth Infantry Division said by telephone from Tikrit.
The thieves, who had 10 to 15 trucks, shot at the soldiers as they came forward to capture them, Sergeant Cargie said. The troops returned fire with rifles and 125-millimeter cannon on a Bradley fighting vehicle, killing seven.
"Three fuel trucks and one transport truck were destroyed," Sergeant Cargie said. There was no indication of serious damage to the pipeline or disruption of fuel supplies, he added.
Sergeant Cargie said that lately it was not unusual for a patrol to lead American soldiers to an incident under suspicion. "Recently, there has been more and more cooperation and more and more incidents of direct identification: `Here's a cache,' `Here are bad people,' etc."
In southern Iraq today, more than 200 demonstrators turned out in Amara, the city where six Iraqis died when the Iraqi police and British troops opened fire on protesters on Saturday and Sunday.
Heavy rain hit the city today, and "the protest lasted just a couple of hours," a spokeswoman for British forces in southern Iraq, Lt. Elizabeth Hill, said by telephone from Basra.
The demonstrators have been protesting over unemployment.
At the Baghdad news conference, an adviser to the coalition, Daniel Senor, sought to play down the official reaction to a statement on Sunday by Iraq's most influential Shiite cleric that members of an interim assembly must be chosen through direct elections.
The statement, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, put at risk White House plans to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis by July 1 and came despite continuing efforts to change the cleric's mind on the subject.
The cleric issued an edict in late June that urged Iraqis to press for general elections and that forced American officials to scrap their original plans for writing a constitution.
A couple of reporters at the news conference inferred that Ayatollah Sistani's statement was a warning that if the United States did not comply with his position the result would be more violence.
Mr. Senor said: "What I hear from Ayatollah Sistani and the full range of religious and political leaders that are speaking out is a vision for Iraq, a democratic vision for Iraq."
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Once-Ruling Sunnis Unite to Regain a Piece of the Pie
January 12, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12SUNN.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 11 - Fakri Abdullah al-Qaisi says the vision came to him as it does with all prophets: in communion with God, atop a holy mountain. God's message, he said, was to unite the Sunni Muslims of Iraq.
That was in February, outside Mecca, at the barren Mount Arafat.
Mr. Qaisi returned to Iraq in June, and now has begun to realize his calling. He has brought together 85 leaders of Sunni groups from across the country - groups often at odds with one other - to form the State Council for the Sunnis, the first unified political voice for Iraqi Sunnis opposed to American rule.
Since the council first met on Dec. 25, it has demanded the release of more than 70 Sunni clerics detained by the Americans. Muhammad Ahmed al-Rashid, a senior member of the council and of the Muslim Brotherhood here, a highly political sect, has condemned the foreign occupation in long interviews with Al Jazeera, the Arab network.
From Ramadi to Tikrit, from Samarra to Baquba, towns in the so-called Sunni Triangle north and west of Baghdad chafe under the occupation, and insurgents there continue to mount deadly attacks against allied soldiers. The Sunni Arabs were put in power by British colonialists and by Saddam Hussein, himself a Sunni, and people in the area fear the installation of a government dominated by Shiite Muslims, who make up 60 to 70 percent of the population but who have never been given ruling authority in modern times.
In a sign that the council is emerging as a political leader, the two Sunni Islamic parties on the Iraqi Governing Council have joined Mr. Qaisi's group. At a meeting on Wednesday, the Sunni council decided to increase the number of representatives from those parties to five each from three each.
In interviews, the two Governing Council representatives from the parties said there was a need for a unified Sunni voice, and one of them, Mohsen Abdul Hameed of the Iraqi Islamic Party, said, "The Sunnis in Iraq think their role has been marginalized."
Mr. Qaisi, a dentist by training, gave a much blunter assessment. "Our country has been invaded, and all rights of the Sunni people have been affected," he said in an office in the Ibn Taimiya Mosque, a stronghold of the conservative Salafiya branch of Sunni Islam. "Their mosques have been destroyed, along with their houses, and Sunnis have been killed. Only the Sunnis are oppressed by the American invasion."
American soldiers have recently raided prominent mosques, alienating many Sunnis, with protesters at rallies calling for jihad. The most inflammatory incident took place on Jan. 1, when soldiers broke up a meeting at the Ibn Taimiya Mosque and arrested 32 people, including Imam Mahdi al-Sumaydai, the mosque's senior cleric.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, an American military spokesman, said soldiers had found explosives, Kalashnikov rifles, boxes of bullets, mortars, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons.
Military officials showed reporters a videotape of the soldiers carting away weapons, but Mr. Qaisi and the imams at the mosque denied the existence of a cache. Such a discovery could indicate a link between senior members of the new Sunni council and Iraqis engaged in the armed resistance.
The State Council for the Sunnis used the raid as the basis for one of its first ultimatums. "We particularly denounce the raid on the Ibn Taimiya Mosque and in general on the other Sunni mosques," the statement said. "We ask for the occupation forces to stop this upsetting and insulting process if they want to avoid bad consequences."
Mr. Qaisi shook his head when asked whether the statement implied violence. Instead, he said, it meant public opinion would move against the Americans.
Since Mr. Hussein fell from power, no political group has emerged as the voice of the insurgency. But it is only a matter of time, terrorism experts say. "Typically it's the armed wing that gets traction," said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation. "Once they've gotten that publicity, they develop a political wing that's a more acceptable face."
Mr. Qaisi is quick to deny any connection between guerrilla fighters and his council. He said that the council was the voice of the "opposition," not the "resistance," and that his members wanted to engage in peaceful discourse with the occupiers. At the same time, he said, the council has members from virulently anti-American parts of Iraq like Falluja and Tikrit. "When the resistance sees the Sunnis getting their rights," he said, "they'll calm down, and their activities will stop."
Many of the members are clerics, and about 40 percent come from outside Baghdad, Mr. Qaisi said. The council is expected to expand to 140 members, he added, and will choose permanent leaders from each of the main branches or groups of Sunni Islam in Iraq - Salafiya, Sufism and Muslim Brotherhood.
Hatred between the hard-line Salafis and the mystical Sufis has often boiled over into armed conflict over the centuries, with the Salafis accusing the Sufis of introducing alien concepts into Islam. The Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq went underground in the early 1970's when Mr. Hussein began jailing its leaders and has resurfaced only recently.
The council leadership plays down suggestions that politically uniting the Sunnis brings Iraq closer to religious conflict. "This is about politics, not about religion," said Mahmood al-Mashhadany, a spokesman for the council's Salafiya branch.
On a recent afternoon, leaders from the three branches prayed at the sprawling Umm al Qura Mosque before meeting to select a 13-member interim leadership committee.
Previously known as the Mother of All Battles Mosque, it was ordered built by Mr. Hussein in honor of the first Persian Gulf war in 1991, complete with minarets resembling Scud missiles and the barrels of AK-47's.
But Mr. Qaisi said he and other council members were not supporters of Mr. Hussein. Many were arrested under his rule and were tortured in the Abu Ghraib prison, he said. There, in the 1980's, Salafi leaders organized hundreds of cells that would carry on the religious struggle, come what may, he said.
That struggle continues today, he added, but against a different oppressor.
"We know that American people like freedom and respect human rights," Mr. Qaisi said. "We thought that America gave many benefits to humanity this century.
"But American soldiers have made big mistakes here in Iraq. There are foolish men in America, men with no culture or education. It's like we had a dream of America, and we woke up from this dream."
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Iraqis Revise Policy on Ex-Baath Members
Thousands May Lose Their Jobs, but Procedures for Appeals Are Strengthened
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8316-2004Jan11.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 11 -- Thousands of Iraqis may lose their jobs in the public sector because they once belonged to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party, but their right to appeal for reinstatement or pensions will be enhanced under a new policy announced Sunday by Iraqi authorities.
The inauguration of the new, Iraqi-controlled "de-Baathification" process came during a spate of recent protests by jobless former policemen, army officers and civil servants in various parts of the country, including a second day of violent demonstrations Sunday in the southern town of Amarah.
Hundreds of protesters, some armed with stones, shovels and homemade bombs, fought British troops guarding the provincial headquarters in Amarah, about 200 miles southeast of the capital, demanding promised jobs. On Saturday, clashes there left six protesters dead and 11 injured.
Senior U.S. officials in Baghdad, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Iraqi authorities would now be in "full command" of the process and that their approach would be "much more focused on reconciliation." The occupation authority's stricter policy had been in effect since May.
"This new policy tends to distinguish between nominal and criminal Baathists," a senior official said. "It is really tough on the worst elements," but for the others, "it tends to focus on reintegration, to [seek to] restore the dignity and ease the poverty and desperation experienced by some nominal Baathists."
Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi Governing Council member who announced the new policy Sunday morning, said the process would be "civilized and humanitarian" rather than vengeful, with a formal system of appeals based on written evidentiary documents rather than hearsay.
Yet Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress Party and chairman of the council's de-Baathification committee, predicted that as many as 28,000 more Baathists might lose their jobs. He also made numerous harsh comments about Baathists, saying reconciliation was "not a suitable expression" for the circumstances and suggesting that all party members deserved to suffer for the crimes committed by Hussein's government.
"This party is a criminal party," he told journalists, adding that the suffering of purged Baathists, and their professional loss to Iraqi society, were nothing "compared to the millions who were killed in mass graves" or oppressed by Hussein's one-party dictatorship. The Baath Party, he said, "was not a normal party; it became an institution for control, repression and corruption."
Between 15,000 and 30,000 Iraqis, including teachers, university professors, engineers and security officers lost their positions and pensions in a May purge ordered by L. Paul Bremer, the chief occupation administrator.
All Baathists from the top two tiers of the party were fired outright and those from two lower ranks had a severely limited right of appeal. This was in part because U.S. officials were in a hurry to rid the government of the party's influence, and in part because they viewed all senior-level Baathists as sharing responsibility for the crimes and abuses that characterized the Hussein era.
But the vast political purge, in addition to the economic upheaval and bureaucratic score-settling that followed the war last spring, have sparked increasingly angry and violent protests as the months of idleness and frustration have lengthened.
"If we don't find a solution to our problems, we could all end up as saboteurs and terrorists," said Majid Ali, 35, a shabbily dressed former police sergeant who joined a small, peaceful protest outside the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority headquarters Sunday.
Like other former policemen at the demonstration, Ali said he was never a member of the Baath Party but had been forced into retirement in July, given one $360 payment and been turned away by authorities since then. "We have families to worry about, and there are groups that seduce you with money to attack the coalition," he said.
Several Iraqis pointed out Sunday that under Hussein's single-party state, many teachers, bureaucrats, army officers and other public servants had little choice but to join the party and participate in its activities if they wanted to succeed in their careers.
"No professor could reach higher studies, no officer could be promoted, no journalist could print a newspaper without being a Baathist, but they did it to survive," said Moohan Hafid Fahad, 51, a former army general who had been imprisoned by Hussein. He said the authorities "should go after the criminals, but it is irrational to judge the millions of ex-party members."
According to U.S. officials, however, that is precisely the distinction the new policy aims to clarify. Under the new, Iraqi-made rules, they said, other criteria beyond party rank will be considered for dismissal and reinstatement, including confiscated documents on the individual's party activities and financial rewards, and information about character.
"Rank was the only factor we were able to consider, and we tended to be strict. The Iraqis have the ability to make subjective judgments," the senior U.S. official said. In hundreds of cases, for example, Iraqis held in Iranian prisoner-of-war camps were given "honorary" status as senior Baath Party members.
Under the old policy, dismissed party members could be reinstated only if U.S. officials deemed their work crucial to achieving coalition goals; that definition will be loosened. In addition, thousands of dismissed workers will be given the choice of receiving their pensions or appealing for reinstatement.
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Top Shiite Cleric Hardens Call for Early Iraqi Vote
Sistani Reiterates Opposition to U.S. Plan
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8436-2004Jan11.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 11 -- Iraq's most influential Shiite Muslim cleric hardened his opposition on Sunday to U.S. plans for ceding control of Iraq to a transitional government, repeating his call for early elections and raising the specter of violence if his demand was not met.
The cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rebuffed delegates from the U.S.-appointed Governing Council who visited the holy city of Najaf in an effort to convince him that regional caucuses should choose a new assembly. The assembly would in turn choose a transitional government. The U.S.-backed plan would culminate in a new ratified constitution and a new elected government by the end of 2005.
Sistani insisted, as he has since November, on direct elections this year that would give the country's majority Shiite population a chance to flex its electoral muscle.
"The planned transitional assembly cannot represent the Iraqis in an ideal manner," Sistani said in statement issued by his office. "New problems will arise as a result of this that will only worsen the tensions in the political and security situation.
"The ideal mechanism . . . is for elections, which a number of experts confirm can be held within coming months with an acceptable degree of credibility and transparency." In December, Sistani called on the United Nations to send a team to assess the environment for holding elections.
Sistani also said that only an elected government could approve extending the stay of U.S. troops beyond July 1. Bush administration officials have indicated that U.S. forces would remain in Iraq for several years while the country stabilizes.
Sistani's stand is the latest obstacle to the Bush administration's plan for reducing its civil and military authority. Iraqi political and ethnic factions are intensely jockeying for position in advance of regaining sovereignty, a transition scheduled to be completed by the end of June. Attacks on U.S. forces since President Bush declared an end to major combat on May 1 have prompted U.S. officials to speed up handing back power to the Iraqis.
Shiite leaders regard elections as the shortest route to power and influence. The minority Sunni Muslim population has effectively administered Iraq through 400 years of Turkish, then British and finally Iraqi rule. Shiites were the underclass. Few Shiites, either religiously or secularly oriented, who might oppose Sistani's positions speak out against him for fear of reprisals from his many fervent followers.
Sunnis lack centralized political leadership, and their tool of influence has been violence. Many sympathize with the armed resistance battling the U.S.-led occupation as a means of restoring the political dominance they enjoyed under deposed president Saddam Hussein.
Meanwhile, Kurds, the second-largest minority group, view early elections with fear. They foresee losing the autonomy in northern Iraq they have possessed for more than a dozen years. During recent negotiations among members of the Governing Council, the Kurds have pressed for autonomy to be codified in a basic law that would guide the future government.
Adnan Pachachi, the current council president under a monthly rotation system, led the Governing Council delegation to Najaf and reacted diplomatically but tersely to Sistani's rebuff. "We have a lot of respect for the grand ayatollah," Pachachi told reporters in Najaf.
Most council members consider it too early for elections; census figures are out of date and violence is endemic in central Iraq, the Sunni heartland.
In the far north of the country, ethnic tensions led to clashes this weekend, with Arabs and Turkmens squaring off against the Kurds. On Sunday, rocket-propelled grenades hit the Mosul headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, one of two political and paramilitary parties in control of Kurdish territory, and a bomb also exploded near PUK headquarters in Kirkuk. No one was injured in either incident.
Control of Kirkuk and the oil-rich region around it is a key issue of dispute. Kurdish leaders insist that the area be included in their proposed autonomous zone. In negotiations last week, Governing Council members endorsed Kurdish autonomy in principle. "We affirmed the right of the Kurdish people to self-determination and the Kurdish leadership affirmed their choice, under this right, to remain in Iraq," said Ahmed Chalabi, a council member.
But the degree of self-government and the geographical reach of the autonomous zone are still undecided. "We agreed to disagree," a leading Kurdish official said.
The official said that elections could prove fatal for Kurdish aspirations, given their minority status, with only about 15 percent of the population. "We could lose everything," he said. "Autonomy is not an issue we can afford to let slip beyond elections. We have to lock it in now."
-------- israel / palestine
Overnight, a Towering Divide Rises in Jerusalem
By JAMES BENNET
January 12, 2004
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12JERU.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Jan. 11 - With a towering concrete slab lowered almost tenderly into a ragged street, Israel began drawing a hard line around Jerusalem on Sunday, walling it off from Abu Dis, an Arab village joined to the city for generations.
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians can look like the stalest of stalemates, a furious standoff that defies measurement and maybe even change. But in this crowded neighborhood of east Jerusalem, the city's Arab section, there was something monumental, even defining, about the 30-foot slab descending from the twilight, just after a muezzin called the sunset prayer over the crane's roar.
Israel has begun work on other sections of the Jerusalem barrier, which it says is a necessary bulwark against suicide bombers. But it has not built in such a busy area or so close to Jerusalem's center and holy sites.
Bent with age, bundled in a shawl and white head scarf, Nadieh Shihabi, 90, picked her way past the growing barrier, crossing to her house on the Abu Dis side.
"I want to stay in my home," she said, wiping at tears.
Her daughter-in-law, Rada Shihabi, 53, replied, "You cannot." She would have to stay in Jerusalem with her family rather than risk separation, she said.
"Come and see your house for the last time," Rada Shihabi said gently.
Nadieh Shihabi said she had lost another house, in what is now a Jewish section of Jerusalem, in the Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
There were no camera crews and no demonstrators to witness as the mostly Arab construction crew showed up and began its task, under heavy military guard. The Israeli plans were announced some time ago, but no date was set publicly. The Palestinian leadership appeared caught flat-footed as construction began.
The prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, who lives in Abu Dis a couple of blocks from the construction site, was in another West Bank village, Qalqiliya, which is enclosed by the West Bank barrier. There, he attacked the "racist separation wall."
Israel says the new barricade is not a permanent, political border but a reversible security measure.
"I know that people are talking about the fence," Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Sunday. "You know who built the fence? Terror built the fence."
Speaking at a news conference in Jerusalem, he continued, "If not for the terror, maybe we wouldn't have done it."
Mr. Sharon was referring to the entire barrier of concrete, ditches, fencing and barbed wire that Israel is building against West Bank Palestinians. Just Sunday, Mr. Sharon said, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up in the West Bank after he spotted an Israeli patrol. No one but the bomber was killed or hurt. Mr. Sharon said the man had been headed for central Israel.
The longer West Bank barrier is to be joined to the one being built around Jerusalem, a roughly 21-mile stretch that will consume some West Bank land along the city's eastern outskirts. Planners have said only some segments will be solid concrete.
They also say they will include gates, but Palestinians say they fear that those gates will seldom be open, or that they will not be able to get the permits they will need to pass.
On the slope of the Mount of Olives, Abu Dis sits partly within Jerusalem's municipal boundaries, and negotiators once saw it as the possible capital of a Palestinian state.
The idea was that Abu Dis could do politically what it had already done socially and commercially: smudge the line between Jerusalem and the West Bank.
But distinctions are getting sharper here, not blurrier. As he often does, Mr. Sharon referred to Jerusalem on Sunday as "the eternal, united, and undivided capital of the Jewish people."
The new wall will actually divide Abu Dis, keeping part of it on the Jerusalem side, separating neighbors and relatives who live just blocks or even a street apart.
Months ago, Israel built another wall against Abu Dis. But it is only six or eight feet high, and every day thousands of Palestinians climb over it or squeeze between its slabs. Taxis idle on either side, as children with backpacks, men wearing suits or carrying tool boxes, and elderly people make their way from Abu Dis, which has counted on Jerusalem for basic services like health care.
Bassam Zagari, 38, said that after the first wall was built, he stopped sending his son Ali from his home in Abu Dis to a special school in Jerusalem. Mr. Zagari was no longer getting enough business at his vegetable stand to afford the fees, he said, and because Ali, now 14, cannot hear or speak, Mr. Zagari was afraid he would not stop if he were called by an Israeli patrol.
Mr. Zagari's business has limped along thanks to commerce over the existing wall. "This will destroy us," he said of the new one. "Jerusalem gave life to the town."
With its base planted in a trench and its slabs slotted together, the wall going up on Sunday rose more than 25 feet above the ground and seemed certain to repel climbers.
"Look at the height of that thing," murmured one of the construction workers, a 42-year-old Israeli Arab, as the first slab went up. "What's the difference between a house here, and a house there?" he asked, indicating the facing sides of the street, the opposite sides of the barrier.
Much as Palestinian workers built many Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Arab citizens of Israel were building this section of wall even as they opposed its construction.
The 42-year-old man, who asked not to be identified, said that if he did not do the job, someone else would. "What we are doing is wrong," he said. "It's breaking my heart. But what can we do?"
As the construction workers unloaded a crane, it bowed a telephone wire strung in the path of the new wall, between what was being defined as strictly Jerusalem and strictly West Bank.
The Arab man climbed on top of a bulldozer. With a small pair of clippers, he cut the line.
---------
Sharon Dismisses Worries of Loss of Jewish Identity
January 12, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 11 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel said Sunday that he saw no risk that Palestinians could undermine Israel's Jewish identity by gaining a demographic majority, dismissing a reason pressed by some members of his Likud faction for a swift exit from some of the occupied territories. Advertisement
"I don't see any demographic danger," Mr. Sharon said.
Speaking at a news conference with foreign correspondents here, Mr. Sharon also said Israel is willing to resume peace negotiations with Syria, provided that Syria halted all support for terrorism and dropped any conditions of its own for talks.
Negotiations between the sides collapsed in 2000. Syria has recently renewed overtures for talks it first made, without success, last spring.
Mr. Sharon said Syria had continued to sponsor Hezbollah, a Lebanese group that is on the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.
"I believe that what should be done is that Syria should stop the help and support for terrorist agents, and if that happens I believe Israel will be ready," he said.
He said that in seeking talks, Syria might merely be trying to escape American pressure in the aftermath of the Iraq war.
While defending Israel's decades-old policy of settling Jews in the occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Mr. Sharon restated his intention to eventually move some of those settlements. As he met with the journalists in Jerusalem, tens of thousands of settlers and their supporters, including ministers in Mr. Sharon's government, gathered to protest in Tel Aviv.
Effi Eitam, the minister of housing and leader of the National Religious Party, told the crowd that he heard "sounds of weakness" from the prime minister.
Mr. Sharon said he did not know who was joining in the demonstration. "Israel is a democracy," he said. "Things are decided not by demonstrators, but by the government."
An architect of the settlement movement, Mr. Sharon said he understood the concerns of the demonstrators, but added, "I believe that in order to make peace, Israel will not be able to hold all the Jewish communities."
Like Israeli doves, some Likud leaders have argued recently that Israel must abandon some of the occupied territory of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, or risk losing a Jewish majority between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Ehud Olmert, the vice prime minister and a Likud leader, stunned his faction last month by telling an Israeli newspaper that Israel risked being seen as an apartheid state. "I shudder to think that liberal Jewish organizations that shouldered the burden of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa will lead the struggle against us," he said.
His comments were widely seen as a trial balloon for Mr. Sharon. The concern for preserving a Jewish majority, long raised by Israel's left, has tended to be framed in moral terms - that a minority should not rule over a majority, regardless of political rights.
But Mr. Sharon framed the question in practical political terms, saying that Israel could not lose its Jewish majority because it had no plans to annex the occupied territories or to grant Israeli citizenship to Palestinians.
"There is no reason to worry about that," he said.
He also said the government was making a major effort to bring more Jews to Israel.
Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, warned Israel on Thursday that Palestinians might demand citizenship rights in a single Jewish-Arab state if Mr. Sharon proceeded with a threat of his own, to impose an Israeli resolution of the conflict if negotiations failed.
But Israeli officials, and some Palestinian officials, have played down that remark, noting that seeking rights as Israelis would be very unpopular among Palestinians.
Mr. Sharon has said his plan, which would include a withdrawal from at least some of the West Bank and Gaza, would leave the Palestinians with less territory than they could gain through negotiations. He has not revealed what areas or Israeli settlements might be vacated.
In the past, Mr. Sharon has criticized the occupation in moral terms, calling it bad for Israel and the Palestinians. "Holding 3.5 million Palestinians under occupation is a bad thing for Israel, for the Palestinians and for the Israeli economy," he said last May.
On Sunday, Mr. Sharon repeatedly stated his overall support, despite some reservations, for the so-called road map, the peace initiative favored by the Bush administration. He said he would proceed with his plan for unilateral separation only if peace efforts fail.
Palestinian officials say they believe that Mr. Sharon's goal is to give up limited areas with large numbers of Palestinians - the big cities - to blunt the demographic threat while retaining as much land as possible.
In the West Bank on Sunday, Israeli soldiers shot and killed an 18-year-old Palestinian man. The circumstances were disputed.
The Israeli Army said soldiers in the village of Beita, near Nablus, came under attack with rocks and shot a man who was lighting a homemade gasoline bomb. Palestinians said the young man was sitting on his balcony, studying for an exam.
In another incident on Sunday, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself apart in the West Bank, injuring no one else, after spotting an Israeli patrol, the army said.
-------- latin america
Expectations Are Low at Americas Conference
January 12, 2004
By TIM WEINER and ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/americas/12LATI.html?pagewanted=all
MONTERREY, Mexico, Jan. 11 - President Bush and 33 elected leaders of the Americas will meet here on Monday without a common vision for the future of the Western Hemisphere.
Expectations for great progress are low and friction on important proposals is high. The leaders of Brazil and Argentina do not see eye to eye with Mr. Bush on his free-trade agenda. President Vicente Fox of Mexico will press him to do more for migrants than his proposition of temporary work permits.
The national security needs of the United States are being viewed by some leaders as imperious demands on their sovereignty. American agricultural subsidies are seen by some as crushing small peasant farmers and stifling competition.
Government ministers from the 34 nations at this Summit of the Americas, who have met here since Thursday, had not even agreed on a common declaration to be issued by their leaders. An American official here said there were only "possibilities at the margins" for the United States' agenda of advancing trade, security and migration control.
"There's a tremendous amount of discontent in Latin America with the United States," said Arturo Valenzuela, a former senior National Security Council staff member.
At the top of the political agenda for Mr. Bush in Mexico is his proposal to control illegal immigration by offering temporary work permits. Since more than half of the illegal workers in the United States are Mexicans, he is seeking strong support from President Fox, who says he likes the idea but wants more from Congress.
"I'm convinced it will pass," Mr. Fox said in an interview with The New York Times on Friday, "because it's very convenient for the United States" to know both the legal identities and the labor value of illegal workers.
Mr. Fox also said Friday that he would "travel to the United States as often as possible" promoting the best possible deal for Mexican migrants.
"They are working in restaurants, they are picking mushrooms, they are harvesting broccoli, working in McDonald's, working at Wal-Mart," he said of millions of illegal Mexican migrants. They should have the right, he said, to be "documented and legal," and to "go and work, return home and see their family, return and work. That's the idea, the idea that we want to endorse."
The proposal's political chances for passage depend in part on the perception of Mexico in the United States. Mr. Fox needs to discourage illegal immigration and, in particular, to continue cooperating with American officials in keeping a vigilant counterterrorism watch at Mexico's airports and borders, a United States official here said.
The United States "is very happy with the level of cooperation" on counterterrorism from Mexico, the American ambassador, Tony Garza, said in an interview. "The level of cooperation is light-years ahead of where it was even a year or two ago."
Not so with other nations. Some of the discontent at the meeting seems to rise from the "either you're with us, or you're with the terrorists" pronouncements made by the United States after the September 2001 attacks. An example is Brazil's decision to fingerprint and photograph Americans arriving at airports, mirroring what the United States is now doing to many foreigners. Some unhappiness comes from a sense that everything south from the Texas border to Tierra del Fuego fell off the United States' radar after the attacks. "I think that there's a perception or a line of argument out there that somehow after 9/11 the United States lost interest in anything that didn't relate to terrorism and 9/11," said Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, in a briefing to reporters in Washington on Friday. "It's just not true."
More friction comes from a splintering of the so-called Washington consensus of the 1990's, which held in part that free trade could drive democracy forward and promote good government. "President Bush will have an opportunity to remind his fellow leaders of the benefit of free and open markets and open societies, and the importance of transparent elections," Ms. Rice said.
This will be the fourth Summit of the Americas since 1994. Every nation in the hemisphere except Cuba takes part. Many "are grappling with persistent political, economic, social and, in some cases, ethnic problems," said Roger Noriega, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.
Economic growth in many nations from Mexico southward is too slow to generate enough jobs or ease poverty, he said in a speech on Jan. 7 about the summit meeting. In many countries, corrupt or incompetent governments have "stunted economic development and spawned disenchantment with the label `free market reforms,' " he said.
"Many of their people are weary of waiting for their lives to get better and for their futures to be brighter," Mr. Noriega said. "Soaring rhetoric is not going to meet their down-to-earth demands for concrete action and tangible results."
Mr. Bush is to arrive at midday on Monday for a meeting with Mr. Fox; they are expected to discuss immigration, border security and trade. He is then to hold a news conference with Mr. Fox, speak at the meeting's inauguration ceremony and meet with Presidents Ricardo Lagos of Chile and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. On Tuesday Mr. Bush is to meet with the new prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin, and with Presidents Nestor Kirchner of Argentina and Carlos Mesa of Bolivia.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Martin are certain to discuss why Canada, because of its opposition to the Iraq war, is ineligible to compete for billions of dollars in American-financed Iraq reconstruction projects, officials said. Mr. Kirchner may respond to criticism from the Bush administration over Argentina's less than chilly relations with Cuba.
Mr. Bush will not see President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela. The United States believes that Mr. Chávez may be working in concert with Fidel Castro of Cuba to undermine governments friendly to the United States, including those in Uruguay, Ecuador and possibly Bolivia.
In all, Mr. Bush is to spend a little more than 24 hours in Monterrey. In that time, American officials said, there are possibilities of agreements, marginal or not, on some of the United States' agenda, including stimulating economic growth, promoting businesses and attacking official corruption and organized crime.
Tim Weiner reported from Monterrey, Mexico, and Elisabeth Bumiller from Crawford, Tex., for this article.
-------- mideast
SAUDIS ACKNOWLEDGE AL QAIDA INFILTRATION
[MENL]
12 Jan 2004
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/january/01_13_3.html
ABU DHABI -- Saudi Arabia has quietly acknowledged that its security forces and military have been infiltrated by Al Qaida.
Saudi security sources said Al Qaida has succeeded in obtaining military equipment and uniforms for suicide operations in the kingdom. The sources said the insurgency group has also obtained either vehicles from the National Guard or its insignia, which can be imposed on non-official trucks and deceive soldiers at checkpoints.
Al Qaida's use of military and security equipment allowed insurgents to attack the Muhaya compound in Riyad on Nov. 9. The security sources said a foiled Al Qaida attack meant to take place later that month included the use of a forged military vehicle.
The sources said Al Qaida has a range of sources for military equipment. They said several tailors around Riyad who service the military and National Guard routinely sell uniforms without asking clients for identification.
--------
Syria Rejects Peace Talks With Israel
January 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Syria.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israel's ceremonial president on Monday invited Syrian leader Bashar Assad for peace talks, but Syria brushed off the offer as insufficient.
President Moshe Katsav's invitation came amid growing debate among Israeli officials about how to respond to recent peace gestures from Damascus. Syrian leaders have repeatedly said since December they are ready to resume negotiations with Israel where talks broke off in 2000 -- with Israel offering to return nearly all the Golan Heights captured in the 1967 Middle East War.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon says new talks would have to start from scratch. He has also been skeptical of Syria's motives, saying Assad may be trying to placate Washington in the wake of the U.S. war in neighboring Iraq.
Sharon said Sunday that Israel would restart negotiations with Syria only after Syria stops backing militant groups that continue to attack Israel. The main Palestinian militant groups, as well as the Lebanese group Hezbollah, all operate on Syrian territory.
The prime minister's spokesman, Raanan Gissin, declined to comment Monday.
In extending the invitation, Katsav echoed recent arguments by several Israeli officials who have said Israel should consider the offer for talks regardless of the motives behind it.
``If indeed President Bashar Assad is serious in his intention to make real and permanent peace with us, the right way for achieving it is direct and bilateral negotiations with the Israeli authorities,'' Katsav said. ``I invite him to come to Jerusalem to meet the Israeli leadership, to discuss seriously with the Israeli leaders.''
In Damascus, Suleiman Haddad, chairman of the Syrian parliament's foreign relations committee, repeated Syria's call for restarting talks -- so long as they start where they left off -- and dismissed Katsav's invitation.
``Israel is fully aware that such proposals are evasive and problematic and could never lead to the hoped-for target, which is to restart negotiations from the point they had last reached,'' Haddad said.
Syria's U.N. Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad also dismissed Katsav's invitation, saying ``this is not a serious response to the Syrian initiative.''
Syria won't negotiate with the Israeli president, only with Sharon who, Mekdad said, is ``making hundreds of preconditions to start these talks.''
``These preconditions should not exist, and if he is serious, then we have to start the discussions from where they stopped two years ago,'' Mekdad told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York.
Katsav said he regretted the Syrian response. ``It would appear that Assad is not made of the same stuff as Sadat,'' Katsav said, referring to late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who made a dramatic visit to Jerusalem in 1977 before becoming the first Arab leader to sign a peace agreement with Israel.
Since the talks broke down in 2000, changes in the Middle East have made a peace accord with Syria less important for Israel, columnist Nahum Barnea wrote Monday in the Yediot Ahronot daily.
With the United States accusing Syria of supporting terrorism and threatening possible economic sanctions, Sharon can afford to wait on the sidelines, Barnea wrote. Israel also has become preoccupied with its conflict with the Palestinians after three years of violence.
``If Sharon believed that Assad was his ejection seat from the Palestinian problem, I believe that he would have pounced on the opportunity. His aversion attests to the fact that he understands that he is mired in the mud,'' Barnea wrote.
Still technically at war with Israel, Syria demands the return of all the Golan, a strategic plateau overlooking northern Israel, as part of any potential deal.
Israel annexed the 620-square-mile Golan in 1981, though its sovereignty there is not internationally recognized. Its current population of about 35,000 is roughly evenly divided between Israelis and its original Druse Arab residents.
--------
U.S. Using Turkey Base For Troop Rotations
WORLD IN BRIEF
Washington Post
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8711-2004Jan11.html
ISTANBUL -- The U.S. military has begun using an air base in southern Turkey for a massive rotation of troops in and out of Iraq, in a sign of improved U.S.-Turkish relations, a U.S. official said Sunday.
Turkish permission to use the Incirlik air base marks a sharp contrast to last year, when the country refused to allow U.S. troops to use its territory for the war against its southern neighbor.
It also comes as concerns mount in Turkey over demands by Iraqi Kurds for greater autonomy in oil-rich northern Iraq. Turkey and neighbors Syria and Iran fear Iraqi Kurds might eventually push for independence and cause instability in the region. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan is expected to raise Turkey's concerns about Iraq during talks with President Bush in Washington later this month.
The use of Incirlik helps the United States as it undertakes its largest movement of troops in decades. The U.S. military is preparing to rotate about 130,000 troops out of Iraq over the coming months, replacing them with about 110,000 fresh troops.
-------- space
Bush Launches a Dangerous Space Policy
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
From: "Global Network" <globalnet@mindspring.com>
Date: Mon Jan 12, 2004 8:50am
CONTACT:
Bruce Gagnon (209) 729-0517 or (207) 319-2017 (cell)
Dr. Michio Kaku (212) 650-8448
Two leading experts on the space program are warning that the expected space policy announcement by George W. Bush to establish permanent bases on the moon and an aggressive program to take humans to Mars will be an expensive and dangerous undertaking.
Dr. Michio Kaku (Professor of Theoretical Physics at the Graduate Center, CUNY) and Bruce Gagnon (Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space) both have years of experience monitoring and writing about the space program and working to stop the use of nuclear power in space.
An integral part of the Bush announcement is expected to be the nuclear rocket - what is now known as "Project Prometheus," named after the God of Fire. The nuclear rocket would cut in half the amount of time it would take to get to Mars, and would have military applications as well.
According to Dr. Kaku, "Perhaps one of the greatest risks facing this ambitious program is the use of dangerous, unproven technologies which could backfire, eroding public confidence in the space program. One such dangerous technology is the nuclear rocket, which is now seriously being reconsidered after being rightly rejected for the past several decades. The nuclear booster rocket has gone through many stages of development in the past, and all of them have been cancelled with good cause."
Said Bruce Gagnon, "There is legitimate reason to question the plan for the establishment of bases on the moon. The military has long eyed the moon as a potential base of operations as warfare is moved into the heavens. The moon is also the site of rare helium-3 which many view as the replacement for fossil fuels as supplies dwindle on Earth. Now is the time for a thoughtful and thorough debate about the expected Bush space proposals."
In a New York Times op-ed piece called A New Pathway to the Stars, space writer Timothy Ferris wrote on December 21, 2003 that "Another possible energy source of the future - nuclear fusion reactors burning clean, safe helium 3 - has its own lunar connection. Helium 3, rare on Earth, is abundant on the moon. When fusion reactors start coming on line, lunar entrepreneurs may stand to make the kind of money their predecessors raked in during the gold rush and the oil boom."
The U.S. never signed the 1979 Moon Treaty that was created at the United Nations to prevent a rush of land claims and military bases on the planetary body. In fact, in a 1959 U.S. Army study entitled The Establishment of a Lunar Outpost the once secret plan stated that "The lunar outpost is required to develop and protect potential U.S. interests on the moon; to develop techniques in moon-based surveillance of the earth and space.to serve as a base for exploration of the moon, for further exploration into space and for military operations on the moon if required."
The moon base theme reemerged in a 1989 study written for the U.S. Congress by John Collins. The study, published in book form, was called Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years and the forward to the book was signed by political leaders at the time including Sen. John Glenn (D-OH) and Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL).
Congressional staffer Collins reported that the U.S. would need to have military bases on the moon in order to control the pathway between the Earth and moon. Collins went on to conclude that with U.S. bases on the moon, "Armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments on return." Obviously the author was envisioning the day when aerospace corporations would be hard at work "mining the sky" for profit.
Said Bruce Gagnon, "Just as the Spanish Armada and British Navy were created to protect the "interests and investments" in the new world, space is viewed today as open territory to be seized for eventual corporate profit. The United Nations created the Moon Treaty and the Outer Space Treaty as ways to circumvent the warlike tendencies of humankind as we step out into the cosmos. These treaties hoped to ensure that conflict over 'national appropriation' of the planetary bodies could be avoided."
The Bush administration appears to be heading in the opposite direction. The Bush space plan will be enormously expensive, dangerous, and will create unnecessary conflict as they expand nuclear power and weapons into space - all disguised as the noble effort to hunt for the "origins of life."
The Global Network, founded in 1992 to stop the nuclearization and weaponization of space, has over 170 affiliate groups all over the world. The website of the organization is http://www.space4peace.org
--
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 729-0517 (207) 319-2017 (Cell phone)
http://www.space4peace.org
-------- propaganda wars
U.S. Firm to Run Iraqi TV
Harris Corp. Also to Operate National Newspaper
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8313-2004Jan11.html
The Pentagon has awarded a $96 million contract to a U.S. communications equipment maker to run Saddam Hussein's old television and radio network, now called al-Iraqiya, for the next 12 months, the chairman of the company said last week.
Harris Corp., based in Melbourne, Fla., will operate the national newspaper formerly run by Hussein's son Uday, in addition to running the broadcast network, said Howard L. Lance, chairman of the company.
When Hussein's government fell in April, the state-run broadcast stations and newspaper were seized. In the months since, they have been run by a U.S. defense contractor, Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC).
Under SAIC direction, the stations have not drawn viewers and listeners because their content was considered too pro-United States. In addition, there has been turnover in the non-Iraqi management and turmoil within the Iraqi staff, many of whom were holdovers from the previous dispensation. The day before Hussein was captured last month, 30 Iraqi reporters and producers were fired, and al-Iraqiya did not get the news of his arrest on the air for almost 24 hours.
Lance said last week he and two partners hope soon "to have up and running a high-quality news and entertainment network."
The partners are the Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. (LBC) and a Kuwaiti publishing and telecommunications company, Al-Fawares. Harris will manage the project and supply the equipment. LBC will be the source of the electronic programming and will conduct training.
Running the newspaper and training its journalists will be handled by Al-Fawares, which publishes a newspaper in Kuwait and prints Newsweek in Arabic.
Although the Pentagon contract runs for a year, there is some question about what will happen to the newspaper and stations -- collectively known as the Iraq Media Network (IMN) -- when the Coalition Provisional Authority turns over sovereignty to a new Iraq government, scheduled for July 1. Lance said last week he did not know what was going to happen, but he pledged to make the network a "high-quality" organization, whether it becomes state-run or remains under Pentagon control after July.
Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, recently voiced concern about the U.S. media program in Iraq and specifically about the IMN. He has told the White House he expects the State Department to take responsibility for supervising the IMN after July 1.
"We don't want U.S. taxpayers paying $100 million for some new Iraqi government over there to take over," Mark Helmke, a senior aide to Lugar on the committee, said last week. "The chairman wants to make sure that the new contract leads to an independent, free press."
Dorrance Smith, a former ABC News producer and an adviser to President Bush and President George H.W. Bush, works in Baghdad as a senior media adviser to the coalition authority. He recently added the IMN to his responsibilities, according to Washington and Baghdad government sources.
Smith's first job in Iraq was to create a 24-hour television feed for local U.S. television stations, bypassing the networks, which U.S. officials complained were emphasizing negative news from Iraq.
The former Hussein network is not the only Iraq media project being run by the U.S. government. The authorities, using money generated by Iraqi oil sales, are working to set up an FM radio station south of Baghdad within 30 days to compete with local religious broadcasters. It is the latest move in the broader, sometimes faltering, effort to present the viewpoints of the United States and the provisional authority.
The U.S. regional coordinator for south-central Iraq is looking for a contractor to build the station, to be housed in a religious university at Al Hillah. The FM outlet will provide "a means of promoting CPA aims and coalition information," along with "democratic education, vocational education . . . [and] public service broadcasting services," according to a request for proposals published recently. The CPA would "identify Iraqi personnel for training" at the station, the request said.
The proposed Al Hillah university station has drawn bids from companies in Cyprus, Sweden, Germany and the United States. It is not the only one planned in the region, which one official described as "a hotbed of Shia religious activity." There has been talk of possibly placing another one in the local women's center to give women a voice, a CPA official said
Meanwhile, the U.S. board that runs the Voice of America and Radio Sawa, an Arabic-language entertainment and news channel, is moving to set up land-based television broadcast stations in Baghdad and Basra. They will carry the programming of its new Middle East satellite channel, which is set to begin operating next month.
In its recent contract proposal, the Broadcasting Board of Governors said it is "particularly noteworthy that the urgent establishment of BBG TV broadcasting systems in Iraq is a top U.S. government priority." The board said it wants the Baghdad station running by the end of next month and the Basra station operating by March 22.
----
Truth about Iraq known; fallout isn't
Jay Bookman
E-mail: jbookman@ajc.com
Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
1/12/04
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/bookman/index.html
Truth is like water. You can try to dam it, block it, plug it and obstruct it, but it never stops trying to run free.
And thank goodness for that.
Last week, after months of stubborn denial, the truth leaked from the lips of Secretary of State Colin Powell. He conceded, openly and in public, that he has seen no concrete evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
"But I think the possibility of a link did exist," Powell said, "and it was prudent to consider them at the time that we did."
That is stunning. A year ago, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Powell and others claimed such ironclad evidence of a Saddam-al-Qaida link that it made military action mandatory. War, we were told, had been forced upon us.
"Iraqi officials deny accusations of ties with al-Qaida," Powell told the United Nations. "Those denials are simply not credible."
In that same presentation, of course, Powell also claimed clear and conclusive evidence that Iraq possessed vast stores of weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. resolutions. "Our conservative estimate is that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent," Powell told the world, outlining just part of the alleged Iraqi inventory of WMD.
Well, that may have been an estimate by conservatives. But it was not by any means a conservative estimate because none of the material existed. None. Not so much as a vial.
Today, our 1,400-member WMD search team is being dismantled and assigned to other tasks. The head of the WMD team, David Kay, is reportedly about to resign and return home. The postwar evidence is overwhelming that Iraq did not possess WMD and had not for years; it did not even possess programs to produce WMD.
A dwindling few, of course, still try to deny that reality. But to borrow from Powell, "those denials are simply not credible."
In one sense, nothing is changed by the prewar justification being false. We have invaded Iraq and assumed responsibility for its future; regardless of how we got there, we must make every effort to create a stable, humane government in that country before leaving. The task will be difficult, expensive and lengthy, and it will exact a continuing toll in the lives of our best and bravest. But it must be done.
In another sense, though, it matters a great deal. A nation that holds itself up to the world as the exemplar of representative democracy cannot blithely ignore the fact that its elected representatives were led into war under false pretenses.
In October 2002, there was no way on earth that Congress would have voted to authorize war had it known the truth. "The possibility of a link" between Iraq and al-Qaida would not have been considered sufficient cause for invasion. Nor would Congress have voted to spend hundreds of billions of dollars and the lives of 500 American soldiers and counting because Iraq possessed the intention to someday create programs that might someday in the future be used to create weapons of mass destruction.
In fact, as I recall, those who had dared to suggest that there must be some other reason for the war, because this talk of Iraqi WMD and alleged ties to al-Qaida made no sense, were accused of spouting wild theories unsupported by fact. As it turns out, the wild theories unsupported by fact were coming from the most powerful people in the U.S. government.
Do we not care how this happened? Are Americans not curious to know how much of this was an honest mistake, and how much of it was official deception? To ignore such questions -- to leave undisturbed the intelligence systems and personnel that created the problem -- is to increase the likelihood of being deceived again in the future.
It is time, past time, to put this controversy behind us and move on. But that won't be possible until we acknowledge the truth and deal with its consequences. The first half of that task -- acknowledging the truth -- is all but accomplished. Now, what will its consequence be?
-------- war crimes
Top Bosnian War Crimes Suspect Again Eludes NATO Searchers
January 12, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/europe/12BOSN.html?pagewanted=all
PALE, Bosnia, Jan. 11 (Reuters) - NATO troops on Sunday scaled down a major weekend hunt for a top Bosnian Serb war crimes suspect, Radovan Karadzic, set off by a tip that an injury may have forced him to seek help in the town where his headquarters were once situated.
If Dr. Karadzic had indeed been there, he appeared to have once again slipped the net. By nightfall, only an ex-paramilitary policeman said to be "a supporter" had been detained, outside a nearby ski-resort hotel. "They have been looking for my husband in the walls, in every inch of the house and, how absurd, in the septic tank," said the former leader's wife, Ljiljana. "They seem to believe Radovan would hide like Saddam Hussein."
The hunt began in a snowstorm on Saturday, as 200 troops and police officers fanned out in Pale to search hospital and church buildings from top to bottom.
Dr. Karadzic's onetime fief is in the mountains above the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, whose siege between 1992 and 1995 led to his indictment for genocide by the international criminal tribunal in The Hague.
Leaders of the unit of the NATO stabilization force that conducted the operation said they were acting on reliable information that Dr. Karadzic had contacted his family and supporters, and might be injured.
The mission carried out by the search team, which included local Bosnian Serb police officers, was the "single biggest joint operation we have conducted in 18 months" said Mathew Brock, a captain with the NATO force.
"Mr. Karadzic has not been located," he said. But ammunition and documents found in his wife's house could be "very useful in determining his whereabouts."
He said the force would maintain a presence in Pale overnight and probably end the operation by noon Monday.
Dr. Karadzic and his military chief, Gen. Ratko Mladic, are both also indicted for genocide in the massacre of up to 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995.
Informants are offered a $5 million reward for the capture of Dr. Karadzic, one of the world's most elusive fugitives. The prospect of injury or illness forcing him to surrender would be tantalizing for NATO, which has sought him for eight years.
His arrest would also be a milestone for Bosnia, still poisoned by bitterness from the ethnic war that took more than 200,000 lives from 1992 to 1995.
Some Serbs, however, regard Dr. Karadzic and General Mladic as national heroes and would hate to see either in handcuffs.
An Orthodox priest in Pale, Jeremija Starovlah, was quoted by the Bosnian Serb news agency as saying troops searched the local church and church buildings at midnight. "They opened wardrobes, looked under beds, tapped on walls and floors and looked into the bell tower," he said.
Saturday and overnight, the troops searched four medical facilities, including two belonging to the Karadzic family.
Dr. Karadzic's daughter, Sonja, protested that she and her family had been kept as "hostages" by the troops.
"We are embittered by the behavior of the soldiers," she said by telephone from the house, after British and American soldiers entered and Slovenian troops and Italian police officers were deployed around it. "We feel like hostages. This is a violation of human rights."
The NATO troops conducted several operations last year intended to capture Dr. Karadzic and General Mladic but the troops failed to find either. Dr. Karadzic is believed to hide in eastern Bosnia and neighboring Montenegro, and General Mladic is usually said to be hiding in Serbia.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Justices Refuse to Review Case on Secrecy and 9/11 Detentions
January 12, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/politics/12CND-SCOT.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 - In a significant victory for the Bush administration, the Supreme Court declined today to review the secrecy that has surrounded foreigners held after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The justices let stand a ruling by a federal appeals court, which concluded last June that the Justice Department was within its rights when it refused to release the names of more than 700 people, most of them Arabs or Muslims, arrested for immigration violations in connection with the attacks.
Many of those arrested have been deported. Some were charged with crimes and others were held as witnesses. But so far only one person, Zacarias Moussaoui, is being prosecuted in connection with the attacks, and he was detained before Sept. 11.
The case that the justices declined today to review, Center for National Security Studies v. Justice Department, 03-472, pitted two fundamental values against each other - the right of the public to know details of how its government operates versus the government's need to keep some information secret to protect national security.
With today's refusal by the justices, the last word in the case apparently belongs to Judge David B. Sentelle of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In his opinion for the 2-to-1 majority on June 17, he noted that courts had always shown deference to executive branch officials in the field of national security.
"The need for deference in this case is just as strong as in earlier cases," Judge Sentelle wrote in the opinion that was joined by Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson and reversed a lower court finding. "America faces an enemy just as real as its former cold war foes."
Judge David S. Tatel offered a blistering dissent last June. "By accepting the government's vague, poorly explained allegations, and by filling in the gaps in the government's case with its own assumptions about facts absent from the record, this court has converted deference into acquiescence," he asserted.
The case revolved around an effort by several civil liberties groups that had asserted the Freedom of Information Act required the Justice Department to disclose the names of those detained on immigration charges.
In arguing the government's case, Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson declared that "requiring the police to open their investigative files and provide a comprehensive list of the persons interviewed and detained - and by the same token to reveal which persons they have not interviewed and detained - would necessarily interfere with the investigation by providing a road map of law enforcement's activities, strategies and methods."
Given the continuing debate over the appropriate response to terrorist threats, the case is surely not the last whose underlying theme, when stripped of the legalese, is how much extra power the government should be given, and how much liberty Americans should be willing to give up, in times of crisis.
Just three days ago the Supreme Court dealt an important setback to the administration. It accepted the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen of Saudi descent who was captured on a battlefield in Afghanistan and has been held in a Navy brig without being charged.
The justices have also agreed to decide whether prisoners at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are entitled to access to civilian courts to challenge their open-ended detention. The administration had urged the justices not to accept that case or the Hamdi case.
The Center for National Security Studies, founded in 1974, describes itself as "a nongovernmental advocacy and research organization" dedicated to preventing "violations of civil liberties in the United States."
A report last year by the Inspector General's office of the Justice Department found dozens of "credible" reports of detainees being abused. The department countered that instances of abuse were infrequent, given the number of detainees, and promised to investigate the accusations.
The history of the case that the Supreme Court declined today to take, including last June's appellate court decision and legal documents filed by both sides, can be read on the center's web site: www.cnss.gwo.edu.
-------- homeland security
U.S. to Push Airlines for Passenger Records
Travel Database to Rate Security Risk Factors
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A8504-2004Jan11?language=printer
Despite stiff resistance from airlines and privacy advocates, the U.S. government plans to push ahead this year with a vast computerized system to probe the backgrounds of all passengers boarding flights in the United States.
The government will compel airlines and airline reservations companies to hand over all passenger records for scrutiny by U.S. officials, after failing to win cooperation in the program's testing phase. The order could be issued as soon as next month. Under the system, all travelers passing through a U.S. airport are to be scored with a number and a color that ranks their perceived threat to the aircraft.
Another program that is to be introduced this year that seeks to speed frequent fliers through security lines in exchange for volunteering personal information to the government.
The two new initiatives will augment a system introduced last week to fingerprint and photograph millions of foreign visitors on arrival in the United States.
Privacy and consumer advocates worry that both programs could be discriminatory because they subject airline passengers to different levels of scrutiny. Certain travelers, such as non-U.S. citizens, could face additional questioning under the program known as CAPPS 2, or the second version of the Computer Assisted Passenger PreScreening Program, some organizations say. Business travelers who typically pay high prices for their seats will likely get an easier pass through security in the "registered traveler" program.
Privacy advocates say they are most concerned about CAPPS 2, which would replace the airlines' existing computer screening system. The TSA believes the current system is based on old assumptions about terrorists, flagging passengers, for instance, who paid with cash or bought one-way tickets. Passengers targeted for additional screening commonly find an "SSS" or "
The TSA said the new computerized system is to provide a more thorough approach to screening passengers. It will collect travelers' full name, home address and telephone number, date of birth and travel itinerary. The information will be fed into large databases, such as Lexis-Nexis and Acxiom, that tap public records and commercial computer banks, such as shopping mailing lists, to verify that passengers are who they say they are. Once a passenger is identified, the CAPPS 2 system will compare that traveler against wanted criminals and suspected terrorists contained in other databases.
The two-step process will result in a numerical and color score for each passenger. A "red" rating means a passenger will be prohibited from boarding. "Yellow" indicates that a passenger will receive additional scrutiny at the checkpoint and a "green" rating paves the way for a standard trip through security. Also factored into one's score will be intelligence about certain routes and airports where there might be higher-rated risks to security.
Although it is unclear how many passengers would fit into each category, the TSA said its best estimation is that 5 percent of the traveling public will be flagged yellow or red, compared with an estimated 15 percent of passengers who are flagged under the current version of CAPPS 1.
The registered traveler program, also known as "trusted traveler," has been a favorite of the airline industry since the terrorist attacks in 2001. The first leader of the Transportation Security Administration declined to pursue the idea, saying he worried that terrorists in "sleeper cells" could establish themselves as trusted residents over a period of years and later exploit their status to hijack planes.
Now under new leadership, the TSA is to begin testing the program at selected airports with $5 million in Congressional funding. Officials say the program could enhance security because the pool of those who need to be assessed would be reduced by the background checks each passenger would undergo. The agency declined to say how the program would work except that it would be voluntary and that registered passengers would not skip security screening altogether.
"It's not as though the person who goes through the checkpoint won't be going through a basic level of screening," said David M. Stone, the TSA's acting administrator.
But privacy experts are skeptical. Registered traveler is "going to create two classes of airline travelers," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that opposes both programs. Registered traveler, he said, "has no security benefits." Terrorists will learn one way or another how to "game" the system, he said.
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security started a visa-tracking program that the ACLU and other groups also deemed discriminatory. International airports and ports began digitally fingerprinting and photographing foreign visitors from certain countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and South America when they enter the country on a visa, although most European countries are exempt from the program.
"These kinds of dragnet systems are feel-good but cost-inefficient," said Richard Sobel, a privacy policy researcher at Harvard Medical School. "The government would do much better using resources to better identify people and deter people who might cause some harm than to use resources devoted to the 99 percent of people who are innocent."
Under one proposal advocated by the major U.S. airlines, passengers who submit an application to the TSA would receive a special card or other identification, if they're approved. At the airport, they would show the card at the security checkpoint or ticket counter and submit to a handprint or fingerprint to verify their identity. Then, the passenger could walk through a checkpoint area dedicated to members of the program.
The airline industry argues that a registered traveler program would not create a class system but would simply reduce wait times for all passengers. "The thing that really frustrates people is not the fact that someone goes through [the security line] more quickly," said Jim May, chief executive officer at the Air Transport Association, the airline industry's lobbying organization. "It's the people who don't prepare themselves and go through security and tie up the whole line. They're the people who really aggravate those people who are trying to catch a plane."
In the push forward on CAPPS 2, U.S. officials said the TSA is to soon begin forcing the airlines to turn over their passenger reservation lists. No airline responded to the agency's initial request for the documents last fall. U.S. carriers have been reluctant to turn over the data because of negative publicity association with the program.
The TSA's first airline partner to test CAPPS 2, Delta Air Lines, backed out of the agreement after privacy advocates put up a Web site encouraging passengers to boycott the airline. The European Union, whose passengers would also be rated and screened, have said the system would violate EU privacy laws, but it has allowed the TSA to use passenger data for testing purposes.
The final blow came in September last year, when JetBlue Airways was sued in several states by passengers after the airline admitted it had turned over passenger data for a military project related to aviation security. The TSA has since been unable to find an airline to help the agency test CAPPS 2 and might now have to resort to coercion to get the reservation data.
Homeland Security officials said some elements of CAPPS 2 and the U.S. VISIT program for fingerprinting and photographing foreigners will overlap because both systems compare passengers against the same terrorist and criminal watch lists. The U.S. VISIT also aims to ensure that visitors do not overstay their visas. U.S. officials said they are considering merging the two programs.
Nuala O'Connor Kelly, the chief privacy officer at Homeland Security, said if the databases are merged, the government would impose strict rules about which agencies can use the passenger information and how it could be used.
"We want these programs to be efficient to the extent it makes them more efficient to have them rolled together, we will be looking at that," Kelly said.
But Kelly acknowledged that there will be several hurdles to clear. The U.S. government has not said how long it will keep data on U.S. VISIT travelers. Information on most passengers screened by CAPPS 2 can be held only for "a matter of days," she said.
--------
New System for Air Security Moves Forward
January 12, 2004
By MATTHEW L. WALD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/politics/12AIR.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 11 - Stymied by the domestic airlines in trying to test a massive new computer system meant to identify people who are risks to civil aviation, the government is thinking of using data collected by European airlines instead, an official said on Sunday night.
The agency responsible for the new system, the Transportation Security Adminstration, wants to test the system, the Computerized Assisted Passenger PreScreening System, which would evaluate information on everyone seeking to board a domestic flight.
The government is moving ahead with the system despite objections from privacy experts and uncooperative airlines, and hopes to have it in place by this summer. Plans to begin the program this year were reported Sunday in The Washington Post.
Last year, the agency asked for an airline to volunteer information on its passengers for use in testing. Jet Blue agreed last summer to provide data for testing but backed out after complaints about its decision. The airline industry officials suggested that the government should order the airlines to comply.
In December, however, the Department of Homeland Security struck an agreement with the European Union on what passenger information would have to be submitted by airlines flying to the United States from Europe. The information is transmitted shortly after take-off.
A spokesman for the Transportation Security Administration, Nico Melendez, said on Sunday that the agreement permitted his agency to use that data for testing the prescreening system.
Last year, the government proposed the new system, which would replace an older version that uses less information.
The new system would call for airlines to provide each passenger's name, home address, phone number and date of birth. Under this proposal, which was disclosed last year, a contractor for the Transportation Security Administration would take the passenger data and compare it to commercial databases.
The contractor would then give each passenger a score, similar to a credit score for a loan, that would estimate the relative security risk.
-------- justice
BOILING SLOWLY LIKE A FROG IN A POT
January 12-19, 2004
NYU Global Beat
http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/index.html#report
It's an old adage that if you increase the temperature slowly, a frog won't realize that he's being cooked until it's all over. WNYC's On The Media, host Bob Garfield suggests that the White House is employing a similar strategy by slipping pieces of Patriot Act II into legislation in small, unnoticed doses. Although the enhanced new version of the Patriot Act aka the the "Domestic Security Enhancement Act" was finally rejected by Congress, the parts that count are quietly being attached to other legislation. The latest example is The Intelligence Authorization Act for F.Y. 2004, which gives the FBI unprecedented powers to gather information on private individuals and radically changes the definition of what constitutes a "financial institution."
Bob Garfield's report is available in real audio and eventually as a printed transcript on the program's web site. (Bob Garfield, WNYC On The Media, January 11, 2003) [click here]
•The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal year 2004
•The Center for Democracy and Technology analyzes the FBI's efforts to obtain "administrative subpoena" power--essentially the right to force citizens to testify or to turn over documents without benefit of judicial protection.
-------- terrorism
Saudi Arabia unveils huge weapons discovery
RIYADH (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112184913.5zkfu9sd.html
Saudi Arabia has found about 300 explosives belts and nearly 24 tonnes of explosive materials in its hunt for terror suspects, the interior ministry said Monday.
The seizures by security forces over the past six months also more than 300 rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and launchers and more than 430 hand grenades, said a statement carried by the official SPA news agency.
Security forces also seized 1,020 weapons such as Kalashnikov rifles and machine guns, more than 352,300 rounds of ammunition and 670 detonators, it said.
--------
Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror's Scope
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8435-2004Jan11.html
A scathing new report published by the Army War College broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an "unnecessary" war in Iraq and pursuing an "unrealistic" quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat.
The report, by Jeffrey Record, a visiting professor at the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama, warns that as a result of those mistakes, the Army is "near the breaking point."
It recommends, among other things, scaling back the scope of the "global war on terrorism" and instead focusing on the narrower threat posed by the al Qaeda terrorist network.
"[T]he global war on terrorism as currently defined and waged is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious, and accordingly . . . its parameters should be readjusted," Record writes. Currently, he adds, the anti-terrorism campaign "is strategically unfocused, promises more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security."
Record, a veteran defense specialist and author of six books on military strategy and related issues, was an aide to then-Sen. Sam Nunn when the Georgia Democrat was chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
In discussing his political background, Record also noted that in 1999 while on the staff of the Air War College, he published work critical of the Clinton administration.
His essay, published by the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute, carries the standard disclaimer that its views are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of the Army, the Pentagon or the U.S. government.
But retired Army Col. Douglas C. Lovelace Jr., director of the Strategic Studies Institute, whose Web site carries Record's 56-page monograph, hardly distanced himself from it. "I think that the substance that Jeff brings out in the article really, really needs to be considered," he said.
Publication of the essay was approved by the Army War College's commandant, Maj. Gen. David H. Huntoon Jr., Lovelace said. He said he and Huntoon expected the study to be controversial, but added, "He considers it to be under the umbrella of academic freedom."
Larry DiRita, the top Pentagon spokesman, said he had not read the Record study. He added: "If the conclusion is that we need to be scaling back in the global war on terrorism, it's not likely to be on my reading list anytime soon."
Many of Record's arguments, such as the contention that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was deterred and did not present a threat, have been made by critics of the administration. Iraq, he concludes, "was a war-of-choice distraction from the war of necessity against al Qaeda." But it is unusual to have such views published by the War College, the Army's premier academic institution.
In addition, the essay goes further than many critics in examining the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism.
Record's core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the scale of U.S. ambitions in the war on terrorism to Adolf Hitler's overreach in World War II. "A cardinal rule of strategy is to keep your enemies to a manageable number," he writes. "The Germans were defeated in two world wars . . . because their strategic ends outran their available means."
He also scoffs at the administration's policy, laid out by Bush in a November speech, of seeking to transform and democratize the Middle East. "The potential policy payoff of a democratic and prosperous Middle East, if there is one, almost certainly lies in the very distant future," he writes. "The basis on which this democratic domino theory rests has never been explicated."
He also casts doubt on whether the U.S. government will maintain its commitment to the war. "The political, fiscal, and military sustainability of the GWOT [global war on terrorism] remains to be seen," he states.
The essay concludes with several recommendations. Some are fairly noncontroversial, such as increasing the size of the Army and Marine Corps, a position that appears to be gathering support in Congress. But he also says the United States should scale back its ambitions in Iraq, and be prepared to settle for a "friendly autocracy" there rather than a genuine democracy.
To read the full report, go to washingtonpost.com/nation
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Altamont Wind Operators Sued Over Bird Deaths
LIVERMORE, California, (ENS)
January 12, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-12-09.asp#anchor2
The Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit today against parties involved with the Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area (APWRA) in the San Francisco Bay area. The organization says the 5,400 turbines at Altamot Pass are killing more than 1,000 birds a year, including species protected by federal and state laws.
The suit was filed against Florida energy producer FPL Group, Inc. and Danish wind power company NEG Micon A/S. Through their subsidiaries and associated entities, the two companies own or operate roughly half of turbines at the APWRA.
"Altamont Pass wind turbines are causing extremely high levels of bird mortality along a major raptor migration route and are likely depleting eagle, hawk, and owl populations not only locally but throughout the western United States," said Jeff Miller, spokesperson for the Center. "We absolutely support wind power, but it is past time for the primary turbine owners, FPL Energy and NEG Micon, to address this problem."
The APWRA was established in 1982 on 160 square kilometers of private cattle ranches in eastern Alameda and Contra Costa Counties.
Due in part to the local abundance of raptor populations in the region, wind turbines at APWRA cause more bird deaths than any wind facility in the world. Critics say poor planning allowed the Altamont's wind turbines to be built along a major raptor migration corridor and in the heart of the highest concentration of golden eagles in North America.
Miller says the Altamont wind turbines kill up to 60 or more golden eagles and hundreds of other hawks, owls, and other protected raptors. These bird kills have continued for 20 years, according to the Center, in violation of the Bald Eagle and Golden Eagle Protection Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and several California Fish and Game Code provisions.
The lawsuit alleges that these violations and bird kills are unlawful and unfair business practices under the California Business and Professions Code.
"Altamont Pass has become a death zone for eagles and other magnificent and imperiled birds of prey," said Richard Wiebe, attorney for the plaintiffs. "Recent studies have proposed numerous recommendations for mitigating the devastating effect of Altamont Pass wind turbines on birds, yet the industry is blindly charging ahead replacing existing turbines with new and much larger turbines without any requirement of effective preventative measures or remediation for ongoing bird kills."
The Center says the issue at Altamont is not wind power versus birds, but rather whether the wind power industry is willing to take simple steps to reduce bird kills.
Raptor experts have suggested numerous measures to reduce bird deaths, including retiring particularly lethal turbines, relocating turbines out of canyons, moving isolated turbines into clusters, increasing the visibility of turbines to birds, retrofitting power poles to prevent bird electrocutions, discontinuing the rodent poisoning program, and managing grazing to encourage rodent prey away from turbines.
"The wind power industry receives tens of millions of dollars in revenue from California's consumers, as well as enormous tax credits and government subsidies, based on the perception that it provides 'green' energy, yet continues to kill thousands of protected birds annually," said Miller. "The Altamont companies routinely kill rare birds that are the natural heritage of all Californians, and take taxpayer subsidies home to Florida and Denmark."
-------- energy
POWER CUTS FEARED AS SCOTLAND GOES GREEN
LOUISE HOSIE
12 January 2004
UK Press & Journal
http://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/displayNode.jsp?nodeId=84092&command=displayContent&sourceNode=83929&contentPK=8460169
The Scottish Executive was last night urged to think again over its timetable for switching to renewable energy amid dire warnings of massive price rises and power failures.
The move to green energy could lead to consumers' electricity bills rising by over 60%, according to a warning circulated to Scots politicians.
And former UK Energy Minister Brian Wilson warned of frequent blackouts as the system struggles to cope with demand.
Four power stations that generate half of Scotland's electricity are due to be decommiss-ioned by 2010. The executive has yet to announce what will replace them, but is committed to producing 40% of energy from renewable sources.
Now concern has been raised that customers may have to foot the £1.75billion bill for upgrading the National Grid in Scotland so it can take power from wind and wave farms.
In a briefing document to MPs and MSPs, British Nuclear Fuels warned that prices could rise by up to 63% by 2010.
North-east Tory list MSP David Davidson said last night that he felt the executive had not considered all the options.
"There is a bit of a scandal going on in that there are no figures being published about how much money is going into wind turbines," he said.
"Wind turbines cannot produce electricity at a sustainable price, they have a huge subsidy, and quite frankly they are not going to deliver, no matter what the executive says.
"If there is no wind and the Government is determined to produce 40% of energy from renewable sources then they might have to shut down the supply to some houses."
He added: "If we are going to hold to the Kyoto agreement we have to reinstate two of the nuclear power sites. We would be far better off putting money into sub-sea turbine research and other forms which are more efficient and effective."
Mr Davidson urged that the Hunterston and Torness nuclear power stations remain open.
"The staff are there, the jobs are there and the stations already comply with regulations by not releasing carbon dioxide," he said.
North-east SNP MSP Richard Lochhead said: "It beggars belief that anyone is even remotely suggesting massive hikes for Scottish householders when Scotland is a major energy producer and on the brink of a renewable energy revolution.
"Scotland already subsidises the rest of the UK and of all the countries in the world that should have cheap electricity it should be top of the list."
Aberdeen North SNP MSP Brian Adam had "significant doubts" about the figures being produced, but said: "The truth is we are all going to have to pay for the decommissioning for many generations.
"If that does not appear directly on bills, it is because the Government makes us pay through taxes."
He said there were higher costs associated with nuclear generation than other means.
The British Nuclear Fuels document said: "The Scottish Executive has set itself an extremely ambitious target for future energy supply.
"It is clear that the cost of failure will not merely be a loss of faith in the ministers, but will likely result in blackouts and huge rises in electricity bills.
"It is therefore vital the executive outlines soon whether it remains on course for its renew-able target and how it intends to replace the four stations that will cease generation by the end of the decade."
Meanwhile, Mr Wilson, Labour MP for Cunninghame North, attacked Scottish ministers for pushing ahead with the decommissioning of conventional energy sources without having a tried and tested alternative in place first.
He said it was inevitable that electricity prices would rise as the switch to green power was made, and that power cuts would increase as the new system struggled to cope.
"I am sure that prices will rise. It is very difficult to put a figure on it because there are so many variables," he said.
"The more reduction there is in surplus capacity then obviously the greater the risk to security of supply and in exceptional conditions we could certainly see power cuts.
"It is foolhardy to talk glibly about running down nuclear until you are confident about what is going to take its place. It is double foolhardy to get rid of our only major source of carbon-free electricity."
Mr Wilson wants the nuclear power stations at Hunterston, in Ayrshire, and Torness, in East Lothian, to be given a stay of execution. Ministers are committed to closing both as part of the executive's green policy.
Yesterday the executive tried to play down fears of steep rises in bills and power blackouts.
Pointing out that the 40% target for renewable power was reached in consultation with the energy industry, Deputy Enter-prise Minister Lewis Macdonald said: "We are committed to increasing the use of renewable energy and ensuring that Scotland's economy and environment each benefit from doing so."
-------- environment
Salvage Logging on Big Oregon Burn Termed Radical
MEDFORD, Oregon, (ENS)
January 12, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-12-01.asp
Sparked by lightning on July 13, 2002, the Biscuit Fire was one of the largest wildfires in Oregon history. Now the U.S. Forest Service has released a draft plan for salvage logging that environmentalists say would be an equally large disaster. The public comment period has been extended by 15 days to January 20.
The Biscuit Fire burned for 120 days, blackening 499,965 acres in southern Oregon and northern California. When the wildfire was at its most destructive, more than 7,000 firefighters and support personnel were assigned, and fighting it cost the taxpayers $153 million.
The fire boundary stretches from 10 miles east of the coastal community of Brookings, Oregon; south into northern California; east to the Illinois Valley; and north to within a few miles of the Rogue River.
The burn area, also known as the greater Siskiyou Wild Rivers area, has been considered a national treasure since the 1930s. Shielded from glaciation for 50 million years, it is a storehouse of botanical richness and diversity.
The Biscuit Fire was one of the largest on record in Oregon. (All photos courtesy U.S. Forest Service) The Biscuit Fire burned through nearly all of the Kalmiopsis Wilderness and the headwaters of the Chetco and Smith Rivers, the Forest Service explains in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS), released in November. The fire swept across major tributaries to the Illinois River below Cave Junction, destroying four homes and nine outbuildings.
"Millions of trees were burned, and habitat for various plant, wildlife, and fish, including threatened, endangered, and sensitive species, was altered or destroyed," the DEIS states.
The fire burned in a mosaic pattern; approximately 20 percent of the area burned lightly, with less than 25 percent of the vegetation killed. Another 50 percent of the area burned very hot, with more than 75 percent of the vegetation killed.
Since many acres of critical wildlife habitat burned, the remaining old growth stands are "very precious," the Forest Service said. Recovery of the fire area is beginning, with flowers, brush and hardwoods re-sprouting amidst the burned trees. In the Cave Junction area, some salmon returned this year to spawn on the Illinois River.
Next year, says the Forest Service, is the time to do salvage logging to benefit humans and the environment. On the human side, it would recover merchantable timber before the value of the wood is lost to deterioration; improve firefighter safety; reduce the risk of high intensity fire on public and private lands, and nearby communities; and help foresters learn about post-fire environments and different strategies to manage resources in those environments.
Forest Service worker treks through land charred by the Biscuit Fire. On the environmental side, the Forest Service says its proposed salvage logging plan would protect remaining late successional, or old-growth, forest habitat used by threatened and endangered species such as the spotted owl.
It would also accelerate restoration of habitats of concern to desirable conditions, maintaining and restoring water quality and reducing potential chronic sediment delivery to streams.
"There is no permanent road construction associated with this effort, and no green trees will be harvested," the Service says.
Of the seven alternative plans outlined in the DEIS, the Forest Service prefers one that would permit logging of 518 million board feet over 29,090 acres, and set fire to 91,000 additional acres in prescribed burns.
The Northwest Ecosystem Alliance calls this "massive" salvage logging plan "radical," warning that the government's plan to cut 518 million board feet across 29,090 acres, including 12,000 acres of inventoried roadless areas, is "more forest than they logged across all Pacific Northwest national forests last year."
"Old growth reserves, wild and scenic rivers, unstable slopes, and green unburned forests are all at risk under this radical logging plan," the alliance says.
In this "heart of biodiversity in western North America," says Rolf Skar, campaign director with the Siskiyou Project, logging would be "like drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
The organization cites research showing that post-fire logging can "increase fire risk" and "impair natural rejuvenation," causing many of the same environmental impacts as the logging of unburned forests.
"Heavy equipment can damage sensitive fire-affected soils, create erosion, and harm regrowth. Removing fire-killed trees truncates critical ecological processes since such trees provide wildlife habitat, rejuvenate soils, reduce erosion; and when deposited into streams and rivers, dead trees create crucial habitat for wild salmon and trout," the environmental organization says.
To strengthen its argument, the alliance points to a recent report by the economic consulting firm ECONorthwest showing that logging in the Biscuit fire area, much of it steep roadless backcountry, likely would cost taxpayers more than the revenue produced.
The economists predict that Biscuit post-fire logging would flood an already over-supplied log market, driving prices lower and hurting smaller, private timberland owners.
In its DEIS, the Forest Service acknowledges that salvage logging could harm soil productivity in the area. "Surface erosion, displacement and compaction of soils from salvage harvesting could affect soil productivity by displacing soils and reducing infiltration rates and water-hold capacity," the DEIS says.
Edge of the Biscuit Fire burn "Large woody material, both residing on the forest floor or as dead standing timber that will supply future downed wood, is critical in providing a healthy forest ecosystem," says the DEIS. "Removal of large woody material by salvage harvest could affect soil productivity."
The Forest Service also acknowledges the potential for the salvage logging to damage inventoried roadless areas (IRAs).
These roadless areas act as biological strongholds for populations of threatened and endangered species, the Service states in the Biscuit fire DEIS. These large, relatively unmanaged landscapes are important to biological diversity and the long term survival of many at risk species, they offer opportunities for recreation as other areas fall to development, and they serve as protection against the spread of non-native invasive plant species.
"In many instances these lands are intermingled with other land allocations and extend within two miles of the wildland-urban interface areas," the DEIS states. "Extensive salvage harvest and planting would detract from the natural, undisturbed character and could reduce the potential for wilderness designation."
That is an assessment with which the Northwest Ecosystem Alliance can agree.
The environmental organization is asking the Forest Service to avoid logging inside roadless areas and old-growth, also known as late successional reserves. It asks that the Service focus restoration on the lands within the Biscuit burn that were previously logged - about 20 percent of the area - and opposes plans to replace forests with clearcuts and plantations.
The public comment period for the Biscuit Fire DEIS is open through January 20. Public comments are welcome by email to: r6_biscuit@fs.fed.us
The Biscuit Fire Draft Environmental Impact Statement is online at: http://www.biscuitfire.com/proj_plan_index.htm
-------- ACTIVISTS
10,000 Pakistani activists gather ahead of India's World Social Forum
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Jan 12, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040112034629.zh5o64c2.html
About 10,000 Pakistani activists were due to gather in the eastern city of Lahore on Monday ahead of the World Social Forum in India, where campaigners will push for a nuclear-free South Asia, organisers said.
Politicians, anti-globalisation activists and peace campaigners will join representatives of civil society organisations and trade unions for the convention and peace rally organised by the private Pakistan Social Forum (PSF), they said.
The convention is in preparation for the World Social Forum in Bombay, starting on Friday, which follows a thaw in relations between nuclear powers Pakistan and India.
"We are making two contributions to WSF (World Social Forum) in the area of peace and anti-globalisation campaign," PSF coordinator Irfan Mufti told AFP.
"PSF will lead a Peace Caravan at WSF, which will be the biggest people-to-people contact event coupled with a meeting of parliamentarians to chalk out a declaration for a de-nuclearised and de-militarised South Asia."
The World Social Forum from January 16 to 21 in Bombay is the fourth such gathering of the world's anti-globalisation activists. The previous meetings were all held in Brazil.
India and Pakistan, two years after a New Delhi militant attack which brought them close to their fourth war, last week announced that they were resuming dialogue stalled since July 2001.
Several delegations of Indian and Pakistani peace activists, parliamentarians, lawyers, journalists and students have crossed the border to revive people-to-people contacts since April last year.
"The Pakistani participants will strive at WSF to give a boost to confidence-building and peace moves in South Asia," Mufti said.
On the issue of globalisation, Mufti said that Pakistani activists will forge alliances with various groups at WSF to fight against corporate control of world economy.
"The global forum will provide us with an opportunity to strengthen ties with civil society groups and regional networks working for the rights of the people marginalised by globalisation," Mufti said.
Some 1,800 members of PSF would participate in WSF meeting, he said.
"We had requests from about 10,000 people across Pakistan who wished to go to Bombay, but had to cut down the number of participants for the convenience of the organisers," he said.
Abbass Shakir, who is organising a delegation from Pakistan's biggest province Punjab, told AFP that the PSF had been preparing for the Bombay convention since last March.
"A 75-member national steering committee drawing members from all regions of Pakistan was set up and a series of meetings and seminars on the impact of globalisation, prospects of peace and cultural harmony were organised," Shakir said.
"We will take part in cultural events at WSF and present theatre performance for the delegates," he added.
Shakir said Monday's convention would be followed by a peace rally.
"The participants will articulate and finalise Pakistan's stand on the issues of peace and globalisation," Shakir said.
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Iranian Reformers Protest Election Ban on Liberals
January 12, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/middleeast/12CND-IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Jan. 12 - Iran's Supreme Religious Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei refused today to intervene in a confrontation between the conservative and reformist camps after a religious authority barred thousands of pro-reform candidates from running in Parliamentary elections.
"Once all legal steps have been exhausted, if we arrive at a sensitive situation which demands a decision, there can be no doubt that I will intervene and give my opinion," he said at a meeting with the country's governor generals, state run television reported.
"We must respect the law and act according to it because a bad law is better than lawlessness and violation of the law," he said. "Both sides are saying that they have acted according to the law but we cannot accept these explanations. The law has defined responsibilities of each body."
The hard-line Guardian Council rejected nearly half of the candidates who had registered to run for the 290-seat Parliamentary elections, scheduled on Feb. 20. Among them were nearly 80 current members of Parliament, including the brother of President Mohammad Khatami.
The Guardian Council has vetted candidates in past elections but this is the first time it has eliminated such a large number of sitting members of parliament, many of whom had won their seats by large margins.
In some cities, only one hard-line candidate has been allowed to run.
The European Union's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, who was visiting Iran today, expressed concern in a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi over the process of democracy in Iran. "The fairness of an election is not only on the day of the election, the process should be fair," he said.
The reformist parliamentarians continued a sit-in they began Sunday in Parliament and warned that they will take their actions farther if the decision is not reversed.
"We had said that we will not participate in a show election, and if our protest does not bear any results we will not be able to participate in the elections," said Ali Shakourirad, one of the members of parliament who was at the sit-in. "We want all candidates who have been eliminated illegally to be allowed to run in the elections."
The sit-in is not widely supported by Iranians, in part because the reformers have lost much of their luster in recent years. Most people accuse President Mohammad Khatami and his followers of failing to capitalize on their broad public support to take bold actions to push through political and economic reforms.
Leaders of the student movement, who had said that they will not encourage people to go to the polls, met with the reformists in Parliament in a sign of solidarity but said that they will not take further actions.
"Unfortunately members of Parliament did not object to the widespread rejection of candidates until their own turn came, but we will support any action that is against undemocratic means," said Mehdi Aminzadeh, one of the leaders of the student movement known as the Office for Fostering Unity.
"Reformers were faced with obstacles during their tenure but we believe that they did not have a clear plan and were not firm enough to force the establishment to give in to people's demand," he said.
Analysts said that the elimination of reformist candidates might have one positive outcome: the deadlock that was a result of the constant battle between reformers and hardliners would end.
"Reform is a different process and will not go way with the reformers," said the journalist and analyst Saeed Leylaz. "It seems that the conservatives are determined to eliminate their political rival in the political scene during this election. They know that people are too disappointed with the reformers to come to the streets."
Amir Mohebian, a hard-columnist for the daily Ressalat, said in his column on Monday that "Reformers do not consider reforms as an ideal anymore but only seek power." He dismissed them as "the least dangerous kind of opposition in any society."
There are signs that conservatives would put aside the ideological obstacles they had created for the reformers once they get elected to Parliament. The additional protocol to the non-proliferation treaty, which ended a crisis in Iran's foreign relations over its nuclear program, was signed in December by a hard-line cleric, Hassan Rowhani, who was picked by Mr. Khamenei.
--------
Thousands March in Haiti
January 12, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/12/international/americas/12HAIT.html?pagewanted=all
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Jan. 11 (AP) - Tens of thousands of people marched Sunday in the largest demonstration yet against President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, as political tensions across the country grew.
The march began at a church in suburban Pétionville with about 1,000 people carrying a banner calling for "Another Haiti." But the crowd swelled to tens of thousands as the protesters approached the capital.
Riot police officers followed the protest. No injuries were reported, but Aristide partisans threw sticks at the marchers at one point.
During protests in the past four months, at least 45 people have been killed and more than 100 wounded. The sides blame each other for the violence, but most deaths have been among antigovernment protesters.
--------
Iranian Reformers Protest Move Barring Many From Reelection
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 12, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8317-2004Jan11.html
ISTANBUL, Jan. 11 -- Reformist legislators in Iran held angry protests Sunday after a conservative oversight body barred almost a third of them from seeking reelection next month.
The lawmakers first walked out of parliament, then dozens of them staged a sit-in to protest the sweeping decision by the hard-line Guardian Council, which under Iran's complex theocratic system screens all candidates for national office.
"It's meaningless that qualification of prominent figures who have worked for the nation for years is not approved," said President Mohammad Khatami, who was voted into office in 1997 on a reform platform. "I'm against such disqualifications. There are legal ways to fight."
In addition to the incumbents, thousands of other candidates were barred from running for the 290-seat parliament, according to the official Islamic Republic News Agency. The Associated Press cited parliament members as saying that about 900 of the 1,700 hopefuls for seats in Tehran alone had been disqualified.
The disqualifications represented a new frustration for Iran's reform movement, which despite overwhelming public support has failed to wrest decisive political power from unelected conservative clerics. Last year, the Guardian Council vetoed two bills that would have broadened Khatami's powers and removed the council's authority to screen candidates.
The candidate disqualifications -- more than three times the number four years ago -- amounted to an aggressive reassertion of authority by the conservatives, who have ruled Iran since 1979. Half of the council's 12 members are clerics; all 12 are appointed either directly or indirectly by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who succeeded the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as Iran's supreme leader.
The potential impact on the Feb. 20 election was not immediately apparent, analysts said. But after winning municipal offices last year in elections that were remarkable for their low turnout, conservatives have recently spoken of mobilizing their base -- widely estimated to be 15 percent of voters -- to regain control of the parliament next month.
Among those barred were leading figures in the reform movement, including Khatami's younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, and Behzad Nabavi. Both are vice speakers of parliament.
"We are witnessing the most wide-scale rejection in the history of the Iranian parliament," the younger Khatami told reporters outside parliament. "The sit-in today is the beginning of a movement which will have more ramifications, and if the legitimate demands of the MPs are not addressed, it will become more widespread and take up other dimensions." He did not elaborate.
"This is a civilian coup d'etat," said another prominent reformist, Mohsen Mirdamadi.
"They have barred certain individuals in every electoral constituency in order to clear the way for their favorite candidates," said Mirdamadi, head of parliament's foreign affairs and national security committee.
President Khatami appealed for calm, saying he would ask Khamenei to review the disqualifications. The president's spokesman suggested that the cabinet office charged with carrying out elections might ignore the disqualifications when publishing ballots.
"The government sees itself not obliged to put into practice any illegal decision no matter which organ had taken it," said spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, according to the official news agency.
For all the drama, however, analysts wondered whether the controversy would matter to the public, which has responded to the reformists' failures by disengaging from politics. Voter turnout last year was lowest in urban areas that are the reformists' base.
"The majority of the Iranian public has been engaging in a kind of passive resistance," said Davoud Bavand, a law professor at Tehran University. "With the stalemate, and the emasculation of the reformation, an indifference and hopelessness has appeared."
--------
Enola Gay, Just War, and Mass Murder
by Scott McPherson,
January 12, 2004
Future of Freedom Foundation
http://www.fff.org/comment/com0401d.asp
On December 15, 2003, the new Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles International Airport, part of the National Air and Space Museum, was opened to the public. The Center boasts a number of high-profile attractions. The SR-71 Blackbird, the Air France Concorde, Russian MIGs, and even the Spaceshuttle Enterprise can all be found in this 294,000-square-foot, 10-story hangar on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. In all, a total of 82 racers, gliders, helicopters, warplanes, and airliners are on display.
But the most historical aircraft to be found there - and certainly the most controversial - is the Enola Gay, the massive B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on August 6, 1945. Piloted by Major Paul Tibbets, Enola Gay's nuclear payload left more than 40,000 Japanese civilians dead, most of them women, children, and senior citizens, and mutilated or irradiated many thousands more, as it exploded 1,890 feet above the ground. Three days later, another atomic bomb was dropped from the B-29 Bockscar, on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing another 40,000 civilians or more.
Japan surrendered unconditionally in less than a week. The Second World War was finally over.
More than 230,000 people would lose their lives, both directly and indirectly, as a result of the two bomb attacks, and emotions run high when discussing those two days in August almost 60 years ago.
Some question the wisdom of an act which left so many innocent people dead. When the new wing of the Air and Space Museum opened its doors, protesters, including survivors of the two bombings, were waiting to highlight this fact. "If they want to show these planes, that's fine, but we can't help but also demand that they show the damage and the stories that take place behind these weapons," said Terumi Tanaka, a 71- year-old Nagasaki survivor. Minoru Nishino, a 71-year-old Hiroshima survivor, told in vivid detail his own experience: "I was 13 when I saw this airplane crossing the sky, just before I was blown to the ground with my skin peeling off," he said.
Yet apologists for the bombings remain unfazed by any criticism. For them, the war against Japan was a "good war." Japan had initiated hostilities against the United States, and drastic measures were essential to defend the United States from possible annihilation.
Furthermore, claim the supporters of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the U.S. government was actually acting in the interests of the Japanese people by bringing the war to a close using nuclear weapons, as many more civilians would probably have been killed in an invasion of the Japanese mainland than were killed in the atomic bombings. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. soldiers could also have been killed in that invasion.
The trouble is, these positions don't stand up to moral scrutiny. There is no excuse for attacking innocent people.
Governments exist solely to defend the individual rights of citizens within a determined political boundary - they serve no other rightful purpose. On the domestic front, this entails the employment of police to respond to emergency calls from crime victims and the establishment of courts of law to determine the possible guilt and punishment of those who have been accused of violating the rights of fellow citizens. Civil courts are needed to settle private disputes that arise from honest misunderstandings and disagreements, such as breach of contract.
The duty of government to protect individual rights also extends to protecting citizens from foreign governments. Should one nation-state decide to attack another, the government of the defending nation has an equally important moral responsibility to shield its citizens from the aggressor, by deploying its military in their defense.
Repelling immediate attack may prove sufficient to put an end to any such threat, as happened when the Continental Army forced the British to surrender their hold over the 13 American colonies or as could have happened if the Confederacy had succeeded in driving back Union forces in the War Between the States in 1861. No further action was or would have been needed to end those conflicts. Still, greater measures may be required to protect a populace from a foreign menace, such as the total destruction of the rival nation's ability to make war. Consequently, in the interests of national or collective self-defense, the theory of "just war" arises. (See Patrick Stephens's commentary, "The Justice of War.")
The just-war theory holds, among other things, that if one nation attacks another, and nothing less than complete destruction of the foreign war machine - total war - will suffice to restrain future acts of violence, then moral responsibility for casualties - military and civilian - must lie at the feet of the attacking, not the defending, nation. After all, the defending government has a duty to protect the rights of its citizen.
An analogy provides the perfect example: If a gunman began shooting at you from the cover of a crowd of people and, with nowhere to escape, you respond by firing back to kill your attacker, then any damage you may inflict on the bystanders is the fault of the gunman.
"Just war" or not, there are immutable moral restraints placed on all participants in any conflict. "War," wrote Herbert Spencer, "is a great evil," visiting carnage, ruin, and loss of life on untold numbers of human beings. For centuries, it has been understood that noncombatants should be spared the hell of war, as they are its innocent bystanders. Warfare is meant to be conducted only against those who are actively participating in the conflict. "Old-fashioned international law had two excellent devices to accomplish this goal," says Murray Rothbard: "the 'laws of war,' and the 'laws of neutrality.' ... The laws of neutrality were designed to keep any war confined to the warring States themselves, without attacks on nonwarring States.... The 'laws of war,' for their part, were designed to limit as much as possible the invasion by warring States of the rights of civilians." [Emphasis added]
To continue with the analogy: The victim of the gunman's attack in the crowded place nonetheless retains a moral responsibility to avoid killing innocent people if possible. For instance, he should not be allowed to fire indiscriminately into the crowd. To be considered within the realm of justifiable defensive action required for self-preservation, his efforts should be concentrated solely on defeating his attacker. (Of course, if feasible, he should retreat, which is consistent with self-preservation while totally eliminating any possibility of "collateral damage.")
In other words, it has long been considered the moral responsibility of warring governments to avoid, wherever possible, inflicting harm on civilians who are not directly part of the war effort. They are as much the victims of war as the defenders. To deliberately attack a civilian, non-combat-related target, such as a city, is considered outside the scope of legitimate defensive action in wartime. It is a violation of the laws of war.
It should be emphasized that not every civilian death that resulted from U.S. attacks on Japanese targets during the war is morally condemnable. On the contrary, taking those actions necessary to prevent further possible attacks on the United States, e.g., destruction of Japan's military capabilities, were not only legitimate but essential if the U.S. government was to fulfill its responsibility to the American people. Nations do not have the privilege of fleeing from an invader to safer ground. Moral responsibility for any civilians who were accidentally killed during counterattacks on justifiable military targets rests rightly with the Japanese government.
Aside from dropping nuclear bombs on large civilian populations, other options were available to America's military planners to finish the war. By August 1945, Japan was completely on the ropes. Japanese forces had been successfully repelled, by conventional means, from Iwo Jimo, Okinawa, the Philippines, and the Solomon Islands. Japan was so beaten that in the last months of the war thousands of kamikaze pilots were actually flying suicide missions against American navy ships, and little effort was made to defend against regular U.S. air raids on Tokyo and elsewhere. U.S. forces were poised to invade Japan itself, and there was little the Japanese could have done to prevent this eventuality.
Can the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima be justified on the grounds that many thousands of U.S. troops would have been killed in an invasion?
Certainly not. A soldier is, like it or not, a tool of the government whose army he serves in. Soldiers are aware, when they put on a uniform, that the ultimate sacrifice may be asked of them. They are in the service to kill enemy soldiers. If they have to give up their lives in order that a noncombatant - even if he is a citizen of the very nation the soldier is fighting - should live, then that is the price that they may have to pay. (Conscription, as a coercive act, makes a victim of the individual forced into service, but does not justify making victims of noncombatants.)
Of course, defenders of the bombings find final refuge in their claim that an invasion of Japan would probably have killed more civilians than the nukes did. That is pure speculation. It also sounds a lot like an Orwellian "we had to kill innocent people in order to possibly save other innocent people" argument. There is no way of knowing for sure what would have happened under those circumstances.
It is highly improbable that the Japanese emperor would have fought to the last man. Most likely, the government would have surrendered when the cost or probable cost became "too high" (as it did after Hiroshima and Nagasaki). How do we know that, with an armada of troop ships entering their ports, or following a successful beachhead, the Japanese government would not have surrendered in the face of inevitable defeat, saving many thousands of lives?
And here "just war" advocates who support the bombings will find that they are entertaining an inconsistency. On the one hand, they want to blame Japan, or at least absolve the U.S. government, for the civilian deaths caused by the U.S. atomic bombs, because Japan had started the war. At the same time, they do not see that all innocent people killed in an invasion would have been the fault of the Japanese government, and so cannot exonerate, in moral terms, the U.S. government's blatant attack on civilians.
Another possible solution could have been military containment. Given Japan's desperate measures at the end of the war, it is highly likely that U.S. armed forces could have prevented Japan from posing any further threat to the United States by sealing off the Japanese military to prevent further strikes.
No amount of patriotic fervor, excuse-making, or rationalization can change this simple truth: the cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima were targeted specifically because of their large civilian populations, and precisely to maximize the number of civilian casualties and force a Japanese surrender without invasion. Adding insult to injury, this was done at the very time that Japan's military might was in total decline. There was no military advantage to leveling those two cities. Dropping massive nuclear bombs on those locations can only be considered a violation of the laws of war, and a war crime. It is the deliberate pursuit of civilian deaths in the A-bomb attacks that rightly deserves condemnation. Those 230,000 deaths did not constitute an unfortunate consequence of "just war" - it was mass murder.
It is important to note that none of the foregoing should be construed as a criticism of the "just war" theory. Actually, this theory is a sound libertarian solution to what is essentially a nonlibertarian predicament. In the modern age of warfare, avoiding civilian deaths is very difficult, if not impossible. Libertarians hold as their highest principle that individual rights should be paramount above all else. The "just war" position on noncombat casualties is meant to bolster this principle, not provide an exception to the rule. Every government has the duty of protecting the rights of the citizens it was formed to defend - even if this requires killing people.
The point here is that the Enola Gay's mission was not consistent with a "just war" policy. It was meant to cause massive destruction and loss of life, not wipe out any legitimate military targets that posed a danger to the people of the United States. In this sense, the U.S. government is responsible for the largest act of terrorism in the history of the world.
War is indeed hell, and all attempts should be made to prevent it. When the United States is engaged in a defensive war, however, all lawful means should be used to protect American lives - but it does not allow for an open season on innocent civilians. Even in wartime, governments have a moral responsibility to avoid unnecessary civilian deaths, as prescribed in the laws of war that have guided military conduct for centuries. Enola Gay played a major part in the two darkest days of the U.S. government's history - a tool of mass murder in an otherwise just war.
Scott McPherson is a policy advisor at The Future of Freedom Foundation.
Send him email - mailto:mcpherson0627@juno.com
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