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NUCLEAR
Georgian Science Institute Blast Kills 2
Pakistan Questions Nuclear Scientists
Revealed: how Pakistan fuels nuclear arms race
Pakistan Expands Nuclear Investigation
Pakistan Quizzes Aide to Father of Atom Bomb
North Korea Eases Stormy Ties With Japan
Indian Point 3 strike averted
Strike Averted at N.Y. Nuclear Power Plant
Peace, and Kucinich, Gets a Chance
MILITARY
Five Killed in Latest Clash in Afghanistan
U.S. Agrees to Move Its Troops Out of Seoul
U.S. Troops To Pull Out Of Seoul
Chinese Move to Relax Severe Judicial Penalties
Iranian Electoral Official Threatens to Quit
Coalition uses 1918 British report on tribal system
Iraq Rebels Seen Using More Skill to Down Copters
Roadside Bomb Kills 3 American and 2 Iraqi Soldiers
Bombing at Gate of Main U.S. Base in Iraq Kills at Least 20
Iraqi Kurdish Leader Demands Guarantees
ISRAEL EXPLORES NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR MILITARY
Israel Diplomat Defends Attack on Bomber Art in Stockholm
No need for US base in Australia: general
Pakistan Leader Jeered in Parliament Speech Criticizing Extremism
Americans in Philippines Warned to Be Cautious
Red Cross pushes Pentagon on Guantanamo prisoners
U.S. Eyes Space as Possible Battleground
UN returns to Iraq on secret mercy mission
U.N. Prepares for Meeting About Iraq, Wary of U.S. Motives
US swallows pride to plead with UN
The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think
After 10 Months in Iraq, U.S. Marks 500th Military Death
Rotation to Cut U.S. Presence
US military will stay in Georgia
CBS Cuts MoveOn, Allows White House Ads During Super Bowl
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Huge caches of drugs, cash seized at borders last year
The Demonized Seed
Northwest Gave U.S. Data on Passengers
Islamic exile ordered bombings from Oslo, claims CIA
OTHER
Scientist Claims Cloning, Implanting Human Embryo
Vietnam and China Report New Cases of Avian Flu and SARS
Vietnamese Child Latest Bird Flu Fatality
ACTIVISTS
US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower
Thousands Protest French Head Scarf Ban
Panning defence plan
Soldier 'tried to cover up killing of British activist'
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Georgian Science Institute Blast Kills 2
January 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Georgia-Explosion.html
TBILISI, Georgia (AP) -- An explosion at a scientific institute in the Georgian capital killed two people and injured two others on Sunday, an investigator said.
The explosion occurred on the 14th floor of the Tbilisi Institute for Stable Isotopes, said Valery Grigarashvili, chief of investigations for the Tbilisi prosecutor's office.
There were no reports of radioactive materials being released in the blast.
The cause of the explosion was not immediately known, but the ITAR-Tass news agency said it occurred during a transfer of nitrogen, an indication that a canister of the gas could have blown up.
The institute is primarily involved in research for medical equipment.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan Questions Nuclear Scientists
By MATTHEW PENNINGTON
Associated Press Writer
Jan 18, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_NUCLEAR_DETENTION?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has expanded its investigation of the country's premier nuclear weapons laboratory, detaining as many as seven scientists and administrators for questioning, amid allegations that sensitive technology may have spread to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya, officials said Sunday.
Also Sunday, Pakistani agents seized seven suspected al-Qaida militants and a weapons cache in a pre-dawn raid on an apartment complex in Karachi, a day after Pakistan vowed to renew its fight against terrorism.
Police found five hand grenades, four handguns, ammunition and maps of Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, an intelligence officer told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
There was no immediate word on whether the arrested suspects were engaged in an active plot. They included two Egyptian and three Afghan men and two Arab women, the officer said. Police did not identify them or say what rank they allegedly held in Osama bin Laden's terror organization.
"Our information is that these are al-Qaida people," Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said. "One is a recognized man."
Addressing the detentions of nuclear scientists, Ahmed said that over the past two or three days between five and seven personnel at the Khan Research Laboratories had been taken in for "debriefing."
Among them was Islam-ul Haq, a director at the laboratory. Two uniformed men believed to be intelligence agents picked him up as he was dining Saturday at the residence of the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The laboratory is named after Khan, a national hero for leading Pakistan to its underground test of the Islamic world's first nuclear bomb in 1998, designed as a deterrent against its larger rival, India. Haq is Khan's principal staff officer.
"We have had no contact with him," Haq's wife, Nilofar Islam, told The Associated Press. "We don't know where he is and what he is being asked."
She was informed of Haq's detention by Khan.
Though all the men remained in custody, Ahmed played down the detentions, saying the personnel being debriefed were not "necessarily involved in something or have allegations against them," he said.
In the past two months, Pakistan has interrogated a handful of scientists at the laboratory, after receiving unspecified documents from the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency about Iran's nuclear program, officials say.
Among those who have been questioned is Khan, although he has not been detained and is still treated as an official dignitary in Pakistan.
Pakistan has strongly denied any official involvement in possible proliferation to Iran, Libya and North Korea, but has acknowledged that individual scientists acting on their own account may have transgressed that rule.
In his first-ever speech to Parliament on Saturday, Pakistan's military ruler, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, noted that the world suspects Pakistan of being a nuclear proliferator and that the country must show that it is a responsible power.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said this month that American officials have presented evidence to Pakistan's leaders of Pakistani involvement in the spread of nuclear weapons technology.
The New York Times reported earlier this month that sophisticated centrifuge design technology used to enrich uranium had been passed to Libya even after a pledge by Musharraf to rein in Pakistani scientists. Pakistan dismissed the allegation as "absolutely false."
Libya, like Iran, has recently opened its nuclear program to U.N. inspections.
Musharraf has previously denied suggestions that Pakistan swapped nuclear technology to North Korea in return for missiles.
The Jan. 2 arrest at a Denver airport of a businessman accused of smuggling nuclear bomb triggers to Pakistan has deepened suspicions of Pakistani involvement in the nuclear black market.
Asher Karni, who heads a South African company, is accused of being the middleman for a Pakistani company's purchase of dozens of triggered spark gaps - electronic devices that can be used to trigger nuclear weapons - allegedly using an elaborate scheme to try to get around U.S. export restrictions to Pakistan.
The proliferation allegations are an embarrassment to Washington, which calls Pakistan a key ally in the war on terrorism for its help in rounding up al-Qaida suspects and support in toppling the Taliban regime in neighboring Afghanistan in late 2001.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for Pakistan's powerful military, on Sunday said Pakistan remained "committed to nonproliferation."
----
Revealed: how Pakistan fuels nuclear arms race
Antony Barnett investigates the illegal global market in nuclear equipment and expertise and how the weapons programmes of Iran, Libya and North Korea all lead back to Pakistan
Sunday January 18, 2004
The UK Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,1125643,00.html
The Austrian village of Seibersdorf is so anonymous that cab drivers from nearby Vienna have difficulty finding it. But it is home to a laboratory complex whose scientists have the power to start a war or keep the peace.
Hunched over electron microscopes and mass spectrometers, they are the world's nuclear detectives, analysing minute fragments of radioactive matter collected by UN inspectors in places such as Iran and Libya. Testing particles as small as one-hundredth of the width of a human hair, they can spot the secret yet indelible signs of a nuclear programme.
It was in Seibersdorf last summer that a scientist analysing dust taken from a cotton swipe used inside facilities in Iran discovered evidence of highly-enriched uranium - the key component of an atomic bomb. It was the first hint of a programme that had remained hidden for 18 years.
Like DNA from a crime scene, analysis of these particles also provides vital clues to the source of any nuclear material. Each radioactive isotope has its own signature.
Scientists at Seibersdorf work for the UN's nuclear watchdog - the International Atomic Energy Authority. They are just one part of a nuclear police force that is at the forefront of a war against a growing black market in nuclear material, equipment and atomic know-how. The battle involves rogue scientists selling their technical knowledge, nations desperate to join the nuclear weapon states and middlemen turn ing a quick buck by trading equipment and material.
Dramatic evidence from Iran and now Libya reveals a clandestine and sophisticated network stretching from North Korea, Malaysia and China to Russia, Germany and Dubai. Yet one country more than any other stands accused of easing this proliferation. In the network of illegal radioactive trade, all roads point to Pakistan. More precisely, they lead to the Khan Research Laboratories in Kahuta in north Pakistan.
Uranium 235 is the holy grail in bomb-making. It is a specific radioactive isotope whose atoms can split in two, releasing the huge amount of fissile energy vital to an atomic weapon. One way of acquiring it is to obtain uranium ore from the ground - which has minute amounts of uranium-235 - then 'enrich' it using thousands of centrifuges. This involves putting unrefined uranium into a tube and spinning it at twice the speed of sound to expel any impurities. By doing this, the amount of uranium-235 becomes more concentrated.
While this process may not sound too complicated, it requires a feat of supreme technical engineering involving a number of complex components. In particular, the rotors of the centrifuge spin so fast they need to be made of extremely strong material and be perfectly balanced.
In the mid-Seventies, these engineering problems were faced by a Pakistani metallurgist, Abdul Qadeer Khan. An ardent nationalist, he had just seen India test its first nuclear bomb. At the time he was working in Holland for an Anglo-Dutch-German nuclear engineering consortium called Urenco. Through his work there, Khan became aware of secret blueprints for two types of uranium enrichment centrifuges: one based on rotors made of aluminium and another based on a highly-strengthened alloy of steel.
Khan went on to steal the blueprints and a list of Urenco suppliers. With the blessing of the then Pakistani government, he established the Khan Research Laboratories near Islamabad and, with the help of the Chinese, went on to secretly develop the country's atomic bomb.
When, in 1998, Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in the desert of Baluchistan, Khan became a hero in his home country as the 'father of the Pakistani nuclear programme'. He once said: 'All Western countries are not only the enemies of Pakistan but in fact of Islam.'
His fundamentalist sympathies mean that it is perhaps no surprise that he is also known as the 'godfather of the Islamic bomb'. Evidence has now emerged from Iran and Libya that Khan's programme in Pakistan may be the source of the greatest level of nuclear weapons proliferation since the Cold War.
The Observer has learnt that UN inspectors who have recently visited a number of facilities in Libya discovered large amounts of aluminium centrifuge parts that had 'all the hallmarks of the Urenco designs' stolen by Khan. Pakistan used these to enrich uranium before later turning to the more complex steel centrifuges.
A Vienna-based diplomat familiar with the Libyan inspections said: 'The big surprise was that components found were almost off-the-shelf turnkey equipment. It was as if somebody had been shopping at Ikea and just needed to put the bits together.'
The diplomat said this was unlike Iraq's secret nuclear programme, which required large teams of scientists to deal with research issues and solve mechanical problems. He said: 'The worry is that if a country like Libya - with little industrial infrastructure and a small population - could lay its hands on this equipment, then a large country might be able to set up a weapons programme at a very fast pace indeed.'
Libyan authorities have been helping the IAEA to piece together the 'cartel' of middlemen feeding this clandestine network of nuclear know-how and equipment. They have been helped by the US seizure of a German-registered ship in the Suez Canal last October destined for Libya with thousands of parts - believed to be Malaysian-made but based on Pakistani designs - for aluminium centrifuges. The UN inspectors uncovered evidence that many of the same middlemen were responsible for arming Libya and Iran. Last November, Iran finally admitted to a vast, secret procurement network that acquired thousands of sensitive parts and tools from numerous countries over an 18-year period.
It is believed that rogue scientists from Pakistan, motivated by million-dollar payouts, were helped by German middlemen and Sri Lankan businessmen based in Dubai. The middlemen are believed to have secured items for Iran from European, Asian and North American companies.
Until the end of last year the Pakistani government furiously denied that any of its nuclear technology had been 'exported'. However, it now accepts that 'certain individuals might have violated Pakistani laws for personal gain'. Last month Pakistan announced it was questioning four of its scientists over the sale of nuclear secrets, including Abdul Khan, but Western officials fear little will come of this inquiry.
The political sensitivity of 'arresting' a national hero such as Khan would inflame Islamic sentiment and backfire on both the US and President Pervez Musharraf, who is an important ally in the war on terrorism. Yet while the 'rogue scientist' theory is helpful to all parties in explaining how Pakistani equipment has ended up in Libya and Iran, an added complication is the role played by North Korea.
US intelligence claims that the Pakistani government, through the Khan laboratories, struck a deal which swapped Pakistani nuclear centrifuge technology for North Korean long-range missiles.
South Korean intelligence agents were reported to have discovered the transactions in 2002 and that summer US spy satellites photographed Pakistani cargo planes loading missile parts in North Korea.
Pakistan has denied such a deal, but pressure is mounting for Musharraf to clamp down. Reports have also emerged of Pakistani nuclear scientists visiting Burma. It is clear that the extent of the black market in nuclear weapons technology is only just beginning to emerge. As one of the scientists in Seibersdorf said: 'This year looks like being a busy one.'
----
Pakistan Expands Nuclear Investigation
January 18, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear-Detention.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has expanded an investigation of its premier nuclear weapons laboratory, detaining as many as seven scientists and administrators amid allegations sensitive technology may have spread to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya, officials said Sunday.
Pakistan has strongly denied any official involvement in sharing technology to those countries but has acknowledged that individual scientists acting on their own account may leaked information.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said over the past few days between five and seven personnel at the Khan Research Laboratories were taken in for questioning. But he said the detained men were not ``necessarily involved in something or have allegations against them.''
Among the detained was Islam-ul Haq, a director at the laboratory, who was picked up Saturday as he was dining at the residence of the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The laboratory is named after Khan, a national hero for leading Pakistan to its underground test of the Islamic world's first nuclear bomb in 1998. The bomb was designed as a deterrent to Pakistan's nuclear-armed neighbor, India. Haq is Khan's principal staff officer.
Haq's wife, Nilofar Islam, said Khan told her that her husband was detained but ``we have had no contact with him. We don't know where he is and what he is being asked.''
The nuclear program investigations came as Pakistan intensifies crackdowns as part of the U.S.-led war on terror, most recently arresting seven suspected al-Qaida militants on Sunday and seizing a weapons cache in the teeming port city of Karachi.
During the past two months, Pakistan has interrogated a handful of scientists at the laboratory, acting on information about Iran's nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. watchdog, officials say.
Khan has also been questioned, although he has not been detained and is still treated as an official dignitary in Pakistan.
Earlier this month, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said American officials have presented evidence to Pakistan's leaders of Pakistani involvement in the spread of nuclear weapons technology.
The Jan. 2 arrest of South African-based businessman Asher Karni at a Denver airport, accused of smuggling nuclear bomb triggers to Pakistan, deepened suspicions of the country's involvement in the nuclear black market.
The New York Times also reported that sophisticated centrifuge design technology used to enrich uranium had been passed to Libya even after a pledge by President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to rein in Pakistani scientists. Pakistan dismissed the allegation as ``absolutely false.''
Libya announced last month it was giving up its nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs and pledged to name its suppliers.
U.S. officials say many of the names probably will be Pakistani. They say evidence points to Pakistani nuclear experts as the source of at least some technology that Libya used; similar reports have arisen about probable Pakistani assistance to Iran.
Pakistan also has been accused of swapping nuclear technology to North Korea in return for missiles.
On Sunday, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, spokesman for Pakistan's powerful military, said Pakistan remained ``committed to nonproliferation.''
The allegations could damage a growing U.S. relationship with Pakistan, a key ally in the war on terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks.
----
Pakistan Quizzes Aide to Father of Atom Bomb
January 18, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Authorities are questioning a key aide to the father of Pakistan's atom bomb and seven other people as they investigate reports of possible transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, officials said Sunday.
Pakistan has questioned Abdul Qadeer Khan, revered as a national hero for developing the country's nuclear bomb, and several colleagues in recent weeks since a U.N. nuclear agency began investigating possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said eight people including three military officers and three scientists were among those being ``debriefed.'' He gave no further details.
A senior government official said Islam-ul-Haq, Khan's principal secretary and a former major, was detained for questioning Saturday evening in Islamabad.
``He was rounded up in connection with the probe of the Iranian nuclear program,'' said the official, who asked not to be named.
Pakistan, a key ally in the U.S.-led war on terror, says some of its scientists may have been driven by ``personal ambition or greed'' to export technology to Iran but denies the government itself was ever involved in such technology transfer.
The detention of Haq came hours after President Pervez Musharraf said Pakistan faced serious accusations of spreading terrorism and nuclear technology.
``Our nuclear and missile power is for the defense of Pakistan,'' Musharraf told a noisy parliament session on Saturday.
``But we have to assure the world that we are a responsible nation and we will not allow proliferation of nuclear weapons.''
The New York Times Saturday quoted U.S. law enforcement officials as saying they were looking into whether the Pakistani government was involved in a plot by a South African businessman to export trigger devices that could be used for nuclear arms.
It quoted a Pakistani diplomat in Washington as saying Islamabad would cooperate in the investigation but denied its involvement in the export deal.
NO CONTACT WITH FAMILY
Haq was serving as a director at the Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), the country's top uranium enrichment laboratory, set up by Khan in the 1970s near Islamabad.
Haq's wife, Nilofar Islam, told Reuters she had no information about her husband's whereabouts. ``We have had no contact with him since last evening,'' she said.
Pakistani intelligence officials questioned at least three scientists working with KRL last month after diplomats in Vienna said the International Atomic Energy Agency was investigating a possible link between Islamabad and Tehran.
Iran acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear to be identical to those used in Islamabad's past quest for an atom bomb. Pakistan tested its nuclear device in 1998.
-------- korea
North Korea Eases Stormy Ties With Japan
January 18, 2004
New York Times
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/asia/18KORE.html
TOKYO, Jan. 18 - Facing a choice of Japanese sanctions or Japanese aid, North Korea is quietly taking steps to unblock its longstanding political logjam with the government in Tokyo.
After 15 months of unremitting hostility, North Korea last week sent a series of signals that suggest a desire for warmer relations with Japan.
First, six adult children of Japanese hijackers from the Red Army faction, an extinct left-wing terror group, unexpectedly arrived here on Tuesday from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
Then, North Korea floated a March 20 deadline for sending to Japan the children of five Japanese who had been kidnapped by North Korea years ago. The parents came here from North Korea in October 2002.
On Saturday, four Japanese diplomats completed a visit to Pyongyang, the first by Japanese officials since relations between the countries soured in the fall of 2002. That was when North Korea first admitted that it had kidnapped Japanese citizens in the 1970's and 80's, who were forced to teach Japanese to North Korean intelligence agents.
By clarifying the fates of as many as 100 kidnapped Japanese, North Korea could win Japan's full participation in a second round of six-country talks, tentatively set for next month, that are intended to defuse North Korea's nuclear threat.
Normalization of relations could also mean the beginning of the payments, to total $10 billion, that Japan agreed to make in reparations for its colonial occupation of northern Korea in the first half of 20th century.
"The North Koreans have come to an understanding that the Japanese can't become a participant in nuclear talks with the abductee issue outstanding," Frank Jannuzi, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee aide, said here on Thursday, after a week of meetings in Pyongyang.
If the issue of the kidnappings is not resolved to Japanese satisfaction, it is likely to strengthen support here for economic sanctions. On Friday, leaders of Japan's governing coalition and the main opposition party agreed that soon after the Parliament reconvenes on Monday, they would submit legislation to empower Japan's government to restrict trade and financial remittances to North Korea.
"They now realize that without having the settlement of the abduction cases, Japan will not give anything to them, and this is why they are approaching us," Hatsuhisa Takashima, a Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman, said in an interview on Friday. "If they really want sincere direct talks with us, that is a good sign."
An American diplomat agreed in a separate interview, saying: "You have to have Japan squeezing the money. That's how you get motion out of them."
A similar view came last week from Senator Sam Brownback, Republican of Kansas, who is sponsoring the North Korea Freedom Act, a bill that would tie all American aid to North Korea to improvement of its human rights record.
"Japan has a strong hand to play on the issue of financial support of North Korea," Senator Brownback said in a speech here on Jan. 7, referring to annual remittances of tens of millions of dollars by ethnic Koreans in Japan to North Korea. "It needs to play its hand."
Japanese concern also extends to the plight of people who flee North Korea. Last week, Japanese human rights groups and editorial writers protested after China disclosed that it had arrested a Japanese human rights advocate and two North Korean refugees a month ago. The activist, Takayuki Noguchi, worked with Life Funds for North Korean Refugees, the largest group here that aims to help North Koreans who escape their country.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
Indian Point 3 strike averted
By BRUCE GOLDING mailto:bgolding@thejournalnews.com
THE JOURNAL NEWS
January 18, 2004
http://www.nyjournalnews.com/newsroom/011804/a0118ipstrikec.html
NEW ROCHELLE - Negotiators apparently averted a strike at the Indian Point 3 nuclear power plant early this morning by reaching a four-year deal that would also cover workers at the adjacent Indian Point 2 plant.
The tentative agreement announced at 2:30 a.m. by plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast faces a ratification vote by members of Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America. Union officials could not be reached and a spokesman would not confirm the deal.
"We're still working on negotiating the contract and we expect to negotiate through the morning hours," spokesman Steve Mangione said.
Fred Dacimo, Entergy's lead negotiator, credited union leaders for their "tenacious" and "professional representation of the very fine and talented union workers at Indian Point."
"This contract reflects Entergy's commitment to its employees, and with these negotiations behind us, we are a much stronger organization that is poised to safely and securely operate this site for many years to come," Dacimo said in a prepared statement.
Details of the agreement were not released this morning.
Dacimo and Mangione's comments came more than two hours after union officials agreed to "stop the clock" on a midnight strike deadline this morning, temporarily averting a strike by almost 300 Indian Point 3 workers.
That move came several hours after a union spokesman had predicted a midnight walkout by plant workers was "inevitable."
But at 12:05 a.m., union President Manny Hellen said, "Based on the (federal) mediator's intervention and the positive movement that I see at the table right now, I've agreed to stop the clock, for how long I can't tell you."
"We're hopeful," he said. "I'd like to send a message to our members: Stay focused, stay on the job, continue to do what you're supposed to be doing in the best interest of the public."
Mangione described the negotiations as "very tense," with flaring tempers. He said there was "a lot of yelling across the table, a lot of screaming back and forth. It was very contentious."
He said that mediator Vincent Watson asked for the clock to be stopped on the strike deadline and that "both sides did the responsible thing."
At about 11 p.m., Entergy spokesman Jim Steets reported progress in the day's negotiations. He said the New Orleans-based company remained optimistic it would come to terms with the 276 plant employees represented by the union.
But Steets also said Entergy was prepared to run the 985-megawatt plant with replacement workers that he said would be "as qualified or more qualified than the people that are in there now."
"We have to keep the plant operating because that electricity is needed," Steets said.
After the clock stopped, Steets said, "We're at a critical point in the negotiations ... we're both committed to signing a good agreement for the workers and avoiding a strike."
He declined to characterize the talks and, when asked which side was making concessions said, "It's a give and take thing."
Major sticking points between the two sides included wages, medical benefits and pensions, although few details were revealed.
Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano last week called for the plant to be shut down in the event of a strike, but the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved Entergy's contingency plan to keep it running.
The plan called for teams of 10 managers each to run the plant in 12-hour shifts, with oversight by a special NRC strike-watch team, Steets said. The plant is normally run by 11 union employees who work eight-hour shifts, he said. During a strike, as many as 180 maintenance and support workers per shift would have been replaced by managers on a 60 percent to 70 percent basis.
Security officers, who are part of a different union, were not expected to take part in a strike.
Last month, more than 90 percent of Local 1-2's members authorized a walkout if a new contract was not reached by last night's midnight deadline, and more than 100 workers took part in a mock picket line on Wednesday. Experienced plant workers earn about $60,000 a year, plus benefits, the union said.
Round-the-clock negotiations began Monday, but broke off Friday when the union walked out over an Entergy proposal to have workers start paying for a portion of their health insurance. The discussions resumed yesterday morning after the union called in the federal mediator.
Entergy, which bought the Indian Point 3 plant from the New York State Power Authority in 2000, is seeking to consolidate the Indian Point 3 labor agreement with the one in place at Indian Point 2, which the company bought from Consolidated Edison in 2001. Entergy's contract with the 282 Local 1-2 workers there expires in June, and those workers were not expected to join a strike.
--------
Strike Averted at N.Y. Nuclear Power Plant
January 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Indian-Point-Labor.html
NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y. (AP) -- Negotiators averted a strike early Sunday at a nuclear power plant just north of New York City, reaching tentative agreement on a four-year contract for control room operators and other key workers.
The deal came after the two sides agreed to negotiate beyond the midnight strike deadline set by Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America.
``This was a very, very difficult negotiation, but we ended up with across-the-board improvements in wages and benefits, and it's fair to say we're very happy,'' said Manny Hellen, president of Local 1-2.
Hellen confirmed the agreement Sunday, hours after plant owner Entergy Nuclear Northeast announced the deal in a press release.
Entergy said the contract covers not just the 276 union members at Indian Point 3, but also 282 workers at the Indian Point 2 power plant. The plants had had separate owners and separate contracts before Entergy bought them in 2000 and 2001.
The agreement was a relief to some who worried about the safety of the nuclear plant if a strike occurred. The reactors are in Buchanan, N.Y., on the Hudson River, 35 miles north of midtown Manhattan. The operation and security of the plants have been concerns in the region since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Entergy had pledged to keep the reactor running during a walkout, with managers and supervisors prepared to take over according to a contingency plan approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Westchester County Executive Andrew Spano had called for the plant to be closed during a strike.
Specific terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Under the previous contracts, experienced workers at Indian Point earned about $60,000 a year plus overtime and benefits, the union said.
Union spokesman Steve Mangione said the new contract would be submitted to the union's executive board for approval on Tuesday. Union members will vote on ratification within a month.
-------- us politics
Peace, and Kucinich, Gets a Chance
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
New York Times
January 18, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/fashion/18IOWA.html?8hpib
FAIRFIELD, Iowa - In this little pocket of Iowa, houses are built to face the rising sun, something called yogic flying is a popular pastime and Dennis J. Kucinich is a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Even as much of the country still struggles to pronounce his name (it's koo-SIN-itch), Mr. Kucinich has become a phenomenon in Fairfield, population 9,500. His proposals to promote world peace, universal health care and environmental sustainability arguably resonate here as in no other place in America.
Mr. Kucinich, a congressman for his native Ohio, is polling in the low single digits nationwide, and is not expected to do much better in tomorrow's Iowa caucuses. But you wouldn't know that here, where he draws hundreds to every public appearance, and where red, white and blue "Kucinich for President" paraphernalia seems to be part of the town's permanent aesthetic. In local stores, Mr. Kucinich's smiling photo is posted among advertisements for white crane tai chi, Himalayan quartz and houses with eastward-facing entrances. "This is a Kucinich town, most definitely," said Gordon Shackelford, a Fairfield resident and Vietnam veteran who counts himself as a Wesley K. Clark supporter. "He's got this really quirky appeal, and there's plenty of quirky people here."
Mr. Kucinich, a vegan, who has proposed a cabinet-level Department of Peace, is not a typical candidate. And Fairfield, despite its picturesque town square and fluttering American flags, is not a typical Iowan town. The home of Maharishi University of Management and a center of the Global Country of World Peace, Fairfield and the surrounding area is home to 2,000 practitioners of Transcendental Meditation who began settling there in the early 1970's.
Hundreds of Fairfield residents now bike, walk and drive to twin 25,000-square-foot golden domes, which rise like gilded breasts from the Midwestern plains, to practice deep Transcendental Meditation twice a day. Through yogic flying, a kind of seated hopping levitation that practitioners believe can lead to enlightenment, their collective mission is to bring peace to the world.
"The main appeal is that he has established himself vocally as a peace candidate," said John Hagelin, a Fairfield resident and the founder of the New Age-oriented Natural Law Party, who himself has run for president several times. "This is a town dedicated to peace, to work for peace for the world and to radiate peace in the world."
While Mr. Kucinich does not practice Transcendental Meditation, after he was voted out of office as mayor of Cleveland in 1979 he did spend time in New Mexico and California finding what he describes as inner peace. "It's so humbling being here in your presence," he began at an event on Jan. 10, "because stepping into this moment you can sense this field of energy which is created by all the shared aspirations for peace - the energy and the light which is present right at this moment. You can feel it. It's palpable."
"For ourselves, for each other, think of the possibility to literally lift up this world, to lift it up from war," he said to great applause.
His message tends to draw supporters by the hundreds. (He's been here four times; other candidates have been only once or twice.) A few months ago, 200 people showed up at an organic dairy farm to hear Mr. Kucinich speak in the rain. When he spoke last Saturday, some 350 people came to a private dessert reception at which only 150 to 200 were expected after a local radio station accidentally announced that he would be appearing. (A recent appearance by John Kerry, meanwhile, drew maybe a hundred people.)
Mr. Kucinich has had an especially deep impact on the students at the private Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment, where children from preschool through 12th grade meditate twice a day and classroom posters include "50 qualities of the unified field" among geology maps.
The high school students were so moved after hearing Mr. Kucinich speak that they created a peace award and presented it to him with a poem in his honor. "Everyone here knows what it is like to have peace," said Wes Dearborn, a 16-year-old student. "They want the rest of the country to feel it too. Dennis is the one who can take us there."
One key to Mr. Kucinich's support in Fairfield is his longtime friendship with Mr. Hagelin, the three-time presidential candidate of the Natural Law Party, who has endorsed Mr. Kucinich. "Here was a mainstream Democrat that really presents all the contents that the Natural Law Party wants to see espoused," said Ed Malloy, the mayor of Fairfield, and a supporter of the Natural Law Party. "They were excited that these ideas could move on the agenda."
In addition to Mr. Kucinich's plan for a Department of Peace, which would emphasize preventive techniques against violence, supporters are drawn to his plan for universal health coverage, one that would embrace alternative medical techniques like acupuncture. They also like his belief in environmental sustainability, an issue dear to a community that embraces organic farming.
"Dennis is the only candidate who will go to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and do something about genetically engineered food," said Eileen Dannemann, a Fairfield resident.
To be sure, not everyone in Fairfield supports Mr. Kucinich, and not all those who support Mr. Kucinich practice Transcendental Meditation. In fact, Jefferson County, home to Fairfield, is a "red" county, where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats by more than 2 to 1. President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney won 53 percent of the vote in 2000. Howard Dean also has broad support in the Fairfield area because of his opposition to the war.
Mr. Kucinich's supporters say their effort is not wasted even if Mr. Kucinich's long-shot bid doesn't win the nomination. Even the national front-runners would envy the devotion Fairfield-area residents have for Mr. Kucinich.
Lynn Kaplan, a local resident, said she was so impressed by Mr. Kucinich that she produced a 12-minute documentary about him that his campaign now distributes on hundreds of CD's. "I've never been interested in politics, not since I was 16 years old with Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy," said Ms. Kaplan, who is in her 50's. Then she saw Mr. Kucinich speak at the Best Western last winter. "I couldn't leave. The guy moved me deeply. I knew at that moment that hope was reborn in my heart," she said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Five Killed in Latest Clash in Afghanistan
January 18, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/asia/18AFGH.html?pagewanted=all
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jan. 17 (Reuters) - Five people were killed and 13 were wounded on Saturday when suspected Taliban fighters ambushed a convoy of Afghan government military vehicles in the restive southern province of Kandahar, an official said.
"Three Taliban were killed and four of them were wounded in the clash that lasted for 50 minutes," said Khali Pashtuna, a spokesman for the provincial governor. He said two government fighters were killed and nine others were wounded.
About 40 Taliban fighters had attacked the vehicles, which were carrying 13 soldiers near the district of Khakraiz, Mr. Pashtuna said.
Separately, state-run media reported Saturday that at least 16 children had died in an outbreak of whooping cough in a remote part of Afghanistan. The deaths over the past five days in the Khwahan District of northern Badakhshan Province came after snow and freezing weather.
About 70 people have been killed or wounded by fighting in the past two weeks in the Kandahar region, once a stronghold of the country's former Taliban rulers.
Afghanistan has had a fresh wave of violence since August, in which more than 450 people have been killed and scores wounded, mostly in the southern and eastern areas.
Militants, civilians, aid workers, Afghan troops and more than a dozen foreign soldiers have been among those killed.
A United States-led combat operation of about 12,000 troops is in Afghanistan hunting Taliban remnants, their suspected allies in Al Qaeda and militants loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a warlord who has declared a holy war against foreign troops.
-------- asia
U.S. Agrees to Move Its Troops Out of Seoul
January 18, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/asia/18SEOU.html
HONOLULU, Jan. 17 (AP) - The United States will move all its troops out of metropolitan Seoul over the next three years without reducing the total number of forces in South Korea, both nations have agreed.
Under a plan to end the American military presence in the capital, which dates from the end of the Korean War, about 7,000 United States troops and their families will be moved to an expanded facility about 45 miles south of Seoul, said Richard Lawless, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Asian-Pacific affairs.
Mr. Lawless and Lt. Gen. Cha Young Koo, South Korea's assistant defense minister for policy, announced the agreement on Friday at a news conference after a sixth round of talks here on the future of the American-South Korean alliance.
General Cha said the move should defuse some anti-American sentiments here. He said there had been no discussion of reducing total American forces in the country.
The two men also said the United States had agreed to spend $11 billion over several years to improve American readiness on the peninsula.
General Cha said the South Koreans had wanted to keep 1,000 United States soldiers in Seoul but had agreed to the relocation of all American forces from the Yongsan Garrison in downtown Seoul. About 50 to 100 American military liaison personnel will remain, Mr. Lawless said.
He said that the move was expected to be completed by the end of 2006, and that units would not begin moving out until the end of next year.
A magnet for anti-American demonstrations, the one-square-mile base is within range of North Korean artillery about 40 miles north of here, along the demilitarized zone.
Most South Koreans support the American military presence as a deterrent against North Korea. But Seoul residents have complained that the base occupies prime real estate and worsens traffic congestion. Younger generations also see the foreign military presence in the capital as a slight to national pride.
There has also been discussion of moving a 16,000-soldier American division now posted in the border area with North Korea. American conservatives argue that the presence of so many Americans within artillery range of North Korea ties the hands of policy makers who want to keep open the option of bombing North Korea's nuclear facilities.
--------
U.S. Troops To Pull Out Of Seoul
Reuters
Sunday, January 18, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26150-2004Jan17.html
SEOUL, Jan. 17 -- South Korea and the United States have agreed to pull out all American troops from Seoul as part of a global realignment plan for U.S. forces, South Korea's Defense Ministry announced Saturday.
About 7,000 U.S. soldiers and their families will be moved to an expanded facility about 45 miles south of Seoul. The move is scheduled to be completed by 2006.
The decision to move U.S. troops south, away from the border with North Korea, was made because of a request by the United States and after a meeting between the two sides in Hawaii, a ministry spokesman said.
The U.S. military presence in the center of the South Korean capital over the past 50 years has been a constant source of anti-U.S. sentiment in the country.
The Defense Ministry did not disclose details of the plan, which came a day after South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun named his foreign policy adviser, Ban Ki Moon, as foreign minister.
Ban's predecessor, criticized by some officials as being too pro-American, quit on Thursday in a dispute that pitted pro-U.S. ministry officials against presidential aides over South Korea's policy toward the United States and North Korea.
The U.S. military has said the move out of Seoul will not diminish its strength in South Korea. Officials note they plan to spend $11 billion over the next four years to modernize forces.
The United States keeps 37,000 troops in South Korea -- a legacy of the Korean War, which ended in an uneasy armistice, not a peace treaty.
The war pitted South Korea and a U.S.-led force from the United Nations against North Korea, which was backed by Chinese ground troops and Soviet aid.
The Korea Times newspaper said about 50 U.S. soldiers would remain in Seoul at a liaison office adjacent to South Korea's Defense Ministry building.
The land occupied by the U.S. forces would be returned to the Seoul metropolitan government, it said.
"We will make efforts to come up with steps in order for our people not to feel uneasy," the assistant defense minister, Cha Young Koo, said on YTN television news.
Separately, North Korea accused South Korea on Saturday of illegally deploying artillery inside the Demilitarized Zone, the buffer area created at the end of the war to keep opposing armies apart. Under a cease-fire accord, only rifles and other small arms are allowed inside the DMZ, the Associated Press reported.
"The South Korean military authorities should stop acting rashly, clearly mindful of the grave consequences to be entailed by such military provocations," the North's official KCNA news agency said.
The report provided no details of the weapons, and a spokesman for the South Korean Defense Ministry rejected the accusation as untrue.
-------- china
Chinese Move to Relax Severe Judicial Penalties
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26146-2004Jan17?language=printer
BEIJING, Jan. 17 -- The Chinese government is planning to implement judicial reforms that could sharply reduce its use of the death penalty and is debating new legislation to abolish the power of police to send people to labor camps without trial, according to Chinese legal scholars who have participated in the deliberations.
The moves would weaken two of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's most notorious instruments of state power and begin to address longstanding international criticism of China's justice system. More people are executed in China than in the rest of the world combined, and police order tens of thousands every year to undergo what the party calls "reeducation through labor."
The government has not announced a final decision on the measures, and the scholars said many conservative police and provincial officials were resisting the changes. But they said that key bureaucracies, including the courts, the Justice Ministry and the legislature, had backed the measures. For the first time in years, they said, the momentum appears to be with advocates of judicial reform.
An official party newspaper, the Legal Daily, published a front-page item last week saying that China's legislature had placed a bill to overhaul the labor camp system on its priority agenda, a rare admission by the party that the system should be changed. And an official told a Western diplomat during recent human rights talks that the government had decided to go ahead with the plan to improve its death penalty review process.
The legal reforms could signal a willingness by the new generation of party leaders who took office last year, including President Hu Jintao, to consider significant changes to China's political system as long as they do not threaten the party's monopoly on power. Even if the measures are implemented, the party would retain full control of the weak courts, and it could continue to use them to send dissidents, labor organizers, religious leaders, ethnic activists and others who challenge its authority to prisons where forced labor is common.
Liu Renwen, a scholar of law at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who has discussed the measures with government officials, said the party had concluded that judicial reform was necessary to fight corruption and other problems that undermine public confidence in its rule. He added that changes to the judicial system presented fewer risks for the party and "can proceed faster than more sensitive and difficult types of political reform," such as the expansion of elections.
But the leadership has not been willing to establish a truly independent judiciary that can serve as a check on the power of party officials; most judges are party members, appointed by party leaders and required to carry out party decisions. Whether piecemeal reform of such a system can produce results and satisfy public demands for rule of law is an open question.
"Criticism of the legal system in society is rising," Liu said. "The Chinese Communist Party, as a ruling party that attaches importance to stability, knows that if it doesn't reform the judicial system, it would be bad for stability."
In a sign of the party's interest in legal reform, the legislature is preparing to add a phrase about protecting human rights to the constitution. In addition, the Foreign Ministry recently asked a group of legal scholars to study a U.N.-sponsored human rights treaty that China signed in 1998 and determine what reforms the government should adopt to ratify it and which provisions it can avoid by attaching "reservations."
The leadership has already decided to restrict the use of capital punishment by requiring China's highest court, the Supreme People's Court, to review all death-penalty cases before executions are carried out, according to scholars who have advocated the change and participated in discussions with government officials about it. Currently, the high court reviews only a minority of such cases, allowing the provincial courts that hand down the sentences to review their own judgments.
The government is still discussing how to implement and finance the change, which could require hiring as many as 100 to 200 new judges in Beijing, but a plan might be worked out and put into effect this year, the scholars said.
Shao Wenhong, a senior judge on the Supreme People's Court, said the government was still researching the issue. But she added that "the dominant opinion among legal experts and theoreticians" is in support of the reform, and that "this view has already attracted the attention of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress," the country's top lawmaking body.
An overhaul of the "reeducation-through-labor" system is less certain, though a legislative subcommittee recently resumed work on the issue. The subcommittee had all but suspended debate on it after the campaign against the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement began in 1999, according to a legal expert who has participated in the discussions.
The system allows police to send people to labor camps for up to four years on a variety of vaguely defined offenses without having to present a case to prosecutors or judges. The wide police discretion has made "reeducation through labor" a key weapon in the crackdown on Falun Gong as well as on Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang province in the west.
But Chen Guangzhong, a senior professor at the China University of Politics and Law who helped draft the country's criminal procedure laws, said the government was debating legislation to transfer to judges the power to send people to the camps, to define more specifically the offenses that must be involved and to reduce the maximum term in the labor camps to a year or less.
If these issues are resolved quickly, Chen said, a law might be introduced within a year or two. "The party has decided to proceed with reform of the judicial system, and the reeducation-through-labor system is one of the most important issues on the agenda," he said.
More than 250,000 people are imprisoned in some 300 reeducation-through-labor facilities nationwide, according to official statistics.
China does not release statistics on executions or death sentences. Amnesty International recorded 1,060 executions in the country in 2002 and 2,468 in 2001, based on accounts published in state-run media; the group says the actual totals are probably much higher. A book about the Chinese leadership published overseas last year cited internal party documents and reported about 15,000 executions every year between 1998 and 2001.
Under Chinese law, defendants are entitled to have their cases heard by both a lower and a higher court, but if they are sentenced to death, a third review must be conducted before the execution is carried out. The Supreme People's Court originally conducted all of these reviews. But when China launched a nationwide anti-crime campaign in 1983, the high court transferred review authority for the most common capital offenses -- including murder, rape, robbery and larceny -- to provincial courts to accelerate the process. In the 1990s, the high court also allowed courts in five provinces to review death-penalty cases involving drug crimes.
Legal scholars for years have pushed the Supreme People's Court to begin reviewing all death-penalty cases again, arguing that provincial courts cannot be relied on to overrule their own sentences and that wide discrepancies over what crimes merit a death sentence have emerged among provinces.
Chen Xingliang, deputy dean of Beijing University's law school, said such a change would reduce the number of executions because high court judges are generally better educated and more liberal than local judges and would impose strict, national standards determining what crimes should be punished with death.
Chen, who has served as a consultant on judicial reforms for the government, said it now takes the court about six months to a year to review a death-penalty case, and it changes the sentence in about 25 to 30 percent of all cases.
Though support for the death penalty is strong in China, the government has begun to allow some public debate about the system. State-run news media also occasionally report stories about innocent people who manage to escape death row. One of them is Li Ping, 35, a migrant worker from eastern Anhui province sentenced to death in 2001 for the murder of a farmer in a nearby village. The court based its decision largely on a confession that Li said he provided under torture.
"I was beaten by police for five days and nights. They didn't let me sleep or eat," he recalled in a telephone interview. "I had to confess. Who wouldn't under such torture? . . . Then they wanted details. I told them I killed the guy in the east part of the village. They said that was wrong, and I said, okay, it was the west part."
A provincial court ordered Li released a year later, after his attorney tracked down several witnesses who testified he was working in another province at the time of the crime. "If the review power is returned to Beijing, more innocent people would be saved," Li said. "Many people in these small cities have connections and can manipulate the law at will."
-------- iran
Iranian Electoral Official Threatens to Quit
January 18, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18TEHR.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Jan. 17 - The man in charge of organizing parliamentary elections said Saturday that he would resign if free elections were not held next month.
The official, Morteza Mobalegh, holds the second-ranking position at the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. Mr. Mobalegh said, "I will not stay to hold an election that violates people's rights," the Iranian Student News Agency reported. "I will not remain in my position if I feel that despite all our efforts we cannot hold lawful elections."
The confrontation began when the Guardian Council, controlled by hard-line clerics, rejected nearly half of the candidates for Parliament in elections scheduled for Feb. 20. Among them were 83 reformists who are current members of Parliament.
Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who picks the clerics on the Guardian Council, was forced to intervene and ask for a revision in the decision. It is not certain whether the Guardian Council, which is scheduled to announce its decision at the end of the month, will comply.
-------- iraq
Coalition uses 1918 British report on tribal system
By David Usborne in New York and Glen Rangwala
18 January 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=482297
As the United States scrambles to end a dispute with Shia leaders over plans to elect an interim government in Iraq before July, it has emerged that American commanders are seeking to reach out to tribal leaders by relying on a report devised in 1918 by Britain, the country's then ruler.
Lieutenant-Colonel Alan King, head of the Tribal Affairs Bureau set up by the US-led coalition last month, admitted last week that he had been referring to the pages of the British report to fathom Iraq's network of tribal sheikhs - regardless of the fact that it dates back to the First World War.
The revelation is not likely to improve confidence in the ability of the US to sort out the deepening muddle over how it means to relinquish political power to the Iraqi people by this summer. The plan to create an interim government before a 30 June deadline has been in doubt since objections were raised last week by the powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani. His words set off mass demonstrations against the proposal in southern Iraq on Thursday.
The American head of the occupying coalition, Paul Bremer, indicated on Friday, after talks in Washington with President Bush, that he will be flexible in how the process might run. He suggested, however, that Ayatollah Sistani's demand for fully fledged direct elections would be impractical. One of the problems Mr Bremer faces is having to deal with the cleric through intermediaries, as Ayatollah Sistani refuses to meet him.
Tomorrow he will travel to New York on an urgent mission to seek help from the United Nations Secretary General, Kofi Annan. The US is increasingly anxious to persuade the UN to return to Iraq and assist in selecting the interim government as well as preparing for the first full election in 2005 and the writing of a constitution. "The UN has a lot of expertise in organising elections, electoral commissions, electoral laws, and has a great deal of expertise it can bring to bear," said Mr Bremer, who will be accompanied by the head of the Iraqi Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi.
But it is not clear how far Mr Annan will go to answer the American call. The Secretary General withdraw his staff from Baghdad after a bomb attack on his headquarters there last summer that killed 22 people, including his envoy to Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello. "The meeting is really for us to listen and see what he has to say, and we'll take it from there," one UN official said. "We're not there to give the seal of approval ... Whatever process is adopted needs to be fair and inclusive, and everybody needs to have a stake in it."
For now, the US envisages setting up caucus meetings in all 18 provinces in Iraq, which would then choose representatives to sit in an interim national assembly. Ayatollah Sistani has denounced the plan, calling for direct elections instead.
"We have always said we're willing to consider refinements," Mr Bremer said after his White House meetings. "There obviously are a number of ways in which these kinds of elections can go forward." But he did not clarify what changes could be made.
The apparent increasing willingness to involve tribal sheikhs in the running of Iraq would seem to be at odds with the vision of a unified state, especially when many question how much authority they have. For Col King the advantages are clear: he receives reports from them on local affairs, a precious commodity since the Iraqi administration fell into decline after the first Gulf War and almost disappeared with the second. His bureau - the Office of Provincial Outreach - was awarded US$900,000 last week to establish "Tribal Democracy Centres", to provide resources to the sheikhs.
--------
Iraq Rebels Seen Using More Skill to Down Copters
January 18, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18COPT.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 17 - A classified Army study of the downings of military helicopters in Iraq found that guerrillas have used increasingly sophisticated tactics and weapons - including at least one advanced missile - to attack American aircraft, senior Army officials in Iraq and the Persian Gulf region say.
The insurgents have proved adept at using both rocket-propelled grenades, which are point-and-shoot weapons, and heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles, which require greater maintenance and skill, said Army officials familiar with the study.
No type of helicopter is more vulnerable or more protected against the problem, the review found. But the team recommended specific changes to help pilots better evade ground fire, Army officials said. Senior officers declined to elaborate, but changes in the past have included flying more missions at night with lights off to avoid detection.
The study was conducted before the three most recent downings this month, but those incidents in the restive area near Falluja, west of Baghdad, have only reinforced the team's findings and raised fears that insurgents are closely studying the flight patterns of helicopters and other aircraft, Army officials said.
"The enemy has clearly seen the possibilities from earlier successes," said one senior Army aviator in the Persian Gulf region. "The enemy enjoys a strategic success each time one of our aircraft is shot down. It becomes a major media event, and questions arise as to who is winning. So the enemy sees this as very useful."
It was concern about these attacks that prompted Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the senior American commander in Iraq, to go beyond the standard review after any crash and order last month a comprehensive study of all downings, Army officials said. The aim was to detect more about the insurgents' techniques and weaponry, and possible weaknesses in the Americans' defensive countermeasures and tactics.
One troubling finding, Army officials said, is that on at least one occasion the insurgents used an SA-16 shoulder-fired missile, which has a guidance system that is harder to thwart than the SA-7 missiles and rocket-propelled grenades that insurgents have used in other attacks.
Since Oct. 25, nine military helicopters have been shot down or have crash-landed after being hit by what the authorities believe was hostile fire, killing a total of 49 soldiers. American military authorities say on Jan. 2, a rocket-propelled grenade or a surface-to-air missile downed an OH-58 Kiowa reconnaissance helicopter, killing the pilot.
Six days later, another missile, probably either an SA-7 or SA-16, struck a UH-60 Black Hawk medical evacuation helicopter, killing nine crew members and passengers. And on Tuesday, ground fire brought down an AH-64 Apache gunship, but the two crew members survived.
Senior military officials in Iraq emphasized that with the three latest incidents near Falluja still under investigation, it was premature to draw any conclusions about long-term trends. "It's hard to say whether it's been a bad couple of weeks or it's something larger," said one senior officer in Baghdad. "But clearly, that area has us concerned."
The team conducting the review was headed by Col. Stephen Dwyer, a brigade commander at the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Ala., and it included about a dozen forensic and weapons experts, crash analysts and helicopter specialists. The team spent about four weeks in Iraq visiting each crash site, taking soil samples for forensic analysis and talking to aviators.
"They went over to look at Army aviation, make an assessment and make recommendations on how to improve it," said Lt. Col. James Bullinger, a spokesman for the Army Aviation Center.
Colonel Bullinger said that even before the team started its work, the Army was adopting lessons from Iraq, teaching pilots to fire their weapons while "running and diving," instead of hovering, when a helicopter is more vulnerable to an attack from the ground.
Senior Army commanders said the assessment team provided several valuable insights for pilots in Iraq, and for the fresh crews preparing to rotate into the country.
"This is a case of our Army coming through quickly with the right expertise at the right place," said Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne Division, which had as many as 250 helicopters in Iraq.
American intelligence analysts have said that during Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraq stockpiled at least 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles, and that fewer than a third have been recovered. The missiles are also easy to smuggle across Iraq's porous borders, as they weigh 30 pounds or less and are under six feet long.
The senior Army aviator added: "No specific aircraft appears more susceptible than others. The team found that RPG's, SA-7's, SA-14's, and an SA-16 were used. The RPG appears to be a fairly effective weapon in a skilled shooter's hands and given the right parameters, somewhat close to the ground."
Army officials declined to specify which incidents might have involved an SA-16. One senior officer said the Black Hawk that crashed on Jan. 8 might have been shot down by an SA-16, but another senior officer disagreed, saying that parts of an SA-7 warhead had been found in the wreckage. Both missile systems were designed by the Soviet Union.
"It's unclear just how many SA-16's are in the theater," the senior Army aviator in the gulf region said, "but it is a worrisome development which both helicopter and fixed-wing forces will have to fully understand and counter."
Army helicopters, like military airplanes, have defensive countermeasures, including flares and a metallic confetti called chaff, that are designed to help defeat infrared and radar-guided missiles. Some helicopters also have infrared jammers.
But these defenses are designed to guard against missiles, not rocket-propelled grenades. So pilots must also rely on evasive tactics. These tactics include flying low and fast, as well as asking passengers and crew members to watch for ground fire.
There are trade-offs in different tactics, Army aviators said. Flying at high altitudes protects aircraft from rocket-propelled grenades, but somewhat increases the likelihood of being spotted and engaged by surface-to-air missiles, one officer said.
Military officials in Iraq say they review pilots' tactics and procedures after every incident, but they never stop flying missions. "We are changing tactics on a daily basis based on the intelligence and the operating patterns that we're seeing so that we don't present a steady-state pattern to the enemy," General Sanchez told reporters in Baghdad on Friday.
On a flight last month between Tikrit and Ad Dwar, the village where Mr. Hussein was captured, a visitor aboard a UH-60 Black Hawk was treated to a roller-coaster ride as the pilot banked sharply several times and flew just above treetops at more than 130 miles an hour during a 10-minute trip, to pose a more fleeting target to potential shooters on the ground.
Military officials said a combination of former Iraqi military or security personnel, and possibly foreign fighters, were probably carrying out the attacks against helicopters.
"Many incidents against aircraft are attacks by Iraqi former regime elements and those paid by them," said the senior Army aviator in the gulf region. "It is clearly possible and likely - if not yet, in the future - that foreign fighters will target helicopters, since a successful attack often has strategic effect."
--------
Roadside Bomb Kills 3 American and 2 Iraqi Soldiers
January 18, 2004
By NEELA BANERJEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18IRAQ.html
IAJI, Iraq, Jan. 17 - Three American soldiers and two Iraqi paramilitary fighters were killed early Saturday when the armored vehicle they were riding in was struck by a large roadside bomb in this town about 12 miles north of Baghdad, the United States military said.
The American soldiers were with the Fourth Infantry Division, which has oversight for much of the volatile region north of Baghdad, which had been the base of support for the regime of Saddam Hussein. The two Iraqis were with the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps, a paramilitary organization formed by the occupying authorities to help the Americans improve security in Iraq. Two other American soldiers were wounded in the attack.
The deaths of the soldiers on Saturday and another death on Friday in Mosul of a soldier by what the military classified as a "nonhostile" gunshot brought the number of American soldiers killed in operations related to Iraq to 500. Most died after May 1, when the end of major combat operations was declared.
The Americans and Iraqis who were attacked Saturday were patrolling in one of three Bradley armored vehicles surveying Taji for roadside bombs. About 7:45 a.m., the first vehicle in the patrol was struck by a bomb made of at least two 155-millimeter artillery shells and an "unknown amount of explosives," said Maj. Josslyn Aberle, a spokeswoman for the Fourth Infantry Division. The blast set the Bradley on fire.
"We woke up to the sound of an explosion," said Qasim Khalaf, a 40-year-old chicken farmer whose house is about 500 yards from the site of the attack. "I heard the Americans yelling. I came out and saw the tank on fire."
The soldiers from the two other vehicles cordoned off the area and detained three Iraqis who were fleeing the scene in a white truck, Major Aberle said. In the truck, they found materials that could be used to make bombs, she said. The initial investigation of the attack indicated that the bomb was "command detonated," which means it was triggered by assailants via wires connected to the bomb. Many roadside bombs now are "remote detonated," triggered by a cellphone or a doorbell device, which allows insurgents to keep their distance and improves their getaway chances.
On Friday morning, insurgents attacked the south-central headquarters of the American-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Hilla, about 60 miles southwest of Baghdad, killing one Iraqi and wounding several others, American authorities said in a statement. The Americans gave no other details of the attack.
Also on Friday, saboteurs blew up a pylon supporting a high-voltage line leading from the north-central town of Beiji to Kirkuk, plunging Kirkuk into darkness. Since the summer, insurgents have been particularly active around Beiji, focusing their efforts on destroying oil pipelines from the oil-rich region around Kirkuk. As a result, Iraq has so far been unable to export oil from the area through a pipeline to Turkey.
The road where the Taji attack took place is one that locals, rather than the military, use often, Major Aberle said. But American soldiers and Iraqi Civil Defense Corps members at a base on the edge of Taji described the area where the attack occurred as hostile. By 2 p.m., the highway from Taji to Baghdad was closed because of another bomb on the road, which American ordnance experts detonated.
Mr. Khalaf said Americans regularly patrol the road, which is near a fuel depot, although they travel at varying times, and that other attacks had occurred along it. American soldiers near the scene of the attack were clearly jumpy. A tank crewman from the Fourth Infantry Division tried to grab a camera from a photographer with The New York Times who was walking near Mr. Khalaf's farmhouse, and dragged her toward his tank until her use of English convinced him she was not a local resident.
Kadhem Jawad, an Iraqi driver from the fuel depot who was allowed to pass through the military cordon, offered a hint of the atmosphere in Taji.
Of the casualties, he said, "All of them are dead, thank God."
--------
Bombing at Gate of Main U.S. Base in Iraq Kills at Least 20
January 18, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 18 - A powerful suicide car bomb exploded at the main gate of the American occupation headquarters here this morning, killing at least 20 people and injuring at least 60 others, military officials said.
At least 18 of the dead were Iraqi civilians, and it was difficult to identify the nationalities of the two others because of the severity of the blast, military officials said. Many of the wounded were Iraqis waiting to enter the compound on foot or in cars to go to work. No Americans were killed in the blast, but several soldiers received minor injuries.
Although guerrilla fighters have occasionally lobbed mortar rounds into the heavily fortified American headquarters, a wide zone that contains the former Republican Palace and other buildings of Saddam Hussein's deposed government, this was the first car bomb attack in the area.
It appeared to be an effort by attackers to send a pointed message to the American authority in Baghdad one day before senior American and Iraqi officials were to meet at the United Nations about resistance from some powerful groups to plans for the scheduled transfer to sovereignty on June 30. Those officials include L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator here, and several members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
The bomber drove a white Toyota pickup truck loaded with 1,000 pounds of Soviet-made plastic explosives into the line for vehicle inspections, then detonated it about 8 a.m., just 50 feet from the gate, military officials said.
The blast destroyed six or seven nearby vehicles and set four ablaze. It shook buildings more than a mile away, and within minutes the wind had carried the acrid smell of smoke across the Tigris River into downtown Baghdad. Dozens of American soldiers surrounded the burning wreckage even as firefighters struggled to put out the flames. At 8:40 a.m., at least three cars still lay smoldering, and a mangled white bus sat in the middle of the wide avenue, its windows completely shattered and its frame charred.
Bodies lay on the ground surrounded by debris as ambulances raced onto the scene. Most of the dead were Iraqis who had been sitting in cars at the busy intersection outside the gate, said Col. Ralph Baker, commander of the 2nd Brigade. Concrete blast walls may have helped protect Iraqis standing at the checkpoint, causing injuries rather than death in many cases. He added that the fact the explosion was outside the perimeter is considered a security success.
American officials have used the walled-off area, called the "green zone," as their command center since the fall of Baghdad last April. Because the walled-off compound is so large and the gate is at its very northern perimeter, at the west end of a bridge spanning the Tigris, the attack was obviously aimed at Iraqis working for the Coalition Provisional Authority and its allies rather than at any distinct military target.
"The attack, which took place at the height of rush hour in Baghdad, was clearly timed to claim the maximum number of innocent victims," Mr. Bremer, who was in the United States, said in a written statement. "Once again, it is innocent Iraqis who have been murdered by these terrorists in a senseless act of violence."
People with dazed expressions and blood on their faces and clothing staggered east across Jumhuriya Bridge. Weesam Kadhum, a 22-year-old civil engineer working in a building just 300 feet outside the main entrance, sometimes referred to as the Assassins' Gate, said he had seen shrapnel flying through the air.
"Suddenly there was this bright light, and small pieces rained down from the sky," he said. "I ran to my house across the street. I didn't want to stop running. I've only now realized that I don't have any blood or injuries on me."
His 4-year-old son, Wadah, was injured slightly by flying glass as the blast shattered the windows of Mr. Kadhum's two-story home and those of other nearby buildings. As Mr. Kadhum led a reporter to his house, Wadah began yelling from the window: "My father's coming, my father's coming!"
In Al Karama hospital, Ahmed Ali, lying half-naked in a bed with a shrapnel wound to his torso, said he had been among 200 people standing at the gate to be let into the compound.
--------
Iraqi Kurdish Leader Demands Guarantees
Minority Seeks Autonomous Region, Expulsion of Arabs Under New Government
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26147-2004Jan17?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Jan. 17 -- A top Kurdish leader said Saturday that Iraq's Kurdish minority would not sign on to guidelines being formulated for a transitional government unless Kurds were guaranteed an expanded region of autonomy and an ironclad commitment to expel Arabs settled in the area by deposed president Saddam Hussein.
Massoud Barzani, leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, or KDP, said he lacked faith that a future, elected Iraqi government would fulfill Kurds' ambitions for self-rule in regions they consider their historic homeland -- including the oil-rich Kirkuk area.
"We do not see any justification for postponement," he said in an interview, discussing the Kurds' demand. "Any voice that would oppose this does not show good intent. As far as a majority imposing its will on the Kurds, this cannot be tolerated."
The so-called basic law meant to guide the transitional government is being hammered out by members of the Iraqi Governing Council, a U.S.-appointed assembly. Barzani said that enshrining Kurdish aspirations in the law would ensure that a future constitution could not reverse them.
The Kurds face significant opposition to their plans. U.S. officials have indicated that Kirkuk should not be part of Kurdish territory. Arab parties in the Governing Council have also questioned Kurdish demands. Syria, Iran and Turkey, all countries with Kurdish minorities, oppose significant autonomy for Iraq's Kurds. On Friday, a top Turkish general, Ilker Basbug, warned, "If there is a federal structure in Iraq on an ethnic basis, the future will be very difficult and bloody."
Kurdish designs on Kirkuk have already ignited ethnic conflict, not only with Arabs but also with the city's large Turkmen population. To ease tensions, the ethnically mixed city council was expanded this week to include more Turkmen and Arab delegates.
The Kurdish position poses another complication for the Bush administration's goal of handing over power to the Iraqis by July 1. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the influential spiritual leader of Iraq's majority Shiites, opposes U.S. transition plans because the new government would be appointed rather than elected. His followers have called for demonstrations and strikes to back up his demand for a quick general election.
The Kurds oppose Sistani's demand, saying it does not allow time for a census to be taken or voting rolls to be prepared.
President Bush's chief administrator for Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and members of the Governing Council are traveling to New York to try to persuade the United Nations to dispatch an envoy to Iraq to change Sistani's mind.
The KDP is one of two parties that control far northern Iraq with the aid of thousands of militia forces. The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, or PUK, the other main Kurdish party, agrees on the need for a consensus on autonomy before power is transferred from the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority to a transitional Iraqi assembly, Iraqi officials have said. Both Kurdish parties have agreed to create a single administration for the north to bolster their call for a single autonomous region, which would be free from central government control except in the areas of foreign policy, finance and national defense.
For more than a decade after the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Kurds in the mountainous far north enjoyed virtual independence from Hussein's government, with U.S. and British warplanes protecting the area. The zone, however, lay north of Kirkuk and other towns that traditionally contained Kurdish populations.
Barzani's plan envisages the autonomous area encompassing the part of northwest Iraq known as Sinjar, Kirkuk and adjacent areas as well as a region in the east that extends as far south as Khanaquin, 100 miles northeast of Baghdad. Barzani has said he wants these areas detached from their current provinces and attached to the Kurdish autonomous area.
The Governing Council has agreed in principle to autonomy within the zone but not beyond it.
Under a policy called "Arabization," Hussein settled Arabs in and around Kirkuk and other towns to reduce Kurdish influence during his three decades of his rule. He also expelled Kurds to the northern regions. The Kurds want that policy reversed.
"Kurds have been very patient, but it is impossible to wait another 10 or 15 years. That would lead to major problems. How can we accept that hundreds of thousands of Kurds have been evicted and outsiders brought in?" Barzani asked.
Barzani contended that the Kurds should be rewarded for aiding the United States in the war to overthrow Hussein. The PUK and KDP put their militias under American command and helped U.S. Special Operations troops pinpoint targets for aerial bombing along the Iraqi northern front.
"We lost lives. We will definitely turn to American public opinion" if Washington opposes expanded autonomy, Barzani said. Last spring, a son and a brother of Barzani's were injured when U.S. jet bombers mistakenly struck a convoy in northern Iraq.
Kurds harbor memories of American betrayals of their cause. U.S. governments encouraged Kurdish uprisings in 1975 and 1991, only to withdraw support. "We hope there will be no repetition of the past," Barzani said.
He dismissed opposition from Syria, Turkey and Iran, saying, "this is an internal matter."
Barzani spoke inside the Green Zone, the high-security area in Baghdad housing the occupation authority headquarters on the grounds of what was one of Hussein's palaces. Barzani, son of the late Mustafa Barzani, KDP founder and guerrilla fighter, wore a blue suit rather than his preferred traditional Kurdish dress of baggy pants and sash.
"We had the power to force people out of our area. We avoided that," he said. "But if things don't go right, maybe things will get beyond our control and people will take matters into their own hands.
"We have never lived like normal people," he said. "We have to assure our people we will be able to live in peace."
-------- israel / palestine
ISRAEL EXPLORES NANOTECHNOLOGY FOR MILITARY
[MENL]
January 18, 2004
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/january/01_18_3.html
TEL AVIV -- Israel is exploring the prospect of using nanotechnology for the military.
Officials said the issue has been discussed and examined in both the military and the Defense Ministry. They said the examination is in the early stages and did not envision any major project over the next few years.
Nanotechnology has been a key subject in several Israeli universities. Officials said such institutions as Haifa's Technion, Jerusalem's Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University are exploring the science.
"This field takes a few people because the great majority is not suitable for such advanced science," Aharon Bet-Halahmi, director-general of Federman Industries and a former Defense Ministry official, said.
----
Israel Diplomat Defends Attack on Bomber Art in Stockholm
January 18, 2004
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 17 - Israel's ambassador to Sweden said Saturday that he had physically attacked an art exhibit at a Stockholm museum because it "glorified suicide bombers." The incident a day earlier has created a diplomatic flap between the countries.
The ambassador, Zvi Mazel, was among several hundred guests invited to the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm on Friday for an exhibit linked to a coming international conference on genocide sponsored by Sweden. Israel is one of the scheduled participants.
The piece that enraged the ambassador, "Snow White and the Madness of Truth," was in the museum's courtyard and featured a large basin filled with red fluid. A boat floated on top carrying a photo of a smiling Hanadi Jaradat, a woman who became a suicide bomber, killing 22 people in an Oct. 4 attack on a restaurant in Haifa. The work was created by Dror Feiler, an expatriate Israeli artist living in Sweden, and his Swedish wife, Gunilla Skold Feiler.
"When I saw it, I became a bit emotional," Mr. Mazel said in a telephone interview from Stockholm. "There was the terrorist, wearing her perfect makeup and floating on the blood of my people."
He said he had ripped out electrical wires lighting the exhibit and tossed a spotlight into the basin.
Mr. Mazel said Mr. Feiler had accused him of "practicing censorship." "I told him: `This is not a work of art. This is an expression of hatred for the Israeli people. This has glorified suicide bombers.' "
After heated discussions with Mr. Feiler and others, the ambassador was escorted out of the exhibit. He has been summoned to meet Swedish government officials on Monday.
"We want to give him a chance to explain himself," Anna Larsson, a spokeswoman for Sweden's Foreign Ministry, was quoted as saying by Agence France-Presse. "We feel that it is unacceptable for him to destroy art in this way."
In Israel, the Foreign Ministry said Saturday that the Swedish government had pledged not to link the genocide conference, scheduled for Jan. 26-28, to the Middle East conflict. Israel is reconsidering its participation.
Mr. Mazel, who has served in his post for a little over a year, said he has faced considerable anger directed at Israel during his time in Sweden. "There is a hostile ambience in this country that is orchestrated by the press and the extreme left," he said. But he said Prime Minister Goran Persson "has very good intentions with this conference."
Mr. Feiler told Agence France-Presse that during his exchange with the Israeli ambassador, Mr. Mazel said "he was ashamed that I was a Jew."
"We see this as an offensive assault on our right to express our thoughts and feelings," Mr. Feiler said.
Mr. Feiler is a member of Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace, a group based in Stockholm that opposes the Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, according to the Reuters news agency.
Mrs. Feiler told Expressen, a Swedish newspaper, that the work was not intended as "a glorification of the suicide bomber." Instead, she said, "I wanted to show how incomprehensible it is that a mother of two - who is a lawyer no less - can do such a thing," apparently conflating the Haifa bomber with an attack carried out on Wednesday by another Palestinian woman.
Israeli officials have called the Swedish ambassador in Israel to protest the exhibit, said Jonathan Peled, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. "We think this kind of exhibit condones terrorism against Israeli civilians," he said.
The museum director, Kristian Berg, said he did not consider the exhibit to be offensive, and it was again on display on Saturday, Agence France-Presse reported.
-------- pacific
No need for US base in Australia: general
By Tony Parkinson International Editor
The Age
January 18, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/17/1073878077303.html
Australia and the US would seek to intensify their joint training in counter-terrorism and high-tech warfare, but this did not extend to the need for a permanent US military presence in Australia, the top military adviser to US President George Bush said told The Sunday Age yesterday.
As he prepared to fly out of Australia after high-level talks with the Howard Government, General Richard Myers signalled irritation at ongoing speculation that the superpower was looking to shift troops to Australia as a potential platform for military operations in Asia.
"That's not on the table," he said, ruling out the prospect of a permanent US military base.
General Myers and the chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove, flagged plans for even closer military co-operation between the allies in Canberra on Friday.
However, General Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said yesterday he was "surprised by the headlines" generated by proposals for a new joint training facility on Australian soil.
The reluctance of the military chiefs to identify the specific purpose of the facility prompted speculation it could serve as cover for a de facto US base.
"There are no specifics because right now it is a notion, and no more than a notion," General Myers said. "What it certainly does not mean is US basing in Australia. That's not what we are talking about here.
"We have good facilities throughout the Asia-Pacific region. I know it (talk of a base) pops up, but it is not something the US is discussing among ourselves or with our Australian partners. I can guarantee you that."
He said he had not come to Australia with the purpose of discussing in detail either potential Australian involvement in missile defences or the implications for this region of the Pentagon's global review of where US forces should best be based.
Rather, the intention was to say thanks for Australia's contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and "to stay close".
General Myers seemed a touch perplexed that there should be any serious controversy about joint training proposals. "If you think about it, the US and Australia have been exercising around the region together for decades," he said. "The US and Australia exercise routinely in Australia, and so we have this notion of a specific facility where we can do more joint training . . . not only for combat, but in any crisis, across the spectrum."
General Myers insisted it could be "many months" before teams assigned by both countries to investigate the proposal reported back with detailed recommendations on possible uses for the joint training facility.
However, counter-terrorism would be prominent. "The international war on terrorism is the number one priority because it is our biggest threat," he said.
General Myers also nominated the so-called revolution in military affairs, through ever more sophisticated use on the battlefield of satellite communications and intelligence-gathering, as another crucial area where the allies needed to keep in step.
"One of the things General Cosgrove and I talked about is the imperative for Australia and the US to maintain our interoperability. That's what enabled Australian forces to be so effective in major combat in Iraq in air, land and sea, and we have to continue that forward," he said.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Leader Jeered in Parliament Speech Criticizing Extremism
January 18, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/asia/18STAN.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 17 - Hard-line Islamist lawmakers walked out and secular deputies jeered and heckled Saturday as Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, delivered his first speech to the nation's Parliament since seizing power in a bloodless coup in 1999.
General Musharraf, who narrowly survived two assassination attempts by suspected militants last month, showed no sign of backing off from a renewed promise to crack down on religious extremism or from a historic agreement reached earlier this month to hold peace talks with India.
"We will have to launch a massive operation against those foreign elements in our border areas who can be a cause of terrorism in our country and Afghanistan," General Musharraf said, adding later, "the curse of extremism, by a handful of persons, is damaging the country internally."
In a 40-minute address that was also broadcast to the nation, General Musharraf said the country was threatened by a "negative image" because it is seen as promoting an Islamic insurgency in Kashmir, the Indian state that is a main source of contention between Pakistan and India; failing to crack down on Taliban supporters along the Afghan border; spreading nuclear weapons technology to other countries; and being an "intolerant society."
The general called that image inaccurate and said a vast majority of Pakistanis were "moderates who totally reject extremism." He urged Pakistanis to "wage a `jihad' against extremism."
Tariq Rehman, a professor at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, said General Musharraf was trying to signal that he was committed to reform.
"He wants the United States to know `I will stick to this,' " Professor Rehman said. "He is giving a message both to India and the U.S."
While such blunt language may please American and Indian ears, the walkout and the jeering from the lawmakers showed that the general still faces serious domestic political opposition, particularly regarding the legitimacy of his rule.
In 2002, General Musharraf blocked Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, the leaders of the two main secular parties, from contesting parliamentary elections. European analysts called those elections, which created the current Parliament, flawed. Mr. Sharif and Ms. Bhutto, both former prime ministers, continue to live in exile.
Last month, General Musharraf struck a deal with an alliance of hard-line Islamist parties intended to end a yearlong deadlock in Parliament. Under the deal, the Islamist members of Parliament voted for the ratification of some of the constitutional amendments General Musharraf unilaterally enacted in August 2002. In exchange, the general promised to resign as army chief of staff by the end of 2004, ostensibly giving up some of the sweeping power he wields, although he will continue as a civilian president.
In a sign of the coming change, General Musharraf, who usually addresses the nation in a military uniform, today wore the sharwani, a jacket that is Pakistan's national dress.
But that gesture, and the agreement over the constitutional amendments, appeared to do little to placate his vocal opponents.
Members of the hard-line religious alliance that struck the deal on the constitutional amendments walked out of the session even before the general spoke. Members of the country's two main secular political parties chanted "Down with dictatorship," "Stranger in the house" and "Go Musharraf go" throughout his speech.
Pakistani observers said they have seen worse jeering in Parliament. During civilian rule in the 1990's, prime ministers and presidents were also heckled by lawmakers while addressing the nation.
The general, for his part, appeared annoyed by the jeering at first. He glared at the chanting lawmakers several times at the beginning of his speech, then raised his voice and read his words loudly, ignoring the clamor.
-------- philippines
Americans in Philippines Warned to Be Cautious
Associated Press
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26356-2004Jan17.html
The government has revised and updated a warning to Americans about terrorism in the Philippines, urging U.S. travelers to "exercise great caution" there.
The State Department announcement renewed an announcement issued in July. The agency said terrorist activity in the Philippines remains high, including several bombings in Mindanao, the largest island in the southern Philippines. The department singled out the communist New People's Army, which operates throughout the country, and the southern Abu Sayyaf Muslim extremist group, which the Philippine government says is loosely aligned with the al Qaeda network.
Both groups, the State Department said, are responsible for killings and hostage takings.
"In view of a number of security-related incidents and the possibility of future terrorism and other violence or criminal activity, Americans traveling to or residing in the Philippines are urged to exercise great caution," the department said.
-------- prisoners of war
Red Cross pushes Pentagon on Guantanamo prisoners
Washington January 18, 2004
Reuters
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/17/1073878075944.html
The International Committee of the Red Cross has said the Pentagon has agreed to accelerate the process of reviewing prisoners for possible release from the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But ICRC president Jakob Kellenberger said he had yet to see "concrete results" on other concerns he expressed to three top US officials about the status of the 660 or so non-US citizens imprisoned at Guantanamo, and the conditions in which they were being held.
Mr Kellenberger also said the United States had not yet told the ICRC when it could see the former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, captured on December 13.
The US announced this month that it had formally designated him an enemy prisoner of war, entitling him, among other things, to a visit by the ICRC.
Mr Kellenberger met Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz on Friday, after meeting Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice on Thursday.
-------- space
U.S. Eyes Space as Possible Battleground
January 18, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-space-weapons.html
http://news.myway.com/top/article/id/379850|top|01-18-2004::11:27|reuters.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush's plan to expand the exploration of space parallels U.S. efforts to control the heavens for military, economic and strategic gain.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld long has pushed for technology that could be used to attack or defend orbiting satellites as well as a costly program, heavily reliant on space-based sensors, to thwart incoming warheads.
Under a 1996 space policy adopted by then-President Bill Clinton that remains in effect, the United States is committed to the exploration and use of outer space ``by all nations for peaceful purposes for the benefit of all humanity.''
``Peaceful purposes allow defense and intelligence-related activities in pursuit of national security and other goals,'' according to this policy. ``Consistent with treaty obligations, the United States will develop, operate and maintain space control capabilities to ensure freedom of action in space, and if directed, deny such freedom of action to adversaries.''
No country depends on space and satellites as its eyes and ears more than the United States, which accounted for as much as 95 percent of global military space spending in 1999, according to the French space agency CNES.
``Yet the threat to the U.S. and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits from the departments and agencies of the U.S. government charged with national security responsibilities,'' a congressionally chartered task force headed by Rumsfeld reported 10 days before Bush and he took office in 2001.
Theresa Hitchens of the private Center for Defense Information said the capabilities to conduct space warfare would move out of the realm of science fiction and into reality over the next 20 years or so.
``At the end of the day it will be political choices by governments, not technology, that determines if the nearly 50- year taboo against arming the heavens remains in place,'' she concluded in a recent study.
Outlining his election-year vision for space exploration last week, Bush called for a permanent base on the moon by 2020 as a launch pad for piloted missions to Mars and beyond.
One unspoken motivation may have been China's milestone launch in October of its first piloted spaceflight in earth orbit and its announced plan to go to the moon.
``I think the new initiative is driven by a desire to beat the Chinese to the moon,'' said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense and space policy research group.
Among companies that could cash in on Bush's space plans are Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co. and Northrop Grumman Corp., which do big business with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as well as with the Pentagon.
The moon, scientists have said, is a source of potentially unlimited energy in the form of the helium 3 isotope -- a near perfect fuel source: potent, nonpolluting and causing virtually no radioactive byproduct in a fusion reactor.
``And if we could get a monopoly on that, we wouldn't have to worry about the Saudis and we could basically tell everybody what the price of energy was going to be,'' said Pike.
Gerald Kulcinski of the Fusion Technology Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison estimated the moon's helium 3 would have a cash value of perhaps $4 billion a ton in terms of its energy equivalent in oil.
Scientists reckon there are about 1 million tons of helium 3 on the moon, enough to power the earth for thousands of years. The equivalent of a single space shuttle load or roughly 30 tons could meet all U.S. electric power needs for a year, Kulcinski said by e-mail.
Bush's schedule for a U.S. return to the moon matches what experts say may be a dramatic militarization of space over the next two decades, even if the current ban on weapons holds.
Among other things, the Pentagon expects to spend at least $50 billion over the next five years to develop and field a multi-layered shield against incoming missiles that could deliver nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
Ultimately, this shield -- first proposed by President Ronald Reagan and dubbed ``Star Wars'' by critics -- may include space-based interceptors, the first weapons in space, as opposed to sensors that guide weapons.
Last year, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency obtained $14 million for research on basing three or more missile interceptors in space by the end of the decade for tests.
The plan would field satellites armed with multiple ``hit-to-kill'' interceptors capable of destroying a ballistic missile through a high-speed collision shortly after its launch, according to Wade Boese, research director of the private Arms Control Association. Such a system could also function as an anti-satellite weapon.
No decision has been made yet to deploy space-based interceptors as part of the U.S. missile defense program ``although we are conducting research and development activities in that area,'' a Defense Department official said Friday.
-------- un
UN returns to Iraq on secret mercy mission
18/01/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/wirq118.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/18/ixnewstop.html
A team of United Nations officials are covertly working to evacuate hundreds of children, war victims and others who are trapped in medical limbo, writes Colin Freeman in Basra
With A cheerful grin he has no business wearing, Al'a Hashem wriggles along his sofa, grabs the TV remote control in his mouth, and carefully switches channel with his teeth. After losing both arms and legs in an electrocution, it is all the 26-year-old law graduate can now do for himself.
As with Ali Abbas, the 13-year-old Baghdadi boy who lost both arms from bombing during the war in Iraq, medical treatment overseas could give Mr Hashem new prosthetic limbs and, in time, a new life. But nine months since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, he is among hundreds of Iraqi patients trapped in medical limbo within the country's dilapidated health system.
In a secret mercy mission mounted by the United Nations, which claimed it had pulled all its officials out of Iraq after its headquarters in Baghdad were bombed last year, a team from its International Organisation for Migration agency has interviewed patients inside the country before searching the world for hospital beds for nearly 400 of the most needy.
Thirteen-year-old Abbas Salah, for example, was born with four holes in his heart and needs surgery to fulfil his modest dream of being able to ride a bicycle. Tabarak Maheb, six, who was born with a badly deformed nose, needs plastic surgery to silence the playground teasing that sends her home in tears every day.
The IOM team, with Iraqi health officials, assessed nearly 600 patients who needed treatment that was only available abroad. The agency now acts as a clearing house for the foreign charities, aid agencies and hospitals that can offer free treatment, as well as sorting out the necessary immigration regulations with the host countries.
However, the process remains complex and last-minute cancellations are frequent. The international response has been muted because the UN is forced to maintain a low profile in Iraq and there is formidable bureaucracy involved in each case. Nearly two thirds of the 389 patients on the list are still waiting to hear when - or indeed if - they will get treatment.
Abbas has seen his hopes raised and dashed once already. "Two months ago we got a call saying, 'Prepare your passports, you will be leaving in three days' time', and then the trip was cancelled," sobs his mother, Sana Abdul al Razak. "His school told us to stop sending him there this year because they don't feel that they can look after him any more. All he wants is to be able to ride a bicycle and play like other boys: now he can't even get an education."
Likewise, Tabarak was on a list of children due to travel to Italy for cosmetic surgery last August. "You could never get the plastic surgery she needed under Saddam's time, so we were very happy," said her father, Maheb. "But in the end it was cancelled - we never found out why. Now, every day she comes home crying from school, saying, 'Daddy, when can I go abroad to get a new nose?' "
Mark Petzoldt, the IOM's Kuwait-based logistics manager, conceded that it was a slow operation. "It is everything from finding a foreign doctor willing to do the treatment free, sorting out immigration for people who often have no passports, and then getting a charity to escort the people out of Iraq, where the security situation is difficult. Unfortunately, a lot of things can go wrong."
Mr Hashem, from Basra, admits that he is no charitable cause celebre. His injuries stem not from coalition bombing or Saddam's torture chambers, but after he tried to erect a television aerial and snagged it on a nearby electric pylon. His flesh was flayed "like scrambled egg", according to his doctor, Rafid Al Adhab.
Yet his brother Walid, 39, who now looks after him, is still hopeful. "We ask every honest man and woman in the world to look at my brother's case, to see his suffering. If we had any ability to help him, we would, but we cannot."
Some families are becoming impatient. Mustapha Salaam, 10, suffers from a generalised bleeding condition that normally demands blood transfusions twice a week. During the war, he and his father, Salaam Khalaf, had to make the six-mile journey to Basrah's main hospital on foot, braving bombs and bullets each time.
"His life is a misery - he cannot play football or run about because if he gets a bruise, he starts bleeding," says Mr Khalaf, 43. "Tony Blair was in Basra just two weeks ago - if he comes here to visit, why doesn't he help people like my son?"
Adrian Sutton, a British film maker who acts as the IOM's Middle East spokesman, stressed the achievements of the programme so far: 147 of the 389 have already been evacuated, and a major programme to rebuild Iraq's health infrastructure is also under way.
He says more help would be welcome, especially from Britain, given its big military presence in southern Iraq. No British aid agencies are involved with the IOM.
"Most have been from the Middle East and Germany, Austria, Italy and Greece," he says. "We think it is mainly because the charities there have just been particularly pro-active, rather than any problem at the British end. But we would greatly appreciate some more UK involvement, and from elsewhere too."
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U.N. Prepares for Meeting About Iraq, Wary of U.S. Motives
January 18, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/middleeast/18NATI.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 17 - The United States comes to the United Nations on Monday, asking the organization that the Bush administration has kept at a deliberate distance from its Iraq stabilization plan to step in now and help rescue it.
In off-the-record comments, many here complain about being asked to validate a process from which they were excluded, and wonder if the world organization is not being manipulated by the White House for election-year political purposes.
The November agreement between the United States and the Iraqi Governing Council to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis on June 30 made no mention of any United Nations role, and the omission was one that Secretary General Kofi Annan said he took as a snub.
But on Monday, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, and a delegation of the United States-appointed Governing Council will be asking Mr. Annan to commit the United Nations to saving the arrangement, after it has come under fire in Iraq.
Asked what the United Nations' mood was after being disparaged often by the Bush administration, Fred Eckhard, Mr. Annan's spokesman, said: "The gut instinct here is not, `I told you so.' It's more relief that we are getting back to normalcy where governments work with each other, where international understanding is a national priority."
Mr. Annan has made it clear that while he favors a speedy timetable for giving authority to Iraqis, he is unwilling to commit the United Nations to an ill-defined mission. The Monday meeting is consequently not expected to produce any definitive announcements.
It could serve, however, to ease the deep worry at the United Nations over the threat the strained relations with the Bush administration are seen to pose.
"It has been a truism since the time of the League of Nations that without the United States committed to and participating in international organizations, they are not going to work," said one official.
David M. Malone, a former Canadian ambassador to the United Nations who heads the International Peace Academy, a research institute across the street from the United Nations, said of the meeting, "The positive feature is that the U.S. belatedly, but importantly, is realizing what its friends have told it all along - which is that the U.N. can be useful in these situations and can build confidence among multiple populations."
But he added, "The risk for the U.N. is that the U.S. could simply be seeking to establish a scapegoat for the failure of its grand design."
The Security Council will hear a report on Iraq in a closed session on Monday afternoon from the current Governing Council chairman, Adnan Pachachi. The president of the Security Council, Heraldo Muñoz of Chile, said members were no longer focusing on the differences they had with the United States over the war.
"My feeling is that the moment of divisions has been overcome and that there is a strong consensus on the Council around the idea that, even given the circumstances, we must do everything possible to assist the political process," Mr. Muñoz said in an interview.
He noted that until now the United States appeared to want the United Nations kept out of the political transition and included only in the second stage after the June 30 transfer of power, where it could employ its experience in writing constitutions and setting up elections.
"It is now welcome that the U.S. would like the U.N. to play a role in the first stage," Mr. Muñoz said. "But what has to be elucidated is what that role is and whether the responsibility will be commensurate with the risk."
Mr. Annan withdrew international staff members from Iraq in October after attacks on relief workers and the bombing of United Nations headquarters, which killed 22 people, including the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
In recent weeks, the United States and some Iraqi politicians have been pressing Mr. Annan to send his staff back into Iraq, but he has insisted on assurances of protection for them and "clarity" in the description of what they would be asked to do.
In that connection, the United Nations announced this week that it was sending a four-person military and police team to study security provisions for the possible return of its workers.
As much as United Nations officials would like to end their marginalization from Iraq, they worry about the timing of going back in now.
"It's a totally novel, unprecedented and uncomfortable position for the U.N. to be in a country under occupation," said an official who served with Mr. Vieira de Mello in Iraq.
A diplomat from a Security Council country that stood against military action said: "Everyone wants to see the U.N. back in Iraq. No one here has any interest in keeping the U.N. out. But part of the poker game we will see Monday will be who needs whom more and who needs to move first."
---------
US swallows pride to plead with UN
Realpolitik: Trevor Royle On why the US has been forced to go cap in hand to the UN for help in Iraq
18 January 2004
Sunday Herald (Scotland)
http://www.sundayherald.com/39334
This time last year the neo-cons in the Bush administration were cock-a-hoop about their Iraq policy. With or without weapons of mass destruction, they were going to take the US to war against Iraq, topple Saddam Hussein and restore democracy and freedom . A new world order was in the offing. Pre- emptive strikes were good, diplomatic mind games were bad. Coalitions of the willing were acceptable, world community nay-sayers were out of order. That was the mood which took the Bush team to war . It worked. Iraq collapsed and Saddam sought sanctuary in his hole in the ground. The problem was nobody really knew what to do next and within days of the official ceasefire coalition, soldiers were being killed and the country remained in chaos.
What a difference a year makes. Tomorrow that policy will be reversed when the US proconsul in Iraq, Paul Bremer, meets UN secretary-general Kofi Annan in an attempt to get the world body back onside.
Acknowledging that the US needs the kind of expertise which only the UN can bring to post-colonial handovers of power, Bremer will ask for help from an organisation which colleagues such as deputy defence secretary Paul Wolfowitz once described as being immaterial. Annan will be minded to accept the olive branch, provided the US can give assurances about security and that will be no easy matter . A realist and a good moderator, Annan has always argued that his people have a role to play in Iraq and he will be keen to take steps which might pacify Ayatollah Sistani, the Shia leader who is calling for elections before any handover of power.
Annan will also want to end the year-long confrontation with Washington, which has disrupted diplomacy and created a split between those who supported the war and those who opposed it. Of course, nothing is for nothing and the pay-off will mean another change in US policy: in return for helping them out in Iraq in 2004, France, Germany and Russia will be allowed to bid for contracts to rebuild Iraq.
The reversal should come as no big surprise. This is election year in the US and Bush's team are anxious to get out of Iraq by the agreed timetable which will see a new Iraqi assembly take over on July 1. Before then Iraqis will be encouraged to participate in regional caucuses for the assembly . At least that's the theory and that is why the UN is being asked to provide its experience and expertise to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible. Ahead of that moment the US has started a massive public relations exercise to encourage Iraqis to support moves towards democracy.
However, Shias are adamant they want elections before any hand over, arguing that their demands are only democratic, and Ayatollah Sistani has threatened civil disobedience if his supporters' wishes are not met. In the aftermath of the military operations the south has been largely free of the kind of violence which has troubled the Sunni-dominated north but all that could change whatever is decided. If elections are not held the Shias could carry out their threat to hold violent demonstrations; if elections are held, the Shias could sweep to power and confrontation would be inevitable.
It will be a tough call for the UN to intervene decisively, but that is what Bremer will be looking for in New York tomorrow. At the back of his mind will be the nightmare of 1975 when helicopters swooped onto the roof of the US embassy in Saigon to rescue another team of well-meaning but suddenly irrelevant US proconsuls.
-------- us
The Defense Budget Is Bigger Than You Think
By Robert Higgs
January 18, 2004
Independent Institute
http://www.independent.org/tii/news/031222Higgs.html
When President Bush signed the defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2004 on November 24, 2003, the event received considerable attention in the news media. At $401.3 billion, the public's visible cost of funding the nation's defense seemed to be reaching astronomical heights, and the president took pains to justify that enormous cost by linking it to the horrors of 9/11 and to the "war on terror." He pledged that "we will do whatever it takes to keep our nation strong, to keep the peace, and to keep the American people secure," clearly implying that such payoffs would accrue from the expenditures and other measures that the act authorizes.
Although the public may appreciate that $401.3 billion is a great deal of money, few citizens realize that it is only part of the total bill for defense. Lodged elsewhere in the budget, other lines identify funding that serves defense purposes just as surely as -- sometimes even more surely than -- the money allocated to the Department of Defense (DoD). On occasion, commentators take note of some of these additional defense-related budget items, such as the nuclear-weapons activities of the Department of Energy (DoE), but many such items, including some extremely large ones, remain generally unrecognized.
Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), many observers probably would agree that its budget ought to be included in any complete accounting of defense costs. After all, the homeland is what most of us want the government to defend in the first place.
Many other agencies, such as the Department of Justice and the Department of Transportation, also spend money in pursuit of homeland security. According to the government's budget documents (Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004, Table S-5), in fiscal year 2002, all such agencies together added approximately 50 percent to the amount spent on homeland security by the agencies later incorporated into the DHS.
Much of the budget for the Department of State and for international assistance programs ought to be classified as defense-related, too. In this case, the money serves to buy off potential enemies and to reward friendly governments who assist U.S. efforts to abate perceived threats. A great deal of U.S. foreign aid, currently more than $4 billion annually, takes the form of "foreign military financing," and even funds placed under the rubric of economic development may serve defense-related purposes indirectly. Money is fungible, and the receipt of foreign assistance for economic-development projects allows allied governments to divert other funds to police, intelligence, and military purposes.
Two big budget items represent the current cost of defense goods and services obtained in the past. The Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA), which is authorized to spend more than $62 billion in the current fiscal year, falls into this category. Likewise, much of the government's interest expense represents the current cost of defense outlays financed in the past by borrowing.
To estimate the size of the entire de facto defense budget, I have gathered data for fiscal year 2002, the most recent fiscal year for which data on actual outlays were available at the time of this writing. In that fiscal year, the DoD itself spent $344.4 billion. Defense-related parts of the DoE budget added $18.5 billion. Agencies later to be incorporated into the DHS spent $17.5 billion, and other agencies (not including the DoD) added $8.5 billion for homeland security. The Department of State and international assistance programs spent $17.6 billion for activities arguably related to defense purposes either directly or indirectly. The DVA had outlays of $50.9 billion. When all these other parts of the budget are added to the budget for the DoD itself, they increase the total by nearly a third, to $457.4 billion.
To find out how much of the government's net interest payments on the national debt ought to be attributed to past debt-funded defense spending requires a considerable amount of calculation. I have added up all past deficits (minus surpluses) since 1916 (when the debt was nearly zero), prorated according to each year's ratio of national security spending -- military, veterans, and international affairs -- to total federal spending, expressing everything in dollars of constant purchasing power. This sum is equal to 81.1 percent of the value of the national debt held by the public in 2002. Therefore, I attribute that same percentage of the government's net interest outlays in that year to past debt-financed defense spending. The total amount so attributed comes to $138.7 billion.
Adding this interest component to the previous all-agency total, the grand total comes to $596.1 billion, which is more than 73 percent greater than DoD outlays alone.
If the additional elements of defense spending continue to maintain approximately the same ratio to the DoD amount -- and we have every reason to suppose that they will -- then in fiscal year 2004, through which we are passing currently, the grand total spent for defense will be approximately $695 billion. To this amount will have to be added the $58.8 billion allocated to fiscal year 2004 from the $87.5 billion supplemental spending authorized on November 6, 2003, for support of U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq and for so-called reconstruction of those despoiled and occupied countries. Thus, the super-grand total in fiscal year 2004 will reach the astonishing amount of nearly $754 billion -- or 88 percent more than the much-publicized $401.3 billion -- plus, of course, any additional supplemental spending that may be approved before the end of the fiscal year.
Although I have arrived at my conclusions honestly and carefully, I may have left out items that should have been included -- the federal budget is a gargantuan, complex, and confusing document. If I have done so, however, the left-out items are not likely to be relatively large ones. Therefore, I propose that in considering future defense budgetary costs, a well-founded rule of thumb is to take the Pentagon's (always well publicized) basic budget total and double it. You may overstate the truth, but if so, you'll not do so by much.
Defense Outlays in Fiscal Year 2002 (billions of dollars)
Department of Defense 344.4
Department of Energy 18.5
Department of State 17.6
Department of Veterans Affairs 50.9
Agencies incorporated into Department of Homeland Security 17.5
Department of Justice (homeland security) 2.1
Department of Transportation (homeland security) 1.4
Department of the Treasury (homeland security) 0.1
National Aeronautics & Space Administration (homeland security) 0.2
Other agencies (homeland security) 4.7
Interest attributable to past debt-financed defense outlays 138.7
Total 596.1
Source: Author's classifications and calculations; basic data from U.S. Office of Management and Budget, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2004 and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970.
Robert Higgs is Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Independent Institute and editor of its scholarly quarterly journal, The Independent Review. He is also the author of Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government and the editor of Arms, Politics and the Economy: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. For further articles and studies, see the War on Terrorism and OnPower.org.
----
After 10 Months in Iraq, U.S. Marks 500th Military Death
Blast Outside Occupation Headquarters Kills at Least 12
By R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26104-2004Jan17.html
The U.S. military death toll after 10 months of engagement in Iraq reached 500 yesterday, roughly matching the number of U.S. military personnel who died in the first four years of the U.S. military engagement in Vietnam.
The death toll in Iraq, which had been 497 on Friday, rose by three when a remote-controlled bomb made of two artillery rounds packed with explosives detonated beneath a Bradley Fighting Vehicle carrying five U.S. soldiers and at least two Iraqi civil defense personnel in cane fields north of Baghdad.
Military officials said the blast occurred near the town of Taji during a search for buried land mines and roadside bombs, which previously claimed lives in the area.
In Baghdad early Sunday morning, a car bomb detonated outside the main gate to the U.S. occupation headquarters, killing at least 12 people and setting several vehicles on fire, according to witnesses and a U.S. military spokesman.
The cumulative toll of 500 U.S. deaths was reached in Vietnam in 1965, the year when the U.S. deployment there rose from 23,300 to 184,300 troops. In Iraq, in contrast, the United States is rotating forces with the goal of reducing the total from 130,000 to 105,000 by June and also sharply scaling back its military presence in Baghdad.
Yesterday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman in Iraq, dismissed the significance of reaching the threshold of 500 deaths. "I do not believe that any arbitrary . . . figure is going to cause any soldiers to lose their will or their focus," Kimmitt said.
But Steven Kull, director of the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes, said the rising death toll eventually could erode the popularity of President Bush and support for his handling of the conflict.
Noting that many Americans polled before the war began said they anticipated about 1,000 combat deaths, Kull said, "There are no signs of the population going toward a Vietnam-style response, in which a large minority or even a majority says, 'pull out.' " That goal has steady support among 15 to 17 percent of the public.
He said the public continued to be led by a consensus among elites in support of continued U.S. military engagement in Iraq. "There is a lot of controversy about whether we should have gone in," but even among the Democratic presidential candidates, only Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) favors a U.S. withdrawal, Kull noted.
Most Americans believe there is little alternative to staying in Iraq, given the risks of creating a breeding ground for terrorism if U.S. troops leave too soon. Nonetheless, he said, the rising death toll has increased the "cost" of the war at the same time its benefits "have gotten muddier" because of the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or clear Iraqi links to al Qaeda terrorists.
As a result, nearly half of those polled already say the war has not been "worth it," and support for Bush's handling of the war dropped from 75 percent in April to 47 percent in October; it rose to the mid-50s in December, after the capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, Kull noted.
The populous states of California, Texas and Pennsylvania have experienced the most deaths of their citizens in Iraq, totaling 123, according to statistics compiled by military officials and news agencies.
But the death toll has been proportionally highest in American Samoa and the lightly populated states of Montana, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, and Delaware, plus the District of Columbia.
The cities that have lost the most citizens are Los Angeles, Buffalo, Houston and San Diego; the U.S. military base to suffer the highest death toll is Fort Campbell, Ky.
The U.S. military attributes 346 of the U.S. deaths to hostile action and 154 to nonhostile causes. At least 2,497 military personnel have been wounded in Iraq. The casualties remain far lower than those incurred during the 14-year U.S. engagement in Vietnam, when a total of 58,198 troops were killed, including 47,413 combat deaths and 10,785 nonhostile deaths.
Correspondent Daniel Williams in Baghdad and staff researchers Meg Smith and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
----
Rotation to Cut U.S. Presence
Reservists to Assume Greater Share of Duties in Iraq
By Liz Spayd and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26148-2004Jan17.html
CAMP AL-SAYLIYAH, Qatar -- A massive rotation of troops in and out of Iraq, due to be completed in five months, will leave the U.S. military with a far smaller presence there, fewer troops with prior experience in the Middle East and a far greater proportion of reservists in the region.
The U.S. Central Command set in motion this month what will be one of the largest troop and equipment movements in American history. If all goes according to plan, 130,000 troops will fly or drive out of Iraq and 105,000 replacements will move in -- all at a time when fighting remains volatile and intense. The military is also beginning to rotate troops in Afghanistan and Kuwait.
The replacement force will have many more units drawn from the National Guard and Army Reserve. Currently, about 28,000 troops in Iraq are from those groups. After the rotation is concluded in late May, the proportion of reservists will more than double, with 66,000 active-duty troops and 39,000 from the Guard and Reserve.
"I don't think we've had that amount of forces moving in that time frame that I'm aware of, ever," even during World War II, a senior official at Central Command's regional headquarters here said.
The heavier reliance on reservists is a concern in part because those troops had more morale problems than their active-duty counterparts. A survey of 500 soldiers serving in Iraq conducted last month by Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University sociologist specializing in military issues, found that the mood of troops from the Guard and Reserve was "markedly lower." In a preliminary report to the Army, Moskos noted, "The complaint that reservists were 'second-class citizens' in OIF (Operation Iraqi Freedom) was frequently heard."
The shift poses considerable risk for a military battling an unpredictable enemy that has proved adept at taking advantage of U.S. vulnerabilities. "Anytime you have a large number of forces moving, there's obviously an opportunity for somebody who wants to do something bad," the official said.
Conscious of that risk, commanders have ordered Predator unmanned reconnaissance aircraft to monitor crucial convoy routes. The troop movements are being coordinated with military intelligence on the insurgents' tactics. "We don't do anything operationally without links" to intelligence, the official said.
Once the new troops are in place, a major issue for commanders will be ensuring that know-how is passed from one soldier to the next. Plans call for each incoming unit to arrive about two weeks before the departure of the one it is replacing, allowing the old units and new ones to live and operate side by side.
"Obviously, 15 days doesn't compensate for 365 days," the official said. "But I think our military forces are trained and adapt well."
The new force will be lighter, operating fewer tanks and other heavy vehicles. U.S. commanders have vowed to make the military more mobile and agile in Iraq, and so most of the tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles -- two mainstays of the combat Army -- are being withdrawn. In their place, troops will operate Humvees, enabling them to patrol the streets of Baghdad and other cities with less disruption, but still respond quickly to events.
Many of the new Humvees are armored versions that provide more protection against the street-side bombs that have killed or wounded hundreds of U.S. soldiers in recent months. Of the 9,800 Humvees in Iraq, about 1,800 are armored, the official said. The new Humvees, whose short supply has become an issue in Congress, are being shipped in as fast as they are made, and the Army plans to have 3,000 in Iraq two years from now, he said.
The entire movement of forces has been modeled extensively on computers, occupying the attention of top military leaders for weeks. One of their major worries is that winter weather in the United States and the North Atlantic could disrupt the movement of ships and aircraft, causing delays that ripple through the highly synchronized process. The heart of the plan is achieving efficiency by having each aircraft and truck fully loaded both going into and leaving Iraq. If shipments are delayed by weather, that plan could go awry.
The new force also will have a significant number of Marines, a major change from the current all-Army ground force in Iraq and one that presents additional logistical challenges. About 25,000 Marines are slated to take over the tumultuous western half of Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland from the Army's 82nd Airborne Division.
----
US military will stay in Georgia
By Natalia Antelava In Tbilisi, Georgia
Sunday, 18 January, 2004
BBC News
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3406941.stm
US officials have said that their military presence in Georgia will now become permanent.
The American military has been training and equipping the Georgian army since the spring of 2002.
Having trained three battalions of Georgian soldiers, US military instructors were due to leave in March.
Georgia's new president-elect has set the removal of Russian troops still based in the country as a major priority for his government.
On Saturday the US ambassador to Georgia said they had decided to continue training the Georgian army in a full-time programme.US 'security guarantee'
During the Soviet era, Krtsanisi military base outside Tbilisi was home to the Red Army.
The programme forms part of the US war on terror Now it is US soldiers who are in charge and, according to the US Ambassador in Tbilisi Richard Miles, they are in Georgia to stay.
In 2002 the Bush administration set up an 18-month, $65m programme aimed at training and equipping Georgia's impoverished army.
The programme was part of America's war on terror and it started after the US confirmed Russian allegations about the presence of Chechen and al-Qaeda fighters in Georgia's Pankisi Gorge, on the border with Chechnya.
Details are still to be announced of the new permanent programme, but analysts say that any sort of US military presence is good news for the Georgian Government, which sees the US engagement as a security guarantee against Georgia's northern neighbour - Russia.
Russia tensions
For Moscow, the Caucasus is a geopolitical backyard, rich in energy resources and crucial to the conflict in Chechnya.
Moscow's refusal to remove its military bases from Georgia has long fuelled tensions between the two countries.
Georgia's President-elect, Mikhail Saakashvili, says the removal of the Russian troops will be high on his government's priority list.
The US, whose own stakes in the Caucasus include a multi-billion dollar Caspian oil pipeline, backs this demand.
Last week, the Bush administration also called for Russia to remove its military and said it was even prepared to take up some of the costs needed for the relocation of Russian troops.
-------- propaganda wars
CBS Cuts MoveOn, Allows White House Ads During Super Bowl
by Timothy Karr,
Sunday January 18, 2004
MediaChannel.Org
http://progressivetrail.org/articles/040117Karr.shtml
The nearly 100 million viewers expected to tune in to next month's Super Bowl on CBS will be served up ads that include everything from beer and bikinis to credit cards and erectile dysfunction.
They will also see two spots from the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. What's missing from America's premiere marketing spectacle will be an anti-Bush ad put forth by upstart advocacy group MoveOn.org. The group had hoped to buy airtime to run "Child's Pay", a 30-second ad that criticizes the Bush administration's run-up of the federal deficit.
CBS on Thursday rejected a request from MoveOn to air the 30-second spot, saying "Child's Pay" violated the network's policy against accepting advocacy advertising, a company spokesperson told reporters.
At the same time, CBS is allowing ads placed on the docket by the White House's anti-drug office. For the third year in a row the White House has paid between $1.5 and $3 million each for 30-second spots during the broadcast. The 2004 ads, produced for the White House by Ogilvy & Mather are expected to convey a message similar to their previous Super Bowl spots. While CBS would not reveal the content of the upcoming ads, previous White House Super Bowl spots drew a controverial link between casual drug use and the financing of global terrorists.
Writing about the previous ads, LA Weekly media critic Judith Miller reported that their message plays well into Bush's anti-terror campaign because it keeps ordinary citizens under siege and the war on terror central in their minds -- an objective which in 2004 serves the president's re-election strategy well.
CBS does not consider the White House ads to cross the line of advocacy. "We are fallible human beings who do not have Solomon-like wisdom but try to make rational decisions based on the ads we receive," Martin Franks, executive vice president of CBS told MediaChannel. "Taking into account the deep pockets in play in this election we don't want to appear to favor one side over the other."
MoveOn is now working the "back channels" at CBS, either via local affiliates or through others within the network to get "Child's Pay" on during the Super Bowl this year, said Wes Boyd, MoveOn co-founder. Boyd claimed that the networks do place advocacy ads during the Super Bowl. Moveon.org worked with Washington's local ABC affiliate WJLA in 2003 to air "daisy" -- an ad based on the famous Lyndon Johnson 1964 campaign commercial -- which urged President Bush to let the UN Iraqi inspections work.
"It's not clear to me that the White House ad is a PSA as opposed to advocacy ad," Boyd said. "This is about CBS and where they draw the line. It's very arbitrary and capricious when certain ads are accepted while others are not. The networks don't reveal their guidelines leaving the public unaware of the process."
Franks would not comment when asked about previous White House Super Bowl ads that equated the war on drugs to the war on terror. These ads appeared in 2002 on the Fox network, which aired the NFL championship that year, and in 2003, on ABC.
Franks would not reveal the content of the White House ads planned for CBS' February 1 broadcast. As a matter of policy CBS does not comment on ad submissions in advance of broadcast, Franks said, adding that there is "a thorough vetting of every ad that appears on CBS. End of sentence."
MoveOn.org has run afoul of Viacom, CBS' parent company, in the past. In February 2003, the grass-roots advocacy group-solicited donations from its email members to raise $75,000 to place an anti-war ad on billboards in four major American markets. The group claims that they raised the amount from members in two hours. When they approached Viacom Outdoor -- a division of Viacom and the largest outdoor-advertising entity in North America -- the company refused to post the ads, according to MoveOn.
In March 2003 MTV, another Viacom-owned entity, refused to accept a commercial opposing war in Iraq, citing a similar policy against advocacy spots that it says protects the channel from having to run ads from any cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome. "The decision was made years ago that we don't accept advocacy advertising because it really opens us up to accepting every point of view on every subject," Graham James, a spokesman at MTV told the New York Times. The youth-oriented music station regularly airs recruitment ads for the U.S. Army.
According to Adage.com, Super Bowl 2004 will also include product spots for AOL, Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline, Daimler Chrysler, FedEx, FritoLay, GM, H&R Block, Monster WorldWide, the NFL, Pepsi Cola, Philip Morris, Procter & Gamble, Sony Pictures, Touchstone Pictures, Universal Studios, Visa USA, and Warner Brothers.
A survey of 1,000 adults conducted last year by Eisner Communications found that 14 percent of those viewing the Super Bowl watch just for the ads.
-- Timothy Karr is Executive Director of MediaChannel and Director of Media For Democracy, MediaChannel's 2004 citizens' initiative to monitor media coverage of the presidential elections.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
Huge caches of drugs, cash seized at borders last year
January 18, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040117-115102-3451r.htm
More than 2.2 million pounds of illicit drugs worth $11 billion were seized last year by U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, who also confiscated $52 million in cash at the nation's seaports and land borders, CBP Commissioner Robert C. Bonner said yesterday.
"As our nation's first line of defense against the terrorist threat, CBP is addressing its greatest priority mission, keeping terrorists and terrorist weapons out of our country," Mr. Bonner said. "However, the traditional missions ... continue and are an important part of what we do, day in and day out, to secure America's borders and protect Americans from harm.
"There is no doubt that illegal drug trafficking is a serious threat to our country's security, and we are committed to do everything possible to disrupt this dangerous criminal enterprise," he said.
Mr. Bonner said CBP officers processed more than 401 million people last year, along with 109 million cars and 20 million commercial trucks and cargo containers - all subjected to increased questioning and inspection.
According to records, the officers made 17,716 marijuana seizures for 2.1 million pounds; 2,255 cocaine seizures for 90,305 pounds; 772 heroin seizures for 3,875 pounds; and 375 methamphetamine seizures for 3,134 pounds. There also were 1,337 currency seizures, totaling $52 million.
Mr. Bonner said that while it is not a crime to carry more than $10,000, it is a federal offense not to declare currency or monetary instruments totaling $10,000 or more to a CBP inspector upon entry or exit from the United States. Failure to do so, he said, can result in seizure of the currency or arrest.
Some of last year's record seizures, according to the records:
•The Bridge of the Americas in El Paso, Texas. Inspectors seized 10,101 pounds of marijuana worth $10 million hidden in a truck hauling artificial Christmas trees.
•Laredo, Texas, port of entry. Inspectors and canine enforcement officers seized the largest marijuana load in the history of the port, a total of 9,331 pounds valued at $9.3 million discovered in a truck hauling a shipment of glass.
•A south Texas checkpoint. Border Patrol agents discovered 4,520 pounds of marijuana worth $3.6 million and 360 pounds of cocaine worth $11 million hidden in a truck filled with sand.
•Sumas, Wash., port of entry. Inspectors seized 1,435 pounds of marijuana, worth $3.5 million, from a double tractor-trailer.
CBP, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, also collected $24.7 billion in duties and importation fees during 2003 at the nation's seaports and border crossings, nearly $1 billion more than 2002's total of $23.8 billion.
As a source of revenue for the federal government, CBP ranks second only to the Internal Revenue Service.
Mr. Bonner said the value of imports to the United States during 2003 was $1.2 trillion, an increase over 2002's $1.1 trillion total.
He also said the total volume of international traffic processed by CBP for 2003 was 11.1 million truck containers with a value of $3.5 billion, 2.4 million rail containers worth $10.8 billion, and 9 million sea containers with a value of $344 billion.
Import data also showed that Canada was the top trading partner of the United States with 15 percent of the total value of imports during 2003. China was second with 11.5 percent, and Mexico third with 10.6 percent, he said.
----
The Demonized Seed
As a Recreational Drug, Industrial Hemp Packs the Same Wallop as Zucchini. So Why Does the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency Continue to Deny America This Potent Resource? Call It Reefer Madness.
By Lee Green
The Los Angeles Times
January 18, 2004
http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/magazine/la-tm-hemp03jan18,1,1658290.story?coll=la-home-magazine
On an otherwise unremarkable day nearly 30 years ago, in a San Fernando Valley head shop, an ordinary man on LSD had an epiphany. The one thing that could save the world, it came to him, was hemp.
Thunderbolts come cheap on LSD, but this one looked good to Jack Herer even after his head cleared. The world needed relief from its addiction to oil and petrochemicals. From deforestation and malnutrition. From dirty fuels, sooty air, exhausted soils and pesticides. The extraordinary hemp plant could solve all those problems. Herer was sure of it. Thus began his journey as a heralding prophet.
For 12 years, Herer expanded his knowledge of hemp, burrowing deep into U.S. government archives and writing about his discoveries in alternative newspapers and magazines. He self-published "The Emperor Wears No Clothes," an impassioned rant for the utilitarian virtues of cannabis sativa, the ancient species that gives us both hemp and marijuana, which are genetically distinct. Experts agree that in contrast to marijuana, cannabis hemp-or industrial hemp as it is often called-has no drug characteristics.
Herer's book, quirky but substantive enough to be taken seriously, inspired thousands and became an underground classic. The author has issued 16 printings over the years, revising and updating his material 11 times. Today, Herer is widely credited with launching the modern hemp movement, a persistent campaign by an eclectic coalition of environmentalists, legislators, rights activists, farmers, scientists, entrepreneurs and others to end the maligned plant's banishment and tap its potential as a natural resource.
Despite the book's over-the-top exuberance and occasional leaps of syllogistic fancy-or more likely because of them-it has sold 665,000 copies in seven languages. Or is it 635,000 copies in eight languages? The prophet isn't sure as he pads across the abused gray carpet of his two-bedroom Van Nuys apartment, a flower-child domicile to which the benefits of even the most rudimentary housekeeping remain foreign. Beard unkempt, hair askew, Herer matches the décor. "How can they make the one thing that can save the world illegal?" he asks, no less astonished by this paradox now than he was three decades ago.
Herer's question is essentially the same one hemp advocates in the U.S. have been asking with mounting consternation for the past decade. They are asking it now with new urgency in response to the Drug Enforcement Agency's latest foray against hemp, an attempt since 2001 to ban all food products containing even a trace of hemp, even though the foods are not psychoactive. The California-based Hemp Industries Assn. and seven companies that make or sell hemp products won a reprieve for the industry in June, when the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled the DEA's efforts "procedurally invalid." But the matter remains in litigation, and the hemp issue continues to confound policymakers.
California's Legislature passed a bill on behalf of hemp not long ago that, in its final, watered-down form, could hardly have been less ambitious. Assembly Bill 388, approved in 2002 by wide margins in both chambers, merely requested that the University of California assess the economic opportunities associated with several alternative fiber crops. But because one of the crops was cannabis hemp, then-Gov. Gray Davis vetoed the measure, leaving California uncharacteristically behind the curve on a progressive issue that many other states and nations have embraced in recent years.
If all or even most of the oft-cited claims for hemp are true, the substance may know no earthly equal among nontoxic renewable resources. If only half the claims are true, hemp's potential as a commercial wellspring and a salve to creeping eco-damage is still immense. At worst it is more useful and diverse than most agricultural crops. Yet from the 1930s through the 1980s, many countries, influenced by U.S. policies and persuasion, banished cannabis from their farmlands. Not just marijuana, but all cannabis-the baby, the bath water, all of it.
Confronted with declining demand for their tobacco, farmers in Kentucky, where hemp was the state's largest cash crop until 1915, argue that commercial hemp could help save their farms. California doesn't face that particular dilemma but, in theory, hemp agriculture eventually could bestow innumerable benefits on the state, from tax revenues to healthier farm soils and reductions in forest logging for wood and paper. Environmentally benign hemp crops could replace at least some of California's 1 million acres of water-intensive and chemical-laden cotton.
Since taking root in the early 1990s, the hemp movement has made great progress around the world. Unfenced fields of the tall, cane-like plants flourish in Austria, Italy, Portugal, Ireland-the entire European Union. Great Britain reintroduced the crop in 1993. Germany legalized it in 1996. Australia followed suit two years later, as did Canada. Among the world's major industrial democracies, only the United States still forbids hemp farming. If an American farmer were to fill a field with this drugless crop, the government would consider him a felon. For selling his harvest he would be guilty of trafficking and would face a fine of as much as $4 million and a prison sentence of 10 years to life. Provided, of course, it is his first offense.
This for a crop as harmless as rutabaga.
Prejudiced by nearly 70 years of government and media propaganda against all things cannabis, most Americans have no idea that hemp crops once flourished from Virginia to California. Prized for thousands of years for its fiber, the plant rode commerce from Asia to Europe in the first millennium and sailed to the New World in the second. American colonists grew it in the early 1600s. Two centuries later, hemp was the nation's third-largest agricultural commodity. The U.S. census of 1850 counted 8,327 hemp plantations, and those were just the largest ones. California farmers cultivated it at least into the 1930s.
If all this seems hazy to the American mind, it's because cannabis hemp slowly vanished from our farms and our cultural memory. The abolition of slavery following the Civil War put hemp at a competitive disadvantage because its harvest and processing required intensive labor. The industry slowly declined to the brink of extinction as cotton captured the fiber market, but by the mid-1930s new machinery could efficiently extract hemp's fibers from its stalk, and the plant was poised for economic recovery. The February 1938 issue of Popular Mechanics hailed it as the "New Billion-Dollar Crop," while a concurrent issue of Mechanical Engineering deemed hemp "The Most Profitable and Desirable Crop That Can Be Grown."
The trail grows murkier here, but the crucial element of this buried history lies beyond dispute: In 1935, the U.S. government-in particular the Bureau of Narcotics (part of the Treasury Department and a predecessor to the present-day U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency) and its chief, Harry J. Anslinger-embarked on an inflammatory campaign to convince the public of the evils of marijuana.
The Hearst newspapers had acquired a taste for sensationalistic headlines and lurid stories about Mexicans and "marijuana-crazed Negroes" assaulting, raping and murdering whites. It was all nonsense, but Anslinger shamelessly parroted these myths and concocted his own in congressional testimony and in speeches and articles, branding marijuana the "worst evil of all." In a 1937 magazine piece titled "Marijuana, the Assassin of Youth," he blamed suicides and "degenerate sex attacks" on the drug.
"Marijuana is the unknown quantity among narcotics," he wrote. "No one knows, when he smokes it, whether he will become a philosopher, a joyous reveler, a mad insensate, or a murderer." Prior to such calculated misstatements, few Americans had smoked marijuana. Most had never even heard of it.
The government's motives for its attack on marijuana remain unclear. Researchers have proffered theories ranging from collusion with corporations threatened by hemp's commercial potential to moralistic fervor and bureaucratic thirst for domain once Prohibition ended in 1933. Regardless of motives, the ensuing stigmatization, red tape, state and federal controls, punitive taxes and misconceptions about marijuana's nature and its relationship to hemp doomed any chance that hemp would be resurrected as an agricultural crop. Fewer and fewer farmers were willing to grow it, and manufacturers sought other resources for rope, twine, nets, sailcloth, textiles, paint and other fiber and oil products for which hemp is well suited. The government briefly reversed course during World War II, launching an aggressive "Hemp for Victory" campaign that implored U.S. farmers to grow the crop to alleviate wartime materials shortages. But after the war, hemp again faded into oblivion.
In 1957, a Wisconsin farmer harvested the last legal commercial hemp crop in America. The government's outright prohibition of the crop, a nonissue until interest in hemp renewed in the early 1990s, was formalized in 1971 with implementation of the Controlled Substances Act, the centerpiece of U.S. drug policy.
Today's reawakened market faces an uphill battle in the U.S., not just because source materials can't be grown here but because decades of enforced hibernation have left the industry light-years behind in technology, infrastructure, research and development, marketing and public acceptance. Hemp Industries Assn., a consortium of about 250 importers, manufacturers, wholesalers and retailers, says that in the past decade the North American market has gone from virtually nothing to an estimated $200 million. Not bad under the circumstances, but still a pittance for a plant that could clothe and house us, build and fuel our cars, enhance our diets and keep the front gate from squeaking.
Hemp has attracted many passionate advocates over the years simply because of its relation to the illegal drug. But a glance at hemp's résumé makes it clear why a mere vegetable could inspire a devout constituency that transcends the counterculture. Hemp's products, its proponents insist, are interchangeable with those from timber or petroleum. The fiber volume supplied by trees that take 30 years to grow can be harvested from hemp just three or four months after the seeds go into the ground-and on half the land. Hemp requires no herbicides, little or no pesticide, and it grows faster than almost any other plant: from seed to 10 feet or taller in just a few months. Unlike most crops, it actually enriches rather than depletes the soil. As a textile it has proven stronger than cotton, warmer than linen, comfortable to wear and durable. As a building material, its extraordinarily long fibers test stronger than wood or concrete. As a nutrient it contains one of nature's most perfectly balanced oils, high in protein, richer in vitamin E than soy and possessing all eight essential fatty acids.
But because hemp contains traces of the chemical intoxicant known as tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, the U.S. government lists cannabis as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for the most dangerous and medically useless drugs. Methamphetamine, PCP and cocaine don't warrant that classification, but hemp does, right alongside heroin and LSD. The word hemp doesn't actually appear on the list, but the drug-war establishment, particularly the instrumental DEA, behaves as though it does by recognizing no distinction between varieties of cannabis.
The DEA sometimes seems bent on fomenting confusion. Two years ago, during his brief tenure as head of the agency, Asa Hutchinson stated that "many Americans do not know that hemp and marijuana are both parts of the same plant and that hemp cannot be produced without producing marijuana." One reason many Americans do not know this is because it's not true. That's like saying beagles and collies are both parts of the same dog and that beagles cannot be produced without producing collies.
Unmoved by logic, accepted nomenclature or the realities of plant genetics, the DEA insists that all cannabis is marijuana. Does the agency also consider industrial hemp grown legally outside the U.S. to be marijuana? "Yes, we do," says Frank Sapienza, the agency's chief of drug and chemical evaluation. Since more than 30 other countries manage to distinguish between marijuana and industrial hemp and allow their farmers to grow hemp, one wonders what they know that the U.S. doesn't. "I'm not going to comment on what other countries do," Sapienza says.
The DEA argues that the revival of hemp farming in the U.S. will somehow increase the availability, use and public acceptance of marijuana. Hemp activists dismiss this argument out of hand, as does one of their most formidable allies, former CIA Director James R. Woolsey. Hailing from the political right, Woolsey vehemently opposes any loosening of America's marijuana laws. But in his experience, he says, most people, once they become informed about hemp, see no justification for America's prohibition against the crop. "They understand that there's not been any increase in use of marijuana in, say, Europe or Canada as a result of industrial hemp cultivation. It's one of those issues in which there are no real substantive arguments on the other side."
Sapienza points out, as DEA officials often do, that the agency merely enforces the law. In truth, though, the DEA also interprets the law, creates exemptions to it and makes judgments that determine how statutory abstractions translate to on-the-ground realities. A case in point is the agency's declaration in late 2001 that all edible hemp products-cereals, health bars, sodas, salad oils and the like, products sold in the U.S. for years-are illegal. Hundreds of retailers were given a few months to get such items off their shelves. If a federal court hadn't intervened, a multimillion-dollar industry would have been wiped out by a DEA decision to reinterpret existing law. For now, edible hemp products remain legal and commercially available in the U.S., pending a 9th Circuit court ruling expected sometime this year.
Despite hemp's stigma, state legislatures in recent years have been surprisingly bold in their willingness to address the issue. Though Davis vetoed California's 2002 bill requesting research, in 1999 both the state Assembly and the California Democratic Party approved unambiguous resolutions supporting hemp commercialization. Twelve other states have passed similar resolutions or bills. Since 1997, North Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, West Virginia and Maryland have legalized cultivation, and in 2000, the National Conference of State Legislatures passed a resolution urging the federal government to clear the barriers to domestic hemp production. But entrenched federal opposition renders all these political machinations meaningless beyond symbolic value.
The DEA, which is within the Justice Department, justifies its unbending posture on hemp with assertions that legal hemp agriculture would provide camouflage for illegal pot growers. From the air or at a distance, the agency says, industrial hemp and marijuana are virtually indistinguishable.
"The DEA is wrong," says Indiana University professor emeritus Paul Mahlberg, a plant cell biologist who has studied cannabis for more than 25 years and is conducting research on 150 different strains, both hemp and marijuana. "Hemp plants are tall, 8 to 20 feet. Marijuana plants in the field are shorter." And cultivated hemp grows a slender, nearly leafless lower stem, whereas marijuana strains are bred to be "Christmas tree-like in appearance," with abundant leaves, glands and flowers in which are stored the intoxicating THC.
Marijuana's bushiness requires far more space per plant, says John Roulac, a compost expert and owner of the Sebastopol, Calif., health-food company Nutiva, which imports sterilized hemp seed from Canada for nutrition bars. From the ground or the air, a hemp crop looks significantly denser than a marijuana crop. "In a square yard, you might grow one or two marijuana plants, whereas with hemp you might have 100 plants," Roulac says.
The argument about physical appearance should be a nonissue, hemp advocates say, given that the last place a marijuana grower would want to locate his drug crop is in or near a hemp field. The consensus among cannabis experts, supported by the logic of plant genetics and field studies, is that cross-pollination would sabotage the pot grower's efforts, causing his next generation of marijuana to be only half as potent. This genetic convenience delights hard-line anti-marijuana types such as Woolsey, the former CIA chief. He was skeptical about pro-hemp arguments when he first heard them. "But then I got into the science of it a bit, and it was quite clear to me that not only is [hemp cultivation] a good idea, it's a major headache for marijuana [growers]," he says with an impish laugh. If it were up to Woolsey, tall, lush fields of industrial hemp would be greening America, filling the sky with airborne pollen and frustrating marijuana growers everywhere.
The DEA flatly rejects the idea that a hemp field would degrade any marijuana in the vicinity. A spokeswoman for the agency recently maintained that "it cannot be said with any level of certainty that a cannabis plant of relatively low THC content will necessarily reduce the THC content of other plants grown in close proximity."
Hemp may be absurdly intertwined with marijuana, but the DEA could ease restrictions on hemp simply by removing marijuana from its list of most dangerous drugs. That may sound radical to a public conditioned to believe marijuana is as dangerous as heroin, but Mitch Earleywine, a drug addiction expert and associate professor of clinical psychology at USC, doesn't think so. In reviewing about 500 marijuana studies for his recent book "Understanding Marijuana: A New Look at the Scientific Evidence," Earleywine found little or no scientific evidence for any of the most prominent allegations against the drug, least of all that it causes violent or aggressive behavior, decreases motivation or acts as a gateway to harder drugs. It is addictive, he says, but "it's nowhere near the caliber of, say, heroin, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, any of those drugs." Should it be a Schedule I controlled substance? "In all honesty, the idea that it has to be scheduled at all might be up for question," he says. "Americans are just too freaked out about [marijuana]."
One of the most persistent charges against the hemp lobby is that it's really just a marijuana movement in disguise.
"Let's not play dumb here," says America's reigning drug czar, John P. Walters of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. "It is no coincidence that proponents of marijuana have invested a great deal of time and money in an effort to expand hemp cultivation. They do this not, one presumes, from any special interest in industrial fiber resources, but from an earnest belief that more widespread domestic hemp cultivation will make the cultivation and distribution of marijuana easier, and that a legal hemp industry would frustrate law enforcement efforts against marijuana trafficking."
Unquestionably, the hemp and marijuana crowds overlap. Most pro-marijuana people think American farmers should be able to grow hemp, and many in the hemp movement condemn America's war on drugs and its marijuana laws. But the government's claim that virtually everyone pressing for hemp cultivation has a hidden agenda amounts to a sort of psychotropic McCarthyism. Eric Steenstra represents a Hungarian hemp textile producer and runs an Internet-based advocacy organization called Vote Hemp. "Industrial hemp is a peripheral issue to the drug war, but it has gotten caught up in it," he says. "It's frustrating. You can't discount this movement as being just a bunch of stoned hippies following the Grateful Dead."
Quips former Kentucky Gov. Louie B. Nunn: "Should we listen when Canada's Royal Mounted Police report no problems regulating hemp, or are they also working to legalize marijuana?"
Yes, there is Woody Harrelson, but the class photo also includes Nunn, Ralph Nader, Hugh Downs, Ted Turner and Woolsey, who sits on the board of directors of the North American Industrial Hemp Council, an advocacy organization founded in 1995.
"They've tried to tie us to the marijuana movement all along, and they can't get it done," says Erwin "Bud" Sholts, chair of the hemp council. Sholts is a 69-year-old farmer whose career as an alternative crop researcher for the state of Wisconsin convinced him America should consider hemp a valuable resource, not an outlaw crop. "If the rest of the world wants to make marijuana legal, that's fine, but we're interested in the agriculture crop."
When Jack Herer began his quest to emancipate hemp, he just assumed that everyone would find the essential facts about the plant's qualities so compelling that the battle would be won in six months-two years, tops. That was 29 years ago.
One of the many people intrigued by Herer's book was Dave West, a Midwest plant breeder with a doctorate in breeding and genetics. His curiosity about hemp had already been piqued by something he witnessed in the mid-1980s as he toiled one sweltering day in a Wisconsin cornfield. A helicopter suddenly appeared low in the sky, then hovered over an adjacent field while several men rappelled to the ground. It was a drug-enforcement operation going after wild marijuana. "Which, as a plant breeder and as somebody who grew up in Wisconsin, I knew was preposterous," West recalls. "I knew this was feral hemp and nobody wanted it, and that's why it was growing as a weed out there and nobody was picking it."
Since 1979, at a cost of millions of dollars annually ($13.5 million in 2002), the DEA has orchestrated an ambitious campaign of "marijuana eradication." The scene West observed in the cornfield was, and still is, a common one: a marijuana eradication team eradicating not marijuana but harmless feral hemp, often called "ditchweed." Escaped remnants from commercial hemp harvests of long ago still grow along railroad tracks and fence lines and in fields and culverts throughout America's heartland. Justice Department statistics show that year after year, as much as 98% of the "wild marijuana" the DEA pulls up is actually ditchweed.
"Here was an agency of the government that was selling this line"-calling ditchweed "marijuana"-"that was obviously a perversion of reality," West says. "This is a genetic resource issue. Instead of collecting, preserving and working with it, we're sending the DEA to rappel down from helicopters to pull it out and destroy it wherever they can find it."
From July 1999 until recently, West presided over a state-sanctioned, corporate-funded quarter-acre test plot of cannabis on the Hawaiian island of Oahu. He possessed the only DEA license to research cannabis for industrial use. To meet DEA requirements, he fortified his site with better security than you'd find at a typical Russian nuclear stockpile. Ten-foot-high fencing topped with barbed wire, an alarm siren, infrared beam perimeter. You'd think he was manufacturing enriched plutonium.
For nearly four years West worked to develop a strain of cannabis ideal for cultivation as industrial hemp in the United States. Funding proved difficult given that investors and grants don't tend to find their way to research for a crop that has been illegal in this country for 33 years. But when he shut down the project last fall, West says, his decision wasn't prompted so much by money woes as by the federal government's "strong and entrenched opposition to hemp." In a written statement he handed to DEA agents Sept. 30, the day he walked off the property for good, he left no doubt about his feelings. "I quit in protest," his statement said.
A few months earlier, he had begun girding himself for the unpleasant task of eliminating the very thing his labors had created. "When I pull the plug," he lamented with wry sarcasm, "the DEA will require that the seed be destroyed. It is, after all a narcotic with no known redeeming use here on this flat earth."
The DEA agents did indeed require West to destroy the seed. The government shows no signs that it will allow industrial hemp to be grown in the United States anytime soon.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
A Cannabis Primer
Because they're often used interchangeably, the terms cannabis, hemp and marijuana can be confusing. While cannabis encompasses all varieties of the species, hemp, often called industrial hemp, has come to mean a few dozen nonintoxicating varieties of cannabis bred and cultivated for commercial ends: clothing, paper, food, biofuels, biodegradable plastic, building materials, automobile parts, insulators, paints, lubricants-the list of possibilities goes on.
Marijuana, on the other hand, refers strictly to the cannabis drug plant, of which there exist endless varieties differentiated by the amount of intoxicating substances they contain, notably tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). Today virtually all strains of cannabis are the product of human alteration, manipulated by scientists, breeders and drug dealers to increase or decrease THC content and other characteristics to suit their purposes.
Mitch Earleywine, a drug addiction expert at USC, says marijuana typically contains a THC concentration of 2% to 5%, and some strains have measured as much as 22% or higher. By contrast, industrial hemp has been reduced by breeders to 0.3%, a trifle that authorities agree produces no psychoactive effect.
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
The Myth of Hemp Licensing
If you want to apply for a license to grow commercial hemp, you must solicit the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA consistently claims that no prohibition on hemp farming exists in this country, as if to suggest that all one need do is file the proper paperwork and make a reasonable case.
"We don't have any preconceived notions that we are or are not going to approve or deny any application," says Frank Sapienza, the DEA's chief of drug and chemical evaluation, implying that every case is a judgment call that could go either way.
Nonetheless, the agency has rejected every application it has ever received. How many? There's no telling-literally. The agency will say only that "the DEA does not have records of the number of applications received for such activities"-an extraordinary claim from an organization that documents every marijuana plant that it and cooperating law enforcement agencies uproot from U.S. soil. (In 2001, the total was 3,304,760 plants, though nearly all of them were feral hemp, or "ditchweed," not marijuana.)
Any denial that there is a U.S. hemp prohibition contradicts a salient fact: The DEA has never approved an application for commercial hemp cultivation.
Lee Green last wrote for the magazine about secular ethicist Michael Josephson.
-------- homeland security
Northwest Gave U.S. Data on Passengers
Airline Had Denied Sharing Information For Security Effort
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26422-2004Jan17?language=printer
Northwest Airlines provided information on millions of passengers for a secret U.S. government air-security project soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, raising more concerns among some privacy advocates about the airlines' use of confidential customer data.
The nation's fourth-largest airline asserted in September that it "did not provide that type of information to anyone." But Northwest acknowledged Friday that by that time, it had already turned over three months of reservation data to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center. Northwest is the second carrier to have been identified as secretly passing travelers' records to the government.
The airline industry has said publicly that it would not cooperate in developing a government passenger-screening program because of concerns that the project would infringe on customer privacy. But the participation of two airlines in separate programs demonstrates the industry's clandestine role in government security initiatives.
In September, JetBlue Airways said that it turned over passenger records to a defense contractor and apologized to its customers for doing so.
Northwest said in a statement Friday that it participated in the NASA program after the terrorist attacks to assist the government's search for technology to improve aviation security. "Northwest Airlines had a duty and an obligation to cooperate with the federal government for national security reasons," the airline said.
The carrier declined to say how many passengers' records were shared with NASA from the period offered, October to December 2001. More than 10.9 million passengers traveled on Northwest flights during that time, according to the Transportation Department.
NASA documents show that NASA kept Northwest's passenger name records until September 2003. Such records typically include credit card numbers, addresses and telephone numbers.
NASA said it used the information to investigate whether "data mining" of the records could improve assessments of threats posed by passengers, according to the agency's written responses to questions. At the time the agency also was exploring other possible projects aimed at improving air security, it said. NASA said no other airlines were involved in the project and that it did not share its data with other parties. The agency said it did not pay for the data.
Northwest said it did not inform any passengers that it shared data with NASA. It also said it did not believe that the data sharing violated its privacy policy.
"Our privacy policy commits Northwest not to sell passenger information to third parties for marketing purposes," the company said in its statement Friday . "This situation was entirely different, as we were providing the data to a government agency to conduct scientific research related to aviation security and we were confident that the privacy of passenger information would be maintained."
The carrier tells passengers visiting its Web site that "when you reserve or purchase travel services through Northwest Airlines nwa.com Reservations, we provide only the relevant information required by the car rental agency, hotel, or other involved third party to ensure the successful fulfillment of your travel arrangements."
The disclosure of Northwest's participation in the NASA project comes just four months after JetBlue's admission of involvement in a secret security project conducted by the Defense Department. JetBlue conceded that it violated its privacy policy when it turned over records on 1.1 million passengers. JetBlue is being sued by passengers in class-action lawsuits.
The Northwest and NASA documents were released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit organization that advocates privacy rights and open government. The organization, which provided the documents to The Washington Post, said it plans to take legal action this week in an effort to force the government to disclose more information about NASA's secret security project and to investigate Northwest's actions.
"We strongly believe aviation security programs should be developed publicly," said David L. Sobel, general counsel for the group. "While the airline in this case might have thought the action appropriate, the public at large sees it as a serious violation of personal privacy."
Northwest's sharing of information with the government could have implications in the European Union, where officials have balked at providing passenger data to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration as part of that agency's computer passenger-screening program, known as CAPPS II. The EU has said that turning over passenger records to the TSA would violate its privacy laws.
NASA officials did not seem concerned about potential privacy violations until last fall, when JetBlue's cooperation with the Pentagon was disclosed.
In an e-mail written on Sept. 23, 2003, to Northwest's security manager, a NASA official indicated that he wanted to return the airlines' passenger data, which was stored on compact discs.
"As you probably have heard by now, our 'data mining for aviation security' project did not receive any FY2003 funds. My interpretation is that NASA management decided that they did not want to continue working with passenger data in order to avoid creating the appearance that we were violating people's privacy," NASA engineer Mark Schwabacher wrote to Northwest Airlines security manager Jay Dombrowski. "You may have heard about the problems that JetBlue is now having after providing passenger data for a project similar to ours."
In its written responses, NASA said it terminated the program in late 2002 because data mining was not a "viable line of investigation."
The e-mail to Northwest included a link to a news report about the JetBlue matter.
On the same day as the NASA e-mail, news media quoted Northwest officials responding to the JetBlue incident. "We do not provide that type of information to anyone," Northwest spokesman Kurt Ebenhoch was quoted as saying in the New York Times on Sept. 23.
An article in the following day's St. Paul (Minn.) Pioneer Press said: "Northwest Airlines will not share customer information, as JetBlue Airways has, Northwest chief executive Richard Anderson said Tuesday in brief remarks after addressing the St. Paul Rotary."
The Electronic Privacy Information Center said it originally filed a Freedom of Information Act request in 2002 with the TSA as part of an effort to obtain details of CAPPS II development. The TSA responded to the request by providing NASA documents that indicated NASA was involved with the "data mining" system with Northwest Airlines. The CAPPS II system, scheduled to be introduced this summer, seeks to identify all U.S. passengers using commercial databases and then rate the security risk posed by each passenger.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center and other privacy advocates have argued for years that CAPPS II is being developed under strict secrecy and they believe that plans disclosed so far violate personal privacy.
The organization said it plans to file a complaint about the Northwest incident this week with the Transportation Department, which oversees the airline industry's compliance with rules guarding private consumer information.
The group said it also plans to sue NASA in U.S. District Court in San Jose this week, because, the organization said, the space agency did not disclose enough information in its response to the FOIA request.
The group seeks to know more about the NASA program, including whether the agency shared the information with other parties and whether any other airlines were involved.
"There doesn't seem to be a classic space exploration endeavor here," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program.
The TSA has said it is developing CAPPS II to better identify people who might be terrorists. But the program will also be used by law enforcement officials to identify and question people suspected of violent crimes.
Steinhardt said the Northwest and JetBlue incidents provide people with another reason to be wary about CAPPS II. "What this makes plain is that we cannot believe the assurances we've received that this passenger data will only be used for limited purposes," he said. "Inevitably, it will leak out for other uses."
Researcher Margaret Smith contributed to this report.
-------- terrorism
Islamic exile ordered bombings from Oslo, claims CIA
By Damien McElroy, Foreign Correspondent
18/01/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/wirq18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/18/ixnewstop.html
Internet messages sent by an exiled Islamic radical allegedly ordering suicide bomb attacks against coalition troops in Iraq have been intercepted by American intelligence officials.
Mullah Krekar, founder of Ansar Al-Islam, the fanatical terror group linked to al-Qa'eda and blamed by America for a number of attacks on its troops, is being held in an Oslo prison while police investigate if he has any role in the Iraqi resistance.
Mullah Krekar
Last week, CIA officials passed the messages from Krekar, a Kurd who was granted political asylum from Saddam Hussein in Norway in 1991, to Norwegian prosecutors. The investigation into Krekar - arrested earlier this month on charges of conspiracy to murder a Kurdish politician in 2002 - has widened to take in his alleged role in plotting recent attacks, in Europe as well as Iraq.
The CIA material details Krekar's alleged role in the terrorist campaign against coalition troops in Iraq. These allegedly include coded messages sent via the internet authorising suicide bomb attacks and exhorting holy war. Krekar's lawyer, Byrnar Meling, confirmed the role played by the Americans in investigating his client.
American troops move in after a bomb attack in Baghdad
"The charges in Norway relate to orders on the internet to carry out suicide bomb attacks in the last months of 2003," he said. "They have been on the internet listening to his messages and the prosecutor has now confirmed that they are interested in starting an investigation into a lot of information that can be tracked to the Americans."
Mr Meling admitted that his client had taken part in internet discussion groups used by Islamic groups while in Norway, but said that his postings were merely his thoughts about the justification of suicide in the context of holy war. "There is no encouragement in his comments," he said. "It is simply a theological, political analysis about Jihad."
The Kurdish radical leader has also been interviewed by Italian police investigating attempts to recruit suicide bombers and Islamic resistance fighters in Milan. No charges have been brought.
Ansar Al-Islam has itself been accused by the German authorities of planning a suicide attack on a US military hospital in Hamburg in December. The plot was thwarted after the authorities closed the hospital after a CIA tip-off.
"This is a case with massive and overlapping international interests," said a senior Western diplomat in Oslo. "The Norwegians have been bombarded with information from a variety of nations, all of which have gathered evidence about this man."
A Kurdish official in Baghdad claimed that the alleged evidence of attacks in Iraq included e-mails and two mobile telephone calls made weeks before the truck bombing of the Baghdad Hotel last October.
"We have been told that Krekar found out on the internet that the CIA was using the hotel as a Baghdad base and had sent a mobilisation order to a cell here in Iraq to plan an attack," he said. In the bombing, six Iraqi guards were killed.
Krekar, who has previously admitted meeting Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman Zawhiri, claims to have severed links with Ansar Al-Islam in May 2002. Last week, however, the judge who ordered him to be held in prison said that Krekar, "has had, and still has, a central position in Ansar Al-Islam."
Shortly before the war was launched in March, Krekar was in northern Iraq. The appeal court heard that according to prisoners interviewed by the Norwegian police, Krekar trained his followers in the techniques of suicide bombers.
"Several witnesses leave the impression that suicide and bombing actions would not have been carried out without [Krekar's] knowledge," the court said, explaining why Krekar was being held in detention while the investigation continues. "According to the suspect's statement to police, no one could be punished without his approval."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- genetics
Scientist Claims Cloning, Implanting Human Embryo
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26036-2004Jan17.html
A maverick Kentucky scientist yesterday said he successfully made a cloned human embryo and transferred it to the womb of a 35-year-old woman.
The scientist, Panos Zavos, who operates several businesses that deal with fertility products and has frequently sought publicity for his interest in human cloning, refused to say who the woman is or where the procedure was performed. Nor did he offer evidence of having made such an embryo, raising immediate suspicions that his announcement is but the latest in a series of cloning-related hoaxes in recent years.
Last year, a group of cloning advocates from an obscure religious group said it had produced a cloned baby, but never offered any evidence.
Zavos made his announcement at a news conference at a hotel in England. In a telephone interview afterward, he said he had retrieved three immature eggs from the ovaries of the woman, who he said had experienced premature menopause.
He said he grew one of those eggs to maturity in the laboratory, removed its DNA and then added DNA from a skin cell taken from her husband -- a procedure that, in theory, could lead to the creation of an embryo and baby genetically identical to the father.
Zavos said the procedure was done two weeks ago -- too recently to know whether the embryo has implanted in the uterine lining to create a pregnancy.
"When we confirm this with a pregnancy test, we'll bring you up to date," he said. "But the embryo was developing very well. It's remarkable."
Although a few other scientists have said they made cloned human embryos, none has reported getting the embryos to produce more than a few cells before dying.
Marian Damewood, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, which represents fertility doctors, joined others in casting doubts about Zavos's assertion. She said the organization would "deem any attempt to transfer a cloned human embryo into a woman for gestation and birth unethical."
-------- health
Vietnam and China Report New Cases of Avian Flu and SARS
January 18, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/international/asia/18HONG.html
HONG KONG, Jan. 17 - Health officials announced Saturday that tests had confirmed more cases of Asia's twin health threats this winter, bird flu and SARS.
Vietnam said four more people had fallen ill with the H5N1 strain of flu currently spreading through Asian poultry. China said two people previously categorized as suspected cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, had been reclassified as confirmed cases.
World Health Organization officials said they had not yet confirmed either the additional Vietnamese cases or the reclassified Chinese ones, and needed more information.
The W.H.O. has begun describing avian influenza, popularly known as bird flu, as the bigger threat. Influenza tends to be more infectious than SARS, the organization said, with influenza outbreaks moving swiftly around the world each winter and killing tens of thousands of people in a mild year and hundreds of thousands or more in a bad year.
Not one of the latest cases of bird flu appears yet to involve person-to-person transmission, said Bob Dietz, a spokesman for the W.H.O. in Hanoi, Vietnam. But as people become infected from chickens, doctors warn that the easily mutating virus could mix genes if someone with a human flu strain contracted a bird flu strain as well. A combined flu virus could be more readily transmissible among people.
The H5N1 strain of flu has been detected in flocks of chickens in at least 15 Vietnamese provinces, with possible cases in 10 others as well as in a few flocks in Japan and South Korea. An H5N2 strain, which might be less dangerous, has turned up in chickens in Taiwan. The H5N1 version is especially feared because humans have little immunity to it and it is hard to create a vaccine against it. Some evidence suggests that H5N1 is also unusually lethal. An outbreak here in 1997 killed 6 of the 18 people infected. The current outbreak in Vietnam has killed at least four people.
The Vietnamese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development told the W.H.O. on Saturday that more than a million chickens have already been killed in just two of the provinces with outbreaks. But Mr. Dietz, the W.H.O. spokesman, said the organization was worried that the workers who had killed the chickens had been given little or no protection from becoming infected themselves.
"You've got guys wading into flocks of chickens," he warned.
More people with respiratory illnesses are being admitted to two Hanoi hospitals with which the W.H.O. works closely. But it is unclear whether these are patients with H5N1 or whether provincial hospitals are simply referring more flu patients in case they have the avian strain, Mr. Dietz said.
While the W.H.O. has not confirmed the latest four H5N1 cases announced by Vietnam, samples sent to a Hong Kong laboratory from an earlier case did show the presence of H5N1, Mr. Dietz added.
Hong Kong and mainland Chinese officials announced separately that samples sent here from a 20-year-old waitress and a 35-year-old businessman in Guangzhou, a city in southern China 80 miles from Hong Kong, had been confirmed as showing the SARS virus, which comes from a family of viruses known as corona viruses. But Roy Wadia, a W.H.O. spokesman in Beijing, said the same samples also tested positive for another corona virus that causes the common cold, and that further tests were needed.
Hong Kong has some of Asia's best medical labs, so the W.H.O. and some Asian governments tend to send samples here for testing.
--------
Vietnamese Child Latest Bird Flu Fatality
Millions of Chickens Slaughtered in Asia to Prevent Spread of Dangerous Virus
By Tini Tran
Associated Press
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26151-2004Jan17.html
HANOI, Jan. 17 -- Vietnam reported five more suspected human bird flu cases Saturday, as the World Health Organization confirmed that a fourth death was caused by the disease.
The latest fatality in Vietnam was a 5-year-old boy from Nam Dinh province, 60 miles south of Hanoi, who died Jan. 8, WHO spokesman Bob Dietz said. Increasing numbers of people are being hospitalized with respiratory problems, he said, although it was unclear whether they were linked to bird flu.
Millions of chickens throughout the region have been infected with one of two strains of the flu. The stronger strain has hit poultry farms in Vietnam, South Korea and Japan hardest, prompting authorities to order the slaughter of millions of chickens. The milder strain has been detected in Taiwan.
Asian governments have been quick to try to curb the virus. WHO's Vietnam representative, Pascale Brudon, has attributed that response in part to last year's epidemic of SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome.
Taiwan on Saturday began culling 35,000 chickens at a farm in the southern part of the island where a mild form of bird flu was discovered. It was Taiwan's second mass slaughter in the past three days, after a similar outbreak was detected in central Taiwan on Thursday.
Taiwan's Council of Agriculture said the chickens at the farm in Chiayi County were infected with the less dangerous strain.
"The prevention of virus outbreaks is like a war," said Hu Fu-hsiung, the vice chairman of the council. "The war has not come yet, but we are preparing for it."
Poultry farms within half a mile of the infected farm were also checked for signs of the flu, but nothing was found, officials said.
The virus -- highly contagious among chickens -- is not known to have been transmitted from person to person. It is believed to spread to humans through contact with infected birds. Health officials say if it mutates and mixes genetic material with a human flu virus, it could become contagious in humans, sparking a major health crisis.
With chicken consumption expected to rise during the Lunar New Year holiday, from Jan. 21 to Jan. 26, Hu said birds for sale on the market were safe to eat, although he advised consumers to cook the meat well.
Hong Kong and Japan already have moved to stop imports of poultry and live birds from Taiwan. The island, mainland China and Cambodia have already stopped poultry imports from Vietnam, South Korea and Japan. Indonesia barred poultry imports from those three countries Friday.
The stronger avian flu strain was first reported in humans in 1997, in Hong Kong, where 18 people were infected and six died. It cropped up in Hong Kong again last year, infecting two and causing one death.
The WHO has identified the same strain of flu as the cause of four recent deaths in Vietnam. In 2003 in the Netherlands, bird flu killed a veterinarian and infected dozens of people.
Vietnamese hospital officials in southern Kien Giang province said on Saturday that a 21-year-old woman admitted on Jan. 11 and a 25-year-old man hospitalized two days later showed all the symptoms of bird flu -- high fevers, coughs, low blood pressure and low levels of blood cells.
Also, the Tuoi Tre newspaper reported Saturday that three 1-year-olds from Hanoi and two surrounding provinces suspected of contracting the virus were admitted to a pediatric hospital in the past two days. Two are in serious condition on respirators, according to the report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
US stars hail Iraq war whistleblower
GCHQ worker Katharine Gun faces jail for exposing American corruption in the run-up to war on Saddam. Now her celebrity supporters insist it is Bush and Blair who should be in the dock. Martin Bright reports
Sunday January 18, 2004
The UK Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1125854,00.html
She was an anonymous junior official toiling away with 4,500 other mathematicians, code-breakers and linguists at the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham.
But now Katharine Gun, an unassuming 29-year-old translator, is set to become a transatlantic cause célèbre as the focus of a star-studded solidarity drive that brings together Hollywood actor-director Sean Penn and senior figures from the US media and civil rights movement, including the Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Gun appears in court tomorrow accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act by allegedly leaking details of a secret US 'dirty tricks' operation to spy on UN Security Council members in the run-up to war in Iraq last year. If found guilty, she faces two years in prison. She is an unlikely heroine and those who have met her say she would have been happy to remain in the shadows, had she not seen evidence in black and white that her Government was being asked to co-operate in an illegal operation.
The leak has been described as 'more timely and potentially more important than The Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, the celebrated whistleblower who leaked papers containing devastating details of the US involvement in Vietnam, in 1971. Ellsberg has been vocal in support of Gun. She was arrested last March, days after The Observer first published evidence of an intelligence 'surge' on UN delegations, ordered by the GCHQ's partner organisation, the National Security Agency.
Legal experts believe that her case is potentially more explosive for the Government than the Hutton inquiry because it could allow her defence team to raise questions about the legality of military intervention in Iraq. The Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, is likely to come under pressure to disclose the legal advice he gave on military intervention - something he has so far refused to do.
At a hearing last November, Gun's legal team indicated that she would use a defence of 'necessity' to argue that she acted to save the lives of British soldiers and Iraqi civilians.
At the time Gun, who was sacked after her arrest and whose case is funded by legal aid, said in a statement: 'Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the US government who attempted to subvert our own security services; and to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war.'
She added: 'I have only ever followed my conscience.'
Sean Penn and Jesse Jackson have already signed a statement of support for Gun and a broader campaign will be launched later this year. They are joined by Ellsberg, who is keen to travel to Britain soon to meet Gun.
Other signatories of the statement, to be released in the coming weeks, include Linda Foley, president of the Newspaper Guild, and Ramona Ripston of the American Civil Liberties Union, both in their personal capacities.
The statement is a glowing tribute to the publicity-shy GCHQ mole who has avoided all media attention since her arrest: 'We honour Katharine Gun as a whistleblower who bravely risked her career and her very liberty to inform the public about illegal spying in support of a war based on deception. In a democracy, she should not be made a scapegoat for exposing the transgressions of others.'
The statement also pays tribute to the transatlantic opposition to the war in Iraq, which it links to historical campaigns against oppression. 'There has been much talk in recent months about the "special relationship" between the US and British governments, which led the world to war, but history tells us of another "special relationship" - between people of good will in the United States and Britain who worked together in opposition to slavery and colonialism, and most recently against the push for war on Iraq. It is in the spirit of friendship between our peoples in defence of democracy that we sign this statement.'
The leaked memorandum - dated 31 January 2003 - from Frank Koza, chief of staff of the NSA's Regional Targets section, requested British intelligence help to discover the voting intentions of the key 'swing six' nations at the UN. Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Chile, Mexico and Pakistan were under intense pressure to vote for a second resolution authorising war in Iraq.
The disclosure of the 'dirty tricks' memo caused serious diplomatic difficulties for the countries involved and in particular the socialist government in Chile, which demanded an immediate explanation from Britain and America. The Chilean public is deeply sensitive to dirty tricks by the American intelligence services, which are still held responsible for the 1973 overthrow of the socialist government of Salvador Allende. In the days that followed the disclosure, the Chilean delegation in New York distanced itself from the draft second resolution, scuppering plans to go down the UN route.
Opposition politicians are already increasing pressure on Tony Blair to release Goldsmith's legal advice. Parliamentary answers last week to Lord Alexander of Weedon QC, the Tory head of the all-party legal reform group Justice, show that the Government recognises there are precedents for disclosure.
In 1993, government legal advice in the arms-to-Iraq affair was disclosed to the Scott inquiry and advice concerning the 1988 Merchant Shipping Act was disclosed when Spanish fishermen argued that it breached EU law. The government response of Baroness Amos would appear to be an open invitation to Gun's defence team: 'In both cases, disclosure was made for the purposes of judicial proceedings.'
But she continued: 'It has been made clear in a number of parliamentary questions that the Attorney General's detailed advice would not be disclosed in view of a long-standing convention, adhered to by successive governments, that advice of law officers is not publicly disclosed. The purpose of the convention is to enable the Government, like everyone else, to receive full and frank legal advice in confidence.'
A summary of the legal advice published on 17 March last year showed that Goldsmith believed that UN Resolution 678, which authorised force against Iraq to eject it from Kuwait in 1990, could be used to justify the conflict. This position has been fiercely criticised by most experts in international law, who argue that 678 applied specifically to the threat posed to the region by Saddam in 1990. Alexander has accused Goldsmith of 'scraping the bottom of the legal barrel' and described the use of 678 as 'risible'.
When the details of the GCHQ disclosure were published in The Observer on 2 March last year, there was considerable media speculation that Goldsmith was set to resign over the issue of his legal advice over the war. Foreign Office legal experts were known to be split on the issue.
A key figure could prove to be 54-year-old Elizabeth Wilmshurst, deputy legal adviser to the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, who stepped down on 21 March. Wilmshurst is said to have left her post because she would not agree to Goldmith's legal advice.
Since leaving her post she has not spoken about the crucial discussions in the Foreign Office last March. Many believe that a second whistleblower could prove fatal to the Government.
--------
Thousands Protest French Head Scarf Ban
Law Condemned Around World As Intolerant
By Elaine Ganley
Associated Press
Sunday, January 18, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26149-2004Jan17.html
PARIS, Jan. 17 -- Waving the French flag, and sometimes wearing it as a head scarf, thousands of Muslims marched Saturday through Paris, the center of a worldwide protest against France's plan to ban religious symbols from public schools.
In cities including Baghdad, Beirut, London and Stockholm, protesters condemned the law as an attack on religious freedom. Even in Nablus, in the West Bank, and in Srinagar, the summer capital of Indian-controlled Kashmir, women came out to support French Muslims.
"Where is France? Where is tolerance?" the crowd chanted during the four-hour march through Paris. "The veil is my choice."
The protesters want to scrap a bill that will go before French lawmakers next month forbidding "conspicuous" religious signs, from Islamic head scarves to Jewish skull caps and large Christian crosses, in public schools. If approved, as expected, the ban will come into force with the new school year in September.
President Jacques Chirac says the aim is to protect the principle of secularism in France. However, it also is seen as a way to hold back Islamic fundamentalism among France's approximately 5 million Muslims.
In Paris, protesters, from young girls to women, formed a sea of color in fanciful scarves of all sizes. Men, some with beards and long robes, also joined in the march. A small group set out a prayer mat and prayed.
"Faith is not conspicuous," said one of hundreds of banners. Read another: "Neither Fundamentalist nor Terrorist but Peaceful Citizen." Police said up to 10,000 people took part in the peaceful march in the French capital, while several thousand others protested in a half-dozen cities around the country.
Critics of the law claim it will stigmatize France's Muslims. French authorities contend the principle of secularism is meant to make everybody equal.
"I think it will make things worse," Kods Mejry, 18, said of the head scarf ban. "There will be no more integration."
Her blue, white and red scarf matching the French flag was meant "to show that we are French and Muslim and proud of it."
"Lots of girls will leave school. Others will take their scarves off," said Myriam Diaou, of the Union of Muslims of Trappes, southwest of Paris. "It will reinforce the sense of exclusion."
In London, 2,400 people demonstrated near the French Embassy in the upscale Knightsbridge area. Waving placards, they chanted: "If this is democracy, we say 'No, merci!"'
Nearby, a small rival group of about 30 demonstrators expressed support for the French ban.
Britain's Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien said the British government supported the right to display religious symbols.
"In Britain, we are comfortable with the expression of religion, seen in the wearing of the hijab, crucifixes or the kippa," O'Brien said in a statement. "Integration does not require assimilation."
Hijab is Arabic for the veil worn by women and kippa is the Hebrew word for skullcap.
Across the Middle East, protesters denounced the French ban. The largest turnout was in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, where about 2,500 people marched. Smaller rallies drew up to 100 people each in Amman, the Jordanian capital, in Cairo and in Kuwait.
About 300 Palestinian women protested in the West Bank city of Nablus.
"As a people who have been oppressed, we know what it means for others in the world who are denied their freedom," said Salam Ghazal, head of a local women's group.
In Iraq, an Islamic group distributed an open letter to Chirac in mosques that called on him to reverse his position, while dozens of male and female students demonstrated at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.
----
Panning defence plan
Protesters oppose Canada's role in missile defence system
By Bill Spurr
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Halifax Herald Limited
http://www.halifaxherald.com/stories/2004/01/18/fMetro129.raw.html
J.C. Locatelli plants mock missiles in the snow outside the public library on Spring Garden Road on Saturday before a protest against Canadian involvement in a North American missile defence system.
http://www.halifaxherald.com/2004/01/18/bigthumbs/1053.jpg
Throwing "missiles" made of cardboard into the air, a few dozen Halifax demonstrators protested against Canada's participation in the U.S. missile defence programd.
David Pratt, Canada's defence minister, wrote his American counterpart this week to start the process of negotiating an agreement on what some term Star Wars. That has appalled members of the Halifax Peace Coalition, who gathered in front of the library on Spring Garden Road.
After a speech and some chanting, the demonstrators waded into the snow, donned placards with labels like Missiles, Warheads, Missile Defence and Defence Contractor, and started a fusillade of projectiles made from toilet paper tubes. This was followed by a skit in which a man wearing a George Bush mask took money out of people's pockets and gave it to the defence contractors.
"We wanted to bring a more theatrical element into it," said John Diamond of the Halifax Peace Coalition.
"We're working under the slogan that cardboard missiles are just as effective as the real ones and a whole lot cheaper. So that's why we decided to do a missile launch instead of a march."
Demonstrators also asked passersby to sign a petition and handed out literature, including copies of Socialist Worker.
"We've already collected 3,000 or 4,000 signatures on the . . . nationwide petition being used by the Canadian Peace Alliance," Mr. Diamond said.
"We're hoping to show that if a city like Halifax can collect that many signatures in a couple of months, the possibilities for organizing this are endless."
Missile defence refers to a plan in which ballistic missiles would be shot out of the sky by other missiles deployed in space.
The Halifax Peace Coalition believes missile defence has less to do with defence than with an American intention to dominate space as well as Earth. Demonstrations were also held Saturday in Nelson, B.C., Saskatoon and Peterborough, Ont.
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 globalnet@mindspring.com
----------
Soldier 'tried to cover up killing of British activist'
By Inigo Gilmore in Jerusalem
18/01/2004
Telegraph Group
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/wisr18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/18/ixnewstop.html
The Israeli soldier accused of killing Tom Hurndall, the British peace activist who died last week, tried to cover up his crime by asking for his commander's permission to shoot an "armed man" moments after he had already fired the fatal shot.
Details of the alleged attempt to cover up the killing are contained in the indictment against the soldier, which has been obtained by The Telegraph. It shows that Sgt Idier Wahid Taysir apparently went to great lengths to cover his tracks, firstly in the moments after the shooting and later by persuading another soldier to lie to army investigators. Sophie Hurndall, sister of dead peace activist Tom Hurndall (in photo being held)
The indictment is based on the apparent confession of Sgt Taysir, from the Bedouin unit in Rafah. In it, he changed earlier statements and admitted that he shot Mr Hurndall. This has opened the way for a groundbreaking military trial which could have major implications for the Israeli Defence Force.
Mr Hurndall, a 22-year-old photography student at Manchester Metropolitan University, was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) in the Gaza Strip when he was killed at the Rafah refugee camp, close to the Egyptian border, last April. He was shepherding Palestinian children across a road when he was shot in the forehead from a nearby Israeli watch tower.
The indictment says that a "short time" after Mr Hurndall was shot, Sgt Taysir radioed his commander from the watch tower and "communicated a false report to the duty officer", claiming that "an armed figure" was leaving a house opposite his position.
The indictment continues: "After the duty officer said to the accused that he was authorised to shoot to injure if he identified that the man had a weapon and wanted to harm the soldiers, he reported to the duty officer that he had hit an armed man."
Sgt Taysir was brought before a military tribunal last week and is now in military prison pending his trial, expected next month.
A second soldier from his unit will also face charges after he allegedly gave false statements to try to conceal the incident. The indictment says that the second soldier, referred to in the documents only as "Sgt C", claimed that the man shot by Sgt Taysir was wearing "camouflaged clothing" and "that he shot in the air and towards the position".
According to the indictment, Sgt C provided these details "even though they were not true, and even though Sgt C did not see the incident at all and only heard one shot".
Western diplomats say that it was the family's intense media campaign, which included lobbying the British government, that forced the IDF to investigate the shooting. The Metropolitan Police has been asked to investigate but on Friday the Israelis said they would not allow British investigators to "interfere" in the case.
The Hurndall family is upset that the IDF leaked details that Sgt Taysir was a Bedouin Arab who had previously been investigated for cannabis use. They claim that it was an attempt to divert attention from what they call a "culture of impunity" in the IDF by creating an image of the Bedouin sergeant as a "rogue" soldier and they believe that other soldiers, including his senior officers, should also be punished.
Carl Arrindell, a friend of the Hurndall family, said: "The impression we get is that there is an attempt to distance the army from a single, reckless soldier who committed the crime, even though the senior officers have made it clear that ISM activists and others, including reporters, are fair game.
"From the beginning, there was an attempt at a blanket cover-up, all the way up the chain of command."
Military commanders argue that Sgt Taysir should face at most a manslaughter charge, and serve only a year in jail if found guilty. Military prosecutors changed the charge from aggravated assault to manslaughter after Mr Hurndall died last week, succumbing to pneumonia after being in a coma since the shooting.
However, the family is pressing for a murder charge to be brought. Their Israeli lawyer, Michael Sfard, has written to the military prosecutors to request a copy of all the investigation documents. "We do not understand why they have only indicted him for manslaughter because he was equipped with telescopic sights and he shot Tom in the forehead," Mr Sfard said last night. "This shows premeditated intent to kill."
He expected the trial to arouse intense interest. "It is a somewhat new experience to have a soldier go on trial for shooting a civilian in the occupied territories. Such incidents do not usually come to trial. Usually, the military police do not bother to investigate."
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