Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Nuclear scientists questioned
Pakistan Questions 8 Linked to Nuclear Program
Pakistan Detains Scientists
Top nuclear official held in Pakistan
Pakistan Says Nuclear Probe Drawing to Close
Iraqis' new missile tactics worry U.S.
Assad says Israel must give up nuclear weapons
Western Team Said to Be in Libya on Antiweapons Mission
IAEA to Play Role in Libya's Disarmament by US, UK
U.S., U.K. Reach Deal With IAEA on Libya
An Agreement on a Contract Averts a Strike at Indian Point
Gore Blasts Bush Space Plan, Says Earth Neglected
The Neoconservative Personality
Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility Abroad
MILITARY
Afghan Officials Say U.S. Bombing Kills 11
Afghan Leader Orders Release of Former Taliban Fighters
Hotbed of weapons deals
S. Korea Vows Its Security Remains Strong
China: Taiwan Vote Pushes Ties to Brink of Danger
Back From Exile, Kurds Demand Political Power
At Least 20 Dead in Baghdad Blast
Sharon Hints Israel Might Alter Route of West Bank Barrier
Hezbollah Missile Hits Israeli Bulldozer at Lebanon Border
U.N. Report
Wary Annan Set to Discuss a Possible U.N. Role in Iraq
Open Door Policy A strange thing happened on the way to the war.
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline
DEA disrupts Colombia drug ring
U.S. Presses for Leeway in Terror Probes
Handcuffing judges and justice
Australian Parents Have New Hope for U.S.-Detained Son
Imam Accused of Lies on Terrorist Links
ENERGY
Australia's Renewable Energy Review Sets Target Low
ACTIVISTS
Thousands of Iraqis Demand Elections on Day of U.N. Talks
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear scientists questioned
January 19, 2004
By Matthew Pennington
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040118-103502-5974r.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan has expanded an investigation of its premier nuclear weapons laboratory, detaining as many as seven scientists and administrators amid charges that sensitive technology may have spread to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya, officials said yesterday.
Pakistan has denied any official involvement in sharing technology with those countries, but has acknowledged that individual scientists acting on their own might have leaked information.
Information Minister Sheik Rashid Ahmed said five to seven persons at the Khan Research Laboratories were taken in for questioning over the past few days. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. Haq is the laboratory's principal staff officer.
Mr. Haq's wife, Nilofar Islam, said Mr. 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."
Pakistan has stepped up its efforts in the U.S.-led war on terror. Yesterday, authorities arrested seven suspected al Qaeda militants and seized a weapons cache in the teeming port city of Karachi.
During the past two months, Pakistan has interrogated a few scientists at the laboratory, acting on information about Iran's nuclear program from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. watchdog, officials say.
Mr. Khan also has been questioned, although he has not been detained and still is treated as an official dignitary in Pakistan.
Earlier this month, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said U.S. officials have presented evidence to Pakistan's leaders of Pakistani involvement in the spread of nuclear weapons technology.
The Jan. 2 arrest at a Denver airport of South African-based businessman Asher Karni, 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 Pervez Musharraf to rein in Pakistani scientists. Pakistan dismissed the charge as "absolutely false."
----
Pakistan Questions 8 Linked to Nuclear Program
January 19, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/asia/19STAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 18 - Authorities in Pakistan are questioning eight officials from its nuclear weapons program - including the personal assistant to the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb and two retired brigadiers - regarding allegations that nuclear weapons technology was shared with Iran, the government's information minister said Sunday.
The minister, Sheik Rashid Ahmed, did not provide further details of the interrogations or say when they had begun. But the disclosure came a day after Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, said the country must convince the world that Pakistan is not a proliferator of nuclear weapons.
Mr. Ahmed identified one of those questioned as a personal assistant to Abdul Qadeer Khan, creator of Pakistan's first nuclear bomb. He said authorities were also questioning a retired brigadier who is the former head of security at the country's main nuclear weapons site, the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, and one other retired brigadier.
Pakistan began an inquiry into its nuclear program in late December after American intelligence officials and the United Nations nuclear agency said Iranian officials disclosed that Pakistanis were among middlemen who the Iranians said had aided Iran's nuclear weapons program. American intelligence officials also said they believed that Pakistan had traded nuclear technology to North Korea in exchange for missile technology. The Americans further said Pakistan was the source for designs of centrifuges used by Libya's recently disclosed nuclear program.
Pakistani officials have said that no nuclear technology was transferred to Libya and that no nuclear technology is currently being transferred to North Korea. Pakistani officials have conceded the possibility that individuals motivated by personal ambition or greed may have sold nuclear technology to Iran between 1987 and 1993.
The wife of Maj. Islam Ul Haq, the personal assistant to Dr. Khan, said Dr. Khan told her that the major had been detained by two uniformed intelligence agents on Saturday night while the two men were eating dinner at Dr. Khan's house, The Associated Press reported. Major Haq is a director at the Khan Research Laboratories.
Telephone calls to Ms. Islam's home, as well as to Dr. Khan's, were not answered Sunday night.
For the past decade, Dr. Khan has been lionized as a national hero. The reported detention of his top aide, in his own home, comes as domestic criticism of the investigation rises.
Since three scientists were detained for questioning in December, Pakistani analysts, opposition politicians and relatives of the scientists have scoffed at the suggestion that they could have transferred such sensitive technology without the government's knowledge.
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is considered the country's most precious asset and is tightly guarded by the military, which dominates the country.
In an interview this week, relatives of one scientist who has been in detention for more than a month, Farooq Muhammad, bitterly accused the government of using low-level scientists as scapegoats to appease the United States. They said that they did not believe the American charges of Pakistani proliferation and that they feared that Mr. Muhammad was in American custody.
"Might is right," said Maher Aamir, the scientist's nephew. "It's all to praise or make happy the U.S.A. by framing innocent people."
Officials at the American Embassy in Islamabad declined to comment. Pakistani officials said Dr. Farooq was in Pakistan.
Senior Pakistani government officials emphasized that no proof of wrongdoing had been discovered. Last week, Iranian and Libyan officials said they had received no nuclear assistance from Pakistan.
Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, a spokesman for Pakistan's military, said Sunday that the investigation was continuing and "anyone who has broken the law will be held accountable."
In late December, officials said Dr. Khan himself had been questioned, but was not in detention. Nearly all those questioned so far have been his close aides.
A senior Western diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity said Dr. Khan should be the focus of any inquiry. "It's completely impossible for there to have been any proliferation activities without A. Q. Khan's knowledge," the diplomat said. "That much is clear."
But Pakistani analysts said it would be political suicide for General Musharraf to detain or prosecute Dr. Khan. Tariq Rahman, a professor at Quaid-e-Azam University, said the public would regard it as an unacceptable bid " to destroy Pakistan's nuclear scientists and its nuclear weapons."
Opposition political groups have dismissed the American charges as false claims aimed at weakening the world's only nuclear-armed Muslim country.
S. A. Shamsi, a spokesman for a coalition of hard-line religious parties that holds the third largest number of seats in Parliament, criticized the government for what he called capitulation to American pressure. "Our government is doing things that others are demanding," he said Sunday.
Questions regarding nuclear technology and Pakistan continue to percolate.
On Jan. 2, the police in Colorado arrested Asher Karni, an Israeli businessman who lives in South Africa, on charges of trying illegally to export to Pakistan triggering devices that could be used in nuclear weapons. American officials have said the Pakistani government may have been involved.
Mr. Karni planned to use front companies to ship the switches to South Africa, then to the United Arab Emirates and ultimately on to a company in Islamabad, federal law enforcement officials charged. Court papers said the recipient in Pakistan was to have been a company called Pakland PME. The company's Web site says its sells dozens of kinds of electrical equipment, including oscilloscopes and transformers. It lists an office address in downtown Islamabad, roughly a mile from the Parliament building.
This weekend, calls to the telephone number listed by the company went unanswered.
Workers in the office building said they had never heard of such a company.
----
Pakistan Detains Scientists
Nuclear Experts Held in Alleged Technology Transfers
By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28458-2004Jan19.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 19 -- Pakistani authorities have detained eight scientists and officials from the country's main nuclear weapons laboratory in the last four days as part of a widening investigation into the possible transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, Pakistan's information minister said Monday.
Among those detained for questioning are two retired brigadier generals who currently serve as directors of the lab as well as a top aide to Abdul Qadeer Khan, a metallurgist who is generally regarded as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Khan, a national hero in some circles who several years ago was forced from his post as director of the nuclear laboratory that bears his name, has also been questioned but is not currently in custody, officials said.
Information Minister Rashid Ahmed said the detentions were part of a continuing "local investigation" into allegations that Pakistani scientists may have helped Iran develop its nuclear program. Several other scientists have previously been questioned and released. Pakistan launched its investigation last month on the basis of information provided by the International Atomic Energy Agency, which found evidence of Pakistani technology during inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities.
Ahmed and other Pakistani officials said no charges have been filed and that the most recent group of detainees could be released within the next few days. The officials maintain that if Pakistani scientists did lend their expertise to Iran's nuclear program, they did so for money and without authorization from the Pakistani government.
Other Pakistani officials however, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that Khan, the former lab director, and several other Pakistani nuclear scientists had visited Iran more than once in the late 1980s with the full knowledge of the Pakistani government.
"The government had responded positively to the Iranian request for cooperation in its nonmilitary nuclear program," one Pakistani official said. "It has now emerged that some scientists may have crossed the limits."
Twice in recent weeks, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, has held one-on-one meetings with Khan, who currently serves as his adviser on nuclear issues, to gather what one presidential aide called "first-hand" information about the whole saga.
Pakistani officials also said that Khan, during his debriefing, maintained that Pakistani-Iranian nuclear cooperation was authorized by then-army chief of staff Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg. Those taken in for questioning in the last four days include two directors of the lab, identified as retired brigadiers Tajwar and Sajawal; a former director general of the lab, Nazir Ahmad, and Islam ul-Haq, a retired army major and senior aide to Khan.
Khan reported from Karachi, Pakistan.
----
Top nuclear official held in Pakistan
By Ahmed Rashid in Lahore
19/01/2004
UK Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml;$sessionid$EMXXJIV2KXDPTQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/news/2004/01/19/wpak19.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/19/ixworld.html
A senior official in Pakistan's nuclear programme was arrested yesterday, hours after President Pervaiz Musharraf vowed to clamp down on the export of atomic technology to rogue states.
Military intelligence officers held Islam-ul-Haq, secretary to the nuclear scientist Abdul Qadir Khan, the "Father" of Pakistan's nuclear bomb.
Officials said Haq, who worked at the main uranium enrichment centre, was being questioned "in connection with the probe of the Iranian nuclear programme". Gen Musharraf: 'We will not allow nuclear proliferation'
Khan and five other scientists were questioned recently after criticism that Pakistan supplied nuclear technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
On Saturday, Gen Musharraf told parliament: "We have to assure the world we are a responsible nation and will not allow nuclear proliferation. I appeal to you and the Pakistan nation to wage jihad [holy war] against extremism."
He promised to hunt down al-Qa'eda and Taliban militants thought to be orchestrating attacks from Pakistan's tribal regions.
He said Pakistan's image was under attack and it was now "at a crossroads". It was seen as supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, along with Islamic militants in Kashmir and extremists at home as well as aiding nuclear proliferation.
Seven al-Qa'eda members were arrested in Karachi yesterday.
--------
Pakistan Says Nuclear Probe Drawing to Close
January 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Questioning of top Pakistani nuclear scientists over reports that they exported bomb-making technology to Iran is nearly complete, Pakistan said Monday.
Pakistan has questioned Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of its atom bomb, and several of his colleagues in recent weeks after a U.N. nuclear agency began investigating possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs.
Officials said Sunday eight people were still being ``debriefed,'' including Islam-ul-Haq, a senior aide to Khan.
``We are moving toward the conclusion of these debriefing sessions,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told a news conference Monday.
Khan said the investigations had yet to conclude whether any nuclear technology was transferred to Iran.
He said last month that some Pakistani nuclear scientists -- all of whom are government employees -- might have been driven by ``personal ambition or greed'' to export technology to Iran.
He denied that the government itself was ever involved in any such technology transfers, however.
``There is no presumption of guilt; it is probable that some of these people would be cleared,'' Khan said Monday.
``We are conducting these investigations under Pakistani laws...those who have not violated the Pakistani laws should not have any apprehensions and fears whatsoever.''
Haq, a director at Khan Research Laboratories, Pakistan's main facility for producing enriched uranium for atomic bombs, was detained Saturday hours after President Pervez Musharraf said the country need to convince the world it was a responsible nuclear power.
Nazeer Ahmed, another senior official at KRL, was detained for questioning the same day.
Saturday the New York Times 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 weapons.
It quoted a Pakistani diplomat in Washington as saying Islamabad would cooperate in the investigation but denied its involvement in the export deal.
Relatives of the detained scientists complained the men had been held incommunicado during their questioning.
``We have not received a single call from him since he was taken away,'' Ahmed's daughter Saima Adil told Reuters. ``The way they have taken him away is shocking...I am worried about him.''
Pakistani intelligence officials questioned Khan and at least three scientists working with Khan Research Laboratories last month.
Iran has acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear to be identical to those used in Islamabad's quest for an atom bomb. Pakistan tested its nuclear device in 1998.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraqis' new missile tactics worry U.S.
Eric Schmitt NYT
Monday, January 19, 2004
International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=125476
WASHINGTON A classified U.S. 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 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, according to army officials familiar with the study.
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 a senior army aviator in the Gulf. "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 Lieutenant General Ricardo 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 learn more about the tactics and weaponry of the insurgents, and possible weaknesses in American countermeasures.
One troubling finding, army officials said, is that on at least one occasion the insurgents used a SA-16 shoulder-fired missile. Those missiles have guidance systems that are 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 crash-landed after being hit by what the authorities say was hostile fire, killing a total of 49 soldiers.
On Jan. 2, the American military authorities say 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 last 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 a senior officer in Baghdad. "But clearly, that area has us concerned."
The team conducting the review was headed by Colonel Stephen Dwyer, a brigade commander at the Army Aviation Center at Fort Rucker, Alabama, 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 Lieutenant Colonel James Bullinger, a spokesman for the Army Aviation Center.
Bullinger said that even before the team started its work, the army was adopting lessons from Iraq, teaching Apache and Kiowa pilots to fire their weapons while "running and diving," instead of hovering, which makes a helicopter more vulnerable to an attack from the ground.
American intelligence analysts have said that during Saddam Hussein's rule, Iraq stockpiled at least 5,000 shoulder-fired missiles of all types, and that fewer than a third have been found.
The missiles are also easy to smuggle across Iraq's porous borders, as they weigh no more than 14 kilograms, or 30 pounds, and are about 185 centimeters, or six feet, long.
"No specific aircraft appears more susceptible than others," the senior army aviator in the Gulf said. The team found that rocket-propelled grenades and an SA-16 were used, the aviator said. "The RPG appears to be a fairly effective weapon in a skilled shooter's hands and given the right parameters," with the helicopter relatively close to the ground.
Army officials declined to specify which incidents might have involved an SA-16. A 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 said, "but it is a worrisome development, which both helicopter and fixed-wing forces will have to fully understand and counter."
Military officials in Iraq say they review pilots' tactics and procedures after every incident, but they never stop flying missions.
------- israel
Assad says Israel must give up nuclear weapons first
BEIRUT (AFP)
Jan 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040119085407.0tubw5t2.html
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad declared in an interview published Monday that Israel must abandon its nuclear arsenal before Arab states can be asked to give up any alleged weapons programmes.
"What (the United States) is requesting is not logically acceptable," Assad told the pan-Arab al-Sharq al-Awsat newspaper.
"It is not possible to ask Arab and Muslim states, where there is no proof that they possess such weapons, to allow inspections of their installations but ignore the Israeli arsenal of weapons of mass destruction," he said in response to a question about US accusations that Syria possesses such arms.
"If they (the Americans) were really serious, let the entire region be free" of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he said.
The United States has urged Syria to follow the example of Libya which last month pledged to renounce its quest for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, threatening Damascus with political and economic sanctions.
But Assad said: "We have been calling from the start for the removal of all weapons of mass destruction from the region. We presented this in an initiative eight months ago.
"Libya has made one step and what is now needed is to achieve the objective, which is to remove all weapons of mass destruction from all countries in the region."
Israel has never confirmed or denied charges it possesses nuclear weapons, but the United States has considered Israel to be a nuclear power since 1969 and experts estimate it has 200 nuclear warheads.
Asked about any possible international inspections of Syrian installations, Assad said such mechanisms would be defined only after the adoption of his initiative to rid the entire region of WMD.
-------- mideast
Western Team Said to Be in Libya on Antiweapons Mission
January 19, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/africa/19CND-LIBY.html
LONDON, Jan. 19 - British and American weapons experts have returned to Libya and within weeks could be dismantling, destroying and removing technology and materials related to Libya's once secret programs to develop nuclear and other illicit weapons, a senior Bush administration official said today.
Plans are also being laid by Libyan chemical weapons scientists to incinerate tons of mustard gas agent that was manufactured to fill chemical bombs, the official said. Missile programs and biological research efforts are still under scrutiny, but experts hope to develop plans to shut them down permanently in the weeks ahead.
The United States and Britain have not decided how to evacuate any highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge machines designed to separate it from natural uranium in the manufacture of the first Libyan nuclear bomb, a project that was in its early stages when Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi announced on Dec. 19 that he would abandon it. The senior official said the illicit materials would most likely be shipped to a secure facility in Britain or the United States.
In Vienna, American and British officials met with Mohamed ElBaradei, the chief inspector for the International Atomic Energy Agency, and reached an agreement under which the United Nations agency will verify the destruction and removal work in the weeks and months ahead, a spokesman for the agency said.
However, the work of destroying or dispatching illicit weapons will not be performed by inspectors from the international body, as it was in Iraq, Western officials said. Instead, it will be performed by American and British experts from intelligence agencies and from the United States Department of Energy and the national nuclear laboratories.
American and British weapons experts have made two previous trips to Libya, including one in December during which they given a tour of the country's arsenal, which reportedly includes mustard gas, a World War I-vintage chemical weapon, and materials for making nerve gas and missiles, the latter from North Korea.
In Vienna, Dr. ElBaradei met with the American undersecretary of state for arms control, John R. Bolton, and a senior British disarmament official, William Ehrman. After the meeting, the three officials met with reporters but did not make reference to the American and British team that has already arrived in the Libyan capital, Tripoli. The head of the team, which consists of about a dozen experts, was identified by Western officials as Donald A. Mahley, the State Departments special negotiator for chemical and biological arms control issues working under Mr. Bolton.
Dr. ElBaradei said his agency's role was "very clear - that we need to do the verification," adding, "A good part of the program needs to be eliminated, it needs to be moved out, and we clearly need the British and American support with logistics."
For his part, Mr. Bolton, speaking in Vienna, said it had been a very productive meeting. However, Western officials said that significant tensions still existed between some American officials and Dr. ElBaradei because his nuclear watchdog organization is regarded by some in Washington as ineffective compared with American and British efforts that persuaded Colonel Qaddafi to rid his country of illicit weapons programs.
And Dr. ElBaradei is said to have bristled at remarks from senior administration officials in Washington that the exposure of the secret Libyan nuclear weapons program demonstrated another failure of detection for the United Nations agency.
Dr. ElBaradei and Mr. Bolton agreed during their meeting what they would say publicly in order to minimize friction and reinforce their decision to work cooperatively as the demanding task of disarming Libya quickly unfolds, Western diplomats said.
A spokesman for Dr. ElBaradei said that he would be sending nuclear inspectors to Libya later this week to work with the American and British team. The international agency will tag and seal the machines, technology and dangerous materials so they can be placed in an inventory for destruction or removal.
The senior administration official said that Libya is in a hurry to dismantle the weapons programs, and is eager to make a full and detailed declaration about its once secret nuclear program to the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency in March.
These critical declarations, along with the dismantling and destruction of weapons and technology, will hasten the day when Libya looks to President Bush to lift sanctions and restore diplomatic relations with Tripoli, an essential step in the return of American oil companies, something Colonel Qaddafi and American oil executives have been seeking for a number of years.
Lacking a United States embassy in Libya, American officials are contemplating opening an office in Tripoli to facilitate the work of the weapons experts, one Western official said, but also to create a channel for direct diplomatic contact between Libyan and American officials.
Also today, the senior official said that the deadline of the Lockerbie settlement that hangs over the Libyan disarmament process could by extended by mutual consent if Congress has not acted to lift sanctions by May.
Libya agreed to pay $10 million to the families of victims of Pan Am Flight 103, downed by a Libyan terrorist operation in 1988. But the final $6 million in payments depends on a decision by President Bush to convince Congress to lift sanctions on Libya and to remove Libya from the list of terrorist-supporting states.
The senior official said that if all the disarmament tasks were not completed by May and if Congress had not acted, but it appeared that both would occur, Libya would probably extend the period of payment and not deprive the Lockerbie families of the final $6 million tranche.
--------
IAEA to Play Role in Libya's Disarmament by US, UK
January 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-libya-nuclear.html
VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - U.N. nuclear watchdog chief Mohamed ElBaradei said on Monday he had agreed with senior U.S. and British officials his agency would oversee the dismantling of Libya's atomic arms program by U.S. and British experts.
Diplomats said ElBaradei had received assurances that the U.N. agency, squeezed out of Iraq by the United States and out of North Korea when Pyongyang expelled its inspectors in 2002, would play a leading role in Libya.
``I think we have an agreement on what needs to be done. The agency's role is very clear. We need to do the verification,'' ElBaradei told reporters outside the U.S. mission to the United Nations in Vienna. ``I think we reached a very good agreement.''
ElBaradei, the International Atomic Energy Agency chief, made the comments after a three-hour meeting with John Bolton, the U.S. undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, and his British counterpart, William Ehrman.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi on Dec. 19 pledged to abandon efforts to acquire nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in a surprise deal with old adversaries Washington and London.
Western diplomats said the meeting appeared to have ended in a deal that would satisfy the United Nations, Washington and London.
The IAEA, Britain and the United States reached the accord despite a recent public disagreement over the scope of Libya's nuclear program, with the IAEA concluding the North African country was years away from producing a weapon while London and Washington suggested it was close to doing so.
ElBaradei said the key aspects of the deal were that the IAEA would verify that Libya's atomic program has been properly dismantled while U.S. and British experts handled the work of physically destroying Libya's nuclear capabilities.
``We clearly need British and American support with logistics and I think the meeting was trying to coordinate our cooperation,'' he said. ``We are trying to move fast. It's important that we move fast.''
Bolton echoed ElBaradei's upbeat description, telling reporters before he left Vienna: ``It was a very constructive meeting. I think we're all on the same page with the IAEA.''
A U.S. official said that, under the agreement discussed on Monday, the IAEA would observe and account for the removal of nuclear materials from Libya, could observe the unsealing of materials in Libya and reseal them itself, and would have full access to the materials once they are removed from Libya.
The official, who asked not to be identified, would not say when the materials would be removed or where they would go but he said that once Libya allowed them to be taken away, Washington could quickly improve ties with Tripoli.
``If we see significant progress in the near term we will swiftly reciprocate with the Libyans,'' said the U.S. official. ``This could be a win-win solution for the United States and Libya. So far, we have seen nothing but encouraging signs but this will be a crucial (period) where we will find out: are the Libyans going to let us take this material out?''
Libya's August admission of responsibility for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and its promise to abandon weapons of mass destruction has set the stage for a possible end to U.S. economic sanctions and even the reopening of a U.S. Embassy.
Lifting sanctions would allow U.S. oil companies, including the Oasis Group that includes Marathon Oil Co., Amerada Hess and ConocoPhillips, to resume work in Libya they abandoned when sanctions forced them out in 1986.
--------
U.S., U.K. Reach Deal With IAEA on Libya
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer
Jan 19, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_LIBYA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- The U.N. atomic watchdog agency will verify the scope and content of Libya's nuclear program, and U.S. and British experts will remove suspect materials from the North African country under an agreement reached Monday.
The agreement - hammered out by International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei, U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton and William Ehrman, a top British disarmament expert - appeared to settle a dispute over who should be in charge of scrapping Tripoli's weapons programs.
The United States had pressed to supervise the process and destroy any materials capable of being used in a weapon, while the IAEA had contended it should have sole responsibility for the mission.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi announced last month his country was giving up its programs to develop weapons of mass destruction after months of secret talks with the United States and Britain.
The IAEA has said Libya was nowhere near producing a weapon, while Washington and London contended it was further along than the agency realizes. "It was a very productive meeting. I think we're on the same page with the IAEA on this very important project," Bolton told reporters after the session at the U.S. mission in Vienna.
ElBaradei called the meeting "very constructive," adding: "I think it went very well.
"We have agreement on what needs to be done," he said. "Clearly the agency's role is very clear - that we need to do the verification. A good part of the program needs to be eliminated, it needs to be moved out, and we clearly need the British and American support with logistics."
Libya recently ratified the nuclear test ban treaty and next month will become a party to the convention prohibiting chemical weapons. Once it gets sufficient support worldwide to enter into force, the test ban treaty bans any nuclear weapon test explosion in any environment.
ElBaradei and a team of IAEA experts recently visited four once-secret nuclear facilities in the Libyan capital of Tripoli. Since then, both IAEA inspectors and joint U.S.-British teams have been to Libya to take stock of its nuclear programs.
"This is our job," ElBaradei said Monday, alluding to verification. "We need some logistical support, some equipment ... we need to coordinate our work and the logistics support that can be provided by the U.S., the British or anyone else."
Libya has promised to cooperate with the Vienna-based U.N. agency and said it would sign a protocol allowing intrusive inspections at short notice, similar to the one signed last month by Iran.
On the Net
IAEA, www.iaea.org
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
An Agreement on a Contract Averts a Strike at Indian Point
January 19, 2004
By DEBRA WEST
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/nyregion/19NUKE.html
NEW ROCHELLE, N.Y., Jan. 18 - A walkout at the Indian Point 3 nuclear power station was averted Sunday when union leaders and the plant's owner agreed on a four-year contract that would require all workers to pay some health care costs in exchange for other financial benefits.
The strike had been planned for midnight Saturday but was postponed when the two sides began making progress as the deadline approached. An announcement that the strike had been officially called off was made at 9:30 a.m. Sunday by Manny Hellen, the president of the union, Local 1-2 of the Utility Workers Union of America, at the Ramada Plaza Hotel, where negotiations had taken place all week.
"We feel this contract is an excellent package," Mr. Hellen said. "Everybody should feel very good about one thing: you have another four years of Local 1-2 running the plant and keeping it safe and secure."
The contract would cover not only the 276 workers from Indian Point 3 whose previous contract had expired, but also the 282 workers at Indian Point 2 whose contract was not due to expire until June.
"Reuniting the work force to form one Indian Point team was our goal from the beginning, but we knew it would only work if we made a very good offer," said Fred Dacimo, the lead negotiator for Entergy Nuclear Northeast, the plant's owner.
Talks broke down on Friday evening, and a federal mediator was called in because the starting contracts for workers at the two power stations were so different, said Jim Steets, a spokesman for Entergy. While Indian Point 3 workers received more benefits, Indian Point 2 workers had a higher pay scale.
Under the new contract, Indian Point 3 workers would have to contribute to the cost of health benefits, as Indian Point 2 workers have been doing.
Indian Point 3 workers would get a raise of 70 cents an hour, to bring them in line with their counterparts. Neither the company nor the union would disclose further details about the contract, which is expected to be ratified by the union membership within a month.
The Indian Point reactors, which have drawn community opposition intermittently since they began operating in the 1970's, became the focus of renewed safety concerns after the attack on the World Trade Center. The security force guarding the plant, which includes the National Guard and the State Police as well as a private security staff, would not have been affected by a strike. During the negotiations, however, union leaders, who in the past dismissed fears that the plant posed any danger to the community, said that the reactor would pose a threat without their workers.
"The public should not believe for a minute that Indian Point 3 will be run safely if there is a strike," said Steve Mangione, a spokesman for Local 1-2. "Management has been shadowing union workers, taking a refresher course. You take a refresher course when you want to brush up on computer skills, not when you want to run a nuclear power plant."
The union called for Indian Point 3 to be shut down for safety's sake during a strike, and the Westchester County executive, Andrew J. Spano, agreed. Entergy said it would not close the plant during a strike and that the plant would operate safely with replacement workers.
"I'm very pleased that the current employees will continue to operate the plant," Mr. Spano said. "I was concerned that if there were a strike, the replacement workers would be spread too thin."
Workers at Indian Point 2 went on strike for nine weeks in 1983, and the plant remained open. At that time, workers at Indian Point 3 were employees of the New York Power Authority and were prevented by state law from striking.
Indian Point is in Buchanan, N.Y., 35 miles north of Midtown Manhattan, on a strip of land along a bend in the Hudson River. Con Edison built three power plants there, the first of which, Indian Point 1, closed in the early 1970's. Indian Point 2 began operating in 1974, and Indian Point 3 followed in 1976. But by the mid-70's, Con Edison was suffering the effects of the oil crisis and had a cash-flow problem. The state stepped in and bought Indian Point 3, Mr. Steets said.
"That began the separation of the two plants, which then moved independently forward under separate companies and developed separate cultures," Mr. Steets said. "They even erected a fence between the two plants."
Entergy, a Louisiana-based company, bought Indian Point 3 in 2000 and Indian Point 2 in 2001 with the goal of restructuring the workplace around the theme "one site, one team," Mr. Steets said. The first thing the company did was tear down the fence. Then, last year, it merged the security forces for the two plants. It is in the process of completing a four-story administration building on the site to house workers who have been scattered at different locations. The building includes a new cafeteria, which Entergy officials hope will create more of a sense of community among the 1,350 employees at the site.
The merger of the two union work forces under one contract was another major goal of the company.
"Now we have a group that is governed by the same work rules," Mr. Steets said. "So accomplishing work and training schedules will be greatly simplified."
Indian Point generates about 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to provide electricity to 2 million homes. Last week, it provided 30 percent of the electricity used by New York City, Westchester County and Long Island, Mr. Steets said.
-------- us politics
Gore Blasts Bush Space Plan, Says Earth Neglected
by Nichola Groom
REUTERS USA:
January 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23487/story.htm
NEW YORK - Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore scoffed at President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars and said Bush was a "moral coward" for ignoring global environmental threats.
Speaking at an event sponsored by political advocacy groups MoveOn.org and Environment2004, Gore said Bush's record on the environment routinely puts the wishes of the coal, oil, utility and mining industries ahead of public interests.
"Instead of spending enormous sums of money on an unimaginative and retread effort to make a tiny portion of the moon habitable for a handful of people, we should focus instead on a massive effort to ensure that the Earth is habitable for future generations," Gore said to a cheering Manhattan crowd.
The speech is one of a series Gore, who served two terms as vice president under President Bill Clinton, has made criticizing Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, the economy, and other issues. Gore lost to Bush in the 2000 election after winning the popular vote and has ruled out a rematch in 2004.
On Wednesday, Bush announced plans to send humans back to the moon as early as 2015 and eventually to Mars - an initiative critics derided as motivated by election-year politics that could cost hundreds of billions of dollars. His dad, former President George Bush, proposed in 1989 to send humans back to the moon and on to Mars, but that idea went nowhere.
Gore accused Bush of reneging on environmental promises made while campaigning for the White House, saying Bush's "seemingly heartfelt declaration" that he was concerned about global warming and the environment was just lip service.
"While President Bush likes to project an image of strength and courage, the truth is that in the presence of his large financial contributors he is a moral coward - so weak that he seldom, if ever, says 'No' to anything that they want to do," Gore said.
In particular, Gore took aim at Bush's "Clear Skies" bill, which limits emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury but fails to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, which is believed to contribute to global warming.
He also criticized Bush's so-called "Healthy Forest" initiative, which the White House said would reduce the risk of forest wildfires but which environmental groups said promoted logging at the expense of environmental protection.
According to Gore, such policies underscore Bush's goal of satisfying the interests of large industrial corporations in return for hefty campaign contributions.
"It seems at times as if the Bush-Cheney Administration is wholly owned by the coal, oil, utility and mining companies," he said.
While environmental issues dominated the speech, Gore still criticized Bush's handling of foreign policy, saying he has "caused America to be seen by the other nations of the world as showing disdain for the international community."
----
The Neoconservative Personality
Greed, gluttony, and glory
by Justin Raimondo
January 19, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=1736
The gang that gave us this rotten war is not only stupidly reckless, as this little story makes all too clear, but also totally corrupted by greed and power-lust.
The greed part is abundantly illustrated by the story of what happened to one of the biggest media companies in the world, Hollinger International, which owns more than 400 daily and weekly newspapers in Canada, the United States, Britain, Israel and Australia, including the British Telegraph, the Spectator, the Jerusalem Post, and the Chicago Times. Lord Black of Crossharbour, formerly plain old Conrad Moffat Black of Canada, has now been kicked out as CEO of his own company, and is being sued by Hollinger's stockholders for the $200 million he and his neoconservative friends, such as Richard Perle, looted from the company's coffers.
Lord Black's newspapers have been among the biggest guns in the War Party's international arsenal, with the Telegraph even beating out the Murdoch-owned New York Post and Fox News as a purveyor of war propaganda. In the long run-up to war, the Telegraph was filled with stories about dubious "intelligence" ostensibly "proving" all sorts of things about Saddam Hussein's fabled "weapons of mass destruction" and his alleged "links" to Al Qaeda. Every last one of these turned out to be bogus, and a distressing number of them involved outright forgeries. Hollinger is also a co-publisher, along with the Nixon Center, of The National Interest, the neocons' influential foreign policy journal, pumping hundreds of thousands into the nonprofit venture. Hollinger has funded the International Institute for Strategic Affairs, a key link in the chain of pro-war thinktanks, to tune of up to $250,000 in a single year. Lord Black also has an interest in the New York Sun, a newspaper explicitly founded to serve as a conduit for pro-war, pro-Israel sentiment, a neocon counterpoint to the New York Times.
According to a special committee of the Hollinger board set up to get to the bottom of the scandal, Black and his associates not only ripped off their own company, they also "altered company books and records to conceal their actions." All this happened under the direction of a board of directors top-heavy with political types, such as neocon firebrand Richard Perle, Henry Kissinger, Robert S. Strauss, dean of the high-powered Washington lawyers and renown "fixer," Richard R. Burt, former U.S. ambassador to East Germany, former Illinois governor James R. Thompson, Dwayne O. Andreas, head of Archer Daniels Midland, whose prolific political contributions have become legend, and Lord Black's wife, Barbara Amiel, a neocon spitfire in her own right.
As the Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein trenchantly observed, "It's amazing the coincidences you find digging into Hollinger International," where corporate bandits and rip-off artists meet and merge with the intellectual Mafia that runs American foreign policy.
Perle's role in all this is characteristic of the method by which Hollinger was used as a cash cow for the personal enrichment of the Board members, as well as to further their political and ideological interests. As Perle tours the country with his co-author, David Frum, pushing a slim volume of polemics calling for invading practically every country in the Middle East, the former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating Hollinger's investment in Trireme Partners. Also coming under scrutiny: Perle's relations with Hollinger Digital, which ploughed $14 million into companies in which Perle has an interest.
In reading about this latest wrinkle in what might be called the Neocon Scandals, I am reminded of what Professor Claes Ryn - whose new book, America the Virtuous diagnoses the neocon disease - has to say in The American Conservative about the personality types behind the drive to war:
"Only great conceit could inspire a dream of armed world hegemony. The ideology of benevolent American empire and global democracy dresses up a voracious appetite for power. It signifies the ascent to power of a new kind of American, one profoundly at odds with that older type who aspired to modesty and self-restraint. That former personality was inseparable from, indeed, the creator of, the notion of limited, decentralized government. Traditional, constitutionalist America derived its moral and political assumptions from the classical, Christian, and British traditions."
A voracious appetite not only for power, but also for haute cuisine is apparently a neocon tradition. As a Boston Globe profile of Albert Wohlstetter - mentor to Perle and Deputy Defense Secretary to Paul Wolfowitz - put it:
"The Manhattan-born Wohlstetter sure knew how to live. A famous epicure, he became legendary for ambling his way to overseas strategic conferences so that he got the chance to dine at as many three-star restaurants as possible."
Along with Wohlstetter, a nuclear strategist who worked tirelessly to legitimize the idea of using "tactical" "pinpoint" nuclear weapons, this hedonic style is reminiscent of the main character in Saul Bellow's Ravelstein, a thinly-disguised docu-dramatic treatment of the life of neocon theoretician Alan Bloom. Not surprisingly, Perle is also a glutton for extravagance and "the finer things in life," as this review of his novel, Hard Line, makes a point of emphasizing:
"He is also a gourmet chef. These days, when he isn't devouring coq au vin at his vacation home in Provence, he's serving on the Defense Policy Board, an influential civilian advisory panel to the Pentagon. Harvard professor Michael Waterman, the menschy hero of Hard Line, is also a right-wing, Frenchified foodie with a No. 2 position at Defense, a house in Chevy Chase and a wife whose name begins with L. In early 2001, the New Yorker's Nicholas Lemann visited Perle at home and realized that the gurgling French stewpots in the lavishly appointed kitchen were straight out of the book."
Greed, gluttony, and outright avarice, along with an exaggerated sense of self-importance, go hand in hand with the kind of vaunting triumphalism that is energizing the neoconservative imagination. It's "the end of ideology"! Oh, no, wait, it's "the end of history"! The U.S. must achieve "benevolent world hegemony"! We must "democratize" the entire Middle East at gunpoint! Grandiose schemes, grandiloquent words, gargantuan appetites - it's all part of the same mindset, the warmongering mentality of would-be world-conquerors, who heedlessly pursue their ruthless pleasures without regard for cost or consequences.
The spirit of the neoconservative enterprise was captured, oh irony of ironies, in a wonderful piece in the Jerusalem Post, "Neoconservatives on Mars." Author Jeff Bander chronicled the neocons' enthusiasm for the President's new space initiative, and went on to admit that, sure, there are plenty of non-neocons who support the space program, but:
"The difference is that for neocons this is a crusade, and not just any kind of crusade, but a delightful one, an amusing one. For them, going to Mars kills all sorts of birds with one rocket ship.
"It's a hell of a display of American supremacism, planting the flag on the moon and all that. It's warlike, the ultimate in capturing the high ground. It's hard and unsentimental, all science and math, none of that squishy humanities idiocy.
"And it's so Darwinian. When you can send a space ship up to the stars, that is really an assertion of dominance, that is some demonstration of prowess....
"But the best thing, the most thrilling aspect of the space program, the truly delicious part, is how it eats up so many hundreds of billions of dollars for no other purpose but one's amusement! One's joy. When all those rabble that the liberals are always blubbering over are starving, dying of thirst, dying of AIDS, dying of whatever - we're going to Mars! It's so - Roman."
And Perle gets richer.
Civilization, as Professor Ryn points out in his excellent book, is the taming and minimization of the human will to dominate others: that's what our constitutional form of government is all about. It was also the basis of the foreign policy of the Founders, which kept America apart from the machinations of Europe's imperial powers. The personalities that make up the War Party are the antithesis of the stern republican virtues exemplified by the Founders. Puffed up in every sense, physically as well as intellectually, the glib megalomania that animates neoconservative ideology - "National Greatness"! "World Hegemony!" "Axis of Evil"! - is truly repulsive to behold.
Just as the neocons commandeered Hollinger International and drained it of resources and journalistic credibility in the service of their personal and ideological interests, so their Washington D.C. chapter hijacked American foreign policy, using our matchless military to implement their Napoleonic ambitions, fleecing American taxpayers in the process. The Hollinger rip-off operation is now in the process of being exposed to the light of day, and several of Hollinger's board members now under investigation could possibly face large fines and/or prison sentences. But the same process of discovery ought to be taking place in the political sphere, where the biggest rip-off of them all is occurring. They lied us into war - and now brazenly call for extending and escalating that war throughout the Middle East and beyond.
I have yet to read the Perle-Frum manifesto, An End to Evil, but the title is yet another example of the in-your-face malevolence of this crowd. If the history of the neoconservative movement in America is ever written and published, it might well be called Endless Evil, for endless is certainly one way to describe the sheer longevity of this troublesome little sect.
How long have these ex-lefties turned rightward been hawking their proposals for perpetual war under one rubric or another? From class war, to world war, to cold war, to the perpetual "war on terrorism" - they've been haunting us since the 1930s, in one ideological guise or another, whether it be anti-Stalinist leftist, Scoop Jackson Democrat, or today's neoconized Republicans. Through all these costume changes, they've always stayed on message: war, always war.
Long before 9/11, the neocons wished and waited for their moment, and now it has come. This is truly a nightmarish world we are living in, and it shall not be made one whit better until we are rid of them, one way or another, for good. The idea that this is just a theoretical issue, an arcane argument among a few intellectuals, is belied by the "letters to the editor" columns in many newspapers, which contain an increasing number of references to "neocons," who are invariably described in unflattering and generally hostile terms. The other day, in conversation with my mailman, he told me that "the neocons" are "the real problem." At this level of popular discourse, the great problem of the neocons becomes a political issue just waiting for some smart presidential candidate to make use of.
----
Arms Issue Seen as Hurting U.S. Credibility Abroad
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A27978-2004Jan18?language=printer
The Bush administration's inability to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- after public statements declaring an imminent threat posed by Iraqi President Saddam Hussein -- has begun to harm the credibility abroad of the United States and of American intelligence, according to foreign policy experts in both parties.
In last year's State of the Union address, President Bush used stark imagery to make the case that military action was necessary. Among other claims, Bush said that Hussein had enough anthrax to "kill several million people," enough botulinum toxin to "subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure" and enough chemical agents to "kill untold thousands."
Now, as the president prepares for this State of the Union address Tuesday, those frightening images of death and destruction have been replaced by a different reality: Few of the many claims made by the administration have been confirmed after months of searching by weapons inspectors.
Within the United States, Bush does not appear to have suffered much political damage from the failure to find weapons, with polls showing high ratings for his handling of the war and little concern that he misrepresented the threat.
But a range of foreign policy experts, including supporters of the war, said the long-term consequences of the administration's rhetoric could be severe overseas -- especially because the war was waged without the backing of the United Nations and was opposed by large majorities, even in countries run by leaders that supported the invasion.
"The foreign policy blow-back is pretty serious," said Kenneth Adelman, a member of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board and a supporter of the war. He said the gaps between the administration's rhetoric and the postwar findings threaten Bush's doctrine of "preemption," which envisions attacking a nation because it is an imminent threat.
The doctrine "rests not just on solid intelligence," Adelman said, but "also on the credibility that the intelligence is solid."
Already, in the crisis over North Korea's nuclear ambitions, China has rejected U.S. intelligence that North Korea has a secret program to enrich uranium for use in weapons. China is a key player in resolving the North Korean standoff, but its refusal to embrace the U.S. intelligence has disappointed U.S. officials and could complicate negotiations to eliminate North Korea's weapons programs.
Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said the same problem could occur if the United States presses for action against alleged weapons programs in Iran and Syria. The solution, he said, is to let international organizations such as the International Atomic Energy Agency take the lead in making the case, as has happened thus far in Iran, and also to be willing to share more of the intelligence with other countries.
The inability to find suspected weapons "has to make it more difficult on some future occasion if the United States argues the intelligence warrants something controversial, like a preventive attack," said Haass, a Republican who was head of policy planning for Secretary of State Colin L. Powell when the war started. "The result is we've made the bar higher for ourselves and we have to expect greater skepticism in the future."
James Steinberg, a deputy national security adviser in the Clinton administration who believed there were legitimate concerns about Iraq's weapons programs, said the failure of the prewar claims to match the postwar reality "add to the general sense of criticism about the U.S., that we will do anything, say anything" to prevail.
Indeed, whenever Powell grants interviews to foreign news organizations, he is often hit with a question about the search for weapons of mass destruction. Last Friday, a British TV reporter asked whether in retirement he would "admit that you had concerns about invading Iraq," and a Dutch reporter asked whether he ever had doubts about the Iraq policy.
"There's no doubt in my mind that he had the intention, he had the capability," Powell responded. "How many weapons he had or didn't have, that will be determined."
Some on Capitol Hill believe the issue is so important that they are pressing the president to address the apparent intelligence failure in the State of the Union address and propose ways to fix it.
"I believe that unanswered questions regarding the accuracy and reliability of U.S. intelligence have created a credibility gap and left the nation in a precarious position," Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), the senior Democrat on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a speech last week. "The intelligence community seems to be in a state of denial, and the administration seems to have moved on."
Since last year's State of the Union, the White House has established procedures for handling intelligence in presidential speeches by including a CIA officer in the speechwriting process. The CIA is also conducting an internal review, comparing prewar estimates with postwar findings, and the final report will be finished after inspectors in Iraq complete their work.
But Bush and his aides have largely sought to divert attention from the issue. White House aides have said they expect this year's State of the Union speech to look ahead -- to the democracy the administration hopes to establish in Iraq -- rather than look back.
Officials also have turned the focus to celebrating Hussein's capture last month and repeatedly drawing attention to Hussein's mistreatment of his people. Officials have argued that if Iraq's stocks of weapons are still unclear, Hussein's intentions to again possess such weapons are not. Thirteen years ago, when the United States was a backer of Hussein, Iraq used chemical weapons in the Iran-Iraq war.
The administration "rid the Iraqi people of a murderous dictator, and rid the world of a menace to our future peace and security," Vice President Cheney said in a speech last week. Cheney -- and other U.S. officials -- increasingly point to Libya's decision last month to give up its weapons of mass destruction as a direct consequence of challenging Iraq.
Bush, when asked by ABC's Diane Sawyer why he said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when intelligence pointed more to the possibility Hussein would obtain such weapons, dismissed the question: "So, what's the difference?"
The U.S. team searching for Iraq's weapons has not issued a report since October, but in recent weeks the gap between administration claims and Iraq's actual weapons holdings has become increasingly clear. The Washington Post reported earlier this month that U.S. investigators have found no evidence that Iraq had a hidden cache of old chemical or biological weapons, and that its nuclear program had been shattered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. A lengthy study issued by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace also concluded the administration shifted the intelligence consensus on Iraq's weapons in 2002 as officials prepared for war, making it appear more imminent and threatening than was warranted by the evidence.
The report further said that the administration "systematically misrepresented the threat" posed by Iraq, often on purpose, in four ways: one, treating nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as a single threat, although each posed different dangers and evidence was particularly thin on Iraq's nuclear and chemical programs; two, insisting without evidence that Hussein would give his weapons to terrorists; three, often dropping caveats and uncertainties contained in the intelligence assessments when making public statements; and four, misrepresenting inspectors' findings so that minor threats were depicted as emergencies.
Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment and co-author of the report, pointed to one example in a speech delivered by Bush in Cincinnati on Oct. 7, 2002. U.N. inspectors had noted that Iraq had failed to account for bacterial growth media that, if used, "could have produced about three times as much" anthrax as Iraq had admitted. But Bush, in his speech, turned a theoretical possibility into a fact.
"The inspectors, however, concluded that Iraq had likely produced two to four times that amount," Bush said. "This is a massive stockpile of biological weapons that has never been accounted for and is capable of killing millions."
Mathews said her research showed the administration repeatedly and frequently took such liberties with the intelligence and inspectors' findings to bolster its cases for immediate action. In the Cincinnati example, "in 35 words, you go from probably to a likelihood to a fact," she said. "With a few little changes in wording, you turn an 'if' into a dire biological weapons stockpile. Anyone hearing that must be thinking, 'My God, this is an imminent threat.' "
Steinberg, who was privy to the intelligence before President Bill Clinton left office, said that while at the National Security Council he saw no evidence Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear weapons program, but that there were unresolved questions about Hussein's chemical and biological weapons programs. "Given his reluctance to address these questions, you had to conclude he was hiding something," he said, adding that given the intelligence he saw, "I certainly expected something would have turned up."
"I think there are [diplomatic] consequences as a result of the president asking these questions [about Iraq's weapons holdings] and the answer being no" weapons, said Danielle Pletka, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who believes the ouster of Hussein justified the war. "The intelligence could have been better."
Richard Perle, another member of the Defense Advisory Board, said the criticism of the Bush administration is unfair. "Intelligence is not an audit," he said. "It's the best information you can get in circumstances of uncertainty, and you use it to make the best prudent judgment you can."
He added that presidents in particular tend not to place qualifiers on their statements, especially when they are advocating a particular policy. "Public officials tend to avoid hedging," he said.
Given the stakes involved -- going to war -- Mathews said the standards must be higher for such statements. "The most important call a president can make by a mile is whether to take a country to war," she argued, making the consequences of unwise decisions or misleading statements even greater.
Indeed, she said, the reverberations are still being felt, even as the administration tries to put the problem behind it. A recent CBS poll found that only 16 percent of those surveyed believed the administration lied about Iraq's weapons. But she said there is intense interest in the report's findings, with 35,000 copies downloaded from the think tank's Web site in just five days. "It is too soon to say there was no cost" to the failure to find weapons, she said. "I think there is a huge appetite for learning about this."
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Afghan Officials Say U.S. Bombing Kills 11
January 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-US-Civilians-Killed.html?hp
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan (AP) -- A U.S. helicopter attacked a house in a village in southern Afghanistan, killing 11 people, four of them children, Afghan officials said Monday.
There was no immediate comment from the U.S. military.
The attack occurred at around 4 a.m. Sunday, a day after U.S. forces hunting for Taliban insurgents had searched Saghatho village, where the home is located, said Abdul Rahman, chief of Char Chino district in Uruzgan province.
``They were simple villagers, they were not Taliban. I don't know why the U.S. bombed this home. We have informed our authorities,'' he told The Associated Press by telephone in the southern city of Kandahar.
Maj. Steven R. Moon, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Kabul, had no immediate comment.
The governor of Uruzgan, Jan Mohammed Khan, confirmed Rahman's account that four men, four children and three women were killed in a U.S. bombing.
He said U.S. authorities had told him they seen ammunition in their search of the village, which apparently raised suspicions. During the search, ``the people were afraid, they started running,'' Khan said.
``The Americans bombed this home,'' he said.
Rahman said the 11 victims were buried Sunday in the village, where residents were ``very afraid and very angry.''
About 100 Afghan forces and between 20 and 30 U.S. soldiers have arrested 10 suspects in an operation in the Mahmara and Saghatho areas of Char Chino district in the past two days, he said.
--------
Afghan Leader Orders Release of Former Taliban Fighters
January 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/asia/19AFGH.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 18 (AP) - President Hamid Karzai ordered the release of more former Taliban fighters on Sunday, a symbolic move that could bolster his standing and undermine Taliban holdouts.
Mr. Karzai issued a decree saying all Afghans detained at the Sheberghan prison and not considered dangerous should be set free.
It was unclear how many inmates were affected. Local officials said the jail held more than 400 Afghans said to be members of the Taliban.
The government hopes the move, like the return of millions of Afghans from exile and the release last week of dozens of Pakistanis who fought with the Taliban, will help heal the wounds left by the latest episode in the country's long history of conflict.
"They are Afghans," said a presidential spokesman, Jawid Luddin. "They have every right to a peaceful and respectable life in the new Afghanistan. The time for making people suffer and jailing them without reason is over."
Thousands of fighters captured when United States and allied Afghan forces pushed the Taliban out of power were disarmed. Many more were killed. But hundreds remained in the jails of commanders from the Northern Alliance faction like Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek warlord.
General Dostum's spokesman, Faizullah Zaki, said Sunday that Mr. Karzai's decree would be respected but declined to comment further.
Mr. Karzai has repeatedly said that only a small number of Taliban leaders were to be regarded as terrorists.
The released prisoners could also bolster his standing in the former Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, where antigovernment insurgents have set off a string of deadly attacks since the Constitution was passed, killing at least 45 people.
It was unclear when Pakistanis held at Sheberghan might also be freed. Mr. Luddin said they were a "separate case" whose fate would be decided later.
Forty-nine were released Thursday in a gesture of good will after the visit of the Pakistani prime minister, Mir Zafarullah Khan Jamali. He pledged to free Afghans in Pakistani jails.
-------- arms
Hotbed of weapons deals
January 19, 2004
By George Jahn
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040118-103519-5374r.htm
TIRASPOL, Moldova - The deal involved Europe's biggest Soviet army weapons cache, Russia's prime minister and the leader of a separatist enclave in Moldova known as a gunrunner's haven.
As described in a confidential 1998 agreement obtained by the Associated Press, Russia and Transnistria would share profits from the sale of 40,000 tons of "unnecessary" arms and ammunition stored in a weapons depot in the breakaway region.
The transaction is only one piece of an arms-dealing puzzle in Transnistria, where the decade-old depot also contained hundreds of portable surface-to-air missiles until last month, when Russia announced it had withdrawn them, amid concerns that they could end up in terrorist hands.
A former Moldovan official said Transnistria, a region the size of Rhode Island, also was a repository of rocket-mounted "dirty bombs" - warheads designed to scatter deadly radioactive material - that now are missing.
That widely publicized contention remains unresolved, with officials not even sure that the dirty bombs ever existed.
But an AP investigation involving interviews with a dozen officials and experts strengthened suspicions that Transnistria is a hotbed of unregulated weapons transactions, legal and illegal.
Moldova's western neighbor, Romania, shares that view. Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoana said Transnistria is a "black hole of transborder organized crime, including drug smuggling, human trafficking and arms smuggling."
Weapons from Transnistria have turned up in Russia's restive Chechnya, in Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia region and in the hands of insurgents in Africa, said a minister of another country in the region. The official spoke on the condition that he not be named.
Experts say just about every sort of weapon is available in Transnistria.
"If I were in search of most commodities related to weaponry ... this would be the place to go," said William C. Potter, director of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute for International Studies in California. "Even if I did not find the weaponry, I would find the individuals who could get me that weaponry."
Reportedly available are arms and ammunition, including tens of thousands of assault rifles and other small arms and weaponry attractive to terrorists, from the huge Soviet army depository near the northern town of Kolbasna that is guarded by some of the 2,000 Russian soldiers in the enclave as peacekeepers.
Additionally, at least six factories are thought to be churning out grenades and rocket launchers, Makarov pistols and Kalashnikov assault rifles, mortar tubes and other relatively low-tech weapons under contract to the Russian military - and possibly skimming off surplus production to sell to arms dealers, diplomats in the region said. Some, such as the Tochlitmash and Elektromash factories in Tiraspol, are thought to be dual-use plants, with civilian and secret military-production lines.
Ruslan Slobodeniuk, whose business card identifies him as Transnistria's "deputy foreign minister," said Elektromash, a Soviet-era factory in Tiraspol, makes only transformers.
"We are ready to show our factories to journalists," he said, but authorities did not respond to a request for a tour of Elektromash.
The 1998 arms agreement between Russia and Transnistria involved the Soviet army repository - 40,000 tons of ordnance, arms and ammunition that were dumped in this remote speck of southeastern Europe in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union broke up and Moldova became independent.
The negotiators: Viktor Chernomyrdin, then prime minister of Russia, and Igor Smirnov, self-appointed president of separatist Transnistria.
Moscow and Tiraspol, capital of Transnistria, would split profits from the sale of "unnecessary weapons, ammunition, military assets and materials," according to the 1998 agreement that bears their signatures.
There seems to be no public record of the deal, but Russian and Western officials confirmed its existence in a one-page memo on what to do with Europe's biggest Soviet army weapons cache. It was superseded a year later by a pact providing for a full withdrawal to Russia of all military equipment.
One Russian official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said his understanding was that the deal never was finalized. But Western diplomats are skeptical, saying nobody ever will know how much of what was sold, to whom or at what price in that one-year window, or what criteria was used to determine what was "unnecessary."
Mr. Smirnov has answered to no one since Transnistria broke away from Moldova in 1992 after a brief war with Moldovans brought on by fears that Moldova would seek reunification with Romania.
Situated between Romania and Ukraine, Moldova was part of Romania until 1940; most of its people speak Romanian or Ukrainian. Transnistria, however, never was part of Romania and is mainly Russian-speaking.
Tiraspol seems caught in a Soviet-era time warp. Some Transnistria soldiers sport fur hats with the Red Star emblem, and creaky Volga sedans vie for parking spots with Western cars on the cracked pavement lining ugly, prefab concrete apartment blocks in need of repair.
Business dealings by associates of Mr. Smirnov include smuggling of all kinds, including weapons by the truckload, diplomats say.
Though less than two hours by air from most European capitals and 50 miles by car to the southeast of Moldova's capital, Chisinau, Transnistria is as inaccessible as some of the continent's most-remote regions.
To the east lies a 250-mile border with Ukraine - unguarded fields broken by stretches of fir trees, laced with twisting dirt paths that can swallow a truck until it's well on its way to nearby Odessa, the Black Sea gateway to hot spots in Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.
Customs officials at the three major international crossing points are on the take, as are those at railway crossings, say diplomats in the region, all speaking on the condition of anonymity.
Oazu Nantoi, a well-connected former Moldovan government official in Chisinau, gives the example of a senior Ukrainian customs official in conversation with his Moldovan counterparts in 2001.
"After some quantity of vodka, the official said: 'Guys, pay us $2 million a week, and we'll close the borders [to illegal traffic]. All it takes is $2 million a week - cash,' " Mr. Nantoi said, quoting a Moldovan official present at the talks.
Almost as porous are the unofficial borders to Moldova, bordered to the west by Romania. Both are high on the list of Europe's most-corrupt nations.
Illustrating the depth of the smuggling problem, even at controlled crossing points, a Moldovan examination two years ago of temporary customs stamps used by Transnistria turned up 350 counterfeit versions.
Vladimir Smirnov, son of the Transnistria leader, leads the breakaway region's customs service. He is said to be the major silent partner in Sheriff, the enclave's consortium with fingers in everything from the enclave's mobile-phone network to gas stations, supermarkets and a still-growing gargantuan sports complex on Tiraspol's outskirts that Western diplomats estimate already has cost $200 million - twice as much as Moldova's annual budget.
Mr. Nantoi, who runs the nongovernmental Institute for Policy Studies in Chisinau, said dozens of dirty bombs formerly stored near Tiraspol military airport are missing.
He showed what he said was a Russian military document dated Oct. 18, 1994, urging "prohibition" of work with the warheads - 24 ready to use, 14 dismantled - because of radiation danger. Another document from May that year recorded the "burning and burying" of uniforms contaminated by radiation.
Mr. Nantoi said reports reached him in 1998 that Alazan rockets - short-range, inaccurate and normally used by the Soviets for weather experiments - had been fitted with warheads modified to carry radioactive material. The rockets and warheads since seem to have disappeared from storage.
"I could not discover what had happened to them," Mr. Nantoi said.
Moldova's government has declined comment.
Valery Litzkai, who acts as Transnistria's "foreign minister," described the reports of dirty bombs as a "smear campaign."
"There are no weapons here," he insisted.
Mr. Potter of the Monterey Institute said some former Soviet government officials think the documents could be authentic but consider it unlikely that Russian units would keep such crude weapons, "considering their access to much more sophisticated weaponry."
Dismissing the dirty-bomb accusations as just one part of an anti-Transnistria campaign, Mr. Litzkai and other Transnistria officials say there have been no major finds of weapons in terrorist hands that can be proven to have come from their enclave.
Still, they cannot deny evidence of arms trading.
Moldovan police four years ago halted a truck leaving Transnistria. Inside were anti-aircraft missiles made in Russia, detonators and plastic explosives, members of Transnistria's army - and Lt. Col. Vladimir Nemkov, a deputy commander of Russian peacekeepers in the enclave.
Although other officials denied the incident ever happened, Mr. Litzkai confirmed it, but suggested it was a setup.
Asked about Col. Nemkov's whereabouts now, Mr. Litzkai shrugged, then said after a pause: "He disappeared."
-------- asia
S. Korea Vows Its Security Remains Strong
January 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-US-Military.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- The decision to pull all U.S. troops out of metropolitan Seoul will not weaken South Korea's security against North Korea military threats, President Roh Moo-hyun said.
Meanwhile, the city on Monday weighed a proposal to turn the American base into a recreation space rivaling New York's Central Park. The agreement between the United States and South Korea to relocate 7,000 American troops and family members from their base in the heart of Seoul over the next three years will make the South Korean capital free of foreign troops for the first time in a century.
U.S. forces came to Seoul in 1945 to disarm Japanese colonial troops at the end of World War II and later led U.N. forces during the Korean War, then have remained as a deterrent against North Korea.
Conservative South Koreans said the move will make their nation more vulnerable to attacks from the North.
Tensions remain high on the Korean Peninsula over the communist North's nuclear weapons program. The United States, the two Koreas, Japan, China and Russia are trying to hold a new round of six-nation talks aimed at dismantling the North's nuclear programs in return for possible economic aid and security guarantees.
``There is nothing to worry about at all,'' Roh was quoted as saying by his office Sunday evening when he met leaders of the pro-government Uri Party.
``We have done our best'' in negotiations with the U.S. military, he said.
Public opinion on the pending move has been divided. To some, the base symbolizes the alliance that repelled a communist invasion during the 1950-1953 Korean War and provided the security that made South Korea's economic growth possible.
But South Korea's postwar generations often see the foreign military presence in their capital as a slight to national pride. Others complain the 656-acre base occupies prime real estate and worsens the city's chronic traffic congestion.
Crimes involving U.S. soldiers further fuel anti-American sentiment.
The South Korean government asked that a contingent of up to 1,000 U.S. soldiers remain in Seoul, but that option foundered on a disagreement over how much land would be needed to support that contingent.
Instead, up to 100 U.S. liaison personnel will stay while the rest move to an expanded American facility about 45 miles south of the capital.
Last year, the U.S. military announced it would move troops stationed near the Demilitarized Zone separating the two Koreas to bases south of Seoul.
The redeployments will put U.S. soldiers out of the range of North Korean artillery and rockets, which can reach Seoul. That spurred South Korean fears the Americans no longer will serve as a ``trip wire'' in case of a North Korean invasion -- taking immediate casualties and thus ensuring U.S. commitment to a fight.
Both U.S. and South Korean officials have tried to ease such fears, and note that the redeployment does not reduce the total number of 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea.
Pentagon strategists call the ``trip wire'' concept outdated, and say the relocations are aimed at strengthening U.S. defense capabilities on the Korean Peninsula and in the region.
The United States has announced an $11 billion package to improve U.S. military readiness on the peninsula. The package includes swift-action units, high-tech air surveillance and anti-missile systems, and high-speed transport for troops based in Japan.
A Metropolitan Government official said Monday the city is considering plans to turn the American base into a commons area rivaling the 843-acre Central Park.
Relocation costs of up to $4 billion will be paid by the South Korean government, a Foreign Ministry official said on condition of anonymity.
-------- china
China: Taiwan Vote Pushes Ties to Brink of Danger
January 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-china-taiwan.html
BEIJING/TAIPEI (Reuters) - China warned Taiwan on Monday that its planned March referendum would push bilateral ties to the ``brink of danger,'' even though the island has watered down the wording of the proposition to be put to voters.
Taiwan's top China policymaking body, in turn, issued a strongly worded statement calling Beijing a ``troublemaker'' that is trying to prevent the island from practicing democracy.
The referendum, scheduled to be held alongside presidential elections on March 20, would ``increase tension in cross-Strait relations and push cross-Strait relations step by step to the brink of danger,'' China's State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan said.
``This kind of provocative action will only stir up antagonism and hostility,'' Tang said in a speech, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.
Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian diluted the referendum proposition last week in an apparent bid to appease Washington, which had warned against either side changing the status quo. China sees the referendum as a move toward independence.
Rather than demand that China dismantle missiles aimed at the island, the referendum will now ask voters whether Taiwan should boost its own missile defense in the face of the Chinese threat.
The referendum will ask a second question -- should Taiwan negotiate with China to establish a peaceful and stable framework for interaction?
Beijing and Taipei have been rivals since their split in 1949 at the end of a civil war. But trade, investment and tourism have blossomed since detente began in the late 1980s. Taiwan investors have poured up to $100 billion into China, lured by low land and labor costs and a common language and culture.
``ILLEGAL AND UNNECESSARY''
Defending Chen's referendum plan, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council said deployment of 500 Chinese ballistic missiles pointed at the island underscored its hostility.
``Communist China has once again deliberately confounded right and wrong, making false interpretation and trying to block Taiwan's democratic development,'' the Taiwan council said.
``Communist China is a real troublemaker that is causing problems in the Taiwan Strait and being provocative. It is not qualified to talk about peace,'' the cabinet-level agency said.
But Chen's controversial referendum plan faces opposition at home, too.
Lien Chan, chairman of Taiwan's main opposition Nationalist Party and a presidential candidate, called the referendum illegal and unnecessary, but stopped short of saying whether his party would block the landmark vote.
``We do not oppose stability, peace, and dialogue on both sides of the (Taiwan) Strait. But is this referendum really necessary?'' Lien told reporters.
``It's legally unfounded. It's unnecessary. It's a waste.''
China's Tang called for negotiations to end the state of hostility under Beijing's cherished ``one China'' principle, which dictates that both Taiwan and the mainland are part of one country.
Chen has rejected the ``one China'' precept and incensed Beijing by redefining bilateral ties as ``one country on each side.'' China has threatened to attack Taiwan if the self-ruled, democratic island of 23 million formally declares independence.
China was confident Taiwan would eventually return to the fold, Tang told a gathering to mark the ninth anniversary of former president Jiang Zemin's eight-point proposal for reunification with Taiwan, including leaders exchanging visits.
-------- iraq
Back From Exile, Kurds Demand Political Power
January 19, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/middleeast/19KURD.html?pagewanted=all
KIRKUK, Iraq - For 130 Kurdish families just returned from exile, purgatory is a muddy field of green canvas tents propped up on this city's edge, the floors damp with rainwater, the interiors warmed by small kerosene heaters.
It is not the homecoming they expected. Driven from Kirkuk more than a decade ago by Saddam Hussein's government, they eke out their days waiting for what they say is their due.
"We lost years of our lives, so we need compensation," Lukman Abdul-Rahman, 39, said as he stood surrounded by a dozen men, all nodding vigorously. "The Kurds have suffered much more than others, and we should be the government's top priority."
Kurdish demands for political rights and reparations have suddenly emerged as one of the most pressing issues confronting American officials, who are trying to create an Iraqi transitional government. Kirkuk, an oil-rich city just outside the northern Kurdish region, is the linchpin of the Kurds' drive to retain their autonomy.
In Kirkuk, the campaign by Kurdish leaders for broad governing powers and claims by families for property restoration are feeding ethnic tensions that could explode. That prospect seems even more likely if Kirkuk's political future is put to a vote in the area, an idea that Kurdish leaders and some members of the Iraqi Governing Council are now supporting.
Recent protests by Arab and Turkmen residents against such Kurdish claims have already ended in gunfire and death. American soldiers have stepped up street patrols, and their searches of the headquarters of various political parties have uncovered illegal weapons. A bomb exploded near the headquarters of one of the two main Kurdish parties on Jan. 11.
Thousands of Kurdish and a few Turkmen families have flooded the city to demand land stripped from them under Mr. Hussein. Many live in squalor, some in tent villages, others in ramshackle public buildings. Arabs paid to move here under the former government's campaign to make the region Arab fear that Kurds will exact vengeance, and many have fled.
For the two main Kurdish parties, this change in demographics bolsters their claim that the Kurdish autonomous region should envelop Kirkuk.
Kurdish leaders believe they need the oil fields and rich agricultural land nearby to keep the Kurdish region economically independent. But no political group is willing to cede control of Kirkuk to the Kurds.
The Americans are trying to control the situation, said Joost R. Hiltermann, a Middle East expert with the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization, but "it could really get out of hand."
Mr. Hiltermann said: "The Kurds have to make a basic decision - to go with the Americans or not. If they go with the Americans, they'll get support, but not everything they want, namely Kirkuk."
L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator in Iraq, has met twice recently with Kurdish leaders to ask them to back down from their demands, including from their claims to Kirkuk, only to be rebuffed.
Fatal clashes have flared up, with Arabs, Kurds and Turkmens each claiming the city as their own.
"The ambition of the Kurds is not a new ambition," said Esmail al-Hadidi, a deputy mayor of Kirkuk and a member of one of the city's oldest Arab families. "But we need Kirkuk for everyone. The Arabs here are not willing to let Kirkuk go to the Turkmen and the Kurds."
At a nearby youth and sports center for Turkmens, a banner proclaims that "Kirkuk is a Turkmen city and will stay a Turkmen city forever." Powder-blue flags with a crescent moon and stars, similar to the Turkish flag, are displayed inside. Muhammad Arga Oglo, 30, the director of the Turkmen Student and Youth Union, greeted a visitor while sitting beneath a poster of Ottoman horsemen slaughtering their enemies in a river of blood.
"We have the right to express ourselves by any means," he said. "If it's necessary to defend ourselves, we will."
Thousands of Arabs and Turkmens held a rally at the end of December against the Kurdish demand for autonomy, and it ended in gunfire between protesters and Kurdish guerrilla fighters. Four protesters were killed and 24 wounded; other killings have followed.
Officers with the 173rd Airborne Brigade, which controls the city, have asked leaders of the main ethnic groups to stop the violence. But during a sweep of the offices of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, American soldiers found a cache of weapons that included 17 Kalashnikov rifles and three rocket-propelled grenade launchers, said Maj. Douglas Vincent, a spokesman for the American-led forces. Major Vincent said soldiers also found Kalashnikovs at the headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the other main Kurdish party, and at the Iraqi Turkmen Front.
Najat Hassan, the local head of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, denied that American soldiers had found illegal weapons. He also defended what he called the right of Kurds to govern the city. "Kirkuk is a historical and geographical part of the Kurdish region," he said.
Mr. Hassan explained his own claim, dating back a half-century, to a one-story home in the city center. In 1986, he said, Mr. Hussein's government seized his home and handed it to an Arab woman. Mr. Hassan moved north to the Kurdish city of Erbil and lived there until the American-led forces took power last spring. He said he was now waiting for the Governing Council to repeal a law that allowed the confiscations.
"I am a patient man," Mr. Hassan said. "But what about the others?"
A local government office has received 3,000 property claims, said Hassib Rozbayani, an assistant mayor.
A mile from the tent village where the returning Kurds live lies the neighborhood of Qadisiya, where over the decades many Arab migrants have built concrete homes. Ahmed Abdullah, 27, an Arab, said his family was paid $33,000 to move here from Diyala 25 years ago.
Standing by his vegetable stand, he pointed to a residence across the street, which he said Arab owners recently sold to move south to Basra, fearing the house would be seized. In the last months, Mr. Abdullah said, graffiti had appeared on several houses saying, "Your homes will be your graves."
--------
At Least 20 Dead in Baghdad Blast
Suicide Attack Outside U.S. Headquarters Wounds Over 60
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A26856-2004Jan18?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Jan. 18 -- A white pickup truck loaded with 1,000 pounds of plastic explosives and several 155mm artillery shells exploded at the main public gate to the U.S. occupation headquarters Sunday, killing at least 20 bystanders and injuring more than 60 others, U.S. military officials said.
The suicide bombing, which came at 8 a.m. on a foggy morning, turned a central Baghdad street into an inferno. The bomb detonated in the middle of rush-hour traffic, turned cars into bonfires, sent metal flying two hundred yards and shook buildings two miles away. The explosion took place just outside a large, domed archway called Assassins' Gate -- an entryway into the Republican Palace, one of deposed president Saddam Hussein's most grandiose residences.
Some of the victims worked at the occupation headquarters and had been trying to make their way inside at the time of the blast. Others had been on their way to work elsewhere.
Most of the casualties were Iraqis. The military initially reported that two of the dead were Americans working for the Pentagon but later said that their nationalities were unknown and that they did not work for the Defense Department, according to the Associated Press. Among the injured, there were three U.S. civilians and three American soldiers.
The attack was the deadliest in Iraq since Hussein's capture on Dec. 13. It came on the eve of a planned meeting in New York on Monday between the chief U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Bremer is seeking to enlist the United Nations in the effort to forestall demands from leading Shiite clerics for direct elections. The United Nations withdrew its staff from Baghdad after 22 people, including special envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello, were killed in the bombing of its headquarters Aug. 19.
In recent days, U.S. officials had reported a reduction in attacks on American forces, to about 17 a day from more than double that number in November. However, insurgents in central Iraq have launched a continuous stream of attacks, sometimes spectacular, taking many Iraqi lives. Car bombs have often been set off in the perimeter between fortified U.S. compounds and streets.
In the past week, a pair of bombs exploded in Baqubah, a town north of here, one at a mosque and the other at a police station. Eight people were killed. In December, a series of bombings in various cities killed 53 people. Heavily armed U.S. forces are not immune. The insurgency has made increasingly sophisticated use of roadside bombs to attack convoys and surface-to-air missiles to shoot down helicopters. Eleven soldiers have died in a pair of missile attacks within the past nine days.
On Sunday, a pair of Iraqis died in Tikrit, Hussein's home town, when a bomb in their car detonated. U.S. officials called it "a failed attempt to attack coalition forces."
Responding to the Baghdad blast, Hamid Kifaie, a spokesman for the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, blamed followers of Hussein and said: "Iraq is at war with the terrorists. All Iraqis must participate in the fight."
Bremer said in a statement that the attack was "an outrage -- another clear indication of the murderous and cynical intent of terrorists to undermine freedom, democracy and progress in Iraq. They will not succeed."
No one claimed responsibility for the attack. The violence came at a time of deepening political uncertainty. The United States wants to hand power to a transitional government, chosen through caucuses, by June 30, but leaders of the country's Shiite Muslim majority are pressing for quick elections. The Shiites have threatened demonstrations and even violence. At the same time, the Kurdish minority in the far north wants to annex territory to a future autonomous zone, which the United States opposes. The Kurdish leaders have also warned of problems if the demands are not met.
The scene outside the occupation headquarters, which is protected by concrete barriers and barbed wire and is home to the Coalition Provisional Authority, was one of agony. On the charred asphalt, a man in a blue jacket wandered aimlessly in the thick morning fog, blood streaming from his eyes. A woman in a floral scarf lay screaming on the pavement, her left foot all but separated from her leg. An elderly laborer in the baggy pants customarily worn by Kurds staggered about, his face covered in blood and mud, groaning almost imperceptibly.
American soldiers in desert fatigues crouched behind sandbags and concrete barriers, rifles at the ready, while others ferried the wounded to a hospital inside the headquarters. Civilians and Iraqi police officers rushed to the scene to comfort the wounded and carry them in blankets and stretchers to private vehicles and squad cars. Lightly injured survivors, their faces speckled with cuts, lurched over the nearby Jumhuriyah Bridge, which spans the Tigris River.
A policeman who daily shepherds unruly motorists through bumper-to-bumper traffic was sliced into thirds. A sign that advised Iraqis of a number to call to report crimes was obliterated. Traffic lights were blown off their crossbars. Left standing, but askew, was a sign that read, "No stopping here."
"I saw dead police. I saw a young man with his face blown off. I saw bodies like charcoal. I lifted a woman without legs," said Mehdi Hamdani, a merchant who ran toward the carnage from his store up the street. "This is not war, this is criminal."
The PE-4 plastic explosives used Sunday can be found throughout Iraq, said Col. Ralph Baker, commander of the troops who guard Assassins' Gate. Assailants in Iraq also commonly pack artillery rounds into car bombs. A similar cocktail upended and ignited a Bradley Fighting Vehicle Friday in a town north of Baghdad, killing three soldiers.
The white pickup had "positioned itself to enter our compound," Baker said. "But it stopped or was stuck in line and the bomb was detonated." Three soldiers were lightly wounded, he said. "Maybe it went off inadvertently. We will not be able to interview the guy who did it to find out."
One military official said two American civilian contractors were killed, but he later backed off the statement. As of Sunday night, they had not been identified.
"This attack shows that the resistance is becoming more organized and dangerous. They have confidence in themselves," said Moohan Hafid Fahad, an Iraqi military affairs commentator.
By sunset, cranes and tow trucks had removed wreckage from Assassins' Gate. Water from firetrucks filled the four-foot-deep by three-foot-wide crater caused by the bomb.
Red Crescent ambulances brought a dozen blackened corpses in black canvas bags to the city morgue. None of the dead could be immediately identified, said Alaa Alwan, a police official there.
Tension and chaos ruled emergency wards in three city hospitals that treated the wounded. At Karama Hospital, one young man stripped away a gray blanket covering his dead brother's body and cried: "What is it that brought you to this place? I will avenge your death with my life!"
The brother of a badly wounded man, Hassan Taher, wept when he saw the bloody wounds. He frantically asked about the fate of another brother, who was missing. Doctors had told reporters the man was dead. But fearing that the visitor would become outraged, the doctors simply told him they did not know.
Tearful relatives hovered over Adel Yousef, an interpreter and driver for U.S. administrators, as he nursed a broken leg and cuts all over his body. "I was driving some electricians into the base. We were waiting in line in our Jeep, two of us and three behind us in another Jeep," he said. "I heard the explosion and glass flew all over me. There was fire behind me. I don't know what happened to the other Jeep."
"I am a merchant and I was driving to my store across the bridge," recalled Omar Rashid, who returned from exile in Germany 20 days ago. "Hot glass blew into my face. I got out of the car and couldn't see [because of] the blood and smoke and fog. Maybe I should go back to Germany."
Abdullah Daud was standing in line waiting to be searched at the gate before entering the compound. "A guy moved to my side, and the bomb went off," said Daud, whose head had been bandaged. "He took the worst of it. I do not think he will make it. He's bandaged from head to foot. You can only see his eyes. I always thought it was dangerous to stand like that in the open. It is dangerous to be an Iraqi in the open."
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon Hints Israel Might Alter Route of West Bank Barrier
January 19, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/middleeast/19MIDE.html?pagewanted=all
JERUSALEM, Jan. 18 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon indicated Sunday that Israel might alter the route of its separation barrier in the West Bank, and acknowledged that the barrier had caused difficulties for ordinary Palestinians.
But he emphasized that any such alterations would flow solely from Israeli deliberations, and that his government would not be swayed by demands made by the Palestinians, the United Nations or the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
Israel says the barrier is intended as a security measure against suicide bombers and other Palestinian attacks. But the Palestinians say it amounts to the confiscation of West Bank land they are demanding for a future state.
In December, the United Nations General Assembly asked the World Court to rule on the legality of the barrier. Mr. Sharon and cabinet ministers on Sunday discussed Israel's preparations for the court case, set for next month at The Hague.
The current route approved by Mr. Sharon's government will put about 15 percent of the West Bank land on the western, or Israeli, side of the barrier, according to United Nations calculations.
Israel has not said exactly how it will respond in the court case. The Israeli news media reported that Israel would send a letter to the court challenging its authority in the matter, and that the government would decide in the coming weeks whether to send representatives to the court.
After discussions with the Israeli legal authorities, Mr. Sharon said there could be "legal difficulties in defending the state's position" regarding the route of the fence.
But in a statement from his office, he emphasized that "there will be no change as a result of Palestinian or U.N. demands, including those from the court." Any further discussions "of the fence's route will take place only as a result of internal Israeli deliberations," he said.
Mr. Sharon and the cabinet members had planned to talk Sunday about possible adjustments to the barrier, but the discussions were postponed.
Even the United States, Israel's strongest ally, has criticized the barrier's route through the West Bank.
Yosef Lapid, the Israeli justice minister and a political moderate, urges that Israel reroute the fence to move it closer to the West Bank boundary. "The present route will bring upon us isolation in the world," he said.
Israel has made a few minor adjustments to the barrier, but is continuing to build it despite the international protests. A section in the northern West Bank was completed last year, and parts have been built around Jerusalem.
Mr. Sharon said the fence had been "excellent at preventing terror, but was not satisfactory in all matters relating to the damage to Palestinians' quality of life."
Some Palestinian towns and villages are surrounded by the barrier, and residents face difficulties with such everyday tasks as commuting to jobs, schools and their farm fields.
In other developments on Sunday, Israel reopened the crossing point with the Gaza Strip, which had been closed since a Palestinian woman blew herself up in a suicide bombing on Wednesday, killing four Israeli security officials.
Thousands of Palestinians go through the crossing to work in Israel or in factories in an industrial zone at the northern tip of Gaza.
Also, Mr. Sharon's government added three more West Bank settlement outposts to an existing list of six that are slated to be dismantled.
The stalled Middle East peace plan calls for Israel to remove all outposts erected since March 2001. Monitoring groups say more than 50 such outposts exist.
--------
Hezbollah Missile Hits Israeli Bulldozer at Lebanon Border
January 19, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/middleeast/19CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 19 - Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon fired an antitank missile today that scored a direct hit on an Israeli military bulldozer clearing roadside explosives in the border region. One Israeli soldier was killed and another seriously wounded, Israel said.
The shooting stirred tensions along the uneasy frontier and raised the possibility of an Israeli military response. The episode also increased friction between Israel and Syria, which maintains a large military presence in Lebanon and supports Hezbollah.
Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, called last month for the reopening peace talks with Israel, but Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was cool to the idea even before today's episode.
"If President Assad is intent on making peace, the least he could do is restrain Hezbollah from attacking Israel," said Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Mr. Sharon. "The first thing Syria has to do is act against terror."
An Israeli military official said the armored bulldozer was on the Israeli side of the border, near the village of Zarit, when it was struck by the missile.
The bulldozer had been preparing to carry out a controlled explosion of roadside bombs detected about two weeks ago, the official said. The bombs had not been removed because of persistent rains.
Hezbollah asserted, however, that the bulldozer was in Lebanese territory and was destroyed by the missile, The Associated Press reported from Beirut, the Lebanese capital.
Because of the uneven terrain, an Israeli fence runs a bit south of the border in this area, an Israeli military official said. The bulldozer was on the northern side of the fence, but was still well within Israeli territory, the official added.
United Nations monitors in southern Lebanon were called in to verify the exact location of the shooting, the official said.
Israel said it had uncovered roadside explosives planted by Hezbollah three times since November.
Earlier in the day, Israeli warplanes flew over Lebanese air space, which they do frequently on reconnaissance missions. And as is often the case, the planes drew Hezbollah anti-aircraft fire, The A.P. reported.
Prior to the shooting, Mr. Sharon told a parliamentary committee that a peace deal with Syria would require Israel to withdraw from all of the Golan Heights, which is not far from the site on today's shooting.
One Israeli legislator said Syria was in a weak position and asked Mr. Sharon if it would be a good time to negotiate because Israel might be able to win concessions.
"Have no illusions. The price for full peace with Syria is Israel relinquishing all of the Golan Heights," Mr. Sharon was quoted as saying by his spokesman, Mr. Gissin.
"The prime minister said this as a statement of fact, not as his position in any negotiations," Mr. Gissin said.
Israel captured the Golan in the 1967 Middle East war, and Syria has demanded the return of all the territory as part of any peace deal.
Mr. Sharon's political supporters and opponents in Israel both interpreted his comments as a reluctance to pursue new negotiations.
Ran Cohen, a legislator with the liberal Meretz party, and a critic of the prime minister, said Mr. Sharon effectively declared that "I don't intend to pay the price of peace with Syria."
"Mr. Sharon prevents these negotiations which Syria proposes today, and so he does not even enter the negotiations in order to see what is possible," Mr. Cohen told Israeli radio.
Ehud Yatom, a member of Mr. Sharon's rightist Likud party, agreed that negotiations seemed unlikely, but supported the prime minister.
"I understood very well what the prime minister meant," Mr. Yatom said. "I understood that the prime minister is not overjoyed about giving up the Golan Heights."
Last week, Israel's president, Moshe Katsav, invited Mr. Assad to visit Jerusalem, but Syria rejected the offer as a public relations stunt.
Syria says it wants talks to resume from the point where the broke off in early 2000, under the previous Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak. The two sides appeared close to an agreement at that time.
But Israel says it wants the negotiations to begin without conditions, and it believes Syria is in a much more vulnerable position today.
Some Israeli officials believe Syria is making peace overtures now because it is facing increased pressure from the United States.
The Clinton administration actively courted Syria in an attempt to broker Middle Eastern peace deals during the 1990's. But President Bush's administration has taken a much tougher line, and the president signed legislation last month that would permit the imposition of sanctions against Syria.
In another development, Mr. Gissin said Israel was reviewing possible adjustments to the controversial separation barrier it is building in the West Bank.
"We came to the conclusion that we have obtained the optimum level of security in some areas, but there is something to be desired in the living conditions for Palestinians," Mr. Gissin said.
Israel has made several minor alterations to the barrier. But the Palestinians reject any part of the barrier being built in the West Bank, which is land they want as part of a future state.
Israel says that the barrier is solely a security measure and that it is going up in the West Bank to safeguard Jewish settlements.
-------- un
U.N. Report
By Betsy Pisik
January 19, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040118-103504-4513r.htm
Economies revive
The world economy will expand overall as much as 3.5 percent this year, according to forecasts by the United Nations, mainly because of accelerated growth in China, India and the United States.
If projections hold, 2004 could be a strong year, U.N. economists said last week in their annual evaluation of the world's finances. The growth of the world economy was 2.5 percent last year and 1.7 percent in 2002, they said.
"The world economy is gaining momentum," said Jose Antonio Ocampo, U.N. undersecretary-general for economic and social affairs. He said the recovery is being driven primarily by the United States (4 percent growth), as well as emerging powerhouses such as China (8.5 percent) and India (4 percent).
The U.S. economy should continue to strengthen and will continue to stimulate world economic growth, said Mr. Ocampo, in presenting the annual U.N. survey, titled "The World Economic Situation and Prospects 2004."
He said Washington should continue spending, rather than adopt a policy to quickly curtail the soaring budget deficit. However, the deficits cannot continue forever, and the U.S. government should try to correct them gradually, he added.
Mr. Ocampo noted China's role as a "trade hub" and said it is capable of supporting regional and global growth. South and East Asian economies could average 6.2 percent growth in 2004, in large part by taking advantage of increased trading opportunities.
Interestingly, Japan and South Korea owe much of their anticipated growth to trade with China, the first time that they owe so much of their commerce to that market.
"It is a locomotive for Japan's surprising recovery," said Mr. Ocampo, whose report found that 12 percent of Japan's exports are destined for China. Japan's economy is expected to grow 2.5 percent this year, after a decade of stagnation.
The following were among the other findings:
•Unemployment continues to be a problem in most countries, with job creation lagging even in nations with strong economic performance.
•Latin America had three "very bad years" but is expected to post growth of close to 3 percent in 2004, in part because of Argentina's recovery and because of improved domestic policies.
•The economies of the Middle East could grow 4 percent this year, but that estimate is subject to political and economic uncertainties in Iraq and the price of oil.
•Western Europe's economies have a low growth rate but will be helped by the strong euro and low interest rates.
•Africa will gain from rising prices in commodities markets and improved political and economic policies.
Liberian aid sought
The United Nations is seeking $500 million over the next two years to stabilize and rebuild Liberia, the tattered West African nation rich in natural resources but gripped by a generation of instability.
The world body will sponsor a conference in New York on Feb. 5 and 6 in which donors will be asked to help rebuild the country from the ground up. Almost no aspect of Liberian society has been spared by continuous warfare and insurgencies. The country is so devastated that life expectancy has fallen to 41 years, one of the lowest in the world.
But Jacques Klein, a former U.S. Air Force general who is the U.N. special representative in Liberia, expressed confidence during a recent visit to New York. "The overall political and security situation in Liberia is daily growing more stable, and I believe it is now irreversible," he told reporters last week.
Former President Charles Taylor has been in exile in Nigeria for three months, and Liberians are cobbling together a new government with U.N. assistance. Eight thousand U.N. peacekeepers are patrolling Liberia's larger cities, and a full authorization of 15,000 blue helmets should arrive by the end of next month, Gen. Klein said.
He praised the United States for underwriting two years of the peacekeeping mission with a $245 million grant, and committing $200 million in bilateral assistance, to be administered by the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia.
•Betsy Pisik can be reached by e-mail at UNear@aol.com.
--------
Wary Annan Set to Discuss a Possible U.N. Role in Iraq
By Robin Wright and Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28147-2004Jan18?language=printer
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is prepared to try to help the United States salvage its Iraq strategy, despite more than a year of rancorous relations over the country, largely due to his deep concern about the potential for a political implosion in Iraq, according to senior U.S. and U.N. officials.
But Annan, who is also wary of U.S. motives, intends to ask some tough and specific questions in talks with L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, and the Iraqi Governing Council at their meeting today in New York, U.N. officials say. The key is how much authority the United States is willing to cede on policy, a critical issue because the United Nations does not want to be used simply to give credibility to the troubled U.S. plan to hand over power to Iraq by June 30.
Annan has set three other conditions for the United Nations to return to Iraq: complete clarity on the scope of the U.N. role, security guarantees, and assurances that the substance of the U.N. role would justify the risks.
A suicide bombing yesterday, which killed 20 people and injured more than 60, only served to accentuate the danger in Iraq, U.N. officials said.
Although there is growing momentum and optimism about U.N. help in rescuing the U.S. plan, it may be an uphill battle for both sides to achieve an agreement. Internal debates continue within the United Nations and the United States on specifics.
Annan's top advisers differ over the wisdom of returning to Iraq under U.S. military occupation. "Some people think this is a trap," a U.N. official said. Others think "this is the perfect time for the U.N. to demonstrate to everybody that it has a role to play and can be useful," the official said. "They don't believe that the impasse is impossible to solve."
Senior U.N. officials are skeptical of Bremer's personal willingness to yield authority, noting complaints from U.N. officials in the field that Bremer had sidelined the United Nations' former envoy, Sergio Vieira de Mello, after he helped Bremer establish the Governing Council. De Mello was killed, along with 21 other people, in the August suicide bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Some critics on the U.N. Security Council also suggest that U.S. efforts to lure the United Nations back to Iraq are motivated by the need to share the risks in a presidential election year. "They need to find a scapegoat to take the blame in case this fails," an envoy from one of the 15 member countries said.
What is needed to repair those tensions, a U.N. official said, is for Bremer to look Annan "straight in the eye" and say "we will abide by whatever solution" emerges from U.N. mediation efforts in Iraq.
The Bush administration has not figured out how much control it is willing to give the United Nations, U.S. officials said. The internal differences echo earlier debates over whether the United States should collaborate with the world body, first in pressuring Saddam Hussein over his programs to produce weapons of mass destruction and then in going to war to oust him.
Vice President Cheney's office is particularly reluctant to cede too much control over Iraq to the United Nations, U.S. officials said. And if the United Nations is not fully satisfied, some of its officials warned, then the prospects of a joint effort could fail.
For now, the United States is looking for what one U.S. official described as "progressive increasing responsibility" for the United Nations, since the world body will need time to dispatch staff and set up operations again in Baghdad. The United Nations withdrew its staff in October after a second suicide bombing at its headquarters.
"We're between a rock and a hard place. . . . We want the U.N. in there, but the situation is moving so fast on the ground that we can't simply turn things over until the U.N. is on the ground, fully staffed and fully engaged," a senior U.S. official said.
Added a senior State Department official: "It should be a growing role that starts out with the U.N. getting involved and goes to wherever they can take it. Based on results, it can grow."
With the June 30 deadline looming and threats of protests against the U.S. plan growing, U.S. officials said there is a general understanding across the administration, including in Cheney's office, that changes have to be made in the U.S. transition plan -- and that there is no alternative but the United Nations to achieve both Iraqi and international legitimacy.
The political hand-over, which centers on a complex process based on caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces to elect a new national assembly, has been challenged by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Iraq's leading religious cleric is demanding direct elections so the caucus process cannot be manipulated to favor U.S.-backed Iraqis.
Sistani has repeatedly called for the United Nations to weigh in on the election issue. Washington hopes the most immediate role U.N. envoys will play is mediating with Sistani and other potential spoilers of the transition plan. Sistani has refused to see U.S. diplomats but has met with U.N. representatives.
"Look, the bottom line is we need help," a U.S. official intimately involved in Iraq policy said. "We need help on a lot of fronts, whether it's managing Sistani, whether it's making this process more truly transparent and inclusive in such a way that the Sistanis of this world buy into it. That is something we haven't had very much success [with]. There is a genuine recognition that we need to engage more broadly."
To the surprise of some U.S. officials, the United Nations has not been spiteful or vindictive about the U.S. request for help, with the main focus of talks on the future instead of on the awkward past. Some Security Council members say it is time to make peace on Iraq policy.
"I don't think it will serve anybody's purpose at this time to recall who was right or wrong," said Pakistan's U.N. ambassador, Munir Akram. "Our only priority objective is to stabilize Iraq. We should find the most effective way to do so."
A new spirit of cooperation has begun to emerge between the United States and the United Nations, according to officials of both. The United States initially responded coolly when Annan called for three-way talks in New York. Washington was only prepared to send low-level officials, and Bremer was not expected to attend.
But talks last Tuesday in New York went particularly well, with the focus on problem-solving, not just process, U.S. and U.N. officials said. The United Nations has put forward one idea to salvage the Nov. 15 agreement, making minor changes to the caucuses and repackaging them as "indirect elections," according to the senior U.S. official.
As a result, additional talks, attended by Robert D. Blackwill, the Iraqi troubleshooter on the National Security Council, and Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns , were held yesterday in New York. The formal talks today are scheduled to bring Annan together with a full array of senior U.S. and British officials from the U.S.-led occupation authority and the Iraqi Governing Council, including current President Adnan Pachachi.
"The United States has never been able to referee in Iraqi politics, and they have come to understand this now," a U.N. official, said. "This is why an external actor, the United Nations, is the only one who can play this role."
Yet all parties are warning against major or immediate agreements on terms for U.N. intervention. The initial meeting is to explore the options, with additional talks to follow. Bremer, Annan and Pachachi could talk again when they attend at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later in the week, U.S. officials said. They added that further meetings will probably be needed to deal with the many issues involved.
Lynch reported from New York.
-------- propaganda wars
Open Door Policy A strange thing happened on the way to the war.
By Karen Kwiatkowski
January 19, 2004
American Conservative
http://www.amconmag.com/1_19_04/article1.html
Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon insider, concludes her observations on the run-up to the Iraq war in this last of a three-part series.
As the winter of 2002 approached, I was increasingly amazed at the success of the propaganda campaign being waged by President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and neoconservative mouthpieces at the Washington Times and Wall Street Journal. I speculated about the necessity but unlikelihood of a Phil-Dick-style minority report on the grandiose Feith-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld-Cheney vision of some future Middle East where peace, love, and democracy are brought about by pre-emptive war and military occupation.
In December, I requested an acceleration of my retirement after just over 20 years on duty and exactly the required three years of time-in-grade as a lieutenant colonel. I felt fortunate not to have being fired or court-martialed due to my politically incorrect ways in the previous two years as a real conservative in a neoconservative Office of Secretary of Defense. But in fact, my outspokenness was probably never noticed because civilian professionals and military officers were largely invisible. We were easily replaceable and dispensable, not part of the team brought in from the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Security Policy, and the Washington Institute for Near East Affairs.
There were exceptions. When military officers conspicuously crossed the neoconservative party line, the results were predictable-get back in line or get out. One friend, an Army colonel who exemplified the qualities carved in stone at West Point, refused to maneuver into a small neoconservative box, and he was moved into another position, where truth-telling would be viewed as an asset instead of a handicap. Among the civilians, I observed the stereotypical perspective that this too would pass, with policy analysts apparently willing to wait out the neocon phase. In early winter, an incident occurred that was seared into my memory. A coworker and I were suddenly directed to go down to the Mall entrance to pick up some Israeli generals. Post-9/11 rules required one escort for every three visitors, and there were six or seven of them waiting. The Navy lieutenant commander and I hustled down. Before we could apologize for the delay, the leader of the pack surged ahead, his colleagues in close formation, leaving us to double-time behind the group as they sped to Undersecretary Feith's office on the fourth floor. Two thoughts crossed our minds: are we following close enough to get credit for escorting them, and do they really know where they are going? We did get credit, and they did know. Once in Feith's waiting room, the leader continued at speed to Feith's closed door. An alert secretary saw this coming and had leapt from her desk to block the door. "Mr. Feith has a visitor. It will only be a few more minutes." The leader craned his neck to look around the secretary's head as he demanded, "Who is in there with him?"
This minor crisis of curiosity past, I noticed the security sign-in roster. Our habit, up until a few weeks before this incident, was not to sign in senior visitors like ambassadors. But about once a year, the security inspectors send out a warning letter that they were coming to inspect records. As a result, sign-in rosters were laid out, visible and used. I knew this because in the previous two weeks I watched this explanation being awkwardly presented to several North African ambassadors as they signed in for the first time and wondered why and why now. Given all this and seeing the sign-in roster, I asked the secretary, "Do you want these guys to sign in?" She raised her hands, both palms toward me, and waved frantically as she shook her head. "No, no, no, it is not necessary, not at all." Her body language told me I had committed a faux pas for even asking the question. My fellow escort and I chatted on the way back to our office about how the generals knew where they were going (most foreign visitors to the five-sided asylum don't) and how the generals didn't have to sign in. I felt a bit dirtied by the whole thing and couldn't stop comparing that experience to the grace and gentility of the Moroccan, Tunisian, and Algerian ambassadors with whom I worked.
In my study of the neoconservatives, it was easy to find out whom in Washington they liked and whom they didn't. They liked most of the Heritage Foundation and all of the American Enterprise Institute. They liked writers Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol. To find out whom they didn't like, no research was required. All I had to do was walk the corridors and attend staff meetings. There were several shared prerequisites to get on the Neoconservative List of Major Despicable People, and in spite of the rhetoric hurled against these enemies of the state, most really weren't Rodents of Unusual Size. Most, in fact, were retired from a branch of the military with a star or two or four on their shoulders. All could and did rationally argue the many illogical points in the neoconservative strategy of offensive democracy-guys like Brent Scowcroft, Barry McCaffrey, Anthony Zinni, and Colin Powell.
I was present at a staff meeting when Deputy Undersecretary Bill Luti called General Zinni a traitor. At another time, I discussed with a political appointee the service being rendered by Colin Powell in the early winter and was told the best service he could offer would be to quit. I heard in another staff meeting a derogatory story about a little Tommy Fargo who was acting up. Little Tommy was, of course, Commander, Pacific Forces, Admiral Fargo. This was shared with the rest of us as a Bill Luti lesson in civilian control of the military. It was certainly not civil or controlled, but the message was crystal.
When President Bush gave his State of the Union address, there was a small furor over the reference to the yellowcake in Niger that Saddam was supposedly seeking. After this speech, everyone was discussing this as either new intelligence saved up for just such a speech or, more cynically, just one more flamboyant fabrication that those watching the propaganda campaign had come to expect. I had not heard about yellowcake from Niger or seen it mentioned on the Office of Special Plans talking points. When I went over to my old shop, sub-Saharan Africa, to congratulate them for making it into the president's speech, they said the information hadn't come from them or through them. They were as surprised and embarrassed as everyone else that such a blatant falsehood would make it into a presidential speech.
When General Zinni was removed as Bush's Middle East envoy and Elliot Abrams joined the National Security Council (NSC) to lead the Mideast division, whoops and high-fives had erupted from the neocon cubicles. By midwinter, echoes of those celebrations seemed to mutate into a kind of anxious anticipation, shared by most of the Pentagon. The military was anxiously waiting under the bed for the other shoe to drop amidst concerns over troop availability, readiness for an ill-defined mission, and lack of day-after clarity. The neocons were anxiously struggling to get that damn shoe off, gleefully anticipating the martinis to be drunk and the fun to be had. The other shoe fell with a thump on Feb. 5 as Colin Powell delivered his United Nations presentation.
It was a sad day for me and many others with whom I worked when we watched Powell's public capitulation. The era when Powell had been considered a political general, back when he was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had in many ways been erased for those of us who greatly admired his coup of the Pentagon neocons when he persuaded the president to pursue UN support for his invasion of Iraq. Now it was as if Powell had again rolled military interests-and national interests as well.
Around that same time, our deputy director forwarded a State Department cable that had gone out to our embassy in Turkey. The cable contained answers to 51 questions that had been asked of our ambassador by the Turkish government. The questions addressed things like after-war security arrangements, refugees, border control, stability in the Kurdish north, and occupation plans. But every third answer was either "To be determined" or "We're working on that" or "This scenario is unlikely." At one point, an answer included the "fact" that the United States military would physically secure the geographic border of Iraq. Curious, I checked the length of the physical border of Iraq. Then I checked out the length of our own border with Mexico. Given our exceptional success in securing our own desert borders, I found this statement interesting.
Soon after, I was out-processed for retirement and couldn't have been more relieved to be away from daily exposure to practices I had come to believe were unconstitutional. War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to Congress and the American people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq-more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate it.
My personal experience leaning precariously toward the neoconservative maw showed me that their philosophy remains remarkably untouched by respect for real liberty, justice, and American values. My years of military service taught me that values and ideas matter, but these most important aspects of our great nation cannot be defended adequately by those in uniform. This time, salvaging our honor will require a conscious, thoughtful, and stubborn commitment from each and every one of us, and though I no longer wear the uniform, I have not given up the fight.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Unlikely to Get Later Deadline
Hearings Being Scaled Back to Finish Work by May;
Top Officials Expected to Testify
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28025-2004Jan18.html
President Bush and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have decided to oppose granting more time to an independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, virtually guaranteeing that the panel will have to complete its work by the end of May, officials said last week.
A growing number of commission members had concluded that the panel needs more time to prepare a thorough and credible accounting of missteps leading to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But the White House and leading Republicans have informed the panel that they oppose any delay, which raises the possibility that Sept. 11-related controversies could emerge during the heat of the presidential campaign, sources said.
With time running short, the 10-member bipartisan panel has already decided to scale back the number and scope of hearings that it will hold for the public, commission members and staffers said. The commission is rushing to finish interviews with as many as 200 remaining witnesses and to finish examining about 2 million pages of documents related to the attacks.
Public hearings in coming months will include testimony from key Cabinet members in the Bush and Clinton administrations. The likely roster will include Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, CIA Director George J. Tenet, former secretary of state Madeleine K. Albright, former defense secretary William S. Cohen, and the current and former directors of the FBI, two officials said. The next hearing, scheduled over two days beginning Jan. 26, will focus on border and aviation security issues.
Commission representatives are also negotiating to secure private testimony from President Bush, former president Bill Clinton, Vice President Cheney and former vice president Al Gore. None of the four would be likely to be asked to testify publicly, several sources said.
The statute that created the panel in late 2002 requires commission members to complete a report for the president and Congress by May 27, with another 60 days available after that to issue supplemental documents or tie up loose ends, officials said. The commission has been beleaguered by organizational problems and fights with the Bush administration and New York over access to documents.
"We need at least a few more months to complete our work," said commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana who has pushed for more time. "We have a breathtaking task ahead of us, and we need enough time to make sure our work is credible and thorough."
But the White House and Hastert's office made clear during discussions over the past two weeks that they would strongly oppose any extension of the deadline, which would require congressional approval, officials said. One source described the issue Friday as "dead in the water."
White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said, "The administration has given them an unprecedented amount of cooperation . . . and we expect they will be able to meet that deadline."
John Feehery, a spokesman for Hastert, said there is little support for a delay in the Republican-controlled Congress. "I can't imagine a situation where they get an extension," Feehery said. "I don't sense a lot of enthusiasm for considering that."
As recently as December, the commission's two leaders -- former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean (R) and former representative Lee Hamilton (D-Ind.) -- said the panel would have enough time to complete its work. But commission members decided during a closed meeting earlier this month that they should explore the idea of a delay with the White House and Capitol Hill.
The commission's handling of the deadline has angered a group of relatives of Sept. 11 victims, who argue that the panel has not been aggressive enough in demanding more time and in seeking key documents and testimony from the Bush administration.
Several relatives have also strongly criticized the commission's executive director, Philip Zelikow, because of his ties to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and other Bush administration officials.
Zelikow has recused himself from issues connected to his role as an administration adviser in the early weeks of Bush's term, but he was also interviewed several months ago as a witness by the commission, officials said. Commission member Jamie Gorelick, a Democrat who served in the Clinton Justice Department, has also been interviewed as a witness, officials said.
Kristen Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, was killed at the World Trade Center, said the interviews underscore a conflict-of-interest problem at the commission and cast serious doubts on the panel's credibility. "We've had it," said Breitweiser, who met with several commission leaders last week. "It is such a slap in the face of the families of victims. They are dishonoring the dead with their irresponsible behavior." Commission spokesman Al Felzenberg said Zelikow and Gorelick were among more than 800 witnesses who have been interviewed so far and said their experiences in national security are relevant to the panel's investigation. "Whether these people were involved in this commission or not, they may have well made this list because of the perspective they would have had about the work of the government during the time in question," he said.
-------- drug war
DEA disrupts Colombia drug ring
January 19, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040118-114324-2043r.htm
The Drug Enforcement Administration has disrupted a major Colombian drug cartel with eight arrests in that country and three in the United States as part of an undercover investigation known as "Operation Streamline."
Nearly 2 pounds of heroin were seized during the Thursday arrests.
DEA Administrator Karen P. Tandy said the investigation, which began in Florida in early 2002, targeted the Orlando Ospina trafficking organization in Colombia that smuggled nearly 1,000 pounds of high-grade heroin a year into Miami for distribution to buyers in New York City, Philadelphia and Newark, N.J.
Those arrested in Colombia will be extradited to face U.S. prosecution, Mrs. Tandy said.
After the investigation began in Miami, it later expanded to Charlotte, N.C., Newark, New York City, and Philadelphia, and later into Argentina, Colombia and Nicaragua.
At least 17 persons already have been taken into custody and more than 100 pounds of heroin seized - with an estimated street value of $6 million.
The original targets, Orlando and Carlos Ospina, were arrested by DEA agents in Florida in May.
"Drug trafficking reaches across international boundaries and jurisdictions. Law enforcement must do the same. The success of this multinational, multijurisdictional investigation exemplifies the cooperation between law enforcement agencies throughout the United States and the governments of Colombia and Argentina," Mrs. Tandy said.
The drug traffickers, she said, used both traditional and nontraditional smuggling routes and methods, including hiding heroin in drinking straws and placing them in boxes of seafood, and using internal body couriers to transport drugs from Cali and Bogota, Colombia, and Buenos Aires to major East Coast cities.
Mrs. Tandy said the traffickers also used various methods to transport their illicit drug profits from the United States back to Colombia, including the use of body couriers who swallowed $100 bills rolled into cylinders and pressed, and a check-cashing business in Cali, Colombia, that could launder $25,000 a day in proceeds.
Additionally, she said, the organization used Western Union wire transfers to send drug proceeds in $1,000 increments from the United States to Colombia.
The two-year Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force (OCDETF) operation was coordinated by DEA's special-operations division, a joint law enforcement program comprising agents and analysts from the DEA, FBI, Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as well as lawyers from the Justice Department's criminal division.
Also involved in the investigation were the Colombian National Police and the Gendarmeria Nacional Police in Argentina.
Colombia remains the world's largest producer of cocaine and a major supplier of heroin to the United States.
-------- homeland security
U.S. Presses for Leeway in Terror Probes
January 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Interrogations.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- An interrogator begins questioning an al-Qaida prisoner who may know of a pending attack. The captive turns to his lawyer, who tells him that he can remain silent. The suspect clams up.
The scenario is the Bush administration's legal nightmare, but there is significant concern that it could come true. The Supreme Court will decide this year whether U.S.-designated ``enemy combatants'' -- U.S. citizens and foreigners -- can be detained indefinitely without lawyers and hearings.
``Any lawyer worth his salt will say (to a client), 'Don't say anything because it can be used against you,``' said Lee Casey, a Washington attorney and a Justice Department lawyer in the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
Several former Justice Department officials and the former highest-ranking Army lawyer said if the Supreme Court sides with the combatants it could be devastating for intelligence-gathering.
``It's vital to national security to interrogate individuals and obtain information about threats, including immediate threats to our country,'' said Alice Fisher, who recently left the Justice Department as a deputy assistant attorney general overseeing counterterrorism cases. ``A private attorney may stunt the ability to get vital information.''
There are two U.S. citizens being held as enemy combatants, while more than 600 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters are detained at the U.S. Navy base in Guantanamo, Cuba. Information gleaned from those suspects has led to arrests around the world and helped the international intelligence community learn much about al-Qaida's operations, authorities have said.
The president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a civil liberties law firm that represents several detainees, said the price paid in loss of constitutional protections is too high.
``Our fundamental argument is that everybody deserves some kind of a hearing before they can be in long-term detention,'' said Michael Ratner. He is seeking military hearings for Guantanamo detainees that would not stop interrogations, but would review each case and could bring freedom to anyone determined not to be a combatant.
Giving constitutional protections to captured terrorists would send an unmistakable message to al-Qaida, said retired Maj. Gen. Michael Nardotti, a Washington attorney who was judge advocate general of the Army. The message: ``If Americans are foolish enough to grant rights given to American citizens, and if you understand your rights, you won't have to give up anything that will compromise this organization.''
The Supreme Court should have a lot to say this year about legal protections for enemy combatants.
The justices will consider an appeal that asks whether the Guantanamo prisoners may contest their captivity in American courts. The court also agreed to hear the case of U.S.-born Yaser Esam Hamdi, a foot soldier captured in 2001 during the fighting in Afghanistan and detained without access to a lawyer.
Last Friday, the Bush administration asked the court to decide, by summer, whether the government could indefinitely detain -- without charges -- former Chicago gang member Jose Padilla. He was arrested in May 2002 in an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive ``dirty bomb.''
The Padilla case may be the crucial test of the government's ability to interrogate captives without a lawyer, because he may have had knowledge of a pending attack.
The prisoner ``represents a continuing, present and grave danger to the national security of the United States,'' Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote the court.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the government 30 days to release Padilla from military custody, but said the government was free to transfer him to civilian authorities who can bring criminal charges. The government asked Friday that the order be suspended.
``In the case of U.S. citizens, ordering immediate judicial process would jeopardize the executive's need in obtaining intelligence information,'' said Viet Dinh, a Georgetown University law professor who recently headed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy.
``The courts recognize that these are very high stakes. Nobody contests that Padilla had very nefarious plans.''
On the Net:
Justice Department main site http://www.usdoj.gov/
Justice Department terrorism site http://www.usdoj.gov/ag/terrorismaftermath.html
Defense Department main site http://www.defenselink.mil/
Center for Constitutional Rights http://www.ccr-ny.org/v2/home.asp
-------- justice
Handcuffing judges and justice
January 19, 2004
WASHINGTON TIMES
By Nat Hentoff
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040118-103516-6677r.htm
In his annual report on the state of the federal judiciary, Chief Justice William Rehnquist on Dec. 31 charged Congress - and by implication, the attorney general - with responsibility for a law that can result in "an unwarranted and ill-considered effort to intimidate individual judges in the performance of their judicial duties."
Attorney General John Ashcroft - not content with weakening the constitutional separation of powers through the minimal judicial supervision provision in his USA Patriot Act and executive orders that undermine civil liberties - has attacked the independence of federal judges in their regular sentencing responsibilities.
Last spring, President Bush signed into law a bill that included the Feeney Amendment, named for Rep. Tom Feeney, Florida Republican. Mr. Feeney, at the Justice Department's request, had introduced legislation making it significantly more difficult for federal judges to use their discretion to give sentences lower than those set by the 20-year-old U.S. Sentencing Commission.
But an independent judiciary, free from such legislative restrictions, is the basic guardian of the Bill of Rights and the rest of the Constitution. It protects against an overreaching executive branch and a Congress so deferential to waves of popular opinion that lawmakers may forget that the rule of law becomes distorted unless there is due process - fairness - in our courts.
The Feeney Amendment orders the Sentencing Commission to keep records of each federal judge whose sentences are downward departures from the commission's guidelines. These reports on judges who are "soft" on sentencing must be given to Mr. Ashcroft, who is then required to inform the judiciary committees of the House and Senate about the "wayward" judges.
In addition, Mr. Ashcroft, taking command, sent an internal memorandum last July 28 to federal prosecutors around the country to report directly to the Justice Department - that is, "the General" - any reductions of sentences under the guidelines.
Reflecting the rising resentment of federal judges around the country is Manhattan Federal District Judge John S. Martin Jr. Nominated by the first President Bush, Mr. Martin, who had been on the federal bench for 13 years, has resigned his lifetime appointment. Explaining why in the New York Times editorial page, he wrote that, "For a judge to be deprived of the ability to consider all the factors that go into formulating a just sentence is completely at odds with the sentencing philosophy that has been a hallmark of the American system of justice."
In a concurring editorial, editors at the Chicago Tribune wrote that the Feeney Amendment "is handcuffing justice."
Years ago, after the U.S. Sentencing Commission guidelines had already begun to be responsible in large part for crowding our federal prisons, I interviewed New York Appellate Judge Burton Roberts, who had previously been one of the toughest law-and-order district attorneys I have covered in reporting on the criminal justice system.
Judge Roberts was outraged at the diminishing of judicial independence. "The description of the crime may be the same," he told me, "but each defendant is different. Judges are supposed to recognize these differences in imposing sentences."
Last August, at an American Bar Association meeting, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, who often votes with the so-called "conservative" bloc on the court, told ABA members that, as a whole, the sentencing guidelines "should be revised downward," and indeed he wants them repealed. "I can accept neither the necessity nor the wisdom," Justice Kennedy emphasized, "of federal mandatory minimum sentences."
A month later, the Judicial Conference of the United States - judges who set policy for the federal courts - unanimously asked Congress to repeal the Feeney Amendment.
As for the blacklist this law creates of judges under suspicion, Southern District Judge Robert P. Patterson charges: "Evidently, Congress sought to deter any (sentencing) departures by the implicit threat to trial judges that, if they are considered for appellate positions, they will be subjected to the type of demeaning and unseemly treatments which nominees to the courts of appeals have undergone at the hands of Congress in recent years." These demeaning assaults have come from Republican and Democratic senators alike.
Rep. John Conyers, Michigan Democrat, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, have introduced legislation to restore the independence of the judiciary in sentencing. But it will take pressure by the press, and then the public, to awaken Congress to what it has done. As Mr. Patterson warns, the Feeney Amendment changes our system of justice so "it will be regarded as subservient to our other branches of government - the system that prevailed for so many years behind the Iron Curtain."
Chief Justice Rehnquist is not given to hyperbole. His warning to the citizenry that individual judges must not be intimidated by Congress and the attorney general is justifiably urgent. More citizens should join him in warning Congress.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Australian Parents Have New Hope for U.S.-Detained Son
January 19, 2004
By RAYMOND BONNER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/asia/19AUST.html?pagewanted=all
ADELAIDE, Australia, Jan. 13 - Last year ended a bit brighter for Terry and Beverly Hicks, a working-class couple here. Ten days before Christmas, they were allowed to speak to their 28-year-old son, David, for the first time in more than two years.
"It was pretty exciting, pretty emotional," Mrs. Hicks said, sitting at the kitchen table of her simple home. Most of the conversation was about family; besides, the censors would not let him talk about other things, like how he was being treated, his parents said.
The Hicks's son, a high school dropout and roustabout adventurer, has been confined in a 6-feet-by-7-feet wire cage at the American military base at Guantánamo Bay since he was seized in Afghanistan in December 2001. He gets two brief exercise periods a week.
In December, Mr. Hicks was also finally allowed a visit by a lawyer, Stephen Kenny of Adelaide, who has often taken difficult and unpopular cases. It was the first time a civilian lawyer had been allowed access to a Guantánamo detainee, Mr. Kenny said, adding that he won access by agreeing not to discuss the conditions of Mr. Hicks's confinement.
Mr. and Mrs. Hicks do not believe that those belated gestures are a coincidence. A few weeks earlier, in November, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments in a lawsuit brought by Mr. Hicks and 15 other foreigners detained at Guantánamo Bay, challenging their lack of access to civilian courts.
The Bush administration argued that the court should not take the appeal. If it is to avoid a potentially adverse ruling, the administration needs to dispose of the detainees' cases before the scheduled argument in March.
In December, a Marine Corps lawyer, Maj. Michael Mori, was appointed to represent Mr. Hicks. He assured the Hickses that he would not "lie down for anyone," the senior Mr. Hicks said.
David Hicks's case may be the stickiest of those involved. The administration is now negotiating for the release of some of the detainees to their home countries, principally Britain, where they would be tried. But Australia says that if Mr. Hicks fought for the Taliban in Afghanistan, he did not violate any Australian laws at the time.
The Bush administration is holding some negotiations to urge Mr. Hicks to plead guilty to a crime, but it is unclear what crime he might have committed.
His case is often compared to that of John Walker Lindh, the Californian who was seized fighting for the Taliban. Mr. Lindh pleaded guilty to violating an American antiterrorism law and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
But Mr. Hicks is not an American citizen. There is no evidence that he killed or wounded any civilians or any American soldiers, said Mr. Kenny, his lawyer, who has enlisted the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights, a liberal public interest group in New York.
Nor does Mr. Hicks have any history of anti-Americanism, his parents said. In 1998, he fought with the Kosovo Liberation Army against the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic. A year later, a convert to Islam, he went to Pakistan. There, he joined Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group used by Pakistan's intelligence service to fight in Kashmir.
Lashkar-e-Taiba was closely linked with Al Qaeda, and Mr. Hicks was sent to Afghanistan, where he was when the United States went to war after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Contrary to most reports, he was not captured by the Americans on the battlefield, his father contended. The elder Mr. Hicks, a printer, went to Afghanistan last August, for a documentary being made about his son's life by a Sydney filmmaker, Curtis Levy. Mr. Hicks said he had met the commander of the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban group allied with the United States, which did capture his son.
The commander told Mr. Hicks that his son had been arrested while traveling in a van with several Afghan men, none of them armed, the father said.
Ten days later, the Afghan commander turned David Hicks over to the Americans, his father said.
His family has received fewer than a dozen letters from him in the last two years, and there is often a long delay before they are delivered.
"I have nothing to say because today is the same as six months ago and six months before that," David wrote to his parents last March; they received the letter in July. He wrote that he knew his father was "doing a lot to help me, but do not do it to a point so that it affects your health."
The next five lines of the letter were blacked out by the censors. "That's Cuba," were the next readable words. His parents assume that David had just described something about life at Guantánamo Bay.
In September, David Hicks received a letter his parents had written in May, with news that an aunt, Pat, had died of cancer.
"The news about Pat is extremely sad; in fact, unbelievable," David wrote back. "Why these things happen to good people."
He told his parents that he had been moved away from the rest of the detainees - the reason is not clear - and that as a result he saw only military police officers.
A lot has changed in the last year, said Mrs. Hicks, who is David's stepmother, and the developments in December suggest that some resolution appears to be ahead.
"But we've still got another harrowing year ahead," she said.
--------
Imam Accused of Lies on Terrorist Links
Charge Results From Citizenship Application in 1990s, U.S. Attorney Says
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 19, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28024-2004Jan18.html
The prominent Muslim cleric arrested last week on charges of lying about his ties to terrorist organizations has built a reputation as one of Cleveland's most respected religious leaders.
But authorities allege that Fawaz Damra, imam of Ohio's largest mosque, did not mention his connection to "terrorist organizations that advocated the persecution of Jews and others by means of violent terrorist attacks" when he applied for U.S. citizenship in the early 1990s.
"He's charged with providing the INS with false information," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Bakeman. "It's not a frequently used charge, because the situation does not arise very often."
Damra is accused of not disclosing his ties to the Alkifah Refugee Center, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and its offshoot, the Islamic Committee for Palestine. Damra, born in what are now the occupied Palestinian territories, co-founded the Alkifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, which sought recruits to help fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
The facility later became linked to Osama bin Laden, founder of the al Qaeda terrorist network. Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman took over the center and an affiliated mosque and was subsequently convicted and imprisoned in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Damra, 41, was secretly indicted in December, but the charges were not unsealed until last Tuesday, when he was arrested and appeared in court. He pleaded not guilty and was released on $160,000 bail. If convicted, he could serve up to five years in prison and lose his citizenship. His trial is scheduled for February.
His attorney, Joseph McGinness, said the charges are part of a misguided government effort -- at the expense of innocents -- to show that it is making headway in the war on terrorism.
"He's been very open about his past," McGinness said. "He's done a great deal to bridge the gap between various religions. You couldn't meet a nicer man."
Law enforcement officials say Damra also has had ties for years to Sami Arian, a former computer sciences professor in Florida who was indicted 11 months ago on charges of conspiracy to commit murder through suicide attacks on Jews in Israel and the Palestinian territories. The indictment said Arian has for years been a top leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist group. Arian denies the charges.
Officials say a person identified in the Arian indictment as "unindicted co-conspirator one" is Damra. The indictment said that at a Cleveland gathering in 1991, the unindicted co-conspirator introduced Arian and urged listeners to contribute funds to Arian's Tampa-based group, which authorities said was a front for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. All the remarks in the indictment attributed to the unindicted co-conspirator were made by Damra at the rally, terrorism experts said.
At the gathering, the unindicted co-conspirator said Arian's group was Palestinian Islamic Jihad's active arm in the United States, and he instructed his audience to turn off tape recorders because the discussion would be too sensitive to be taped, according to congressional testimony.
Damra became well known locally for more than a decade spent building bridges between the Islamic Center of Cleveland and Christians and Jews. But the sincerity of his efforts was questioned soon after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, when a television station ran a decade-old video of him discussing "directing all rifles at the first and last enemy of the Islamic nation and this is the sons of monkeys and pigs, the Jews." Damra later apologized.
Staff writer John Mintz contributed to this report.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Australia's Renewable Energy Review Sets Target Low
By Bob Burton
(ENS),
January 19, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-19-02.asp
CANBERRA, Australia - In a rebuff to environmentalists and the renewable energy industry, an Australian government committee Friday dismissed the need to require that 10 percent of the country's electricity originate from renewable sources such as the wind.
The committee, chaired by former Northern Territory conservative senator Grant Tambling, backed the current legislative requirement that the equivalent of two percent of the 2001 demand for electricity be obtained from renewable sources by 2010. This target should be gradually increased in the following decade to double that level and increased again by 2030, the committee said Friday.
The renewables industry and a broad coalition of labor, community and environmental groups had backed the adoption of a 10 percent target by 2010.
The high level panel was established in March 2003 to review the Commonwealth's Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) legislation. The MRET requires the sourcing of 9,500 gigawatt hours of extra renewable electricity per year by 2010 through to 2020 - enough power to meet the residential electricity needs of four million people.
While the panel received over 5,000 submissions, most in favor of increasing the target, the committee opted to propose only cautious amendments to the MRET law.
Under the current scheme, implemented in 2001, direct electricity users - such as major industry - and retailers are allocated shares of the two percent equivalent target to purchase. They face penalties for non-compliance of $40 per megawatt hour or four cents per kilowatt-hour.
The committee notes in its report that under the current law it expects investment in renewables to stall from 2007 due to the lack of further growth potential in the market.
But the panel dismissed the adoption of a more ambitious target on the grounds that it "would unnecessarily induce investment in marginal projects and raise costs to electricity users without commensurate benefits, and risks locking the industry into an uncompetitive cost structure."
Environment Minister David Kemp said Friday that the government remains committed to the MRET scheme, which he called "a world first in developing a legislated national renewable energy market based on an innovative system of tradeable certificates. MRET has been a cornerstone of the Australian government's renewable energy strategy," he said.
After almost three years of operation, the review panel found that MRET is meeting its objectives, with industry taking up the challenge of delivering new renewable energy projects, and meeting its targets, Kemp said. Some 190 power stations that run on renewable energy have been accredited across Australia.
Dr. Karl Mallon, communications director for the Australian Wind Energy Association (AusWEA), welcomes retention of the MRET but believes that unless a more ambitious target is adopted, Australia will miss the chance to be a major regional manufacturer of wind energy equipment.
"Our considerable reservation is that their timeframe for the targets is far too slow. They have pushed the target out to 2020 and actually the scheme doesn't fully mature until 2030," he said.
"A lot of the companies will now be looking at the MRET legislation to see whether there is enough in there to justify installing manufacturing capacity in Australia, said Mallon. "The critical issue they will be looking at is how many wind turbines will they be selling a year and will that justify building a factory."
"Unfortunately," he said, "this is still a very slow ramp up and what we needed was a much more considerable throughput earlier."
While there has been a boom in the establishment of wind farms in Australia, largely because of the MRET law, wind power has attracted opposition from the powerful mining, oil and aluminium industries.
"They are powerful they're is no doubt about it, and they have the ear of government," said Catherine Fitzpatrick a Greenpeace climate changer campaigner.
Fitzpatrick describes the panel's low renewables target as "tragic."
"It is insignificant," she said. "By 2010 growth in the power sector will have generated more greenhouse emissions than the small renewables target will have saved. There is nothing to stop the power sector from continuing to expand."
Rio Tinto, one of the world's largest mining companies with a major interest in aluminium smelting, opposes requiring a renewable energy target at all.
"Rio Tinto has significant exposure to existing and emerging greenhouse gas reduction measures," the company complained in its submission to the panel, saying that its aluminium subsidiary Comalco faces a "direct liability under the current MRET scheme over the 20 years of operation is expected to be nearly $200 million."
Rio Tinto does not believe supporting the development of renewables is a major priority for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
"Support for renewable energy alone would not provide a timely and cost-effective climate change response, and in isolation is unlikely to be sufficient for many decades at least," the company stated in its submission.
Instead, Rio Tinto wants the Australian government to focus its attention carbon sequestration, "the capture of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel use and its long term disposal in deep geological reservoirs" which it describes as "a promising prospect."
One supporter for what is termed "geo-sequestration" is Robin Batterham, who has a foot in each of two camps. Batterham works two days a week as the Australian government's chief scientific adviser and three days a week as the chief technologist for Rio Tinto.
Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown said last week that the government's own data shows it had even paid Batterham's expenses to attend two functions related to Rio Tinto.
One was the launch of a government funded Rio Tinto foundation for research into a sustainable minerals industry, and the other was attendance at the Rio Tinto Australian Science Olympiads awards dinner. Brown argues that Batterham should resign from one of his two roles.
While public opinion surveys show strong support for the development of wind energy, the Australian government has opted to follow the U.S. government position of refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol that imposes binding limits on industrialized countries for the emission of six greenhouse gases responsible for climate warming.
Australia's binding target under the Kyoto Protocol would have been an increase in emissions of eight percent in the period 2008-2012. According to Environment Minister Kemp, the government is still taking this target seriously. "MRET is a key plank in achieving Australia's 108 percent emissions target and in positioning Australia for a lower greenhouse signature," he said Friday.
But last week, Kemp confirmed that the government's own specialist Greenhouse agency had been directed to abandon further research work on the international emissions trading scheme that is central to the implementtion of the Kyoto Protocol.
Fitzpatrick of Greenpeace Australia believes the recommendation of a low renewables target reflects the government's determination to appease the fossil fuel lobby. "They are still not taking the wind industry seriously," she said. "What they should have done is adopted the 15 percent target so the industry can grow rapidly, reduce costs so they are cost-competitive with coal power and not need government support."
The Mandatory Renewable Energy Target Review Report is online at: http://www.mretreview.gov.au
-------- ACTIVISTS
Thousands of Iraqis Demand Elections on Day of U.N. Talks
January 19, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/19/international/middleeast/19CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 19 - Tens of thousands of Iraqis marched in Baghdad today to demand early elections, and an Iraqi official said that the death toll from a powerful truck bomb that exploded at the main gate of the American occupation headquarters on Sunday had risen to at least 24 people.
It was one of the worst suicide bombings in Iraq since a truck bomber struck the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations in August, killing 23 people. The United Nations is reviewing the issue of Iraq on Monday in New York, where top American and Iraqi officials are visiting officials for an important meeting.
Iraq's health minister, Khudair Abbas, said today that in addition to the 24 people who had been killed in the Sunday suicide bombing, about 120 had been wounded, The Associated Press reported.
At least 18 of the dead were Iraqi civilians, and it was initially difficult initially to identify the nationalities of the other two people, military officials said on Sunday. Many of the wounded were Iraqis waiting to enter the compound to go to work. No Americans were killed, but several soldiers received minor wounds.
Though 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, Sunday's explosion was the first car bomb attack in the area.
The attackers appeared to be sending a pointed message by striking at the heart of the American authority in Baghdad one day before senior American and Iraqi officials were to meet at the United Nations to discuss resistance from a powerful Shiite cleric to coalition plans for the scheduled transfer to sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30.
The attack "was clearly timed to claim the maximum number of innocent victims," L. Paul Bremer III, the top American administrator here, said from the United States in a written statement. "Once again, it is innocent Iraqis who have been murdered by these terrorists in a senseless act of violence."
In the meeting in New York today, Mr. Bremer and other American and Iraqi officials are expected to try to persuade the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to send a delegation here to lend legitimacy to caucus-style elections for a transitional assembly. That is contrary to the wishes of Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the most influential Shiite cleric in Iraq, who renewed a call for direct elections on Jan. 11, hobbling the American plans.
Mainly because of security concerns, the United Nations has not returned to Iraq since it suffered the devastating suicide bombing in August, and it is unclear how the Sunday's attack on the American compound in Baghdad will affect the New York talks.
The American military said in a statement today that on Sunday an American soldier died of wounds he sustained on Friday from an explosive device in the Iraqi city of Samarra.
In Sunday's bomb attack, 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 at about 8 a.m., just 50 feet from the gate, military officials said.
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 Second Brigade of the First Armored Division. Concrete blast walls helped protect Iraqis standing at the checkpoint, who suffered wounds rather than death in many cases. He added that the fact that the explosion was outside the perimeter was considered a security success.
American officials have used the walled-off area, called the green zone, since the fall of Baghdad in April. Because the 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.
In Al Karama hospital on Sunday, 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, waiting to be let into the compound. "I felt as if a storm had hit," said Mr. Ali, 23, who does maintenance for water pumps in the compound. "There was a huge blast and smoke and fire everywhere. Then the Americans began shooting."
Colonel Baker disputed his account, though, saying American soldiers did not open fire.
In regards to the meeting at the United Nations in New York today, many United Nations officials have complained that they were deliberately kept at a distance during the planning stage and are now being asked to validate a process from which they were excluded.
The United Nations withdrew from Iraq after the bombing of its headquarters in August, where the victims included Mr. Annan's senior envoy here, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The bombing on Sunday was the deadliest single attack in Baghdad since that attack on the United Nations, which has said it is reluctant to have its staff members return until security improves.
Neela Banerjee and John H. Cushman Jr. contributed reporting for this article.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.