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NUCLEAR
City on Fire: Anatomy of a Nuclear Blast
Empty Nuclear Fuel Shipping Trucks Crash After Delivery
Bushwhacking Mother Nature
Czech nuclear workers demand EU-level pay
Radiation May Help After Cancer Surgery
'Hero' suspected in nuke transfer
India, Pakistan have 'definite desire' for peace: defence minister
Pakistani Nuclear Scientists Scrutinized
Iran Said to Renege on Nuclear Promises
US delegation briefs Congress on North Korea nuclear trip
Three Nations to Discuss N. Korea Nukes
Japan, U.S., S.Korea to Discuss North This Week
Experts Arrive in Libya to Dismantle WMD
American and British Weapons Experts Return to Libya
U.S. Will Work With U.N. Agency in Libya
A Puppet Fantasy Evokes the True Aftermath of Hiroshima
Domestic Issues Hurt Bush in Poll
Senator John Kerry's Environmental Policy
Statement of John Kerry on Libya's Dismantling Weapons of Mass Destruction
Democrats' response
MILITARY
11 Civilians Reported Killed In a U.S. Raid In Afghanistan
U.S. Strike Killed 11 Villagers, Afghans Say
Swedish FM proposes sending troops to Liberia
China Rebukes Taiwan's Leader On New Plans For Referendum
Iran Council Backs Off a Bit on Barred Politicians
Thousands of Iraqis Demand Death for Hussein
A Raid in Iraq, And a Glimpse Into the World Of Infiltrators
Missile Lands in U.S. Compound in Iraq
Israeli warplanes raid Lebanon after Hezbollah attack
Israeli fighter jets strike south Lebanon
Israel Warplanes Attack Hezbollah in Lebanon
Israel Planes Attack Hezbollah in Lebanon
Hezbollah Kills Israeli Soldier in Attack at Border
French troops arrive in Kuwait for wargames
Russia Space Engineers Eager to Join U.S.
Annan Signals He'll Agree to Send U.N. Experts to Iraq
U.N. to Consider Request to Study Earlier Elections in Iraq
G.I.'s Headed for Iraq Train for Peace as Well as War
International Criminal Court to Get Evidence of 'Illegality' of Iraq War
UK cluster bombs may be war crime
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
New Kinds of Drug Tests Weighed for Federal Workers
Bush Pushes Plan to Permit Internet Surveillance
ENERGY
Clean energy and efficiency investments would create 3.3 million jobs
ACTIVISTS
Huge March Backs Cleric Over U.S. Plan
Anti-Globalization Forum Adds Variety of Causes to Its Agenda
Shiites March for Elections in Iraq
-------- NUCLEAR
City on Fire: Anatomy of a Nuclear Blast
Tuesday January 20 2004
By Lynn Eden
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2004/jf04/jf04eden.html
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/01/20/4604326
By ignoring the fire damage that would result from a nuclear attack and taking into account blast damage alone, U.S. war planners were able to demand a far larger nuclear arsenal than necessary.
For more than 50 years, the U.S. government has seriously underestimated damage from nuclear attacks. The earliest schemes to predict damage from atomic bombs, devised in 1947 and 1948, focused only on blast damage and ignored damage from fire, which can be far more devastating than blast effects.
The failure to include damage from fire in nuclear war plans continues today. Because fire damage has been ignored for the past half-century, high-level U.S. decision makers have been poorly informed, if informed at all, about the extent of damage that nuclear weapons would actually cause. As a result, any U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons almost certainly would be predicated on insufficient and misleading information. If nuclear weapons were used, the physical, social, and political effects could be far more destructive than anticipated.
How can this systematic failure to assess fire damage have persisted for more than half a century? The most common response is that fire damage from nuclear weapons is inherently less predictable than blast damage. This is untrue. Nuclear fire damage is just as predictable as blast damage.
One bomb, one city
To visualize the destructiveness of a nuclear bomb, imagine a powerful strategic nuclear weapon detonated above the Pentagon, a short distance from the center of Washington, D.C. [1] Imagine it is a "near-surface" burst-about 1,500 feet above the ground-which is how a military planner might choose to wreak blast damage on a massive structure like the Pentagon. Let us say that it is an ordinary, clear day with visibility at 10 miles, and that the weapon's explosive power is 300 kilotons-the approximate yield of most modern strategic nuclear weapons. This would be far more destructive than the 15-kiloton bomb detonated at Hiroshima or the 21-kiloton bomb detonated at Nagasaki. [2]
Washington, D.C., has long been a favorite hypothetical target. [3] But a single bomb detonated over a capital city is probably not a realistic planning assumption.
When a former commander in chief of the U.S. Strategic Command read my scenario, he wanted to know why I put only one bomb on Washington. "We must have targeted Moscow with 400 weapons," he said. He explained the military logic of planning a nuclear attack on Washington: "You'd put one on the White House, one on the Capitol, several on the Pentagon, several on National Airport, one on the CIA, I can think of 50 to a hundred targets right off. . . . I would be comfortable saying that there would be several dozens of weapons aimed at D.C." Moreover, he said that even today, with fewer weapons, what makes sense would be a decapitating strike against those who command military forces. Today, he said, Washington is in no less danger than during the Cold War.
The discussion that follows greatly understates the damage that would occur in a concerted nuclear attack, and not only because I describe the effects of a single weapon. I describe what would happen to humans in the area, but I do not concentrate on injury, the tragedy of lives lost, or the unspeakable loss to the nation of its capital city. These are important. But I am concerned with how organizations estimate and underestimate nuclear weapons damage; thus, I focus largely, as do they, on the physical environment and on physical damage to structures.
With this in mind, let us look at some of the consequences of a nuclear weapon detonation, from the first fraction of a second to the utter destruction from blast and fire that would happen within several hours. This will allow us to understand the magnitude of the damage from both effects, but particularly from fire, which is neither widely understood nor accounted for in damage prediction in U.S. nuclear war plans.
Unimaginable lethality
The detonation of a 300-kiloton nuclear bomb would release an extraordinary amount of energy in an instant-about 300 trillion calories within about a millionth of a second. More than 95 percent of the energy initially released would be in the form of intense light. This light would be absorbed by the air around the weapon, superheating the air to very high temperatures and creating a ball of intense heat-a fireball.
Because this fireball would be so hot, it would expand rapidly. Almost all of the air that originally occupied the volume within and around the fireball would be compressed into a thin shell of superheated, glowing, high-pressure gas. This shell of gas would compress the surrounding air, forming a steeply fronted, luminous shockwave of enormous extent and power-the blast wave.
By the time the fireball approached its maximum size, it would be more than a mile in diameter. It would very briefly produce temperatures at its center of more than 200 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 100 million degrees Celsius)-about four to five times the temperature at the center of the sun.
This enormous release of light and heat would create an environment of almost unimaginable lethality. Vast amounts of thermal energy would ignite extensive fires over urban and suburban areas. In addition, the blast wave and high-speed winds would crush many structures and tear them apart. The blast wave would also boost the incidence and rate of fire-spread by exposing ignitable surfaces, releasing flammable materials, and dispersing burning materials.
Within minutes of a detonation, fire would be everywhere. Numerous fires and firebrands-burning materials that set more fires-would coalesce into a mass fire. (Scientists prefer this term to "firestorm," but I will use them interchangeably here.) This fire would engulf tens of square miles and begin to heat enormous volumes of air that would rise, while cool air from the fire's periphery would be pulled in. Within tens of minutes after the detonation, the pumping action from rising hot air would generate superheated ground winds of hurricane force, further intensifying the fire. [4]
Virtually no one in an area of about 40-65 square miles would survive.
A little farther away
At Pentagon City, a shopping and office complex about seven-tenths of a mile from ground zero, light from the fireball would melt asphalt in the streets, burn paint off walls, and melt metal surfaces within a half second of the detonation. The interiors of vehicles and buildings in line of sight of the fireball would explode into flames.
Roughly one second later, the blast wave and 750-mile-per-hour winds would arrive, tossing burning cars into the air like leaves in a windstorm. At this distance, the blast wave and thermal radiation would be more powerful and destructive than at ground zero in Hiroshima.
The compressed air and winds associated with the shockwave could cause structures to cave in and might even topple large office buildings. The massive concrete and steel office buildings at Pentagon City might not be knocked down, but all nonsupporting interior walls and doors would be shattered, their fragments blown away at high speed. Window frames, glass, heavy desks, tables, filing cabinets, chairs, and other furnishings would become missiles and shrapnel. Within minutes, the insides of buildings still standing would be burning pyres of splintered walls, doors, and other combustibles.
Seconds after the blast wave passed, suction effects created in part by the rising fireball would reverse the winds, drawing them toward ground zero. Trees and other objects could be sucked toward the point of detonation.
Within a slightly longer distance from the Pentagon-about 1.3 miles-are most of Arlington National Cemetery, most of the Virginia Highlands and Addison Heights neighborhoods, and parts of Washington, D.C., including the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials.
At this distance, for a split second the fireball would shine more than 5,000 times brighter than a desert sun at noon. Thermal energy from the fireball-more than 15 times more intense than that at the edge of the mass fire that destroyed Hiroshima-would radiate onto exposed surfaces in just seconds.
All combustible materials illuminated by the fireball would spew fire and black smoke. Grass, vegetation, and leaves on trees would explode into flames; the surface of the ground would explode into superheated dust. Any flammable material inside buildings (paper, curtains, upholstery) that was directly exposed would burst into flame. The marble on the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials would crack, pop, and possibly evaporate. If the light from the fireball illuminated part of the bronze statue of Jefferson, its surface would melt.
Trees and telephone poles would recoil from the flaming gases. Birds in flight would drop from the sky in flames. The air would be filled with dust, fire, and smoke. Visitors at Arlington National Cemetery or the Lincoln or Jefferson memorials who were directly exposed to the fireball's light would be killed instantly. Others would not survive long.
It would take about four seconds after the detonation for the shockwave to arrive at the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. They would collapse instantly. As the shockwave passed over, it would engulf all structures in high pressure and crush all but the strongest. The blast wave would generate ferocious winds of 300-400 miles per hour that would persist for about a second and a half.
The winds and the crushing overpressure would tear apart many strong structures. Wood-frame and residential brick buildings would be completely destroyed. Other structures at this range, such as the Arlington Memorial Bridge and the George Mason Memorial Bridge, might not collapse, but anyone caught in the open or even sheltered behind these structures would be killed within seconds or minutes.
The high winds would tear structural elements from buildings and cause them to disintegrate explosively into smaller pieces. Some of these pieces would then become destructive projectiles, causing further damage. The superheated, dust-laden winds would be strong enough to overturn trucks and railroad cars.
Just beyond this range, about 1.6 miles from the Pentagon, aircraft at Reagan National Airport would be exposed to a light flash from the fireball more than 3,000 times brighter than a desert sun at noon. The thermal radiation would melt and warp aluminum surfaces on aircraft. Interior sections of the aircraft illuminated by the fireball would burst into flames. The tires of the aircraft would catch fire, as would the tires and fuel hoses of service vehicles near the aircraft.
Three miles from ground zero
The Capitol, the House and Senate office buildings, and the Library of Congress are all about three miles from the Pentagon, and just beyond is Union Station. The Mall and the White House are closer. The monumental structures on Capitol Hill are among the strongest civilian buildings in the world: They are reinforced concrete, two- to 10-story buildings of earthquake-resistant design. The surrounding neighborhood mostly comprises private two -to four-story dwellings with brick, load-bearing walls, surrounded by many trees.
At the Capitol, the fireball would be as bright as a thousand suns and would deliver nearly three times the thermal energy deposited at the perimeter of the mass fire at Hiroshima. The Capitol is well constructed to resist fire and stands in an open space at a distance from other buildings, but it would probably suffer heavy fire damage. Light from the fireball shining through its windows would ignite papers, curtains, light fabrics, and some upholstery. The House and Senate office buildings would suffer greater damage-their interiors would probably burn, as would the area's adjacent residential buildings and trees.
Fire would be virtually everywhere within three miles of ground zero. Clothes worn by people in the direct line of sight of the fireball would burst into flames or melt, and uncovered skin would be scorched, charring flesh and causing third-degree burns.
It would take the blast wave 12-14 seconds after the fireball's light flash to travel three miles. At this distance, the blast wave would persist for well over two seconds and be accompanied by near-hurricane winds of 100 miles per hour. Buildings of heavy construction on Capitol Hill would suffer little or no structural damage, but all exterior windows would be shattered, and nonsupporting interior walls and doors would be severely damaged or blown down.
At a distance of 3.5 miles from the detonation, the light flash from the fireball would still be severe, delivering twice the thermal energy at the edge of the mass fire at Hiroshima. The light and heat to surfaces would approximate 600 desert suns at noon. Black smoke would effuse from wood houses as paint burned off wood surfaces and furnishings ignited.
At Union Station, not quite 3.5 miles from the Pentagon, the majestic front facade of glass would be smashed into razor-sharp projectiles. Curtains, table cloths, and other combustibles would ignite on the upper decks. Blast damage would not be nearly as severe as it would be closer to the point of detonation, but streets would be blocked with fallen debris. The scouring effects of the high winds accompanying the shockwave would loft dust into the air. Fires would be everywhere. Dust and smoke would create a dense, low-visibility, foglike environment, impeding the ability of individuals and emergency response teams to move about.
Even at this and greater distances from the detonation, fires would result from the tremendous release of thermal energy. Fires would also be started by the breakup of buildings from the blast wave and its accompanying winds.
Structural breakup would start fires by releasing flammable materials (gas, chemicals, and other hazards), by exposing and shorting electrical lines and equipment, and by exposing additional ignitable surfaces. These are "blast-disruption" fires. More ignitions would be caused by fire spread from radiant heat and from the winds accompanying the blast wave, which would carry firebrands. [5] In all probability, fires would be ignited to a distance of about 4.6 miles from the detonation-over an area of approximately 65 square miles.
A hurricane of fire
Within tens of minutes after the cataclysmic events associated with the detonation, a mass of buoyantly rising, fire-heated air would signal the start of a second and distinctly different event-a mass fire of gigantic scale and ferocity. The firestorm would quickly increase in intensity, generating ground winds of hurricane force with average air temperatures well above the boiling point of water. This would produce a lethal environment over a vast area.
The Pentagon is located near the relatively wide Potomac River, but fires would start simultaneously in large areas on both sides. The direction of fire winds in regions near the river would be modified by the water, but the overall wind pattern from these two huge and nearly contiguous fire zones would be similar to that of a single mass fire and will be treated as one.
The first indicator of a mass fire would be strangely shifting ground winds of growing intensity near ground zero. (Such winds are entirely different from and unrelated to the earlier blast-wave winds that exert "drag pressure" on structures.) These fire-winds are a physical consequence of the rise of heated air over large areas of ground surface, much like a gigantic bonfire.
The inrushing winds would drive the flames from combusting buildings horizontally toward the ground, filling city streets with hot flames and firebrands, breaking in doors and windows, and causing the fire to jump hundreds of feet to swallow anything that was not yet violently combusting. These extraordinary winds would transform the targeted area into a huge hurricane of fire. Within tens of minutes, everything within approximately 3.5 to 4.6 miles of the Pentagon would be engulfed in a mass fire. The fire would extinguish all life and destroy almost everything else.
Firestorm physics
This description of the physics of mass fire is based on the work of a few scientists who have examined in detail the damaging effects of nuclear weapons, including nuclear engineer Theodore A. Postol and physicist Harold Brode. Postol is one of the country's leading non-government-funded technical experts on nuclear weapons, missiles, and arms control. Brode's five-decade career has been devoted to the study of nuclear weapons effects.
That mass fires have occurred, and that something like the firestorm described here could occur, is not in dispute. What is not widely accepted is that nuclear weapons detonated in urban or suburban areas would be virtually certain to set mass fires, and that the resulting damage is as predictable as blast damage. The much more widely held view is that the probability and range of mass fire depends on many unpredictable environmental variables, including rain, snow, humidity, temperature, time of year, visibility, and wind conditions.
But the work of Postol, Brode, and Brode's collaborators shows that mass fire creates its own environment. Except in extreme cases, environmental factors do not affect the likelihood of mass fire. Weather can affect the fire's range, but this can be reasonably well predicted. For nuclear weapons of approximately 100 kilotons or more, the range of destruction from mass fire will generally be substantially greater than from blast. The extraordinarily high air temperatures and wind speeds characteristic of a mass fire are the inevitable physical consequence of many simultaneous ignitions occurring over a vast area. The vacuum created by buoyantly rising air follows from the basic physics of combustion and fluid flow (hydro- or fluid dynamics). As the area of the fire increases, so does the volume of rising air over the fire zone, causing even more air to be sucked in from the periphery of the fire at increasingly higher speeds.
Only a few mass fires have occurred in human history: those created by British and U.S. conventional incendiary weapons and by U.S. atomic bombs in World War II. These include fires that destroyed Hamburg, Dresden, Kassel, Darmstadt, and Stuttgart in Germany, and Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki in Japan. History's first mass fire began on the night of July 27, 1943, in Hamburg-created by allied incendiary raids. Within 20 minutes, two-thirds of the buildings within an area of 4.5 square miles were on fire. It took fewer than six hours for the fire to completely burn an area of more than five square miles. Damage analysts called it the "Dead City." Wind speeds were of hurricane force; air temperatures were 400-500 degrees Fahrenheit. Between 60,000 and 100,000 people were killed in the attack. [6]
A mass fire from a modern nuclear bomb could be expected to destroy a considerably larger urban or suburban area, in a similarly short time.
The unique features of the mass fire fundamentally distinguish it from the more slowly propagating line fire. Famous line fires include the great urban fires that destroyed London (1666), Chicago (1871), and San Francisco (1906); the forest fire that swept Peshtigo, Wisconsin (1871); the suburban fire that burned the Oakland, California, hills (1991); and the combined forest and suburban fires that recently devastated southern California (2003). [7] These fires were terrifying and destructive, but they were not mass fires. They burned and spread for days and were not ignited simultaneously over very large areas. They generated high temperatures and winds, but not on the scale or with the intensity of mass fires.
The dynamics of mass fire are grounded in Newtonian laws of conservation of mass, momentum, and energy; classical hydrodynamic equations can be applied to mass fire. A nuclear detonation ignites material that releases energy into a fluid-the atmosphere. The region of atmosphere being heated can be approximated as a thin disc-shaped volume near the earth's surface. By solving the hydrodynamic equations, it is possible to calculate the flow of rising air from the heated fire zone and the lateral inflow of cool air near the ground from just outside the periphery of the fire zone. These equations model the behavior of mass fire.
Fire environments created by mass fires are fundamentally more violent and destructive than smaller-scale fires, and they are far less affected by external weather conditions. They are not substantially altered by seasonal and daily weather conditions.
There are, of course, uncertainties in the damage ranges associated with the initiation and spread of mass fires, and variations in environmental conditions could contribute to these uncertainties. For example, the location of the perimeter of mass fire following a nuclear attack cannot be predicted precisely. How the topography or the weather might affect the range of mass fire is also uncertain. But uncertainty over the extent of damage associated with mass fire can be estimated and modeled, and this uncertainty is not greater than that associated with blast damage.
Moreover, for higher-yield weapons (more than 100 kilotons), under almost all conditions fire damage will be far more destructive than blast damage. In addition, "fire may cause more complete and permanent damage. A structure only moderately damaged by blast may be gutted and rendered useless by fire. Similarly, building contents may survive the blast but be destroyed by the fires." [8]
What effect could the weather have on the probability and range of mass fire? Reductions in visibility because of rain, fog, haze, or smoke could absorb or scatter thermal radiation from the detonation and reduce or attenuate the amount that would reach exposed structures, equipment, and people. But even with a reduction in visibility from 10 miles to five (from the visibility of a relatively clear day to a misty rainy day), enough thermal energy would be delivered to set a mass fire out to three miles from ground zero. Even with visibility reduced to two miles, the flash would set a mass fire out to 2.2 miles from ground zero. (Visibility in the Washington, D.C., area is 10 miles or greater about 64 percent of the time. Visibility is five miles or greater 90 percent of the time, and visibility is two miles or greater 98.5 percent of the time.) [9]
The flash from the fireball from a 300-kiloton detonation would set a mass fire under virtually all weather conditions.
If the ground were snow-covered, vegetation covered by snow would not be ignited at first, but light and heat from the fireball would be reflected by the snow, roughly doubling the amount of light entering building windows. Further, during periods of cold weather when snow cover would be a factor, the warm interiors of buildings have very low relative humidities, greatly increasing the likelihood of ignitions. The mass fire set at Dresden in February 1945 by non-nuclear incendiary weapons occurred in "winter with snow on the ground. It was cold and wet and cloudy outside, but there was fuel inside where it was warm and dry." Similarly, in the first incendiary attack on Tokyo, in February 1945, the city "was covered by snow . . . but about one square mile was burned out." [10]
If a nuclear weapon were detonated below cloud cover, reflections off the clouds would increase the light shining into buildings by a factor of about two. When there is both snow and cloud cover, light reflected could intensify the fire-initiating fireball flash roughly by a factor of four.
Only if detonations occurred at altitudes above cloud cover or in periods of very intense rain or heavy ground fog would the size of the fire zone be as small as the zone of severe blast damage.
Severe weather conditions in Washington, D.C., are rare and can be taken into account by military war planners. More generally, the likelihood of severe weather is known for many locations and time of year. In addition, real-time or near real-time weather data have been available on a global basis for decades. The U.S. military maintains its own weather satellites to forecast cloud cover, predict low-altitude weather systems, and collect wind data.
Because of the many ways fires can start and spread, it is reasonable to assume that a mass fire with a radius of at least 3.5 miles would occur in all but the most extreme weather conditions. The fire would generate its own extremely intense winds; air temperatures would be so high that wet surfaces would quickly dry, and the relative humidity within the fire zone would be very low. Such a fire would be only weakly influenced by external weather conditions.
Blast and fire damage
In the late 1970s, Brode and a team of scientists at Pacific-Sierra Research began to investigate the possibility of incorporating the effects of fire into damage prediction for nuclear targeting under contract for the Defense Nuclear Agency. By the late 1980s, Brode and his colleagues thought they had developed an analytical basis for predicting fire and blast damage from nuclear weapons. But in early 1992, federal funding for the nuclear fire and blast damage studies begun by Brode was canceled. (The issue was later revisited and, as far as I know, remains under consideration.) If the U.S. government were to take both fire and blast into account, its predictions regarding nuclear weapons damage would have to change.
We can see how great the changes would be by comparing the differences in damage predicted by the above hypothetical scenario, which takes into account both blast and fire damage, with the results of the method used by the U.S. government, which predicts only blast damage. For many targets, although not all, the differences are great.
The government's way of predicting damage to structures, installations, and equipment uses the Physical Vulnerability Handbook-Nuclear Weapons, published by the Defense Intelligence Agency. It exists in a number of editions, from 1954 to 1992. [11] The Handbook characterizes structures in terms of their physical vulnerability to blast effects using "vulnerability numbers" (VNs) at specified damage levels. [12] Physical vulnerability sounds like the opposite of the widely used term "target hardness," but for all practical purposes it is the same: A target is strong, or hard, up to the point at which it is vulnerable, or fails. Physical vulnerability is stated in terms of level of damage that the structure would be expected to sustain at a given overpressure-severe, moderate, or light damage. Severe structural damage is defined as "that degree of structural damage to a building which precludes further use of the building for the purpose intended without essentially complete reconstruction or replacement. A building sustaining severe structural damage requires extensive repair before it can be used for any purpose." Moderate damage is "that degree of structural damage to principal load-bearing members . . . of a building which precludes effective use of the building for the purpose intended until major repairs are made." [13] The Handbook does not describe light structural damage for buildings, presumably because such damage would not be severe enough to bother with in targeting calculations.
Despite the sophisticated understanding of blast waves and structural response embedded in the government's vulnerability number system, for many types of targets the total damage that would occur in a nuclear attack is vastly understated because only blast damage is taken into account.
Take, for example, a target of interest to military planners-an aircraft carrier. The Handbook gives aircraft carriers a VN of 11P0 for moderate damage. (In this code, 11 is a rating of target hardness that translates to blast pressure; P indicates a type of target that responds mainly to overpressure, not drag pressure; 0 means the target is not sensitive to the duration of blast pressure.) At this rating, according to the government's method of calculating damage the aircraft carrier would sustain "about half loss in ability to deliver weapons effectively, because of damage to equipment or topside structure, or because of personnel casualties." The carrier's target-acquisition and communication equipment, however, are predicted to be operative. [14]
This code corresponds to blast-wave pressure that in a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon attack on the Pentagon would occur about 1.6 miles from ground zero. For purposes of illustration, such a target could be located in the Potomac River near Reagan National Airport. On an aircraft carrier at this range, the thermal flash would be more than 4,000 times brighter than a desert sun at noon, and the winds would be over 250 miles per hour. The light flash would ignite clothing, rubber, and exposed petroleum products; seven seconds later, the blast wave and winds would overturn and break up the carrier's fuel-laden planes. Under these conditions, the carrier could become a floating inferno. It is highly unlikely that sailors on it would be able to deliver half of its weapons effectively.
Damage to aircraft on the carrier and a little farther away at Reagan National Airport is also underestimated. According to the Handbook, light fighter and bomber aircraft located about 1.8 miles from a detonation and oriented "nose-on" toward it would sustain only "light damage," which it describes as "structural failure of small control surfaces, bomb bay doors, wheel doors, fuselage skin damage, and damage due to flying debris. Requires one to four hours repair but may permit limited flight." At this distance, the blast wave would cause the complete collapse and disintegration of typical two-story wood-frame and brick buildings. The winds accompanying the blast would be a little less than 220 miles per hour. Given that aircraft routinely fly into winds of several hundred miles per hour, we can see how the Handbook might arrive at such a prediction of damage.
But when the thermal effects are considered, "light damage" is understated. At a range of 1.8 miles, the light flash from the bomb would be thousands of times brighter than a noonday sun. The surfaces of the aircraft would warp and melt and tires and other components would burst into flames, rendering the aircraft inoperable.
These targets would be deep within the perimeter of mass fire. Farther away from the detonation, the built-up areas of Capitol Hill would be engulfed in a mass fire that would extinguish all life and destroy nearly all buildings and residences, large or small. Only the Capitol and some similarly monumental buildings on the Mall might be spared from complete destruction.
According to the calculations used in the Handbook, for a 300-kiloton detonation, severe damage could be expected against such massive buildings only if they were one mile from the detonation, and moderate damage only if they were within 1.2 miles.
What level of damage would the Handbook predict for the buildings on Capitol Hill, approximately three miles from the Pentagon? At this range, blast pressure and wind forces would not meet the government's criteria for achieving severe or moderate damage. But fire would cause damage that would be severe indeed.
Even if visibility were below two miles, an area of 12-15 square miles would be destroyed. This is two to three times the area destroyed in the incendiary attack on Hamburg in 1943. If visibility were five miles or greater, an area of approximately 25-45 square miles would burn. On a clear day, when visibility is 10 miles or greater, 40-65 square miles would burn.
Average air temperatures in the burning areas after the attack would be well above the boiling point of water; winds generated by the fire would be hurricane force; and the fire would burn everywhere at this intensity for three to six hours. Even after the fire burned out, street pavement would be so hot that even tracked vehicles could not pass over it for days, and buried, unburned material from collapsed buildings could burst into flames if exposed to air even weeks after the fire.
Those who sought shelter in basements of strongly constructed buildings could be poisoned by carbon monoxide seeping in, or killed by the ovenlike conditions. Those who tried to escape through the streets would be incinerated by the hurricane-force winds laden with firebrands and flames. Even those able to find shelter in the lower-level sub-basements of massive buildings would likely die of eventual heat prostration, poisoning from fire-generated gases, or lack of water. The firestorm would eliminate all life in the fire zone.
Lynn Eden is the associate director for research at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation. This article is adapted from the first chapter of her book, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (December 2003).
1. I have written this in close consultation with Theodore A. Postol; Alex Montgomery also provided technical guidance. Sources include: Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, eds., The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3d ed. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1977); Theodore A. Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires following Nuclear Attacks in or near Urban Areas," in Fredric Solomon and Robert Q. Marston, eds., The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1986), pp. 15-72; Theodore A. Postol, "Targeting," in Ashton B. Carter, John D. Steinbruner, and Charles A. Zraket, eds., Managing Nuclear Operations (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1987), pp. 373-406; Lachlan Forrow et al., "Accidental Nuclear War-A Post-Cold War Assessment," New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 338, no. 18 (1998): 1326-1331; R. D. Small and H. L. Brode, Physics of Large Urban Fires, PSR Report 1010, final report for Federal Emergency Management Agency, Washington, D.C. (Santa Monica, Calif.: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., March 1980); H. L. Brode, G. P. Fisher, P. F. X. Konokpa, A. Laupa, and G. E. McClellan, Fire Damage to Urban/Industrial Targets, vol. 1, Executive Summary, and voluminous unclassified material from vol. 2, Technical Report, PSR Report 1936, prepared for Headquarters Defense Nuclear Agency, Washington D.C. (Los Angeles: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., 1989).
2. Glasstone and Dolan, Effects of Nuclear Weapons, list the yield of the bomb at Hiroshima as 12.5 kilotons; in United States Nuclear Tests, July 1945 through September 1992, DOE/NV-209-Rev. 15 (Las Vegas: Energy Department, Nevada Operations Office, December 2000), p. xi, the Energy Department lists the yield at Hiroshima as 15 kilotons. Both publications list the yield of the Nagasaki bomb as 21 kilotons.
3. See, for example, "Preview of the War We Do Not Want," special issue of Collier's (October 27, 1951).
4. Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires," pp. 59-66.
5. Harold L. Brode and Richard D. Small, Fire Damage and Strategic Targeting, PSR Note 567, sponsored by Defense Nuclear Agency, Washington, D.C. (Los Angeles: Pacific-Sierra Research Corp., June 1983), pp. 10-21; Brode et al., Fire Damage to Urban/ Industrial Targets, vol. 1.
6. On Tokyo, see U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, Physical Damage Division, Effects of Incendiary Bomb Attacks on Japan, a Report on Eight Cities (n.p., April 1947), pp. 65-117. On Hamburg, see Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires," pp. 52-53; and the broader treatment by Horatio Bond, "The Fire Attacks on German Cities," in Bond, ed., Fire and the Air War (Boston: National Fire Protection Association, 1946), pp. 76-97.
7. See Stephen J. Pyne, Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). On the power of a single forest fire, see the American classic by Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
8. Brode and Small, Fire Damage and Strategic Targeting, pp. 32, 22.
9. These figures are based on a decade of hourly weather observations at Reagan National Airport. See Federal Climate Complex, Asheville, N.C., U.S. Navy-U.S. Air Force, Department of Commerce, International Station Meteorological Climate Survey, prepared under authority of Commander, Naval Oceanography Command, Version 1.0, October 1990. I thank Benjamin Olding for finding these data.
10. Harold Brode, phone conversation with author, August 11, 1989; see also Small and Brode, Physics of Large Urban Fires, p. 18; and H. L. Brode and R. D. Small, "A Review of the Physics of Large Urban Fires," in Solomon and Marston, The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, p. 83. Robert Nathans, "Making the Fires That Beat Japan," in Bond, Fire and the Air War, p. 141.
11. I draw on a copy of the handbook marked "unclassified" (originally classified as confidential) from the late 1960s and early 1970s.
12. See Lynn Eden, Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter 7, for discussion of how VNs were used to produce the VN coding system, which has been used in all the physical vulnerability handbooks after 1954. See also the explanation of the VN system in the detailed study of U.S. nuclear war planning by Matthew G. McKinzie, Thomas B. Cochran, Robert S. Norris, and William M. Arkin, The U.S. Nuclear War Plan: A Time for Change (New York: Natural Resources Defense Council, June 2001), www.nrdc.org.
13. DIA, Physical Vulnerability Handbook-Nuclear Weapons, AP-550-1-2-69-INT (Washington, D.C.: DIA, 1969, with change 1 [1972] and change 2 [1974]), p. I-3.
14. Ibid., p. I-20.
--------
Empty Nuclear Fuel Shipping Trucks Crash After Delivery
BERWICK, Pennsylvania, (ENS)
January 20, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-20-09.asp#anchor4
From the "It Could Have Been Worse" file, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission today released the report of an accident between two tractor trailers carrying empty shipping boxes from a nuclear fuel shipment that just had been delivered to the Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant in central Pennsylvania.
The two tractor trailers involved in the shipment were amongst the vehicles in the accident that occurred at 8pm local time on January 14. One of the truck drivers was seriously injured. The trucks were severely damaged.
The Clinton County Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency was called to the scene by initial responders as well as the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. Both surveyed the shipping boxes and found no indication of radiation contamination, according to the commission.
The shipping boxes and vehicles are being held by the towing company until the shipping company can provide replacement vehicles. The commission states that the empty boxes were being shipped in accordance with U.S. Department of Transportation regulations.
The Susquehanna plant, located on the Susquehanna River in Luzerne County about seven miles north of Berwick, is owned jointly by PPL Susquehanna LLC and Allegheny Electric Cooperative Inc. and is operated by PPL Susquehanna.
-------- depleted uranium
Bushwhacking Mother Nature
US Environmental Destruction Abroad
by Heather Wokusch
www.dissidentvoice.org
January 20, 2004
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan04/Wokusch0120.htm
While some German politicians are worried about the closing of US military bases in their regions, others fear nasty surprises will surface after the Americans depart. The United States has consistently valued military power more than the environment - but at what price?
Some in the White House argue that US national interests transcend greenie niceties, and this certainly was the case with Bush's 3-day stay at Buckingham Palace last year. US security forces trashed the Royal Gardens, historic statues and even the palace itself in an effort to provide the best environment for the president. The Queen's ensuing outrage didn't seem to bother Washington: if US self-protection mandates despoiling a patch of land far away, then so be it.
The issue of US military bases overseas arouses similar conflicts. According to Gary Vest, an assistant deputy undersecretary of defense for environmental security, "There is not a [US] military base in the world that doesn't have some soil or ground water contamination. That is just a given."
A classic case involves the Clark and Subic bases in the Philippines, which after closing in 1992, were discovered to be veritable death traps: wells had been poisoned by insecticides, industrial waste and toxic metals had been buried in random landfills, and petroleum had leaked from underground tanks. As a result, ground water and nearby agricultural lands were contaminated, and Filipinos living at or near the bases suffered from disproportionately high rates of illness.
It gets worse: while the cost of decontaminating Clark and Subic was estimated to be $1 billion, the US claimed to be exempt from any clean-up liabilities, and even refused to provide technical assistance and pertinent documents.
Germany's tough environmental laws and strategic importance have ensured more favorable treatment thus far, but significant problems remain. In 1999, a US Department of Defense inspector general said base cleanup costs in Germany could total at least $1 billion.
Yet another black mark in the US environmental record abroad concerns toxic weaponry dumped on countries such as Afghanistan. Via independent monitoring of weapon types and delivery systems, the Uranium Medical Research Center (UMRC) indicated that "radioactive, toxic uranium alloys and hard-target uranium warheads were being used" by US-led coalition forces during 2001's Operation Enduring Freedom. UMRC's follow-up assessments of uranium contamination in Afghan civilians' urine samples found "abnormally high levels of non-depleted uranium," 400% to 2000% higher than normal population baselines.
Put bluntly, in addition to littering the Afghan countryside with cluster bombs and a seismic shock warheads, it appears US-led forces helped irradiate the local environment, with unspeakable civilian health implications.
Same story in Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf War, depleted uranium (DU) bullets and shells were widely used by US forces because of DU's ability to cut through conventional armor plating on tanks. DU-weaponry burns upon contact, emitting radioactive dust which can then spread across a large region.
Experts at the Pentagon and the United Nations estimate that while 375 tons of DU were used in Iraq during the Gulf War, up to 2,200 tons of DU were dumped on the country by US-led coalition forces during the 2003 invasion. DU remains destructive for 4.5 billion years.
But military bases and the War on Terror and aren't the only justifications given by the US for its assault on the global environment; its War on Drugs has dealt Mother Nature a separate death blow.
The White House has mandated a sharp increase in funding for aerial spraying of coca and opium poppy crops abroad, despite evidence that domestic drug treatment programs are 20 times more effective than eradicating drug supply at the source.
Aerial eradication, a process by which toxic herbicides are indiscriminately dumped from airplanes onto the land and water below, flies in the face of logic. A United Nations' study, for example, found that coca cultivation in Colombia tripled between 1996 and 2001, despite nearly one million acres of Colombian land having been sprayed during that time.
More alarmingly, an herbicide commonly used in US-sponsored Colombian eradication programs is Roundup Ultra, a broad-spectrum Monsanto product which destroys food crops, water supplies and Amazonian bio-diversity along with the intended coca and poppy plants. According to its warning label, Roundup Ultra should not directly come into contact with bodies of water, people, grazing animals, and desired crops; regardless, the US is funding Colombia to spray such herbicides over hundreds of thousands of hectares each year.
The theme is clear: too often America's War on Fill-in-the-Blank becomes a war on the environment, a trumped up justification to rape and pillage Mother Nature in the name of increased personal security.
And too often this approach backfires into a spiral of destruction and resentment.
It's safe to say George W. Bush will not be invited back to Buckingham Palace anytime soon - consider that door slammed. Given the ongoing attacks on American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, it would appear US interests are not welcome there either. And it's doubtful that aerial drug eradication in Latin America will lead to much else than hungry locals enraged at Yankee destruction of their habitat.
The White House has to learn that it's impossible to secure a sustainably safe environment through the destruction of nature and endangerment of people abroad.
-------- europe
Czech nuclear workers demand EU-level pay
PRAGUE (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120184129.kbb0j3qr.html
Around 200 employees of the Czech Republic's two nuclear power plants demonstrated Tuesday in front of the southwestern Temelin plant to press their demand a pay raise.
"In the year of our entry into the European Union, it is not an exaggerated demand our salaries be increased faster to the level in the EU," said the head of the CMKOS union, Milan Stech, which represents many of the plants' workers.
Employees at Temelin and southeastern Dukovany plants are seeking an eight percent pay raise this year, while the Czech electricity company CEZ (Ceske energeticke zavody) which manages the plants has offered a five percent increase.
Temelin employees earn an average of 27,000 korunas (825 euros, 1,025 dollars) per month, according to the plant's spokesman Milan Nebesar, more than 50 percent above the national average of 530 euros per month.
The nuclear plant employees had earlier threatened to hold a strike to press their wage demands.
The Temelin plant is located just 60 kilometers (36 miles) across the border from Austria and for years has been the center of controversy between the two countries.
Austria has denounced security measures at the plant and is concerned about its impact on the environment.
-------- health
Radiation May Help After Cancer Surgery
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Breast-Cancer.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Radiation after surgery for early-stage breast cancer improves survival chances for most patients, according to a study that analyzed the case histories of more than 9,000 women.
Two doctors evaluated the results of 15 international studies and found that women who omitted radiation therapy after surgery were dying at a rate 8.6 percent higher than women who had the radiation.
A decision against radiation ``may translate into a considerable survival disadvantage for patients,'' wrote Dr. Vincent Vinh-Hung of the Academic Hospital in Jette, Belgium, and Dr. Claire Verschraegen of the University of New Mexico Cancer Research and Treatment Center in Albuquerque.
A report on the analysis appears this week in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.
Radiation is given to most early-stage breast cancer patients who choose to undergo a surgical technique, called lumpectomy, that removes the tumor but leaves the rest of the breast intact, according to an editorial in the journal by Dr. Katherine A. Vallis and Dr. Ian F. Tannock of the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto.
The findings, they said, reinforce that practice.
All of the women in the studies had early-stage breast cancer and underwent breast-conserving surgery. In about half the cases, the patients went on to receive radiation therapy.
Besides improving survival rates, radiation significantly reduced the chance of a relapse of the disease, the study found. The authors found that women who did not undergo radiation were about three times as likely to develop cancer in the previously unaffected breast. The relapse rate was 0.4 percent to 2.1 percent per year for women who got radiation and 1.4 percent to 5.7 percent per year for women without it.
Despite the statistical survival benefit, however, Verschraegen said radiation is not appropriate for every patient. Some women may have other conditions, such as vascular disease or previous radiation treatments, that would make radiation therapy more risky than the cancer itself.
``These results should not be generalized,'' she said. Instead, Verschraegen said, physicians should evaluate each patient on a case-by-case basis and tailor the treatment appropriately.
Patients, said Verschraegen, should take an active role in the decision process.
``If a physician after surgery says that radiation is not needed, then it is important that the patient get a second opinion,'' she said.
A National Institutes of Health panel concluded in 2000 that radiation is necessary for all women who undergo a lumpectomy.
That panel said many women might also benefit from a combination of chemotherapy drugs to kill remaining cancer cells floating in the body. That post-surgery treatment is called ``adjuvant therapy.''
The new study did not look at the added effect of chemotherapy on survival or recurrence rates.
On the Net:
Journal of the National Cancer Institute: http://jncicancerspectrum.oupjournals.org/jnci/
-------- india / pakistan
'Hero' suspected in nuke transfer
January 20, 2004
By Anwar Iqbal
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040119-091832-7195r.htm
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Abdul Qadeer Khan, the man revered as a national hero as the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, might have been involved in the transfer of nuclear-weapons technology to Iran, Pakistani authorities say.
Yesterday, officials in Islamabad confirmed that they had detained some of Mr. Khan's senior aides for questioning.
"So far, our investigations indicate that only one man is behind this alleged transfer. It is wrong to blame an entire nation for the mistakes of an individual," a senior Pakistani official told United Press International after the detentions.
Without naming Mr. Khan, the official said, "We gave him the status of a national hero when he did something for the country, but now if he makes a mistake, he will have to pay for his mistake as well."
Mr. Khan and some of his associates already have been questioned about suspected involvement in selling bomb-making know-how to Iran.
Pakistan denies detaining its nuclear scientists for questioning, but says several have been "debriefed."
Masud Khan, a spokesman for the Pakistan Foreign Office, who is not related to the scientist, said it was wrong to "presume" that those being debriefed were guilty.
"Some of them could also be cleared," he said.
The investigations, he said, were being conducted under Pakistani laws and "those who have not violated these should have no fears whatsoever."
Pakistan has been investigating the export of nuclear technology and equipment to Iran since early last month, when U.S. news organizations first reported the proliferation.
Quoting officials at the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, several U.S. newspapers reported that Iran clandestinely had received centrifuges and other nuclear know-how from its Islamic neighbor Pakistan.
Tehran has acknowledged having centrifuge designs similar to those used in Pakistan but denied receiving them from Islamabad.
Pakistan denied the government in Islamabad might have been involved in the transfer, but said some scientists might have handed over nuclear equipment to Iran "out of personal ambition or greed."
Those detained yesterday included Islam-ul Haq, a retired major of the Pakistan army who has been Mr. Khan's senior aide since at least May 1998 when Pakistan exploded nuclear devices after similar tests by arch rival India.
----
India, Pakistan have 'definite desire' for peace: defence minister
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120170137.xj9i4oqq.html
Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes said Tuesday there was a "definite desire" on the part of India and Pakistan to improve bilateral ties and find peace.
"There is a definite desire in the two countries and governments to bury the hatchet," Fernandes told India's Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency.
The rival neighbours this month announced a resumption of stalled talks aimed at resolving their differences over the Himalayan region of Kashmir, which is divided between them and claimed in full by both.
They have also been holding fire since November as part of a ceasefire agreement along the disputed border in Kashmir.
"Not a bullet has been fired," Fernandes said.
"We hope that both countries can carry forward the peace process," he said.
The defence minister told PTI he also wished Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf, who recently survived assassination attempts, "a long life".
He added: "While the post-9/11 saw a global turbulence and increase in security concerns for India, the current peace initiative with Pakistan may largely, if not completely, change the security scenario."
"The levels of production in future for the defence sector may be dictated by other factors."
India and Pakistan annually spend huge sums to arm against each other due to the constant threat of war between them.
----
Pakistani Nuclear Scientists Scrutinized
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear-Detentions.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- In a country that takes pride in producing the only ``Islamic bomb,'' few people enjoy higher esteem than the scientists at the heart of Pakistan's nuclear program. But now, members of the nuclear establishment are suffering a fall from grace -- and their families are worried.
An investigation into alleged leaks of sensitive secrets abroad has picked up steam since the first scientist was detained two months ago. Over the weekend, a half-dozen more scientists and administrators were rounded up for interrogation.
The Bush administration has made nonproliferation a priority, fearing nuclear material could end up with terrorists or rogue states. Pressure has mounted for Pakistan -- a key U.S. ally -- to investigate allegations that its program has sent sensitive technology or know-how to countries including Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Relatives say as many as 24 men, many of them respected scientists, may be in custody, a far higher number than the government has acknowledged. Family members say they have had no reassurance from the government, no indication where the men are being held and no word when they might come home.
Defying warnings from government agents, the wives, sons and daughters of several detainees appealed Tuesday for their release.
``First, they treated them as heroes of the nation,'' an angry Sobia Nazeer Ahmad, daughter of one detainee, told reporters in Islamabad. ``Then they treated them like criminals.''
Her father, Dr. Nazeer Ahmad, is director general of scientific technology and cooperation at Khan Research Laboratories, Pakistan's top nuclear weapons lab. It is named for Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the country's nuclear program and a household name nationwide.
Saturday night, a half-dozen men in civilian clothes turned up at the family home in Islamabad. They told Ahmad to come for questioning and, the family says, manhandled a servant.
On the way of the Ahmad family's living room, a poster-size photograph shows of the scientist receiving the country's most prestigious medal. Nearby, a commemorative plate depicts two nuclear-capable missiles to mark Pakistan's first nuclear missile tests in 1998.
``He's a patriotic and aboveboard man,'' said another daughter, Saima Adil. ``What happened to him was disgraceful. The whole street saw it.''
Ruled by the military for most of its 56 years, Pakistan exists in a permanent state of edginess toward its nuclear-armed neighbor, India. The two nations have fought three wars, and nearly had a fourth only two years ago. Relations have warmed recently, with talk of comprehensive peace talks to begin soon.
Pakistan's nuclear establishment is revered for protecting national security. Statues in Islamabad honor both nuclear missiles and the hill where the first underground warhead test was conducted. Coffee tables are decorated with models of the Ghauri long-range rocket.
And in a country where so much goes wrong -- from illiteracy and poverty to fitful attempts to restore democracy -- Khan Research Laboratories is considered a peerless success.
``KRL is the only institution that our country can boast of in the world, where we are on a par with the developed world,'' said Shafiq-ur Rahman, whose 66-year-old father, Sajawal Khan Malik, the lab's retired director general of maintenance and general services, was detained Saturday.
Pakistan has denied proliferating nuclear technology, but has acknowledged that rogue individuals may have been the source of leaks.
The government has acknowledged detaining ``five to six'' scientists and administrators for what it calls ``debriefings.'' Almost none have been released, relatives say, and no formal charges have been made in court.
``We are moving toward the conclusion of these debriefing sessions,'' Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said Monday. ``We haven't made our final determination yet. There is no presumption of guilt. It is probable that some of these people would be cleared.''
-------- iran
Iran Said to Renege on Nuclear Promises
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Iran.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Western diplomats and nuclear experts voiced growing concern that Iran has reneged on its promise to fully suspend uranium enrichment -- a process that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Worries over Tehran's nuclear intentions coincided with decreased concern among nuclear watchdogs about Libya's nuclear ambitions. Tripoli volunteered last month to give up chemical, biological and nuclear weapons or weapons programs.
Disarmament teams are in Libya to start dismantling the country's weapons of mass destruction, and diplomats say the North African country apparently was sincere in its vow to disarm.
The most recent developments threaten, therefore, to put Iran at center stage at the next top-level meeting of the International Atomic Energy agency in March.
Tehran announced it had suspended uranium enrichment late last year as it sought to blunt international concern it was running a secret weapons program and to defang U.S. attempts to gain U.N. Security Council involvement.
Now, diplomats told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity, even key European nations who negotiated the deal with Tehran have started to question Iran's commitment because it appears to be using semantics -- the meaning of the word suspend -- to keep some of its nuclear enrichment program operational.
The IAEA last autumn asked Iran to stop ``enrichment-related activities.'' But while Tehran has stopped introducing uranium into enrichment equipment, it continues to make and assemble that equipment -- centrifuges used to spin uranium into low grade fuel for peaceful use or high-grade material, for weapons.
If the Iranian program becomes central at the March IAEA meeting, the issue could pit Washington against France, Germany and Britain, which secured Iran's suspension pledge last summer in exchange for a promise to ease restrictions on technology exports to Tehran.
``We fully expect the next board meeting will discuss the matter,'' said one of the diplomats.
``They have been clearly called on to adopt a comprehensive suspension of all enrichment activities, so naturally that's what we will discuss in March.''
The United States interprets suspension as encompassing the whole process -- including a halt in assemblage of enrichment equipment. U.S. State Department spokesman Richard Boucher warned last week that failure by Iran to indefinitely suspend ``all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities would be deeply troubling.''
The IAEA continues to negotiate with Iran on what constitutes suspension, but one diplomat told AP that Mohamed ElBaradei, the agency's director general, ``feels strongly'' that Iran should also stop making and assembling centrifuges.
While the European Union has not commented publicly, diplomats familiar with the issue told AP it is also an EU concern.
They said Javier Solana, the European Union's foreign policy chief, brought up the continued manufacture of centrifuges with Hasan Rowhani, head of Iran's powerful Supreme National Security Council, during his visit to Tehran last week. The French also raised the issue Thursday, when Rowhani visited Paris, the diplomats said.
For his part, Rowhani suggested Iran would not expand its narrow interpretation of what constituted an enrichment embargo -- and pointedly urged the Europeans to deliver on promises of increased technological aid.
``Iran will not accept restrictions on its peaceful nuclear program,'' he said, while in Paris. ``Iran expects its European friends to honor their commitments.''
One of the diplomats suggested an oversight on the part of France, Germany and Britain when they made their deal with Iran.
``Right from the beginning, everybody asked, 'what is suspension,' but the Europeans and Iranians never defined it,'' he said.
Diplomats also said U.S. and British weapons experts began arriving in Libya over the weekend. They also said members of a separate team from the IAEA, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
``The idea is to move quickly,'' said one of the diplomats, speaking specifically of plans to dismantle Libya's nuclear program. ``Those involved expect to be well on the way to accomplishing our goal within weeks.''
Confirming the presence of an IAEA team, agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said Tuesday that experts ``arrived yesterday and they are at work today, verifying the details,'' of Libya's nuclear programs.
``More experts are to follow over the coming weeks,'' he added.
On the Net:
IAEA: www.iaea.org
-------- korea
US delegation briefs Congress on North Korea nuclear trip
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120225624.7a6x5vbe.html
A top US nuclear scientist who visited North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear complex briefed senators in a classified session Tuesday, following reports the communist state showed him it had the key ingredient for nuclear weapons.
Siegfried Hecker, former head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory which developed the atom bomb, gave the Senate Foreign Relations committee a private account of his trip, congressional sources said.
Several congressional staffers declined to give details of his testimony.
Hecker is due to meet Senators again on Wednesday, for a public rundown of the visit earlier this month, his presentation stripped of sensitive intelligence information.
North Korea has said it showed its "nuclear deterrent" to their US visitors and US newspapers later reported that the visitors appeared to have seen reprocessed plutonium, a key ingredient for making nuclear bombs.
Hecker was part of two non-government delegations which visited the Yongbyon nuclear complex, 90 kilometres (50 miles) north of Pyongyang, where the communist regime has said it is processing weapons grade plutonium.
The group also included former State Department envoy to talks on North Korea Jack Pritchard. A second delegation consisted of congressional staffers Keith Luse and Frank Jannuzi, who also briefed the committee on Tuesday.
North Korea said it had shown a "nuclear deterrent" to US delegates while US newspapers reported that Pyongyang disclosed plutonium, an ingredient for a potential nuclear weapon, to the US delegations.
The United States and North Korea have been locked in a nuclear showdown since Washington accused Pyongyang of embarking on a banned program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, in violation of a 1994 anti-nuclear pact.
--------
Three Nations to Discuss N. Korea Nukes
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- Officials from the United States, Japan and South Korea plan to meet in Washington this week in an effort to broker a fresh round of talks on ending the North Korean nuclear crisis, a senior South Korean official said Tuesday.
Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck, who is leading the South Korean delegation, said he will also try to reassure U.S. officials that his country's policy toward its biggest ally will remain consistent despite the recent replacement of its foreign minister.
``I plan to meet U.S. officials and explain to them the firmness of the South Korea-U.S. alliance,'' Lee said.
South Korea's foreign minister resigned last week over a dispute between government officials who wanted closer ties to the United States and others who championed President Roh Moo-hyun's policy of independence. Roh took office last year pledging not to ``kowtow'' to Washington and greater openness toward North Korea
New Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, a 60-year-old career diplomat, has promised to continue close cooperation with Washington but has removed the officials who were critical of Roh's push for independence.
Lee said he expects the consultations to take place on Wednesday and Thursday. The three allies will discuss ways to resume six-nation talks on persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons programs. A first round ended last August without much progress, and Lee said South Korea, the United States and Japan want to set up a second round as soon as possible with North Korea and the other two countries involved, Russia and China.
A South Korean national security adviser left for Japan Tuesday for similar discussions.
For its part, China, which hosted the first round, is making ``positive efforts'' toward arranging a new round, a Foreign Ministry spokesman said. He had no information on when they might take place.
The nuclear dispute flared in October 2002 when U.S. officials accused North Korea of running a secret nuclear program in violation of a 1994 deal requiring the North to freeze its nuclear facilities. Washington and its allies have since cut off free oil shipments, also part of the 1994 accord.
North Korea has insisted it needs nuclear weapons as a deterrent against a possible U.S. attack. But it says it will freeze its nuclear programs as a first step in talks if Washington lifts sanctions against the North, resumes oil shipments, and removes North Korea from the U.S. State Department's list of countries that sponsor terrorism.
The United States has responded that North Korea must first verifiably begin dismantling its nuclear programs before receiving any concessions.
--------
Japan, U.S., S.Korea to Discuss North This Week
January 20, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-talks.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan, the United States and South Korea will hold talks this week in Washington on North Korea's nuclear ambitions, Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi said Tuesday.
The discussions will follow a meeting between U.S. and Chinese officials last week on how to resume six-way talks with North Korea about dismantling its nuclear arms program.
``We are now coordinating on how to move forward toward future six-party talks,'' Kawaguchi told reporters.
A first round of talks between North Korea, China, South Korea, Japan, Russia and the United States took place in Beijing in August but ended inconclusively.
Japanese, U.S. and South Korean officials will hold a two-day meeting in Washington from Wednesday, Kawaguchi said, adding that the three countries wanted six-way talks at an early date.
``Japan, the United States and South Korea have been saying that it is important to conduct it as early as possible even if there is no joint statement,'' she said.
The Washington talks will be attended by Mitoji Yabunaka, director general of the Foreign Ministry's Asian and Oceanian Affairs Bureau, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, and South Korea's deputy foreign minister, Lee Soo-hyuck, Kawaguchi said.
Kawaguchi is also set to meet with South Korean President Roh Moo-Hyun's national security adviser Ra Jong-yil on Wednesday in Tokyo for discussions on the six-way talks, a Foreign Ministry official said.
The North Korean nuclear crisis began in October 2002 when the United States said Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing a covert nuclear weapons program.
North Korea offered this month to freeze its nuclear activities, a move seen by the United States and others as signaling that Pyongyang was preparing for talks.
-------- mideast
Experts Arrive in Libya to Dismantle WMD
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer
Jan 20, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NUCLEAR_AGENCY_LIBYA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Teams from the United Nations, the United States and Britain are quietly setting up bases in Libya for the purpose of scrapping Tripoli's programs for weapons of mass destruction, diplomats said Tuesday.
The diplomats said on condition of anonymity that U.S. and British weapons experts - including specialists on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons - began arriving this past weekend. They also said members of a separate team from the International Atomic Energy Agency - the U.N. nuclear watchdog - were gathering in Tripoli, the Libyan capital.
"The idea is to move quickly," one of the diplomats said, speaking specifically of plans to dismantle Libya's nuclear program. "Those involved expect to be well on the way to accomplishing our goal within weeks."
Confirming the presence of an IAEA team, agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said experts "arrived yesterday and they are at work today, verifying the details," of Libya's nuclear programs.
"More experts are to follow over the coming weeks," he added.
In London, Britain's Foreign Office said the country was "prepared to offer assistance with the dismantlement of Libya's program" but declined to say whether British experts were in the North African nation.
After Libya volunteered last month to give up its chemical, biological and nuclear weapons or weapons programs, experts from the IAEA, United States and Britain went to Tripoli to take inventory and discuss the details of their destruction. But there was disagreement over who would oversee the scrapping of Libya's nuclear program.
That squabble appeared resolved Monday after IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei met U.S. Undersecretary of State John Bolton, a critic of the IAEA policy on Libya, and William Ehrman, Bolton's British counterpart.
After the meeting, ElBaradei said his agency was given the role of establishing the scope and content of Libya's nuclear program. Once IAEA verification was complete, American and British experts would remove any suspect materials, he said.
Diplomats said the IAEA also claimed the right to verify that all contentious equipment and material had been removed or rendered unusable.
The IAEA had insisted it be in charge on nuclear issues. But Bush administration officials said American and British experts should lead in identifying and destroying Tripoli's nuclear weapons program because U.S.-British talks with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi led to his decision to renounce it.
Differing characterizations of the state of Libya's program had fueled the dispute. The IAEA has said Libya was nowhere near producing a nuclear weapon, while Washington and London contended Tripoli was further along than the agency realized.
Both sides seemed happy Monday to put the disputes behind them.
"It was a very productive meeting. I think we're on the same page with the IAEA on this very important project," Bolton said after the session at the U.S. mission in Vienna.
ElBaradei called the meeting "very constructive."
"We have agreement on what needs to be done," he said. "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."
On the Net:
International Atomic Energy Agency: http://www.iaea.org
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American and British Weapons Experts Return to Libya
January 20, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/europe/20LIBY.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, Jan. 19 - British and American weapons experts have returned to Libya and within weeks could begin 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 Monday.
The experts spent several weeks in the fall inspecting Libyan laboratories and military factories but had taken no steps to begin dismantling the weapons programs after Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi announced on Dec. 19 that he would give them up.
Plans are also being laid by Libyan chemical weapons scientists to incinerate tons of mustard gas agent manufactured to fill chemical bombs, the senior administration official said in a telephone interview. Missile programs and biological research efforts are still under scrutiny.
The United States and Britain have not decided how to remove any highly enriched uranium and the centrifuge machines designed to separate it from natural uranium in the manufacture of the first Libyan nuclear bomb. That project was in its early stages when Colonel Qaddafi said he was dropping the arms programs. The senior administration official said the illicit materials would probably be shipped to a secure facility in Britain or the United States.
In Vienna, American and British officials met Monday with Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and reached an agreement under which the United Nations agency will verify the destruction and removal work, 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 familiar with the talks on Monday said. Instead, it will be performed by American and British experts from intelligence agencies, the United States Department of Energy and the national nuclear laboratories.
Dr. ElBaradei met with John R. Bolton, the American undersecretary of state for arms control, and William Ehrman, a senior British disarmament official. After the meeting, they met with reporters, but did not make reference to the American and British team that has already arrived in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, Western officials said. The head of the team, numbering about a dozen experts, was identified by Western officials as Donald A. Mahley, the State Department's special negotiator for chemical and biological arms control issues.
Dr. ElBaradei said his agency's role was "very clear - that we need to do the verification.
"A good part of the program needs to be eliminated," he said. "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 was a "very productive meeting," though Western officials said significant tensions still existed between some American officials and Dr. ElBaradei.
A spokesman for Dr. ElBaradei said the director would send 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 Libya was "in a hurry" to dismantle the weapons programs and was eager to make a full and detailed declaration about its once secret nuclear program to the board of governors of the atomic agency in March.
Those 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. All are essential steps in the return of American oil companies.
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 on Monday, the senior administration official said the deadline of the Lockerbie settlement that hangs over the Libyan disarmament process could be extended by mutual consent if Congress has not acted to lift sanctions by May.
Libya agreed to pay $10 million to the families of each of the victims of Pan Am Flight 103, brought down by a Libyan terrorist operation over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988. But the final $6 million in payments depends on a decision by President Bush to persuade Congress to lift sanctions on Libya and to remove Libya from the list of terrorist-supporting states.
The 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.
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U.S. Will Work With U.N. Agency in Libya
Agreement on Dismantling Nuclear Program Ends Sniping Over Duties
By Peter Slevin and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30091-2004Jan19.html
The Bush administration agreed yesterday to work with the International Atomic Energy Agency to dismantle Libya's nuclear weapons program, dividing the labor to strengthen the project and avoid a turf battle.
At a three-hour meeting in Vienna, the IAEA's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, and emissaries from the United States and Britain concluded that the Americans and the British will remove and destroy the components of the fledgling nuclear development program while the IAEA, a U.N. agency, will verify Libya's compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
A U.S. official said the arrangement allows the IAEA to "witness and verify the removal of nuclear materials and components."
Officials on both sides, emphasizing a desire to move quickly to take up the offer of Libya's leader, Moammar Gaddafi, to forgo weapons of mass destruction, said they got much of what they wanted after a period of sniping about how to share responsibility.
The Bush administration will set the pace for the elimination of Libya's nuclear projects and will take responsibility for the physical work of eliminating banned components, the diplomats said. By cooperating, the U.S. government hopes to forge a working relationship with the U.N. nuclear watchdog and gain support from governments that insisted on a key U.N. role.
The Vienna-based IAEA, criticized in the past by John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control, and other Bush administration officials, will be responsible for formal assessments of Libya's program and monitoring treaty compliance. Some officials had voiced fears that the agency, kept largely in the dark as the United States and Britain negotiated with Libya, would be shunted.
"It was important that the U.S. and the IAEA bury the hatchet," said David Albright, a former IAEA inspector in Iraq and president of the Institute for Science and International Security. "This could set a precedent for dealing with other countries such as North Korea."
Until last month, the United States had not informed the IAEA about the seizure last fall in Italy of nuclear-related cargo bound for Libya. U.S. officials have complained about the IAEA's bureaucratic pace and fear the agency could be hoodwinked if Gaddafi shifts gears.
The Bush administration, which last week dispatched a team to take up residence in Libya, intends to assign a dozen or more intelligence officers and diplomats to work there. The next challenge for teams from the United States, Britain and the IAEA will be to find practical ways to combine their efforts.
"We will work as a team," one U.S. official said. "It was important the IAEA be brought on board because we are moving very fast. We want this to happen quickly. The sooner it happens, the sooner we can normalize relations, and the sooner American companies can return to Libya."
An IAEA team is expected to travel to Libya next week to help develop an inventory of nuclear-related components.
U.S. nuclear specialists are scheduled to begin work there this week. They hope not only to confirm the end of Libya's program, but to uncover details about the far-flung producers and middlemen who supplied technology and equipment to the secret projects.
"We have agreement on what needs to be done," ElBaradei said after the meeting with Bolton and William Ehrman, a British diplomat. "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."
The Bush administration is hurrying to capitalize on Gaddafi's Dec. 19 promise to surrender his illegal weapons programs in return for renewed diplomatic and economic links, particularly investment in Libya's antiquated oil industry. The pledge, which also includes chemical and biological weapons and certain missiles, followed nine months of secret negotiations with U.S. and British officials.
Experts from the two countries and the IAEA have visited Libyan sites and interviewed scientists and other specialists about the extent of Libya's nuclear ambitions and successes. ElBaradei told reporters in December that Libya had imported natural uranium and processing equipment in an attempt to produce fissile material suitable for producing a nuclear weapon.
For more than a decade, Libya worked on the uranium enrichment project without reporting it to the IAEA. Yet one Libyan official, Matooq Mohamed Matooq, told ElBaradei that no large-scale facilities had been constructed and that no weapons-grade uranium had been produced. To emphasize its commitment, the Libyans agreed to allow investigators to visit suspect sites on short notice.
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THEATER REVIEW | 'HIROSHIMA MAIDEN'
A Puppet Fantasy Evokes the True Aftermath of Hiroshima
January 20, 2004
By MARGO JEFFERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/arts/theater/20MAID.html
These days ambitious theater works are often accompanied by extensive program notes. At their best they are small, valuable essays that prepare the mind and stir the senses. At their worst they are pompous little lectures that let us know we need educating to grasp the full complexity of what we are about to see.
But theatergoers are very lucky to have the program notes that accompany "Hiroshima Maiden," Dan Hurlin's theater piece at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn through Feb. 1. The historian David Serlin, who wrote the notes, does better by the real horrors and ironies of this story than all of Mr. Hurlin's exquisite stagecraft.
In 1955 a group of young Japanese women, disfigured from the bombing of Hiroshima and disdained by Japanese society, were brought to the United States for reconstructive surgery. The Japanese Methodist minister who helped arrange their journey was a guest on "This Is Your Life," the show that helped pioneer both shlock biography and shock reality television. The host, Ralph Edwards, chose to "surprise" the minister by bringing him face to face with the co-pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the nuclear bomb on Hiroshima.
Using the techniques of Japan's Bunraku puppet theater, Mr. Hurlin concentrates on one young woman. He visualizes her flight as the bomb decimates the city, her isolation and self-loathing in the postwar years and her trip to the United States, where she and the other women were nicknamed the Hiroshima Maidens by a wildly curious public.
Mr. Hurlin (who created and directed the work) also takes dramatic license to imagine that his maiden appeared on "This Is Your Life," too, and that at the show's end she came face to face with the pilot. Then, to dramatize America's willful naïveté during those years, he contrasts the maiden's story with that of a sheltered, middle-class American boy. Sheltered yes, but tainted by the cold war paranoia of bomb drills in school and dire media warnings about the Soviet threat.
Then there are the boy's private moments, which are dwelt on in loving detail and are tied to the larger events with labored metaphors. The boy's mother doesn't want him to look at bad things like car accidents. But he does, and eventually he looks at the bad things of history, too, on television.
The boy's life and perceptions are much too trivial to matter here. If a writer wants to use a child's point of view to illuminate history, he must distance himself from the child. Mr. Hurlin is utterly wrapped up in his child's poignancy and sensitivity. But his prose is rhythmically monotonous and much too precious. Can the embarrassment of wetting one's pants in grade school possibly matter to us in this context?
Worst of all, the boy's words are the only ones spoken in the entire 90 minutes of a work that is, after all, titled "Hiroshima Maiden." Bunraku depended on skilled playwrights. These playwrights used both narrative and dialogue but the narrator (the tayu) held a privileged position. There is no dialogue here at all (except for a few striking moments borrowed from a television broadcast). And the tayu, Dawn Akemi Saito, is made to devote herself exclusively to the American boy. The Japanese, whose story she could also tell, are kept in utter silence.
Can silence sometimes be more powerful than speech? It can, and here it is not. It is reductive, and exposes an ugly irony that I'm sure Mr. Hurlin did not intend. Once again the story of "the other," the foreigner, a story Americans badly need to hear, has become less important than our own homemade American story.
There was so much historical material, including interviews with some of the Hiroshima Maidens, for Mr. Hurlin to draw on. He drew on so little. And the ending that he invents between the pilot and the maiden is infinitely less powerful - but much more comforting - than what actually happened.
His puppets are beautifully made, as are the sets that he designed after studying Japanese art and architecture. One feels his love for the beauty of this theatrical form. And one feels nothing else. He has not made art from history. He has been trapped in technique and artsy imagery.
HIROSHIMA MAIDEN
Created and directed by Dan Hurlin; music composed by Robert Een; lighting by Tyler Micoleau; costumes for puppets and actors by Anna Thomford; slides by Julie Alane Simons; stage manager, Brenna St. George Jones. A production of Mapp/Multiarts Projects and Productions, Ann Rosenthal, executive director; Cathy Zimmerman, co-director. Presented by Arts at St. Ann's. At St. Ann's Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Brooklyn.
WITH: Matthew Acheson, Chris Green, Deana Headley, Tom Lee, Yoko Myoi, Kazu Nakamura, Lake Simons, Nami Yamamoto and Eric Wright (puppeteers), Dawn Akemi Saito (narrator) and Jeff Berman, Robert Een and Bill Ruyle (musicians).
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Domestic Issues Hurt Bush in Poll
By Richard Morin and Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29858-2004Jan19.html
President Bush delivers his State of the Union address tonight to an American public that has become broadly dissatisfied with his domestic agenda, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The survey found that, on the eve of his annual address to Congress, Bush continues to enjoy a huge advantage over Democrats on matters of national security, besting them by 2 to 1 in the fight against terrorism and by nearly as broad a margin on his handling of the conflict in Iraq.
But while Bush retains the support of nearly six in 10 Americans, the public believes Democrats would do a better job on domestic issues, such as the economy, prescription drugs for the elderly, health insurance, Medicare, the budget deficit, immigration and taxes. And Bush has lost the advantage on education policy he once enjoyed.
As a result, Bush finds himself in a statistical dead heat with the opposition nine months before the election. When matched against a generic Democratic presidential candidate -- the party held its first nominating contest last night in Iowa -- Bush narrowly wins, 48 percent to 46 percent. On the question of who is trusted to handle the nation's major problems, Bush is roughly even with Democrats, ahead 45 percent to 44 percent -- down from an 18-point advantage Bush enjoyed nine months ago.
Bush's speech tonight will address this anxiety by giving greatest emphasis to his domestic proposals. Aides said the president will reverse the order of his annual address from last year -- when he closed with the case for war in Iraq -- to put his closing emphasis on domestic issues such as health care, the economy, Social Security and immigration.
That election-year emphasis closely follows the public's wishes. The poll found that worries about domestic issues have increased in the past year while concerns about terrorism, Iraq and the economy have dipped. More Americans want Bush to discuss domestic programs (40 percent) than want to hear him discuss the campaign against terrorism (15 percent).
Overall, the poll found that support for Bush remains healthy and essentially unchanged at 58 percent, in the same range it has been since July. At the same time, the number of people who strongly disapprove of his presidency reached 30 percent. That's the highest level of strong disapproval ever recorded in his presidency, and a clear sign of the intensifying dislike for Bush among his political opponents.
The poll makes it clear that neither Bush nor Democrats in Congress have been given a clear mandate by Americans to lead. It suggests that the fall presidential campaign may be driven by whether voters prefer a war president, in which case Bush has a prohibitive advantage, or one focused on the domestic concerns that favor Democrats.
As a whole, the survey findings portray Bush as a popular president who is championing unpopular programs. He has gained no advantage from the recent Republican-led success in providing a prescription drug benefit to senior citizens. And his call last week to establish a manned base on the moon and eventually send American astronauts to Mars is broadly unpopular.
Bush aides said his speech tonight will seek to remind the public about his national security achievements before laying out his bona fides on domestic matters. "He's going to speak at length about the actions we have taken over the course of last year and the path we're on of assuring that the country and our world is a safer, more peaceful place to live," a senior administration official said.
On Iraq, Bush's ratings have retreated from the surge he experienced after the capture of Saddam Hussein. A majority of Americans -- 55 percent -- continue to approve of the job Bush is doing handling the situation in Iraq, down from 60 percent one month ago but still higher than at any time in the fall.
Aides said Bush will talk about the U.S. move to transfer sovereignty to Iraqis this summer, which they hope will soothe Americans anxious about the cost of the war. A clear majority of the public -- 56 percent -- continues to say the war with Iraq was the right thing to do, down slightly from last month. The proportion who say current casualty levels are unacceptable ticked up after dropping immediately after Hussein was captured last month. But six in 10 agree with Bush's claim that the war with Iraq has helped to make the United States at least somewhat safer and more secure.
Bush appears to be well positioned on broader matters of terrorism. The heightened terror alerts over the holidays, rather than raising doubts, seem to have given Americans more confidence in the government's ability to defend the country against terrorist attacks. Fifty-five percent now say they are confident that the government can prevent further terrorist attacks in this country, up from 45 percent in September and the highest level of confidence in two years.
Bush tonight will be more on the defensive on domestic policies. The economy has lost about 2.3 million jobs since Bush took office, a budget surplus has turned into a large deficit, and Americans are divided about his main remedy for the economy: $1.7 trillion in tax cuts.
"We are an economy that is going through great change," one official said. "I think he'll demonstrate that he's not satisfied with the progress that we've made, and he'll speak directly to those issues related to jobs."
Though the public has clearly noted an uptick in the economy -- 51 percent approve of the job Bush is doing managing the economy -- four in 10 Americans still believe the economy is in recession, the poll found. By 58 percent to 39 percent, they rate the economy and not terrorism as the bigger problem facing the country. And when asked who they would prefer handling the nation's economy, more Americans favored Democrats in Congress (50 percent) than preferred Bush (43 percent), the first time in more than two years that Bush has failed to best the Democrats on this key issue.
Bush also plans tonight to discuss the high cost of health care, his proposal to allow more immigrants to earn legal status and his proposal for private Social Security accounts -- all issues on which the public has concerns about his leadership. For example, only four in 10 approve of the way that Bush is handling the issue of prescription drugs for seniors -- 6 percentage points lower than his rating less than a year ago.
Overall, while 54 percent were generally positive when asked how they felt about Bush's policies, only 12 percent said they were enthusiastic about them, and 43 percent described themselves as "satisfied but not enthusiastic." An additional 15 percent said Bush made them "angry." Even among Republicans, fewer than one in four -- 24 percent -- said they were enthusiastic about Bush's policies.
A total of 1,036 randomly selected adults were interviewed Jan. 15 to 18 for this survey. The margin of sampling error for the overall results is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
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Senator John Kerry's Environmental Policy
DES MOINES, Iowa, (ENS)
January 20, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-20-03.asp
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won the 2004 Iowa Caucus Tuesday, beating his challengers for the Democratic presidential nomination in the first important primary test of the 2004 election campaign.
At precincts across Iowa, Democrats voted 38 percent for Kerry, 32 percent for Senator John Edwards, 11 percent for former Vermont Governor Howard Dean, and 11 percent for Congressman Dick Gephardt of Missouri, who now has dropped out of the race.
Now the country's attention turns to New Hampshire where the Democratic primary takes place January 27.
Kerry detailed his environmental policy in a speech at the University of New Hampshire on October 20, 2003. Here is his address in its entirety.
I'm here today to lay out a comprehensive vision for how we create a cleaner and greener America. How we can repair the environment today and protect it for tomorrow. This is a cause that I care about a great deal and one that I've fought for all my life. But this isn't just my fight. I'm here on this campus because the fight for our environment is a fight for young people's future. The decisions we make today are going to have more of an impact on your lives than on mine. You need to be on the frontlines of that fight - and you deserve a President who is leading the way.
Some candidates seem only to discover the cause of the environment only on election years. These politicians figure endangered species don't vote; our forests don't give campaign contributions; WorldCom has more political muscle than the White Mountains.
But for me, protecting the environment isn't just the cause of a campaign. It's been the commitment of a lifetime. My mother was a true environmental activist. She started a local recycling program long before it was cool. And when I was a young boy, she would wake me up in the early hours of the morning, take me into the woods and simply say "listen." At the time, I wasn't so happy about being woken up. Now, I understand she was teaching me about our responsibility to this world better than you found it.
And when I wasn't much older than some of the students here today, I was honored to speak at the first Earth Day in Massachusetts back in 1970. As a young person, I was angered at what we were doing to our country - rivers on fire from pollution, our forests being clear-cutted every day. Since that time, we have made progress: removing lead from gasoline, reducing air pollution, reclaiming waterways, renewing land that had been lost to toxic waste, defending and expanding our national parks - and we have even saved our national symbol, the bald eagle, from extinction.
But George W. Bush is taking us in the wrong direction. He is the kind of politician who would cut down a tree and then climb on its stump to give a speech about conservation. Since he has made it easier to clear cut acres of forests, we can expect plenty more campaign speeches about the environment. But the American people won't be fooled by his rhetoric. They know his record.
This President has not only refused to act, he has set back the cause of environmental protection. President Bush broke a campaign promise to reduce the harmful carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming. Instead of enforcing the law, he's taking environmental cops off the beat and letting power plants hundreds of miles away pollute New England's air. Instead of renegotiating the Kyoto Treaty to improve it, he simply repudiated it - and isolated America in the world. He's made taxpayers instead of polluters pay for clean ups. He's stood in the way of our efforts to make cars cleaner and more fuel efficient. And despite all our efforts to stop him, he continues to want to open up our most pristine and sacred national parks and resources to destructive development and drilling.
The difference between us and George Bush is one of vision. Where we see a pristine wilderness or a scenic coast, George Bush sees an oil field. Where we see a beautiful mountaintop, George Bush sees a strip mine. Where we see a pristine old growth forest, George Bush sees toothpicks. And where we see an opportunity to join the global community to fight global warming, George Bush sees a chance to curry favor with his buddies in the oil business.
They don't think you are going to notice. They think that the American people can be misled by false names. Chop down mountainsides of old growth trees and call it Healthy Forests. Increase the pollution in the air and call it Clear Skies. They believe as long as they use the right words, the American people can be deceived. But we don't get fooled that easy.
George Bush has put pollution ahead of preservation, campaign contributions ahead of conservation, special interests ahead of America's special places, Exxon ahead of the environment, parking lots ahead of parks. It's time we put George Bush and Dick Cheney out of work - and on a bus back to Texas.
Under President Bush, America's environment has become threatened, endangered, and imperiled. I'm running to keep clean the water we drink, the air we breathe, the yards and parks in which children play and laugh, and the communities in which we live. This is our commitment - and we won't back down.
Senator Kerry outlines his environmental policy at the University of New Hampshire (All photos courtesy John Kerry for President ) For thirty years, I have been fighting to protect the environment - and I've won important battles. I pledge today that I will be "the true environmental President," but when I say it, its not just rhetoric - I have the record to back it up. Over and over again, I've found myself at the forefront of the battle against the powerful corporations and their revolving door government friends who want to turn back progress on fuel efficiency, oil spills, and drilling. I have pushed for America to take the lead in guarding the last pristine open spaces in the world like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, to slow the destruction of coral reefs, and to stop the extinction of ocean life. I've been a leader in battling global warming and worked with Senator John McCain to make America's cars cleaner and safer.
It's been an honor and a fight I've loved to stand up for the environment in the U.S. Senate. But I've also seen that real progress takes a President who will shine a spotlight on the special interests that sneak behind the scenes to get what they want. A President who will call powerful corporations on the carpet and call the American people to action.
The members of this administration may only know how to dismantle and destroy, but we need a President who knows that Americans have the power to imagine and build.
If I am your President, it'll mean the end of secret meetings for energy industry special interests. I'll have a simple message for the lobbyists and polluters that call the Bush White House home: Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
As soon as I step into the Oval Office, I will transform the White House into a hub of inspiration and innovation and lead America on the great endeavor of creating a cleaner and greener nation.
Today, I am releasing a comprehensive plan for how to take our environment back. Within the first six months of my taking office, here's what we will be able to accomplish: We will reverse the damage of the Bush assault on our environment and take aggressive steps to clean our air and water. We will restore America's leadership on combating climate change and set America on a course to energy independence.
But we won't just fix what they did wrong, we'll do even better. We will begin building a clean and prosperous and beautiful nation in the twenty first century by supporting smart growth policies for every community and by creating a Conservation Covenant to preserve those unprotected parts of America's natural beauty for the generations to follow.
As President, I will build a coalition for environmental progress and protection - with every worker, every business executive, every parent, every student helping us move forward - together. We will enlist farmers and ranchers, hunters and fishermen, as stewards of the land and the water on which they depend on for their livelihoods.
We'll reward those who innovate, and charge those who pollute. We'll give America's most powerful companies green lights and greenbacks to pull advanced technology out of the lab and off the shelf and put the American people back to work.
We will bring the technologies of tomorrow to the roads and rails and homes of today. Instead of vast subsidies for dirty industries and obsolete technologies, we'll invest in a cleaner tomorrow.
We will return America to its rightful role as a leader in the global battle against climate change, poverty, and the spread of disease. Global problems know no boundaries. The earth is a small planet where wind and water, poison and pollution know no borders.
Senator John Kerry smiles on Iowa voters in Waterloo, Iowa January 18. (Photo by Lou Dematteis) If we care about the national security of America, we can settle for nothing less than energy security for America. The dollars we spend at the pump can too easily be diverted to finance the very terrorists that would seek to destroy us. The threats that America faces today don't just come from gun barrels, they come from oil barrels - and we need to disarm that danger. I have a comprehensive plan to end America's reliance on Mideast oil within the next decade. It's right for our security. Right for our economy. Right for our environment.
We have the technology to manufacture cars with far better gas mileage - and we can and must do it now. Not a single American needs to give up driving an SUV or a pick-up truck. But at the same time, we need to repeal the outrageous one hundred thousand dollar tax break for the purchase of luxury gas-guzzlers like Hummers. Americans have the right to drive whatever car they want - but they don't have the right to have the government pay for more dependence on foreign oil.
As President, I will put environmental justice center stage. For too long, poor and minority communities have been overlooked when it came to the environment. And for too long, polluters thought they could get away with breaking the law as long as it was in someone else's back yard. Those days need to end. Under a Kerry Administration, no community will have their environment overlooked. They will have the power to fight back. And the polluters won't get away with it any more.
What will America look like when we are done? We will have pollution-free cars drawing their energy from redesigned fueling stations. We will see gleaming high speed trains carrying passengers from city to city. Our oceans and rivers and forests will move out of intensive care and back into health, so that they are once again teeming with life. In rural America, people will be as connected as anyone living in the city; and our cities will see almost as much green as out in the country.
America faces a choice: do we wish to be remembered as the last generation of the foolish - those who believed that the earth could be stripped without conscience - or as the first generation of the wise?
George Bush has offered his answer - time and again.
We need to offer a better answer. We need to unlock the force of invention and imagination. We need a President who will lead the country and the world in tackling the challenges we face. We need a President who'll protect our rivers and lakes, our oceans and forests. We need to make sure our children's children know the true meaning of "America the Beautiful."
When it comes to our environment, George Bush and Dick Cheney have broken the trust of all Americans - but especially young Americans. They've thrown a party for their friends - but left your generation to clean up the mess and stuck you with the bill.
I ask you to lead the way to a brighter future. Enlist in the cause of protecting the environment. Join my campaign for a clean, green America. Go to johnkerry.com and learn more about the issues and how you can make a difference. Your courage to do what's right can change the world and save the world for the young people of tomorrow. I ask for your support in that commitment and that cause.
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Statement of John Kerry on Libya's Dismantling Weapons of Mass Destruction
December 20, 2004
John Kerry for President
http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/releases/pr_2003_1220.html
For Immediate Release
"If the President can put aside his go it alone unilateralism to engage with a longtime enemy like Qaddafi, why are the ideologues in this Administration so hesitant to negotiate with North Korea to end their nuclear weapons programs?"
"Libya's agreement to terminate their weapons of mass destructions program is an important step forward in addressing the great security challenge of our time, proliferation. It is particularly important that it will be done within the international non-proliferation treaty regime and using the IAEA, the bases of international law and multilateral cooperation and verification. After all, if anyone has any illusions about the true character of Qaddafi and the importance of vigilance in holding him to his word, they need only remember the victims of Pan Am 103 and their families who have paid the price for Qaddafi's past brutality.
Ironically, this significant advance represents a complete U-turn in the Bush Administration's overall foreign policy. An Administration that scorns multilateralism and boasts about a rigid doctrine of military preemption has almost in spite of itself demonstrated the enormous potential for improving our national security through diplomacy. If the President can put aside his go it alone unilateralism to engage with a longtime enemy like Qaddafi, why are the ideologues in this Administration so hesitant to negotiate with North Korea to end their nuclear weapons programs? Why not rally the United Nations and NATO to forge a new cooperative effort to combat proliferation around the globe?"
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Democrats' response
Text of comments by Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Tom Daschle
January 20, 2004
WorldNetDaily.com
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=36700
Response delivered by House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota.
Pelosi: The state of our union is indeed strong, due to the spirit of the American people - the creativity, optimism, hard work and faith of everyday Americans.
The State of the Union address should offer a vision that unites us as a people - and priorities that move us toward the best America. For inspiration, we look to our brave young men and women in uniform, especially those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their noble service reminds us of our mission as a nation: to build a future worthy of their sacrifice.
Tonight, from the perspective of 10 years of experience on the Intelligence Committee working on national security issues, I express the Democrats' unbending determination to make the world safer for America, for our people, our interests and our ideals.
Democrats have an unwavering commitment to ensure that America's armed forces remain the best trained, best led, best equipped force for peace the world has ever known. Never before have we been more powerful militarily. But even the most powerful nation in history must bring other nations to our side to meet common dangers.
The president's policies do not reflect that. He has pursued a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care here at home.
The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition.
Therefore, American taxpayers are bearing almost all the cost, a colossal $120 billion and rising. More importantly, American troops are enduring almost all the casualties - tragically, 500 killed and thousands more wounded.
As a nation, we must show our greatness, not just our strength. America must be a light to the world, not just a missile. Forty-three years ago today, as a college student standing in the freezing cold outside this Capitol building, I heard President Kennedy issue this challenge in his inaugural address: "My fellow citizens of the world," he said, "ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man."
There is great wisdom in that, but in it there is also greater strength for our country and the cause of a safer world.
Instead of alienating our allies, let us work with them and international institutions so that together we can prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and keep them out of the hands of terrorists.
Instead of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for politically connected firms such as Halliburton, and an insistence on American dominance in Iraq, let us share the burden and responsibility with others, so that together we can end the sense of American occupation and bring our troops home safely when their mission is completed.
Instead of the diplomatic disengagement that almost destroyed the Middle East peace process and aggravated the danger posed by North Korea, let us seek to forge agreements and coalitions so that, together with others, we can address challenges before they threaten the security of the world.
We must remain focused on the greatest threat to the security of the United States, the clear and present danger of terrorism. We know what we must do to protect America, but this Administration is failing to meet the challenge. Democrats have a better way to ensure our homeland security.
One-hundred percent of containers coming into our ports or airports must be inspected. Today, only 3 percent are inspected. One-hundred percent of chemical and nuclear plants in the United States must have high levels of security. Today, the Bush administration has tolerated a much lower standard.
One-hundred percent communication in real time is needed for our police officers, firefighters and all our first responders to prevent or respond to a terrorist attack. Today, the technology is there, but the resources are not. One-hundred percent of the enriched uranium and other material for weapons of mass destruction must be secured. Today, the Administration has refused to commit the resources necessary to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists.
America will be far safer if we reduce the chances of a terrorist attack in one of our cities than if we diminish the civil liberties of our own people.
As a nation, we must do better to keep faith with our armed forces, their families and our veterans. Our men and women in uniform show their valor every day. On the battlefield, our troops pledge to leave no soldier behind. Here at home, we must leave no veteran behind. We must ensure their health care, their pensions and their survivors' benefits.
The year ahead offers great opportunity for progress and perhaps new perils still hidden in the shadows of an uncertain world. But you, the American people, have shown again and again that you are equal to any test. Now your example summons all of us in government, Republicans and Democrats, to a higher standard.
This is personal for all of us, in every community across this land. As a mother of five, and now as a grandmother of five, I came into government to help make the future brighter for all of America's children. As much as at any time in my memory, the future of our country and our children is at stake.
Democrats are committed to strengthening the state of our union, to reach for a safer, more prosperous America. Together, let us make America work for all Americans; let us restore our rightful role of leadership in the world, working with others for "the freedom of man."
I'm now proud to introduce my colleague, the outstanding Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle.
Daschle: Let there be no doubt: the state of our union is strong - stronger than the terrorists who seek to harm us and stronger than the challenges that confront us. At the same time, we know that our union can be stronger still.
The president spoke of great goals, and America should never hesitate to push the boundaries of exploration. But neither should we shrink from the great goal of creating a more perfect union here at home.
In his speech, the president asked us to make permanent the tax cuts already passed. He asked us to create more tax shelters for the wealthy, and he asked us to use Social Security money to pay for it. For the last couple of weeks, I've been traveling through my home state of South Dakota, visiting the people and small towns that are America's backbone. And the folks I met were asking something, too: "What about us? When do our priorities become America's priorities?"
Rather than a society that restricts its rewards to a privileged few, we need an "opportunity society" that allows all Americans to succeed. Our "opportunity society" has at its foundation good jobs, a solid education and quality health care that is affordable and available. We believe that we have to honor the promises we've made to the millions of families who worked hard, played by the rules and have earned a retirement of dignity.
Our first challenge is to strengthen the economy, the right way. The true test of America's economic recovery is not measured simply in quarterly profit reports; it's measured in jobs. The massive tax cuts that were supposed to spark an economic expansion have instead led to an economic exodus. To make up for the 3 million private-sector jobs that have been lost on President Bush's watch, the economy would have to create 226,000 jobs a month through the end of his term. Last month, the economy created only 1,000 new jobs. That's not good enough.
America can't afford to keep rewarding the accumulation of wealth over the dignity of work. Instead of borrowing even more money to give more tax breaks to companies so that they can export even more jobs, we propose tax cuts and policies that will strengthen our manufacturing sector and create good jobs at good wages here at home. We can also show our patriotism while strengthening agriculture and rural America by labeling all food products with their country of origin.
Education is the second key to our "opportunity society." Two years ago, the president signed a new education law. The heart of that law was a promise: The federal government would set high standards for every student, and hold schools responsible for results. In exchange, schools would receive the resources to meet the new standards. America's schools are holding up their end of the bargain; the president has not held up his. Millions of children are being denied the better teachers, smaller classes and extra help they were promised.
At the same time, the president's tax cuts have put states in such a bind that they're being forced to raise the cost of college. Since President Bush took office, the average tuition at a four-year public college has increased by nearly $600. The America our parents gave us was a place in which everyone had a chance to go to a good school, and then to college, community college or vocational school, regardless of family income. Our children deserve nothing less.
Third, our "opportunity society" is built on the belief that affordable, available health care is not a luxury, but a basic foundation of a truly compassionate society.
Today, 43.6 million Americans - almost all of them from working families - have no health insurance. That's over 3.8 million more than when President Bush took office. Those Americans lucky enough to have health insurance have seen their premiums go up each of the last three years. The increase in premiums that middle-income families have seen over the past three years is larger than the four-year tax cut they've been promised. This is an invisible tax increase on middle-class families.
Tonight, three years into his administration, the president acknowledged that the rapidly rising cost of health care and the increasing number of Americans with no health coverage are problems. But the solutions he proposed - more tax cuts - are not the right ones. More tax cuts will do little to make health care more affordable or reduce the number of people without insurance, and they will weaken health coverage for those who now have it.
When I was driving around South Dakota this summer, I met a nurse in Sioux Falls who has cancer. She told me that she couldn't afford the $1,500 a month her drugs cost. She told me that she was going to die, that she was a lost cause. But, she said, we must solve this problem; don't turn more people into lost causes.
We believe that the federal government should use the power of 40 million Americans to lower prescription drug prices and to allow us to get more affordable drugs from Canada instead of forbidding both. Drug companies and insurance companies are the only ones who benefit from that restriction, not the American people, and that's why we want to change it.
And in our vision of an "opportunity society," promises made to those who have worked a lifetime will be honored in retirement. That's why we believe that America's pension system needs to be strengthened, and Social Security's benefit should be a guarantee, not a gamble.
Only when every American who wants to work, can; when every child goes to a good school and has the opportunity to go further, only when health care is available and affordable for every American, when a lifetime of work guarantees a retirement with dignity, and when America is secure at home and our strength abroad is respected and not resented; only then will we have a union as strong as the American people. That's the America we want to build, because that's the union the American people deserve. Thank you for listening, good night, and God bless America.
-------- MILITARY
------- afghanistan
11 Civilians Reported Killed In a U.S. Raid In Afghanistan
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20AFGH.html?pagewanted=all
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jan. 19 (AP) - An American helicopter attacked a house in a village in southern Afghanistan, killing 11 people, four of them children, Afghan officials said Monday.
The American military said it conducted a weekend raid in the area in which it killed five armed militants. It said it had no information about civilian casualties.
The attack occurred around 9 p.m. Sunday in Saghatho, a village where American forces hunting for Taliban insurgents had carried out searches the day before, said Abdul Rahman, chief of the Char Chino District in Oruzgan Province.
"They were simple villagers," he told a reporter by telephone. "They were not Taliban. I don't know why the U.S. bombed this home."
The governor of Oruzgan, Jan Muhammad Khan, confirmed Mr. Abdul Rahman's account that four men, four children and three women were killed in an American bombing.
He said American authorities had told him they had seen ammunition in their search of the village, which raised suspicions.
In Kabul, an American military spokesman, Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, confirmed a weekend airstrike north of Deh Rawood, a town in Oruzgan Province.
"Coalition forces engaged from the air and killed five armed anti-coalition militia members," he said. He said he had no information about civilian casualties. "The coalition does have stringent rules of engagement, and we carefully weigh the use of deadly force," he said.
Mr. Abdul Rahman said the 11 victims were buried early on Monday in the village, where residents were "very afraid and very angry."
About 100 Afghan soldiers and 20 to 30 American soldiers had arrested 10 suspects in the Mahmara and Saghatho areas of the Char Chino District in the past two days, he said.
At least 15 civilians have been killed in the past month in raids by the American military.
On Dec. 5, six children were killed when a wall fell on them during an assault on a complex in eastern Paktia Province, where the military seized weapons. The next day, nine children were found dead in a field after an American attack on a mountain village in Ghazni Province.
--------
U.S. Strike Killed 11 Villagers, Afghans Say
Army Reports Militants Slain in Weekend Raid
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30092-2004Jan19.html
KANDAHAR, Afghanistan, Jan. 19 -- A U.S. air strike in southern Afghanistan killed 11 villagers, including four children, Afghan officials said Monday. The U.S. military said it killed five militants in the weekend raid in Uruzgan province.
Abdul Rahman, chief of Char Chino district in Uruzgan, said the attack occurred around 9 p.m. Sunday in Saghatho, a village where he said U.S. forces hunting for Taliban and al Qaeda fighters had carried out searches and made several arrests. He said the victims were outside a house and a helicopter was hovering nearby when "a big plane came and dropped bombs."
"They were simple villagers, they were not Taliban. I don't know why the U.S. bombed this home," he said by telephone.
The provincial governor, Jan Mohammad Khan, confirmed Rahman's account that four men, four children and three women were killed in the U.S. attack. He said U.S. authorities told him they found ammunition in a search of the village. During the search, "the people were afraid, they started running," Khan said.
Army Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a U.S. military spokesman, said a warplane killed five armed militants in a town 25 miles north of Deh Rawood in Uruzgan, where the U.S. military has a base. He said he had no more information on the location of the attack, and said he had no word of civilian casualties. He said an AC-130 gunship attacked the men when they left a house frequented by insurgents.
"They were running away from a known bad-guy site," Hilferty said, adding that military planners "carefully weigh the use of deadly force."
Two botched U.S. raids last month sparked outrage and drew U.N. warnings that civilian casualties could bolster support among Afghans for militants who oppose the U.S.-backed president, Hamid Karzai.
Six children died on Dec. 5 when a wall fell on them during a nighttime U.S. assault on a complex in eastern Paktia province in which soldiers seized hidden weapons caches. The next day, nine children were found dead in a field after an attack by a U.S. A-10 ground attack plane on a village in neighboring Ghazni province.
Both attacks were aimed at wanted militants, but neither target was killed or detained. U.S. commanders had vowed to review their procedures after those raids.
-------- africa
Swedish FM proposes sending troops to Liberia as part of UN peace operation
STOCKHOLM (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120201622.37tgmcjt.html
Swedish Foreign Minister Laila Freivalds said Tuesday she would propose that parliament send 231 Swedish soldiers to Liberia next month to participate in a United Nations' peace effort in the country.
At a Social Democratic party meeting Tuesday evening, Freivalds said she would propose to parliament that it agree to a UN request to send troops to join the 15,000-strong United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), which got underway last September.
"There is broad support for this initiative," Freivalds' press secretary Anders Hagquist told AFP. "We haven't heard protests from anyone."
Last December, the Defense Department instructed the Swedish army to start preparing for possible participation in the UN peace mission, and parliament is expected to make its final decision on the matter soon.
"The formal parliamentary decision should be made very soon, since the troops are supposed to get there sometime in February," Hagquist said.
The Swedish unit is expected to join the Irish battalion in UNMIL.
The eventual 15,000-strong UN deployment from 20 countries will enforce a ceasefire between government forces and rebel factions. It will also demobilize and disarm rebels and begin reconstruction ahead of elections
-------- china
China Rebukes Taiwan's Leader On New Plans For Referendum
Relations Near 'Brink of Danger'
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30021-2004Jan19.html
BEIJING, Jan. 19 -- A senior Chinese official rejected the new wording of a referendum that Taiwan is planning to hold in March and warned Monday that it would push cross-strait tensions "to the brink of danger." But he did not say how China would respond if the self-governing island went ahead with the vote.
The statement was the first by a Chinese leader on the subject since Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, under pressure from the United States, announced Friday that he was changing the questions he intended to put on the ballot.
Chen originally proposed asking whether Taiwan should demand that China remove the estimated 500 missiles it has aimed at the island. After the Bush administration criticized the ballot question as meaningless and dangerous, Chen said he would ask voters whether Taiwan should buy more advanced weapons if China refused to withdraw its missiles, and whether the island should try to open talks with Beijing.
Tang Jiaxuan, a former Chinese foreign minister who now holds the title of state councilor, said the March 20 referendum, "no matter how it is packaged . . . will only cause confrontation and animosity between the two sides, aggravate already strained cross-strait relations and push them further to the brink of danger."
In a speech delivered at a forum marking the anniversary of a Chinese proposal for unification with Taiwan, Tang described Chen's referendum as a "provocative action" that threatens regional stability. He said it was designed "to mislead and manipulate the Taiwanese people" into supporting Taiwanese independence.
State-run media released the text of the speech and noted that two members of China's ruling Politburo, Jia Qinglin and Liu Qi, attended the forum, signaling that the government considered it an important statement of policy.
China considers Taiwan part of its territory and has said it will attack the island if it declares independence or puts off unification indefinitely. It also argues that Chen is using the referendum to lay the groundwork for an island-wide vote on independence.
But Chen says the referendum is intended to draw international attention to China's missile buildup and to deepen the development of democracy on the island, which is scheduled to hold its third presidential election on the same day. His challenger in that race, Lien Chan, the Nationalist Party leader, has criticized the referendum as an attempt by Chen to mobilize his supporters, and his party is planning to challenge it in court.
The Bush administration sided with China last month, issuing an unusual rebuke of Chen during a visit by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao to Washington. But Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Friday that Chen had shown flexibility with the new questions, and a White House spokesman said the United States neither supported nor opposed the new ballot issue.
On Saturday, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman urged the United States to "continue to oppose any activity by the Taiwan authorities aimed at Taiwan independence."
The Taiwanese government issued a sharp rebuttal of Tang's speech, describing Beijing as a "troublemaker" that was trying to prevent the island from practicing democracy and said it had "randomly detained" Taiwanese businessmen to put pressure on the island. China announced the arrest of 24 people it alleges to be Taiwanese spies last month and paraded seven of them before reporters on Friday.
"Tang's words are again a deliberate twisting and misinterpretation, and his attempt to thwart democratic development in Taiwan is evident," Chen Ming-tong, a Taiwanese official, told the island's Central News Agency.
-------- iran
Iran Council Backs Off a Bit on Barred Politicians
January 20, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/middleeast/20CND-IRAN.html?hp
TEHRAN, Jan. 20 - The hard-line Islamic religious authority that disqualified 3,600 candidates from parliamentary elections next month has reversed its ruling for 200 candidates, and it announced today that more reinstatements would follow.
But reformers, who have accused conservatives of trying to steal the election, continued their sit-in today, saying they would not stop until all the disqualifications were reversed.
Abbas Kadhodai, a member of the hard-line body, the Guardian Council, said, "So far, we have approved some 200 candidates who had been disqualified."
He added, in a statement on the council's Web site: "This trend will continue After the order was given by the supreme leader, we have been obliged to speed up our work."
After reformers began a sit-in protest at Parliament on Jan. 11, Iran's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, entered the dispute, saying the disqualified incumbents should be allowed to run. He also said non-incumbent candidates should be considered on their merits rather than rejected out of hand.
The Guardian Council rejected nearly half of the candidates who registered to run on Feb. 20, including 83 incumbents. But the identities of the 200 approved today were not immediately made known. The council is expected to announce its final list around Feb. 10.
Many supporters of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, were rejected on the grounds that they were not loyal to Ayatollah Khamenei or devoted to Islam.
The coalition of some 18 reformist parties announced in an open letter to President Khatami on Sunday that they would decide on Thursday whether to boycott the election.
The coalition, which is led by Mohammad Reza Khatami, the president's younger brother, said it would make its decision based on the extent of the disqualifications.
-------- iraq
Thousands of Iraqis Demand Death for Hussein
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Shiite Muslims marched through Baghdad for a second day Tuesday, this time demanding the execution of Saddam Hussein -- whose Sunni-dominated regime repressed the Shiite majority for decades.
Five thousand people joined the march that wound its way from Sadr City, a poor Shiite neighborhood in northeastern Baghdad, to Firdous Square, the plaza in the center of the capital where Saddam's statue was pulled down April 9, marking the ouster of the Baathist regime.
Saddam was captured Dec. 13 and the Pentagon has designated him a prisoner of war.
``The butcher of Iraq is not a POW. He must be punished,'' read a banner waved by some demonstrators.
``Saddam is a war criminal, not a POW. Execute Saddam,'' the crowd chanted, waving huge green flags, the color of Islam.
The march, which coincided with smaller protests in two other cities, came a day after a much larger demonstration of 100,000 Shiites in Baghdad to demand direct elections to replace the U.S.-led interim administration.
Shiites, who are believed to make up about 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, were kept out of power during Saddam's 35-year rule by the minority Sunni Muslims. Thousands of Shiites, including clerics, were murdered by the regime. Victims often were buried in mass graves.
Since the fall of Saddam, the Shiites have begun asserting their numerical superiority. Generally supportive of the U.S. invasion last year, Shiite leaders now pose the biggest political challenge to the U.S.-led occupation and its plans for a power transfer this summer.
Leading Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani opposes the U.S. plan that envisages holding 18 regional caucuses in May to choose a transitional legislature. The assembly would then appoint a provisional government to take power on July 1, formally ending the U.S. occupation.
Al-Sistani wants early, direct elections for the new government. But Washington says it is impossible to hold elections before June 30 because there has been no census and there are no true voter lists. The precarious security condition -- reinforced by the suicide bomb blast in Baghdad on Sunday that killed 31 people -- makes the exercise even more unfeasible, U.S. officials say.
But recognizing that Shiite aspirations cannot be ignored, the United States on Monday asked U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to send a team to Iraq to determined if elections are possible. Annan said he would consider the request.
U.S. officials hope the U.N. team would conclude that early elections are impossible and convince al-Sistani to drop his demand.
``What we're trying to do is find a solution that will work for us and the Iraqi people and provide a legitimate way'' to chose a government, U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq L. Paul Bremer told CNN.
The U.S.-led administration is struggling to bring stability to the country. Saddam loyalists and members of his former Baath Party continue to launch attacks on American troops, although the frequency has dropped since Saddam's capture. A total of 501 U.S. soldiers have died in the conflict.
Saddam is being held at an undisclosed location.
``Since the fall of Saddam, we got our total freedom. We call for the execution of Saddam the infidel, who killed our sons and kept them in mass graves,'' 40-year-old Karima Hanoun said at Tuesday's demonstration. She said 11 relatives were executed by Saddam.
POW status under the Geneva Conventions grants Saddam certain rights, and many Iraqis fear such status will shield him from a trial in Iraq.
International Red Cross officials have said the conventions would not prevent the United States from handing Saddam over to an Iraqi tribunal, as long as a fair trial is guaranteed.
A statement by the demonstrators said Saddam should be tried by an Iraqi court for crimes against humanity.
``We emphasize our rejection and condemnation of the unjust American decision'' to term him a prisoner of war, the statement said. ``Did America forget, or is (it) forgetting the screams of the children, orphans, and the tears of women who are crying at the graves of their sons and husbands?'' it said.
--------
A Raid in Iraq, And a Glimpse Into the World Of Infiltrators
Foreign Arab Fighters Had Posed as Merchants
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30119-2004Jan19.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 -- After midnight Monday, Ardashees Mherian heard the pitter-patter of footsteps on his roof and rushed upstairs to see what was going on.
The footsteps quickly turned into the rat-a-tat of automatic rifle fire, the bangs of exploding grenades, angry shouts and awful moans. His little house in far southeast Baghdad was caught in a raid by U.S. soldiers on suspected foreign fighters who lived around the corner.
"I was surprised. I did not know such people lived here," he said. "On the other hand, this is Baghdad. We're used to shooting and explosions. Life here is one big war."
The raid took the lives of two men from Yemen and one from Syria, U.S. officials said. Grenades and automatic rifle fire damaged the house where they lived, and blood stained the floor and walls in an interior courtyard. When Mherian ventured onto his roof at dawn, he found the corpse of one of the Arabs in a pool of blood.
The raid and its results provided a rare glimpse into the opaque world of foreign Arabs who U.S. and Iraqi officials say have infiltrated Iraq to fight U.S.-led occupation forces.
Although U.S. officials declined to provide details of the raid or the means they used to locate the house in the Hay Reasa district of Baghdad, Iraqi officials described it as a terrorist safe house. "They clearly knew what house they wanted," said Adnan Abdul Hamid, who lives across the street. "Loudspeakers told those people to surrender and warned everyone else to stay in their homes."
After the raid, U.S. soldiers and Iraqi police carried off boxes of dynamite and grenades, residents said, as well as notebooks. Besides the men, three women and three children lived in the house in a nondescript neighborhood of modest tan, walled-in homes. One man was captured and one of the women was also detained. The two other women and the children were permitted to stay.
Neighbors said they had been reluctant to query the foreign residents about their origins or interests. They say they did not know what the men were up to, although some suspected they were not the second-hand clothing merchants they claimed to be.
"They were not very friendly. They left the house early and came back late," said Salah Abdul Kadam, who lived next door. "Only one spoke to anyone. The women wore black veils. We were curious, but people keep to themselves here."
The tenants rented the house in July from its owner, Ali Sharat, who everyone said had not been seen in the neighborhood lately. Neighbors noted that they drove in and out in a car painted orange and white, the characteristic colors of Iraqi taxis. They would load the car with cartons of clothes, though residents now suspect that the apparel hid explosives and weapons. "When they carried things out, it always took two men to do it. It looked heavier than clothing," said Abdul Hamid.
The raid began with the loudspeaker announcements telling the tenants to surrender, witnesses said. Fifteen minutes later, shots rang out from inside the house. Soldiers ferried in by Humvee began firing rifles and grenades at the two-story structure. Helicopters circled overhead but did not fire rockets in the neighborhood, residents said.
The shooting continued for about three hours. The grenade blasts shattered windows in nearby homes. At the Mherian home, first a soldier and then one of the Arabs took up positions on his roof. The Arab had clambered across rooftops two houses away to reach the home of the Mherians, who are of Armenian descent.
By dawn, when silence had returned to the neighborhood, Mherian's high-school-aged daughter discovered the body lying in a corner of the roof. There was a crater, evidently from a grenade that sprayed shrapnel all over and killed the Arab. His nationality was not clear to the Mherians.
Ardashees Mherian, a computer salesman, rushed to the street and told the soldiers, "There's a body on my roof."
They quickly carried the dead man away, but the Mherians have been unable to remove all the blood that stained their roof.
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Missile Lands in U.S. Compound in Iraq
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Explosion.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A missile landed in the sprawling U.S. compound in central Baghdad late Tuesday but caused little damage, a U.S. spokesman said. Unconfirmed reports said one person was injured.
The projectile ``believed to be a rocket impacted in the vicinity of the Al-Rasheed Hotel,'' said the spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The missile caused a loud explosion heard as far as two miles away at about 9:30 p.m., and immediately sirens were activated in the compound, known as ``green zone.''
``We have an unconfirmed report of one person being injured. No other significant damage was reported'' and officials were investigating the attack, the spokesman said.
The ``green zone'' has several offices and residences of the U.S. military and civilian authorities involved in governing Iraq since the ouster of Saddam Hussein in April last year.
It also contains the former luxury Al-Rasheed Hotel, now unoccupied.
Saddam loyalists have carried out several attacks against the U.S. forces, mostly in central Iraq, but the intensity has reduced since the former dictator's capture on Dec. 13.
Last fall, several mortars and rockets were fired into the ``green zone,'' including a barrage on Oct. 26 at the Al-Rasheed Hotel in which a U.S. lieutenant colonel was killed and 18 people were wounded.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, was in the hotel at the time but escaped injury. The hotel was evacuated after that attack and remains unused except for a coffee shop.
A suicide bomb attack on Sunday morning at the edge of the green zone killed at least 31 people and injured more than 120.
-------- israel
Israeli warplanes raid Lebanon after Hezbollah attack
Israel strikes Hezbollah targets after deadly border attack
TYRE, Lebanon (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120170747.wkoaahpo.html
Israeli warplanes raided targets deep into southern Lebanon on Tuesday, a day after a Hezbollah strike killed an Israeli soldier in the volatile border region, AFP correspondents said.
Israel had warned it would retaliate after the soldier was killed and another wounded when the Shiite Muslim militia fired an anti-tank rocket on an Israeli bulldozer Monday.
The raids hit the Hezbollah-controlled area of Zibkin, some 15 kilometres (10 miles) southeast of Tyre, and Aalman, near Nabatiyeh, to the northeast, they added.
It was not immediately known if there were any casualties from the attacks, which began around 6:00 pm (1600 GMT) and lasted half an hour. Shortly beforehand two helicopters were seen flying off Tyre, a port city around 30 kilometres from the Israeli border.
Earlier, Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz accused Hezbollah and Syria -- the main powerbroker in Lebanon -- of "deliberate provocation," the radio reported.
"Those responsible for these provocations will pay the price," he was quoted as saying. "Israel has the supreme right to defend its nationals.
"Those who speak of peace should first renounce terrorism," Mofaz added, referring to recent Syrian overtures to reopen peace talks with Israel that collapsed four years ago.
Hezbollah said the bulldozer was on the Lebanese side of a UN-demarcated border when it was hit, but Israel said it was on Israeli soil, between an Israeli-built border fence and the UN's Blue Line.
Israeli radio said residents of northern Israel had been warned to be on the alert for a counter-attack, but not for the moment to take shelter.
----
Israeli fighter jets strike south Lebanon
Tuesday January 20, 2004
UK Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,1127326,00.html
Israeli fighter jets today attacked Hizbullah guerrilla targets in south Lebanon, Israeli military officials said.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, the officials said that Israeli warplanes hit Hizbullah bases in the Bekaa Valley, the area of south Lebanon that is closest to the Syrian border.
Israel's Channel Two TV said that at least four explosions were heard. There were two targets but no immediate reports of casualties, the report said. The air strike followed a border incident yesterday, in which Hizbullah guerrillas fired an anti-tank missile at a bulldozer clearing explosives. An Israeli soldier was killed and another seriously wounded.
The Israeli army today changed its account of the border incident to acknowledge that the soldier killed in the clash had actually been on Lebanese and not Israeli soil at the time.
"We deviated [from standard procedure] by going into Lebanon," Reuters reported Brigadier General Yair Golan as saying.
"From their [Hizbullah's] standpoint [the attack] is legitimate, although not from ours," Brig Gen Golan said. "It is very serious and an escalation ... it is a provocation by Hizbullah."
Military officials said that the decision to attack Hizbullah targets was made at a four-hour meeting of senior commanders earlier today.
Though Israel held Syria responsible, it was decided not to attack Syria in order not to inflame the situation, the same officials said.
The Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, claimed that the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, was responsible for the original incident.
"If President Assad thinks he's going to use Hizbullah as the long arm in the fight against us, he should know that our response will be very clear," Mr Shalom said.
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Israel Warplanes Attack Hezbollah in Lebanon
January 20, 2004
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/middleeast/20CND-MIDE.html?hp
JERUSALEM, Jan. 20 - Israeli warplanes launched airstrikes against two Hezbollah posts in southern Lebanon today, the Israeli Army said, a day after Hezbollah guerrillas there fired an antitank missile that hit an Israeli military bulldozer, killing one soldier and seriously wounding another.
The targets were in the west and central areas of southern Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, an Israeli army spokesman said. An army statement said the posts had been used by Hezbollah to launch attacks on civilian areas in northern Israel. There were no reports of casualties.
Israel had said the military bulldozer was clearing roadside explosives in the border region.
The attack on Monday stirred tensions along the uneasy frontier and also increased friction between Israel and Syria, which maintains a large military presence in Lebanon and supports Hezbollah.
Last month, Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, called for reopening peace talks with Israel, but Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, was cool to the idea even before Monday'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 the area, an Israeli military official said. The bulldozer was on the northern side of the fence but still well within Israeli territory, the official added.
United Nations monitors in southern Lebanon were called in to verify the exact location, the official said.
Israel said it had uncovered roadside explosives planted by Hezbollah three times since November. Israeli warplanes frequently fly over Lebanese airspace to reconnoiter the situation on the ground. Before the shooting, Mr. Sharon told a parliamentary committee that it was clear to him that a peace deal with Syria would require Israel to withdraw from all of the Golan Heights, which is not far from the site of Monday's shooting.
One Israeli legislator said Syria was in a weak position and suggested that Israel might be able to win concessions if talks were held soon..
"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, who added, "The prime minister said this as a statement of fact, not as his position in any negotiations."
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 his opponents in Israel all 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 had effectively declared that "I don't intend to pay the price of peace with Syria."
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 of the Labor Party. 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 now.
Some Israeli officials believe Syria is making peace overtures because it is facing increased pressure from the United States.
The Clinton administration actively courted Syria in an effort 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.
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Israel Planes Attack Hezbollah in Lebanon
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Lebanon.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli planes attacked Hezbollah targets in south Lebanon on Tuesday, threatening an escalation of clashes along a border that has been relatively calm for nearly four years.
The airstrikes came a day after the guerrilla group fired an anti-tank missile at an Israeli bulldozer clearing explosives along the border, killing an Israeli soldier and seriously wounding another.
There were no immediate reports of casualties. The Israeli military said it hit two Hezbollah bases about six miles north of the Israeli border. Three air-to-surface missiles were fired in the two air raids, Lebanese officials said.
The airstrikes were the first since August, when Israeli warplanes targeted a Hezbollah artillery piece.
The Israeli officials said the decision to attack Hezbollah targets was made at a four-hour meeting of senior military commanders on Tuesday. It was decided not attack Syria in order not to inflame the situation, the officials said.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz both said Syrian President Bashar Assad was responsible for Monday's incident.
After insisting that the bulldozer had not crossed the border, the Israeli army commander in the area, Col. Yair Golan, told Israel Radio on Tuesday that part of the vehicle had crossed into Lebanon while digging up the explosives.
Syria is widely believed to help arm and fund Hezbollah. Syria is on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism, and Washington has threatened to impose sanctions for harboring anti-Israel militants.
The Shiite Muslim group fought against Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon, which ended in May 2000 with a U.N.-approved Israeli pullback. Since then, there have been several cross-border incidents in which Israeli soldiers have been captured and killed. Israeli warplanes often fly over southern Lebanon, breaking the sound barrier.
``If President Assad thinks he's going to use Hezbollah as the long arm in the fight against us, he should know that our response will be very clear,'' Shalom said Tuesday.
Mofaz called Monday's attack an ``intentional provocation by Syria and Hezbollah. Anyone who is involved in directing this attack will be held responsible.''
Although Mofaz called for restraint, he said ``Israel has the right, and more importantly, the highest moral obligation to defend its citizens and soldiers.''
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Hezbollah Kills Israeli Soldier in Attack at Border
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30022-2004Jan19.html
BEIRUT, Jan. 19 -- Hezbollah militants attacked an Israeli bulldozer at the Lebanese border on Monday, and the Israeli military reported one soldier killed and two wounded, one seriously.
In a broadcast by its al-Manar Television, the Islamic militant group said the bulldozer had crossed the border into Lebanon, but the Israeli army disputed that.
"Holy warriors of the Islamic resistance destroyed a hostile vehicle that violated the border line in the town of Marouahine in southern Lebanon," al-Manar said.
"The bulldozer was directly hit," a separate Hezbollah statement said.
The Israeli army commander on the Lebanese border, Maj. Gen. Benny Gantz, said the bulldozer was clearing land on the Israeli side when it was attacked. "It was hit by an antitank missile fired from the Lebanese side. We don't know what type," Gantz said.
The general said the situation on the border could escalate. "Hezbollah keeps operating," Gantz said. "The Syrians are encouraging them. One day this is going to blow up."
Hezbollah is believed to receive support from Iran and Syria, which dominates Lebanon and has about 20,000 troops in the country.
A senior aide to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Raanan Gissin, said Syria was responsible for the attack. "We have no intention of escalating the situation," Gissin said. But Syria, he said, must "stop supporting terrorist organizations and dismantle the terrorist infrastructure that it built in Lebanon."
Since Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in May 2000, there have been numerous cases of Israeli aircraft flying over Lebanon and Israeli soldiers exchanging fire across the border with Hezbollah. Hezbollah, which led an 18-year guerrilla war against Israeli forces until their withdrawal, routinely fires on Israeli warplanes over Lebanon.
Earlier Monday, Israeli warplanes flew over eastern and southern Lebanon, drawing antiaircraft fire from the Lebanese army and Hezbollah guerrillas, Lebanese security officials said.
Two Israeli jets flew over the southern cities of Sidon and Tyre and the market town of Nabatiyah, as well as the Hermel region in eastern Lebanon, breaking the sound barrier, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Israeli military officials declined to comment on whether Israeli jets had flown over Lebanon but said echoes of explosions were heard on the Israeli side.
The office of the U.N. secretary general's representative for Lebanon, Staffan de Mistura, issued a statement expressing dismay over the flights and calling on the Israeli government to stop them.
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French troops arrive in Kuwait for wargames
KUWAIT CITY (AFP)
Jan 20, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040120155913.axwqd0t7.html
An advance unit of French forces consisting of about 100 troops have arrived in Kuwait to take part in joint wargames slated for February 7 to 23, the French embassy here said Tuesday.
"Up to a hundred troops arrived late Monday. They are the first batch. More troops will arrive later," spokesman Christian Huteau told AFP.
A total of 1,200 French troops will take part in the joint maneuvers which will involve land forces, the navy and the air force, the spokesman added.
The wargames, involving four Mirage-2000 aircraft, three warships and several Puma and Gazelle helicopters, are not related to events in Iraq and were planned well in advance, said Huteau.
Kuwait and France, which signed a defense pact after the 1991 Gulf War, hold military exercises once every four years. Previous large-scale maneuvers were staged in 1996 and 2000.
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Russia Space Engineers Eager to Join U.S.
January 20, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Russia-Space-Dreams.html
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's space engineers spent years designing futuristic spacecraft for missions to Mars with little hope they would survive the financial meltdown of the nation's once-glorious space program.
But President Bush's announcement of a new thrust into space has awakened hopes that these dreams could come true in a new alliance with the United States.
From giant booster rockets to tiny robots, Russia has developed a range of cutting-edge space technologies it now hopes to share with the United States to send humans to the moon and Mars.
It would offer the cash-strapped space industries an alternative to China, which put a man in orbit last year, envisages conquering the moon and has sought Russian technology and know-how for its space program.
``We not only can, but we must participate in these (U.S.) projects,'' Vyacheslav Filin, a senior designer for the RKK Energiya rocket manufacturer, told the Interfax news agency Friday. ``A new step is necessary in space, a new unifying project.''
The Soviet Union put the first man and the first satellite in space and, in 1988, Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev was the first to propose a joint U.S.-Russian manned mission to Mars. But Washington's reaction was lukewarm, and the Soviet Union collapsed just two years later, leaving Russia's space program in shambles.
Its space industries have struggled ever since. The single interplanetary robotic mission that Russia managed to mount since the Soviet collapse failed miserably in 1996.
Despite the money crunch, designers continued drafting projects of new ships. At RKK Energiya, a team led by Leonid Gorshkov has done some preliminary design work on an interplanetary ship and landing vehicles for a manned mission to Mars.
Those engineers have conceived a 77-ton spacecraft modeled on the Russian Zvezda module for the international space station built by Energiya that could carry a crew of four to six people to Mars at a cost of $15 billion.
The Institute for Medical and Biological Problems, the premier center for research in space medicine, is launching a 500-day experiment next year intended to model a mission to Mars, according to Mark Belakovsky, a leading institute expert.
A crew of six volunteers will be locked in a mock-up spacecraft loaded with more than 5 tons of food and more than 3 tons of water, he said.
Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov holds the world record for the longest space mission -- 438 days in 1994-1995 -- roughly the time believed required for a roundtrip to Mars.
The trip would require improved onboard life-support systems, stronger protection from harmful space radiation and new approaches to crew training. Russian scientists say their nation's experience in long-term orbital missions gives it an edge.
``Russia has unique expertise in long-term space flights, particularly in the field of space medicine and biology,'' Belakovsky said.
Other Russian space engineers said the United States would be bound to tap into Russia's rich expertise in space if it goes ahead with interplanetary missions.
Denis Pivnyuk, a deputy director of the Khrunichev State Research and Production Center, a leading Russian rocket manufacturer, said such missions are feasible and can be based on hardware and know-how that already exist.
``It's a large-scale effort, but it's quite possible to carry it out on the basis of existing technologies,'' Pivnyuk told The Associated Press.
Some Russian space engineers talked about using Khrunichev's Proton booster rockets to launch components of a Mars spacecraft to be assembled in orbit. Others spoke of reviving the giant Energiya booster, mothballed for lack of money and mission following two successful launches in the late 1980s.
Vyacheslav Mikhailichenko, a spokesman for the Russian Aerospace Agency, said the huge payload of Energiya, which was built to excel the U.S. Saturn V ``Moon rocket,'' could make it useful in future lunar and Mars missions.
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DIPLOMACY Annan Signals He'll Agree to Send U.N. Experts to Iraq
January 20, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/middleeast/20NATI.html?pagewanted=all
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 19 - Secretary General Kofi Annan gave strong indications on Monday that he would accept a request to send United Nations experts to Iraq, in a move that could help end the stalemate over how to turn over authority to an Iraqi-led government.
Mr. Annan met Monday with top American, British and Iraqi officials from Baghdad. The meeting came after months of ill will between the United States and the United Nations, which refused to authorize the Bush administration's decision to use military action. Last fall, after a fatal bombing at its Baghdad headquarters, the United Nations pulled out of Iraq, citing security concerns and a lack of clarity about its role.
Striking a stance that was at once cooperative and cautious, Mr. Annan told a news conference that he understood the urgency of the issue but that "further discussions should take place at the technical level." Those discussions began almost immediately, with United Nations election experts being briefed on the complicated political plans by which the occupation authority hopes to transfer power to Iraqis on June 30.
Diplomats said that despite Mr. Annan's careful public statements, it appeared likely that he would decide quickly to approve the request. A European diplomat who took part in the meeting said, "In my experience at the United Nations, when you say you'll consider something, you've already put your foot on the slope."
The occupation authorities had largely shunned the United Nations in their political planning but have suddenly turned to it now that the most revered cleric among Iraq's majority Shiite Muslims, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has objected to the American plans for a transition and has instead called for direct elections. Thousands of his followers have staged demonstrations backing his plea. A march on Monday in Baghdad drew 100,000. [Page A10.]
According to participants in the meeting on Monday, a representative of the ayatollah gave assurances that he would accept the conclusions of the United Nations experts. The United States has maintained that there is not enough time to organize direct elections.
Emerging from the meeting, L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator in Iraq, pronounced it "a very good, open and candid exchange" and declared, "The encouraging news from today is that the secretary general agreed to consider this request very seriously."
A senior United States diplomat reported that Mr. Annan asked many questions about current conditions in Iraq but appeared interested in finding ways to take up the offer. "We didn't get a yes answer, definitely not, but my sense of the meeting was that he was forward leaning," the diplomat said.
Last month, Mr. Annan sent a letter to Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, the associate who was at the meeting on Monday, saying direct elections might not be manageable in the short time before the June 30 transfer date under current conditions in Iraq.
Ayatollah Sistani is reported to have dismissed that letter as one written under pressure from the Americans but also to have said that he might change his mind if a United Nations team came to Iraq and verified the judgment that holding direct elections was unreasonable in the time frame.
On one crucial point for Mr. Annan, he said that while any United Nations activities would be constrained by security considerations, the occupation authorities had promised to do all they could to protect workers.
The occupation authorities' invitation to Mr. Annan represented an apparent admission that the United Nations has a role to play in Iraq immediately, not just one after the transfer of sovereignty this summer, a point that Mr. Annan had been seeking to make.
Attending the meeeting in addition to Mr. Bremer were Sir Jeremy Greenstock of Britain, the No. 2 official at the Coalition Provisional Authority; John D. Negroponte, the American ambassador to the United Nations; and three other American officials, William Burns, the assistant secretary of state for near eastern affairs; Kim Holmes, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations; and Robert Blackwill, who is coordinating Iraq issues for the National Security Council; as well as eight members of the Iraqi Governing Council.
In confronting the request for assistance from Iraq's occupation powers, Mr. Annan faced a quandary.
The Security Council refused to approve military action last year, and the United Nations has been excluded by the United States from the political planning that was set last November in an agreement that made no mention of any role for the world organization. Mr. Annan is consequently eager not to appear to be validating a process he had no role in formulating.
Mr. Annan removed international staff from Iraq in October after attacks on relief workers and the bombing of the United Nations' headquarters in Baghdad in August that killed 22 people.
The suicide bomb blast on Sunday at the gates of the United States administrators' compound in Baghdad, which killed at least 24 people, underscored the instability on the ground and reminded officials in New York that their people would probably be targets if they went back and associated themselves with the occupying forces.
But if he resisted the invitation to expand the world organization's presence and enhance its role in Iraq, Mr. Annan could end up fulfilling the frequent prediction of President Bush's that the United Nations risks becoming "irrelevant" and going the way of the League of Nations.
He is said by aides to be unforgiving of himself for having sent the original United Nations mission to Baghdad without better preparation for its security. Among the 16 staff members killed was the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello.
The date of the bombing, Aug. 19, is still a fresh one for people in the East River headquarters, many of whom counted the victims in Baghdad among their friends.
As for what duties United Nations people would have in Iraq, Mr. Annan is concerned that they be assigned to specific areas where they could have impact and not be used just to bring a degree of international legitimacy to the occupation.
Mr. Annan has set three broad conditions for the United Nations' return: "clarity" on the scope of the organization's role, security assurances and guarantees that the responsibility would be commensurate with the risk.
The mission to study the election process is a relatively limited one in that context, but Mr. Annan cautioned people on Monday against thinking that a "massive" United Nations presence in Iraq was under consideration now.
Late on Monday, the Security Council heard a closed-session report from Adnan Pachachi, this month's chairman of the Iraqi Governing Council, on the situation in Iraq.
At a preceding lunch with Security Council members, Mr. Annan was asked by one of the ambassadors whether he intended to make his decision on the mission to Iraq "sooner or later," according to one of the participants.
He replied, "Sooner."
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U.N. to Consider Request to Study Earlier Elections in Iraq
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30089-2004Jan19?language=printer
At talks yesterday with the United States and the Iraqi Governing Council, the United Nations took its first step toward reengaging in Iraq and helping the United States rescue its troubled plan to hand over political power to the Iraqis, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
Secretary General Kofi Annan promised to look at how the United Nations can help, after a request from L. Paul Bremer, the chief U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq, and Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi.
Bremer and Pachachi asked the United Nations to begin by dispatching a team to help decide whether elections can be held for a new provisional government before the U.S.-led occupation is scheduled to end on June 30.
The fate of the political transition hinges largely on how a provisional government is selected. The U.S. plan calls for a complex system of caucuses in 18 regional provinces; it has been rejected by Iraq's leading cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, and a growing number of Iraqis. Tens of thousands took to the streets of Baghdad yesterday to support Sistani's call for direct elections.
"We have asked the secretary general to send a team to Iraq to investigate the possibility of having such elections and, in case that is not possible, to explain why so, and also to discuss alternatives to that," Pachachi said at one of three news briefings after the talks.
In private communications with Iraqis, Annan has signaled that elections seem impractical. But he tipped his hand publicly after the morning talks.
"I don't believe there may be enough time between now and May to hold elections, but the team will go down and look into that further and then report to me," he said at a news conference.
Intervention by the United Nations could defuse the mounting tension over elections, said Abdul Aziz Hakim, a member of the Governing Council and a Shiite Muslim cleric who has dealt with Sistani.
"We would like a technical committee to be sent to look into and consider the matter of elections in Iraq," said Hakim, who was also on the Governing Council delegation. "Then this conclusion will be respected by Mr. Sistani."
Despite rancorous relations between the Bush administration and the United Nations for more than a year, Annan stressed the importance of pooling resources, skills and leverage to help Iraq make the difficult transition.
"The stability of Iraq should be everyone's business. I think we have an opportunity to work together to try and move forward in a process that the council and all of us have believed in," Annan told reporters.
The United Nations had expected to play a prominent role in Iraq once the United States leaves at the end of June. The issue is what role the United Nations will play -- and how it will participate in decision-making -- between now and then.
"If we get it wrong at this stage, it will be even more difficult and we may not even get to the next stage. So I think it is extremely important that we do whatever we can to assist. And I'm looking at this issue and holding these discussions in that spirit," the secretary general said.
The talks were frank but cordial, according to Iraqi, U.S. and U.N. officials. The U.N. delegation was especially struck by what it perceived as a new U.S. attitude about working with other nations through the world body. U.N. envoys said they hope this will be the beginning of an enduring pattern of international cooperation.
The major obstacle could be security. Annan drilled delegations from Iraq and the occupation authority on the spate of recent attacks and the ability of U.S. or new Iraqi forces to protect the United Nations if it returns.
Annan pulled out the U.N. staff in October, after two suicide bombings at Baghdad headquarters in less than three months killed about two dozen people, including chief U.N. representative Sergio Vieira de Mello.
Yet Iraqi and U.S. officials came away convinced that the United Nations will agree in the next two weeks to send a U.N. team to Iraq as a harbinger of its return in some form -- first operating from offices in Cyprus and Amman, Jordan, and later inside Iraq.
"Certainly it is our hope that the United Nations can play an active role, and soon. This has been our hope all along. I am optimistic. I think this will be done," Pachachi said.
In a sign of U.N. interest in helping facilitate the return of Iraqi sovereignty, U.N. officials are already talking about possible options to adapt the caucus system and refine the U.S. plan to make it more acceptable to Sistani and other challengers.
Although the United Nations might not be able to provide enough personnel to provide independent monitoring of the caucus or indirect elections, it could advise on how to recruit such monitors and how to conduct the process, well-placed sources said.
Bremer and the Iraqi delegation are due to hold talks at the White House, Pentagon and State Department today.
On another front, the White House announced yesterday that former secretary of state James A. Baker III will travel to oil-rich countries of the Persian Gulf to hold further discussions on relief of Iraq's $120 billion foreign debt. Baker already toured Europe and Asia to appeal for debt relief; he will visit Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia this week.
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THE MILITARY
G.I.'s Headed for Iraq Train for Peace as Well as War
January 20, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/middleeast/20GENE.html?pagewanted=all
FORT HOOD, Tex., Jan. 15 - When Lt. Gen. Thomas F. Metz arrives in Iraq in the coming days to take command of day-to-day military operations there, he will be battling insurgents as much as ill will, and his troops will be engaged in everything from firefights to fixing sewers.
That is why General Metz, commander of the Army's III Corps, ordered up training for the mission that went far beyond the usual tabletop war games and field exercises.
He dispatched senior officers to Jordan for lessons on Middle Eastern history and culture. Combat maneuvers in the deserts of California and muggy Louisiana included 200 Arabic-speaking civilians, under contract with the military, whose job it was to complicate the work of soldiers training to operate checkpoints and raid homes.
The headquarters staff of III Corps, which will form the core of the coalition joint task force running the entire Iraq mission, drilled with scenarios castwell into June for weather and religious holidays and local politics.
And he assigned his commanders and senior noncommissioned officers a reading list on Islam because "we have to understand their culture through a different set of eyes," General Metz said in an interview.
"Regardless of your academic background, whether you've come through a public or a private school system in the United States, you're going to get a good dose of American history, West European history and a little world history," said General Metz, a soft-spoken three-star officer who has commanded mechanized infantry units and taught engineering at West Point.
"That world history is going to be written through the eyes of a Westerner, and we have to understand that the Islamic culture was a dominant power in the world for hundreds and hundreds of years."
Study of what he called "the cultural piece" led to new procedures that may allow the military to conduct muscular missions while minimizing bruised relations with the Iraqi population.
"Example: What a squad leader must do when he enters someone's home," he said. "If you have to break the door down to get in to do the search, then have an engineer team standing by that, when you leave, will repair the door. After you've thought of it and done it once, it seems real simple."
For years, III Corps trained to command divisions readied for a specific high-intensity conflict - the fight to defend South Korea from invasion by the Communist North. Since receiving his orders for Iraq, General Metz has guided III Corps in preparing instead for an operation that presents troops with lower-intensity challenges of stability and security operations.
Lessons observed are only learned once they are incorporated into future action, and General Metz will be drawing on experience gained from America's first front against terror. From October 2002 to January 2003, he served as chief of staff to the Central Command under Gen. Tommy R. Franks, dealing hands-on with the complicated postwar period in Afghanistan.
That experience, he said, taught him the importance of analyzing a range of influence that any government may exert, what he called DIME, for diplomacy, information, military and economy.
"I learned in Afghanistan that you can't build the security tower all the way to its top and then expect everything else to come up," he said. "You can't build any one to its finished production and then start on the next one. They have to come together."
General Metz will arrive in Iraq as deputy to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, commander of the coalition's joint task force. Pentagon officials say General Sanchez will then focus his energies less on tactics and daily operations and more on strategic-level, military-political issues in the critical months as control passes to a new Iraqi government, which is planned by July 1.
Those changes are part of the largest movement of American troops since World War II, with almost a quarter million rotating in and out of Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, which presents opportunities for creative missions - and increased opportunities for insurgents to attack.
The complexity of that rotation can be seen here at Fort Hood, one of the Army's largest and most important bases. One of its divisions, the Fourth Infantry, will return from Iraq this spring; another, the First Cavalry, will go to Iraq, to be responsible for the security of Baghdad.
Members of a National Guard brigade, the 39th, from Arkansas, are here for accelerated training for their role in the deployment of large numbers of citizen-soldiers to join active-duty forces in Iraq.
Maj. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, commander of the First Cavalry Division, said he worked with community leaders in nearby Killeen to arrange training very different from that usually given to troops heading overseas.
Soldiers are being teamed with the chief of Killeen's water and sewer district, the supervisor of the electricity grid and the manager of the local landfill "to get an idea how the whole thing works, and what `right' looks like," General Chiarelli said.
In Iraq, "The soldier is the guy down in the neighborhood on a day-to-day basis, and if something is not going right, he's the first person who is going to hear about it," General Chiarelli added. "We're going to make life better for the Iraqi people in those areas."
Brig. Gen. Thomas P. Bostick, an assistant division commander for the First Cavalry, said, "The overarching theme is, we want to turn over in a progressive manner to the Iraqi people control of their country."
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International Criminal Court to Get Evidence of 'Illegality' of Iraq War
by Sanjay Suri
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
by the Inter Press Service
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0120-09.htm
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=22018
LONDON - A strong case arguing the illegality of the invasion of Iraq will be handed soon to the International Criminal Court at The Hague.
The report prepared by eight leading international lawyers and professors of law drawn from four countries makes a strong case against the illegality of the way British and U.S. troops fought the war.
The professors came together for the study within an independent group Peacerights. The study was funded largely by shows done last year by British comedian Mark Thomas in a campaign he called White Ribbon.
"We will be presenting the report first to the Attorney-General in Britain," solicitor Phil Shiner from Peacerights said at a meeting called by the group Tuesday.
The Attorney-General is not expected to respond, given his official advice to the government last year that it would be legal for Britain to join an invasion of Iraq. The ICC will be given a copy of the report but asked formally to proceed only after the Attorney-General in Britain turns down the request to prosecute British leaders.
The dossier prepared by the experts is expected to be handed to prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICC) Luis Moreno Ocampo next month in The Hague, capital of the Netherlands.
Since his appointment as prosecutor in April last year Ocampo has received around 500 requests from 66 countries, but has asked for a full inquiry in only one case relating to the Democratic Republic of Congo.
But there are indications that the prosecutor will study the law professors' report seriously. "The prosecutor knows what we are doing, and his office is waiting for the information we are sending," Bill Bowring who headed the panel of law experts told IPS. "We know there is interest in the prosecutor's office."
The prosecutor will have to study the professors' report and can take it to the ICC to demand a full inquiry if he finds merit in it. A full inquiry could mean that British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his senior ministers could be called to face charges.
If the prosecutor orders a formal investigation, then the ICC would have wide-ranging powers to interview people. "As a strong supporter of the ICC, Britain would be under enormous obligation to cooperate," Bowring said. And given the precedent from Serbia that has brought former president Slobodan Milosevic to The Hague to face trial, British leadership would not be exempt, Bowring said.
The United States has stayed away from the ICC and can therefore claim immunity from any ICC procedures. "But there remains the question of complicity in a joint enterprise," Bowring told media representatives Tuesday. "If Britain and the United States acted together, and if war crimes were committed, then there is a real question of war crimes committed by the United States that would be before the ICC."
The legal team plans to make the United States liable by association by focusing its inquiries on the role of Britain, which played a strong role in supporting creation of the ICC.
The eight law experts gathered evidence from a wide range of sources, and also spoke directly to witnesses over two days in London in November. Evidence was gathered from witnesses on the ground such as Spanish medical teams, and from weapons experts.
The experts' report focused particularly on cluster bombs used by the British. The Ministry of Defence in London has admitted to dropping 70 cluster bombs from the air, each of them containing 147 'bomblets'. In addition, British artillery fired more than 2,000 shells, each containing about 40 smaller bombs.
The report, a full version of which is due to be released about two weeks from now, also takes a close look at the targeting of media by way of attacks on the offices of Al Jazeera and Abu Dhabi TV, and on Palestine Hotel in Baghdad.
"We want to make it clear that we are not levelling accusations," Shiner said. "We are pointing to questions that need answers, and we are demanding an investigation into these."
The Peacerights group did not have access to all the information that would be needed in order to make a charge against the government, Shiner said. "We would need to know what the military objectives were, who took the decision to risk civilian casualties, what the targeting data was before those who took the decisions and other such information. We do not have that information but the prosecutor could ask for it."
The lawyers who carried out the study include William Schabas, professor of human rights law at the national University of Ireland, Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, Bill Bowring, professor of human rights and international law at London Metropolitan University and Reni Provost, associate professor at the faculty of law at the McGill University in Canada.
Other lawyers are Paul Tavernier, professor at the Faculti Nean Monnet in Paris, Nick Grief, professor of law at the University of Bournemouth in Britain, Guy Goodwin-Gill, senior research fellow at All Souls College in Oxford and Upendra Baxi, professor of international law at Warwick University in Britain.
--------
UK cluster bombs may be war crime
Tue 20 January, 2004
(Reuters)
By Peter Apps
http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsPackageArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=442590§ion=news
LONDON - British use of cluster bombs in the Iraq war could count as a war crime and justifies further investigation by the International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor in the Hague, a group of international lawyers say.
Seven academics from Britain, Ireland, France and Canada interviewed eyewitnesses and examined evidence to see if there was a case for referring British conduct to the court, said the pressure group Peacerights, which organised the review.
"There is a considerable amount of evidence of disproportionate use of force causing civilian casualties," one of the lawyers, Professor Bill Bowring of London Metropolitan University, told a news conference on Tuesday.
"The U.S. cannot be tried before the court because it refuses to sign up to it. The UK did."
Cluster munitions are small bomblets scattered on a target area by larger bombs, rockets or artillery shells, designed to destroy infantry or soft skinned vehicles.
Use of bunker-busting munitions had also killed civilians, Peacerights said.
"THIS ONE GOES TO TOP"
ICC officials were unavailable to comment, but Bowring said senior politicians, possibly including Prime Minister Tony Blair, could have something to worry about.
"Heads of state are not immune in principle," the law professor said. "This one goes right to the top."
U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said last month more than 1,000 civilians were killed or wounded by some 13,000 U.S. and British cluster bombs in the Iraq war last year.
Bowring said British aircraft had dropped 70 cluster bombs and British artillery fired 2,000 cluster shells.
A spokesman for the Ministry of Defence said cluster munitions were lawful weapons that had been used in line with international law during the war to oust Saddam Hussein.
British forces had "of course" not been involved in war crimes, he added.
Bowring said the report would be sent to both the British attorney general Lord Goldsmith and the ICC.
Experts were dubious the case would proceed.
"Instinctively, it seems probable that political pressure will be bought to bear to prevent this going to the ICC," barrister Hugo Charlton told Reuters.
The British military was also the subject of complaints to the ICC last July when Greek lawyers sent the court a dossier of human rights allegations in Iraq.
The court has received hundreds of complaints from dozens of countries since it came into force in July 2002, but only one formal investigation has been launched, into reported crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- drug war
New Kinds of Drug Tests Weighed for Federal Workers
Bush Administration Considers Sampling Hair, Saliva, Sweat
By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29936-2004Jan19?language=printer
Federal workers who submit to drug screening soon may have their saliva, sweat or hair tested as the Bush administration increases efforts to deter and detect illegal drug use among 1.6 million civilian employees.
Officials have relied on urine samples alone in the federal government's nearly two-decade-old drug-testing program, begun in 1986 when President Ronald Reagan issued an executive order declaring that the federal workplace be drug-free. Bush administration officials want to give agencies the option of using the alternative tests to catch drug use that urine tests may miss because of masking agents or because an employee took the drugs weeks earlier.
The main goal is to drive home the message to federal workers that it is not worth risking your job to take drugs, officials said.
"This isn't a 'gotcha' kind of system," said Robert L. Stephenson II, director of the division of workplace programs in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The agency, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, sets guidelines and oversees drug-testing programs at federal agencies. "This is a fair, objective, scientifically defensible program that is aimed at deterrence and in having everybody believe that if you actually use [drugs], we'll be able to detect it."
The division plans to publish proposed revisions to federal mandatory drug-testing guidelines in the Federal Register as soon as this month, Stephenson said.
The public will have 90 days to comment. After a final rule is adopted, it will take at least six months to implement in most federal workplaces, Stephenson said. Moreover, the screening labs that work under contract to federal agencies would have to demonstrate that they can perform the new tests.
The proposal was first reported last week by the Associated Press.
Officials of federal employee unions said they will study the proposals closely.
Colleen M. Kelley, president of the National Treasury Employees Union, said her union previously has opposed sweat tests on the grounds that scientific studies have shown them to be unreliable. Her staff plans to review the track record of saliva and hair tests as well.
Mark Roth, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees, said the union fought successful court battles in the 1980s to force the government to narrow its broad drug-testing program to workers in "safety-sensitive" jobs.
"To the extent that they are not talking about expanding the scope of employees under the program, . . . we probably would not have any vehement objections to what they are doing, so long as it's limited to the more accurate and less intrusive forms of testing," he said.
Federal drug-testing efforts focus on about 400,000 federal employees who have security clearances, carry firearms, deal with public safety or national security, or are presidential appointees. Such employees are routinely tested when they apply for jobs, and many are subject to random drug tests throughout their careers.
Other civilian workers typically would only be tested if they were involved in a workplace accident or displayed signs of possible drug use on the job, officials said.
In fiscal 2000, the most recent year for which figures are available, drug tests were performed on 106,493 workers at 118 agencies at a cost of $6.1 million. The number who test positive hovers consistently at about one-half of 1 percent, he said.
Urine tests cost about $20 to $50 each, and the prices of saliva and sweat tests are similar, Stephenson said. Hair tests cost more but are expected to become cheaper as they become more widely used, he said.
Agencies could pick the test that best fits their needs, he said. For example, a hair test, which can show drug use from months earlier, might be used to screen job applicants. But an employee involved in an accident might have an oral swab to determine whether drugs were in his system.
Some employee advocates complain that the new tests are not as accurate as a urine test. Hair tests in particular can come back positive simply because a person -- a police officer, say -- was in a room where drugs were used, they say.
"There's a lot of things not to like [about urine testing], but at least we've reached a stage where you don't see a lot of false positives when you use the right labs," said Lewis Maltby, president of the National Workrights Institute, a nonprofit employee rights group. "Sweat and saliva testing have potential, but they aren't ready for prime time. . . . Hair testing is junk science."
Federal workers aren't the only ones with a stake in the proposed changes. If the government adopts alternative tests, many private employers are likely to follow suit, officials at testing companies said.
William M. Greenblatt, chief executive of New York-based Sterling Testing Systems Inc., said: "An argument can be made that 'Would the government accept it if it wasn't an accurate science?' " The company performs half a million tests a year, most of them urine tests, for such clients as Con Edison, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, and The Washington Post, he said.
J. Michael Walsh, a former HHS official who helped design the federal drug-testing program in the 1980s, said the testing industry has been pressing the government to adopt the alternative tests. Still, scientific advances mean it is "very reasonable" for federal officials to examine whether such tests are worth using, said Walsh, now a consultant on substance abuse policy whose clients include The Post.
"The industry sort of believes that once this thing hits the Federal Register that things are going to happen quickly," he said. "I don't think that's true. My experience has been that change comes very slowly in this whole workplace arena. It's such a litigious area. I think these big corporations are very happy with what they are doing. And unless there is some huge economic incentive to change, change is not going to come rapidly."
-------- justice
Bush Pushes Plan to Permit Internet Surveillance
Jan 20, 2004
Haider Rizvi,
(IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=22023
NEW YORK - The Bush administration is pushing to ratify an international convention that civil libertarians say would pose serious threats to privacy rights at home and abroad.
After delaying for about two years, U.S. President George W. Bush recently asked the U.S. Senate to ratify the Council of Europe Cybercrime Convention, a global agreement apparently created to help police worldwide cooperate to fight Internet crimes.
"It's the only international treaty to address the problems of computer-related crime and electronic evidence gathering," Bush said in his November letter asking the Senate to confirm U.S. adherence to the treaty.
"It promises to be an effective tool in the global effort to combat computer-related crime," added the president.
But independent legal experts and right activists on both sides of the Atlantic are sceptical about such claims.
"This is a bad treaty that not only threatens core liberties, but will obligate the United States to use extraordinary powers to do the dirty work of other nations," says Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the oldest civil rights group in the country.
"We are opposed to this treaty," says Cedric Laurent, a senior policy fellow at the Electronic Privacy Information Centre (EPIC), a public interest research group based in Washington, DC that specialises in issues of democracy and technology.
The treaty criminalizes acts such as hacking and the production, sale or distribution of hacking tools, and expands criminal liability for intellectual property violations that nations must have on their books as crimes.
So far, only four countries -- Albania, Estonia, Hungary and Croatia -- have ratified the treaty since it opened for signatures in 2001.
Thirty-two countries besides the United States have signed the convention; it must be ratified by five nations before it enters into force.
The agreement also makes it mandatory for each participating nation to grant new powers of search and seizure to its law enforcement authorities, including the power to force an Internet service provider (ISP) to preserve a customer's usage records and to monitor his or her online activities as they occur.
If approved by the Senate, experts say, U.S. police would be required to cooperate in "mutual assistance requests" from police in other nations "to the widest extent possible".
"The Cyber-crime signatories include nations of recent and untested democratic vintage, such as Ukraine and Bulgaria," says ACLU Legislative Counsel Marv Johnson.
"Do we really want professional American law enforcement personnel conducting surveillance on people who haven't broken any U.S. law in order to help enforce the 'law' of some Party apparatchik in China?" he added in a statement.
Right groups are also worried about the possible use of new surveillance devices like Carnivore, the "Internet-tapping" system used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to intercept communications.
Unlike wiretaps, which are set up by a telephone company on behalf of authorities, Carnivore allows law enforcement agents direct access to entire ISP networks, far beyond the scope of powers those agents now have.
When the U.S. Congress passed the infamous Patriot Act to boost law-enforcement in response to the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it authorised the use of Carnivore for collecting information on Internet addresses and traffic. But it stopped short of permitting the system to be used to eavesdrop on actual content.
"The Patriot Act has given more powers to the law enforcement agencies. That is right," says Laurent in an interview. "But the ratification of this convention would give even more powers to the authorities."
"Unfortunately, the history of the FBI and other government agencies on respecting privacy is not good," says Steinhardt in an interview, explaining that is why, "Carnivore has been opposed by organisations from across the political spectrum''.
The ACLU and other critics of the treaty also argue that it provides too little protection for political activities. They point out that the text fails to define "political offences", a fault they call "a huge omission", since an act considered political in the United States might be a criminal matter in another country.
For example, the treaty section on real-time monitoring of Internet activity does not include an exemption to the mutual assistance requirement for "political" offences, meaning, the experts say, the FBI could be asked to order an ISP like AOL to spy on a political dissenter in Ukraine or a union organiser in Latin America.
Steinhardt wonders why Bush decided to request ratification now. "We are trying to understand why the U.S. government did not do anything two years ago," he says. "They had abandoned this (treaty). I think it's all related to 9/11. But it's a mystery to us."
In his letter to the Senate, Bush wrote, "the treaty would help deny 'safe havens' to criminals, including terrorists, who can cause damage to U.S. interests abroad using computer systems".
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Clean energy and efficiency investments would create 3.3 million jobs, says study
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
By GreenBiz.com
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-01-20/s_12200.asp
WASHINGTON, D.C. - An alliance of labor, environmental, civil rights, business, and political leaders in the United States have laid out a vision for a "New Apollo Project" to create 3.3 million new jobs and achieve energy independence in 10 years.
Named after President Kennedy's moon program, which inspired a major national commitment to the aerospace industry, the Apollo Alliance aims to unify the country behind a 10-year program of strategic investment for clean energy technology and new infrastructure.
The alliance also announced that it has received support from 17 of America's largest labor unions - including the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers, and Machinists - as well as a broad cross section of the environmental movement, including the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), the Union of Concerned Scientists, and Greenpeace.
Dr. Ray Perryman, a corporate economist from Texas who prepared a detailed economic analysis of the proposal for a New Apollo Project said, "If economists agree on anything it's that inventing new technologies and creating whole new industries is what America does best. We are a creative economy, not a commodity economy. The New Apollo Project would keep us on the cutting edge of manufacturing emerging technologies and secure our long-term prosperity."
Perryman concluded that the proposed tax credits and investments would create 3.3 million new, high-wage jobs for manufacturing, construction, transportation, high-tech, and public sector workers, while reducing dependence on imported oil and cleaning the air. Perryman's analysis shows that a New Apollo Project would also position the United States to take the lead in fast-growing markets, dramatically reduce the trade deficit, and more than pay for itself in energy savings and returns to the U.S. Treasury. Perryman's study was based on an input-output analysis of impacts on key industry sectors, using a highly regarded economic model and extensive survey data.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) said, "At the time of Kennedy's moon shot, we were in space race with the Soviet Union. Now we are in an economic race with the Europeans and Japanese. Bush is focused on the past; the New Apollo Project for energy independence is focused on the future. America led the electronic and communications revolutions. Now we must lead the clean energy revolution if we are to maintain our global economic leadership."
Congressman Jessie Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.) issued a statement in support of the release saying, "One of the keys to America's energy security - and therefore our national security - lies in rebuilding our cities. We need strategic investments to retrofit old buildings, expand transportation alternatives, restore our infrastructure, and create solar, wind, and hydrogen technology. Apollo will rebuild our country in a way that benefits all Americans and reestablishes our global economic competitiveness."
California State Treasurer Phil Angelides said, "As California's chief investment officer and a fiduciary of the nation's first and third largest pension funds, I am well aware that the way in which we invest capital can shape not only the contours of our economy, but also the future of our communities, our society, and our environment for decades to come. I applaud the efforts of the Apollo Alliance to develop programs that illustrate how strategic public investments can stimulate our economy while at the same time improve the quality of life in communities across our nation."
Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) said, "The New Apollo Energy Project is an opportunity for a bold new energy policy that can free us from our over-dependence on Middle East oil, expand the economy, and address environmental challenges. We should call for a total national commitment to harness the genius of America's can-do attitude that would design, invent, and deploy the new clean energy technologies that benefit this new century. No single national endeavor has such capacity to expand our economy by tapping our innate and unique technological genius for innovation, and creating millions of new jobs."
According to Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the country's oldest and largest environmental groups, "A New Apollo Project will help accelerate the transition away from our dependence on imported oil and other polluting fossil fuels and toward clean energy like solar and wind. Apollo stands in marked contrast to the Bush Administration's damaging energy agenda, which hurts job creation and the environment. An Apollo Project can simultaneously address the threats of manufacturing job loss, global warming, and our diminishing national energy security."
John Podesta, president of the Center for American Progress, said, "In stark contrast to the secret Cheney energy plan hatched by big oil, the Apollo Project harnesses America's ingenuity in support of an energy program that enhances our security, our health, and our livelihoods."
Bracken Hendricks, executive director of the Apollo Alliance underscored the importance of Apollo in the upcoming political cycle. "We are seeing for the first time a competition among all the major presidential candidates to produce the best plan for investing in clean energy infrastructure and good jobs. The public is demanding a forward-looking plan to rebuild our economy and a positive solution to our energy insecurity. A bold approach like Apollo is the kind of leadership we need from our next president."
-------- ACTIVISTS
SHIITE PROTEST
Huge March Backs Cleric Over U.S. Plan
January 20, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/middleeast/20IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 19 - As many as 100,000 Iraqis marched peacefully through the center of the city on Monday in a show of support for a revered Shiite cleric opposing the Bush administration's plans for the transfer of sovereignty.
The march was a powerful display of solidarity behind the cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, at a time when leaders of the Shiites, who account for more than 60 percent of the population, are beginning to exercise their enormous political influence over American policy here. Almost as many people attended the protest as there are American soldiers in Iraq.
The demonstration sent an unmistakable message to senior American and Iraqi officials, who were to meet at the United Nations later in the day to discuss with officials there the American plan to transfer power through indirect, caucus-style elections. Demands from Ayatollah Sistani for direct elections of a transitional assembly before the turnover of power on June 30 have forced American officials to turn to the United Nations in an effort to legitimize their proposal.
A representative of Ayatollah Sistani in Baghdad said in an interview that the cleric still insisted on direct elections and wanted the United Nations to monitor the process.
What role the United Nations will play is unclear, especially given the tenuous security situation in Iraq. The United Nations withdrew all its workers from Iraq in October after several bombings at its headquarters here, including one in late August that killed 22 people.
On Monday, Khudair Abbas, the country's health minister, raised to 24 the number of people killed in a powerful suicide car bomb that exploded at the main entrance of the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority on Sunday. About 120 people were wounded, Mr. Abbas said, according to The Associated Press. It was the single deadliest bombing in Baghdad since American forces occupied Iraq in April.
Like the demonstration on Monday, that attack was undoubtedly an attempt to influence the direction of the talks at the United Nations.
The march began at 8 a.m. and did not taper off until mid-afternoon, with Shiites walking a mile through central Baghdad carrying banners and chanting slogans in support of their most revered spiritual leader.
"All the people are with you, Ayatollah Sistani!" the marchers shouted as they flowed beneath an overpass near Mustansiriya University, where they began to disperse.
Many people held up portraits of the reclusive ayatollah, 75. Others lifted up paintings of Ali, Hussein and Abbas, the three most important Shiite martyrs, all slain in the seventh century in killings that solidified the Sunni-Shiite split. Green flags, symbols of Shiite Islam, rippled above the heads of the crowd.
American helicopters buzzed overhead as an announcer with a bullhorn urged the marchers onward. "Say `yes, yes' to elections and `no, no' to appointing the people in any way other than elections," he said.
"Enough with America!" people yelled from the street.
"We want to be with Ayatollah Sistani," said Imad Ali, 40, a salesman walking with the protesters. "We want to support what he says. He wants elections, so we want elections too."
Muhammad Masser, a 35-year-old doctor standing next to Mr. Ali, said he had come here partly because he knew that a delegation from the Iraqi Governing Council was arriving at the United Nations.
"The will of the Iraqi people will give this delegation power to achieve what the Iraqi people want," he said. "All people have the right to choose their representatives. So why shouldn't the Iraqis do that too? The world has become so small, and everyone has elections other than us."
An agreement reached between the Provisional Authority and the Governing Council on Nov. 15 states that a transitional assembly will be chosen through caucus-style elections in Iraq's 18 provinces. The assembly would be put together by May 31 and would then appoint an interim government by June 30. But on Jan. 11, Ayatollah Sistani challenged that plan by renewing a call for direct elections.
"About the role of the United Nations, Ayatollah Sistani wants it to be one of monitoring or observing," said Muhammad Alaaowi al-Shameri, a representative at the cleric's office at Kadhimiya Mosque here and a professor of Islamic philosophy at Mustansiriya University. "If the United Nations plays an active role in the election process, that will support and legitimize the assembly."
In southern Iraq, an advance team of more than 30 Japanese soldiers crossed into the country from Kuwait to prepare for the entry of a larger relief effort of 1,000 soldiers by March, The Associated Press reported. The soldiers are expected to help purify water supplies, rebuild schools and provide health care. It is the first deployment of Japanese troops to a country embroiled in combat since World War II and has generated much debate in Japan.
American military officials said a soldier died Sunday from wounds suffered in a roadside bombing north of Samarra last week. That brings to 501 the number of American soldiers who have been killed since the war began in March.
--------
Anti-Globalization Forum Adds Variety of Causes to Its Agenda
January 20, 2004
By SARITHA RAI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/international/asia/20FORU.html?pagewanted=all
BOMBAY, Jan. 19 - Anti-globalization protesters jostled with opponents of war, and those fighting India's caste system performed street plays alongside groups opposing religious and sex discrimination. At the six-day annual World Social Forum here in India's financial capital, hundreds of groups raised their voices in protest, if not always in unison.
The agenda of the gathering, held for the first time outside Brazil, appeared to have shifted from its central focus on trade and the inequities of global capitalism, splintering into a long list of regional causes.
"I came here and went `Huh?' " said Ellen Lenox, an English teacher from Brasília. "The focus has changed from unfair global trade and the monopoly of big business toward antiwar, antidiscrimination causes."
As in the last three years, this year's World Social Forum is timed to run concurrently with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which is seen by critics and most of those in attendance here as a gathering of rich capitalists.
Amid the heat and dust of a vast derelict factory complex in suburban Goregaon usually reserved for home decor or auto expositions, thousands of people gathered from across India and abroad to make common cause, with the slogan "Another world is possible."
Members of the organizing committee in Bombay, also known as Mumbai, said about 80,000 people from more than 100 countries were taking part.
Prominent among the speakers in the first three days of the forum were José Bové, the French farmer who led the demolition of a half-built McDonald's outlet; the Iranian human rights activist and Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi; and the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy.
Coca-Cola and Pepsi were barred from the refreshment stands in favor of water and freshly squeezed sugar cane juice and lemonade. Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer were discarded in favor of Linux operating systems and Mozilla browsers.
Continuing with the theme of the previous three global gatherings, all held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, peace activists vehemently criticized President Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But some new themes emerged.
Pratap Kumar complained that for Dalits, or untouchables, like him, who were on the lowest rung of India's caste system, diatribes against globalization ring hollow to people denied basic human rights.
"What does anti-liberalization mean when we don't have the basic freedom to drink water at the village well or send our children to the same school as those from the upper castes?" asked Mr. Kumar, from Vijayawada in the southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh.
On Monday, halfway through the meeting, the sober proceedings were hijacked by the news that a young South African delegate had accused a South African judge of raping her in a hotel room here on Saturday night. Local television networks reported that the judge, who was also attending the forum, had been arrested by the local police after the woman entered a complaint.
--------
Shiites March for Elections in Iraq
Protest in Baghdad Is Largest Since Hussein's Fall
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 20, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A29371-2004Jan19?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 -- Tens of thousands of Shiite Muslims marched through Baghdad on Monday in the largest protest since the occupation of Iraq began 10 months ago, demanding that U.S. authorities organize direct elections to choose a new government.
The peaceful demonstration sent, in numbers and message, a clear signal that the demands of Iraq's emboldened Shiite majority could not be ignored by U.S. and Iraqi officials, who met Monday with Secretary General Kofi Annan and other U.N. leaders in New York to seek a greater U.N. role in the troubled plan to transfer power to Iraqis by this summer.
Under the plan unveiled in November, the U.S. administration in Iraq wants to hold 18 regional caucuses across the country in May that would choose a transitional assembly. That assembly would select a provisional government that would take power by June 30, formally ending the U.S. occupation. But the country's leading Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, has insisted on direct, nationwide elections -- a process that U.S. officials say would be impossible to organize quickly and unpredictable in its outcome.
"The sons of the Iraqi people want a political system based on direct elections and a constitution that ensures justice and equality for everyone," Hashem Awadi, a representative of Sistani, told the crowd at one of Baghdad's main universities.
The protest, which followed a large demonstration in the southern city of Basra last week, was the most visible display so far of Shiite empowerment and delivered what may pose the greatest challenge to U.S. plans.
Ten months after the fall of President Saddam Hussein, U.S. officials are struggling to cope with a persistent guerrilla campaign in areas dominated by Iraq's Sunni Muslims, a minority that gave Hussein most of his support. Although Hussein was captured in December, the insurgency continues to demonstrate its grim potency -- on Sunday, a suicide bombing at the gate of the heavily fortified U.S. occupation headquarters killed at least 31 people and wounded about 120.
In addition, Iraq's ethnic Kurds -- long the most ardent U.S. allies in the country -- have pressed in recent weeks for a greater degree of autonomy than U.S. officials envisioned.
But Shiite Muslims, who make up an estimated 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, hold the key to Iraq's stability, and their religious leadership has steadily escalated demands for power commensurate with their rights as a majority.
In addition to the demand for direct elections to choose a transitional assembly, Sistani has also said that only an elected body can approve the prolonged presence of U.S. troops in the country and ratify a basic law that will serve until a constitution is ratified in 2005.
"We gave the Americans a chance, and there was no use," said Udai Ghali, 23, a Baghdad University student. "The Americans have acted too slowly."
The protest movement has gained momentum since Sistani's call last month for elections. U.S. officials have acknowledged that they do not know what, if any, concessions short of elections would mollify the demands. They are hampered, in part, by a lack of direct communication with the reclusive, 73-year-old Sistani, who has not left his home in the Shiite holy city of Najaf in nearly a year.
The impasse has left the conservative clergy, who are blunt in their demands for the imposition of Islamic law, as the most vociferous proponents of democratic elections in the face of U.S. objections -- an irony that was not lost on some at the demonstration.
"We want the Americans to comply with their promises of democracy," Rahim Abu Raghif, a cleric in a black turban, said as he watched the flag-waving crowd pass.
After talks at the United Nations on Monday, the civilian administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, said the United States intervened there to topple a dictator and allow Iraqis to participate in democracy. "One of the beauties of democracy is freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. The demonstrations are actually, in my view, a healthy sign. They are peaceful demonstrations," Bremer told reporters.
Unlike the Shiite clergy in neighboring Iran, who have been largely discredited during 25 years of theocratic rule, Iraq's religious authorities -- while divided among themselves -- still enjoy a great degree of loyalty. To many, they stand as an independent representative of the community, which sees Hussein's fall and the wrangling over a new government as an opportunity to end centuries of disenfranchisement.
Many also voice respect for the clergy's sacrifices. Hundreds of clerics were arrested and executed under Hussein's rule, a record that resonates in Shiite Islam's narrative of suffering and martyrdom.
That loyalty was evidenced by the discipline of the protest Monday. The clergy leading the demonstration from a bridge spanning a six-lane street ordered the crowds to limit their chants to those approved by religious leaders. Calls to attend the march, which took two hours to pass under the bridge, went out at mosques and Shiite community centers on Sunday.
The protest moved seamlessly between religious symbolism -- chants of fealty to Shiite saints -- and political demands.
"Yes, yes to elections, no, no to appointment," the crowd chanted. Others shouted, "No, no to conspiracies. No, no to occupation."
"God hopes the Americans will agree with us," said Ahmed Zubeidi, a 41-year-old cleric standing on the bridge. "If they don't, the clergy will force them to agree."
For now at least, the protest papered over divisions within the clergy's ranks. For months, a militant cleric, Moqtada Sadr, sought to rally his substantial support in the street with calls for an end to the U.S. occupation, angering the American administration. At the same time, Shiite political parties, such as the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, preached patience with the U.S. administration and took part in the American-appointed Governing Council. For much of the past year, despite criticism by some followers, Sistani delivered important edicts but remained largely in the background, content with a spiritual role.
Monday's protest brought out followers from virtually all Shiite factions and signaled that Sistani would play a crucial if not preeminent role in any political transition.
"All the people are with you, Sayyid Ali," the crowd chanted.
"The Americans did us a favor in getting rid of Saddam. But they promised us stability, freedom and democracy, and until now, there's nothing," said Ammar Saadi, 25, a Baghdad resident. "We've lost trust in them."
Some religious leaders have warned of a confrontation with the occupation authorities if their demands are not met, and a handful of banners invoked the memory of a largely Shiite uprising in 1920 against the British occupation that followed World War I.
But Monday's protest was peaceful, and participants as well as clerics leading the march were careful to avoid what might be perceived as inflammatory rhetoric. Throughout the protest, two U.S. helicopters passed overhead. A small convoy of U.S. military vehicles -- three Humvees and an armored personnel carrier -- moved down the broad avenue toward the protest, but turned around before meeting the crowd.
"We want to take our rights peacefully," said one marcher, Hassan Musawi, 50. "If each person here had one bullet and one Kalashnikov, they would end the occupation today. There would be no occupiers left in Iraq."
Staff writer Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this report.
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