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NUCLEAR
City on Fire
Musharraf Vows to Prosecute Nuke Sellers
That Iranian Nuclear Headache
U.N.: Iran Not Reneging on Nuke Promise
IAEA Warns Iran, Fears Nuclear 'Black Market'
Hunt for Iraqi Weapons May Get New Chief Soon
''Tokyo Questions Relevancy of Article Nine''
North Korea could soon be making 13 nuclear bombs a year
N. Korea atomic bomb in doubt
From The Archives on North Korea
Nuclear Expert Is Unconvinced North Korea Has the Bomb
N. Korean Evidence Called Uncertain
Report Cites Potential of N. Korean Arsenal
Pentagon report warns lack of testing limits confidence
Missile Defense Testing May Be Inadequate
U.S. Missile Shield Will Work, Pentagon Agency Says
Americas nuclear test legacy lingers 50 years after Bravo test
New Mexico Wins Accelerated Cleanup Funds for Sandia Lab
Toxic cleanups may be scaled back
More care urged for WIPP trips
Conservative Republicans Push for Slowdown in U.S. Spending
MILITARY
Military equipment in short supply at start of Iraq war, Britain admits
25 US investment projects launched after Polish plane buy: Lockheed Martin
Iranian Officials Resign to Protest Election Dispute
2 G.I.'s Killed as Security Is Seen as Obstacle to Iraq Vote
Sharon Says He Will Not Resign Over Inquiry
Land Developer Bribed Sharon, Indictment Alleges
Spy chief sold guns to rebels, court told
Next stop Syria?
Powell Says No Hard Evidence Iraqi WMD Hidden in Syria
US wants NATO programme extended to Mideast: press
France eases rift with United States
US lawyer blasts 9/11 tribunals as Pentagon rebuffs church leaders
Spirit Rover Stops Sending Data, NASA Says
The Next Space Race: China Heads to the Stars
Ex-C.I.A. Aides Ask for Leak Inquiry by Congress
U.S., Britain Detail Iraq Plan at U.N.
Annan Sets Conditions for Sending U.N. Team to Iraq
Federal Auditor Blasts Pentagon's Munitions Cleanup Plan
Study finds sharply increase risk of cancer
Pentagon's Online Voting Program Deemed Too Risky
Pentagon report warns lack of testing limits confidence in missile defense
Canadian Mounties Seize Reporter's Files in Terrorist Case
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Lawmakers Not Rushing to Take Up Terrorism Act
Suits Against Airline Put Focus on Privacy Concerns
2 Senators Counter Bush on Immigrants
Easing of Internet Regulations Challenges Surveillance Efforts
Probe of Intercepted Messages Focuses on Shelby
Ex - CIA Officials Urge Name Leak Inquiry
Ashcroft Urges Global Corruption Fight
Lawyer Says Cuba Detainees Face Unfair System
Lawyer Criticizes Rules for Tribunals
OTHER
Supreme Court Rules EPA Can Block State Clean Air Permits
Court Upholds E.P.A. Role in Alaska Case
Justices Decide EPA Can Overrule States
ACTIVISTS
Five hundred pairs of boots
The Loud Answer to Davos, in Bombay This Year, Is Antiwar
-------- NUCLEAR
City on Fire
by Lynn Eden
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,
January/February 2004, Volume 60, No. 1, pp. 33-43
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2004/jf04/jf04eden.html
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
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 orizontally 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.
(end of part one)
--
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
4. Postol, "Possible Fatalities from Superfires," pp. 59
-------- india / pakistan
Musharraf Vows to Prosecute Nuke Sellers
January 22, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Musharraf-Nuclear.html
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/MUSHARRAF_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- Pakistan's president vowed Thursday to prosecute any scientists found to have sold atomic secrets amid growing suspicion that Pakistani experts aided the nuclear programs of Iran, North Korea and Libya.
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said his government has never exported nuclear know-how, but he said it was possible individual scientists may have sold secrets.
``We are carrying out a thorough investigation of any proliferation that may have been done by any individual for their personal financial gain,'' Musharraf told a conference of government and business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos. ``We will deal with them as anti-state elements.''
For years Pakistan has scoffed at reports that its scientists might have been involved in proliferation.
But the country started hedging in December, saying individuals motivated by ambition or greed may have sold secrets, after U.N. inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities showed that ``Pakistani-linked individuals'' had acted as ``intermediaries and black marketeers.''
Pakistani scientists were later implicated in a scheme to sell high-tech centrifuge technology to Libya, and have also been named in probes into North Korea's nuclear program.
Pakistan has acknowledged detaining ``five to six'' scientists and administrators for what it calls ``debriefings.'' Most have not been released, relatives say, and no formal appearances or charges have been made in court.
``Let me assure this gathering that Pakistan is an extremely responsible state,'' Musharraf said. ``All the nuclear and strategic assets are under total custodial control. The Pakistan government has never and will never proliferate.'' The head of the U.N. atomic agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, said the allegations involved a ``very sophisticated network of black market'' operators and said he had not seen any evidence that the Pakistani government was involved.
ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he had ideas to improve nonproliferation efforts in the wake of disclosures about Pakistan.
``Clearly, it needs to be looked at,'' he said. ``The (inspection) regime is under a good deal of stress.''
Musharraf said his government is also trying to crack down on extremists. He survived two bombings last month believed to have been carried out by Islamic militants, who despise him for allying Pakistan with the United States in its war on terrorism.
``We are fighting the al-Qaida and Taliban on the western borders (with Afghanistan), and we want to negotiate a peaceful settlement of the Kashmir dispute with the Indians on the eastern one,'' he said. ``At the same time we are fighting sectarian and religious extremism within our country.
``So I'm treading on a lot of toes, and that has led to these extremist attacks on me, but I call them occupational hazards. And I also believe that I haven't outlived my nine lives as yet. I have a number of lives left still.''
Musharraf said he believed his efforts to bring ``sustainable democracy'' to Pakistan had taken root and would survive.
``Islam is not in conflict with democracy, modernism or secularism. Islam is democratic in essence. It believes in human rights, freedom of speech and freedom of expression.''
He said there also was progress toward good governance in Afghanistan and that the search for Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding the Afghan mountains, can continue ``simultaneously with stability.''
-------- iran
That Iranian Nuclear Headache
January 22, 2004
National Review Online,
By Henry Sokolski
http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/sokolski200401220852.asp
Some problems get worse even after they've been tackled. Tehran's admission late last week that it is still building uranium-enrichment centrifuges needed to make nuclear bombs is surely a case in point. Late last October, Germany, France, and Great Britain announced that Tehran had agreed to freeze this activity. Now, it appears they were bamboozled. If Europe and the U.S. are serious about capping the Iranian nuclear threat, they need to get the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to admit that it still can't be sure Iran is out of the bomb-making business and to demand that IAEA members (including Russia) suspend nuclear cooperation with Tehran until it can.
A review of recent developments suggests why at least this much is needed.
On September 12, 2003, the IAEA all but found Iran in violation of its Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) obligations. The agency urged Tehran to suspend all uranium-enrichment and -reprocessing activities and advised it to open up to more intrusive inspections by signing an additional inspections protocol. The IAEA's deadline for these actions was October 31, 2003. On October 21, 2003, Tehran agreed with Germany, France, and Great Britain that it would sign the protocol and "voluntarily suspend all uranium-enrichment and -reprocessing activities as defined by the IAEA." The quid pro quo for this announcement was a promise that Iran could expect greater access to European high technology. Finally, in December, nearly two months after the IAEA's deadline, Tehran signed the additional inspections protocol and volunteered to adhere to it even without ratification. This produced sighs of relief in Europe and Washington.
What it didn't do, though, was address two problems. First, the protocol still allows Iran to come within weeks of getting nuclear weapons and, second, Iran has accelerated its nuclear program and done so legally. How is this possible? Mostly, it's a result of how the NPT is read. The treaty's popular interpretation permits NPT members to pursue even the most dangerous nuclear activities - i.e., ones that bring nations within weeks of producing nuclear weapons - provided these activities are open to occasional inspection. So long as this is how the treaty is viewed, intrusive inspections - even of the sort Iran just agreed to - will only confirm that allowable nuclear activities are underway. This will hardly reveal, much less guard against, what Iran is pursuing: We already know it is nearing completion of two worrisome, declared nuclear projects.
The first is a large light-water reactor being built with Russian help at Busheir. This undertaking is roughly 80 percent complete. Shortly after the IAEA's September ultimatum, Moscow announced it would delay completion of the plant - originally slated to go online late this spring - by about a year. Late last week, however, Russian and Iranian officials met and announced that they planned to accelerate Busheir's construction.
This is worrisome. Many experts insist that light-water reactors are "proliferation resistant." But all reactors produce plutonium usable for bombs. That's why we have the IAEA - to safeguard against "peaceful" reactors being put to military use. With large light-water reactors, like that at Busheir, over 50 bombs' worth of near-weapons-grade plutonium is produced during the reactor's first 15 months of operation. All that's required to get at this material is to remove the spent fuel from the reactor (something that is done as a matter of course approximately every 12 months) and chemically strip out the plutonium from the fuel rods.
If Iran was to undertake this stripping process, called reprocessing, on a commercial scale, it would be expensive and difficult to hide. But Iran needn't go the commercial route. In l977 - when the U.S. was training hundreds of Iranian nuclear students at American universities - Oak Ridge National Laboratory detailed how a small, inexpensive reprocessing plant could be constructed covertly. This could be done by a nation of Iran's nuclear abilities within a matter of four to six months. With dimensions of only 130 feet by 30 feet by 40 feet, the plant could produce a bomb's worth of plutonium daily after operating for a week. Fashioning this material into a workable bomb would only require Iran to have mastered the crude design that Iraq perfected a decade ago.
Russia says it can guard against this by taking back the spent fuel that Busheir produces. Iran, however, has not yet agreed to this. More important, spent reactor fuel is risky to move long distances until it has cooled off for several years. Once it is removed from the reactor, though, Iran could quickly shift this material at any time to a nearby covert reprocessing plant. Doing so might set off alarms but by the time any outside nation tried to block the diversion, Iran could have its first bomb.
The story is much the same with Iran's enrichment program. Last week, Iran admitted that it was still importing the means to build more centrifuges. It insists it has a right to do so under the NPT and that building more enrichment capacity does not violate its October pledge to stop enriching uranium. It says it is not currently operating any of its centrifuges. Neither the Europeans nor the IAEA concur with this loose view of what the freeze agreement banned but they have yet to reach a formal understanding with Iran over what precisely is prohibited.
If Iran imported centrifuge equipment of the sort Libya did last fall - nearly complete machines of Pakistani design made in Malaysia - Tehran could be developing quite a nuclear-breakout capability. Just 1-2,000 of these machines would enable Iran to convert enough natural uranium into weapons-grade material to produce a bomb in one to two years. On the other hand, if Iran fed these centrifuges with the lightly enriched uranium Russia plans to send it for Busheir, Iran could produce enough material for a bomb in a matter of weeks.
Clearly, getting rid of Iran's centrifuges and its large reactor program is the best way to keep it from becoming a nuclear weapons-ready nation. It also suggests why keeping Tehran from taking delivery of lightly enriched uranium ought to be a high priority. Given that bombing Iran's known nuclear sites or overthrowing its regime right now are politically unlikely, though, U.S. and allied officials are at a loss as to how to slow Iran's nuclear efforts.
One approach that's worth trying is to enforce the rules. The IAEA will report on Iran's NPT compliance in the next three weeks. It then will meet in March to decide what to do. It would be useful, given Iran's revelations about importing centrifuge equipment, if the IAEA publicly told the truth: The agency cannot clearly find Iran yet to be in full compliance with its NPT obligations. It also would help if one or more of the IAEA's key members - say Germany, France, Great Britain, or, if necessary, the U.S. - formally asked the IAEA to determine how much time and access it would need to give Iran a clean bill of health. The IAEA did this in 2001for North Korea but, so far, for some reason, no senior official from any member state has formally asked the agency to do this for Iran. This needs to be corrected immediately.
Armed with a study, either underway or completed, that would detail how much more time and access is needed, the IAEA's key members in March could reasonably insist that all agency members (including Russia) suspend nuclear cooperation with Iran until the IAEA can clearly find Iran to be in full compliance.
Rather than a call for sanctions for a violation, this would merely be a prudential request for due diligence. It would allow the IAEA to get a clearer idea of what Iran intends to suspend or dismantle under the October freeze and to determine whether or not Tehran is truly out of the bomb making business. It also would demonstrate a renewed seriousness about enforcing the rules - something Washington, Europe, and the others members of the IAEA urgently need to impress now upon Tehran.
- Henry Sokolski directs the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, D.C., and is editor with Patrick Clawson of Checking Iran's Nuclear Ambitions (U.S. Army War College, 2004).
----
U.N.: Iran Not Reneging on Nuke Promise
January 22, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- The head of the U.N. atomic agency on Thursday rejected suggestions that Iran may be reneging on its promise to fully suspend uranium enrichment -- a process that can be used to make nuclear weapons.
Tehran announced it had suspended uranium enrichment late last year as it sought to blunt concern it was running a secret weapons program and to deflect U.S. attempts to gain U.N. Security Council involvement.
Western diplomats and nuclear experts told The Associated Press this week that even key European nations that negotiated the deal with Tehran have started to question its commitment. They said Iran appears to be using semantics -- the meaning of the word ``suspend'' -- to keep some of its nuclear enrichment program operational.
But International Atomic Energy Agency Director-General Mohamed ElBaradei said Thursday the U.N. agency had seen no indications Iran had reneged on its promise. He spoke on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum.
``I see no reason why Iran should backtrack on its pledges,'' ElBaradei said, adding that U.N. inspectors were working in Iran this week. ``Obviously it would have serious implications if they do not cooperate fully with us ... I hope and I am confident they will continue to cooperate.''
President Bush on Tuesday reiterated demands that Iran ``meet its commitments and not develop nuclear weapons.''
Iranian President Mohammad Khatami told reporters in Davos Wednesday that ``we are not doing anything wrong.''
Asked about reports that North Korea had supplied Iran with nuclear weapons technology, he said, ``I categorically deny that there were nuclear shipments from North Korea to Iran.''
ElBaradei called North Korea ``in my view, the most dangerous proliferation program we are facing.''
He said he hoped North Korea would allow U.N. inspectors at some point, but it would depend on the outcome of a six-nation process that got under way last summer in Beijing.
``I haven't seen any indication of a breakthrough,'' he said.
Authorities also are investigating allegations that Pakistani scientists provided nuclear weapons assistance to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
ElBaradei described those involved as a ``very sophisticated network of black market'' operators and said he had not seen any evidence that the Pakistani government was involved.
----
IAEA Warns Iran, Fears Nuclear 'Black Market'
January 22, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran-elbaradei.html
DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) - The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog told Iran Thursday it faced ``serious consequences'' unless it cooperated with a probe of its atomic program, which Washington suspects is aimed at building a bomb.
``They (the Iranians) know it's very important for the agency to come to a conclusion that the Iran program is for peaceful purposes,'' International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters in Davos, Switzerland at the World Economic Forum.
Amid worries in the West that Iran may be backsliding on its promises to suspend some of its nuclear activities, he said Iran still owed the IAEA some explanations.
``I wouldn't say they (Iran) are not living up to their obligations, but I think that there are issues they still need to clarify,'' ElBaradei said separately in a BBC TV interview.
Despite Iran's pledge last year to halt all uranium enrichment activity, Western diplomats say they are increasingly concerned that it has continued to acquire centrifuge equipment.
Enriched, or purified, uranium can be used either as fuel for atomic power plants or to make nuclear weapons. Experts say acquiring weapons-grade material is the biggest hurdle that countries seeking to make an atomic bomb must overcome.
``It would obviously have serious implications if they do not continue to cooperate fully with us in investigating the scope, nature, and content of that program,'' ElBaradei told reporters in Davos.
ElBaradei has previously warned that Iran would be reported to the U.N. Security Council if it did not cooperate with the Vienna-based nuclear agency.
The United States suspects Iran of seeking to build a nuclear bomb under cover of its atomic energy program, which Tehran insists is purely peaceful and geared only to generating electricity.
In November, foreign ministers from France, Britain and Germany went to Tehran and struck a deal under which Iran agreed to suspend enrichment activities and accept more intrusive, snap IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities in exchange for a possible exchange of technology.
But now those countries want Iran to suspend more activities related to enriching uranium, diplomats said.
Last week, Western diplomats told Reuters Tehran has been acquiring large amounts of equipment for centrifuges, used to enrich uranium, despite its promise in November to suspend all enrichment-related activities. They said it showed Iran had failed to deliver on its pledge, meant to build confidence.
BLACK MARKET IN WEAPONS TECHNOLOGY
ElBaradei told reporters that efforts to stop more countries from acquiring nuclear arms were under great stress because of what he called a black-market network that was trading in weapons technology.
Nuclear programs in Iran, North Korea and Libya have all intensified Western concern that one or more new countries could join the ``nuclear club,'' although Libya announced late last year it would cooperate with the United States and Britain in dismantling its weapons programs.
Asked about reports that nuclear know-how and technology may have reached Iran or Libya from Pakistan, ElBaradei said: ``I think what we know is that there have been individuals involved. I do not want to jump to conclusions and say a government is involved.''
He added: ``What we are seeing is a very sophisticated network of black-market proliferators, people who are selling equipment, material underground ... We're still very much in the process of investigating this network.''
Pakistan has questioned Abdul Qadeer Khan, father of its atomic bomb, and several of his colleagues in recent weeks after the IAEA started investigating possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs.
ElBaradei said it was clear that international non-proliferation controls must be examined and strengthened in the light of ``lessons'' from Iran and Libya.
``The regime is under a good deal of stress right now. Absolutely, we need to work fast and hard to strengthen the regime,'' he said.
-------- iraq / inspections
Hunt for Iraqi Weapons May Get New Chief Soon
By Walter Pincus and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37126-2004Jan21.html
Charles A. Duelfer, an experienced former U.N. weapons inspector, is likely to be named soon to succeed David Kay as head of the U.S. hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a senior administration official said last night.
Duelfer, 51, who has expressed doubts that such weapons will ever be found, is widely respected in the arms-control field and has personal relationships with many of the Iraqi scientists who were involved in Iraq's weapons programs.
In making the case for war, President Bush and his aides repeatedly warned of the consequences to the United States if Saddam Hussein were to use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. The failure of the military to find any such weapons in eight months of searching has damaged U.S. credibility in some foreign capitals.
White House officials say they are eager to continue the search. Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio yesterday that it will "take some additional, considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that."
Kay told administration officials last month that he planned to leave in February, before a final report is issued. Officials said last night that he is still likely to appear on Capitol Hill to provide the briefings he has promised to lawmakers.
Duelfer, who was chosen by CIA Director George J. Tenet, will head the 1,400-member Iraq Survey Group, which is slated to submit its final report this fall.
NBC News first reported last night that Duelfer was likely to replace Kay.
Duelfer told NBC in an interview aired Jan. 9: "I think it's pretty clear right now that they're not going to find existing weapons in Iraq of either a biological or chemical nature."
-------- japan
''Tokyo Questions Relevancy of Article Nine''
22 January, 2004
By Erich Marquardt
Power and Interest News Report
http://www.pinr.com/report.php?ac=view_report&report_id=138&language_id=1
On December 9, Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi's cabinet finalized a plan to send approximately 1,000 troops from Japan's Self Defense Forces (SDF) to Iraq to assist with the U.S.-led occupation. On January 19, these troops crossed the Kuwaiti border into Iraq. Koizumi's decision was marked with controversy, since Article Nine of the Japanese constitution prevents Japan from using war as a foreign policy option. Article Nine explicitly states, "land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained."
While the SDF will be on a strictly humanitarian mission and will work to provide essential services to the Iraqi people, such as rebuilding schools and medical facilities, they will be armed with weapons never before carried by the SDF in overseas deployments, such as anti-tank weapons. Strictly speaking, the fact that the SDF will be armed with such weapons, combined with the chaotic situation on the ground in Iraq, implies it is a near certainty that Japanese troops will engage members of the Iraqi insurgency; this state of affairs is certain to spark major discussions in Tokyo over the future relevancy of Article Nine.
Article Nine was placed in Japan's constitution in order to pacify the country's expansionist tendencies. Japan, which is an island state, requires extensive resources found outside its borders. This need was behind Japan's violent drive for raw materials in the lead-up to World War II. After Japan fell to U.S. forces in 1945, the country was quickly incorporated into the U.S.-designed global capitalist system in order to facilitate its rebuilding process and to prevent it from falling into the communist orbit; its external security was provided for by the United States to keep the country from going down the path of militarization once again and to buffer it from Soviet and Chinese influence.
The success of Japan's postwar constitution is evident by the fact that Japanese troops have not set foot in a war zone since WWII; indeed, Japanese involvement in the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq will be the country's most ambitious military operation since 1945. In light of this, Japan's readiness to disregard the tenets of Article Nine must be closely examined since current involvement in Iraq should not be looked at as a one-time exemption to this rule, but as the first step in a long march away from Japan's pacifist post-WWII history.
Japan's involvement in Iraq rests on its commitment to the United States. Because Japan is an island state, it finds itself at a strategic, regional disadvantage. Due to its island status, the country can be easily embargoed or blockaded. Since Japan's most vital resources are imported from abroad, an embargo or blockade on its ports could destroy Tokyo's economy, demonstrated by the U.S. in WWII.
Japan also lacks allies in the region. China, to its west, can no longer be manipulated in the way it was in the 1930s. Beijing is on the quick road to becoming an economic and military powerhouse, and, in the coming decades, will look to surpass Japan's potential might. Russia, too, does not have firm ties with Japan and the two states have engaged in military clashes in the past over control of East Asia; they have yet to settle their sovereignty dispute over the Kurile Islands. North Korea, like China, has been left with indelible scars over Japan's past colonial adventures. Therefore, Japan has very few states that it can rely on in Asia.
To Japan's east, far across the Pacific Ocean, is the United States. Since WWII, Washington has protected Tokyo economically and militarily. The 1960 U.S.-Japan Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security is responsible for a large U.S. troop presence in Japan, mostly on the island of Okinawa. This protection was vital during the days of the Soviet Union and Washington's protection served both countries' mutual interests.
For Tokyo, Washington ensured Japan's economic survival and progress and prevented the Soviet Union and other powerful states from manipulating it. For Washington, Tokyo provided the United States with a vital strategic outpost on the edge of the Asian landmass and above the resource-rich islands of Southeast Asia. U.S. ties to Japan were crucial to Washington during the wars in Korea and Vietnam, in addition to other U.S. interventions in Southeast Asia. As the U.S. State Department writes, "Japan provides bases and financial and material support to U.S. forward-deployed forces, which are essential for maintaining stability in the region."
This mutually exclusive relationship was one of the prime reasons why Japan was willing to support the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq. In recent weeks, Koizumi candidly announced this strategic relationship as the prime example for Japan's involvement in Iraq: "The U.S. is Japan's only ally, and it is striving very hard to build a stable and democratic government in Iraq. Japan must be a trustworthy ally to the United States."
However, Japan's reliance on the United States as an ally was not the only reason for Japan's involvement in Iraq. In recent years, there has been much debate in Tokyo over whether it is in Japan's best interests to be considered a "pacifist" country and to allow its foreign policy to be restrained by Article Nine. As long as American interests are synonymous with Japanese interests, this relationship will proceed smoothly. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Tokyo has been debating how long this state of affairs can last. With no Russian attempt at regional hegemony to fear, it is quite likely that Tokyo's and Washington's interests could begin to diverge. Diverging interests between the two countries would place into doubt U.S. protection over Tokyo's interests.
Tokyo has already subverted Article Nine more than once in order to justify troop deployments. First, following the September 11 attacks, the country passed the Anti-Terrorism Special Measures Law, authorizing Tokyo to dispatch its military to the Indian Ocean to assist the U.S.-led campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. These troops, however, did not engage any enemies and were utilized by refueling U.S. and British warships. In July of 2003, Japan's parliament, the Diet, went further, passing a law authorizing the use of Japan's SDF in Iraq, as long as they were confined to conducting humanitarian missions; since the SDF is allowed to defend itself in case of attack, it is quite likely that it will have an opportunity to engage the insurgency.
Therefore, what Tokyo's involvement in Iraq may represent is the next stage in Japan's post-WWII evolution. With the memory of the country's past militarism receding further into history, it will become easier for Tokyo to rearm and rely on its own military to protect its interests. With the geostrategic threats of China and North Korea just a short trip across the sea, Tokyo may have decided that it is now time to increase its military power in the region in order to stave off future intimidation and manipulation, regardless of physical military support from the U.S.
Japan's military establishment has certainly been waiting for this moment to occur. Toshiyuki Shikaka, a former SDF general and currently a professor at Teikyo University, expressed his delight over Japanese involvement in Iraq to the New York Times, calling the decision "epoch-making" since it is likely that the SDF will engage the insurgency. Shikaka noted that the Japanese military has been "too cowardly until now" to be part of such an engagement.
Since Japan's increased military power has the support of Washington, there is very little blocking its path. Washington has been prodding Japan to help develop and test Washington's new missile defense shield, and has been the principal country asking Japan for military support in recent U.S. interventions. Other than its own domestic opposition to increasing its military power, there is little preventing Japan from pursuing this path.
If Japan sheds Article Nine from its constitution, and reinvigorates its military potential, it will have a tremendous effect on the balance of power in Asia. Ironically, all of the threats that are pushing Tokyo toward increasing its military power will only become more serious as Tokyo achieves this potential.
For example, Tokyo fears China's growing strength. Yet once Japan becomes a military force to contend with in Asia, it will only reinvigorate China's push for a powerful military. Russia will see an increasingly powerful Japan as a possible threat to its territory and interests in East Asia, and North Korea, already paranoid over its security, will no doubt react with even more brinkmanship of the kind that characterizes Kim Jong-il's government. In conclusion, Japan's removal of Article Nine from its constitution is a natural development, but it is one that will have a serious effect on the foreign policies of Asia's most powerful states.
-------- korea
North Korea could soon be making 13 nuclear bombs a year
Ewen MacAskill, diplomatic editor
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/korea/article/0,2763,1128410,00.html
North Korea could be producing nuclear weapons at the rate of eight to 13 a year in the next year or two, the International Institute of Strategic Studies predicted yesterday.
The US claims that North Korea is engaged in a covert programme to build nuclear weapons, and has entered into elaborate diplomacy with the Pyongyang government. North Korea boasts that it has nuclear weapons, but no one outside knows whether it is telling the truth.
The IISS said the window for US diplomacy may be shorter than the US believes, and that if North Korea establishes a sizeable arsenal, it may be less willing to negotiate.
John Chipman, director of the London-based IISS, said that lots of caveats had to be attached to assessments of North Korea's activities as it was an even more secretive state than Saddam Hussein's Iraq. An IISS assessment of Iraq's weapons programme in 1992 proved wrong in several key areas.
In its latest report, a 120-page assessment of North Korea's weapons programmes, the IISS said that before 1992, North Korea could have had the ability to produce one or two nuclear weapons. A freeze was agreed in 1994 that lasted until 2002. Dr Chipman said that, based on various assumptions, "North Korea's arsenal could be around four to eight nuclear weapons over the next year."
The IISS assessment is that North Korea's ability to expand dramatically a nuclear weapons programme depends on how quickly it can complete a 50 megawatt reactor and a production-scale centrifuge enrichment plant. Dr Chipman said that it was impossible to predict when these might be completed.
"In a worst case, if the facilities are completed within the next one or two years, North Korea's output of nuclear weapons could significantly increase around mid-decade to about eight to 13 weapons every year," he said.
"A more cautious assessment - taking into consideration possible technical difficulties and delays, including interdiction efforts - is that these facilities will not be completed until the second half of the decade."
Asked if a US invasion of North Korea to impose regime change was an option, Gary Samore, the author of the report, said this was "an unattractive option" that would involve high casualties.
Dr Chipman hinted that the US should speed up negotiations: "There is still some time for diplomatic efforts to halt and eliminate North Korea's nuclear arsenal while it remains limited to a handful of nuclear weapons. As time elapses, however, a diplomatic solution could become more difficult, as Pyongyang acquires additional strategic bargaining chips."
In a separate development, a US nuclear weapons specialist, Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos nuclear research site in New Mexico, told the Senate foreign relations committee he had seen no convincing evidence that North Korea has the capability to build a plutonium-based nuclear device, but said he did see evidence the North Koreans can probably make plutonium.
Mr Hecker made an unofficial visit to a North Korea nuclear facility on January 8.
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N. Korea atomic bomb in doubt
January 22, 2004
By Nicholas Kralev
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040121-113827-9650r.htm
A leading U.S. scientist who toured North Korea's main nuclear complex this month said yesterday he saw no clear evidence the reclusive state can produce an atomic bomb, even though it can probably make weapons-grade plutonium.
Siegfried Hecker, former head of Los Alamos National Laboratory, warned, however, that the North's nuclear program is still too dangerous to be ignored by policy-makers.
He said that 8,000 spent fuel rods, which had been canned for nearly eight years, had been removed from their holding pond. While there was no proof they had been reprocessed to extract plutonium, the North Koreans are capable of doing so, he said.
"What they did demonstrate is that they have the industrial-scale capability, the equipment and the technical know-how to do all of that," Mr. Hecker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The North Koreans showed that they "most likely had the capability to make plutonium metal," but "I saw nothing and spoke to no one who could convince me that they could build a nuclear device with that metal and that they could weaponize such a device into a delivery vehicle," he said.
Asked by reporters after his testimony about the likelihood that Pyongyang has full-fledged nuclear weapons, Mr. Hecker said: "It would be a poor assumption to think that the North Koreans would not be able to build some sort of a rudimentary nuclear device."
U.S. intelligence has maintained for years that the North could have built up to two nuclear weapons by the beginning of the 1990s.
Based on an estimate that the fuel rods contain between 55 and 66 pounds of plutonium, analysts say that a half-dozen new weapons could be produced.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank, said in a study published yesterday that North Korea could have up to 12 nuclear weapons within the next few years.
The North said last year that it reprocessed all spent fuel rods between January and June, but that claim has not been substantiated by U.S. or independent sources.
Mr. Hecker visited the Yongbyon nuclear complex Jan. 8 as part of an unofficial U.S. delegation. Also visiting were Jack Pritchard, the State Department's former special envoy for North Korea; John Lewis, a Stanford University scholar; and Frank Jannuzi and Keith Luse from the staff of the Foreign Relations Committee.
Last week, Mr. Pritchard said Pyongyang plans to use any delays in nuclear negotiations with Washington to make more atomic bombs.
" 'Time is not on the U.S. side,' " Mr. Pritchard quoted Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye-gwan as saying. " 'Lapses of time will result in quantitative and qualitative increases in our nuclear deterrent.' "
"Are they bluffing?" Mr. Pritchard asked. "I don't think so."
Mr. Pritchard resigned in August over policy differences with the Bush administration.
China is leading an effort to reconvene six-party talks aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff after the first such meeting in Beijing in August failed to achieve any results. Japan, South Korea and Russia are also part of the group.
Mr. Hecker said that, in his view, the North Koreans had agreed to this month's visit because they hoped to convince the Americans they had sufficient nuclear capabilities to force Washington to the negotiating table.
"The 5-megawatt reactor has been restarted," he said. "It appears to be operating smoothly, providing heat and electricity, also accumulating approximately 5 kilograms [11 pounds] of plutonium per year in its spent fuel rods."
He said Yongbyon's chief engineers took the "extraordinary step" of showing him two glass jars kept in a wooden box inside a metal case, which they claimed contained plutonium reprocessed last year from the 8,000 spent fuel rods.
One glass jar contained 150 grams of plutonium oxalate powder and the other 200 grams of plutonium metal, the North Koreans said.
Mr. Hecker said he held one of the jars in his hands, gloved for safety, to get a sense of the substance's density and heat content.
"It certainly was consistent with the way plutonium [metal] looks," he said. But he was not able to draw more specific conclusions because he could not perform all necessary scientific measurements.
Mr. Hecker also said, as did Mr. Pritchard last week, that senior North Korean officials flatly denied the existence of a program to enrich uranium, which, like plutonium, can be used to make nuclear bombs.
The administration says the North, when confronted by U.S. officials with intelligence during a visit to Pyongyang in October 2002, admitted having a secret uranium-enrichment program.
Mr. Hecker said his delegation was given a transcript of that meeting, which shows that an admission was never uttered.
U.S. officials insist their transcript does contain an acknowledgment of the program. They also say they did not record the exchange but restored its contents by memory as soon as the meeting was over.
Mr. Lewis told the Associated Press yesterday the disagreement may have resulted from a problem in the translation from Korean to English.
He said the North Korean transcript quoted Vice Foreign Minister Kang Sop-ju as saying, "We are entitled to have a nuclear program."
Mr. Lewis said that in the Korean language, there is "a small difference between 'to have' and 'entitled to have.'"
A single syllable distinguishes the two phrases.
----
From The Archives on North Korea
From: FoE Sydney - Nuclear Campaign <nonukes@foesyd.org.au>
Date: Thu Jan 22, 2004
1) FAS - North Korea Nuclear Weapons Program
2) North Korean Nuclear Arsenal by Lee Wha Rang
3) Results of Congressional Trip to North Korea May/June2003
In view of the doubts that have been expressed by Mr Hecker on the putative North Korear nuclear capability, it is as well to look at some of what has been written over the years.
Here are some of the more detailed sources, still available on the net.
Even the relatively conservative CIA has assumed that the DPRK has had a nuclear weapons capability since the late 80's.
Other commentators have put the DPRKs nuclear capabilities much higher (Lee Wha Rang), based on the sourcing of plutonium through Russian sources and better utilisation of the Pu aobtained before the implementation of the 'agreed framework'.
There is a mass of literature on DPRK nuclear capabilities, and this is only a tiny fraction of it.
I believe that Hecker is probably wrong, but what really worries me is that if he is extensively enough believed - or rather, if it is believed that 'North Korea has no nuclear capability, but may get one soon, (which is not actually what hecker said at all - all hecker said is that he is not 'convinced') - then this is even more dangerous than assuming that they already have one and have had one for more than ten years, (which I believe is more than 50% likely to be the case). Believing that the DPRK does not yet have a significant nuclear capability or that they have no means of delivery is simply playing right into the hands of the loonies who want to inflict the Iraqi solution on the DPRK.
And if in fact that calculation turns out to be wrong, the result could possibly be the incineration of millions of people.
On the other hand if the DPRK actually has NOTHING and we assume it has something, then the result is that the lives of millions of people are NOT put at risk.
It is noteworthy that Hecker has actually NOT said that 'The DPRK has no nuclear capability'.
In fact he specifically states that we would be 'smart' NOT to act on that belief.
He has said he is 'not convinced'.
Which could mean just about anything.
It's still possible that the DPRK has nothing.
It's possible that they have just the two warheads that the CIA concedes.
It's possible thay have up to a dozen warheads.
It's unlikely they have more.
My guesstimate has always been that they have more than conceded by the CIA, for the simple reason that the Bush administration has consistently downplayed the DPRK nuclear capability so that the hawks in that administration can rationalise military action. Hopefully that will not happen. I think it is more than 50% likely that the DPRK can strike Seoul or Tokyo with a nuclear warhead, and possible that they may be able to strike the west coast of the USA with un unreliable and inaccurate Taepo-Dong-II, that might or might not blow up on the launch pad, and might or might not reach its target.
Russian roulette anyone?
1) FAS - North Korea Nuclear Weapons Program
Current Status, Updated 4/24/03
In a roundtable discussion with the United States and China in Beijing on April 24, 2003, North Korean officials admitted for the first time that they possessed nuclear weapons. Furthermore, North Korean officials claim to have reprocessed spent fuel rods and have threatened to begin exporting nuclear materials unless the United States agrees to one-on-one talks with North Korea.
Tensions between the United States and North Korea have been running especially high since, in early October of 2002, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly informed North Korean officials that the United States was aware that North Korea had a program underway to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons. Initially North Korea denied this, but later confirmed the veracity of the US claim. In confirming that they had an active nuclear weapons program, they also declared the Agreed Framework nullified.
The Agreed Framework signed by the United States and North Korea on October 21, 1994 in Geneva agreed that:
- North Korea would freeze its existing nuclear program and agree to enhanced International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards
- Both sides would cooperate to replace the D.P.R.K.'s graphite-moderated reactors for related facilities with light-water (LWR) power plants.
- Both countries would move toward full normalization of political and economic relations.
- Both sides will work together for peace and security on a nuclear-free Korean peninsula.
- And that both sides would work to strengthen the international nuclear non-proliferation regime.
Prior to the establishment of the Agreed Framework, intelligence sources believed that North Korea could have extracted plutonium from their reactors for use in nuclear weapons; perhaps enough for one or two nuclear weapons.
Nevertheless, it has remained unclear whether North Korea had actually produced nuclear weapons due to difficulties in developing detonation devices.
History
North Korea maintains uranium mines with four million tons of exploitable high-quality uranium. In the mid-1960s, it established a large-scale atomic energy research complex in Yongbyon and trained specialists from students who had studied in the Soviet Union. Under the cooperation agreement concluded between the USSR and the DPRK, a nuclear research center was constructed near the small town of Yongbyon. In 1965 a Soviet IRT-2M research reactor was assembled for this center. From 1965 through 1973 fuel (fuel elements) enriched to 10 percent was supplied to the DPRK for this reactor.
In the 1970s it focused study on the nuclear fuel cycle including refining, conversion and fabrication. In 1974 Korean specialists independently modernized Soviet IRT-2M research reactor in the same way that other reactors operating in the USSR and other countries had been modernized, bringing its capacity up to 8 megawatts and switching to fuel enriched to 80 percent. Subsequently, the degree of fuel enrichment was reduced. In the same period the DPRK began to build a 5 MWe research reactor, what is called the "second reactor." In 1977 the DPRK concluded an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA], allowing the latter to inspect a research reactor which was built with the assistance of the USSR.
The North Korean nuclear weapons program dates back to the 1980s. In the 1980s, focusing on practical uses of nuclear energy and the completion of a nuclear weapon development system, North Korea began to operate facilities for uranium fabrication and conversion. It began construction of a 200 MWe nuclear reactor and nuclear reprocessing facilities in Taechon and Yongbyon, respectively, and conducted high-explosive detonation tests. In 1985 US officials announced for the first time that they had intelligence data proving that a secret nuclear reactor was being built 90 km north of Pyongyang near the small town of Yongbyon. The installation at Yongbyon had been known for eight years from official IAEA reports. In 1985, under international pressure, Pyongyang acceded to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). However, the DPRK refused to sign a safeguards agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), an obligation it had as a party to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
In July 1990 The Washington Post reported that new satellite photographs showed the presence in Yongbyon of a structure which could possibly be used to separate plutonium from nuclear fuel.
In a major initiative in July 1988, South Korean President Roh Tae Woo called for new efforts to promote North-South exchanges, family reunification, inter-Korean trade, and contact in international forums. Roh followed up this initiative in a UN General Assembly speech in which South Korea offered for the first time to discuss security matters with the North. Initial meetings that grew out of Roh's proposals started in September 1989. In September 1990, the first of eight prime minister-level meetings between North Korean and South Korean officials took place in Seoul, beginning an especially fruitful period of dialogue. The prime ministerial talks resulted in two major agreements: the Agreement on Reconciliation, Nonaggression, Exchanges, and Cooperation (the "basic agreement") and the Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula (the "joint declaration").
In late 1991 North and South Korea signed the Agreement on Reconciliation, Non-aggression, Exchanges and Cooperation and the Joint Declaration on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. The Joint Declaration called for a bilateral nuclear inspection regime to verify the denuclearization of the peninsula. The Declaration, which came into force on 19 February 1992, states that the two sides "shallnot test, manufacture, produce, receive, possess, store, deployor use nuclear weapons," and that they "shall not possess nuclear reprocessing and uranium enrichment facilities." A procedure for inter-Korean inspection was to be organized and a North-South Joint Nuclear Control Commission (JNCC) was mandated with verification of the denuclearization of the peninsula.
On 30 January 1992 the DPRK also signed a nuclear safeguards agreement with the IAEA, as it had pledged to do in 1985 when acceding to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This safeguards agreement allowed IAEA inspections to begin in June 1992. In March 1992, the JNCC was established in accordance with the joint declaration, but subsequent meetings failed to reach agreement on the main issue of establishing a bilateral inspection regime.
When North Korean Deputy Prime Minister Kim Tal-Hyon visited South Korea for economic talks in July 1992, President Roh Tae Woo announced that full North-South Economic Cooperation would not be possible without resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue. There was little progress toward the establishment of an inspection regime, and dialogue between the South and North stalled in the fall of 1992.
The North's agreement to accept IAEA safeguards initiated a series of IAEA inspections of North Korea's nuclear facilities. This promising development was halted by the North's refusal in January 1993 to allow special inspections of two unreported facilities suspected of holding nuclear waste. Ignoring the South-North Joint Declaration of the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, North Korea refused IAEA inspections and operated nuclear reprocessing facilities, making the world suspicious of its nuclear intentions.
Lack of progress on implementation of the denuclearization accord triggered actions on both sides that led to North Korea's March 12, 1993, announcement of its withdrawal from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The North's threat to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) brought North-South progress to an abrupt halt. Tensions ran high on the Korean Peninsula as the confrontation between North Korea and the United States deepened.
The UN Security Council on 11 May 1993 passed a resolution urging the DPRK to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and to implement the 1991 North-South denuclearization accord. It also urged all member states to encourage the DPRK to respond positively to this resolution and to facilitate a solution.
The US responded by holding political-level talks with the DPRK in early June 1993 that led to a joint statement outlining the basic principles for continued US-DPRK dialogue and North Korea's "suspending" its withdrawal from the NPT. A second round of talks was held July 14-19, 1993, in Geneva. The talks set the guidelines for resolving the nuclear issue, improving U.S.-North Korean relations, and restarting inter-Korean talks, but further negotiations deadlocked.
Following the DPRK's spring 1994 unloading of fuel from its five-megawatt nuclear reactor and the resultant US push for UN sanctions, former President Carter's visit to Pyongyang in June 1994 helped to defuse tensions and resulted in renewed South-North talks. A third round of talks between the US and the DPRK opened in Geneva on July 8, 1994. However, the sudden death of North Korean leader Kim Il Sung on July 8, 1994 halted plans for a first ever South-North presidential summit and led to another period of inter-Korean animosity. The talks were recessed upon news of the death of North Korean President Kim Il Sung, then resumed in August. These talks concluded with the Agreed Framework.
Under the framework agreement, the North would freeze and eventually dismantle its existing suspect nuclear program, including the 50 MW and 200 MW graphite-moderated reactors under construction, as well as its existing 5 MW reactor and nuclear fuel reprocessing facility. In return, Pyongyang would be provided with alternative energy, initially in the form of heavy oil, and eventually two proliferation-resistant light water reactors (LWR). The two 1,000 MW light-water nuclear reactors would be safer and would produce much less plutonium, in order to help boost the supply of electricity in the North, which is now in a critical shortage. The agreement also included gradual improvement of relations between the US and the DPRK, and committed North Korea to engage in South-North dialogue.
A few weeks after the signing of the Agreed Framework, President Kim loosened restrictions on South Korean firms desiring to pursue business opportunities with the North. Although North Korea continued to refuse official overtures by the South, economic contacts appeared to be expanding gradually.
A close examination by the IAEA of the radioactive isotope content in the nuclear waste revealed that North Korea had extracted about 24 kilograms of Plutonium. North Korea was supposed to have produced 0.9 gram of Plutonium per megawatt every day over a 4-year period from 1987 to 1991. The 0.9 gram per day multiplied by 365 days by 4 years and by 30 megawatts equals to 39 kilograms. When the yearly operation ratio is presumed to be 60 percent, the actual amount was estimated at 60% of 39 kilograms, or some 23.4 kilograms. Since 20-kiloton standard nuclear warhead has 8 kilograms of critical mass, this amounts to mass of material of nuclear fission out of which about 3 nuclear warheads could be extracted.
Estimates vary of both the amount of plutonium in North Korea's possession and number of nuclear weapons that could be manufactured from the material. South Korean, Japanese, and Russian intelligence estimates of the amount of plutonium separated, for example, are reported to be higher -- 7 to 22 kilograms, 16 to 24 kilograms, and 20 kilograms, respectively -- than the reported US estimate of about 12 kilograms. At least two of the estimates are said to be based on the assumption that North Korea removed fuel rods from the 5-MW(e) reactor and subsequently reprocessed the fuel during slowdowns in the reactor's operations in 1990 and 1991. The variations in the estimates about the number of weapons that could be produced from the material depend on a variety of factors, including assumptions about North Korea's reprocessing capabilities -- advanced technology yields more material -- and the amount of plutonium it takes to make a nuclear weapon. Until January 1994, the Department of Energy (DOE) estimated that 8 kilograms would be needed to make a small nuclear weapon. Thus, the United States' estimate of 12 kilograms could result in one to two bombs. In January 1994, however, DOE reduced the estimate of the amount of plutonium needed to 4 kilograms--enough to make up to three bombs if the US estimate is used and up to six bombs if the other estimates are used.
On 22 April 1997, U.S. Defense Department spokesman Kenneth Bacon officially stated, "When the U.S.-North Korea nuclear agreement was signed in Geneva in 1994, the U.S. intelligence authorities already believed North Korea had produced plutonium enough for at least one nuclear weapon." This was the first time the United States confirmed North Korea's possession of plutonium.
In accordance with the terms of the 1994 framework, the US Government in January 1995 responded to North Korea's decision to freeze its nuclear program and cooperate with US and IAEA verification efforts by easing economic sanctions against North Korea in four areas through:
- Authorizing transactions related to telecommunications connections, credit card use for personal or travel-related transactions, and the opening of journalists' offices;
- Authorizing D.P.R.K. use of the U.S. banking system to clear transactions not originating or terminating in the United States and unblocking frozen assets where there is no D.P.R.K. Government interest;
- Authorizing imports of magnesite, a refractory material used in the U.S. steel industry--North Korea and China are the world's primary sources of this raw material; and
- Authorizing transactions related to future establishment of liaison offices, case-by-case participation of U.S. companies in the light water reactor project, supply of alternative energy, and disposition of spent nuclear fuel as provided for by the agreed framework, in a manner consistent with applicable laws.
Smooth implementation of the 1994 agreed framework was obstructed for a time by North Korea's refusal to accept South Korean-designed LWR model reactors. US and DPRK negotiators met for three weeks in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and on June 12, 1995, reached an accord resolving this issue. North Korea agreed to accept the decisions of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO) with respect to the model for the LWRs and agreed that KEDO would select a prime contractor to carry out the LWR project. The KEDO executive board announced that it had selected the South Korean-designed Ulchin 3-4 LWR as the reference model for the project and that a South Korean firm would be the prime contractor. The South Korean prime contractor would be responsible for all aspects of the LWR project including design, manufacture, construction, and management. In this Kuala Lumpur accord to the 1994 Geneva agreed framework, the DPRK also agreed to negotiate directly with KEDO on all outstanding issues related to the LWR project. On December 15, 1995, KEDO and the DPRK signed the Light Water Reactor Supply Agreement. KEDO teams have also made a number of trips to North Korea to survey the proposed reactor site; in the spring of 1996, KEDO and the DPRK began negotiations on implementing protocols to the supply agreement.
Pyongyang is cooperating with Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization, whose leading members are South Korea, the United States and Japan. KEDO has reached an agreement on the provision of the light-water nuclear reactors by 2003, and, in return, North Korea has frozen its nuclear program. South Korea, which has promised to bear the lion's share of the reactor project cost estimated at US$4.5 billion, is asking the United States to put up at least a symbolic amount. The US administration, however, has said it can make no contribution to the construction cost as Congress has not appropriated the necessary budget. An official in Seoul, however, said that South Korea cannot drop its demand simply because of domestic problems in the United States. The US Congress has been delaying approval of the cost for the reactor project. South Korean officials said the U.S. refusal to share the reactor cost would make it difficult for them to obtain approval from the National Assembly for the South Korean share.
Since the conclusion of the Supply Agreement in December 1995, six related protocols have come into effect and three rounds of expert-level negotiations have produced solid results. The ROK power company, Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO), is the prime contractor for this project and has as its responsibility the design, manufacture, procurement, construction and management of the reactors. On 19 August 1997 KEDO and North Korea held a groundbreaking ceremony to begin construction of two light-water reactors.
In October 2002, North Korean officials acknowledged the existence of a clandestine program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons that is in violation of the Agreed Framework and other agreements.
Sources and Resources
- DPRK 'Nuclear Deterrent Force' To Be Built If US Maintains 'Hostile Policy', Korean Central News Agency, P'yongyang, June 9, 2003
- Report of U.S. Congressional Delegation Visit to North and South Korea, May 30 - June 2, 2003 led by Rep. Curt Weldon
- KCNA "Detailed Report" on Failure of Denuclearization, Korean Central News Agency, P'yongyang, May 12, 2003
- North Korea Explains Its Withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, Korean Central News Agency, P'yongyang, January 22, 2003
- North Korean Nuclear Weapons, CIA Estimate for Congress, November 19, 2002
- North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program, Congressional Research Service
- North Korean Nuclear Program, U.S. State Department release, October 16, 2002
- Text of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons - Text of the Agreed Framework
- North Korea's Nuclear Weapons Program Larry A. Niksch, Foreign Affairs and Trade Division, Congressional Research Service, October 9, 2002
- STRATEGIC IMPLICATIONS OF THE U.S.-DPRK FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT Thomas L. Wilborn, Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College -- April 3, 1995 [40 pages, 125 kb PDF]
- Assessing the U.S.-North Korea Agreement Masao Okonogi Joint Forces Quarterly Spring 1995 [215 kb PDF] The North Korean leadership is attempting to sell its outmoded baggage of the Cold War.
- Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) The Nuclear Potential of Individual Countries Treaty on Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons Problems of Extension Appendix 2 Russian Federation Foreign Intelligence Service 6 April 1995
- Nuclear Nonproliferation: Implications of the U.S./North Korean Agreement on Nuclear Issues (Letter Report, 10/01/96, GAO/RCED/NSIAD-97-8).
- N Korean Nuclear Arsenal By Lee Wha Rang, April 27, 1996
2) North Korean Nuclear Arsenal by Lee Wha Rang
N Korean Nuclear Arsenal
By Lee Wha Rang
The US-N Korea Geneva Nuclear Accord freezes N Korea's nuke "activities" in return for six billion-plus dollars in aids. N Korea's existing nuclear sites are not immediately affected. The accord does not address the "existing" nuclear devices. Its primary interest appears to be curtailing further expansion of nuke production in N Korea.
Nuke Sites
- Yongbyon 0.1 megawatts thermal (MWt) critical assembly - This small reactor is believed to be the first nuclear reactor in N Korea. It was provided by the Soviet and went into operation in early 1960s. Its primary function is isotope production.
- Yongbyon Reactor I - The construction of this natural uranium-graphite power reactor began in 1980 at Yongbyon, 100 km north of Pyongyang. It is based on a 1950 MAGNOX technology (graphite moderator, aluminum-magnesium clad natural uranium fuel , CO2 gas cooling). The reactor was completed in 1984 and it as was activated in February 1987 under Prof. Ha Kyong Won, a Korean physicist educated in US. After many startup problems, it was operating at 20-30 MW by 1990.
N Korea removed about 30 lb. of plutonium from this reactor in 1988 and built two nuclear bombs. From 1989 to 1991, N Korea may have extracted additional 60 lb. of plutonium, enough for five nukes.
- Yongbyon Reactor II - A 50 MW MAGNOX-type reactor was started in 1984. N Korea built a military nuclear complex next to this reactor. This complex was completed in 1989 and the reactor was tentatively activated in 1992. This reactor alone is capable of producing enough plutonium for 10-12 nukes a year.
- Taechon Reactor I - The construction of a 200 MW MAGNOX-type reactor was started at Taechon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang in 1988 and it is expected to be completed in 1996.
- Taechon Reactor II - A 600-800 MW reactor is also underway at Taechon (completion possible by 1997). This reactor could produce 180-230 Kg of plutonium a year, enough for 30-40 nukes.
- Simpo Reactor I - This 635mw reactor is based on a German design. In May 1989, N Korea and Germany signed a comprehensive agreement on the transfer of "substantial" amounts of German nuclear technology and nuclear weapons materials, including enriched uranium, to Pyongyang. The transfer of the German nuclear know-how has continued via Iran, Libya Syria and Yugoslavia.
- Yongbyon Separation Plant - A plutonium separation facility ("Radiological Research Lab") was built at Yongbyon in 1987. This plant is capable of handling several hundreds of tons of fuel a year, enough to handle fuel from all of the reactors , some 33 lb. of plutonium annually.. The plutonium factory for the nuclear weapons is a single story building constructed on top the main plutonium reprocessing facility, deep underground. In 1993, N Korea completed a second plant, doubling its capacity for plutonium production.
About 70 lb. were believed to have been extracted from the reactors since 1991. In 1992, N Korea bought 120 lb. of plutonium from a former Soviet block country and may have produced 10 bombs. It is quite possible that N Korea has acquired additional nuclear material from the former Soviet republics.
Most intelligence sources, including Russian and Chinese, state that N Korea has close to 10 operational nuclear warheads for its missiles and two nuclear devices that can be carried by truck , boat or transport aircraft. N Korean warheads are of 50 KT class, weighing around 1,100 lb.
N Korean Missiles
N Korea has deployed over 300 Nodong-x (medum range - Japan and Okinawa) and close to a thousand Scud-B/C missiles (short range - S Korea) all of which can carry nuclear or chemical warheads. NoDong-1's have a range of 1,300km and NoDong-2's have a range of 1,500-2,000km. N Korea is believed to have a limited number of Taepodong-x ICBMs (long range - America) hidden in underground tunnels.
The Taepo Dong-2 ICBM has a maximum range of 6,200 miles. The US DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) estimates that the missile has a range of about 4,650 miles with large nuclear warheads and 6,200 miles with smaller warheads. At the extreme of 6,200 mil es, the missile could reach all major West Coast cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego,,,) and reach as far east as Chicago.
3)Results of Congressional Trip to North Korea May/June2003
Congressional Record: June 4, 2003 (House) Page H4968-H4971
RESULTS OF TRIP TO NORTH KOREA
Mr. WELDON of Pennsylvania. [...]
Mr. Speaker, the real and primary purpose of my special order tonight was to focus on a trip that I just led, we got back yesterday, from North Korea, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Mr. Speaker, no one from America in an elected capacity had been to Pyongyang, North Korea, for the past 6 years, and in fact the only contact we have had with the leadership of DPRK has been through our State Department diplomats. We had a team there almost a year ago, or last fall, actually, and we had our Assistant Secretary of State, Secretary Kelly, meet in Beijing to have further discussions with North Korea.
About a year ago, Mr. Speaker, I decided it was important that the Congress attempt to understand what was happening inside of DPRK, because of the tensions building between North and South Korea. I wanted to make sure we did not end up in another conflict. So I set out to take a delegation of 13 of our colleagues into Pyongyang last May. We sat in Beijing and we sat in Seoul for 4 days waiting for the visas to be approved. They never came. The reason given by the North Korean government was that President Bush had referred to North Korea as a part of the axis of evil, and, therefore, they did not think it right we should be allowed admittance to their country. But, Mr. Speaker, I persevered, and throughout the last 12 months traveled up to the UN on at least two occasions, met with the Ambassador for the DPRK mission at the UN, Ambassador Han, the only representative of North Korea allowed in America, and I talked to him about taking a delegation in.
Every time I met with him, as I have done in all of my contacts, I made sure I talked to the folks at the White House, the National Security Council and the State Department, so I kept them informed. I used seven or eight individuals and groups that have contacts inside of North Korea to convey the message that it was more important for us to bring in a delegation of non-diplomats. There was an added sense of urgency because in the late summer-early fall our intelligence community gave the evidence to the State Department that in fact North Korea had an active nuclear weapons program under way, which was a clear violation of the 1994 agreed upon framework that was negotiated in the Clinton administration.
So, for all of those reasons I kept the pressure on to take a group into Pyongyang to meet with the officials of that country, not as diplomats, not as representatives of the President, not as representatives of the State Department, but as elected officials from our country, to put a face on the American people and to tell the people of North Korea that none of us want war, none of us want conflict.
Approximately 10 days ago, Mr. Speaker, at the 11th hour, after I had planned a trip to go to Moscow and then on into North Korea, we were initially told the visas were not coming forward. Then the day after we canceled that trip I got a call from the New York embassy or New York office of the mission at the United Nations and Ambassador Han said Congressman Weldon, Pyongyang has invited you to bring your delegation into my country.
Very quickly we reassembled a team, three Democrats and three Republicans, and traveled to Pyongyang on a naval aircraft. The Navy did a fantastic job in providing support to us. We left on a Wednesday evening and flew all night. The trip took us about 30 hours, with the fuel stops that we had to make in the C-9 we were traveling in, and we arrived into Pyongyang, North Korea, from a stop in Japan, at approximately 9:30 a.m. last Friday.
For 3 days, we were hosted by the leadership of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DPRK regime.
Mr. Speaker, I would say at the outset that we let it be known going in we were not going in to represent the President of the United States, nor the State Department. We were not going in to do any negotiations. We were simply going in to put a face on America so that the leadership of DPRK that has been so outrageously nasty within their country toward America and the American people should see who we are, not as diplomats, but as ordinary people.
The three Democrats and the three Republicans who went to Pyongyang made it be known that we were not going to negotiate because that is not our position, and in fact we were going in supporting the position of President Bush and Secretary Powell; that a multilateral approach to dealing with North Korea in the end had to be the vehicle, the way to get this issue of this nuclear threat under control.
Our goal was to put the human face on, and we did. In fact, during the 3 days that we were in Pyongyang, North Korea, it was an unbelievable experience. I had asked in advance, Mr. Speaker, to visit 10 sites so that we would not just be taken where they wanted us to go, but rather we would pick the type of sites that we would like to see. In fact, half of those sites they agreed to and we visited. One was a school, a school with 1,800 children from the age of 3 years to 18 years. It was an impressive sight, a model school for the country. But it gave us an understanding of the support of the DPRK government to educate their children.
The second was the Pyongyang Computer Center, one of three buildings in the downtown city area that are used to develop North Korea's technology and information and the use of computers. We had to visit a film studio because the leader of North Korea, Kim Chong-Il, has a major interest in producing video productions, actually movies. He does not import any from the West for his people because society in North Korea is totally closed. So I thought it would be relevant to visit what I had heard to be one of the largest studio complexes outside of Hollywood and Orlando, Florida. We visited that site where there are 1,500 employees.
Mr. Speaker, to say the least, it was unbelievable. We were driven through the back lot. I have been through the back lot of Universal Studios, and I can tell you, that this rivaled that back lot. There were scenes for movies that could be shot about Japan, about China, about Korea, about Europe, about the West. All of these sets were established so that North Korea each year can produce between 20 and 25 feature lengths films that are shown in the movie houses of North Korea, which are all oriented toward the propaganda message and the message of the North Korean leadership. So we visited that facility. We had a shopping visit to interact with the ordinary people that were in the city. We visited restaurants.
Mr. Speaker, on the last day we were there, we were scheduled to meet with the Minister of Trade, but I asked the delegation the night before if they wanted to do that meeting, and they said not really. So I told the representative who handles U.S. issues for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs that we did not want to go to the meeting with the Minister of Trade, but instead on Sunday morning we wanted to go to church. They agreed. They picked us up at our hotel at 9:45 in the morning, and six Members of Congress went to church in a Protestant church on a hill in North Korea, in the middle of this closed society, where there were no pictures of Kim Chong-Il or Kim Il-Song, his father, but rather were crosses, and with 300 people we worshipped in a Protestant church, much like churches all over America do every Sunday morning. So we had a good glimpse of this closed society.
Let me say, Mr. Speaker, I have visited the Soviet Union when it was communist many times and I visited China under its communist system. North Korea makes those two societies in their worst days of communism look like an open society. It is an absolutely closed society to the outside world, no access to outside media, no access to newspapers, totally closed. In fact, limitation on people traveling in is also closed.
But, Mr. Speaker, we are in a tense situation right now, because North Korea has admitted publicly in our meetings that we held that they have nuclear weapons today. They admitted that they are reprocessing the 8,000 nuclear rods from their nuclear power plants and they admitted that that reprocessed nuclear weapons grade fuel will be used to build more nuclear weapons.
Mr. Speaker, the fact is that if North Korea uses the fuel from those 8,000 rods, they will have the ability within a year to build four to six additional nuclear weapons. That is unacceptable, Mr. Speaker, and that is why we have to aggressively at this point in time move in to find a common way to solve the nuclear crisis that exists between North Korea and the rest of the world.
The thing I wanted to mention to our colleagues, Mr. Speaker, is after meeting with the leadership, after meeting with the foreign minister, the speaker of their parliament called the Supreme People's Assembly and the vice foreign minister, I came away convinced that we in fact can find a way to get the North Koreans to give up their nuclear capability.
Tomorrow morning I will talk to Secretary Powell on the phone, and I will relay to him the exact details of what I think could become the basis for his experts and professionals to conduct negotiations within the context that the President and the Secretary of State have defined to allow us to move away from the brink of nuclear war. Mr. Speaker, the alternative is unacceptable. The alternative would be for North Korea to continue to develop nuclear weapons. If we try an economic embargo, they would likely offer to sell their nuclear weapons to other nations, rogue groups, terrorist organizations. That is unacceptable.
Regime change by means of war I think is unacceptable, at least until we make every possible effort to find a way to convince the North Koreans, as President Putin and Chinese President Hu Jintao have said, to have them remove nuclear weapons from the Korean Peninsula. Mr. Speaker, I would like to include the trip report, and I would like to thank our congressional delegation Members, the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Ortiz), who was my co-chair; the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Reyes); the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel); the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson); the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Miller). They were a dynamic team, and together we have now brought back to our colleagues the knowledge and a fuller understanding of this nation that has been so secretive.
But more importantly, we bring back to America the possibility that we can resolve this nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula through peaceful discussions and through peaceful resolution. Hopefully, Mr. Speaker, under the leadership of our great President and our Secretary of State and Condoleezza Rice, our security adviser, we will in fact this year be able to solve this very difficult challenge in a peaceful way.
The material referred to earlier is as follows:
U.S. CONGRESSIONAL DELEGATION (CODEL) WELDON VISIT TO NORTH AND SOUTH KOREA--DEMOCRATIC PEOPLES' REPUBLIC OF KOREA (DPRK) AND REPUBLIC OF KOREA (ROK), MAY 30-JUNE 2, 2003
overview
North Korea DPRK
The delegation was the largest congressional delegation to visit the DPRK and the first CODEL to visit the DPRK in five years. The visit occurred during a period of escalating tensions between the DPRK, the United States, and nations of the region resulting from the DPRK October, 2002, admission of its nuclear weapons-related uranium enrichment program.
Subsequent DPRK withdrawal from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT); confirmation of its possession of nuclear weapons; expelling of IAEA inspectors; declared intentions to reprocess its spent fuel; continued sales of missiles and technology to terrorist nations; and allegations of nation- sponsored drug trafficking all served to further raise tensions between the DPRK and the international community.
The delegation visit was the culmination of over a year- long effort by Representative Weldon to gain entry into the DPRK for the purpose of engaging senior DPRK officials in informal discussions, free of the formality of traditional posturing and imposed pressures of negotiation objectives, to share mutual perspectives on the major political, military, and economic issues.
The resulting visit achieved its purpose by providing the Members an opportunity to engage senior DPRK officials (attachment 2) in lengthy, candid, unstructured, and often pointed, yet respectful, discussions, in several venues covering the complete range of outstanding issues. While discussions with senior DPRK officials included the predictable hard line rhetoric associated with recent DPRK public statements, balanced discussion took place in the formal as well as more personal informal sessions. The demonstrated goodwill and willingness to go beyond first level posturing gave the delegation reason to believe that there are options that should be considered to avoid conflict and resolve critical outstanding issues in a way satisfactory to both sides. There is unanimous agreement within the delegation that a way must be found to initiate discussions in an agreed framework at the earliest possible opportunity. Concern exists that failure to address these crictical issues in a timely manner could result in the proliferation of nuclear weapons and/or technology to terrorist organizations and States.
Repeated statements were made by the DPRK leadership that their brief is that the Bush Administration seeks regime change in North Korea, "The Bush Administration finds regime change in different nations very attractive . . . and is trying to have regime change, one by one. This kind of conduct damages the U.S. image in the world and weakens the leadership role of the U.S. This is the heart of the question. If the U.S. would sign a non-aggression pact, we would give up nuclear programs and weapons." The DPRK seeks normalization of relations and non-interference with its economic relations with South Korea and Japan. Chairman Weldon indicated he did not believe regime change to be the goal of the U.S.--and stated his position of not advocating regime change. The issue of regime change is seen as the determining factor in whether a peaceful resolution to the current standoff is possible.
Chairman Weldon also stated his concern that the establishment of a DPRK nuclear weapons program would lead to similar programs in surrounding nations. He cited Hu- Putin statements calling for a nuclear free Korean Peninsula. The DPRK, Vice Minister Kim, acknowledged this as a valid point, but indicated that the other nations can rely on the U.S. "nuclear umbrella," while the DPRK has no such option.
A major issue often voiced by DPRK officials remains a requirement on their part to achieve a satisfactory framework for bilateral discussions because of their belief that certain issues "are too serious" to be dealt with in an multilateral framework. The delegation believes flexibility exists within a multilateral framework to satisfy the DPRK officials desires for bilateral discussions.
Requested visits by the delegation to the Pyongyang Information (Computer) Center, a school for gifted students, Kim Il Sung's birth place, the North Korean movie studio production facilities, and a Christian church as well as casual evening social events permitted the delegation to interact with a wide variety of North Koreans and to travel to several sections of the city.
Prior to departure, Ministry of Foreign Affairs officials extended an open invitation to the delegation for a return visit and further indicated a willingness to consider visits to the Yong Byon nuclear facility.
Seoul, ROK
In Seoul, the delegation was hosted by President Roh for a breakfast meeting, met with Foreign Minister Yoon, Members of the National Assembly, Ambassador Hubbard, General LaPorte, and other officials to discuss the meetings in the DPRK. The ROK officials expressed their appreciation for the efforts of the delegation and reinforced the need for dialogue with the North.
Observations
Each of the senior DPRK officials with whom the delegation met cited the importance of the visit, given the current tense relationship between the DPRK and the U.S. They also noted their understanding of the role of Congress and that the delegation was not visiting to negotiate issues for the United States, but to enhance mutual understanding between the two nations.
In each of the meetings, Chairman Weldon cited the past and continued importance of inter-parliamentary exchanges in improving relationships with nations and improving the well- being of the peoples once considered to be enemies of the United States, including the People's Republic of China and the U.S.S.R., and expressed his belief that this could be the case with the DPRK once normalized relations could be established. He also expressed his belief that no one in the Congress wishes ill-will toward the North Korean people and that no one wants another war.
Each of the senior DPRK officials noted the tense international situation and sought to place the blame on the U.S. "because the U.S. seeks to make us give up our military forces which safeguard our political system." Each of the leaders also cited their preference for the "Clinton approach" in the bilateral relationship and took strong exception to President Bush's inclusion of the DPRK as part of the "Axis of Evil." They stated their belief that such a characterization demonstrates that the U.S. is unwilling to "accommodate with our country" and the U.S. seeks regime change. "Further, the U.S. is enlisting other nations to prepare a nuclear first strike--seeking to blackmail and intimidate us . . . The U.S. does not want to coexist with us . . . And not only does the Bush Administration not want to coexist, but wishes to get rid of my nation with its nuclear strength . . . We see the U.S. preparing for a military strike . . . The U.S. must change its hostile policy." Without necessarily supporting the Bush Administration policies toward the DPRK, all members of the delegation agreed with Representative Engel's point to DPRK officials, that violations of the 1994 Agreed Framework by the DPRK were the reason for the current tensions, not Bush Administration policies.
The DPRK officials stated their belief that the situation can only be resolved by acceptance of the current leadership--coexistence--and dialogue. And in the meantime it intends to continue to develop its "restraint capability" (nuclear deterrent). "We have tried dialogue and have been patient . . . Our willingness to meet in Beijing in April shows our flexibility to allow the U.S. to save face, showing our flexibility and sincerity to resolve the issues at any cost . . . We have not had concrete results. The Bush Administration has not responded to our request for bilateral talks--they are more focused on our first giving up our nuclear program . . . This causes us to believe that the Bush Administration has not changed its policy about disarming my nation . . . We want to conclude a non-aggression treaty between the two countries and avoid a military strike on my country."
DPRK officials explicitly reconfirmed their nation's possession of nuclear weapons and repeated previous public statements regarding the reprocessing of the 8,000 spent fuel rods from the Yong Byon facility. They also indicated they will use the reprocessed materials for making weapons. They further indicated that the only option open to them, given their inclusion in the "Axis of Evil" and U.S. refusal to engage in bilateral discussions, "is to strengthen and possess restraint (deterrent) capability and we are putting that into action . . . I know some say we possess dirty weapons. We want to deny they are dirty ones . . . I apologize for being so frank, but I believe you have good intentions and I want to be frank. We are not blackmailing or intimidating the U.S. side. We are not in a position to blackmail the U.S.--the only super power. Our purpose in having a restraint (deterrent) is related to the war in Iraq. This is also related to statements by the hawks within the the U.S. Administration. Our lesson learned is that if we don't have nuclear restraint (deterrent), we cannot defend ourselves."
DPRK officials maintained that their nuclear program is only for deterrence and not being pursued to seek economic aid--that "we only wish to be left alone. The nuclear issue is directly linked to the security of our nation . . . We need frank exchange on nuclear policies." DPRK officials indicated that economic sanctions would be viewed as a proclamation of war.
Attachment 1
CODEL WELFON--Members of Congress: Curt Weldon (R-PA); Solomon Ortiz (D-TX); Silvestre Reyes (D-TX); Joe Wilson (R- SC); Jeff Miller (R-FL); Eliot Engel (D-NY). Professional Staff: Doug Roach; Bob Lautrup. State Department Interpreter: Tong Kim. Navy Escorts: Commander Lorin Selby; Lt Commander/Dr. Erik Sawyers; Lt Frank Cristinzio; Lt Tamara Mills.
Attachment 2
DPRK--PAEK, Nam Sun, Foreign Minister; KIM Gye Gwan, Vice Minister, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; CHAI Tae Bok, Chairman, Supreme People's Assembly (SPA); CHO, Seung Ju, Director General, Bureau of U.S. Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs; RHEE Sang No, Director of External Affairs, Presidium of SPA; PAK Myong Guk, Director of U.S. Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. ROK--ROH, Moo-Hyun, President; YOON, Foreign Minister; YOO, Jay-Kun, Member, National Assembly; KIM Un-yong, Member, National Assembly; LEE, Jae-joung, Member, National Assembly; SONG, Young-gil, Member, National Assembly; LEE By-yang, Member, National Assembly; PARK, Jin, Member, National Assembly; KIM, Suh-woo, Chief of Staff to the Speaker, National Assembly; SOHN, Jang-nai, former Ambassador to Indonesia; Thomas C. Hubbard, U.S. Ambassador to ROK; General Leon LaPorte, Commander, USFK.
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Nuclear Expert Is Unconvinced North Korea Has the Bomb
January 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/politics/22NUKE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - An American nuclear expert who recently visited North Korea's main nuclear facility said Wednesday he was not allowed to see enough to determine the country's nuclear weapons ability.
The expert, Siegfried Hecker, a former director of the Los Alamos, N.M., nuclear research laboratory, said the North Koreans "most likely" have the ability at the nuclear site in Yongbyon to make plutonium metal.
But, he said, he saw no convincing evidence that the North Koreans could use the plutonium to build a nuclear device. And even if they had that ability, he said he saw no proof the North Koreans could convert such a device into a nuclear weapon.
Dr. Hecker added that he was also unable to substantiate a North Korean claim that 8,000 fuel rods were reprocessed last year to extract plutonium metal - an essential step in developing nuclear weapons.
He went to North Korea with several American colleagues on an unofficial visit two weeks ago.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Dr. Hecker said the North Koreans apparently wanted to show the delegation their main nuclear site "to verify that they had taken significant actions since December 2002 and to impress us with their nuclear capabilities."
He said his hosts seemed disappointed when he told them he had not seen enough to draw definitive conclusions about the facility.
The Bush administration has believed for some time that North Korea has at least one nuclear weapon. It has been worried about the possibility of North Korean attempts to sell nuclear technology to terrorist groups or to unfriendly states.
The American government neither facilitated nor discouraged the group's mission to North Korea. Members of the group have briefed administration officials since returning.
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N. Korean Evidence Called Uncertain
Scientist Describes Show and Tell at Nuclear Plant Tour
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36874-2004Jan21?language=printer
The North Korean engineers put a red metal box on the table and opened it. They pulled out a white box made of wood that fit snugly in it. They slid off the top and pulled out two clear jars, which looked as if they had once held marmalade. The lids were sealed tight with tape.
Siegfried S. Hecker, a former director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, peered at the jars from several feet away. One contained a greenish powder, the other an oddly shaped piece of metal. It looked a bit like a funnel, 11/2 inches high and an eighth of an inch thick.
Hecker focused on the metal. This, the North Koreans proudly proclaimed, was their "deterrent" -- plutonium that had been recently created and shaped from the waste of nuclear fuel rods that until a year ago had been under the careful watch of United Nations inspectors.
The jars and boxes were whisked away. Wait a minute, Hecker said. "It looks like plutonium, but there is no way I can be sure it is plutonium," he said. "I want to hold the jar." The red box reappeared.
North Korea's willingness to show off its Yongbyon nuclear facility -- and eagerness to show it can produce plutonium -- was intended to demonstrate Pyongyang is serious about breaking the stalemate with Washington over its nuclear programs, members of an unofficial U.S. delegation say. But the delegation's observations have alarmed U.S. officials because the trip two weeks ago appears to confirm that North Korea has processed all 8,000 spent fuel rods -- giving them enough weapons-grade plutonium for as many as half a dozen nuclear weapons.
U.S. intelligence had been divided on this question, with the State Department's intelligence arm in particular arguing it was unclear whether the rods had been reprocessed.
Hecker, in a two-hour interview and in testimony yesterday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said he cannot say conclusively that the metal displayed was recently reprocessed plutonium, in part because he did not have the necessary equipment. Moreover, the North Koreans did not provide evidence to the visitors the plutonium had been placed in a nuclear device. But the delegation also saw a small reactor operating, apparently smoothly, producing enough plutonium for an additional bomb a year.
At one point, Hecker said, Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan noted that Libya and Iraq were proved not to have nuclear weapons. Then he bragged to his visitors, "But we have weapons of mass destruction."
The following account is based on the interview with Hecker and supplemented by interviews with other delegation members: The delegation was led by Stanford University scholar John W. Lewis, and its members were the first Westerners to visit the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center since U.N. inspectors were ousted more than a year ago. The group arrived Jan. 8 at 10:30 a.m., after a two-hour drive, sometimes over an unpaved road, from Pyongyang.
It spent nearly eight hours there, viewing the small 5-megawatt reactor, the cooling pond that once held the rods and the facility for reprocessing. They also drove past the crumbling facade of a much larger, 50-megawatt reactor, where construction had been halted 10 years ago under an agreement with the Clinton administration.
After an introductory meeting at a guest house, the group toured the small reactor. It saw a steam plume emanating from the cooling tower in the morning and the afternoon, and all indications from the control room suggested the reactor was operating smoothly.
The North Koreans said the reactor began operating last February to provide heat for the nearby town, replacing shipments of fuel oil that had been suspended by the Bush administration in late 2002 when the nuclear crisis began. Hecker, a metallurgist with top-secret clearances, noted to his hosts that the uranium fuel rods in the core of the reactor were also generating up to six kilograms of plutonium a year.
The delegation then visited the cooling pond for spent fuel, next to the reactor. At great expense, the United States had provided 400 stainless-steel canisters to store the 8,000 rods in a deep pool of water -- and the canisters had been sealed to prevent tampering.
The group dressed in protective gear -- smocks, booties and skullcaps -- and looked into the pool. The seals and locking plates were gone. There was a thin layer of ice on the pool. A number of canisters were open.
"Okay," one of their North Korean hosts said. "You have that answer."
"Wait a minute," Hecker objected. "There were a whole bunch of canisters that were closed, so I can't go back home and say they are all gone."
The North Koreans suggested he select one at random and they would open it up. Hecker picked one that was seven rows down and four over, and then four men operated a crane to bring it up and unscrew the top. It should have held 20 rods. Using a light, Hecker confirmed it was empty.
Finally, the delegation was taken to the reprocessing facility, where the plutonium that has built up in the rods is separated. The delegation peeked through the heavily shielded windows where the separation is done, but no one was at work. The North Koreans said they had completed reprocessing the rods at the end of June.
"Okay," one North Korean official said. "We have demonstrated our deterrent."
Hecker again objected, saying that he had seen nothing to prove processing had taken place and that the rods could be anywhere. That's when the North Korean brought out the red box with the two jars. One jar held what appeared to be plutonium oxalate powder -- which could be turned into plutonium. The other jar held the metal piece.
"This is a scrap piece from a casting from our recent campaign," one official said.
"What's the density?" Hecker asked.
"Between 15 and 16."
Hecker raised his eyebrows, since plutonium has a normal density of about 19.8 grams per square centimeter. This meant the North Koreans had produced an alloy, making the notoriously brittle metal easier to manipulate.
When Hecker asked what element was added to the plutonium, the North Korean shot back: "I'm not authorized to tell you that, but you know. It's the same thing you use."
Hecker, using plastic gloves, wanted to hold the jar to conduct two simple tests -- to see how heavy it was and whether it was warm. Plutonium is twice as dense as iron and is slightly warm to the touch because of its radioactivity. Hecker said it felt heavy and, in the frigid air of the facility, the jar wasn't cold. But it also wasn't hot. When Hecker noted to a North Korean official that it wasn't very warm, he replied, "That's because the '240' content is low."
This also was potentially important. Plutonium-240 is one of the two main isotopes, or chemical types, of plutonium used in weapons. Plutonium-240 is more radioactive than the other isotope, plutonium-239, and it accounts for most of the heat given off by the metal. Reactor plutonium has as much as 40 percent plutonium-240; weapons-grade plutonium, by contrast, has less than 6 percent of plutonium-240.
When Hecker asked to have his hands checked for radiation, the North Koreans brought in a Geiger counter. The red box was still in the room, and it set off the device when it was turned on. "This stuff was radioactive," Hecker said.
The day after the Yongbyon visit, a senior North Korean official, Li Gun, approached Hecker and declared, "We've shown our deterrence."
Hecker was blunt. "No, you didn't show us your deterrence," he said. A nuclear deterrent, he told Li, has three elements: weapons-grade plutonium, a nuclear device and a delivery system for the weapon.
"Let me make sure we understand each other," Hecker said. "You showed me nothing -- no facilities. You had me talk to no people that give me any indication as to whether you have the ability to go from plutonium metal to a nuclear device. I saw nothing."
"Well, you saw the capability of our people," Li replied. "Didn't that convince you that we know how to build a nuclear device?"
Hecker said what he saw required reactive physics and chemical engineering. The next steps take more physics and metallurgy, knowledge of high explosives and testing, and much more.
"Look, this is just like somebody in an automobile company telling me that just because they've got steel, they know how to build an automobile," Hecker told Li. "It's the same thing."
A disappointed Li said he would try to find someone to speak to Hecker who could prove North Korea has that ability. But in the evening Li came back and said they had run out of time.
Staff writer Joby Warrick contributed to this report.
--------
Report Cites Potential of N. Korean Arsenal
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35664-2004Jan21.html
LONDON, Jan. 21 -- North Korea's nuclear arsenal could reach four to eight bombs over the next year and increase by up to 13 additional bombs per year by the end of the decade, according to a detailed assessment released Wednesday by a prominent research group here.
The report by the International Institute for Strategic Studies warns that time is running out on diplomatic efforts to halt the Pyongyang government's nuclear program while it remains relatively small.
"What we're saying is, in the near-term immediate future, North Korea's ability to increase its nuclear arsenal is very limited," said Gary Samore, a weapons expert and the report's principal author, who was senior director for nonproliferation and export controls at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration.
"But as you go beyond that window," he added in a news briefing here, "it really begins to get into the range of dozens of nuclear weapons."
The institute's 120-page report cautioned that it was impossible to know for certain how many nuclear bombs, if any, North Korea currently possessed. But based upon previous assessments and the assumption that the country's nuclear weapons would use a simple, implosion-type fission device, the study said it was "plausible" that North Korea had already acquired enough plutonium to build one or two bombs before it suspended its nuclear program in the early 1990s.
After North Korea ousted international inspectors and announced a resumption of its nuclear activities in 2002, the report said, the country's ability to manufacture more nuclear weapons depended on whether Korean officials were truthful in their claims that they had reprocessed nearly 8,000 spent fuel rods from one of two reactors. The report estimated the fuel rods could provide 25 to 30 kilograms of plutonium -- enough to build two to five nuclear bombs.
At present, the report stated, North Korea's capability to produce fresh plutonium is limited to its functioning 5-megawatt reactor, which it restarted in February 2002. The reactor could produce enough plutonium for one new bomb per year, according to the report.
But completion of a second, 50-megawatt reactor now under construction could produce 55 kilograms of plutonium each year, according to the study, and a new centrifuge enrichment plant could add another 75 kilograms of highly enriched uranium. Together, these substances could provide the material for another eight to 13 bombs per year.
The "worst-case scenario" was that these weapons would be available "around mid-decade," while a more cautious assessment would put them out of reach until the second half of the decade, the report estimated.
Samore said North Korea had developed missiles that could reach South Korea or Japan, but probably not the United States.
The United States has been trying to persuade North Korea to scrap its nuclear program, although the Bush administration and its diplomatic partners in China, Russia, Japan and South Korea are divided over the extent of the program and over whether incentives or economic and political pressure might work best. Samore said recent successes in bringing Iran and Libya's nuclear development programs back within international inspection regimes would have little impact in North Korea, whose leaders see nuclear weapons as a key to their survival at a time when the country is slipping further into economic deprivation.
The report said that the North Korea's military forces had degraded to the point where they would be hard-pressed to launch a conventional strike against South Korea. But Samore warned they were strong enough to make any invasion by U.S. forces "a very unattractive option."
Samore said, "the costs and the casualties and the risks would be extremely high," but added that the threat of military force was still important in compelling Pyongyang to the bargaining table.
-------- missile defense
Pentagon report warns lack of testing limits confidence in missile defense
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122002118.s6adfqil.html
A Pentagon report warned Wednesday that existing testing data gives only limited confidence in a missile defense system that the United States is intent on deploying beginning this year.
The Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, Thomas Christie said in an annual report very little testing of the system was performed in 2003 "due to immature BMDS (ballistic missile defense system) components."
The Missile Defense Agency will therefore depend on two flight tests scheduled this year to validate its mid-course missile defense system, which is designed to intercept long-range missiles in space, according to the report.
"Even with successful intercepts in both of these attempts, the small number of tests would limit confidence in the integrated interceptor performance," the report said.
President George W. Bush has directed the Pentagon to begin deploying the system this year even though it is still in development.
Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat of Rhode Island, said the report "makes it clear that in a rush to win an ideological victory, President Bush risks prematurely deploying a missile defense system by 2004 that is technologically unproven and will drain resources from other essential priorities."
--------
Missile Defense Testing May Be Inadequate
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36878-2004Jan21.html
The Pentagon's top weapons evaluator said yesterday that setbacks in the Bush administration's effort to develop a national missile defense system are likely to make it difficult for him to assess the system's effectiveness ahead of its planned deployment in September.
In his annual review of major new weapons, Thomas P. Christie, who heads the Pentagon's office of operational test and evaluation, expressed concern about the small number of flight tests in the missile defense program and about the relatively simple nature of those tests. Even with two more flight intercept attempts planned this year, Christie doubted that enough information will be available to render much of a judgment about the system's ability to defend the United States against missile attack.
"At this point in time, it is not clear what mission capability will be demonstrated" before President Bush's deployment deadline, he said in his report, which was released yesterday.
As the Defense Department official responsible for monitoring military testing, Christie enjoys considerable authority in assessing whether new weapon systems are ready for full production. He has said little publicly about the missile defense effort and has avoided taking sides in the political debate over it, in contrast to his predecessor, Philip Coyle, who emerged as a critic in the final years of the Clinton administration. But Christie's new assessment was cheered yesterday by opponents of Bush's program.
"It is a scorching criticism," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. "I think it argues for doing it right, not just doing it. I think the administration should delay deployment and get this program on a schedule where operational testing is clearly defined."
Plans call for as many as 10 missile interceptors this year -- six in Alaska and four in California. The system also will feature a mix of satellites and land- and sea-based radars, linked by a communication and command network for detecting and tracking enemy missiles and launching the interceptors into space.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior defense officials have acknowledged that the initial system will lack many desired features. But they say it will be at least a rudimentary defense against a potential North Korean missile attack, and they argue that having some missile defense in place is better than having none. They also have outlined plans to improve the system in coming years with more interceptors, enhanced radars and a new generation of tracking satellites.
"We believe the testing we've done -- and will do this year -- will give us the confidence we need to make a recommendation to go forward with deployment," said Richard Lehner, chief spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. "We will have an effective capability against the limited, near-term threat that we need to be prepared for."
In his report, Christie said trying to take early advantage of some of the antimissile capabilities under development was "prudent." But he warned that little real basis existed for judging the actual worth of those capabilities. Much of the current assessment, he said, must be "based primarily on modeling and simulation" and tests of subsystems, "not end-to-end operational testing of a mature integrated system."
In eight flight tests since 1999, interceptors have scored five hits. But the tests have involved a number of substitute elements, including a surrogate booster and a prototype tracking radar, while the actual parts for the planned system have remained in development. Additionally, all the tests have run on the same course, with the target missile soaring west over the Pacific Ocean from an Air Force base in California and the interceptor launching from the Marshall Islands.
The last flight test, which resulted in failure of the interceptor vehicle to separate from its booster, occurred 13 months ago. Problems with a new booster, being designed specifically for the system by Lockheed Martin Corp., prompted the Pentagon last year to suspend further intercept attempts. The next attempt is scheduled for May using an alternate booster developed by Orbital Sciences Corp.
Christie called the testing suspension "reasonable," given the risk of further failure with the surrogate booster and the limited amount of new information that could be gained from flying essentially the same scenario. But the move, he added, has left "very limited time for demonstration" of the performance of the new booster and the rest of the system.
Delays in producing both the Lockheed and Orbital Sciences boosters "have put tremendous pressure on the test schedule immediately prior to fielding," Christie said. Noting that flight tests so far have involved only "simple target complexes," he urged conditions "more closely matching the projected threat."
Plans for the two tests this year call for more challenging targets and flight geometries, including a target launch from Alaska and an interceptor launch from California. But "even with successful intercepts in both of these attempts," Christie said, "the small number of tests would limit confidence" in the system's performance.
--------
U.S. Missile Shield Will Work, Pentagon Agency Says
January 22, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-missile-usa.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon agency building a U.S. missile shield on Thursday brushed off doubts voiced by the top U.S. arms evaluator about whether the system was being adequately tested before its planned deployment in September.
``We believe the system will be reliable and effective against a near-term threat, and will continue to improve over time,'' said Rick Lehner, spokesman for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency.
``What we will have this year will be a capability to defend all 50 states against long-range ballistic missiles -- something that we don't have now,'' he said in an e-mailed reply to a question from Reuters.
President Bush, fearful of possible attacks from nations like North Korea, has ordered fielding of a limited missile defense despite criticism from some experts that it will not be reliable and that it is being rushed into deployment.
In an annual review of big weapons projects made public on Wednesday, Thomas Christie, who heads the Pentagon's office of operational testing and evaluation, voiced doubt about the ``small number'' of flight tests and their relatively simple nature.
``At this point in time, it is not clear what mission capability will be demonstrated'' before Sept. 30, when a basic system to defend against incoming warheads is due to be declared operational.
Christie's job is to make sure arms work before vast sums are spent to produce them.
Up to 10 anti-missile interceptors -- six in silos at Ft. Greely, Alaska, and four at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California -- are to be part of the initial setup, a supposed bulwark against, first and foremost, any missile attack from North Korea.
The Pentagon has planned to spend about $50 billion over the next five years to develop and field the shield, which would include land-, sea- and space-based sensors and long- and short-range interceptors among other weapons.
LIMITED SYSTEM
The initial system is designed only to protect against a limited attack and would not keep out a sustained missile assault from a country with a big arsenal like Russia.
Boeing Co. is responsible for tying together the complex web, which includes optical and radar sensors to detect incoming warheads, communications networks, battle management systems, and a three-stage booster rocket carrying a ``kill vehicle'' meant to destroy its target by slamming into it.
In eight flight tests since 1999, interceptors have scored five hits, relying partly on pre-production prototypes while the hardware meant to be part of the final system remains under development.
In the last flight test, in December 2002, the ``kill vehicle,'' manufactured by Raytheon Co., failed to separate from a surrogate booster.
Delays in booster production and testing by both Lockheed Martin Corp. and Orbital Sciences Corp. ``have put tremendous pressure on the test schedule immediately prior to fielding,'' Christie wrote in his annual report to Congress.
So far, testing of the kill vehicle has involved only ``simple target complexes in a limited set of engagement conditions,'' said Christie.
In reply, Lehner sketched an aggressive test schedule for the ground-based leg of the planned system in coming months, including using the Orbital booster against a simulated target ``within the next few weeks.''
The Orbital booster would also be used for a flight test in the March or April against ``a very challenging target,'' he said. Two other tests are scheduled for the spring and summer.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Americas nuclear test legacy lingers 50 years after Bravo test
MAJURO (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122031737.wjqy2jd4.html
Half a century after the largest ever US hydrogen bomb test in the Marshall Islands, the inhabitants of the central Pacific Island archipelago are hoping this month's visit by a high-level US delegation will revive their stalled bid for two billion dollars' compensation.
The mid-January visit by senior administration and US Congress members was seen as positive by Marshall Island leaders who more than three years ago filed a petition seeking additional compensation for the massive damage caused by 67 US nuclear tests in the island chain in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Bikini Senator Tomaki Juda, who was a small child when Bikini islanders were relocated ahead of the first post-World War II nuclear tests in 1946, says the meetings with US Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Congress members this month gave islanders an opportunity to discuss the issues with key policy makers from Washington for the first time in recent years.
American officials argue that 270 million dollars provided to nuclear test victims between 1986 to 2001 represents a full and final settlement to compensation claims.
However, Republican California Congressman Richard Pombo, who chairs the House Resources Committee which oversees funding to the Marshall Islands, admitted during the visit that Washington's obligations had not ended.
"Obviously, the United States has an ongoing liability (for the nuclear test legacy)," Pombo said in an interview with AFP in Majuro.
"This issue is 50 years old. At some point we need to find closure."
But as the 50th anniversary looms of the March 1, 1954 Bravo test at Bikini -- the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested by the United States -- the dissatisfaction of Marshall islanders continues to fester.
Rongelap Atoll Senator Abacca Anjain-Maddison and Bikini Council official Jack Niedenthal said the closure at the end of this month of a special medical program for nuclear test victims because of a lack of US funding was a serious concern.
However, Pombo said Washington was prepared to step in to save the health project, which was previously funded by the 270 million dollars.
"One way or another this will be addressed, either administratively or through Congressional action," he said.
A US-Marshall Islands agreement, known as the Compact of Free Association, ended more than 40 years of American rule of the islands as a United Nations Trust Territory in 1986. The Compact provided for a compensation package which paid out 270 million dollars over the next 15 years.
The money was used for individual compensation, community development projects, a special health program for people from the four worst affected atolls and to fund a Nuclear Claims Tribunal.
A US-funded nuclear clean-up at Enewetak in the late 1970s allowed people to return to three southern islands, but most of the remaining coral islands, the test site for 43 nuclear blasts, are off-limits because of dangerously high radiation levels.
As the compensation package wound up two years ago, the Nuclear Claims Tribunal was completing nearly 10 years of judicial proceedings on claims by Bikini and Enewetak islanders over land damages, clean-up costs and hardship.
The awards, after deducting previously provided compensation, amounted to more than one billion dollars but have so far not been fully been paid.
The tribunal has received only 45 million dollars in funding from the United States for its operations and paying awards.
The tribunal is now in the final stages of judging similar claims from Rongelap and Utrik, which were exposed to high-level fallout from the Bravo test and many of the other hydrogen bomb explosions in the 1950s.
In addition, the tribunal has approved personal injury claims of over 70 million dollars from more than 1,700 Marshall Islanders for cancers and related health problems.
According to statistics provided by the tribunal, more than one-third of the claimants have died without receiving their full compensation because it has had to make small annual percentage payments due to the lack of funding.
In September 2000, the Marshall Islands sent a petition to the US Congress seeking two billion dollars, which includes the tribunal's unpaid awards. It languished until March 2002, when several members of the Congress sent a letter to the Bush Administration requesting a review of the petition.
Bush Administration officials have been stating publicly since July that the report to Congress was to be issued shortly.
Privately, top Marshall Islands government officials believe the Bush Administration review will reject the petition. However, officials here want it to issue its report in order to move the long-stalled issue forwards.
Pombo said this month's visit would help to speed the process and "relay the sense of urgency" to the administration.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new mexico
New Mexico Wins Accelerated Cleanup Funds for Sandia Lab
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico, (ENS)
January 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-22-09.asp#anchor6
The Department of Energy has reached an agreement with the New Mexico Environment Department on the terms of a consent order that will facilitate accelerated environmental cleanup at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The consent order is the culmination of many months of negotiations between the DOE, Sandia National Laboratories and the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED).
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson served as Energy Secretary in the Clinton administration, so he is familar with all the details of contamination at Sandia and all of the other 16 national laboratories administered by the Department of Energy.
The consent order means that an additional $2.4 million will be provided by DOE's Office of Environmental Management from its accelerated cleanup account, approved by Congress to fund targeted cleanup projects at facilities around the DOE complex. The additional amount brings the DOE's total Sandia funding commitment to $20.3 million for fiscal year 2004.
From 1945 to the present, Sandia National Lab has generated, treated, stored, disposed of, and otherwise handled solid wastes, hazardous wastes, hazardous waste constituents, and hazardous wastes mixed with radioactive wastes. This handling, storage, treatment and disposal of wastes have caused hazardous waste and hazardous constituents to be released into the environment.
Wastes released include chlorinated and non-chlorinated solvents, high explosives, metals, polychlorinated biphenyls, nitrates, and radionuclides.
In several locations, there has been contamination of the regional aquifer, from which many entities including the city of Albuquerque draw drinking water. No drinking water wells currently in use by the city are contaminated by Sandia operations, according to NMED.
There are a total of 126 sites at Sandia National Lab that require corrective action. Under the consent order, these sites will be cleaned up following ironclad schedules that the state will enforce with stipulated penalties of up to $3,000 a day if deadlines are missed.
"The DOE believes that this agreement is in the best interest of all parties and the public," said Jessie Roberson, DOE assistant secretary for environmental management. "We are willing to support agreements that are negotiated in good faith and will provide funding to support the terms of those agreements. The agreement with the New Mexico Environment Department demonstrates the DOE's willingness to work with state governments to find solutions to environmental issues."
The consent order has been issued for a 30 day public comment period by the New Mexico Environment Department.
Once finalized, the order satisfies congressional requirements for the additional $2.4 million accelerated cleanup funding to be released to the site. This agreement is the 17th such agreement in the DOE complex to facilitate a site's access to additional accelerated cleanup dollars.
"The successful conclusion of this order shows that this Department can work with DOE and that DOE can work with an order that is enforceable by the state," said NMED Secretary Ron Curry. "The willingness of Sandia to sit down and hammer out an order that protects the health of New Mexicans gives me hope that DOE may come to their senses on Los Alamos National Laboratory."
For Los Alamos National Laboratory, NMED's baseline cleanup commitment, which does not include accelerated cleanup funds, stands at $77 million for fiscal year 2004.
-------- us nuc waste
Toxic cleanups may be scaled back
Department of Energy causes uproar over plan for old nuclear weapons sites
By Ian Hoffman,
OAKLAND TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
Thursday, January 22, 2004
http://www.oaklandtribune.com/Stories/0,1413,82~1865~1907430,00.html
Facing a national nuclear cleanup costing at least $220 billion and lasting several decades, the U.S. Department of Energy is pushing what it believes is a faster, cheaper approach that requires setting aside environmental regulations and longstanding agreements with states.
The agency's new "Risk-Based End States Vision" is premised on limiting the cleanup of factories and labs contaminated by cold war weapons work to no more than is needed to protect humans or wildlife.
Far from being embraced, the Energy Department's idea is forging a uniquely broad coalition of opponents.
Federal and state regulators are up in arms. Traditional Energy Department allies in Congress and in the towns that grew up around U.S. weapons sites are allying themselves with nuclear-disarmament activists and environmentalists.
New Mexico governor and former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson has vowed to "play hardball" with his old agency.
In California and Ohio, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is abandoning its sister federal agency to join state agencies in fighting the cleanup plan.
Kathy Setian, a Superfund cleanup manager for EPA's Region 9, headquartered in San Francisco, called the Energy Department's latest idea "an extraordinary proposal."
Taken at face value, DOE's new cleanup plan would require states such as California to overlook several environmental regulations. It seeks to revamp state-federal-tribal agreements on cleanup that took years to negotiate, without offering the kind of rationale that regulators legally would demand of a private business, federal and state regulators said.
Livermore lab impact
At Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons lab, for example, the Energy Department would move the point at which it has to meet groundwater cleanup standards from the aquifer itself to the site boundary, leaving water under the lab contaminated.
That would require the state's Water Quality Control Board to overlook its "anti-degradation policy" against allowing contamination of potential future drinking-water resources.
"Everyone in the remediation business knows that it is easier to clean up the contamination at the source than to let it spread and then try to clean it up," EPA's Setian said. "It's kind of like being penny-wise and pound-foolish."
The Energy Department's latest cleanup scheme is the brainchild of Assistant Secretary Jessie Roberson, a former cleanup official at the Rocky Flats plutonium-pit plant near Boulder, Colo. But it's hardly a new idea.
Federal, state and local regulators heard the phrase "risk-based" cleanup repeatedly as Clinton administration officials tried to finagle the largest environmental cleanup in history, priced as high as $300 billion and estimated to last until late this century.
Talk of cleanup pragmatism and risk-basing keeps arising out of sticker shock and political salesmanship.
Lawmakers may embrace idea
Congress rarely is enthusiastic about dispensing DOE's cleanup money, preferring its other, competing charges -- water projects, nuclear weapons, oil and gas markets and defense spending. Lawmakers welcome ideas for saving on cleanup.
But cities and states say they already negotiated "risk-based" cleanups with the Energy Department in the late 1980s and 1990s, and they're wary of the agency's retreating from its promises.
"The city of Livermore strongly recommends that now is not the time to change the speed or standards for the cleanup of the groundwater contamination," City Manager Linda Barton wrote the Energy Department last week.
At Livermore, a plume of chemical solvents and toxic metals has tainted an estimated three billion gallons of groundwater, reaching past the lab's western fence line and up to 200 feet deep.
Lab and DOE environmental scientists attacked the plume aggressively, pulling contaminants out with two dozen pumps and treating them.
They're using intriguing new technologies, such as exposing solvents to ultraviolet light or filtering them underground through tiny palladium balls.
In recent years, they stopped the plume's westward march toward Livermore's city wells, about a mile and a half away.
The pumps are pulling the tainted water back toward the lab, while siphoning off the original chemical spills that feed the plume.
Regulators see progress
Federal and state regulators, the city and environmentalists acknowledge the cleanup could take 50 years but say they're pleased with the progress.
And the local Energy Department cleanup manager said he's unsure whether his agency's revised cleanup "vision" will result in cost savings, for example, if pumps have to be relocated.
"We are already well-developed. We already look at cleanup from a risk base," said Roy Kearns, cleanup manager for DOE's Livermore Site Office. "We're having great success."
Several states compromised heavily with the Energy Department in the 1990s, agreeing to lower cleanup costs by allowing tons of radioactive wastes to remain on defunct nuclear sites, partly relying on DOE's promise to watch them and clean them up if needed.
They're wary of DOE abandoning those agreements under its new plan.
"We would caution anyone who follows us down this road to 'risk-based end states' that you ensure you have the ability to protect your state and its health, in case of neglect by a responsible federal agency," said James D. Werner, a former Energy Department cleanup official who is now chief of land and water programs at Missouri's Department of Natural Resources.
"The view of DOE appears to be, 'Trust us,'" Werner said. "We in Missouri would say, 'Show me.'"
Contact Ian Hoffman at ihoffman@angnewspapers.com
----
More care urged for WIPP trips
By Jennifer W. Sanchez
Albuquerque Tribune Reporter,
January 22, 2004
http://www.abqtrib.com/archives/news04/012204_news_council.shtml
The thought of a wreck involving nuclear waste shipments along I-40 through Albuquerque terrifies Sylviana Diaz-Douville.
For 24 years, she has lived in a three-bedroom stucco house less than a mile from the intersection of I-40 and Coors Boulevard Northwest. The is area filled with homes, churches, parks, schools and strip malls, Diaz-Douville said.
"It's only a matter of time before something happens," said Diaz-Douville, a retired city employee."This is serious business. We're not prepared."
On Wednesday, the City Council listened to Diaz-Douville and about 20 others. The council passed a measure urging the U.S. Department of Energy to follow stricter guidelines when shipping waste through the city to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
Councilor Miguel Gomez, who sponsored the measure, said he and other councilors are scheduled to meet with a DOE leader Friday afternoon in Albuquerque to discuss the council's suggestions.
They include having the department give the city's chief of police advance notification when a shipment would be going through the city; restricting shipments to times outside rush hour; and requiring safety escorts.
The first shipments of waste from the Nevada test site began passing through Albuquerque on I-40 this month. Low-level waste bound for WIPP includes plutonium-contaminated protective gear, tools and equipment.
A few people told the councilors they already feel safe with the nuclear waste trucks going through the city.
One man, who did not give his name for fear of retaliation, said he is more concerned with flammable materials and chemicals that are shipped on the city's streets each day.
"They don't know what they're protesting," he said after the meeting.
Gomez said it was "fantastic" the measure was approved. He said he has concerns the shipment trucks might wreck in the city or terrorists could attack.
"We don't know what the potentials are for accidents," he said.
Councilor Debbie O'Malley supported the request.
"As a governing body, it's important to protect the citizens of this city," she told the council.
-------- us politics
Conservative Republicans Push for Slowdown in U.S. Spending
January 22, 2004
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/politics/22FISC.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - A day after President Bush vowed to submit an austere budget and halve the deficit in five years, conservatives in his own party said on Wednesday that they were not satisfied and stepped up their campaign to force the White House and Republican leaders on Capitol Hill to do more to hold down the growth of government spending.
Forty Republican House members gathered to hash out how to press Mr. Bush and the Congressional leadership to deal with spending increases that they say are running out of control and a deficit that is reaching alarming proportions.
Their discomfort has been echoed in recent weeks by conservative researchers and commentators who support Mr. Bush on most issues. Among them are the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, a political action committee, and The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
"The president used the State of the Union to defend past spending increases, and he made eight specific calls for new spending increases," said Brian M. Riedl, a budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "But he made zero calls for spending cuts. He merely said focus on priorities, cut wasteful spending and be wise with the people's money. That's not specific enough."
Mr. Bush had long attributed the sharp swing from budget surpluses to deficits to the recession and the war on terror. Now, he faces political pressure not just from small-government conservatives in Congress and Democrats who say his tax cuts have plunged the government into a sea of red ink, but also from voters.
Polls show that the widening deficit is of increasing concern to the electorate and that Republicans are losing their traditional advantage over Democrats on the issue.
A poll this month by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 51 percent of respondents called the deficit a top priority for Mr. Bush and Congress. That was up from 40 percent a year earlier and 35 percent two years ago.
Concern about the deficit was particularly evident among Democrats, 57 percent of whom identified it in the Pew poll as a priority issue, versus 44 percent of Republicans.
Democrats said Mr. Bush had mortgaged the nation's future to pay for repeated rounds of tax cuts whose benefits went largely to the wealthy but that had failed to deliver the promised rebound in job creation. The party's presidential candidates regularly use the deficit as a proxy for Mr. Bush's overall economic management and argue that the deficits are leading the government to underfinance programs in areas like health and education.
The government ran a deficit of $374 billion in the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, and the deficit is expected to be around $500 billion for the current fiscal year. When Mr. Bush took office three years ago, the Congressional Budget Office forecast a surplus of $5.6 trillion for the following decade.
In recent years, Republicans have focused less on the deficit than on the desirability of holding down spending and enacting tax cuts to help the economy and restrict the growth of government. Politically, Republicans have always been able to rely on their image as the party to trust with the purse strings, and to assert that Democrats would raise taxes not to cut the deficit but to pay for even more spending.
But an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll this month found that Democrats had nearly caught up with Republicans on the question of which party does a better job of controlling government spending. The poll found that 33 percent of respondents said Republicans did a better job, with Democrats at 31 percent. Fiscal conservatives said it would be hard for them to make progress on deficit reduction in an election year, when lawmakers of both parties would be eager to send more federal money home to their districts.
"You're going to have someone upset with you if you do the right thing," said Representative Sue Myrick of North Carolina, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, the group whose members were meeting to agree on ways to hold down spending and address the deficit. "That's what we've got to find out: Are our members willing to stand up and do the right thing?"
In his State of the Union address on Tuesday, Mr. Bush said he would send a 2005 budget to Congress next month that would hold the rise in discretionary spending to 4 percent, about what he proposed last year.
Liberal groups said Mr. Bush had shortchanged many domestic programs to offset his increase in military spending and the budget for domestic security following the terrorist attacks in 2001. The catchall spending bill for the current fiscal year has been hung up in Congress because of partisan disputes, though Democrats signaled on Wednesday that they would let it pass this week.
According to calculations by the Heritage Foundation, government outlays for the current fiscal year will rise 9 percent, after increases of 13 percent in 2002 and 12 percent in 2003, making the last few years among the fastest-growing periods of government spending since the 1960's. White House officials said that Mr. Bush had spent money for the needed wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and to protect the nation from terrorism and that domestic spending outside security had been held in check.
But many conservatives said they were still irked by Mr. Bush's record, especially since he signed into law last year an overhaul of Medicare that amounted to the largest expansion of a federal entitlement program in a generation.
"The Republican party has long been the party of small government," an aide to a senior Republican senator said, "but the era of small government has ended for the Republican Party."
Referring to Mr. Bush's call on Tuesday night for athletes to stop using performance-enhancing drugs, the aide said, "Unfortunately, the president's ban on steroids doesn't apply to the appropriators."
-------- MILITARY
-------- britain
Military equipment in short supply at start of Iraq war, Britain admits
LONDON (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122202809.rydyi0y4.html
Britain's Ministry of Defence admitted Thursday that some military equipment for British troops in Iraq was in short supply at the start of the Iraq war, but said lessons would be drawn from the experience.
A MoD statement on the shortage was released after the widow of a British soldier killed in Iraq demanded a public apology from Defence Secretary Geoff Hoon.
"The MoD has carried out an extensive review of Operation Telic, which identifies some areas of concern, particularly in the logistics chain," said the ministry, referring to the British deployment of 46,000 troops in the Gulf last year.
"Where shortages were apparent, equipment was prioritised and sent to those units identified as being most in need, eg, those soldiers who would be acting in the dismounted forward infantry role," the MoD statement added.
Hoon "is committed to ensuring that the MoD learns from these lessons."
Hoon on Monday refused to take responsibility for the fate of 33-year-old Sergeant Steve Roberts, killed four days into the Iraq war on March 24 without body armour, as he met his angry widow in London.
Samantha Roberts' husband died in a clash with Iraqi militants near the southern city of Basra, becoming the first British fatality.
Fifty-one British troops were killed during the Iraq campaign, according to the defence ministry.
An official report said last week that Roberts, who was serving with the 2nd Royal Tank Regiment near the southern Iraqi town of Al-Zubayr, was issued with special armour but was told to hand it back because other troops did not have enough. He was given less effective armour instead.
An investigation by the defence ministry concluded that the better armour would have saved his life.
Samantha Roberts said Hoon told her at a meeting last month that 98 percent of British equipment had reached Iraq in time for the war.
"That was clearly not the case, or he misled us," she told BBC radio.
Hoon "pretty much said that it (Roberts' death) was an isolated incident and there were not major issues with the supply to the troops.
"I want to know exactly what they (the defence ministry) are going to do and to admit that there are major issues with equipment shortages," said the widow.
Britain's National Audit Office said last week that insufficient numbers of special flak jackets were distributed to frontline troops, adding that there had been difficulties with distribution.
-------- business
25 US investment projects launched after Polish plane buy: Lockheed Martin
WARSAW (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122152053.trt5ebov.html
US aircraft manufacturer Lockheed Martin said Thursday it had launched 25 investment programmes under a deal to offset to the cost to Poland of buying 48 of its F-16 fighter jets for 3.5 billion dollars.
"25 projects have been launched," Philip Georgariou, the US official responsible for the so-called "offset" programme in Poland, told a news conference, referring to a list of 44 investment projects planned.
The announcement came days before President Aleksander Kwasniewski travels to Washington to meet US President George W. Bush, amid Polish grumblings that the billions of dollars of promised US investments have been slow to materialise.
At the signature of the sales contract for the F-16 planes last April, the United States had said that the investments could come to 12 billion dollars.
Officials declined at the same news conference to give a value of the investments launched to date.
The planes are needed to bring Poland's military up to the standards of NATO, which it joined in 1999.
Lockheed Martin snared the contract in December 2002, beating bids from British-Swedish consortium BAE Systems-SAAB with its Jas-39 Gripen and France's Dassault Aviation with its Mirage 2000-5.
The deal drew criticism from European Union countries, who thought a member-in-waiting should have given its business to an EU company.
Among the projects listed was the launching of production in Poland of the medium cylinder Opel Astra T-3000 car at Gliwice, the transfer of technologies to the Polish oil group Lotos of Gdansk in northern Poland and the setting up of a series of hi-tech laboratories to build aircraft engines in Warsaw.
-------- iran
Iranian Officials Resign to Protest Election Dispute
January 22, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/middleeast/22TEHR.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Jan. 21 - A senior government official said Wednesday that several ministers and vice presidents had submitted letters of resignation protesting the disqualification by the antireformist Guardian Council of nearly half of the candidates in next month's parliamentary elections. But the resignations have yet to be accepted, he said.
"A number of ministers and vice presidents have resigned, but they are waiting for the outcome" of the disqualification controversy, Muhammad Ali Abtahi, vice president for parliamentary affairs, told reporters after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
Iranian state news media reported Wednesday that the Guardian Council, which had disqualified nearly 3,600 candidates for the Feb. 20 elections, reinstated 100 candidates. This is in addition to the 200 that were reinstated on Tuesday.
The confrontation that began after the Guardian Council rejected the candidates, most of whom are reformists, is turning into a challenge for the reformers and their leader, President Mohammad Khatami, and their hard-line opponents. There were 83 current reformist members of the Parliament among them.
In reaction to the disqualifications, more than 60 reformist Parliament members began a sit-in that is now in its 11th day.
The country's supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, intervened last week, ordering the reinstatement of all sitting members of Parliament and a re-evaluation of the nonincumbents. The council is expected to announce its final decision by Feb. 10, and it has given no indication yet as to how many independent and reformist candidates will be allowed to run.
Reformers argue that by withholding its decision until 10 days before the election, the council is hoping to damage reformers' chances to campaign effectively. Accordingly, a coalition of 18 pro-reform parties said that it planned to announce on Thursday whether it would take part in the elections.
-------- iraq
2 G.I.'s Killed as Security Is Seen as Obstacle to Iraq Vote
January 22, 2004
By EDWARD WONG and JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/middleeast/22CND-IRAQ.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Jan. 22 - For months, the Bush administration has resisted Iraqi calls for direct elections by June 30, citing the need for a census to compile voter rolls and other measures to ensure fair voting but too cumbersome to complete in time.
But some experts say that many of these conditions could be met. Another obstacle, perhaps greater and largely unacknowledged, according to the military, the United Nations and outside election experts, is the continuing violence in Iraq. To argue that security is a serious impediment, however, would be to admit that American forces are unable to quell the running war with the insurgents.
The American military said today that two American soldiers were killed on Wednesday night and one was wounded in a mortar and rocket attack near Baquba, about 30 miles northeast of Baghdad. Attackers gunned down three Iraqi women and a driver working for the American-led forces in a central city, the police said today, The Associated Press reported.
Some American generals now say privately that the continuing attacks, especially those against Iraqi civilians, present a daunting obstacle to holding the direct elections demanded by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the country's most powerful cleric among the majority Shiites.
Even those outside experts who say that there are practical ways to hold a quick vote say that turnout could be suppressed by violence, and that protecting the polls with soldiers or policemen, too, may keep people away.
"I guess you could devise mechanisms to make it possible, security permitting," said Joost R. Hiltermann, a Middle East expert at the International Crisis Group, a conflict-prevention organization, who visited Iraq this week to research the prospects for elections here. "But security permitting' is a big if. The risk is that if you go ahead, the results could be seriously skewed, even dangerously skewed."
If bombings or other attacks like those that occurred this week in Baghdad, Karbala and Mosul take place in one section of the country or another during balloting, the resulting disparities in security might badly reduce turnout in certain areas and render the election unfair, election experts say. Iraq's ethnic divisions, mirrored imperfectly in its politics, tend to follow rough geographic lines that define the largely Kurdish north, the central Sunni Arab heartland and the overwhelmingly Shiite Arab south.
It would be especially dangerous if security is weak in Sunni Arab areas and consequently depressed turnout among that group, which makes up a fifth of the country's 25 million people. Sunnis formed the core of Saddam Hussein's government, and it is in the so-called Sunni Triangle that violence against the American military is fiercest. Many Sunnis already feel disenfranchised, and their anger will only grow if security problems keep them from voting and skew the election results, Mr. Hiltermann said.
Under the current plan, a transitional assembly several hundred Iraqis from every region and social sector will be chosen in caucus-style elections from the country's 18 provinces. That assembly is to choose an interim government in June, and that indirectly elected interim government is to draft a constitution.
But shortly after the November agreement, Ayatollah Sistani came out against the caucus plan and for direct balloting. A direct ballot would give the Shiites, who account for 60 percent of the population, a clear advantage, while the caucus plan is more likely to give moderate politicians a leg up.
On Monday, 100,000 supporters of Ayatollah Sistani marched through Baghdad protesting the coalition's plans. Because the issue of violence would lend weight to the arguments of those who oppose a direct election, the ayatollah's supporters generally avoid the issue of security.
"Grand Ayatollah Sistani insisted on direct elections, and it's a sort of obligation," said Muhammad Alaaowi al-Shameri, a representative of Ayatollah Sistani at the Khadimiya mosque in Baghdad, in an interview this week. "It must be done. The picture of real democracy will not be achieved unless we have direct elections."
The military, though, which has sustained hundreds of casualties in the past few months, sees democracy following security, not the other way around.
"Regarding elections, the concerns one in the military would have are security, and how the votes are represented and counted, given right now there's no polling data," a United States Army general based in central Iraq said in an interview on Wednesday.
Iraqi army and police forces would have to guard the polls, because a highly visible presence of American soldiers at voting booths could be seen as intimidation, the general said. But there are not even enough policemen right now to fight crime and battle insurgents, he said.
Other experts agree that the practical and technical obstacles to cobbling together a direct election swiftly could be overcome if the American-led occupation truly wanted to hold an early vote. Optimistic internal reports have also been written by Iraqi officials and by experienced hands at the United Nations.
Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Shiite member of the American-picked Iraqi Governing Council, said on Wednesday that he supported elections and even suggested that militias already organized by some Iraqi parties might play a role in helping to provide security. But that, too, could raise questions of intimidation, as the handful of parties with well-developed militias, like the two big Kurdish ones, would undoubtedly field candidates during an election.
The call for elections was repeated in Washington by another member of the Governing Council, Adnan Pachachi, this month's chairman, who asked again for the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, to send a team of experts of Iraq to determine whether direct elections can be held before June 30.
"In principle, we are all in favor of elections," Mr. Pachachi said in a luncheon speech. "The problem is that of time. Can we have proper elections in the next three months?"
An electoral assessment team from the United Nations visited Iraq for two weeks over the summer and concluded that it was possible to set up mechanisms for direct elections within six months, according to an official who worked out of the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad.
Their findings were summed up in an internal report written by Carina Perelli, the head of the electoral assistance division of the United Nations, who had met with Iraqi officials and leaders of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The report, the existence of which was first mentioned in Time magazine this week, was never circulated and is now considered outdated by United Nations officials in New York precisely because the security situation has deteriorated so much that the findings are obsolete. A bombing in August drove the United Nations out of Iraq, along with many other international organizations.
Mr. Annan is sending a four-member team of military and security experts to Iraq this week to assess potential dangers here before deciding whether to send in an electoral assessment team that would look again at the feasibility of direct elections.
In addition to the formidable security issue, American and Iraqi officials are debating whether ration cards issued to households under the United Nations oil-for-food program can be used to build voter rolls in the absence of a census. The proponents of this plan say the computerized list of households and their members is fairly comprehensive. But its detractors, including coalition officials, say the oil-for-food rolls are likely to be inaccurate, especially given how Mr. Hussein sometimes manipulated them for his own political purposes.
Supporters of direct elections say there are other ways to avoid a time-consuming census. Voter cards, for example, could be issued to individuals when they show up to vote. Some have suggested setting up regional civil affairs offices to locate voters and record their addresses, letting them register on the basis of whatever form of identification card they may already possess or issuing a standard identity card to all who register to vote.
Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article.
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon Says He Will Not Resign Over Inquiry
January 22, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
JERUSALEM, Jan. 22 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said today that he had no intention of resigning, a day after the indictment of a prominent real estate developer increased political pressure on him.
"I am not about to resign," Mr. Sharon told Israel's largest daily newspaper, Yediot Ahronot. "I stress, I am not about to resign. If the question is whether recent developments are liable to bring about my resignation, the answer is no."
On Wednesday an Israeli court accused the developer, David Appel, of trying to bribe Mr. Sharon, beginning in the late 1990's when he was foreign minister. The indictment raises potentially serious legal and political issues for Mr. Sharon and prompted political opponents to call for his resignation.
Mr. Sharon has not been charged with any wrongdoing. A Justice Ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a decision on whether to indict him and his son, who is also under investigation, was expected sometime in the next few weeks or months.
The indictment accuses Mr. Appel of paying roughly $700,000 to Mr. Sharon's son Gilad, with the aim of getting Mr. Sharon's support for real estate projects.
Mr. Appel "gave Ariel Sharon a bribe in recognition of activities connected to the fulfillment of his public position," the indictment says. He paid "exorbitant funds to the son of Ariel Sharon for the goal of getting action from Ariel Sharon," it says.
Mr. Appel's lawyer, Moshe Israel, said his client was innocent.
"There was no bribery, there was no giver and there was no taker," Mr. Israel was quoted as saying in the Israeli media on Wednesday.
In a country where prime ministers fall with regularity, Mr. Sharon has shown strong staying power during his nearly three years in office. His current four-party coalition government has remained stable since its formation a year ago after a landslide election victory by his rightist Likud Party.
But the scrutiny of the unfolding case could put extreme political pressure on Mr. Sharon, even if he is not charged.
The indictment in the Tel Aviv Magistrates Court says Mr. Appel agreed in 1998 to hire Mr. Sharon's son Gilad to promote the planned development of a Greek island resort, and proposed payments totaling $3 million. Gilad Sharon was hired even though he "did not have the relevant professional skills," the indictment says.
After the agreement was reached, Mr. Appel made monthly payments to an account of the Sharon family ranch, which is in Gilad Sharon's name, the indictment said. The prime minister has lived for years at the sheep and cattle ranch in the Negev region of Israel and stays there when he is not in Jerusalem.
The indictment lists 15 separate payments, some in dollars and some in shekels, totaling about $700,000.
The first payment listed was in November 1999. Mr. Sharon was no longer foreign minister then, but was the leader of the opposition in Parliament. He became prime minister in March 2001, and the payments continued until June 2001, according to the indictment. The indictment also alleges that Mr. Appel tried to bribe Ehud Olmert, who was then mayor of Jerusalem, and is now the deputy prime minister.
Mr. Olmert has not been charged, and a decision on whether to indict him is expected around the same time as with Mr. Sharon and his son, said the Justice Ministry official.
Mr. Appel's Greek island project never won approval from the Greek authorities. But he also sought political help with a real estate deal in Israel, the indictment said.
The case has been simmering for months, and the Israeli police questioned Mr. Sharon for seven hours on Oct. 30 at his official residence.
But the indictment, with its new details about alleged payments, could potentially lead to pressure from within his coalition to step down, or to a no-confidence vote in Parliament, analysts said.
"He should already have resigned in the light of earlier events," said Avraham Shochat, a member of the opposition Labor Party. "What happened today is just an extra. He is polluting the atmosphere."
Mark Heller, an analyst at the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, said Mr. Sharon and his coalition had seemed capable of weathering Israeli political turbulence and the ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. But the scandal could make him vulnerable.
Mr. Sharon has given no indication that he would consider resigning. But if he did step down, his rightist coalition, which holds 68 of the 120 seats in Parliament, could remain in place.
Mr. Heller said that in that case, a new prime minister would almost certainly come from the ranks of Likud. Benjamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister and the current finance minister, would be a leading candidate, he said.
If Mr. Sharon remains in office and the scandal worsens, some of his coalition partners could threaten to leave, depriving the government of its majority and possibly forcing its collapse. The second-largest faction in the government coalition, the centrist party Shinui, has 15 seats and made its reputation by demanding clean government, Mr. Heller noted.
"It could be a question of how long Shinui can hold its nose before it begins to lose credibility," he said.
Hillel Sommer, a constitutional law scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, said the case could take years to play out in court. Even if the prime minister is indicted, he will not be required to step down while legal proceedings are under way, Mr. Sommer said.
A prime minister can only be forced from office on legal grounds after a conviction, he said.
Mr. Sharon and his sons, Gilad and Omri, are the subjects of a separate campaign finance investigation.
In that case, Mr. Sharon was ordered to return campaign contributions of nearly $1 million that were improperly raised from overseas donors in 1999, when he was chosen as the leader of Likud.
Mr. Sharon and his sons sought a loan to repay the money, using the ranch, which they possess on a long-term lease, as collateral. But the application was rejected, and a South African businessman, Cyril Kern, transferred $1.5 million to Mr. Sharon's sons. Mr. Kern has described the money as a personal gift, not a political donation. Mr. Sharon has denied knowledge of the money.
Corruption investigations are an almost permanent feature of political life in Israel.
Mr. Sharon's two predecessors, Ehud Barak and Mr. Netanyahu, both faced long-running investigations that were ultimately dropped without charges being filed.
--------
Land Developer Bribed Sharon, Indictment Alleges
Court Charges Israeli Businessman
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A36732-2004Jan21?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Jan. 21 -- A long-running corruption scandal moved closer to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his ruling Likud Party on Wednesday when a Tel Aviv court charged a businessman and political activist with bribing Sharon, his son and Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in exchange for help in real estate deals in the 1990s.
Sharon, 75, was not charged in the case against real estate developer David Appel, but a prosecutor held out the possibility that the prime minister could be indicted soon, according to Israeli news reports. Channel 2 television quoted prosecutor Edna Arbel as saying Sharon "could and should" be indicted in the next two weeks.
An Israeli Supreme Court ruling could compel the prime minister to leave office if indicted, but opposition Labor Party members in parliament began calling for Sharon to step down immediately.
Sharon had no immediate comment on the indictment. A statement issued by an unidentified official in his office said, "The prime minister is continuing to perform his duties with no change whatsoever."
[Early Thursday, however, Sharon was quoted by the Yedioth Aharonoth newspaper as saying he would not resign, the Reuters news agency reported. "I am not about to resign. I stress -- I am not about to resign," he said. "If the question is whether recent developments are liable to bring about my resignation, the answer is no."]
Appel, through his attorney, Moshe Israel, denied the allegations. "There was no bribery. There was no giver and no taker," Israel said. "There is no doubt he is innocent."
Political analysts said that although Sharon appeared in no immediate political danger, with no obvious challengers ready to take him on, the affair could threaten him in several ways: if he were indicted, if his son, Gilad, were indicted, or if Appel were convicted and testimony at trial showed that Sharon had received bribes.
Another possibility, analysts said, is that nervous Likud members will decide Sharon has been too severely weakened to survive and begin shifting allegiance to other party leaders.
"It's not the end -- at least, it's not the end yet," said Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Hebrew University. "I think he's probably in very, very big trouble. The circumstantial evidence doesn't look good."
For years, Sharon has been at the center of several overlapping scandals involving campaign finances and questionable loans linked to Gilad and his other son, Omri. Over the past few months, the investigation has become a kind of Israeli Watergate, including recorded conversations, reports of police wiretaps and videotapes of Omri Sharon openly discussing ways to funnel money to his father's campaign.
At the center of one scandal is Appel, who has been described in the news media as a deal-making real estate developer and a Likud Party kingmaker who tried to use his political connections to advance his business interests.
According to Israeli news accounts of the indictment, Appel is accused of hiring Gilad Sharon in 1999 as a marketing adviser for a real estate project on a Greek island and paying him an inflated salary to secure the help of his father, then the foreign minister. Among other things, the indictment says Ariel Sharon held an event in honor of the Greek deputy foreign minister to try to secure his backing for the project.
The indictment alleges that Sharon, before and during his time as prime minister, tried to help Appel get land near the Tel Aviv airport rezoned in a way that would have netted huge benefits. Appel is accused of helping finance Sharon's political ambitions in exchange.
The indictment says Appel "gave Ariel Sharon a bribe in recognition of activities connected to fulfillment of his public positions." It alleges Appel paid about $100,000 to Gilad Sharon and transferred about $580,000 to the Sharon family ranch in the Negev desert.
The indictment also accuses Appel of making payments to Olmert for help with the Greek project in the 1990s, when Olmert was mayor of Jerusalem. Both of Appel's projects were unsuccessful and were eventually abandoned.
If indictments were handed up against Sharon and Olmert -- the top two Likud officials in the government -- and they were compelled to resign, the party could face a leadership vacuum. The third-ranking Likud member in the government, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, is not a member of parliament and thus is ineligible to become prime minister.
If Sharon and Olmert resigned, the Israeli president would have seven days to pick a member of parliament to form a government. Israel Radio reported Wednesday night that Likud lawmaker Gideon Saar had readied a bill to extend that period to three weeks -- enough time to allow Likud to organize an internal election for a new leader.
Political analysts, including Diskin, predicted that Sharon, a former general known for toughness, would not step down unless indicted. "He's not a person who retreats from a battle that easily," Diskin said.
Another Hebrew University political scientist, Yaron Ezrahi, said: "I think Sharon has been weakened today. If this process goes on, I think he may be forced to resign -- even before indictment."
He said Sharon's departure from power "depends on the extent to which his political supporters, his rank and file, and the political operatives in the Likud start to abandon his sinking ship. . . . That process may start soon, because there's a reward for switching early."
A Likud vote could set off a bitter power struggle between Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom and Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a former prime minister.
Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader, called on Sharon to go public with his version of events to clear the air. Peres also asked his parliamentary whip to begin drafting a no-confidence motion.
Another senior Labor lawmaker, Ophir Pines-Paz, was more critical. "This is very sad, very grave, but this is the reality of Israel in 2004," he said. He added, with a reference to the hit American cable TV series about a gangster family, "There's 'The Sopranos' on television and there's the Sopranos in Israel."
-------- latin america
Spy chief sold guns to rebels, court told
By Juan Forero Bogota, Colombia
January 22, 2004
The Age - New York Times, Reuters
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/21/1074360830426.html
The former chief of Peru's intelligence service gave Colombian rebels 10,000 rifles, prosecutors have claimed.
The arms were said to have been bought from Jordan in a complex transaction involving Brazilian drug lords and a Ukrainian flight crew.
The spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, who appeared in a Lima court on Tuesday, is accused of having orchestrated a plan in which the rifles were air-dropped in 1999 to rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). At the time, Mr Montesinos was a close ally of the US and the Clinton administration.
Mr Montesinos, 58, has been in custody since 2001 and is facing dozens of trials on charges ranging from drug trafficking to authorising assassinations.
He had been a paid CIA informant since the 1970s, providing intelligence in the fight against drugs and terrorism in the Andes, according to Peruvian authorities.
At the same time, Mr Montesinos was involved in drug trafficking, prosecutors alleged.
"These facts destroy Vladimiro Montesinos's reputation as a fighter of terrorism," said Ronald Gamarra, the special prosecutor in the case. "He did not fight terrorism. He instead gave arms and support to Colombian guerillas."
Through his spy apparatus and close ties to Alberto Fujimori, the former president, he also controlled congressmen, newspaper editors and government agencies.
Mr Montesinos sparked a huge corruption scandal, which brought down Mr Fujimori in 2000, and has been convicted already on four lesser corruption charges. He has remained silent in court appearances so far.
Prosecutors say that with the help of Sarkis Soghanalian, an international arms dealer dubbed the "Merchant of Death", Mr Montesinos bought AK-47s that were sold to the Colombians in 1999. The guns were dropped from a Ukrainian-registered cargo plane. The rebels paid with money from an $US8 million ($A12 million) cocaine deal.
Mr Gamarra said there was no proof that the CIA had known the arms would go to the rebels. He said the tribunal would seek testimony from the CIA director at the time, George Tenet.
US intelligence officials have said officials in Amman told the CIA that Jordan was planning to sell rifles to the Peruvian military. The agency signed off on the deal, only to learn later that the rifles went to Colombia.
After the CIA learned of the arms smuggling, Mr Fujimori and Mr Montesinos tried to shield themselves by announcing that they had uncovered the deal, blaming Lieutenant Jose Luis Aybar and his brother, fellow officer Luis Frank Aybar.
Officials in Colombia and Jordan challenged the Peruvian Government, and the truth came out.
Investigators later learned that Mr Soghanalian, a Lebanese citizen who lives in the US, had arranged the deal after being contacted by the Aybars through a Miami intermediary. Mr Soghanalian, who maintains that he did not know the weapons were for Colombian rebels, is being tried in absentia.
-------- mideast
Next stop Syria?
Washington's post-9/11 war on terror is finished. But another has only just begun
Timothy Garton Ash timothy.garton.ash@guardian.co.uk
Thursday January 22, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1128499,00.html
So that's it: Washington is no longer at war. But didn't President Bush just tell us the exact opposite in his state of the union address? He did. He said most emphatically that the war goes on - and showed that it's over. The war on terror, September 11 2001 to January 20 2004. RIP.
I don't mean by this that fighting international terrorism, rogue states and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction won't remain near the top of the United States' foreign policy agenda for some time to come. They probably will. I don't mean that Bush won't try to fight the election as the commander-in-chief of a nation at war. He probably will. I mean that the real psychological sense of being at war has faded even in Washington, where it was strongest, and, unless there is another major terrorist attack on the American homeland, will further fade. "The killing has continued," Bush said, "in Bali, Jakarta, Casablanca, Riyadh, Mombasa, Jerusalem, Istanbul and Baghdad." Well, better not go on holiday there.
Accordingly, foreign policy is slipping back down the American agenda to its usual second, third or fourth place. America's real war this year will be the election war, and that will be won or lost on the economy, education, healthcare and family values. Iraq, with American soldiers being killed almost every day, is not such an election- winning triumph. Flimsy evidence of "weapons of mass destruction-related programme activities" (an early entrant for weasel words of the year) will hardly make voters' flesh crawl. Democrats and Republicans will agree on the need to hang tough in the fight against international terrorism. If the Democrats field the Vietnam veteran John Kerry, or General Wesley Clark, they can look almost as credible on matters of national security.
One giveaway is the order of the speech. Last year's state of the union address, which was a preparation for war on Iraq, started with several pages on the economy, education and health, then turned to the real business of war. This one starts with a resounding statement that "hundreds of thousands of American servicemen and women are deployed across the world in the war on terror", and goes on for three pages about national security, but then turns to health, education and the economy. The most important part comes last.
It was always difficult to imagine how the war on terror would end. There could hardly be a moment when the president would don pilot's gear, descend on to an aircraft carrier and declare that major combat operations were over, as he did after the toppling of Saddam. You can't do that with a worldwide, open-ended war on an abstract noun. You can't capture an abstract noun. You can't shoot fear. But now we know how the war on terror ends: with the president loudly proclaiming that it continues. The war in Iraq continued when it was declared over; the war on terror ends when it's proclaimed to be continuing.
Obviously I'm using war on terror in a rather special sense, to mean the central, organising principle of a White House agenda. But then, that's the only clear, concrete meaning the phrase has ever had. It's never been anything like the second world war against Hitler's Germany, or the cold war against the Soviet Union. Where does terror live? What is its capital? Who commands its army? The 2001 terrorist attacks have changed for ever the way governments think about many problems in the world. They have heightened our sense of insecurity, our security measures, and, more patchily, our commitment to addressing the underlying causes of that insecurity. (Causes such as the lack of an equitable peace settlement between Israel and Palestine - notably absent from this election-year presidential address.) But will the first decade of world history in the 21st century be remembered as that of the war on terror? I suspect not. Rather, I think there'll be a chapter in the history of the United States entitled war on terror, and the dates future historians add in brackets may well be 2001-04.
This is a risky prognosis, to be sure; another major terrorist attack on the American homeland, and it could look very silly. But we always have to operate on informed guesswork. Now if this guess is right, one interesting question is: where would it leave the rest of us, especially us in Europe? The awkward answer might be: holding the bawling baby. I have never thought that the greatest danger from American policy under George Bush was that it would go storming around the world, deposing dictator after dictator, occupying country after country, in pursuit of a neo-conservative programme of revolution from above. The greater danger was always that the United States would start intervening, and then retreat into its own vast carelessness, preoccupied with domestic issues, leaving the job abroad half-done.
For some two years after the 9/11 attacks, America quite understandably went ape. This frightened the hell out of terrorists and dictators, but also out of many of America's allies and friends. The neo-cons enjoyed a brief, heady moment of agenda-setting supremacy. But that's over. Next stop Syria is not a message heard much these days. In Iraq, the US is looking for what Bush called "a transition to full Iraqi sovereignty" by the end of June.
Where does that leave the wider Middle East? Still in a mess. Who's most directly affected by this mess? Europe. Not that America will simply turn away; things are never that clear-cut. In the middle of the state of the union address there was a short passage reinforcing the message that Bush delivered at the Banqueting House in London last November. The US, he repeated, would pursue a "forward strategy of freedom" in the Middle East. However, he added one specific proposal: to double the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy and refocus it on developing "free elections, free markets, free press and free labour unions in the Middle East". This is dynamite.
I've seen the impact of the National Endowment for Democracy, together with our own Westminster Foundation for Democracy and other semi- and wholly non-governmental organisations in eastern Europe and the Balkans. Without their work, Slobodan Milosevic might not have been toppled by a revolution in Serbia. Add the clear message that corrupt, oil-bloated Arab elites no longer enjoy Washington's unconditional support, and we could see some fireworks. Not laser-guided American military fireworks from the sky, but emancipatory Arab fireworks from the ground. The fact that this support for would-be democrats is tainted by its association with the United States, the neo-imperialist occupier of Arab lands, will, I suspect, dampen but not extinguish the fuse.
We in Europe need urgently to work out for ourselves how we stand to this unpredictable, but in principle hugely welcome, process. America may light the fuse, but we will feel the heat - not least, through our own Muslim populations. At the end of the day, we also have most to gain. Washington's war on terror, as it began on September 11 2001, may be over. The campaign for freedom in the Middle East has only just begun.
----
Powell Says No Hard Evidence Iraqi WMD Hidden in Syria
Syria-USA, Politics,
1/22/2004
Arabic News
http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/040122/2004012228.html
US Secretary of State Colin Powell says there is "no hard evidence" to suggest that Iraqi stocks of weapons of mass destruction were hidden in neighboring Syria before the U.S. and coalition forces attacked last year.
While being interviewed by a reporter for WPHT radio in Philadelphia January 21, Powell was asked about critics of the administration who contend that the inability to find WMD in Iraq means the United States should not have attacked that country. In his response, Powell said Saddam Hussein's regime had used WMD in the past and appeared ready to develop WMD in the future.
"Why we haven't found stocks, we can't answer that," Powell said. "We're still looking. Is it because they were destroyed, as they knew we were coming or something else happened to them? I don't know."
With regard to the suggestion that Iraq's WMD may have "ended up in Syria," Powell said, "that is always a possibility, but I have seen no hard evidence to suggest that is the case, that suddenly there were no weapons found in Iraq because they were all in Syria. I don't know why the Syrians would do that, frankly: why it would be in their interest. They didn't have that kind of relationship with Iraq."
-------- nato
US wants NATO programme extended to Mideast: press
HAMBURG, Germany (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122135019.dz9jgszc.html
The United States wants NATO to extend its Partnership for Peace Programme to include its Middle East allies to help bring stability to the region, the Financial Times Deutschland reported Thursday.
The business daily, citing NATO diplomatic sources, said Washington and Turkey would invite representatives from six countries, including Israel, Egypt and possibly north African countries, to the NATO summit in Istanbul in June.
It said others being considered were Morocco, Tunisia and Qatar.
"The Americans have come to the conclusion that stability in Iraq can be achieved by a stronger cooperation with the neighbouring countries," it quoted a Brussels-based diplomat as saying.
But it said that EU diplomats briefed on the proposal, dubbed the "Greater Middle East" initiative, were not enthusiastic about it because it could stretch the alliance's resources.
The Partnership for Peace Programme currently includes 27 countries and is chiefly aimed at cooperation in defence matters. NATO says it is designed to reinforce stability and reduce the risk of conflict.
----
France eases rift with United States
January 22, 2004
By Andrew Borowiec
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040121-090514-2893r.htm
PARIS - France is ready to open a new chapter in its strained relations with the United States but without changing any of its foreign policy objectives, government officials say.
A series of official comments and news analyses point to a strong desire to end the sniping that has marred the trans-Atlantic relationship for most of last year.
But President Jacques Chirac and his conservative prime minister, Jean Pierre Raffarin, remain opposed to the U.S. policy in Iraq. This stand has caused the sharpest tension between the two countries since the 1960s, when President Charles de Gaulle removed France from the military structure of NATO and ejected NATO from its headquarters in France.
At the start of this year, Mr. Chirac signaled that France was ready to play a more active role in NATO, regardless of the European Union's plans to form a separate military intervention corps.
The French president, to the surprise of many diplomats, described NATO as the "foundation of our collective defense" and said that "there cannot be any opposition between NATO and the European Union."
The mood of improved relations between France and the United States was highlighted last week by French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie's visit to Washington and New York. She spoke of "a desire for normal relations" and described U.S. officials as showing "a more open and understanding attitude" toward France.
Addressing the National Assembly in Paris yesterday, Mrs. Alliot-Marie said she perceived a "desire ... to turn the page" during her U.S. meetings.
"The American administration cannot stay too long in the eyes of its own public opinion on such bad terms with one of its oldest allies," Agence France-Presse quoted her as saying.
French officials stressed that the foreign policy disagreements between Paris and Washington are likely to be attenuated by three major meetings this year: the Washington summit of the Group of Eight leading economic powers, the NATO summit in Istanbul and the ceremonies in June marking the 60th anniversary of the Allies landing in Normandy.
The French hope President Bush will accept an invitation to attend the Normandy ceremonies.
Having spearheaded opposition to the U.S.-led war against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, the French continue their criticism of the war's aftermath with confusing statements about France's eventual military involvement.
"The growing appreciation of the difficulties [the Americans] are facing in Iraq corresponds with some of the warnings we gave last year, which makes our past position more understandable," Mrs. Alliot-Marie said yesterday.
The liberal daily Le Monde wrote last week that France intended to send troops to Iraq, but only under a U.N. mandate and after sovereignty is restored in Iraq.
Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin countered the report, saying that "as things stand now, there is no situation where I can imagine that France would send troops to Iraq."
He added, "We will clarify our position once a government has been formed in Iraq."
The U.S.-led coalition plans to transfer power to Iraqis by July 1.
-------- prisoners of war
US lawyer blasts 9/11 tribunals as Pentagon rebuffs church leaders
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122060107.kowkxh63.html
A US military lawyer representing an Australian national held at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, said the military tribunals created to try September 11 suspects were unfair and unable to serve justice.
The comments by Marine Corps Major Michael Mori, who represents Australian "enemy combatant" David Hicks, came as the US National Council of Churches said the Pentagon had rebuffed its request to visit the Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The council last month had sought permission to send a delegation to the prisoner camp home to some 660 foreign terror suspects out of "humanitarian concern for the detainees physical and mental well being," said the group's general secretary, Bob Edgar.
But Defense Department official Jeffrey Starr said access to detainees "is only provided to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and on a case-by-case basis to government officials for legitimate government purposes," according to excerpts from his letter made public by the council.
The US government insists that, as "enemy combatants," the Guantanamo Bay detainees can be held and interrogated indefinitely without any legal representation.
US President George W. Bush has declared six such inmates, including Hicks, eligible to be tried by military tribunals, which existed in the United Stated during World War II and were reinstated in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks to try terrorism suspects.
The tribunals will conduct their business behind closed doors a will have a lower threshold for conviction than regular courts, according to legal experts.
Mori, who on Wednesday held a press conference in a Washington suburb along with several other military attorneys, said the military tribunals or commissions were "created and controlled by those with a vested interest only in convictions."
"Using the commission process just creates an unfair system that threatens to convict the innocent and provides the guilty a justifiable complaint as to their convictions," the lawyer said.
He said he believed the system was unfair because only the executive branch of government controlled them and was responsible for filing charges, setting the rules and appointing judge and jury.
He warned that military trials could "lower the standard" used to treat US citizens in foreign countries and might set "a dangerous precedent."
"The reality is, we wouldn't tolerate these rules if they were applied to US citizens," he said.
Mori said the United States should use well-established courts-martial, if there was reliable evidence to convict a detainee.
In a separate interview with Sydney commercial radio, the attorney said he believed that since Hicks had not injured any US citizens, he should be tried in Australia.
Hicks was captured by US troops in late 2001 in Afghanistan where he was fighting alongside Taliban troops.
A working-class lad from South Australia, he has had a lengthy involvement in Islamist causes outside his native land, according to people familiar with his background.
In 1999, he traveled to the Balkans to fight with the Kosovo Liberation Army against Yugoslav troops trying to maintain control over the predominantly Muslim enclave.
After that, he received military training in camps run by radical Muslim groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The United States and Australia agreed last November that Washington would not seek the death penalty for Hicks or monitor his conversations with his attorneys.
If he is convicted, he is likely to be allowed to serve his prison term in Australia under this accord.
-------- space
Spirit Rover Stops Sending Data, NASA Says
January 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Mars-Rover.html?hp
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) -- NASA's Spirit rover stopped transmitting data from the surface of Mars for more than 24 hours, mission members said Thursday.
NASA last heard from Spirit early Wednesday. Since then, it has returned just random, meaningless data -- and only then sporadically, scientists said. Initially, the scientists said they believed weather problems on Earth caused the glitch. They now said they believe the rover was experiencing hardware or software problems.
``This is a serious problem. This is an extremely serious anomaly,'' project manager Pete Theisinger said.
Spirit is one half of a $820 million mission. Its twin, Opportunity, is scheduled to land on Mars on Saturday.
--------
The Next Space Race: China Heads to the Stars
January 22, 2004
By JIM YARDLEY and WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/asia/22SPAC.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BEIJING, Jan. 21 - When President Bush outlined his ambitious vision last week for a new era of space exploration, one country in particular was on his mind as he extended an invitation for international cooperation: China.
In the last year, China succeeded in becoming only the third nation to put an astronaut into orbit, definitively signaling that it intends to break into the front rank of space explorers.
The Chinese plan to send more astronauts into space next year, to launch a Moon probe within three years, and are aiming to land an unmanned vehicle on the Moon by 2010, a half decade before the deadline President Bush set for the next Americans to arrive there.
The United States and China now stand at a critical juncture, between cooperation or competition, in what could be a costly and dangerous new space race that extends even beyond China.
Mr. Bush was deliberately reaching out to the Chinese, a senior administration official in Washington said. "The reference to international cooperation was not a throwaway line," said the official of the speech on Jan. 14. "It was an invitation. The president drew a day-night contrast. This is not the cold war."
But it could be. The Chinese are not alone in this new push to harness the power and prestige of space, which is fast becoming a necessary stop, like mastery of the atom, for aspiring global powers.
Nations like Brazil and India are taking ever wider steps to make sure that they are not left behind in the new space race, intensifying the pace of exploration by the developing world.
Joan Johnson-Freese, an expert the Chinese space program at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, said the Bush administration had no choice but to respond to China's recent successes with a space initiative.
"The success allowed China to reach out to other countries and they've been responding favorably, so we could not do nothing," she said in an interview. "While a space race is not a foregone conclusion, it is a possibility."
She added that the United States now had a window of opportunity for concord that might not last long. "Cooperation is the best position for the U.S. and the future," she said. "An inclusive vision will give the U.S. an opportunity to assume the mantle of leadership on a mission that could inspire the world."
The greatest concern is the militarization of space, using space-based weapons and satellites to extend the reach of nations or potential terrorists, and allowing more extensive and widespread intelligence gathering than ever before.
Such scenarios are central to the mistrust between the United States and China. Many American analysts note that China's manned space program falls under a wing of the People's Liberation Army, and suspect that China's primary ambitions in space are military.
Some analysts contend that China's manned space vehicle is specifically designed for potential military uses. The Chinese, meanwhile, saw the technological prowess displayed by the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq, and are now emphasizing the importance of "information warfare," with the need for a presence in space.
In October, People's Liberation Army Daily said outer space would become a "sphere of warfare" because space-based satellite technologies were critical for a swift, modern military.
"It's clear that the Chinese are worried about the U.S. domination of space, and that the U.S. considers China as a potential competitor," said Adam Segal, a senior China expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. "It's probably a good time to try to talk about these things since we haven't moved very far along in any of these plans."
President Bush never mentioned China by name in his address, but the administration official said that by not limiting his call to Europe and Russia he was implicitly reaching out to Beijing. Asked for comment on playing a possible role in Mr. Bush's Moon-Mars endeavor, China's Foreign Ministry answered in broad terms, noting that China is committed to collaborating with other space-faring nations, including the United States.
But the Foreign Ministry also hinted at past frustrations, noting that the Chinese space program has already sought - without success - a stronger relationship with NASA. Since 2002, the ministry noted, the two sides have been talking about a meeting of the heads of the two space agencies.
"We hope the realization of this meeting will present an opportunity for developing Chinese-American cooperation in the space sphere," the ministry said in a written statement.
Brian Harvey, author of the forthcoming "China's Space Program: From Conception to Manned Space Flight," said the United States had in the past excluded China on space issues, partly as political retribution for the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown. In one case, American officials denied visas for more than 50 Chinese officials to attend an annual meeting of the World International Space Congress held in Houston.
"The Chinese have felt very isolated," Mr. Harvey said.
Publicly, both American and Chinese officials now say the relationship is growing closer, even as frictions continue, particularly over Taiwan. Notably, the Chinese allowed Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to tour China's top-secret space command center in Beijing on the same day as Mr. Bush's speech on space.
The visit was part of a larger trip intended to build closer military ties. General Myers also met with his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Liang Guanglie, and later conferred with Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese president who remains in charge of the Chinese military.
At a news briefing, in a gesture to smooth tensions, General Myers was careful to praise China's successful launch last October. "Obviously, this is a big step for the Chinese space program, and we congratulate them," he said.
China has taken other important steps as well. It recently teamed up with the European Union on a new global satellite navigation system. In a different project, China and the European Space Agency launched a research satellite last month to study the Earth's magnetic fields, China's first such collaboration with developed countries, state news media reported. China has also joined with Brazil on satellite launches.
In all, China plans to launch 10 satellites this year, and a total of 30 by 2005; it currently has 16 in orbit. The satellites have scientific, commercial and military applications.
More bold are China's plans to build on the success of last year's Shenzhou 5 space orbit, and eventually to land on the Moon. Officials say next year's Shenzhou 6 mission is expected to carry two astronauts on a five- to seven-day space journey.
Efforts to reach the Moon are beginning in earnest this year, and some experts in the United States speak ominously of a "Red Moon" - the possibility that China might one day launch military astronauts into space with the aim of setting up a Communist lunar base.
Last March, Luan Enjie, director of the China National Aerospace Administration, described the Moon as "the focal point wherein future aerospace powers contend for strategic resources."
But Mr. Luan and other Chinese officials say China's lunar ambitions are wholly peaceful. Mr. Luan suggested that one of China's primary motivations for reaching the Moon was possible economic exploitation. He told People's Daily, the Communist Party's official newspaper, that China was also interested in developing lunar energy resources, like helium-3, a rare form of the element that scientists say could power advanced reactors on Earth.
In an interview this week, Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist for China's Moon program, said the program was part of China's larger efforts to become a leader in space.
"China has made a lot of achievements in satellite applications and manned space flight, but we haven't done much in deep space exploration," he said. "We need a breakthrough in this field to fill the gap. As a starting step, the Moon program is very necessary."
United States government documents, like the Air Force's Space Operations Doctrine and its Space Command's Strategic Master Plan, talk much about maintaining "space superiority" near Earth and even about using weapons in orbit. But they remain silent about the Moon.
"There is nothing in Air Force planning for the Moon," said Theresa Hitchens, vice president of the Center for Defense Information, a private research group in Washington.
Still, some analysts believe the Moon is part of a larger American military plan and interpreted Mr. Bush's speech as unilateral in emphasis, with echoes of the cold war.
"The Moon is a beachhead," said Alice Slater, director of the Global Resource Action Center for the Environment, a private group in New York. "It's the high ground from which they want to control space" she said of the Bush administration.
Bush administration officials say they are not worried that China's space achievements will undermine American prestige and leadership. Throwing open the door to Beijing on the Moon-Mars initiative, they added, stands to enhance American influence.
But the real potential for cooperation, the senior official said, "we're going to have to determine over time as China's activities unfold."
In the jubilant aftermath of the Shenzhou 5 flight, Chinese officials flirted with the notion of launching their own Mars mission by 2020. But this month, officials said any timetable was premature and that China was not yet far enough along to initiate such a program.
Meanwhile, the official Chinese news media have closely followed the exploits of the American robotic Mars explorer, Spirit, as have Chinese space officials.
"We have been always closely watching Mars exploration activities," Mr. Luan, the top space administrator said on the day Spirit landed. "We hope the U.S. mission will be a complete success in the days to come."
Jim Yardley reported from Beijing for this article and William J. Broad from New York.
-------- spies
Ex-C.I.A. Aides Ask for Leak Inquiry by Congress
January 22, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/politics/22INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - A group of former intelligence officers is pressing Congressional leaders to open an immediate inquiry into the disclosure last summer of the name of an undercover C.I.A. officer, Valerie Plame.
Their request, outlined in a letter on Tuesday to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and others, reflects discontent and unrest within the intelligence services about the affair, along with concern that a four-month-old Justice Department investigation into the matter may never identify who was behind the disclosure. The syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who first identified Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. officer in a column last July, has identified his sources only as Bush administration officials, and the Justice Department inquiry has not yet produced any public findings.
It is unusual for former intelligence officers to petition Congress on a matter like this. The unmasking of Ms. Plame is viewed within spy circles as an unforgivable breach of secrecy that must be exhaustively investigated and prosecuted, current and former intelligence officials say. Anger over the matter is especially acute because of the suspicion, under investigation by the Justice Department, that the disclosure may have been made by someone in the White House to punish Ms. Plames's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for opposing administration policy on Iraq.
Attorney General John Ashcroft disqualified himself last month from any involvement in the inquiry, and Justice Department officials have named Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, as a special prosecutor in the case. Mr. Ashcroft's decision to step aside came after months of criticism from Democrats in the Senate who complained that the attorney general could not impartially lead an investigation that focused in part on his political patrons and friends at the White House.
Justice Department officials have said almost nothing in public about the status of the investigation. But they have said they are focusing on conversations between White House officials and reporters that both sides might try to cast as private.
Critics of the White House, including Representative Rush D. Holt, a New Jersey Democrat who is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, have said they fear that the administration may eventually call a halt to the inquiry by announcing that investigators have found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Mr. Holt and several other Democrats introduced legislation on Wednesday that would authorize an independent inquiry by the House.
The 10 former intelligence officers who signed the letter include respected intelligence analysts and retired case officers, including at least two, John McCavitt and William Wagner, who were C.I.A. station chiefs overseas. The former analysts include Larry C. Johnson, a former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department's intelligence branch, and Ray Close and Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. analysts in the agency's Near East division.
"The disclosure of Ms. Plame's name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering using human sources," the group wrote in the two-page letter.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Johnson, who described himself as a registered Republican who voted for President Bush, said he and other former intelligence officers had been discussing the idea of a letter for months and decided to go forward with it because of a lack of evidence of progress in the Justice Department investigation.
"For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable," Mr. Johnson said.
In addition to Mr. Hastert, the letter was sent to Representatives Tom DeLay, the House Republican leader; Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader; Porter J. Goss, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; and Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the panel. A copy was made available to The New York Times by a Congressional official who received one.
Current and former intelligence officials have felt particularly bruised in recent months as the C.I.A. and other agencies have come under criticism from some in Congress and the public as having underestimated the danger of attacks on the United States like those on Sept. 11, 2001, and having overestimated the dangers posed by Iraq's alleged stockpiles of illicit weapons.
In the letter, the former officers called on Congress to act "for the good of the country" and said it was time to "send an unambiguous message that the intelligence officers tasked with collecting or analyzing intelligence must never be turned into political punching bags."
The request for a Justice Department investigation into the matter was made last summer by the C.I.A.'s general counsel, as part of what intelligence officials have described as an automatic response to the disclosure of classified material. Asked to describe the current sentiment within the community about the affair, an intelligence official said that "people within the agency obviously don't like it when classified information appears in the press, and they especially don't like it when the names of intelligence officers get into the press."
The intelligence official added, however: "There's an investigation under way at the Justice Department, and that's appropriate. If Congress gets involved, there's always the risk of turning this into a political football, and that would make it even worse."
The officials who identified Ms. Plame as a C.I.A. officer to Mr. Novak were apparently trying to cast doubt on the credibility of Mr. Wilson, who emerged as a prominent critic of the administration after being enlisted by the C.I.A. to investigate a claim related to Iraq's reported nuclear weapons program.
In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Holt said it was time to "put the heat on the Justice Department" and compel investigators to share with members of Congress the information they had gathered.
"Congress needs to make a statement that whoever was behind this is going to be held accountable," he said.
The "resolution of inquiry" that Mr. Holt introduced Friday followed a model that the House has previously used to begin investigations of the Iran-contra affair and other matters that were independent of any inquiries conducted by the Senate.
Among Democrats who joined Mr. Holt in introducing the resolution were Representatives Anna G. Eshoo of California and Silvestre Reyes of Texas, who like Mr. Holt are members of the Intelligence Committee, which oversees the C.I.A.
Ms. Harman, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, said in a separate interview that Justice Department investigators "should be given time to complete their work" and that Congress should "not meddle in the investigation." But she said she would consider joining the call for a Congressional inquiry if the leaker was not identified by next month.
-------- un
U.S., Britain Detail Iraq Plan at U.N.
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36805-2004Jan21.html
The United States and Britain have begun detailed discussions at the United Nations about the disputed U.S. plan to hand over power in Iraq, with Secretary General Kofi Annan expected to make an announcement as early as Monday that he will send a U.N. team to Iraq to help defuse the building political crisis, according to U.S., U.N. and Iraqi officials.
Two days of U.N. talks have focused on the proposed caucuses to elect a new provisional government and possible options to widen participation to make the U.S. plan acceptable to Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and tens of thousands of his followers who have taken to the streets over the past week to demand elections, U.S. and U.N. envoys say.
In Washington and Baghdad, senior Iraqi officials predicted yesterday that Sistani would back down if the United Nations concluded that elections would not be feasible before the U.S.-led coalition returns sovereignty June 30.
"Sistani is a reasonable man," Iraqi Governing Council President Adnan Pachachi told Washington Post editors and reporters yesterday. "He will accept whatever conclusion" the United Nations makes.
In Baghdad, Ibrahim Jafari, Shiite Muslim leader of the Dawa Party, also predicted that Sistani would not insist on elections in defiance of the world organization.
"If there is a U.N. delegation that has a background in electoral and census matters and has an open dialogue . . . one side may be convinced by what the other says," Jafari said. "If it comes to an agreement, I believe Sayyid Sistani will accept that."
The United States and Britain are lobbying the United Nations to name Lakhdar Brahimi, a veteran U.N. diplomat and former Algerian foreign minister, to become the special representative for Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. This month, Brahimi was appointed special U.N. adviser on conflict prevention and conflict resolution, after a second two-year term as special U.N. representative in Afghanistan.
Brahimi also has the credentials the United States seeks as it rebuilds a partnership with the world body after a year of rancorous relations, U.S. officials said. Brahimi served as U.N. representative in South Africa and Haiti as they went through traumatic political transitions after internal political tensions.
The Iraqi Governing Council wants a special U.N. representative appointed during the current transition to help with the potentially more difficult phases once the occupation ends and Iraqis begin a second 18-month transition. The second period will include the writing of a constitution and the holding of nationwide democratic elections for a permanent government.
But it is unclear whether Brahimi, 70, is prepared to take up another lengthy posting in another hot spot, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
Meanwhile, Pachachi said the new Transitional Administrative Law, which will outline the transition rules and serve as a precursor to a constitution, is almost finished. The next major benchmark in the transition is to be completed by Feb. 28.
On the disputed issue of whether the Governing Council will be phased out or survive after June 30, Pachachi said the 25-member body is about evenly divided, even though the U.S. plan calls for it to be eliminated. As the new national assembly will have 250 or so members representing all sectors of Iraqi society, Pachachi said he sees no reason for the council to continue.
--------
Annan Sets Conditions for Sending U.N. Team to Iraq
Associated Press
Thursday, January 22, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36734-2004Jan21.html
BADEN-BADEN, Germany, Jan. 21 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said Wednesday that if a U.N. team is sent to Iraq to study whether the country can quickly hold elections for a new legislature, he would insist on its "independence and neutrality."
After receiving an award in this southern resort town, Annan said his ability to support a U.S. and Iraqi request for the team "involves a complex set of considerations," some of which he outlined in a television interview.
"In the discussions that I had with the Americans and with the [Iraqi] Governing Council on Monday, I made it clear that if the U.N. gets involved, we must insist on our independence and neutrality and that both sides accept our judgment," he told ARD television.
Annan indicated Monday that he was leaning toward sending U.N. experts to Iraq to help resolve a dispute between the United States and a top Shiite cleric over the best way to transfer power to the Iraqis. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani has demanded direct elections to choose a provisional assembly, while the U.S.-led occupation wants regional caucuses to choose the assembly.
After receiving the German Media Prize, awarded annually by a group of German editors to an international personality, Annan reiterated concerns that his staff's safety must be guaranteed in Iraq. "We remain committed to doing whatever we can to help the people of Iraq, within the very real constraints imposed by the security situation, which is still difficult," he said.
The secretary general ordered all foreign U.N. employees to leave Iraq in October following two bombings at U.N. headquarters, including one in August that killed U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 other people.
The Reuters news agency reported from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia:
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait told the United States they were ready to discuss a major reduction in Iraq's debt, but both wanted to see a sovereign Iraqi government in place before any deal could be reached.
Neither country would say how much debt would be forgiven and neither wanted to make an agreement with the existing U.S. authority.
-------- us
Federal Auditor Blasts Pentagon's Munitions Cleanup Plan
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
January 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-22-09.asp#anchor4
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) has made limited progress in its program to identify, assess, and clean up sites contaminated with military munitions, according to a report from the investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, the General Accounting Office.
More than 15 million acres in the United States are suspected or known to be contaminated with military munitions. These sites include ranges on military installations that are in the process of being shut down, closed ranges on active installations, and formerly used defense sites.
The DOD is required by law to assess and clean up these sites - an effort the military estimates will cost some $8 billion to $35 billion.
As of September 2002, the DOD had identified 2,307 potentially contaminated sites. Officials say they continue to identify additional sites and are not likely to have a firm inventory for several years.
The report by the General Accounting Office says the Defense Department does not have a complete and viable plan for cleaning up these sites.
There are 1,387 of these potentially contaminated sites that the DOD has not begun or not completed its initial evaluation or has determined that further study is needed before a cleanup plan can be written, the report details.
The DOD's plan does not "contain goals or measures for site assessment and cleanup," for these sites the GAO reports.
The Defense Department says it intends to use a new procedure to assign a relative priority for these remaining sites, but will not complete the reassessments until 2012.
But by then, the General Accounting Office report warns, the DOD's preliminary cost estimates can change greatly and cleanups may rely on the reallocation of funds that may not be available.
The report recommends that the Defense Department develop a comprehensive approach to revising its plan in order to establish firm deadlines for completing its inventory, reassess its timetable for completing risk assessment of potential sites, and establish specific targets.
----
Study finds sharply increase risk of cancer among dioxin-exposed Vietnam veterans
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 22, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040122225207.3zepkcqy.html
An air force study has found for the first time a sharply increased risk of cancer among veterans who were exposed to the toxic chemical dioxin while spraying Agent Orange and other herbicides during the Vietnam War, the air force said Thursday.
The higher incidence of prostate, skin and other types of cancer was revealed after analysis of data gathered over the past two decades for the Air Force Health Study on Operation Ranch Hand was adjusted to take into account veterans' years in Southeast Asia.
The latest analysis found that veterans who sprayed herbicides as part of Operation Ranch Hand and who had the highest exposure to dioxin were more than twice as likely to develop cancer "at any anatomical site" than unexposed veterans who were in southeast Asia for two years or less.
The Ranch Hand veterans' risk of contracting prostate cancer was more than six times greater than that of the other veterans, while their risk of melanoma, a type of skin cander, was more than seven and a half times greater, the study found.
But Joel Michalek, an author of the analysis, cautioned that there was less statistical confidence in the figures for prostate cancer and melanoma because they were based on a small number of cases.
The analysis will be published in the February edition of the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine.
Previous analyses of the air force data had found no increase in the incidence of those cancer categories among Operation Ranch Hand veterans when compared to other veterans who served in southeast Asia but did not spray herbicides.
But a couple of years ago, researchers discovered that veterans who had spent more than two years in Southeast Asia were themselves at a higher risk of cancer, whether they had sprayed Agent Orange or not.
"So in past analyses when we failed to adjust for years in the region, we failed to find the cancer effect in the control group," said Michalek.
That, in turn obscured the increase in risk to veterans exposed to dioxin when compared to other veterans who served in southeast Asia because both groups were at higher than normal risk.
The latest air force study found that Ranch Hand veterans as well as veterans who served in southeast Asia but did not spray herbicides had a higher incidence of prostate cancer than the US population as a whole.
The veterans exposed to dioxin also had a higher incidence of melanoma than the US population as a whole.
----
Pentagon's Online Voting Program Deemed Too Risky
By Dan Keating
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36875-2004Jan21.html
A Pentagon program for Internet voting in this year's presidential election is so insecure that it could undercut the integrity of American democracy and should be stopped immediately, according to computer-security specialists who were asked to review the $22 million pilot plan intended for about 100,000 overseas voters.
The critical report released yesterday is intended to halt the momentum building for national Internet voting as the least expensive and most convenient way to upgrade election technology that was exposed as unreliable in 2000.
"It's not possible to create a secure voting system with off-the-shelf PCs using Microsoft Windows and the current Internet," said Avi Rubin, an associate professor of computer science and the technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University.
He and Barbara Simons, a retired researcher from International Business Machines Corp., said their biggest fear is that this year's experiment would be a hit, leading to widespread Internet voting for the 2008 presidential election. That is when the kind of Internet attack they envision could emerge, possibly from foreign subversives.
"History has shown that when people have the opportunity to tamper with an election they do," said Rubin, noting that the Internet is rife with viruses and worms even when there is no incentive for an attack.
The threat to the current election is great enough that the program should be shut down immediately, said Rubin, Simons and the other two other scientists who released a report yesterday -- David Wagner, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, and David Jefferson of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
The Pentagon's Federal Voting Assistance Program was created in 1986 to help military personnel stationed overseas vote. It also serves civilian Americans living abroad. Yesterday, a Pentagon spokesman defended the pilot program.
"The concern for security is a good thing, and we respect what they've done," Glenn Flood said. "But we think the thing will be secure, and security will continue to be enhanced. We're not going to stop it."
Supporters say the pilot for military, government and private citizens abroad is important to learn the right way to gather electronic votes and to help overseas voters who often have trouble casting ballots. The chance of a security threat has to be weighed against the knowledge gained and the improved voting access for those people, said R. Michael Alvarez, co-director of the CalTech-MIT Voting Technology Project and co-author of "Point, Click and Vote," a recent book about online voting.
"There's a widespread perception that Internet voting is going to happen at some time," he said. "As scientists, we'd like to lay out some kind of rational path that leads from punch cards and lever machines to that logical future."
-----
Pentagon report warns lack of testing limits confidence in missile defense
AFP
Thursday January 22, 2004
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/040122/1/3hfon.html
A Pentagon report warned Wednesday that existing testing data gives only limited confidence in a missile defense system that the United States is intent on deploying beginning this year.
The Pentagon's director of operational test and evaluation, Thomas Christie said in an annual report very little testing of the system was performed in 2003 "due to immature BMDS (ballistic missile defense system) components."
The Missile Defense Agency will therefore depend on two flight tests scheduled this year to validate its mid-course missile defense system, which is designed to intercept long-range missiles in space, according to the report.
"Even with successful intercepts in both of these attempts, the small number of tests would limit confidence in the integrated interceptor performance," the report said.
President George W. Bush has directed the Pentagon to begin deploying the system this year even though it is still in development.
Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat of Rhode Island, said the report "makes it clear that in a rush to win an ideological victory, President Bush risks prematurely deploying a missile defense system by 2004 that is technologically unproven and will drain resources from other essential priorities."
-------- propaganda wars
Canadian Mounties Seize Reporter's Files in Terrorist Case
January 22, 2004
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/americas/22CANA.html?pagewanted=all
TORONTO, Jan. 21 - Officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided the home and newspaper office of a reporter for The Ottawa Citizen on Wednesday in an effort to learn how she obtained secret documents concerning a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who was arrested in the United States as a suspected Qaeda terrorist.
The incident immediately became the biggest constitutional challenge to freedom of the press in Canada in decades, with the reporter, Juliet O'Neill, facing possible criminal charges for violating Section 4 of the Security of Information Act, one of several sweeping measures passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The act strengthens previous prohibitions against possession or communication of many sorts of secret security information.
Ten officers with a search warrant knocked on the door of Ms. O'Neill's home at 8 a.m. and in a daylong search took her notepads, downloaded her computer files and confiscated her address books and Rolodex.
Other records were confiscated from Ms. O'Neill's desk at The Ottawa Citizen's city hall bureau, said Scott Anderson, the paper's editor in chief. He said the entire bureau was converted into a crime scene, with yellow police tape draped across the front door of the office.
"I cannot remember a blacker day for freedom of the press in this country," Mr. Anderson said. "This sort of star chamber, police state attitude that has crept into government and law enforcement post 9/11 is jeopardizing some of the basic rights we take for granted."
The raids came in response to a front-page article by Ms. O'Neill published on Nov. 8, which outlined a detailed Canadian intelligence dossier on Maher Arar, an Ottawa computer technician who was seized in New York during a brief stopover in 2002 on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia. Mr. Arar, 33, was deported to Syria for detention, questioning and, he said, torture.
Mr. Arar was freed by Syria and returned in October to Canada, where his case has touched the national conscience. The fact that he was sent by American officials to Syria for interrogation without Ottawa's explicit permission has become a sore point in United States-Canadian relations, although officials from both countries have said that he was seized based on information gathered and supplied by Canadian security officials.
In a recent meeting in Mexico, Prime Minister Paul Martin said he was given assurances by President Bush that in the future Washington would consult with Ottawa first before deporting Canadian citizens to third countries.
Ms. O'Neill's article claimed that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had identified Mr. Arar as a possible member of a now disbanded Qaeda support group operating in Ottawa. Her article laid out a case put forth in Canadian security documents that Mr. Arar had told Syrian military intelligence officials during his incarceration in Damascus that he had trained at the Khalden terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and named specific instructors who taught him tactics and how to use small firearms.
Ms. O'Neill did not disclose the sources of her information in the article.
Mr. Arar has denied ever being in Afghanistan and characterized himself as a nonviolent moderate. He has never been charged. He announced Wednesday that he plans to file suit in federal court in Brooklyn against the United States for wrongfully expelling him to Syria.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police refused to discuss the case.
"The R.C.M.P. is presently conducting searches at two locations in the Ottawa region in relation to this criminal investigation, and because that investigation is ongoing no further comment can be made at this time," Sgt. Paul Marsh, a police spokesman, told reporters.
While freedom of the press is protected under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada's equivalent of the Bill of Rights, the news media do not have unlimited rights to gather information under Canadian law. Reporters enjoy no special protections beyond those granted to other citizens, which makes them subject to search warrants.
The O'Neill case could become the most important of its kind since the late 1970's, when a Toronto Sun editor and its publisher were prosecuted for violating the 1939 Official Secrets Act for publishing information from a secret report on Soviet espionage. That case was thrown out of court.
There was no comment from senior officials in the government, and it was not immediately clear whether the raids had been cleared by Mr. Martin or anyone in his cabinet.
Mr. Anderson said the newspaper's lawyers reached an agreement with prosecutors to have all the confiscated materials remain sealed in exhibit bags for the time being. He said officers had apparently not closely examined the data and will wait until the newspaper and its owner, CanWest Global Communications Corporation, can appeal the search warrants.
Richard G. Dearden, the lawyer for The Citizen and for Ms. O'Neill, said she would not speak about the case. But he said Ms. O'Neill, 50, has had 30 years of journalism experience and has been at the paper since 1996. She "was quite shaken by this experience," he said, adding that the raid was "pretty ironic" given that "the purpose of the story was to defend the R.C.M.P.'s investigative work."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Lawmakers Not Rushing to Take Up Terrorism Act
January 22, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/national/22PATR.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - Despite President Bush's plea for an extension of the counterterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, leading Republicans and Democrats in Congress said Wednesday that were in no rush to take up the politically divisive issue in this election year.
Crucial provisions of the law do not expire until the end of 2005, and Mr. Bush's push for their renewal in his State of the Union speech, which he repeated on Wednesday, caught many lawmakers off guard.
"I'd say he's about a year early," said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and a leading member of the judiciary committee. "If I were running for president, I wouldn't have brought it up now."
Mr. Grassley, like other members of Congress interviewed on Wednesday, said that while the antiterrorism act included some important law enforcement tools worth keeping, it was so far-reaching that its continuation needed careful scrutiny.
"I would not take a position of outright renewal at this point," he said.
The expanded authority that the law gave the government to track people suspected of terrorism after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, has come under growing criticism from liberals and conservatives alike because of civil liberties concerns.
Democratic presidential candidates, while differing on many issues, largely agree in opposing the law. Members of Congress from both parties have sought to repeal main parts of it, and the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday became the latest of more than 230 communities to approve a symbolic resolution in opposition to the law.
Bush administration officials said on Wednesday that the president wanted to use the high visibility of the State of the Union speech to declare his unwavering support of the law.
"He was setting out a marker and engaging in a public debate at a time when a lot more Americans would be tuning in," Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, said,
But Democrats, civil liberties advocates and even some Republicans said they were wary of extending the act without far greater scrutiny of how it had been used so far.
Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who heads the House Judiciary Committee and who has criticized some of the administration's counterterrorism policies, plans to hold hearings on the possible extension of the act in the spring or summer of 2005, and he has no plans to speed that timetable, a spokesman said.
-------- homeland security
Suits Against Airline Put Focus on Privacy Concerns
January 22, 2004
By TERENCE NEILAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/national/22CND-AIR.html
Growing concern over the privacy rights of American travelers in the face of heightened national security has come into sharper focus this week as lawyers pursue cases against Northwest Airlines for handing over passenger information to the government.
One case, a class-action suit, seeks damages from the carrier for possibly millions of passengers. A separate complaint calls on the Transportation Department to investigate what it calls Northwest's "unfair and deceptive practice" of giving information to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which it says caused "substantial injury to consumers." It also seeks an order for Northwest to notify all affected passengers and says civil penalties might be appropriate.
A spokesman for Northwest, Kurt Ebenhoch, said that privacy rights would be discussed today at a regular meeting of the Air Transport Association in Washington. The airline said that although it believed it would still be appropriate to hand over passenger data to the government "to advance aviation security," it felt that a protection protocol should be set up to address privacy concerns.
It said in a statement its current policy was not to provide passenger data for use in aviation security research projects. But it added that it would provide such information to federal agencies if required to do so by law.
An independent law professor said today that he thought the law firm bringing the class-action suit would have a very difficult time establishing a right to a remedy under American privacy law.
"As egregious as this violation was there is no clear legal right to information privacy under American law," said Prof. Joel Reidenberg of Fordham University, who specializes in information privacy and technology issues.
"In Europe what Northwest did is clearly illegal," he added, saying that that kind of data disclosure could not be made unless a criminal investigation was under way and a judge's order had been issued.
"In the United States, on the other hand, we don't have any such right," he said.
The professor's view of the case was disputed today by a lawyer at the firm pursuing the case, Stuart A. Davidson, of Cauley Geller Bowman and Rudman, in Boca Raton, Fla. He said such a right existed under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, because Northwest became an Internet company when it created its Web site and let passengers go on line to buy their tickets.
Mr. Reidenberg said such a claim was not designed to be covered by the act and that he believed it was not likely to succeed. He called the suit "a novel approach."
The second complaint was filed on Tuesday by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group in Washington. The center said it also plans to file a lawsuit against NASA to seek more information about the agency's secret project.
The center said Department of Transportation statistics indicate that more than 10.9 million passengers traveled on Northwest during the three months in 2001 that detailed passenger data was obtained.
Mr. Reidenberg said he believed the center's claim was stronger than the class-action suit because it is based on the statement by Northwest to keep passenger data confidential. Violating that promise is exactly what the unfair and deceptive trade practice rule sanctions, he said.
The class-action suit, filed on Tuesday in United States District Court in Minneapolis, where Northwest has its headquarters, says the airline violated its own privacy policy as well as federal and state law.
"Northwest tells people bluntly" on its Web site that it does not give out "personal information to anyone," Mr. Davidson said.
"If you give away information that you obtain electronically then you're liable. So they broke both their promise to keep that information private and federal law at the same time. And then they lied about it."
David A. Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said on Wednesday that the class-action suit "raises similar issues that we have raised." He added that Northwest, which first denied it had handed over information and then acknowledged that it had, "continues to maintain it was not a violation of its privacy policy."
Mr. Davidson said in an interview on Wednesday that July to September 2001 were the most likely months when the passenger information was collected. It was later handed over to NASA for a project to see if the agency could "mine" the data to spot terrorists.
Assuming that 10 million people traveled in those months, he said, federal law allows each person to collect at least $1,000 in statutory damages, and that the firm was also seeking punitive damages.
The Florida law firm also has suits pending against JetBlue, which in September 2003 said it had given information on passengers to a military company that works under contract for the Defense Department. The disclosure was heavily criticized by privacy advocates, and JetBlue later apologized to its customers.
Mr. Reidenburg said: "The other question is, are there other airlines that have taken part in this? When JetBlue was exposed, Northwest said they had never done this. It would be somewhat surprising if they only sought this data from two airlines."
-------- immigration / refugees
2 Senators Counter Bush on Immigrants
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36724-2004Jan21.html
Two prominent senators proposed yesterday a bipartisan alternative to President Bush's immigration initiative, including the prospect of permanent legal status for undocumented workers who fulfill residency, employment and other requirements.
The proposal by Democratic leader Thomas A. Daschle (S.D.) and Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) differs in key respects from Bush's plan, but they pledged to work with the White House to ensure passage of a new immigration law.
"We can tighten and bring common sense to a patchwork of immigration law that make no sense," Hagel said at a news conference as he and Daschle unveiled their bill.
The senators conceded that final action is unlikely this year but predicted eventual passage of a proposal similar to what they submitted yesterday, in part because of its bipartisan sponsorship. "A bill like ours . . . will eventually pass," Daschle said.
The proposal outlined by Bush this month -- and touted in his State of the Union speech Tuesday night -- would allow immigrant workers and those already illegally employed in this country to obtain temporary visas for as many as six years, so long as Americans are not available to fill the jobs. There would be no automatic path to permanent residence. After their visas expire, they would have to return home.
The Daschle-Hagel proposal would allow illegal immigrants and their families to become "invested stakeholders" in the United States -- putting them on track for permanent residence and eventual citizenship -- if they meet a half-dozen requirements.
They would have to have lived in this country for five years and worked here for four years, including one year after enactment of the bill. They would have to pass national security and criminal background checks, pay federal taxes, demonstrate a knowledge of English and American civics, and pay a $1,000 fine.
The Daschle-Hagel measure would admit new temporary workers from abroad but limit their number to 350,000. Bush would also admit new workers but did not propose a limit.
The senators also proposed increased spending on border security and efforts to reduce visa-processing backlogs that contribute to family separations. They said their bill would enhance national security by documenting immigrants living in the United States and tracking workers who enter the country.
Daschle and Hagel said their proposal does not provide "amnesty" to illegal immigrants -- a charge some critics have made of Bush's proposal. Becoming a permanent resident will "not come without a great deal of effort" on the part of the workers, Daschle said.
-------- internet
Easing of Internet Regulations Challenges Surveillance Efforts
January 22, 2004
By STEPHEN LABATON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technology/22VOIC.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - The Federal Communications Commission's efforts to reduce regulations over some Internet services have come under intense criticism from officials at law enforcement agencies who say that their ability to monitor terrorists and other criminal suspects electronically is threatened.
In a series of unpublicized meetings and heated correspondence in recent weeks, officials from the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration have repeatedly complained about the commission's decision in 2002 to classify high-speed Internet cable services under a looser regulatory regime than the phone system.
The Justice Department recently tried to block the commission from appealing a decision by a federal appeals court two months ago that struck down major parts of its 2002 deregulatory order. Justice Department officials fear that the deregulatory order impedes its ability to enforce wiretapping orders.
The department ultimately decided to permit the F.C.C. to appeal, but took the highly unusual step of withdrawing from the lawsuit, officials involved in the case said.
As a result of the commission's actions, said John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general who has played a lead role for the Justice Department, some telecommunications carriers have taken the position in court proceedings that they do not need to make their networks available to federal agents for court-approved wiretapping.
"I am aware of instances in which law enforcement authorities have not been able to execute intercept orders because of this uncertainty," Mr. Malcolm said in an interview last Friday. He declined to provide further details.
The clash between the commission and officials from the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies pits two cherished policies of the Bush administration against each other. On one side stand those who support deregulation of major industries and the nurturing of emerging technologies; on the other are those who favor more aggressive law enforcement after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
The outcome of the debate has far- reaching consequences.
Law enforcement officials say it will determine whether they can effectively monitor communications between suspects over new kinds of phone services that otherwise might allow them to escape detection. Also at stake is whether the government or industry will bear the considerable costs of developing the technology for such surveillance.
By contrast, some F.C.C. officials and telephone industry executives say that if the commission buckles to the other agencies and forces the industry to take on a host of expensive obligations the development of promising new communications services may be stalled or squelched for years to come.
The law enforcement officials have also raised concerns about recent statements by the commission's chairman, Michael K. Powell, that suggest he intends to propose rules soon that would place nascent Internet-based telephone services under a looser regulatory regime than the traditional phone system.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Powell declined to discuss the subject.
David Fiske, the commission's chief spokesman, said that he could not respond to Mr. Malcolm's statement that the F.C.C.'s interpretation of the rules was making it more difficult to execute surveillance orders.
A senior official at the F.C.C. said the commission was not unsympathetic to the concerns of the law enforcement agencies. "We're an economic regulatory agency as well as a law enforcement agency and we have to look at the interests of everyone," the official said.
Some industry experts say that their biggest worry is that law enforcement demands may reshape the technical specifications of the new Internet voice services, an accusation that officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. deny.
"What's most scary for industry and perhaps some people at the F.C.C. is the notion that the architecture of the Internet will depend on the permission of the F.B.I.," said Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign communications. Mr. Baker now represents a number of telecommunications companies as a partner at the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson.
But law enforcement officials say they are not seeking uniform technical standards but requirements that the new companies offering so-called "voice over Internet" services build into their systems easy ways for agents to tap into conversations between suspects.
In a strange-bedfellows twist, officials from the F.B.I. and other agencies have found themselves the unlikely allies of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which have also argued that the new Internet services offered by cable companies should be under a regulatory regime like the phone system - but for different reasons. The A.C.L.U. prefers that approach because it would prohibit cable companies from discriminating against Internet service providers, and as such would assure a greater diversity of voices.
The law enforcement officials have repeatedly complained about the direction the agency has been taking on the issues.
Last month, officials from the Justice Department, the F.B.I. and the drug agency warned officials of the F.C.C. that the commission's regulatory rulings on high-speed Internet access through cable systems "suffers from statutory interpretation problems" and "directly threatens" the ability to apply the law permitting them to monitor suspects, according to a letter on file at the F.C.C. describing a meeting on the issue.
The meeting at the F.C.C. included lawyers from the Justice Department's criminal division, civil appellate division, narcotics and dangerous drugs section and solicitor general's office, as well as officials from the F.B.I., and D.E.A.
Shortly before that meeting, the Justice Department tried to block the F.C.C. from appealing a decision by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, sitting in Seattle, because of the problems it could pose for law enforcement, officials said.
The commission lost the case last October, when the panel issued a ruling that may force the cable companies to share their broadband networks with competing Internet service providers.
The F.C.C. order, which was partly struck down, had classified cable broadband as an "information service" under the 1996 Telecommunications Act. In so doing, it threatened to undermine the ability of law enforcement agencies to use the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a wiretapping law that applies to phone services but exempts information services.
The Justice Department ultimately reached a compromise that permitted the commission to go forward and petition the entire Ninth Circuit to review the case, Brand X Internet Services v. Federal Communications Commission. But government lawyers removed the department from the case, rejecting the Justice Department's traditional role as the main legal advocate for the United States in nearly all cases before federal appeals courts.
Law enforcement officials have also warned the F.C.C. that the approach that Mr. Powell has begun to articulate to have few regulations over the emerging technology that will permit consumers to use the Internet to send and receive phone calls could make it significantly more difficult for prosecutors and federal agents to monitor those calls.
The F.B.I. and the Justice Department have told the commission that greater use of high speed Internet phone services "offers increasing opportunities for terrorists, spies, and criminals to evade lawful electronic surveillance," according to a document on file at the F.C.C.
Classifying Internet-based phone services as "telecommunications" would allow law enforcement officials to require companies to provide them with access to contemporaneous conversations on their networks under the 1994 wiretapping law.
But such a classification also imposes on the companies a host of onerous requirements under the 1996 act, including those intended to assure that telephones are universally available and that everyone has access to 911 emergency services. These obligations, purveyors of the new Internet telephone services say, are so expensive that they will deter their development.
Government and industry lawyers say that the commission could try to define the new services as "telecommunications" under the 1994 surveillance law and "information" under the 1996 act. But taking that potentially conflicting approach could undermine the F.C.C. in court in the inevitable legal challenges that would follow its rulings.
Mr. Powell, in a series of recent speeches and interviews, has suggested that the new technologies need to be classified as "information services" and thus be subjected to fewer regulations.
"Don't shove the round Internet into a square regulatory hole," Mr. Powell said at a luncheon appearance last week before the National Press Club. "We cannot contort the character of the Internet to suit our familiar notions of regulation. Do not dumb down the genius of the Net to match the limited visions of the regulator.
"To regulate the Internet in the image of a familiar phone service is to destroy its inherent character and potential," Mr. Powell said. Such new technologies empower people, "giving them more choice and control."
"And I think as consumers do more, governments do less, because we don't regulate our citizens."
In the same speech, Mr. Powell added, "We will need to ensure the legitimate concerns of public safety and law enforcement are addressed."
-------- justice
Probe of Intercepted Messages Focuses on Shelby
Justice Department Investigating Leak of Classified NSA Material Regarding Sept. 11 Attacks
By Dana Priest and Allan Lengel
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36876-2004Jan21.html
The Justice Department's 18-month investigation into the leak of classified intercepted messages is focusing on Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time of the disclosure, according to a law enforcement official and congressional sources.
A grand jury has been hearing information and has taken the testimony of at least two witnesses, including Shelby's former press secretary, sources said. The investigation centers on the disclosure in 2002 that the National Security Agency had intercepted two messages on the eve of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks signaling that something was to happen the next day. The cryptic messages were not translated until Sept. 12.
Shelby has since left the committee and is chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. He said in a statement yesterday: "My position on this issue is clear and well-known: At no time during my career as a United States Senator and, more particularly, at no time during my service as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence have I ever knowingly compromised classified information.
"To my knowledge, the same can be said about my staff. We have provided the investigation with our full cooperation in the past, and we will continue to do so." The statement said Shelby has had no contact with investigators for more than a year.
Shelby's former press secretary, Andrea Andrews, has moved to Texas. Neither she nor her attorney could be reached to comment yesterday.
It was unclear yesterday how close the FBI is to concluding its investigation, or for how long it has focused on Shelby.
On June 19, 2002, CNN, citing "two congressional sources," quoted phrases contained in two classified NSA intercepts from Sept. 10, 2001, that hinted of an impending terrorist operation. The intercepts included the phrases "The match begins tomorrow" and "tomorrow is zero day." This information was revealed by NSA's director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, during a closed session of a joint House-Senate panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.
CNN reporter Dana Bash, who was credited by her network with getting the scoop, was interviewed by FBI agents, sources said. Her office said yesterday she was traveling with President Bush. She did not return a phone message to comment.
At the time, Vice President Cheney chastised committee members publicly about the disclosure of sensitive information. Critics said the administration was trying to stop public disclosure of embarrassing information about the lapses in intelligence and security surrounding the attacks.
Cheney's criticism prompted the House and Senate intelligence committees to encourage an FBI investigation of themselves. Within two months, FBI agents had the phone records, appointment calendars and schedules of 17 senators and had questioned more than 100 people, including all 37 members of the committee and about 60 staff members.
The agents typically asked lawmakers and staff members if they were willing to take polygraph tests.
Meanwhile yesterday, Democratic members of key House committees said they were frustrated by a lack of information about another leak investigation: the FBI's probe of who disclosed the identity of a CIA case officer, Valerie Plame, who was undercover.
In December, seven members of the House asked the Justice Department for a progress report on the investigation, launched to find out who told columnist Robert D. Novak that Plame is a CIA officer. Plame is married to former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, a prominent critic of the administration's Iraq policies, who concluded during a 2002 CIA-sponsored mission to Africa that there was little evidence Saddam Hussein sought uranium there. Wilson says he believes his wife's identity was disclosed in retaliation for his public discussions of those findings.
Bush mentioned the alleged Africa-Iraq uranium connection in last year's State of the Union address as he built a case for going to war against Iraq. The CIA had warned the White House against using that assertion, and documents showing a Niger-Iraq link turned out to be forged.
Members of the House asked the Justice Department how many interviews had been conducted and how many remain to be scheduled. The lawmakers, some of whom said they fear the department is not pushing hard enough to resolve the matter, also wanted to know whether the Bush administration had turned over the documents requested.
The department, in a letter dated Jan. 13, declined to answer the questions, citing long-standing policy against revealing information during an investigation.
Yesterday, Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.), and the ranking members of the House International Relations, Judiciary and Government Reform committees, introduced a Resolution of Inquiry, an infrequently used device to compel the executive branch to turn over information to Congress.
The resolution will be introduced in four committees that share jurisdiction on the matter. If it is not voted down or acted upon by each committee within 14 days, Holt and his co-signers can take the matter to the floor. Holt said chances of the resolution passing are "slim" but "at least it raises the issue."
"I certainly don't want to compromise an ongoing investigation," he said. "I think this is a way of strengthening the backbone of investigators."
Co-signers include Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Tom Lantos (D-Calif.) of the International Relations Committee and Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) of the Government Reform Committee.
--------
Ex - CIA Officials Urge Name Leak Inquiry
January 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-CIA-Leak.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Members of Congress and 10 ex-CIA officials are seeking a broader inquiry into the leak of an undercover officer's name, aiming to determine if U.S. national security was compromised and to discourage future leaks.
In addition, a leading Democratic critic of the Justice Department investigation into the matter says the Bush administration should release details of the probe to show the public whether officials are cooperating as President Bush promised.
``A prosecutor has the responsibility to assure public confidence in criminal investigations, especially those of such a serious nature,'' Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a letter Thursday to Deputy Attorney General James Comey.
Justice Department and FBI officials refused to comment on any aspect of the investigation, which began in September, other than to say it is continuing. Attorney General John Ashcroft has recused himself from the probe, which is led by Comey and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald of Chicago. Time magazine reported on its Web site that a grand jury in Washington began hearing testimony in the leak investigation Wednesday. Two law-enforcement officials said they could not confirm the report.
Investigators want to know who leaked the name of the CIA undercover officer, Valerie Plame, to syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July. Her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, has said his wife's identity may have been disclosed to discredit his assertions that the Bush administration exaggerated Iraq's nuclear capabilities to build a case for war.
The former CIA officials, in a letter to congressional leaders, said an investigation by Congress could go further than the Justice Department's by exposing how the leak happened and making clear that such actions won't be tolerated.
``A thorough and successful congressional investigation of this crime is necessary to send a clear signal that the elected representatives of this government will not accept nor ignore the political exploitation of the men and women in our intelligence community,'' said the letter, dated Tuesday.
The letter, signed by former CIA analyst Larry C. Johnson and nine other former agency analysts and case officers, was sent to House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and other senior Democrats and Republicans in the House. A congressional official provided a copy Thursday to The Associated Press.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement that she agreed with the thrust of the former officials' letter and expressed support for an effort by Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., to force the House to examine the case, including the possible damage to national security.
Holt and other Democrats have introduced a resolution that, if approved, would request that the Bush administration forward all documents related to the Plame case. It is far from certain that the Republican-led House will even consider the resolution or launch an investigation of its own.
``The Department of Justice investigation has the full support of Congress and should be vigorously pursued, but it is not enough,'' Holt said.
In his letter to Comey, Schumer asked for public release of details such as whether a grand jury is investigating the matter, whether any journalists have been interviewed and whether White House staffers had signed waivers releasing journalists from their promise of source confidentiality.
The answers to these and other questions, Schumer said, could help the public understand ``whether the administration is playing a spin game to make it look like it is cooperating.''
Justice Department officials declined comment on Schumer's request. They noted, however, that some of the information being sought is prevented by law from disclosure in active criminal investigations.
--------
Ashcroft Urges Global Corruption Fight
January 22, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-World-Forum.html
DAVOS, Switzerland (AP) -- Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday urged nations that rallied against terrorism after Sept. 11 to unite again to fight corruption, which is costing the world economy more than $2 trillion every year.
In a speech to the World Economic Forum, Ashcroft attacked government officials who pocket payoffs and deprive their people of money for better roads, cleaner water and more modern schools.
``We are winning the war on terrorism,'' he said, but corruption is threatening ``the capacity of business and government to work together to end the plague of poverty and expand human achievement.''
The World Bank estimates the cost of corruption represents about 7 percent of the annual world economy -- roughly $2.3 trillion, which ``is equal'' to the entire U.S. federal budget, Ashcroft told more than 100 participants at a private lunch during the annual five-day meeting.
``Twenty-eight months ago, all free nations were called to defend freedom from terrorism. Today we are called to defend our freedom from corruption,'' the attorney general said.
``To defeat terrorism we must prevent acts from occurring in the first place. Just as we cannot wait for the next terrorist to strike, we must not wait for the next bribe to be paid before moving to stop future corrupt activity,'' he said.
Ashcroft called for leadership, unprecedented international cooperation, and openness to detect and deter corruption.
Last month, Ashcroft signed a landmark U.N. anti-corruption treaty requiring politicians to disclose their campaign finances and countries to return tainted assets to the nation they were stolen from.
The United States was one of 95 countries to sign the U.N. convention, which Ashcroft said shows ``a worldwide conviction that the crime of corruption ... must be defeated.''
Later at the forum of business and government leaders, Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf stressed his commitment to resolve his country's dispute with India over Kashmir.
``I strongly believe that we must not live perpetually in enmity,'' he said. ``I am very glad that mutually we agreed on a way forward.''
India and Pakistan are expected to start talks next month aimed at resolving the Kashmir conflict and other disputes.
Musharraf also said his government would prosecute any scientists in Pakistan who sold nuclear secrets.
``All the nuclear and strategic assets are under total custodial control. The Pakistan government has never and will never proliferate,'' he said.
But he said it was possible that individual scientists may have sold secrets, adding that Pakistan is investigating ``any proliferation that may have been done by any individual for their personal financial gain,'' Musharraf said. ``We will deal with them as anti-state elements.''
For years, Pakistan has scoffed at reports that its scientists might have been involved in proliferation. But the country started hedging in December, saying individuals motivated by ambition or greed may have sold secrets, after U.N. inspections of Iranian nuclear facilities showed that ``Pakistani-linked individuals'' had acted as ``intermediaries and black marketeers.''
Pakistani scientists were later implicated in selling high-tech centrifuge technology to Libya, and have also been named in inquiries into North Korea's nuclear program.
On the business side, leaders tackled the thorny issue of how to resist stock market pressure to distort company earnings -- one factor cited in the scandal involving energy trader Enron.
In a discussion among the heads of major corporations, the practice of rewarding top executives with stock options was both praised and blamed, depending on how those options are structured.
Options that pay off in the short term can push executives to cut corners and pump up quarterly earnings to satisfy the market, while long-term options can promote better strategic thinking, panel members said.
``It's the best thing or the worst thing, depending on how you use it,'' said Bertrand Collomb, chairman of French building materials company Lafarge.
Pressure from stock markets is widely considered one of the factors contributing to corporate accounting scandals such as the collapse of Enron. European officials have been confronted with a mushrooming scandal of their own in the collapse of Italian dairy giant Parmalat.
Some said such pressure can be averted by simple approaches, such as clearly explaining the company's strategy to employees and investors.
``If we do that, the share price takes care of itself,'' said Joe Forehand, chairman and chief executive of U.S. consulting giant Accenture.
Corporate governance and ethics have assumed a more prominent role at the annual gathering with the passage of U.S. legislation -- the Sarbanes-Oxley Act -- imposing new accountability on companies and executives for the truthfulness of their earnings.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Lawyer Says Cuba Detainees Face Unfair System
January 22, 2004
By NEIL A. LEWIS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/national/22GITM.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - The military lawyer assigned to defend an Australian, David Hicks, detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, said on Wednesday that the military commission system under which his client might soon be tried was inherently unfair and was explicitly created to improve the likelihood of convictions.
The lawyer, Maj. Michael D. Mori, said, "Using the commission process just creates an unfair system that threatens to convict the innocent and provides the guilty a justifiable complaint as to their convictions." Major Mori was one of five uniformed military lawyers assigned as defense counsel to Guantánamo detainees who filed a brief with the Supreme Court last week arguing that President Bush had overstepped his bounds as commander in chief by planning to prosecute prisoners in a system that does not allow for any appeal to civilian courts. The administration says the detainees are illegal enemy combatants.
Major Mori said: "The military commissions will not provide a full and fair trial. The commission process has been created and controlled by those with a vested interest only in convictions."
He said that one example of unfairness was that the individual with the authority to approve any charges was also detailed to rule on defense motions.
"This rule alone demonstrates that the designers of the commissions intend to exercise central control of the process without interference by independent checks and balances," Major Mori said.
Maj. John Smith, a spokesman for the office of military commissions, said in response that the military commissions were needed because they took into account battlefield conditions and were thus preferable to courts-martial.
"Courts-martial, which are used to maintain order and discipline, do not make as much sense with acts committed on the battlefield," Major Smith said. "While the commission rules may be different in some respects, they are certainly very fair."
He said they provided for considerations like the presumption of innocence and the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
--------
Lawyer Criticizes Rules for Tribunals
Trials Won't Be Fair, Military Attorney Says
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36877-2004Jan21.html
A military defense lawyer for an Australian detainee expected to be the first man tried before a military tribunal denounced President Bush's rules for the special courts yesterday, saying they are skewed against defendants and could result in proceedings that resemble political trials in authoritarian Third World countries.
Marine Corps Maj. Michael Mori's news conference demonstrated that he and other military defense attorneys appointed by the Pentagon to represent defendants in the tribunals agree on many points with human rights activists around the world who have criticized the tribunals.
"The military commissions will not provide a full and fair trial," said Mori, who represents David Hicks, an Australian detainee at the U.S. Navy prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was arrested while allegedly fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan in late 2001. "The commission process has been created and controlled by those with a vested interest only in convictions," Mori said.
Mori was one of five military defense attorneys for future tribunal defendants who filed a friend-of-the-court brief with the Supreme Court last week seeking access to federal courts for their clients. The U.S. government contends that the 680 alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters at Guantanamo Bay are not entitled to access to U.S. courts, whether they are assigned to military tribunals or not.
U.S. military officials rejected Mori's criticisms and said they show that tribunal defendants will have aggressive representation in court. "His job as defense counsel is to zealously defend people who may be tried before military commissions," said Maj. John Smith, a spokesman for the Pentagon's tribunal office. "I expect him to raise issues in his client's interest."
Smith added: "The commissions are set up to provide full and fair trials while protecting sensitive information and taking into account the unique battlefield environment."
Mori said he objects to one rule that bars tribunal judges from dismissing charges filed by Pentagon officials. Another unfair provision, he said, is that convictions are to be appealed not to civilian courts but up the chain of command to the defense secretary and the president.
Echoing the privately expressed views of some U.S. military officials, Mori said the tribunals might lead adversary nations to try U.S. soldiers under unjust terms if they are captured in war zones. "What's to stop the North Koreans from arresting a [U.S.] contractor as a spy and trying him under the very rules we set up?" he asked. "We wouldn't tolerate it."
Smith, the Pentagon spokesman, said the tribunals will have many rules that are akin to those in criminal courts, including the presumption of innocence and a requirement of proof beyond a reasonable doubt to secure a conviction.
Mori declined to detail the allegations against Hicks, a former adventurer and kangaroo skinner who converted to Islam. But he said that "mentally, he's degenerated to the point where his main concerns are basic human instincts, food, shelter. Two years in detention creates disorientation."
Informed sources said U.S. officials want Hicks to be the leadoff tribunal defendant because he informally agreed, before a lawyer was appointed for him, to plead guilty to some charges and to make a public statement of regret about his jihadist past. In exchange, the government would agree to a relatively light sentence.
But Mori and Hicks's other lawyers are urging him to reconsider any deal reached under what they believe are the prison's inherently coercive conditions, the sources said. Mori declined to discuss the matter.
Mori said he would prefer that Hicks be tried in his native Australia, or even under U.S. military rules for courts-martial. He and his uniformed defense colleagues have tried for months to persuade superiors to soften the tribunal rules, but to no avail, Mori said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Supreme Court Rules EPA Can Block State Clean Air Permits
By J.R. Pegg,
(ENS)
January 22, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-22-11.asp
WASHINGTON, DC - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that the federal government has the authority to override decisions by state officials that afford less environmental protection than mandated by the Clean Air Act. By a 5 to 4 margin the court upheld a lower court ruling that found the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) followed the law when it blocked construction at an Alaskan zinc mine because of concerns about the laxness of state pollution control permits.
The case centered on the Red Dog Mine, which is located in northwest Alaska some 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle and five miles from the Noatak National Preserve.
The open pit mine is owned and operated by the Canadian firm Teck Cominico Ltd - it has a yearly production capacity of more than 600,000 tons of zinc.
In 1999, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation granted the company a pre-construction permit allowing it to add another large diesel generator to its operation.
The company estimated the additional generator would have increased the mine's production by some 40 percent and its nitrogen oxide emissions by some 40 tons per year.
Under the Clean Air Act, such pre-construction permits are required for large industrial sources of pollution and must call on these facilities to use "best available control technology" (BACT) in order to curtail harmful emissions.
Although state officials determined BACT capable of reducing emissions by some 90 percent was feasible and affordable, its permit required pollution controls only one third as effective.
This prompted the EPA to issue an enforcement action to revoke the state's permit and block construction of the new generator.
The state and the company challenged the decision and questioned whether the Clean Air Act grants the EPA such authority.
According to the majority, the law "confers that checking authority on EPA."
The EPA's order was "neither arbitrary nor capricious," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote in the majority opinion.
The law gives the EPA "supervisory authority over the reasonableness" of BACT determinations by state permitting authorities, Ginsburg wrote, and the agency "may issue a stop construction order ... if a BACT selection is not reasonable."
In a familiar pattern of recent Supreme Court decisions, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor joined Ginsburg along with Justices John Paul Stevens, David Souter and Stephen Breyer to forge a narrow majority.
Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas opposed the verdict, which they say strikes a blow against states rights.
"After today's decision ... a state agency can no longer represent itself as the real governing body," Kennedy wrote on behalf of the minority. "No matter how much time was spent in consultation and negotiation, a single federal administrator can in the end set all aside by a unilateral order."
"This is a great step backwards in Congress' design to grant States a significant stake in developing and enforcing national environmental objectives," according to the dissenting justices.
Environmentalists hailed the decision and called on the Bush administration to ensure the EPA carries out its obligations under the Clean Air Act.
"Today's decision is good news for the lungs of every American and shows that the federal government has an obligation to secure clean, safe air for all Americans," said Vicki Patton, a senior attorney with Environmental Defense.
Environmentalists feared a decision in favor of Alaska would allow states to put in place weak pollution controls for new power plants and industrial sources, even though more cost effective and more stringent pollution control technology may be available.
The ruling upholds a decision by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision that upheld a ruling in favor of the EPA. Some 11 states filed in support of Alaska's view, but at least 14 filed in opposition.
--------
Court Upholds E.P.A. Role in Alaska Case
January 22, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/politics/22SCOT.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 21 - Narrowly divided on a question of federal versus state regulation, the Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to insist that factories and power plants use the "best available" anti-pollution technology and to block construction of those that, in the agency's view, do not.
The 5-to-4 decision came in a Clean Air Act dispute between the federal agency and Alaska over conditions for allowing the world's biggest zinc mine to expand its operations. The E.P.A. had overruled Alaska's acceptance of the technology that the Red Dog Mine proposed to use to control the additional pollutants that the expanded facility would emit.
The ruling has implications for the new generation of coal-fired power plants being planned across the Rocky Mountain West. These will require permits under the same provisions of the Clean Air Act that the court interpreted Wednesday.
As an affirmation of the federal agency's authority over the states, the E.P.A.'s victory was in some respects an awkward one. The solicitor general's office vigorously defended the agency's authority when the case was argued in October. But a month later, the Bush administration abandoned more than 50 investigations into violations of the Clean Air Act, a sharp change in enforcement policy that rejected making use of the agency's full authority.
The agency's official response to the ruling appeared to reflect the situation's inherent ambivalence.
"We're reviewing the opinion," Cynthia Bergman, an agency spokeswoman, said, "and while we're pleased, we continue to believe that states have the primary responsibility for the enforcement of our environmental statutes."
Vickie Patton, a lawyer for Environmental Defense, an advocacy group that filed a brief in the case, said the decision "highlights the stark contrast" between the power the court has affirmed and the current position of the executive branch in "dramatically scaling back the use of these vital legal protections."
The Red Dog Mine, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, is the biggest private employer in northwest Alaska. In 1996, the mine owner, Teck Cominco Alaska Inc., proposed expanding production by 40 percent. The plan required a special Clean Air Act permit because Alaska, having met the national standards for nitrogen dioxide pollutants, is required by the statute not to allow "significant deterioration" of its good air quality.
The question for the Supreme Court was whether federal or state environmental officials should have the final word on whether the mine's proposal to control its new emissions was the "best available control technology" that the law requires.
Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation had accepted Cominco's proposal to install an anti-pollution technology known as Low NOx, for low nitrogen oxide, as "logistically and economically less onerous" than an alternative that, while more expensive, was more efficient. The E.P.A. vetoed that decision on the ground that the state had not justified its refusal to insist on the alternative as the best available.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, upheld the E.P.A. In Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's opinion affirming that decision, the Supreme Court said Congress had "expressly endorsed an expansive surveillance role for E.P.A.," which the agency carried out properly when it found Alaska's action to be unreasonable.
While the case, Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. Environmental Protection Agency, No. 02-658, presented a statutory rather than a constitutional issue, it had overtones familiar from the court's debates over the allocation of federal and state power.
The dissent by Justice Anthony M. Kennedy accused the majority of "relegating states to the role of mere provinces or political corporations, instead of coequal sovereigns entitled to the same dignity and respect." But the states were divided in this case, with a group of mostly Western states siding with Alaska, and Northeastern states siding with the federal regulators. States including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut told the court that E.P.A. oversight "provides a necessary backstop" to clean air enforcement. These states' attorneys general recently declared that they intend to bring their own enforcement suits if the E.P.A. will no longer do so.
Justices John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer joined the majority opinion. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas joined the dissent.
--------
Justices Decide EPA Can Overrule States
Bar to Zinc Mine Expansion Is Upheld
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 22, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36729-2004Jan21.html
The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that federal air-quality regulators may overrule their state counterparts when Washington can show that state regulators have unreasonably given industry the right to expand emissions in pollution-free areas.
By a vote of 5 to 4, the justices said that the Clean Air Act empowered the Environmental Protection Agency to block the expansion of a huge zinc mine in northwestern Alaska because Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation, citing cost concerns, had allowed the mine to install pollution-control technology that reduced emissions by less than an alternative device would have.
In an opinion by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the court majority said that the EPA plays a "limited but vital role" in preventing states from straying too far from the overall purposes of the Clean Air Act. Without such federal oversight, Ginsburg argued, states could engage in a competitive lowering of environmental standards to attract industry.
The ruling significantly reinforced federal supremacy in pollution-control matters and sent a strong signal that the current court's strong support for states' rights is not unlimited.
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who had joined with the court's conservative wing in a series of 5-4 states' rights decisions, was in the majority yesterday, along with Ginsburg and the court's other center-left justices, John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Stephen G. Breyer.
Dissenters on the court said the decision upset a state-federal balance that Congress set out unambiguously in the law.
"After today's decision . . . a state agency can no longer represent itself as the real governing body," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote in an opinion joined by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. "This is a great step backward in Congress' design to grant States a significant stake in developing and enforcing national environmental objectives."
But Ginsburg emphasized that the court was not abolishing states' "considerable leeway" to issue environmental permits; it was, she wrote, simply ensuring that the EPA can step in when it has evidence that state regulators acted without good reason, given the Clean Air Act's overall objectives.
The case began in 1996, when the Red Dog zinc mine, the largest such mine in the world and a major source of jobs and income for Native Alaskans, sought more electric power generating capacity so that it could expand zinc production by 40 percent.
Located five miles from the scenic Noatak National Preserve, the mine is subject to 1977 amendments to the Clean Air Act that seek to prevent the degradation of air that is clean. It needed permission for its expansion plans from Alaska's Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC).
In 1999, ADEC approved Red Dog's expansion using a pollution control technology that would reduce its power plant's nitrogen oxide emissions by 30 percent.
But the EPA vetoed that decision, ruling that the state had done only a skimpy analysis to support its claim that an alternative technology that reduces emissions by 90 percent was too expensive.
The state and the mine took their case to the San Francisco-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, which, in 2002, ruled in favor of the EPA. They then appealed to the Supreme Court.
The case is Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation v. EPA, No. 02-658.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Five hundred pairs of boots
Thu Jan 22, 2004
Antiwar.com
http://www.antiwar.com/blog/index.php?id=P427
More than 500 pairs of empty Army boots were placed side-by-side in downtown Chicago Wednesday to serve as a reminder of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. The black boots, some dusty and dirty from use, were placed on Federal Plaza in front of a posterboard display that listed the names, ages and states of all soldiers killed in the war...
Sometimes, we have to go back to the innocence of our childhood, when we learned to count using apples and beads as numbers, to fully appreciate how many of our troops have died unnecessarily in Iraq. The boots show us the visual reality of the number "500." That's an awful lot of boots, and lives. Take a look.
http://famulus.msnbc.com/famulusgen/ap01-21-162633.asp?t=apnew&vts=12120041637
---------
The Loud Answer to Davos, in Bombay This Year, Is Antiwar
January 22, 2004
By SARITHA RAI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/international/asia/22FORU.html
BOMBAY, Jan. 21 - Kenyans in colorful robes and headgear, South Koreans with blue peace signs painted on their faces and Britons carrying posters of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush crossed out in black joined thousands of others marching through the congested streets of Bombay on Wednesday to denounce the Iraq war. It was a demonstration that marked the close of the fourth annual World Social Forum.
Delegates carrying placards that read "Iraq is not for sale" and "End occupation of Iraq" elbowed others who raised slogans of "Down with war, down with Bush" and caused chaos in downtown Bombay. Police officers brandishing riot sticks could barely keep the crowds under control.
The local police, who feared that the antiwar protest might get out of hand, mounted a heavy guard at the United States Consulate.
More than 80,000 people from a hundred countries took part in the six-day forum, which was held in Asia for the first time. The forum was founded as a counter to the World Economic Forum, which is being held in Davos, Switzerland, an international meeting of politicians and business executive to discuss world trade and other issues.
The march ended at Azad Maidan, or Freedom Park, near the majestic Victoria Terminus, a lavish 19th-century domed structure that houses India's largest train station.
The mood was somber. Detler V. Larcher, from Bremen, Germany, gestured to the milling crowds and said, "People are clearly saying that George Bush is responsible for the growing anti-American feeling across the world."
In addition to its primary focus on denouncing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the forum highlighted issues ranging from caste and gender discrimination to nuclear disarmament and rights of the disabled. True to form, the meeting did not come up with any declaration or action plan.
The freewheeling nature of the forum, however, did not find unanimous support even within India. A splinter group of far left elements called for a violent movement against globalization and war.
This group, calling itself Mumbai Resistance 2004 (using a common spelling of "Bombay"). was based just outside the forum and vehemently protested its acceptance of financing from "American multinationals." So while the previous three meetings, in Pôrto Alegre, Brazil, were financed by the Ford Foundation, the meeting in India was sponsored by Oxfam International and others.
The event will shift back to Brazil next year.
Nineteen-year-old Chaman Singh, who weaved his way in and out of the milling crowds peddling savory Indian snacks for 5 cents each, said he did not know who George Bush was or what the meeting was all about.
"Most of them look like they are farmers and they don't seem to want my samosas," said Mr. Singh, who had shifted his business to Azad Maidan from the nearby beach in anticipation of good sales. But by the end of the evening, he was disappointed. "I usually make 100 rupees [$2.20] at Chowpatty Beach, but today I've only made 60 rupees so far," he said.
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