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NUCLEAR
Uranium in Your Koolaid
Nuclear Inquiry Heightens Divisions Within Pakistan
Pakistan Scientists' Detentions Protested
Iraq WMD Flap May Bolster U.N. Position
Powell Voices Doubts About Iraqi Weapons
'Little point' in WMD search
War Party Puts Syria in Its Sights
Syria Scoffs at U.S. Claim It Has Iraqi Weapons
Clark: Bush Too Focused on Missile Defense
The Nuclear Market: An Array of Vendors
U.S. Mulling Stronger International Nuclear Curbs
Cheney Reaches Out To Iraq War Critics
'The Bubble of American Supremacy'
MILITARY
Hitler's chemical weapons a seeping menace
Colombia Targeting Rebel Strongholds
Iraq's Path Hinges on Words of Enigmatic Cleric
6 G.I.'s Are Killed in a Wave of Violence
Changes In U.S. Iraq Plan Explored
Israel Agrees to Free Arabs in a Swap With Militants
Israel, Hezbollah To Swap Prisoners
Mexico Accepts Peace Corps for First Time
U.S. Lawmakers Make Landmark Libya Visit
Syria Denies Weapons Received Before War
Spy chiefs warn PM: don't blame us for war
Iraq weapons report should be taken seriously: Annan
Wary UN returns to Iraq
UN to Decide on Iraq, Three U.S. Soldiers Missing
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Guantanamo Spy Cases Evaporate
Cheney Calls for More Unity in Fight Against Terrorism
OTHER
Scientists Warn of Imminent New Ice Age
A Horror Script For Health Officials
Thailand Brings in Troops to Fight Bird Flu
Avian Flu Said to Be Resistant to a Main Flu-Fighting Drug
ACTIVISTS
World Forum Protest Staged From a Distance
Robert McNamara: 'It's Just Wrong What We're Doing'
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Uranium in Your Koolaid
interview with cancer specialist Dr Jawad Al Ali, Occupied Basra
posted by Ewa Jasiewicz,
Occupation Watch
Sunday January 25 2004
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/stories.php?story=04/01/25/1998471
DU - What is it?
Depleted Uranium is a highly toxic heavy metal derived from nuclear bomb and fuel waste. It's heavy weight and pyrophoric qualities cause it to burn-melt like a blowtorch through steel when a DU coated/loaded penetrator, self-sharpening by nature, strikes a hard target. It's mainly used to incinerate battle tanks, and on contact pulverizes into breathable aerosol-like dust that can travel 26 miles and remains radioactive for 4.5 billion years.
Despite the name "Depleted" Uranium, DU has 60% the radioactivity of natural uranium, which is pure uranium, and all uranium whether "natural", "depleted" or "enriched" is a chemical and radiological toxic substance emitting alpha, beta and gamma particles, all of which have a destructive effect on the cellular make-up of the human body, ie they attack the human body at the most essential, primary and vital levels.
Imagine the effect of DU weapons on tanks and compare it to that of the after-drift and settlement into water systems, soil, vegetation, and the animal/human body. The energy of a single alpha particle, never mind the gamma, the heaviest penetrating rays known to science - is more than the amount required to damage important macromolecules (the glue that holds us together) such as DNA, RNA, enzymes and proteins. It does this by breaking molecular bonds and chemical reactions, which alter or destroy the shape, organization and function of these essential life sustaining molecules. DU particles have the capacity to penetrate, corrode, crack and break down the building bricks of human life within the body, through generating cancer. It can kill, slowly and undetectably at first, with the effects of DU invisible for the first 4 years of exposure.
According to Dr Durakovic, a former US army colonel and current professor of medicine, in the course of one year, 1 milligram of uranium emits 390 million alpha particles, 780 million beta particles and associated gamma rays. This is over one billion high-energy, ionizing, radioactive particles and rays which can produce extensive biological damage .biological warfare fought out across the inner terrains of the human body: attacking the ovaries, lungs, lymph nodes, kidneys, breast, blood, bones, brain, stomach and fetuses. There are over 1000 different cancer types known to medical science. Cancer means mutated cells. The body's immune system kicks in to combat the cancerous cells and in doing so begins to attack the whole body. White blood cells do the fighting. They're designed to attack any foreign cells, or any foreign object entering the body, be it viruses, mutated cells or even organs such as mismatched transplanted kidneys. As cancer spreads through the body, the immune system strategy is to try to defeat it. Cancer cells divide rapidly, overtake other cells and can spread faster than the immune system can react. Death envelops when cancerous cells reach a critical mass in the body, attacking and multiplying through mutating every cell around them.
An estimated 300-800 TONS of DU were pounded into Iraq during the 1990 Gulf war.
Lab Rat Nation
DU emerged in the 70s as the US.s Cold War weapon of choice . cheap, abundant and devastatingly effective in busting new top-line Soviet tanks - US manufacturers had found a captive market and a sustainable enemy.
DU is the modern tyrant's multipurpose must, indispensable for armor-piercing bullets, casing for bombs, shielding on tanks, counter weights and ground penetrators on missiles, Cluster Bomb fragments that penetrate armor and anti-personnel mines.
The destructive effects of DU have been known to scientists, military strategists and politicians for over 60 years.
A 1943 U.S. War Department proposed the 'Use of Radioactive Materials as a Military Weapon', defining it as:
1) a terrain contaminating material, the radioactive product of which would be spread on the ground and would affect personnel. 2) As a gas warfare instrument, the material would be ground into particles of microscopic size to form dust and smoke and distributed by a ground-fired projectile, land vehicle, or aerial bombs
The US government began experimenting on and poisoning its own subjects long before its military and economic warfare experiments ignited Iraq's already internal and external war savaged environment. Research by Damacio Lopez, Executive Director, International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST) features a 1994 Interim Report of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments which described intentional releases of radioactive materials into populated areas prior to 1963 as "Experiments involving intentional environmental releases of radiation that
(A) were designed to test human health effects of ionizing radiation; or (B) were designed to test the extent of human exposure to ionizing radiation.
These releases were generally related to radiation warfare tests, the gathering of intelligence, and the development of instruments. Four such tests were conducted at Los Alamos, New Mexico, however the Department Of Energy reports that the number of such tests approximates 250.
The majority of DU shot in the 1990 Kuwait/US war and in this US/UK war was concentrated on Basra and Baghdad respectively. 1000 to 2000 metric tons are estimated to have been used by US and to a lesser extent British forces, in the 2003 Gulf War. (Figure from Dr Jawad Al Ali)
Sitting in Basra's Talimi Teaching Hospital Dr Jawad Al Ali, a renowned cancer specialist, talks measuredly about his research into the affects of DU and cancer cases in Iraq's radioactive governorate of Basra.
'The rate of cancer here has multiplied 15 times since the last Gulf war. In 2002 we had 644 deaths from cancer in Basra. We have approximately 123 patients per 100,000 of the population. (Basra's is Iraq's second largest city with an estimated population of 2-3 million). People living near the nuclear reactors are affected the worst, but overall, its estimated that 1000-2000 tons of Depleted Uranium were inside Iraqi cities and in west Basra and between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. A10 planes were dropping it, and Apaches. Abu Khaseeb, North Rumeilla, and the airport were particularly hard hit. The results of the DU used in this war will not be seen for another 4-5 years - the incubation period for cancer'.
The staff of Talimi hospital theselves have not escaped the DU seep. 13 doctors and nurses at Talimi have contracted cancer since 1990 - Breast, testicular and lymphoma. And in terms of US aggression, in 1990 the hospital itself was the target of a US missile strike which saw its intensive care unit crushed by shells and rockets, killing four patients and burying a specialist doctor alive under a collapsed ceiling.
'Workers smelting old tanks and vehicles in Khor Zubier are known to have contracted leukemia' Tells me Dr Jawad. Hardly suprising, keening over a hot radioactivity accelerating poisonous metal slop, breathing in re-energized particles of depleted uranium all day. But, it's scrap metal, it sells on the market and it brings in the cash to feed families in a country staggering under 70% unemployment. Pity those particular workers are unlikely to ever see their children grow up.
'DU is the cause of these cancers but its difficult to prove', explains Dr Jawad. 'Our patients attest to the fact that cancer rates are skyrocketing. There is three times more DU in the air than is present naturally. Water and food are the key contaminated sources, and also the 're-suspension of particles' - i.e the re-release of DU into the air through strong winds or the digging up of DU.'
'In Gurna we have found cancer clusters, a director of a school plus two teachers are suffering from Luekemia there. We know of one person, Doug Rokke, an American, who was decontaminating tanks. He received 5000 times the proper dose of DU. He now has slurred speech and dizziness, no cancer as yet, but, he has been affected'.
Indeed, Doug Rokke, ex-director of the Pentagon's depleted uranium project, former professor of environmental science at Jacksonville University and onetime US army colonel, was recruited by the US department of defense to handle the post-first- Gulf war depleted uranium desert clean-up. He told Sunday Herald reporters last March, 'A nation's military personnel cannot willfully contaminate any other nation, cause harm to persons and the environment and then ignore the consequences of their actions. To do so is a crime against humanity. We must do what is right for the citizens of the world: ban DU.'
Dr Jawad goes on to describe the threat of DU to the most vulnerable sector of society. 'Children in particular are susceptible to DU poisoning. They have a much higher absorption rate as their blood is being used to build and nourish their bones and they have a lot of soft tissues. Bone cancer and leukemia used to be diseases affecting them the most, however, cancer of the lymphoma, which can develop anywhere on the body, and has rarely been seen before the age of 12 is now also common.'
'Two strange phenomena have come about in Basra which I have never seen before. The first is double and triple cancers in one patient. For example, leukemia and cancer of the stomach. We had one patient with 2 cancers - one in his stomach and kidney. Months later, primary cancer was developing in his other kidney . he had three different cancer types'. The second is the clustering of cancer in families. We have 58 families here with more than one person affected by cancer. Dr Yasin, a general Surgeon here has two uncles, a sister and cousin affected with cancer. Dr Mazen, another specialist, has six family members suffering from cancer. My wife has nine members of her family with cancer'.
Dr Jawad looks exhausted. He slowly toys with his pen. 'The occupation forces should have protected the stores near the nuclear reactor in Baghdad, in Twaitha.' The case was well documented by Greenpeace in May. Post regime fall, impoverished, mostly squatter families were using barrels meant for toxic nuclear waste to store water for washing, cooking and drinking. 'They should have known to protect the place but they can now say, 'people stole the barrels, its their fault and they spread the radioactive materials'. They will be held responsible for DU contamination, not the forces. And I think they did this on purpose, this is my opinion, just my opinion'. It makes sense. In April last year, the Pentagon announced that the US government had no intention of conducting a post war clean up of DU, believing that that there was no evidence for long-term affects of DU. The 200,000 US soldiers suffering from mystery fatigue, memory loss, and chronic muscle and joint pain aka Gulf War Syndrome, not being evidence enough on their own soil, and the eyeless children, multiple cancer bearing and leukemia fighting victims filling hospital wards in Basra and Baghdad and other war-scarred Iraqi cities, are too not evidence enough to seriously confront the effects of the radioactive killer.
For Dr Jawad, the constant cancer cases (many of which go unreported he stresses) are a spiraling emergency which needs to be investigated promptly, efficiently and accurately soon. 'For the past 13 years we were unable to test people properly, we didn't have sufficient or appropriate equipment. WHO teams were banned from visiting us and the US took away parts for our MRE machines and our computer systems, saying that they could be used for making weapons of mass destruction. We really need special sensitive tissue testing equipment, but under the sanctions, this was unavailable. And it's not just lack of equipment, we need physicists and specialist doctors, people who can help conduct tests and do analysis. A woman from Britain came to visit me and said that doctors from The Royal College of Physicians would be coming to conduct studies. But noone has come. We were accused of spreading propaganda for Saddam before the war. When I have gone to do talks I have had people accuse me of being pro-Saddam. Sometimes I feel afraid to even talk. Regime people have been stealing my data and calling it their own, and using it for their own agendas. The Kuwaitis banned me from entering Kuwait - we were accused of being Saddam supporters.'
Dr Jawad and his patients have suffered acutely from the kill of the ecocidal tons of nuclear weapons deployed in the last two gulf wars. The killing continues. War casualties continue to be hospitalized, expire, and pile up in the graveyards of Basra. Some of the alive are slowly dying already, from the first breath of heavily radiated air breathed after The Fall. Others are set to bring deformed babies into the world, with crownless skulls or fused fingers, while whole families watch listlessly as taut bed-bound members reel from the violence of the poison in their veins, in their flesh.
There are weapons of mass destruction everywhere in Iraq. They were made in America, bombed over here, and lie left vitiating in the dessert, beside highways, in demolished homes, rubble buildings; a fine murder dust on the breeze, upon the water, inside the roasting tissues of a chicken on a spit in the street, inside the bodies of bone-eating cancer bearing children, or inside the wombs of women sick with dizziness - just pregnancy or poisoning? Their birth-days can only tell. But one thing is certain in occupied Iraq circa 2004, the UK and US governments are guilty of deploying in effect, biological warfare against the Iraqi civilian population. And the killing continues. The killing continues.
Resources
Countries using DU or contaminated by DU according to Damacio Lopez, Executive Director, International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST): Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bahrain, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Iraq, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Kuwait, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, Panama, Pakistan, Poland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States and Yugoslavia.
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/du-weapon.htm - The Use of the Radioactive Material Depleted Uranium U-238 (DU) as a Military Weapon - By Damacio Lopez, Executive Director, International Depleted Uranium Study Team (IDUST)
http://www.afghandufund.org/dubasics1.htm - Basics about Uranium and Depleted Uranium (DU) and Its Impact on Human Health by Dr. Durakovic
http://www.merip.org/mer/mer215/215_peterson.html - Middle East Report: Depleted Uranium Haunts Kosovo and Iraq - Scott Peterson
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=cache:eRonjt3Mw24J:www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/pdf/duiq03.pdf+2003+depleted+uranium+basra&hl=en&start=9&ie=UTF-8 . assessment of Depleted Uranium Use in the 2003 Iraq War by 1991 Gulf War veteran Dan Fahey
http://www.peacelink.it/tematiche/disarmo/u238/documenti/marouf_du.html - The Environmental and Health Effects of Deployment of Depleted Uranium During 1991 by US and UK Armies in Iraq . DR B.A Marouf http://www.afsc.org/pwork/0305/030507.htm - US Forces' Use of Depleted Uranium is Illegal - by Neil Mackay
http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/dissgw.html#USREJIQC L - Current Issues - Depleted Uranium Weapons in the Gulf Wars (1991, 2003)
-------- india / pakistan
Nuclear Inquiry Heightens Divisions Within Pakistan
January 25, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/asia/25ASSE.html?pagewanted=all
KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan. 24 - Over the next several days, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, is expected to impugn members of a revered group central to Pakistan's national pride - the nuclear scientists who built the atomic bombs that deter its neighbor and rival India.
Taking such a step is expected to be among the most treacherous tasks General Musharraf has faced since reversing Pakistan's support for the Taliban in September 2001 and becoming an American ally in the campaign against terrorism.
The general, who seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, is expected to announce that a handful of Pakistani nuclear scientists - a group long considered the pride of the nation - sold nuclear technology to Iran in the late 1980's without government permission. On Friday, General Musharraf said that "some individuals" appeared to have been involved in the transfer of technology, but he did not give names.
General Musharraf is also expected to say the scientists acted without the knowledge of Pakistan's famed and feared military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.
On Friday, General Musharraf said that "some individuals" appeared to have been involved in the transfer of technology for personal gain, but he did not give names.
The problem for the general is that few people are likely to believe him. If he files criminal charges against the scientist at the center of suspicion, Abdul Qadeer Khan, considered the father of the Pakistani atomic bomb, he could open himself to a political savaging from Islamist and secular political opponents.
In addition to involving issues at the heart of Pakistan's self-image, the situation highlights the central split that has festered in Pakistani society since the country's birth in 1947 - civilians versus soldiers.
"The biggest question is how these nuclear scientists could do this without the government and the intelligence knowing," said Rasul Baksh Rais, a Pakistani political analyst and professor. "Generally, the people I speak to are skeptical."
When General Musharraf, or one of his top aides, makes the announcement, his opponents will be watching to see whether the generals walk free and the low-level scientists pay.
The investigation, to date, centers on three men, according to interviews with government officials and news media reports.
Pakistani investigators have concluded that at least two scientists - Dr. Khan and an aide, Dr. Muhammad Farooq - shared technology with Iran, The Washington Post reported Saturday. A senior Pakistani official said Saturday that the investigation was continuing and no conclusions had been reached.
Circumstantial evidence exists that Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the commander of the Pakistani army at the time, at least tacitly approved of such transfers. Senior Pakistani officials have said that Dr. Khan has told investigators that General Beg approved the transfer of technology to Iran. Former government officials have said that General Beg proposed forming a strategic alliance with Iran and, according to one account, selling it nuclear technology.
In an interview in November, General Beg denied transferring technology to Iran. Dr. Khan made the same denial through associates. Relatives of Dr. Farooq insist that he would never have acted without government permission.
Political opponents of General Musharraf predict that General Beg and Dr. Khan will go unpunished. General Musharraf, they say, must maintain the loyalty of the army, his main power base, at all costs. Prosecuting Dr. Khan, a national hero would be politically too dangerous.
The way the investigation has been conducted reflects bias, they say. Dr. Farooq has been detained and has not contacted his family since Nov. 22, his relatives said. Dr. Khan has been repeatedly questioned but not detained, a senior official said. General Beg has not been questioned.
The three men could not be more different. Dr. Khan, tall and voluble, is aggressive, wealthy and hungry for publicity, associates say. They describe him as a proud "techno-nationalist" who dismissed American nonproliferation efforts as an attempt by a small group of wealthy, white countries to keep atomic weapons for themselves.
General Beg, burly and soft-spoken, is viewed as somewhat eccentric. Since retiring from the army, he has run a nonprofit group called Friends - Foundation for Research on International Development and Security - and has published hard-line Islamist articles. "The Muslim World is facing unprecedented oppression and injustice because their struggle for liberation has been labeled as terrorism," he wrote in an article last November.
Dr. Farooq, who is quiet, was described by his family as a recluse who read poetry, drove a Korean-built sedan and lived in a simple four-bedroom house with his wife and five children. But at the country's top nuclear site he held an important position: head of overseas procurement.
Mahmud Ali Durrani, a retired general and analyst, scoffed at that notion and predicted that General Musharraf would hold anyone who broke the law accountable. "The military is not a holy cow," he said.
For average Pakistanis, the scandal represents yet another disappointment. Talat Masood, a retired general and analyst, said the investigation represented the fall of another Pakistani institution - its nuclear program. In the 1990's, when democracy appeared to have taken hold in the country, two prime ministers, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, were forced from office in disgrace.
Islamist parties are expected to play on another sentiment - that the charges have been manufactured by the United States and General Musharraf is America's lackey. Secular political parties are expected to attack any ruling on culpability, saying it is too harsh on the scientists and too easy on the generals. Both groups are expected to urge Pakistanis to direct their anger at the country's generals, not its scientists.
----
Pakistan Scientists' Detentions Protested
January 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear-Detentions.html
RAWALPINDI, Pakistan (AP) -- Hundreds of religious hard-liners rallied Sunday in support of Pakistani nuclear scientists, hailing them as ``national heroes'' and denouncing their detentions over allegations they profited from selling nuclear technology to Iran.
Supporters of the radical Islamic opposition coalition, Mutahida Majlis-e-Amal, trailed a truck stacked with megaphones through the city center of Rawalpindi, near the capital Islamabad, bringing traffic to a halt. They held banners reading: ``Stop terror against national heroes'' and ``Atomic power saved Pakistan.''
Speakers railed against President Gen. Pervez Musharraf's government, saying it had caved in to pressure from abroad, including the United States, by leveling accusations against scientists who helped produce the Muslim world's first nuclear bomb as a deterrent against Pakistan's larger, nuclear-armed rival India.
``We will never accept the blame being leveled against the nuclear scientists,'' said MMA leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed. ``The nuclear heroes made these nuclear weapons for us -- that's why India never dared to touch us.''
Eight scientists and administrators from the Khan Research Laboratories, a nuclear weapons facility named after its founder Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, are being held for questioning over nuclear proliferation allegations that surfaced after admissions made by Iran to the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Pakistan's government denies it authorized any transfers of weapons technology to other countries -- including Iran, Libya or North Korea -- but says individuals may have done so for their own profit.
The News, Pakistan's leading English-language daily, reported Sunday that foreign bank accounts with funds from sales of nuclear technology to Iran have been traced to at least two senior Pakistani scientists.
The report, citing unnamed government sources, said one nuclear scientist held tens of millions of dollars in financial and real estate holdings in Pakistan and abroad, including Dubai. The report did not name any of the scientists.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan declined to comment on the report, only saying investigators were trying to determine ``if some individuals had pursued personal financial gains.''
At the rally, Ahmed dismissed the report. ``Even if Dr. Khan has millions of dollars in his accounts we don't care. ... He's a national hero, we love him,'' Ahmed told the crowd.
Ahmed's MMA, is a powerful coalition of religious parties that prospered in 2002 Parliamentary elections by opposing Musharraf's support of the U.S.-led war on terrorism.
Khan has long been regarded as a national hero and the father of Pakistan's nuclear program. He has not been detained during the ``debriefings'' of scientists, but has been questioned and is confined to the capital Islamabad.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraq WMD Flap May Bolster U.N. Position
January 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-WMD-Retreat.html
Whatever the political backlash in election-year America, the U.S. retreat on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction signals a victory in the larger fight to control the deadliest of weapons. Sanctions and inspections, the United Nations and global teamwork appear to have worked in curbing Iraq's ambitions.
In the lead-up to the U.S. invasion last March, David Kay said war was the only answer. ``If you want to disarm Iraq ... there is no alternative,'' wrote the man who would become chief U.S. weapons hunter.
But by Sunday, after leaving that job, Kay had concluded that years of earlier U.N. inspections had ``got rid of'' weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ``The weapons do not exist,'' he told National Public Radio.
That finding, if accepted in the corridors of power in Washington, may help revive a unified, U.N.-led strategy on arms proliferation, a strategy in which economic pressure, diplomacy and inspectors supplant the threat of unilateral U.S. attack.
In North Korea, Iran and wherever else WMD ambitions may grow, Kay's words could help clear the way again for a peaceful approach to arms control.
Official U.S. acceptance may come slowly, however.
In a futile bid for U.N. support for war last Feb. 5, Colin Powell flatly told the Security Council that Iraq was making prohibited arms -- with a ``conservative estimate'' of 100 to 500 tons of chemical weapons on hand.
By this weekend, the U.S. secretary of state had added only two little words, wondering aloud to reporters, ``What was it? One hundred tons, 500 tons or zero tons?''
``Zero tons,'' or close to it, was always a strong possibility in the eyes of experts who knew the record of U.N. inspections. But Bush administration officials, in their overtures to war, never acknowledged it.
Those U.N. inspections had unfolded in phases:
--After the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. teams, sometimes helped, sometimes hindered by Baghdad, dismantled its nuclear weapons program and destroyed Iraqi chemical arms.
--In the mid-1990s, a key defector led U.N. inspectors to documents proving the existence of a biological weapons program. But the Iraqis had quietly destroyed the weapons themselves in the early 1990s, he said. An Iraqi internal communication, recently uncovered, supports that.
--Until 1998, inspectors dismantled more arms-making equipment, but never again found weapons stockpiles. The inspectors were withdrawn in 1998 in a dispute over CIA spies' infiltration of the U.N. operation. Baghdad was balking at allowing the U.N. teams into sensitive Iraqi leadership sites.
By 2002, Washington contended the Iraqis, in the absence of inspectors, were again producing banned weapons. But it offered no hard evidence, only assertions in intelligence reports and speeches.
As U.S. troops massed for an invasion late in 2002, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein allowed U.N. monitors to return. In some 700 inspections from November 2002 to last March, they reported finding no evidence of revived weapons programs.
The U.N. Security Council intended to continue to monitor Iraq's defense establishment for years to come, but the U.S.-British invasion aborted that unprecedented plan for intensive arms control.
In the nine months since the war, no uncoventional weapons have been found. Instead, Kay said last October, his 1,500-member Iraq Survey Group came across signs of Iraqi ``intentions'' and ``capabilities'' to make WMD. President Bush echoed that in his State of the Union address last week, speaking vaguely of Iraqi ``weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.''
Once again, however, no hard evidence was presented for international verification. In fact, an Associated Press investigation in Baghdad found no support for a central assertion of Kay's October report -- that an Iraqi scientist, now dead, had been doing research possibly related to nuclear bombs.
To many supporters of multilateral arms control, the Iraq invasion was, in a sense, an attack also on the idea of relying on global unity -- and not U.S. military force -- to face the perils of the nuclear age.
``Iraq is a major turning point in how to deal with WMD,'' Patricia Lewis, chief U.N. disarmament researcher, said as Kay's experts fanned out across Iraq last summer.
Now, more and more, eyes will turn from Iraq to Washington, to see how the Bush administration deals with the weapons that weren't there.
One test will come as the CIA decides when and how to issue the weapons hunters' final report. Will that report, sure to undercut the chief rationale for the U.S. war, come before or after the first Tuesday in November, the day of the U.S. presidential election?
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Charles J. Hanley has covered weapons of mass destruction issues for more than 20 years and reported on the Iraq crisis since mid-2002.
--------
Powell Voices Doubts About Iraqi Weapons
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45117-2004Jan24.html
TBILISI, Georgia. Jan. 24 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who urged the United Nations to endorse a preemptive war to strip Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction, conceded Saturday that Saddam Hussein's government may have no longer had such munitions.
One day after David Kay, the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, said he believes Hussein had not stockpiled unconventional weapons for years, Powell told reporters that his prominent Feb. 5 argument was based on "what our intelligence community believed was credible."
"What is the open question is how many stocks they had, if any, and if they had any, where did they go? And if they didn't have any, then why wasn't that known beforehand?" Powell told reporters aboard his plane en route to Sunday's presidential inauguration of Mikheil Saakashvili.
Powell said in defense of the decision to go to war that the Bush administration was not simply troubled by the conviction that Iraq possessed unconventional weapons and development programs, but also that Hussein had refused to answer U.N. questions about his government's activities on the subject.
"We were not only saying we thought they had them," Powell said, "but we had questions that needed to be answered. What was it: 500 tons, 100 tons or zero tons? Was it so many liters of anthrax, 10 times that amount, or nothing? What we demanded of Iraq was that they account for all of this and they prove the negative of our hypothesis."
In response, Powell said, "all they did was make statements without proving it to our satisfaction. This is a regime that never lost its intention to have such programs and have such weapons."
Powell's widely watched presentation to the U.N. Security Council represented the heart of the administration case for a war that many governments then and now believe was unjustified on weapons grounds.
Months of investigation in Iraq have failed to support what Powell described Saturday as his "good, solid, comprehensive presentation" of the intelligence community's conclusions.
President Bush, too, has backed away from his assertions about Iraq's weapons programs, referring in Tuesday's State of the Union address to materials hidden from the U.N. inspector and "weapons-of-mass-destruction-related program activities."
On Wednesday, Vice President Cheney told National Public Radio that the administration has not given up looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "It's going to take some additional considerable period of time in order to look in all the cubbyholes and ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you'd expect to find something like that," he said.
A senior administration official told reporters in Davos, Switzerland, on Saturday that the "jury is still out" on the accuracy of intelligence reports that said Hussein possessed such weapons. "We won't know until we've gotten through . . . interviewing all of the people who were involved in those programs."
Staff writer Mike Allen in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this report.
----
'Little point' in WMD search
Peter Beaumont
Sunday January 25, 2004
The Observer
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1130804,00.html
Pentagon and CIA officials appear to have accepted that there is little point in searching for weapons stockpiles in Iraq, and will now concentrate on auditing Iraqi claims of their destruction.
The sharp change in emphasis by the CIA-directed Iraq Survey Group follows the admission on Friday by its outgoing leader, Dr David Kay, that his 1,000-man organisation had not found evidence of stockpiles, and that he now believed they had never existed.
The CIA has announced that Kay will be replaced by Charles Duelfer, a former senior weapons inspector, who has said that in the past that the Bush administration's prewar allegations on Iraq's weapons were 'far off the mark'. 'My goal is to find out what happened on the ground. What was the status of the Iraqi weapons programme? What was their game plan? What were the goals of the regime? To find out what is the ground truth,' said Duelfer.
In a deeply embarrassing reverse for both the Bush administration and Tony Blair, Duelfer indicated on Friday that he regarded his primary task as attempting to reconstruct a 'complete, credible and openly demonstrable picture of what Iraq had, what their programmes were and where they were headed' before the war.
Although CIA and White House officials told the Washington Post that this did not represent a 'redirection of the search', officials with the UN's former Iraq weapons inspection agency believe it is nothing short of a return to the approach of Hans Blix and his pre-war UN inspection teams, who were pushed aside in the rush to war.
Duelfer has already laid out his stall, in the Washington Post in the autumn when he remarked on 'the apparent absence of existing weapons stocks'.
He wrote then that although he still considered the Iraqi regime as posing a theoretical future threat over WMD: that 'clearly this is not the immediate threat many assumed before the war'.
-------- mideast
War Party Puts Syria in Its Sights
by Jim Lobe,
January 25, 2004
http://antiwar.com/lobe/?articleid=1780
Retired Gen. Anthony Zinni began warning that ousting Saddam Hussein, let alone invading Iraq, risked destabilizing the entire Middle East back in 1998, when he led U.S. Central Command and testified against the Iraq Liberation Act that made "regime change" official US policy.
And just six months before the actual invasion last March, in October 2002, he told the annual Fletcher Conference on National Security Strategy, "we are about to do something that will ignite a fuse in this region that we will rue the day we ever started."
While President George W. Bush tried hard to project a sense of confidence and control concerning Iraq and the larger Middle East in his State of the Union Address on Tuesday, a careful look at the news this week suggested that Zinni's fears were not unfounded.
Talk of possible civil war in Iraq finally reached the front pages of US newspapers, while reports that at least some elements of the administration are pushing for military action against Hezbollah in Lebanon and targets in Syria surfaced for the first time since last summer.
At the same time, by omitting any reference to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in his speech, Bush indicated he has no intention of seriously pressing either party toward a cease-fire, let alone peace talks designed to meet the goal of the "roadmap": securing Palestinian statehood by next year.
In other words, the outlook for the region between the eastern Mediterranean and Iran 10 months after US troops launched their drive from Kuwait to Iraq is for more - possibly a lot more - turbulence.
Long before this week, demands by Iraqi Kurds for virtually total autonomy, including the retention of their own "pesh merga" force, in a new, federal Iraq have been drawing grim warnings from neighboring Turkey, Iran and Syria - which all have large and restive Kurdish populations.
But last week's rejection - by Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, Ayatollah Ali al-Husseini al-Sistani - of a US plan to transfer sovereignty to a transitional government that will not be directly elected by the Iraqi people, has brought home the message that whatever progress Washington is making in suppressing the insurgency in the "Sunni Triangle" of central Iraq could very quickly be overwhelmed by the lack of a credible political strategy.
"CIA officers in Iraq are warning that the country may be on a path to civil war," was the lead sentence in a front-page article in the Philadelphia Inquirer Thursday.
The article, written by veteran Knight-Ridder reporters who have consistently led the mainstream media in uncovering secrets the Bush administration would rather not have exposed, quoted senior US officials as saying that failure to satisfy demands for direct elections could spark an uprising by much of the heretofore friendly Shi'a population, who make up 60 percent or more of Iraq's 24 million people.
That message was underscored by the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of Shiites in protest demonstrations over the past week - a display of discipline and organization that clearly surprised the administration.
If the Shi'a turn against the U.S.-led coalition, "this would be like losing the Buddhists in Vietnam," Anthony Cordesman, a Mideast expert at the conservative Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) here, told the Financial Times Friday, referring to the US war against the Asian country in the 1960s and '70s.
"It would mean losing the war."
However unattractive that option seems, holding the direct elections Sistani is demanding - which almost certainly would bring a Shi'a-dominated government to power - is also considered distinctly dangerous.
"We can't simply walk away and let the Shi'a dictate the shape of the new government," warned John Hamre, deputy defense secretary under Bush's predecessor Bill Clinton, earlier this week, "because that will likely unleash a civil war in Iraq."
Hamre, who as CSIS' president led an independent task force to Iraq last August to review the situation at Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld's behest, described the administration as "caught in a box."
A box with more than a few sharp edges, too. Sistani and his followers have made clear that they, as well as the Sunnis, strongly oppose a federal system that would give Kurds the autonomy they seek, particularly if the northerners were to claim oil-rich Kirkuk as theirs.
Deadly clashes between the pesh merga and Turkomen and Arab residents in Kirkuk and parts of the northern Sunni Triangle have been a constant, albeit under-reported, feature of the landscape for months, but they might only be a warm-up to a much bigger struggle, unless the administration prevails on the Kurds to stand down.
The fact that Washington has permitted the pesh merga to retain its arms has not helped matters.
Meanwhile, tensions between Shi'as and Sunnis, who have dominated Iraqi governments since independence, have mounted steadily since Dec. 9, when three Sunnis were killed in an explosion at a Baghdad mosque.
While Washington says it agrees with Sistani that direct elections are best, it insists there is not enough time to hold them before the scheduled Jun. 30 turnover, a date that was decided more out of concern for Bush's reelection campaign than by a commitment to build viable democratic institutions in Iraq.
If the complicated "caucus" system that Washington proposed in November will not work, the administration appears poised to back the creation of an enlarged Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) as the transitional government, although there is no agreement on how its members would be chosen.
Washington hopes that Sistani, who has indicated he will abide by the recommendations of U.N. experts as to how to proceed, will be willing to deal.
In this context, the administration appears increasingly frantic about involving the United Nations, which plans to send a team to Iraq to assess the situation next week.
While it hopes the world body can devise an agreement that will keep all parties calm and its transition timetable on track, Washington also clearly sees it as a convenient scapegoat if things go bad.
Not content with the mounting signs of civil war in Iraq, however, the Pentagon, presumably with the help of Vice President Dick Cheney's office, was reported this week by Jane's Intelligence Digest to be drawing up plans for carrying out raids on Hezbollah targets in Lebanon and Syria, in what would be a notable expansion of Bush's "war on terror."
Some of the same personnel who worked in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP), which reviewed intelligence for evidence allegedly linking Saddam to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs before the Iraq invasion, have reportedly been working on a similar effort regarding Syria.
David Warmer, a neo-conservative who has long advocated destabilizing Damascus through Lebanon and Iraq, joined Cheney's staff as his Mideast adviser last September.
An administration ally, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, also suggested this week that Iraq's alleged WMD stockpiles were transported to Syria before the war.
Most observers here believe the administration is unlikely to authorize such operations before the November presidential elections, if only because it would fuel voter concerns and Democratic charges that the president's conduct of the "war on terror" has been reckless and far too costly in blood, treasure and alliances.
They suggest the reports are being deliberately circulated to intimidate Syria's Assad regime into complying with a series of US demands, including cutting off aid to Hezbollah and Palestinian groups.
Jane's noted, however, that US attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon could well destabilize that country only a decade after its last civil war.
--------
Syria Scoffs at U.S. Claim It Has Iraqi Weapons
January 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-syria-usa.html
DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syria brushed aside Sunday U.S. accusations that it has Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a cover story for what it called U.S. failure in Iraq.
``This (allegation) is meant to mislead (the public opinion). So long as there were no weapons of mass destruction (found) in Iraq itself how can they be in Syria?'' Information Minister Ahmad al-Hassan told reporters.
U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said Wednesday there was some concern Iraqi weapons of mass destruction had gone to Syria.
David Kay, the leader of the U.S. team in charge of the search for banned weapons in Iraq who resigned Friday, told Britain's Sunday Telegraph newspaper that he had uncovered evidence that unspecified materials had been moved to Syria shortly before the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
``We are not talking about a large stockpile of weapons,'' he told the newspaper.
``But we know from some of the interrogations of former Iraqi officials that a lot of material went to Syria before the war, including some components of Saddam's WMD program. Precisely what went to Syria, and what has happened to it, is a major issue that needs to be resolved,'' Kay said.
Syria, which vehemently opposed the U.S.-led war in neighboring Iraq, has repeatedly denied U.S. charges it has its own weapons of mass destruction programs.
``They are seeking to cover their failure,'' Hassan said after a meeting with a delegation of Iraqi journalists and artists in Damascus.
Bush, seeking re-election in November with Iraq high on the campaign agenda, ordered U.S.-led forces to oust Iraq's former president after accusing Saddam of possessing chemical and biological arms and trying to build a nuclear weapon.
However, Kay said when he resigned Friday he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.
Hassan urged a swift end for the occupation of Iraq and a role for the United Nations to allow fellow Arab Iraqis to elect a national government.
He urged Iraqis to safeguard their country's unity and said all Arab nations oppose the division of the occupied Arab state.
-------- missile defense
Clark: Bush Too Focused on Missile Defense
January 25, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Clark.html
MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Democratic presidential hopeful Wesley Clark on Sunday said President Bush's preoccupation with a missile defense program distracted him from the threat of al-Qaida before the 2001 terrorist attacks.
``One of the reasons we had 9/11 is because this president spent too much time worried about national missile defense and not enough time worried about the greatest threat to this country,'' Clark told supporters and undecided voters in a crowded living room two days before New Hampshire's primary.
``He was told when he came to office that al-Qaida was the greatest threat and he didn't pay attention,'' Clark said.
Asked whether he would continue Bush's emphasis on missile defense, Clark said he would have to study the issue.
'``I don't know if it will work and I don't know if it's worth the money. What I'll do is take an objective look at it and make a decision,'' he said. ``I'm the best qualified person in this race to make that decision.''
That statement was one of several by Clark claiming an advantage over his rivals, none of whom he mentioned by name.
Asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the retired general said he is the only candidate who has used diplomacy to end a war. He also said working with the leaders of 19 countries as NATO's supreme allied commander puts him in the best position to restore America's reputation worldwide.
``George Bush can't do it. No other candidate in the race knows how to do it. I've done it and that's the way we've won in the wars in the Balkans and Kosovo,'' he said.
In the last days before Tuesday's voting, Clark has been following in the footsteps of fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton, whose second-place finish in New Hampshire in 1992 started his drive to the White House.
On Saturday, Clark campaigned in a general store where a sign commemorates Clinton's 1992 visit. The host of Sunday's house party was George Bruno, who held a similar gathering for Clinton just before that year's primary.
``We're hoping history repeats itself,'' said Bruno, former ambassador to Belize.
Keith Miles, of Deering, said he's seen nearly all the Democrats and is deciding between Clark, Howard Dean and John Kerry.
``I like (Clark) but I worry about his political experience and being able to get his programs passed,'' Miles said. ``But he's immensely intelligent and I think his heart is in the right place.''
-------- terrorism
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Nuclear Market: An Array of Vendors
January 25, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/middleeast/25DIPL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 24 - The bluntly worded conclusion by the chief American arms inspector in Iraq, David Kay, that Saddam Hussein "got rid" of his unconventional weapons long before the Iraq invasion last year underscores a point that has become clear to intelligence experts in the past few months: President Bush moved first, and most decisively, against a country that posed a smaller proliferation risk than North Korea, Libya and Iran or even one of America's allies, Pakistan.
While Dr. Kay's team has come up largely empty-handed so far, contributing to his decision to resign on Friday, a team of American experts visiting North Korea were shown what appeared to be at least a rudimentary ability to produce plutonium - though they were not able to confirm that North Korea spent 2003 churning out new weapons.
Meanwhile, investigators crawling through Libya's newly opened nuclear weapons program have uncovered a remarkably sophisticated network of nuclear suppliers, spanning the globe from Malaysia to Dubai.
On Friday, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, personally acknowledged what his government has slowly begun to admit over the past month: Pakistani nuclear scientists set up a nuclear bazaar that stretches back 15 years, selling sophisticated technology for enriching uranium for what General Musharraf called "personal financial gain."
In retrospect, as even some of the administration's own intelligence experts now acknowledge, each of those programs was more advanced than was Iraq's, and consequently posed a greater threat of passing weapons and technology to terrorists.
Speaking to reporters on his plane on Saturday on the way to Tbilisi, Georgia, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that Dr. Kay's comments left open the question of whether weapons stockpiles existed in Iraq, but not the question of Saddam Hussein's abilities and intentions to produce and use such weapons. As a result, he asserted, the comments did not undercut the rationale for going to war.
Most important, Mr. Powell said, it was clear that the Iraqis were trying to exhaust their enemies, stretch out the process and have sanctions lifted so they could return to their intention of making weapons.
But the information also shows that the National Intelligence Estimate, produced in 2002 by the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies, significantly overestimated Iraq's current abilities. The document provided the rationale for going to war quickly, without waiting for the United Nations Security Council to become convinced of the threat.
Intelligence officials now say that comparable assessments understated the progress Iran and Libya were making in enriching uranium and missed many of the signals that Pakistan's scientists had provided their designs to Iran and Libya. To this day, the intelligence agencies are arguing over what exactly the North Koreans are able to accomplish, facing a difficult task of sorting out what is boast and what is real.
Yet of all these threats, Mr. Bush determined, by his own account, that the combination of Saddam Hussein's ambitions and his potential to obtain unconventional weapons some day in the near future posed the greater threat. His critics say he was motivated by settling unfinished business; his defenders say it would have been foolish to wait, only to discover too late that Mr. Hussein could unleash hidden weapons.
Mr. Bush and his aides are still defending their warnings about mobile biological laboratories, active nuclear programs and the like. The president defended his decision all week, with no apologies but using wording that was far more hedged than the claims he made last year. In a carefully worded assessment in his State of the Union address, he said Dr. Kay's group had found evidence of "W.M.D.-related program activities," words drawn straight from Dr. Kay's interim report to Congress. But he avoided any mention of Dr. Kay's broader conclusions at the time, that Iraq had no active stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons, much less the chief inspector's more recent conclusion that it was highly unlikely that such stockpiles would ever be found.
Traveling the country this week, Mr. Bush made clear that he had no regrets. He told visitors to the White House that he still believed that eventually weapons of mass destruction would be found in Iraq.
In public, he told audiences in Ohio, Arizona and New Mexico this week that Mr. Hussein was a "brutal dictator" who gassed his own people and set up gulags and rape rooms, and deserved the fate he met - a line that drew big applause at every stop. Mr. Bush also argued that Mr. Hussein's fall was making other nations with nuclear ambitions come clean.
"Nine months of intense discussion with Qaddafi worked because the word of this country matters," Mr. Bush said in Roswell, N.M., on Thursday, referring to the Libyan leader, Muammar el-Qaddafi. "When you say something, you better believe it. People now trust the word of America."
But America's allies and competitors are likely to interpret Dr. Kay's findings very differently: that America's word - or at least its intelligence findings - cannot be fully trusted.
Dr. Kay concluded, for example, that Mr. Hussein once had a very active nuclear program - before the 1991 Persian Gulf war. But along with the chemical and biological programs, it was virtually halted, it now appears, by the combination of intrusive inspections by the United Nations, sanctions that made imports of new technology extremely difficult, and Iraq's own decisions to get rid of some of its stockpiles.
"The strategy of containing Iraq appears to have been largely successful," Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, concluded in an interview late last year. "As far as we can tell, the system was working."
But Dr. ElBaradei's other conclusion is perhaps the most alarming: that while Iraq was contained, the rest of the world had turned into a "Wal-Mart of private-sector proliferation," one where many nuclear aspirants - with the notable exception of Iraq - seemed to go shopping regularly, often without detection.
Libya had not actually produced a weapon by the time Mr. Qaddafi decided to dismantle his weapons program. But what was found there has "astounded many of my colleagues," a senior American intelligence official said earlier this week. "It looks like there were factories dedicated around the world to the production of centrifuge parts," including one in Malaysia that American officials are now working to shut down. A network of middlemen, some operating in Dubai, apparently with close ties to the Pakistani scientists, operated with comparative freedom, supplying both Iran and Libya.
Mr. Bush has not ignored that network. His "Proliferation Security Initiative" has gathered more than a dozen nations in a coalition to fight trafficking in unconventional weapons.
--------
U.S. Mulling Stronger International Nuclear Curbs
January 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-nuclear-usa-treaty.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration is considering a change in international rules to prevent countries like Iran from legally acquiring components for a nuclear weapons program, senior U.S. officials say.
The goal is to strengthen the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, cornerstone of efforts to stem the spread of atomic arms, by closing what is now viewed as a major loophole.
The initiative is similar to a deal that France, Germany and Britain recently offered Iran and to proposals advocated by some of Washington's most respected security experts.
It is still in early discussions but may be formally advanced at the June 8 U.S.-hosted summit of the Group of Eight major industrialized countries, U.S. officials told Reuters.
Under a bargain struck when the NPT took effect 33 years ago, most countries pledged never to acquire nuclear weapons.
In return, they were promised that the five declared nuclear weapons states -- the United States, Russia, France, Britain and China -- would help them acquire nuclear technology for peaceful uses, namely nuclear power plants.
However, U.S. officials and experts say it is clear that some NPT signatories -- like Iran, Libya and North Korea -- exploited the pact to acquire technology that brings them close to being able to produce nuclear weapons.
In general, the proposal now under discussion in Washington would guarantee and even enhance the ability of non-nuclear weapons states to obtain nuclear power for electricity.
ENDING FUEL PRODUCTION
But they would be denied the right to manufacture, store or reprocess nuclear fuel -- a key component of nuclear bombs.
``A lot of people have been talking about that and we're considering it -- cutting off enrichment and reprocessing technology to close the loophole while guaranteeing them (non-nuclear states) access to fuel,'' one U.S. official said.
``Guaranteeing these states access to (nuclear) fuel has its own risks, but it's better than allowing them to have enrichment and reprocessing capabilities ... We may well do that in the G8 context,'' he said.
The official added: ``It's obvious that there is a problem with the NPT when a country can stay in compliance with it and still get very close to a nuclear weapons capability.''
Experts say acquiring weapons-grade material is the biggest hurdle countries face in seeking to make atomic bombs.
President Bush put a new spotlight on Iran's ambitions in 2002 when he accused the Islamic republic of being part of an ``axis of evil'' -- with North Korea and Iraq -- bent on acquiring atomic arms.
Later, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, found traces of bomb-grade highly enriched uranium at two sites in the country.
Iran insists its nuclear program is purely peaceful. Libya, on the other hand, recently agreed to dismantle its nuclear program while North Korea, having withdrawn from the NPT, claims its nuclear activities are proceeding.
EUROPEAN DEAL
Last November, France, Germany and Britain 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 western technology.
But Iran has since balked at fully suspending the nuclear program as Washington and the Europeans demand.
Rather than amend the NPT -- a tedious and maybe impossible task -- experts have suggested that the international community supplement the pact with additional inducements and penalties.
Writing in the New York Times last month, former national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Brent Scowcroft, former Defense Secretary William Perry and two other former officials -- Arnold Kanter and Ashton Carter -- outlined their proposal.
Nuclear countries should withhold nuclear power technology from states that do not forsake atomic weapons but should offer a reliable source of nuclear fuel to, and retrieval of spent fuel from, states that do forsake atomic weapons, they said.
They urged Washington to propose that Russian plans to help Iran build a network of civilian nuclear power reactors be permitted to proceed -- as long as Tehran agrees to a verifiable ban on enrichment and reprocessing and lets a Russian-led consortium handle its nuclear fuel needs.
Such a deal will not be easy, partly because of a lack of U.S. trust in Iran and because Russia and Europe may argue over whose nuclear industry should benefit most from this arrangement, experts said.
But it would present Iran with a ``clear test'' of whether it harbors nuclear ambitions, Scowcroft and his co-authors said.
-------- us politics
Cheney Reaches Out To Iraq War Critics
Anti-Terror Efforts Need 'Many Hands'
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45118-2004Jan24?language=printer
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 24 -- Vice President Cheney on Saturday launched the White House's broadest overture yet to foreign critics of the Iraq war and called for global cooperation against terrorism and repression.
Speaking at an annual meeting of elite corporate and government officials that last year was rife with anti-American sentiment, Cheney acknowledged no mistakes in the administration's handling of Iraq and insisted that "direct threats require decisive action."
But trying to reassure traditional allies, he said it would take "many hands" from Europe and elsewhere to stymie a new generation of terrorists by promoting democracy in the Middle East.
"We must meet the dangers together," Cheney told an audience of about 1,000 at the World Economic Forum. "Cooperation among our governments, and effective international institutions, are even more important today than they have been in the past."
Later, a senior U.S. official said the administration envisioned what Cheney considers "a pretty significant role" for the United Nations in Iraq in coming months. But the official went on to describe an advisory role, which many other nations might consider inadequate.
In addition, the official said the United States would be willing to commit resources to help alleviate the security concerns of U.N. officials.
Cheney's speech reflected the continuing struggle within the administration over how to get past the bitterness and mistrust that remain among allies over President Bush's handling of the Iraq war and its aftermath, without backing away from the president's insistence that he will confront gathering dangers, alone if necessary.
The White House has moved on several fronts in the past few weeks to try to repair its international relations, partly because of the impending presidential campaign and partly because Bush realizes he needs help in dealing with Iraq, North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
After a furious overseas reaction to the administration's announcement in December that prime contracts for rebuilding Iraq would be available only to companies from nations that supported the invasion, Bush lifted those restrictions against Canada. A Bush aide in Washington said Saturday that the president is still leaning toward making the next round of contracts available to French, German and Russian companies.
"It's a question of how, not if," the aide said. "You're seeing the administration's increased level of engagement."
L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, went to the United Nations last week to try to get help in rescuing the administration's plan for Iraq. Cheney told the Davos audience, "We urge all democratic nations and the United Nations to answer the Iraqi Governing Council's call for support for the people of Iraq in making the transition to democracy."
The senior administration official told reporters at a luncheon briefing that the administration is interested in having the United Nations "be an adviser, help oversee this process of setting up a transitional government for the Iraqis, be an interlocutor for the Shia, for example, and generally participate in the process by which decisions are made and power is transferred to the transitional authority."
The official indicated that Bush was willing to consider changes to the caucus-based plan he has pushed, but said that discussing specifics would only "restrict options." The official sketched what would be acceptable to the White House.
"There is a general agreement where we want to end up at the end of this process," the official said. "You want to have a democracy in Iraq, and you want to have free elections. You want to have government in accordance with a constitution, written by Iraqis, that demonstrates due regard for the rights of minorities, the rights of women, freedom of religion, in a manner that's consistent with the Islamic faith."
Administration officials said the atmosphere in Davos was much warmer than last year, when the United States was on the brink of invading Iraq and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell was met with a barrage of complaints. But the reaction to Cheney's 58-minute appearance was tepid. The audience withheld applause during the speech and then clapped for hostile questions about the U.S. government's handling of Arab visitors and its treatment of military detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Cheney, who is spending five days in Switzerland and Italy on his second foreign trip in three years, called it a "great responsibility" to "keep our alliances and international partnerships strong, and cooperate on every front as we meet common dangers."
"There will be occasional differences, even among allies who have great respect for one another," he said. "We do not shrink from these obligations, because we know from bitter experience that tragedy can come from division, weakness and vacillation."
The vice president took a subtle shot at French President Jacques Chirac's effort to build a counterweight to the United States in a "multipolar" world of competing power centers. "Our choice is not between a unipolar world and a multipolar world," Cheney said. "Our choice is for a just, free and democratic world."
During a question period, Cheney disavowed U.S. aspirations to empire, saying the United States has often unseated dictators throughout its history without taking any territory. "If we were to empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the Earth's surface than we do," he said. "That's not the way we operate."
Jon B. Alterman, a former State Department policy planner who directs the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said Cheney's appearance at Davos had "a Nixon-to-China element to it, since he and the people around him have been persistent critics of the necessity of multinational engagement."
The vice president began by warning of the peril of "21st century terrorism," asserting that extremists "are doing everything they can to develop or acquire chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear weapons." He said the threat would continue "very far into the future."
Cheney said that "encouraging the spread of freedom and democracy" in the Middle East "is the right thing to do, and it is also very much in our collective interest."
"Helping the peoples of the greater Middle East to overcome the freedom deficit is, ultimately, the key to winning the broader war on terror," he said. "It is one of the great tasks of our time, and will require resolve and resources for a generation or more."
Cheney said the rulers of Iran "must follow the example being set by others throughout the greater Middle East," and said Europe and the United States "must stand as one in calling for the regime to honor the legitimate demands of the Iranian people."
The vice president urged the European Union to grant Turkey, a NATO ally of the United States, membership in the European economic groups. But Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told a small group of reporters afterward that he saw "nothing good right now" in postwar Iraq as a result of the U.S.-led intervention. "The current Iraq is worse than Iraq prior to the war and worse than Iraq during the war," said Erdogan, who was due in Washington on Sunday for meetings with Bush and his advisers.
On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Cheney reiterated the administration's position that peace would not be achieved by Palestinian rulers "who intimidate opposition, tolerate and profit from corruption."
"Israel, too, must redouble its efforts by alleviating the suffering of the Palestinian people and by avoiding actions that undermine the long-term viability of a two-nation solution," he said. He did not specifically mention the Israeli settlements in territory claimed by the Palestinians, or the Israeli security fence that juts into Palestinian territory. The senior official called the vice president's statement "evidence of our desire to be even-handed."
Just before leaving Davos, Cheney met for 45 minutes with the Pakistani president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
Staff writer Barton Gellman contributed to this report.
--------
FIRST CHAPTER
'The Bubble of American Supremacy'
January 25, 2004
By GEORGE SOROS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/books/chapters/0125-1st-soros.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Excerpted from The Bubble of American Supremacy by GEORGE SOROS
It is generally agreed that September 11, 2001, changed the course of history, but we must ask ourselves why that should be so. How could a single event, even if it involved three thousand civilian casualties, have such a far-reaching effect? The answer lies not so much in the event itself but in the way the United States, under the leadership of President George W. Bush, responded to it.
Admittedly, the terrorist attack was a historic event in its own right. Hijacking fully loaded airplanes and using them as suicide bombs was an audacious idea, and the execution could not have been more spectacular. The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center made a symbolic statement that reverberated around the world, and the fact that people could watch the event on their television sets endowed it with an emotional impact that no terrorist act had ever achieved before.
The aim of terrorism is by definition to terrorize, and the attack of September 11 fully accomplished this objective. Most people in America were shaken to their core. They were affected both individually and collectively. Until then, the idea that the United States could be challenged on its own soil and that U.S. citizens may be personally vulnerable did not enter into Americans' consciousness. The attack shattered people's sense of security. A feeling of normalcy was replaced by a sense of emergency.
Even so, September 11, 2001, could not have changed the course of history to the extent that it has if President Bush had not responded to it the way he did. He declared war on terrorism and under that guise implemented a radical foreign policy agenda that predated the tragedy of September 11.
The underlying principles of this agenda can be summed up as follows: International relations are relations of power, not law; power prevails and law legitimizes what prevails. The United States is unquestionably the dominant power in the post-Cold War world; it is therefore in a position to impose its views, interests, and values on the world. The world would benefit from adopting American values because the American model has demonstrated its superiority. Under the previous administrations, however, the United States failed to use the full potential of its power. This has to be corrected. The United States must assert its supremacy in the world.
This view on foreign policy is part of a comprehensive ideology customarily referred to as neoconservatism, but I prefer to describe it as a crude form of social Darwinism. I call it crude because it ignores the role of cooperation in the survival of the fittest and puts all the emphasis on competition. In the economy, the competition is between firms; in international relations, it is between states. In economic matters, social Darwinism takes the form of market fundamentalism; in international relations, it leads to the pursuit of American supremacy.
Not all the members of the Bush administration subscribe to this ideology, but the neocons form an influential group within the executive branch and their influence greatly increased after September 11. Their ideas were succinctly stated in the 1997 mission statement of the Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank and policy advocacy group. Already in 1992, under the first Bush administration, a similar memorandum had been prepared by the Defense Department, but it proved so controversial that it had to be dropped. It is worth quoting the 1997 mission statement and its signatories in full:
In 1998, many of the same signatories sent to President Clinton an open letter in which they argued for the invasion of Iraq. Five years later, they were in charge of the invasion, Dick Cheney as vice president, Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz as his deputy, Zalmay Khalilzad as the envoy of the Pentagon, and the others as advocates and ideologues both inside and outside the government. These people had a clear idea of the direction in which they wanted to take the country, and when the September 11 terrorist attacks presented an opportunity, they seized it without ever coming clean about all of their goals. The public is still not fully aware of this history.
Prior to September 11, 2001, the ideologues of the Project for the New American Century were hindered in implementing their strategy by two considerations. First, President Bush came to office without a clear mandate-he was elected president by a single vote on the Supreme Court. Second, America did not have a clearly defined enemy that would have justified a dramatic increase in military spending. The strategy advocated prior to September 11 was not identical with the one adopted afterward-it emphasized missile defense rather than the war on terrorism-but it was infused with the same spirit of seeking unilateral American dominance.
September 11 removed both obstacles in one stroke. President Bush declared war on terrorism, and the nation lined up behind its president. Then the Bush administration proceeded to exploit the terrorist attack for its own purposes. To silence criticism and keep the nation united behind the president, the administration deliberately fostered the fear that has gripped the country. It then used the war on terrorism to pursue its dream of American supremacy. That is how September 11 changed the course of history.
Exploiting an event to further an agenda is not inherently reprehensible. It is the task of the president to provide leadership, and it is only natural for politicians to twist, exploit, or manipulate events to promote their policies. The cause for concern is to be found in the policies that President Bush is promoting and in the way he is going about imposing them. President Bush is leading the United States and the world in a very dangerous direction.
Supremacist Ideology
The supremacist ideology of the Bush administration is in contradiction with the principles of an open society because it claims possession of an ultimate truth. It postulates that because we are stronger than others, we must know better and we must have right on our side. That is where religious fundamentalism comes together with market fundamentalism to form the ideology of American supremacy. The very first sentence of our latest national security strategy reads as follows: "The great struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom-and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise."
This statement is false on two counts. First, there is no single, sustainable model for national success. And second, the American model, which has been successful, is not available to others, because our success depends greatly on our dominant position at the center of the global capitalist system and we are not willing to yield this position to others.
The Bush doctrine, first enunciated in the president's speech at West Point in June 2002 and then incorporated in the national security strategy in September 2002, is built on two pillars: First, the United States will do everything in its power to maintain its unquestioned military supremacy and, second, the United States arrogates the right to preemptive action. Taken together, these two pillars support two classes of sovereignty: the sovereignty of the United States, which takes precedence over international treaties and obligations, and the sovereignty of all other states, which is subject to the Bush doctrine. This is reminiscent of George Orwell's Animal Farm: All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
To be sure, the Bush doctrine is not stated so starkly; it is buried in Orwellian doublespeak. The doublespeak is needed because of the contradiction between the Bush administration's concept of freedom and democracy and the actual principles of freedom and democracy. Talk of spreading democracy looms large in the national security strategy. When President Bush says, as he does frequently, that "freedom" will prevail, in fact he means that America will prevail. I am rather sensitive to Orwellian doublespeak because I grew up with it in Hungary first under Nazi and later Communist rule.
In his address to Congress nine days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, President Bush declared, "The advance of human freedom-the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of our time-now depends on us. Our nation-this generation-will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future. We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage." In a free and open society, however, people are supposed to decide for themselves what they mean by freedom and democracy and not simply follow America's lead.
The contradiction has been brought home by the current occupation of Iraq. We came as liberators bringing "freedom and democracy," but that is not how we are perceived by a large part of the population. The military part of the campaign went better than could have been expected, but the occupation turned into a disaster.
The dearth of thought given to, and preparation for, the aftermath of the invasion is truly amazing, especially when so many critics had been so vocal in warning about the difficulties. It can be explained only by a confusion in the mind of President Bush, which has been exploited by the advocates of the Iraqi invasion. President Bush equates freedom with American values. He has a simplistic view of what is right and what is wrong: We are right and they are wrong. This is in contradiction with the principles of open society, which recognize that we may be wrong.
It is ironic that the government of the most successful open society in the world should have fallen into the hands of ideologues who ignore the first principles of open society. Who would have thought sixty years ago, when Karl Popper wrote Open Society and Its Enemies, that the United States itself could pose a threat to open society? Yet that is what is happening, both internally and internationally. At home, Attorney General John Ashcroft has used the war on terrorism to curtail civil liberties. Abroad, the United States is trying to impose its views and interests on the rest of the world by the use of military force, and it has proclaimed its right to do so in the Bush doctrine.
The invasion of Iraq was the first practical application of the Bush doctrine, and it turned out to be counterproductive. A chasm has opened between America and the rest of the world. That is what Osama Bin Laden must have been hoping for. By declaring war on terrorism and invading Iraq, President Bush has played right into the terrorists' hands.
Discontinuity
September 11 introduced a discontinuity into American foreign policy. It created a sense of emergency that the Bush administration skillfully exploited for its own purposes. Violations of American standards of behavior that would have been considered objectionable in normal times came to be accepted as appropriate to the circumstances, and the president has become immune to criticism, because it would be unpatriotic to criticize him when the nation is at war with terrorism. Contrary to the mission statement of the Project for the New American Century, our policies did not strengthen our ties to our democratic allies; on the contrary, they stand in the way of international cooperation. There has been an unprecedented rift between the United States and what Donald Rumsfeld calls "old Europe," because the United States demands unquestioning subservience from its allies. Some, like French President Jacques Chirac, resisted even to the point of endangering French national interests; others, like British Prime Minister Tony Blair, aligned themselves with us in the hope of modifying our behavior, but they have found themselves in an untenable position with regard to their electorates. It is difficult for a democracy like Britain to be allied with a country determined to act unilaterally.
The discontinuity was brought about by the Bush administration's carrying to extremes certain ideological tendencies that were already present in the United States before President Bush came into office. Ever since Senator Barry Goldwater's candidacy, the Republican Party has come under the domination of a curious alliance between religious fundamentalists and market fundamentalists. The two groups feed off each other-religious fundamentalism provides both an antidote to and a cover for the amorality of the market. Market fundamentalists and religious fundamentalists make strange bedfellows, but they have been held together by their success: Together they came to dominate the Republican Party.
Until recently, the natural complement of market fundamentalism in the foreign policy area has been geopolitical realism, which maintains that states should-and do-pursue their national interests. The pursuit of American supremacy is a wild extrapolation of that idea, reflecting America's success as the sole remaining superpower. The neoconservatives add a dose of proselytizing zeal that is lacking in geopolitical realists. Necons regard the American model of national success as superior to all others and want the rest of the world to benefit from it. That is the origin of the quaint idea that we can introduce democracy to a country like Iraq by military force. Although they were influential, the advocates of American supremacy could not have their way until the terrorists struck on September 11. That is when American foreign policy entered what I call far-from-equilibrium territory.
(Continues...)
-------- MILITARY
-------- chemical weapons
Hitler's chemical weapons a seeping menace
By Alister Doyle
January 25, 2004
Reuters
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/01/24/1074732654196.html
Six decades after the defeat of Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler's chemical weapons are coming back to haunt Europe as they ooze from rusting and poorly mapped graves on the seabed.
Far from the hunt for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, corrosion, deeper fishing by trawlers and seabed cables or oil pipelines are disturbing stockpiles in what once seemed inaccessible dumps from the Baltic to the Atlantic.
"It was terrifying. The pain was unbearable and my hands blistered all over," said Danish fisherman Walther Holm Thorsen, who was 15 when he threw a cracked grey canister back into the Baltic Sea after it was snared in the net of his trawler.
One of the first postwar victims of the Nazis in the 1969 accident, he said the pain came in the middle of the night, hours after he and another crew member had rinsed the oily substance off the fish. They had no idea it was mustard gas.
Thorsen spent three months in hospital, and his hands are badly scarred despite skin grafts. "Working as a fisherman now is hard -- my hands often feel like they're freezing," he said.
He said that trawler crew are now more aware of the dangers from chemical arms and have decontamination gear aboard. "But increasing rust will be a problem in future," he added.
In some parts of Europe, no one even knows where tens of thousands of tonnes of munitions are.
Ole-Kristian Bjerkemo of the Norwegian coastguard said he hoped a new seismic survey would be carried out this year to locate ships loaded with Nazi stocks of mustard gas and the nerve agent tabun which were scuttled off Norway in 1945.
Norway knows the exact locations of just 15 of a probable 36 ships in waters about 600 metres deep off the southern town of Arendal, one of the main postwar chemical dumps with 168,000 tonnes of Nazi ammunition.
"We want to know where they are," Bjerkemo said. A robot camera sent down in 2002 found a trawler net caught on one wreck. Sulphur mustard and traces of arsenic compounds were found in the seabed but no chemicals in the sea water.
European governments reckon the stocks are safest where they are, slowly seeping poisons that may break down in contact with sea water or become diluted over decades.
The environmental group Greenpeace says they should be recovered. Apart from the threat to people working at sea, a sudden release of nerve gas could kill fish stocks. Other poisons might sink into the sediment and damage the food chain.
"Recovery of dumped munition is a costly and high-risk operation which could result in the release of large amounts of toxic compounds," the OSPAR commission of 15 nations protecting the north-east Atlantic said in a study.
"This problem is not going to go away," countered Paul Johnston, principal scientist at Greenpeace research laboratories. "As corrosion sets in the likelihood of releases increases.
And he said that, unlike Iraq, "we know the weapons are there." US-led forces have failed to find alleged weapons of mass destruction that were a main justification by President George W Bush for the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Most dumps around Europe are from Nazi Germany but other countries from Britain to the United States have disposed of munitions at sea since World War One.
Led by Ireland, OSPAR governments are working on a common set of guidelines for fishermen on the frontlines, likely to be ready in June.
The so-called Helsinki Commission, grouping states around the Baltic Sea, already gives tips to fishermen including:
-- cut the nets if you suspect mustard gas, which smells like cress, horseradish or mustard.
-- don't rub your eyes if they sting and you suspect mustard gas because you can go blind if you unwittingly already have it on your fingers. Instead, wash eyes with water from a hose for 15 minutes.
-- fishing boats should have one "gas box" per three crew members that should include decontamination liquids and sprays and syringes with injections to counter nerve agents.
In other areas, a Belgian study of the Paardenmarkt site where 35,000 tonnes of chemical and conventional munitions from World War One are dumped in shallow waters concluded that it could take up to 1,000 years for all to corrode.
And since the 1920s, more than one million tonnes of mostly conventional arms have been dumped in the Beaufort's Dyke, a 200-300 metre deep trench between Scotland and Northern Ireland. A 1996 study showed no contamination of fish.
-------- colombia
Colombia Targeting Rebel Strongholds
More Aggressive U.S.-Backed Strategy Expected to Be More Challenging, Brutal
By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45203-2004Jan24?language=printer
EL PAUJIL, Colombia -- The Colombian army, under pressure to produce lasting results against a resilient Marxist insurgency, has begun pushing into guerrilla strongholds in a military campaign expected to be more challenging and brutal than previous battles.
Since President Alvaro Uribe took office 17 months ago, Colombia's military has pushed the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, a roughly 18,000-member guerrilla army known as the FARC, from many towns and highways it had occupied in the previous decade. The guerrillas were never able to win civilian support in those regions and rarely stood ground to fight. The newly confident Colombian army has been welcomed in many of those towns as heroes.
That part was relatively easy, according to Colombian military sources and Western officials. Now the military, which has received nearly $2 billion in U.S. aid since 2000, has begun the far more difficult task of defeating the guerrillas in zones where they have held sway for generations. The question is whether the army has the resources to carry through this harder phase of combat.
An offensive unfolding along an expanse of rolling plains six miles southeast of this town offers a view of the new activity, driven by a general officer corps under constant pressure from the president. But it also reveals the challenges as government forces advance into villages traditionally sympathetic to the guerrillas and disrupt local economies built on the illegal drug trade.
Military success in this second phase of fighting, taking place in regions that the guerrillas count on for recruits, supplies and intelligence, would significantly increase pressure on the insurgency to seek a negotiated peace after 40 years of waging war against the state. But the army already has faced weeks of often intense fighting and an uneasy welcome from civilians.
"This is about recovering the credibility of the state," said Sgt. Luis Fernando Cano, who helped lead an armored unit into the village of La Union Peneya under heavy fire earlier this month. "The state abandoned these people years ago."
'Never a Moment's Peace'
The campaign, Operation New Year, began in the evening hours of Jan. 4 with an assault on the village of San Isidro using four UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters. At the same time, Cano's squad of 11 Brazilian-made armored personnel carriers, equipped with 90mm cannons or .50-caliber machine guns, began approaching from the west down a long dirt track running through the string of villages at the heart of the 15th Front of the FARC. The two forces converged days later in the village of La Union Peneya, the center of the guerrilla unit's thriving coca trade. The operation, which involves several thousand men, is the region's largest since 2002, when soldiers reentered a 16,000-square-mile stretch of southern Colombia beginning 35 miles northeast of here that had been turned over previously to the guerrillas as an incentive to begin peace talks.
Brig. Gen. Guillermo Quiñones, commander of the 12th Brigade carrying out the new operation, said his plan is based on U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine. Tall and rangy, Quiñones has a background that includes artillery training at Fort Sill in Oklahoma and a stint at the U.S. Southern Command.
In the two years since peace talks collapsed, the army has followed a methodical strategy, Quiñones said. At first, the army occupied large urban centers and connecting roads, mostly abandoned without a fight by the guerrillas. Now his troops are pushing into main villages, such as La Union Peneya, then securing the unpaved tracks that join them to towns.
"We think we can accomplish it with the number of troops we have," he said. "But the plan is to do this in two years, and we can't guarantee that we can achieve it on that schedule unless we get more troops."
The troops have been startled by what they have found in the villages. Army officials said guerrillas gave orders to residents to abandon the villages or be killed, hoping to avoid mass arrests that would break up their civilian support networks. Only four of 1,000 La Union Peneya residents -- many of whom grow coca, the key ingredient in cocaine, which helps finance the guerrillas -- were there when the army arrived.
Many of the soldiers were on their first combat mission. They encountered crude guerrilla defenses upon entering villages that sometimes had only a few shacks. Most of the roads were mined, lined in places with explosives triggered by nylon tripwires, army officials said. After hours of meticulous mine-clearing by army engineers, the guerrillas returned each night to bury new ones.
A bomb found in a box by the bridge spanning the Peneya River also contained human excrement, army officers said, to ensure that wounds would become infected. Cars and a house were rigged to explode. As troops ate lunch each day, snipers fired at them from houses and tree lines.
"There was never a moment's peace," said one private, a member of the armored unit.
Quiñones said he believes that 80 percent of the population of Caqueta province, where the operation is taking place, supports the government effort. The remaining 20 percent, he said, are FARC members, longtime guerrilla sympathizers or civilians forced at gunpoint to help.
"It is a very different kind of operation," Cano said. "We need more logistical help, more communications equipment to develop it properly."
More than anything, commanders on the ground said, the army requires more air support, the key to success over rugged terrain against a seasoned guerrilla enemy. The U.S. aid package was initially restricted for use against Colombia's drug trade, which accounts for as much as 90 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States. President Bush eased those rules to allow U.S.-trained troops and more than 70 transport helicopters to be used directly against the insurgency, not just the drug crops it profits from.
At the time, the change was hailed as a boon for the Colombian army, now numbering 180,000 soldiers after Uribe's addition of between 40,000 and 60,000 troops. But commanders on the ground said the U.S.-provided resources are rarely employed in complicated anti-insurgency operations such as the one taking place here, and the army's mobility has suffered as a result.
"We have had to find other ways of doing things, usually by land," said Quiñones, who was supervising operations from the Larandia army post, 10 miles southwest of here. "Only under exceptional circumstances do we get to use a helicopter."
On a recent morning, 10 UH-1N Iroquois and three UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, all donated by the United States, sat idle on the post's new tarmac. Quiñones' troops, meanwhile, were engaged in combat less than 10 miles away without any air support.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman in the capital city of Bogota said the helicopters at Larandia were assigned to the army's U.S.-trained counter-narcotics brigade, engaged chiefly in operations against drug-production laboratories and crops. At any given time, he said, a third of the fleet is grounded for maintenance, which was probably why the helicopters were not in use.
"In the past we have been asked, and acquiesced, for the use of the helicopters in non-drug operations," the spokesman said. "It is not unprecedented."
Nonetheless, the army has reported gains in this new phase. In the operation here, it reported 17 guerrillas and one Colombian soldier killed. But the army recovered the bodies of only three guerrillas, basing casualty estimates on eyewitness accounts by soldiers and overheard radio chatter.
The lack of resources has slowed operations here and allowed the guerrillas, who have slipped out of the large villages, to maintain a potent presence just outside them. Without air support, which ended after the first night, the army has managed to impose only light control over the villages and virtually no presence along the roads or in the hills that surround them.
'We Don't Feel Free at All'
The military has not reported any civilian casualties so far in the operation, although no independent humanitarian delegations have been able to reach the combat area to verify those reports. Human rights officials and Western diplomats say arrest sweeps being carried out in villages the army has entered in recent weeks, here and in neighboring regions, have posed significant hardship among the population, sowing mistrust. The government has arrested 38 people for allegedly collaborating with the guerrillas, including the husband of Aurora Rodriguez, a mother of five.
"The government says that because we live there we are all a part of the guerrillas," said Rodriguez, 27, who tends a plot of coca. "We didn't even have a shotgun to shoot birds with. We don't feel free at all."
Villagers, skeptical that the army intends to stay, continue to heed guerrilla rules and warnings. No taxis or buses -- not even the truck that picks up milk each morning from the farms -- enter the narrow dirt track to La Union Peneya. The guerrillas have threatened to burn any vehicle that does.
Only a trickle of people have escaped the combat area because much of the population has been forbidden to leave -- a tactic employed by the guerrillas and their paramilitary rivals across Colombia to maintain their hold on regions they control. Refugee advocates say the tactic helps explain why the number of people forced from their homes dropped 49 percent to 175,000 over the first nine months of last year, even though the intensity of the fighting increased.
"We heard the helicopters, and we just started running," said one refugee, Eloisa Vargas, 37, who walked for more than 10 hours and left behind a husband and three children. "They can't get out, and I have no idea where they are. Is there any way to talk to them?"
Here in El Paujil, a town 225 miles south of Bogota, 42 people from those villages have arrived since the fighting started. Reports from the area suggest that hundreds of villagers are gathered on remote farms, unable to leave. One town official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared reprisals, said, "If they were allowed to, there would be 1,500 displaced or more."
The national government's relief agency has informed local officials it has no money to help the refugees, a dozen of whom gathered one recent afternoon in an open-air classroom next to the church.
"This is what is happening in Colombia," the Rev. Faiber Granja, the parish priest, told the mothers, fathers and scattered small children. "This time it has touched us."
-------- iraq
Iraq's Path Hinges on Words of Enigmatic Cleric
January 25, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/middleeast/25SIST.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
NAJAF, Iraq, Jan. 24 - An austere home in a dusty alleyway here has become a center of power rivaling the American occupation headquarters in Baghdad - and the scene of fierce inner struggles for one man's ear.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive 73-year-old cleric revered by many of Iraq's 15 million Shiites, hears arguments and requests here from the country's most senior politicians, occasionally issuing decrees through them that thwart the plans of the world's sole superpower.
Donkey carts trundle through the mouth of the narrow alleyway, but bodyguards keep most visitors out. On Saturday morning, two dozen men in brown robes pleaded to be allowed to seek the cleric's spiritual advice. Only two emissaries from a Baghdad mosque were allowed in.
The ayatollah's secular power is clear: his insistence on direct elections for a transitional national assembly before Iraqi sovereignty in June drew up to 100,000 supporters to Baghdad's streets on Monday and left the Bush administration scrambling to salvage plans for a caucus-style selection.
Yet this man has not stepped out of his house in six years, rarely gives interviews and is often described as wanting to stay out of politics.
He has a Web site, sistani.org, but it focuses on religious guidance, like whether Islamic law allows the eating of Caspian sturgeon. (Only if close inspection reveals scales, he counsels.)
The world now simply comes to him. The ayatollah's house has become as important a pilgrimage site for Iraq's leaders as the nearby golden-domed shrine of Ali, son-in-law of the prophet Muhammad, is for the world's Shiites.
The men who visit say they deliver their opinions on the American-led occupation; they are clearly vying for the cleric's backing in the current political free-for-all, with many factions jockeying for a share in the as-yet unshaped Iraqi government. Any endorsement from Ayatollah Sistani instantly bestows legitimacy in the eyes of many Shiites; his support can win votes for politicians and will weigh heavily on further plans for installing an interim government.
The full motives of the men advising Ayatollah Sistani are known only to them, yet they are some of the cleric's main conduits to and from the outside, passing on his messages and bringing him their versions of the latest developments.
That makes them the only tea leaves to read, however murkily, to divine the ayatollah's intentions. They range from formerly exiled Iraqi politicians to local imams to envoys of L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Perhaps to distance himself from the day-to-day fray of politics, and to remain on a level above the occupation forces, he has refused to meet with Mr. Bremer himself.
It is inevitable that those closest to Ayatollah Sistani are Shiite Islamists, many of whom can win popular support by getting his backing. Last week, Ibrahim al-Jafari, a Governing Council member and the current head of the venerable Dawa Islamic Party, visited to discuss the stalemate over direct elections. Other frequent visitors include officials from the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a political party recently returned from exile in Iran that clearly wants to play a role in governing the new Iraq.
Adnan Pachachi, the current head of the Governing Council, said he was skeptical of some of the men surrounding Ayatollah Sistani. Mr. Pachachi met with the ayatollah two weeks ago to ask him to back down from his demands for direct elections, only to be rebuffed. Some of the ayatollah's advisers, Mr. Pachachi said in an interview, wanted to keep personal power "under the guise of protecting Shiite influence" and "want to use religion in order to assume power."
Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a senior Dawa official in the 1980's who now professes to be relatively secular, meets with the ayatollah once or twice a week and has his own view of the cleric's decision making.
"The major thing in his mind is not to hand over the country to an American-picked government," Mr. Rubaie said. "The fear is that the coalition forces will impose a group of Western-influenced politicians, fanatic liberals who will design the future of Iraq irrespective of the culture and religion of the country."
The ayatollah sometimes delivers his messages through political leaders, but more often through religious representatives, as he did Friday when he asked a spokesman to tell worshipers at a mosque in Karbala to refrain from protests against the Americans. The people should hold off, the spokesman said, while the United Nations is deciding whether to send a team to assess the feasibility of direct elections.
Associates say Ayatollah Sistani does not want to be so politically involved and that he simply sees it as his duty as a marja-al-taqlid, or senior cleric with the authority to interpret Islamic law, to ensure that Iraq has an Islamic identity. They say he is keenly aware that the Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the population, for centuries were kept from ruling under the Ottoman and British Empires and the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Arab.
That is not to say that he wants a complete intertwining of the state and Shiite Islam, as in Iran. Though the ayatollah was born in the holy Iranian city of Mashad and began studying the Koran there at age 5, he spent his early 20's in Najaf, where he became the protégé of the late Grand Ayatollah Abu al-Qassim al-Khoei.
Ayatollah Khoei was a proponent of the "quietist" school of Islamic thought, which advocates a withdrawal from politics, unlike the activist school promoted by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran and put into practice there after the revolution of 1979.
Ayatollah Sistani, Mr. Rubaie said, "always says something like this: `I did not find election in the jurisprudence books. I did not go into the Koran and the prophetic tradition to derive the idea of elections. I derived the idea from a textbook on democracy.' "
Befitting a spiritual leader, the ayatollah, through his representatives, interacts regularly with the other three grand ayatollahs in Najaf. Muhammad Hussein al-Hakim, the son and spokesman of Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Said al-Hakim, said people from his organization and that of Ayatollah Sistani consult often. All the ayatollahs have voiced support for Ayatollah Sistani's demands for direct elections, though none have issued similar edicts.
Some Iraqis have wondered whether Ayatollah Sistani's political involvement is an attempt to stave off a power play by a young rival to the older clerics, Moktada al-Sadr, who has also begun calling for direct elections. His father, the respected cleric Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, was killed by Saddam Hussein's government in 1999. Mr. Sadr is now trying to use his father's name - and brash anti-American rhetoric - to leverage himself into a position of authority.
But his organization has only a fraction of the popular support and financial resources of the ayatollah's group, which has amassed a fortune through the Shiite tradition of donations.
"I know Mr. Sistani, and I'm sure he's not acting out of personal interest," Mr. Hakim said. "The most important thing for the marjaiah is to act in the general interest of the people. Maybe others just can't grasp this concept."
Last November, Ayatollah Sistani made it clear he wanted direct elections for a transitional assembly by delivering the message through Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, the head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Mr. Hakim is one of the politicians closest to the ayatollah and acts as an intermediary between the cleric, the Governing Council and the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Mr. Hakim's deputies meet often with Ayatollah Sistani, including Imam Jalaladeen al-Sagheir of the Baratha Mosque in Baghdad. At a recent interview with two reporters, the imam took an urgent phone call from one of Mr. Bremer's aides. "I have to go to Karbala and Najaf to take care of that issue," he said quickly before hanging up, indicating perhaps that Mr. Bremer wanted him to talk to the ayatollah.
Two weeks ago, a major battle for the cleric's ear was joined, when it fell to Mr. Pachachi, of the Governing Council, to lead a delegation to discuss the issue of direct elections. Mr. Rubaie, who accompanied the delegation, said the ayatollah sat on the floor of his home opposite them, wearing his customary black turban and black robes. Mr. Pachachi tried explaining that there was not enough time to organize direct elections by the June 30 deadline. He produced a letter from Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, saying as much.
"That didn't cut the ice with him," Mr. Rubaie said. "He had already been convinced that elections were possible."
That had come about, Mr. Rubaie said, because the ayatollah had absorbed the opinions of Iraqi census experts, the minister of trade and a senior United Nations envoy acting unofficially, all of whom had made it known to the cleric that direct elections were feasible.
If American officials end up compromising too easily with Ayatollah Sistani, though, that could quickly alienate Sunni Arabs and Kurds, who fear being marginalized in a Shiite-dominated government. Those groups make up 40 percent of the population, and that is where Ayatollah Sistani's influence ends. Their loyalties lie with their own leaders.
--------
6 G.I.'s Are Killed in a Wave of Violence
January 25, 2004
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/middleeast/25IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 24 - Insurgents in Iraq killed or wounded scores of people in several attacks on Saturday, including two American soldiers who were killed by a makeshift bomb on a road near Falluja and three more who died in a truck-bomb attack in Khaldiya, military officials said.
On Sunday, a sixth American soldier was killed in the town of Bayji, about 70 miles north of Baghdad, after insurgents attack a military patrol at 10 p.m. on Saturday, said a spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, which controls the area. The attacks hit a Bradley fighting vehicle with a rocket-propelled grenade, critically wounding a soldier inside. The soldier died early Sunday morning.
Bayji has the largest oil refinery in Iraq and lies inside the so-called Sunni triangle, where guerilla fighters continue to mount ambitious and deadly attacks against American-led forces.
Another bomb went off near the city council building in Samarra, killing four Iraqi civilians and wounding 33 badly enough that they required treatment at the local hospital, the officials said. In that attack, which occurred just after American soldiers passed the spot in their vehicles, three soldiers were hurt.
And in Mosul, four Iraqis in the local security forces were wounded in a spate of five drive-by shootings, one of which erupted into a brief firefight, the military said.
In the Khaldiya attack, a four-wheel-drive vehicle rigged with explosives drove up to an American checkpoint at a bridge and detonated, The Associated Press reported, quoting a witness.
In recent weeks, attacks on the American-led occupation forces have been running at about one and a half dozen a day, with others mounted daily against Iraqi security forces or against civilians, sometimes those working for the occupation army and sometimes bystanders.
The latest deaths brought to 513 the number of American service members who have died since the United States and its allies launched the Iraq war on March 20, according to a tabulation by The Associated Press. The American military and the Iraqi forces it is training have been mounting many raids themselves, including 52 simultaneously in Baghdad alone on Friday night that resulted in the arrest of about 25 people, the military said. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, a military spokesman, said that in those raids bomb-making materials, documents that he said were "associated with" the intelligence services of the ousted government, and weapons and ammunition were seized.
American troops and local police officers also arrested a suspect in a previous attack on the Iskandariya police station, the American command said.
The continuing guerrilla war is complicating efforts to hand over sovereign power to the Iraqis by June 30, starting with caucuses to select a transitional national assembly that would then write a constitution calling for general elections in 2005. Many Iraqis would prefer quicker general elections instead, but the lack of security is one of the obstacles to that approach.
In a news conference Saturday, General Kimmitt said the goal of anti-American fighters who killed Iraqi civilians working for the occupying forces was to delay the advent of democracy.
"They weren't attacked because they were working side by side with the coalition," he said, using the term preferred by the Americans for the occupation army that they lead. "They are being attacked because they are working for a free Iraq."
Dan Senor, the spokesman for L. Paul Bremer III, the head of the Coalition Provision Authority that runs Iraq under occupation, said at the same news conference that the United States was not considering any major changes to the plan for caucuses worked out between the occupation headquarters and the American-installed Iraqi Governing Council on Nov. 15. The only changes to be expected, he said, were "clarifications."
--------
Changes In U.S. Iraq Plan Explored
Deadline Firm; Other Details Are Negotiable
By Robin Wright and Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 25, 2004; PageA01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45188-2004Jan24?language=printer
The Bush administration has produced a list of possible changes for Iraq's political transition, with some U.S. and British officials acknowledging for the first time that the original plan could even be scrapped altogether if the United States is to preempt the growing clamor for elections.
In two rounds of talks at the United Nations and Washington last week, the United States told U.N. representatives that everything is on the table except the June 30 deadline for handing over power to a new Iraqi government, U.N. and U.S. officials said.
"The United States told us that as long as the timetable is respected, they are ready to listen to any suggestion," a senior U.N. official said.
The United States is publicly talking tough about clinging to a "refined" variation of the Nov. 15 accord signed with the Iraqi Governing Council that outlines the terms of a hand-over. The changes could include expanding participation in 18 streamlined caucuses that would select representatives for a national assembly, which would then pick a cabinet and head of state, U.S. officials say.
But in private conversations with the United Nations and its coalition partners, the administration has begun to discuss the viability of abandoning the complex caucuses outlined in the agreement and even holding partial elections or simply handing over power to an expanded Iraqi Governing Council, an old proposal now back on the table, U.S. and U.N. officials say.
The administration says there is no sense of panic, despite the mounting opposition to the current U.S. transition plan.
"It's complicated, it's not easy, it's not been done in Iraq before, but we'll get the job done. And as we go through the process, there are bound to be different points of view," said a senior U.S. administration official speaking to reporters after Vice President Cheney's speech in Davos, Switzerland. "I suppose on any given day you look over and say, my gosh, we're on the edge of the abyss here, but I don't think so. I think we're in a hell of a lot better shape than we were before."
Yet in a sign of how much control the United States has lost since the Nov. 15 accord, U.S. officials concede that the most important calculations in ending the political crisis will be the positions of two players excluded from the original agreement: the United Nations and an aging ayatollah who has not left his home in six years.
The U.S.-led coalition needs U.N. help to give the process credibility and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's approval to pull off the transition and meet its deadline, U.S. officials say.
Sistani's demand for direct elections has rapidly gained momentum this month in cities from Baghdad to Najaf and Nasiriyah. On the tan-brick walls of the shrine of Imam Hussein in Karbala, one of Shiite Islam's two most sacred sites, a leaflet reflects popular sentiment: "All of us are with the supreme religious authority in the demand for conducting elections to choose members of the transitional legislative assembly." The call for elections dominates sermons at Friday prayers, the Muslim Sabbath.
For now, catering to the Shiites has become the main consideration of U.S. strategy, U.S. officials say. Yet each day, the political situation in Iraq gets more complicated.
U.S. officials are concerned about alienating either the powerful Sunni Muslim or Kurdish minorities in their effort to satisfy Sistani, Iraq's most popular Shiite cleric.
Already, the preeminent body of Sunnis, the Association of Muslim Clergy, has come out against elections. Sunni clerics have used their Friday prayer sermons to make clear they will not give in to a plan that ends up with Shiite domination -- and that all methods of resistance will be allowed to prevent it.
But the Shiites do not speak with one voice either. Cleric Muqtada Sadr, who heads his own faction, supports Sistani's call for elections but insisted at Friday prayers last week that the United Nations should not be involved.
The 25 U.S.-picked members of the Governing Council are also not united -- nor happy with the plan they signed 10 weeks ago. Reflecting the views of several members, one Iraqi official said the Nov. 15 agreement was "hasty and hurried. There was a lot of pressure [from the United States] to sign it."
To accommodate the communities, the United States has developed options in four broad categories.
One category involves expanding the 18 provincial caucuses to bring in a "critical mass" of participants so that they would seem more open than elite-dominated. The variations are being referred to as "partial elections" or "cascading caucuses," U.S. officials say.
Under the original plan, 15 Iraqis on coordinating committees -- five from the Governing Council, five from provincial councils and one each from the five largest cities in each province -- would vote on caucus members. Each winner would have to get at least 11 votes, giving the council an effective veto. That prospect has triggered fears of manipulation to favor pro-council candidates. The 18 caucuses would then select representatives for a new national assembly.
Another proposal calls for scrapping the coordinating committees and opening up the caucus process to anyone who wants to participate, with limits only on age and clean criminal records, U.S. officials say.
Although L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, favors modifying the process, there is a growing sense among Iraqis and even key U.S. officials that these ideas no longer go far enough to defuse the crisis, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.
A second category centers on local elections or referendums, U.S. officials say. Local elections could possibly be conducted in a town hall format to come up with a list of candidates for the national assembly -- perhaps four, five or six times larger than the allocated seats -- from which representatives would then be picked by a provincial caucus.
A variation calls for local elections in one province at a time because conducting polls in all 18 provinces at the same time would pose manpower and security problems.
The problem with this category, U.S. officials say, is that each option involves larger operations than currently envisioned, with far more manpower, electoral expertise and, potentially, time that the U.S.-led coalition authority may not have.
A third category is elections, which U.S. officials now say is unlikely -- although the United States has consulted experts at the National Endowment for Democracy, the International Republican Institute, the International Foundation for Election Systems and the National Democratic Institute think tanks.
The administration has rejected elections as not feasible by June 30, although they remain on the back burner until the United Nations provides its assessment, expected next month. The administration repeatedly notes that elections will be held for a permanent government next year. But some U.S. officials involved in the planning fear that the momentum behind holding elections this year may force their hand.
And those pressures have produced the fourth category of options. If the United States and the United Nations find that elections have to be held as part of the immediate transition, the leading option is to turn over power to the Governing Council or an expanded version until elections can be held -- and so the United States can still end the occupation on June 30.
This proposal -- favored by many on the council, who are reluctant to step aside -- was floated last summer but shelved after the United Nations pulled out last fall.
The United Nations has also begun to develop its ideas on how to select an Iraqi government, U.S. and U.N. officials say. At the top of a tentative list is reviving a national meeting -- the equivalent of Afghanistan's loya jirga assembly -- of representatives of political parties, tribal communities, ethnic factions and professional groups to pick a provisional government.
The United States tried this option after the war ended, but it was aborted because of the difficulty of doing background checks and identifying a credible cross-section of representatives, U.S. officials say.
Sistani, meanwhile, is looking at options, too, Iraqi and Arab officials said, in preparation for the verdict from the United Nations on elections. If the world body, which is expected to announce early this week that it will dispatch a team to Iraq, does determine that elections are not feasible, he has been talking among his advisers about what alternative he would support, the sources added.
Shadid reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Mike Allen in Davos, Switzerland, contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Israel Agrees to Free Arabs in a Swap With Militants
January 25, 2004
New York Times
By GREG MYRE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/middleeast/25HEZB.html?8br
JERUSALEM, Jan. 24 - Israel will free more than 400 Arab prisoners in a swap with Lebanon's Hezbollah guerrilla group, an important breakthrough that will return a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the remains of three Israeli soldiers, officials said Saturday.
The complicated exchange was brokered by the German government and is set to be carried out on Jan. 29, said Israeli, German and Hezbollah officials, all of whom confirmed the agreement in separate announcements Saturday night.
"We are satisfied that our boys are coming home, that's our main concern," said Jonathan Peled, spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry.
The deal is a rare instance in which Israel and Hezbollah have managed to reach an accord. Israel pulled its military out of southern Lebanon in May 2000 after battling with Hezbollah for the better part of two decades. But no peace agreement was reached, and the parties still exchange fire across the border Israeli-Lebanese border.
Israel and Hezbollah will exchange not only the living, but also the remains of fighters who, even in death, have been held captive for years.
Israel will free mostly Palestinian prisoners, but it will also release 23 from Lebanon, 5 from Syria, 5 from Morocco, 3 from Sudan and one from Libya, an Israeli official said.
The most prominent among them will be two Lebanese guerrilla leaders, Sheik Abdel Karim Obeid, who was seized in 1989, and Mustafa Dirani, captured in 1994. Israel has never charged them with crimes.
In addition, Israel will repatriate the remains of 59 Lebanese, most of them Hezbollah fighters killed in southern Lebanon before Israel's pullout, the official added.
In return, Hezbollah will free Elhanan Tannenbaum, an Israeli businessman kidnapped in October 2000 in the United Arab Emirates, Israeli media reports said. That same month, Hezbollah forces ambushed three of Israeli soldiers along the border and took them into Lebanon. Israel has declared them dead, and their remains are to be returned.
For years, Israel and Hezbollah have staged on-and-off negotiations through third parties, and a deal appeared within reach last November when Israel's cabinet narrowly approved an agreement in principle. But there had been no word recently on the negotiations, and the announcement on Saturday came as a surprise.
Tensions rose again this past week when Hezbollah guerrillas fired a missile that hit an Israeli armored military bulldozer, killing a soldier and seriously wounding a second.
Violence in the region continued on Saturday. Israeli troops shot to death two Palestinian militants who entered an unauthorized military zone near the barrier separating Gaza from Israel, Israeli Army and Palestinian sources said.
A small number of Lebanese who killed Israeli soldiers in southern Lebanon are expected to be released, but no other prisoners with what Israel called "blood on their hands" are to be freed.
Israel will not release Samir Qantar, a Lebanese sentenced to life in prison for an attack in 1979 that killed an Israeli man and his 4-year-old daughter in their home.
Hezbollah had been demanding the release of Mr. Qantar and all other Lebanese prisoners, but apparently agreed to drop that demand rather than risk undermining the deal.
The exchange has produced anguished debates in Israel, with the government, the public and the families of the missing Israelis expressed mixed feelings.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who has often opposed concessions to Israel's enemies, supported the swap with Hezbollah because it would bring home a captive Israeli, Mr. Tannenbaum. "Leaving him there is leaving him to die," Mr. Sharon said in November.
The Israeli news media has reported that Mr. Tannenbaum was deep in debt, and was lured to the United Arab Emirates by men posing as Arab businessmen and promising a quick financial windfall.
However, some Israeli critics said Israel was paying too high a price and expressed concern that the arrangement could encourage more kidnappings.
Israelis have also expressed disappointment that the deal will not bring new information on Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force navigator shot down in southern Lebanon in 1986. He was captured by Lebanese guerrillas. Israel says he later wound up in Iranian custody, but Israel has had no word on his fate in over a decade.
In the exchange, Israel will release the Palestinians to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The other Arab prisoners will be put on a plane to Frankfurt, an Israeli official said.
A plane from Lebanon will carry Mr. Tannenbaum and the remains of the three Israeli soldiers to Frankfurt. The swap will take place there, the official said.
--------
Israel, Hezbollah To Swap Prisoners
Deal Follows 3 Years of Negotiations
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A45204-2004Jan24.html
JERUSALEM, Jan. 24 -- Israel and the Lebanese Islamic militant group Hezbollah have agreed to a prisoner exchange in which about 400 Palestinians and dozens of other Arab detainees will be traded for a kidnapped Israeli businessman and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.
The deal, which comes after three years of negotiations brokered by a German mediator, was announced Saturday night by Germany and confirmed by Israeli officials. "With this agreement, Israel and Hezbollah have achieved a breakthrough in seeking to soothe one of the most painful consequences of the Middle East conflict," said Ernst Uhrlau, the mediator.
Israel considers Hezbollah, or Party of God, to be controlled by Iran and Syria, and Uhrlau said the agreement was reached with the assistance of Iran. But an Israeli official denied Iran's involvement and said Israel had negotiated only with Hezbollah. Those dealings, he said, had not been direct, but relayed through Uhrlau.
"We know very well that Hezbollah is a proxy of Syria and Iran," the Israeli official said, adding that the deal could not be seen as a new opening of Israeli dialogue with Damascus. Syria's president, Bashar Assad, facing increasing pressure since the U.S. invasion of Iraq, proposed last month reopening peace talks with Israel that were suspended in 2000, but Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has so far rejected those overtures.
An Israeli Foreign Ministry official said that in striking the deal with Hezbollah, Israel's "main concern was to bring our boys back home."
The exchange is expected to take place Wednesday or Thursday, when an Israeli plane will take the Arab prisoners to Germany at the same time a Lebanese plane from Beirut arrives there with the Israeli businessman and the bodies of the soldiers. The Palestinian prisoners will be released in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The non-Palestinian Arab prisoners include 23 Lebanese, for the most part captured during Israeli incursions and occupation of Lebanese territory from 1982 to 2000. There are also five Syrians, three Moroccans, three Sudanese and one Libyan, whom Israeli officials said were apprehended trying to enter Israel illegally.
The 400 Palestinian prisoners are the largest group of Palestinians to be released since Sharon took office three years ago. An Israeli official said the Palestinian prisoners were "terrorists" but "they don't actually have blood on their hands." He said most of the Palestinians were involved in planning terrorist attacks against Israelis but were apprehended before carrying out their plans.
A German, Steven Smyrek, accused of being an Islamic militant and planning an attack inside Israel, is also scheduled to be released.
The three Israeli soldiers were captured near the Lebanese border in October 2000. Israel at first held out hope that the soldiers were taken alive, but in November 2001 said the three were dead.
Hezbollah kidnapped the businessman, Elhanan Tannenbaum, in October 2000 after luring him to a meeting on the pretext of a business venture. Hezbollah's leader, Said Hasan Nasrallah, announced at a news conference the same month that Tannenbaum was a colonel and an agent for the Israeli Mossad intelligence agency, who was "arrested" in Lebanon during a "complex security operation" while on a spy mission to infiltrate Hezbollah. Israeli officials have said Tannenbaum was a businessman who may have been kidnapped in Switzerland and taken to Lebanon with the aid of the Iranian Embassy.
Tannenbaum is alleged to have been involved in questionable business transactions outside Israel, and officials said he could face criminal charges in Israel when he returns. "It will be interesting to see what kind of homecoming he gets," said one official.
A similar prisoner exchange was scuttled last year over the release of Samir Qantar, a Lebanese jailed in 1979 for an attack that killed three members of an Israeli family. Under the agreement announced Saturday, Israel will consider releasing him later, in exchange for information about the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli aviator whose plane was shot down over Lebanon in 1986.
Uhrlau said those talks should be completed in "two or three months."
-------- latin america
Mexico Accepts Peace Corps for First Time
By MARK STEVENSON
Associated Press Writer
Jan 25, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/N/NO_AID_PLEASE?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexico has broken a decades-old tradition of rejecting U.S. aid workers, granting permission for the first group of U.S. Peace Corps volunteers ever to work here.
Mindful of national sensitivity over U.S. influence, though, the government plans to keep the group out of public view.
Still, for a country that has kicked out or criticized U.S. experts in the past - and for one touchy about being viewed as underdeveloped - it's a big change.
The decision was made in November. The first 15 volunteers, scheduled to arrive this summer, won't be performing the Peace Corps' usual tasks in construction, rural schools, clinics or farmer training. They will be tucked away in research centers to work on information technology, science and business development.
"This is not the typical (Peace Corps) program. These people are not going to be working out in the villages," said Efrain Aceves Pina, international affairs director for Mexico's National Science and Technology Council. The Peace Corps is happy with Mexico's plan even though it is accustomed to more contact with everyday people, said agency spokeswoman Barbara Daly.
"The Peace Corps always works to integrate ourselves in the local culture," she said. "The volunteers live in the community and live with host families during the training."
Housing for the volunteers has not yet been decided.
The decision to accept the Peace Corps coincided with a low point in U.S.-Mexican relations. Washington had been miffed by Mexico's lack of support for the war in Iraq.
Mexican officials insist the idea of accepting the volunteers came up as a natural extension of existing scientific and technical cooperation programs. But many analysts think President Vicente Fox went along to try to smooth relations with President Bush.
"After the clash on Iraq, Fox is eager to please the United States," historian Lorenzo Meyer said. "He's trying to prove that he and Bush are the best of buddies."
Washington spends billions of dollars on military help, economic development and other aid programs elsewhere in Latin America, but Mexico gets next to nothing, apart from some small training programs for police and soldiers.
Even that can cause problems. News of a U.S. training program for the Mexican army made front-page headlines here in October, stirring such controversy that the U.S. Embassy issued a statement stressing that the total amount of aid was just $1.25 million - compared to U.S. outlays of about $700 million a year in the Andean countries of South America.
Mexico has rejected other U.S. aid programs aimed at persuading farmers to substitute legal food crops for illegal harvests like opium and marijuana, two illicit crops now widespread in some regions of Mexico.
"It's not that we have declined any aid out of spite," said Jose Santiago Vasconcelos, Mexico's top anti-drug prosecutor. "It's just that we think our sister nations (in Latin America) have a greater need for these programs, so out of solidarity we decided to let them have the scarce funding."
Meyer said the idea of accepting aid grates on his countrymen.
"Mexico has never wanted to accept aid," he said. "It's like accepting charity, a pittance."
Part of Mexico's hesitation comes from bad past experiences.
American anthropologist Oscar Lewis didn't mean to offend when he came to Mexico to interview a poor, problem-plagued Mexican family for his 1961 book "The Children of Sanchez." The book became a social science landmark, defining what came to be known as "the anthropology of poverty."
But it angered some Mexicans so much that the country's Society for Geography and Statistics filed a criminal complaint in 1965 accusing Sanchez of sedition, violating public morality and defaming Mexico.
Prosecutors dropped the case, but the feeling of insult didn't fade. In 1966, private publishers in Mexico put out a biting book about social problems in U.S. ghettos titled "Stories for Oscar Lewis."
Perhaps the most troubled American project was the Summer Institute of Linguistics, a group of researchers who were invited in the 1930s to work on improving literacy rates in Mexican Indian villages.
While they made great contributions in that field, the American linguists also helped sow the seeds of bloody divisions in traditionally Catholic Indian communities, by introducing Protestantism.
The linguists documented dozens of Indian languages and translated the Bible into those tongues. They set up medical services, agricultural training programs and even operated a jungle air service.
By the 1980s, however, the Americans - affiliated with a Protestant Bible-translation society - were being accused of being everything from missionaries to CIA agents. The government withdrew permission for the project, and most volunteers had been asked to leave by 1990.
On the Net:
Peace Corps: http://www.peacecorps.gov
-------- mideast
U.S. Lawmakers Make Landmark Libya Visit
By NIKO PRICE
Associated Press Writer
Jan 25, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LIBYA_US?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) -- The sight of the white jet taxiing down the tarmac Sunday - the first U.S. military plane to touch down in Tripoli since 1969 - left no doubt that a pariah state was coming in from the cold after renouncing its nuclear weapons program.
In a landmark visit, seven U.S. Congress members emerged from the U.S. Navy jet and heaped praise on the recent reforms of Col. Moammar Gadhafi, who former President Ronald Reagan once called a barbarian.
"We're very excited about opening this new chapter in our relations," said Rep. Curt Weldon, a Republican from Pennsylvania, who stepped off the plane wearing a pin with the American and Libyan flags.
"I'd say the Libyan leader has taken the first step," Weldon said, adding: "Once our governments have completed the process of formal relations, there is no limit to what we can accomplish together."
Rep. Solomon Ortiz, a Texas Democrat, put it more simply: "We want to be friends."
The U.S. military aircraft was the first to touch down in Tripoli since 1969, when Gadhafi seized power.
In the interim, American warplanes have flown only overhead, notably in 1986 when they launched attacks that killed 37 people, including Gadhafi's adopted daughter, in retaliation for the bombing of a German disco that killed a U.S. soldier and a Turkish woman.
The United States imposed sanctions that year, accusing Libya of supporting terrorist groups. Ten years later, America said it would penalize the U.S. partners of European companies that did significant business in Libya and Iran.
"I don't think we can change history, but we also understand we can move together toward a new beginning," Weldon said.
Over the last year Gadhafi has made a startling turnaround. He admitted his country's involvement in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, and agreed to pay $2.7 billion to the victims' families.
He also admitted he had tried to develop weapons of mass destruction - including a nuclear bomb - and invited U.N., American and British teams to inspect his weapons programs and dismantle them.
"I think clearly that Gadhafi is for real in that he has made this switch," Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, told The Associated Press. "He has been a person of abrupt changes throughout his career." Some have suggested that Libya didn't want to face the kind of war that drove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq last year. But diplomats say Libya appears to have made a firm decision to remake itself in 2002, before the United States launched its war on Iraq.
Gadhafi's decisions followed months of secret negotiations with the United States and Britain.
After Libya admitted in September its involvement in the Lockerbie bombing, the U.N. Security Council voted to lift its sanctions. The United States is waiting for Gadhafi to follow through on the rest of his pledges before doing the same.
The lawmakers indicated that barring any changes of heart, diplomatic ties soon could be restored.
"We are here to let the leaders of Libya know that if they continue the steps they are taking, that's a very real likelihood," Weldon said.
Libya is also counting on a restoration of economic ties. The sanctions have cost Libya more than $30 billion in lost business. Investment is especially needed for an oil industry that once made the North African country of about 5 million people a regional power.
The Congressional delegation met Sunday with Libya's prime minister, foreign minister and a delegation from the People's Congress - the equivalent of a parliament.
The Congress members also walked through a section of Tripoli and visited a farm owned by Gadhafi's son, Seif el-Islam, who is seen as a possible successor to his father. The lawmakers said the farm had tigers, a cougar and falcons.
Before their scheduled departure late Monday, the members hope to meet Gadhafi and visit sites related to Libya's weapons of mass destruction, which U.S. and British experts are preparing to dismantle with Gadhafi's blessing.
At the airport, the delegation was received by a senior local official, Abdul-Latif al-Dali, secretary of the Tripoli People's Congress, who chatted with Weldon about the overcast weather as they made their way to the airport lounge.
Al-Dali sat stiffly as the Americans spoke, but told the delegation: "We are very happy that the representatives of the American people have come."
In Tripoli's central market, many shoppers and shopkeepers echoed his words.
"They're very welcome here," said Abdul Hakim Bizanti, 45. "Libya's opening up. It's good for us, for everybody."
The delegation's arrival came on the heels of that of another American lawmaker. Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, landed Saturday in the first visit by an elected U.S. official in 38 years.
Asked if he felt upstaged by the separate Lantos visit, Weldon said: "I don't know why he did it. I would question why you spend $30,000 to fly across, when you could have flown in on a military plane that had 100 empty seats.
"He's got to answer to the taxpayers on why he spent that money," he said.
In addition to Weldon, Ortiz and Issa, the delegation includes Democratic Rep. Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, as well as Republicans Candice Miller of Michigan, Mark Souder of Indiana and Elton Gallegly of California. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., planned to join the delegation at a later stop in Kuwait.
Niko Price is correspondent-at-large for The Associated Press
----
Syria Denies Weapons Received Before War
Jan 25, 2004
(AP)
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SYRIA_WEAPONS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
DAMASCUS, Syria -- Syria on Sunday denied claims that it received weapons of mass destruction from Iraq shortly before the United States and its allies invaded.
An article in London's Sunday Telegraph quoted David Kay, the outgoing leader of a U.S. weapons search team in Iraq, as saying that part of Iraq's secret weapons program had been hidden in Syria.
But in an interview aired later Sunday on National Public Radio, Kay said it is difficult to determine whether shipments to Syria included weapons, in part because Syria has refused to cooperate in this part of the weapons investigation.
In brief comments to reporters, Syrian Information Minister Ahmad Hassan called the Telegraph report "baseless and misleading."
The Syrian government has repeatedly denied that Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were sent to Syria to prevent their discovery by U.N. inspectors or U.S. troops.
American forces have turned up no evidence of such weapons despite months of searching. Kay said he now believes there is nothing to find.
"I don't think they exist," Kay said in the radio interview. "The fact that we found so far the weapons do not exist - we've got to deal with that difference and understand why."
-------- spies
Spy chiefs warn PM: don't blame us for war
25 January 2004
UK Herald .EXCLUSIVE.
By Neil Mackay, Investigations Editor
http://www.sundayherald.com/39548
BRITISH intelligence chiefs launched a pre-emptive strike against Tony Blair last night, ahead of the publication of the Hutton report, and blamed the government for pressurising them into cherry-picking intelligence to justify the war on Iraq.
The UK's leading spies believe the political fallout from the publication on Wednesday of the Hutton Inquiry's report will result in an attempt by the Prime Minister and his senior Cabinet colleagues to blame the intelligence services for the shoddy information which was used by the government to convince the British people and parliament that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were a threat to the UK.
The views of senior members of the intelligence community were passed to the Sunday Herald. They include those from:
# The Defence Intelligence Staff, which helped supply intelligence for Blair's disputed September 2002 WMD dossier.
# The Joint Intelligence Organisation, which includes John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) - the body which liaises between the intelligence services and the government and which was supposed to have sole control of the drafting of the dossier - and the JIC's support staff.
# MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, the main agency responsible for gathering the intelligence which went into the dossier.
The intelligence community is speaking out now in order to pre-empt any attack. It is warning the government that it will not be blamed for the failure to prove the case for war, the death of Dr David Kelly and the lack of WMD in Iraq.
The key points it wants on the record are:
# Many had been openly sceptical about the presence of WMD in Iraq for years.
# The intelligence community was under pressure to provide the government with what it wanted, namely that Iraq possessed WMD and was a danger.
# Intelligence was "cherry-picked", with damning intelligence against Iraq being selectively chosen, while intelligence assessments, which might have worked against the build-up to war, were sidelined. lIntelligence work had become politicised under Labour , and spies were taking orders from politicians. They provided worst-case scenarios which were used by politicians to make factual claims.
They accept that intelligence was used for political ends, but believe it is not their job to help politicians justify their actions, as that distorts the nature of intelligence work.
Britain's senior spies believe they are not in the firing line over Hutton, but realise that a rethink is needed over the future of British intelligence. They say they want changes made in order to maintain their integrity.
The first attacks on British intelligence, ahead of the Hutton report, came from Donald Anderson, a Labour loyalist and chairman of the influential foreign affairs committee.
His attack followed the resignation on Friday of David Kay, the head of the Iraq Survey Group. Kay, who was appointed by the CIA to lead the hunt for Saddam's WMD, quit his post saying he didn't think WMD existed in Iraq.
Anderson said Blair and President George Bush had relied on intelligence regarding Iraq's WMD, adding that Kay's claims "raise very important questions about the quality of that intelligence".
Kay's successor, Charles Duelfer, said earlier this month that he did not believe banned weapons would ever be found.
US Secretary of State Colin Powell also conceded yesterday that Iraq may not have possessed any WMD - even though he gave a presentation to the United Nations in the run-up to war saying Saddam had large stockpiles of banned weapons.
# news in focus: Waiting for Hutton
# what we think: Now we know. We were lied to about WMD. So now Blair should go
-------- un
Iraq weapons report should be taken seriously: Annan
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Reuters
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1031122.htm
United Nations secretary-general Kofi Annan has said a statement by the outgoing chief US arms hunter Dr David Kay that Iraq had no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction should be taken seriously.
Dr Kay resigned on Friday, saying he had concluded that Iraq did not have stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, a finding that could embarrass President George W Bush abroad and help his election-year Democratic rivals at home.
Mr Annan told reporters that Dr Kay, who led a fruitless hunt for illegal weapons after the US-led invasion of Iraq last year, was credible.
"He's an experienced inspector, he had worked with the UN before and he has also taken on this thing. And I think his report and what he says should be taken seriously," Mr Annan said.
The UN Security Council did not approve military action in Iraq because the United States failed to convince a majority of members of an imminent threat from Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
UN weapons inspectors left Baghdad last March, shortly before the war, saying President Saddam Hussein's government had not given full answers to their questions.
----
Wary UN returns to Iraq
Baghdad
January 25, 2004
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/01/24/1074732653862.html
A UN security team arrived in Baghdad - the world body's first Iraq deployment in three months - as a top Shiite cleric urged an end to protests against coalition plans for a power transfer, and two more US soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who pulled staff out of Iraq after two deadly attacks on the UN's Baghdad headquarters, promised to announce "shortly" the UN's role in the US-led coalition's plan to end its nine-month occupation of Iraq.
A UN spokesman stressed that the team that arrived yesterday was charged only with opening channels of communication with the coalition, not with assessing the safety of returning a full-blown UN mission.
"The opening of a direct line of communication with the coalition on security matters is necessary for the planning for the safety and security of UN personnel, activities and assets in Iraq and for an eventual return of UN international staff to Iraq," UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.
A separate security assessment would be needed if Dr Annan announced a full mission return, as he is widely expected to do this week.
The White House supported a resumption of the UN's presence in Iraq.
"They have an important role to play," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "They have a lot of special expertise that they can offer. And so we are hopeful that they can return to Iraq as soon as possible."
He said US President George Bush had met briefly with Lakhdar Brahimi, a widely respected UN diplomat newly appointed as Dr Annan's special adviser on Iraq.
The spiritual leader of Iraq's Shiite Muslim majority gave the coalition and the UN a respite when he called for a halt to protests against plans for the transfer of power until UN experts can rule on whether direct elections can be held in the next six months.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani directed his followers to give the UN time to organise an evaluation mission, just a week after he threatened a campaign of civil disobedience unless the coalition agreed to organise elections.
It was vital "to wait until the United States and the UN clarify their positions on the election procedure to choose the nature of the next Iraqi government," Ayatollah Sistani's envoy, Sheik Abdel Mahdi al-Karbalai, said at the main weekly Muslim prayers in the Shiite pilgrimage city of Karbala.
Meanwhile two US soldiers were killed when their military reconnaissance helicopter went down in northern Iraq, the fourth such crash this month.
A military spokesman said it was not immediately clear what had brought the aircraft down.
In the northern city of Samarra, three people were killed and four wounded yesterday morning when a truck bomb exploded outside a courthouse, a local official said.
And in Baghdad, two members of the Iraqi Communist Party were killed when a bomb went off outside the party's offices.
The latest blasts occurred during a bloody few days for Iraqi civilians, with nine others killed in rebel attacks, including one on a bus carrying laundry workers to a US military base. Five women died in the attack.
----
UN to Decide on Iraq, Three U.S. Soldiers Missing
January 25, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said he may decide as early as Monday on sending a mission to help a U.S. handover of power to Iraqis, while U.S. forces searched for three missing military personnel.
The U.S. military said a Kiowa helicopter crashed during a search for a U.S. soldier who had been on a patrol boat on the Tigris river near the northern city of Mosul that went missing earlier. It was not known if the helicopter came under fire.
No details of what happened to the boat were available, but a military spokesman said two Iraqi police and a translator were believed to have died in the incident.
Rescuers were fired at with small arms after the helicopter crash and a Reuters cameraman at the scene said an Iraqi policeman was killed in a drive-by shooting.
``I would expect to make a decision in the next day or so,'' Annan told Swedish TV on Sunday as Washington said it saw a significant role for the U.N. in the handover of power to Iraqis in June, particularly in assessing the feasibility of elections.
Annan has sent two security experts to Baghdad to decide whether it is safe for U.N. international staff to return to Iraq. Guerrilla bomb attacks at the weekend killed six U.S. soldiers and four Iraqis.
ELECTION DEMANDS
Washington, which previously ruled out any major U.N. political involvement in Iraq, has said the United Nations could help supervise the handover and discuss demands by the majority Shi'ite Muslims and other Iraqis for early elections.
Top Shi'ite cleric Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani wants a full-scale election, which would probably favor Shi'ites who make up an estimated 60 percent of the 25 million population from a volatile mix of ethnic and religious groups.
The Shi'ites have been flexing their muscle after three decades of repression under Saddam Hussein, a Sunni Muslim.
A U.S. plan envisages regional caucuses selecting an assembly to choose a transitional government for sovereignty in June. Washington believes elections would be difficult to organize due to a lack of electoral registers and laws.
``We have asked the United Nations...for a second opinion on this issue of is it possible to get world standard elections within four, five or six months before June,'' said U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Democracy Lorne Carner.
Diplomats at the United Nations said Annan may not give details on the timing of the U.N. mission to Baghdad or who would lead it, but it was expected to go next month.
They said Annan would probably link the departure to a U.N. security assessment, required since a bomb attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad last August killed 22 people and prompted the world body to withdraw all international staff.
Annan was asked to send the mission by Iraq's U.S. Governor Paul Bremer and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council.
CALL FOR INQUIRY ON BUSH
U.S. Senator John Kerry, a Democratic hopeful in the race to challenge President Bush in presidential elections in November, demanded an independent commission investigate the Bush administration's grounds for going to war in Iraq.
David Kay, who quit last week as chief U.S. arms hunter in Iraq, told Reuters he did not believe Saddam had any stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons as U.S. intelligence said before the war.
Bush ordered U.S.-led forces to invade Iraq last March to topple Saddam after accusing him of possessing chemical and biological arms and developing a nuclear weapon.
``(U.S. Vice President) Dick Cheney and others in the administration misled the American people with respect to the true status of the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,'' Kerry told CBS TV.
But Kay said: ``I actually think the intelligence community owes the president, rather than the president owing the American people. It is not a political gotcha issue.''
Washington says Saddam supporters and foreign Islamic militants are behind guerrilla attacks on U.S.-led forces, but that the number of raids have declined in the wake of the former Iraqi president's capture in December.
Since the U.S.-led invasion in March, at least 513 American soldiers have died in Iraq, 355 in combat.
Annan said the United Nations would be ready to set up an international tribunal for the trial of Saddam if it were asked by the U.S.-led authorities in Baghdad.
``We have not been asked to play a role yet. But if we were asked, I'm sure that we are capable of playing a role. We have a vast experience in this,'' Annan said.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- prisons / prisoners
Guantanamo Spy Cases Evaporate
Chaplain and Arabic Translator Are Now Facing Only Lesser Charges
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44930-2004Jan24?language=printer
Last September, top officials of the Navy prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, told a military judge in Florida that the prison's Muslim chaplain, Army Capt. James Yee, would soon be charged with mutiny, sedition, espionage, spying and aiding the enemy -- crimes that could lead to his execution.
Based on those allegations, Yee was held in solitary confinement in a Navy brig in South Carolina for 76 days. But authorities never charged him with any of those offenses. Instead, Yee will face much less serious charges, such as mishandling classified materials and adultery, when the case against him resumes at a hearing at Fort Benning, Ga., scheduled for Feb. 4.
At the same time Yee was being detained, Air Force Senior Airman Ahmad I. Halabi, who worked as an Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay, was also in solitary confinement 3,000 miles away, held in California on charges of espionage and aiding the enemy. In time, the most serious of those allegations have been withdrawn as well.
Some experts on military law and the men's lawyers say the prosecutions of Yee and Halabi have been riddled with inconsistencies and oddities that cast doubt on the government's original fears that a spy ring was operating in the high-security prison for alleged al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
"I find it difficult to believe professional prosecutors are proceeding with these two cases in this manner," said Gary D. Solis, a former Marine Corps prosecutor who teaches the law of war at Georgetown University. "The ineptitude at each step of the proceeding is amazing. . . . It seems there's been investigative overreaction in both cases."
Even now, prosecutors have not made final determinations that some of the documents Halabi was charged with possessing were, in fact, classified -- and, if they were, what level of security applied to them. As a result, his lead civilian attorney, Donald G. Rehkopf Jr., said he has only a hazy picture of why his client was arrested last July.
A similar review of documents in the Yee case was finished only in recent days.
In an unusual episode last month, military investigators raided offices used by Halabi's military lawyers at an Air Force base in California, temporarily seizing one computer and copying its hard drive in a search for evidence against the airman.
Rehkopf protested the search in a letter to Air Force officials, calling it "bizarre" and "a conscious disregard of the attorney-client relationship."
"We are imploring the senior leadership of the Air Force to get this case under control," the letter said.
The Air Force is refusing to comment on the case of the Syrian-born Halabi, 25, who is accused of illegally possessing letters from detainees and other documents about the prison at Guantanamo Bay.
Officials at the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees Guantanamo Bay, have commented on Yee. They say they are demonstrating caution and fairness in their treatment of him. "We've taken a methodical, well-thought-out approach in the case against Chaplain Yee," said Col. Bill Costello, a Southern Command spokesman.
Yee, who graduated from West Point and converted to Islam, faces two counts of mishandling classified material related to papers found on him when he was arrested in Florida after a flight from Guantanamo Bay last Sept. 10. He also has been charged with failing to obey an order or regulation; making a false official statement; conduct unbecoming an officer, for downloading pornographic material onto his laptop computer; and adultery with a female officer at Guantanamo Bay.
Halabi was originally charged last summer with 30 offenses, including espionage, aiding the enemy and other allegations based on searches of his Guantanamo Bay computer. But in the fall, 13 charges were dropped, including the most serious ones, which could have led to the death penalty. He still faces charges of mishandling classified material and attempted espionage involving an alleged plan, apparently never carried out, to pass information to someone in Syria.
Two other men have been charged with breaching Guantanamo Bay security. Ahmed F. Mehalba, a Muslim linguist who worked as a prison contractor, faces charges in a federal court of lying to investigators and mishandling classified data after secret files about the prison were found on his computer when he landed at Boston's Logan International Airport on a flight from Egypt. Army Reserve Col. Jack Farr, a senior officer in the Guantanamo Bay unit that interrogates detainees, was charged in November with mishandling classified material and lying to investigators after he flew from the base to Florida and classified papers were found in his bags.
In the Yee and Halabi cases, prosecutors have handed over batches of papers to defense lawyers, only to demand their return. In each case, prosecutors said the documents had mistakenly been designated as unclassified. Officials also provided other papers to the defense, saying they were classified but releasable, then later retracted that description, saying the documents were unclassified, defense attorneys said.
"If ranking military officers don't know what's classified, how is a 25-year-old supply clerk totally inexperienced in classification supposed to know?" Rehkopf said.
Officials have refused to say what provoked investigations of Yee and Halabi. But knowledgeable sources said suspicions about them began last year, around the time Halabi started helping Yee prepare a community center on the base for Muslim prayer services each Friday. Halabi also had dinner twice at Yee's quarters with him and other Muslim service members, sources said.
Around the same time, Halabi -- whose job was translating letters between detainees and their families -- was allegedly sending some of the letters he translated to undisclosed recipients via e-mail and to a Web site he maintained.
Halabi also was corresponding with the Syrian Embassy to obtain a visa to travel there for his wedding, an event he had to reschedule repeatedly because his military tour was extended a number of times. Sources say investigators feared there was some connection between Halabi and Yee because each had ties to Syria. Yee had spent four years there in the mid-1990s training as an imam and is married to a Syrian woman.
On July 23, when he arrived at a naval base in Jacksonville, Fla., for the trip to Syria, Halabi was arrested secretly and interrogated for 24 hours without sleep. The next month he was preliminarily charged with the 30 counts that included aiding the enemy.
On Sept. 10, when Yee was leaving Guantanamo Bay to return to his home in Washington state, Guantanamo Bay officials investigating him theorized he had classified material with him. They tipped off customs officials in Florida.
Customs agent Sean Rafferty testified in a hearing last month that he found in Yee's backpack four notebooks and notepads, a variety of other printed papers, and a typed, official-looking list of names of detainees and interrogators, with numbers by the names. "It was determined the documents were of interest to national security," Rafferty testified.
But Yee's lawyers said that among the papers Rafferty found "suspicious" were Web pages on Middle East history that Yee had downloaded for a course on international affairs he was taking at Army expense at Troy State University, which had a satellite program at Yee's home base of Fort Lewis, Wash.
Military officials said Yee was evasive at the airport. When asked whether he had luggage with him, Yee replied no. But his lawyers said that was a misunderstanding: His suitcase was not in his possession at that time. In any case, the luggage contained no documents, while the backpack he had with him contained the papers that generated officials' suspicion, indicating Yee made no effort to conceal anything, his lawyers said.
Yee was arrested on suspicion of various crimes but not formally charged. But in documents filed with the military magistrate who reviewed his detention, top Guantanamo Bay officials said that among the "offenses charged" against Yee were mutiny, sedition, espionage, spying and aiding the enemy. On Sept. 12, the magistrate ordered him held in the brig at a Navy base in Charleston, S.C.
On Oct. 10, Yee was charged with two counts of mishandling classified material because of the papers found on him in Jacksonville -- but there was no mention of the more serious charges.
His lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell, wrote a scathing letter to President Bush in November pointing out that cases involving accusations of mishandling classified material almost always end up with administrative slaps on the wrist, not solitary confinement.
Yee "is being treated as if the original laundry list of charges [such as mutiny] was the legal basis for his confinement," Fidell wrote. "He is being treated as if he were an enemy combatant rather than a commissioned officer."
On Nov. 25, officials freed Yee but also charged him with other offenses, including the relatively rare count of adultery because of a sexual affair investigators discovered during their probe. Fidell said adding these counts was vindictive.
Costello, the Southern Command spokesman, acknowledged that officials had the choice of not charging Yee with adultery. But Yee "is supposed to be a moral compass" for soldiers, Costello said. "If adultery goes unpunished, that sends a message."
Yee's lawyers also noted several medals and citations awarded during his stint in Cuba. "Yee's strong sense of professionalism, maturity and dedication to duty," read one citation last July, "reflected credit upon himself, the U.S. Army and the Department of Defense."
Halabi, meanwhile, remains in jail pending a yet-to-be-scheduled court-martial in California. In recent months, the most serious charges against him have been dropped, including using the computer to communicate with "the enemy," a term never defined. Among the remaining charges are two for attempting to commit espionage, apparently for allegedly planning to send prisoners' letters to someone in Syria.
His attorneys said Air Force officials issued orders months ago that bar Halabi from speaking Arabic in prison, even to his non-English-speaking relatives. The defense lawyers expressed puzzlement at prosecutors' later claim that no such order was ever given, saying they have it in writing. Halabi still must use translators to speak to his relatives, the attorneys said.
Halabi's attorneys have asked to interview a number of detainees whose names they provided to authorities. But officials have denied the requests, demanding to know how they learned the prisoners' names and contending that it may have been through unauthorized disclosure. Rehkopf, Halabi's lawyer, said it was from the Internet.
Halabi's and Yee's attorneys say their clients have been treated more harshly than Farr, a non-Muslim charged with similar offenses. Farr voluntarily returned to Cuba to face the charges and continues to serve in his old interrogation unit, officials said.
-------- terrorism
Cheney Calls for More Unity in Fight Against Terrorism
January 25, 2004
By ERIC SCHMITT and MARK LANDLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/europe/25DAVO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
DAVOS, Switzerland, Jan. 24 - Vice President Dick Cheney called Saturday for greater global unity to fight terrorism, halt the spread of illicit weapons and promote democratic trends in the Middle East, in the Bush administration's most significant appeal yet to disaffected allies who opposed the Iraq war.
Mr. Cheney, one of President Bush's most influential senior advisers, defended the administration's decision to topple Saddam Hussein. But in a rare trip outside the United States, he also sought to mend rifts over the war, striking a conciliatory tone in seeking help from Europeans and other traditional allies to strengthen the global partnership against an array of security threats. In a wide-ranging address to about 1,000 political, business and religious leaders at an international conference here in the Alps, Mr. Cheney asked European allies to join the United States to promote democratic movements in Iran, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and to combat the root cause of terrorism by helping to overcome what he called the "freedom deficit" in many Middle Eastern countries.
"We must meet the dangers together," Mr. Cheney said in his 30-minute speech to the gathering, the annual World Economic Forum. "Cooperation among our governments, and effective international institutions, are even more important than they have been in the past."
Mr. Cheney continued, "Working cooperatively against the dangers of a new era will place demands on us all, and there will be occasional differences, even among allies who have great respect for one another."
The administration's choice of Mr. Cheney to lead its delegation here may seem improbable, given his low profile and hard-line reputation. Mr. Cheney was making only his second international trip in three years as vice president, and remains an enigma to many Europeans and other foreigners. The White House also generally avoids the kinds of issues this conference champions, like globalization and multilateral diplomacy.
But aides to Mr. Cheney said he was eager to come, both out of an interest in meeting with world political and business leaders, including King Abdullah of Jordan and Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharaf, and to soften Mr. Bush's international image and to reassure allies that the United States was not pursuing a unilateral security strategy.
Responding to a question after his speech, Mr. Cheney sought to dispel perceptions that the United States was empire-building. "If we were a true empire, we would currently preside over a much greater piece of the earth's surface than we do," he said. "That's not the way we operate."
Last year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke at the conference, drawing a skeptical response when he laid out the case for military action in Iraq, even without a United Nations mandate. Mr. Cheney received polite, but perfunctory, applause on Saturday as he sought to patch up strains with European allies over the Iraq war, stricter visa requirements and the treatment of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Klaus Zumwinkel, chairman of the German postal service, Deutsche Post, said that Mr. Cheney "increased the market share of positive sentiment toward the United States."
While other listeners took note of Mr. Cheney's conciliatory tone, some were suspicious of his motives.
"This overture comes during an election year," said Carel N. Van Der Spek, a Dutch banker. "The Bush administration wants to draw down its troops in Iraq, and to do that, it needs helps from Europe."
Dominique Borde, a French law firm partner, praised Mr. Cheney's tone. But he said the vice president offered little evidence that the United States planned to pay more heed to France or other allies in formulating its foreign policy.
"This is a world where economic might prevails," Mr. Borde said. "We're not run by an empire. We're run by a democracy."
Speaking at a dinner for journalists, the financier George Soros said administration officials have "recognized the mistakes they have made, and now realize that they need international cooperation," but "there is a big gap between the words of the Bush administration and its actions."
In his remarks, Mr. Cheney offered no specific initiatives, instead proposing democratic reforms like greater political participation and the rule of law as a broad prescription for "confronting the ideologies of violence" and addressing the root causes of terrorism. "Helping the peoples of the greater Middle East to overcome the freedom deficit is, ultimately, the key to winning the broader war on terror," he said.
Even as Mr. Cheney proposed a rhetorical truce in the trans-Atlantic feud over Iraq and new courses of action ahead, he offered an unapologetic defense of the administration's threat to use military force, if necessary, whenever diplomacy fails.
Mr. Cheney, echoing themes in Mr. Bush's State of the Union address last Tuesday, cited the ouster of the Taliban in Afghanistan and the end of Mr. Hussein's rule in Iraq as examples of the strategy's success.
The recent decision by the Libyan president, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, to give up his nation's illicit weapons programs, was the result of quiet diplomacy backed up by the threat of force, Mr. Cheney said. "Our diplomacy with Libya was successful only because our word was credible," he said.
He did not address the issue of Iraq's elusive unconventional weapons, and was not asked about them during a brief question-and-answer period after his remarks. David Kay, who led the American effort to find banned weapons in Iraq, said Friday after stepping down from his post that he had concluded that Iraq had no stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons at the start of the war.
Mr. Cheney's remarks appeared to build on themes Mr. Bush voiced in a speech on Nov. 21 in Britain, when he said France and Germany, which have been reluctant to take part in stabilizing Iraq, should recall the lessons of World War II, when an Allied effort defeated Nazi tyranny in Europe and paved the way there for postwar security and prosperity.
Mr. Cheney again invoked World War II, and noted that American and European intelligence and law enforcement agencies were working together to hunt down terrorists.
"Through six decades and 12 American presidents, the United States and Europe have faced monumental challenges and have overcome them together," he declared.
But he called on Europe to do more: "Europeans know that their great experiment in building peace, unity and prosperity cannot survive as a privileged enclave, surrounded on its outskirts by breeding grounds of hatred and fanatics."
Mr. Cheney listed several positive security developments, including Mr. Hussein's capture, the new democratic Constitution in Afghanistan, and the easing of tensions between India and Pakistan.
But he said terrorist groups still posed a long-term threat, given their determination to develop or acquire chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons.
"Were they to gain those weapons either by their own efforts or with the help from an outlaw regime, no appeal to reason or morality would prevent them from committing the worst of terrors," he said.
Mr. Cheney put a new emphasis on promoting democratic values as a way to defeat terrorism. This appeared to answer criticism from foreign officials that the administration's strategy for combating terrorism was too narrow.
"Democracies do not breed the anger and radicalism that drag down whole societies or export violence," Mr. Cheney said. "Terrorists do not find fertile recruiting grounds in societies where young people have the right to guide their own destinies and to choose their own leaders."
The notion that democratic values could never take root in the Middle East was "condescending" and "false," he said. He cited broader women's rights in Morocco, as well as reduced state controls on news organizations in Jordan and increased opportunities for women to run for public office in Bahrain.
Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, applauded Mr. Cheney for pressing for democracy in the Arab world, though he said he was disappointed by most of the speech, which he said was notable for its "complete lack of reference to international law."
Some Arab members of the audience said the United States must step in more forcefully to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, if it wanted to hasten the development of democracy in the Middle East.
"Reform is like a seed you plant," said Nadim Y. Muasher, the chairman of the Arab International Hotels Company in Jordan. "If you plant it between two rocks - Israel and Palestine - it won't grow."
Alan Cowell contributed reporting for this article.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Scientists Warn of Imminent New Ice Age
Global warming will plunge Britain into new ice age 'within decades'
The Independent (U.K.)
Jan, 25, 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=484490
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?id=4570&method=full
Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests.
A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change "of remarkable amplitude" in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic.
Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden "flips" of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as "the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments", by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild.
If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison.
A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden - launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists - warned last week that pollution threatened to "trigger changes with catastrophic consequences" like these.
Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as "likely". But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away.
The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen.
Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: "This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling."
Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered one of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: "We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes. "Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates."
The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become "very much" saltier in the tropics and subtropics and "very much" fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years.
This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current.
The change is described as the "fingerprint" of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water.
Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade.
The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as "the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light". Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate,lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries.
When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide.
Some scientists say that this is the "worst-case scenario" and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world's climate "flickering" between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilisation.
-------- health
A Horror Script For Health Officials
Bird Flu Poses Global Epidemic Threat
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 25, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45119-2004Jan24?language=printer
The metaphor that public health officials invoke when talking about a global flu epidemic is the same one that lies at the heart of the scariest horror movies.
It is the idea of a small and deadly thing that is poking and prodding for a weak spot in whatever is protecting its intended victims. It is patient, because it knows it will eventually succeed. When it does, a horrible metamorphosis makes it huge and unstoppable.
This plot was a deadly hit in 1968, 1957 and, most notoriously, 1918, when pandemic influenza killed about 50 million people worldwide. Today, virologists fear a remake is underway in East Asia.
Over the past month, a strain of bird flu that has killed thousands of chickens in four countries has broken through the "species barrier" to claim a few human victims. This time, though, the public health community hopes to write a different end to the script.
"There is a chance that something can go wrong," Klaus Stohr, head of the World Health Organization's flu program, said Friday in Geneva. "But it looks as if we act decisively and timely now, there is a window of opportunity here to control the disease before it takes global proportions."
That action consists of exterminating chickens carrying the virus, protecting people in contact with the birds from infection and understanding the pathogen at the molecular level -- all as quickly as possible. Cross-border traffic of live birds and poultry products has stopped in much of the region, and there is talk of vaccinating millions of chickens.
So far, there is no evidence that this bird flu can be passed from person to person -- a trait it would need to acquire to make it a global threat.
"Everyone has their ear to the ground. That is the big question, isn't it?" said Robert G. Webster, one of the country's leading influenza experts, who jetted to Hong Kong two weeks ago to study the new strain.
If evidence of person-to-person contagion appeared, the already urgent response would escalate dramatically. Borders would close, the ill would probably be quarantined, and a crash program to make a new version of the annual flu shot would begin. The response would be much like the one mounted against severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) a year ago.
The stakes would be much higher, however, because the flu virus, once fully adapted humans, can spread with a speed and ease that SARS never showed. A lot has to happen, though, for bird flu to gain that capacity. The trouble is that in influenza's world, a lot can happen very quickly.
Health authorities in Vietnam are investigating 30 suspected cases of bird flu in people. Fourteen have died, most of them children under age 12. In six cases, laboratory testing identified a strain of avian influenza designated H5N1. Late last week, two children in Thailand -- both still alive -- were diagnosed with H5N1 flu.
The H and N denote two proteins, hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, that sit on the outer shell of the virus. Together, they provide a virus's chemical appearance to the immune system. The particular combination of H and N is the key to a strain's identity and the first hint of whether it might be a danger to people.
There are 15 forms of hemagglutinin and nine of neuraminidase in the most populous class of flu viruses -- influenza A. (The less common and less dangerous influenza B has only one type of H and N).
When a virus with a new H-N combination appears, immunity built up to older ones is no help. What follows can be a worldwide epidemic -- assuming the virus also grows well in people and is spread easily in coughs and sneezes.
The great pandemic of 1918 was H1N1. It was unquestionably new, although what strain it replaced is not known. In 1957, an H2N2 virus appeared in southern China, triggering a pandemic of "Asian flu." In 1968, an H3N2 virus appeared, causing the global "Hong Kong flu." In 1977, H1N1 reemerged -- by then, nearly everyone under age 20 had never seen it -- and caused a mini-pandemic.
There are many H-N combinations, however, seen only in other species, particularly birds, which are the real home range for flu virus. The feared H5N1 is one of them. It can tear through chicken flocks with a mortality approaching 90 percent. But virologists did not think it could infect people -- at least, not until 1997.
That year, 18 people in Hong Kong became infected with H5N1 -- the first time direct bird-to-people transmission had been seen. Six died, most of them healthy young adults -- a disturbingly high percentage.
Previously, scientists believed that to infect and kill a person, a bird flu virus would first have to acquire at least a few genes from the flu viruses that regularly circulate in human populations. That is possible because unlike viruses whose genes reside on a single unbroken strand of RNA or DNA, flu carries its genetic information on eight separate strands. Under the right conditions, it can trade one of more of them with another flu virus, like a card player in a game of hearts.
Virologists once believed these "reassortments" occurred only in pigs, because that species is capable of being infected by both human and avian flu. With the 1997 Hong Kong cases, however, it was clear reassortment might also occur in a person simultaneously infected by both.
The chance of that occurring depends on how much avian flu is around. What scares scientists this winter is that it is all over the place -- in flocks in Japan, Vietnam, South Korea and now Thailand.
"It is an unprecedented situation with H5N1 virus in so many countries around Asia," Webster said. "The extent of the spread of this virus has not been seen before."
How H5N1 became so widespread is not known. The urgent chore is to get rid of the animals harboring it.
In recent weeks, tens of thousands of chickens have been killed in flocks in Japan, Vietnam and Thailand. The number could go much higher.
It is important to protect the workers culling the flocks from getting human flu, lest they themselves become the "mixing vessels" in which a reassortment occurs. WHO is urging they be vaccinated, and if possible be given preventive medicines.
Even without reassortment, it is possible that avian influenza could become a pandemic strain, but that is far less likely.
"Given enough time and enough opportunity, viruses could go through a process of human adaptation and become more transmissible than these ones are at the moment," said Nancy J. Cox, the head of the influenza program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We know, though, that in 1968 and in 1957 the strains were reassortments between human and avian viruses."
Curiously, Hong Kong, where the first human cases of bird flu occurred, is reporting no H5N1 now.
That region changed its poultry-marketing practices after the 1997 outbreak. Waterfowl, which can carry H5N1, were separated from chickens. Quail, also viral hosts, were banned.
Markets were also required to be cleaned twice a month. People were thought to have been infected by breathing an infectious dust stirred up when chickens, whose feathers were contaminated with virus-containing feces, were taken flapping from their cages.
Still, H5N1 continued to turn up occasionally until last year, when a poultry vaccine began to be used widely, Webster said. Today in Hong Kong's markets, he said, "every chicken has had its shots."
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Thailand Brings in Troops to Fight Bird Flu
January 25, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/asia/25CND-BIRD.html?hp
BANGKOK, Jan. 25 - Provincial governments in west-central Thailand dispatched hundreds of soldiers and prisoners today to slaughter chickens in flocks infected with avian influenza, as hospitals across southeast Asia remained on high alert for further human cases of the disease.
Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra of Thailand visited farmers and promised government compensation for the millions of chickens being killed in an effort to stamp out bird flu before it spreads even more. But he stopped short of saying how much compensation would be made.
The government of Vietnam has been paying as little as 10 percent of the market price as workers there slaughter chickens in or near infected flocks. Farmers there are estimated to have quickly sold at markets close to a million chickens that were supposed to be destroyed.
Viroj Na Bangchang, the president and founder of the Consumer Force Association of Thailand, an advocacy group, said that anything short of full market compensation for farmers would cause serious financial harm in rural areas. "They don't have anything left if you kill all the chickens," he said.
Workers in protective gear are netting chickens, putting them in plastic bags and burying them alive in pits 15 feet deep. A senior Thai agriculture official said that 9.1 million chickens had been culled since November, but that lab tests had only provided definitive proof late last week of the presence of bird flu in a small area of one province, Suphan Buri, and that today the disease was in an adjacent area of the next province, Kanchanaburi.
The official Antara news agency in Indonesia reported today that millions of poultry in that country had also fallen ill with avian influenza, a further sign that it is spreading. South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Hong Kong have previously confirmed the disease in birds, while Taiwan has reported a less dangerous strain of bird flu in some chickens there.
Sudarat Keyuraphan, Thailand's health minister, said in a telephone interview today that one of the two Thai boys confirmed on Friday as having the disease seems to be recovering. The other remains in critical condition. There are also five suspected cases.
Vietnam reported on Saturday that a boy and a girl had fallen ill with the disease, bringing its total number of confirmed cases to seven, and reported no new cases today. Genetic sequencing by a Hong Kong lab of the virus from several of the Vietnamese cases has shown that it is of strictly avian origin.
That is important because it suggests the virus has not yet recombined with human influenza virus. Doctors describe this as a necessary step before the disease can spread quickly and easily from person to person.
Ms. Sudarat said it would be another couple of days before a genetic sequencing would be available for the two Thai boys. World Health Organization officials have said that all the cases so far appear to have occurred among people, mainly children, who have been in close contact with chickens or their waste.
The World Health Organization is sending a Canadian pediatrician specializing in influenza, Dr. Theresa Tam, who is expected to arrive in Bangkok on Monday night.
Dr. Bjorn Melgaard, the health organization's chief representative in Thailand, said that a side effect of last spring's outbreak of SARS is that Thailand's public health system is very well prepared to detect and report abnormal flu cases. Thai hospitals treated eight cases of SARS last year, all of them people who acquired the disease elsewhere, most notably Dr. Carlo Urbani, the health organization doctor from Italy who first spotted the disease and raised the alarm in Hanoi last March, but was fatally infected while treating the sick.
Thailand beefed up its flu surveillance nationwide, including in rural areas, in response to the first of three SARS cases in southern China last month. "Everything is mobilized, and the system is quite strong," Dr. Melgaard said.
Hong Kong, which took the brunt of last spring's outbreak of SARS, has also instructed hospitals to be on the alert for bird flu, and has required frequent cleanings of poultry markets.
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Avian Flu Said to Be Resistant to a Main Flu-Fighting Drug
January 25, 2004
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/health/25BIRD.html
New tests have turned up a disturbing problem with the avian influenza virus that is spreading in Asia: the strain appears resistant to one of the two main classes of drugs used to fight influenza viruses, a World Health Organization official said yesterday.
Meanwhile, the strain, A(H5N1), has been detected among birds in a sixth Asian country, Cambodia, and two more human cases have been diagnosed in a new area of Vietnam, the official, Dr. Klaus Stöhr, said.
Both Vietnamese cases were in children in Ho Chi Minh City, bringing to seven the total in that country. Six have been fatal. Five earlier Vietnamese cases were in Hanoi. Thailand has reported two human cases.
All the human cases are believed to be from contact with chickens or their waste, not from eating them or their eggs. The agency said it knows of no person-to-person spread of the disease.
The number of human cases is small, and the A(H5N1) strain contains only avian genes. But W.H.O. officials are concerned that the bird strain might exchange genes with a human virus to create an entirely new virus that could spread easily among people. It would take a combination of events, each of low probability, to produce a large outbreak. But the health agency said the implications for public health were so important that precautionary measures must be taken.
Because a viral recombination could occur at any time, and the threat is likely to last for some time, the health organization is establishing systems for a long vigil through its influenza surveillance network, said Dick Thompson, a W.H.O. spokesman in Geneva.
The organization, other United Nations agencies and health groups, are emphasizing that infected Asian countries must kill all poultry, a standard measure to stop avian influenza from becoming endemic.
Laboratories in the W.H.O. network are using new techniques to try to develop a human vaccine. The agency hopes to develop in a month a seed virus for possible vaccine production.
Dr. Nancy J. Cox, an influenza expert at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, which is helping prepare a seed virus, said there was no guarantee on that time frame. "That would be the best-case scenario," Dr. Cox said.
Once the seed virus is ready, it will take months to produce a new vaccine and test it in animals and human volunteers.
Knowing that anti-influenza drugs may be needed in an outbreak of human bird flu, and as part of the surveillance process, laboratories in the network have been testing which of a small number of such drugs may be effective against the A(H5N1) strain. The tests are being done at the C.D.C. in Atlanta, in London and in Hong Kong.
Dr. Stöhr said that on Friday night his agency learned that initial genetic tests showed that the A(H5N1) was resistant to the less expensive class of anti-influenza virals. The class includes amantadine (Symmetrel) and rimantadine (Flumadiine).
Earlier studies by Dr. Malik Peiris of the University of Hong Kong showed that the resistance results from a change in just one of the many amino acids in the avian influenza virus.
Additional tests are expected to be conducted this week to confirm the early findings, said Dr. Stöhr. The tests will involve adding drugs to A(H5N1) in test tubes to determine how well the virus grows.
However, A(H5N1) is believed to be susceptible to the costlier class of anti-influenza drugs known as the neuraminidase inhibitors. Tamiflu (oseltamivir) is the main drug in this class.
Before Cambodia was added to the list, A(H5N1) had been officially reported in birds from five countries: Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam. The W.H.O. suspects that the virus is also present in other Asian countries.
Taiwan has reported that a different strain of avian influenza, A(H5N2), is causing mild illness among poultry. Tests show that the strain's genes are closely related to those in a vaccine that is widely used for poultry in Hong Kong and China, Dr. Stöhr said. He said that one possibility was that the Taiwan bird cases were from a poor-quality vaccine.
-------- ACTIVISTS
World Forum Protest Staged From a Distance
January 25, 2004
By FIONA FLECK
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/international/europe/25GENE.html
CHUR, Switzerland, Jan. 24 - Armed with spray cans and paint bombs, about 500 antiglobalization protesters clashed with the police in the eastern Swiss town of Landquart on Saturday, as the officers tried to stop them from heading into nearby Davos to protest illegally at the World Economic Forum.
The police said they fired tear gas and pepper spray at the protesters at the Landquart railway station. Four protesters were injured, the police reported; two were given first aid, and two were taken to the hospital.
The railway station and trains were left covered with anticapitalist and antiwar slogans. The police said there had been many cases of criminal damage, including a train so badly vandalized it had to be taken out of service.
The protesters arrived in Landquart by train from Chur, where they had been among about 1,200 people demonstrating earlier in the day, leaving a trail of litter and spray paint - in the anarchist colors of red and black - and the window of one bank smashed.
The Swiss authorities banned protests in Davos to prevent disruption to the five-day economic forum, which opened there on Wednesday, but allowed one in Chur, about 45 miles away. Security for the forum was tight, with 4,600 Swiss soldiers and hundreds of Swiss police officers on patrol.
Earlier, 50 to 70 protesters managed to get past police lines and reached Davos.
The police in Davos said they had kept the group "under control" and had checked their identities before releasing them. About 30 who refused to give proof of identity were put on a train to Landquart.
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Robert McNamara: 'It's Just Wrong What We're Doing'
In an exclusive interview, repentant Vietnam War architect Robert McNamara breaks his silence on Iraq: The United States, he says, is making the same mistakes all over again
By Doug Saunders
January 25, 2004
by the Globe & Mail (Canada)
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/ArticleNews/TPStory/LAC/20040124/MCNAMARA/TPColumnists/
"Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why."
With those words, written nine years ago, Robert McNamara began an extraordinary final phase of his career -- devoted to chronicling the errors, delusions and false assumptions that turned him into the chief architect and most prominent promoter of the Vietnam war. No historic figure has put so much effort into self-examination:
At the age of 87, he has now written three very detailed and analytical books, and starred in one very good movie, devoted to the fundamental mistakes that led the United States into the most politically costly and least successful war in its history. What, then, does he think about Iraq?
Until now, the former secretary of defense has avoided comment on the actions of that job's current occupant, Donald Rumsfeld. The two are often compared to each other in their autocratic leadership styles and in their technocratic, numbers-driven approaches to war. And their wars, of course, are often likened.
But Robert McNamara has insisted in staying out of the fray. He decided to break his silence on Iraq when I called him up the other day at his Washington office. I told him that his carefully enumerated lists of historic lessons from Vietnam were in danger of being ignored.
He agreed, and told me that he was deeply frustrated to see history repeating itself.
"We're misusing our influence," he said in a staccato voice that had lost none of its rapid-fire engagement. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."
While he did not want to talk on the record about specific military decisions made Mr. Rumsfeld, he said the United States is fighting a war that he believes is totally unnecessary and has managed to destroy important relationships with potential allies.
"There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position, the United States' position vis-à-vis the other nations of the world."
On Monday night, we heard the United States at its very worst with George W. Bush's caustic State of the Union address, in which he declared, over and over, that America is serving God's will directly and does not need "a permission slip" from other nations since "the cause we serve is right, because it is the cause of all mankind."
That vision of manifest destiny, stripped of any larger view, has led down some unfortunate roads. The Iraq action, which would have been conducted in some form or another at some point under any imaginable government, would have been far better conceived if its executors had read Mr. McNamara's works instead of the Book of Revelation.
In 1995, in his memoir 'In Retrospect', Mr. McNamara published a list of the 11 specific mistakes he believed the United States had made in and around the Vietnam war that still had relevance in the very different political and military climate of the 21st century.
I have always been wary of comparisons between Vietnam and Iraq. The circumstances are profoundly different, and the scale of conflict and death is nowhere near the same. Vietnam was a small nation engaged in a civil war that Americans misread as a Chinese incursion on all of Asia, while Iraq has been strangled by one of history's worst totalitarian dictators. The American mistake was its belief that the dictator's removal would be sufficient.
But to read Mr. McNamara's 1995 list today is to read an uncanny analysis of the missteps of the Iraq campaign. He told me that this list has come to haunt him as he watches the Mesopotamian misadventure unfold.
Chief among the discoveries that led him to see Vietnam as a mistake, he said, was his realization that the United States could not, by itself, properly analyze the actions and ground-level conditions necessary to achieve the complex and ambiguous goals of a war -- reversing the influence of communism in Asia, in Vietnam's case, or bringing democracy to the Arab world, in Iraq's. "And the reason I feel that is that we're not omniscient," he said. "And we've demonstrated that in Iraq, I think."
He pointed to Washington's failure to appreciate the complexities of Iraqi culture, and therefore to anticipate the extended guerrilla war it is now engaged in -- a chief mistake of Vietnam. Without the full involvement of other major nations, he said, such mistakes will always be made.
"And if we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merit of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam, because there wasn't one single major ally, not France or Britain or Germany or Japan, that agreed with our course or stood beside us here. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."
In his recent book 'Wilson's Ghost', Mr. McNamara argued that military forces should sometimes be used to oust dictators guilty of grave crimes against humanity. However, he said, this can succeed politically and militarily only if it is done with broad international support under the aegis of a body such as the United Nations (which helped intervene in East Timor) or NATO (which led the charge in the Balkans).
"The United States is today the strongest power in the world, politically, economically and militarily, and I think it will continue to be so for decades ahead, if not for the whole century," he told me. "But I do not believe, with one qualification, that it should ever, ever use that power unilaterally -- the one qualification being the unlikely event we had to use it to defend the continental U.S., Alaska or Hawaii."
Mr. McNamara said it is particularly upsetting to see that the White House administration has ignored or failed to heed key recommendations coming from military officers on the ground in Iraq -- a crucial and oft-repeated mistake in Vietnam. American military officials in Iraq complained early that their forces were ill-equipped for the complex work of nation-building and policing, but the White House has until very recently refused to discuss using UN peacekeeping forces for such work.
Last week, the United States indicated that it is seeking the UN's assistance in the nation-building effort, a move that Mr. McNamara said is vital if the war is ever to be brought to an end, and civil life restored in Iraq.
"Many people, myself among them, thought the United Nations should have played a much greater role in connection with Iraq than it has, and I'm personally very pleased to see that the administration is thinking today of increasing the role of the UN.... I hope the UN will accept."
To appreciate the staggering scale of the lessons Mr. McNamara has learned, everyone ought to see the new feature documentary about him, 'The Fog of War'. Its director, Errol Morris, is certainly the best non-fiction filmmaker alive (his 'Fast, Cheap and Out of Control' is the most action-packed movie ever made about the philosophy of being).
This film, focused tightly on the bombings of Japan in the Second World War and Vietnam in the 1960s, offers a profound fourth volume to Mr. McNamara's continuing mea culpa. In it, he suggests repeatedly that his faith in superior military technology and the scientific potential of data processing (he was known to his 1960s critics as "an IBM machine with legs") led him to underestimate the difficulties and complexities of the cultures in which he was fighting. The same fundamental fallacy, he said, is present today.
Even though computerized and laser-guided weapons allow campaigns to be waged with only a few dozen American deaths and hundreds of foreign deaths (as opposed to the tens of thousands of American deaths and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese deaths in the 1960 sand 1970s), it has become no easier to achieve society-transforming military goals, or to extricate yourself from an invaded nation.
"The new circumstances and new technology didn't help us in Iraq, and the issue there was allegedly the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons. You can't get anything more fundamental than that. The case for this was certainly made forcefully -- I think erroneously, but it was very well made.... And now we've just got to repair these fissures, these breaks in our relationship with many, many important powers in the world, and many important institutions."
He said many lives have been unnecessarily lost around the world because the United States has refused to support the International Criminal Court, an institution he believes could have provided an alternative to war in Iraq.
"Let's think about that in human terms -- you have to reduce the risk of killing and catastrophe," he said. "We've got to do that, and we're not paying nearly enough attention to it. And one illustration is, we don't support things that would have that as their goal... for example, this international court. The U.S. is totally opposed to it. I think they're absolutely wrong. We've not only refused to support it, we try to buy off countries that are supporting it."
Mr. McNamara broadly declined to discuss specific decisions made by Mr. Bush -- "I don't want to get in an argument with Bush and the administration. I don't think that advances my interests at all," he said.
But he didn't mind adding that he was dismayed that members of the Republican administration have likened their position after Sept. 11, 2001, to that of John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which had been Mr. McNamara's moment of truth. Mr. Bush, he said, wouldn't have been up to it. And Mr.Kennedy would have handled Iraq differently.
Just over a year ago, Mr. McNamara traveled to Cuba and learned just how perilous that moment had been: Cuba, Fidel Castro admitted, had been home to a nuclear arsenal, and he had been willing to sacrifice his own island nation in order to launch a nuclear attack on the United States. The world really did come within moments of ending. More than anything else, this revelation has led Mr. McNamara to argue that the Kennedy approach to the world ought to be emulated.
Mr. McNamara was the first to argue, based on his own diary, that had he lived, JFK would have ended the Vietnam war in 1965.
I take that claim with a grain of salt, since I believe that Mr. Kennedy's record of endlessly reversing himself and caving in to the authority of his military commanders would have trumped his better convictions. Nevertheless, recently declassified documents have lent the notion credence.
And I do believe Mr. McNamara when he says that the Kennedy taste for international co-operation would have served the world better than the White House's current with-us-or-against-us approach.
"I don't believe that Kennedy would be reacting the way Bush is. For one thing, Kennedy reached out. A critic in those early days of the administration was John Kenneth Galbraith [the Canadian economist, who believed Vietnam was a bad idea]. And Kennedy reached out, and appointed him to a high-level position, and he talked to him about Vietnam. You don't see that today."
McNamara's 11 lessons
In 1995, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara published 'In Retrospect', the first of his three books dissecting the errors, myths and miscalculations that led to the Vietnam War, which he now believes was a serious mistake. Nine years later, most of these lessons seem uncannily relevant to the Iraq war in its current nation-building, guerrilla-warfare phase.
We misjudged then -- and we have since -- the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries... and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions. We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of ourown experience.... We totally misjudged the political forces within the country. We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
Our judgments of friend and foe alike reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people inthe area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders. We failed then -- and have since -- to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces and doctrine.... We failed as well to adapt our military tactics tothe task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement... before we initiated the action.
After the action got under way and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course ... we did not fully explain what was happening and why we were doing what we did. We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient.
Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action.... should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions.... At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
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