Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Fire at weapons plant could result in fine for BWXT Y-12
Dealing with Dirty Bombs: Plain Facts, Practical Solutions
General Denies Letting Secrets of A-Bomb Out of Pakistan
Libya Ships Materials on Nuclear Weapons to Tennessee
Libya Nuclear Components Arrive in U.S.
Watchdog: Nuke Guards Cheated in Drill
U.S. Uranium Stock in Peril
Guards at Plant Tipped to Mock Attacks
U.S.: Nuclear Plant Cheated During Drill
Bush administration delays MOX plant by 3 years?
Minnesota delegation hears Nevada opposition
U.S. Uranium Stock in Peril
Congress Cannot Be Appointed
Bush Expresses Less Certainty on Iraq Arms
Powell says "open question" if WMDs remain in Iraq
White House Shows Less Certainty Now on Iraq's Arms
Budget Office Forecasts Record Deficit in '04
CBO Says '04 Deficit Will Rise to $477 Billion
From Iraq to Libya, US knew little on weapons
Budget analysts see deeper 10-year deficits of $2.4 trillion
MILITARY
Leak against this war
Rebels, Many in Teens, Disarm in Sudan's South
Russian arms industry sets post-Soviet record
The folly of our war machine
Army to Hold Hearings on Nerve Agent
Roadside Attack Kills 3 G.I.'s West of Baghdad
Iraqi whispers mull repeat of 1920s revolt
Rocket Fired at U.S. Post in Baghdad
Iraqi Aide Says Safety Inadequate for a Vote
Iraqi whispers mull repeat of 1920s revolt
3 Reservists Charged in Iraqi's Death
Powell Displays Tough U.S. Stance Toward Russians
Military brains ignoring defence minister
Powell criticizes Kremlin policies
A Flawed Intelligence
Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
Annan Approves Sending U.N. Election Experts to Iraq
U.N. Ready to Send Election Team to Iraq
U.N. Election Team To Be Sent to Iraq
U.N. to study elections in Iraq
Soldiers battle anguish as Iraq tours are extended again
Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue
Cheney's favorite leak
Democracy Now! Confronts Wesley Clark
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Says F.A.A. Played Down Scenario
9/11 Panel Faults U.S. For Letting Hijackers In
Citing Free Speech, Judge Voids Part of Antiterror Act
Part of Patriot Act Is Struck Down
Patriot Act rule rejected by judge
Advice on Right to Counsel Upheld
Supreme Court to Review Using Execution in Juvenile Cases
A Death Penalty Revisited
Supreme Court to rule on execution of minors
New York Seeks Change in Disbursing Terror Funds
Rights Group Disputes Iraq War Claim
North Korean refugees get harsh treatment on return
ENERGY
World's Largest Solar Power Station Set for Summer
Solar Power Industry Slowed by Pricey Silicon
OTHER
Appeal for Aid to Fight Growing Bird-Flu Threat in Asia
Bird flu poses no threat to U.S.; CDC warns tourists
ACTIVISTS
Leak against this war - by Daniel Ellsberg
Whatever happened to Dr. King's anti-war message?
New Zealanders Demand Closure of 'Spy Base'
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Fire at weapons plant could result in fine for BWXT Y-12
By: Paul Parson paul.parson@oakridger.com
Oak Ridger Staff
January 27, 2004
http://www.oakridger.com/stories/012704/new_20040127043.shtml
Corrective measures have been taken as a result of a fire last year at Oak Ridge's nuclear weapons plant, according to the plant's manager.
However, BWXT Y-12 could still face penalties due to apparent violations noted by the Department of Energy's Office of Price-Anderson Enforcement. BWXT Y-12 manages Y-12 for the National Nuclear Security Administration - the quasi-independent agency within DOE that oversees the nuclear weapons complex.
On April 15, workers at Y-12 were in the final testing phase of a new "saltless uranium processing system" when a small explosion in a glove box and subsequent fire occurred in Building 9202, where prototype work was conducted. Workers were not using the glove box at the time of the accident.
An operational emergency, the lowest of emergency level at the plant, was called; the building was evacuated; and 33 workers were tested for exposure. Two workers had contamination on their clothing and one had contamination on both clothing and hair.
"Immediately after the event, we conducted a three-pronged investigation including our own in-house experts, experts from three DOE labs and our two corporate parent companies, and finally experts from the commercial chemical industry who perform research and development," said Dennis Ruddy, BWXT Y-12's president.
Investigators concluded that the fire was caused by heat and steam generated from unreacted calcium, excess water and depleted uranium in an unvented container. The resulting overpressurization of the container caused the explosion. The shockwave from the explosion broke the seal on the glovebox, which allowed air to enter and the uranium powder - which ignites spontaneously in air - began to burn.
"From those reviews, which were completed by July 2003, we identified some areas for improvement and implemented these improvements by September 2003," said Ruddy. "We have mobilized the right management systems and right review systems, and we have taken a hard, objective view of the circumstances and implemented the right corrective actions."
Officials with BWXT Y-12 confirmed that DOE's Office of Price-Anderson Enforcement performed a review of the events leading up to, and actions as result of the April fire. The review was conducted in mid-October, and BWXT Y-12 received a draft report in December.
"Last week, a group of my staff went to Washington, D.C., and presented additional information for evaluation as the Department of Energy develops its final conclusions," said Ruddy.
Despite a request made by The Oak Ridger, BWXT Y-12 did not release a copy of the draft report on the fire or an accompanying letter from Stephen M. Sohinki, director of the Office of Price-Anderson Enforcement. No reason was given.
Although Ruddy maintains that BWXT Y-12 takes safety "extremely seriously," the company still faces what could be its second fine in the past year under the enforcement program.
Last June, the National Nuclear Security Administration identified violations of nuclear safety rules and procedures involving welding inspection deficiencies at Y-12. As a result, the NNSA proposed a $96,250 civil penalty against BWXT Y-12 under the Price-Anderson Amendments Act.
The Price-Anderson Amendments Act of 1988 requires DOE to undertake regulatory enforcement actions against contractors for violations of nuclear safety requirements. The enforcement program is designed to have contractors correct procedural violations to prevent more serious events from occurring.
-------- depleted uranium
Dealing with Dirty Bombs: Plain Facts, Practical Solutions
by James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., and Jack Spencer
Heritage Foundation Backgrounder #1723
January 27, 2004
http://www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/bg1723.cfm
Most assessments of America's vulnerabilities include some mention of the nation's susceptibility to attacks by radiological dispersal devices, or "dirty bombs." The threat is often portrayed as a homogenous danger, but it in fact covers a spectrum of risks, not all of which are equally serious.
Because the nature of the threat is often misconstrued, there is no shared appreciation of the problem or how best to address it. The reality is that the threat of a dirty bomb attack by terrorists is a credible one, although the psychological and economic consequences would likely far outweigh any casualties or physical destruction. To be better prepared, the United States should:
- Develop national standards for emergency response,
- Create a national system-of-systems emergency response structure,1
- Focus federal resources on developing national surge medical capacity,
- Centralize oversight of federal emergency medical response in the Department of Health and Human Services,
- Enhance federal expertise in emergency medical care, and
- Establish better coordination with the private sector.
The Demand for Dirty Bombs
Radiological dispersal devices are attractive to terrorists and terrorist states. Abu Zubaydah, a key al-Qaeda operative captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, was widely believed to have told U.S. investigators that al-Qaeda was "interested" in obtaining a dirty bomb. Although Zubaydah's statements are unconfirmed, they appear to dovetail with evidence reportedly seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan. In addition, on May 8, 2002, the FBI arrested Abdullah al Muhajir on charges of planning a radiological attack in the United States at the direction of al-Qaeda operatives.2
Although it was never fielded, Saddam Hussein also sought this capability.3 In 1987, Iraq tested a bomb weighing 1,400 kilograms that carried radioactive particles derived from irradiated impurities in zirconium oxide.4 Further prototypes were designed from the casings of 100 Muthanna-3 aerial chemical bombs. They were then modified to a 400-kilogram weight so that aircraft could carry more. Of the original 100, it is likely that only 25 were destroyed and that the remaining 75 were sent to the Al Qa'Qa State Establishment for an unknown fate.5 What Dirty Bombs Are, and What They Are Not
The first step in appreciating the threat of dirty bombs is to understand that they are not nuclear weapons. Indeed, the only difference between a dirty bomb and a conventional explosive is that the dirty bomb is laced with some sort of radiological material. Therefore, it is better to think of the threat not in terms of the dirty bomb, but instead in terms of any devise that disperses radioactive materials.
A radiological dispersal device may not even require an explosion. It is quite possible to separate the "dirty" from the "bomb." A terrorist could choose any number of methods to disperse dangerous radioactive material. The dispersion method may well be a conventional explosion, but putting radioactive material in a trashcan or sprinkling it on a sidewalk could also be an effective--and covert--means of contamination.
The initial destruction caused by a dirty bomb would likely result from the explosion itself and not from the nuclear material. Its destructive capacity would be a function of the amount and type of explosive materials used, not of the radioactive additives. A car bomb laced with radioactive cobalt-60 would look no different from a car bomb without the extra material.
Likewise, the radiological affect would be defined by the type and amount of radioactive material. A bomb with a small amount of radioactive material might wreak economic havoc and spread terror, but it would have little biological effect on local populations. On the other hand, a bomb laced with large amounts of strontium-90 (a highly radioactive isotope found in old Soviet power generators), highly enriched uranium, or spent nuclear fuel from a nuclear power plant could be devastating.
However, like most threats, the highest risks are also the least likely. Not only are the more dangerous materials much more difficult to obtain, but the successful dispersal of a highly radioactive material would require an extremely sophisticated terrorist. The Practicality of Dirty Bombs
To kill or sicken a large number of people would require a relatively large weapon with highly radioactive material. A truck bomb, for example, with 220 kilograms of explosive and 50 kilograms of one-year-old spent fuel rods could produce a lethal dosage zone with a radius of about one kilometer.6 Detonating such a device in an urban area with a large, unsheltered population might contaminate thousands of people or more.7
Although producing such a weapon is far easier than building a nuclear bomb, fabricating a highly effective radiological dispersal device that could easily be transported to its target would be difficult. Among the problems in building such a large device is the heavy shielding required to work with a significant amount of highly radioactive material. Otherwise, it would melt the carrying containers and sicken or kill anyone attempting to assemble or transport the weapon. For example, one assessment concluded that sufficient radioactive material to contaminate 230 square kilometers would require about 140 kilograms of lead shielding.8 While such weapons may not be practical tools for most terrorists, the idea of martyrdom could lead some to disregard the dangers.
Distributing radiological material as a fine aerosol (the ideal molecule size being about one to five microns, a fraction of the width of a human hair) would require some degree of specialized knowledge and specialized handling and processing equipment to mill the radioactive agent and blend it with an inert material to facilitate dispersion and increase the risk of inhalation.
Many variables can significantly affect the effectiveness of an attack: the distance from the radioactive source; the manner of dispersal; weather conditions (extent of dispersal); the degree of protection (e.g., buildings and overhead cover); and the type of radiation. For example, Alpha particles--one type of radiation--travel only a short distance, and most will not penetrate the dead, outside layer of skin. They are harmful, however, if inhaled or swallowed. Beta particles can penetrate the skin and inflict cellular damage, but they can be blocked by common materials such as plastic, concrete, and aluminum.
In contrast, gamma rays and neutrons are far more powerful and do not lose energy as quickly as alpha and beta particles when they pass through an absorber like clothing or walls. Heavy lead shielding, great amounts of other shielding with absorbent or scattering material (e.g., several feet of earth or concrete), or significant distance (perhaps kilometers) may be required to avoid high-dose exposure.9 In an urban attack, buildings might absorb or shield significant amounts of radiation, significantly reducing the initial prospects for casualties.
Unlike nuclear weapons, a radiological dispersal device does not require plutonium or enriched uranium. It requires only some form of radioactive material, which any nuclear reactor is capable of producing. In addition, numerous medical and industrial practices employ radioactive substances. However, obtaining these less dangerous materials associated with industry and the medical field would be easier than obtaining the more dangerous materials that result from nuclear power production.
Illicitly obtaining materials is not impossible. The United States has significant gaps in its export rules.10 Abroad, however, the problems are even worse. Large quantities of relatively dangerous radioactive material remain unaccounted for.
When assessing the risk of foreign radioactive material entering the United States, it is important not to be misled by media outlets that purport to demonstrate the ease with which terrorists could smuggle these substances into the U.S.11 While it may or may not be easy to smuggle radioactive material into the United States, smuggling harmless depleted uranium demonstrates no more than smuggling an illegal Persian rug. Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the manufacturing of fuel for nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Simply put, it is leftovers after the highly radioactive uranium-235 has been removed from uranium ore. The remaining (depleted) uranium is very dense and produces minimal radiation.12
The Likely Impact of a Dirty Bomb
The impact of a successful dirty bomb attack on those who do not receive an immediately lethal, incapacitating dose of radiation is difficult to predict. Even the largest radiological dispersal device is likely to inflict catastrophic casualties only if long-term cancer risks are considered.13
Prompt modern medical treatment can dramatically improve survivability after radiation injury for individuals who do not receive an initial, lethal dose of radiation.14 In particular, dramatic medical advances have been made in caring for individuals with suppressed immune systems, a common byproduct of radiation attack.
In addition, the danger of low-dose exposure from a radiological weapon may be far less than is commonly assumed. The long-term effect of low-dose radiation is determined by the capacity of irradiated tissue to repair DNA damage within individual cells, which is governed by a number of exposure, health, and genetic factors. There is some scientific evidence that current models may significantly overestimate the risks.15
On the other hand, due to public fears of radiation, an attack might have a considerable disruptive effect--forcing mass evacuations, creating economic chaos, and inflicting environmental and property damage and significant cleanup costs. In 1987, for example, scrap dealers in Goiânia, Brazil, unintentionally dispersed 137 pieces of a highly radioactive material, which required a massive environmental cleanup.16 This is proportional to industrial accidents or environmental incidents in the United States. However, a radiological release that was intentional and associated with a terrorist attack would undoubtedly have a psychological effect disproportionately greater than the actual physical threat.
Thus, the fear factor is a major component of the radiological threat. A radiological strike, in which the fear of the unknown might be particularly acute, could trigger severe and widespread reactions, including mass hysteria and serious psychological casualties.17
The economic impact of a radiological strike should also be considered. If contamination is extensive, just removing irradiated material could have significant consequences. For comparison, removing low-level radioactive waste from a biomedical research facility to an appropriate storage facility is extremely expensive, costing $300 or more per cubic foot.18 The economic consequences of an attack would also include the cost of evacuating contaminated areas and housing, feeding, and caring for displaced persons, as well as lost worker productivity.
Given the widespread availability of radioactive material, deception, hoaxes, and blackmail may also occur. These dangers are hardly new. In January 1979, for example, the general manager of a nuclear facility in Wilmington, North Carolina, received an extortion letter with a sample of uranium dioxide powder.19 Detecting the Presence of Radiation
Technologies to detect radiological threats are fairly mature. Radiological monitors can identify contaminated food supplies and detect dispersal devices. Passive detection systems are relatively simple and safe to employ, but they can be evaded by shielding. Active systems (i.e., detectors that x-ray or irradiate an object with neutrons or high-energy electrons) can overcome some attempts to evade detection. Active detection, however, is more costly, inconvenient, and complex.20
One issue in attempting to detect radiological weapons in transit is the problem of false positives. Many commercial items and industrial and health care equipment employ radioactive material. It is likely that screening will inadvertently cause the unnecessary investigation of many items and persons. With the U.S. transportation system handling more than 11 million tons of freight each year, screening could significantly impede the flow of goods and services, especially in high-traffic areas such as airports, shipyards, and border crossings. Interspersed in this vast amount of material are many products that include varying amounts of radioactive material.
In some ways, searching for a radiological bomb will be like searching for a needle in a needle stack. For example, in September 2002, U.S. officials boarded and searched the cargo ship Palermo Senator after detecting radiation. After several days, the source was determined to be a harmless load of ceramic tiles, which was emitting naturally occurring radiation.21
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) already employs a variety of passive and active sensors to screen people and cargo entering the United States and is developing more effective and efficient screening systems. In addition, research on detecting radiological sources and mitigating the effects of radiation is a priority for the department's Science and Technology Directorate. Preparing for the Unthinkable
Efforts to secure the global supply of radioactive material and prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists should continue.22 Improved export controls, international monitoring, "buyback" programs, and other threat reduction measures could reduce, if only somewhat, the global glut of high-risk radioactive substances;23 but even with aggressive enforcement programs, sufficient material will likely be available worldwide over the next decades for any group wanting to mount a radiological attack.
U.S. strategy rightly focuses on stopping terrorists before they can successfully conduct an attack on American soil. However, given the wide availability of radioactive material and the many means of employing it in an attack, a determined terrorist could conduct a successful strike. Fortunately, a great deal can be done to mitigate the casualties, psychological affects, and economic consequences of a radiological event. In addition, many of the countermeasures that can be implemented are "dual-use." In other words, they would also greatly facilitate a national response to any kind of natural or man-made disaster.
Domestic efforts to prepare for a radiological attack should focus on creating a truly national emergency response system that would allow state and local governments to efficiently pool their resources, effectively direct federal assets where they are most needed, and appropriately engage the private sector. Particularly with regard to a radiological response, a national system should effectively perform four functions: provide accurate and timely information, surge medical response to the scene, ensure efficient and effective cleanup of the contaminated area, and monitor health and environmental affects.
Building an effective national emergency response system could facilitate all these actions. Specifically, the U.S. should:
- Develop national standards for emergency response. There are no national standards for an emergency response to a dirty bomb attack, or for that matter to any major terrorist incident. This is a subject of some debate. Long before September 11, experts in the field recognized that the lack of measurable objectives would make it difficult to establish policy goals, allocate resources properly, and establish the right balance of local, state, and federal roles in responding to a disaster.24 On the other hand, many have opposed such an initiative. The National Governors' Association, for example, has argued against mandatory standards. The U.S. Conference of Mayors has called for broad discretion in funding, allowing communities to adapt resources to local needs.25
In fact, current assessments of preparedness are based on voluntary surveys and needs assessments. Both have significant shortfalls. They lack objective measures of preparedness and consistent criteria for determining what personnel and equipment are needed for emergency response. Nor do these assessments account for the biases frequently associated with self-reported information. Establishing broad national standards is essential for creating a rationale national response system.
The House Select Committee on Homeland Security has unanimously approved the Faster and Smarter Funding for First Responders Act (H.R. 3266), which includes procedures for establishing standards for responding to radiological attacks and other types of attacks using weapons of mass destruction. This legislation could serve as the foundation for establishing appropriate national preparedness standards.26
- Create a national system-of-systems emergency response structure. Given the complex and demanding requirements of responding to a radiological attack or other major terrorist threat, the fundamental requirement of an effective national response system may be to adopt a system-of-systems or network-centric approach to emergency preparedness. Network-centric operations could increase effectiveness by networking sensors, decision makers, and emergency responders. In essence, this means linking knowledgeable entities in the response to emergencies from the local level to the national level.
Such a system might produce significant efficiencies by sharing skills, knowledge, and scarce high-value assets and by building capacity and redundancy in the national emergency response system, as well as gaining the synergy of providing all responders with a common operating picture and the ability to readily share information. Network-centric systems might be especially valuable in responding to a radiological attack, where responders will have to disseminate information quickly and accurately, surge medical capacity, adapt to difficult and chaotic conditions, and respond to unforeseen requirements.
The DHS should adopt a system-of-systems architecture to support the National Incident Management System and focus research, development, and acquisition programs in the emergency response areas on those capabilities that would most contribute to building a national emergency responder network.
- Focus federal resources on developing national surge capacity. Over one-third of the current federal assistance provided to state and local government is for developing local hospital surge capacity. This funding supports a questionable strategy. A fixed hospital-based national emergency response system is not the answer. It is likely that local hospitals would be quickly overwhelmed by mass casualty attacks, particularly radiological strikes that might see thousands of contaminated victims as well as additional thousands of the "worried well," or unaffected individuals who seek medical treatment out of fear.
Federal aid should strike the right balance in ensuring that the national, state, and local governments focus on their appropriate responsibilities. Assistance to the state and local levels should focus on medical surveillance, detection, and communication so that problems can be identified quickly and regional and national resources can be rushed to the scene.
- Centralize medical response capabilities in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). An effective national medical response could be key to successfully mitigating casualties from a radiological attack. Oversight of national medical emergency programs, however, is split between HHS and the DHS.
Bifurcating responsibility for medical response programs such as the Metropolitan Medical Response System, National Disaster Medical System, and National Strategic Stockpile between HHS and the DHS is a mistake. Managing complex programs through interagency memoranda of understanding is bureaucratic, inefficient, and unnecessary. Clearly, transferring responsibility and budgetary oversight of these efforts into one department or the other would increase efficiency. HHS has the expertise and experience--which the DHS lacks--to oversee large medical emergency response programs.
Congress should amend the Homeland Security Act of 2002 to move responsibility for overseeing the National Strategic Stockpile, the Metropolitan Medical Response System, and the National Disaster Medical System to HHS.
- Enhance federal expertise in emergency medical care.The federal government lacks an integrated approach to emergency medicine, a key component of responding to a radiological attack. HHS, for example, does not have a National Institute of Emergency Medicine. Meanwhile, the Emergency Medical Services Division, tasked with developing the federal contribution to enhancing and guiding the emergency medical system, is a small office within the Department of Transportation's National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration, far removed from other key elements of the federal emergency medical response system in HHS and the DHS.
Congress should address the shortfall in federal expertise in emergency medical services by moving Emergency Medical Services Division functions to HHS and establishing an Institute for Emergency Medicine within the National Institutes of Health that is dedicated to spearheading emergency medical research efforts. This institute should work closely with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to devise more comprehensive emergency medical response strategies, particularly with regard to radiological contamination.
- Establish better coordination with the private sector. A significant portion of the cleanup after a radiological disaster will be conducted by the private sector. Potentially, in addition to professional responders and volunteers, there are about 6.5 million skilled construction workers in the United States who could respond in the wake of a disaster.
Thousands of workers, for example, were required at the World Trade Center to help in response and recovery operations. 27 The response also illustrated the challenges of being unprepared to quickly integrate civilian assets into a dangerous emergency response environment. A safety survey of the site found that many of these workers lacked even basic safety equipment, including safety eyewear, dust masks, ear protection, gloves, steel-toed boots, and hard hats. As a result, numerous injuries occurred and long-term health concerns arose during the course of operations.28
The DHS, in concert with state and local governments and the private sector, should explore means to pre-train and certify construction workers; establish a registry of qualified contractors, firms, and unions; and link them to emergency management agencies. The DHS also needs to determine how technologies to speed cleanup efforts and protect workers can be rapidly distributed or contracted from the private sector when required.
Conclusion
A clearer understanding of the dirty bomb threat will ensure that policymakers are prepared to coordinate public, private-sector, and governmental responses to a dirty bomb attack. Policymakers and the public need to understand the costs and risks associated with dirty bombs to invest appropriate resources for preparation and prevention efforts as well as for consequence mitigation.
Perhaps most important is ensuring that people do not overreact to the mere presence of radiation without full knowledge of the extent and type of contamination. Implementing a few commonsense policies will not only better prepare the nation for a dirty bomb attack, but also substantially increase America's general preparedness.
James Jay Carafano, Ph.D., is a Senior Research Fellow for National Security and Homeland Security, and Jack Spencer is a Senior Policy Analyst for Defense and National Security, in the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation.
1. A "system of systems" is an overarching system that allows disparate systems to communicate and function with each other. The term is often used in the defense industry.
2. For example, see Mark Hosenball, "How Good Is Abu Zubaydah's Information," MSNBC News, April 27, 2002, at www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3067224. In May 2002, authorities arrested Jose Padilla, an American citizen who converted to Islam and took the name Abdullah al Muhajir. Authorities claimed that al Mujahir had "trained with the enemy, including studying how to wire explosive devices and researching radiological dispersion devices." See "From Brooklyn to al Qaeda?" ABC News, June 10, 2002, at www.abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/chicagosuspect_profile020610.html.
3. For an overview of the open-source data describing Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs before the war, see "Appendix: A Survey of Iraq's Arsenal and Use of Weapons Of Mass Destruction," in Baker Spring and Jack Spencer, "In Post-War Iraq, Use Military Forces to Secure Vital U.S. Interests, Not for Nation-Building," Heritage Foundation Backgrounder No. 1589, September 25, 2002, at www.heritage.org/Research/MiddleEast/bg1589.cfm.
4. United Nations, Tenth Report of the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission Established by the Secretary General pursuant to Paragraph 9(b)(i) of Security Council Resolution 687 (1991), and Paragraph 3 of Resolution 699 (1991) on the Activities of the Special Commission, S/1995/1038, December 17, 1995, part VII.
5. William J. Broad, "Iraq Tested Bomb Meant to Carry Radioactive Cloud," The New York Times, April 29, 2001; United Nations, Tenth Report of the Executive Chairman of the Special Commission; and Federation of American Scientists, "Radiological Weapons," updated November 03, 1998, at www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/other/radiological.htm (January 23, 2004).
6. James L. Ford, "Radiological Dispersal Devices," Strategic Forum, Vol. 136 (March 1998), pp. 3-4.
7. In one proposed scenario, radioactive cobalt released at the tip of Manhattan in New York City contaminated a 1,000-square-kilometer area over three states. Henry Kelly, President, Federation of American Scientists, testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, March 6, 2002, at www.fas.org/ssp/docs/030602-kellytestimony.htm. In another scenario developed by the Center for Counterproliferation Research and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, detonation of a device consisting of 100 kilograms of C4, 50 grams of Cesium-137, and 2 kilograms of plutonium in a San Diego convention center was estimated to have killed 31 and caused up to 1,969 additional fatalities and sickened 6,569. Center for Counterproliferation and the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, NBC Scenarios: 2002-2010, April 2000, pp. 14 and 19.
8. Ford, "Radiological Dispersal Devices," p. 4.
9. David G. Jarret, Medical Management of Radiological Casualties (Bethesda, Md.: Armed Forces Radiological Research Institute, 1999), pp. 4-9, and Hanford ALARA Reference Center, "Shielding Use and Analysis," undated, pp. 1-4, at www.hanford.gov/alara/PDF/analysis.pdf (January 21, 2004).
10. Charles D. Ferguson et al., "Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks," Monterey Institute of International Studies Occasional Paper No. 11, January 2003, pp. 45 and 64, at cns.miis.edu/pubs/opapers/op11/op11.pdf.
11. Brian Ross, Rhonda Schwartz, and David Scott, "How Safe Are Our Borders?" ABC News, September 11, 2003, at abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/sept11_uranium020911.html (January 20, 2004).
12. Jack Spencer and Michael Scardaville, "Dispelling the Myths About the Military Use of Depleted Uranium," Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum No. 721, February 20, 2001, at www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/EM721.cfm.
13. For example, one scenario of a radiological dispersal device attack on New York City suggests that residents in a 1,000-square-kilometer area could suffer death rates from cancer ranging from 1 in 10 within a kilometer of the attack, to a 1 in 100 risk for those living in all of Manhattan, to 1 in 10,000 for those living up to 15 kilometers downwind of the attack. See Kelly, testimony before the Committee on Foreign Relations. These figures, however, are not for immediate casualties, but for long-term cancer risks. They do not include accounting for factors such as the protective effects of buildings, medical treatment, or cleanup. In addition, this analysis was based on radiation-exposure standards derived from Environmental Protection Agency and Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidelines and does not address the fact that these standards are somewhat controversial and may overstate long-term threats. The modeling used for this scenario draws on linear no-threshold theory (LNT). See Michael Levi and Henry Kelly, "Dirty Bombs Continued," FAS Public Interest Report, Vol. 55 (May 2002). LNT holds that any amount of radiation dose, even those close to zero, is harmful. Therefore, low-dose exposure is assumed to have effects similar to those of high-dose exposure, but with lower incidence (i.e., fewer casualties per the number exposed). There is no scientific consensus over whether LNT is appropriate for accurately predicting casualties. For contrasting views on the debate, see Myron Pollycove, "The Rise and Fall of the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) Theory of Radiation Carciogenesis," presentation to the Institute of Physics, 1997, at cnts.wpi.edu/RSH/Docs/PollycovePhysics.html, and Richard Wakeford, "Low Dose Irradiation: A Threshold Assumption Is Inappropriate," paper presented to the Southport Conference, 1999, at www.srp-uk.org/srpcdrom/p7-3.doc.
14. Jarret, Medical Management of Radiological Casualties, pp. 8-9.
15. Health Physics Society, "Radiation Risk in Perspective: Position Statement of the Health Physics Society," March 2001, at www.Hps.Org/Documents/Radiationrisk.pdf; National Radiological Protection Board, "Risk of Radiation-Induced Cancer at Low Doses and Low Dose Rates for Radiation Protection Purposes," Documents of the NRPB, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1995), pp. 1-7; Animal Studies of Residual Hematopoietic and Immune System Injury from Low Dose/Low Dose Rate Radiation and Heavy Metals, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute Contract Report 98-3, 1998, p. 1. See also Military Medical Operations Office, Medical Management of Radiological Casualties Handbook, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, December 1999, pp. 34-39, and Electronic Power Research Institute, Health Risks Associated with Low Doses of Radiation, EPRI TR-104070, 2002.
16. For a detailed analysis of the incident, see International Atomic Energy Agency, Dosimetric and Medical Aspects of the Radiological Accident in Goiânia, Brazil in 1987, June 1998.
17. Defense Threat Reduction Agency et al., Human Behavior and WMD Crisis: Risk Communication Workshop: Final Report, March 2001, at www.bt.usf.edu/Reports/AHA-report-hospital-mass-casualties-2000.PDF.
18. Committee on the Impact of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Policy on Biomedical Research in the United States, The Impact of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Management Policy on Biomedical Research in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001), p. 11, and Audeen W. Fentiman et al., "Factors That Affect the Cost of Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal," Ohio State University Information Extension Research Low-Level Radioactive Waste Fact Sheets RER-66, at www.ag.ohio-state.edu/~rer/rerhtml/rer_66.html (January 21, 2004).
19. S. A. Mullen, J. J. Davidson, and H. B. Jones Jr., Potential Threat to Licensed Nuclear Activities from Insiders (Insider Study), NUREG-0703 (Washington, D.C.: Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Office of Nuclear Material Safety and Safeguards, July 1980).
20. Steve Fetter et al., "Detecting Nuclear Warheads," Science & Global Security, Vol. 1 (1990), p. 226.
21. Admiral Thomas H. Collins, remarks before the World Shipping Council, September 17, 2002, p. 2, at www.uscg.mil/ commandant/speeches%5Fcollins/2002%2D09%2D17worldshippingcouncil7.doc, and David A. Howard, "Valuable Lessons from Palermo Senator Incident," American Shipper, October 2002, at www.americanshipper.com.
22. Mathew Bunn, "Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: A Progress Report," Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, October 22, 2003.
23. Ferguson et al., "Commercial Radioactive Sources: Surveying the Security Risks," pp. 65-66.
24. Richard A. Falkenrath, "The Problems of Preparedness: Challenges Facing the U.S. Domestic Preparedness Program," executive session on domestic preparedness discussion paper, John F. Kennedy School of Government, 2000, p. 15.
25. U.S. General Accounting Office, National Preparedness: Integration of Federal, State, and Local and Private Sector Efforts Is Critical to an Effective National Strategy for Homeland Security, GAO-02-621T, April 11, 2002, p. 13.
26. James Jay Carafano, "Homeland Security Grant Bill Needs Revision But Is a Step in the Right Direction," Heritage Foundation Executive Memorandum No. 909, January 8, 2004, at www.heritage.org/Research/HomelandDefense/EM909.cfm.
27. Donald Elisburg and John Moran, "Response to the World Trade Center (WTC) Disaster: Initial WEPT Grantee Response and Preliminary Assessment of Training Needs," National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, October 6, 2001, p. 7. See also Bruce Lippy and Kerry Murray, "The Nation's Forgotten Responders," National Clearinghouse for Worker Safety and Health Training," December 14, 2002, pp. 17-23.
28. Elisburg and Moran, "Response to the World Trade Center (WTC) Disaster," p. 7.
-------- india / pakistan
General Denies Letting Secrets of A-Bomb Out of Pakistan
January 27, 2004
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/asia/27STAN.html?pagewanted=all
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 26 - Days after Pakistan's president acknowledged that scientists from his country had most likely sold nuclear secrets to other nations, the army commander formerly in overall charge of the program declared Monday that he had never approved a transfer of atomic information.
"I was never confronted with any such situation," said the retired general, Mirza Aslam Beg, who was the army commander from 1988 to 1991.
Last week, a senior intelligence official said that senior nuclear scientists had told investigators that any transfer of technology to Iran would have been approved by General Beg. The general's comments contradicted those assertions.
At a news conference on Monday, Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said that a meeting of senior government leaders chaired by Gen. Pervez Musharraf had decided to take stern action against any scientists found guilty of proliferation. Pakistani officials have insisted that the government never approved any transfer.
As head of the army, which tightly controlled the nuclear program, General Beg was believed to have had the clearest knowledge of what happened. But while 11 scientists and military staff officers have been questioned, Pakistani investigators have not spoken to the general.
He confirmed that he had not been questioned, adding: "They would not dare. They would not dare."
In a 90-minute interview, the general, at times combative, asserted that any scientists who sold Pakistan's nuclear technology should not be punished. He also said Muslim countries should not be asked to give up the pursuit of nuclear weapons until India and Israel destroyed their nuclear arsenals.
"Why don't you start from there?" General Beg asked. "This is the discrimination and duplicity which gives heartburn and humiliation to the Muslim world."
Asked if he had looked the other way when technology or information might have been transferred, he replied, "Nothing came to our knowledge."
General Beg's comments reflect the view in some corners of Pakistan that the United States maintains a double standard when it comes to Muslim countries and nuclear weapons. The general said it was natural for countries to want nuclear weapons to counter nuclear-armed rivals. He also said it was natural for nuclear scientists to want to collect "gold dust," a reference to profit from their work.
He expressed deep antipathy toward American foreign policy, saying it was blocking the spread of democracy in the Muslim world, not aiding it. He described himself as an Islamic nationalist, not an Islamic fundamentalist, and called criticism of efforts by Muslim countries to obtain nuclear weapons, as well as his portrayal in the Western news media, unfair. "It's the Jewish lobby, a particular lobby, which tries to portray me that way," he said.
Pakistani government officials said they completely disagreed with General Beg's views, particularly regarding proliferation of nuclear weapons. "He's wrong about that," a close aide to General Musharraf said in an interview on Monday. "This is dangerous technology."
In the last few weeks, General Beg has abruptly emerged as a pivotal figure again in Pakistan's history.
In 1988, he gained a reputation as a selfless hero, the army chief who chose to restore democracy instead of seizing power himself after the death of the country's military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. Today, he sits near the center of the inquiry into whether Pakistan's nuclear secrets were transferred to Libya and Iran in the late 1980's.
The sense of a double standard for Pakistan has also been mentioned by senior Pakistani government officials, including General Musharraf. Pakistani officials pointed out again on Monday that Europeans were also said to have aided Iran's nuclear program, but that there had been far less Western media coverage of the European smugglers.
Since retiring from the army, General Beg has run an organization called the Foundation for Research on International Environment, National Development and Security, or Friends. The general writes analyses of world politics regularly published in Pakistani newspapers.
While dismissed by liberal Pakistanis as extreme, he has a sizable following among hard-line nationalists and Islamists, who believe that the United States is systematically subjugating the Muslim world.
-------- mideast
Libya Ships Materials on Nuclear Weapons to Tennessee
January 27, 2004
By BRIAN KNOWLTON,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/africa/27CND-LIBY.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 27 - Libya has shipped documents and equipment related to its nuclear weapons and missile programs on an overnight flight to a secure facility in Tennessee, the White House announced today.
The 55,000 pounds of materials from Tripoli represented the most concrete sign of dramatic new cooperation by Libyan authorities in dismantling weapons programs. This followed lengthy negotiations with United States and British officials, which yielded a Libya undertaking Dec. 19 to end these programs.
British and American weapons experts returned to Libya this month to begin dismantling, destroying and removing Libyan weapons technology.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, praised Libya's latest cooperation as "excellent."
While the shipment to Tennessee marked "only the beginning of the elimination of Libya's weapons," he said, it reflected "real progress in Libya meeting its commitment."
Mr. McClellan declined to say that Libya would receive any concrete reward at this time. Administration officials have said that Libya needed to take further steps to dismantle its weapons programs while making it absolutely clear that it was out of the business of helping terrorists.
Mr. McClellan's words were, nonetheless, some of the warmest about Libya to have come from the White House in many years.
Tripoli's opening to the West, which had begun to evolve in recent years, has gained shape and steam of late.
President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have both suggested that Tripoli's offer to destroy its weapons was a byproduct of the war in Iraq, and of a resultant new realization of American seriousness in dealing with such weapons.
"Our diplomacy with Libya was successful only because our word was credible," Mr. Cheney said Saturday in Switzerland.
Mr. McClellan said the Libyan arms shipment had landed at 8:37 a.m. today at an airport near Knoxville, Tenn. He did not say where it was taken.
One of the major United States nuclear research facilities is at Oak Ridge, Tenn., about 25 miles from Knoxville.
The plane's cargo included what Mr. McClellan called "critical" and "sensitive" materials such as "uranium hexafluoride, which is used for feedstock to enrich uranium"; centrifuge parts used in uranium enrichment; and missile guidance devices.
Another plane last week removed "the most sensitive documentation" on the Libyan nuclear program, Mr. McClellan said. Chemical munitions are already being destroyed in Libya, he added.
On Monday, Representative Tom Lantos, Democrat of California, who had once campaigned to maintain tight sanctions on Libya, said he thought the country had "turned the corner" and deserved improved relations.
"My recommendation is that we proceed step by step to move toward normalization," Mr. Lantos said after meeting with the Libyan leader, Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi.
In September, Libya admitted its responsibility in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. The plane's crash killed 270 people.
Libya has reached settlements to compensate families of Lockerbie victims and, separately, the families of victims of a French UTA airliner that exploded in 1989 over Niger, killing 170.
Many family members have expressed bitterness that Libya would now be allowed to work its way back into good relations with the West, particularly so long as it remains under Mr. Qaddafi, once scorned as the leader of a terror-supporting state.
But Mr. McClellan said that Libya was now making a fresh start.
"They are now taking steps to move away from their past," he said, "from their past that included W.M.D. programs, that included support for terrorism."
And by doing so, he said, "they can realize far better relations in this world."
--------
Libya Nuclear Components Arrive in U.S.
January 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Libya.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi, following up a promise to end his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, has shipped some 55,000 pounds of nuclear and missile components to the United States in a bid to break out of diplomatic isolation.
Bush administration officials indicated Gadhafi could expect some easing of economic pressure in return if he continued on a cooperative track. But one official told The Associated Press that Libya had not proved it no longer supported terrorism.
As a result, the State Department is not ready to cancel Libya's designation as a terror sponsor, said the official on condition of anonymity. Therefore, at least some economic sanctions will remain in place.
An American transport plane carrying the components arrived Tuesday at McGhee Tyson airport outside Knoxville, Tenn., with the equipment. It included stock to enrich uranium, centrifuge parts and guidance sets for long-range missiles, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.
The equipment probably will be evaluated at the Oak Ridge nuclear weapons plant in Tennessee, the major storehouse in the United States for highly enriched bomb-grade uranium.
The ``most sensitive documentation'' associated with Libya's nuclear program arrived by plane last week, McClellan said.
Also, the spokesman announced that Libya had begun destroying chemical munitions.
Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called the shipment ``a critical first step in securing nuclear materials and equipment to make sure they don't end up in the hands of terrorists.''
Gadhafi, seeking a lifting of U.S. economic sanctions, promised last Dec. 19 to end development of nuclear and all other weapons of mass destruction.
``The world can see that Col. Gadhafi is keeping his commitment,'' McClellan said.
However, the White House gave no indication it was ready to ease the U.S. economic squeeze on Libya, nor did the State Department say Libya's designation as a supporter of terrorism would be canceled.
``As they take these essential steps and demonstrate its seriousness, its good faith will be returned and Libya can regain a secure and respected place among the nations,'' McClellan said.
He said the shipments were ``only the beginning of the elimination of Libya's weapons.''
Rep. Tom Lantos, the senior Democrat on the House International Relations Committee, met Monday in Tripoli with Gadhafi for 90 minutes and reported the Libyan leader intended to follow through on his pledge.
Lantos, in an interview, said he would urge Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., to join him in a bipartisan appeal to the Bush administration to show ``good faith'' in Gadhafi by ending a ban on travel to Libya.
Gadhafi's turnabout, promoted by Britain with U.S. support, is being cited by the White House as a triumph in the campaign to halt the spread of nuclear technology.
After Gadhafi's pledge to abandon his quest for weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of State Colin Powell said, ``The next step is to make sure we have a clear understanding of what Libya possesses.''
Powell said the administration intended to pursue aggressively reports that Libya obtained much of its nuclear technology from Pakistan.
``We know that there have been cases where individuals in Pakistan have worked in these areas,'' Powell said.
The Energy Department's Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., was created as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb to end World War II.
Today, Y-12 refurbishes parts for every warhead in the nuclear arsenal and is the country's major storehouse for bomb-grade uranium.
Over the years, the facility has received uranium from other countries. Most notably, the plant received 1,320 pounds of uranium secreted out of Kazakhstan in 1994 in a nonproliferation mission code-named ``Project Sapphire.'' The materiel was destined to be downblended into fuel for nuclear reactors.
On the Net:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory: http://www.ornl.gov/
-------- terrorism
Watchdog: Nuke Guards Cheated in Drill
Tuesday January 27, 2004
By TED BRIDIS,
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-3672660,00.html
WASHINGTON (AP) - Security guards who repelled four simulated terrorist attacks at a Tennessee nuclear weapons plant had been tipped in advance, undermining the encouraging results, the Energy Department's watchdog office said Monday.
The surprising successes by guards at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant last summer in Oak Ridge, Tenn., spurred an internal investigation. It determined that at least two guards defending the mock attacks had been allowed to look at computer simulations one day before the attacks. The plant processes parts for nuclear weapons and maintains vast supplies of bomb-grade uranium.
The Energy Department's inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, declared the exercises ``tainted and unreliable.'' He said each mock attack cost as much as $85,000 to stage, and he urged the department to consider his conclusions when awarding contracting fees for Wackenhut Corp., which employs guards at Oak Ridge.
The plant paid Wackenhut award fees of $2.2 million and rated its work ``outstanding'' for the period through July 2003. The cheating reported by the inspector general had taken place just weeks earlier.
A senior vice president for Wackenhut Services Inc., Jean Burleson, described details in the inspector general's report as ``old news,'' which he said ``may or may not have occurred.'' Burleson added: ``There is no impropriety right now going on. Security is better today than it has ever been.''
A broader investigation uncovered more evidence of cheating during mock attacks against U.S. nuclear plants over the past two decades. Results from such simulations are commonly classified for national security reasons.
The inspector general said guards in another mock attack in late 2000 or early 2001 were improperly told which building would be attacked, the exact number of attackers and where a diversion was being staged. Investigators also said managers substituted their best security guards for others scheduled to work the day of attacks; standby guards would sometimes be armed and used to bolster existing security guards on duty.
In other cases, security guards disabled laser sensors they wore to determine whether they received a simulated gunshot. Guards removed batteries, deliberately installed batteries backward and covered sensors with tape, mud or Vaseline so they wouldn't operate properly.
Such cheating is ``not uncommon at all,'' said Ronald Timm, president of RETA Security Inc. of Lemont, Ill., a consulting company that has worked with the Energy Department to analyze vulnerabilities at its plants. ``Most security forces don't like to lose; they go through great lengths to cheat to win. A loss is considered a negative mark against them.''
Investigators said the claims they heard were based on interviews with current and former guards, which they described as ``credible and compelling.'' But they acknowledged they could find no documentary evidence to support the claims of previous cheating.
``There's no point in doing them if you have people who are going to cheat,'' said Richard Clarke, a former senior White House counterterrorism official. ``That's ridiculous. It kind of defeats the whole point of having these tests.''
The National Nuclear Security Administration, which protects nuclear plants, said in a letter disclosed Monday that it already has taken unspecified action.
That agency within the Energy Department was sharply criticized in May 2003 by congressional investigators, who accused it of failing to make sure contractors were adequately protecting nuclear facilities. Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn., who requested the earlier audit, said it showed the Energy Department couldn't provide assurances that weapons-grade material was protected against a ``determined, well trained adversary force willing to die in a nuclear detonation.''
An associate administrator, Michael C. Kane, wrote to the inspector general that if the attack simulations ``were in any way compromised so as to skew the quality of information we have about our ability to protect, the results could have extremely significant effects in a way that is entirely unacceptable.''
``We will take all appropriate steps to ensure that is not the case,'' Kane wrote.
The inspector general said two guards at Oak Ridge acknowledged looking one day in advance at the computer simulations of the pending mock attacks. The guards denied they did anything differently to prepare, but Friedman said the information would have revealed important details that would tip off the guards about which simulated attack was being launched.
``It's blatant cheating,'' said Peter Stockton of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group that has been critical of security at Oak Ridge, about 20 miles west of Knoxville. ``It doesn't say much for the integrity of the guard forces and some managers who knew this kind of thing was going on.''
Computer models had predicted guards at the plant would decisively lose at least two of the four simulated attacks, all on June 23. Two other guards identified as improperly looking at the plans in advance denied doing so, the report said.
The report came just one week after the Oak Ridge plant operators replaced the security manager, Judy Johns. A spokeswoman for BWXT Y-12 L.L.C., which operates the plant, said she could not immediately say whether the transfer was related to the inspector general's findings. Johns was given a new homeland security assignment and replaced by Willis ``Butch'' Clements, who previously held the job from 1994 until 1998.
Citing the federal Privacy Act, the inspector general's report did not identify any of the Oak Ridge guards. Security at the plant is handled by Wackenhut, the largest supplier of guards for U.S. nuclear facilities, including the Nevada Test Site, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Colorado's Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site and the Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security Institute in Albuquerque, N.M.
On the Net:
Energy Department Inspector General: http://www.ig.doe.gov/pdf/ig-0636.pdf
Y-12 National Security Complex: http://www.y12.doe.gov
Wackenhut Corp.: http://www.wackenhut.com
----
U.S. Uranium Stock in Peril
By Noah Shachtman,
Wired
Jan. 27, 2004 PT
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62052,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html
Security guards at the country's leading nuclear storehouse have been cheating during antiterrorism drills -- perhaps for as long as 20 years, according to a report released Monday by the Energy Department's inspector general.
And now, watchdogs in Congress and beyond are questioning whether the tons of enriched uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are really safe at all.
"First off, heads should roll," said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut), who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee. "I can assure you, my committee will be following up in a very direct way."
Y-12 is America's main facility for processing enriched uranium. It stores nearly all of the country's reserve of about 5,000 "secondaries," the thermonuclear hearts of hydrogen bombs.
When a team of Y-12 rent-a-cops racked up a perfect score during an antiterror drill June 26, officials there were shocked. How could the guards have performed so well, they wondered, when a computer model had predicted that the defenders would lose at least half of their confrontations?
The answer was simple: The guards cheated. They had seen the computer models of the strikes the day before they were launched, rendering the test "tainted and unreliable," according to the report (PDF).
"From the mid-1980s to the present," contract security guards had been given the plans to the attacks beforehand, noted Inspector General Gregory Friedman. The defenders knew ahead of time "the specific building and wall to be attacked by the test adversary," and they knew "whether or not a diversionary tactic would be employed."
"How are you ever going to figure out your weaknesses and vulnerabilities if you're shown the plans before?" asked Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former intelligence director. "I don't think a terrorist is going to tell you what they're going to do before they come crashing in."
"It distorts the whole system," added Peter Stockton, a senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight and a longtime critic of Energy Department security. "It calls into question whether these sites can be protected or not."
During the 100-person drill June 26, the Y-12 guards already had a pretty solid idea of what was going to happen.
William Brumley, manager of the Energy Department's Y-12 site office, said chieftains there set up a safe, mocked-up facility where the guards and attackers could go after each other without worrying about upsetting any radioactive material.
"You get some additional artificialities," he said. "But you can also play harder."
But the game gets a whole lot easier still when you've seen the other team's playbook.
"The day before the exercise," the inspector general's report notes, "two members of the protective force "were allowed to view computer simulations ... of the four scenarios that would comprise the performance test."
"There was confusion about who should know how much when," Brumley admitted. "We didn't do a particularly good job."
Y-12 has a long history of botched antiterror exams, noted Ronald Timm, who spent six years as an independent security analyst there.
"There were tests that were so flawed that all I could find out was whether the guys could shoot straight," he said. "Bogus is one word that comes to mind."
Guards would routinely cover the laser sensors used to simulate gunshot wounds so that they could not be hit during the drill, the inspector general noted.
If that wasn't a big enough advantage, "management would identify the best prepared protective force personnel and then substitute them for lesser prepared personnel," according to the report. "Based on specific attack information, trucks or other obstacles would be staged at advantageous points to be used as barricades and concealment."
The guards got slaughtered the few times they didn't cheat, Timm said.
During one test, simulated terrorists took a mock, 44-pound uranium package, and "got outside of the fences in 38 seconds," he said. "People were shocked out of their minds."
These lapses were supposed to end when Wackenhut Services, a longtime government security contractor, took over the protection of Y-12 in 2000. But the company's history of nuclear security has been uneven.
Brumley credits the firm with a "very professional job" guarding the Energy Department's Savannah River nuclear facility in South Carolina. But government watchdog Stockton, a former assistant to then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, called Wackenhut's defense of the Rocky Flats atomic storehouse in Colorado "miserable." And at the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside of New York City, only 19 percent of the Wackenhut guards said they could "adequately defend the plant," according to a January 2002 report.
Until this month, Wackenhut's experience at Y-12 seemed decidedly better. The company scores were nearly perfect during performance reviews in the middle of 2003, for example. But then, an Energy Department audit found about 200 keys missing from the facility. Stockton's group alleged that an antiterror drill at Y-12 went badly, with guards unable to protect the uranium there.
Jean Burleson, a Wackenhut senior vice president, defended the company's actions in an interview Monday with Tennessee's Knoxville News Sentinel.
"The state of security at Y-12 is better than it's ever been, and it's getting better," Burleson said.
But Rep. Shays isn't satisfied with Burleson's assurances.
"This is just too serious an issue to be passed over," Shays said.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Guards at Plant Tipped to Mock Attacks
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50518-2004Jan26.html
Security guards who repelled four simulated terrorist attacks at a Tennessee nuclear weapons plant were tipped off in advance, the Energy Department's watchdog office said yesterday. The surprising successes last summer by guards at the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn., spurred an internal investigation. It determined that at least two guards had been allowed to look at computer simulations one day before the attacks.
----
U.S.: Nuclear Plant Cheated During Drill
January 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Weapons-Plant-Security.html
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Security guards at the nuclear weapons plant in Oak Ridge stunned inspectors in June by successfully repelling four simulated terrorist attacks -- a feat computer programs predicted wouldn't be done.
That apparent success was tarnished, according to the Energy Department: Employees of an outside security contractor were tipped off about the impending simulations, making the tests a costly waste of time.
A broader investigation uncovered more evidence of cheating during mock attacks at the plant over the past two decades, including barricades being set up before the test to alter the outcome and guards deviating from the established response plan to improve their performance.
``There's no point in doing them if you have people who are going to cheat,'' said Richard Clarke, a former senior White House counterterrorism official. ``That's ridiculous. It kind of defeats the whole point of having these tests.''
The department's inspector general, Gregory H. Friedman, issued a report concluding the June drills at the Y-12 nuclear facility were ``tainted and unreliable'' because two guard supervisors from Wackenhut Corp. were allowed to see computer simulations one day before the attacks.
Friedman's investigators also said they received ``compelling testimony'' from more than 30 former and current security officers at Oak Ridge that this was part of ``a pattern of actions ... going back to the mid-1980s that may have negatively affected the reliability of site performance testing.'' Each mock attack cost as much as $85,000 to stage, Friedman said.
The plant paid Wackenhut award fees of $2.2 million and rated its work ``outstanding'' for the period through July 2003. The cheating reported by the inspector general had taken place just weeks earlier.
A senior vice president for Wackenhut Services Inc., Jean Burleson, described details in the inspector general's report as ``old news,'' which he said ``may or may not have occurred.'' Burleson added: ``There is no impropriety right now going on. Security is better today than it has ever been.''
Burleson acknowledged that two guard supervisors saw the exercise plans the day before the drills. But he said they were filling in for two absentee supervisors who had reviewed the same material with other supervisors two weeks before. The reason for the advance review, the company argues, is that that particular drill was not intended to be a surprise drill but rather an exercise designed to improve computer simulations of security measures.
The National Nuclear Security Administration, an agency within the Energy Department which protects nuclear plants, said in a letter disclosed Monday that it already has taken unspecified action.
The inspector general said guards in another mock attack in late 2000 or early 2001 were improperly told which building would be attacked, the exact number of attackers and where a diversion was being staged. Investigators also said managers substituted their best security guards for others scheduled to work the day of attacks, and standby guards would sometimes be armed and used to bolster existing security guards on duty.
In other cases, security guards disabled laser sensors they wore to determine whether they received a simulated gunshot. Guards removed batteries, deliberately installed batteries backward and covered sensors with tape, mud or Vaseline so they wouldn't operate properly.
Such cheating is ``not uncommon at all,'' said Ronald Timm, president of RETA Security Inc. of Lemont, Ill., a consulting company that has worked with the Energy Department to analyze vulnerabilities at its plants. ``Most security forces don't like to lose; they go through great lengths to cheat to win. A loss is considered a negative mark against them.''
Investigators said the claims they heard were based on interviews with current and former guards, which they described as ``credible and compelling.'' But they acknowledged they could find no documentary evidence to support the claims of previous cheating.
The inspector general said having security supervisors know about a pending mock attack would have revealed important details that would tip off the guards about what methods to help neutralize the assault.
``It's blatant cheating,'' said Peter Stockton of the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group. ``It doesn't say much for the integrity of the guard forces and some managers who knew this kind of thing was going on.''
Computer models had predicted guards at the plant would decisively lose at least two of the four simulated attacks, all on June 26. Two other guards identified as improperly looking at the plans in advance denied doing so, the report said. A suspicious site manager began investigating after the tests.
``I understand the perception, but the fact is there was nothing wrong with what occurred,'' said Burleson, the Wackenhut executive. ``If we had lost the exercise, it wouldn't have been an issue because they expected us to lose the exercise.''
Citing the federal Privacy Act, the inspector general's report did not identify any of the Oak Ridge guards. Security at the plant is handled by Wackenhut, the largest supplier of guards for U.S. nuclear facilities, including the Nevada Test Site, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, Colorado's Rocky Flats Environmental Technology Site and the Nonproliferation and Nuclear Security Institute in Albuquerque, N.M.
The Y-12 plant, about 20 miles west of Knoxville, makes parts for every warhead in the U.S. nuclear arsenal and is a major storehouse for bomb-grade uranium.
On the Net:
Energy Department Inspector General: http://www.ig.doe.gov/pdf/ig-0636.pdf Y-12 National Security Complex: http://www.y12.doe.gov
Wackenhut Corp.: http://www.wackenhut.com
------
Bush administration delays MOX plant by 3 years?
Tue, 27 Jan 2004
From: "David Culp" <david@fcnl.org>
It appears the Bush administration has decided to delay the MOX plant for three years. The reason is that the Russian program has been delayed.
Details will be available when the Energy Department releases its budget next Monday, February 2.
David Culp, Legislative Representative
Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers)
245 Second Street, N.E.
Washington, D.C. 20002-5795
Tel.: (202) 547-6000, ext. 146
Toll-free: (800) 630-1330, ext. 146
Fax: (202) 547-6019
E-mail: david@fcnl.org
Web: http://www.fcnl.org
-------- nevada
Minnesota delegation hears Nevada opposition to nuke dump plan
ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 27, 2004
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/archives/2004/jan/27/012710969.html?A+delegation+of+Minnesota+lawmakers
LAS VEGAS (AP) - A delegation of Minnesota lawmakers got an anti-nuclear earful from Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn and state and county officials before a scheduled Tuesday tour of the site the federal government has picked for a national radioactive waste dump.
The reaction was mixed among the four out-of-state lawmakers to Monday's meeting with Nevada officials and members of Citizen Alert, an environmental group opposed to the Yucca Mountain project.
Minnesota state Rep. Frank Hornstein, a Democrat from Minneapolis, said he thought Nevada's speakers made a compelling case.
But Republican Minnesota state Rep. Michael Beard said what he heard was, "'Not in my back yard.'"
"Their transportation discussion was overblown," said Beard, who represents the Minneapolis suburb of Shakopee. "They're so against this happening, they're grasping at weak arguments."
Guinn said he hoped Minnesota would be the first state to join Nevada's opposition to the federal government's plan to entomb 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste at Yucca Mountain, a desert ridge 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The governor and officials stressed fears about accidents and terrorist attacks on the nation's most highly radioactive waste if it is shipped to Nevada from 103 commercial reactors and various industrial and military sites in 39 states.
Fred Dilger, Clark County's transportation coordinator, said the Energy Department's transcontinental transportation plan lacked specifics.
The Energy Department last month proposed building a new a 319-mile rail line across Nevada to reach Yucca Mountain by skirting the vast Nevada Test Site and Nellis Air Force Base bombing range.
Minnesota has two nuclear power plants, and Republican state Sen. Pat Pariseau of Farmington said she didn't see the argument about the safety of keeping waste at reactor sites as better than the argument about terrorist threats to nuclear waste transportation.
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal
-------- tennessee
U.S. Uranium Stock in Peril
By Noah Shachtman Wired News
02:00 AM Jan, 27, 2004
http://wired.com/news/technology/1,62052-0.html
Security guards at the country's leading nuclear storehouse have been cheating during antiterrorism drills -- perhaps for as long as 20 years, according to a report released Monday by the Energy Department's inspector general.
And now, watchdogs in Congress and beyond are questioning whether the tons of enriched uranium at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, are really safe at all.
"First off, heads should roll," said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Connecticut), who chairs the House Committee on Government Reform's National Security, Emerging Threats and International Relations Subcommittee. "I can assure you, my committee will be following up in a very direct way."
Y-12 is America's main facility for processing enriched uranium. It stores nearly all of the country's reserve of about 5,000 "secondaries," the thermonuclear hearts of hydrogen bombs.
When a team of Y-12 rent-a-cops racked up a perfect score during an antiterror drill June 26, officials there were shocked. How could the guards have performed so well, they wondered, when a computer model had predicted that the defenders would lose at least half of their confrontations?
The answer was simple: The guards cheated. They had seen the computer models of the strikes the day before they were launched, rendering the test "tainted and unreliable," according to the report (PDF).
"From the mid-1980s to the present," contract security guards had been given the plans to the attacks beforehand, noted Inspector General Gregory Friedman. The defenders knew ahead of time "the specific building and wall to be attacked by the test adversary," and they knew "whether or not a diversionary tactic would be employed."
"How are you ever going to figure out your weaknesses and vulnerabilities if you're shown the plans before?" asked Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former intelligence director. "I don't think a terrorist is going to tell you what they're going to do before they come crashing in."
"It distorts the whole system," added Peter Stockton, a senior investigator at the Project on Government Oversight and a longtime critic of Energy Department security. "It calls into question whether these sites can be protected or not."
During the 100-person drill June 26, the Y-12 guards already had a pretty solid idea of what was going to happen.
William Brumley, manager of the Energy Department's Y-12 site office, said chieftains there set up a safe, mocked-up facility where the guards and attackers could go after each other without worrying about upsetting any radioactive material.
"You get some additional artificialities," he said. "But you can also play harder."
But the game gets a whole lot easier still when you've seen the other team's playbook.
"The day before the exercise," the inspector general's report notes, "two members of the protective force "were allowed to view computer simulations ... of the four scenarios that would comprise the performance test."
"There was confusion about who should know how much when," Brumley admitted. "We didn't do a particularly good job."
Y-12 has a long history of botched antiterror exams, noted Ronald Timm, who spent six years as an independent security analyst there.
"There were tests that were so flawed that all I could find out was whether the guys could shoot straight," he said. "Bogus is one word that comes to mind."
Guards would routinely cover the laser sensors used to simulate gunshot wounds so that they could not be hit during the drill, the inspector general noted.
If that wasn't a big enough advantage, "management would identify the best prepared protective force personnel and then substitute them for lesser prepared personnel," according to the report. "Based on specific attack information, trucks or other obstacles would be staged at advantageous points to be used as barricades and concealment."
The guards got slaughtered the few times they didn't cheat, Timm said.
During one test, simulated terrorists took a mock, 44-pound uranium package, and "got outside of the fences in 38 seconds," he said. "People were shocked out of their minds."
These lapses were supposed to end when Wackenhut Services, a longtime government security contractor, took over the protection of Y-12 in 2000. But the company's history of nuclear security has been uneven.
Brumley credits the firm with a "very professional job" guarding the Energy Department's Savannah River nuclear facility in South Carolina. But government watchdog Stockton, a former assistant to then-Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, called Wackenhut's defense of the Rocky Flats atomic storehouse in Colorado "miserable." And at the Indian Point nuclear power plant outside of New York City, only 19 percent of the Wackenhut guards said they could "adequately defend the plant," according to a January 2002 report.
Until this month, Wackenhut's experience at Y-12 seemed decidedly better. The company scores were nearly perfect during performance reviews in the middle of 2003, for example. But then, an Energy Department audit found about 200 keys missing from the facility. Stockton's group alleged that an antiterror drill at Y-12 went badly, with guards unable to protect the uranium there.
Jean Burleson, a Wackenhut senior vice president, defended the company's actions in an interview Monday with Tennessee's Knoxville News Sentinel.
"The state of security at Y-12 is better than it's ever been, and it's getting better," Burleson said.
But Rep. Shays isn't satisfied with Burleson's assurances.
"This is just too serious an issue to be passed over," Shays said.
-------- us politics
Congress Cannot Be Appointed
by Rep. Ron Paul, MD
January 27, 2004
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul152.html
In the months following the September 11th terrorist attacks, questions arose about whether Congress could continue to function if many of its members were killed or injured in a future terrorist attack. These concerns resulted in the creation of a commission that advocated a first in American history, namely the appointment of individuals to the U.S. House. A constitutional amendment has been proposed that would provide the method for such appointments following a catastrophe that killed or disabled a majority of the people in Congress.
I strongly oppose this constitutional amendment, because I believe an appointed Congress would become an unaccountable, tyrannical Congress. Over the past year I met with top scholars, attorneys, and colleagues who reject the idea of an appointed House of Representatives. Fortunately, we had success in turning many members of Congress against the proposal through a series of public lectures, meetings, and published articles. Legislation I cosponsored, recently passed by the House Judiciary committee, will enable congressional districts around the nation to hold emergency elections without resorting to political appointments. The bill has the support of congressional leadership, and should reach the House floor in coming months.
At its heart, the proposed constitutional amendment is fundamentally at odds with the right of the people always to elect their members of the House of Representatives. The term "appointed representative" clearly is an oxymoron. The House, designed as the most directly representative branch of government, must be elected to have any legitimacy. Even "temporary" appointees would be unacceptable, because the laws passed would be permanent.
Those advocating an appointed Congress argue that a U.S. House consisting of only a handful of surviving members would not be seen as legitimate by the public. In fact the opposite is true: the legitimacy of appointed "representatives" would be strongly questioned, especially by those who disagreed with their actions. Appointees would be viewed suspiciously as recipients of political patronage, regardless of the system put in place to appoint them. Appointees would not be seen as legitimate because they would in fact not be legitimate. Without exception, every member of the House of Representatives has been elected for over two hundred years. We can amend the Constitution, but we cannot force the public to accept the loss of its voting franchise.
One very important point should be emphasized: the Constitution already provides the framework for Congress to function after a catastrophic event. Article I section 2 instructs state governors to hold special elections to fill congressional vacancies, while Article I section 4 authorizes Congress to designate the "time, place, and manner" of such special elections if states should fail to act quickly following a national emergency. The legislation passed by the Judiciary committee simply exercises the existing congressional power by requiring states to hold special elections within 21 days after the House Speaker or acting Speaker declares that a majority of House members are incapacitated.
To quote Charles Rice, a distinguished Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame Law School, "When it is not necessary to amend the Constitution, it is necessary not to amend the Constitution." We must not allow the fear of terrorism to compel us to abandon our existing institutions - including an elected House. The Constitution is our best ally in times of relative crisis, and it is precisely during such times we should adhere to it rather than rush to amend it.
Dr. Ron Paul is a Republican member of Congress from Texas.
----
Bush Expresses Less Certainty on Iraq Arms
January 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/middleeast/27WIRE-BUSH.html
WASHINGTON -- President Bush on Tuesday vigorously defended his decision to go to war against Iraq despite chief inspector David Kay's conclusion that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, as the United States had believed.
Bush said he had "great confidence" in the intelligence community, which had provided prewar estimates about what Saddam had in his arsenal. But Bush refrained from saying -- as he once did -- that weapons of mass destruction would be discovered eventually. Bush had cited Saddam's alleged weapons as justification for the war.
"There is no doubt in my mind that Saddam Hussein was a gathering threat to America and others. That's what we know," Bush said.
"We know he was a dangerous man in a dangerous part of the world," the president said.
The issue was injected into the presidential campaign when retired chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay said he had concluded, after nine months of searching, that deposed Saddam did not have stockpiles of forbidden weapons. Confronted with Kay's statement, administration officials declined to repeat their once-ironclad assertions that Saddam had them.
Kay, in an interview with NBC's Tom Brokaw, said, "Clearly, the intelligence that we went to war on was inaccurate, wrong." Kay stepped down from his position Friday and went public with his doubts about Iraq's weapons.
"There is no doubt in my mind the world is a better place without Saddam Hussein," Bush said Tuesday. "America is more secure. The world is safer and the people of Iraq are free."
Bush spoke with reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski.
The Polish leader defended Bush.
"It's very difficult today to judge how it was -- when he had (weapons), when he decided to continue these projects of mass destruction weapons," Kwasniewski said.
Kwasknieswki said a top U.N. weapons inspector had told him that "absolutely, Iraq is ready to produce (weapons) if it is necessary to keep the power of the dictatorship of Saddam and to play such an important role in the region."
A year ago, the president appeared certain about Iraq's arsenal. "The dictator of Iraq has got weapons of mass destruction," Bush said on Jan. 22, 2003. On Tuesday, Bush said, "It's very important for us to let the Iraq survey group do its work so we can find out the facts and compare the facts to what was thought," the president said.
Democrats pounced on Kay's conclusion as evidence that President Bush duped the nation about a principle reason for going to war.
Campaigning in New Hampshire, Sen. John Kerry, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said Bush had misled the people. "When the president of the United States looks at you and tells you something, there should be some trust. He's broken every one of those promises," the Massachusetts senator said.
Howard Dean, another Democratic candidate, said, "The White House has not been candid with the American people about virtually anything with the Iraq war."
Kay, meanwhile, was called to appear Wednesday at a public hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee and agreed to attend.
Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle demanded an investigation, either by the Senate Intelligence Committee or an independent commission, into the "administration's role in the intelligence failures leading up to the war with Iraq."
Sen. Joe Lieberman, another Democratic candidate campaigning in New Hampshire, also urged an investigation or congressional hearings "on the intelligence that some of us saw directly, and the statements that the administration was making and the emphasis the administration was putting on weapons of mass destruction."
Vice President Dick Cheney, meeting in Rome with Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, did not answer when a reporter asked if he felt prewar intelligence was faulty. Cheney has been among the administration's most forceful advocates of war and was outspoken in describing Iraq's alleged threat.
Kerry has questioned whether Cheney tried to pressure CIA analysts who wrote reports on Iraq's weapon programs.
Attorney General John Ashcroft, traveling in Vienna, Austria, said the Iraq war was justified, even if banned weapons are never found, because it eliminated the threat that Saddam might again resort to "evil chemistry and evil biology."
Even before Kay announced his conclusion, Bush had expanded his public rationale about the war as the search for weapons proved fruitless. Bush cast it as a broader war against terrorism, calling Iraq the central front, and said democracy would spread in the Middle East if it should take hold in Iraq.
----
Powell says "open question" if WMDs remain in Iraq
MOSCOW (AFP)
Jan 27, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040127082022.y4w4dgua.html
US Secretary of State Colin Powell reiterated Monday that it was an "open question" as to whether stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Iraq, at the end of a two-day visit here aimed at moving US-Russian relations beyond the dispute over the Iraq war.
He said that Russia and the United States had put aside their bitter disagreement over the need for the war and were both "trying to look forward toward the future and not the past."
Powell defended pre-war intelligence used to argue the US case for going to war.
"There were programs that were clearly intended to produce weapons of mass destruction. They had the intention to produce weapons of mass destruction, and we knew they previously had stockpiles," Powell said in a live interview on Moscow Echo radio.
"What we are now looking at is whether there are still stockpiles and that is an open question, but that we have sent back a new chief inspector," he said.
Powell conceded that the US administration was no longer certain that stockpiles were still in occupied Iraq. But he argued that Saddam had had the full intention of creating new deadly weapons in the future.
The United States intends "to finally answer the question" of whether Iraq had stockpiles or not, he said.
"There is also no doubt in my mind that what Hussein was trying to do was to get the international community to stop looking at him, to get relief from all of the sanctions so that he could go back to his programs and develop these weapons.
"He had never lost the intention to develop even more deadly weapons," Powell said.
He referred on Saturday to the "open question" about Iraq weapons, echoing a move by other top US officials to back away from pre-war rhetoric accusing Saddam of having banned arms and warning of imminent danger if he was not deposed.
The top US diplomat's arrival in Moscow came amid a growing debate about the US administration's failure to find weapons of mass destruction, fueled by the resignation last week of the man leading the US search in Iraq.
David Kay -- who resigned on Friday after his Iraq Survey Group failed to find any proof of active banned weapons programs -- shifted the blame over the weekend from US President George W. Bush to the US intelligence community for the pre-war assertions of an Iraqi threat.
Russia argued repeatedly against the war by noting that UN weapons inspectors had themselves found no traces of an Iraqi weapons of mass destruction program.
Powell said that those disagreements were now a thing of the past and that he was reassured that this was the case after his meeting Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
"We had a positive discussion about Iraq," Powell said of Putin. "There is no question that last year there was a serious disagreement.... but now we are cooperating again in helping rebuild Iraq."
However he was noncommittal about the return of Russian oil companies to the lucrative Iraqi market. Russian majors struck those deals with Saddam and lost them when his regime fell.
Powell said the decision as to who will be awarded oil contracts would be up to the "Iraqi people."
"After we have transferred sovereignty to the Iraqi people, it will be up to the Iraqi people what relationship they will have with German, French and Russian (oil companies)," he said.
"We are trying to look forward toward the future and not the past," Powell said.
----
White House Shows Less Certainty Now on Iraq's Arms
January 27, 2004
By JAMES RISEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27WEAP.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 - The White House began to back away on Monday from its assertions that Iraq had illegal weapons, saying it now wanted to compare prewar intelligence assessments with what may be actually found there.
The evolving position followed criticism of the intelligence reports about Iraq from the C.I.A.'s former chief weapons inspector, David A. Kay, comments that increased pressure on the C.I.A. and intensified the political debate in Washington over who was responsible for shaping the prewar intelligence that President Bush used to justify toppling Saddam Hussein.
While Republican leaders have focused on the C.I.A. and how it gathered intelligence, Democrats have called for a close look at how the White House used that information.
On Monday White House officials were no longer asserting that stockpiles of banned weapons would eventually be found.
Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, told reporters en route to an appearance by President Bush in Little Rock, Ark., that the administration would wait for the weapons search team, the Iraq Survey Group, to complete its work before drawing any conclusions about the quality of the intelligence available.
But he said that whatever the group's conclusions, Mr. Bush had done the correct thing in deposing Mr. Hussein because Iraq was clearly working on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
"We know he had the intention, we know he had the capability," Mr. McClellan said. "And, given his history and given the events of Sept. 11, we could not afford to rely on the good intentions of Saddam Hussein."
Dr. Kay, who resigned Friday, said that there was scant evidence that Mr. Hussein kept stockpiles of illicit weapons, and that the C.I.A., under its director, George J. Tenet, and other intelligence agencies were wrong in their assessments.
Dr. Kay has avoided placing any political spin on the flaws in the intelligence. But his comments, coming during a presidential campaign and as Congressional panels draw up reviews of prewar intelligence, had immediate political impact.
On Capitol Hill, Democratic leaders used Dr. Kay's statements to argue for a more aggressive investigation by the Republican-controlled Congress into the shaping of prewar intelligence. The Senate Democratic leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, complained that the Republican leader of the Senate intelligence committee, Pat Roberts of Kansas, was seeking to limit the scope of that panel's inquiry, even as Dr. Kay was disclosing the extent of the problem.
"Unfortunately, it appears neither the administration nor the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee shares this view" of the need for a vigorous investigation, Senator Daschle said.
Mr. McClellan, pressed on whether the White House still believed that stockpiles of illicit weapons would be found in Iraq - an assertion White House officials made as recently as Friday - replied, "I think it was the judgment of intelligence agencies around the world, as well as the United Nations Special Commission on Iraq, that there were large, unaccounted-for stockpiles." The special commission was the United Nations inspection team.
Caught in the middle is Mr. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, who is both a Bush confidant and a strong defender of the agency.
The Senate intelligence panel has drafted a report strongly critical of the C.I.A.'s handling of prewar intelligence, and is waiting for Mr. Tenet's testimony, among other things, before completing its work. He is scheduled to appear on March 4, for the first time since the committee began its inquiry last spring, a Congressional official said.
Administration officials said a draft of Mr. Tenet's written testimony was being circulated for review within the government, and is expected to be discussed later this week by President Bush's advisers.
Congressional officials said the written testimony was not due until 72 hours before he appears before the panel, but they said they understood that the administration was seeking to deliver the document within the next 10 days in order to influence the final report.
Dr. Kay said in an interview over the weekend that he did not believe that C.I.A. analysts were pressed by the Bush administration to exaggerate the threat posed by Iraq's weapons programs. He also stressed that everyone in the intelligence community, as well as outside experts here and abroad, all thought Iraq had illegal weapons.
He said American intelligence analysts had believed that Iraq had illegal weapons during the Clinton and Bush administrations, and said the fact the intelligence community as a whole was so wrong meant there should be a thorough reappraisal of how such intelligence work is done.
On Monday, Dr. Kay's comments prompted members of both parties to argue that it is time for the Central Intelligence Agency to acknowledge it had made serious mistakes in its prewar assessments.
Until now, both in public and in private discussions with the committee staff members, senior intelligence officials have refused to acknowledge that any mistakes were made, the Congressional officials said. But the officials, both Democrats and Republicans, said they believed that Dr. Kay's candid remarks should prompt Mr. Tenet to provide Congress his best explanation.
"The conclusions reached by the intelligence community weren't substantiated by the intelligence," said one Congressional official, outlining a finding that is expected to be spelled out in a draft report being prepared for members of the committee. "The question is why these conclusions were allowed to permeate the analysis."
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel, said over the weekend that Dr. Kay's public statements raised "truly alarming questions about our intelligence, the reasons and justification for going to war and the president's doctrine of pre-emption."
The House intelligence committee is preparing its own report on the administration's handling of prewar intelligence. That panel's top Democrat, Representative Jane Harman of California, said over the weekend that the administration had been "in deep denial" by failing to acknowledge what she called "serious deficiencies in prewar intelligence on Iraq" and by having "no apparent commitment to addressing them."
"The potential threat posed by Iraq's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and Iraq's nuclear weapons program was central to the case for war," she said. "In light of Dr. Kay's statement, the president owes the American public and the world an explanation."
Douglas Jehl contributed reporting from London for this article.
--------
Budget Office Forecasts Record Deficit in '04
January 27, 2004
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27BUDG.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 - The Congressional Budget Office predicted on Monday that the federal budget deficit would hit a record $477 billion this year and that accumulated deficits over the next decade would total $1.9 trillion.
The nonpartisan budget office's outlook for the long term is significantly more pessimistic than it was just one year ago. It casts new doubt on the ability of President Bush to fulfill his promise of cutting the deficit in half over the next five years, particularly if he persuades Congress to make his tax cuts permanent, which he has vowed to do.
If Congress extends all tax breaks that are scheduled to expire, the agency predicted, the total cost would add up to more than $2 trillion in additional borrowing over the next decade.
And if Congress moves to stop an explosive rise in what is known as the alternative minimum tax, a provision that is expected to raise taxes on millions of families as their incomes rise, the Treasury would lose an additional $469 billion over 10 years.
Extending the tax cuts would increase the accumulated deficit more than $1.2 trillion above the agency's basic forecast. They are now scheduled to expire at various points between now and 2011.
Just a year ago, before the war in Iraq and before Congress passed a sweeping expansion of Medicare, Congressional forecasters predicted that the deficit could melt away by 2007 and that the government could rack up $1.3 trillion in accumulated surpluses within 10 years.
Democrats immediately pounced on the new report, saying it provided more evidence of Mr. Bush's fiscal recklessness.
"It is becoming clear that the Bush administration has no plan to eliminate these deficits," said Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. "In the face of mounting deficits, the president proposes another round of tax cuts reducing revenues by more than $1 trillion and driving the budget further into the red."
Administration officials contend that today's deficits are "manageable," given the need for spending on domestic security and the war in Iraq as well as the need to help the economy rebound from the recession of 2001.
The federal deficit reached $374 billion in 2003, a record in dollar terms though not as a percentage of the total economy. The new forecast calls for the deficit to reach $477 billion in 2004, which is essentially what the White House predicted last summer.
But the new budget estimate painted a much gloomier picture for the long-term outlook, even though Congressional analysts are expecting rapid economic growth to lead to big increases in tax revenue for the next several years.
The agency predicts that the economy will grow at the extremely fast rate of 4.8 percent this year and 4.2 percent next year, which is slightly more optimistic than the consensus view among private economists.
The agency also expects tax revenues to surge even faster than the economy, after having fallen for three years in a row.
But the agency's long-term outlook is more subdued. The agency predicts that economic growth will slow to just 2.5 percent a year beginning in 2010. The expected slowdown reflects slower growth in the size of the labor force, but also to some extent the economic drag created by higher deficits.
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former economist in the Bush White House, said on Thursday that making Mr. Bush's tax cuts permanent would most likely have a "modestly negative" impact on long-term economic growth.
Mr. Holtz-Eakin said the initial impact of Mr. Bush's tax cuts was positive, because the cuts lowered marginal tax rates and gave people more incentive to work and produce.
But to the extent the tax cuts lead to higher deficits and greater government borrowing, he warned, they could have a "cumulative corrosive effect on capital accumulation, on national saving and on productivity."
Economists prefer to look at budget deficits in relation to the size of the overall economy, rather than to the absolute dollar amounts.
If this year's deficit turns out as both Congressional and White House budget analysts have been predicting, it would equal about 4.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. That is high, but well short of the record set under President Ronald Reagan in 1983, when the deficit was equal to 6 percent of the economy.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, in a speech delivered by satellite to a business conference in London, said today's deficits were "not historically out of range" and said the deficit would be equal to less than 2 percent of gross domestic product by 2009.
To be sure, the Congressional report includes a few assumptions about spending that are unrealistically high. To comply with its own legal requirements, the agency assumed that the government would repeat last year's $87 billion in extra spending for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Most analysts assume that the costs of occupying those countries will decline in the next few years, though they are unlikely to disappear.
But if the Congressional Budget Office assumed an unrealistically high level of spending on Iraq, it may have been too optimistic about the willingness of either Mr. Bush or Congress to restrain the overall growth in spending.
The new report assumes that discretionary spending, which includes money for everything from military programs to education and environmental programs, will climb only at the rate of inflation - about 2.5 percent a year.
But White House officials have said they will propose to increase discretionary spending by 4 percent in 2005 and defense spending by 7 percent. Those costs will not include additional money for occupying or rebuilding Iraq, which the administration has thus far sought through supplementary budget requests to Congress.
Republicans took heart that the new report confirmed a strong rebound in the economy, which they said proved the value of Mr. Bush's tax cuts.
"I am pleased that our economic outlook has improved and the unemployment rate is projected to continue to fall," said Representative Jim Nussle, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the House Budget Committee. But Mr. Nussle also hinted at frustration about the administration's refusal to include cost estimates for Iraq in the budget plan for 2005 that is to be unveiled next Monday.
"At this point, the immediate, necessary spending we've had to do as a result of `emergency' circumstances is now largely known," Mr. Nussle said, "and can be worked into our regular budget planning."
--------
CBO Says '04 Deficit Will Rise to $477 Billion
Extending Tax Cuts Could Double Debt
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50684-2004Jan26.html
The federal deficit will reach $477 billion this year, up sharply from last year's $375 billion level, and the government is on track to accumulate nearly $2.4 trillion in additional debt over the next decade, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said yesterday.
The government's $4 trillion debt could more than double if President Bush succeeds in making permanent an array of tax cuts that are set to expire by 2011, the CBO's annual budget report added.
Measured against the size of the economy, this year's deficit -- a record in dollar terms -- will still be smaller than those in six deficit years under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. CBO officials acknowledged that the cumulative deficit would shrink dramatically from 2005 to 2014 -- from $1.9 trillion to $785 billion -- if all spending in Iraq and Afghanistan were to end this year. That is a scenario the White House and Congress do not envision.
Where the deficit goes from here, the CBO said, will depend in part on a major decision facing Congress: whether to follow Bush's admonitions and make permanent the $1.7 trillion in tax cuts passed in 2001 and 2003, or to let them expire by 2011.
If they do expire, the 2004 peak deficit would gradually decline until the books balance in 2014. But if they are extended, the government would continue to run large deficits well into the next decade.
"If you look forward, sustained, large deficits in the face of a fully operating economy will have economic consequences," warned CBO Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former economist in the Bush White House.
Regardless of those future decisions, the government's long-term finances have worsened considerably in the past six months, largely because of the war in Iraq and passage of the $400 billion law adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare. In August, congressional forecasters predicted a 10-year deficit of $1.4 trillion through 2013. That figure has jumped nearly a trillion dollars since then.
And those deficits will persist, even though the CBO forecasts robust economic growth of 4.8 percent this year and 4.2 percent in 2005.
"CBO's projections confirm that deficits loom far into the future," said Rep. John M. Spratt Jr. (S.C.), ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
Treasury Secretary John W. Snow, in a speech delivered via satellite to a conference in London, said the administration remains committed to cutting the deficit in half over the next five years. "Make no mistake, President Bush is serious about the deficit," Snow said.
Under the CBO's forecast, the $477 billion deficit of 2004 would reach $268 billion in 2009, not quite half the 2004 level.
White House officials cautioned that the CBO may have inflated its long-term deficit figure. By law, the agency had to assume that this year's $87 billion spending in Iraq and Afghanistan would continue at that level through the next 10 years.
A White House official said the president's own deficit forecast will look "substantially different" when he releases his 2005 budget on Monday. That forecast will go out only five years, in effect omitting the cost of extending the tax cuts. But the official said longer-range forecasts are more difficult.
By most measures, the prospects appear bleak, and Holtz-Eakin has put the future of the Bush tax cuts at the center of the budget battle. Maintaining the tax cuts would improve the labor market and increase business investment, he said, but the attendant budget deficits would lower national savings, reduce economic productivity and ultimately curtail economic growth.
"The cumulative corrosive impacts of sustained deficits in the face of a full-employment economy" would, on balance, make the extension of the tax cuts "a modestly negative" policy choice, he said.
Even some Republicans are increasingly nervous about the tide of red ink. The chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees underscored the CBO's optimistic assessment of the economy, but they also said more would have to be done about the deficit.
"Last year, we invested in two priorities, winning the war on terrorism and strengthening the economy," said Senate Budget Committee Chairman Don Nickles (R-Okla.). "But Congress must show fiscal discipline moving forward. The deficit projection for this year is expected, but not acceptable."
Bush has said he will tackle the deficit by controlling spending of programs not related to defense or homeland security. But with his planned increases in security spending, Bush anticipates total spending to increase by 4 percent next year, a larger increase than the CBO is anticipating. Even if all spending at Congress's discretion were to be frozen at this year's levels, the government would still run a $776 billion deficit over the next 10 years. If spending were frozen and the tax cuts were extended, that deficit would top $2.3 trillion.
And by 2014, the retiring baby boom generation will be affecting the deficit in earnest. Medicare alone will grow by an average rate of 9 percent each year over the next decade. By 2014, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid will consume half the federal budget, up from 40 percent this year. Snow again yesterday blamed the sluggish economy, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for the dramatic turnaround. But the CBO's new forecasts make it clear that economic growth alone will not bring the budget into balance, when coupled with the president's tax policies.
---------
From Iraq to Libya, US knew little on weapons
Doubts that Hussein had WMD raise questions about war's rationale and intelligence reliability.
January 27, 2004
By Peter Grier
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0127/p01s01-usfp.html
WASHINGTON - When it comes to unconventional weapons, Iraq may have been far from the most dangerous country in the world after all. In recent days a string of surprising revelations has scrambled the world's proliferation threat assessments.
Iraq's weapons programs were apparently in shambles, for instance, while Libya's were surprisingly advanced. Pakistan's nuclear scientists might have been rogue agents, proffering secrets for cash. And it appears that North Korea may be the most advanced rogue nuclear nation of all, with an advanced capacity to produce fissile material.
The bottom line: In the shadowy world of intelligence, judging capacities to produce biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons is among the most difficult estimating jobs of all.
"These intelligence estimates are not good enough to support a policy of preemptive war," says Joseph Cirincione, of the nonproliferation project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington D.C.
It is still possible that traces of weapons of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. The capture of Saddam Hussein might convince cowed scientists that the old regime is never coming back, leading to new tips, documents, or even buried equipment.
But after months of weapons hunting, the US right now is coming up with little. This was underscored over the weekend by forceful comments from the CIA's former chief weapons inspector, David Kay, who characterized Iraq's unconventional weapons programs as being in "disarray" under a leadership that was increasingly out of touch with reality.
Mr. Kay said that almost certainly Iraq had no stockpiles of such weapons, as the administration said it likely did prior to its invasion of the country last year. Iraq did maintain some test capability in regards to chemical weapons, said Kay, and may have been continuing research and development on biological weapons prior to its downfall.
The Hussein regime had made some effort to restart a nuclear program dismantled in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, but it had made little progress, according to Kay. And he said one dominant feature of all Iraq's unconventional weapons programs was corruption, in the sense that scientists and lower-level officials fooled higher-ups about the real lack of progress, solely to reap money and other benefits.
"The regime was no longer in control. It was like a death spiral," Kay told The New York Times.
Critics of the administration's use of weapons intelligence prior to the Iraq war said Kay's findings should have come as no surprise to anyone. "My reaction? I told you so," says Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association.
IN the run-up to war, the administration clearly took the worst-case scenario for almost all aspects of unconventional weaponry when building its case for invasion, according to Mr. Kimball. It ignored other evidence, including fresh intelligence produced by UN inspectors.
"The [unconventional weapons] programs were essentially in a state of suspension," says Kimball.
It shouldn't be surprising that Iraq's leaders were themselves in the dark about the program, says Kimball. That same dynamic may have been at work in Pakistan, where nuclear scientists apparently sold weapons technology without the central government's knowledge.
Pakistani offiicals indicated over the weekend that several scientists - who they declined to name - had large bank accounts tied to technology sales.
Thus the most dangerous weapons proliferator in Iraq's region might not have been Iraq itself, but an ally of the United States. Libya's uranium enrichment technology, for instance, is very similar to that used by Pakistan. Now that Libya has pledged to give up its unconventional weapons programs, it turns out its equipment was much better than believed, according to international inspectors who have visited the country.
And North Korea may have the most dangerous programs of all. A group of private experts that recently toured North Korea's nuclear sites said last week that they were shown evidence that Pyongyang is at least producing plutonium metal.
Siegfried Hecker, a senior fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, told Congress that he handled a small sample of what was alleged to be plutonium during the trip, and that its color and weight seemed about right.
In addition, the 8,000 spent fuel rods stored in the Yongbyon nuclear facility appear to have been withdrawn, perhaps in preparation for reprocessing for plutonium extraction.
"For all intents and purposes ... those fuel rods are gone," Dr. Hecker told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
--------
Budget analysts see deeper 10-year deficits of $2.4 trillion
Monday, January 26, 2004
ALAN FRAM,
Associated Press Writer
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/01/26/national1803EST0787.DTL
The government's budget outlook deteriorated further on Monday as the Congressional Budget Office projected nearly $2.4 trillion in deficits over the next decade, providing new fuel for an election-year battle over soaring federal shortfalls.
Along with the forecast, almost $1 trillion worse than estimated in August, Congress' nonpartisan fiscal watchdog said this year's deficit would hit $477 billion. That would be a record in dollar terms.
Although the report envisioned red ink ebbing to $362 billion next year and receding thereafter, it stirred up Democrats, who blame President Bush for squandering the unprecedented surpluses of just three years ago; and conservative Republicans, who say he has let the budget spin out of control.
"He's been completely irresponsible," presidential hopeful Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C., said in New Hampshire, underscoring Democrats' hopes that the issue is catching on. "We can't afford four more years of the right-wing Republican administration," candidate Howard Dean said. "Republicans don't balance budgets; Democrats do."
"These budget deficits as far as the eye can see are the predictable result of a president and Congress spending taxpayer dollars with reckless abandon," said Brian Riedl, who studies the budget for the conservative Heritage Foundation.
The highest deficit ever was last year's $375 billion.
Bush sends Congress his $2.3 trillion budget for 2005 next Monday. It will propose holding nondefense, nondomestic security spending to about 0.5 percent growth, with a goal of halving deficits by 2009.
"The president has a plan to cut the deficit in half over the next five years, and that's what we intend to do," said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.
Critics from both parties say the actual shortfalls could be even worse than projected because the budget office excluded the cost of extending tax cuts and other items that are set to expire in coming years. Lawmakers are considered likely eventually to enact such extensions.
In addition, the report's numbers do not extend far enough to catch the brunt of the retirement of the baby boom generation, which will foist huge costs on Social Security, Medicare and other income-support programs.
"Even if economic growth turns out to be greater than projected, however, significant long-term strains on the budget will start to intensify within the next decade" from the mass retirements, the report said.
Conservatives, who have been rebelling openly for weeks over the growth of spending and deficits on Bush's watch, said Monday his proposals for corrective action were too timid.
Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., said he and other conservatives were working on a budget that would balance in five years and be even more stringent on spending, perhaps cutting programs that Congress controls.
"I think Congress can do better, and I think we should make it our purpose to present a bolder fiscal vision than the administration will put forward," he said.
Pence and others conceded that while they probably don't have the votes to push their plan through the GOP-run House, they hoped to influence the budget it produces. Highlighting Bush's problems on Capitol Hill, the conservative chairmen of the House and Senate budget committees -- Rep. Jim Nussle, R-Iowa, and Sen. Don Nickles, R-Okla. -- issued cautious statements stressing the need to control spending and red ink.
The national debt, the running total the government owes its debt holders, is more than $7 trillion, including money it owes its own Social Security and other trust funds.
Monday's report, as required by law, assumed lawmakers will not change tax or spending laws over the next decade, a farfetched scenario. That is because the numbers are not predictions but a neutral measure of current policy to judge the budgetary effect of legislation.
The budget office projected that for the decade ending in 2013, the red ink will total $2.38 trillion. That was $986 billion worse than it projected in August and $3.7 trillion deeper than it projected only a year ago.
As Bush took office in January 2001, the budget office projected surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion for the decade ending in 2011.
The worsening since August was because of the costs of legislation enacted since then, including bills creating Medicare prescription drug benefits and paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The report also projects lower federal revenue, partly because of lower inflation that the budget office now expects.
The report assumed that the $87.5 billion enacted in November for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would be approved anew annually -- an unlikely scenario.
But more than offsetting that were expected and potential expenses the budget office excluded.
These included the costs of making tax cuts enacted under Bush permanent; easing the alternative minimum tax on higher-earning Americans so it doesn't gradually hit middle-income people; paying for unforeseen wars and disasters; sending people to Mars, as the president has proposed; boosting spending for highways and other popular programs; and overhauling Social Security.
On the Net:
Congressional Budget Office: www.cbo.gov/
-------- MILITARY
Leak against this war
US and British officials must expose their leaders' lies about Iraq - as I did over Vietnam
Daniel Ellsberg
Tuesday January 27, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1132043,00.html
After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year's Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army's 25th Division, moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles, when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around, ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing as well.
They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn't fire at them, because we would have been firing into our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved on.
About an hour later, the same thing happened again; this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by their tactics but by their performance.
One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.
Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: "By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?"
Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: "I've been thinking that ... all ... day." You couldn't miss the comparison if you'd gone to grade school in America. Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their own homes, blending into the local population after each attack.
I can't help but remember that afternoon as I read about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors - as we preferred to imagine - but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.
There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide "security" for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation - as in Vietnam - is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.
As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq - killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there - they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.
I served three US presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied - and continue to lie - as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam.
By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents.
I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can.
I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now - the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic results.
Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me.
Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.
· Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
-------- africa
Rebels, Many in Teens, Disarm in Sudan's South
January 27, 2004
By MARC LACEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/africa/27SUDA.html?pagewanted=all&position=
TAM, Sudan, Jan. 22 - Hope is gaining ground on the front lines of Africa's most expansive - and exhaustive - battlefield, where Sudanese have killed and maimed other Sudanese in an area the size of Europe for 20 long years.
The new reality could be seen in this village west of the Nile the other day when a brigade of rebel soldiers arrived in formation, singing songs of liberation and clutching aging AK-47's.
At their commander's order, about 100 of the youngest fighters dropped their rifles in the dirt, stripped off their camouflage uniforms and ran around in the hot sun like children. Actually, they were children, the youngest no more than 10.
The Sudan People's Liberation Army, which enlisted the children when Tam was a flash point several years ago, is forcing them out of the army and back to their homes now that major fighting has subsided in the area.
Southeast of here, in Leer, where government troops and rebels have dug in for battle not far from each other, there are similarly optimistic signs. Between them a small team of international monitors have carved out a neutral zone. The monitors watched with amazement recently as a government commander entered the area, strode past rebels he has long been trying to kill and sat down to get his hair cut.
Peace is still not a word that captures present-day Sudan, despite a string of accords signed in recent months between the government and the main rebel movement, known as the S.P.L.A. There are too many guns, too much ill will and too many people still dying.
Fighting rages most explosively in Sudan's east, where the government is laying waste to communities controlled by a rival group of rebels not part of the peace talks. Tens of thousands of refugees have poured across the Sudanese border in recent weeks into the harsh deserts of Chad.
The main war, though, has been the one between the north, controlled by the Islamic government in Khartoum, and the south, a patchwork variously claimed by S.P.L.A. rebels, various militia forces and the government.
Southerners have long resisted attempts by the government to impose Shariah, the Islamic legal code, on them. Oil has exacerbated the north-south conflict as the government has piped the south's rich underground deposits to the north without sharing the wealth.
Recently, though, the north-south war has entered a new, low-intensity phase, as the warring parties await developments from Naivasha, the lakeside resort in Kenya where peace negotiations are unfolding.
Led by Vice President Osman Ali Taha and the rebel leader John Garang, the parties have made significant strides in setting up a new Sudan with a semiautonomous south.
The negotiators have agreed to let southerners decide in a referendum in six years whether they want to separate altogether from the north. They have agreed to form a joint military force in the south, and pull back forces from the web of front lines that crisscross the country. They have also decided to divide the nation's oil wealth evenly.
But reaching a final deal has proved difficult, with various deadlines - first the end of 2003, then the end of January - slipping. Pushing hard from the sidelines has been the Bush administration, which has made resolving Sudan's war a top priority.
Should a deal be reached, there will remain deep skepticism in the south that Khartoum will honor its commitments, especially if southerners vote to separate from the north.
John Gang Guom, a teenage soldier demobilized in Tam in an exercise organized by Unicef, said he believed he would be picking up his gun again soon. "I can't believe there will be no more war," he said. "The enemy is still out there."
Such gloom, however, has not stopped many southerners from taking advantage of the lull in the fighting. Displaced people - and Sudan's war has displaced more than any other current conflict - have begun returning to their homes from other parts of Sudan and from neighboring Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia.
Some trek for days in flipflops. Others climb aboard vehicles, like the rickety pickup truck that made its way across the south the other day loaded with 29 civilians, one goat, numerous sacks of dried fish and a rebel soldier.
When the returnees reach their villages, they are sometimes disappointed to find that family members have run away, too. But there are poignant reunions, like the one the other night at the Majoko residence in Rumbek.
One of Moses Majoko's 14 wives managed to make it back home after 20 years of being blocked from her family by war. She was thin and weak when she arrived, shocking every last family member.
As she lay in a hut, her family slaughtered a bull to celebrate her return. "Our mother has come!" one of her sons cried.
Sudan, and particularly the south of the country, has suffered immensely from the long war. Public buildings are in ruins. Paved roads are nonexistent, isolating the south from the region.
Only a quarter of the south's children are enrolled in schools. Peace is expected to clog the relatively few schoolhouses still standing and force many pupils to learn outside under trees, as some do now.
Experts estimate that as many as two million land mines remain hidden. Just as dangerous, AIDS, which has affected the population at relatively low levels, is expected to skyrocket when soldiers and refugees flock back home.
Armed conflict is also likely to continue, peace deal or no peace deal. Ethnic skirmishes have become commonplace in the south, stoked by government-backed militias. Petty crime is also expected to soar.
In Rumbek, one of the main southern towns, the tiny police department is training new recruits, hoping to get out front of any lawbreakers. There are plenty of guns available, but the police have no vehicle. "We foot it," the chief said.
Despite the many challenges, southerners hope the war is finally petering out.
It is that optimism that gives strength to the young men hacking through the bush outside Yarol with homemade axes and machetes. Using a narrow dirt path as their guide, the villagers have cleared miles and miles of trees and brush from Yarol to a place called Ramciel.
In the Dinka language, Ramciel means "Where the Rhinos Meet." Southerners envision it as the place they will meet, too, in their future capital.
Today it is nothing more than a collection of shrubs and trees around a towering rock. In the dirt, there are snake tracks and paw prints left by very large cats. But southerners have high hopes. They see fountains atop the dry earth, broad boulevards and maybe even skyscrapers.
Pipe dreams, probably. But international donors preparing to flood southern Sudan with assistance should peace eventually break out are not thrilled with the idea of building a shiny new capital while people are suffering so.
The work crew is not worried about that. With the sun beating down and at least six more miles of brush to clear before they reach Ramciel, they are happy to be planning for something other than the next battle.
"The road is the first step," said Jok Ayom, a local administrator who imagines the future city rivaling even Rome. "Ramciel can function as soon as people can get there."
-------- arms
Russian arms industry sets post-Soviet record
January 27, 2003
Gazeta (Russia)
http://www.gazeta.ru/2004/01/27/oa_110352.shtml
Russia's leading arms exporter, State Unitary Enterprise Rosoboronexport, has published a report stating that in 2003 the country made over $5 billion from exports of arms and military hardware. The arm exporters also predict further development. The head of Rosoboronexport, Andrei Belyaninov, told a gathering of the company's executives that they accounted for 94 percent of the country's overall income in the arms trade. He said that over the past few years Rosoboronexport has shown steady growth in sales of military goods - approximately one billion US dollars every year, from $3.2 billion in 2001 to $5.1 billion in 2003.
According to statistics, the best year for Russian (then-Soviet) arms exporters was 1987 when defence contracts yielded $20 billion. However, in 1987 the majority of supplies went to political allies and no more than one third of the contracts were paid for. Presently, the share of cash money in the revenues amounts to 80 percent and this is also considered a breakthrough by industry majors.
Rosoboronexport's report reads that the good results were a result of the enlarged geographical area of exports and especially through active work in the countries of South-East Asia, like Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam. The total number of countries that bought arms and military hardware from Russia in 2003 reached 52. The majority of the goods supplied were aircraft, naval weapons and anti-aircraft systems.
Rosoboronexport's plans for 2004 are no less ambitious, with export incomes set to rise further. The main part of the foreseen growth is attributed to the recently signed contract for the sale of the heavy aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov to India. The deal will bring in $1.5 billion to the state coffers. Apart from the sale of the ship the company intends to enter a number of additional contracts connected with her maintenance, creation of on-shore infrastructure and the supply of additional aircraft. With these contracts added to the initial one, the overall sum may grow to $3 billion, the company's experts predict.
At the same time, the specialists see 2004 as a potentially difficult year because of the possible changes in relations with Russia's traditional partners, primarily China. In spring the European Union may lift sanctions against Beijing imposed in 1989 after the brutal suppression of a student rally on Tiananmen Square. This will bring the Russian monopoly of supplying weapons to China to an end - Germany and France are ready to enter the market with modern high-tech systems to which the cheaper Russian versions are no match.
Rosoboronexport will fight the possible expansion by Western companies, but what kind of strategy the company will adopt remains unclear. Andrei Belyaninov stressed that the company sees the development of programs to modernize previously delivered hardware and supplying spare parts as priority projects for 2004.
-------- britain
The folly of our war machine
Billions are being wasted on defence projects that will have no place in the type of future conflict Britain is likely to face
Max Hastings
Tuesday January 27, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/military/story/0,11816,1132071,00.html
Most of politics is about little things. Geoff Hoon may lose his job this week for bungling the semantics of the Kelly affair, and because an army sergeant killed in Iraq lacked the latest model of body armour.
How perverse, it seems, that none among the legion of Mr Hoon's critics has suggested that he should be expelled from office, not for these offences, but instead for abject failure to confront the big issues of British defence policy. Nobody urges that Hoon should go because he is presiding over the waste of billions of pounds of taxpayers' money, condoning follies that will dog the armed forces for decades. Yet this is what the secretary of state is indeed doing today.
How we laugh at tales of 19th-century admirals who sought to cling to wooden sailships in the age of ironclads. How we mock generals who tried to preserve horsed cavalry in the era of the tank. Yet Britain's armed forces are now doing the same again.
Last week, we were told that the defence budget faces a crisis, because a string of flagship projects - Nimrod, the Eurofighter, the Astute submarine - are overshooting costs by £3bn. A frenzied struggle has begun to save money elsewhere, by juggling the books, cancelling exercises, postponing equipment deliveries - all the usual marginal expedients. Instead, the government and the service chiefs should be undertaking a vastly more radical review. They should be exploring fundamentals: what sort of armed forces will Britain want in the generation ahead? What sort of equipment and manning will these need?
If such a review was honest, it would lead to a dramatic rebalancing. Historically, defence planning and budgeting has been conducted on the basis that the resources and self-respect of the three services must be kept in rough equipoise. Each must be allowed its share of money for cherished projects. When cuts are needed, each must take a share of pain.
The consequence of this approach, encouraged by chronic ignorance about defence matters in the House of Commons, the media and the public, is that today we are again preparing the Royal Air Force to fight the Battle of Britain. We are likewise equipping the Royal Navy with a new generation of warships to defend the Atlantic sealanes against U-boats. These are huge mistakes, which should be undone before it is too late.
Some 20 years ago, Michael Heseltine as defence secretary asserted that Britain could no longer afford to conduct so-called out-of-area operations, such as the Falklands war. Europe was the only credible battleground for Britain's forces. Today, and as explicitly avowed in George Robertson's radical white paper four years ago, this proposition has been turned on its head.
A European war seems unthinkable. Instead, the armed forces are being configured to fight far afield, alongside the Americans or other allies. The thrust of British policy is to man and equip a standing expeditionary force for services overseas - "out of area" - as warriors or peace-keepers.
Such an expeditionary force is bound to be dominated by soldiers. The tradition whereby the job of chief of defence staff rotates between the services has become obsolete. A soldier is permanently needed. Attempts to massage the self-esteem of the navy and RAF by giving them their turns at the top have proved disastrous in recent years - witness the embarrassing tenure of Admiral Sir Michael Boyce.
Britain is about to buy 232 Eurofighters at a cost of £80m a piece. This is a folly comparable with building a modern copy of Nelson's Victory for fleet service, and much more expensive. The Eurofighter is a cold war interceptor. No strategist can devise a credible threat for it to intercept. Whatever the political difficulties of abandoning this project now, we should do so. The cost and futility of persevering are too great. No one should be deceived by current plans to fit some Eurofighters with missiles and bombs for a ground attack role. The RAF is, in effect, buying a racing car as old-fashioned as the Bugatti, and spending another fortune to modify it for cross-country work. Diehards say: if the RAF does not have the Eurofighter, what does it have? Yet this argument possesses validity only if British defence policy is perceived as a job creation scheme for pilots and air marshals.
In the air, Britain needs a modest force of ground-attackers, a lot of helicopters, and a credible plane for the Royal Navy's two planned aircraft carriers. These ships are indeed indispensable to the navy's future role. But after them, what? Britain has committed itself to spend £4.5bn on the first six of a planned 12 new Type 45 destroyers.
These represent another huge folly. They are escorts, offering limited anti-missile and anti-submarine cover, whose chief purpose is to maintain the critical mass of the Royal Navy. I have heard some senior sailors sincerely suggest that frigates also fulfil an important role in countering drug-smuggling. To such desperate measures has the navy come, in the struggle to justify its own existence, and what a nonsense it all is. In the unlikely event that Britain's carriers and minehunters face a submarine threat, aircraft offer far more effective protection than destroyers or frigates.
We honour the past achievements of the Royal Navy and RAF. But historic reverence should not today determine defence policy. We need a small Royal Navy dominated by carriers and submarines. We need to shift resources decisively towards the army, which is today grossly overstretched.
No minister will address these big issues, because none has the stomach for the political rows that would follow. Yet how many thousands of millions of pounds of public money are we willing to waste, to appease the wrath of neanderthals and nostalgics? A great many, seems to be the answer. If Geoff Hoon somehow survives this week's excitements, who could suppose that he possesses either the political will or intellectual equipment to address these vital matters? Fat chance.
· Max Hastings' book, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany 1944-5, will be published by Macmillan in September
-------- chemical weapons
Army to Hold Hearings on Nerve Agent
January 27, 2004
By MARIA NEWMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/nyregion/27nerve.html
Environmentalists and elected officials who have expressed alarm with an Army plan to dispose of neutralized VX nerve gas in the Delaware River in South Jersey will be able to question military officials about the process.
Officials and residents of the area, including United States Senator Jon S. Corzine, complained earlier this month that the Army planned to bring partially treated VX gas to Pennsville Township in Salem County, near the Delaware Memorial Bridge, without notifying the public. In response, Army officials said last week they were planning to hold one public meeting and possibly two by Feb. 18.
VX was manufactured for military use as a nerve agent and is considered among the deadliest of all chemicals, causing paralysis and death within minutes when it is in its active stage. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the federal government accelerated disposal of chemical warfare stockpiles to prevent them from becoming targets.
The DuPont Company, which is expected to get the contract to neutralize the VX, is conducting a "treatability" study to determine whether it can be safely disposed of in the Delaware. Officials said they hoped to have the results of that study in time for the public meetings.
Environmentalists and elected officials have objected to the ways the project was proceeding. "There's been a real lack of information here,'' said Maya Van Rossum of the Delaware Riverkeeper Network, an environmental group. "What in fact are they going to be doing? What are the possible threats to the river and to people? It's not DuPont's river. It's not the Army's river. It's our river. It's nature's river.''
Army officials said they followed requirements about public notification by placing an advertisement in Today's Sunbeam, a Salem County newspaper, and posting information at a public library in Pennsville Township, where the DuPont Chambers Works, the plant that would handle the treated nerve agent, is situated. Residents and elected officials say the first they heard of the Army's project was in news articles in local newspapers, when it was almost too late to meet the Army's deadline for public comment.
After their complaints, Army officials decided to extend the period for public comment by 60 days and to hold informational meetings by Feb. 18, said Col. Jesse Barber, the projects manager for alternative technology for the Army, who is in charge of getting rid of the stockpile of the VX nerve agent.
"I will personally conduct the public information sessions,'' Colonel Barber said. "This contract is not a done deal yet. If there are significant problems, as a responsible government official, I have to address those or look at what the problems are.'' He said the Army can decide on awarding the contract, but the treatability study would determine what additional permits they would have to seek.
Colonel Barber said that he was unsure of the dates and places of the meetings, but that there would probably be one in New Jersey and possibly one in Delaware, across the river from the DuPont plant, if there appears to be a call for one there.
Army and DuPont officials will try to assure the public that the treated effluent treatment would be harmless.
The DuPont plant is one of the world's largest commercial and industrial wastewater treatment facilities and is already treating another neutralized agent for the military at its Secure Environmental Treatment, a biodegradation facility. That agent, a byproduct of mustard gas, is being shipped from Aberdeen Proving Ground. So far, the Chambers Works has handled more than 400,000 gallons without any problems, said David Strait, the plant manager.
The VX nerve agent is now stockpiled at the Newport Chemical Depot in Newport, Ind. If the contract is approved, the VX will be made nonlethal in Newport by mixing it with hot water and sodium hydroxide to form hydrolysate, a caustic compound scientists liken to household drain cleaner.
From 2 million to 4 million gallons of the VX hydrolysate would then be transported to DuPont's Chambers Works over a period of a year or so, where any remaining harmful chemicals will be removed before the liquid, by then almost pure water, is discharged into the Delaware, company and Army officials said.
The hydrolysate would be transported either by truck, or by truck and rail, and the route would take it through Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and possibly Maryland and West Virginia. Those details are yet to be determined, Colonel Barber said.
"The lack of communication makes me intensely skeptical about this proposal,'' said United States Representative Rob Andrews, a Haddon Heights Democrat. "I'm very concerned that no one who is credible and objective is looking at this proposal. DuPont has a vested interest in saying, 'Yeah, this is fine.' The Army has a responsibility of getting rid of the residue. They want to solve their problem. They also say it's fine.
"At the very minimum I'm going to insist that some objective person or organization look at this proposal if the Army approves it,'' he said. "There are lots of unanswered questions.''
Mr. Strait, the plant manager, said DuPont and the Army would be as open to public inquiry about the VX byproduct process as they have been with the mustard gas project.
"We've been very open throughout this process with Aberdeen and Newport as well,'' Mr. Strait said. "We've been open with employees, and we have a community advisory panel that meets every other month that includes local politicians and others. We think it's going very well.''
-------- iraq
Roadside Attack Kills 3 G.I.'s West of Baghdad
January 27, 2004
New York Times
By TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/middleeast/27CND-IRAQ.html
At least three United States soldiers were killed today after a large explosion in a town west of Baghdad, an American military spokesman said.
Also today, American forces killed three Iraqis, one of whom was targeted as a suspected member of a guerrilla group.
The explosion west of Baghdad, probably from a roadside bomb, went off in an area controlled by the 82nd Airborne Division, the spokesman said by telephone from the Iraqi capital. But it was not immediately confirmed that those who died were from that division, he added. One soldier was wounded, the spokesman said.
The incident took place in the town of Khaldiya, near Falluja, about 50 miles west of Baghdad.
On Saturday both towns were the scene of attacks that killed five American soldiers.
The area is part of the so-called Sunni Triangle, where attacks on American forces have been particularly frequent, although American officials say the number of attacks has decreased since the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13.
Today's fatalities bring the number of American military forces killed in hostile action since the beginning of the Iraq war to at least 517.
In a separate action, American soldiers killed three Iraqis, one of whom was targeted as a suspected member of a guerrilla cell linked to the former Baathist government, a United States military spokesman said.
Master Sgt. Robert Cargie, spokesman for the Fourth Infantry Division, said by telephone from Baghdad that American forces raided four locations in Beiji, north of Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown.
The targeted individual and two others were killed in "a confrontation" with American soldiers, Sergeant Cargie said. "The two had some affiliation with him because they were together," Sergeant Cargie added. "Whether or not they had direct involvement with this cell" was yet to be determined.
Five people were captured during the raids, including three other targeted individuals suspected of being involved in the guerrilla group, known as Muhammad's Army.
----
Iraqi whispers mull repeat of 1920s revolt
By HANNAH ALLAM and TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Tue, Jan. 27, 2004
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/world/7809543.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as an omen for the future.
Iraqis remember 1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries that hang in living rooms.
Now, many say there's an uncanny similarity with today: unpopular foreign occupiers, unelected governing bodies and unhappy residents eager for self-determination. The result could be another bloody uprising.
"We are now under occupation, and the best treatment for a wound is sometimes fire," said Najah al Najafi, a Shiite cleric who joined thousands of marchers at a recent demonstration where construction workers, tribal leaders and religious scholars spoke of 1920.
The rebellion against the British marked the first time that Sunni and Shiite Muslims worked in solidarity, drawing power from tribesmen and city dwellers alike. Though Shiites, Sunnis and ethnic minorities are rivals in the new Iraq, many residents said the recent call for elections could draw disparate groups together. A smattering of Sunnis joined massive Shiite protests last week, demanding that U.S. administrators grant the wishes of the highest Shiite cleric for general elections.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani has been unbending in his demand for direct elections instead of U.S. plans to select a new government through caucuses. At the request of L. Paul Bremer, the American envoy to Iraq, and several members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, the United Nations is sending a team to Iraq to study the feasibility of holding elections in time for the transition of power this summer.
Sistani's representatives expect widespread civil disobedience and violence if elections are deemed impossible.
"They know what will happen if they do not listen to us," said Sabah al Khazali, a religious scholar who joined last week's demonstrations. "They know this is a warning."
The historic rebellion has broad resonance. A band of anti-American insurgents has named itself the "1920 Revolution Brigades," and Sistani himself, in a newspaper advertisement this month, asked Iraq's influential tribes to remember that year.
"We want you to be revolutionaries ... you should have a big role today, as you had in the revolution in 1920," the ad said.
Elderly tribal leaders recently discussed revolution amid plumes of incense smoke and the gurgle of tobacco-filled water pipes. Many men on the 50-member Independent Iraqi Tribes council proudly claimed ancestors who rose against the British in 1920. They likewise would join a revolt if Sistani and other clerics gave the word, they said.
History writers are less kind in their assessment of the rebellion's outcome. In 1920, the League of Nations awarded Britain the new mandate of Iraq as part of secret deals made during World War I. Just six months into British rule, Iraqi opposition was growing. After the unrest deteriorated into three months of death and anarchy, the British plucked an Arab nationalist fighter from exile in the United Kingdom and installed him as king. The monarchy lasted until 1958, when a military coup turned Iraq into a republic.
To many Iraqis, today's U.S. occupation reads like an old play with modern characters: America as the new Britain, grenade-lobbing insurgents as the new opposition, and Ahmad Chalabi and other former exiles on the Governing Council as the new kings.
"We've sacrificed many martyrs and we would do it again," said Sheik Khamis al Suhail, the secretary of the tribal council. "In 1920, we faced a struggle between Muslims and non-Muslims in Iraq. We are living under basically the same conditions now, and revolution is certainly possible."
Iraqi Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the country's population of 26 million, look to Sistani for leadership.
"If Sistani called for revolution, I would sacrifice my life for the good of my country," said Hamdiya al Niemi, a 27-year-old street vendor whose father raised her on stories of the 1920 uprising. "My father was so proud talking about that time, how we kicked out the British and how we should never allow foreigners to rule our land."
The al Hamdani tribe, with thousands of members across Iraq, provided key organizers of the 1920 revolt. These days, the family name is linked to the cream-filled confections sold at the popular al Hamdani pastry shops throughout Baghdad.
Yaser al Hamdani, a 28-year-old tribe member whose great-uncle fought in the revolution, said he'd give up his job in the steaming bakery for a rebellion.
"Of course I would join," Hamdani said. "There would be bloodshed along the way, but sacrifice is important for success."
----
Rocket Fired at U.S. Post in Baghdad
January 27, 2004
New York Times
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/middleeast/27IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 26 - Guerrilla fighters fired a rocket on Monday night across the Tigris River and into a parking lot of the compound housing the headquarters of occupation forces in Iraq. The attack came just a few hours after the minister in charge of the police and security said at a news conference there that the continuing violence was one reason not to hold elections this year.
The thumping detonation across the river could be heard from the heavily fortified compound shortly after 9 p.m., followed a few seconds later by the much louder explosion of the incoming round.
A military official said the lot where the round exploded was empty at that hour, so the damage was light and nobody was hurt.
Immediately after the blast, sirens wailed from the compound, once set aside for the palaces and office buildings of the ousted government, and now the main headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Authority that runs Iraq under occupation.
"Take cover! Take cover!" warned recorded messages in the compound, words that echoed across the city as if to remind citizens of the fragile security situation. Helicopters immediately arrived overhead and patrolled the area for some time, but there was no word of any counterstrike.
Rocket and mortar attacks on the compound are a fairly regular occurrence, as are similar attacks on bases around the country. So, too, are attacks on Iraqi police officers, seven of whom were killed in three separate incidents late Sunday and on Monday.
Elsewhere in Baghdad, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi civilian and wounded two, Reuters reported. That, too, is a common event.
The attacks, running at more than 20 a day with targets of Iraqi civilians and security forces as well as the American military and its international occupation partners, present one of the thorniest problems confronting the allies' plan, worked out with the handpicked Iraqi Governing Council, for handing over sovereignty to Iraq.
The United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, was expected to make his decision known on Tuesday on whether to send a United Nations team to Iraq to examine that plan and to suggest refinements in the voting procedures to meet local objections. The Coalition Provisional Authority and the Iraqi Governing Council requested the move at a meeting with Mr. Annan in New York last Monday. While he indicated that he would agree to the request, he asked for time to assess the security situation for United Nations staff. A two-person United Nations security team arrived in Baghdad on Friday.
Though the Bush administration had kept the United Nations out of the transition planning, it reversed field after Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a powerful Shiite Muslim cleric, dismissed the American-devised arrangements and insisted on direct elections instead.
When the United States protested that there was not enough time to organize direct elections and meet the June 30 target date for returning sovereignty to the Iraqis, Ayatollah Sistani said he would withdraw his objections only if the United Nations verified the claim and suggested changes in the present caucus-based selection procedures for an interim government.
United Nations diplomats in New York said they expected Mr. Annan to cooperate and an election team to be on its way to Iraq by next week.
The American authorities have said it would be impractical to hold direct elections this summer, but they usually cite practical considerations like the difficulty of building voter rolls, rather than security problems. The Iraqi interior minister, Nouri Badran, cited both factors at a news conference in the government compound on Monday when he spoke against quick elections.
"We ask for this matter to be postponed, even if it is for a short time, until all the political and security preparations can ensure that elections can run in a free and stable manner," he said.
John H. Cushman Jr. reported from Baghdad for this article and Warren Hoge from the United Nations.
--------
Iraqi Aide Says Safety Inadequate for a Vote
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50455-2004Jan26.html
BAGHDAD, Jan. 26 -- Iraq's interior minister said Monday that the country is not secure enough to hold elections in the near future, as the country's leading Shiite Muslim cleric has repeatedly demanded.
"We ask for the matter to be postponed, even for a short time, until all political and security requirements can be met . . . [and] elections can be held in a stable and safe manner," the minister, Nouri Badran, said at a news conference.
Badran's comments echoed the view of the U.S. occupation administration, which has stuck to a plan for gradual democratization that would result in the United States handing over sovereignty to an appointive government by June 30, with elections not planned until late next year. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the principal leader of Iraq's Shiite majority, has said the U.S. transition plan does not guarantee full representation for all Iraqis.
American and Iraqi officials have asked U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to help break the impasse by sending a team of experts here to determine if it is feasible to hold direct elections before the handover of power. Annan indicated Sunday he would announce his decision imminently.
Though Badran supports the U.S. position, he made clear Monday that he partly blamed occupation authorities for Iraq's persistent problems with political violence and crime, saying the officials had mistakenly decided to dissolve Iraqi security forces that could have helped prevent criminal gangs and insurgents from operating.
"The police, the army, the intelligence forces, the traffic police -- everyone disappeared from the streets" after the U.S. invasion, Badran said. "Regretfully, the military and civilian coalition did not pay attention to this major defect" and thus "gave an opportunity" for criminals and insurgents to organize in chaotic postwar conditions.
In recent months Iraq has been plagued by such violent street crimes as carjackings and armed robberies, as well as by constant roadside bombings and lethal suicide attacks, generally attributed either to loyalists of ousted president Saddam Hussein's security network or to Islamic extremists seeking to undermine stability.
In the past two weeks, bombs and armed attacks have killed more than 40 Iraqi civilians and police officers, as well as more than a dozen U.S. troops.
The most serious incident was a Jan. 18 car bombing outside the main U.S. compound in the heart of Baghdad that killed 31 people. Most attacks have occurred in the Sunni Triangle, the volatile region extending north and west from the capital.
On Monday, a man was killed when he stepped on a roadside bomb as he got off a bus in a Baghdad suburb, an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps officer said. On Sunday, police reported, seven Iraqi policemen manning checkpoints around the town of Ramadi, west of Baghdad, were killed by gunmen.
Since Hussein's fall, Badran said, "300 families have lost a father" in the police force to violent crime or insurgent attacks.
The minister also cited the early dissolution of the Iraqi border patrol as an error that, in combination with the decision to allow thousands of Iranians to visit Shiite shrines inside Iraq, may have enabled foreign guerrillas and smugglers to infiltrate from Iran.
"The dissolving of the border forces opened the border wide for a lot of bad forces to enter," Badran said. "For a long time, there was no central authority" to control breaches of security and foreign infiltration.
Because of inaccurate information, he said, some occupation officials initially believed all security forces "belonged to Saddam, and all police are thieves." The wholesale purge, he added, "created chaos in the political arena" and cost the security establishment "a lot of long-term experience. We let it all go."
Occupation authorities dissolved the security forces in large measure because it was the most efficient way to remove the influence of Hussein's Baath Party from their ranks. They have since focused their efforts on rebuilding these services largely from scratch.
In recent weeks, occupation officials have also been meeting with various former army and intelligence officers, partly in a belated attempt to capitalize on their knowledge and partly in preparation for forming a new Defense Ministry.
Badran said his ministry has worked to rebuild the national police, border forces and Facilities Protection Service, despite a disabling lack of equipment and little time to screen and train recruits. There are now 67,000 police, 40,000 armed facilities guards and 9,000 border patrol officers.
"We have tried hard to build the ministry from nothing," with few police officers available and their reputation tarnished, Badran said. He said his goal was to create a security establishment that is accountable and observant of human rights as well as able to combat crime and terrorism.
In several interviews Monday, Iraqi policemen here said they felt disadvantaged against better-armed criminal gangs and insurgent groups, who they said had obtained sophisticated weapons by looting security facilities during and immediately after the war.
"They have better weapons than we do, and we lost a lot of expertise. We don't have enough equipment or cars," said one veteran officer. "Now we are like militia fighters. We are out there alone, and we have to confront them face to face."
--------
Iraqi whispers mull repeat of 1920s revolt
Tue, Jan. 27, 2004
By HANNAH ALLAM and TOM LASSETER
Knight Ridder Newspapers
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/world/7809543.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Whispers of "revolution" are growing louder in Baghdad this month at teahouses, public protests and tribal meetings as Iraqis point to the past as an omen for the future.
Iraqis remember 1920 as one of the most glorious moments in modern history, one followed by nearly eight decades of tumult. The bloody rebellion against British rule that year is memorialized in schoolbooks, monuments and mass-produced tapestries that hang in living rooms.
Now, many say there's an uncanny similarity with today: unpopular foreign occupiers, unelected governing bodies and unhappy residents eager for self-determination. The result could be another bloody uprising.
"We are now under occupation, and the best treatment for a wound is sometimes fire," said Najah al Najafi, a Shiite cleric who joined thousands of marchers at a recent demonstration where construction workers, tribal leaders and religious scholars spoke of 1920.
The rebellion against the British marked the first time that Sunni and Shiite Muslims worked in solidarity, drawing power from tribesmen and city dwellers alike. Though Shiites, Sunnis and ethnic minorities are rivals in the new Iraq, many residents said the recent call for elections could draw disparate groups together. A smattering of Sunnis joined massive Shiite protests last week, demanding that U.S. administrators grant the wishes of the highest Shiite cleric for general elections.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al Husseini al Sistani has been unbending in his demand for direct elections instead of U.S. plans to select a new government through caucuses. At the request of L. Paul Bremer, the American envoy to Iraq, and several members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, the United Nations is sending a team to Iraq to study the feasibility of holding elections in time for the transition of power this summer.
Sistani's representatives expect widespread civil disobedience and violence if elections are deemed impossible.
"They know what will happen if they do not listen to us," said Sabah al Khazali, a religious scholar who joined last week's demonstrations. "They know this is a warning."
The historic rebellion has broad resonance. A band of anti-American insurgents has named itself the "1920 Revolution Brigades," and Sistani himself, in a newspaper advertisement this month, asked Iraq's influential tribes to remember that year.
"We want you to be revolutionaries ... you should have a big role today, as you had in the revolution in 1920," the ad said.
Elderly tribal leaders recently discussed revolution amid plumes of incense smoke and the gurgle of tobacco-filled water pipes. Many men on the 50-member Independent Iraqi Tribes council proudly claimed ancestors who rose against the British in 1920. They likewise would join a revolt if Sistani and other clerics gave the word, they said.
History writers are less kind in their assessment of the rebellion's outcome. In 1920, the League of Nations awarded Britain the new mandate of Iraq as part of secret deals made during World War I. Just six months into British rule, Iraqi opposition was growing. After the unrest deteriorated into three months of death and anarchy, the British plucked an Arab nationalist fighter from exile in the United Kingdom and installed him as king. The monarchy lasted until 1958, when a military coup turned Iraq into a republic.
To many Iraqis, today's U.S. occupation reads like an old play with modern characters: America as the new Britain, grenade-lobbing insurgents as the new opposition, and Ahmad Chalabi and other former exiles on the Governing Council as the new kings.
"We've sacrificed many martyrs and we would do it again," said Sheik Khamis al Suhail, the secretary of the tribal council. "In 1920, we faced a struggle between Muslims and non-Muslims in Iraq. We are living under basically the same conditions now, and revolution is certainly possible."
Iraqi Shiites, who make up 60 percent of the country's population of 26 million, look to Sistani for leadership.
"If Sistani called for revolution, I would sacrifice my life for the good of my country," said Hamdiya al Niemi, a 27-year-old street vendor whose father raised her on stories of the 1920 uprising. "My father was so proud talking about that time, how we kicked out the British and how we should never allow foreigners to rule our land."
The al Hamdani tribe, with thousands of members across Iraq, provided key organizers of the 1920 revolt. These days, the family name is linked to the cream-filled confections sold at the popular al Hamdani pastry shops throughout Baghdad.
Yaser al Hamdani, a 28-year-old tribe member whose great-uncle fought in the revolution, said he'd give up his job in the steaming bakery for a rebellion.
"Of course I would join," Hamdani said. "There would be bloodshed along the way, but sacrifice is important for success."
-------- prisoners of war
3 Reservists Charged in Iraqi's Death
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50647-2004Jan26.html
CAMP PENDLETON, Calif., Jan. 26 -- Three Marine reservists appeared in military court Monday to face charges stemming from the death of an Iraqi prisoner who prosecutors said was punched, karate-kicked and dragged by the throat while in their custody
The military prosecutor, Capt. Leon Francis, said Nagem Sadoon Hatab, a high-ranking member of the Baath Party, was singled out for punishment because he was captured with an M16 rifle belonging to the 507th Maintenance Company, which had been ambushed in Nasiriyah in March. Eleven members of the 507th were killed, nine wounded and six captured, including Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
Of the three reservists, Lance Cpl. Christian Hernandez and his superior officer, Maj. Clark A. Paulus, face the most serious charge -- negligent homicide -- as well as charges of cruelty, assault and dereliction of duty. Sgt. Gary Pittman is accused of dereliction of duty and assault.
A fourth Marine, Lance Cpl. William Roy, who was supposed to appear in court, struck a deal with the military and will testify against his former comrades under a grant of immunity.
-------- russia / chechnya
Powell Displays Tough U.S. Stance Toward Russians
January 27, 2004
New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/europe/27POWE.html?pagewanted=all
MOSCOW, Jan. 26 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell criticized curbs on free elections and the news media, as well as the Russian military campaign in Chechnya, in meetings with the Russian president on Monday and in an essay in a Russian newspaper. His words were the toughest public stance to date by a Bush administration official.
"Certain developments in Russian politics and foreign policy in recent months have given us pause," Mr. Powell said in his essay, published Monday in the newspaper Izvestia. Mr. Powell said he raised those concerns in seven hours of meetings with the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin, and other officials at the Kremlin.
Administration officials said Mr. Powell's concerns included the arrest of a businessman and political rival of Mr. Putin, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, and the seizure of his assets. Mr. Powell also commented on parliamentary elections in which several parties complained about a lack of access to the news media.
The Bush administration has been reluctant to criticize Russia publicly, saying Russian officials' sensitivity to such remarks could make them less likely to cooperate on a variety of issues, from nuclear proliferation to Iraq's reconstruction.
But growing concern about Russian actions - along with rising criticism in Congress and among Democratic presidential candidates about American passivity - have contributed to an adjustment in the administration's stance.
Publishing Mr. Powell's article markedly increases the pressure, but it also avoids putting Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin directly at loggerheads. One senior official said earlier this month that the strategy was to "avoid making this a leader-to-leader confrontation," using surrogates to send the messages.
Indeed, Mr. Powell declined to repeat his criticisms during a news conference with the Russian foreign minister after the meetings. The state-controlled television coverage of the meetings emphasized the cooperation between the United States and Russia, and there appeared to be little public concern here.
In the Izvestia essay, Mr. Powell said Russia had yet to achieve an "essential balance" between the executive and other branches of government. "Political power is not yet fully tethered to law," Mr. Powell asserted in the essay. "Key aspects of civil society - free media and political party development, for example - have not yet sustained an independent presence."
The secretary also criticized "certain aspects" of the war against Chechen rebels and asserted that neighboring countries were entitled to "their rights to peaceful and respectful relations across their borders."
He mentioned no names of any countries, but his comments echoed complaints that Mr. Powell had heard in Georgia on Sunday about the Russian refusal to withdraw troops stationed there since the days of the Soviet Union.
Mr. Powell told reporters at the news conference with Igor S. Ivanov, the foreign minister, that he was not trying "to interfere in the internal dynamics of Russian political life," and that "it was one friend speaking to another."
Asked whether he regarded Mr. Powell's criticisms as interference, Mr. Ivanov was circumspect, saying dismissively that the secretary of state got "a good opportunity to get a full and clear understanding of Russia's position on many issues," and that "many doubts that might have risen with respect to some of these issues will be dispersed as a result."
On the issue of Georgia, however, the foreign minister was a bit more forthcoming, asserting that as soon as that nation's new president, Mikhail Saakashvili, forms his new government, Russia will work with him to find "solutions" on the problem of Russian troop presence.
Mr. Powell then thanked Mr. Ivanov for showing flexibility, although what the minister said lacked details and echoed Russian comments over many years surrounding the refusal to withdraw troops.
On the flight to Georgia on Saturday night, Mr. Powell declined to criticize Mr. Putin's government, saying only that it was important to have a dialogue about certain Russian actions.
He noted, for example, that Mr. Putin enjoyed 80 percent approval ratings, that his party had just swept parliamentary elections and that the Russian economy was growing at a fast clip. All those factors, he suggested, might make Russian leaders impatient with American carping.
The debate over how tough to be with the Russians on human rights and other matters has echoed through Russian-American relations for decades. Aides to Mr. Bush criticized President Clinton in the 2000 campaign for being too soft on President Boris N. Yeltsin, and now many experts on Russia make the same criticism of Mr. Bush.
What few criticisms there have been have not been well received in Moscow. The American ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow, who has spoken of growing concerns about Russian political values, has himself been singled out for attack in the Russian news media.
American concerns about recent Russian actions peaked in the summer and fall, especially after the arrest of Mr. Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and critic of the government, and the seizure of his energy company's assets. Mr. Khodorkovsky had begun saying that he would challenge Mr. Putin in the presidential election in 2004.
Mr. Khodorkovsky's jailing, in turn, galvanized the international business world, and American officials said they had transmitted the worries of businesspeople to the Russians during the past several months.
In addition, American officials said the United States energy secretary, Spencer Abraham, and the commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans, had spoken to their Russian counterparts about Mr. Khodorkovsky's fate.
----
Military brains ignoring defence minister
Sergei Sedelnikov,
January 27, 2004
Gazeta (Russia)
http://www.gazeta.ru/2004/01/26/oa_110255.shtml
At the weekend the Russian defence minister instructed the General Staff on its new functions. Now, all the generals will have to worry about is general planning of wars having been relieved of their conscription and logistical tasks. However, the chief of the General Staff didn't seem to understand the minister. The annual session of the Academy of Military Sciences, which gathers the top commanders of all Russia's military forces, was held over the weekend. The gathering had quite a lengthy title - 'The Problems of Modern Military Command and its Improvement Regarding Changes in the Character of Future Wars'. It was attended by Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov and all his deputies, including the first deputy, and the chief of the General Staff, Anatoly Kvashnin.
The minister used the meeting with the country's top brass as an opportunity to reiterate the major points of his programme on the military's development, which he presented at his meeting with the president in autumn. He said that the Russian military had paid little attention to the experience of recent military conflicts around the World, and that it was necessary to reach an operative flexibility of forces and to create new high-tech weapons systems.
There were also some new ideas presented at the meeting - the minister said that the functions of the General Staff would be reconsidered and reminded the chief of the General Staff of his role. The minister also drew on a lot of historical expressions from the times of Ancient China, the Soviet Union and the Russian empire.
First of all, Ivanov promised to free the General Staff of their ''non-residual'' functions. ''In order to successfully implement the enlarged range of tasks in the sphere of military planning, the General Staff must be relieved of the functions not directly related with its activities, with which it has been overloaded over the past few years. The function of strategic planning is by itself exceptionally large-scale and multi-faceted,'' the minister said.
Ivanov noted that the General Staff must forecast possible threats to Russia's security, study the experience of the use of military forces in combat, develop suggestions on the tactical and technical characteristics of new hardware, conduct military exercises and prepare suggestions on changes in the country's military doctrine. For these functions to be duly performed, the minister urged to reinforce the main structural units of the General Staff - the Main Operations Directorate, the Main Organization and Mobilization Directorate and the Main Intelligence Directorate.
However, the minister did not go into the details of the non-residual functions of the General Staff, giving the generals some metaphors instead. First, he quoted Sun-Tzu who had said that wars must be planned well; later he quoted Soviet Marshall Vasilevsky, who, during the Second World War, said that relieving the General Staff from the tasks of recruitment and logistics allowed it to concentrate on commanding the military forces and aiding the commander-in-chief to solve operative and strategic questions. Another quotation followed, this time from Marshall Shaposhnikov, who said that the General Staff must be ''the brains of the military''.
It now appears that the brains ought to understand that its functions do not include recruitment and logistics. The minister then told the generals that they were not going to put up with any competitiveness from the side of the General Staff commanders. Here, Ivanov again turned to historical parallels.
''I would like to draw your attention to one moment of crucial importance. No matter what discussions we hold, what concepts we propose, we must remember that any military organization has an unquestionable constant: the principle of single command and singularity of military management,'' he said. He then recalled that there had been a period in Russian military history when from June 1905 till December 1908 the chief of the General Staff was subject directly to the supreme power and personally reported to the emperor. In the end, it disrupted the work of the Defence Ministry and discredited the logical division of responsibilities in military command structures.
Chief of General Staff Kvashnin, who, as the Russian press claims, is in constant conflict with the defence minister just like his predecessor, seemed to be listening attentively.
However, when it was time for Kvashnin to speak, he acted as if he had not really been listening to everything, but rather building the strategic plans as demanded by the minister. It turned out that the General Staff still has plans regarding recruitment and logistics - they intend to bring the number of contract soldiers of the private and warrant officer rank to 50 per cent of the whole enlisted personnel.
Kvashnin also had to disappoint Minister Ivanov in his expectations regarding the creation of high-tech ''smart weapons'' - the chief of General Staff said he saw no concentration of finances, materials, technology, scientific resources in the space sphere, methods of intelligence, communications, recognition, navigation, automation of management, creation of long-range high-precision weapons and ammunition.
----
Powell criticizes Kremlin policies
January 27, 2004
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040126-092118-5268r.htm
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell took an unexpected public swipe at Russia's domestic and foreign policy just before meeting with President Vladimir Putin yesterday, a sign that the Bush administration is adopting a tougher stance toward Moscow.
Mr. Powell, who met with Mr. Putin and senior Russian officials at the start of a brief Moscow stopover yesterday, wrote in a front-page editorial in the influential daily Izvestia that recent events have called into question the Kremlin's commitment to the rule of law, press freedoms and noninterference in the affairs of Russia's neighbors.
"Certain developments in Russian politics and foreign policy have given us pause," said Mr. Powell, in an English text of the op-ed piece released by the State Department.
"Russia's democratic system seems not yet to have found the essential balance among the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government. Political power is not yet tethered to law. Key aspects of civil society - free media and political party development, for example - have not yet sustained an independent presence," he added.
Even couched in diplomatic generalities, Mr. Powell's remarks were the most pointed to date by a top U.S. official since the Dec. 7 Russian elections that gave a party closely tied to Mr. Putin an overwhelming edge in the lower house of parliament.
The United States and other Western observers said media coverage of the election was slanted heavily toward pro-government candidates, with all of the national television networks now under state control.
The State Department also has expressed concerns about the vigorous prosecution of oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an outspoken Putin critic, in the past six months on fraud charges.
Mr. Powell's commentary also contained a veiled warning about recent Russian pressure on its neighbors, including a territorial dispute with Ukraine and clashes over Russian troop deployments in Moldova and Georgia.
Saying he recognized Russia's legitimate interest in secure borders, Mr. Powell added, "We recognize no less the sovereign integrity of Russia's neighbors and their rights to peaceful and respectful relations across their borders, as well."
Celeste Wallander, director of the Russia and Eurasia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said Mr. Powell's editorial marked a "clear shift in the public tone coming out of the State Department."
"What's interesting is that he's not just saying Russia still needs time to achieve democracy. He's saying Putin has actually taken steps that have set Russia back," she said.
Cliff Kupchan, a senior fellow at the Nixon Center, said lower-level American officials, including Ambassador to Russia Alexander Vershbow, already had expressed misgivings about Mr. Putin's policies on democracy, the separatist war in Chechnya and foreign policy. But Mr. Powell is the most senior administration official to date to raise such concerns.
"I wouldn't have expected the tone [Mr. Powell] took, because there had been a reluctance to criticize Russia when we have needed it support on terrorism, Iran and other issues," Mr. Kupchan said.
"But I think the trend got to a point where the secretary felt he couldn't help but criticize certain negative developments in Russia," he said.
Mr. Putin, in brief remarks to reporters in Moscow before a private meeting with Mr. Powell, shrugged off the criticism, saying only Russia would remain a "stable and predictable" U.S. ally.
• This article was based in part on wire service reports.
-------- spies
A Flawed Intelligence
Confidence in Washington's ability to assess threats must be restored.
January 27, 2004
Los Angeles Times
EDITORIAL
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-wmd27jan27,1,594397.story
When he resigned last week, Iraq weapons hunter David M. Kay carefully avoided blaming President Bush for telling the world that Iraq possessed banned weapons and that their use could be imminent. "The intelligence agencies," he said, "owe the president [an explanation] rather than the president owing the American people." Not so fast, please. The spy agencies made terrible errors, but the administration was not a passive consumer of intelligence. The CIA's own Iraq analysts contended last June that the administration pressured them to create worst-case scenarios.
If the rest of the world is to trust what the United States says about emerging threats around the world, the inaccuracies that propelled the U.S. into Iraq need to be traced and corrected. Ideally, CIA Director George Tenet should launch more than the internal investigation his agency is currently conducting. He should create a second team of outside experts, led by someone like former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski or former Secretary of State George Shultz, that studies how to avoid a repeat of the intelligence collapse.
There is plenty of good history from which to begin. As former CIA analyst Ken Pollack notes in the current Atlantic magazine, the intelligence agencies' belief that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction dates to the late 1990s. The failure to predict the biological and chemical weapons that were discovered after the 1991 Persian Gulf War may have led them to overcompensate, resulting in the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate that Iraq, "if left unchecked ... probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." Kay also points to the agencies' failure to develop sources inside the Iraqi government. The agencies saw what they wanted to see, not for the first time. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, was expected to result in an uprising inside Cuba; instead, U.S.-backed forces were slaughtered almost before they could set foot on the island.
Any investigation, however, will also have to take into account the administration's agenda. Vice President Dick Cheney made multiple prewar visits to the CIA and, analysts said, pressured them to link Hussein to Al Qaeda and weapons of mass destruction. Cheney continues to make bogus claims: On National Public Radio last Tuesday, he declared that military trailers discovered in Iraq proved that Hussein was working on bioweapons. Kay's comments over the weekend indicate this is incorrect.
The burden is on Tenet, who probably has little appetite for a thorough investigation. But failure to detect the 9/11 plot and the perception that the administration skewed intelligence on Iraq have battered confidence in the U.S.' ability to correctly assess threats - in North Korea and Iran, in Pakistan and Afghanistan, in Africa and Southeast Asia. That confidence, at home and abroad, needs restoring.
----
Spies, Lies, and Weapons: What Went Wrong
How could we have been so far off in our estimates of Saddam Hussein's weapons programs? A leading Iraq expert and intelligence analyst in the Clinton Administration-whose book The Threatening Storm proved deeply influential in the run-up to the war-gives a detailed account of how and why we erred
by Kenneth M. Pollack
Atlantic Monthly
January/February 2004
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2004/01/pollack.htm
Let's start with one truth: last March, when the United States and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam Hussein's regime sank, a vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the surface. That, of course, has not been the case. In the words of David Kay, the principal adviser to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), an organization created late last spring to search for prohibited weaponry, "I think all of us who entered Iraq expected the job of actually discovering deployed weapons to be easier than it has turned out to be." Many people are now asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
Democrats have typically accused the Bush Administration of exaggerating the threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war. Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community, which they say overestimated the threat from Iraq-a claim that carries the unlikely implication that Bush's team might not have opted for war if it had understood that Saddam was not as dangerous as he seemed.
Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The intelligence community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD programs, although not to the extent that many people believe. The Administration stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build regional and international support for military action.
This issue has some personal relevance for me. I began my career as a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where I saw an earlier generation of technical analysts mistakenly conclude that Saddam Hussein was much further away from having a nuclear weapon than the post-Gulf War inspections revealed. I later moved on to the National Security Council, where I served two tours, in 1995-1996 and 1999-2001. During the latter stint the intelligence community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Administration that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programs following the withdrawal of the UN inspectors, in 1998, and was only a matter of years away from having a nuclear weapon. In 2002 I wrote a book called Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in which I argued that because all our other options had failed, the United States would ultimately have to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered the question of why we didn't find in Iraq what we were so certain we would.
What We Thought We Knew
he U.S. intelligence community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing weapons of mass destruction pre-dated Bush's inauguration, and therefore cannot be attributed to political pressure. It was first advanced at the end of the 1990s, at a time when President Bill Clinton was trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from Iraq was growing.
In congressional testimony in March of 2002 Robert Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, summed up the intelligence community's conclusions about Iraq at the end of the Clinton Administration:
"How close is the peril of Iraqi WMD? Today, or at most within a few months, Iraq could launch missile attacks with chemical or biological weapons against its neighbors (albeit attacks that would be ragged, inaccurate, and limited in size). Within four or five years it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle East and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons containing fissile material produced indigenously-and to threaten U.S. territory with such weapons delivered by nonconventional means, such as commercial shipping containers. If it managed to get its hands on sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these threats could arrive much sooner."
In October of 2002 the National Intelligence Council, the highest analytical body in the U.S. intelligence community, issued a classified National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's WMD, representing the consensus of the intelligence community. Although after the war some complained that the NIE had been a rush job, and that the NIC should have been more careful in its choice of language, in fact the report accurately reflected what intelligence analysts had been telling Clinton Administration officials like me for years in verbal briefings.
A declassified version of the 2002 NIE was released to the public in July of last year. Its principal conclusions:
- "Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade." (The classified version of the NIE gave an estimate of five to seven years.)
- "Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program."
- "If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a year ... Without such material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a weapon until the last half of the decade."
- "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents, probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX ... Saddam probably has stocked a few hundred metric tons of CW agents."
- "All key aspects-R&D, production, and weaponization-of Iraq's offensive BW [biological warfare] program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf war ... Baghdad has established a large-scale, redundant, and concealed BW agent production capability, which includes mobile facilities; these facilities can evade detection, are highly survivable, and can exceed the production rates Iraq had prior to the Gulf war."
U.S. government analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002 I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present included nearly twenty former inspectors from the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM), the force established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq. One of the senior people put a question to the group: Did anyone in the room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge plant? No one did. Three people added that they believed Iraq was also operating a secret calutron plant (a facility for separating uranium isotopes).
Other nations' intelligence services were similarly aligned with U.S. views. Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war, the German Federal Intelligence Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within three years. Israel, Russia, Britain, China, and even France held positions similar to that of the United States; France's President Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last February, "There is a problem-the probable possession of weapons of mass destruction by an uncontrollable country, Iraq. The international community is right ... in having decided Iraq should be disarmed." In sum, no one doubted that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
What We Think We Know Now
ut it appears that Iraq may not have had any actual weapons of mass destruction. A number of caveats are in order. We do not yet have a complete picture of Iraq's WMD programs. Initial U.S. efforts to seek out WMD caches were badly lacking: an American artillery unit that had too few people for the task and virtually no plan of action had been hastily assigned the mission. Not surprisingly, its efforts garnered little useful information. According to Judith Miller, a New York Times reporter who was embedded with the unit, by mid-June-nearly two months after the end of major combat operations-the United States had interviewed only thirteen out of hundreds of Iraqi scientists. Documents relating to the programs are known to have been destroyed. Much of Iraq is yet to be explored; as David Kay, of the Iraq Survey Group, which took over the search for WMD in June, told Congress, only ten of Iraq's 130 major ammunition dumps had been thoroughly checked as of early October (the time of his testimony). Now that Saddam Hussein is in custody, it is possible that new information may be forthcoming, or that closemouthed Iraqis will offer fresh details.
Nevertheless, the preliminary findings of the ISG will probably not change dramatically, at least not in their broad contours. Kay summarized those findings in his October testimony.
- Iraq had preserved some of its technological nuclear capability from before the Gulf War. However, no evidence suggested that Saddam had undertaken any significant steps after 1998 toward reconstituting the program to build nuclear weapons or to produce fissile material.
- Little evidence surfaced that Iraq had continued to produce chemical weapons; only a minimal amount of clandestine research had been done on them. For instance, the production line at the Fallujah II facility (the plant that intelligence officers believed was Iraq's principal site for making chlorine, an ingredient in some chemical-warfare agents) turned out to be in derelict condition and had not operated since the Gulf War. Nevertheless, Iraqi officials seemed to believe that they could convert existing civilian pharmaceutical plants to chemical-weapons production, and that Saddam was interested in their ability to do so.
- Iraq made determined efforts to retain some capabilities for biological warfare. It maintained an undeclared network of laboratories and other facilities within the apparatus of its security services, and as Kay put it, "this clandestine capability was suitable for preserving BW expertise, BW-capable facilities, and continuing R&D-all key elements for maintaining a capability for resuming BW production." To disguise its biological-warfare programs Baghdad had scientists working on overt projects that were closely related to proscribed activities.
- Iraq seemed to have been most aggressive in pursuing proscribed missiles. In Kay's words, "detainees and cooperative sources indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of ballistic missiles with ranges of at least [240 miles] and up to [620 miles] and that measures to conceal these projects from [UN inspectors] were initiated in late 2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors." The Iraqis were also working on clustering liquid-fueled rocket engines in order to produce a longer-range missile, and were trying to convert certain surface-to-air missiles into surface-to-surface missiles with a range of 150 miles. Most troubling of all, the ISG uncovered evidence that from 1999 to 2002 Iraq had negotiated with North Korea to buy technology for No Dong missiles, which have a range of 800 miles.
Overall, these findings suggest that Iraq did retain prohibited WMD programs, but that those programs were not so extensive, advanced, or threatening as the National Intelligence Estimate maintained.
More-cautious analysts had argued that the NIE's assessment that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was unlikely, because such munitions deteriorate rapidly and can be quickly produced in bulk if production lines and precursor agents are available (making stockpiles unnecessary as well as inefficient). These analysts instead believed that Iraq had a "just-in-time" production capability-that it could churn out these weapons as needed, using hidden or dual-use facilities. But not even this more conservative scenario was borne out by the ISG's investigations. Sources told the group that Saddam and his son Uday had each, on separate occasions in 2001 and 2002, asked officials associated with Iraq's chemical-warfare program how long it would take to produce chemical agents and weapons. One official reportedly told Saddam that it would take six months to produce mustard gas (among the easiest such agents to manufacture); another told Uday that it would take two months to produce mustard gas and two years to produce sarin (a simple nerve agent). The questions do not suggest the presence of large stockpiles. The answers do not support a just-in-time capability.
The ISG's findings to date are most damning in the nuclear arena-as it happens, the segment of Iraq's WMD program in which the initial findings are most likely to be correct, because nuclear-weapons production is extremely difficult to conceal. The perceived nuclear threat was always the most disturbing one. The U.S. intelligence community's belief toward the end of the Clinton Administration that Iraq had reconstituted its nuclear program and was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me and other Administration officials to support the idea of a full-scale invasion of Iraq, albeit not right away. The NIE's judgment to the same effect was the real linchpin of the Bush Administration's case for an invasion.
What we have found in Iraq since the invasion belies that judgment. Saddam did retain basic elements for a nuclear-weapons program and the desire to acquire such weapons at some point, but the program itself was dormant. Saddam had not ordered its resumption (although some reports suggest that he considered doing so in 2002). In all probability Iraq was considerably further from having a nuclear weapon than the five to seven years estimated in the classified version of the NIE.
The View From Baghdad
iguring out why we overestimated Iraq's WMD capabilities involves figuring out what the Iraqis, especially Saddam Hussein, were thinking and doing throughout the 1990s. The story starts right after the Gulf War. An Iraqi document that fell into the inspectors' hands revealed that in April of 1991 a high-level Iraqi committee had ordered many of the country's WMD activities to be hidden from UN inspectors, even though compliance with the inspections was a condition for the lifting of economic sanctions imposed after the invasion of Kuwait. The document was a report from a nuclear-weapons plant describing how it carried out this order. According to UNSCOM's final report, "The facility was instructed to remove evidence of the true activities at the facility, evacuate documents to hide sites, make physical alterations to the site to hide its true purpose, develop cover stories, and conduct mock inspections to prepare for UN inspectors."
A great deal of other information substantiates the idea that Saddam at first decided to try to keep a considerable portion of his WMD programs intact and hidden. His efforts probably included retaining some munitions, but mainly concerned production and research elements. In other words, Saddam did initially try to maintain a "just-in-time" capability. However, it became increasingly clear how difficult this would be. In the summer of 1991 inspectors tracked down and destroyed Saddam's calutrons. Their discoveries may have convinced him that he would have to put his WMD programs on hold until after the sanctions were lifted-something he reportedly thought would happen within a matter of months.
But the inspectors proved more tenacious and the international community more steadfast than the Iraqis had expected. Accordingly, from June of 1991 to May of 1992 Iraq unilaterally destroyed parts of its WMD programs (as we know from subsequent Iraqi admissions). This action appears to have served two purposes: It got rid of unnecessary munitions and secondary equipment that the inspectors might have found, which would have constituted proof of Iraqi noncompliance. And it helped Baghdad conceal more-important elements of the programs, because the regime could point to the unilateral destructions as evidence of cooperation and could claim that even more material had been destroyed. (Since the fall of Baghdad scientists have told the ISG that key equipment was in fact diverted from these destructions and hidden.)
In 1995 matters changed. That August, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law and the head of Iraq's WMD programs, defected to Jordan, prompting a panicked Baghdad to hurriedly turn over hundreds of thousands of pages of new documentation to the United Nations. According to the former chief UN weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus, Kamel's statements and the Iraqi documents squared with what UNSCOM had been finding: although all actual weapons had been eliminated, either by the UN or in the earlier destructions, Iraq had preserved production and R&D programs. Although the Iraqis tried to withhold any highly incriminating documents from the UN (and, ridiculously, claimed that Kamel had been running the programs on his own, without anyone else's knowledge), in their rush they overlooked several containing crucial information about previously concealed aspects of the nuclear and biological programs.
Other secrets were laid bare that same year. A U.S.-UN sting operation caught the Iraqis trying to smuggle 115 missile gyroscopes through Jordan. (UN inspectors later found other gyroscopes hidden at the bottom of the Tigris River.) Iraq was forced to admit to the existence of a facility to build Scud-missile engines, and to destroy a hidden plant for manufacturing modified Scud missiles. It was also forced to admit to having made much greater progress on its nuclear program before the Gulf War than it had previously acknowledged. Most important, it was forced to admit that a very large biological-weapons plant at al-Hakim, whose existence had been concealed from UN inspectors, had produced 500,000 liters of biological agents in 1989 and 1990, and that it was still functional in 1995. Three years after this confession Lieutenant General Amer al-Saadi, Saddam's principal liaison with the UN, told inspectors that Iraq would offer no excuse or defense for having denied the existence of its biological-weapons program. He stated matter-of-factly that Iraq had made a political decision to conceal it.
Either late in 1995 or at some point in 1996 Saddam probably recognized that trying to retain his just-in-time capability had become counterproductive. The inspectors kept finding pieces of the programs, and each discovery pushed the lifting of the sanctions further into the future. It's important to keep in mind several other events of this period. Saddam's internal position was very shaky. He had faced disturbances in several of his most loyal Sunni tribes. In addition to Kamel, a number of high-ranking officials had defected to the West, including Saddam's chief of military intelligence, Wafic Samarai. Coup plots abounded. In 1995 the Kurds smashed two Iraqi infantry brigades at Irbil, humiliating the Iraqi army. In 1996 Iraqi intelligence uncovered a CIA-backed coup attempt whose participants had penetrated some of Saddam's most sensitive intelligence services. Iraq's economy was suffocating under the sanctions, and inflation was rampant. Given this precarious situation, Saddam probably decided to scale back his WMD programs (with the likely exception of work on proscribed missiles, which could be concealed by Iraq's permitted missile program) by destroying additional equipment, keeping the bare minimum needed to rebuild them at some point, in order to reduce the risk of further discoveries. This would have meant giving up the idea of just-in-time production capabilities and limiting his efforts to hiding documents and only key pieces of equipment. In short, Saddam switched from trying to hang on to the maximum production and research assets of his WMD programs to trying to keep only the minimum necessary to reconstitute the programs at some point after the sanctions had been lifted.
What Was Saddam Thinking?
aving decided to give up so much of his WMD capability, why didn't Saddam change his behavior toward the UN inspectors and demonstrate a spirit of candor and cooperation? Even after 1996 the Iraqis took a confrontational posture toward UNSCOM, fighting to prevent inspectors from going where they wanted to go and seeing what they wanted to see. The governments of the world inferred from this defiance that Saddam was still not complying with the UN resolutions, and the sanctions therefore stayed in place.
The first and most obvious answer is that Saddam still had some things to hide, and was fearful of their discovery. Although he did unquestionably have some things to hide, this answer is not entirely satisfying. Iraq was able to conceal the minimized remnants of its WMD programs so well that UNSCOM found little incriminating evidence in 1997 and 1998. This early success should have given Saddam the confidence to begin to cooperate more fully with the UN resolutions. But throughout the period leading up to the war Saddam remained as obstinate as ever.
An alternative explanation, offered by Iraq's former UN ambassador, Tariq Aziz, and other officials captured after last year's war, goes like this: Saddam was pretending to have WMD in order to enhance his prestige among the other Arab nations. This explanation doesn't ring completely true either. It is certainly the case that Saddam garnered a great deal of admiration from Arabs of many countries by appearing to have such weapons, and that he aspired to dominate the Arab world. But this theory assumes that he was willing to incur severe penalties for the UN's belief that he still had WMD without reaping any tangible benefits from actually having them. If prestige had been more important to him than the lifting of the sanctions, it would have been more logical and more in keeping with his character to simply retain all his WMD capabilities.
Saddam's behavior may have been driven by completely different considerations. Saddam has always evinced much greater concern for his internal position than for his external status. He has made any number of highly foolish foreign-policy decisions-for example, invading Kuwait and then deciding to stick around and fight the U.S.-led coalition-in response to domestic problems that he feared threatened his grip on power. The same forces may have been at work here; after all, ever since the Iran-Iraq war WMD had been an important element of Saddam's strength within Iraq. He used them against the Kurds in the late 1980s, and during the revolts that broke out after the Gulf War, he sent signals that he might use them against both the Kurds and the Shiites. He may have feared that if his internal adversaries realized that he no longer had the capability to use these weapons, they would try to move against him. In a similar vein, Saddam's standing among the Sunni elites who constituted his power base was linked to a great extent to his having made Iraq a regional power-which the elites saw as a product of Iraq's unconventional arsenal. Thus openly giving up his WMD could also have jeopardized his position with crucial supporters.
Furthermore, Saddam may have felt trapped by his initial reckoning that he could fool the UN inspectors and that the sanctions would be short-lived. Because of this mistaken calculation he had subjected Iraq to terrible hardships. Suddenly cooperating with the inspectors would have meant admitting to both his opponents and his supporters that his course of action had been a mistake and that, having now given up most of his WMD programs, he had devastated Iraqi society for no reason.
This suggests that in 1995-1996 Saddam took one of his famous gambles-gambles that almost never worked out for him. He chose not to "come clean" and cooperate with the UN for fear that this would make him look weak to both his domestic enemies and his domestic allies, either of whom might then have moved against him. But he would try to greatly diminish the chances that UNSCOM would find more evidence of his continuing noncompliance by reducing his WMD programs to the bare minimum, in hopes that the absence of evidence would lead to the lifting of sanctions-something he desperately sought in 1996.
In other respects Saddam's fortunes began to rise in 1996. Although the CIA-backed coup attempt may have signified internal weakness, the fact that Saddam snuffed it out, as he had many previous attempts, signified strength. Also, to avenge the Iraqi army's 1995 defeat at Irbil, Saddam manipulated infighting among the Kurds so as to allow his Republican Guards to drive into the city, smash the Kurd defenders, and arrest several hundred CIA-backed rebels. As the historian Amatzia Baram has persuasively argued in his book Building Toward Crisis (1998), these successes made Saddam feel secure enough to swallow his pride and accept UN Resolution 986, the oil-for-food program, which he had previously rejected as an infringement on Iraqi sovereignty. Oil-for-food turned out to be an enormous boon for the Iraqi economy, and commodity prices fell quickly, stabilizing the dinar.
The oil-for-food program itself gave Saddam clout to apply toward the lifting of the sanctions. Under Resolution 986 Iraq could choose to whom it would sell its oil and from whom it would buy its food and medicine. Baghdad could therefore reward cooperative states with contracts. Not surprisingly, France and Russia regularly topped the list of Iraq's oil-for-food partners. In addition, Iraq could set the prices-and since Saddam did not really care whether he was importing enough food and medicine for his people's needs, he could sell oil on the cheap and buy food and medicine at inflated prices as additional payoff to friendly governments. He made it clear that he wanted his trading partners to ignore Iraqi smuggling and try to get the sanctions lifted.
By 1997 the international environment had changed markedly, in ways that probably convinced Saddam that he didn't need to cooperate with the inspectors. The same international outcry-against the suffering inflicted by the Iraq sanctions-that prompted the United States to craft the oil-for-food deal was creating momentum for lifting the sanctions completely. At that point it was reasonable for Saddam to believe that in the not too distant future the sanctions either would be lifted or would be so undermined as to be effectively meaningless, and that he would never have to reveal the remaining elements of his WMD programs. Only in 2002, when the Bush Administration suddenly focused its attention on Iraq, would Saddam have had any reason to change this view. And then, according to a variety of Iraqi sources, he simply refused to believe that the Americans were serious and would actually invade.
Another explanation should be posited. This is the notion that Saddam did not order the program scaled down, but Iraqi scientists ensured that it did not progress and deceived Saddam into believing that it was much further along than it in fact was. Numerous Iraqi scientists have claimed that although Saddam ordered them to produce particular things for the WMD programs, they dragged their feet or found other ways to avoid delivering them. There is most likely a germ of truth to these stories: prevarication on the part of some Iraqi scientists may have helped to account for the modest state of Iraq's WMD programs in 2003. But they probably form only a part of the explanation. Many of the accounts of scientists' quietly thwarting Saddam are undoubtedly self-serving, concocted in the aftermath of his defeat. As we have heard time and again from Iraqi defectors, those who did not meet Saddam's demands risked torture and murder for themselves and their families. We have consistently found that in Saddam's Iraq very few people took that risk.
One last element may also have been at work all along: the possibility that Saddam genuinely feared that the inspections were a cover for a CIA campaign to overthrow or assassinate him. The Iraqis repeatedly cited this fear in denying UNSCOM access to certain "sensitive" sites-particularly palaces-that were associated with Saddam personally. The rest of the world assumed that it was merely an excuse to keep inspectors out of places that contained evidence of WMD programs. However, the Iraqis may have been telling the truth on this point (and the initial debriefing of Saddam lends some credence to this scenario). After all, as various sources have now disclosed, the United States did run a covert-action campaign against Saddam, starting in 1991, and U.S. intelligence did use UNSCOM operations (without UNSCOM's knowledge) to gather intelligence for that campaign.
The Perils of Prediction
veryone outside Iraq missed the 1995-1996 shift in Saddam's strategy-that is, to scale back his WMD programs to minimize the odds of further discoveries-and assumed that Iraq's earlier behavior was continuing more or less in a straight line. This misperception took on considerable weight in the following years.
Context is crucial to understanding any intelligence assessment. No matter how objective the analyst may be, he or she begins with a set of basic assumptions that create a broad perspective on an issue; this helps the analyst to sort through evidence.
The context for the 2002 NIE assessment of Iraq's WMD programs began to take shape before the Gulf War. Prior to 1991 the intelligence communities in the United States and elsewhere believed that Iraq was at least five, and probably closer to ten, years away from acquiring a nuclear weapon. Of course, after the war we learned that in 1991 Iraq had been only six to twenty-four months away from having a workable nuclear weapon. This revelation stunned the analysts responsible for following the Iraqi nuclear program. The lessons they took from it were that Iraq was determined to acquire nuclear weapons and would go to any lengths to do so; that in pursuit of this goal Iraq was willing to use technology that Westerners considered crude and obsolete; that the Iraqis were superb at concealment and deception; and that inspections were inherently flawed-after all, there had been inspectors in Iraq prior to 1990, and they had been completely fooled.
These lessons were strongly reinforced by the revelation of Iraq's attempts in the first four years after the war to preserve significant parts of its WMD programs. By about 1994 UNSCOM believed, incorrectly, that it had largely disarmed Iraq; its members were privately discussing switching its operations from active inspections to passive monitoring. Many intelligence analysts in the United States, Britain, and Israel disagreed with UNSCOM's assessment, but they were hard-pressed to substantiate their suspicions-until Hussein Kamel's defection, in 1995, and subsequent Iraqi admissions regarding the extent of deception. These developments came as a profound shock to the UN inspectors, who resolved that Iraq could never again be trusted. Thus, just when Iraq was in all likelihood giving up efforts to maintain its just-in-time production capability, the rest of the world became hardened in its conviction that Saddam would never abandon or even reduce his efforts to acquire WMD.
Another important contribution to the context is the continuation of Saddam's hostility toward the inspectors. If anything, the Iraqis became even less accommodating over time. By 1998 they were physically harassing the inspectors-on one occasion firing two rocket-propelled grenades into an UNSCOM building in Baghdad, on another grabbing the controls of an UNSCOM helicopter in flight and nearly causing it to crash. Western intelligence agencies understandably took these actions to mean that nothing in Saddam's weaponry plans had changed.
In December of 1998 the inspectors withdrew from the country. Their decision to do so came after Iraq announced, in August of that year, that it would no longer cooperate with them at all, and after repeated crises demonstrated that Baghdad's announcement was not just bluster.
The end of the UN inspections appears in retrospect to have been a much greater problem than anyone recognized at the time. The inspectors had been the best source of information on Iraq and its WMD programs. UNSCOM had a large and highly capable cadre of weapons specialists who focused exclusively on Iraq. Many Western intelligence agencies, faced with other issues that demanded their resources, increasingly relied on UNSCOM's data and assessments and did little to bolster their own (meager) capabilities in Iraq. And UNSCOM had something that American intelligence did not-physical access to Iraq. Without an embassy there it was very hard for U.S. case officers to penetrate the country.
The end of the inspections eliminated the single best means of vetting what information intelligence agencies could gather independently about Iraq. These agencies usually shared (in some form) new information or analyses about the WMD programs with UNSCOM. If a defector claimed that biological-weapons material was stored at a given site, inspectors would look for it. If satellite imagery indicated unusual activity at a particular location, inspectors would try to confirm it. Although Iraq's counterintelligence efforts were formidable (UNSCOM estimated that only six of its roughly 250 inspections actually caught the Iraqis by surprise), UNSCOM was usually able to gauge, if only broadly, whether a source or a deduction was correct.
When the inspectors suddenly left, the various intelligence agencies were caught psychologically and organizationally off balance. Desperate for information on Iraq, they began to trust sources that they would previously have had UNSCOM vet. If a defector came out of Iraq after 1998, the CIA had to gauge his credibility by comparing his account with those of other defectors-who might be unreliable or just unproven-or by checking it against whatever they could glean from satellites and other indirect sources. With so little to go on, intelligence agencies believed many reports that now seem deeply suspect.
In the absence of hard evidence, the intelligence analysts tended to fall back on the underlying assumptions they had begun with. Those assumptions included the belief that Saddam was determined to preserve his extant WMD capabilities and acquire new ones. And now there were no weapons inspectors to hinder him. The inspectors had also been a moderating influence on Western intelligence agencies; the information they provided, and the mere fact of their presence in Iraq, helped those agencies stick to reasonable suppositions and keep unsubstantiated fears at bay. After 1998 many analysts increasingly entertained worst-case scenarios-scenarios that gradually became mainstream estimates.
Another element that contributed to faulty assessments before the 2003 invasion was Iraqi rhetoric. Imagine that you were a CIA analyst in June of 2000 and heard Saddam make the following statement: "If the world tells us to abandon all our weapons and keep only swords, we will do that. We will destroy all the weapons, if they destroy their weapons. But if they keep a rifle and then tell me that I have the right to possess only a sword, then we would say no. As long as the rifle has become a means to defend our country against anybody who may have designs against it, then we will try our best to acquire the rifle." It would be very difficult not to interpret Saddam's remarks as an announcement that he intended to reconstitute his WMD programs.
The final element in the context for our pre-invasion analysis involved discrepancies between how much WMD material went into Iraq and how much Iraq could prove it had destroyed. Before the Gulf War (and to a certain extent afterward) Baghdad imported enormous quantities of equipment and raw materials for WMD. The UN inspectors, with remarkable diligence, obtained virtually all the import figures, either from the Iraqis or from their suppliers. They then asked the Iraqis to either produce the materials or account for their destruction. In many cases the Iraqis could not. The difference between what they had imported and what they could account for was seen as important evidence of an ambitious clandestine WMD program. These are the numbers-of bombs, of liters of precursor chemicals, and so on-that the world regularly heard Bush Administration officials intone during the run-up to the 2003 war.
In hindsight there are legitimate reasons to question these numbers. According to David Kay, a number of Iraqi sources have told the ISG that some of the material that was unaccounted for was diverted from the unilateral destructions that took place from 1991 to 1996. However, it is not clear whether or not any of that material was destroyed later. And it is likely that some of the discrepancies between UNSCOM and Iraqi figures are no more than the result of sloppiness. Saddam's Iraq was not exactly an efficient state, and many of his chief lieutenants were semi-literate thugs with no understanding of esoteric technical matters and little regard for how things should be done-their only concern was that Saddam's demands be met.
The Politics of Persuasion
he intelligence community's overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is only part of the story of why we went to war last year. The other part involves how the Bush Administration handled the intelligence. Throughout the spring and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints from friends and colleagues in the intelligence community, and from people in the policy community, about precisely that. According to them, many Administration officials reacted strongly, negatively, and aggressively when presented with information or analysis that contradicted what they already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that Saddam Hussein was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle East and was an imminent danger to the United States because of his perceived possession of weapons of mass destruction and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently downplayed threats to the United States. They believed that the Agency, not the Administration, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.
Intelligence officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the pre-existing views of senior Administration officials were subjected to barrages of questions and requests for additional information. They were asked to justify their work sentence by sentence: "Why did you rely on this source and not this other piece of information?" "How does this conclusion square with this other point?" "Please explain the history of Iraq's association with the organization you mention in this sentence." Reportedly, the worst fights were those over sources. The Administration gave greatest credence to accounts that presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases intelligence analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded; instead they were beset with further questions about their own sources.
On many occasions Administration officials' requests for additional information struck the analysts as being made merely to distract them from their primary mission. Some officials asked for extensive historical analyses-a hugely time-consuming undertaking, for which most intelligence analysts are not trained. Requests were constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that conformed to the views of Administration officials-pieces by conservative newspaper columnists such as Jim Hoagland, William Safire, and George F. Will. These columnists may be highly intelligent men, but they have no claim to superior insight into the workings of Iraq, or to any independent intelligence-collection capabilities.
Of course, no policymaker should accept intelligence estimates unquestioningly. While I was at the NSC, I regularly challenged analysts as to why they believed what they did. I asked for additional material and required them to do significant additional work. Any official who does less is derelict in his or her duty. However, at a certain point curiosity and diligence become a form of pressure. If your employer asks you every so often about your health and seems to take an appropriate interest in the answer, you probably feel that he or she is kind and considerate. If your employer asks you about your health every ten minutes, in highly detailed, probing questions, you may have a more nervous reaction.
As Seymour Hersh, among others, has reported, Bush Administration officials also took some actions that arguably crossed the line between rigorous oversight of the intelligence community and an attempt to manipulate intelligence. They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of Special Plans, in order to sift through the information on Iraq themselves. To a great extent OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intelligence they passed on, selecting reports that supported the Administration's pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest.
Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that trained intelligence officers considered unreliable or downright false. In particular it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader was the Administration-backed Ahmed Chalabi. It is true that the intelligence community believed some of the material that came from the INC-but not most of it. (In retrospect, of course, it seems that even the intelligence professionals gave INC reporting more credence than it deserved.) One of the reasons the OSP generally believed Chalabi and the INC was that they were telling it what it wanted to hear-giving the OSP, in a kind of vicious circle, further incentive to trust these sources over differing, and ultimately more reliable, ones. Thus intelligence analysts spent huge amounts of time fighting bad information and trying to persuade Administration officials not to make policy decisions based on it. From my own experience I know that it is hard enough to figure out what the reliable evidence indicates-and vast battles are fought over that. To have to also fight over what is clearly bad information is a Sisyphean task.
The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to those in the highest levels of government, often passing raw, unverified intelligence straight to the Cabinet level as gospel. Senior Administration officials made public statements based on these reports-reports that the larger intelligence community knew to be erroneous (for instance, that there was hard and fast evidence linking Iraq to al-Qaeda). Another problem arising from the machinations of the OSP is that whenever the principals of the National Security Council met with the President and his staff, two completely different versions of reality were on the table. The CIA, the State Department, and the uniformed military services would present one version, consistent with the perspective of intelligence and foreign-policy professionals, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Office of the Vice President would present another, based on the perspective of the OSP. These views were too far apart to allow for compromise. As a result, the Administration found it difficult, if not impossible, to make certain important decisions. And it made some that were fatally flawed, including many relating to postwar planning, when the OSP's view-that Saddam's regime simultaneously was very threatening and could easily be replaced by a new government-prevailed.
For the most part, the problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of Administration officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold Administration officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for going to war.
As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intelligence estimates that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to the time frame for Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon-the issue that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world. Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear weapon in five to seven years if it had to produce the fissile material indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a year if it could obtain the material from a foreign source. The intelligence community considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do so for twenty-five years with no luck. However, time after time senior Administration officials discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed to mention the intelligence community's most likely scenario. Some examples:
- In a radio address on September 14, 2002, President Bush warned, "Today Saddam Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons program, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year."
- On October 7, 2002, the President told a group in Cincinnati, "If the Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
- On November 1, 2002, Undersecretary of State John Bolton told the Second Global Conference on Nuclear, Bio/Chem Terrorism, "We estimate that once Iraq acquires fissile material-whether from a foreign source or by securing the materials to build an indigenous fissile-material capability-it could fabricate a nuclear weapon within one year."
- Vice President Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press on September 14, 2003, "The judgment in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material, weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a few months to a year. That was the judgment of the intelligence community of the United States, and they had a high degree of confidence in it."
None of these statements in itself was untrue. However, each told only a part of the story-the most sensational part. These statements all implied that the U.S. intelligence community believed that Saddam would have a nuclear weapon within a year unless the United States acted at once.
Some defenders of the Administration have reportedly countered that all it did was make the best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a defense attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case for a client (even if the client is guilty). That is a false analogy. A defense attorney is responsible for presenting only one side of a dispute. The President is responsible for serving the entire nation. Only the Administration has access to all the information available to various agencies of the U.S. government-and withholding or downplaying some of that information for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.
What Is to Be Done?
hat we have learned about Iraq's WMD programs since the fall of Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was considerably weaker than I believed beforehand. Because of the consensus among American and foreign intelligence agencies, outside experts, and former UN weapons inspectors, I had been convinced that Iraq was only years away from having a nuclear weapon-probably only four or five years, as Robert Einhorn had testified. That estimate was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit. My reluctant conviction that war was our only option (although not at the time or in the manner in which the Bush Administration pursued it) was not entirely based on the nuclear threat, but that threat was the most important factor in it.
The war was not all bad. I do not believe that it was a strategic mistake, although the appalling handling of postwar planning was. There is no question that Saddam Hussein was a force for real instability in the Persian Gulf, and that his removal from power was a tremendous improvement. There is also no question that he was pure evil, and that he headed one of the most despicable regimes of the past fifty years. I am grateful that the United States no longer has to contend with the malign influence of Saddam's Iraq in this economically irreplaceable and increasingly fragile part of the world; nor can I begrudge the Iraqi people one day of their freedom. What's more, we should not forget that containment was failing. The shameful performance of the United Nations Security Council members (particularly France and Germany) in 2002-2003 was final proof that containment would not have lasted much longer; Saddam would eventually have reconstituted his WMD programs, although further in the future than we had thought. That said, the case for war-and for war sooner rather than later-was certainly less compelling than it appeared at the time. At the very least we should recognize that the Administration's rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we thought we knew in March of 2003. It appears even more reckless in light of what we know today.
The problems that led to our mistaken beliefs about the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction must be addressed immediately. Unfortunately, to some extent the problems are contradictory, and therefore the solutions may work against one another. For example, a remedy used in the past to address influence from the executive branch on the intelligence process has been to increase oversight of intelligence operations and analysis by Congress. However, in this instance increasing congressional oversight could have exacerbated another problem: the failure of the intelligence community to sufficiently challenge its own assumptions about Saddam's strategy. The more that intelligence agencies must report to both Congress and the White House, the more they fear becoming a political football, and the more they will tone down their estimates, stick to mainstream judgments, and avoid taking controversial positions. Arguing that Iraq had minimized its WMD holdings after 1996 would have been a very controversial position indeed.
Some of the problems that led to our misunderstanding of Iraq's WMD may be insoluble, at least by bureaucratic changes. The forms of pressure exerted on the intelligence community by the Bush Administration were perfectly legal; it would probably be impossible to regulate against them. Moreover, doing so could preclude useful and necessary questioning of intelligence analysts by Administration officials. Still, some fixes do suggest themselves.
In the future we as a nation must be willing to devote enough resources to intelligence so that we will always be able to sustain a large, aggressive program to collect all manner of information and a sophisticated analysis program on all high-priority issues. In retrospect, our over-reliance on UNSCOM inspectors lulled us into a false sense of security; this in turn contributed to our inflated estimates of Iraq's WMD progress after 1998. Even though Iraq was a difficult environment for any intelligence service to operate in, and the CIA did devote substantial assets to it at all times, it would have made some difference if the Agency could have devoted still greater resources to it, even when that seemed redundant with UNSCOM's missions.
Our failings in the WMD experience also argue for a more powerful and independent director of central intelligence. The DCI currently serves at the pleasure of the President, and although he is the nominal head of the entire intelligence community, in reality he does not have much authority over most of the intelligence agencies, whose budgets and personnel come largely from the Department of Defense. The United States could make the DCI position similar to that of the director of the FBI: the President would nominate a candidate who would then need to be confirmed by Congress, and who would serve a fixed term. And the DCI could be made the true head of intelligence, with control over the budgets and personnel of all the intelligence agencies. Many of the intelligence agencies that currently report to the Secretary of Defense, including the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, to name just two, should instead report to the DCI. These changes would put the DCI in a stronger position to resist pressure from the executive branch (or Congress) and to protect his people from the same.
Strengthening the DCI and increasing his independence might make for smarter, bolder analysis. The less intelligence analysts have to worry that the DCI is going to take heat for unpopular if accurate judgments, the more willing they will be to make them. This is not a slur against DCI George Tenet, who I think handled the difficulties of his situation extraordinarily well. But it is a recognition that DCIs must not be put in the position that Tenet was forced into.
Another step worth considering is forbidding the CIA or anyone else in government from making any intelligence estimates public for five or ten years. As someone firmly committed to the concept of open government, who believes that the CIA has benefited from its efforts in the past decade to be more open to the public, I dislike the idea of greater secrecy. However, when intelligence estimates become public, they have a huge impact on the course of foreign-policy debates, and administrations therefore find themselves with a great incentive to make sure the Agency's estimates support the Administration's preferred policy. If such estimates were not made public, an administration would have little reason to try to influence them. The government could still produce white papers, but they should come from the State Department-the agency that is, after all, officially charged with public diplomacy.
Finally, the U.S. government must admit to the world that it was wrong about Iraq's WMD and show that it is taking far-reaching action to correct the problems that led to this error. Iraq is not going to be the last foreign-policy challenge in which we must make choices based on ambiguous evidence. When the United States confronts future challenges, the exaggerated estimates of Iraq's WMD will loom like an ugly shadow over the diplomatic discussions. Fairly or not, no foreigner trusts U.S. intelligence to get it right anymore, or trusts the Bush Administration to tell the truth. The only way that we can regain the world's trust is to demonstrate that we understand our mistakes and have changed our ways.
-------- un
Annan Approves Sending U.N. Election Experts to Iraq
January 27, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/middleeast/27CND-NATI.html?hp=&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1075227155-lNVMxe59PTSUNDT3cpQruA
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 27 - Secretary General Kofi Annan agreed today to send United Nations elections experts to Iraq in an effort to help end the stalemate over how to turn over authority to an Iraqi-led government.
"I have concluded that the United Nations can play a constructive role in helping to break the current impasse," Mr. Annan said in a statement issued in Paris, where he is in the midst of a European trip.
Speaking to reporters at Elysée Palace after a lunch with President Jacques Chirac, Mr. Annan also said that the eventual creation of a multinational military force for Iraq under the authority of the United Nations would help to bring much-needed stability to the country.
But he ruled out, as he has done before, the possibility of a classic United Nations peacekeeping force known as "blue helmets," saying that stabilizing the country would be "an enormous task."
Mr. Annan agreement to send in experts was a response to pleas from members of the American-administered Coalition Provisional Authority and the United States-appointed Iraqi Governing Council, whose members came to New York Jan. 19 to lobby for immediate United Nations assistance.
The urgent requests represented a political about face by the United States, which had kept the world organization out of current planning in Iraq and not even mentioned a United Nations role in the Nov. 15 agreement under which the procedures for the handover of power were drawn up.
Today's agreement signaled the world organization's re-entry to Iraq three months after its international staff was removed from the country following attacks on relief workers and the fatal bombing of its Baghdad headquarters in August.
Mr. Annan said the timing of the dispatch of the technical team will depend on security assurances from the occupation forces. Diplomats in New York said they hoped the mission could go next week.
At issue are clashing ideas of how to transfer sovereignty to Iraq by a June 30 deadline that the United States has set and promised to adhere to, despite security and political setbacks on the ground.
The American plan is a complex one, based on caucuses in all 18 Iraqi provinces aimed at selecting an assembly that will in turn choose an interim government by July. The plan ran into opposition from Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the top spiritual leader of the majority Shiite Muslims, who contended it did not promise a representative government and insisted instead on direct elections.
Individual members of the Iraqi Governing Council have proposed an alternative method that would expand their numbers from the current 25 to 125 and keep them in power as the new sovereign government.
The United States argues that direct elections are impossible to organize in the short time available, and it hopes that the United Nations team will validate that view. Ayatollah Sistani has dismissed the American objection but has said through associates that he would accept the judgment if it came from the United Nations.
Mr. Annan's statement said, "The mission will ascertain the views of a broad spectrum of Iraqi society in the search for alternatives that might be developed to move forward to the formation of a provisional government."
Time is short since there is a Feb. 28 deadline for the completion of an interim constitution, known as the fundamental law; work on it by a 10-man drafting committee has been virtually suspended pending a verdict on elections by the United Nations team.
Mr. Annan said that that verdict would become known only on the team's return to New York.
The interim constitution is supposed to include a bill of rights, details of a federalist governing structure for Iraq, a mechanism for judicial review and a timetable for the drafting of a permanent constitution and elections under that constitution.
The election dispute is crucial to Iraq's future, since a decision to hold direct elections empowering the majority Shiites risks inflaming Sunni Muslims who have run the country and want their minority rights protected, as well as Kurdish leaders in the mountainous North who want their broad autonomy enshrined in the new political structure.
Other opponents of the direct election plan cite technical issues such as the need to hold a census, compile election rolls, draft electoral laws, build political parties and put in place a method of judging the results.
"I have already made it clear that in my view there is no single `right way,' " Mr. Annan's statement said. "I strongly hold to the idea that the most sustainable way forward would be one that came from the Iraqis themselves."
--------
U.N. Ready to Send Election Team to Iraq
January 26, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq-un-teams.html
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said on Tuesday he was willing to send a mission to Iraq to assess whether elections can be held by mid-year, but made any mission contingent on an evaluation of security risks.
"Once I'm satisfied that the CPA (U.S.-led authority in Iraq) will provide adequate security arrangements, I will send a mission to Iraq in response to the requests that I received," Annan said in a statement released during a visit to Paris.
Such precautions are required by the United Nations as a result of an attack on U.N. headquarters in Baghdad on August 19 which killed 22 people. The United Nations withdrew its international staff from Iraq in October.
Time is short for setting up elections, which are favoured by Shi'ite leaders. Decisions are needed by late February for a provisional national assembly and government to be chosen in time for a June 30 transfer of political power to Iraqis.
--------
U.N. Election Team To Be Sent to Iraq
Experts to Assess Logistics of Vote
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50648-2004Jan26.html
UNITED NATIONS, Jan. 26 -- U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan plans to announce Tuesday in Paris that he is preparing to send a team of U.N. experts to Iraq to determine whether elections can be organized to choose a transitional Iraqi government by this summer, U.N. officials said Monday.
The decision, which officials said Annan will announce Tuesday morning before meeting with French President Jacques Chirac, marks the most significant expansion of the United Nations' role in Iraq since Annan evacuated most staffers from the country in late October. The move also increased prospects that the United Nations will emerge as a mediator between U.S. authorities and critics in Iraq over how the country will make the transition to self-rule.
A U.N. security team is expected to arrive in Baghdad as early as Tuesday to determine whether there is sufficient security to allow the election team to carry out its work. But U.N. officials said it is likely that the security team will give them the go-ahead.
The United Nations' electoral team, which is expected to arrive in Iraq in early February, will focus primarily on the "technical" aspects of elections in Iraq, according to a U.N. official. Carina Perelli, a U.N. election specialist, is expected to lead the delegation.
L. Paul Bremer, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, and the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council appealed to Annan earlier this month to send the delegation as a way of breaking an impasse over the U.S. plan to relinquish political authority. The plan calls for a series of 18 regional caucuses to appoint a transitional national assembly, which then would chose a cabinet and a new head of state to take power by June 30.
An influential Shiite Muslim cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, opposes the U.S. plan, saying that direct elections are required to guarantee the legitimacy of a future Iraqi government. The clamor for elections among Iraq's Shiite Muslims, who account for more than 60 percent of Iraq's population, prompted the Bush administration to ask the United Nations to study the options.
U.S. officials have argued there is not time to conduct elections by June. But in an effort to address some of Sistani's concerns, the Bush administration has raised the possibility of expanding participation in the caucuses to include more of Sistani's followers. The administration has also begun to privately consider abandoning the caucuses altogether and holding partial elections or transferring authority to an enlarged Iraqi Governing Council.
U.S. and Iraqi officials hope that Annan, who has also expressed skepticism about the possibility of holding credible elections before June 30, will explore those or other options with Sistani and others who oppose the U.S. plan.
For now, U.N. officials have sought to play down prospects for the United Nations playing a major role in mediating the political dispute over the country's future. But Annan is facing mounting pressure from the United States and Iraqi leaders to produce an alternative to full-fledged elections that all sides can support.
--------
U.N. to study elections in Iraq
January 27, 2004
By Betsy Pisik
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040126-092113-1322r.htm
NEW YORK - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan is expected to announce today that he will send a team to study the feasibility of holding direct elections in Iraq this summer, even as an Iraqi Cabinet minister said the country is not ready.
U.N. and foreign diplomats said that Mr. Annan is likely to announce during a visit to Paris that he is sending the advisory team, as requested by coalition authorities and Iraqi leaders in New York last week.
But Iraq's acting interior minister told reporters yesterday that the country is not ready for elections.
"We ask for this matter to be postponed, even if it is for a short time, until all the political and security preparations can ensure that elections can run in a free and stable manner," Nouri Badran said at a news conference.
Mr. Annan, traveling in Europe, has acknowledged that Iraq does not appear ready for elections.
Pressure has increased on the United Nations to return to Iraq three months after its staff was withdrawn because of growing threats against foreigners. In August, the organization's Baghdad headquarters were bombed, killing nearly two dozen staff and visitors.
But Mr. Annan until now has been unwilling to send staff back into Iraq without security guarantees and a clear set of independent responsibilities.
Yesterday evening, a series of explosions rocked the green zone in central Baghdad that is home to the Coalition Provisional Authority and thousands of soldiers and civilian workers.
Two U.N. security specialists, assigned with the provisional authority to ensure the safety of Iraqi U.N. employees, have been working inside the heavily fortified area.
A second security team, which will evaluate measures to protect the proposed electoral specialists, should be dispatched shortly.
Diplomats said Mr. Annan was sure to send the electoral specialists, who will determine whether the political and social climate is conducive to direct elections.
"It would be very difficult for him not to honor the request by the Iraqi Governing Council and the occupation [authorities]," said one council diplomat who has been watching the Iraq issue closely. "It's a reasonable request, and the United Nations has plenty of expertise" in setting up elections.
It is not clear who will be on the team, when the members will go or what exactly they will do.
Details could emerge during a visit to Washington today by Lakhdar Brahimi, an adviser to Mr. Annan who enjoys good relations with the Bush administration.
The Coalition Provisional Authority and Iraqi Governing Council agreed in November that sovereignty should be transferred to Iraqis by July 1.
-------- us
Soldiers battle anguish as Iraq tours are extended again
Monday, January 26th, 2004
BY HAL BERNTON
The Seattle Times
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/mld/sanluisobispo/news/world/7802676.htm
BALAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Rushing across central Iraq in a low-flying Chinook helicopter, Sgt. Rachel Green perches at the edge of an open tail ramp, a finger near the trigger of her M-60 machine gun.
Her 150-pound frame is clad in some 50 pounds of gear - helmet, flight jacket and ballistic vest beefed up with ceramic plates.
Like some exotic nocturnal bird, she peers through night goggles that even on this nearly moonless night illuminate the land below in an eerie glow.
Green scans for the telltale flash of a tracer round, or worse, a heat-seeking missile that could down her Boeing-made Chinook with deadly consequences.
In this war, as in those that came before, the Army seeks to keep female soldiers away from the front line. But in the unruly realm of central Iraq, there is no way to define the front lines, and women - on the ground and in the air - face hostile fire. Nine female soldiers were killed by hostile fire or accidents in Iraq through mid-December, and more were wounded.
"You know the possibility of not coming back home, and you just have to close your eyes and look away," Green said. "But I don't really think about being in a combat zone. I just think about what has to be done to complete the mission."
Green, of Olympia, Wash., is a flight engineer with the Fort Lewis, Wash.-based Washington Army Reserve Alpha Company. Back home, the company performs high-altitude rescue work in the Cascade Mountains and also fights forest fires.
In Iraq, everything changed.
Green and the more than 200 company soldiers take to the air in 14 heavy-duty CH-47 Chinooks, each capable of hoisting a couple of Humvees or a bulldozer.
Alpha Company is part taxi, part delivery service. The crews ferry troops during ground assaults, haul prisoners to internment camps and, when necessary, can defend themselves.
After spotting flares and a suspicious flash from a ground position last summer, Green fired back with her M-60.
Her skills and judgment have earned the respect of the company. Its commander, Maj. Grant Haugen, places her among the best flight engineers he has flown with.
Yet the 24-year-old Green doesn't fit easily into the Army mold. She is soft-spoken with a muscular build. She has big, brown eyes and long, brown hair pulled back in a bun. She grew up in the wide open spaces of Montana, enthralled by snow and horses before her father's maintenance work with helicopters prompted her to join Alpha Company, 5th Battalion, 159th Aviation Regiment.
And while she takes pride in her service, she has no interest in pursuing a career with the Army.
"I miss my freedom of speech. I miss my opinions. ... The military can tell what you say, what you do. And respect isn't necessarily gained by intelligence or by brains. It is just not a career path for me. I want other things."
Most of all, she wants to teach high school math and science. When Alpha Company was mobilized in January, she was one year shy of earning her bachelor's degree at St. Martin's College in Lacey, Wash.
She also is looking forward to marrying her fiance of four years, Sgt. Dean Wehr, a fellow flight engineer in the company, who lives in Centralia, Wash. They are a tight-knit couple, their relationship strengthened by the hardships of duty in Iraq.
"Honestly, the majority of my time I spend with Dean. We're the two luckiest souls in here because we have each other," Green said.
They were supposed to wed Dec. 14, in recognition of his grandmother's birthday, but the date was postponed as their tour of duty lengthened. Now they talk of trying next year, on the same day. Dean said his grandmother, who lives in the tiny town of Wilkeson, Wash., has been one of the most important people in his life.
Here, at this U.S. base in central Iraq, they bunk with other soldiers in a heated tent erected inside an old concrete bunker, where they are protected from the mortars that slammed the base this fall.
Sometimes Green and Wehr fly the same mission, though usually in separate helicopters. Then, they both are soldiers, focused on the task.
Sometimes one is tapped for duty while the other is left behind to suffer the agony of waiting around the base.
"If I had my way, I wish she wasn't here," said the 34-year-old Wehr, who grew up in foster homes and dreams of starting a family with Green. "To look at it selfishly, she's my whole life. I don't want anything to happen to her. If you don't get yourself into the right mind-set, you will drive yourself crazy thinking about what could happen."
Over the past six months, central Iraq has been the scene of the most intense clashes between U.S. and insurgent forces. Convoy after convoy has been attacked by rocket-propelled grenades and improvised explosive devices spread along the roadways.
At least once, a Russian-made, heat-seeking missile was shot at an Alpha Company helicopter, according to Haugen, the commander. Five to 10 times, insurgents unsuccessfully tried to down Alpha Company helicopters with rocket-propelled grenades. And dozens of times, the crews have been subject to small-arms fire.
So far, only one bullet has pierced an Alpha Company helicopter. "I never did see the guy that fired it - just a little hole in the floor," said Haugen, who was flying that day.
But a National Guard company from the Midwest, attached to the 12th Aviation Brigade, based out of a nearby hangar, was not so lucky. A Nov. 2 attack downed a Chinook, claiming the lives of 16 soldiers.
The daylight attack came as Alpha Company flight crews were already struggling to come to terms with their tour of duty, which had been extended beyond Christmas into next spring.
"When this other company's bird got hit, it was kind of a breaking point," Green said. "It was a culmination of a lot of different anxieties and frustrations. There was a period when I was scared to fly. I got to the point where I could never fly another day, and it wouldn't matter to me. But you just work through that."
At the time of the attack, the Chinooks already were flying just a few hundred feet off the ground. The crew's goal was to avoid being seen from long distances, giving insurgents more time to take aim. The loss of the Chinook triggered tighter security measures.
Alpha Company was ordered to fly only at night and to turn off its running lights.
The cloak of darkness works: The engine and rotors can be heard from the ground, yet it is hard to draw a bead on the direction of the clatter.
Night flights are dangerous. Even with night-vision goggles, the crew must strain to avoid electric wires, and it can be rough to navigate in nasty weather.
Sometimes, when the freight loads are light and the distance long, Green wonders whether the mission is worth the risk.
"You don't want to die hauling tires. Granted, we're not complaining. ... It's the validation of the mission that bothers me," she said.
The day after Christmas, Green ran a careful check on her Chinook. As flight engineer, she is responsible for overseeing the readiness as pilot crews rotate through the cockpit. She calls the 32,000-pound helicopter her "baby," and her name is painted in white on the side.
Haugen, in civilian life a pharmaceutical-sales representative from Kirkland, Wash., drew pilot duty that day.
Before taking off, he reviewed the flight plan, noting clouds to the north and thundershowers expected in the south. He pinpointed the electrical transmission towers to avoid. Then he cited the latest intelligence briefings: "There's one guy talking smack, saying he wants to shoot down a helicopter. We have adjusted our route, which should take care of that."
As the helicopter lifts off, Green takes the rear gun. She said she is keenly aware that what looks like a threat might on closer examination be a farmer firing a celebratory round.
Two other crewmembers poke weapons out of side windows.
This night's flight is uneventful.
Soon after leaving, the helicopter suddenly speeds up and banks sharply near the Tigris River. This is the spot where Haugen's helicopter was hit by a bullet, and he's not taking chances.
The helicopter flies over a patchwork landscape of fields, canals and farmhouses. At a northern base outside Tikrit, Haugen pauses to savor a cigar, while Green and other crewmembers assist in the loading.
On the final hop, lightning flashes in the southern skies.
Back at the base, Green checks out the helicopter for signs of wear or damage. Then she heads to dinner, where she devours a midnight meal - burger, chicken patty and fries.
Later, in her tent, she sifts through the memories of home - safely held in a picture scrapbook. Some show Green and Wehr hiking on Mount Rainier and beachcombing in southwest Washington.
"God willing," Green said, "we've got 90 days to go, and counting down."
-------- propaganda wars
Iraqi who gave MI6 45-minute claim says it was untrue
David Leigh and Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday January 27, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1131993,00.html
The government's dogged insistence that Saddam Hussein was able to deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of the order being given suffered two serious blows yesterday as ministers braced themselves for the findings of the Hutton inquiry.
As the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, was once again forced to defend the justification for going to war, the Iraqi exile group in London which claims to have supplied MI6 with the intelligence about Saddam's 45-minute capability admitted that the information might have been completely untrue.
Nick Theros, the Washington representative of Iyad Allawi, who headed the Iraqi National Accord in exile, said it was raw intelligence from a single source, part of a large amount of information passed on by the INA to MI6.
He told the Guardian: "We were passing it on in good faith. It was for the intelligence services to verify it."
The admission came as David Kay, who resigned as the coalition's chief weapons inspector in Iraq on Friday, accused the intelligence agencies of failing to detect that Saddam's weapons programme was in disarray as a result of corruption and increasingly erratic leadership.
Mr Straw admitted that it was "disappointing" that the inspectors had not found evidence of the weapons, but said the war with Iraq was more justified today than it had been when MPs voted for the invasion.
"We were never saying that Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United Kingdom... The serious and current threat [was] to the world, and that was absolutely true, and I remain convinced it was," he told the BBC Radio 4 programme Today.
The claim that Saddam could deploy chemical or biological weapons within 45 minutes was highlighted by Tony Blair's preface to the dossier issued by the government in September 2002 in the run-up to the war.
It was also at the heart of the row between Downing Street and the BBC after doubt was cast on its accuracy by the government weapons scientist David Kelly.
But Mr Theros said the information now seemed to be a "crock of shit". "Clearly we have not found WMD," he said.
Mr Theros works with his father, a former US ambassador, to promote the political affairs of Mr Allawi, who is now a member of the Iraqi governing council in Baghdad.
He said the Iraqi officer who claims to have been the original source of the intelligence had in fact never seen inside the purported chemical weapons crates upon which his 45-minute claim was based.
The former INA spy, who calls himself Lieutenant Colonel al-Dabbagh, although this is not his full name, is now said to be "in hiding".
At the time, he says, he commanded a frontline unit.
He told the Sunday Telegraph and NBC television that before the September 2002 dossier was published he smuggled out sketchy intelligence about WMD to MI6 via a general in Baghdad working for the INA.
He said one of Saddam's senior officials told a meeting of air defence commanders "probably sometime in the spring" that an arsenal of unspecified secret weapons would be used for battlefield defence against US invaders.
"They told us that [coalition troops] cannot pass across Iraq because we will use everything from the knife to nuclear weapons to defend ourselves."
The colonel says his unit later took delivery of an unspecified number of crates which appeared to contain short-range weapons, such as rocket-propelled grenades.
They were supposedly to be fired from civilian jeeps as a last-ditch defence by Saddam loyalists wearing gas masks.
Sir Richard Dearlove, head of MI6, did not deny in evidence to the Hutton inquiry that the intelligence for the 45-minute WMD claim came second-hand from a single source who was a senior Iraqi army officer.
Further damage to Downing Street's case for going to war came from Dr Kay, who said yesterday that the CIA and other intelligence agencies had failed to recognise that Iraq had all but abandoned its efforts to produce large quantities of chemical or biological weapons after the first Gulf war.
He told the New York Times that his team discovered that Iraq had plunged into what he called a "vortex of corruption" around 1997 and 1998.
Iraqi scientists realised that they could go to Saddam and present plans for weapons programmes and receive large amounts of money, without making good their promises.
--------
Cheney's favorite leak
The vice president hails an "inaccurate" leak and provokes a new battle in the White House war with the intelligence community.
By Eric Boehlert
Jan. 27, 2004
(Salon.com)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5591.htm
Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that a magazine article, based on leaked and unevaluated intelligence, definitively proved links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden has triggered a new round in the Bush administration's conflict with the intelligence community.
"It's disgusting," said Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA chief of counter-terrorism. "It's bullshit," said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who served in the agency's Near East division.
Cheney's touting of the leak was also condemned by Democratic presidential candidate Gen. Wesley Clark, who demanded an internal White House investigation into whether Cheney violated national security laws by appearing to confirm the contents of the article, which reprinted classified information.
The conservative Weekly Standard published its article on the Saddam-al-Qaida connection, "Case Closed," by Stephen Hayes, in its Nov. 24, 2003, issue. The piece, released on Nov. 14, was instantly promoted as providing proof for the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam was long involved with Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization. Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes trumpeted the article on Fox News. "These are hard facts, and I'd like to see [skeptics] refute any one of them," he said.
But the Department of Defense did just that. On Nov. 15, the next day, the Pentagon issued an extraordinary statement calling the story "inaccurate" and explaining it was based on raw intelligence (or a "classified annex") that had not been evaluated. "The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions."
In the strongest possible terms the Pentagon condemned the leak: "Individuals who purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."
The assertion that Saddam and al-Qaida were in league was a major justification for the Iraq war. Indeed, a majority of Americans came to believe the alliance was real as a result of the administration's persistent suggestion that Saddam was behind 9/11, and it was the reason they gave for supporting the war.
However, no proof was ever offered, and the administration's continuing effort to press the point led the press corps to question President Bush about it. "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties," Bush said on Nov. 18, 2003. But he added, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11" attacks.
Yet on Jan. 9, Cheney, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, spontaneously lauded the discredited Weekly Standard article and described it as "the best source of information."
On this Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC, Clark criticized Cheney's comments as "playing politics with national security." James Rubin, Clark's senior foreign policy advisor and a former assistant secretary of state for public affairs in the Clinton administration, said that "the vice president at a minimum should retract his comments." He added: "The president ought to call in Vice President Cheney and his legal counsel and look into the matter and determine how much damage has been done."
Cheney's remarks about the Weekly Standard article, particularly in light of the Pentagon's firm and public denunciation, angered former intelligence experts. "I just can't find words to describe how horrible it is," says Cannistraro. "For the vice president to undercut the head of intelligence at the Pentagon is unparalleled. It just illustrates the peculiar worldview Cheney has and how distorted it is. And it shows there's a real contempt for the professional intelligence community."
Intelligence professionals are particularly offended by what they see as Cheney's attempt to deliberately mislead and mischaracterize the article. In particular they point to his reference to the leaked information as an "assessment" as though it had been evaluated and judged to be creditable. "That was no assessment. It was a roundup of [unsubstantiated] reports," says McGovern, a steering group member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which has been critical of the Bush administration's handling of intelligence. "To call that an assessment is a joke and disavows what the Department of Defense said, for God's sake."
The fury surrounding Cheney's comments and the rationale for war come in the wake of former U.S. weapons inspector David Kay's comments on Friday that he now doubts Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of WMDs, as the administration had insisted before the war last year. Meanwhile, recent reports from the National War College and the Carnegie Endowment have cast serious doubts on administration claims that Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Throughout the debate about the Iraq War, Cheney has presented himself as a guardian of national security and an enemy of intelligence leaks. But his praise for the Weekly Standard article sharply contrasts with his disapproval of a leak in June 2002 -- a leak that seriously embarrassed the administration and called attention to an intelligence failure under its own watch. At the time, CNN reported that the National Security Agency had failed to translate in time two intercepts on Sept. 10, 2001, which noted that "tomorrow is the zero hour" and "the match is about to begin." The intercepts were translated from Arabic on Sept. 12. CNN had reported that the leak came from two congressional sources.
Cheney personally telephoned the chairmen of the joint congressional inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks, Rep. Porter Goss, R-Fla., and Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla. to denounce the leaks. Soon, a criminal investigation was launched, with FBI agents administering polygraph exams to congressional staffers. At the time, White House press secretary Ari Fleischer complained, "The selective, inappropriate leaking of snippets of information risks undermining national security."
But the target of that leak investigation has turned on a subject the Bush administration did not expect -- Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, who was chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time of the disclosure.
"It certainly shows the hypocrisy, because when the administration doesn't like the results of a leak, they order an investigation," says Rubin. "But if Vice President Cheney likes the results of a leak, he confirms it."
The Weekly Standard article was drawn from a "top secret U.S. government memorandum" that the magazine depicted as proving bin Laden and Saddam had an "operational relationship" that dated back nearly a decade. The memo was written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who also oversaw the unique Office of Special Plans within the Pentagon. This small office of handpicked operatives was created under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to act as a counter to the CIA and other intelligence agencies that were seen as insufficiently loyal in providing material to help make the administration's case about Saddam's imminent threat. Since its inception, the OSP has worked outside established intelligence channels, rarely sharing its intelligence information for peer review, and has been a direct source of information, often faulty, for the White House.
Following Feith's testimony about alleged ties between Saddam and external terrorist groups before Congress last July 10, he was pressed in a follow-up letter from Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., respectively the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to provide the evidence that backed up his assertions. In response, Feith's office cited 50 instances of raw intelligence that suggested ties between Iraqi dictator and the al-Qaida leader. Meanwhile, Feith's report also found its way to the Weekly Standard.
The article, which gave credence to Feith's report and suggested it had conclusively confirmed the Saddam-al-Qaida connection, never informed its readers that the report was simply a laundry list of uncorroborated data.
Former CIA counter-terrorism chief Cannistraro explains that hundreds, if not thousands, of raw reports from first-, second- and third-hand sources flood into the CIA offices around the word every day. But these are of little or no use until they can be analyzed. "The problem with raw intelligence is you can cherry-pick it," he says. "It's like having the Bible in your hand; you can pick and choose individual passages to prove almost any point."
Cannistraro is stunned that Feith's office, out to prove linkage between Saddam and bin Laden, relied on raw intelligence summaries and not evaluated intelligence. "It's just amazing, because it's the antithesis of the intelligence process," he said.
Traveling with Cheney in Europe, the vice president's spokesman could not be reached for comment.
-------- war crimes
Democracy Now! Confronts Wesley Clark Over His Bombing Of Civilians, Use Of Cluster Bombs And Depleted Uranium And The Bombing Of Serb Television
Monday, January 26th, 2004
EXCLUSIVE: DEMOCRACY NOW!
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/01/26/1632224
[In a Democracy Now! exclusive, General Wesley Clark responds for the first time to in-depth questions about his targeting of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, his bombing of Radio Television Serbia, the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the speeding-up of the cockpit video of a bombing of a passenger train to make it appear as though it was an accident and other decisions he made and orders he gave as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander.]
Since the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark has not answered any in-depth questions about his targeting of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, his bombing of Radio Television Serbia, the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the speeding-up of the cockpit video of a bombing of a passenger train to make it appear as though it was an accident and other decisions he made and orders he gave as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander.
With the New Hampshire primary just 24 hours away, the remaining Democratic candidates are in their final push to win votes in the key poll in the Granite state. Whether or not Howard Dean wins or loses, he set the tone very early for what has become a definitive issue in the race early on: opposition to the war in Iraq. Among the Democrats, Dennis Kucinich, Al Sharpton and Carol Moseley Braun held the most clear antiwar stances. But Braun has pulled out of the race, Al Sharpton is not in New Hampshire and Dennis Kucinich - well the media hardly gives him any airtime.
With the exception of Senator Joseph Lieberman, all of the candidates have sought to portray themselves as opponents of the war. But only Kucinich has announced a concrete plan for withdrawing US forces from Iraq. The theme of Iraq is the main issue on which General Wesley Clark is running his campaign.
- Gen. Wesley Clark, speaking at a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on January 24, 2004.
TRANSCRIPT
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: We went to war with Iraq without an imminent threat from Iraq. Without any connection between Iraq and the events of 9-11. We went to war with Iraq before all diplomatic options were exhausted. We went to war with Iraq without our allies all on board. We went to war with Iraq without a clear understanding and a plan for what was going to happen when we did get to Baghdad, and we didn't have the forces on hand to handle the situation. In short, I don't consider the war with Iraq patriotic. It was simply bad leadership and deceptive practices. It was wrong, and I'm going to hold the president of the United States accountable. He didn't do the right thing for America. It's that simple. He didn't do it!
Clark portrays himself as the antiwar warrior and his rhetoric against the war has escalated significantly over the past week of campaigning in New Hampshire. At his campaign stops, he has been saying regularly, "The war is wrong."
This is not always what he said as one voter pointed out to him onstage.
- Gen. Wesley Clark, responding to a voter asking about his previous comments on Iraq as a CNN commentator.
TRANSCRIPT
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I was a military analyst and so I looked at everything in great detail. I wasn't allowed on television to talk politics at all. I testified in front of the senate, but the "Boston Globe" did a long piece on my military stuff about three or four days ago. You can find it there. Joanna Weiss wrote it, and she said what's changed is my rhetoric. My rhetoric has changed, because when I wasn't a politician, I couldn't speak out this forcefully, because I didn't have any basis for doing it. I had a military commentary that I gave. I said from the beginning of the war with Iraq, that Iraq wasn't an imminent threat. I said in the beginning that we shouldn't rush into war. I said that it was an elective war. I always believed that he had weapons of mass destruction because that's what the intelligence told us. And I wasn't -- I didn't know how much to rely on the intelligence. In fact, at one point, I had lunch with a bunch of other retired generals, with Donald Rumsfeld just a few months in front of the war and Rumsfeld told me that he knew where 30% of the weapons were. Well, if the secretary of defense tells you personally, I still didn't think it was an imminent threat, but I wasn't privy to the intelligence. He was. They misled the American people, so I didn't think we had to go to war, but I will admit my rhetoric has gotten harsher and tougher since then because I think they misled us. I think it was deliberate. I found out that Rumsfeld on 9-11 that he said he was going to try to use it to take us to war with Saddam Hussein. I have never been inconsistent.
This is in sharp contrast to statements Clark made as a commentator on CNN before the bombing last year. In January, Clark told CNN, "He [Hussein] does have weapons of mass destruction." When asked, "And you could say that categorically?" Clark responded: "Absolutely."
In February, Clark told CNN, "The credibility of the United States is on the line, and Saddam Hussein has these weapons and so, you know, we're going to go ahead and do this and the rest of the world's got to get with us...The U.N. has got to come in and belly up to the bar on this. But the president of the United States has put his credibility on the line, too. And so this is the time that these nations around the world, and the United Nations, are going to have to look at this evidence and decide who they line up with."
Immediately following the fall of Baghdad to US forces, Clark responded to a question about finding the alleged weapons of mass destruction, saying: "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this."
But as Clark speaks out about the war in Iraq, his own record in a different war is almost never examined. That is his role as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999. Sure, the Clark campaign promotes this in its TV ads - but they say that he liberated a nation and ended a genocide. Clark mentions it often in his stump speeches and the debates. But as a qualification to be commander-in-chief.
What is not discussed is what Clark actually did when he was running a war.
Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill covered the 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia from the ground in 1999, the war Clark was leading as the Supreme Allied Commander of NATO. Jeremy is now in New Hampshire and joins us on the line from Concord, New Hampshire.
- Jeremy Scahill, Democracy Now! correspondent speaking from Concord, New Hampshire.
Since the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, General Wesley Clark has not answered any in-depth questions about his targeting of civilian infrastructure in Yugoslavia, his bombing of Radio Television Serbia, the use of cluster bombs and depleted uranium, the speeding-up of the cockpit video of a bombing of a passenger train to make it appear as though it was an accident and other decisions he made and orders he gave as NATO's Supreme Allied Commander.
This weekend, we had a chance to ask Clark some questions he has never faced before. After a rally where Clark was filming a TV commercial for his campaign, Jeremy and I made our way to the stage. As we attempted to question General Clark, we were told by his press people that he would not be taking questions from reporters. As he was heading backstage, Jeremy approached Clark.
- Gen. Wesley Clark, being questioned by Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill.
TRANSCRIPT:
JEREMY SCAHILL: In Yugoslavia, you used cluster bombs and depleted uranium...
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Sure did.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I want to know if you are president, will you vow not to use them.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I will use whatever it takes that's legal to protect the men and women against force.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Even against civilians in the Nis marketplace? Why bomb Radio Television Serbia? Why did you bomb Radio Television Serbia? You killed 16 media workers, sir.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: They were-[in audible - Interview interrupted by another questioner.]
That was Clark making an exit off the stage. We followed him as he left the theater and walked down the streets of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, shaking hands, signing autographs, talking to potential voters. As he was entering a business establishment, Jeremy Scahill again approached the General.
- Gen. Wesley Clark, being questioned by Democracy Now! correspondent Jeremy Scahill.
TRANSCRIPT:
JEREMY SCAHILL: General Clark, on that issue of the bombing of Radio Television Serbia, Amnesty International called it a war crime.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Excuse me -- I'm not --
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amnesty called it a war crime and it's condemned by all journalist organizations in the world. It killed makeup artists.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I want to answer this fellow. Because the truth was that that -- first of all, we gave warnings to Milosevic that that was going to be struck. I personally called the CNN reporter and had it set up so that it would be leaked, and Milosevic knew. He had the warning because after he got the warning, he actually ordered the western journalists to report there as a way of showing us his power, and we had done it deliberately to sort of get him accustomed to the fact that he better start evacuating it. There were actually six people who were killed, as I recall.
JEREMY SCAHILL: There were 16.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I recall six.
JEREMY SCAHILL: I was there at the time and I knew the families. They do hold Milosevic accountable and they also hold you accountable, sir.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: They were ordered to stay there.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And they were makeup artists, and they were engineers, and they were technicians
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I remember reading the story, but I want to tell you about it.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Amnesty International said you committed a war crime by bombing that.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It was all looked at by the International Criminal Tribunal crime by Yugoslavia. All of my actions were examined and they were all upheld by the highest law in the United States.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And you think a media outlet is a legitimate target?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: No, but when it is used as command and control, it is. But then
JEREMY SCAHILL: Even if it kills...
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Now wait a minute, you have to let me finish and then I will let you finish.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Go ahead.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: What I said is, we would give them the warnings. It was part of the command and control systems. It was approved as a legitimate target under the laws of land warfare and went through the U.S. Government. That was the basis on which we struck. We actually called the bombers back one time, because there was still -- it was still unclear to us that we weren't absolutely certain. What we know is that Milosevic ordered them to stay there, and it was wrong, but I was doing my duty, and I have been looked at by the law, so -- I mean, I respect Amnesty International. I think they're a good organization, but --
JEREMY SCAHILL: But do you feel any remorse for the killing of civilians that you essentially were overseeing?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yes, I do.
JEREMY SCAHILL: And what about the bombing of the Nis marketplace with cluster bombs, shredding human beings.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It was terrible, but you know in that instance, if we had got the same incident, there was a cluster bomb that opened prematurely. It was an accident. And every one of these incidents was fully investigated. All of the material from the Yugoslavian government was given to the International Criminal Tribunal, plus as the NATO commander, I made a full report to the International Criminal Tribunal. It was all investigated. The pilots who did it, nobody could have felt worse than the pilots who did it. And I got a letter from a man in Serbia who said you killed my granddaughter on a schoolyard at Nis. I know how he must have felt. And I felt so helpless about it. Every night before I let those bombs go, I prayed we wouldn't kill innocent people. But unfortunately, when you are at war, terrible things happen, even when you don't want them to. You can't imagine what those pilots felt like in those convoys when they struck the convoys. You remember the convoys?
JEREMY SCAHILL: In Gurdulica were the 72 Albanians were killed.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: In that place, too. And they had flown over it a couple of times. You know, we just -- we were trying to establish some kind of communications on the ground with the Albanians. The Serbs were on the nets, and they were jamming all of the communications, and they were doing imitative communications deception. And nobody could get the truth about it. We saw the Serb vehicles around the place. And I didn't make the decision, but they were following orders on my command. And it was looked at, and so forth. The decision was made as a legitimate target. It turned out that they had been ordered to stay in there by the Serbs. The Serbs were surrounding the place to keep them penned in. It was horrible. You never forget stuff like that. That's why when this government has used force as it has, it makes me so angry. Because these people in the White House don't understand -- you don't use force except as a last, last, last resort.
JEREMY SCAHILL: On April 12th you targeted a passenger train, and then you showed a video that was sped up at three time the speed. Why?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think -- first of all, the passenger train was not targeted. The pilot's instructions were to go after a bridge, and not the train. He felt, as he launched that missile, that all of a sudden at the very last minute, the train suddenly came into his field of view. I showed the tape. I did not know that the tape was accelerated. I don't think it was three times. I think it was one-and-a-half times. Whatever it was, it was going faster than the actual speed. It made it look like it was --
JEREMY SCAHILL: But the Supreme Allied Commander, you are ultimately responsible for all of the information that came out.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's true. I was.
JEREMY SCAHILL: What the actual in real-time speed showed is that the pilot actually moved the target so that it would hit the train.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I don't have that information.
JEREMY SCAHILL: 12 people were killed, including an orthodox priest.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's terrible. But, I don't have the information. When I looked at it, we didn't see that. All of the material was sent to The Hague and they did not see that either.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Do you think you owe the people of Serbia who died in that war an apology?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: No, I don't because I did my duty as the commander for NATO and for the United States. I think Slobodan Milosevic owes the people of Serbia an apology, because we acted to prevent regional destabilization, and to be honest, when you take the kinds of actions that he has done, he was the proximate cause. All we tried to do was head off the ethnic cleansing through diplomacy, and basically, he had a plan to go to war, no matter what.
JEREMY SCAHILL: But now the U.S. is supporting a regime of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo where all minorities have been forced out, including almost every single Serb.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well you know, we are trying very hard not to allow that to happen. And we have worked very hard with the Kosovo Albanians and the Serbs, but to be honest with you that regime that's north of the Ibar River is a regime that wants to prevent Serbs from living peacefully with Kosovo Albanians. So, both sides have to share the blame. They have been under the control of Seselj and also some under Milosevic and their tactic in 1999 was to provoke the retaliation by the Albanians to be able to blame the Albanians for reverse ethnic cleansing. There were -- there were crimes on both sides and they needed to be investigated. To the best of my ability as NATO commander at the time, we did.
JEREMY SCAHILL: But then why -- you have a man like Agim Ceku in power, a man who was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Serbs at Kraina, a man trained by MPRI in Virginia. Why put a man like that in charge? What kind of message does that send to ethnic minorities in Kosovo, when a man who is a basically a war criminal is in charge of what is going to be the future army in Kosovo.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, we looked at his record and it's not clear that he's going to be in charge of the future army of Kosovo. He did receive instruction from a contracted U.S. firm at MPRI. He received basic information after he became there in charge of the Kosovo protective corps. We thought that was the best way to maintain order and security in the country.
JEREMY SCAHILL: He has been accused of hate speech by the United Nations.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Lots of people in that part of the world have been accused of hate speech, and they shouldn't do it. I met with Agim Ceku a few times when I was over there, and I told him who I thought about it. I don't accept that language.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Do you think that he should be in a position of power in Kosovo?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, you know, I'm so far removed from the issues right now --
JEREMY SCAHILL: But you know him.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: But I can't - yeah - I know him, but what I have seen of him, he is the one of the more reasonable people in that region.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Because in your ads you say you liberated a nation. And that's why I am asking you this question.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: The thing is I have got to talk to some other voters. Is that okay? Can you excuse me?
JEREMY SCAHILL: Absolutely. Thank you very much.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I am trying to answer all your questions.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Thank you I appreciate it. Thank you for being patient with me.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
9/11 Panel Says F.A.A. Played Down Scenario
January 27, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Sept-11-Commission.html?hp
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Months before the Sept. 11 attacks the Federal Aviation Administration played down the possibility of suicide hijackings, saying the greater threat was from explosives smuggled aboard planes, a federal panel investigating the attacks said Tuesday.
The preliminary report by the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States said that in a presentation to airline and airport officials in early 2001, the FAA discounted the threat of a suicide hijacking because there was ``no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction.''
In July 2001, the FAA issued a warning to air carriers but did not mention suicide hijackings. Instead, it focused on the possibility that some terrorist groups might conceal explosive devices inside luggage.
For months after the attacks, Bush administration officials maintained there was no indication terrorists were considering suicide hijackings. But the report said the FAA's Office of Civil Aviation Security officially considered such a possibility as early as March 1998.
The panel's finding follows earlier disclosure of a 1999 report prepared for the National Intelligence Council that warned of suicide hijackings.
The commission report acknowledged there was no specific intelligence indicating suicide hijackings would occur but said the FAA still had a responsibility to protect the flying public against such a threat.
``Without actionable intelligence information, to uncover and interdict a terrorist plot in the planning stages ... it was up to the other layers of aviation security to counter the threat,'' the report said.
The 10-member, bipartisan commission was established by Congress to study the nation's preparedness before Sept. 11 and its response to the attacks, and to make recommendations for guarding against similar disasters.
On Monday, the first day of a two-day public hearing, the commission said U.S. authorities missed some obvious signs that might have prevented some of the Sept. 11 hijackers from entering the country.
Government officials have said the 19 hijackers entered the country legally, but the panel said its investigation found at least two and as many as eight had fraudulent visas. The commission also found examples in which U.S. officials had contact with the hijackers but failed to adequately investigate suspicious behavior.
For example, Saeed al Ghamdi was referred to immigration inspection officials in June 2001 after he didn't provide an address on his customs form and had only a one-way plane ticket and about $500. Al Ghamdi was able to persuade the inspector that he was a tourist.
The panel also found that at least six of the hijackers violated immigration laws by overstaying their visas or failing to attend the English language school for which their visas were issued.
And Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, exploited the fact that customs officers did not routinely collect fingerprints to obtain a visa, even though federal authorities in New York indicted him in 1996 for his role in earlier terrorist plots. He never entered the country and was apprehended after the attacks.
The commission said part of the problem was a lack of coordination among immigration officials and a focus on keeping out illegal immigrants rather than keeping out potential terrorists.
The commission detailed other government missteps prior to September 2001: --Three of the hijackers, al Ghamdi, Khalid al Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour, submitted visa applications with false statements about never previously applying for a visa, something that could have been easily checked.
--One hijacker, Ziad Jarrah, entered the United States in June 2000 on a tourist visa and then enrolled in flight school for six months. He never filed an application to change his status from tourist to student. Had the immigration officials known, it could have denied him entry on three subsequent trips.
Also Monday, the commission said it can't finish its final report by the May 27 deadline imposed by Congress and asked for an extension of at least two months. The Bush administration and Republican congressional leaders have said they oppose such a move.
Commissioners decided they needed more time because the group had been bogged down by disputes with the administration and New York City authorities over access to documents and witnesses, according to a person familiar with the commission who spoke on condition of anonymity.
On the Net:
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States:
http://www.9-11commission.gov
--------
9/11 Panel Faults U.S. For Letting Hijackers In
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50466-2004Jan26.html
The U.S. government fumbled repeated opportunities to stop many of the men responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks from entering the country, missing fraudulent passports and other warning signs that should have attracted greater scrutiny, according to a preliminary report released yesterday.
The new findings by the independent commission investigating the terrorist strikes stand in marked contrast to the contentions of many senior U.S. officials, who for more than two years have portrayed the 19 hijackers as law-abiding travelers who did little to attract government suspicion and who, in nearly all cases, entered or resided in the country legally.
Yesterday's report disclosed that as many as eight of the hijackers carried passports that "showed evidence of fraudulent manipulation," while as many as five of the passports had "suspicious indicators." The report did not identify the details missed by authorities.
The report also found that at least six hijackers, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, violated U.S. immigration laws either while in the United States or while returning. Five of the hijackers aroused enough suspicion that they were questioned individually by customs or immigration inspectors but were eventually allowed to enter the United States. None of the hijackers filled out his visa application correctly, and three clearly lied on the forms, according to the report.
"There were many opportunities to stop the 9/11 plot," said commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a former Justice Department official in the Clinton administration.
Several current and former government officials who testified yesterday disputed such assertions, arguing that little more could have been done to detect the plotters. "I don't believe that in a visa interview, you would ever uncover a terrorist," said Mary A. Ryan, former assistant secretary for consular affairs in the State Department.
In yesterday's report, commission investigators also identified five suspected al Qaeda associates by name who they believe may have intended to join the plot but were thwarted. Four were blocked from obtaining visas in a variety of ways by U.S. consular officials abroad, while a fifth was sent back to the Middle East by an observant immigration inspector in Orlando.
Jose E. Melendez-Perez, now an inspector with the Department of Homeland Security, recounted an interview he conducted with a Saudi national, Mohamed al Qahtani, who investigators now believe was planning to meet Atta at the Orlando airport on Aug. 4, 2001. Al Qahtani had no return ticket and no hotel reservations, and he refused to identify a friend who, he said, would provide him with money and other assistance on his trip.
"The bottom line was, he gave me the creeps," Melendez-Perez said in his prepared statement, adding that his first impression was that al Qahtani was a "hit man" because of his hostile and arrogant attitude and his refusal to disclose his plans. "A 'hit man' doesn't know where he is going because if he is caught, that way he doesn't have any information to bargain with," he said. "My wife said I was watching too much movies."
Before departing, al Qahtani turned to Melendez-Perez and said, in English: "I'll be back."
Melendez-Perez said he was taking a bit of a risk by refusing al Qahtani entry to the United States because Saudis were generally treated more permissively than other foreign nationals by U.S. border agents. Al Qahtani -- who would later be apprehended by U.S. forces in Afghanistan -- was eventually escorted onto a flight bound for Dubai via London, a decision that was applauded by the audience and the commission at yesterday's hearing.
"It is extremely possible, and perhaps probable, that Mohamed al Qahtani was to be the 20th hijacker," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor and Democratic member of the commission. "It is entirely plausible to suggest that your actions . . . may well have contributed to saving the Capitol or the White House and all the people who were in those buildings."
Ben-Veniste was referring to the plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on the day of the attacks after passengers attempted to wrest control from the four hijackers aboard. Authorities believe it was headed to Washington, probably aimed at the Capitol or the White House. It was the only aircraft to be commandeered by four hijackers instead of five, and authorities have long debated whether the plan called for a "20th hijacker" to be aboard.
Said Melendez-Perez, a 12-year veteran of the immigration service, "I was just doing my job."
The commission's findings go further than some previous investigations of this subject. The FBI and others have said it is not clear whether the men prevented from entering the country sought to participate directly in the attacks.
Under questioning from commissioners, Melendez-Perez also said that when Atta attempted to reenter the United States in January 2001, his case raised enough red flags that he should have been blocked from getting in.
Yesterday's hearing marked a watershed moment for the 10-member bipartisan panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which has produced little information since it was established by Congress in late 2002.
The panel's work has been delayed by a series of battles for access to classified information held by the Bush administration, leading a majority of commissioners to favor an extension of its May 27 deadline. The White House and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) have indicated they would oppose such a move, and the commission is expected to decide this week whether to press the fight more publicly.
Unlike a joint inquiry by the House and Senate intelligence committees -- which detailed shortcomings in the intelligence process before the hijackings -- the commission is charged with investigating a wide range of topics, including the immigration and border issues highlighted yesterday.
Among other findings released by the commission's staff:
• Two of the Saudi hijackers may have obtained their passports with help from family members who worked in the passport office.
• Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who has been identified as the mastermind behind the attacks, obtained a visa to enter the United States on July 23, 2001, using a Saudi passport and an alias. There is no evidence he used the document, however.
• In addition to al Qahtani, those identified in the report as having attempted to enter the United States to participate in the attacks are Ramzi Binalshibh, who authorities have long said helped coordinate the plot when he could not secure a visa to participate in it; Moroccan operative and "potential pilot" Zakariya Essabar; Mohammed's nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, an alleged financier of the plot; and Saeed al-Gamdi, who was known by the nickname "Jihad," or holy war.
A hijacker with a similar name, Saeed Alghamdi, who helped commandeer United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, was referred to an immigration inspector in June 2001 because he had a one-way ticket, provided no address and only had $500 in his possession. But he was able to persuade the inspector that he was a tourist and was allowed to enter the United States.
-------- courts
Citing Free Speech, Judge Voids Part of Antiterror Act
January 27, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27PATR.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 - For the first time, a federal judge has struck down part of the sweeping antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, joining other courts that have challenged integral parts of the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism.
In Los Angeles, the judge, Audrey B. Collins of Federal District Court, said in a decision made public on Monday that a provision in the law banning certain types of support for terrorist groups was so vague that it risked running afoul of the First Amendment.
Civil liberties advocates hailed the decision as an important victory in efforts to rein in what they regard as legal abuses in the government's antiterrorism initiatives. The Justice Department defended the law as a crucial tool in the fight against terrorists and promised to review the Los Angeles ruling.
At issue was a provision in the act, passed by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that expanded previous antiterrorism law to prohibit anyone from providing "expert advice or assistance" to known terrorist groups. The measure was part of a broader set of prohibitions that the administration has relied heavily on in prosecuting people in Lackawanna, N.Y., Portland, Ore., Detroit and elsewhere accused of providing money, training, Internet services and other "material support" to terrorist groups.
In Los Angeles, several humanitarian groups that work with Kurdish refugees in Turkey and Tamil residents of Sri Lanka had sued the government, arguing in a lawsuit that the antiterrorism act was so ill defined that they had stopped writing political material and helping organize peace conferences for fear that they would be prosecuted.
Judge Collins agreed that the ban on providing advice and assistance to terrorists was "impermissibly vague" and blocked the Justice Department from enforcing it against the plaintiffs.
"The USA Patriot Act places no limitation on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited, and instead bans the provision of all expert advice and assistance regardless of its nature," Judge Collins wrote in a ruling issued late Friday.
As a result, the law could be construed to include "unequivocally pure speech and advocacy protected by the First Amendment," wrote the judge, who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton.
At the same time, however, Judge Collins sided with the government in rejecting some of the plaintiffs' arguments, and she declined to grant a nationwide injunction against the Justice Department.
Even so, lawyers for the humanitarian groups said they were heartened by the ruling. It came seven weeks after many of the same plaintiffs won a ruling in a separate but related case before a federal appeals court in San Francisco. That court, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, found that a 1996 antiterrorism law prohibiting anyone from providing training or personnel for terrorist groups was too vague to pass constitutional muster. In recent months, other courts have also challenged the administration's designation of enemy combatants and other aspects of the campaign against terrorism, but the Los Angeles decision was the first by a federal judge to strike down any portion of the Patriot Act.
"The critical thing here is that this is the first demonstration that courts will not allow Congress in the name of fighting terrorism to ignore our constitutional rights," said Nancy Chang, a senior lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, the New York-based organization that brought the lawsuit against the Justice Department on behalf of the humanitarian groups. "By using a broad and vague definition of terrorism, that has a chilling effect on free speech."
The Justice Department, which already sought a review of the related decision in San Francisco, also plans to review Judge Collins's ruling to decide whether it should be appealed, officials said.
Administration officials have made clear that they consider the Patriot Act to be an integral part of their efforts to identify, track and disrupt terrorist activities.
Indeed, President Bush in his State of the Union message last week urged Congress to renew parts of the act that are scheduled to expire in 2005. But the administration may face a tough sell in Congress, with a growing number of lawmakers from both parties questioning whether the government's expanded powers in dozens of areas of law enforcement have infringed on civil liberties. In largely symbolic votes, more than 230 communities nationwide have raised formal objections to the law.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said in a statement on Monday that the language banning expert advice or assistance to terrorists represented only "a modest enhancement" of previous law.
"By targeting those who provide material support by providing expert advice or assistance," Mr. Corallo said, "the law made clear that Americans are threatened as much by the person who teaches a terrorist to build a bomb as by the one who pushes the button."
--------
Part of Patriot Act Is Struck Down
Ban on 'Expert Advice' to Terrorist Groups Vague, Judge Says
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50517-2004Jan26.html
A federal judge in Los Angeles has declared unconstitutional a provision of the USA Patriot Act that bans providing expert advice to groups that the U.S. government has designated as terrorist organizations. It is the first time that a court has struck down a portion of the controversial law approved by Congress six weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In a decision issued late Friday and released yesterday, U.S. District Judge Audrey Collins said the prohibition on giving "expert advice or assistance" to designated terrorists is so vague that it could improperly bar even innocent contacts with the foreign terrorist groups in question.
Collins said the section of the USA Patriot Act is so broad that it "could be construed to include unequivocally pure speech and advocacy protected by the First Amendment," and that it "places no limitations on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited."
The case was filed by the Humanitarian Law Project, an organization that said it has tried to give "human rights" training to the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a Marxist group designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. government because of its militant activities in Turkey.
David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights who argued the case, said in a statement yesterday that the decision "calls into question the government's reliance on overbroad laws imposing guilt by association in the war on terrorism.
"Our clients sought only to support lawful and nonviolent activity, yet the Patriot Act provision draws no distinction whatsoever between expert advice in human rights, designed to deter violence, and expert advice on how to build a bomb," Cole added.
Mark Corallo, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the provision of the Patriot Act "made clear that Americans are threatened as much by the person who teaches a terrorist to build a bomb as by the one who pushes the button."
The provision was an elaboration on an earlier law, enacted in 1996, that bans giving "material support" to terrorists. The USA Patriot Act's addition of the words barring "expert advice or assistance" was only a "modest, incremental" change to the earlier law, Corallo said.
In addition to the Kurdish-affiliated Humanitarian Law Project, other plaintiffs involved in the case included several groups of Tamil Americans who say they try to support the legal activities of the Liberation Tamil Tigers of North Eelam, a Sri Lankan group designated a terrorist organization by Washington.
The same plaintiffs filed a previous lawsuit and won a key victory in December, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled 2 to 1 that the 1996 anti-terrorism law's prohibition on providing "personnel" and "training" to designated terrorist groups is unconstitutionally vague.
The Justice Department is seeking a review of the panel's ruling by the full appeals court, which is based in San Francisco. It is also considering how to respond to the latest district court ruling, Corallo said.
--------
Patriot Act rule rejected by judge
January 27, 2004
By Audrey Hudson
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040127-121306-2279r.htm
A federal judge has declared unconstitutional a Patriot Act provision that forbids giving advice or assistance to groups identified as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. government.
In the first ruling to strike down part of the post-September 11 antiterrorism statute, U.S. District Judge Audrey B. Collins in Los Angeles said the provision is too vague to enforce and violates the Constitution's First and Fifth amendments, which protect freedom of speech and defendants from self-incrimination, respectively.
"The USA Patriot Act places no limitation on the type of expert advice and assistance which is prohibited and instead bans the provision of all expert advice and assistance regardless of its nature," said the ruling filed Friday and released yesterday.
A Justice Department spokesman said the ruling is being reviewed, but the provision was a "modest amendment to a pre-existing antiterrorism law that was designed to deal with real threats caused by support of terrorist groups."
Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, called it "significant that yet another court has delivered a rebuke to the government's unconstitutional policies and practices in the wake of September 11."
The court challenge was brought by the Humanitarian Law Project on behalf of five groups and two U.S. citizens, who sought to assist Kurdish refugees in Turkey. The Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey was designated as a terrorist organization in 1997 by Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright.
The plaintiffs say they wanted to give lawful and nonviolent support to the Kurds, but were threatened with 15 years in prison. The ruling rejected the Patriot provision because it did not allow for peaceful assistance or advice.
Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the provision makes it clear that "Americans are threatened as much by the person who teaches a terrorist to build a bomb as by the one who pushes the button."
"The Patriot Act is an essential tool in the war on terror and has played a key part - and often the leading role - in a number of successful operations to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America and our way of life," Mr. Corallo said.
Judge Collins, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1994, struck down a similar provision in a 1996 federal antiterrorism law that banned "training" or "providing" personnel to groups designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations. That law was enacted in response to the Oklahoma City bombing in which 168 persons were killed in a federal building.
Meanwhile, President Bush last week called on Congress to make numerous other contentious measures in the Patriot Act permanent, but a key House Republican has blocked any action until next year, when a new Congress - and perhaps a new president - will make the final decision.
Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., Wisconsin Republican and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, will wait until 2005 to hold hearings and consider changes to the law, his spokesman, Jeff Lungren, said yesterday.
"The chairman's intention is to continue to do aggressive oversight of the Patriot Act this year, and assuming that he is chairman next year, it is his intention to begin extensive hearings on the Patriot Act," Mr. Lungren said.
Congress put a four-year "sunset" or limit on several provisions in the law, which expires Dec. 31, 2005.
Congressional critics of the act say they will continue to push the Security and Freedom Ensured (SAFE) Act to amend the Patriot Act.
The bill would limit the use of "sneak and peek" search warrants that allow searches without notifying the target to situations where a life is at stake, evidence might be destroyed or if there is a flight risk.
Roving wiretaps, which allow surveillance of any phone a person is known to use, could be employed only when the suspect is present. Warrants for these wiretaps also must identify the target and location of the wiretap.
Sen. Larry E. Craig, Idaho Republican, said the legislation "is a measured, reasonable, and appropriate response to bipartisan concerns with the USA Patriot Act."
"The SAFE Act ensures that the liberties of law-abiding individuals are protected in our nation's fight against terrorism, without impeding that fight," Mr. Craig said.
At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Mr. Sensenbrenner said "over my dead body" will the act be reauthorized without undergoing thorough re-examination in hearings held by the House.
Mr. Bush told Congress that "the terrorist threat will not expire" on the same day as the Patriot Act.
"Our law enforcement needs this vital legislation to protect our citizens. You need to renew the Patriot Act," Mr. Bush said.
Claire Buchan, White House spokeswoman, yesterday said the president did not set a time frame.
"He was laying down the marker on a very important issue," she said.
Mr. Corallo at Justice said passage this year is "not imperative."
"The president wanted to spark the debate, to show that it is vitally imperative to this administration's ability to protect life and liberty."
The Patriot Act passed by overwhelming votes in the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks, but local governments nationwide are rejecting the law. The Los Angeles City Council last week became the 237th governing body in 37 states representing 34 million Americans to condemn the law and call for its repeal.
--------
Advice on Right to Counsel Upheld
'No Precedent' Noted in Issue of Recusal Over Hunting Trip
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50529-2004Jan26.html
The Supreme Court affirmed yesterday that police cannot question defendants who have already been indicted without advising them of their constitutional right to have a lawyer present during questioning.
By a vote of 9 to 0, the court ruled that Nebraska police violated Supreme Court precedent when they "deliberately elicited" incriminating statements from John J. Fellers, an alleged methamphetamine trafficker, as they arrested him at his home.
Since Fellers was under federal indictment, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wrote in the opinion for the court, his right to a lawyer under the Sixth Amendment was in effect, and he could be interrogated only if he waived it.
The ruling was a narrow one, however; the court declined to decide the broader question of whether statements Fellers gave police at the jailhouse a little while later, after waiving his rights, should also be thrown out, since the questions that police asked in the second encounter were derived from information gathered during the first.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit, based in St. Louis, had ruled that the jailhouse statements could be used against Fellers. But yesterday, the Supreme Court ordered the 8th Circuit to reconsider that ruling, noting that the standards for permissible questioning under the Sixth Amendment are not necessarily the same as those under the Fifth Amendment, which protects against self-incrimination.
The court has taken other cases this term in which it will define whether and under what circumstances police may use information derived from statements that suspects make without being warned of their Fifth Amendment rights to remain silent and to have counsel present during questioning.
The case decided yesterday is Fellers v. United States, No. 02-6320.
Separately, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist responded curtly to a request from two Democratic senators for more information about how justices decide whether to recuse themselves from cases.
After news reports about Justice Antonin Scalia's recent hunting trip to Louisiana with Vice President Cheney, who is a named party in a case pending before the court, Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Joseph I. Lieberman (Conn.), a Democratic presidential candidate, wrote to Rehnquist on Jan. 22, asking him to explain how justices decide whether they have a conflict of interest in a given case.
In his response, which was released by the court yesterday afternoon, Rehnquist said the senators' suggestions that Scalia should have recused from the Cheney case have "no precedent."
"A Justice must examine the question of recusal on his own even without a motion, and any party to a case may file a motion to recuse," Rehnquist wrote. "And anyone at all is free to criticize the action of a Justice -- as to recusal or as to the merits -- after the case has been decided. But I think that any suggestion by you . . . as to why a Justice should recuse himself in a pending case is ill considered."
Leahy said in a statement: "The question of recusal . . . is one best raised before a case is decided, in the interest of maintaining the public's confidence in our judicial system. Because Supreme Court decisions cannot be reviewed, waiting until after a case is decided needlessly risks an irreversible, tainted result."
-------- death penalty
Supreme Court to Review Using Execution in Juvenile Cases
January 27, 2004
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27SCOT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 26 - The Supreme Court agreed Monday to decide whether the Constitution prohibits the death penalty for crimes committed at the age of 16 or 17.
With capital punishment for juvenile offenders falling rapidly into disuse across most of the country - only two such death sentences were imposed last year and jurors in Virginia rejected the death penalty for Lee Malvo, the teenage sniper whom they convicted of murder - the justices will consider whether there is now a national consensus of the sort the court discerned two years ago when it prohibited the execution of mentally retarded defendants.
The outcome is uncertain. Opponents of the death penalty have pressed the court for several years to reconsider a 1989 decision that upheld capital punishment for older teenagers; a decision in 1988 struck down the death penalty for those age 15 and younger.
Four justices - John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen G. Breyer - have made clear their opposition to the death penalty for 16- and 17-year-olds, calling it "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society" when they dissented in 2002 from the court's refusal to take up the issue.
Despite that strong language, the four conspicuously did not manage to attract a fifth vote for their position then, and it is far from certain that a fifth vote exists today. In fact, the impetus to take up the issue this time may well have come from the court's more conservative members, responding to an appeal filed by the state of Missouri from a ruling by the Missouri Supreme Court last August that overturned the death sentence of a man who killed at age 17.
The defendant, Christopher Simmons, who is now 27, was convicted in 1993 of murdering a woman who recognized him when he broke into her house with a 15-year-old companion to commit a burglary.
A majority in the Missouri Supreme Court's 4-to-3 decision relied heavily on the United States Supreme Court's analysis in the mental retardation case, Atkins v. Virginia, for their conclusion that the execution of those who were younger than 18 when they committed their crimes had become so rare as to be "cruel and unusual punishment," prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.
Only three states, Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma, had executed juvenile offenders in the past 10 years, the state court observed.
Jeremiah W. Nixon, the Missouri attorney general, said in his appeal that the state court had defied a directly relevant precedent of the United States Supreme Court, the 1989 ruling in Stanford v. Kentucky.
"The decision in Stanford has not been overturned by this court, even though the court has had recent opportunities to do so," Mr. Nixon told the justices. He said the state court's departure threatened to "wreak havoc throughout the justice system."
The Stanford ruling held that there was no national consensus on executing juveniles and let stand the death penalty imposed on the defendant, Kevin N. Stanford. Mr. Stanford's sentence was later commuted by the governor of Kentucky.
The court will not hear the Missouri case, Roper v. Simmons, No. 03-633, until next October. Because the decision will turn on the court's view of the existence of a national consensus, the briefs of each side are likely to display dueling interpretations of the same evidence.
Of the 38 states that have a death penalty, 17 have set a minimum age of 18, either by legislation or judicial decision. That is an increase of five states since the Supreme Court found a lack of consensus on the question in its 1989 decision.
By contrast, only two states that had a death penalty barred execution of the mentally retarded in 1989, when the Supreme Court in a separate decision rejected a challenge to capital punishment for that category of defendants. The number grew to 18 by the time the court, concluding that there had been a "dramatic shift in the state legislative landscape," ruled in the Atkins case in 2002.
Justice Stevens, in a footnote to his majority opinion in the Atkins case, compared the trends in punishing mentally retarded and juvenile defendants, finding no such dramatic shift on the juvenile question. The contrast "is telling," Justice Stevens said.
Since his own view was that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, it is highly likely that he inserted that footnote to assure Justices Anthony M. Kennedy and Sandra Day O'Connor, both of whom joined the 6-to-3 majority, that the retardation decision did not foreordain a similar outcome for juveniles.
But the decision did not foreclose taking the next step. In retrospect, the footnote appears simply to have underscored the obvious: that Justices O'Connor and Kennedy hold the balance of power on the juvenile death penalty. Death penalty opponents need to persuade only one of them to prevail.
To that end, the opponents are likely to stress not only growing domestic opposition to executing juveniles but also, from an international perspective, the unmistakable isolation of the United States. In speeches and opinions, both Justices O'Connor and Kennedy have expressed growing interest in international legal developments.
The United States is the only country in which the execution of those under 18 is officially sanctioned and the only country that has not signed the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, which prohibits the practice. Worldwide, the last five executions of juvenile offenders have taken place in the United States, the most recent in Oklahoma last April.
Earlier this month, Amnesty International began a campaign to abolish what it calls the "heinous practice" of executing juvenile offenders.
The practice in the United States is highly uneven. Texas alone has accounted for 13 of the 22 juvenile executions since the modern era of capital punishment began in 1976. Of the 73 people currently on death row for crimes committed before the age of 18, almost a third are in Texas.
Since executing Scott A. Hain last year, Oklahoma has had no juvenile offenders on its death row. It has not sentenced any to death in the past eight years. Nationwide, only two juveniles were sentenced to death in 2003, the fewest in 15 years.
The juvenile death penalty issue came under public scrutiny last year when the Bush administration arranged to have Mr. Malvo, the younger of the pair of Washington-area snipers, tried in Virginia so that he might face the death penalty for a murder he was charged with committing at age 17. The jury convicted him of the murder but voted to spare his life.
Impact on Texas
HUNTSVILLE, Tex., Jan. 26 (AP) - Twenty-six Texas death row inmates, including three scheduled for lethal injection in the coming months, would be affected if the Supreme Court barred execution of convicted killers whose crimes were committed when they were younger than 18.
Under Texas law, a person who commits a capital murder at 17 can be sentenced to death. There are other states that extend capital punishment to 16-year-olds, but in Texas a 16-year-old charged with capital murder receives an automatic life prison term if convicted.
About a dozen men have been executed in Texas for crimes committed when they were 17 since 1982, when the state resumed executions. The three now on the execution schedule, all Harris County cases, are : Eddie Capetillo, set to die March 30; Efrain Perez, June 23; and Raul Villarreal, June 24.
Roe Wilson, who handles capital case appeals for the Harris County district attorney's office, said Mr. Capetillo's lawyer was already inquiring about seeking a reprieve.
Of the 26 now on death row in Texas, where the total death row population is 451, 10 are from Harris County. The most recent inmate to be executed for a crime committed when he was 17 was Toronto Patterson, who was 24 when he was put to death in August 2002 for killing a 3-year-old cousin at her Dallas home.
--------
A Death Penalty Revisited
High Court to Review Sentence of Man Who Killed at 17
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A50761-2004Jan26?language=printer
The Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will decide whether to abolish the death penalty for juvenile offenders, raising the prospect of a major change in capital punishment law.
In a brief order, the court said it will hear Missouri's appeal of a ruling last year by that state's Supreme Court, which decided that executing convicted murderer Christopher Simmons would be "cruel and unusual punishment" because Simmons was younger than 18 at the time of his crime. Oral arguments are to take place in the fall, with a decision by July 2005.
The U.S. Supreme Court last ruled on the death penalty for juvenile offenders in 1988 and 1989. In a pair of close votes, it stopped capital punishment for killers younger than 16 but permitted it for those 16 or 17. The Missouri court ruled 4 to 3 that a "national consensus" against the practice has since emerged.
The Missouri court said it was following not the Supreme Court's 1989 ruling but the line of constitutional reasoning laid out in 2002 when the Supreme Court banned the execution of mentally retarded offenders.
In that case, the justices ruled 6 to 3 that the cumulative effect of new state laws against executing mentally retarded offenders, which the court had upheld in 1989, confirmed that Americans now regarded it as "cruel and unusual," and as such a violation of the Constitution. The Missouri court said the same can now be said of the death penalty for offenders younger than 18, which is rarely imposed even where it is permitted.
Opponents of the death penalty say their case was bolstered by a Virginia jury's recent refusal to recommend death for convicted Washington area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, who was 17 when he killed FBI employee Linda Franklin.
An unusual aspect of the case announced yesterday, Roper v. Simmons, No. 03-633, is that most of the current justices have already expressed strong views on the issue: The four most liberal members have declared that the death penalty for juvenile offenders is unconstitutional, and three of the most conservative members have said it is not.
Thus the outcome is likely to hinge on the vote of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who has hedged.
In three cases since 2002, the court's four opponents of the death penalty for juveniles could not muster a fifth vote to stop the executions of petitioners who presented the court with many of the same arguments accepted by the Missouri Supreme Court in this case.
Each of those cases presented procedural issues that could justify avoiding a ruling on the merits. But in Roper, the Missouri court nearly forced the justices to tackle the issue by explicitly interpreting a Supreme Court decision in a way the justices themselves had not done.
The basic argument against the death penalty for murderers younger than 18 is that they, like the moderately mentally retarded, may be held accountable for their actions -- but lack the emotional and intellectual maturity to qualify for a penalty society reserves for its most blameworthy wrongdoers.
Recent science showing that brain development is still in flux during the teenage years buttresses this moral claim, opponents say.
But supporters of state laws permitting capital punishment for juvenile offenders say that any particular defendant's culpability is a matter for juries to decide case by case.
Many teenagers are capable of acting with cold malice, they note; Simmons bound and gagged Shirley Crook and threw her, still alive, off a railroad trestle into a river. A dissenting judge on the Missouri court pointed out that Simmons told an accomplice they could get away with it because they were juveniles.
Of the 38 states that have a death penalty, 16 do not permit the execution of juvenile offenders -- an increase of five states since 1989. Twelve states have no capital punishment at all, bringing the total number of states with no death penalty for juvenile offenders to 28. When the court abolished the death penalty for the mentally retarded, 30 states were in a comparable position.
There were 74 juvenile offenders on death row as of Oct. 16, 2003, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment.
Since the Supreme Court permitted the states to resume executions in 1976, 22 of the 887 people executed have been juvenile offenders, all of them in southern or border states. Texas leads with 13 such executions, followed by Virginia with three and Oklahoma with two. There is no federal or U.S. military death penalty for juveniles.
Though the number of juvenile offenders sentenced to death is relatively small -- 1 percent of all death sentences imposed in 2003 -- the symbolic importance of the issue is great. Death penalty opponents have mounted a major campaign around it, hoping to leverage their victory in the mental retardation case into another ban on a category of executions.
The opponents enjoy clear support from the court's liberal wing.
In October 2002, Justice John Paul Stevens published a dissenting opinion that declared the execution of juvenile killers "shameful" and "inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society."
He was joined by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
In 1989, by contrast, when the court voted 5 to 4 to permit the execution of 16- and 17- year-old offenders, Justice Antonin Scalia specifically rejected the kind of evidence of decreasing public support for executing juvenile offenders that death penalty opponents offer today, noting that since "a far smaller percentage of capital crimes are committed by persons under 18 than over 18, the discrepancy in treatment is much less than it might seem."
He was joined in that opinion by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Justice Clarence Thomas was not on the court at the time, but as a justice he has generally opposed overturning state death penalty laws.
But O'Connor, while voting with the majority in 1989, left the door open to a different result later.
In a separate concurring opinion, she said there was not enough evidence of a "general legislative rejection" of executing 16- and 17-year-olds, but conceded that "the day may come" when there is.
Kennedy's vote, too, may be in play. Though he voted as a first-year justice with Scalia and Rehnquist in the 1989 case, he joined O'Connor and the liberals in the ban on executing the mentally retarded in 2002.
--------
Supreme Court to rule on execution of minors
January 27, 2004
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040126-105849-9637r.htm
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to consider whether a constitutional ban on "cruel and unusual punishment" prohibits the execution of murderers convicted of crimes committed before their 18th birthday.
The high court agreed, without comment, to hear the case of Christopher Simmons, a Missouri man convicted 10 years ago - when he was 17 - in the death of a 46-year-old woman abducted from her home during a burglary, hogtied with electrical wire and duct tape, and thrown off a railroad trestle.
After several appeals, the Missouri Supreme Court last year ruled that it was unconstitutional to send people to their deaths for killings committed when they were younger than 18. The 4-3 decision by the state Supreme Court overturned the death sentence and ordered Simmons to life in prison instead.
Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon appealed the decision to the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that Missouri law properly allows the execution of 16- and 17-year-old killers and that it is an option that "should remain there for Missouri juries." Missouri has executed only one minor since 1937.
Missouri authorities said Simmons described to his friends how he planned to commit the crime and assured them that their status as juveniles would allow them to "get away with it."
In 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court forbade executions for those who had killed at age 15 or younger. A year later, the high court ruled 5-4 that killers who were 16 and 17 could be put to death. In a separate decision, it allowed the execution of people with mental disabilities.
Last year, the nation's high court forbade executing people with mental disabilities, citing "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society."
There are 83 juveniles currently on death rows nationwide, nearly half of whom are being held in Texas and Alabama. The states have executed 22 persons younger than 18 since 1973, including 13 in Texas, 3 in Virginia, 2 in Oklahoma and 1 each in Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri and South Carolina.
Lee Boyd Malvo was sentenced to life in prison after his conviction in Virginia for one of the sniper killings in the Washington area, but he faces additional trials and possible death-penalty sentences for crimes committed when he was 17.
In the pending Missouri case, Simmons and a co-defendant, Charlie Benjamin, then 15, were convicted of first-degree murder in the killing of Shirley Crook, who was tossed to her death off the trestle after being held captive for more than an hour.
Missouri authorities said Simmons and Benjamin broke into Mrs. Crook's home through a rear door, ordering the woman out of her bed and then binding her hands behind her back with duct tape. The teenagers then taped her eyes and mouth shut, they said, adding that Mrs. Crook then was forced into the back of her minivan and driven to a remote trestle that spanned the Meramec River about an hour away.
They said Simmons and Benjamin discovered that Mrs. Crook had freed her hands and removed some of the duct tape from her face. Using her purse strap, the belt from her bathrobe, a towel from the back of the van and some electrical wire found on the trestle, they said the teenagers retied her hands and feet and covered her head with the towel before Simmons pushed her into the river below.
Benjamin was sentenced to life in prison for his part in the murder.
The high court is expected to hear arguments in the Simmons case beginning in October.
In a December 2002 dissent, four Supreme Court justices called the execution of minors younger than 18 "a relic of the past ... inconsistent with evolving standards of decency in a civilized society." The four were John Paul Stevens, who was appointed by President Ford; David H. Souter, named to the bench by the first President Bush; and Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, both of whom were nominated by President Clinton.
Twelve states forbid the death penalty outright; 11 states, including Virginia, set 16 and older as the age requirement for the death penalty; five states have an age requirement of 17; and 14 states, including Maryland, set 18 and older as the death-penalty age requirement. Eight states have no age regulation.
-------- homeland security
New York Seeks Change in Disbursing Terror Funds
January 27, 2004
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/nyregion/27secure.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 25 - New York politicians in both parties say they are troubled that federal antiterrorism money specifically intended for the nation's most vulnerable cities is being spent in parts of the country that do not have urgent security needs.
The politicians argue that the way the federal government is doling out the money - apportioning it, they say, to a growing list of cities that face no apparent threat - is shortchanging New York City and other obvious targets for terrorists.
Early last year, President Bush and Congress established a fund for urban areas believed to be at high risk of attack. The fund was created in response to concerns that millions of dollars in federal homeland security money was being given to every state, regardless of its vulnerability.
Initially, the money for high-risk areas was distributed among 7 cities, and then, in May, among 30 cities, including New York, Washington, Los Angeles and Chicago. But in recent months, the number of eligible cities has grown to 50, reducing the share of money New York and other major cities had been counting on.
In May, for example, New York City was awarded about $125 million out of a total of $500 million in grants that Washington provided to vulnerable cities, according to the Department of Homeland Security. But in November, after more cities were added, New York's share was cut to $47 million of an additional $675 million that was disbursed.
President Bush is set to propose a new federal budget this week, and he said on Thursday that he would ask Congress to add more money for homeland security. Leading New York officials said they would urge Congress to limit the number of cities entitled to money intended for places most at risk of attack.
"The mayor fought hard to get money allocated for high-threat areas, but the funds are being diluted as more cities are added," said a spokesman for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Edward Skyler. "The vast majority of homeland security funds are already being distributed like political pork, and now what little there was for high-threat areas is meeting the same fate."
Last week, Representative Anthony D. Weiner, Democrat of Brooklyn, proposed legislation that would limit the number of cities entitled to such funding to no more than 15. Cities now eligible for so-called high-threat money include Louisville, Ky., Fresno, Calif., and St. Paul - "places that no one in their right mind would think of as a terror target," Mr. Weiner said.
Members of New York's Congressional delegation are also urging lawmakers from Washington, Los Angeles and other major cities to sign a letter, written by Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of Manhattan, urging President Bush to assure that federal security dollars are directed to localities where the threat of a terrorist attack is perceived to be greatest.
"The need for increased assistance in high-threat cities was once again made clear over the holidays, when the terror threat level was raised to Code Orange," the letter says. "All reports suggested that cities such as New York, Washington and Los Angeles are in Al Qaeda's bull's eye."
And on Friday, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton proposed providing $1.5 billion for high-threat urban areas, more than double the amount previously allotted. She also expressed support for limiting the number of cities eligible for such money, though she acknowledged that such a goal might be politically difficult to attain.
Mrs. Clinton, a Democrat, said "there are clearly certain places in our country" that are widely regarded as vulnerable to attack. "New York City is always on any list that anybody puts out."
It is unclear whether the efforts of New York's largely Democratic Congressional delegation will be successful, particularly since Republicans from other regions hold the top leadership positions in Congress. But in the past, President Bush and Congressional leaders have acquiesced to some of New York's arguments, possibly because they did not want to appear to be shortchanging the city hardest hit by terrorists.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said the department did not believe the federal government should limit the number of cities eligible for the pool of money designated for high-risk areas. Instead, he said, more money should be placed in that pool.
Meanwhile, Gov. George E. Pataki of New York, who tends to avoid putting his Republican allies in Washington on the spot publicly, is pressing the case. "Given that we know New York has been a target in the past and remains a potential target of terrorism, we will continue to push for a funding formula that fully recognizes the risks to New York," said a spokeswoman for Mr. Pataki, Lynn Rasic.
-------- human rights
Rights Group Disputes Iraq War Claim
By Michael McDonough
Associated Press
Tuesday, January 27, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A50638-2004Jan26.html
LONDON, Jan. 26 -- The war in Iraq should not be justified as a defense of human rights even though it brought down a brutal government, Human Rights Watch said Monday, dismissing one of the Bush administration's main arguments for the invasion.
While ousted president Saddam Hussein had an atrocious human rights record and life has improved for Iraqis since his removal, his worst actions occurred long before the war, the advocacy group said in its annual report. It said there was no ongoing or imminent mass killing in Iraq when the conflict began.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair cited the threat from Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction as their primary reason for attacking Iraq. But both leaders have also highlighted the brutality of the Hussein era when justifying military intervention.
Human Rights Watch rejected such claims.
"The Bush administration cannot justify the war in Iraq as a humanitarian intervention, and neither can Tony Blair," said Kenneth Roth, the group's executive director.
Atrocities such as the mass killing of Kurds would have justified humanitarian intervention, Roth said.
"But such interventions should be reserved for stopping an imminent or ongoing slaughter," he said. "They shouldn't be used belatedly to address atrocities that were ignored in the past."
The group's 407-page World Report 2004 also said the U.S. government was applying "war rules" to the struggle against global terrorism and denying suspects their rights. It suggested that "police rules" of law enforcement should be applied in such cases instead.
"In times of war you can detain someone summarily until the end of the war and you can shoot to kill. And those are two powers that the Bush administration wants to have globally," Roth said. "I think that's very dangerous."
Human Rights Watch criticized the United States for detaining 660 "enemy combatants" without charges at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Most of the detainees were captured in Afghanistan.
Government officials have described the lengthy detentions as vital to intelligence-gathering and said the information gleaned from prisoners has led to arrests around the world.
The New York-based group also said European and other governments were ignoring human rights abuses in the conflict in Chechnya, which Russia characterizes as its contribution to the global war on terror.
The annual survey featured 15 essays related to war and human rights. But unlike previous versions, it did not include summaries of human rights events in more than 70 countries where Human Rights Watch works. Instead, updates on those countries were posted on the group's Web site.
-------- immigration / refugees
North Korean refugees get harsh treatment on return
January 27, 2004
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040126-105905-2906r.htm
An increasing number of North Korean refugees are fleeing to China, where they are detained and sent back to face harsh treatment in their home country, according to a human rights activist from the region.
Tim Peters, a South Korea-based Christian activist who is part of a network of aid groups helping North Koreans in China, also said the United Nations refugee relief group in China is ignoring the plight of the fleeing North Koreans.
Mr. Peters, founder of the group Helping Hands Korea, said officials from the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Beijing have been banned from traveling to the Chinese-North Korean border, where they could assist the refugees.
The U.N. organization has the legal power under international law to help the fleeing North Koreans, but has failed to take action, Mr. Peters said.
"What is happening with the UNHCR is beyond disgusting," Mr. Peters said. "They've allowed the government to keep them cooped up in a compound in Beijing.
"They have the title, the mission and the mandate," Mr. Peters said. "And yet they seem more than happy just sitting on their hands."
Mr. Peters said the United States - both the Bush administration and Congress - should pressure China and the UNHCR into "helping these forgotten people."
Joung-ah Ghedini, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Washington, said China is not honoring a 1995 agreement that allows the UNHCR to help the fleeing North Koreans.
"We have not been able to access the border areas despite the agreement," she said. "The issue has been brought up numerous times with the Chinese."
Beijing has ignored the refugee problem by claiming that those fleeing are not properly classified as refugees.
Miss Ghedini said, however, there are refugees in the area.
"It is a difficult situation," she said. "And there are refugees there that need our protection and assistance."
Mr. Peters said many of the aid workers helping North Koreans who flee to China are Christians. "Most are strongly motivated by their Christian faith, he said.
At least five aid workers have been imprisoned in recent months, including Choi Bong-il, a South Korean recently sentenced to nine years in a Chinese labor camp.
To discourage the aid workers, China's government recently announced it would pay bounties to Chinese residents in northeastern China who inform on them.
North Koreans who are sent back by the Chinese are questioned upon their return about whether they had contact in China with Christians, Mr. Peters said.
If they answer yes, he said, the repatriated North Koreans are then sent to prison camps for "incorrigibles" - labor camps designed to kill those categorized as unreformable under the communist system.
Reports from humanitarian groups indicate that North Koreans, many of them starving because of the North's collapsed economy, are coming across the Chinese border in increasing numbers.
Several thousand North Koreans flee each year to China. They then are sent back under an agreement with the Pyongyang government.
In one recent case, more than a hundred North Koreans crossed the border and were picked up and placed in a detention camp by Chinese authorities, Mr. Peters said.
The refugee flow increases during the winter when the Yalu and Tumen rivers that delineate the North Korea-China border freeze over.
A report made public last week by Amnesty International stated that starving North Koreans have been executed for stealing food and have died of malnutrition in labor camps.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
World's Largest Solar Power Station Set for Summer
MUNICH, Germany, (ENS)
January 27, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jan2004/2004-01-27-19.asp#anchor6
Shell Solar GmbH and Gesellschaft für Solarenergie (GEOSOL) plan to build the largest solar power station in the world, south of Leipzig in Germany. GEOSOL is the initiator and project developer while Shell Solar is the prime construction contractor, the companies jointly announced last week.
The solar power station, due on stream in July, will be built on a former lignite mine ash deposit near Espenhain. The free-standing array will be made up of some 33,500 solar modules.
The total output of five megawatts will be fed directly into the grid operated by enviaM Mitteldeutsche Energie AG, and will be sufficient to meet the electricity demand of about 1,800 households.
The companies estimate the solar power station will save some 3,700 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
In the Epsenhain project, Shell Solar will be using high performance photovoltaic modules of the new Shell SQ series in large scale industrial production for the first time.
These modules are capable of handling high-voltage and delivering the highest energy yields.
Siemens AG is supplying the inverters, the transformers and the medium-voltage connection equipment.
To date, Shell Solar has supplied solar cells and modules with a total peak capacity in excess of 350 megawatts. This corresponds to about one-fifth of the entire capacity installed worldwide.
In 1997 Shell Solar completed an installation at the Munich Trade Centre that is still the world's largest roof mounted photovoltaic installation.
Shell Solar is part of Shell Renewables, a core business of the Royal Dutch/Shell Group of Companies.
----
Solar Power Industry Slowed by Pricey Silicon
Story by Georgina Prodhan
REUTERS GERMANY:
January 27, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23585/newsDate/27-Jan-2004/story.htm
BURGHAUSEN, Germany - The solar industry is exploring new ways to produce silicon needed for photovoltaic cells as high oil prices spark a renewed search for alternative energy sources.
The cells, used in solar panels that convert sunlight into electricity, are made of semiconducting materials - the same basic materials used to make microprocessor chips for computers.
Direct applications range from powering small devices like pocket calculators and watches to lighting and heating homes, and some 60 percent of solar power produced is used to provide power to national electric grids.
Found in quartz and sand, silicon is the second-most abundant element on Earth after oxygen. But processing the material is complex and expensive.
Soaring oil prices and competition for silicon from computer chipmakers have prompted a race to develop new ways of producing solar-grade silicon material more cheaply.
As chipmakers enjoy a recovery in their industry, the price of high-purity silicon - as cheap as $6 per kilogram (2.2 pounds) during the semi-conductor slump - has leaped tenfold.
But the purity of silicon needed for solar is not as high as that needed for microchips, and it is this market that companies such as Germany's Wacker Chemie want to exploit.
Wacker, 51 percent owned by the Wacker family and 49 percent by French-German drugmaker Aventis, believes it is ahead of the game with a process it has developed for solar-grade silicon at its main plant in Burghausen on the German-Austrian border.
"Of course some competitors may say it's not worth our while, but we have given a real commitment that we will invest specifically for pv (photovoltaic cells)," Ewald Schindlbeck, polysilicons director at Wacker Chemie, told Reuters.
Among other companies in the race are Joint Solar Silicon, a joint venture between Degussa and Deutsche Solar, and U.S. company Hemlock - a joint venture between Japan's Shin-Etsu and Mitsubishi and Dow Corning of the United States.
Norwegian metals company Elkem, the world's biggest producer of impure silicon, also says it has found a new refining method and has said it plans to make an announcement in January.
TOUGH COMPETITION
Power can be produced from traditional fossil fuels about four or five times more cheaply than solar. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the world's electricity consumption is currently generated with solar power, which is heavily subsidized to allow it to compete.
As the cost of silicon accounts for some 40 percent of the price of a solar installation, Michel Viaut, general secretary of the European Photovoltaic Industry Association lobby group, says an affordable supply is the only way of giving the solar industry a chance to compete.
Wacker thinks it has the answer. It says its new method can produce purified silicon of a high enough grade for the solar industry one-third more cheaply than the traditional, so-called "Siemens" process - and be ready to go into commercial production in 2006.
The traditional process involves reacting a hazardous liquid form of silicon, trichlorosilane, with hydrochloric acid at temperatures of more than 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit to create ingots of pure silicon around silicon rods.
It is a stop-start process that has to be halted to allow cooling and harvesting of the ingots, which are then crushed and cleaned.
NEW METHOD
Wacker's method uses milled silicon seed particles on a so-called "fludized bed" instead of silicon rods, giving a larger surface area for the reactions to occur and producing a continuous flow of silicon granules with no need for further cleaning.
The company says once it ramps up production from its current pilot projects it will be able to give long-term supply guarantees to the solar industry at around $32 a kilogram.
Wacker believes solar-cell makers would tolerate this price for the quality it says it can provide, and the EPIA's Viaut cautiously agrees that the price is in a realistic range.
He would certainly welcome any help for an industry still in its formative years.
"It's a very sensitive and still a very young sector," Viaut said. "Any little thing can make a huge difference to us."
(Additional reporting by Lucas van Grinsven in Amsterdam)
-------- health
Appeal for Aid to Fight Growing Bird-Flu Threat in Asia
January 27, 2004
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/international/asia/27CND-BIRD.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BANGKOK, Jan. 27 - China said late today that avian influenza had been found in fowl in three regions, and three international agencies issued a global appeal for donor nations to help bankroll Asia's fight to forestall a lethal flu epidemic in humans.
The official New China News Agency said that lab tests had confirmed that ducks were infected at a farm in the southern autonomous region of Guangxi Zhuang, near the border with Vietnam. Preliminary tests also showed bird flu among chickens at a household in the central province of Hubei and among ducks at a household in the central province of Hunan.
All of the Chinese bird cases involve the deadly A(H5N1) virus, which has spread among chickens from Japan to Cambodia, and has infected a dozen people in Thailand and Vietnam, with many more cases suspected. But the New China News Agency said no human cases had been found in China.
Other countries, notably Australia, had urged China to acknowledge persistent reports of bird flu there. Public health experts suspect the disease may have originated in China, because there have been small outbreaks in Hong Kong almost every year since 1997; Hong Kong authorities have attributed those outbreaks to migratory birds that would have crossed mainland China to reach Hong Kong.
The presence of the disease in China, a crowded country with 1.3 billion people and a huge poultry industry, increases the risk that the virus might spread to people. China's insistence until late today that it had no cases of the disease is likely to draw comparisons to its handling last winter of the first cases of SARS, which were hidden from the world for four months.
Earlier today, the World Health Organization, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Organization for Animal Health appealed for wealthier countries to help foot the large and rising bill to compensate farmers for the slaughter of tens of millions of chickens.
Some farmers in Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia have been selling or smuggling out chickens from infected flocks rather than let government workers or soldiers slaughter them with little or no compensation.
"Although it has not happened yet, the so-called `bird flu' presents a risk of evolving into an efficient and dangerous human pathogen," that could pass swiftly from person to person, the three agencies said in a statement.
Dr. Shigeru Omi, the W.H.O.'s regional director for the Western Pacific, said at a news conference in Hanoi today that an outbreak of A(H5N1) in people could kill millions.
Most influenza viruses occur in birds, and scientists believe that flu pandemics in people occur when a new strain of avian influenza jumps the species barrier and evolves so that it can be transmitted easily from person to person. That evolution can occur if a person is infected with avian and human influenza strains at the same time and they combine to produce a more transmissible and potentially more harmful virus.
Thailand announced today that it would spend $64 million to provide compensation to farmers that would come close to matching market prices for chickens before the outbreak. But Indonesia said it would try to vaccinate birds against a swiftly spreading outbreak there, and would allow the sale of meat from infected flocks in order to help farmers cover their costs.
W.H.O. officials strongly criticized Indonesia's approach, saying that vaccinated birds could still be carriers of the disease even if they did not become ill, and that the movement of infected birds for sale could also spread the disease.
Vietnam has been paying as little as 10 cents on the dollar in compensation, and veterinarians there have estimated that farmers quickly sold close to a million chickens to the public rather than lose them in culls.
"Farmers in affected areas urgently need to kill infected and exposed animals and require support to compensate for such losses," said Jacques Diouf, the director general of the Food and Agriculture Organization, a United Nations agency. "This will represent a huge cost, especially to struggling economies and small farmers. The international community has a stake in the success of these efforts and poorer nations will need help."
Japan has donated to Vietnam a small shipment of Tamiflu, a costly antiviral drug that may prevent the disease or limit its severity. But Western countries have done little beyond sending a handful of doctors as advisers.
Today Thailand reported its second death from bird flu, that of a 6-year-old boy; Vietnam confirmed another human case, its seventh; and Laos announced that it had found the disease in chickens.
Dr. Bjorn Melgaard, the W.H.O.'s chief representative in Thailand, said that while it was impossible to predict when the disease might evolve for easy transmission among people, each additional human case raised the possibility of that happening.
Public health experts hope that if they can limit or even stop the spread of the disease among poultry, they can delay the evolution of the disease at least until next winter's flu season, and possibly prevent it entirely.
Dick Thompson, a W.H.O. spokesman, said that scientists should be able to produce in four to eight weeks the seed stock that pharmaceutical companies need to start testing and then mass-producing a vaccine - a process that could then take several more months.
The culling of birds has been a brutal process. In Thailand, workers, soldiers and prisoners have been stuffing chickens in plastic bags, dumping the bags in pits, sprinkling the bags with lime to hasten decomposition and then burying the chickens alive.
Hans Wagner, an F.A.O. livestock expert, said that while the burials did not meet even minimum animal welfare standards, Thailand did face a public health emergency and did not have the facilities for more humane methods, such as gassing or electrocuting the birds.
Another worry for health officials is the huge number of chickens raised by small farmers or even kept as pets, in close proximity to people who might become infected.
Soiaphong Suchitta, the manager of a shop in Suphan Buri Province, in western Thailand, said that he and his wife had kept two hens as pets, as many people do in a province where statues of chickens appear on the rooftops of homes and in front of Buddhist temples. One of the hens died on Saturday of what Mr. Soiaphong thinks was bird flu.
When he reported the bird's death and its appearance, he said, the government sent a veterinarian to take away the body for examination.
Mr. Soiaphong said that he and his wife and 15-month-old daughter felt fine, and were mostly worried about what the extermination of much of the province's chicken population would do to the economy.
"Everybody is very serious about this one," he said, "because in Suphan Buri Province, the chicken is very important."
--------
Bird flu poses no threat to U.S.; CDC warns tourists
January 27, 2004
By Tom Carter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040127-121255-9163r.htm
The outbreak of bird flu, which has killed seven persons and led to the slaughter of millions of chickens in Southeast Asia, poses no threat in the United States and little peril to American tourists, health officials say.
Unlike with the deadly SARS virus that killed hundreds of people last year in Asia and Canada, the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued no travel warnings for the affected countries, primarily because the disease is not known to spread from person to person.
The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recommends that travelers to nations with bird-flu cases simply stay away from poultry farms and open markets.
The biggest fear among public officials is that an individual already infected with a human flu strain could catch bird flu, also known as avian influenza, at the same time.
"It is very scary," said Dave Daigle, spokesman for infectious diseases at the CDC.
"So far, people who have contracted the disease got it by handling chickens, from contact with [chicken] feces or saliva. If you already had human H3N1 flu, the strain that is going around this year, and you contracted bird flu and the viruses combined. ... This has the potential for a global pandemic if we see human-to-human transmission."
The fear is that the genetic material from the two viruses could combine and produce a deadly, new disease, Mr. Daigle said.
"This is not a theoretical concern, and we believe it becomes more likely as more people are infected," he said.
For that reason, public health officials are closely tracking the bird-flu virus, known as H5N1.
The CDC has two teams on the ground working with the WHO to corral the disease and stop its spread.
When a chicken gets the bird flu, it usually dies. Any chicken within a three-mile radius of the sick bird must be killed and destroyed to contain the disease.
Millions of chickens have died or been slaughtered in Asia in the past few weeks in an effort to stop the disease.
Vietnam has slaughtered more than 3 million chickens, Pakistan 4 million and Thailand some 9 million.
Yesterday, Indonesia announced it had detected the disease in its chickens, joining Pakistan, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.
Chickens were also being tested in Laos, and Reuters news agency quoted an unnamed government official early today as saying the tests had confirmed the presence of bird flu.
The U.S. poultry industry said there is little or no chance of the disease reaching American shores and endangering poultry business here.
It is believed the disease infected Asian chickens after the birds came in contact with migratory wild ducks, which come from Siberia and winter in Southeast and South Asia.
The virulent strain of bird flu carried by these ducks is not found in the Western Hemisphere. In addition, there are barriers between U.S. birds being raised for consumption, often in closed buildings, and wild fowl.
Richard Lobb, spokesman for the National Chicken Council, representing farmers who produce 8.5 billion chickens a year, said yesterday American consumers have nothing to fear.
"The United States exports chicken. We import very, very little, and what we do import is processed, smoked chicken from Israel, some pate from France, a small amount of fresh chicken from Canada. Nothing from Asia," he said.
He said that avian flu does occur here, noting that 5 million birds were put down in Virginia in 2002, but it was a "low-pathogen" variety of bird flu, equivalent to the "sniffles" and a danger only to other chickens.
He said it would be difficult for a terrorist to bring the Asian bird flu to the United States and infect American birds.
"[Terrorism] is something the industry is aware of. I've heard it spoken about in conferences. Only authorized people are allowed on the farms near the birds," he said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Leak against this war - by Daniel Ellsberg
US and British officials must expose their leaders' lies about Iraq - as I did over Vietnam
Daniel Ellsberg
The Guardian,
Tuesday January 27, 2004
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1132043,00.html
After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year's Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army's 25th Division, moving through tall rice, the water over our ankles, when we heard firing close behind us. We spun around, ready to fire. I saw a boy of about 15, wearing nothing but ragged black shorts, crouching and firing an AK-47 at the troops behind us. I could see two others, heads just above the top of the rice, firing as well.
They had lain there, letting us four pass so as to get a better shot at the main body of troops. We couldn't fire at them, because we would have been firing into our own platoon. But a lot of its fire came back right at us. Dropping to the ground, I watched this kid firing away for 10 seconds, till he disappeared with his buddies into the rice. After a minute the platoon ceased fire in our direction and we got up and moved on.
About an hour later, the same thing happened again; this time I only saw a glimpse of a black jersey through the rice. I was very impressed, not only by their tactics but by their performance.
One thing was clear: these were local boys. They had the advantage of knowing every ditch and dyke, every tree and blade of rice and piece of cover, like it was their own backyard. Because it was their backyard. No doubt (I thought later) that was why they had the nerve to pop up in the midst of a reinforced battalion and fire away with American troops on all sides. They thought they were shooting at trespassers, occupiers, that they had a right to be there and we didn't. This would have been a good moment to ask myself if they were wrong, and if we had a good enough reason to be in their backyard to be fired at.
Later that afternoon, I turned to the radio man, a wiry African American kid who looked too thin to be lugging his 75lb radio, and asked: "By any chance, do you ever feel like the redcoats?"
Without missing a beat he said, in a drawl: "I've been thinking that ... all ... day." You couldn't miss the comparison if you'd gone to grade school in America. Foreign troops far from home, wearing helmets and uniforms and carrying heavy equipment, getting shot at every half-hour by non-uniformed irregulars near their own homes, blending into the local population after each attack.
I can't help but remember that afternoon as I read about US and British patrols meeting rockets and mines without warning in the cities of Iraq. As we faced ambush after ambush in the countryside, we passed villagers who could have told us we were about to be attacked. Why didn't they? First, there was a good chance their friends and family members were the ones doing the attacking. Second, we were widely seen by the local population not as allies or protectors - as we preferred to imagine - but as foreign occupiers. Helping us would have been seen as collaboration, unpatriotic. Third, they knew that to collaborate was to be in danger from the resistance, and that the foreigners' ability to protect them was negligible.
There could not be a more exact parallel between this situation and Iraq. Our troops in Iraq keep walking into attacks in the course of patrols apparently designed to provide "security" for civilians who, mysteriously, do not appear the slightest bit inclined to warn us of these attacks. This situation - as in Vietnam - is a harbinger of endless bloodletting. I believe American and British soldiers will be dying, and killing, in that country as long as they remain there.
As more and more US and British families lose loved ones in Iraq - killed while ostensibly protecting a population that does not appear to want them there - they will begin to ask: "How did we get into this mess, and why are we still in it?" And the answers they find will be disturbingly similar to those the American public found for Vietnam.
I served three US presidents - Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - who lied repeatedly and blatantly about our reasons for entering Vietnam, and the risks in our staying there. For the past year, I have found myself in the horrifying position of watching history repeat itself. I believe that George Bush and Tony Blair lied - and continue to lie - as blatantly about their reasons for entering Iraq and the prospects for the invasion and occupation as the presidents I served did about Vietnam.
By the time I released to the press in 1971 what became known as the Pentagon Papers - 7,000 pages of top-secret documents demonstrating that virtually everything four American presidents had told the public about our involvement in Vietnam was false - I had known that pattern as an insider for years, and I knew that a fifth president, Richard Nixon, was following in their footsteps. In the fall of 2002, I hoped that officials in Washington and London who knew that our countries were being lied into an illegal, bloody war and occupation would consider doing what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did, before the bombs started to fall: expose these lies, with documents.
I can only admire the more timely, courageous action of Katherine Gun, the GCHQ translator who risked her career and freedom to expose an illegal plan to win official and public support for an illegal war, before that war had started. Her revelation of a classified document urging British intelligence to help the US bug the phones of all the members of the UN security council to manipulate their votes on the war may have been critical in denying the invasion a false cloak of legitimacy. That did not prevent the aggression, but it was reasonable for her to hope that her country would not choose to act as an outlaw, thereby saving lives. She did what she could, in time for it to make a difference, as indeed others should have done, and still can.
I have no doubt that there are thousands of pages of documents in safes in London and Washington right now - the Pentagon Papers of Iraq - whose unauthorised revelation would drastically alter the public discourse on whether we should continue sending our children to die in Iraq. That's clear from what has already come out through unauthorised disclosures from many anonymous sources and from officials and former officials such as David Kelly and US ambassador Joseph Wilson, who revealed the falsity of reports that Iraq had pursued uranium from Niger, which President Bush none the less cited as endorsed by British intelligence in his state of the union address before the war. Both Downing Street and the White House organised covert pressure to punish these leakers and to deter others, in Dr Kelly's case with tragic results.
Those who reveal documents on the scale necessary to return foreign policy to democratic control risk prosecution and prison sentences, as Katherine Gun is now facing. I faced 12 felony counts and a possible sentence of 115 years; the charges were dismissed when it was discovered that White House actions aimed at stopping further revelations of administration lying had included criminal actions against me.
Exposing governmental lies carries a heavy personal risk, even in our democracies. But that risk can be worthwhile when a war's-worth of lives is at stake.
· Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: a Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.
http://www.ellsberg.net
--------
Whatever happened to Dr. King's anti-war message?
Tuesday 27 January
by Susu Jeffrey
Pulse of the Twin Cities
http://www.pulsetc.com/article.php?sid=877
When my husband returned from Vietnam he wanted to sleep with me and his gun. Our marriage ended and so did his life a few years later; one night his heart and brain just turned to mush. Doctors doing the autopsy on this young man never found a cause of death. Of course, they didn't ask the right questions.
His family thinks he was microwaved by his equipment, by just-doing-his-job. His job was to neutralize "the enemy" - one of whom turned out to be a Vietnamese maid who cleaned up his air-conditioned quarters.
War does not bring peace. War is a failure, a breakdown. Freedom is not preserved by fighting.
The U.S. national debt is $7 trillion. The greatest threat to American freedoms is the billion dollars per week going to Iraq. A billion dollars a week is sucked out of our economy and we have 40 kids in a classroom, homelessness, a crisis in health care, more people working more jobs and fewer people earning a living wage.
Our domestic tranquility is being disturbed by the disappearance of the middle class.
Democracy requires a middle class that is economically secure, has enough leisure time to be educated, and has access to accurate news. The truth leaking out of U.S. armed service compounds in Iraq is that suicide is up, troops are refusing to go out on patrol, and soldiers on-leave are deserting rather than returning to the war zone.
When young people join up for a green card, health insurance for the family or because there are no other jobs-that is not free choice. What kind of freedom is available to young men being advised to "bank your sperm" because you may be exposed to depleted uranium which could cause birth defects in your children, or your children's children. It is impossible for service women to "bank your eggs" against future genetic damage.
It is difficult to get much news from our narrow and propagandized media. The watered-down Martin Luther King message is an example: A dream. Dr. King had a dream and an economic vision to get from here to there. King pointed to the war and the poor, tied to the same economic continuum. He died supporting striking sanitation workers in Memphis and opposing the war in Vietnam. King called for "A radical redistribution of economic and political power ... a revolution of values."
I did not hear the call for a boycott of war this Martin Luther King birthday weekend. In some speeches the word "Iraq" was not mentioned. In Vietnam 11 percent of U.S. soldiers were black and they suffered 23 percent of the "casualties." The singer Gil Scott-Heron commented, "Nothing casual about death."
About 16,000 Iraqis are reported killed in the second Bush-Iraq war, 9,000 American troops have been injured, in addition to more than 500 casualties. Pvt. Jessica Lynch was injured in a traffic accident, she didn't fire her weapon-it malfunctioned-and she will wear a colostomy bag for the rest of her life. Soldiers carry weapons and are targeted whether they serve food, fix machines or go out on patrol. They all wear the same uniform.
The war always comes home-domestic violence, police violence, economic fallout with its attendant underground economy. In the Twin Cities we have Alliant Techsystems Corporation with their depleted uranium war profits and employees. "The Kosovo War has been very profitable for us," CEO Paul David Miller announced in 2000. Miller made $16.8-million in 2002.
Patrick Nauheimer, a career Marine from St. Louis Park, died in 1995 of virulent leukemia at age 31 after being sent to Kuwait to clean up U.S. war debris. His family believes he was contaminated by highly radioactive war waste.
Two and one-half million jobs have disappeared under Bush II. Huge income disparities at home, trashing the Bill of Rights for corporate security, a fear-&-revenge based national policy-we have soldiers in 150 countries and we're losing our freedom.
We need nurses and teachers and a living wage so we can pay each other. Instead we have soldiers all over the globe and guns in suburban high schools. If war worked it would have worked by now. I come down on manufacturing depleted uranium bullets and shells, and on soldiering, because it's bad for the soul of the nation. One Iraqi vet home on leave told his mother his job is to burn Iraqi bodies. You don't want anybody you love to live with that.
-------
New Zealanders Demand Closure of 'Spy Base'
by Norm Dixon
Jan 27, 2004
New Standard
http://newstandardnews.net/content/?action=show_item&itemid=151
People from across New Zealand converged January 17 at the government's satellite station in the Waihopai valley, to demand its closure. More than 40 people joined the protest, according to the protest organizer, the Christchurch's Anti-Bases Campaign (ABC). The protest was addressed by representatives of New Zealand's Green Party and the left wing Alliance party.
The ABC describes the Waihopai installation as a "spy base" because they say it is a key component of the super-secret world network of electronic listening posts, codenamed "Echelon".
Based on interviews with more than 50 former employees of the intelligence services of countries involved with Echelon, New Zealand journalist Nicky Hager reported that the Waihopai station is part of the Echelon system and records all email, telephone calls and faxes sent by satellite between particular countries, primarily in the western Pacific. It then electronically sorts and stores any material containing particular keywords in a vast database. This database is accessible by all member-governments of Echelon.
In 1997, a report commissioned by the Scientific and Technological Options Assessment (STOA) department of the Directorate-General for Research of the European Parliament found that all email, telephone and fax communications in Europe were routinely intercepted by the US National Security Agency, via the Echelon network. A 2001 report by STOA reiterated these findings, saying, "The existence of a global system for intercepting communications, operated by means of cooperation proportionate to their capabilities among the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand under the UKUSA Agreement, is no longer in doubt." The report stated further that "There can now be no doubt that the purpose of the system is to intercept, at the very least, private and commercial communications ... although the technical capabilities of the system are probably not nearly as extensive as some sections of the media had assumed." The report recommended that European Union governments use encryption to avoid interception by Echelon.
The 2001 report notes that the US National Security Agency refuses to admit to the existence of the UK-USA agreement or the Echelon system. However, in 1999, Martin Brady, then-director of Australia's electronic monitoring agency, the Defence Services Directorate (DSD), admitted in a letter to television reporter Ross Coulhart, that the Australian government was a party to the Echelon network, according to Nine Network's Sunday Program.
The ABC claims that Waihopai's two giant domes, which contain satellite interception dishes, make New Zealand a direct contributor to US President George Bush's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in any future unilateral military operation Washington may launch.
The New Zealand government, led by the Labour Party, budgeted almost NZ$30 million last year to fund the Government Communications Security Bureau, which operates the Waihopai and Tangimoana installations, according to the Green Party's foreign affairs spokesperson Keith Locke.
The ABC also notes that bases' operations are exempt from key provisions of New Zealand's privacy and crimes acts, making their activities unaccountable to the country's parliament.
The Waihopai protest has become an annual event. The action at the Waihopai base was the culmination of a weekend of protest activity. It began with a public meeting in Blenheim on January 16, attended by 60 people, and a rally and march in central on January 17, according to reports carried on IndyMedia New Zealand.
~~ Norm Dixon is a former editor of Green Left Weekly, Australia's leading radical newsweekly.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.