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NUCLEAR
URANIUM: "SAVE CORP. MAJOR MELIS", LOBBY IN SARDINIA
Pakistan top nuclear command meets amid probe into alleged leaks
Pakistan's top nuclear scientist sacked amid leaks probe
Pakistan's nuclear hero throws open Pandora's box
Pakistan's Nuclear Responsibility
Pakistan Fires Top Nuclear Scientist
Pakistan Sacks 'Father' of Nuclear Program
U.S. Envoy Mildly Optimistic on Feb. N.Korea Talks
Pentagon to seek big boost in missile defense spending
Bush Seeking a Large Rise in Missile Defense Spending
Russia plans nuclear war games
Nuclear plant poll supports extension option
N.R.C. Orders Talks on Safety at 3 Reactors in New Jersey
Kerry criticized as foe of defense
Bush Considering Independent Probe on Iraq WMD
Cheney Appears to Soften on Iraq Weapons
MILITARY
U.S. Pressing EU to Uphold Arms Embargo Against China
After eight years in an Indian jail
Recalling Pol Pot's Terror, but Forgetting His Backers
U.S. Official, in Beijing, Questions Taiwan's Referendum Plans
Much of Europe Is Derisive About Report on Iraqi Arms
Most Iran Candidates Are Not Reinstated
Iran Council Restores More, but Not Most, Names to Ballot
U.S. argues World Court has no right to judge Israel
Castro Says Bush Plotting to Kill Him
Jordan, UAE sign 25-million-dollar deal to set up military factory
Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda
Get smart about intelligence
No Evidence CIA Slanted Iraq Data
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission
Seven Flights to and From U.S. Are Canceled
New Concern Is Expressed About Flights From Abroad
New Air Terror Concerns Raised
FBI Investigates Head of Detroit Office
OTHER
Proposed Mercury Rules Bear Industry Mark
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
URANIUM: "SAVE CORP. MAJOR MELIS", LOBBY IN SARDINIA
AGENZIA GIORNALISTICA ITALIA,
Jan 31, 2004
http://www.agi.it/english/news.pl?doc=200401311507-1089-RT1-CRO-0-NF11&page=0&id\=agionline-eng.oggitalia
(AGI) - Cagliari, Italy - He's not even 30 years old and already the Hodgkin's lymphoma that he caught whilst on peace missions to Bosnia and Macedonia at the end of the nineties is killing him in a hospital bed in Cagliari.
Corporal Major Valery Melis, from Quartu Sant'Elena is in intensive care after having had an immediate stem cell transplant in a Milanese centre.
Around fifty friends and relatives are taking action on his behalf and today they have decided to protest in front of the Sardinia military headquarters. They want the affliction to be officially recognised as linked to service because Valery only got his operation thanks to a collection and he needs to be urgently transferred, preferably by military plane, to a specialist hospital in England or the United States.
Friends for the young soldier have started a campaign by internet so that his case is given due recognition and e-mails are being sent to the Italian president, the prime minister and to the ministers of defence and health. The Committee of Parents to Soldiers who Died during Peacetime and the ANA-Vafaf (the National Association for Assistance to Enlisted Victims from the Armed Forces and their Families) are also fighting on his behalf. A few days ago, the president, Falco Accame, sent an appeal to the head of State, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, attributing the young man's affliction as being due probably to uranium.
Accame wrote, "Maybe he will be able to get the treatment he has needed for some time now thanks only to your assistance. At the time of writing, more than 20 soldiers have died and 200 are stricken and there are countless cases where soldiers (and non-soldiers) have had babies with deformities at birth". Valery said that since he was diagnosed with the disease in 1999 after his final four-month long mission to Macedonia, "No military personnel have ever come to pay me a visit. Nobody ever told me not to worry, that they were doing something for me". His case was also made public by a friend, Lieut. Cristiano Pireddu, with letters to the daily papers and the TV channels. Pireddu was then suspended from service. A few days later someone wrote the words "Do justice to people who's got uranium" near the entrance of the Military HQ in Via Torino in Sardinia. Valery Melis had also helped write it. The MP, Piergiorgio Massidda, presented a paper to the prime minister and the ministers of health and defence.
"It would seem that Valery Melis has been completely forgotten by all the official bodies," wrote the Sardinian-born minister, "and left to fight this terrible illness alone, without enough financial help from the State. Even today, it has not been recognised as the result of military service. They even suspended his salary to begin with, whilst the refunds for his medical costs have been ridiculous. We must find out what happened and the reasons for the delays and/or the lack of practical assistance for Valery Melis". (AGI) .
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan top nuclear command meets amid probe into alleged leaks
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Jan 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040131085321.sj4pbygh.html
Pakistan's political and military leaders met Saturday for talks expected to focus on a two-month probe into the suspected selling of Pakistani nuclear know-how to Iran and Libya, officials said.
The National Command Authority (NCA) meeting, held under the chairmanship of President Pervez Musharraf, was the first since the probe was launched on the basis of information received from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
It was also attended by Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali, military chiefs and ministers for the interior, defence, finance and foreign affairs, a foreign ministry official told AFP.
The NCA, set up by Musharraf four months after he grabbed power in a military coup in October 1999, controls the entire nuclear establishment and army and air force strategic command.
The meeting in Rawalpindi, near the capital Islamabad, was expected to discuss the outcome of the investigation, during which nearly a dozen nuclear scientists and officials have been interrogated, the official said.
The architect of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, has also been questioned over suspicions that he was a primary source of the transfer of Pakistan's nuclear data through the international black market mafia trading in nuclear technology.
The government initiated the probe after the IAEA shared with Islamabad in November information provided to it by Iran about the possible involvement of Pakistani scientists and officials in selling nuclear secrets for personal profit.
Five nuclear scientists have been exonerated by investigators while six other individuals, including three officials, are still being interrogated with the probe said to be on the verge of completion.
The interior ministry said in a statement overnight that, "If anyone is found to be involved in any wrongdoing, his deeds would be brought before the nation."
The statement said Khan, who is considered a national hero, was being questioned but "as yet he has not been found guilty."
Two government officials told AFP Friday that Khan was a prime suspect in the probe.
----
Pakistan's top nuclear scientist sacked amid leaks probe
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Jan 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040131141119.f57ak5av.html
The architect of Pakistan's nuclear programme was sacked as a government adviser Saturday to "facilitate" a probe into the suspected sale of nuclear technology to Iran and Libya, the government said.
The decision, which came after a meeting of the country's political and military leaders chaired by President Pervez Musharraf, will shock a nation accustomed to revering Abdul Qadeer Khan as a hero.
"In the background of the investigations into alleged acts of nuclear proliferation by a few individuals and to facilitate those investigations in a free and objective manner, Dr. A.Q. Khan, special advisor to the prime minister on strategic programme with the status of a federal minister, has ceased to hold the office," a government statement said.
Government officials told AFP on Friday that Khan was a primary suspect in the alleged transfer of Pakistan's nuclear data to other nations in the late 1980s and early 1990s through the international black market mafia trading in nuclear technology.
The National Command Authority (NCA), which controls Pakistan's nuclear establishment and army and air force strategic command, met Saturday to discuss the investigation into the alleged leaks of national nuclear technology.
It was the first time it had met since a government investigation was launched into the matter two months ago on the basis of information received from the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The information provided to the IAEA by Iran referred to the possible involvement of Pakistani scientists and officials in selling nuclear secrets for personal profit.
Khan, who is credited with developing Pakistan's nuclear capability, has been questioned regularly since the investigation started.
Regarded as a national hero for helping Pakistan become a nuclear state in response to nuclear tests by India, the 66-year-old scientist has not been detained during the probe -- unlike about a dozen other scientists and officials.
Five nuclear scientists have been exonerated by investigators while six other individuals, including three officials, are still being interrogated with the probe said to be on the verge of completion.
In a statement released after its meeting, the NCA condemned and distanced itself from individual acts of indiscretion in the past.
It said Pakistan's nuclear capability was solely for deterrence against aggression and "it would never be in the national interest to share this technology in whatever form with any other country."
"Pakistan took its international obligations with the utmost seriousness and in this regard, the government condemns and distances itself in categorical terms from individual acts of indiscretion in the past," the NCA said.
"With regard to the investigations, the NCA was informed that it was nearly concluded and appropriate action will be taken against those found guilty," it said.
In March 2001 Khan was relieved of the post of director general of the country's main uranium enrichment facility, Khan Research Laboratories (KRL), where he had served since 1976, and made a special government adviser on strategic and KRL affairs.
----
Pakistan's nuclear hero throws open Pandora's box
Investigators have uncovered a sophisticated black market in components with Islamabad at its centre
Ian Traynor in Vienna
Saturday January 31, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,3858,4848960-103595,00.html
While on a tour of eight Asian countries in the summer of 2002, Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, arrived in Islamabad with a special request.
Mr Powell asked Pakistan's president, General Pervez Musharraf, to arrest Abdul Qadeer Khan, the mastermind of Pakistan's nuclear weapons programme and a hero in the country. His demand was extraordinary but so were the allegations which went with it.
He said Mr Khan needed to be questioned over the alleged secret trading of Pakistan's nuclear technology to North Korea and he had evidence.
An American spy satellite had recorded images of a Pakistani transport plane being loaded with missile parts in North Korea. It was, the US believed, part of a barter deal trading Pakistani nuclear know-how for missiles.
According to sources in Washington, Mr Powell offered Gen Musharraf assistance for an inquiry into Mr Khan's activities. The Guardian has learned that money, equipment and lie detectors for interrogations would be made available. Gen Musharraf rejected the overture but the case against Mr Khan has been building up inexorably since.
Yesterday, Mr Khan was under effective house arrest in Islamabad waiting to hear if he will face charges of treason.
Global network
The evidence being considered is embarrassing for Pakistan, whose scientists are accused of being at the centre of the illegal and dangerous trade in nuclear secrets.
Astonishing details of their alleged involvement not only with North Korea but with Libya and Iran have emerged in the last two months after the UN's demand that Iran provide its investigators with a comprehensive record of its 20-year-old nuclear effort. The UN's nuclear detectives, acting on names and contacts supplied by Tehran plus information gleaned in Iran, found evidence which pointed to Pakistan as the source for Iran's uranium enrichment technology.
But in an interview with a Pakistani satellite channel last month Mr Khan denied any involvement with Iran. "I am being accused for nothing, I never visited Iran, I don't know any Iranian, nor do I know any Iranian scientist.I will be tar geted naturally because I made the nuclear bomb, I made the missile," he said.
When Libya's leader, Colonel Muammar Gadafy, volunteered last month to scrap his covert nuclear bomb project, MI6, the CIA and UN inspectors from Vienna got a glimpse of Libya's equipment and concluded that Pakistan and Mr Khan were again the source, directly or indirectly, of the bomb-making equipment.
Gary Milhollin, head of the Wilson Project, a counter-proliferation group, said: "In all three places [North Korea, Iran and Libya], it's the same designs and technology. It was pilfered by A Q Khan. It's old but it works. The Pakistanis used it to make 30 bombs."
Gary Samore, a former Clinton Administration official and nuclear expert at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, says the link between Pakistan and Iran is clear, while the more recent disclosures from Libya also point to Pakistan.
"The operating assumption is that Pakistani scientists sold designs and perhaps centrifuges to Iran and Libya."
The result is that almost two years after Gen Musharraf rebuffed Mr Powell and almost 30 after Mr Khan absconded from the Netherlands with top secret blueprints on how to enrich uranium, the scientist feted in Pakistan may be about to face trial.
One of his key aides, Mohammed Farooq, a metallurgist, who was in charge of procuring foreign components for Pakistan's nuclear programme, has been in detention for six weeks. At least 20 other Pakistani scientists, businessmen, and military officers have been questioned.
The signals from Islamabad, this week, are that at least two men, apparently Mr Khan and Mr Farooq, will face trial for selling Pakistani nuclear secrets abroad.
Faisal Saleh Hayat, Pakistan's interior minister, said on Monday: "No patriotic Pakistani should even think of selling out Pakistan. There was a time when they used to call themselves heroes of Pakistan. But now the real face of some of these heroes is being exposed. We will take legal action against them." The network being revealed by investigations in Pakistan, Iran, and Libya has alarmed seasoned inspectors and intelligence services by its scale, its sophistication and the ease with which it has operated unimpeded for almost two decades.
According to this week's issue of Der Spiegel, a German weekly, a German intelligence report found in the mid-1990s that "there is said to be cooperation between Iran's atomic energy organisation and Pakistan's Khan laboratories".
Almost 10 years later, the threads in the dense web of the nuclear black market stretching from the far east to the Middle East and Europe are being unravelled.
Pakistan and its nuclear laboratories named after Dr Khan, at Kahuta, south of Islamabad, are the common factor in tracing equipment found in Libya and Iran, and believed to be in North Korea. But the networks which appear to have been set up in the mid-80s may now have grown so extensive as to have acquired a life of their own, independent of the original Pakistani sponsors.
According to diplomats tracking the investigations, Tehran named some six individuals and several firms as being involved in the black market trade.This led to the questioning of Mr Khan and his associates, but investigators suspect this is the tip of an iceberg.
"This is globalisation at work," said one well-informed source."So many fingers are pointing at Pakistan. There are only a handful of people who can pull together systems like this. But there are a large number of firms who can do gadgets and gizmos for centrifuges." Another diplomatic source agreed Pakistan was the main suspect. "But there's a whole bunch of other suspects and sources. There has been a very active market in this stuff and this thing is widening." Those suspected of involvement include an unnamed British businessman in Dubai and middlemen in Sri Lanka and the Middle East.
A planeload of nuclear equipment impounded by the Americans from Libya will provide details on the provenance of the machinery, as will a shipload of centrifuge components manufactured in Malaysia and seized aboard a German boat en route to Libya in October.
Mr Milhollin said Col Gadafy's programme, going back a decade, involved a deal with the Pakistani scientists "to outsource" the manufacturing and supplies of parts.
But the main focus of the investigation is the trade in parts for gas centrifuges, the key machines required to establish a home-based nuclear weapons effort. The centrifuges found in Libya and Iran are all of the same fundamental design, by the German engineer Gernot Zippe. The design dates from the late 1960s for what was to become the Anglo/German/Dutch consortium, Urenco. At the same time as Zippe was working on his design, Mr Khan was studying in Germany and Belgium.
In 1975 he absconded with the Zippe centrifuge blueprints. Back home and given carte blanche to lead Pakistan's race to match India's nuclear bomb, he and his experts improved the Zippe design, known as G-2, to what has become known in expert circles as Pak-2. A Dutch court sentenced Mr Khan to four years jail for industrial espionage in 1983, but the verdict was overturned on the grounds that he had never been served with the arrest warrant.
Political imperative
The centrifuge is made up of hundreds of high-performance components, meaning that would-be bomb-builders can out source purchasing strategies to dozens of different manufacturers and suppliers making their ultimate aims harder to discern.
But IAEA sleuths have just concluded that the black marketeers have become bolder, offering ready to assemble centrifuge rigs with scientific and engineering advice. In the case of Libya, a backward country with insufficient home-grown engineering or scientific talent to operate a uranium enrichment programme, the sleuths concluded that the black marketeers have offered ready-to-assemble centrifuge rigs and the required scientific and engineering advice. This suggests that Col Gadafy needed to go to far fewer sources for his bomb programme than Saddam Hussein or Iran required.
It remains unclear how tainted Gen Musharraf's government is. The political imperative for both Islamabad and Washington is to maintain that Pakistan's role was limited to that of a few rogue scientists acting without state authorisation and that in any case the nuclear deals preceded Gen Musharraf's takeover in 1999 and have been suppressed since then.
The latter claim is called into question by the alleged sighting of the Pakistani plane in North Korea in 2002 and by some of the supplies to Libya which have taken place since 1999. Because of the Pakistani leader's importance to the Americans in the war on terror, "there is," says one of the diplomats, "a high need to protect Musharraf. That's politics. Musharraf may not have wanted to know what was going on for reasons of plausible deniability".
But even if the Pakistani channels are being closed down and Gen Musharraf escapes international censure and survives the domestic fallout, the damage may well already be done.
Jon Wolfsthal, a nuclear analyst at the Carnegie Endowment said: "There's concern that this thing has spread beyond their [Pakistan's] control. Once you let the chickens loose, you can't get them back into the coop."
----
Pakistan's Nuclear Responsibility
January 31, 2004
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT2.html
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's military ruler, has a history of strong declarations, followed by weak and contradictory actions. Washington cannot settle for a repetition of this pattern in the Pakistani investigation into whether its nuclear scientists passed bomb technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya. All the links in this reckless supply chain - commercial, military or political - must be uncovered and severed.
Pakistan now appears to be one of the world's leading suppliers of illicit nuclear technology. In 2002, American satellites detected a Pakistani plane picking up missile components in North Korea, apparently as part of a barter deal for nuclear weapons technology. Last November, Iran told nuclear inspectors that its uranium enrichment programs had gotten crucial help from people in various nations who were probably linked to Pakistanis. And in recent weeks, Libya has indicated that its nuclear programs benefited from intermediaries in Dubai who may have been working with Pakistanis.
The picture now emerging points to an intricate underground network of traders in nuclear contraband. Filling in all the details depends on thoroughly questioning all those likely to have been involved and aggressively following up the leads provided by the new Iranian and Libyan disclosures.
It is not yet clear that General Musharraf is willing to do this. He has backed off from insisting that Pakistan was never involved in nuclear technology exports. He now claims that whatever problems existed came from rogue scientists, acting in pursuit of financial gain. The investigation he began under American pressure has so far centered on close associates of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the nuclear scientist who helped Pakistan illicitly obtain its own nuclear weapons secrets in the 1970's. Pakistani investigators must also probe whatever role senior military and political leaders may have played.
Such a wide-ranging investigation will not be easy for General Musharraf to undertake. The military high command is his most important power base. He is currently under attack from several directions and barely escaped two recent assassination attempts. Even so, Washington must insist that he not flinch from his responsibility to see that the nuclear technology pipeline from Pakistan is finally closed down. The world cannot afford a repetition of what seems to have happened in Iran, Libya and North Korea.
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Pakistan Fires Top Nuclear Scientist
January 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Nuclear-Detentions.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- In the first action from Pakistan's probe into allegations of nuclear proliferation, the government on Saturday fired the revered founder of the country's atomic program from his job as a top adviser and confined him to his home.
The moves against Abdul Qadeer Khan -- considered a national hero for giving Pakistan its nuclear deterrent against India and the Islamic world its first atomic bomb -- came as investigators narrow their pursuit of nuclear scientists' black market ties to Iran and Libya.
Opposition Islamic parties called the action against Khan baseless and said they would take to the streets in protest against what they labeled yet another case of President Gen. Pervez Musharraf caving in to the West.
Khan hasn't been placed under arrest, but authorities have told him to remain at his Islamabad home for security reasons and increased security around him, military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan said. Six other scientists and security officials also have been detained.
It wasn't immediately clear if Khan could face criminal charges, or whether other scientists or military officers from Khan Research Laboratories -- the heart of its nuclear program, renamed for Khan in 1981 -- would face punishment.
Khan was dismissed as a scientific adviser to the prime minister ``in the background of the investigations into alleged acts of nuclear proliferation by a few individuals and to facilitate those investigations in a free and objective manner,'' the government said in a statement.
At a meeting Saturday of Pakistan's National Command Authority, which controls the country's nuclear assets and is chaired by Musharraf, the military said officials were informed the investigation ``was nearly concluded and appropriate action will be taken against those found guilty.''
Officials have said Khan and a top aide -- Mohammed Farooq, one of those detained -- have failed to account for money in personal bank accounts. Scientists at the lab allegedly used the same black market contacts who helped them build Pakistan's nuclear program to profit by spreading the technology to other countries.
Khan and Farooq have told investigators they didn't supply any technology to Iran and Libya, and Khan has maintained he did nothing to damage the interests of Pakistan, officials have said.
Small protests in recent days have spread across the country against the detention of the scientists. Families pleading for information on their arrested relatives have found a sympathetic ear in Islamic parties -- eager to use the issue to increase pressure on Musharraf.
Those parties have repeatedly labeled Musharraf as a patsy for the West, and he has drawn harsh domestic opposition for joining the U.S.-led war on terror. Musharraf was targeted in two assassination attempts in December blamed on Islamic extremists -- possibly helped by al-Qaida.
Musharraf ``has made another scapegoat to please America. He is now after the national heroes,'' Ameer-ul Azeem, a spokesman for Jamaat-e-Islami party, said of Khan's dismissal. ``The time has come for giving a big call (for protest) against the government,'' he said, declining to give details on future demonstrations.
The Pakistani government has focused its probe on individuals, and asserted there was no high-level government or military involvement in any decision to share nuclear secrets.
On Saturday, the military reiterated the nuclear program was only intended to deter Pakistan's enemies, saying in a statement that ``it would never be in the national interest to share this technology in whatever form with any other country.''
Khan had held the adviser position, a Cabinet-level post, since 2001 when he retired as head of the nuclear lab.
Analysts have said simply removing Khan as an adviser could be a way to avoid a domestic backlash and a public trial, but that it might also be viewed as too soft a step by the international community -- which has long suspected Pakistan of spreading its nuclear technology around the world. Pakistan, which had repeatedly denied allegations of proliferation, began its investigation in November after revelations by Tehran to International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
Born in present-day India in 1935, Khan emigrated to Pakistan in 1952, five years after its partition from India, He earned a doctorate in metallurgy in Belgium, and has been awarded Pakistan's highest civilian award twice -- the only person so honored.
Khan worked in the Netherlands at a subsidiary of the British-German-Dutch nuclear conglomerate URENCO in 1972-76 before returning home to start Pakistan's nuclear program, which tested its first nuclear device in 1998.
In 1983, a Dutch court convicted Khan in absentia of stealing confidential material from URENCO and sentenced him to four years in prison. He denied the charge and the conviction was later overturned on a technicality.
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Pakistan Sacks 'Father' of Nuclear Program
January 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-pakistan.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan fired the ``father'' of its nuclear program from his position as scientific adviser to the prime minister on Saturday amid a probe into the possible sale of nuclear technology to Iran and Libya.
The sacking of top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan was announced just a few days after the United States took possession of Libyan documents and equipment for nuclear weapon and missile programs Libya agreed to abandon in December.
A government statement said Khan had ``ceased to hold the office'' of special adviser to the prime minister on the strategic program while a government body in charge of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and chaired by President Pervez Musharraf said it condemned ``individual acts of indiscretions.''
Pakistani experts and Western diplomats doubt whether top scientists could have traded secrets abroad without the knowledge of senior military and intelligence officials.
Khan's removal also comes amid increasing calls from the international community for wider access to Iran's nuclear facilities and less than a year after the United States invaded Iraq on the premise it had weapons of mass destruction that posed an international threat.
Khan's fate is a sensitive issue in Pakistan, where he is revered as the ``father'' of the country's and the Islamic world's atomic bomb, seen by many Pakistanis as a vital deterrent to nuclear rival India.
ROGUE SCIENTISTS
The decision coincided with a meeting of the National Command Authority (NCA) that controls Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, is chaired by Musharraf and composed of military, political and scientific officials.
The military repeated earlier statements from Musharraf that rogue scientists operating without official sanction must be blamed for any illegal proliferation of nuclear secrets.
``The NCA... reiterated Pakistan's strong resolve and commitment in adherence to international agreements of non-proliferation,'' a statement said.
``The government condemns and distances itself in categorical terms from individual acts of indiscretion in the past.''
Musharraf, a general who first took power in a bloodless October 1999 coup, is a key U.S. ally in its ``war on terror.''
He said earlier this month it appeared Pakistani scientists had sold nuclear secrets abroad.
Musharraf has said he would deal harshly with anyone found guilty ``because they are the enemy of the state.'' Hours after his removal the military said Khan's security had been enhanced.
Western diplomats have said Pakistani scientists might also have sold nuclear technology to North Korea, which has been in the crisis spotlight since 2002 when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had told them it was pursuing a secret nuclear program. North Korea denies saying such things.
The Pakistani investigation is nearing a conclusion. Khan, several of his colleagues and former military officers were questioned in recent weeks after a U.N. nuclear watchdog began looking into links between Pakistan's nuclear program and those of Iran and Libya.
Musharraf's critics say the military as a whole should be held accountable, not the odd scientist or mid-ranking officer who might have known of any black market nuclear secrets trade.
``He (Musharraf) has omitted to note the most critical factor... the unaccountable status of the Pakistan army as the guardian of the nuclear program and its overbearing control of civil society,'' the weekly Friday Times said in an editorial.
The military statement said since the formation of the NCA in February, 2000, no illegal peddling of nuclear technology had taken place and there was ``no chance'' of future illegal trade.
But it added Pakistan would not curtail its nuclear weapons program as a result of the investigation and the intense media spotlight on such programs.
-------- korea
U.S. Envoy Mildly Optimistic on Feb. N.Korea Talks
January 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-usa.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - The chief U.S. negotiator for North Korea arrived in South Korea on Sunday and voiced guarded optimism that talks aimed at ending the communist North's nuclear weapons programs could resume soon, perhaps as soon as this month.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly was the latest of a series of officials to express the expectation that the United States, China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas might meet soon to tackle the thorny regional security problem.
``I'm mildly optimistic that we may be able to have another round of six-party talks before very long, perhaps even this month,'' he told reporters at Inchon International Airport.
During a brief visit to Seoul, Kelly is slated to meet South Korea Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun. In the past week, both ministers have made upbeat comments on the prospects for new six-way talks.
China and Russia have also sounded optimistic about talks, prompted in part by North Korea's offer last month to freeze its nuclear activities as a first step to a crisis settlement.
Kelly's trip continues months of shuttle diplomacy to try to square negotiating positions and narrow differences to enable a follow-up round of talks in Beijing after a first session ended inconclusively in August.
The United States wants North Korea -- at least by the end of the next round -- to commit to dismantling any nuclear arms programs. It has offered to then lay out in detail how it could guarantee it would not attack the country President Bush labeled part of an ``axis of evil'' with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
The crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials, including Kelly, reported that in a meeting North Korea admitted pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
North Korea has since denied the U.S. account but Kelly reiterated last month that there had been no ambiguity at the meeting. Other officials have said the U.S. case is based on the intelligence that prompted the North's initial admission.
Kelly will fly to Tokyo on Monday for more consultations.
On Tuesday, Unification Minister Jeong will host a North Korean delegation for ministerial talks in Seoul. Jeong said he would use the cabinet-level talks to prod the North to get serious about six-way nuclear negotiations.
The main focus of the previous 12 rounds of North-South ministerial talks has been cross-border economic projects to aid the impoverished North and reunions of families separated since the 1950-53 Korean War.
But Jeong said he would persuade the North to resolve the nuclear dispute, which has been an impediment to deeper exchanges seen as vital to reviving the North's decrepit economy.
-------- missile defense
Pentagon to seek big boost in missile defense spending
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Jan 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040131004349.fj9aneo9.html
The Pentagon is seeking a big boost in spending for missile defense to 9.1 billion dollars in 2005 but its overall budget for procuring new ships, planes and other military equipment declined markedly, according to budget documents made public Friday.
The requests are part of a 401 billion dollar defense budget for 2005 that President George W. Bush is scheduled to submit Monday to Congress.
The defense budget documents were inadvertently posted on a Pentagon website and later withdrawn, but not before they were seen and widely circulated among news organizations.
The request for more money for missile defense comes as the Pentagon nears deployment of a rudimentary missile defense system in Alaska that is designed to track and intercept long range missiles.
The 9.1 billion dollars requested is a 20 percent increase over the 7.6 billion dollars authorized for missile defense in 2004.
But procurement of other weapon systems is set to decline in 2005 to 74.9 billion from 81.1 billion this year.
The army suffered drops in procurement of aircaft, missiles and combat vehicles while the navy also had spending on aircraft and shipbuilding cut back, the documents showed.
The air force, which has the heftiest procurement budgets of all the services, was up slightly at 32.5 billion dollars.
It budgeted 4.1 billion dollars for advanced procurement of 24 F-22 Raptors, and 4.7 billion dollars for C-17 and C-130 transport planes.
Money also was budgeted by the air force and the navy for the V-22 Osprey, the controversial aircraft that flies like a plane but takes off and lands like a helicopter.
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Bush Seeking a Large Rise in Missile Defense Spending
January 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/politics/31PENT.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 (AP) - The Bush administration is seeking a big increase in spending for missile defense next year, setting the program on course to have a bare-bones system in place by the end of this year and up to 30 interceptors on land and at sea by the end of 2005.
Over all, the military plans to spend less next year to buy new weapons systems, more on personnel and more to maintain and upgrade copters, tanks and planes worn down by heavy duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. The total procurement budget request is $74.9 billion, compared with $81.1 billion for 2004, according to Pentagon documents. The request for the Missile Defense Agency is $9.14 billion, according to a copy of the budget President Bush plans to release on Monday.
-------- russia
Russia plans nuclear war games
President Vladimir Putin is expected to oversee the maneuvers, which are intended to demonstrate the nation's renewed military might, a business newspaper reports.
BY VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV
Associated Press
Sat, Jan. 31, 2004
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7840497.htm
MOSCOW - Russia's nuclear forces reportedly are preparing their largest maneuvers in two decades, an exercise involving the test-firing of missiles and flights by dozens of bombers in a massive simulation of an all-out nuclear war.
President Vladimir Putin is expected to oversee the maneuvers, which are apparently aimed at demonstrating the revival of the nation's military might. The exercises will come ahead of Russian elections in March.
The business newspaper Kommersant said the exercise was set for mid-February and would closely resemble a 1982 Soviet exercise dubbed the ''seven-hour nuclear war'' that put the West on edge.
DETAILS LIMITED
Official comments on the upcoming exercise have been sketchy. The chief of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces, Col.-Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, was quoted by the Interfax-Military News Agency as saying the planned maneuvers would involve several launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles in various regions of Russia, but he wouldn't give further details.
A Defense Ministry spokesman refused to comment on the reports. The Russian military typically says little about upcoming exercises.
Kommersant said the maneuvers would involve Tu-160 strategic bombers test-firing cruise missiles over the northern Atlantic. Analysts describe such an exercise as an imitation of a nuclear attack on the United States. Other groups of bombers will fly over Russia's Arctic regions and test-fire missiles at a southern range near the Caspian Sea, the newspaper said.
As part of the exercise, the military is planning to conduct several launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles, including one from a Russian nuclear submarine in the Barents Sea, the Kommersant report said.
MILITARY SATELLITES
The military also plans to launch military satellites from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and the Plesetsk launch pad in northern Russia -- a simulation of the replacement of satellites lost in action, Kommersant said.
Russia's missile defense system will also be involved in the exercise, it added.
Pavel Felgenhauer, an independent military analyst, said the military has regularly held nuclear exercises that were timed to coincide with the annual test-firing of aging Soviet-built missiles.
''It has been a routine affair, but it can be expanded if they want a show,'' he said.
Ivan Safranchuk, head of the Moscow office of the Center for Defense Information, a Washington-based think-tank, said the maneuvers would further strengthen Putin's popularity ahead of the March 14 presidential election he is expected to win easily.
Putin has pledged to rebuild Russia's military might and restore pride to the demoralized service. When he ran for his first term in 2000, he flew as a second pilot in a fighter jet and later donned naval officer's garb on a visit to a nuclear submarine -- images that played well with many voters who are nostalgic for Soviet global power and military prestige.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
Nuclear plant poll supports extension option
Asbury Park Press
1/31/04
By NICHOLAS CLUNN MANAHAWKIN BUREAU
http://www.app.com/app/story/0,21625,898226,00.html
LACEY -- State residents overwhelmingly favor extending the life of New Jersey's nuclear power plants for another 20 years if the facilities continue to meet federal safety standards, according to a report released yesterday by the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant.
About 79 percent of those polled in a statewide sample said they support an option plants have to continue generating power past the expiration of current 40-year operating licenses. About 82 percent of those polled within a 10-mile radius of the township plant said state plants should pursue that option, according to the poll. The plant commissioned Bisconti Research, a private firm in Washington, to compile the random study. Plant officials would not say how much it cost.
Plant officials have been studying whether to seek a new license from the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission. By applying to commission by April 1, the plant would be allowed to stay open if its application is pending when its current license expires in 2009. The commission could not guarantee that leeway if the plant applies after the deadline.
Sen. Andrew R. Ciesla and Assemblymen James W. Holzapfel and David W. Wolfe, all R-Ocean, believe the plant should not seek a new license, Ciesla said yesterday.
"Technology that exists at that power plant is aging, and it doesn't produce that much electricity," he said.
[It produces a huge amount. 9% of the entire New Jersey generation. See http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Know_Nukes/message/5601 - JH]
These lawmakers, who represent residents in northern Ocean County, also have asked towns in their jurisdiction to oppose a new license because they believe the plant will seriously consider that input.
Another opponent to a new operating license for the plant, the New Jersey Public Interest and Research Group, spoke out against the Bisconti report. Group lobbiest Suzzane Leta said the report lacks authenticity because plant owner Exelon paid for it.
Leta also said the report's findings fail to directly address Oyster Creek and that it contradicts what Ocean County's elected officials have said. Ten towns in Ocean County, about one-half its municipalities, have officially opposed a new license.
"Public officials representing these people are opposed to a license extension," she said. "It doesn't seem to be representative of their feelings."
Bisconti used 300 people in each sample group, which means a margin of error of plus or minus 6 percentage points. Bisconti in November obtained public opinion by telephone and then reported its findings to plant officials in early December.
New Jersey's other nuclear power plants, Salem I, Salem II and Hope Creek, are in Salem County. None of these plants have applied for a new license. The plants' existing licenses expire in 2016, 2020 and 2026, respectively.
Nicholas Clunn: (609) 978-4597 or nclunn@app.com
----
N.R.C. Orders Talks on Safety at 3 Reactors in New Jersey
By MATTHEW L. WALD
January 31, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/nyregion/31nuclear.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has told a company that runs three nuclear reactors in southern New Jersey to determine whether its employees are willing to raise safety concerns or make decisions that put safety foremost, because the commission's interviews with current and former employees indicate that they might not be.
It ordered the company to come up with a plan within 30 days to assess and correct the problem.
The commission sent a letter on Wednesday to the Public Service Enterprise Group, which operates Salem 1 and 2 and Hope Creek, which are adjacent, in Lower Alloways Creek Township, giving the company 30 days to come up with a plan to assess and correct the problem. The letter said that "we have not identified any serious safety violations," but it added that commission interviews raised questions about the plants' "work environment." Some of the information from the employees calls into question "the openness of management to concerns and alternative views," the letter said.
Disagreements between workers licensed by the federal government to run the reactors and the corporation's senior managers, particularly on problems that might force a plant to shut down, may have discouraged plant personnel from raising concerns, the letter said.
Hubert J. Miller, the regional administrator for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's region covering the Northeast, said in a telephone interview that his staff had not drawn any conclusion yet but that "we've got enough information here that calls for the licensee to look hard themselves at this."
"We're not saying in this case it's crossed any significant line," he said. "We're trying not to get to the point where it turns into a situation that's unacceptable." He would not detail what the disagreements were.
A. Christopher Bakken 3rd, a company senior vice president for plant operations at Salem and Hope Creek, said that Public Service knew that it might have a problem in the area and had commissioned an outside contractor six weeks ago to survey its employees. The company brought in new managers last year to address the issue, he said.
-------- us politics
Kerry criticized as foe of defense
January 31, 2004
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040130-105141-8706r.htm
The voting record of Sen. John Kerry has weakened U.S. military defenses and would make true Howard Dean's prediction that "America's military will not always be the world's strongest," Bush campaign manager Ken Mehlman said yesterday.
"Howard Dean early in the campaign said that America will not always have the world's strongest military," Mr. Mehlman said yesterday. "And Senator Kerry at the time criticized it. But if you look at Senator Kerry's voting record, what you find is that his votes would make Governor Dean's vision a reality."
Mr. Kerry, of Massachusetts, who on Thursday charged that President Bush is exaggerating terrorism threats for political gain, has voted against efforts to expand and improve intelligence operations and strengthen the U.S. military, said Mr. Mehlman.
Earlier yesterday, Mr. Bush said he wanted to "know the facts" about any intelligence failures concerning Saddam Hussein's suspected cache of forbidden weapons but he declined to endorse calls for an independent investigation.
Democrats and Republicans have raised the question of an independent commission since former chief weapons inspector David Kay said Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction.
Top Republicans inside and outside the White House yesterday defended the president and attacked Mr. Kerry, who has unseated Mr. Dean as the Democratic front-runner after winning the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.
"What has he ever done? Nobody knows," said one senior Republican source, who, like the others, spoke only on the condition of anonymity. "The guy didn't leave much of a footprint in all his years in the Senate."
Said another top Republican: "He not only has never tried to help our intelligence community or our armed forces, he has vehemently fought us every step of the way when we try to protect the American people from threats. He is the last one who should ever criticize this president."
In the South Carolina debate of Democratic candidates on Thursday, Mr. Kerry sounded a new theme among hopefuls that Mr. Bush exaggerated the threat posed by now-ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein in order to persuade Americans to go along with what he says was an unnecessary and premature war.
Asked by moderator Tom Brokaw how the president has been misleading, Mr. Kerry said: "Well, deployment of weapons of mass destruction, number one; aerial vehicles to be able to deliver materials of mass destruction, number two. I mean, I - nuclear weapons, number three. I could run a long list of clear misleading, clear exaggeration. The linkage to al Qaeda, number four."
In a speech at the winter meeting of the Republican National Committee, Mr. Mehlman laid out how Mr. Kerry's own voting record has compromised U.S. security.
"Even after the first World Trade Center bombing, Senator Kerry voted to gut intelligence spending by $1.5 billion for the five years prior to 2001. In 1996, he voted to slash defense spending by $6.5 billion. Both bills were so reckless that neither had any co-sponsors willing to endorse his plans."
On Wednesday, Mr. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee that analysts told him that they had limited information on the arms programs, lacked human agents and relied too much on information from foreign intelligence services. None told him they were pressured.
• This story is based in part on wire service dispatches.
--------
Bush Considering Independent Probe on Iraq WMD
January 31, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-bush.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Under pressure from Capitol Hill, President Bush is considering an independent panel to investigate pre-war intelligence on Iraq that he used to justify war, and aides are discussing it with congressional officials, sources familiar with the talks said on Saturday.
Sources said a decision could come in a matter of days.
Bush had rejected an independent investigation amid White House fears of a political witch hunt by Democrats hoping to unseat him in this year's presidential election, but began in recent days to reconsider the position.
``I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts,'' Bush told reporters on Friday.
He is under strong pressure from both Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill to accept an investigation into intelligence that said Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons and was developing a nuclear weapon -- all issues Bush used to justify war against Iraq last year.
The sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said a range of options for such a panel was being explored and that an agreement was hoped for soon.
The White House would not comment.
Vice President Dick Cheney was involved in some of the discussions with members of Congress but the negotiations were being led out of the White House, sources said.
Bush, who traveled to Philadelphia to attend an election-year strategy session with Republican members of Congress, was asked there about intelligence on Iraq by Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania.
The president replied he wanted to know the facts about the accuracy of U.S. intelligence before the war, according to an administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. His reply was similar to the one he gave reporters on Friday, the official said.
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain broke party ranks to join Democratic demands for an independent probe into how U.S. intelligence got it wrong given the failure by searchers to find weapons of mass destruction.
Appeals for a probe were strengthened when former chief U.S. weapons hunter David Kay said on Capitol Hill on Wednesday ``we were almost all wrong'' about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that his search there found no evidence of biological or chemical arms.
The issue poses a political problem for Bush as he seeks re-election this year. His Democratic challengers have accused him of hyping the intelligence to justify war.
``I think the administration owes the entire country a full explanation on this war -- not just their exaggerations but on the failure of American intelligence,'' Sen. John Kerry, who is vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, said earlier this week.
U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said the decision to go to war had been based on the best available intelligence.
``You have to make decisions based on the intelligence you have, not on the intelligence you're going to discover later,'' Wolfowitz said on Saturday during a visit to U.S. troops based in Germany.
``It's very important to try to have the best intelligence you possibly can have,'' he said.
--------
Cheney Appears to Soften on Iraq Weapons
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
January 31, 2004
WASHINGTON -- If Vice President Dick Cheney shares in the rising doubts about the accuracy of prewar intelligence on Iraq's cache of banned weapons, he is keeping any misgivings mostly to himself.
Yet, it appears that Cheney, portrayed by critics as the war's behind-the-scenes architect, is softening his insistence that deposed Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had such weapons.
In August 2002, months before the U.S.-led invasion, Cheney said: ``Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.''
On Tuesday, Cheney told reporters in Rome: ``There's still work to be done to ascertain exactly what's there, and I'm not prepared to make a final judgment.''
Whatever assessment he makes will be watched closely.
There is no question he is among the most powerful and polarizing men in Washington, on call to advise President Bush on almost every foreign, domestic or political issue.
``I think even calling him vice president minimizes his role,'' says Paul Light, a New York University professor who has written extensively on the vice presidency. ``He's kind of a super vice president.''
Cheney is a huge asset to the Republican ticket, says GOP pollster Ed Goeas. But the liberal-leaning Light sees ``a Dr. Strangelove quality to him: secretive, quiet.''
Quick to defend the war, Cheney occasionally reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a declassified memo that outlined intelligence agencies' best prewar guess about dangers Saddam held for America.
If the weapons issue comes up in conversation, he sometimes pulls out the memo, known as the National Intelligence Estimate, and reads aloud its ominous warnings: ``High confidence: Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to U.N. resolutions.''
Bush says he used the estimate in making his decision to go to war. Now it appears that even Cheney, the administration's most senior hawk, is having doubts about its accuracy.
``The jury is still out,'' he told National Public Radio when asked whether Iraq had had banned weapons. He said more time is needed ``to look in all the cubby holes and the ammo dumps and all the places in Iraq where you might expect to find something like that.''
Later, in Switzerland, where Cheney was speaking to the World Economic Forum, a senior administration official said the administration did not know whether the document accurately reflected the situation in Iraq.
Cheney is not wavering from his belief that Saddam was a threat that required the United States to act regardless of strong international backing.
A darling of the Republican Party's right wing, Cheney is a favorite target of Democratic presidential candidates. They stepped up their jabs after former chief weapons inspector David Kay said Wednesday that the United States was ``almost all wrong'' about Saddam's weapons programs.
Howard Dean alleged in a debate Thursday night that Cheney berated CIA operatives so their reports would be in step with a march to war. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry said whether Cheney massaged the intelligence is ``a very legitimate question.''
The Washington Post reported Saturday, however, that congressional and CIA investigations found no evidence that the White House had influenced the judgment of CIA analysts. Richard Kerr, a former CIA deputy director who is leading the agency's internal review, told the Post the CIA's analytical work was consistent over many years.
On other issues, Democrats and others have demanded, so far unsuccessfully, that Cheney release details of private deliberations of his 2001 energy policy task force.
Democrats regularly try to make the troubled Texas-based Halliburton oil services company, which has pledged to repay the Pentagon $6.3 million for possible kickbacks involving work in Iraq, synonymous with Cheney, who used to run the company. Cheney's aides say the vice president has long severed relations with Halliburton.
Many Americans know little about the balding, gray-haired vice president with a boyish complexion and wire-rimmed glasses other than he's had four heart attacks and spent many days after Sept. 11, 2001, in ``secure, undisclosed locations.''
The 62-year-old vice president was President Ford's White House chief of staff in the 1970s, congressman from Wyoming for a decade, House Republican whip in the late 1980s, and defense secretary during the Gulf War before he went to Halliburton.
When Cheney talks, he fixes his blueish-gray eyes on the eyes of his listener. His large hands, fingers apart, move to punctuate his points. If he does not want to discuss an issue, he simply says so, and that's pretty much that. But he is a good listener, according to his aides, and methodically processes information.
``Watching his mind work is like watching someone play speed chess instead of slow-motion checkers,'' said Kevin Kellems, the vice president's spokesman.
On the Net:
An excerpt from the declassified intelligence report is available at: http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/iraq-wmd.pdf
Cheney: http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
U.S. Pressing EU to Uphold Arms Embargo Against China
Rights Abuses, Security Cited; France, Germany Back Beijing
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64444-2004Jan30.html
BEIJING, Jan. 30 -- The Bush administration has quietly lodged a series of formal protests with the European Union and its members in an attempt to persuade the body not to lift its 14-year ban on weapons sales to China, according to diplomats from several European countries.
China has stepped up its campaign to persuade the European Union to end the arms embargo it adopted after the Chinese military's violent 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. France and Germany have already sided with the Chinese and succeeded in pushing the EU to conduct an unprecedented review of the embargo.
The United States, which imposed a similar ban in 1989, has told Europe that ending the embargo would send the wrong signal to a government that continues to resist democratic reform and violate its citizens' human rights.
"We believe that the U.S. and European prohibitions on arms sales are complementary, were imposed for the same reasons, specifically serious human rights abuses, and that those reasons remain valid today," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters this week.
U.S. officials have also argued that the transfer of European military technology to China could pose a threat to U.S. security, European diplomats said.
China has made ending the embargo its top priority in relations with the EU, in part because it is worried that persuading Europe to repeal the ban will be much more difficult after May, when the 15-nation bloc accepts 10 new members, including several considered close U.S. allies, the diplomats said.
The Chinese leaders who took office last year also appear eager to score a diplomatic victory that would set them apart from their predecessors, earn respect from the country's influential army and demonstrate to the world that China has moved out of the shadow of the Tiananmen massacre.
"We are being buffeted in a terrible way between the two sides," said one European diplomat involved in discussions. "The United States is going about this in its usual blunt way . . . and China is making a strong case that the embargo is outdated."
The EU is China's third-largest trade partner and funds a broad range of aid projects here, from judges' training to environmental protection programs. In a strategy paper released in October, China said it expected the EU to become its leading trade partner and largest source of foreign investment within five years.
Though China still fails to meet international human rights standards, the diplomats said, many European governments believe it has made enough progress that it no longer belongs with the other nations under the EU arms embargo -- Libya, North Korea, Burma, Liberia and Sudan, among them.
No decision is expected from the EU until at least April. European officials are worried that any action before then might exacerbate tensions surrounding the March 20 presidential election in Taiwan, the self-governing island that China claims and has threatened to seize, diplomats said.
But in a meeting Monday, the EU's council of foreign ministers assigned two high-level committees to review the embargo.
"There has been a shift of mood in the council," said Emma Udwin, an EU spokeswoman in Brussels. "For a very long time, it was believed that public opinion in Europe felt so strongly about the human rights situation in China that questions about the embargo were not raised. Now, those questions are being asked."
A unanimous decision by the council is necessary to lift the embargo. In a sign of the growing consensus, the Dutch government announced Friday it favored ending the embargo; the Netherlands had previously been considered one of its strongest supporters. Its parliament passed a resolution in December calling for the ban to be maintained because of China's human rights record.
The EU's deliberations have already alarmed some in the United States who feel that lifting the ban on weapons sales could upset the balance of military power across the Taiwan Strait. The United States is Taiwan's main source of arms and is committed to helping Taiwan defend itself against a Chinese attack.
"If Europe drops the embargo," the Chinese army would gain a "source of military technology that would accelerate its modernization in ways that will create significant new dangers for U.S. forces in Asia," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., an expert on the Chinese military at the Center for Security Policy, a conservative research organization in Washington.
British, French, German and Italian firms have already sold dual-use technology to China that is being used in fighter bombers, warships, attack helicopters and submarines, he said, "so the groundwork is there for immediately launching into direct military sales in almost every sphere if the embargo is lifted."
Some analysts said lifting the embargo would have little effect on China's military modernization program because China can purchase much of what it wants from Russia. Russian weapons systems are not as advanced as those produced in Europe, but they are less expensive.
"The Chinese understand that Western military equipment comes with significant strings attached, and those strings include the risk of sanctions that can cut off your supply of spare parts," said Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor of Jane's Defense Weekly. "There is Chinese interest in a range of European military products that fulfill niche requirements, but I doubt lifting the embargo will have a broad impact on force modernization in China."
The European Union also maintains a code of conduct on arms sales that restricts what its members can sell to nations with human rights problems. European diplomats said one question under review by the EU is to what extent the code of conduct prohibits the sale to China of weapons and technologies now covered by the embargo.
European officials are also discussing whether to ask for specific human rights concessions from China in exchange for lifting the embargo and what those concessions should be. The diplomats said sweeping reforms appear unrealistic, but China might release several political prisoners or announce a timetable for ratifying a U.N.-related human rights treaty.Staff writer Peter Slevin in Washington contributed to this report.
----
After eight years in an Indian jail, the arms dealer who says he was framed by British intelligence gets his freedom
By Peter Popham
31 January 2004
Independent Digital (UK)
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/crime/story.jsp?story=486339
Shortly before midnight on 17 December 1995, Indian villagers looking up into the night sky above the state of West Bengal were astonished to see wooden crates floating down towards them - crates containing enough arms and ammunition to start a small war.
Who were the arms intended for? What were the recipients expecting to do with them? These are questions that have never been satisfactorily answered. The man said to be behind the arms drop remains at large. But one of the other men in the plane, who has said frankly that the drop "was clearly on behalf of some terrorist group", will shortly regain his liberty.
He is Peter Bleach, a British arms dealer, and yesterday the Indian government announced that he is to be released. Sentenced to life imprisonment for conspiring to wage war on India, he is to be freed on humanitarian grounds.
Yet many of the questions raised by one of the most baffling international escapades of recent years remain unanswered.
Lal Krishna Advani, India's Deputy Prime Minister, announced Bleach's impending release after talks with David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, in Delhi. "There is an outstanding matter pending between India and Britain," Mr Advani told reporters after the meeting. "There has been a long-standing demand that Peter Bleach be released... It should be possible to release him soon."
The Government has been lobbying for his release for years. Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, had pressed Bleach's case in Delhi. Tony Blair also raised the matter with Mr Advani, who is also India's Interior Minister, when the latter visited London last June. Yesterday's announcement was greeted with joy by Bleach's ailing mother Oceana, who said at her home in Scarborough: "I am very thrilled. That was my biggest wish for this year, that my son would be coming back."
Had it not been for the strong-arm diplomacy of Vladimir Putin, the Russian President, Bleach would probably be facing many more years in jail. Two and a half years ago, Russian pressure led to the release of five Latvians who were tried and convicted with Bleach of the same crime, and given identical sentences.
It was four years ago that Bleach was sentenced to life imprisonment by a Calcutta court. He had been arrested in December 1995 after a private plane in which he was travelling dropped arms, including 300 AK-47 rifles, 15 Makarov pistols, two sniper rifles, 10 rocket launchers, 100 anti-tank grenades and 24,000 rounds of ammunition, on a remote part of West Bengal, due west of Calcutta.
Five Latvians were crewing the plane and they were arrested, tried and convicted with Bleach. But historically Russia has been one of India's strongest allies. Diplomatic pressure is believed to have resulted in the case moving at unusual speed through the normally sluggish waters of the Indian judicial system; and heavy arm-twisting by President Putin led to the release of the Latvians just five months after they were sentenced.
Yesterday Mr Blunkett made it clear that the Latvians' early release was an important factor in persuading the Government to urge the Indians to let Bleach go. He said: "I would not have pressed the case for Peter Bleach had those co-defendants, who had been found guilty with him and sentenced to jail with him, not already been released some time ago.
"Quality and fairness of justice involves treating one person equally with another in relation to the crime they have committed. On those grounds it would be fair to treat Peter Bleach and his co-defendants in exactly the same way."
That consideration, plus the fact that Bleach was now "seriously ill" and the fact of "him having an ageing mother", were "a trio ... of very good reasons", Mr Blunkett added, "to ask that he should be released on humanitarian grounds".
The case of Bleach and the Indian arms drop is a baffling one. The tall, elegant figure in the Ray-Ban shades and the navy blazer, who represented himself in court in Calcutta with wit and good humour, looked like everybody's idea of a suave double agent. Even the name sounds as if it belongs in the pages of popular fiction: plain Peter Bleach most of the time, Peter James Gifran von Kalkstein Bleach in full. But whether Bleach's tale belongs more naturally in the realms of John Le Carré or Walter Mitty remains unclear.
Bleach has in fact served in military intelligence, though not at the level that his immaculate appearance in the Calcutta court room suggested: he was a lance-corporal in the Army Intelligence Corps. After his discharge from the army he moved to Zimbabwe where he worked in the prison service, then returned to the UK and worked as a private bodyguard.
It seems clear that he felt himself destined for higher things, and at his farmhouse in North Yorkshire, as well as raising Dobermann pinschers as guard dogs, he set up a firm called Aeroserve UK to deal in arms.
He had yet to achieve very much in the trade: a British military intelligence source described him as "an international bits-and-bobs man". So when one day in 1994 Bleach received a telephone call from a mysterious Dane known as Kim Davey, asking for his help with an arms shipment, Bleach was amenable.
The role required of him was to arrange the lease of the aeroplane with which the arms shipment would be delivered. But after meeting "Kim Davey" - who is known by at least two other names - in Copenhagen, Bleach said he quickly realised that this was not a legitimate transaction but "clearly on behalf of some terrorist group". So, on returning to Britain, he contacted the export services organisation of the Ministry of Defence, told them of the terrorist plot and asked for their advice. Military intelligence sources said that they advised Bleach to have nothing to do with it.
But Bleach himself maintains that they told him to stick with it. His understanding, he claimed, was that he was now participating in a sting operation. "At every stage of this," he said after his arrest, "I expected some big police action to swing into operation. I expected... we would all be arrested, and I would be let out the back door of the police station."
In the light of what actually came to pass, Mr Bleach was either betrayed by the Government (his version) or became the victim of his own vivid imagination.
Helping the Government pull off a sting: that is one explanation Bleach has given for why he came to find himself high above West Bengal in an aeroplane stashed with arms bound for an anti-government organisation.
Another he has given is that once he had got involved up to a certain point, "Kim Davey" would not let him withdraw. He found himself trapped. "I went to Bulgaria as the agent for the sale of the plane," he said. "I had nothing to do with the sale of the arms. But once I was there, "Kim Davey" made it clear he was not letting me out of his sight until the job was done."
It was on 17 December 1995 that the plane left Europe bound for India with its cargo of arms. It made a stop at Varanasi, then took off again. At about midnight the plane's hatches opened and the crates of arms floated down over the village of Purulia, the headquarters of an esoteric Hindu sect called Ananda Marg, which has long been in dispute with the government of West Bengal state.
Whether that ostensibly religious organisation was the intended final destination of the arms, and if so, what they wanted them for, are two more of the questions that Bleach's trial failed to clear up. But there appears to be a connection of sorts: one of "Kim Davey's" other aliases is said to be Dada Nirvananda, the name by which he was known during his years as an acolyte of the sect.
Although villagers at Purulia reported the arms drop to the police, Bleach's plane was allowed to fly on unimpeded to Phuket in Thailand, another aspect of the case that has caused feverish speculation. It returned to India four days later, when it was admitted to Indian air space but forced to land at Bombay.
That was when, according to Bleach's optimistic scenario, the sting should have occurred and he in his innocence should have been allowed to go free. But the scenario went horribly wrong. After the plane was ordered to land, a big police action did indeed swing into action - but the man who managed to get away was not Bleach but "Kim Davey".
Bleach and the Latvians, the patsies by Bleach's account, were arrested and charged with waging war on India, an offence punishable by hanging.
For the first four years of his incarceration, Bleach lived in the shadow of the gallows. At the conclusion of the trial all six were convicted of the lesser crime of conspiring to wage war.
Since being sentenced Bleach has twice unsuccessfully appealed to India's President for pardon, and his mother also made an emotional appeal for his release. Soon he will be on his way home to Yorkshire, free at last from a gruelling ordeal.
But what exactly he and the enigmatic "Kim Davey" imagined they were playing at over the skies of West Bengal eight years ago has yet to be fully explained.
-------- asia
Recalling Pol Pot's Terror, but Forgetting His Backers
by John Pilger
January 31, 2004
Antiwwar.com
http://antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=1807
"It is my duty," wrote the correspondent of the Times at the liberation of Belsen, "to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in the summer of 1979, arriving in Cambodia in the wake of Pol Pot's genocidal regime.
In the silent, gray humidity, Phnom Penh, the size of Manchester, was like a city that had sustained a nuclear cataclysm which had spared only the buildings. Houses, flats, offices, schools, hotels stood empty and open, as if vacated that day. Personal possessions lay trampled on a path; traffic lights were jammed on red. There was almost no power, and no water to drink. At the railway station, trains stood empty at various stages of interrupted departure. Several carriages had been set on fire and contained bodies on top of each other.
When the afternoon monsoon broke, the gutters were suddenly awash with paper; but this was money. The streets ran with money, much of it new and unused banknotes whose source, the National Bank of Cambodia, had been blown up by the Khmer Rouge as they retreated before the Vietnamese army. Inside, a pair of broken spectacles rested on an open ledger; I slipped and fell hard on a floor brittle with coins. Money was everywhere. In an abandoned Esso station, an old woman and three emaciated children squatted around a pot containing a mixture of roots and leaves, which bubbled over a fire fueled with paper money: thousands of snapping, crackling riel, brand-new from the De La Rue company in London.
With tiny swifts rising and falling almost to the ground the only movement, I walked along a narrow dirt road at the end of which was a former primary school called Tuol Sleng. During the Pol Pot years it was run by a kind of Gestapo, "S21," which divided the classrooms into a "torture unit" and an "interrogation unit." I found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor, where people had been mutilated on iron beds. Some 17,000 inmates had died a kind of slow death here: a fact not difficult to confirm because the killers photographed their victims before and after they tortured and killed them at mass graves on the edge of the city. Names and ages, height and weight were recorded. One room was filled to the ceiling with victims' clothes and shoes, including those of many children.
Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death center. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after "confessing" that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi: anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families were confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written:
1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.
2. Before doing something, the authorization of the warden must be obtained.
"Doing something" might mean only changing position in the cell, and the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines were small ammunition boxes labeled "Made in USA." For upsetting a box of excrement the punishment was licking the floor with your tongue, torture or death, or all three.
This is described, perhaps as never before, in a remarkable documentary, S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, by Tuol Sleng's few survivors. The work of the Paris-based Khmer director Rithy Panh, the film has such power that, more than anything I have seen on Cambodia since I was there almost 25 years ago, it moved me deeply, evoking the dread and incredulity that was a presence then. Panh, whose parents died in Pol Pot's terror, succeeded in bringing together victims and torturers and murderers at Tuol Sleng, now a genocide museum.
Van Nath, a painter, is the principal survivor. He is gray-haired now; I cannot be sure, but I may have met him at the camp in 1979; certainly, a survivor told me his life had been saved when it was found he was a sculptor and he was put to work making busts of Pol Pot. The courage, dignity and patience of this man when, in the film, he confronts former torturers, "the ordinary and obscure journeymen of the genocide," as Panh calls them, is unforgettable.
The film has a singular aim: a confrontation, in the best sense, between the courage and determination of those like Nath, who want to understand, and the jailers, whose catharsis is barely beginning. There is Houy the deputy head of security, Khan the torturer, Thi who kept the registers, who all seem detached as they recall, almost wistfully, Khmer Rouge ideology; and there is Poeuv, indoctrinated as a guard at the age of 12 or 13. In one spellbinding sequence, he becomes robotic, as if seized by his memory and transported back. He shows us, with moronic precision, how he intimidated prisoners, fastened their handcuffs and shackles, gave or denied them food, ordered them to piss, threatening to beat them with "the club" if a drop fell on the floor. His actions confront all of us with the truth about human "cogs" in machines whose inventors and senior managers politely disclaim responsibility, like the still untried Khmer Rouge leaders and their foreign sponsors.
Panh, whose film-making is itself an act of courage, sees something positive in the mere act of bearing witness and, speaking of the prisoners, in "the resistance [that is] a form of dignity that is profoundly human." He refers to the "little things, these insubstantial details, so slight and fragile, which make us what we are. You can never entirely 'destroy' a human being. A trace always remains, even years later ... a refusal to accept humiliation can sometimes be conveyed by a look of defiance, a chin slightly raised, a refusal to capitulate under blows ... The photographs of certain prisoners and the confessions conserved at Tuol Sleng are there to remind us of it."
It seems almost disrespectful to take issue at this point; but one must. For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show in the west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has to be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I said I would, but that the role of "civilized" governments in bringing him to power, sustaining his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical component. He wasn't interested.
The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, "Year Zero." It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did this, secretly and illegally.
Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was the catalyst for Pol Pot's fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh's film, a torturer refers to the bombing as his reason for joining "the maquis": the Khmer Rouge. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed. And having been driven out by the Vietnamese, who came from the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government, who invented a "coalition" to provide the cover for America's continuing war against Vietnam.
Thank you, Rithy Panh, for your brave film; what is needed now is a work as honest, which confronts "us" and relieves our amnesia about the part played by our respectable leaders in Cambodia's epic tragedy.
-------- china
U.S. Official, in Beijing, Questions Taiwan's Referendum Plans
January 31, 2004
By CHRIS BUCKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/international/asia/31TAIW.html?pagewanted=all
BEIJING, Jan. 30 - A senior State Department official said Friday that he could see no reason why Taiwan should hold a referendum on its relations with mainland China.
"As much as we respect Taiwan's democracy, the referendum in question does raise questions," Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, said in a press briefing in Beijing. He made the remarks after a day of talks with senior Chinese officials, including Prime Minister Wen Jiabao and Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan, on issues ranging from the North Korean nuclear crisis to the reconstruction of Iraq.
The referendum, scheduled for March 20, will ask Taiwan's voters to decide whether the island should obtain advanced antimissile weapons if China refuses to renounce the use of force and withdraw missiles aimed at it, and whether Taiwan should negotiate with China over a peaceful and stable framework for talks.
Mr. Armitage suggested that Taiwan's planned ballot was not intended to resolve a truly contentious domestic issue. He warned that it was destabilizing volatile relations between Taiwan and mainland China.
"As I understand it," Mr. Armitage said, "referenda are reserved for issues that are very divisive or very difficult, and the wording that I see in the referendum seems to be neither divisive or difficult, so I think this raises questions about the motives of those who want to put it forward."
The referendum has been condemned by Chinese officials, who see it as another step in the efforts by Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, to establish the island's formal independence from China. The mainland government maintains Taiwan is a part of China.
Mr. Armitage said his talks with Chinese officials also dealt with resuming the "six-country talks" aimed at defusing North Korea's nuclear weapons program. He praised China's "strenuous efforts" in organizing the talks, which brought North Korea and South Korea together with the United States, China, Japan and Russia in November. But he emphasized that it was in China's own interest to rein in North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
Mr. Armitage was previously reported as saying that he hoped the talks would resume as soon as February, but in the briefing on Friday he declined to specify a date.
"Both sides expressed hope that we'd have six-party talks soon," he said.
Mr. Armitage repeated the Bush administration's policy that it wished to see no unilateral acts that threatened the delicate status quo between Taiwan and mainland China, and he reiterated that the United States was committed to helping Taiwan under the Taiwan Relations Act.
Commentators on Taiwan said Mr. Armitage's remarks were likely to add to fears there that Mr. Chen had alienated Taiwan from the United States.
A stream of criticism from the administration, especially remarks by President Bush during his meeting in December with Prime Minister Wen, has hurt Mr. Chen's standing in Taiwan, said Philip Yang, an expert on international affairs at the National Taiwanese University.
"I think Chen is under tremendous pressure," Mr. Yang said. "He has brought Taiwan-U.S. relations into a serious deterioration, and the lack of understanding and trust is becoming a very important issue."
-------- europe
Much of Europe Is Derisive About Report on Iraqi Arms
January 31, 2004
By CRAIG S. SMITH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/international/europe/31REAX.html?pagewanted=all
PARIS, Jan. 30 - Much of Europe has given a collective snort to the testimony by David Kay, the former chief United States weapons inspector, that there probably were no illicit weapons in Iraq before the United States-led war there.
"There is a kind of cynicism here," said Dominique Moïsi, a political analyst in Paris. "So the Americans lied to their people and to us and maybe to themselves. That's exactly what we already thought."
Similar sentiments rippled across the Continent, where debate on the war was split between those who believed and those who doubted American and British contentions that Iraq posed an imminent threat.
Mr. Kay's testimony on Wednesday created less derision in countries like Poland, which supported the United States in going to war. "It doesn't change our position," said Boguslaw Majewski, a spokesman for Poland's Foreign Ministry. "When the decision was reached, all the warning signals were there."
There was greater bemusement in Europe over Britain's seemingly contradictory report that chastised the British Broadcasting Corporation for suggesting that Prime Minister Tony Blair's administration had hyped intelligence reports of weapons in Iraq.
"Especially in France, there is a feeling that if the David Kay report is right," Mr. Moïsi said. "How can the BBC be so severely punished for revealing what was ultimately true?"
Some German media scoffed at the purported independence of the Hutton report, which led to the resignations of the BBC's board chairman, Gavyn Davies its director general, Greg Dyke, and Andrew Gilligan, the reporter of the original account.
"Hutton has been a servant to the crown all his life; he always knows what his duty is," read an editorial in Friday's Die Tageszeitung, a national newspaper published in Berlin. It likened Lord Hutton's role to "a football team putting up their own manager as referee and then celebrating a win on dubious penalties."
The debate over whether Iraq posed enough of a threat to justify military action revealed deep divisions within Europe, which has worked hard for decades to forge a unified polity that would eventually be able to speak with a single voice on foreign affairs. France and Germany led the opposition to the American initiative. But Spain and most of Eastern Europe's former Soviet bloc countries took the United States and Britain's side.
Most galling to France and Germany was the allegiance to the United States expressed by Eastern European countries that will join the European Union this year.
Some people in the United States and Britain have called for independent inquiries into the quality of intelligence used to justify the war and whether that intelligence was unduly manipulated. But such calls are rarely heard on the Continent.
An exception is Spain, where the government supported the American-led invasion despite popular discontent. The opposition Socialist Party has taken Mr. Kay's testimony as an opportunity to demand such an inquiry at home. So far, the government has ignored the requests.
In general, though, far less energy has been spent in continental Europe on re-examining prewar intelligence or decisions than has been expended in Britain or the United States.
Europe, it appears, would happily forget the matter and move on.
-------- iran
Most Iran Candidates Are Not Reinstated
Reformer Threatens Election Boycott
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64443-2004Jan30.html
ISTANBUL, Jan. 30 -- The governance crisis in Iran edged toward a climax Friday as conservative clerics refused to reinstate most of the reformist candidates who had been disqualified from next month's parliamentary elections.
The Guardian Council relented on only 1,160 of the 3,600 candidates it had dismissed almost three weeks ago in what analysts termed a brazen effort to clear the field of all but conservative candidates. It was not immediately clear how many of the 80 members of parliament barred from seeking reelection had been reinstated.
The apparently final decision by the council, a 12-member appointive body with authority to reject legislation as well as screen candidates, was announced on state radio and the council's Web site late on the Muslim day of rest. It produced no immediate official reaction, but the number of restored candidacies fell far short of the full reinstatement demanded by outraged members of parliament, who have staged daily sit-ins at the legislative chamber in central Tehran.
The striking lawmakers had anticipated the council's limited retreat, however, and issued a statement repeating their vows to resign or otherwise disable the government, whose day-to-day functioning has been entirely in reformist hands for four years.
A leader of the largest reform party spoke of pulling out of the Feb. 20 balloting.
"The council statement means there is no option left for us but to boycott this sham election," said Saeed Shariati of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, in remarks cited by the Associated Press. "As Iran's biggest party, almost all our candidates have been barred."
Shariati added, however, that an official announcement about the reformists' intentions would wait until Monday.
"A lot of it is political rhetoric," said Shirzad Bozorgnehr, a senior editor of Iran News, an independent English-language daily in Tehran, referring to the threats. "It's hard to discern between the talk and real decisions that will result in action."
Bozorgnehr said the impact of the council's decision would become apparent only after reformists saw which candidates had been validated and which remained disqualified.
"The problem is that right now we don't know who they are. Are the most prominent reformists restored, people who matter and who will lead? Or are they insignificant people?" he said.
The council, which answers only to Iran's top cleric, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, suggested it was being generous. "Approving such a high number of parliamentary hopefuls is nearly unprecedented in the history of the Iranian parliament," it said in a statement.
The council also denied a formal request to postpone the election. The request was made by Iran's reformist interior minister, Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari, who said the mass disqualification and the controversy that followed made it impossible for the ministry to mount "a proper election."
The bid followed a vow by Iran's governors to withhold their own crucial cooperation in setting up polling places. Similar threats from other elements of the reform movement, including student leaders, are widely seen as meant to stiffen the spine of Mohammad Khatami. The reformist president, who disdains confrontation, has sought to restore the candidacies by negotiating with the Guardian Council and parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karrubi, who promised "good results."
"To shut down the elections means to shut down democracy, and God does not want such a thing for our people," Khatami said this week after turning down the resignations of dozens of top officials incensed over the candidate bans.
--------
Iran Council Restores More, but Not Most, Names to Ballot
January 31, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/international/middleeast/31COUN.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Jan. 30 - The hard-line Guardian Council reversed itself on fewer than a third of the 3,600 candidates it had banned from parliamentary elections scheduled for February, prompting reformist lawmakers to vow to resign and pushing the country a step closer to political chaos.
The council unleashed one of the worst political crises of the last 25 years earlier this month when it banned the 3,600 from a list of 8,200 candidates for elections to be held on Feb. 20, then reinstated 700.
It was the council's most drastic intervention in Iran's parliamentary history. The council, a panel of six clerics appointed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and six Islamic lawyers appointed through the judiciary, is charged with reviewing electoral candidates and reviewing laws. It gave no public explanation for barring the candidates, but many were known to oppose the religious leadership.
Iran's theocracy, established after the Islamic revolution of 1979, imbues the supreme leader with vast power over the military, the judiciary and broadcasting and, through the Guardian Council, profound influence on Parliament. But the president and Parliament are elected by the people, and in recent years as popular demand for social and economic freedoms has grown, that part of the government has taken on a strong reformist cast.
On Friday the council announced the reinstatement of 1,160 candidates to the Interior Ministry, which is responsible for holding the elections.
Their names were not made public, but an earlier list of about 500 approved candidates did not include the names of 83 current members of Parliament, all supporters of the reformist president, Mohammad Khatami. Among them are two prominent feminists, two deputy speakers, six leaders of important parliamentary commissions and six representatives of Iran's Kurdish areas.
The interior minister, Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari, asked the council on Thursday to delay the elections and take more time to review candidates. But after reversing some of the bans on Friday, the council said elections would go on as scheduled.
About 70 members of the 290-seat Parliament, who held a sit-in protest for nearly three weeks, are expected to resign on Sunday.
"We are determined to go ahead with our decision to resign and will not participate in a show election," said Ali Mazroui. "Not even a third of those who were rejected have been approved. This cannot be free and competitive elections."
The crisis may deepen if President Khatami accepts the resignations submitted two weeks ago by cabinet ministers and provincial governors, who help run any elections.
The conflict may revitalize calls for reform from outside the government. Reform from within has been so slow that many students, a main source of calls for freedom, became disillusioned. The sit-in has largely been seen as a bid for popular support. Independent social movements, including the pro-democracy student movement, approved of the protest but did not join it.
"The university does not want to get involved in political games and is waiting to see if the deputies are serious in their resistance, even if some of them are approved," said Behrouz Nematdoost, a student activist, The Shargh daily reported.
But the president's brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, said at a meeting in the northeastern city of Mashhad on Friday that all pro-reform factions had finally reached an agreement to act unanimously.
"If we do not adopt a clear and firm stance now, we may never reach the republicanism, democracy and freedom that we have been seeking," the official Islamic Republic News Agency quoted him as saying.
He said that if his reform movement failed to secure free elections it would continue its activities from within society.
"This is a very important event," said Hamidreza Jalaipour, a professor of sociology at Tehran University. "The reform movement was determined until now to move its reform agenda through peaceful and civil channels. Now, by pushing them to resign, their opponents are pushing them more toward people who were frustrated with such slow methods."
-------- israel / palestine
U.S. argues World Court has no right to judge Israel
January 31, 2004
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040130-093741-4774r.htm
The Bush administration said yesterday the top U.N. court does not have the jurisdiction to put Israel in the dock over the construction of a security fence designed to contain Palestinian terrorists.
The United States joined Israel, Britain, Australia, France and more than two dozen countries in urging the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to stay out of the dispute over the fence, arguing it could hurt a political settlement and set a dangerous precedent for future disputes between states.
The Hague-based ICJ, also known as the World Court, "is not the appropriate forum to discuss Israel's security barrier," the administration said in its submission.
Yesterday's deadline for briefs to the ICJ came just a day after a Palestinian suicide bomber killed 10 Israelis in an explosion on a Jerusalem city bus not far from the residence of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher warned that The Hague case could undercut diplomatic efforts under the U.S.-backed road map to solve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
For the court to issue an opinion on the case, he said, would violate the principle that the ICJ would only claim jurisdiction in disputes where the parties mutually agreed in advance to abide by the decision.
U.S. officials also worry that the issue reached the court through a Dec. 8 vote of the U.N. General Assembly, which many view as dominated by states hostile to Israel.
"There's a difference between saying that we have an opinion and others may have a strong opinion about this, and saying the General Assembly has a back door to get the court to intervene in any dispute that it feels like," Mr. Boucher said.
Israel contends that the proposed 440-mile security wall, which includes fences, trenches and other barriers, is needed to stop the infiltration of terrorists from Palestinian territories into Israel.
Palestinian and Arab states have furiously objected to the route taken by what they call the "Apartheid Wall," saying it represents a de facto seizure of Palestinian territory held by Israel since the 1967 Middle East War.
Mr. Boucher said yesterday the United States has its own concerns about the Israeli fence, but said the question should be hammered out in direct negotiations, not through the U.N. legal body.
On a 90-8 vote with 74 countries abstaining, the U.N. General Assembly last month asked the court to provide an "advisory opinion" on the legal consequences of the barrier under international law, including the Geneva Conventions.
Oral arguments on the court's jurisdiction were set for Feb. 23, with a ruling expected a few weeks after that. But with more than 30 countries reportedly objecting to the filing, there was some doubt yesterday whether the court will proceed to oral arguments.
Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy here, said the Sharon government and the Bush administration "see eye-to-eye" on the court's lack of jurisdiction.
"We've unfortunately seen the politicization of U.N. agencies through the years and this is just another example," he said.
Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath earlier this month traveled to Moscow and Western European countries seeking support for the filing.
Marty Rosenbluth, a specialist on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute for the U.S. arm of Amnesty International, said the Bush administration's opposition to the World Court case was "disappointing."
"No one is questioning the right of Israel to defend itself," he said, "but the route taken by the wall raises very legitimate human rights issues for the Palestinians."
-------- latin america
Castro Says Bush Plotting to Kill Him
By ANDREA RODRIGUEZ
Associated Press Writer
Jan 31, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CUBA_US?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
HAVANA (AP) -- Fidel Castro accused President Bush of plotting with Miami exiles to kill him, and said he would die fighting if the United States ever invaded to oust him.
"I don't care how I die," Castro said at the end of a 5 1/2-hour speech that began Thursday night and continued into early Friday. "But rest assured, if they invade us, I'll die in combat."
The Cuban president didn't back up his accusations with details. He spoke at the close of a conference bringing together activists across the region who oppose the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
Castro has insisted over the past year that hardline Cuban exiles in Miami have been pressuring the Bush administration to invade the island - a charge U.S. officials deny.
Castro also has increasingly referred to his own mortality in recent years, promising to remain in power until his last breath. "We know that Mr. Bush has committed himself to the mafia ... to assassinate me," the Cuban president said, using the term commonly employed here to describe anti-Castro Cuban Americans. "I said it once before and today I'll say it clearer: I accuse him!"
Castro has accused past U.S. administrations of seeking to assassinate him, and during his early years in power there were numerous documented cases of U.S.-sponsored attempts on his life.
The assassination of foreign leaders as U.S. policy was later banned in 1976 by an executive order signed by then-President Gerald Ford and reinforced by Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Castro also criticized the Bush administration's Commission for a Free Cuba - a panel set up in October and headed by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
When the United States announced creation of the commission, Powell suggested that the goal is not to ease Castro out but to plan a strategy for Cuba once the 77-year-old leader is no longer in power.
Earlier in his speech, Castro called on the more than 1,000 activists from across the Americas gathered here to work against the U.S.-backed free trade pact, which he said will only further impoverish their nations.
The Bush administration has progressively hardened its policies toward the island. Cuban authorities charge the strategy is aimed at wooing voters in Florida, home to most of the Cuban-American exiles living in the United States.
For more than four decades, the two countries have been without diplomatic ties and a U.S. trade embargo against the island makes most trade between the nations impossible, except for sales of farm products.
-------- mideast
Jordan, UAE sign 25-million-dollar deal to set up military factory
AMMAN (AFP)
Jan 31, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040131093538.ybdzir2a.html
Jordan and the UAE have signed a 25-million-dollar deal to set up a factory in Jordan to produce an unspecified type of military vehicle starting in June, the pro-government daily Al-Rai said Saturday.
In line with the deal, the factory will go into production in June and is expected to make 500 "military vehicles" over the next four years at a cost of 75,000 dollars each, the newspaper reported.
Al-Rai said that after the first four years the factory was expected to produce 1,000 vehicles a year.
These vehicles are due to be sold in Jordan, the UAE and other Arab countries, the newspaper added.
The agreement was struck between the King Abdullah II Center for Design and Development, which makes military equipment, and the UAE's Bin Jabr Group, Al-Rai said.
It was signed Thursday by Major General Khaled Jamukha, assistant director to Jordan's chief of staff for military productions and manager of the King Abdullah center, and Said bin Jabr, head of the Bin Jabr group.
Over the years Jordan has developed its military industry.
In December, the Jordan Aerospace Industries announced at the Dubai air show that it was expecting to produce soon the first light aircraft in the Arab world dubbed the Sama CH 2000.
JAI president Muayad al-Samaree said his private company had secured export orders for at least 25 aircraft from buyers across the Middle East, Africa and Asia, after getting approval from the Jordan Civil Aviation Authority.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistan Adopting a Tough Old Tactic to Flush Out Qaeda
January 31, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE and ISMAIL KHAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/international/asia/31STAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Jan. 30 - At the start of the month, Pakistan massed several thousand troops in and around the town of Wana, near the country's mountainous border with Afghanistan. Using a harsh century-old British method, officials handed local tribal elders a list and issued an ultimatum.
If 72 men wanted for sheltering Al Qaeda were not produced, they said, the Pakistani Army would punish the tribe as a group, demolishing houses, withdrawing funds and even detaining tribe members.
Several days later, several thousand tribal elders held a jirga, or council, and agreed to raise a force of their own to find the wanted men. In the last two weeks, the tribes have handed over 42 of them. Tribal members, meanwhile, have bulldozed and dynamited the homes of eight men who refused to surrender.
The most wanted fugitives, including foreign Qaeda members, remain at large, although as an added incentive, Pakistani officials have promised not to hand over any fugitive Pakistanis to the United States.
American officials declined to comment on the policy, but Pakistani officials hope the British method, combined with the American-financed building of roads and schools, will show results.
"There is this age-old system of collective responsibility," said Lt. Gen. Syed Iftikhar Hussain Shah, the governor of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province and a key supporter of the new approach. "Tribes are supposed to help the government."
Since the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the tribal areas that span both sides of the border have proved to be a redoubt for Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the area's inaccessible crags. Insurgents have used the border area, home to smugglers and guerrillas for centuries, as a base to carry out cross-border attacks that have killed or wounded dozens of American soldiers.
Responding to American pressure, Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, deployed soldiers in the tribal areas for the first time in the country's history in the spring of 2002. That provoked bitter protests from hard-line Islamic political parties that won sweeping support in and around the tribal areas in elections that October.
All told, Pakistani soldiers and police officers have captured more than 500 suspected Qaeda members, most of them low-level fighters caught fleeing Afghanistan in 2002.
More than 70,000 Pakistani soldiers are now deployed in the tribal areas, but over the last year capturing fighters has proved more difficult. Suspected Taliban fighters have killed six Pakistani soldiers carrying out raids in the tribal areas since August. Two Pakistanis were killed by American fire on the border. A senior Pakistani intelligence official said Pakistan has had no reports since 2002 that Mr. bin Laden has been in South Waziristan, the tribal agency whose main town is Wana.
Pakistani officials said they would never allow American forces into Pakistan, but conceded that they had been under intense American pressure to act in the tribal areas. They said they hoped the new approach would prove fruitful. There is little expectation that the tribes would abruptly hand over Mr. bin Laden. Instead,the hope is to gradually make the area less hospitable for the Qaeda leader and his backers.
Mr. bin Laden is believed to have strong popular support in the tribal areas, the most religiously conservative and isolated part of Pakistan. The virulent fundamentalism in the tribal areas, which are governed directly by Pakistan's federal government, is the product of decades of government neglect and the anti-Soviet jihad of the 1980's, according to Pakistani analysis.
The United States indirectly helped pay for hundreds of hard-line religious schools that produced anti-Soviet fighters. Today, the same schools appear to produce anti-American fighters.
Malik Ajmal Wazir, 35, a leader of the Zalikhel tribe, said in a telephone interview from the tribal areas on Friday that the tribes were addressing the problem and that American forces would face resistance. "Our tribes will rise against them," he said. "We don't like the Americans, and there will be a fight."
The religious schools and clerics are one of the main sources of information for the 3.1 million residents of the area, where the literacy rate is 25 percent for men and 3 percent for women and public schools are few. Seventy percent of the tribal areas are not easily accessible by road.
Pakistan bars foreign journalists from entering the tribal areas without a military escort. Military officials said no journalists would be taken to Wana until the current operation concluded.
Mark Lyall Grant, the British ambassador to Pakistan, said the British empire sent 11 expeditions into Waziristan in the early 1900's in an effort to subdue them. Criminals had repeatedly kidnapped British colonialists, fled to the impenetrable border areas and demanded ransom. In one famous case, the saga of a schoolgirl kidnapped and taken into the tribal areas played out across London's front pages, embarrassing colonial administrators.
But all 11 expeditions failed to subdue the areas, he said. The British decided instead to take advantage of an existing tribal custom that held an entire tribe responsible for the actions of one of its members. Tribes were ordered to find kidnappers themselves, or face collective punishment. "It's kind of striking to see how Pakistan today is using tactics that the British used 100 years ago," Mr. Lyall Grant said.
Tribal elders said they would rather sort out matters themselves than have outsiders search their communities and homes. In an interview in Islamabad, Maulana Abdul Malik, 43, a leader of the Jalikhel tribe and a member of Pakistan's Parliament from Wana, said he had urged other tribal leaders to hand over the men.
But he insisted that Mr. bin Laden and his supporters were not on the Pakistani side of the border. He also displayed the perceptions of the United States that exist in much of the tribal areas. He said that "only God knows" who carried out the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States and that "hundreds of thousands of people" died in the subsequent American bombing of Afghanistan. "Americans should spread a message of love," he said, "and stop slaughtering humanity."
The senior Pakistani intelligence official said that at least 70 low-level Qaeda members were hiding in South Waziristan, but that he did not believe Mr. bin Laden and his senior aides were on the Pakistani side of the border.
Other Pakistani officials said their raids were handicapped by a severe shortage of helicopters. They asked the United States to send military equipment to Pakistan, not troops. Local tribesmen spot ground convoys from miles away, they said, and warn the wanted men, who flee.
The governor said he hoped new aid flowing into the area would reduce sympathies for Taliban and Al Qaeda. He said the government had increased the development budget for the tribal areas by 400 percent, to $67 million. If significant increases are made for several years, he said, the tribal areas will finally receive government financing on a par with other parts of the country.
There is also international help. Norway is building 350 schools, he said. Japan and the United States are spending $2 million on refurbishing existing primary schools. And the United States is paying $10 million for new roads.
Pakistani officials said they would wait to see how many of the wanted men were handed over, particularly foreigners. Depending on the results, they will shower the area with money, or soldiers.
David Rohde reported for this article from Islamabad, Pakistan, and Ismail Khan from Peshawar.
-------- spies
Get smart about intelligence
Washington Times
Letters to the Editor,
January 31, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040130-081811-8114r.htm
Congratulations on an excellent editorial regarding the need for reform of the CIA ("Reforming the CIA," Thursday).
The Washington Post later also ran an editorial on the subject of the poor quality of our intelligence leading up to the war in Iraq. The Post, however, failed to make any note of the gutting and virtual destruction of the agency and its assets in the wake of the Church Committee report and the actions of President Carter and his director of central intelligence, Adm. Stansfield Turner.
Your editorial was built largely around this information and also included an appropriate knock on political correctness and "diversity" programs within the CIA. Just as war is too important to be entrusted solely to generals, so intelligence is too important to be subject to the considerations of political correctness and "fair play" that loom so large in our intelligence activities. Our lack of strong, on-the-ground assets overseas is directly traceable to the Carter years. Rebuilding what was lost as a result of those years will take longer than the 10 years you suggest. Still, the time to make changes is now.
PETER S. GLICK
Honolulu
•The "Reforming the CIA" editorial could not have been better said or more timely. Yet, while you mention the Church Committee and Pike Report, you must understand that few Americans really appreciate how congressional actions created the problems all our intelligence services face today. For Democratic senators and representatives to try to blame the present administration for the intelligence failures that were primarily created by a Democrat-run Congress created, should be intolerable to everyone. Our elected officials who were there when all of these mistakes were put in place or who allowed them to continue must accept responsibility for the recent intelligence failures and stop trying to pass the blame to the present administration.
With an important election coming, now is the time to educate the people, by papers like The Washington Times doing in-depth reporting or updates. This way America can begin to understand who and what caused the intelligence crisis our country is facing.
We are all in this together. We are at war with a very evil group of people quite willing to do whatever it takes to defeat us. We cannot defeat such an enemy by being politically correct. Indeed, our enemies believe that they can defeat us because we are dumb enough to strive for the stupidity of political correctness.
EDWIN W. IRBY JR.
Tallahassee, Fla.
--------
No Evidence CIA Slanted Iraq Data
Probers Say Analysts Remained Consistent
By Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64626-2004Jan30?language=printer
Congressional and CIA investigations into the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons and links to terrorism have found no evidence that CIA analysts colored their judgment because of perceived or actual political pressure from White House officials, according to intelligence officials and congressional officials from both parties.
Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy CIA director who is leading the CIA's review of its prewar Iraq assessment, said an examination of the secret analytical work done by CIA analysts showed that it remained consistent over many years.
"There was pressure and a lot of debate, and people should have a lot of debate, that's quite legitimate," Kerr said. "But the bottom line is, over a period of several years," the analysts' assessments "were very consistent. They didn't change their views."
Kerr's findings mirror those of two probes being conducted separately by the House and Senate intelligence committees, which have interviewed, under oath, every analyst involved in assessing Iraq's weapons programs and terrorist ties.
The panel chairmen, Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), and other congressional officials said in recent interviews that they found no evidence that analysts shaded their findings to more closely fit the White House's known desire to create the strongest, most urgent case for war with Iraq.
The conclusion that analysts did not buckle under political pressure does not answer the question of why the intelligence reports were so flawed. Nor does it address allegations -- made by Democrats in Congress and Democratic presidential candidates -- that top Bush administration officials misused intelligence and exaggerated the threat posed by Iraq.
On Wednesday, former chief U.S. weapons inspector David Kay told a Senate committee that he no longer believed Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the months leading up to the war. And he called for an independent inquiry into why U.S. intelligence agencies believed the opposite.
The White House, which has said it opposes such an outside inquiry, has said final conclusions about Iraq's weapons programs and U.S. intelligence cannot be made until the Iraq Survey Group, the inspection agency Kay used to lead, completes its work.
"I want the American people to know that I, too, want to know the facts," Bush told reporters yesterday. "I want to be able to compare what the Iraq Survey Group has found with what we thought prior to going into Iraq." Bush added that Hussein was a danger and "we dealt with the danger. And, as a result, the world is a better place and a more peaceful place, and the Iraqi people are free."
There were instances before the war in which intelligence analysts said they sensed pressure to reach certain conclusions, but the House and Senate investigators said there was no indication they bowed to such wishes.
Last year, for example, some analysts at the CIA complained to senior officials when Vice President Cheney made multiple trips to CIA headquarters to question their studies of Iraq's weapons programs and alleged links to al Qaeda.
And analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency told investigators they sensed pressure when civilian Defense Department leaders constantly questioned why their analysis had found only tentative links between al Qaeda and Iraq.
But "their constant message" to congressional investigators was "they didn't buckle to pressure," another congressional official said.
Neither the CIA inspector general nor the agency's ombudsmen received any complaints about outside meddling, a senior intelligence official said. Added one congressional official: "There were no anonymous calls, no letters, nothing."
The CIA, congressional intelligence committees, Kerr's team and the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are investigating how the CIA analysis missed the mark so widely.
That is a more difficult question to answer and a much more complex problem to fix than situations in which analysts are improperly influenced by elected officials, intelligence experts said. The congressional committees have found that CIA analysts relied too heavily on outdated, circumstantial intelligence and on information from unreliable informants.
Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee this week that he had talked to CIA analysts and had found no evidence of "inappropriate command influence."
"And, you know, almost in a perverse way," Kay added, "I wish it had been undue influence, because we know how to correct that. We get rid of the people who in fact were exercising that. The fact that it wasn't tells me that we've got a much more fundamental problem of understanding what went wrong. And we've got to figure out what was there. And that's what I call fundamental fault analysis."
Kerr said the "analysts believed that the evidence supported their judgment. Whether it did or not is another question."
The CIA maintains that it is still too early to say that its assessment was wrong because the search for weapons is not over. There are still millions of pages of documents to be read, hundreds of sites to visit and thousands of Iraqis to be interviewed, the agency says.
CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said Kerr's and the committees' findings mirror the CIA's view of its analysts' work: "We have long said and still say that our analysts didn't change their assessment of Iraq because of any outside pressure."
In fact, some analysts have told Kerr and congressional investigators that they welcomed the attention of Cheney on his visits.
"Analysts are very independent people," Kerr said. "When they get pressure, they tend to react the other way. They find it quite easy to stand up" to superiors. "It's kind of the culture."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
White House Holding Notes Taken by 9/11 Commission
Panel May Subpoena Its Summaries of Bush Briefings
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64628-2004Jan30.html
The White House, already embroiled in a public fight over the deadline for an independent commission's investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, is refusing to give the panel notes on presidential briefing papers taken by some of its own members, officials said this week.
The standoff has prompted the 10-member commission to consider issuing subpoenas for the notes and has further soured relations between the Bush administration and the bipartisan panel, according to sources familiar with the issue. Lack of access to the materials would mean that the information they contain could not be included in a final report about the attacks, several officials said.
"We're having discussions on this almost hourly or at least daily," said the commission's vice chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. "We retain all of our rights to gain the access we need. . . . This is a priority item for us to resolve, and we are working to resolve it."
The disagreement is the latest obstacle to face the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which is racing to complete its work by a May 27 deadline after months of fighting over access to government documents. The commission has asked that the deadline be pushed back at least two months, but the White House and leading congressional Republicans oppose that idea.
Such a postponement would mean releasing the potentially damaging commission report on July 26, in the middle of the presidential campaign. Legislation to be introduced next week in the Senate would extend the commission's deadline until next January, avoiding the election altogether.
The latest dispute stems from an agreement reached in November that allowed a four-member team from the commission to examine highly classified documents known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB), including a controversial August 2001 memo that discusses the possibility of airline hijackings by al Qaeda terrorists. The deal allowed the team -- made up of three commission members and Executive Director Philip D. Zelikow -- to take notes on the materials that would be passed along to the rest of the commission, but only after the White House gave its approval.
The team completed its work several weeks ago but has been unable to reach an agreement with the White House on how to share its summaries with the seven commission members who were not privy to the material, officials said.
The standoff has prompted commission members to discuss using subpoenas to obtain either the summaries or the entire catalogue of President's Daily Briefs, several sources said.
Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former Indiana congressman, said that "the convoluted and tortuous process set up by the White House has bottlenecked. If it's not resolved within the next few days, I believe we have to pursue other options."
Commission member Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general during the Clinton administration, who served on the four-person review team, declined to comment on the details of the impasse but said negotiations are continuing.
"All I can say is that we have followed the procedure that we contemplated and we are discussing with the White House whether that can be made to work for us," Gorelick said. "We are trying to ensure that we get the information we need, while at the same time respecting the needs and desires of the White House. . . . We have not been able yet to transmit [PDB summaries] to the whole commission."
White House officials declined to comment on the details of the negotiations, or to say why administration lawyers have objected to releasing the review team's notes.
"The administration has worked closely with the commission, providing unprecedented access to information and documents," said White House spokeswoman Erin Healy. "We continue to have discussions on a number of issues as the process moves forward, and we will continue to do so in a spirit of cooperation."
But Kristen Breitweiser, widow of World Trade Center victim Ronald Breitweiser and a member of a group of victims' families who monitor the commission's work, called the White House position "unacceptable." She said the panel should subpoena the documents it needs.
"The White House needs to stop being all talk and no action," Breitweiser said. "They say they're cooperating. It's time to show that."
After months of delays last fall, the commission issued subpoenas for documents from the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration and the city of New York, eventually working out agreements in all three cases. The panel also threatened to subpoena the White House over the PDB issue, but settled on the compromise because officials said they did not want to get bogged down in a court battle.
The White House indicated at the time that it would consider asserting that the PDB documents were covered by executive privilege and not subject to review by outside parties.
-------- homeland security
Seven Flights to and From U.S. Are Canceled
January 31, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Flights-Canceled.html?hp
LONDON (AP) -- British Airways and Air France on Saturday announced the cancellation of seven flights to and from the United States because of security concerns. The United States has indications of al-Qaida's continued interest in targeting international flights to America, a government official said.
BA canceled four flights between Heathrow Airport and Washington on Sunday and Monday and one from Heathrow to Miami on Sunday. Air France canceled two Paris-to-Washington flights. There are no plans to raise the terror alert in the United States because of the latest threats, Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.
``We remain concerned about al-Qaida's desire to target aviation, especially international aviation,'' Roehrkasse said.
``The U.S. intelligence community continues to gather specific credible threat information on international flights, as we have done in an ongoing basis in the past few weeks. We have shared this information with our international partners, and will work with them to put in place the appropriate security measures.''
A government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said based on threat reporting there are a handful of specific flights on three airlines -- Air France, British Airways and a U.S.-based carrier that flies internationally -- that are of concern. The official declined to identify the third airline or provide information about its flights.
The official said that while some of the canceled flights were scheduled for Sunday, when the Super Bowl is being played in Houston, there is no direct intelligence to indicate a threat to the football game.
Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, declined comment on the developments. President Bush was in Philadelphia to speak to congressional Republicans.
BA Flight 223 to Washington's Dulles airport will not fly on Sunday or Monday, but departed Saturday at 4 p.m., just under an hour late because of heavy winds, said an airline spokeswoman. No extra security was visible around the jet. Flight 222 from Washington Dulles to London also was canceled Sunday and Monday, the airline said.
Dennis Lopez, 48, a lawyer from Tampa, Fla., boarding the plane, said the cancelations were unnerving.
``I'm a little worried and if I had another flight arrangement right now that could take me there I would definitely take advantage of that,'' he said.
He added that he had just arrived from Kuwait, and ``I breathed a sigh of relief when I landed in London, thinking I was out of the area of most concern. ... It hadn't occurred to me that this flight could be a possible target.''
BA Flight 207 to Miami will not fly on Sunday, the airline said, but had departed Saturday morning.
Air France canceled its Flight 026 from Paris to Washington on both Sunday and Monday ``for reasons of security,'' spokeswoman Veronique Brachet said.
The BA spokeswoman, who declined to be identified, said BA had made its decision on the advice of the British government. She cited security fears but gave no further details.
``The safety and security of our operations is our absolute priority and will not be compromised,'' the airline said.
BA's Flight 223 had been the subject of concern early in January, when it was canceled twice because of security fears and then delayed for hours several more times.
Six Air France flights were canceled between Paris and Los Angeles on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day after security talks between U.S. and French officials.
U.S. officials said Friday that new intelligence indicated Flight 223 and Air France flights from Paris to an unspecified U.S. city could be terrorist targets.
The department said it could not immediately say why the flights were canceled, or specify the source of the intelligence -- U.S., British or another government's -- that led to BA's decision.
A British Department for Transport spokesman said only that the decision to cancel the flights was made ``in the light of information received.''
``Aviation security measures are adjusted from time to time, and occasional cancellations may be necessary,'' he said on condition of anonymity. ``The first priority is always the safety of the traveling public.''
Associated Press reporters Leslie Miller, Curt Anderson and Katherine Pfleger contributed to this report.
--------
New Concern Is Expressed About Flights From Abroad
January 31, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/national/31TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - American officials said on Friday that they had received new information in recent days pointing to the possibility of an international hijacking and were considering the grounding of several flights from England and France over the weekend as a result.
Officials said terrorist intelligence that they considered "specific and credible" raised particular concerns about British Airways flights from London to Washington and Air France flights. Officials would not disclose the Air France flights but said they were not on the Paris-to-Los Angeles route on which flights were grounded in December.
"It's very similar to what we saw over the Christmas and New Year's holidays, and a repeat of that situation - with the cancellation of some flights - is a high probability," a law enforcement official said.
There were no cancellations as of Friday night, officials said.
At the end of December, United States officials became so alarmed about the threat of an international hijacking that they raised the nation's threat status to "orange," or high risk. Numerous flights into and out of the United States on British Airways, Air France and Aeromexico were canceled or subjected to extraordinary security measures. One flight from Mexico City to Los Angeles turned around in mid-flight because American officials were not satisfied that passengers and baggage had been properly screened.
The threat level was lowered on Jan. 9 to "yellow."
This week, a "re-scrubbing" of intelligence gleaned from the orange alert, along with new intelligence developed from an informant, again raised the specter of an international aviation attack, the law enforcement official said. The threats, corroborated by other sources, including information on specific flights.
"We remain concerned," said Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, "about Al Qaeda's desire to target aviation, especially international aviation." But he said there were no plans to elevate the threat status.
--------
New Air Terror Concerns Raised
Some Airports and Airlines Warned of Elevated Attack Risk
By Sara Kehaulani Goo and John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A241-2004Jan31.html
U.S. officials alerted some airports and airlines yesterday about renewed concerns that terrorists might try to use inbound international flights to attack the United States, according to aviation and Bush administration officials.
An administration official said the threats were not as specific as those raised over the holidays, when 16 flights from Mexico, France and Britain were canceled out of concerns about hijackings.
However, the new intelligence did renew concerns about British Airways Flight 223, the London Heathrow-to-Washington Dulles route that was repeatedly canceled over the holidays; inbound Air France flights; and other specific flights into Los Angeles International and Miami International airports, the official said.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department has asked British, French and other officials to take additional security precautions. He declined to elaborate.
U.S. officials yesterday said there were no plans to cancel flights. But it is a possibility as officials in other countries analyze the intelligence and decide what security precautions to take.
"The intelligence isn't specific enough" to say whether the main danger is a hijacking followed by a crash landing, or some other attack scenario, a U.S. official said.
An aviation source briefed yesterday said the intelligence seems to be focused on a few airports, specifically Dulles, Miami, Los Angeles, and airports in the New York area.
The new intelligence arrived in the last 48 hours and was quickly deemed credible, a government official said. It comes mostly from "a source corroborated by other intelligence information," the official said, declining to state whether the source was a person, an electronic intercept of conversations or e-mails, or some other type of data.
The Department of Homeland Security said it did not plan to elevate the nation's alert level. Several airports remained on an "elevated" or "orange" alert even after the national level was lowered to "yellow" on Jan. 10. Those airports include Los Angeles, Las Vegas's McCarran International, the Washington area's three airports and the New York area's three airports.
-------- police
FBI Investigates Head of Detroit Office
Agent Reassigned as Agency Looks Into Handling of Confidential Informants
By Allan Lengel and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A64629-2004Jan30?language=printer
The head of the FBI field office in Detroit has been temporarily removed from his post, making him the latest of several law enforcement officials there to face review by federal investigators over the handling of high-profile terrorism cases in recent months.
Special Agent in Charge Willie Hulon has been temporarily reassigned to FBI headquarters in Washington while teams from the FBI and the Justice Department investigate his agents' use of confidential informants, according to law enforcement sources.
Hulon's transfer came just weeks after authorities launched an internal affairs investigation of Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard G. Convertino, who was removed as the lead prosecutor of a case involving a suspected al Qaeda sleeper cell.
A federal judge is now considering whether to overturn the convictions of three defendants in the case, including two who were convicted of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists because prosecutors allegedly failed to turn over documents to defense attorneys. The convictions were hailed by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as a major victory in the domestic war on terrorism.
With doubts now growing about both cases, the developments have affected law enforcement agencies' already difficult task of improving relations with eastern Michigan's Arab American community, one of the largest in the United States.
Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, Mich., said the investigations have been a "double-edged sword" in the Arab community, eroding some people's faith in the government but heartening others who see that the government is willing to investigate itself.
"It's never been an easy challenge to sell trust to the people. Usually people are skeptical. But this is where authorities can show such misconduct will not be tolerated," Hamad said.
Ed Cogswell, an FBI spokesman in Washington, said Hulon is "working on a special project" at FBI headquarters. Michael Wolf, head of the FBI's New Haven, Conn., office, is filling in for Hulon in Detroit. FBI officials stressed that it is standard procedure to temporarily reassign an employee who is the subject of an internal investigation.
FBI officials declined to make Hulon available for comment.
A primary focus of the Hulon investigation are claims by a confidential FBI informant, Marwan Farhat, 34, of Dearborn, who said in a letter left with an immigration officer two weeks ago that he was forced to flee the country after he was identified in a local newspaper story and someone fired a shot at him but missed.
Farhat's FBI supervisor was agent Robert Pertuso, whose handling of informants is central to the investigation, numerous law enforcement sources said.
Pertuso and his wife, Karen, who is also an FBI agent, were involved in the investigation of two brothers, Ali Abdul-Karim Farhat and Hassan Farhat of Dearborn, who were arrested Jan. 20 on charges of drug trafficking and providing financial support to the Hezbollah terrorist group.
The couple has been removed from the counterterrorism squad during the investigation, sources said. Neither returned telephone calls for comment.
Marwan Farhat, who is not related to the defendants in the drug trafficking case, left behind the letter as he fled the country Jan. 21. He alleged that Pertuso ordered him to steal mail from people under investigation and promised him 25 percent of all money taken from terrorism suspects, according to sources who have copies of the letter. Marwan Farhat also alleges that Pertuso paid him nothing.
The six-page letter, which was first reported in the Detroit News, includes a stamp of Marwan Farhat's fingerprint, sources said. Farhat said in the letter that he supplied more than 400 pages of notes to Pertuso, who, he contended, also asked him to obtain information from a defendant in jail, sources said.
"I assisted the FBI in giving information on about 242 (two hundred and forty two) Arab Muslims who are criminals, radicals and extremists," the letter reads, according to one source. "I worked around the clock helping and assisting the government of the United States to put Muslims in jail. My life has been destroyed, abused and used to benefit your interests."
According to law enforcement sources, Pertuso also put his wife on his squad, a practice frowned upon by the FBI. It is improper for related agents to keep tabs on one another's handling and payment of informants.
To further complicate matters, authorities are looking into who leaked an internal investigative document containing Marwan Farhat's name that was the focus of a Jan. 17 article in the Detroit Free Press. The leaked document was part of a Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility investigation of Convertino.
The OPR investigation includes allegations that Convertino failed to get approval before arranging plea deals with certain defendants, including Farhat, and that he inappropriately sought information about a defense witness in the sleeper cell case.
Convertino, on temporary assignment as an expert on terrorism financing for the Senate Finance Committee, called the allegations "ridiculous" and insisted the investigation was politically motivated because he frequently clashed with Justice officials in Washington over the handling of the terror cell case. He said he got approval from his supervisor before seeking the plea agreements and did nothing improper when he asked a court employee about the witness.
In the terror cell case, the defense accused Convertino and co-counsel Keith Corbett of failing to disclose a letter to officials from a convicted drug dealer, Butch Jones. Jones wrote that he had spent time in jail with the government's key witness in the case, Yousef Hmimssa, and that Hmimssa said he was lying about the defendants' involvement in terrorism. The letter also accused President Bush's family of being involved in drug trafficking.
Richard Helfrick, an attorney for Karim Koubriti, one of the men convicted of terrorism charges, said "from our perspective it's very disturbing that exculpatory evidence was withheld and that it may turn out that there's more that wasn't turned over."
At a Dec. 12 hearing, Corbett told U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen that he did not find the letter credible and therefore did not turn it over. Rosen said it should have been turned over.
Lawyer William M. Sullivan Jr., who represents Convertino, said "turning over this type of material is always a judgment call that prosecutors are compelled to make every day. The letter on its face was not credible and would not have affected the outcome of the trial. . . ."
Convertino said his removal from the case "was clearly in retaliation" for his decision to testify before the Senate Finance Committee about terror financing after the Detroit case concluded. The Justice Department had opposed his appearance, but Convertino said he was subpoenaed.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Proposed Mercury Rules Bear Industry Mark
EPA Language Similar to That in Memos From Law Firm Representing Utilities
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 31, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64630-2004Jan30.html
The Bush administration proposed new rules yesterday regulating power plants' mercury pollution, and some of the language is similar to recommendations from two memos sent to federal officials by a law firm representing the utility industry.
The three approaches that the administration published for public comment would for the first time regulate airborne emissions of toxic mercury, which can enter the food chain and cause developmental damage to infants whose mothers eat mercury-tainted fish.
A side-by-side comparison of one of the three proposed rules and the memorandums prepared by Latham & Watkins -- one of Washington's premier corporate environmental law firms -- shows that at least a dozen paragraphs were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from the industry suggestions.
Environmental Protection Agency officials dismissed the matter as largely an interagency mix-up that had little to do with shaping the administration's centerpiece proposal for forcing power plants to reduce mercury emissions 70 percent by 2018. They said the law firm language that turned up in the proposed rule published in the Federal Register was related to an alternative proposal that the administration does not support.
"That's not typically the way we do things, borrowing language from other people," said Jeffrey Holmstead, head of the EPA's air policy office. "But it came to us through the interagency process."
Latham & Watkins was among the law firms and utility industry groups that lobbied the administration last year during deliberations over mercury rules in the Clean Air Act. The firm represents Cinergy Inc. and other major utilities and energy companies with a major interest in the outcome of the rule-making. Holmstead, an assistant EPA administrator, and his chief counsel, Bill Wehrum, worked for Latham & Watkins before joining the EPA.
There is nothing unusual about industry groups peppering government agencies with position papers and recommendations. Indeed, lawyers for Latham & Watkins served on an EPA mercury advisory group and submitted two detailed memos -- one dated March 8, 2002, that dealt with the challenges of regulating different grades of coal, and another, dated Sept. 4, that outlined a number of regulatory legal theories. However, some former EPA officials said it is rare for the agency to simply insert large chunks of an industry analysis into a proposed rule.
"The regulations are supposed to be drafted by the staff -- the people in the science program and regulatory branches," said Robert Perciasepe, who headed the EPA air policy office during the Clinton administration. "I think it would be inappropriate" for the agency to borrow heavily from an industry memorandum, he said, "unless it was from a government contractor."
Martha Keating, a toxics scientist with the Clean Air Task Force and a former EPA employee, was the first to discover the similarities between some of the proposed rules and the law firm's memos. "It just illustrates the inside track the industry groups and some of these law firms have with the administration," she said.
Claudia M. O'Brien, lead writer of the Latham & Watkins memos, said it was "gratifying" that the EPA found the firms' analysis persuasive, but that "we didn't ask EPA to cut and paste our analysis into their [rule-making] preamble."
"It was a long rule-making process, and it's a big document done under a tight time frame," she said. "If they found an analysis persuasive, they adopted the analysis."
Until recently, the EPA appeared on track to issue new rules requiring the nation's 1,100 coal- and oil-fired power plants to meet a maximum achievable control technology (MACT) standard to sharply reduce mercury pollutants within three years. That approach met strong resistance from industry groups, which say the regulations would be excessively costly and would be impossible to meet with existing technology.
Instead, the administration has embraced a mandatory "cap-and-trade" program, similar to the program used to combat acid rain, begun in 1990. The new program, intended to reduce mercury emissions by nearly 70 percent by 2018, would allow utilities to buy emissions "credits" from cleaner-operating plants to meet an overall industry target without having to install new scrubbers in every plant.
To comply with a consent agreement, the EPA also proposed a modest MACT standard to reduce mercury emissions by 29 percent by the end of 2007 -- although Holmstead said that is not the administration's preference.
A third proposal would use a more novel legal interpretation of the Clean Air Act to launch a cap-and-trade program. In describing this alternative, the EPA borrowed heavily from one of the Latham & Watkins memos. According to Holmstead, the law firm's language was part of the public record and was passed along to the EPA by the White House budget office and the Energy Department.
The EPA used the other memo to describe at length plans to rank and regulate coal in "subcategories" based on the amount of mercury pollution they emit.
"Neither Bill [Wehrum] nor I had any idea this language came from Latham & Watkins," Holmstead said. "Our technical folks who did subcategorization used it."
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without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.