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NUCLEAR
Karen Parker: Fighting to stop the use of illegal weapons
US mum on trial for Pakistan nuclear leaker
Pakistan cabinet to mull fate of disgraced nuclear scientist
Pakistani Scientist Admits That He Passed On Nuclear Secrets
Warhead Blueprints Link Libya Project to Pakistan Figure
Pakistani Finger-Pointing and Denials Spread
Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Takes the Rap for Leaks
Brazil's nuclear ambitions
North Korea Agrees to Resume Talks With U.S. Over Arms
N. Korea And U.S. Have Plenty To Discuss
Koreas Wrangle Over Nuclear Crisis
Experts Worry Terrorists Have Nuke Plans
Teen hacker triggered nuclear terrorism alert
Calif. Utility Abandons Nuclear Shipment
Energy Budget Fast Tracks Nuclear Waste Repository
Fuels plant delayed at least 10 months
Bush budget boosts cleanup fund
Rudman, Foley eyed for panel on Iraq
FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S MILITARY SERVICE RECORD
At Senate, Rumsfeld Defends Iraq War Despite Arms Questions
MILITARY
Doubt grows over preventive war
Better security in Rwanda
China, Pakistan skip military fair as India talks to global arms firms
U.S. SELLS AIM-9 MISSILES TO EGYPT
Global weapons merchants gather at Indian arms fair
Australia to Form Squadron of Unmanned Aircraft
Swift and secret, Blair's inquiry
Blair Sets Up Own Inquiry to Be Done Before Bush's
Blair Opens Second Inquiry on Iraq
Blair Defends Iraq War Despite Protests
Builders in Iraq must factor in cost of security
Accused firm given £350m MoD contract
Halliburton to Return $27.4 Million to Government
Miniature Chemical Warfare Agent Detection System Planned
Taiwan's Leader Proposes DMZ With China
Iran's Leader Orders Review of Excluded Candidates
Iran's Leader Said to Refuse Delay in Vote
Pentagon: Most U.S. deaths in Iraq from homemade weapons
Top Arafat aide accuses U.S. of 'blackmail' in bomb probe
Shift on Settlements: Sharon's 'Painful' Course
Possible Plan to Evacuate Dismays Gaza Settlers
Munich security conference: the "Davos" of the defence world
From Prague to Prague
Iraq fallout, NATO's future the focus at Munich security conference
Revealed: the nationalities of Guantanamo
Russia could move army bases out of Georgia
263 Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya last year: defense minister
What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood?
British spy chiefs overruled experts on Iraq dossier: former expert
Rumsfeld Defends U.S. Intelligence Operations
Despite Scrutiny of Iraq Data, It's Business as Usual for Tenet
Bush Urges U.N. to Help Fix Iraqi Clash on Rule
Annan: U.N. To Help End Iraq Impasse
US war machine nearly fell apart, army reveals
Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout UAV Officially Joins the Army
Powell under pressure over Iraq war comments
Rumsfeld: WMD May Still Be Found in Iraq
Rumsfeld: 2002 Iraq WMD Remark May Have Been Misleading
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
President to Allow More Time for 9/11 Commission's Report
Supreme Court Mulls Enemy Combatant Case
Insanity Issue Lingers as Texas Execution Is Set
Broader security
Incident Illustrates Lapses in Security Net
Investigators Seek Ties In Anthrax, Ricin Cases
Teams Search Capitol Mail for Ricin
Deconstructing the Bill of Rights
Finding of Ricin in Office Disrupts Senate
Ricin Partially Shuts Senate
ACTIVISTS
Norway Praised for Its Peaceful Solutions
Russian anti-war NGO to set up new pro-democracy party
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Karen Parker: Fighting to stop the use of illegal weapons
by Stephanie Hiller,
February 4, 2004
Awakened Woman E-Magazine
http://www.awakenedwoman.com/karen_parker.htm
"I think since we've raised this issue at the UN as vocally as we have, it has had a nonproliferation effect."
Karen Parker is a human rights lawyer who specializes in armed conflict law; she has been an advocate for victims of rights abuses including Ugandan refugees, World War II comfort women of Japan, and child slavery in Saudi Arabia. She is responsible, in part, for the evolution of international law in such areas as economic sanctions, weaponry, environment as a human right, and the rights of the disabled. She is currently the chief delegate for International Educational Development - Humanitarian Law Project, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) accredited by the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). In 2001, Ms. Parker and her colleagues lobbied successfully for the appointment of a special rapporteur on depleted uranium during the annual session of the Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination Against Minorities. A graduate of the University of San Francisco Law School, Karen lives in San Francisco.
Awakened Woman talked with Karen Parker via telephone a few days before Thanksgiving. I had just learned about the UMRC study (please see our story, "Scientists Discover Radioactive Trail in Afghanistan") regarding the high uranium levels in Afghan citizens, and I asked her for her view of it.
"I'm not a scientist, but I know Dr. Durakovich, having communicated with his organization for a number of years. And I have reviewed his material with others highly knowledgeable in the field, who concur that his findings appear to be verifiable and credible and his methodology is also credible."
Asked whether their study indicates that some other type of uranium weapons was used in Afghanistan, Karen said, "It's very likely. I think there will also be indications that something more than depleted uranium was used in Gulf War 2."
Depleted uranium is a byproduct of the nuclear process, whether military or for energy, and the US has huge piles of it. Though depleted, it is still highly radioactive. DU was introduced in weaponry during the first Gulf War. Initially, DU was used to form tank-penetrating rounds. These were about six inches long and had the feature of penetrating the heavy metal in tanks. Because of its density, depleted uranium was also used in tanks and protective armor for soldiers. Due to its relatively low levels of radioactivity, depleted uranium was considered fairly harmless (it is also used in golf clubs) and the Pentagon has repeatedly denied any danger from its use, even though its original research into the military application of du stated clearly the dangers to personnel.
However, when exploded, depleted uranium releases a highly radioactive gas; tiny alpha particles are easily inhaled into the lungs. When Gulf War veterans returned home, many of them became mysteriously ill, with symptoms highly suggestive of radiation sickness. Thanks to the work of Gulf War veterans like Doug Rokke and Dan Fahey, and many dedicated activists, the dangers of depleted uranium are now well known, but the Pentagon continues to defend its use.
Karen said that depleted uranium has been used in the nose cones of big bombs used in recent wars. "The daisy cutter is a big fuel air bomb, 15,000 pounds, and when they hit they create a mushroom cloud. They incinerate everything in an area the size of three football fields directly. Maximum bang for the buck!
"I have worked with the United Nations on evaluating these weapons. The weapons used in Afghanistan were more bunker busters and fuel air bombs which are called either daisy cutters or nicknamed Big Blu, more than the Abrams tanks and that kind of thing.
"The UN investigator has a lot of evidence that the bunker busters have DU nosecones and perhaps other radioactivity. It's kind of from inferences because the radiation tested doesn't match just DU, but there is possible plutonium contamination which according to scientists was more likely to give the kinds of readings that Dr. Durakovich (of UMRC) found."
Are they nuclear weapons?
"I think so. The UN has condemned the use of them.... They are illegal weapons, and they are illegal for more reasons than the depleted uranium. They're just indiscriminate weapons."
Whether these weapons are termed nuclear depends on which scientist you talk to, said Karen. For some scientists, nuclear refers only to fission-fusion. But they are certainly radiological weapons, "and as such are illegal by international law. It doesn't have to be shown to be a nuclear weapon to be illegal. It has to have the effects that illegal weapons have, and one of the effects of course is poison. It may be a great weapon but what does it do -- to people? Even people who are not combatants, three years later children are born with no arms. The child was not a target. It's on those grounds that depleted uranium is viewed as illegal.
"The other concern the UN has had about those daisy cutters is they're so big and they make such a bang, there are indications that they may have been responsible for subsequent earthquakes in the nearby areas. There have been two rather large earthquakes in Afghanistan, in areas that weren't all that active seismically, and there are some scientists looking into it but it's very difficult because control of the area is almost exclusively in the hands of the United States or United States controlled people."
These bombs, and the new generation of small nuclear missiles the Pentagon is currently developing, unlike the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, are not nuclear fission explosives, but they are chemically toxic and do release radiation that can be spread by wind, water, and even birds, affecting masses of people far beyond the target areas. The effects of exposure may not show up for years, and it's not easy to ascertain the exact cause of a birth deformity or a cancer that occurs 20 years later.
Karen has argued that these types of weapons are already illegal under the protocols of international laws of warfare such as the Geneva Convention, established just after the second world war, and the Hague Convention.
Weapons that keep killing when the war's over are all classed as "weapons of mass destruction" -- and they are illegal according to four rules of warfare:
1. Weapons can only be used in the legal field of battle.
2. Weapons can only be used for the duration of an armed conflict. Weapons can't "keep on giving" twenty years after the military incident.
3. Weapons may not be unduly inhumane. (A look at the pictures of birth deformities in Iraq will confirm that these weapons are not humane.)
4. Weapons may not have an unduly negative effect on the natural environment. In Iraq and Afghanistan, water and soil have been thoroughly -- and permanently -- polluted by these weapons. Radioactive uranium has a half-life of 450 million years!
What can we do about this? I asked her.
In Karen Parker's view, the strategy that seems to be working is nonproliferation.
Typically there are 30 to 40 wars around the world every year. "Governments that have DU weapons and could be using them, have not. The list includes France, Russia, Pakistan, India, Israel. It would be so easy for them to knock off those tanks with depleted uranium, but they're not.
"I think since we've raised this issue at the UN as vocally as we have, it has had a nonproliferation effect. I think it has also slowed the sale. So countries that already had DU and were sort of on track to buy some more could be deciding to put their bucks elsewhere. The US can try to fend off the legal consequences. Some of these other countries don't feel that they can."
Will the use of these weapons by the US liberate others to use them?
"I think the anti nuclear movements in some of these countries is so strong, I can't see that happening. I see a possibility of them ganging up on us and taking a more forceful, unified position against us, similar to the grouping around the steel embargo. Now with the contract-restriction issue raising its head, the EU countries, adding Russia and Canada and perhaps some others, are probably going to take a very strong and very unified action.
Through the UN?
"A lot of different ways. Through trade sanctions, etc."
Will that be effective?
"Well Bush backed down on the steel embargo issue -- and he had made a huge promise to a huge number of Americans that financially back him in a really big way. The way the WTO came down on him, he realized it was to his advantage to back down particularly in an election year.
"I think what they will do will be very forceful, and I think it will weigh on the depleted uranium issue as well, if they kind these kinds of ways to penalize the United States for what they view as 'wrong' then they'll find other ways.
"The US takes an extremely arrogant position on whether it can be hauled into court, defying the International Court. The international community tends to tear its hair, wondering how they're going to control the rogue elephant, particularly in light of this year and these kinds of actions."
Legal action by the victims of war demanding compensation is possible, Karen said. She was the attorney in a case brought before the Organization of American States (OAS) by Disabled Peoples International on behalf of the victims of the US bombing of the Hospital for the Mentally Retarded and Mentally Ill in Grenada.
They won their case, and the United States responded by building a state of the art hospital in Grenada.
-------- india / pakistan
US mum on trial for Pakistan nuclear leaker
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204160651.0quygp5y.html
The White House on Wednesday said it was up to Pakistan to decide whether to prosecute the architect of its nuclear program for his unauthorised transfer of atomic secrets to other countries.
"That is a matter that the government of Pakistan is addressing," spokesman Scott McClellan said. "We appreciate their efforts to address what is a serious concern which is the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
Abdul Qadeer Khan, in a statement he read on Pakistan television, acknowledged he had "much to answer for" with regard to passing nuclear know-how to other countries and asked for forgiveness.
He said he accepted full responsibility for the nuclear transfers which he said were carried out "in good faith but on errors of judgement related to unauthorised proliferation activities."
The investigation was prompted by information from Iran that was forwarded to Pakistan via the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in November.
"The government of Pakistan is continuing to look into issues of proliferation. There is an ongoing investigation in Pakistan related to proliferation issues and the government of Pakistan is still addressing these issues," McClellan told reporters.
----
Pakistan cabinet to mull fate of disgraced nuclear scientist
ISLAMABAD (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204164124.yztme91r.html
Prime Minister Zafarullah Jamali's cabinet will discuss on Thursday a mercy petition by the disgraced architect of Pakistan's nuclear programme, Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, officials said Wednesday.
Jamali will advise President Pervez Musharraf on whether to pardon Khan, who has admitted to leaking nuclear secrets to other countries.
The National Command Authority, the highest body responsible for formulating policies on nuclear and missile regime, discussed Khan's appeal at a special session.
"The NCA meeting co-chaired by President Musharraf and Prime Minister Jamali decided to refer it to the cabinet for discussion and consideration," a government official told AFP.
Khan, 66, met General Musharraf for an hour Wednesday and a government statement said the scientist accepted "full responsibility" for nuclear proliferation and submitted his petition for clemency to the head of state.
Speaking on government television after the meeting, Khan confessed to the leaks.
"There was never ever any kind of authorisation for these activities by the government, I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon," said Khan.
More than a dozen nuclear scientists, engineers and administrators have been questioned after information from Iran was forwarded to Pakistan via the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in November.
"I have much to answer for," said Khan.
"The recent investigations was ordered with the government of Pakistan consequent to the disturbing disclosures and evidence by some countries to international agencies relating to alleged proliferation activities by certain Pakistanis and foreigners over the last two decades.
"The investigations have established that many of the reported activities did occur and these were inevitably initiated at my behest.
"In my interviews with the concerned government officials I was confronted with the evidence and findings and I have voluntarily admitted that much of it is true and accurate."
The White House on Wednesday welcomed Pakistan's effort to crackdown on people engaged in nuclear proliferation.
It was up to Pakistan to decide whether to prosecute the architect of its nuclear program for his unauthorised transfer of atomic secrets to other countries, spokesman Scott McClellan said in Washington.
--------
Pakistani Scientist Admits That He Passed On Nuclear Secrets
February 4, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/asia/04CND-STAN.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 4 - In an extraordinary announcement, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the revered founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, appeared on national television early this evening, admitted he had shared Pakistani nuclear technology with other countries and asked the nation for forgiveness.
"I take full responsibility for my actions," the scientist, once one of the most powerful men in Pakistan, said in a soft voice, "and seek your pardon."
Wearing glasses, a tan suit jacket and a striped tie, Dr. Khan, 66, said his "unauthorized proliferation activities" were "based in good faith, but errors in judgment."
He said he acted entirely on his own and did not have the permission of his superiors to share the technology.
"There was never, ever any kind of authority for these activities from the government," he said.
Pakistani government officials said the country's National Command Authority, a group of senior military and civilian officials who oversee Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, met this evening to decide whether to prosecute Dr. Khan and six of his aides accused of carrying out the proliferation.
A senior Pakistani official said General Musharraf would announce the government's decision on Thursday.
On Sunday a senior Pakistani official said a government investigation had found that the scientist had shared Pakistan's nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea for more than a decade. In what appears to be one of the most successful efforts to evade antiproliferation controls in history, Dr. Khan sent nuclear-weapons related parts, plans and designs to the three countries with the aid of middlemen from Sri Lanka, Germany and the Netherlands.
Pakistani analysts said it was unlikely that Dr. Khan would be prosecuted.
A series of carefully scripted events today appeared to be designed to quickly put the issue to rest.
Analysts have said that it would have been nearly impossible for Dr. Khan to have passed on such information without the tacit approval of the country's powerful army.
This morning Dr. Khan met President Pervez Musharraf, a general who seized power in a 1999 coup, and asked for a pardon for his activities.
In silent footage shown on national television earlier in the day, a forlorn-looking Dr. Khan was seen leaning forward, alternately pressing his hands together and waving them in the air, as he spoke to General Musharraf.
The general, sitting stiffly and dressed in a commando uniform, looked at him sternly and said nothing, with his hands clasped in his lap.
At the outset of the speech, Dr. Khan said he was appearing "with the deepest sense of sorrow, anguish and regret." His statement today, which his supporters said was coerced and humiliating, marked an ignoble end for a scientist lauded in Pakistan but derided in the West.
Dr. Khan was convicted of stealing plans for a high-speed centrifuge, which can be used to produce enriched uranium, a key component in a nuclear bomb, from a European company in the 1970's. The conviction was overturned on appeal.
In Pakistan he was hailed for achieving a miracle by overcoming a huge American effort to prevent Pakistan from acquiring the technology to enrich the uranium. He is the only Pakistani to have been twice awarded the nation's highest civilian award.
Dr. Khan is rumored to own dozens of houses across Pakistan. American investigators suspect that he has profited handsomely from the nuclear black market.
Senior Pakistani officials told them that Dr. Khan said he shared technology with three to four other Muslim countries in the hope that the creation of more nuclear-armed Muslim nations would ease Western attention on Pakistan's program.
A senior official said Dr. Khan had no good answer for why he shared technology with North Korea. "None of his explanations were satisfactory," the official said.
In recent days, as a resolution to the investigation approached, Pakistani officials had toned down their comments about Dr. Khan's corruption. A senior official said today that Dr. Khan was "partly driven by financial motivations."
American analysts have said the key is not whether Dr. Khan is severely punished. It is whether the United States is given as much detail as possible about the nuclear smuggling network. They said eliminating that network, which appears far more difficult than keeping states from producing weapons, is now critical for the United States.
In Pakistan, the scientist's confession represented the collapse of an esteemed national institution - the country's nuclear program. The program, which was begun in the 1970's to counter India's nuclear arsenal, was a source of enormous national pride. Pakistani military analysts said they believed that senior military officials must have at least tacitly approved of Dr. Khan's activities over the years, particularly those that involved the shipment of nuclear hardware out of the country. The inquiry by the military-led government found that senior military and intelligence officials were guilty of "omissions," but did not actively take part in the scheme.
A former senior American diplomat who served in Pakistan said on Monday that he believed successive Pakistani military and civilian leaders intentionally turned a blind eye to Dr. Khan's activities for a decade.
The former diplomat said Dr. Khan produced things Pakistani leaders felt they needed to counter their nuclear-armed rival India, such as ballistic missile technology from North Korea. Dr. Khan also became such a potent political force in his own right that no one dared challenge him.
"It's like Iran-Contra, they didn't want to know," said the former diplomat, referring to the Reagan administration scandal. "They needed the things he brought them."
--------
Warhead Blueprints Link Libya Project to Pakistan Figure
February 4, 2004
By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/politics/04NUKE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - Twelve days ago, a 747 aircraft chartered by the United States government landed at Dulles Airport here carrying a single piece of precious cargo: a small box containing warhead designs that American officials believe were sold to Libya by the underground network linked to Abdul Qadeer Khan, the creator of the Pakistani bomb.
The warhead designs were the first hard evidence that the secret network provided its customers with far more than just the technology to turn uranium into bomb fuel. Libyan officials have told investigators that they bought the blueprints from dealers who are part of that network, apparently for more than $50 million. Those blueprints, along with the capability to make enriched uranium, could have given the Libyans all the elements they needed to make a nuclear bomb. What the Libyans purchased, in the words of an American weapons expert who has reviewed the program in detail, was both the kitchen equipment "and the recipes."
Experts familiar with the contents of the box say the designs closely resemble the warheads that China tested in the late 1960's and passed on to Pakistan decades ago.
American officials are still studying the designs flown out of Libya to determine whether, in fact, they are complete. There is no evidence, the officials say, that the Libyans actually produced the warheads, much less sufficient nuclear fuel. The Libyan nuclear program was just getting started, although Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said recently, "It was simply a matter of time."
American officials emphasize that they have no evidence that the Pakistani government itself was aware of the sales, and they wave aside recent accusations by Mr. Khan's allies that President Pervez Musharraf was himself aware of the transactions. But some experts inside and outside the government say it is difficult to believe that Pakistan's nuclear secrets could have been exported without the knowledge of some in the military and the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, especially since some shipments were made on Pakistani military aircraft.
Whoever was responsible, the warhead design appears now to have been a sought-after prize of the network of nuclear middlemen and parts producers that American officials say is being broken up, from Germany to Malaysia, and from Dubai to the Netherlands.
"Ever since the Libya revelations last month, there have been a lot of detentions, and some arrests," one American official said Tuesday.
The documents were hurried out of Libya on the first flight that could be arranged - a Jan. 22 charter that had arrived in Libya with equipment for the C.I.A. and others dismantling the Libyan nuclear complex. The documents are being held by the Department of Energy, which oversees America's nuclear arsenal. A second flight, a few days later, took thousands of parts for centrifuges to a site in Tennessee.
Inside the White House and across the Potomac at the Central Intelligence Agency, the documents from Libya have raised as many urgent questions as they have answered.
American intelligence officials say they are uncertain who else possesses copies of the design, but they assume there are others. Obtaining the enriched uranium or the plutonium to make a bomb is more difficult than getting a workable bomb design, but their fear is that the network they are uncovering sold both.
Investigators are also trying to determine whether the network of suppliers and experts sold a similar weapons design to North Korea.
American and South Korean officials say North Korea traded its missile technology to Pakistan in return for nuclear weapons technology in the late 1990's. That is during the same period when Libya paid to obtain the design and the centrifuge parts, investigators say.
The last shipment of those parts to Libya was intercepted in October, which was several years after Washington began pressuring Mr. Musharraf's government to shut down the scientists at the Khan laboratory.
According to American and European investigators, the network that supplied Libya was enormously complex, and not all the paths led directly back to the Khan laboratory. Centrifuge parts were made in Malaysia, and other parts were obtained in Germany and Japan. The Japanese last year seized critical equipment headed for North Korea, though they never announced it.
But both the centrifuge designs and the bomb designs seized in Libya appear to have come from the same country, according to experts who have reviewed them. "My understanding is that it did come from Pakistan," said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security here.
The I.A.E.A. has not publicly said where the designs came from. But Mr. ElBaradei said publicly two weeks ago that weapons designs had been found and secured - apparently a reference to the documents flown to the United States. He did not say how Libya had obtained the blueprints or the origin of the bomb designs.
Mr. Khan was convicted in the Netherlands of stealing a centrifuge design in the 1970's. His conviction was overturned on a technicality, and American officials say it is possible that he or his associates also stole the warhead design in Pakistan without the government's knowledge. Mr. Khan had access to almost every aspect of Pakistan's nuclear program.
Mr. Khan has not spoken publicly since he was relieved of his post as an adviser to President Musharraf and accused - but not arrested - by Pakistani government officials of having supplied nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Bush adminstration officials said Tuesday that they are waiting to see if Mr. Musharraf is willing to order his arrest, and face the wrath of Pakistani nationalists who regard Mr. Khan as a hero.
Statements by Mr. Khan's supporters already leave little doubt about the scientist's strategy: if arrested, he appears ready to argue that the Pakistani leadership knew about his transaction at the highest levels. That would put the White House in a difficult position, because President Bush is attempting to support Mr. Musharraf, a critical ally in tracking down members of Al Qaeda, while forcing him to shut down what officials say was a widespread source of nuclear proliferation.
The discoveries in Tripoli are causing intelligence agencies and investigators to revisit some older cases, including one involving Iraq - which documents suggest was offered nuclear technology before the start of the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Mr. Albright and his associate, Corey Hinderstein, have reviewed documents found at the farm of Hussein Kamel, Saddam Hussein's son in law, after he defected from Iraq in 1995. Mr. Kamel told the C.I.A. that many of Mr. Hussein's weapons had been destroyed - a statement that appears to be correct, in light of the findings of David A. Kay, the former chief American weapons inspector in Iraq.
A memorandum found among Mr. Kamel's papers, dated June 10, 1990, appeared to be a proposal from an unidentified middleman referring to offers "from the Pakistani scientist Dr. Abd-el-Qadeer Khard regarding the possibility of helping Iraq establish a project to enrich Uranium and manufacture a nuclear weapon."
The I.A.E.A. later concluded that the Iraqis never took up the offer. Iraq already had sophisticated enrichment technology, and it suspected a sting operation or a scam.
The I.A.E.A. reviewed the memorandum and informed the United Nations Security Council four years ago, but said its study of the memo, and whether it represented a genuine offer, was inconclusive. But American officials say that details in the memorandum match up with what they are now learning.
William J. Broad reported from New York for this article and David E. Sanger from Washington.
--------
Pakistani Finger-Pointing and Denials Spread in the Furor Over Nuclear Transfers Abroad
February 4, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/asia/04STAN.html?pagewanted=all
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 3 - The debate over who bears responsibility for the transfer of Pakistan's nuclear technology to other countries intensified Tuesday, with surrogates for the country's leading nuclear scientist and President Pervez Musharraf denying charges of impropriety.
The scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, denied telling a government inquiry that he had given nuclear technology to Iran, North Korea and Libya without government permission, a leading politician said Tuesday.
At the same time, Pakistani media accounts, citing both a senior investigator and a friend of the scientist, asserted that Dr. Khan had told investigators that General Musharraf had known that the nuclear technology was going to North Korea.
Government officials vehemently denied that the general had known about or approved of any transfer of technology to North Korea or any other country. "That's not true," said a senior official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Of course not. Of course not."
In a series of disclosures in the past two weeks, Pakistani government and intelligence officials, speaking anonymously, have issued to the media various accounts assailing Dr. Khan as a corrupt rogue scientist who used German, Dutch and Sri Lankan middlemen to sell or share nuclear technology with Iran, North Korea and Libya from 1989 to 2000.
Dr. Khan and his allies, including secular and Islamist political parties, have responded with allegations that the country's powerful army approved of the transfers. Their latest statement, first reported in The Washington Post on Tuesday, included the assertion, reputedly from Dr. Khan, that General Musharraf knew of nuclear transfers to North Korea.
The Post also reported that a senior investigator and a friend of Dr. Khan said the scientist had told investigators that Gen. Mirza Aslam Beg, the army chief from 1988 to 1991, had known that Dr. Khan was assisting the Pakistani nuclear transfers. The account said the scientist had also told investigators that General Musharraf and Gen. Jehangir Karamat, the army chief from 1996 to 1998, had known of and approved the barter of nuclear technology for North Korean ballistic missile technology.
In interviews, General Beg has repeatedly denied ever approving nuclear transfers to Iran. General Karamat declined Tuesday to comment on the report. In an interview in November, he said no transfers had occurred.
American officials have said they believe that Pakistani nuclear technology has been transferred to Iran, Libya and North Korea. They have said Pakistani technology arrived in North Korea as late as mid-2002, and in Libya as late as last fall.
General Musharraf seized power in a bloodless coup in 1999, meaning that the reported transfers occurred at least four years into his rule. Pakistani officials have dismissed the American accounts of recent transfers and said tight controls the general placed on the nuclear program in early 2002 halted Dr. Khan's transfers.
Any revelation that General Musharraf supported transfers would put both American and Pakistani officials in a politically awkward and dangerous position. Since he reversed Pakistan's support for the Taliban after the September 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States, the general has been hailed by the Bush administration as a firm ally in the campaign against terrorism.
But critics in Congress have said the general is not doing enough to crack down on militancy in Pakistan and restore full democracy in the country. Links to nuclear transfers could only intensify that criticism.
--------
Pakistani Nuclear Scientist Takes the Rap for Leaks
February 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-pakistan.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Top Pakistani scientist and national hero Abdul Qadeer Khan made a dramatic personal apology Wednesday for leaking atomic secrets, the latest twist in a proliferation scandal stretching from Libya to North Korea.
In a somber address on state television, Khan, revered at home as the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, absolved the government and fellow scientists of any blame in an apparent bid by all concerned to draw a line under the damaging affair.
Commentators said his confession smacked of a cover-up, possibly part of a wider deal to spare the powerful military unwanted scrutiny in any trial and allow President Pervez Musharraf to sidestep pressure from Islamists and nationalists.
The United States, which has urged Pakistan to stop illegal proliferation to what it considers ``rogue'' states, has publicly backed Musharraf, who is a key ally in its ``war on terror.''
``My dear brothers and sisters, I have chosen to appear before you to offer my deepest regrets and unqualified apologies,'' Khan said on state-run Pakistan Television.
``There was never ever any kind of authorization for these activities by the government. I take full responsibility for my actions and seek your pardon,'' the silver-haired 69-year-old added, speaking in English.
Western diplomats and many Pakistanis believe Khan could not have sold nuclear secrets and sent technology for enriching uranium abroad without the knowledge of top military officials.
A key part of the investigation focused on Khan's vast personal fortune, which local press reports say he amassed through selling secrets.
An open trial of Khan could lead to embarrassing evidence implicating the army, which Musharraf heads, and make a national martyr of the scientist. Analysts say Musharraf may have agreed to pardon Khan in return for his apology.
The National Command Authority, which oversees Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and is headed by Musharraf, said Wednesday it had deferred Khan's ``mercy petition'' to the cabinet which is due to meet Thursday. In Washington the White House said a trial was a matter for Pakistan, but a spokesman added:
``We appreciate their efforts to address what is a serious concern, which is proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.''
SCANDAL MAY NOT BE OVER
The appearance by Khan, at the center of an international storm over Pakistan's role in nuclear proliferation during the 1980s and 1990s, was greeted with skepticism.
Farhatullah Babar, spokesman for exiled former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, said: ``One doesn't know if it is a confession under duress, a confession being extorted from him or a confession that he is voluntarily making.''
``There is no doubt that it is a cover-up,'' said Shahid-ur-Rehman, a Pakistani journalist and nuclear expert.
He said Khan's statement may not end the scandal.
``Has there been any violation of international law and will the international community accept the appeal of clemency, if the Pakistani government grants it?''
Khan sought to clear his fellow scientists, who he said acted under his instructions. Four other scientists have been questioned in the probe along with two brigadiers responsible for security at the nuclear facility where he worked.
A senior military official told Pakistani journalists on Sunday that Khan had made a detailed statement confessing to supplying designs, hardware and materials used to make enriched uranium for atomic bombs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Khan has been reported in foreign media as saying he acted on the indirect instructions of two former army chiefs, Generals Aslam Beg and Jehangir Karamat. Beg has denied the charge.
A friend of Khan was also quoted by the Washington Post as saying the scientist told investigators Musharraf knew about the transfer of nuclear know-how to North Korea, an allegation the military called absurd.
Musharraf has already made many enemies in Pakistan for supporting the U.S.-led ``war on terror'' and trying to make peace with India. The general narrowly survived two assassination attempts late last year blamed on disgruntled Islamic militants.
The Islamic opposition has pounced on the government's treatment of Khan, saying he is a scapegoat hounded by the authorities because of pressure from the United States.
``I don't think people like A.Q.Khan should be tried. He is a national hero. He has developed the (nuclear) program,'' said Qazi Hussain Ahmed, head of the Islamic coalition which has threatened to call a national strike over the issue.
Pakistan originally denied its nuclear secrets and technology had been leaked, either officially or by individuals.
But it launched an investigation in November after the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency provided evidence pointing to Pakistani involvement in Iran's nuclear program. Similar links have been found with Libya.
-------- latin america
Brazil's nuclear ambitions
4 February 2004
http://jid.janes.com
Recent statements by Brazil's former science minister, Roberto Amaral, that his country should consider building nuclear weapons, highlight the possibility that countries outside of US President George Bush's 'Axis of Evil' may be contemplating the acquisition of nuclear weapons and the means of their delivery. JID's nuclear weapons specialist focuses on a potential nuclear aspirant much closer to the USA's borders than North Korea.
-------- korea
North Korea Agrees to Resume Talks With U.S. Over Arms
February 4, 2004
By CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS and NORIMITSU ONISHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/asia/04KORE.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - The United States and North Korea have agreed to resume six-party talks later this month over the North's nuclear weapons program, the State Department said Tuesday.
The negotiations, scheduled to start in Beijing on Feb. 25, are likely to focus on North Korea's offer to suspend its nuclear programs in return for a security guarantee and other concessions.
A first round of talks in August ended without an agreement, and a follow-up session in December was postponed. Both the United States and North Korea have insisted that the other side must make the first concession before talks can resume.
It was not clear whether any concessions had been granted to get the talks restarted. State Department officials said Chinese diplomats had worked exhaustively to help them narrow their differences with North Korea. China, South Korea, Japan and Russia were enlisted as parties in the talks, primarily at the insistence of the United States, which seeks regional guarantees for any deal that is reached.
Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, discussed North Korea in meetings in China and Japan this week, and James Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asia, met with his counterparts in South Korea and Japan as well. Mr. Kelly is expected to lead the American delegation later this month.
Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman, said the United States had not backed off its central demand, the elimination of North Korea's weapons program and safeguards to ensure that the program is never reconstituted. North Korea moved slightly closer to the American demand last month when it offered to freeze its program as part of a deal.
"We're looking for a round that can move toward the goals of verifiable elimination of North Korea's nuclear weapons programs and, in return, a provision of whatever security assurances might be helpful in helping North Korea go down that path," Mr. Boucher said.
He said the administration had not offered any financial compensation to lure the North back to the bargaining table and had not discussed having other parties provide such aid. "We're not talking with anybody about compensating the North Koreans," he said. He observed, however, that South Korea was exploring new investment opportunities in North Korea, anticipating a day of normalized commerce.
Lee Soo Hyuck, South Korea's deputy foreign minister, tried to lower expectations for the meeting. "We cannot resolve the North Korean nuclear issue with one sweep through the next round of talks," Mr. Lee said. "But if we are able to launch working groups of experts, we will be able to have more substantive and specific talks and negotiations."
Kim Ryong Song, head of a North Korean delegation that arrived in Seoul, South Korea, on Tuesday for bilateral talks, said the success of the negotiations would depend on the United States.
"Judging from the current situation, no matter how long the winter may be, spring will eventually arrive," Mr. Kim said. "It all depends on what attitude the U.S. brings to the talks. We have maintained our stance all along.
"The fact that the U.S. is coming to the talks at all seems to indicate that it has reached a certain understanding on our basic demands."
The North has made conciliatory gestures toward Japan, whose financial contribution would be crucial to any eventual deal. North Korea said it was ready to release the children of five Japanese kidnapped years ago if the parents came to get them in North Korea.
The still unresolved cases of kidnapping of Japanese nationals have hardened sentiments in Japan and remain an obstacle to any agreement. Last week, Japan's lower house of Parliament passed legislation that would allow Tokyo to impose economic sanctions on North Korea by restricting the flow of money and goods that are vital to the North.
Christopher Marquis reported from Washington for this article and Norimitsu Onishi from Seoul.
--------
N. Korea And U.S. Have Plenty To Discuss
Differences Are Wide Before Nuclear Talks
By Anthony Faiola
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8928-2004Feb3.html
TOKYO, Feb. 3 -- A fresh round of six-nation talks addressing North Korea's nuclear weapons program was agreed to despite the fact that the two key players -- the United States and North Korea -- still hold widely divergent positions, officials close to the negotiations said Tuesday, as they sought to lower expectations for a quick breakthrough in the standoff.
After weeks of intensive diplomatic efforts, North Korea announced earlier in the day that it would return to Beijing for a new round of talks starting Feb. 25. The first round, held in August among North Korea, the United States, China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, ended with virtually no progress.
Since then, China has tried to lay the groundwork for a speedy resolution by narrowing the gap between the Bush administration, which is seeking the complete and verifiable dismantling of the Pyongyang government's nuclear program, and the North Koreans, who have offered to freeze their program in exchange for a number of requests, including economic aid and oil shipments.
In Washington, where the North Korean crisis has often split the Bush administration, officials said key issues needed to be resolved, both internally and with allies, before the talks. Among the questions are how to define a freeze, whether it will include the highly enriched uranium program that U.S. intelligence says exists in North Korea and what level of verification will be required.
Attempts to bridge the differences between Washington and Pyongyang have met with little success, according to diplomats from three of the nations involved. Now, the parties appear to be shooting for a more modest goal of simply advancing the dialogue.
"We're not bringing any agendas," said Lee Soo Hyuck, South Korea's deputy foreign minister. "The agenda is resolving the North Korean nuclear issue. It may be difficult to hold big expectations for a breakthrough from the talks, but the position of each party would become clearer."
Russia's deputy foreign minister, Alexander Losyukov, echoed those sentiments. "The difference of stances between Washington and Pyongyang is very great," he told the Russian Tass news agency, saying that what is required is "not a breakthrough, but an understanding in what direction to develop the negotiating process."
But Asian diplomats say the North Koreans may be prepared to take an important first step -- offering not only to freeze their nuclear program, but also to allow the return of weapons inspectors expelled more than a year ago from the Yongbyon nuclear facility. The Pyongyang government claims to have reprocessed 8,000 spent fuel rods at the plant into weapons-grade plutonium.
In exchange, the sources said, North Korea is likely to insist on at least one of its demands: the quick resumption of international oil shipments that were cut off under U.S. pressure after what U.S. officials say was North Korea's admission in late 2002 that it had a uranium enrichment program.
The sources said North Korea is likely to be pressed on several other issues. These include a broad agreement to hold regular nuclear talks and a commitment to negotiations with Japan aimed at fully resolving disputes stemming from North Korea's admitted abduction of Japanese citizens during the 1970s and 1980s.
"Our agreement to the six-party talks is a product of our efforts to resolve the nuclear issue peacefully," the chief North Korean negotiator, Kim Ryong Song, said in Seoul, where he was participating in cabinet-level talks on Korean economic cooperation. "It also means that our position is right and just."
U.S. officials say they believe the recent disclosures in Pakistan, indicating that North Korea's alleged uranium enrichment program was developed with the aid of A.Q. Khan Laboratories, will strengthen their negotiating position. North Korea has denied having such a program, and its position had recently won support from China. "A.Q. Khan has saved our bacon on this," one official said.
China, traditionally an ally of North Korea but now seeking to quell its nuclear ambitions, played a major role in getting the North Koreans back to the table, even threatening to move the talks out of Beijing, sources familiar with the talks said. They said China's growing frustration with the North Koreans is likely to be a key incentive for Pyongyang to cooperate. Of equal weight, the sources said, will be whether the Bush administration is willing to bend.
"We think [Washington's] position has become somewhat more flexible," said one Asian diplomatic source familiar with the talks. "But we have to see what the North Koreans are really willing to offer first. The fact that we are going back to the bargaining table is an essential first step."
Staff writer Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
--------
Koreas Wrangle Over Nuclear Crisis
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- South Korea and North Korea argued Wednesday over how to end the crisis over the communist North's atomic weapons programs, a day after the North agreed to resume six-nation talks on the nuclear standoff.
During a Cabinet-level inter-Korean meeting in Seoul, South Korean Unification Minister Jeong Se-hyun urged the North to commit to a complete dismantling of its nuclear programs during a six-nation meeting scheduled to begin Feb. 25 in Beijing.
Unless nuclear tensions ease significantly, Jeong said, South Korea cannot push ahead with tourism and industrial projects that would bring badly needed investment to impoverished North Korea.
Jeong's North Korean counterpart, Kim Rayon Song, blustered at Jeong's overture, accusing South Korea of succumbing to U.S. pressure to regulate economic exchanges between the two Koreas according to progress in nuclear negotiations.
``The two sides could hold 100 rounds of talks but would resolve nothing for the nation, as long as the South subjects matters between the two Koreas to interference and pressure from outside forces,'' said Kim, according South Korean pool reports.
North Korea agreed Tuesday to resume talks Feb. 25 with the United States, South Korea, Japan, China and Russia on ending a 15-month nuclear standoff.
The six-nation talks have stalled since the first meeting ended in August without much progress.
On Wednesday, China's U.N. ambassador played down chances of a major breakthrough, saying Beijing hopes the meeting will lead to a step-by-step solution.
China believes resolving the dispute will be a lengthy process and was consulting with the other parties about an ``informal mechanism'' for sorting out differences in between the high-level talks, possibly through a lower-level expert group, Ambassador Wang Guangya told a news conference at the United Nations.
``I hope that during the second round they will come to agree to this idea,'' he said afterward. ``All realize that after one meeting, you wait for another six months. It's a bad practice, so there has to be some mechanism to keep in touch with each other.''
North Korea says it would freeze its nuclear programs as a first step in resolving the dispute, only if the United States provides economic aid and other concessions. Washington demands that North Korea first start dismantling its nuclear facilities.
``The United States has not at all changed its demand that we first give up our nuclear programs,'' said Kim, the North's chief negotiator. ``What is important is resolving the issue through our proposal of simultaneous action.''
Kim said ``if the South side truly wants a peaceful solution to the nuclear issue, it will support our just proposal so as to be realized and work hard to make the United States respond to it,'' according to the North's official news agency, KCNA.
He urged the South to ``promote inter-Korean economic cooperation in a responsible manner from the stand of national cooperation.''
South Korea said the North's offer was not enough.
``We urged North Korea to take a more progressive position on the dismantlement of the nuclear programs in general because it will be difficult to resolve the nuclear issue in the near future just with North Korea's offer of a freeze in exchange for compensation,'' South Korean delegate Shin Eun-sang said.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon also said the government hopes the six-nation talks will generate an outcome in which North Korea ``publicly declares'' it will dismantle its nuclear programs in a ``complete, verifiable and irreversible'' way.
Ban added that South Korea and Japan share Washington's view that North Korea has a secret uranium-based weapons program in addition to a plutonium-based one. Washington has demanded North Korea dismantle both, but North Korea has denied possessing any uranium-based program.
``If North Korea has intentions to give up its nuclear programs, it must also give up HEU (highly enriched uranium) programs as well as plutonium,'' Ban said.
Outside Seoul's Shilla Hotel, the venue of Cabinet-level talks, 20 South Korean protesters shouted slogans such as ``Stop all South-North Korean exchanges until North Korea dismantles its nuclear programs!''
U.S. officials believe the North already has one or two nuclear bombs and could make several more within months.
-------- terrorism
Experts Worry Terrorists Have Nuke Plans
By BURT HERMAN
02/04/04
(AP)
http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/story.jsp?floc=FF-APO-1104&idq=/ff/story/0001%2F20040204%2F0753915856.htm&sc=1104
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - The nuclear black market that let Iran, Libya and North Korea acquire weapons technology from Pakistan under the noses of international monitors raises suspicions that terror groups also acquired bomb components or plans, experts told The Associated Press.
Al-Qaida apparently has shown interest in acquiring nuclear technology. Two Pakistani nuclear scientists were detained in late 2001 after meeting Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan on suspicion of giving away secrets, but they were later released without being charged. The military, which controlled the weapons program, also is known to have elements who sympathize with the Taliban and bin Laden.
Pakistan has for years denied spreading nuclear technology and claimed its arsenal was safe from extremists. But strong international pressure after Iranian revelations to the U.N. nuclear watchdog forced Islamabad to begin an investigation of its weapons program in November. It admitted last month for the first time that scientists had leaked technology.
Officials say Abdul Qadeer Khan - the father of Pakistan's nuclear program - has confessed to selling equipment related to centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Libya also received designs for a nuclear bomb from Pakistan that it handed over to U.S. and British intelligence last month, European diplomats say.
Khan, however, has denied making a confession, according to the leading Islamic party, Jamaat-e-Islami.
Pakistan itself relied on international black market supplies for the equipment used in its nuclear weapons program that started in the 1970s.
``If the black market could transfer technology from Europe to Pakistan in spite of all these sanctions and embargoes, that same black market of smugglers can also pass on materials from this lab to terrorist groups,'' said A.H. Nayyar, a nuclear physicist and head of the Pakistan Peace Coalition. ``The possibility exists and needs to be investigated thoroughly.''
Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan on Tuesday denied that Pakistani nuclear technology had fallen into terrorist hands. ``It's absolutely negative, there is no truth in it,'' he said.
The government also has denied official complicity in giving away technology, but a friend of Khan's told the AP that top army officials, including now-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, were ``aware of everything.''
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the Bush administration accepted Musharraf's assurances that the Pakistani government was ``not involved in any kind of proliferation.''
Musharraf has said the scientists were given wide latitude to develop the nuclear program and worked in secret even from top officials. That secrecy also has raised fears that nuclear workers may have transferred technology or equipment to terrorists, either for money or ideological sympathy.
Experts say centrifuge technology wouldn't be of much use to terror groups, who probably couldn't set up the vast facilities required to enrich useful quantities of uranium, with hundreds of technicians needed to run thousands of centrifuges.
``It's hard enough for countries to do,'' said Gary Samore, a nonproliferation expert at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.
The acquisition of weapons designs, however, would make it far easier for terrorists to make a workable bomb, said David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington.
And if a terror group was able to obtain highly enriched uranium - anywhere from about 110 to 220 pounds - it could possibly build a bomb similar in design to that used on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II, experts said.
``It's not something that you or I could do in our backyards, but it's relatively easy,'' Samore said.
Pakistan is estimated to have produced more than 1,540 pounds of highly enriched uranium, but no official figures have ever been released.
``It is very important that all the material that has been produced is accounted for to the last gram,'' said Nayyar. ``If it is not done, then the doubt remains.''
Sultan, the military spokesman, declined to comment on whether Khan's alleged confession mentioned highly enriched uranium and potential leaks of it outside Pakistan.
The strongest known link between Pakistani scientists and terrorists were the 2001 arrests Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mahmood and Abdul Majid, who worked for Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission until retiring in 1999. The commission, together with Khan's lab worked on the nuclear weapons program.
Mahmood's son told the AP in December 2002 that his father - a deeply conservative Muslim who sympathized with the Taliban - met bin Laden several times between 2000 and July 2001 and the al-Qaida leader asked how to make nuclear bombs. Mahmood claimed to have rebuffed the request, telling bin Laden ``it is not child's play for you to build a nuclear bomb,'' according to his son, who didn't want to be named.
The scientists were cleared of all charges and released in December 2001.
``Pakistani scientists were active there (in Afghanistan) - we never got to the bottom of it,'' said Albright, also a former Iraq nuclear weapons inspector.
In light of recent news, the years of Pakistani denials ring especially hollow, Albright said, hoping international pressure would finally make Pakistan come clean.
``There's a lot of smoke and mirrors that the government is throwing up, but at the same time it's being forced to reveal information,'' he said.
--------
Teen hacker triggered nuclear terrorism alert
February 4, 2004
Press Association
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/03/1075776065349.html
A British teenager has narrowly escaped jail after sparking a nuclear panic by hacking into a top secret United States weapons laboratory.
Joseph McElroy, 18, who on Monday was ordered to serve a 200-hour community punishment order, bypassed the facility's electronic security systems with sophisticated software he had developed and nicknamed Deathserv.
McElroy wanted to use the advanced network's power to download and store films and music from the internet.
London's Southwark Crown Court heard that in June 2002, he used a special password to protect his collection and cover up his "parasitic" invasion.
But so many of his fellow hackers also accessed the system at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois that it began to slow down. Technicians discovered the breach and "pressed the panic button". Fearing a terrorist attack, the computer was closed down for three days and the US Department of Energy sounded a full-scale alert.
Officers at Scotland Yard's computer crimes unit were contacted and quickly traced the then-16-year-old student to his east London home.
McElroy, now a first-year engineering undergraduate, pleaded guilty to one count of unauthorised modification of the contents of a computer.
Judge Andrew Goymer told him he ought to "think yourself lucky" he was not going to jail. "Computers are an important feature of life in the 21st century. Government, industry and commerce, as well as a whole variety of other institutions, depend upon the integrity and reliability of their computers in order their proper and legitimate activities can be carried on."
As the slightly built, bespectacled defendant stood in the dock, Mr Goymer said no criticism could be levelled at the way US authorities responded to the security breach.
"One can well understand why their initial reaction was to think that a terrorist attack had been made to compromise that computer," he said. "It caused a great deal of damage and expense amounting to £21,000 ($50,300)." The judge said he had to think "long and hard" how best to punish McElroy for what was clearly a "serious" offence.
While "giving you the benefit of the doubt" and accepting that McElroy was initially unaware whose system he was hacking into, Parliament had intended such conduct be dealt with severely.
It was important the "wrong message is not sent out to anybody else who is tempted to behave in this way", he said.
However, said the judge, McElroy's previous good character, the fact he had not caused any actual harm and had not accessed any classified material meant prison was not necessary in this case.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Calif. Utility Abandons Nuclear Shipment
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Reactor-Voyage.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A California utility on Tuesday abandoned a plan to send a 600-ton decommissioned reactor vessel on what would have been the longest voyage ever for a piece of nuclear waste in U.S. history.
Southern California Edison blamed delays that came as it finalized plans to send the vessel on a 15,500-mile trip around the icy tip of South America to a nuclear graveyard in Barnwell, S.C., spokesman Ray Golden said.
The vessel will remain safely in place, wrapped in tons of steel and concrete, at the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station next to the ocean between Los Angeles and San Diego. Edison will explore other options to get the vessel to the East Coast, including a domestic route.
Edison has spent several million dollars getting the vessel ready for shipment and seeking approval from more than a dozen government agencies since 1999.
Plans had called for a truck to carry the decommissioned reactor vessel down a 17-mile stretch of the California coast. A barge was to take the vessel on a 90-day voyage past Cape Horn to the East Coast. Finally, a train was to haul the vessel to South Carolina.
``It's good news from an environmental perspective because the reactor's much safer in our opinion ... on site,'' said Tom Clements, senior adviser to Greenpeace International's nuclear campaign. ``Plus, it avoids a diplomatic confrontation with Chile and Argentina.''
Critics said the company was risking disaster by sailing the vessel past Cape Horn, one of the world's most dangerous nautical passages. Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog group, called it ``the worst possible route from a safety standpoint you can come up with.''
Countries along the route had raised objections, most notably Argentina, where a federal court last month banned the vessel from entering its 200-mile territorial waters.
Continued delays would mean the passage around Cape Horn would occur closer to South America's winter, when the weather often turns treacherous, Golden said. The utility also had to avoid the March breeding season of the western snowy plover, a threatened species that nests on the beaches where the reactor would have passed.
Edison's record-breaking route wasn't its first choice. A plan to get the vessel to South Carolina by rail and barge fell apart when Edison failed to reach terms with a railroad company. Then the Panama Canal refused to waive new weight limits for nuclear waste.
The decommissioned reactor generated enough power for 450,000 homes from 1968 until it was shut down in 1992. Modifications that could have kept it running were deemed too expensive.
On the Net:
Southern California Edison: http://www.edison.com/
Transportation Department: www.dot.gov
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: www.nrc.gov
Barnwell disposal site: http://www.chemnuclear.com/
-------- nevada
Energy Budget Fast Tracks Nuclear Waste Repository
By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 4, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-04-10.asp
The Bush administration has asked Congress to double funding for a project to transport and store nuclear waste in a national repository deep within Nevada's Yucca Mountain. The $880 million demand is part of the $24.3 billion budget proposal for the U.S. Energy Department - the largest request in the history of the department.
The Yucca Mountain site was first identified as a possible location for storage of the nation's high-level nuclear waste in 1987, and legislation authorizing it has been passed by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush. But the project has been beset with criticism and skepticism and is the subject of an array of lawsuits brought by the state of Nevada.
The waste is spent nuclear fuel rods from the nation's 104 nuclear power plants and highly radioactive materials left from nuclear weapons production. It is currently stored where it was generated at more than 100 locations across the country.
U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham said the Yucca Mountain geological repository "is key to ensuring the future use of nuclear power in this nation."
Funding for the Yucca Mountain program includes $186 million to study and develop transportation plans to haul the waste from 39 states to the proposed facility.
The White House budget also contains a proposal to direct all the fees received from utilities paid into the Nuclear Waste Fund toward construction of the Yucca Mountain facility.
Environmentalists and Nevada lawmakers say the increased support for Yucca Mountain is irresponsible given the pending legal challenges against the project and unresolved questions about the site's safety.
The facility, to be located some 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is not expected to be complete until 2010 and will not be large enough to hold all of the nation's nuclear waste.
The Energy Department has spent more than $6 billion on the project, and project estimates total $58 billion.
The administration is trying to "sink so much money into this hole in the ground that the project becomes a self fulfilling prophecy," said Wenonah Hauter with the advocacy group Public Citizen.
Critics of the Yucca Mountain plan note that federal officials have raised an array of concerns about the project, including a finding that the manufactured storage containers in which the government plans to store nuclear waste at the facility will probably leak.
More than 250 other scientific questions about Yucca Mountain remain unanswered, and the state of Nevada has filed six lawsuits to block the project.
"Due to the doubts and uncertainties plaguing the Yucca Mountain project, Congress should not increase its budget or change the funding practices," Hauter said.
Abraham defended the plan and said the administration aims to apply for a license for the project with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the end of 2004.
"The department did an excellent job of conclusively establishing from a scientific point of view that the site would be safe," Abraham said. "I believe that at the end of the day America will finally have a long promised, safe repository for nuclear waste."
The Energy Department's overall $24.32 billion budget request is an increase of $1.03 billion over 2004 appropriations.
Abraham said it focuses on the priorities of national security, energy development, scientific research and environmental protection.
Some $9 billion, more than one third of the department's budget, is earmarked for the National Nuclear Security Administration, including $6.6 billion to maintain the nation's stockpile of more than 10,000 nuclear weapons, $1.35 billion for nuclear nonproliferation initiatives and $798 million to develop nuclear reactors to power naval warships.
Despite widespread criticism of the plan, the budget supports a new facility to build plutonium pits for nuclear weapons and calls on Congress to help the department reduce the time needed to resume nuclear testing.
"One of the concerns the President and I have is that some of the capabilities within our weapons complex have either been allowed to deteriorate or simply have been lost," Abraham said. "The ability to manufacture plutonium pits for nuclear weapons is one example. This will restore to the United States the capacity that other nuclear weapons states already have."
The Bush administration has been a vocal advocate for nuclear energy and advanced fossil fuel and hydrogen technologies, and this is reflected in its $2.6 billion request for energy resources.
"The administration's energy portfolio takes a long term focus through investments in hydrogen use and production, electricity reliability, and advanced coal and nuclear energy power technologies," Abraham said. "Investments in these pivotal areas honor a commitment to strengthen the nation's energy security for the near term and for generations to come."
The budget includes $410 million for nuclear energy, including $31 million to develop a next generation nuclear power plant.
It provides $228 million for the administration's hydrogen initiative and $447 million in research and development for advanced coal power technologies. This includes $237 million for a $1 billion integrated carbon sequestration and hydrogen production research power plant.
Some $291 is set aside to conserve energy and cut utility costs for 1.2 million low income families and $91million is earmarked to research efforts to modernize and expand the nation's electricity grid and
Research and development for renewable energy technologies totals $220 million, a sum that covers wind, solar, geothermal and biomass energy development.
But the Bush budget request cuts some $29 million from the department's energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, including $3 million from solar and $15 million from biomass and biofuels programs.
The Energy Department's science and technology programs are provided $3.43 billion, but this is down $52 million from 2004 appropriations.
Abraham said priorities include $209 million for nanoscience research and $264 million for fusion science.
"Fusion power could well be one of the technologies that allows us to leapfrog the enormous acceleration in future energy demand that we know threatens economic growth in every corner of the world," Abraham said.
-------- south carolina
Fuels plant delayed at least 10 months
Budget documents show building will not be started before May 2005
By SAMMY FRETWELL Staff Writer
Wed, Feb. 04, 2004
http://www.thestate.com/mld/thestate/news/local/7868460.htm
The Bush Administration will delay by at least 10 months construction of a jobs-rich, but hotly debated nuclear fuels plant at the Savannah River Site, according to budget documents released Monday.
It will be at least May 2005 before the government can start building the mixed oxide fuel factory, federal records show. Construction of the plant, part of a $3.8 billion project at SRS, was supposed to begin by July 2004, if not sooner, federal officials have said.
Last year, Congress committed about $400 million to start building the plant. President Bush proposes $368 million for the mixed oxide fuel plant next year.
As expected, however, disagreements with Russia over construction of a companion factory have delayed the American fuel plant, according to U.S. Department of Energy documents released as part of President Bush's proposed 2005 budget. The plants are supposed to convert plutonium, a poisonous metal and key component of nuclear weapons, into fuel for commercial power plants, according to an agreement to reduce atomic threats.
South Carolina business leaders have lobbied for the mixed oxide fuel plant at SRS because it will bring about 500 jobs to the federal nuclear weapons complex along the Georgia border.
But former Gov. Jim Hodges contends the government never made an ironclad commitment to build the facility, raising the prospect the Energy Department would leave the nation's surplus plutonium at SRS forever. The government intends to haul much of the country's extra plutonium to SRS.
"If these delays continue or, God forbid, they shelve the project, then SRS has moved into the status of a long-term storage facility for plutonium, which is dangerous,'' Hodges said upon hearing of the delays.
Meanwhile, anti-nuclear activists oppose the mixed oxide fuel plant, citing the dangers of making and using plutonium-blended fuel for commercial power plants. They favor encasing excess plutonium in glass and burying it in Nevada.
A DOE budget document released Monday said "political realities" make it impossible to begin construction of the American plant at SRS before next May.
Despite the delay, the federal government is committed to building the mixed oxide fuel plant and related facilities at SRS, said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration, an Energy Department division.
Wilkes said the Bush Administration's inclusion of $368 million in its proposed 2005 budget shows the commitment.
Kevin Bishop, a spokesman for U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, said a law approved by Congress in 2002 will force the government to finish the project, process the plutonium and ship it out of South Carolina. The law requires the DOE to begin producing mixed oxide fuel by 2011 under threat of penalty.
The plutonium-blended fuel will be burned in Duke Energy power plants near Charlotte.
Tom Clements, a nuclear nonproliferation expert with the environmental group Greenpeace, said the delay in starting the fuel plant could make it harder for the DOE to get additional funding from Congress.
"They will have an extremely difficult time justifying to Congress why they need construction money for fiscal year 2005 when they were not able to spend all the money Congress gave them in 2004," Clements said.
The dispute with Russia centers on liability over plant construction in that country. U.S. contractors want legal protection in the event the American-designed Russian plant encounters problems. The Russian fuel plant is supposed to be constructed in roughly the same time frame as the U.S. plant, but the Russian plant is behind schedule
U.S. and Russian fuel plants are to be built to neutralize the dangers of leftover bomb-grade plutonium no longer needed by either country. About 68 metric tons of the poisonous metal would be blended with uranium to make fuel for commercial nuclear power plants. In addition to the liability issues, funding for the Russian plant has been slow to materialize.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission must also approve a construction license for the plant, but that has been slowed. The DOE wants its chief contractor to move a radiation boundary closer to the site of the plant.
Reach Fretwell at (803) 771-8537 or sfretwell@thestate.com.
-------- tennessee
Bush budget boosts cleanup fund
Oak Ridge program, however, facing cuts right now
By FRANK MUNGER, munger@knews.com
February 4, 2004
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/local_news/article/0,1406,KNS_347_2627593,00.html
OAK RIDGE - The Oak Ridge environmental cleanup fund could top $600 million in 2005 if Congress approves the Bush administration's budget proposal.
That's a sizable increase over the current spending level and would support the U.S. Department of Energy's plans to accelerate the Oak Ridge cleanup effort and eliminate higher-risk areas of pollution over the next few years.
However, DOE officials acknowledged Tuesday during a briefing with reporters that the program is facing newly mandated cuts this year that could delay some projects or require other short-term adjustments.
All of DOE's environmental cleanup sites are dealing with midyear funding reductions, but the Oak Ridge cuts are bigger than most, according to Gerald Boyd, DOE's Oak Ridge manager.
Steve McCracken, the agency's cleanup chief here, said the Oak Ridge program is losing about $35 million from its 2004 funding base. About $29 million will come from funds allotted for environmental projects, he said.
McCracken said it's not clear what cleanup activities would be affected, but he said the fiscal shortfall would not impact operations at the government's toxic-waste incinerator or another facility where highly radioactive waste is being processed.
John Owsley, the state's environmental oversight chief in Oak Ridge, said he was aware of the situation, but added, "DOE has not told us where the cuts will be made."
Owsley said state officials are pleased with proposed increases in the 2005 budget. "So we would expect to be able to meet the accelerated cleanup schedules," he said.
Meanwhile, DOE's overall budget for Oak Ridge in 2005 is proposed at about $1.9 billion, which is up about 4 percent from this year's spending.
"We're pretty proud of this budget, quite frankly," Boyd said.
The DOE budget doesn't include funding for the Y-12 nuclear weapons plant, which comes under the National Nuclear Security Administration. Y-12's 2005 budget is projected at about $814 million, up from the current year's $751 million.
Judy Penry, DOE's chief financial officer in Oak Ridge, said the Y-12 funding growth reflects the administration's planned boost in nuclear defense work on a national basis.
Boyd said DOE's Oak Ridge budget for 2005 included about $50 million for security, up 25 percent over the current spending level.
That doesn't account for security at Y-12, a warhead-manufacturing plant and the nation's storage center for bomb-grade uranium. Y-12 is expected to spend about $100 million on security-related activities next year.
Senior writer Frank Munger may be reached at 865-342-6329.
-------- us politics
Rudman, Foley eyed for panel on Iraq
February 04, 2004
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040203-103452-8113r.htm
Lawmakers have begun suggesting names of respected national security figures for a new presidential commission to investigate the intelligence community and mistakes that occurred in the run-up to war with Iraq.
Among the top tier of candidates for the presidentially appointed commission, the creation of which President Bush may announce as early as today, are:
•Former Sen. Warren Rudman, New Hampshire Republican, an elder statesman who co-chaired the bipartisan U.S. Commission on National Security, which predicted a direct attack against American citizens on U.S. soil prior to September 11, 2001.
•Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Ford and the first President Bush, who served as a member of the President's Special Review Board on Iran-Contra (also known as the Tower Commission) in 1986-87.
•Tom Foley, a former Washington Democratic congressman who held the House speakership from 1989 to 1995 and is highly respected by many members of both parties.
•Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as secretary of state under the first President Bush after a 27-year State Department career.
•Bob Kerrey, a former two-term Democratic senator from Nebraska and a military veteran who has a reputation as a nonpartisan statesman, but also was involved in CIA covert operations in Vietnam.
•Richard J. Kerr, a former deputy director of central intelligence who has been leading the CIA's internal review of Iraq intelligence.
Other names suggested for the commission include former CIA directors William H. Webster, James Woolsey and Robert M. Gates; former Secretary of State and Treasury Secretary George Shultz; William Perry, Defense secretary under President Clinton; and Gary Hart, a former Democratic senator from Colorado who served as co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, a bipartisan commission chartered by the Department of Defense in 1998.
David A. Kay, until recently the chief American weapons inspector in Iraq working for the Central Intelligence Agency, has also been mentioned for the panel, as has Lee Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Ohio who served as vice chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, headed by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.
A senior administration official on Sunday said the panel may also include some current members of Congress.
"The people that the president will appoint to this commission will be people of experience in the public sector. They will be people with expertise in intelligence. They will be people of integrity, people who are committed to doing a thorough job to take a broad assessment of our intelligence capabilities," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said yesterday. "Their independence will be spelled out in the executive order that the president signs."
Mr. Bush will handpick the panel's appointees after input from top security officials in the administration, White House sources said. He will attempt to empanel a commission above political reproach, but even before the panel has been announced, Democrats contended that the president will be moved solely by political considerations.
"Although one of the major questions that needs to be addressed is whether senior administration officials exaggerated the nature of the threat from Iraq, the president is attempting to make the case that actions by these officials are best investigated by a commission whose members are appointed by and report to the White House," said a letter signed by Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota, Senate intelligence committee Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
But White House lawyers have chosen a format for the new commission similar to that of the Warren Commission, which led a 10-month investigation that concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President Kennedy.
----
FINALLY, THE TRUTH ABOUT BUSH'S MILITARY SERVICE RECORD
George W.'s Missing Year
TomPaine.com,
February 4, 2004
http://www.tompaine.com/feature.cfm/ID/3671
Marty Heldt is a farmer. He told us, "I spent 17 years as a brakeman [for the railroad] before moving back to the farm. That job had some long layovers that gave me a lot of time to read and to educate myself." He lives in Clinton, Iowa.
Nearly two hundred manila-wrapped pages of George Walker Bush's service records came to me like some sort of giant banana stuffed into my mailbox.
I had been seeking more information about his military record to find out what he did during what I think of as his "missing year," when he failed to show up for duty as a member of the Air National Guard, as the Boston Globe first reported.
The initial page I examined is a chronological listing of Bush's service record. This document charts active duty days served from the time of his enlistment. His first year, a period of extensive training, young Bush is credited with serving 226 days. In his second year in the Guard, Bush is shown to have logged a total of 313 days. After Bush got his wings in June 1970 until May 1971, he is credited with a total of 46 days of active duty. From May 1971 to May 1972, he logged 22 days of active duty.
Then something happened. From May 1, 1972 until April 30, 1973 -- a period of twelve months -- there are no days shown, though Bush should have logged at least thirty-six days service (a weekend per month in addition to two weeks at camp).
I found out that for the first four months of this time period, when Bush was working on the U.S. Senate campaign of Winton Blount in Alabama, that he did not have orders to be at any unit anywhere.
On May 24, 1972, Bush had applied for a transfer from the Texas Air National Guard to Montgomery, Alabama. On his transfer request Bush noted that he was seeking a "no pay" position with the 9921st Air Reserve Squadron. The commanding officer of the Montgomery unit, Lieutenant Colonel Reese R. Bricken, promptly accepted Bush's request to do temporary duty under his command.
But Bush never received orders for the 9921st in Alabama. Such decisions were under the jurisdiction of the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver, Colorado, and the Center disallowed the transfer. The Director of Personnel Resources at the Denver headquarters noted in his rejection that Bush had a "Military Service Obligation until 26 May 1974." As an "obligated reservist," Bush was ineligible to serve his time in what amounted to a paper unit with few responsibilities. As the unit's leader, Lieutenant Colonel Bricken recently explained to the Boston Globe, ''We met just one weeknight a month. We were only a postal unit. We had no airplanes. We had no pilots. We had no nothing.''
The headquarters document rejecting Bush's requested Alabama transfer was dated May 31, 1972. This transfer refusal left Bush still obligated to attend drills with his regular unit, the 111th Fighter Interceptor Squadron stationed at Ellington Air Force Base near Houston. However, Bush had already left Texas two weeks earlier and was now working on Winton Blount's campaign staff in Alabama.
In his annual evaluation report, Bush's two supervising officers, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, made it clear that Bush had "not been observed at" his Texas unit "during the period of report" -- the twelve month period from May 1972 through the end of April 1973.
In the comments section of this evaluation report Lieutenant Colonel Harris notes that Bush had "cleared this base on 15 May 1972, and has been performing equivalent training in a non flying role with the 187th Tac Recon Gp at Dannelly ANG Base, Alabama" (the Air National Guard Tactical Reconnaissance Group at Dannelly Air Force Base near Montgomery, Alabama).
This was incorrect. Bush didn't apply for duty at Dannelly Air Force Base until September 1972. From May until September he was in limbo, his temporary orders having been rejected. And when his orders to appear at Dannelly came through he still didn't appear. Although his instructions clearly directed Bush to report to Lieutenant Colonel William Turnipseed on the dates of "7-8 October 0730-1600, and 4-5 November 0730-1600," he never did. In interviews conducted with the Boston Globe earlier this year, both General Turnipseed and his former administration officer, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Lott, said that Bush never put in an appearance.
The lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills through regular training.
Bush campaign aides claim, according to a report in the New York Times, that Bush in fact served a single day -- November 29,1972 -- with the Alabama unit. If this is so it means that for a period of six weeks Lieutenant George W. Bush ignored direct instructions from headquarters to report for duty. But it looks even worse for Lieutenant Bush if the memory of Turnipseed and Lott are correct and Bush never reported at all.
After the election was over (candidate Blount lost), Bush was to have returned to Texas and the 111th at Ellington Air Force Base. Bush did return to Houston, where he worked for an inner-city youth organization, Project P.U.L.L. But, as I mentioned already, his annual evaluation report states that he had not been observed at his unit during the twelve months ending May 1973. This means that there were another five months, after he left Alabama, during which Bush did not fulfill any of his obligations as a Guardsman.
In fact, during the final four months of this period, December 1972 through May 29, 1973, neither Bush nor his aides have ever tried to claim attendance at any guard activities. So, incredibly, for a period of one year beginning May 1, 1972, there is just one day, November 29th, on which Bush claims to have performed duty for the Air National Guard. There are no dates of service for 1973 mentioned in Bush's "Chronological Service Listing."
Bush's long absence from the records comes to an end one week after he failed to comply with an order to attend "Annual Active Duty Training" starting at the end of May 1973. He then began serving irregularly with his unit. Nothing indicates in the records that he ever made up the time he missed.
Early in September 1973, Bush submitted a request seeking to be discharged from the Texas Air National Guard and to be transferred to the Air Reserve Personnel Center. This transfer to the inactive reserves would effectively end any requirements to attend monthly drills. The request -- despite Bush's record -- was approved. That fall Bush enrolled in Harvard Business School.
Both Bush and his aides have made numerous statements to the effect that Bush fulfilled all of his guard obligations. They point to Bush's honorable discharge as proof of this. But the records indicate that George W Bush missed a year of service. This lack of regular attendance goes against the basic concept of a National Guard kept strong by citizen soldiers who maintain their skills and preparedness through regular training.
And we know that Bush understood that regular attendance was essential to the proficiency of the National Guard. In the Winter 1998 issue of the National Guard Review Bush is quoted as saying "I can remember walking up to my F-102 fighter and seeing the mechanics there. I was on the same team as them, and I relied on them to make sure that I wasn't jumping out of an airplane. There was a sense of shared responsibility in that case. The responsibility to get the airplane down. The responsibility to show up and do your job."
Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue.
Bush's unsatisfactory attendance could have resulted in being ordered to active duty for a period up to two years -- including a tour in Vietnam. Lieutenant Bush would have been aware of this as he had signed a statement which listed the penalties for poor attendance and unsatisfactory participation. Bush could also have faced a general court martial. But this was unlikely as it would have also meant dragging in the two officers who had signed off on his annual evaluation.
Going after officers in this way would have been outside the norm. Most often an officer would be subject to career damaging letters of reprimand and poor Officers Effectiveness Ratings. These types of punishment would often result in the resignation of the officer. In Bush's case, as someone who still had a commitment for time not served, he could have been brought back and made to do drills. But this would have been a further embarrassment to the service as it would have made it semi-public that a Lieutenant Colonel and squadron commander had let one of his subordinates go missing for a year.
For the Guard, for the ranking officers involved and for Lieutenant Bush the easiest and quietest thing to do was adding time onto his commitment and placing that time in the inactive reserves.
Among these old documents there is a single clue as to how Bush finally fulfilled his obligations and made up for those missed drill days. In my first request for information I received a small three-page document containing the "Military Biography Of George Walker Bush." This was sent from the Headquarters Air Reserve Personnel Center (ARPC) in Denver Colorado.
In this official summary of Bush's military service, I found something that was not mentioned in Bush's records from the National Guard Bureau in Arlington, Virginia. When Bush enlisted his commitment ran until May 26, 1974. This was the separation date shown on all documents as late as October 1973, when Bush was transferred to the inactive reserves at Denver, Colorado. But the date of final separation shown on the official summary from Denver, is November 21, 1974. The ARPC had tacked an extra six months on to Bush's commitment.
Bush may have finally "made-up" his missed days. But he did so not by attending drills -- in fact he never attended drills again after he enrolled at Harvard. Instead, he had his name added to the roster of a paper unit in Denver, Colorado, a paper unit where he had no responsibility to show up and do a job.
Bush has found military readiness to be a handy campaign issue. Yet even though more than two decades have passed since Bush left the Air National Guard, some military sources still bristle at his service record -- and what effect it had on readiness. "In short, for the several hundred thousand dollars we tax payers spent on getting [Bush] trained as a fighter jock, he repaid us with sixty-eight days of active duty. And God only knows if and when he ever flew on those days," concludes a military source. "I've spent more time cleaning up latrines than he did flying.
~~
You can't just walk away
http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/Intro.htm
Vietnam had been over for a couple of years and the U.S. was at peace when I graduated from high school. When I told my parents that I was going to go into the service my mother was a little upset. My dad, though, was very supportive with just one warning, "Once you sign, once you join up, you can't just walk away. You have to follow orders."
I thought about that a lot recently when I first heard the story of how G.W. Bush had seemingly just walked away from at least a year's service in the National Guard. He had, it now appears, deserted his post. A charge so serious that I could not believe that a presidential candidate could get away with it.
"ALMOST POSITIVE"
But a quick glance at Bush's military service tells why George felt he could walk away from his duty without fear of recriminations. G.W. Bush had been treated special since before he signed up. The rumors had circulated for years that G.W. had gotten into the Guard because of his prominent father. The senior Bush denied such rumors including a specific rumor mentioning President Bush's friend, Houston businessman Sid Adger, as the one who had wielded influence, saying he "was almost positive" (Dallas Morning News, September 28, 1999) that he had not talked with Adger about the Guard.
One who was even more positive that G.W. Bush had gotten into the Guard on his own was Colonel Walter B. "Buck" Staudt, then commander of the Texas Air National Guard. Colonel Staudt told the Los Angeles Times last July 4th that "Nobody did anything for him. There was no goddamn influence on his behalf. Neither his daddy nor anybody else got him into the Guard." (The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1999.)
That seemed to be the line that the Junior Bush's spokesman David Beckwith took when he declared that G.W. Bush's special commission and treatment in the Guard were "routine." He said, "Our information is there was absolutely no special deal." (The Los Angeles Times, July 4, 1999.)
That somebody had influenced G.W. Bush's admission into the Guard became clear when Bush's entrance test results were released. He had scored the bare minimum 25 percent on one of the exams, and he was chosen over several hundred others who sought entrance to the Texas guard. (The Age (Australian Press) September 30, 1999.)
Then came the crushing news that the former Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives had testified under oath that he had been contacted by Houston businessman "Sid Adger and asked to recommend George W. Bush for a pilot position with the Air National Guard," and that he called General James Rose and "did so." (Dallas Morning News, September 28, 1999.)
This testimony was brought about by a lawsuit alleging that the State of Texas had allowed Gtech to keep its lucrative lottery contract in exchange for former Texas Lieutenant Governor Ben Barnes's silence about helping Mr. Bush get into the Texas Air National Guard. Not long after Barnes gave his testimony the case was settled out of court. (The Dallas Morning News, October 30, 1999.)
So, despite all claims to the contrary, Bush had in fact received aid in getting into the Texas Guard. Young G.W. Bush was sworn in on the very day he applied, complete with a ceremony for the press. He was then sent to basic training and given a special commission instantly making him a second lieutenant.
LEAVES OF ABSENCE
That fall, while some of the heaviest fighting of the Vietnam War raged, young Bush was allowed to take a leave of absence to go work on the Florida senatorial campaign of Edward Gurney. He also took time off from the Guard in 1970 for his dad's congressional campaign and then from May to November 1972 to travel to Alabama to work on a Republican U.S. Senate campaign.
Bush was required to attend drills with the Alabama National Guard. But there is no evidence in Guard files that he even bothered to show up. General William Turnipseed and his aide Kenneth Lott both flatly deny that Bush ever appeared for duty in Alabama. (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000.)
When Bush went back to Texas after his electioneering break he didn't bother with showing up for his Guard duties. In fact, seven months rolled 'round until Bush's two superior officers at Ellington Air Force Base, Lieutenant Colonel William D. Harris Jr. and Lieutenant Colonel Jerry B. Killian, effectively declared Bush missing from duty because they could not perform his annual evaluation covering the year from May 1, 1972 to April 30, 1973. They stated in their filing that ''Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of this report."
Within days of being reported missing, Bush showed up again in the Texas Guard records as doing duty. His friend at the time (U.S. News, November 1, 1999), Al Lloyd, now speculates that Bush's superiors noticed and that "I'll bet someone called him up and said, 'George, you're in a pickle. Get your ass down here and perform some duty.'" (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000.) Lloyd was an administrative officer with the Texas Guard until his retirement in 1995 as personnel director of the Texas Air Guard and he is a self-professed Bush supporter.
Bush only served thirty-six days of duty after that and he was given an honorable disharge eight months early. The early release wasn't unusual and the honorable discharge was just what Bush had always known he would get. After all, he had been shown privileges and granted a wide-ranging leeway that included letting him disappear from the service for a full year. The pilot who had had expensive flight training was allowed to work as a campaign aide for three different legislative races.
There is an indication that someone higher up was trying to find out why G.W. was missing for so long. Shortly before he was given his honorable discharge a request from National Guard headquarters was placed for Bush's annual evaluation for that year. The national headquarters was told by the administrative officer at Bush's base, ''Report for this period not available for administrative reasons.'' (The Boston Globe, May 23, 2000 - http://www.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/One_year_gap_in_Bush_s_Guard_duty+.shtml )
It looks as if Bush got into the Guard with a cover-up and then got out with a cover-up. In the meantime it looks like Bush got away with the one thing my father told me I couldn't do. "You can't just walk away."
Newspaper and magazine articles dealing with George W. Bush's Air National Guard service.
http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/1.htm
Go HERE for LINKS: http://users.cis.net/coldfeet/document.htm
The Military records of George Walker Bush
Document 2 - ( doc2.gif)-Second Bush request for temporary transfer
Document 4 - ( doc4.gif) -Annual Officer Effectiveness Report part 1
Document 5 - (doc5.gif)-HQ disallows transfer
Document 6 - ( doc6.gif)-lt. Colonel Brickens Response
Document 7 - ( doc7.gif) -First transfer request
Document 9 - ( doc9.gif)-Annual Officer Effectiveness Report part 2
Document 10 ( doc10.gif)- Chronological Listing
Document 11 - ( doc11.gif)-HQ approval.
Document 12 - (doc12.gif)-HQ request for more information
Document 14 - ( doc14.gif)-Bush duty assignments
Document 16 - (doc16.gif)-1973 days credited.
Document 17 - ( doc17.gif)-Orders to report for active duty.
Document 20 - ( Doc20.gif)- Bush request for discharge from Texas Air NationalGuard and Transfer to inactive reserves
Document 21 - ( Doc21.gif)- Texas Air National Guard OK for transfer to inactive reserves
Document ANG22 -( ang22.gif) - Bush discharge papers
Document 23 - ( doc23.gif)-Penalty for bad attendance
Document 24 -( doc24.gif) -Statement of intent: "Flying is lifetime goal."
Document 25 - ( doc25.gif)-TXANG Request to be notified if Bush is assigned to reserves. May 72
Document 26 -( doc26.gif)- Contract of Service
Document 27 -( doc27.gif)- Request Discharge
Document 28 - ( doc28.gif)-"Not available for administrative reasons."
Document 30- ( grounded.gif)- Bush's suspension from flying.
This is a cover letter from the National Guard Bureau (I wrote to the pentagon and they sent the request to the NGB) http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/cover2.gif
Here is the unaltered Document 99 Note that there is no handwriting applied to this document. The one used by George Magazine has been altered at a later date.
This is the cover letter from the Reserve Personnel Center in Denver CO http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/Den_cov_letter.gif
Here is a PR release http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/He_gets_high_PR_release.gif
Second page of the PR release http://www.cis.net~/coldfeet/afterburners.gif
FOIA request http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/FOIApg1.gif
FOIA request http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/FOIApg2.gif
Postcard confirming document shipment http://www.cis.net/~coldfeet/pcd_reply.gif
Some questions about Bush's past "Were you ever arrested"
--------
At Senate, Rumsfeld Defends Iraq War Despite Arms Questions
February 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/news-iraq-usa-weapons.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who cited Saddam Hussein's chemical and biological arms as justification for war, said on Wednesday it was possible Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction when U.S.-led forces invaded, but not likely.
Rumsfeld held out the possibility that a U.S.-led team still searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq eventually might find them despite last month's conclusion by the group's departing leader, David Kay, that no stockpiles of such arms existed in Iraq when it was invaded last March.
Testifying before committees of the Senate and House of Representatives, Rumsfeld also defended the war despite the doubts over the presence of these arms.
``I'm convinced that the president of the United States did the right thing in Iraq. Let there be no doubt,'' Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee. ``The world is a safer place today and the Iraqi people far better off for that action.''
The existence of chemical and biological weapons and a reconstituted nuclear arms program was cited by President Bush, Rumsfeld and other U.S. officials as a major reason for invading Iraq and overthrowing President Saddam Hussein.
Publicly addressing Kay's comments for the first time, Rumsfeld acknowledged that Iraq may not have possessed weapons at the start of the war.
``I suppose that's possible, but not likely,'' Rumsfeld testified.
He put forward several competing theories to explain why such arms had not yet been found in Iraq:
-- Such weapons may not have existed at the start of the war;
-- Iraq had such weapons but they were ``transferred in whole or in part to one or more other countries'';
-- Such weapons existed but were ``dispersed and hidden throughout Iraq'';
-- These weapons were ``destroyed at some moment prior'' to the war;
-- Iraq possessed small quantities of biological or chemical agents, and had ``a surge capability for a rapid build-up -- and that we may eventually find it in the months ahead'';
-- Possession of these weapons was ``a charade by the Iraqis,'' either with Saddam fooling everyone into thinking he had them, or ``his own people'' tricking him into believing he had capabilities that did not exist.
SHARP QUESTIONING
Rumsfeld indicated that he thought weapons may still be hidden, but did not state which, if any, of the other theories he believed.
``It took us 10 months to find Saddam Hussein. The reality is that the hole he was found hiding in was large enough to hold enough biological weapons to kill thousands of human beings,'' Rumsfeld said. Saddam was captured in a hole in the ground at a farm near Tikrit on Dec. 13.
``But unlike Saddam Hussein, such objects, once buried, can stay buried. In a country the size of California, the chances of inspectors finding something buried in the ground without their being led to it by people knowledgeable about where it was is minimal,'' Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld faced sharp questioning by Democrats. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts confronted Rumsfeld with his own statement before the war that ``we know where they are,'' referring to Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld said he meant to say suspected weapons sites.
``I'm sure from time to time I say something that, in retrospect, I wish I hadn't,'' Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld said the search for weapons of mass destruction under Kay's successor ``is some distance from completion,'' adding that ``when that work is complete, we will know more.''
-------- MILITARY
Doubt grows over preventive war
Intelligence lapses over Iraq raise skepticism among allies and others about the Bush doctrine on when to wage war.
By Howard LaFranchi
The Christian Science Monitor
February 04, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0204/p01s02-usfp.html
WASHINGTON - As questions mount around the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the intelligence that was used to justify going to war, one of the first casualties may be the Bush administration's doctrine of preventive war.
That is just one way the controversy over the use of intelligence to justify war is likely to impact US foreign policy. Already the wisdom of waging war against a gathering but unexercised threat is being questioned in Congress and among weapons experts.
But the failure to find weapons and the clouds over prewar intelligence are also feeding US allies' doubts on the rationale for war, and solidifying opposition to the administration's stated right to preemptive war.
"People who opposed this war feel vindicated and will feel even stronger about the risks of the doctrine of preventive war, that you have to base it on intelligence that may be flimsy, inaccurate, or can be interpreted in different ways," says Jens Van Scherpenberg at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.
Calling the last year "difficult for everybody," a European diplomat in Washington says, "We see validation of the importance of inspections, the priority of cooperation, and we will emphasize that as the right way to go forward." Still, to the extent the administration holds to its first-strike policy even in the absence of a proven, imminent threat, defining differences between the US and some allies will continue.
"There is a lasting schism" between the US and some of its allies over the use of military force, fed by specific differences over defense spending, adds Mr. Van Scherpenberg. But he and others in antiwar countries say the underlying differences, while too deep to go away, will be played down in coming months as Europe seeks to repair relations with Washington, and Washington continues to press for international help in postwar Iraq.
European leaders may be hoping the White House has learned from what they believe are the pitfalls of preemptive military action - a doctrine first outlined in the Bush administration's national security strategy of August 2002.
Some experts argue that British Prime Minister Tony Blair - and even Mr. Bush - will be hesitant to repeat the Iraq venture because of public opposition and political scrutiny. In short, observers note, antiwar leaders may not feel compelled to focus on the doctrine's liabilities since others in Washington already are.
In a televised interview this week, former chief US weapons inspector David Kay said, "If you cannot rely on good, accurate intelligence that is credible to the American people and to others abroad, you certainly can't have a policy of preemption."
And in a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, Sen. Bob Graham (D) of Florida, former chairman of the Sentate Select Committee on Intelligence, said "if we continue to rely on preventive or pre-emptive military actions as a central part of our strategy, it is critical that we have accurate intelligence to justify that the threat to be preempted is imminent."
The added importance of accurate intelligence when it is being used to justify war, and flaws in intelligence on Iraq, are prompting action on both sides of the Atlantic. Bush this week ordered creation of a commission to examine intelligence shortcomings, and Mr. Blair opted for a similar investigation.
Those steps, and others that US allies see as retreats from a first-strike doctrine, or as "peace feelers" toward them, may improve working conditions between allies.
Also easing tensions are recent statements by Secretary of State Colin Powell, first acknowledging that weapons of mass destruction may not have existed in Iraq, and Tuesday stating in an interview that a clear absence of stockpiled weapons might have affected his recommendation for war. Still, he told the Washington Post that he believed Saddam Hussein's Iraq did have an intent and capability that justified action, and that history would vindicate the war.
At the same time, there is hope in some European capitals that the administration is shifting its emphasis to building alliances.
"France always felt the doctrine of preemptive action was impracticable, and while that view has not changed, the emphasis now is on improving relations with the US," says Philippe Moreau Defarges, an international-relations expert at the French Institute for International Relations.
Washington's emphasis last year on war was seen as deleterious to the sharing of intelligence, since governments disagreed on how intelligence should be used. But Mr. Moreau Defarges says Paris wants to heal relations with Washington and, in turn, improve counterterrorism and international economic policies - so the French government will not make an issue of Iraq at this time.
"Look at the recent cancellation of some commercial flights from Paris to the US," he says. "There a strong signal from the French government saying, 'We want to cooperate.' " Though the French are no more likely to go along with preemptive war, he continues, they feel reassured that the US has reached the limit of its own doctrine. "Look at North Korea: That is a more dangerous threat, but the US is not talking about waging war there."
Indeed, though a tougher stance may be required in North Korea, any action would be made more difficult by doubts about the Iraq war, says David Mepham of the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research. "The chance of getting public support will be reduced," he says. "The lack of credibility brought on by going to war in Iraq on the basis of inaccurate intelligence has undermined public trust and made the world more insecure."
• Mark Rice-Oxley contributed.
-------- africa
Better security in Rwanda
February 04, 2004
Washington Times
Embassy Row
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040203-092708-9068r.htm
Rwanda's security has shown dramatic improvement since the recent agreement by all parties to end the internal conflict that had threatened to drive a dagger of instability into the heart of Africa.
"Our security situation has vastly improved with the settlement of the Congo conflict," Charles Murigande, the foreign minister of the nation of 7 million that is perched on Congo's eastern border, told our correspondent Gus Constantine this week.
The enhanced security, in turn, promises to clear the way to work out a more substantial Tutsi-Hutu reconciliation. In the past, the Rwandan government has been far more focused on prosecuting the perpetrators of the 10-year-old genocide that took some 800,000 lives than in striving for ethnic reconciliation.
At a luncheon with reporters and editors at The Washington Times, Mr. Murigande emphasized that the Tutsi-led government's two interventions in Congo were based solely on the threat it perceived from armed remnants of the Hutu government overthrown in 1994.
"We did not go in to benefit from Congo's resources, as some have claimed," he said. "We went in to assure our survival."
Two Hutu groups - an armed militia of former President Juvenal Habyarimana called the Interahamwe and elements of the former Rwandan Armed Forces, referred to as ex-FAR - fled to eastern Congo to continue the struggle against the Tutsi-led Rwandan government.
Congolese President Joseph Kabila has moved against these forces and has taken Congolese rebels friendly to Rwanda into his government.
Mr. Murigande was in Washington to attend this week's National Prayer Breakfast and to brief U.S. officials on the situation in his region of Africa.
-------- arms
China, Pakistan skip military fair as India talks to global arms firms
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204145552.rrwcqdh6.html
India's neighbours Pakistan and China were absent from an international weapons fair that opened Wednesday as New Delhi began talks with global armament firms displaying their latest hardware.
A spokesman for the four-day event said some 300 companies were present from 21 countries including Britain, France, Israel, Russia, Singapore and the United States.
"Pakistan and China are absent," the spokesman said, without elaborating on the reason the two countries, which have both fought wars with India, did not attend.
As Indian officials began talks with US and other arms dealers, Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes said his country's arms procurement would not be slowed down for want of funds.
The government alotted 250 billion rupees (5.5 billion dollars) for military procurement in an interim budget presented Tuesday to parliament that provides funding until new elections are held in April or May.
"And if we need more than 250 billion rupees, the money will be there," Fernandes said.
India spends around 14 billion dollars on its military each year.
A group of 15 private US arms dealers met with India's chief military scientist V.K. Atre and was due to hold more extensive talks on technology Thursday, Indian officials said.
The United States and India announced last month a pact to boost ties in technology and work together to prevent weapons proliferation.
"The pact between president (George W.) Bush and Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee has altered the strategic partnership and so there would be no light switch diplomacy," said Daniel Christman, senior vice president at the US Chambers and Commerce.
"Over the next three days we will take a closer look at the potential for sales of sophisticated new technologies," he said.
Britain's Defence Procurement Minister Lord Bach said the large British presence at the fair reflected growing interest in India's defence sector.
French naval shipbuilder DCN, meanwhile, said it had completed negotiations with India for the construction of six Scorpene submarines in a deal valued at two billion euros (2.5 billion dollars).
"We are waiting for the signing of the contract. Everything is ready and negotiations have concluded and now it is in the hands of the Indian government," DCN's sales support director Frederic Ludet said.
----
U.S. SELLS AIM-9 MISSILES TO EGYPT
Wed, 04 Feb 2004
[MENL]
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/february/02_05_1.html
WASHINGTON -- The United States has decided to sell advanced air-to-air missiles to Egypt.
The Defense Department has awarded Raytheon Systems a $54 million contract for the procurement of hundreds of AIM-9M-2 missiles to Egypt. The award is a folo-up order to a previous AIM missile contract with Cairo.
Under the award, Raytheon will supply missiles to both Egypt and Taiwan. Egypt will obtain 414 AIM-9M-2 missiles and Taiwan will receive 182 missiles
The AIM-9M-2 is regarded as one of the most advanced short-range missiles available to U.S. allies. The missile can be fired from most U.S.-origin airborne platforms, including Egypt's fleet of F-16 multi-role fighters.
----
Global weapons merchants gather at Indian arms fair
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204093016.srey25mj.html
Global armament companies Wednesday displayed their latest hardware for Asian buyers as nuclear-capable India said it would not allow funds shortages to slow its arms shopping spree.
India launched its second international defence exhibition a day after Finance Minister Jaswant Singh announced a 250-billion-rupee (5.5-billion-dollar) defence modernisation fund to speed up arms procurements.
"All this demonstrates that nothing is left to chance," Indian Defence Minister George Fernandes said, flagging off the four-day event which is playing host to more than 300 companies from 21 arms-selling countries.
"And if we need more than 250 billion rupees, the money will be there," the defence minister told participants which included Britain, France, Israel, the United States and Russia, India's largest arms supplier.
India last month signed a 1.5-billion-dollar deal for a Soviet-era Russian aircraft carrier as part of a rapid spate of arms purchases, ending what it called neglect of the country's armed forces, one of the largest in the world.
The contract followed Indian purchases of 66 British Hawk jet trainers worth 1.66 billion dollars and stepped-up negotiations for six French Scorpene submarines worth around two billion euros (2.5 billion dollars).
"There are reasons to feel good in the country," Fernandes said.
Participants said India, which annually spends around 14 billion dollars on its military, rated high on their scales.
The Indian government, which has engaged in a peace process with longtime foe Pakistan, has said the strengthening of national security is a major goal. The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), expected to call elections for April-May, is a staunch proponent of a powerful armed forces.
Britain's Defence Procurement Minister Lord Bach said the large British presence at the fair reflected growing interest in India's defence sector.
"By attending this exhibition in such strength they show their commitment to the important Indian market," Bach said.
At the exhibition, Indian companies also hawked indigenously-built military hardware to global merchants as well as shoppers.
It put up for sale BraHmos, a cruise missile built jointly by India and Russia and successfully tested several times from Indian soil.
"The BraHmos is an example of developing world-class weaponry with not so fancy price tags," said an official from the state-run Defence Research and Development Organisation, which helped build the cruise missile.
Private firms such as India's Mahendra and Mahendra said they hoped to profit from the defence ministry's "feel-good" mantra.
"We're discussing with India and also exploring the international market for our latest product," company executive Ashwani Sriniwas said, referring to a 18,000-dollar strike vehicle that can either launch anti-tank rockets or turn into an infantry combat vehicle.
Phillipe Harache, Vice President of Eurocopter, a subsidiary of Europe's EADS company, said India's growing defence needs had created room for more business.
"We want to renew cooperation after 40 years of success," he said, adding Eurocopter was now looking at the outright sale of rotorcraft to India as well as producing them in India through a licence.
-------- australia
Australia to Form Squadron of Unmanned Aircraft
February 4, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-arms-australia.html
CANBERRA (Reuters) - Australia will set up a squadron of unmanned aircraft under a A$50 billion ($38 billion) defense plan to protect its borders and boost military compatibility with the United States, the government said on Wednesday.
Defense Minister Robert Hill said the success of the U.S. Global Hawk drone in Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated how pilotless aircraft could boost military capacity.
``This plan envisages investing in a squadron of pilotless aircraft to provide not only maritime patrol but also land surveillance and intelligence,'' Hill said at the launch of Australia's Defense Capability Plan 2004-2014.
``These aircraft would have the capacity to support operations ranging from border control to maritime and land operations in our region and beyond. They would also be able to assist with civil tasks such as bush fire detection and response.''
Hill said Australia, a close U.S. ally, would spend up to A$1.0 billion ($770 million), up from A$150 million, on unmanned aircraft, with the latest generation of drones promising even greater potential for high-altitude, long-endurance operations.
He said no prime contractors had been identified for the new aircraft, which were expected to be in operation between 2009 and 2011, but the Global Hawk was currently the lead contender.
The Northrop Grumman Corp RQ-4 Global Hawkflew 1,500 hours during the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, identifying targets and providing instant assessments on bombing strikes.
TIES U.S. LINKS
Australia more than most countries invests heavily in surveillance, stressing the information aspects of warfare that the U.S. military believes are increasingly decisive.
It has ordered airborne-radar planes and established big ground radars in the middle of the continent to watch ships and aircraft thousands of kilometers to the north.
Hill said the plan was drafted as the new global situation brought Australia's responsibilities as a U.S. alliance partner into ``sharper focus,'' with Canberra accused by some Asian nations of playing ``deputy sheriff'' to the United States in the region.
Australia has already tightened security ties with the United States, joining a recent U.S.-led initiative to practice intercepting and searching ships suspected of carrying equipment and materials related to weapons of mass destruction.
The conservative government has also joined the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter program to develop a Lockheed Martin Corp new-generation fighter aircraft, and is in talks over a possible role in the controversial U.S. missile defense shield project although the plan did not earmark any funding for this.
The defense plan also confirmed a commitment to acquire three new air warfare destroyers, two new amphibious supply vessels and a fleet oiler ship. Australia's army is in the processes of acquiring a modern tank to replace its 40-year-old Leopard model.
Analysts said Australia's defense plan with 64 projects was not a radical departure from past plans, but a blow-out in some costs since the last review in 2000 was worrying and appeared linked with the bid for platforms with U.S. compatibility.
``You can get compatibility with the United States without buying American so it's concerning that there seems to be a buy-American mentality in the defense force,'' said Aldo Borgu, an analyst at think-tank Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
-------- britain
Swift and secret, Blair's inquiry
Remit focuses on intelligence and excludes politicians from scrutiny over decision to go to war in Iraq
Patrick Wintour and Richard Norton-Taylor
Wednesday February 4, 2004
The Guardian
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956,1140421,00.html
Tony Blair risked a further loss of trust on Iraq yesterday when he ordered a wide ranging inquiry into intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq but debarred the inquiry from examining the political and diplomatic decision to wage war, and the legal basis for doing so.
His tortuously worded terms of reference, the product of 24 hours of backstage Westminster wrangling, split the opposition parties last night.
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, said his party would not sit on the inquiry because the narrow terms of reference prevented an examination of "the judgments which were made by the politicians about the intelligence assessments".
He added: "An inquiry which excludes politicians from scrutiny is unlikely to command public confidence. Politicians should always be willing to answer for their judgment and their competence to the public".
But the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, said he had negotiated changes to the terms of reference which specifically allowed the inquiry to look into the use the government had made of intelligence.
Mr Blair confirmed this interpretation, saying: "There is no doubt that the inquiry will be able to look into how the intelligence is gathered and used by government: I think that's entirely sensible."
In essence, the terms of reference permit the inquiry to examine the accuracy of the intelligence but not whether the threat was sufficiently big or imminent to justify war.
Mr Kennedy is risking an accusation of political irresponsibility if the inquiry makes substantial findings, but after his recent drop in the polls he may benefit by the re-emphasis of his anti-war stance.
Mr Blair defended the inquiry's remit by arguing that he could not allow a political decision to go to war - the property of parliament, government and country - to be sub-contracted to an independent inquiry.
The inquiry panel of five, which is due to report before the summer recess, will be chaired by Lord Butler, a sometime cabinet secretary to three prime ministers.
He will be joined by the former permanent secretary at the Northern Ireland Office Sir John Chilcott, the former chief of the defence staff Field Marshal Lord Inge, and the two senior Labour and Tory members of the intelligence and security committee, Ann Taylor and Michael Mates, who will represent parliament, even though the ISC has already largely endorsed the intelligence case.
Alan Beith, the senior Liberal Democrat on the ISC, will not sit on the inquiry because of Mr Kennedy's decision.
Mr Kennedy said Mr Beith had accepted the decision once it was explained to him.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said the inquiry, in part modelled on the Franks inquiry into the Falklands war, would meet in private, but some of the evidence might be published.
Sources close to the intelligence agencies put a brave face on Mr Blair's decision. In respect of MI6, the main agency involved, the key issue is what caveats its raw intelligence contained before it was hardened up as a result of pressure from Downing Street.
Lord Butler is said to take the view that senior intelligence officials, notably John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intelligence committee, became too close to political officials at No 10.
Another key issue is how strongly Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, who is due to retire in the summer, will express concern about the way in which the raw intelligence was handled.
MI6 is extremely vulnerable on one central claim: that Iraqi forces could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes. This came from a single secondary source.
Military chiefs are voicing concern about the quality of the intelligence they were given. "Someone was misled somewhere", a defence source said yesterday.
And concerns about the handling of the intelligence were highlighted last night when a senior intelligence official claimed that a large part of the defence intelligence staff, the MoD's intelligence analysis wing, were unhappy with the way raw WMD intelligence was being used without "careful caveats".
DIS official Brian Jones, who first stunned the Hutton inquiry with his revelations last year that Iraq's weapons capablity was not accurately portrayed in the government's dossier, told the Independent: "In my view the DIS were overruled in the preparation of the dossier in September 2002 resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."
The inquiry timetable is shorter than the parallel US congressional inquiry, which is not due to report until next year.
Three British official inquiries into the war have so far failed to quell the political controversy and Mr Blair was pessimistic yesterday that this latest effort would change minds.
He justified his volte-face on the need for an inquiry by pointing to the startling admissions last week by David Kay, the former head of the Iraq Survey Group.
Speaking to select committee chairmen at Westminster, he said: "I think it is right, as a result of what David Kay has said, and the ISG now probably won't report in the very near term, that we have a look at the intelligence we received and whether it was correct or not."
Mr Blair insisted the war was legally justified, since Dr Kay had confirmed that Saddam had not cooperated with the UN inspectors.
Anti-war MPs ridiculed the inquiry. The former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, said it was not feasible to "separate out the intelligence judgments on the threat and the political judgment to go to war on the basis of that threat".
--------
Blair Sets Up Own Inquiry to Be Done Before Bush's
February 4, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/europe/04BRIT.html?pagewanted=all
LONDON, Feb. 3 - Prime Minister Tony Blair announced Tuesday that he had set up an inquiry into Britain's prewar intelligence on Iraq's illicit weapons, but he added that the committee would not have a mandate to examine the political decisions to go to war.
The inquiry will work largely behind closed doors and report its findings to Mr. Blair before Parliament adjourns this summer. As such, it will be much shorter than the inquiry President Bush said Monday that he would establish to examine intelligence on Iraq and report in 2005.
"I think it is right," Mr. Blair said in a morning meeting with a parliamentary committee, "that we have a look at the intelligence that we received and whether it is accurate or not." But the prime minister said he was opposed to any inquiry that reviewed the political judgments to go to war and how intelligence findings were used in support of those judgments.
The inquiry will be headed by Lord Butler, who served as private secretary to Prime Ministers Margaret Thatcher, Harold Wilson and Edward Heath.
Mr. Blair said an inquiry had become necessary after the chief United States weapons inspector, David A. Kay, said in Washington that stocks of Iraqi chemical and biological weapons might not have existed and that intelligence assumptions about the immediate threat from Saddam Hussein might have been broadly wrong.
Mr. Blair made the announcement at a question and answer session with parliamentary committee chairmen. In shirt sleeves, the prime minister was affable and in good humor, admitting recent mistakes in how he had handled major legislation and asserting that the period for questioning his integrity over the preparations for war had come to an end with Lord Hutton's verdict last week. Lord Hutton found that the government had not exaggerated or deliberately distorted the intelligence on Iraq to persuade a reluctant public to go to war.
Mr. Blair said that Lord Hutton's was the third full inquiry into circumstances related to the war and that the only thing left to examine was the intelligence process itself.
"I honestly think that the political judgment has got to be in the end the government and Parliament, and you can't subcontract that to a committee, and I don't believe frankly that the committee would want to look into that," Mr. Blair said.
The announcement touched off a lengthy debate in Parliament over whether the inquiry would settle the most contentious questions of how political leaders used intelligence findings to support the assertion that Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat to the region and to "the stability of the world," as Mr. Blair warned in September 2002.
Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary under Mr. Blair, asked from the floor of the House of Commons, "Does he really believe he can separate the intelligence judgment on the threat from the political judgment to go to war?"
But other members like Ann Clwyd pointed out that even Kurdish leaders in Iraq believed that Mr. Hussein had chemical and biological weapons that he was ready to use on them in March. She called it a "disgrace" that the international community had not acted sooner to end the "genocide" that she said Mr. Hussein was practicing.
Michael Howard, the Tory opposition leader, said his party supported the inquiry because Mr. Blair had promised that all questions on how intelligence was used in the political decision making "came fairly and squarely within the remit of this inquiry."
The Liberal Democratic Party refused to endorse the inquiry after lengthy negotiations with Mr. Blair and his aides on Monday night. Menzies Campbell, speaking for the Liberal Democrats during the debate, said the party had withdrawn because "any inquiry" that failed to address the foundation of Mr. Blair's judgments over going to war "would be unlikely to command public confidence."
--------
Blair Opens Second Inquiry on Iraq
Tough Questions In Commons For British Leader
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8958-2004Feb3.html
LONDON, Feb. 3 -- Prime Minister Tony Blair faced another round of criticism and questioning Tuesday as he launched an inquiry into why Britain's intelligence services apparently failed in their prewar assessment of Iraq's access to weapons of mass destruction.
Blair underwent a grilling from committee chairmen at the House of Commons, some of whom accused him of taking Britain to war based on the premise that Iraq was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction.
"Do you regret now in retrospect that you placed your case wholly on that one issue of weapons of mass destruction?" asked Donald Anderson, chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. "It's a pretty flimsy foundation, isn't it?"
Anderson recited to Blair segments of the congressional testimony given last Wednesday by David Kay, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, that his team of inspectors had failed to find such weapons.
Blair responded with his own readings from Kay's testimony to support his claim that Iraq had been in violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions and had remained a threat because it was preparing to develop such weapons. Blair also argued that the U.S.-led military campaign had influenced such other countries as Iran, Libya and North Korea to seriously consider ending their own weapons programs.
"I think we've done the right thing," Blair told lawmakers, "not just because Iraq was a dangerous place under Saddam but also because the rest of the world needs to know that this issue will be tackled with firmness."
But Tony Baldry of the opposition Conservative Party retorted that Blair had "abandoned the United Nations." He said members of Parliament would not have voted for war in March if they had had a true picture of Iraq's weapons capabilities. "If you really do believe that if colleagues had known then what they know, that they'd still have supported you," Baldry told Blair, "then I think you're more out of touch than you really know."
Blair appointed a five-member bipartisan panel to be led by Robin Butler, a retired senior civil servant. It will meet behind closed doors and will evaluate the accuracy of intelligence reports received before the war began in March and determine how and why those reports differed from what Kay's group has discovered.
Blair ordered the panel to work closely with its U.S. counterpart, which President Bush announced Monday. The U.S. commission is expected to look at wider issues of nuclear weapons proliferation and is not expected to issue its report until 2005, but the British inquiry has been ordered to issue findings by the mid-summer parliamentary recess.
While the Conservatives endorsed the Blair panel, the minority Liberal Democrats refused to go along, arguing that the probe would not be broad enough to satisfy public concerns because it would scrutinize only the intelligence and not the politics behind the decision to go to war. "It deals neither with the workings of government nor with the political decision-making based on intelligence," Menzies Campbell, the party's foreign affairs spokesman, told the House of Commons, adding that "an inquiry which excludes politicians from scrutiny is unlikely to command public confidence."
Until this week, Blair had resisted establishing a new panel, arguing that an independent judicial inquiry headed by a former judge, Brian Hutton, was sufficient. In findings issued last week, that inquiry cleared Blair and his top aides of allegations they had falsified or exaggerated intelligence reports to make the case for war.
But opinion polls over the weekend showed that a majority of people surveyed did not believe Hutton's findings and still suspected that Blair had lied to the public about Iraq. The prime minister's political troubles were compounded when Kay reported that no stockpiles of unconventional weapons had been discovered and said they probably did not exist.
On Monday, after Bush announced the U.S. commission, Blair reversed his position as well, leading critics to argue that Britain was being caught up in the wake of American decision-making. "This government has had to flip-flop rather dramatically because of decisions arrived at in Washington and not arrived at in London," the Liberal Democrat leader, Charles Kennedy, told the BBC.
But Blair insisted that he did not want "a rerun" of the Hutton inquiry and that the new commission should confine itself to intelligence matters.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's acknowledgment in a Washington Post interview that he did not know whether he would have supported going to war if he had been told there were no weapons stockpiles is certain to cause further political discomfort for Blair, who insisted to the parliamentary chairmen that he had no doubt about the decision to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein.
"I have to accept that David Kay has said he has not found large stockpiles of weapons," Blair said. "But he's found ample evidence both of breaches of U.N. resolutions on weapons of mass destruction programs and that Iraq was possibly a more dangerous place than we thought, that the conflict was justified."
--------
Blair Defends Iraq War Despite Protests
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Britain-Iraq.html
LONDON (AP) -- Prime Minister Tony Blair, undaunted by critics but briefly silenced by shouting protesters in the House of Commons, said Wednesday he was proud of his decision to go to war in Iraq, even though weapons inspectors have found less than he expected.
While a new inquiry will examine the prewar intelligence, Blair said only lawmakers and the British people can pass judgment on whether he was right to join the U.S.-led invasion.
``To attempt to subcontract this issue to some committee as to whether it was right or wrong to go to war is not merely wrong, ultimately, it is profoundly undemocratic,'' he said.
At a Commons debate interrupted by heckling, Blair said inspection teams had turned up evidence showing Saddam Hussein's ``total, unrepentant, malignant intent'' and his violation of United Nations resolutions -- enough to justify the U.S.-led invasion.
``I accept (the inspectors) have not found what I and many others including Dr. (David) Kay confidently expected they would -- actual weapons ready for immediate use,'' Blair said, referring to the former top U.S. inspector in Iraq.
``But let others accept that what they have found are laboratories, technology, diagrams, documents, teams of scientists told to conceal their work on biological, nuclear and chemical weapons capability, that in sum amounts to breaches of the United Nations resolution,'' Blair said.
``If all that the (Iraq Survey Group of inspectors) find is all that they have found, ... we would have been irresponsible in the highest degree not to have acted against Saddam and rid him and his loathsome regime from power,'' he said.
Blair announced an inquiry Tuesday into the quality of prewar intelligence. Pressure for such an investigation grew after Kay said he doubted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in recent years and President Bush authorized an examination of U.S. intelligence.
Blair spoke at the start of a parliamentary debate on senior judge Lord Hutton's report clearing the government of wrongdoing in the death of a Defense Ministry weapons scientist and the preparation of an intelligence dossier on Iraqi weapons.
Shouts from anti-war protesters in the public gallery interrupted Blair's statement five times, prompting Speaker Michael Martin to order the gallery cleared and suspend proceeding for about 10 minutes.
``Murderer!'' shouted one protester. ``Whitewash!'' yelled another.
Police detained four men and three women. The protesters said they represented a group called Oxford Residents for the Truth.
Blair said the new inquiry will examine the quality of prewar intelligence.
He defended Hutton's report, which cleared his government of allegations it hyped evidence in the September 2002 dossier to justify war and mistreated adviser David Kelly before his July suicide.
Hutton found that the British Broadcasting Corp. was wrong in reporting that Blair's office ``sexed up'' the dossier and overrode objections from intelligence officials to claim Iraq could deploy biological and chemical weapons within 45 minutes.
``Not a single shred of evidence was presented to his inquiry that would have justified an alternative finding,'' Blair said.
The BBC quoted an anonymous official later identified as Kelly. Hutton's report prompted the BBC's board chairman and its chief executive to resign, along with the journalist who reported the piece.
The judge's report has been met with skepticism by some Britons and many of Blair's political opponents, who have derided it as a ``whitewash'' that was too easy on the government and too harsh on the BBC.
Pressing that theme, a handful of protesters dressed in wigs, robes and glasses to look like Hutton splashed white paint on the gates of 10 Downing Street, the site of the prime minister's official residence.
The Metropolitan Police said five people were arrested for criminal damage.
Michael Howard, leader of the opposition Conservative Party, criticized Blair's statements about Defense Ministry officials' leaking of Kelly's name to the public, saying the prime minister had contradicted himself.
Howard, whose party staunchly supported the war, also slammed what he called Blair's quick turnaround on the need for a new inquiry.
``For many months the prime minister has been in denial on the need for an inquiry. He has been the last person ... to change his mind,'' Howard said.
-------- business
Builders in Iraq must factor in cost of security
February 04, 2004
By Sharon Behn
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040203-113731-9003r.htm
U.S. companies bidding for massive reconstruction contracts in Iraq will spend more than $1 billion and employ up to 200,000 people to protect their staff and work sites, consultants say.
Companies bidding on the more than $18 billion of contracts being put out to tender by the Bush administration say security considerations will account for a major portion of their spending.
With the American contractor Kellogg, Brown & Root (KBR) reporting eight staffers or subcontractors killed and 39 wounded in Iraq, security has become almost an obsession.
The costs include armored vehicles, heavily defended facilities and small armies of guards to protect convoys, offices and work sites. Executives of companies working in Iraq seldom travel without a phalanx of well-armed bodyguards.
The security cost "is absolutely huge," said Doug Hartman, chairman of the American Turkish Council's construction committee and a Washington-based international consultant.
He and other security consultants said the expense is substantially more than companies spend in other politically unstable areas.
Oil companies in Indonesia, for instance, may spend large sums on securing a camp from attacks by local bandits. But in Iraq, contractors also will have to run armed convoys for supplies, maintain elaborate telecommunications systems and arm their guards with advanced weapons.
"This is organized political violence and very sophisticated," Mr. Hartman said of the threat in Iraq.
With work soon to begin on more than 2,000 projects in Iraq, companies will have to decide how to secure hundreds of work sites, living facilities for thousands of employees and security for workers traveling to and from the job sites.
"The private armies that are going to be built are huge," said Mr. Hartman. Recently back from a trip to Baghdad, he estimated that between 150,000 and 200,000 people would be involved in security operations.
Security officer Dave Smith said staff of many U.S. and European contractors have taken to scouring the streets for black-market weapons to beef up their arsenals.
"Contractors die every day over there, and it's all being hushed up," Mr. Smith said in Kuwait during a visit from Iraq.
Large U.S. contractors like KBR "should be supplying these guys with the appropriate equipment to defend themselves, [but] no one will supply us with guns," added Mr. Smith, who has his own security firm based in the Philippines.
"We have to get them off the street. MP5s are all bought on the street."
Mr. Smith said an MP5 submachine gun costs from $500 to $1,000 in Iraq, while an AK-47 assault rifle can be purchased for as little as $70 to $100.
He said he was aware of one KBR employee who was killed shortly after calling his wife to say he was on his way home, and another who was hit by rocket fire in the Palestine Hotel.
During another week, two Frenchmen working for Steel Foundation were killed.
KBR spokeswoman Patrice Mingo said the company has had four employees and four subcontractors killed in Iraq "due to hostile action," while 26 employees and 13 subcontractors have been wounded.
Company policy would not allow Mrs. Mingo to comment on steps the company is taking to protect its workers, but she said KBR strictly prohibits employees from obtaining weapons from local suppliers.
Bechtel, another major contractor with about 100 American employees in Iraq, also bars its non-security personnel from carrying arms.
"We've got trained professionals who focus on security. We've got security personnel with them 24 hours," said company spokeswoman Alison Abbott.
As far as buying weapons on the street, Miss Abbott said: "We follow all federal regulations. If individuals are doing something like that, that's something we would have to take a hard look at."
Bechtel refused to say whether any of its staff had been killed or injured, citing security concerns.
Casualties could rise further in March and April when thousands of contractors are expected to arrive in Iraq to work on new projects in the electrical, water, security, transportation, housing and oil sectors.
Private security companies, both Iraqi and foreign-based, will have to expand rapidly to meet the challenge, taking over the defense of everything from buildings and infrastructure projects to workers and company executives.
Even investors who prefer to keep a low profile, eschewing armed bodyguards, flak jackets and fast-moving sport utility vehicles for inconspicuous sedans with local drivers, say good security is the key to working in Iraq.
Burak Talu, vice president of business development for the Turkish Alarko contracting group, said his organization likes to work as much as possible "with local people in the area, because security ultimately comes from providing jobs to the local people and getting the community involved."
But, he said, the risk varies from project to project. Companies building military bases for American troops, for example, are likely targets of attack.
"Everything you do with Americans, eventually you will become a target. Once you are spotted, you cannot be so low profile anymore," Mr. Talu said.
----
Accused firm given £350m MoD contract
Wed 4 Feb 2004
Scotsman
GETHIN CHAMBERLAIN DEFENCE CORRESPONDENT
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/index.cfm?id=136132004
A COMPANY accused of overcharging the United States army for fuel and food and the US government for reconstruction contracts in Iraq has been awarded a contract worth a potential £50 million a year to supply the British Army.
Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) has been handed a seven-year contract to handle logistic support for the UK's Permanent Joint Headquarters. The contract covers the supply of fuel, meals and a range of other support services for Britain's armed forces.
The US-based company is part of the giant Halliburton group, formerly run by the US vice-president, Dick Cheney. In December, KBR was awarded a £127 million contract for the restoration of essential infrastructure of the Iraqi oil industry, bringing to £1.25 billion the value of its contracts obtained so far in Iraq without competitive bidding.
But the company has faced a series of embarrassing accusations about overcharging. The latest claim, which surfaced yesterday, was that it had overcharged the US military by more than £8.8 million for meals for troops at one Kuwaiti base last year.
An internal Pentagon e-mail sent to US army officials and cited by the Wall Street Journal, revealed that a Saudi sub- contractor hired by Halliburton at the Arifjan base had charged the US army for an average of 42,042 meals a day in July, while serving up only 14,053.
This allegedly resulted in an overcharge of £8.7 million over seven months. The overpayment was reported to have come to light as part of a routine Pentagon audit, but it has prompted a review of other catering contracts at 50 other facilities.
KBR said it was working with the US government to improve ways of estimating how many meals were needed.
Randy Harl, KBR's president and chief executive, said: "This is not about overcharging. This is about finding a good way to estimate the number of meals so soldiers can get fed."
The discrepancy, coming after previous revelations, has encouraged the Pentagon to re-examine its contracts with the company. In December, a draft Pentagon audit revealed that the company may have overcharged by £33.21 million for fuel transported into Iraq from Kuwait. The company paid back £3.4 million to the US army after it admitted employees may have received payments from a Kuwaiti contractor.
The White House has told KBR it expects answers on the fuel-supply allegations. The US administration has faced questions from Democrats about the award of contracts to companies with ties to the White House.
Halliburton has admitted that one or two employees may have accepted improper payments from a Kuwaiti subcontractor as part of the £3.4 million overcharge. Two employees were later fired.
But yesterday the Ministry of Defence said it was happy with the contract awarded to KBR, which it said had been clinched after a competitive tendering process.
An MoD spokeswoman said there were audit checks and procedures built into the contract to ensure that it received value for money. "They were selected on merit," she said.
The contract is worth a minimum of £12 million annually, rising to a potential £50 million a year depending on demand.
The MoD, which has faced heavy criticism from the National Audit Office for its failure to prevent costs spiralling out of control on other procurement projects, said the deal to supply the UK's Permanent Joint Headquarters (PJHQ) would deliver "effective infrastructure support for military operations and exercises worldwide".
Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, said: "This new partnering approach between PJHQ and KBR will deliver important benefits to future operations. By bringing all this activity under one umbrella, we will ensure that our front-line forces receive the best logistical and infrastructure support, as and when they require it.
"Experience from other nations has already shown that having a single point of contact provides both operational benefits as well as better value for money. I am convinced by involving industry at an early stage in the deployment planning process is the best way forward for our armed forces."
Last month it emerged that the MoD had wasted £3 billion on major projects which had also over-run on delivery times.
The MoD said defence contractors had to raise their game and improve performance.
Lord Bach, the defence procurement minister, said the government would insist on improvements in industrial project management as a condition of doing business.
----
Halliburton to Return $27.4 Million to Government
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10376-2004Feb3.html
The Defense Department said yesterday that Halliburton Co. will reimburse the government $27.4 million for possible overcharges for food services in Iraq and Kuwait.
The amount includes $16 million that a Halliburton unit may have overcharged for meals it never served at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, as well as $11.4 million in previously undisclosed overcharges at four other dining facilities in Kuwait and Iraq.
Lt. Col. Rose-Ann L. Lynch , a Pentagon spokeswoman, said Defense Department auditors also are reviewing billing at 53 other dining facilities that the Halliburton unit, KBR, operates through subcontractors in Iraq and Kuwait.
She said the possible overbillings, which took place over nine months last year, were discovered "during routine evaluation of contract costs submitted for payment."
Halliburton said on Monday that it would temporarily delay billing the government for food services until it can improve counting methods that may have led to the overcharging.
"KBR has a responsibility to clients and it is important to understand that this is not any sort of admission," Wendy Hall, a Halliburton spokeswoman, said yesterday in an e-mail. "It is an agreement to temporarily delay billing while KBR and the government jointly determine the best way to estimate how many meals to prepare."
The possible overcharge at Camp Arifjan, a base the Kuwaiti government built for the U.S. military to replace temporary facilities at Camp Doha, involved a Saudi Arabian firm, Tamimi Global Co.
Tamimi is primarily a commercial construction company with an estimated 8,700 employees, according to a 2003 credit report. It is also a subcontractor for Bechtel National Inc., which hired the Saudi company to run a base camp in Baghdad for 90 employees.
"They're doing a good job for us," said Francis Canavan, a spokeswoman for Bechtel, which has a prime U.S. contract to repair Iraq's infrastructure.
KBR runs dining facilities for soldiers and civilians under a Defense Department contract it won in 2001 to provide food, shelter and other logistical support to the U.S. military throughout the world. The company has been awarded $3.8 billion in work under the contract.
Last week, Halliburton said it would repay the government $6.2 million to cover possible overcharges by another subcontractor under the same contract. The amount covered the possible overbilling by an unidentified Kuwaiti firm, and possible kickbacks to one or two KBR employees.
Pentagon auditors also are reviewing whether KBR may have overcharged the government at least $61 million to import fuel from Kuwait into Iraq under a separate contract with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
KBR has denied wrongdoing in each instance.
Researcher Richard Drezen contributed to this report.
-------- chemical weapons
Miniature Chemical Warfare Agent Detection System Planned
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 4, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-04-09.asp#anchor3
A team of scientists from the United States and Russia have been awarded an $80,000 grant to develop a small portable instrument to measure trace levels of chemical warfare agents and explosives.
The grant comes from the U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation (CRDF) as part of the organization's Special Competition for Research on Minimizing the Effects of Terrorist Acts on Civilian Populations. Each grant provides nine months of support to joint teams of U.S. and Russian scientists working on finding innovative solutions to minimize the impact of terrorist threats.
The competition is the foundation's response to the events of September 11, 2001. Funding for the competition comes from the U.S. Department of State, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.
The first joint U.S. Russian team is headed by Graham Cooks of Purdue University and his Russian colleague Eugene Nikolaev of the Institute of Energy Problems of Chemical Physics.
The scientists aim to develop a technology that will enable them to miniaturize and expand the detection capabilities of mass spectrometers, highly sensitive instruments that have the ability to rapidly identify and measure the presence of minute traces of compounds in the air.
"Those of us in Indiana know that Purdue University is a leader in many areas," said Senator Richard Lugar, an Indiana Republican who chairs the Foreign Relations Committee. "This joint research will further solidify that reputation, while also advancing our safety and security. Equipment to detect chemical warfare agents is a vital tool in our arsenal against terrorism."
"Mass spectrometers are particularly appealing for emergency on-site analysis due to their inherent speed, precision, sensitivity, capability for continuous real-time measurements, and fairly low maintenance requirements," said Dr. Cooks. "However, the threat of unpredictable terrorist acts involving chemical warfare agents and explosives presents an urgent problem that requires a system that can operate even faster and with a greater degree of mobility than is currently available."
The U.S. Civilian Research and Development Foundation is a private, nonprofit organization authorized by the U.S. Congress and established by the National Science Foundation in 1995. The CRDF supports scientific and technical collaboration between the United States and other countries, primarily the countries of the former Soviet Union, through grants, technical resources, and training.
The foundation is currently completing its review of additional proposals and plans to announce further cooperative research awards in the near future.
-------- china
Taiwan's Leader Proposes DMZ With China
By Tim Culpan and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8926-2004Feb3.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Feb. 3 -- President Chen Shui-bian offered Tuesday to exchange envoys with China and establish a demilitarized zone across the Taiwan Strait, a proposal apparently aimed at appeasing the Bush administration and other critics who have accused him of recklessly provoking the Chinese government.
Beijing did not immediately comment on the offer, but it is unlikely to accept, given its deep hostility toward Chen and its long-standing position that Taiwan must first acknowledge that it is part of China before any talks are possible. Chen maintains that the self-governing island is an independent nation.
Tensions between Taiwan and the mainland are running high over Chen's plan to hold a referendum on March 20 asking voters whether the island should increase military spending in response to China's buildup of missiles across the strait that separates them. The referendum will also ask whether Taiwan should try to negotiate a "peace and stability framework" with the mainland.
China opposes any referendum in Taiwan as a dangerous move toward an island-wide vote on independence, which it has said would spark a war. The Bush administration has also objected to the referendum, describing it as unnecessary and destabilizing. But U.S. officials softened their criticism last month after Chen changed the language of the ballot questions.
Chen went further Tuesday, proposing a raft of measures to facilitate talks with China, including the establishment of an unspecified demilitarized zone, liaison offices in Taipei and Beijing, and a joint pledge to preserve the status quo and prevent military conflicts.
Speaking at his first news conference in more than three years, broadcast live across the island, Chen defended the planned referendum and said that allowing the Taiwanese people to vote on his peace plan might prompt Beijing to come to the negotiating table.
"We are allowing the people to be the true masters of our country," he said. "Once the decision is made by our people, China will have to decide if they want to accept it or not."
On Friday, Deputy Secretary of State Richard L. Armitage questioned Chen's motives for holding the referendum but said the Bush administration was studying the ballot questions and watching how the vote is being used on the island.
"As much as we respect Taiwan's democracy, the referendum in question does raise questions," Armitage told reporters during a visit to Beijing. "Referenda are generally reserved for very difficult and divisive issues, and the wording of the referendum, as I understand it, is neither difficult nor particularly divisive. So it brings about a question of why one would put that referendum forward."
Chen is campaigning in a tight race for reelection, and the ballot issue is scheduled the same day as the election. Analysts say Chen is trying to use the referendum to fan anti-China sentiment and attract voters. At the same, though, he is worried that criticism from the United States has hurt him in the polls, they said.
"I believe Chen is facing a crisis of trust, not just from Beijing and Washington, but also from mainstream Taiwanese," said Philip Yang, an expert on international affairs at the National Taiwanese University.
A government official in Taiwan, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Chen was trying to demonstrate with his proposal that he is willing to improve relations with China and should not be blamed for the current tensions. "He's trying to remind people the number of goodwill measures he's shown over the years toward China," the official said.
At his news conference, Chen argued that it was China that was threatening peace in the region. "Taiwan faces the world's most severe missile threat," he said. "It is anticipated that by 2005, Communist China will have deployed 600 ballistic missiles pointed at Taiwan, with their accuracy greatly enhanced so that they can strike major military bases with little or no warning."
But the opposition Nationalist Party attacked Chen's proposal as dangerous and insincere. "It's a lot of useless words," said party spokesman Justin Chou.
Pan reported from Beijing.
-------- iran
Iran's Leader Orders Review of Excluded Candidates
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Elections.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran's supreme leader has ordered a review of the disqualifications of thousands of candidates from legislative elections, a government spokesman said Wednesday, in a bid to defuse a standoff with reformers threatening a boycott.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei later also rebuked public servants who had threatened to have nothing to do with the elections and accused reformists of bullying.
Khamenei's moves came a day after he sided with hard-liners and rejected a request by reformist President Mohammad Khatami for the Feb. 20 elections to be postponed.
Khatami's government has said it would not stage voting unless the disqualifications are overturned. However, the powerful, hard-line Guardian Council has refused to withdraw its disqualification of about 30 percent of the 8,200 people who applied to run in the polls.
Government spokesman Abdollah Ramezanzadeh said Khamenei decided on the review -- the second in less than a month -- in a meeting with Khatami on Tuesday.
``We hope to achieve a final result as soon as possible that would allow us to hold an election with a huge turnout,'' Ramezanzadeh told reporters.
``I think we can expect some positive results tomorrow,'' Ramezanzadeh added. He did not elaborate.
Ramezanzadeh's announcement was the first in days that suggested the elections might go ahead as planned. On Tuesday, scores of reformist lawmakers called for the elections to be postponed.
Also, Iran's provincial governors said in a statement posted on the Interior Ministry's Web site that they would not hold the elections -- suggesting that hard-liners would have to use the military to run the polls.
Khamenei was broadcast on state television Wednesday talking about the crisis.
``No one is allowed to refuse to carry out his legal responsibilities because of his opposition,'' Khamenei said, referring to the provincial governors' stand. ``Avoiding one's responsibilities by way of resignation, or other forms, is illegal and religiously forbidden.''
He attacked reformist lawmakers for their protests against the disqualifications.
``Some had excessive demands and resorted to bullying to push their objectives. They put pressure on the president and the Guardian Council and parliamentary speaker, who resisted the pressure,'' he said.
Khamenei reiterated there would be no postponement: ``Elections must be held on Feb. 20th without any delay.''
The Guardian Council, which is appointed by Khamenei, has disqualified more than 2,400 people from the polls. Reformers have protested the disqualifications as an attempt to fix the elections in favor of conservatives. Hard-liners have denied any political motives, arguing that the disqualified lacked the criteria to stand. But the disqualified include 80 incumbent lawmakers.
Ramezanzadeh said the review would be conducted by the Intelligence Ministry.
A Cabinet minister indicated that most of the candidates, but not all, were likely to be restored to the ballot by the review.
``A large number are expected to be reinstated,'' Oil Minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh, a pro-reform minister told reporters Wednesday.
While Ramezanzadeh and Zanganeh sounded upbeat about the review's prospects, reformists have been disappointed before. Early last month, Khamenei urged the Guardian Council to reconsider the disqualifications. It did so, but its reinstatements were regarded as politically insignificant.
What makes the new review different is that it is to be conducted by a ministry that is nominally under the control of reformists.
When the list of approved candidates was first announced in early January, it emerged that the Guardian Council had disqualified about 3,600 people of the 8,200 who filed papers to stand.
After protests, and Khamenei's requested reconsideration, the council reinstated 1,160 low-profile names, but the major reformists -- including the leaders of the Islamic Iran Participation Front -- remained barred. Reformists rejected the reinstatements as cosmetic.
The meeting between Khamenei, who has the final say on all state matters, and Khatami was seen as a last chance to ease Iran's worst political crisis in years. It was attended by parliamentary speaker Mahdi Karroubi, a reformist who had urged Khamenei to intervene, and Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the hard-line head of the judiciary.
The leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the largest reformist party, Mohammad Reza Khatami, said Monday his group would boycott the polls. The day before, more than 120 lawmakers tendered their resignations, saying there was no point in holding elections whose outcome was a foregone conclusion.
Without the Front, hard-line candidates likely would easily retake control of parliament with an expected low turnout. Reformists had won the parliament in 2000 for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and used it as a platform to press for social and political reforms.
--------
Iran's Leader Said to Refuse Delay in Vote
February 4, 2004
By NAZILA FATHI
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/middleeast/04IRAN.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Feb. 3 - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, met Tuesday afternoon with President Mohammad Khatami and the speaker of Parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, in an effort to resolve the country's deepening political crisis, but they were unable to come to any agreement, said a person knowledgeable about the talks.
The meeting had been seen as a last-ditch effort to prevent the country from falling into political chaos.
The person said the ayatollah refused to agree to any delay in parliamentary elections scheduled for Feb. 20. President Khatami and other reformers had asked for a postponement so that the hard-line Guardian Council, a 12-member panel that reviews candidates, might allow more candidates to run.
The conflict between President Khatami supporters, who control Parliament, and their hard-line opponents has been building since early January, when the Guardian Council barred from running nearly half of 8,200 people who had filed as candidates. Last week, the council reinstated 1,160, but most of the liberal candidates, including 87 sitting members of Parliament, remain excluded. On Sunday, some 125 members of Parliament resigned in protest.
The student democracy movement, long frustrated by the slow pace of government reformers, had kept its distance during a three-week parliamentary sit-in after the bans were announced.
But forecasts that the crisis would reunite those groups seem to be bearing out. A pro-democracy student group broke its silence on Tuesday, holding a meeting in support of the lawmakers who resigned and calling for a referendum over the future of the Islamic state and for a boycott of the Feb. 20 vote.
A request by Tehran University students to demonstrate on Wednesday was denied, but the students said they would protest on Sunday, the Student News Agency reported.
The leading reform party, the Islamic Participation Party, announced that it would boycott the elections unless the vote was delayed and all candidates were allowed to run.
Twenty-eight provincial governors, the officials normally responsible for organizing elections, laid out the same conditions in a letter to President Khatami on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the Guardian Council has ignored the Interior Ministry's intention to delay the vote, leaving open the possibility that the military may run the elections.
The possibility that the Khatami government will step down is being widely discussed.
President Khatami meets with his cabinet on Wednesday morning.
-------- iraq
Pentagon: Most U.S. deaths in Iraq from homemade weapons
By Robert Burns, AP Military Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2004
http://www.theworldlink.com/articles/2004/02/04/news/news04.txt
WASHINGTON - Nearly two months have passed since Saddam Hussein's capture, yet American soldiers still are dying at a rate of more than one a day.
Forty-five soldiers died in January and three more in the first three days of February. The January toll was five more than in December, despite hopes that Saddam's Dec. 13 capture would weaken the Iraqi insurgency and slow the killings from roadside bombs and other attacks.
The number of deaths in January will rise to 47 when the Pentagon changes the status of two soldiers who are missing and believed to have died in the Tigris River on Jan. 25. That would make the second highest monthly total since last April when daily combat from the invasion was still under way.
The worst month was November, when 82 died. In October there were 43, September had 30, August 35.
All told, 528 U.S. troops have died since the war began in March. (The Pentagon's official tally on Tuesday was 525, but that did not include two deaths on Feb. 1 and one on Feb. 3.)
A review of Pentagon casualty reports shows that, of 39 deaths in January that the Army attributed to hostile action, 23 involved attacks with homemade bombs, which the military calls "improvised explosive devices."
The Army has put enormous effort into overcoming the threat from homemade bombs, often detonated along roadways used by Army convoys. Usually a remotely transmitted signal sets them off.
To counter the threat, more soldiers are using Humvee utility vehicles with extra armor, and troops are wearing an improved version of body armor that provides more protection against bomb shrapnel. Some vehicles also are equipped now with devices that jam the electronic signal used to detonate the bombs.
When U.S. troops captured Saddam near his hometown of Tikrit on Dec. 13, some thought that would take the sting out of the resistance. By early January, U.S. commanders were publicly emphasizing that the number of attacks on U.S. troops had declined, as had hostile deaths.
Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, told reporters on Jan. 6 that "we've turned the corner" in the counterinsurgency effort in his area of responsibility, the western part of Iraq, which includes a part of the so-called Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad.
The number of attacks on his forces had declined by almost 60 percent in the past month, he said then.
Two weeks later, Maj. Gen. Raymond Odierno, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, said, "The former regime elements we've been combating have been brought to their knees." His troops operate in an area north of Baghdad that includes Tikrit, a focus of anti-U.S. violence.
But in fact, many of the fatal attacks against U.S. forces in January were in Swannack's and Odierno's areas. On Jan. 24, for example, three soldiers from Swannack's force were killed in an improvised explosive device attack in the town of Khalidiyah, east of Ramadi, in the Sunni Triangle. Three days later, another such attack near the same town killed three more soldiers. Still another who was severely wounded in the same attack died in a hospital two days later.
On Jan. 31, three soldiers from Odierno's 4th Infantry Division were killed when their vehicle was hit by an improvised explosive device while traveling in a convoy in the city of Kirkuk.
The depth and effectiveness of the insurgency is difficult to measure with only statistics, which tend to fluctuate over time. It appeared a few weeks ago that many U.S. commanders had hoped the drop-off in guerrilla action would usher in a less violent period for U.S. troops.
That has not happened.
In an eight-day span, Jan. 9 to Jan. 16, only three American soldiers died, and two from nonhostile causes.
But in the two weeks after that, 26 died - all but three in hostile action.
L. Paul Bremer, U.S. civilian administrator of Iraq, said Tuesday he still believes security has improved.
"I think the situation has improved importantly since the capture of Saddam Hussein," he said.
In the four weeks after Saddam's capture, the number of insurgent attacks against American troops throughout Iraq did fall to an average of 18 per day from 23 per day in the preceding four weeks.
But on Tuesday, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy chief of operations for the U.S. military in Baghdad, told reporters that the daily average had climbed back to 23 in the past week.
Kimmitt said the insurgency presents a danger as long as U.S. troops are getting killed or wounded.
"One never wants to have the significant responsibility of having to walk up to a family and tell them that their son or their daughter has died in combat," he said. "And so I don't want to make an assessment until that number is zero. Then I'll tell you the assessment is good."
-------- israel / palestine
Top Arafat aide accuses U.S. of 'blackmail' in bomb probe
2/4/2004
(AP)
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2004-02-04-palestinians-us_x.htm
RAMALLAH, West Bank - The United States is using political and financial "blackmail" to pressure the Palestinians to arrest those behind the deadly bombing of an American diplomatic convoy in the Gaza Strip, a top adviser to Yasser Arafat said Wednesday.
Jibril Rajoub, a senior security adviser to the Palestinian leader, said Washington has threatened to disengage from peacemaking and stop U.S. aid to the Palestinians, and has pressured other nations to withhold funding, unless those responsible for the Oct. 15 roadside blast are found.
The bomb ripped apart a diplomatic car in the Gaza Strip, killing three American security guards.
"You know that the Americans stopped their involvement (in funding and in the peace process) waiting for the results of the investigation," Rajoub told foreign reporters. "I think that this is blackmail."
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Wednesday "comments like that are ridciulous."
He said everybody should take seriously the blast that killed three Americans and the Palestinians should improve their security.
At the same time, Boucher said the U.S. remains engaged in peacemaking.
Rajoub also accused Washington of pressuring other countries to reduce aid to the Palestinians until the Gaza assailants are caught.
"The Americans are pressuring everybody, even some Arab countries not to pay the Palestinian people," Rajoub said.
A U.S. Embassy spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, declined to comment on Rajoub's remarks.
The Palestinian Authority depends on foreign assistance for 60% of its annual budget. A cutoff in foreign aid would cause it to collapse.
The attack, which Rajoub called an "isolated" case, was condemned immediately by Palestinian officials, who say they are doing all they can to find those responsible.
Rajoub also condemned Palestinian suicide bombings and called them a "mistake." But he said Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon invites such actions through his army's own military operations in Gaza and the West Bank.
American officials repeatedly have said they are disappointed with the level of cooperation from Palestinian security forces in the investigation. Despite continued U.S. pressure, no arrests have been made.
In December, American envoy William Burns said the United States "cannot carry out our full range of assistance projects" without progress in the probe.
The embassy spokesman said the level of American assistance has not changed since the bombing. The spokesman also declined to say whether the Americans have threatened to reduce aid to the Palestinians.
The United States, the main backer of the international "road map" peace plan, remains involved in the region, the official said.
Two senior State Department officials, John Wolf and David Satterfield, were in the region last week to promote the peace plan that aims for an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by 2005.
Rajoub has had close relations with the Americans and Israelis in the past when he served as head of Preventive Security Service in the West Bank.
--------
NEWS ANALYSIS
Shift on Settlements: Sharon's 'Painful' Course
February 4, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/middleeast/04MIDE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
JERUSALEM, Feb. 3 - After three years of saying he was prepared to make "painful concessions" to the Palestinians, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has convulsed Israeli politics by revealing, at least partly, what he has in mind: evacuating most or all settlers from the Gaza Strip and a small number from the West Bank.
In doing so he has undermined ideological pillars he himself helped put in place for the settlement movement: that settlements protect Israel rather than weaken it, and that to evacuate any of them under fire would only reward and encourage terrorists.
That helps explain settlers' furious reaction. "It's a disaster," said Shaul Goldstein, a settler leader from the relatively moderate Gush Etzion settlement bloc, a community south of Jerusalem. "I think Sharon is old and tired, and this is very sad to say."
Since winning office in a landslide over Ehud Barak in 2001, Mr. Sharon, 75, labored to keep all of his options open and to keep even his allies guessing about his plans if, indeed, he had any. But after his announcement on Monday that he assumes that someday "there will be no Jews in Gaza," his priorities and fears are coming into focus.
His disclosures imply that he does not foresee any end to the conflict with Arabs that, one way or another, he has fought his whole life.
He has been careful not to offend the Bush administration by giving up on its peace initiative, known as the road map, with its commitment to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.
But unlike Mr. Barak, who tried and failed to reach a final settlement of the dispute, Mr. Sharon is preparing to establish unilaterally what he considers demographically and militarily defensible lines to safeguard Israel as a Jewish state.
Speaking with a deeply furrowed brow, Mr. Sharon on Tuesday defended his plans as necessary for Israel, implicitly invoking his credentials as a visionary of the settlement movement.
"Except for the settlers, I allow myself to say, this hurts me personally more than anyone else in the state of Israel," he said at a groundbreaking ceremony in Ashkelon.
But, he said: "It is necessary to take this step. I am looking forward on this issue. This is my responsibility."
Mr. Sharon has yet to set a timetable, let alone take any action. He says he will move only when he judges that the Bush administration's peace initiative has failed.
It is possible that he will not get the chance, if he loses his governing coalition or is severely weakened by a continuing bribery investigation. Several politicians said they believed that he was acting now out of fear that he might soon be indicted, though he denied any such motive.
In January a court indicted a real estate developer on charges he paid roughly $700,000 to Mr. Sharon's son Gilad in the hope of bribing Mr. Sharon. Justice officials are looking into whether there is evidence to indict the prime minister and his son.
In keeping with Mr. Sharon's own approach so far to evacuating settlements, there has been quite a lot of political talk but no action since his announcement on Monday. Two ultranationalist parties threatened to quit his governing coalition if he moved ahead, while leaders of the left-of-center Labor Party offered to support him if he did so.
Asher Arian, an Israeli political scientist, said that for the last 10 or 15 years a stable majority of about 60 percent of Israelis has supported the basic positions Mr. Sharon outlined.
"What we've lacked is a legitimate political leader to express these," he said. "Barak tried, but did not have the political coalition or the political skill to pull it off. Sharon does, but he has to stay in power."
Where Mr. Barak sought a negotiated peace, Mr. Sharon, because of circumstance or design, is preparing for something else. "Peace is the wrong word here," Professor Arian said. "It's some kind of disengagement, of breaking away."
Ahmed Qurei, the Palestinian prime minister, reacted more positively on Tuesday to Mr. Sharon's comments than other Palestinian officials had on Monday. Speaking to Voice of Palestine radio, he called Mr. Sharon's plan "good news," adding that he wanted "deeds, not words," and an Israeli departure from the West Bank after the departure from Gaza. "Then there will be a real peace,' he said. "Otherwise the situation will remain as is."
But Mr. Sharon's disclosures indicate that he has something very different in mind. He is intent on preventing a withdrawal to Israel's pre-June 1967 borders, which he calls militarily indefensible, and he appears willing to give up almost all of Gaza to hold onto as much of the West Bank as he can.
Mr. Sharon, who helped develop the settlement strategy in Gaza, told the daily Yediot Ahronot that evacuating settlements was like "having to decide between one son and the other." He has made clear which son he prefers.
The Palestinian leadership and public would almost certainly not be content with the limited territory Mr. Sharon is preparing to concede. That means the conflict would continue. It is also not clear whether the United States or other major nations will accept this unilateral approach.
Mr. Sharon made clear that he feared that deeper international involvement here might impose a solution to the conflict. By acting on his own initiative and sacrificing some territory unilaterally, he hopes to avoid broader, mandated concessions, his allies say.
Mr. Sharon recently said that unlike many other Israeli leaders, he foresaw no threat that Arabs might do by demography and democracy what they had been unable to do by force: overwhelm Israel's Jewish character. But his plan suggests that he is worried about exactly that.
The Gaza Strip is home to more than one million Palestinians, and by unloading it Mr. Sharon would postpone the possibility of an Arab majority in Israel and its occupied land. Further, Mr. Sharon told the daily Maariv that he had requested a legal analysis about transferring a large Israeli Arab town, Umm al Fahm, and its surrounding villages from Israel to the Palestinian Authority.
Doing so would further diminish Arabs' presence in Israel, and the idea was angrily rejected by Israeli Arab leaders. "It is a very racist proposal," said Hashem Mahameed, an Israeli Arab politician from Umm al Fahm. "We never looked at Jews as a problem. I look at those who want to transfer me as a problem."
Like a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, the notion of exchanging Israeli Arab towns for settlements in the West Bank originated in the Labor Party. But it is getting hard to tell the hawks from the doves.
On Israel radio, Yossi Beilin, a leftist politician long derided by the right for his commitment to negotiating with the Palestinians, accused Mr. Sharon, Israel's most famous warrior, of coddling terrorists.
"The fact of saying he will evacuate the settlements from Gaza - he has already given the Hamas a gift for nothing," Mr. Beilin said.
--------
Possible Plan to Evacuate Dismays Gaza Settlers
February 4, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/middleeast/04GAZA.html?pagewanted=all
ATZMONA, Gaza Strip, Feb. 3 - Ariel Sharon uprooted Ayana Yogev from the Jewish settlement where she was born, and now Mr. Sharon is threatening to oust her from the Gaza Strip settlement where she has started a family of her own.
Mr. Sharon, Israel's prime minister, has been known for years as the master builder of Jewish settlements. But here at the southern end of Gaza, many remember Mr. Sharon as the defense minister who supervised the dismantling of the large settlement of Yamit in the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, as part of a peace treaty with Egypt.
Some of those same settlers were shaking their heads over Mr. Sharon's statement on Monday that he was considering removing nearly all Jewish settlers in Gaza.
"We never thought that Yamit would go," said Ms. Yogev of her birthplace. She was less than a year old when it was evacuated.
Her family was then among the first to settle in Atzmona, where she was raised and where her parents still live. Ms. Yogev, 22, has a 1-year-old son and another child on the way.
"There's no way we will walk out of here on our own," said Ms. Yogev's husband, Amichai, as the couple entertained their son in a playground on a mild winter day.
Israel has expanded its settlement population in Gaza and the West Bank for two decades despite the fierce Palestinian opposition.
Mr. Sharon's announcement brought a rare round of qualified applause from the Palestinians. Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei called it "good news." But Palestinians emphasized that such a move would be only one of many they were demanding of Israel.
The Gaza settlements have 7,500 Jewish residents, compared with about 230,000 settlers in the West Bank. During the past three years of fighting, Palestinians have attacked settlers almost daily in both territories, and are seeking all of Gaza and the West Bank for a future state.
Atzmona is part of the main cluster of Gaza settlements in the southern corner of the strip, along the Mediterranean Sea. They resemble small, American-style subdivisions, with whitewashed houses and red-tile roofs, built on the coastal sand dunes and surrounded by electronic fences and soldiers.
The settler economy is based on agriculture, which depends heavily on Palestinian workers from the neighboring villages.
By day, Palestinian laborers tend to row after row of greenhouses that produce some of the highest quality fruit and vegetables in Israel. By night, Palestinian militants lob mortars into the settlements and snipe at Israeli cars along the road leading in and out of the communities.
There are constant reminders of this bizarre relationship, based on mutual economic dependence and unrelieved hostility.
On Tuesday, young men played volleyball in the sand at the Jewish seminary here, where a Palestinian attacker carried out a suicidal rampage in March 2002, killing five students before he was killed himself.
Overhead, Israeli warplanes roared through the sky on their daily training runs along the coast.
Driving through the Gaza settlements in the middle of the day, a visitor could easily get the impression that the settlements are already being evacuated. Here in Atzmona, one of the larger Gaza settlements, the community office building and the main grocery store are closed at 2:30 in the afternoon.
The streets are largely deserted, except for a few children on bicycles and others playing soccer in the schoolyard.
The settlements are populated mostly by young couples, with the schools and agriculture providing many of the jobs, while others commute to Israeli towns for work.
Many residents say they are here because of the close-knit community atmosphere. But the isolation can feel restrictive to children.
Yaffa Hadad, 44, has lived for 18 years in the small settlement of Rafieh Yam, where she and her husband have four children.
Palestinian gunfire is a daily event. Her husband is the community's security officer, and so has to respond to shooting incidents around the clock. Still, she said, "I like it here, and we plan to stay."
But then her 12-year-old son, Omre, chimed in. "I prefer a city like Jerusalem," he said. "There are so many things to do there."
Omre takes an armored bus to school each day, escorted by soldiers. He is free to roam his neighborhood, but it consists of just a few streets and about 20 houses, several of them deserted. The beach is within walking distance, yet he cannot stray beyond the settlement gates.
-------- nato
Munich security conference: the "Davos" of the defence world
BERLIN (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204022652.nnb3fpge.html
Some 250 defence ministers and senior officials from 30 countries are expected this weekend at the 40th annual Munich security conference, which organisers claim is the "Davos" of the defence world.
Lodged in their own private security enclave around the Bavarian capital's plush Hotel Bayerischer Hof, strategy experts and representatives from the arms lobby will pack the maximum number of meetings into the three-day event.
The weekend gets underway on Friday with an informal gathering of NATO's 19 defence ministers, including Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, Britain's Geoff Hoon, Germany's Peter Struck and Sergei Ivanov from non-member Russia.
The conference proper begins on Saturday morning with debate on the "Prospects of Transatlantic Relations", where German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer could speak.
The afternoon session is focused on the "Future of NATO", most notably its work in Afghanistan, where it is trying to extend its mission outside of Kabul, and the role it would be able to play in ensuring the future security of Iraq.
Among the many delegations taking part is a huge team from the United States, including Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Richard Lugar and former presidential challenger John McCain.
Representatives from Russia, Ukraine and the Balkans will also attend.
Sunday's talks at the "Wehrkunde", as the conference was first known when it began in 1962, will focus on "Future Developments in the Middle East".
Major delegations from Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Iran will be taking part, as well as officials and experts from as far east as Pakistan and India.
Leftist groups are also hoping that protestors will be out in number. Some 21 demonstrations are planned over the three days and up to 4,000 police and security personnel are expected to be mobilised.
----
From Prague to Prague
February 04, 2004
Washington Times
By Harlan Ullman
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040203-084902-4388r.htm
In 1939, Albert Einstein drafted a short letter to Franklin Roosevelt advising the president that it was possible to generate huge amounts of explosive power from the atom. Six years later, two Japanese cities were laid waste by two atom bombs. The nuclear age had begun.
No letter to the president may ever carry more impact than Einstein's. But that does not mean that there will never be any events with strategic consequences approaching what E=MC2 wrought. In fact, one may beunderway todaywithin NATO - the profound transformation of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance Organization, born in 1949 to protect the West from the gathering danger of Soviet expansion.
NATOwas and is a military alliance to defend against militarythreats. For the first 40 years, that threat was well understood in the form of the Soviet Union. Originally, defense rested on "massive retaliation" and the protection afforded by American nuclear superiority. By 1968, that superiority was eroding. NATO agreed to shift its strategy to "flexible response." This doctrine mandated a balance between nuclear and conventional deterrence, so that Soviet attack would not automatically trigger nuclear war.
Despite clear evidence of a Soviet buildup in conventional and nuclear forces, European allies only reluctantly embraced this strategy. But the so-called Prague Spring of 1968 soon convinced them otherwise. Democratic reform seemed to bloom. That bloom was short-lived. The Soviets intervened to end reform in Hungary and elsewhere, and threatened the other East Bloc states with what became the Brezhnev Doctrine, named for the then-Soviet leader. Soviet military forces would be used to preserve socialist control. NATO's new strategy was essential preventing the Brezhnev Doctrine from encroaching upon the West.
After the Soviet Union imploded, NATO began the search for a new strategy. The dilemma was finding a valid rationale for a military alliance when there was no military threat even on the distant horizon. September 11 helped clarify a new understanding of danger and, in November 2002, NATO's heads of state met in Prague to change the alliance yet again. This transformation, if successful, will not only turn NATO on its head, but it could also create the conditions for decades of stability in the West.
The Prague declaration was a commitment to expand membership, missions and capability. This year, NATO will have 26 states. The broader construct of "security" has replaced "defense" in defining missions, and new threats now run from containing the frightening juncture of terrorists and weapons of mass destruction to humanitarian relief, reflecting the realities of the 21st century. New capability will rest on creating a highly trained, ready, agile and capable expeditionary force literally able to be deployed round the world, called the NATO Response Force, or NRF.
The spear for this transformation is the NRF. The tip is the high readiness portion, about 5,000 to 6000 personnel ready to deploy in 5-6 days, with at least 30 days of staying power. But the NRF will require profound changes in how NATO organizes, equips, uses and provides its forces.
Last October at NATO's meeting of ministers and chiefs of defense staffs in Colorado Springs, a highly successful seminar "war game" on the NRF, and the possible implications in using it, was played. Two weeks ago, 100 NATO flag and general officers, including 10 of four-star rank, with responsibilities for the NRF, met in Norfolk, Va., in Exercise Allied Reach to advance the fielding and deployment of the full force of about 30,000 in two years time. In NATO terms, these were very big deals.
Why is this important? No matter how powerful the United States may be, Afghanistan and Iraq validated the need for allies and for multinational forces that can go into action even at short notice. NATO unanimously joined America in the war on terror immediately after September 11. Today, NATO is in Afghanistan as the International Security and Assistance Force and is likely to go into Iraq as an alliance.
Europeans recognize the new dangers but not as urgently as they should. Looking south, they understand that Africa's population on the northern tier, the bulk of it Muslim, is the fastest growing in the world. Many will emigrate north. To the east, the Greater Middle East remains a cockpit of terror and violence, in the shadow of oil and nuclear weapons.
This new NATO can form a powerful force to contain instability, violence and terror. But, as in the Cold War, military force is critical. The post-Prague NATO, with the NRF as its cutting edge, fills this role. The crucial question is whether member states will ultimately honor the commitments made at Prague. If they do, and it is no means certain that they will, the new NATO will have great and positive consequence. If not, look out.
----
Iraq fallout, NATO's future the focus at Munich security conference
BRUSSELS (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204022157.i9zhmvy3.html
The lingering fallout from the Iraq war and the future direction of NATO will focus minds when the big names of the defence world meet for the 40th annual Munich security conference this weekend.
NATO defence ministers, including Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, will use the occasion to meet Friday in the Bavarian capital mainly to discuss extending the Alliance's role in Afghanistan, according to diplomats in Brussels.
Iraq's security, and NATO's role in it, will also be broached at the informal meeting and the conference, whose agenda is: "Transatlantic relations, the future of NATO, and future developments in the Middle East."
A year after the war began, the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found and inquiries have been launched into intelligence failures in the United States and Britain could be fodder for further conflict.
Last year's Munich meeting was already highly charged with tensions between Washington, Paris and Berlin as it fell days before the UN Security Council was set to vote on a new Iraq resolution.
Rumsfeld and German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who clashed then, return and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov will also be among the estimated 250 officials taking part.
Security conference host Horst Teltschik says some reconciliation is likely.
"I get the impression that the Americans want to give us a sign that they are prepared to talk so that both sides can get back to a 'normal' relationship," he told reporters in Munich.
On Iraq, Washington has openly said it wants NATO to play a real role there and has been soliciting wider contributions from its member states.
New NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said last week that the Alliance, which is supporting the Polish-led division in Iraq, is ready and able to do the job.
"If the question comes, it goes without saying that I'm very much in favour of a NATO role," he told journalists, before adding: "It's too early to say exactly what that role will be."
But apart from low-key discussions, no action has been taken and none is likely before sovereignty is transferred from the US-appointed interim leadership to the Iraqis, planned for June, a diplomatic source here said.
The priority now is a successful mission in Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was NATO's first mission outside Europe. It took command last August of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which was set up in December 2001 after the defeat of the hardline Taliban regime.
The Alliance wants to extend ISAF's operations beyond the capital Kabul, notably using German troops, but it is having trouble with resources.
"I think that there is political will, but translating it into terms of concrete forces on the ground is more difficult and that is our challenge" said Britain's ambassador to NATO Peter Ricketts.
German Defence Minister Peter Struck said on January 26 that Eurocorps will be able to take over leadership of ISAF at year's end and that the five nations involved would propose doing so at Munich.
The Middle East could also provide grounds for transatlantic consensus, but it may just as easily be a source of tensions.
Washington wants NATO to develop relations there to help build regional stability, and around six Middle East and northern African nations, including Israel and Egypt, are being invited to the Alliance summit in Istanbul in June.
With several Middle East delegations present in Munich, Israel's "security fence" in and around the West Bank and its decision to dismantle some Jewish settlements promise lively discussion, as do developments in Iran.
Protestors are also coming. Some 21 rallies have been planned before the meeting finishes on Sunday and some 4,000 police will be mobilised.
The United States has expressed fears that the protests may turn violent and has urged US citizens around Munich to be vigilant for possible unrest.
-------- prisoners of war
Revealed: the nationalities of Guantanamo
By John C. K. Daly
(UPI) International Correspondent
2/4/2004
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20040204-051623-5923r
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 -- At least 160 of the 650 detainees acknowledged by the Pentagon being held at the United States military base at Guantanamo, Cuba -- almost a quarter of the total -- are from Saudi Arabia, a special UPI survey can reveal.
In UPI's groundbreaking and detailed breakdown of the nationalities of the detainees, some arrested far from the 2001 battlefield of Afghanistan, the other top nationalities being held are Yemen with 85, Pakistan with 82, Jordan and Egypt, each with 30.
Afghans are the fourth largest nationality with 80 detainees, according to the detailed UPI survey that has now for the first time established the homelands of 95 percent of the total number of prisoners.
One member of the Bahraini royal family is among those detained, according to his lawyer Najeeb al-Nauimi of Doha, Qatar, who was Qatar's 1995-97 justice minister and has power of attorney from the parents of about 70 prisoners.
The Pentagon's own list of nationalities detained at Guantanamo may be flawed. Yemeni officials have told UPI they fear more than twice as many of their citizens are held than the Pentagon count.
Suspected terrorists are detained by U.S. forces at a number of points around the world, including Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and Bagram air force base outside Kabul. But Camp Delta, the U.S. detention facility in Guantanamo, has attracted the most media attention and international protest.
Camp Delta was built at a cost of $9.7 million by Brown and Root Services, a subsidiary of Haliburton by contract workers from India and the Philippines. Camp Delta replaces Camp X-Ray, the first improvised detention center constructed in January 2002 to house individuals detained in Afghanistan.
The Pentagon has kept a very tight lid on material about the detainees; only the identities of those who choose to correspond via the Red Cross are known. The Defense Department has repeatedly declined to provide a breakdown of the detainees by nationality.
Sources close to the Pentagon have admitted to UPI that "sensitive diplomatic considerations" were behind the decision to keep the nationalities secret.
The large number of Saudi nationals at Guantanamo, now it has been made public, is likely to intensify concern in the U.S. Congress about the real state of the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
A DoD spokesperson told UPI Wednesday "such a list exists, but it is classified."
Drawing on a wide range of sources, UPI has tentatively determined the nationalities of 619 of Camp Delta's inmates from 38 countries.
Until the U.S. government is more forthcoming with information, the figures below remain incomplete.
Complicating the issue is the sporadic release of a number of detainees; in the wake of last week's release of three teenagers, another 87 detainees have been transferred pending release. In addition, four detained Saudis have been transferred to continue their imprisonment in Saudi Arabia.
There is a rough correlation between nations subjected to terrorism and the number of their citizens incarcerated in Guantanamo. That Camp Delta currently holds 80 or more Afghans is hardly surprising, as most of the detainees were captured there. However, Camp Delta also holds seven Arab men handed over to U.S. authorities in Bosnia, as well as five individuals arrested in Malawi last summer.
The magnitude of the Saudi presence in Camp Delta raises troubling questions about their presence in Afghanistan and whether the U.S. forces succeeded in capturing more than a fraction of those who might have been there.
Emphasizing the global metastasizing of terrorism, among the 85 Yemenis is an individual arrested in Sarajevo.
Yahya Alshawkani, Yemeni Embassy deputy chief of communication in Washington told UPI that his embassy kept in close touch with the U.S. authorities -- but questioned the accuracy of the Pentagon's own count. His government cites domestic reports that more than twice as many Yemenis were held as the Pentagon has told the Yemeni government.
When queried if the number 85 was accurate, Alshawkani replied, "We have been communicated 37 names by United States authorities. I think it is more than 37. Domestic reports indicate more than 70."
Asked to comment on the discrepancy Alshawkani said: "We were communicated names that they were sure that they were Yemenis, adding, "Perhaps the U.S. only passed on names of people they could positively identify." Alshawkani remarked that Yemen had already had "some preliminary discussion" about the Yemeni detainees; furthermore, "We were told some Yemenis would be released, but we are not sure how many."
Jordan, a close ally of the U.S. in its war on terror, has 30 of its citizens detained in Camp Delta, as does Egypt. Jordan has worked closely with the U.S. in the initial processing of prisoners, providing both interrogators and interpreters.
Morocco, site of an al-Qaida attack on a synagogue in April 2002 that killed 21 people, has 18 of its nationals in Guantanamo. Algeria, currently in the throes of a violent conflict between Islamists and the government, has 19 prisoners in Camp Delta, six of whom were arrested in Sarajevo.
Kuwait, liberated from Saddam Hussein by Operation Desert Storm in 1991 has 12 citizens in Guantanamo; the Kuwaiti government insists that all of its citizen were involved in charity and relief work. China also has at least 12 its citizens in Guantanamo, although they are all identified as ethnic Uighurs rather than Han Chinese. Next on the list are Tajikistan and Turkey with 11 citizens each. Tajikistan fought a bloody civil war in the aftermath of the collapse of communism in 1991 and fundamentalists maintain a strong presence there. Turkey last November was subjected to al-Qaida bombing attacks in Istanbul, which killed 62 people.
Nine British citizens of Muslim background are in Guantanamo; they have proven to be a political liability for Prime Minister Tony Blair, as calls have been made in Parliament for their repatriation.
Both Tunisia and Russia have eight of their nationals at Camp Delta; a Russian embassy spokesman was careful to point out however that the eight Russian citizens are not ethnic Russians. Rustam Akmerov, Ravil Gumarov, Timur Ishmuradov, Shamil Khadzhiev (originally identified as Almaz Sharipov), Rasul Kudaev, Ravil Mingazov, Ruslan Odigov and Airat Vakhitov are members of Russia's Muslim community. The Russian embassy nonetheless is quietly pursuing negotiations with Washington to extradite its citizens.
France and Bahrain both have seven each of their nationals at Gauntanamo. Highlighting the problems of identification, France only recently discovered its seventh national at Camp Delta. The Bahraini detainees include a member of the royal family.
Kazakhstan has been quietly lobbying Washington for the return of its citizens, as have Australia (2) and Canada (2.) Australian David Hicks is one of the most high profile prisoners in Camp Delta; a convert to Islam, Hicks fought as a jihadi in the Balkans before shipping out to Afghanistan.
There are reportedly at least two Chechens, two Uzbeks and two Syrians in Camp Delta. The Syrian detainees especially interest U.S. intelligence, as one of the four workers at Camp Delta under investigation for possibly aiding the prisoners, Air Force translator Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi is accused of trying to pass messages from the prisoners to Syria. There are also two Georgian and two Sudanese nationals in Guantanamo.
Bangladesh, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Iraq, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Qatar, Spain and Sweden all have a single citizen in Camp Delta.
The UPI survey was conducted by painstaking compilation and analysis of the press and media reports from countries all around the world along with interviews with foreign government officials and concludes that nationalities of 38 separate countries are represented in the U.S. military detention center.
-------- russia
Russia could move army bases out of Georgia in five years: Russian official
MOSCOW (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204200740.r65a882p.html
Russia will need at least five years to withdraw its remaining two military bases from Georgia, a senior defense ministry official told reporters Wednesday, further easing Moscow's stance on the festering issue between the two former Soviet republics.
"This timeframe remains at the basis of negotiations between Moscow and Tbilisi," the official said under condition of anonymity.
Georgia has insisted that Russia withdraw its two remaining army bases in three years. Russia initially said it needed 11 years.
However, a deputy head of Russia's General Chiefs of Staff, Yury Baluyevsky, on Monday slightly softened Moscow's position.
"It's possible that the process can be accomplished in seven to nine years," the Interfax news agency quoted him as saying.
But Baluyevsky was adamant that Tbilisi's timetable of three years for the withdrawal was "unrealistic."
The withdrawal of the bases -- one of the main disputes between the neighbouring states -- is conditioned on Tbilisi agreeing to fund facilities in Russia to house Russian soldiers pulled out from Georgia, the senior official said Wednesday, adding this would cost "a few hundred million dollars".
"The withdrawal will only begin following the signature of an ad hoc intergovernmental agreement between Russia and Georgia," the official said.
Under accords hammered out at a 1999 summit of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, Russia agreed to close the four bases it had maintained in Georgia following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
It has withdrawn from two of them, but negotiations over the timetable for the removal of the other two, in the western town of Batumi and the southern one of Akhalkalaki, have long been stalled.
Officially, 8,000 troops are based in the remaining facilities.
Washington has offered to provide financial assistance to persuade Russia to pull out its troops faster than planned.
----
263 Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya last year: defense minister
MOSCOW (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204211502.j46bn3ui.html
Two hundred and sixty three soldiers from the Russian armed forces were killed in Chechnya last year, a senior defense ministry official told reporters Wednesday, adding that the number was a steep decrease from 2002.
"The (defense) ministry's losses in Chechnya have decreased, and amount to 263 military killed in 2003, as against 463 in 2002," the official said under condition of anonymity.
He added that a total of 971 soldiers had died in Russia last year. "These are men who died for all kinds of reasons, in combat, in accidents, or for other reasons," the official said.
Russia has 31,000 soldiers currently deployed in Chechnya, where they are fighting separatist rebels across a third of the republic's territory, particularly in its mountainous south, the official said.
However, with the addition of interior ministry and FSB security agency (formerly KGB) forces, a total of some 70,000 troops are deployed in Chechnya, which has been at war since Russian forces rolled back into the separatist republic over four years ago.
Some 5,000 Russian soldiers have died since the beginning of the conflict, according to official figures. However, human rights groups claim that the real casualty figures are closer to 15,000, and that tens of thousands of civilians have been killed.
----
What Are We Doing in Russia's Neighborhood?
by Pat Buchanan
February 4, 2004
Antiwar.com CREATORS SYNDICATE
http://antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=1846
Napoleon III, Emperor of France, saw his opportunity.
With the United States sundered and convulsed in civil war, he would seize Mexico, impose a Catholic monarchy and block further expansion of the American republic.
In 1863, a French army marched into Mexico City. In 1864, Maximilian, the brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, was crowned Emperor of Mexico. The French empire had returned to North America a century after its expulsion in 1763.
Secretary of State Seward did nothing until the Union armies had defeated the Confederacy. Then, he called in Gen. John Schofield, who had wanted to lead an army of volunteers into Mexico to drive the French out, and instructed him instead to go to Paris. "I want you to get your legs under Napoleon's mahogany and tell him he must get out of Mexico," Seward told Schofield. To impress upon Napoleon that the Union was in earnest, President Johnson, at the urging of Grant and Sherman, sent Gen. Sheridan with 40,000 troops to the Rio Grande.
Napoleon got the message. The French army headed for the boats, and Maximilian went before a Mexican firing squad.
Lesson: Nations are unwise to seize upon the temporary weakness of a great power to put military forces inside its sphere of influence.
Which brings us to this headline in last week's Washington Post: "U.S. May Set Up Bases in Former Soviet Republics."
The lead graph reads like something out of the London Times in the salad days of Kipling and Queen Victoria: "Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that the United States might establish military bases in parts of the former Soviet empire, but he sought to reassure Russians that increased U.S. influence in the region does not pose a threat to them." With bases already in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, we apparently intend to build a base in Georgia, birthplace of Stalin.
Query: What are we doing there? What is the strategic interest in Georgia? Tbilisi is about as far away as one can get. Why are we rubbing Russia's nose in her Cold War defeat by putting U.S. imperial troops into nations that only yesterday were a part of that country? Powell anticipated the question: "Are we pointing a dagger in the soft underbelly of Russia? Of course not. What we're doing is working together against terrorism."
But after Iraq, where we invaded an oil-rich country on what the world believes were false pretenses and forged evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, why should Russians not suspect our motives?
After all, the neoconservatives who beat the drums loudest for war, and cherry-picked the intelligence sent to Bush that got us into war, have been braying for years that we intend to create an American empire and impose our "benevolent global hegemony" on all mankind.
Why should Russians, Chinese and Iranians not believe America's crusader castles in Central Asia and the Caucasus are not part of a grand scheme for a Pax Americana?
Have we forgotten our history? When Reagan put Marines into the middle of Lebanon's civil war, 241 perished in the terrorist bombing of their Beirut barracks. Reagan retaliated, but got out. He should never have gone in. Who runs Beirut or rules Lebanon is not our business.
When we intervened in Somalia's civil war, we got "Blackhawk Down" in Mogadishu and 18 dead Rangers. Again, we pulled out. We should never have gone in. When we planted a U.S. army on Saudi soil after the Gulf War, we got 9-11. Now we have pulled out of there.
How often must we be taught the lesson?
Have we considered the consequences of planting military bases in countries afflicted by Islamic fundamentalism and ruled by autocrats who, only 15 years ago, were apparatchiks of Moscow?
A U.S. imperial presence in Central Asia and the Caucasus resented by Russia, Iran and China and detested by Islamists is less likely to contain terrorism than to invite it.
Even a cursory reading of U.S. history shows us to be an almost paranoid people about any foreign military presence near our frontiers. The French, British, Spanish and Russians were all bought off or driven out. Moscow's presence in Cuba and meddling in Grenada and Nicaragua in the Cold War were constant causes of American outrage.
But if we are entitled to our own Monroe Doctrine - i.e., no foreign colonies or bases in our backyard - are not other great nations like China and Russia equally entitled? Why should they not feel as we do, and one day act as we did with Napoleon, and tell us to get out of Central Asia and to get out of the Caucasus?
But, again, why are we going in? Other than empire, what is the vital interest here?
-------- spies
British spy chiefs overruled experts on Iraq dossier: former expert
LONDON (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204020049.n14zbqqo.html
Britain's spy chiefs ignored warnings from leading experts that Iraq may not have had chemical and biological weapons before the US-led invasion, a former intelligence official said Wednesday.
Brian Jones told The Independent newspaper he and other experts had formally complained about the drafting of a September 2002 Iraq dossier because they feared being made "scapegoats" if no weapons of mass destruction were discovered after the war.
The dossier, a key plank of Tony Blair's case in persuading a sceptical British public to back the war, is now at the centre of an independent inquiry launched by the prime minister Tuesday into the intelligence used to justify the invasion.
"In my view, the expert intelligence analysts of the DIS (Defence Intelligence Staff) were overruled in the preparation of the dossier back in September 2002, resulting in a presentation that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities," Jones said.
"There was no indication that the Iraqi military had practiced the use of CW (chemical warfare) or BW (biological warfare) weapons for more than a decade," Jones said.
"My belief is that right up to the publication of the dossier there was a unified view amongst not only my staff but all the DIS experts that on the basis of the intelligence available to them the assessment that Iraq possessed a CW or BW capability should be carefully caveated."
Pressure on Blair to justify his argument that Iraq's weapons programs posed a threat intensified after US President George W. Bush launched a probe Monday into pre-war intelligence.
Blair, Washington's closest ally in the war, had been far more clear-cut than Bush in citing Saddam's refusal to give up his alleged pursuit of weapons as the main reason for taking the nation to war.
However, Blair stressed Tuesday that a separate inquiry had already cleared his government of charges it deliberately exaggerated intelligence on Iraq.
A judicial investigation into the death of British weapons expert David Kelly, headed by senior judge Lord Hutton and published last Wednesday, exonerated Blair and his ministers of wrongdoing over that issue.
Instead it blasted the BBC for getting its facts wrong when it quoted a source, later identified as Kelly, as saying the government had deliberately "sexed up" the case for war.
In his report Hutton acknowledged that Jones's concerns over the wording of parts of the September 2002 dossier were not acted upon by the "higher echelons of the Intelligence Service".
Jones retired in January 2003 as head of the DIS scientific and technical directorate which was responsible for analysing all intelligence on nuclear, chemical and biological warfare.
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Rumsfeld Defends U.S. Intelligence Operations
February 4, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/international/middleeast/04CND-MILI.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Feb. 4 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld encountered sharp questions on Capitol Hill today at a Senate committee session that deepened an already bitter fight about the campaign in Iraq and President Bush's proposed budget for 2005.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mr. Rumsfeld heard questions and criticism about the White House's refusal to include the costs of the Iraq campaign in the budget; about pre-war intelligence; and about a tanker-leasing deal that has come under scrutiny.
Mr. Rumsfeld did not depart from his usual demeanor of steely certainty as he defended the intelligence community and the conclusions President Bush drew from its findings on Iraq.
"The men and women in the intelligence community have a tough and often thankless job," the secretary said in his opening remarks. "If they fail, the world knows it. And when they succeed, as they often do, to our country's great benefit, their accomplishments often have to remain secret."
Turning to the issue of whether Saddam Hussein indeed had deadly chemical and biological weapons, as President Bush asserted before the war to oust the dictator, Mr. Rumsfeld stood his ground.
"It was the consensus of the intelligence community, and of successive administrations of both political parties, and of the Congress, that reviewed the same intelligence, and much of the international community, I might add, that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction," he told the panel. "Saddam Hussein's behavior throughout that period reinforced that conclusion."
The secretary told the committee that weapons of mass destruction might yet be found in Iraq, a country the size of California, and that President Bush did the right thing in any event by moving to depose him.
Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who has been among the severest critics of the Iraq campaign, was not persuaded.
"Mr. Secretary," the Senator said, "the U.S. Iraqi weapons inspector, David Kay, made it clear in the recent days that his exhaustive postwar inspections leave little doubt that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction at the time the war began. And his conclusion is a devastating refutation of the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq and, I think, seriously undermines our credibility in the world."
"The debacle cannot all be blamed on the intelligence community," Mr. Kennedy said a moment later. "Key policymakers made crystal clear the results they wanted from the intelligence community."
Mr. Rumsfeld told the senator that his assertions were baseless. "You've twice or thrice mentioned manipulation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I haven't heard of it, I haven't seen any of it, except in the comments you've made."
The secretary summed up his basic stance on the Iraq intelligence in his opening statement to the panel, headed by Senator John W. Warner, Republican of Virginia.
"As Dr. Kay has testified, what we have learned thus far has not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated and what we believed he had," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "But it also has not proven the opposite."
Another senior Democrat on the committee, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, echoed Senator Kennedy's sentiments. "This committee has a particular responsibility to look into how intelligence failures affected planning for and the conduct of Operation Iraqi Freedom," Mr. Levin said.
The Michigan lawmaker also criticized President Bush's refusal to include the costs of the Iraq campaign in his proposed Pentagon budget of more than $401 billion.
"It has been reported that an additional supplemental appropriation of $50 billion to $55 billion will likely be required to fund continued operations over the next fiscal year," Mr. Levin noted. "That money should have been part of the budget before us, not left to a supplemental and therefore not part of the projected budget deficit. A fair deficit projection would have included those costs since we are planning on those costs."
Mr. Rumsfeld also heard sharp words from a Republican, Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, who denounced an arrangement under which the Air Force agreed to lease some tanker planes from the Boeing company, rather than buy them outright.
Critics of the multibillion-dollar deal have said it made no economic sense. The criticism intensified after it was disclosed that a Pentagon official who negotiated the deal with Boeing later took a high job with the aircraft maker. (The revelation led to the firing of that person and the Boeing official who helped to bring her to the company.)
"Does it bother you?" Mr. McCain asked Mr. Rumseld repeatedly, referring at one point to "this incestuous relationship" between Boeing and the Air Force. "Does it bother you?"
"We are looking into it," Mr. Rumsfeld replied. "If we find any wrongdoing, I can assure you that we will take appropriate action, as we have in the past."
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Despite Scrutiny of Iraq Data, It's Business as Usual for Tenet
Working Relationship With Bush Still Solid, Officials Say
By Walter Pincus and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10422-2004Feb3?language=printer
The morning after President Bush announced he would empower a tough-minded commission to investigate the failings of U.S. intelligence agencies, the man who coordinates those agencies walked into the Oval Office.
CIA Director George J. Tenet sat down on the couch, cracked open a notebook and spent a half-hour yesterday describing threats to the United States -- as he has nearly every day since Bush took office in January 2001.
Faulty prewar intelligence on Iraq has put the CIA under scrutiny as never before in Tenet's nearly seven-year tenure. But White House officials point to yesterday's business-as-usual briefing as a sign that Tenet's working relationship with Bush remains solid.
Moreover, administration officials, Republican leaders and associates of Tenet's consider it highly unlikely that Tenet will resign anytime soon -- voluntarily or otherwise -- because of his relationship with the president and because the administration would find little political advantage in forcing him out in an election year.
"George will not walk out the door and leave the agency before the work that has been done gets a fair evaluation," said former senator David L. Boren (D-Okla.), once chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and a 20-year confidant of Tenet's.
The president, said Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), chairman of the House intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, "has full confidence in him." So, too, said White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday: "The president has great confidence in Tenet and the hardworking people who serve in the intelligence community."
Tenet has presided over the intelligence community's most significant failures since 1991, when the CIA did not predict that the Soviet Union was about to fall apart. Tenet's watch included the 2000 terrorist attack on the USS Cole in a Yemeni port; the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and the creation of prewar intelligence estimates on Iraq that, in the words of chief weapons hunter David Kay, have turned out to be "all wrong."
Last week, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the former chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, called on Tenet to resign. He joined critics who say the man at the helm has not done enough to move the Cold War-era agency into the age of transnational terrorists.
Things will not be getting easier for Tenet in the near future. An upcoming Senate intelligence committee report of prewar intelligence will be harshly critical of the CIA and Tenet, congressional officials said, as will a similar House report to be completed later this year and the findings of the independent Sept. 11 commission.
And as soon as today, Bush will appoint nine people to serve on what he says will be a nonpartisan, independent commission to investigate the CIA's prewar conclusions that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. The panel will also probe questions about the CIA's assessments of weapons programs in Libya, Iran and North Korea.
The commission will be told to finish its work in 2005, White House officials said, well beyond the fall election.
Top CIA officials have been holding long meetings at their Langley headquarters, one running late Monday night, trying to determine whether Tenet should answer the criticisms now or wait until his next scheduled appearance before the House and Senate intelligence oversight committees March 2.
"We have to step up to the plate and explain the process," one administration official said. "Part of getting things right in the future is being honest about mistakes. Part of healing thyself is admitting you were wrong."
Tenet and a CIA spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Tenet is a top appointee who survived the transition from President Bill Clinton to Bush. "He's a political survivor," the administration official said. "He won't go quietly. He will make his case and stick it out."
Besides his close relationship with the president, campaign-year political considerations make it likely Tenet will remain in place, said White House officials, intelligence experts and congressional officials from both parties.
Although some Republicans think forcing Tenet out would deflect criticism from Bush, officials said they are being checked by White House officials who believe his firing would be tantamount to a politically damaging admission that the war in Iraq was a mistake, which they do not believe.
Democrats in Congress, on the other hand, want to see Bush held accountable for the difficulties in Iraq and do not want Tenet taking blame they want assigned to the president.
"I think Tenet should do more to fix the problems," said Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee. "But the answers [on Iraq] start at the top. The president should explain what happened."
What's more, finding a replacement for Tenet would not be easy. The most obvious choice -- his deputy, John E. McLaughlin -- is so close to Tenet that many CIA watchers believe any decision to make a wholesale change would have to include McLaughlin and Tenet's seventh-floor management team. Besides, any replacement would have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Even congressional Democrats acknowledge the confirmation process would be used to chastise the administration on Iraq, the failure to capture Osama bin Laden and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "Getting someone new through the confirmation would be daunting in this poisonous partisan environment in Washington," Harman said.
The irony is Tenet, whose job is one of the most high-pitched in the U.S. government, has told associates he has been wanting to leave for some time. Boren, now president of the University of Oklahoma, said Tenet had considered leaving twice before but that he expects him to remain through Bush's first term.
"The president has continued to head off any talk of George leaving, and I don't think it is imminent," Boren said.
Staff writer Mike Allen contributed to this report.
-------- un
Bush Urges U.N. to Help Fix Iraqi Clash on Rule
February 4, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/politics/04DIPL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - President Bush pressed Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, on Tuesday to have his aides mediate among quarreling factions in Iraq and forge a consensus behind a plan that would allow the transfer of sovereignty to a government in Baghdad by June 30, administration officials said.
They said that without rapid progress on the political issues, the White House might agree to postpone Iraqi self-rule, but several officials said such a step would be a "last resort."
Mr. Annan has been given a dozen options for the transfer of sovereignty, the officials said, ranging from holding direct elections before June 30 to overhauling radically the unwieldy caucus system that is supposed to choose a new national assembly by that date.
The Bush administration had previously frozen the United Nations out of the transition process in Iraq.
After the meeting, Mr. Annan said the United Nations team heading soon to Iraq to assess the possibility of direct elections would expand its agenda.
"We are going to go there to help the Iraqis, to help them establish a government that is Iraqi, a government that will work with them to assure their future, in terms of political and economic destiny," he said. He said he thought that the United Nations had "a chance to help break the impasse which exists at the moment, and move forward."
The administration's plans for Iraq have been stymied by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's rejection of the proposed caucuses and by divisions within the Iraqi Governing Council.
"We are trying to put this issue in Kofi Annan's lap and let him run with it," one official said. "There's still very much the intention to stick with the date of June 30. But there's a lot of pressure on Kofi Annan to come up with the right solution."
Mr. Annan, for his part, has not wanted to become involved without wielding substantial authority.
The administration seems willing to allow that. Officials said Mr. Annan would have wide latitude to present Washington with a plan for Iraq's future governance - including a schedule for elections later this year - and that if he can demonstrate that it has broad backing in Iraq, the administration would have little choice but to go along. Some administration officials are now even saying it is possible for the United Nations to take the lead role in guiding the Iraqi political process after the return of self-rule.
But other officials warned that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were still likely to oppose giving the United Nations virtual supervisory control over the political future of Iraq, out of fear that such a step might result in constraints on American forces.
Mr. Bush and Mr. Annan met with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and other top officials to discuss a range of possibilities for the future of Iraq.
Aides to Mr. Annan and top American officials say the situation pulls the secretary general in several directions. Mr. Annan, they say, does not want to be seen as an American proxy, but he is determined to do what is necessary to help Iraq create a viable government. Still, they say, he is extremely reluctant to return the United Nations to a highly visible role in the country that could make it the target of attacks. A suicide bombing at the United Nations' Baghdad base in August killed the mission chief, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and 21 other people.
"This is not an issue of anyone wanting the U.N. to take over Iraq," a United Nations official said. "But the secretary general is very keen on this whole process succeeding. They have to get the mechanics right, because if Iraqis can agree on the mechanics, there's a better chance of all Iraqis accepting the results."
Ayatollah Sistani has refused to meet with any American mediator, including L. Paul Bremer III, Iraq's civilian administrator. Some administration officials said Mr. Bremer was relieved at the prospect that the United Nations might be able to improve communications with the ayatollah and his fellow Shiites, who respect him above all other clerics.
"The American attitude is much more open to the United Nations than it used to be," said a European diplomat familiar with the negotiations over Iraq. "It's not just a `vital' role any more."
But many experts on Iraq say Mr. Annan may have as much difficulty in forging consensus as Mr. Bremer has had.
The Iraqi Governing Council has had trouble reaching agreement within itself, and also in dealing with the ayatollah, who wants direct elections before June 30 to choose the transitional government that will write a permanent Iraqi constitution.
The Bush administration insists that elections on that time frame are impractical. But some officials say there is also fear at the Defense Department that a sweeping victory by Shiites will deepen the problems American forces have had in suppressing the insurgency in Sunni areas.
"There is a building inclination in the administration to give this problem to the United Nations, if the U.N. will take it," said Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former C.I.A. specialist on the Middle East and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. "But I don't think it's going to work. I don't think Sistani is going to play ball."
The administration official said the hope was for the United Nations to play a role that Lakhdar Brahimi, the special United Nations envoy for Afghanistan, played in that country with Zalmay Khalilzad, a former White House official who is now ambassador in Kabul. Together, they called for a grand council, or loya jirga, to choose an interim authority to preside over the writing of a constitution, which has been adopted, and also to plan for elections, which are due in June.
Two United Nations specialists have already gone to Iraq to assess the security situation. The election advisers are to leave for Iraq this week and could report back in a week or two, officials said.
The current plan for choosing a government to take office after June 30 calls for a series of caucuses in Iraq's 18 provinces. The caucus participants are to be carefully chosen by provincial councils and other bodies supervised by the United States and its handpicked Iraqi leadership.
Because of the American control, the process is regarded by many Shiites as potentially limiting their ability to gain control of Iraq's government.
The alternatives discussed with Mr. Annan included simplifying the caucuses, opening them up to many more participants, and making participants cast ballots so the process looks more like direct elections.
"There are more than a dozen different possibilities that have been floated at one time or another," an administration official said. "The United Nations is as aware of them as we are. They have to go out to Iraq and say: What's going to work on the ground? What do they think can achieve the goal of an Iraqi government that is respected by the Iraqi people?"
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Annan: U.N. To Help End Iraq Impasse
Team Expected to Look Into Possible Election Time Frame
By Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10295-2004Feb3.html
The United Nations is committed to helping end the crisis over how to transfer political power in Iraq so the U.S.-led occupation can end as scheduled on June 30, Secretary General Kofi Annan said during a meeting with President Bush yesterday.
Annan is expected to dispatch a U.N. team to Iraq this week to determine whether elections are feasible before the occupation ends, U.S. and U.N. officials said.
In remarks in the Oval Office, Annan told reporters that he hopes the world body will help persuade Iraqis to come to some agreement about "finding the way forward" in choosing a provisional government to assume power.
"I hope this team I'm sending in will be able to play a role [in] getting the Iraqis to understand that if they could come to some consensus and some agreement on how to establish that government, we're halfway there," Annan said. "So we do have a chance to help break the impasse which exists at the moment and move forward."
The team will meet with the Iraqi Governing Council and "as many Iraqis as possible," Annan said. But U.N. and U.S. officials said it is still unclear whether the U.N. election specialists will talk with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's leading Muslim cleric, who has not left his home in six years and has not met any occupation officials. Sistani's call for direct elections -- and his challenge of a U.S. plan calling instead for 18 regional caucuses to select a provisional Iraqi government -- precipitated the current crisis.
Uruguayan diplomat Carina Perelli, who will be part of the U.N. team, undertook a similar mission last August, when the United Nations concluded that elections were not feasible. The team is expected to be in Iraq for more than a week, although the timing and extent of travel around the country will depend on the security situation and availability to a cross section of Iraqis, U.N. officials said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the United States is open to "refinements" of the original U.S. plan, which was announced Nov. 15. But Annan told reporters that the Bush administration had pledged to accept the conclusions of the U.N. mission. "The stability of Iraq is in everyone's interest," Annan said.
The White House is pressing veteran Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi to accept the job as U.N. special representative to Iraq, although he is resisting the idea. The post has been vacant since an August bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad killed U.N. envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello and more than 20 others. After a second suicide bombing at the same facility in October, the United Nations withdrew its staff.
The coalition has pledged to do "everything possible" to provide security for the U.N. team, Annan told reporters after the White House meeting.
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US war machine nearly fell apart, army reveals
February 4, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald / The New York Times
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/03/1075776064461.html
The first official army history of the Iraq war reveals that United States forces were plagued by supply shortages, radios that could not reach far-flung troops and virtually no reliable intelligence on how Saddam Hussein would defend Baghdad.
While it is well known that many army units ran low on fuel and water as fast-moving armoured forces raced towards the Iraqi capital, the study offers vivid new details of a supply system nearing collapse.
Tank engines sat on warehouse shelves in Kuwait with no truck drivers to carry them north. Broken-down trucks were scavenged for usable parts and left by the roadside. Artillery units cannibalised parts from captured Iraqi guns to keep their howitzers operating.
In most cases, soldiers improvised solutions to keep the offensive rolling.
"The morass of problems that confounded delivering parts and supplies - running the gamut of paper clips to tank engines - stems from the lack of a means to assign responsibility clearly," the report concluded.
The unclassified study was ordered last year by the former army chief-of-staff General Eric Shinseki, who clashed with the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, over troop strength for postwar Iraq. It draws on interviews with 2300 people, 68,000 photographs and nearly 120,000 documents.
While divisional commanders could communicate with one another, the study says, officers at lower levels often could not. Units separated by long distances found their radios suddenly out of range, leaving troops to improvise solutions by using mobile phones or secure email messaging.
Despite elaborate army planning for a final battle in Baghdad, including the mapping of every building and section of the city of 5.5 million people, commanders and intelligence analysts were at a loss to determine how the Iraqis would defend Baghdad, if at all.
Not until armoured columns carried out probes, called "thunder runs", through Baghdad, the study found, did American commanders realise that the city was virtually undefended.
Senior army officials say lessons from the study are already being incorporated.
For the most part, the study praises the army's combat operations and the ability of soldiers and commanders to adapt to rapidly changing battlefield conditions. It found, however, that the extensive psychological operations campaign - leaflets and broadcasts to coax Iraqi soldiers to surrender and to refrain from sabotaging oil fields - had either failed to reach many of the intended Iraqi units or baffled the Iraqi soldiers who received them.
"It is clear that, on the whole, psyop produced much less than expected and perhaps less than claimed," the report found.
The study also found that future adversaries could draw several lessons from the war.
The forces' reliance on high-tech surveillance satellites and aircraft could be countered by decoys and the imaginative disguise of weaponry; more powerful warheads for rocket-propelled grenades, already effective against helicopters and light vehicles such as Humvees, could offset American armour.
Also, US forces could be drawn into a protracted, costly urban war more effectively than they were by the Iraqis, and they are vulnerable to classic weapons of insurgency, such as car bombs.
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Northrop Grumman's Fire Scout UAV Officially Joins the Army
Feb 04, 2004
UAV NEWS
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/uav-04c.html
San Diego - A Northrop Grumman-built Fire Scout vertical takeoff and landing tactical unmanned aerial vehicle system has officially lifted off as the Class IV unmanned aerial system (UAS) for the U.S. Army's Future Combat System (FCS).
Northrop Grumman received an eight-year, $115-million contract for the program's system development and demonstration phase from The Boeing Company and Science Applications International Corporation, the Army's FCS lead systems integrators.
During this phase, Northrop Grumman's Integrated Systems sector will develop the Class IV UAS architecture, produce seven RQ-8B Fire Scout air vehicles, perform system tests and evaluations and help develop long-lead future requirements.
Northrop Grumman's Baltimore-based Electronic Systems sector, the aerial sensor integrator for FCS, will integrate the surveillance, reconnaissance and target acquisition systems on the FCS Fire Scout air vehicles.
``This contract reinforces Northrop Grumman's growing leadership as a valued and preferred provider of unmanned aerial vehicle solutions to the nation and its allies," said Chris Hernandez, general manager of Integrated Systems' Unmanned Systems unit.
``Fire Scout is ready to takes its place as a vital, capable and highly effective part of the Army's Objective Force transformation."
The FCS Fire Scout will be a key element of the Army's tactical intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting architecture, providing real-time imagery and data collection and dissemination at the brigade level, he added.
The RQ-8B air vehicles for FCS are similar to the RQ-8A Fire Scouts Northrop Grumman is producing for the Navy. The FCS air vehicles will feature a new, four-blade rotor system (versus the RQ-8A's three-blade design), improved airfoil blades and several performance enhancements that enable more than eight hours endurance with a specification payload weight of 130 pounds.
Data from company-sponsored engineering tests indicate that the four-blade design will triple Fire Scout's payload capacity to 600 pounds, double its on-station time at 110 nautical miles (with a 200 pound payload), increase its payload volume and enhance system supportability.
The four-bladed rotor system also enhances Fire Scout 's ability to carry multiple payloads simultaneously. To date in Northrop Grumman's Navy Fire Scout test program, the three-bladed RQ-8A air vehicle has flown 13 flights carrying the General Atomics Lynx synthetic aperture radar with ground moving target indicator; the baseline electro-optical/ infrared/ laser designator range finder; and a communications relay payload -- a combined payload weight of approximately 430 pounds. The company conducted those flights in July and October of 2003.
In addition to the rotor configuration, the most significant differences between the Army and Navy Fire Scout systems are the air vehicles' sensors and avionics. For the Navy, Northrop Grumman takes a total systems approach, defining the optimum sensors, data links, and ground control station.
For the Army, the FCS lead system integrators will define for Northrop Grumman the communications package, data links, sensors and a common distributed ground control station that must be integrated.
Both services will benefit from a Northrop Grumman Fire Scout weapons integration program currently underway. To date, the program has completed fit checks and engineering for the installation of two four-packs of 2.75-inch rocket launchers on the air vehicle. The launchers are designed to fire Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System laser-guided rockets.
The company expects to begin its rocket-firing test program in 2004 using unguided rockets, followed by tests using guided rockets when they become available. The company is also planning a Fire Scout weapons test in 2004 with Viper Strike, a laser-guided precision munition.
As the Class IV UAS, Fire Scout will be a force multiplier for Army forces. The air vehicle can operate up to a service ceiling of 20,000 feet and out to 150 nautical miles from its ground control station while providing real-time video imagery. The system can also support intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting and precision strike missions.
-------- propaganda wars
Powell under pressure over Iraq war comments
Wednesday, 4 February, 2004
Leigh Sales,
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2004/s1037584.htm
TONY EASTLEY: Across the Atlantic, the decision-making on Iraq is still on the front page. US Secretary of State Colin Powell says he doesn't know if he would've recommended an invasion of Iraq if he'd known there were no stockpiles of banned weapons in the country.
In an interview with the Washington Post newspaper, Mr Powell says the weapons of mass destruction were "the final little piece" that made Iraq more of "a real and present danger".
But today, the Secretary of State was hosing down his comments, as North America Correspondent Leigh Sales reports.
LEIGH SALES: Colin Powell is not at all suggesting that invading Iraq was the wrong thing to do.
COLIN POWELL: But the bottom line is this: the President made the right decision, he made the right decision based on the history of this regime, the intention that this leader, terrible despotic leader had, the only thing we're debating is the stockpile.
LEIGH SALES: But as he makes a broad defence of the Bush administration's decision, the Secretary of State's publicly expressed doubts about the case for war made by the White House.
Mr Powell was asked by the Washington Post newspaper if he would have recommended the invasion of Iraq, had he known there were no prohibited weapons.
"I don't know, because it was the stockpile that presented the final little piece that made it more of a real and present danger," he replied.
"The absence of a stockpile changes the political calculus".
Today, Colin Powell declined to repeat or elaborate on those remarks.
COLIN POWELL: The only thing that is even being discussed right now is what stockpiles were out there and that is one element that we will let the various communities and intelligence groups that are looking at this look at this.
LEIGH SALES: As questions continue, and an inquiry looms into the pre-war intelligence, US President George W. Bush met United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to try to resolve a dispute about the handover of power in Iraq.
The Bush administration wants to give government to a transitional Iraqi authority selected in regional meetings. But Iraq's Shia majority wants direct elections. The President's trying to get the UN to help convince the Shias to go with the American plan.
Kofi Annan has agreed to play a brokering role.
KOFI ANNAN: I have decided to send in a team, and I hope this team I'm sending in will be able to play a role getting the Iraqis who understand that if they could come to some consensus and some agreement, they're halfway there. So we do have a chance to help break the impasse.
LEIGH SALES: Despite President Bush's past difficulties with the UN, today he said the world was changing for the better, and that the United Nations was part of that.
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Rumsfeld: WMD May Still Be Found in Iraq
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
2/4/2004
http://www.620ktar.com/news/article.aspx?id=306676
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday he is not ready to conclude that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before U.S. troops invaded to depose him last year.
Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee that U.S. weapons inspectors need more time to reach final conclusions about whether chemical and biological weapons existed in Iraq before the war, as the Bush administration had asserted before sending American troops into battle.
In a prepared statement, Rumsfeld said he was confident that prewar intelligence, while possibly flawed in some respects, was not manipulated by the administration to justify its war aims.
In his first public comments on the subject since David Kay told Congress last week that he believed it was now clear that U.S. intelligence on Iraq's weapons programs was fundamentally flawed, Rumsfeld praised the efforts of U.S. intelligence agencies and stressed the difficulty of penetrating secretive societies like Iraq.
Rumsfeld offered several examples of what he called "alternative views" about why no weapons have been discovered in Iraq, starting with the possibility that banned arms never existed.
"I suppose that's possible, but not likely," he said.
Other possibilities cited by Rumsfeld:
_ Weapons may have been transferred to a third country before U.S. troops arrived in March.
_ Weapons may have been dispersed throughout Iraq and hidden.
_ Weapons existed but were destroyed by the Iraqis before the war started.
Or, Rumsfeld postulated, "small quantities" of chemical or biological agents may have existed, along with a "surge capability" that would allow Iraq to rapidly build an arsenal of banned weapons. Commenting on that possibility, Rumsfeld said, "We may eventually find it in the months ahead."
Lastly, he offered the possibility that the issue of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction "may have been a charade" orchestrated by the Iraqi government. It is even possible, he said, that Saddam was "tricked" by his own people into believing he had banned weapons that did not exist.
The Kay team, known as the Iraqi Survey Group, did confirm one thing, Rumsfeld said: "The intelligence community got it essentially right" with regard to Iraq's ballistic missile programs. It found that Iraq was working on missiles of longer range than was permitted under U.N. sanctions.
Rumsfeld also said he saw a possibility that Iraq managed to hide some banned weapons of mass destruction. He said that it took 10 months to find Saddam Hussein and that the hole in which he was found on Dec. 13 "was big enough to hold biological weapons to kill thousands" of people.
"Such objects, once buried, can stay buried," Rumsfeld said.
The findings of the Kay group, he added, so far have "not proven Saddam Hussein had what intelligence indicated he had and what we believed he had. But it also has not proven the opposite."
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Rumsfeld: 2002 Iraq WMD Remark May Have Been Misleading
(AP) Dow Jones Newswires
4 Feb 2004
http://framehosting.dowjonesnews.com/sample/samplestory.asp?StoryID=2004020418410004&Take=1
WASHINGTON--Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld acknowledged Wednesday that remarks he made in 2002 claiming to know where Iraqi weapons of mass destruction were stored may have been misleading.
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Rumsfeld was reminded by Sen. Edward Kennedy and other Democrats on the committee that in September 2002 he had claimed "we know" where weapons of mass destruction are stored in Iraq.
Explaining that remark, Rumsfeld told the panel that he was referring to suspected weapons sites, but he acknowledged that he had made it sound like he was talking about actual weapons.
The remark "probably turned out not to be what one would have preferred, in retrospect," Rumsfeld said.
He also said he isn't ready to conclude that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before U.S. troops invaded to depose Saddam Hussein last year.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
President to Allow More Time for 9/11 Commission's Report
February 4, 2004
By KIRK SEMPLE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/politics/04CND-PANE.html?hp
President Bush will support a request by the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to extend the panel's deadline by two months, the White House spokesman said today.
President Bush, backed by Congressional Republicans, had publicly resisted the request and demanded that the 10-member commission meet its original deadline of May 27.
But Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said Mr. Bush would now recommend to Congress that it give the commission a two-month extension, to July 26.
"The president is pleased to support the commission's request, and we urge Congress to act quickly to extend the timetable for an additional 60 days for the commission to complete its work," Mr. McClellan said during a news briefing.
The commission announced on Jan. 27 that it needed at least two more months to complete the inquiry. Commission officials had said there was no way to finish their work on time, a situation that they attributed in part to delays by the Bush administration in turning over documents and other evidence.
"We have been providing unprecedented cooperation," Mr. McClellan said today. "We are committed to making sure that the commission has the information that they need to do their job."
If Congress accepts President Bush's recommendation, the report would arrive in the heat of the end of presidential race: The Democratic National Convention is scheduled to run from July 26-29.
Republican strategists have worried that the report may criticize the Bush administration for failing to act on intelligence before Sept. 11 that suggested a catastrophic terrorist attack might be imminent. Such criticism, the strategists have feared, could damage the president's re-election hopes if presented in the middle of the campaign.
The White House confirmed news reports last year that an Oval Office intelligence summary presented to Mr. Bush shortly before the attacks suggested that terrorists might be planning an attack using passenger planes.
Groups representing the families of victims of the Sept. 11 attacks had joined in calling for an extension, saying that it would be improper for the White House and Congressional Republicans to try to rush the commission into completing its work.
The commission is known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States.
-------- courts
Supreme Court Mulls Enemy Combatant Case
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Scotus-Enemy-Combatant.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Lawyers for a U.S.-born terrorism suspect asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to reject government claims that their client is a dangerous enemy combatant who may be held indefinitely without charges or trial.
``The government's assertion of executive power in this case is raw and stark,'' lawyers for Jose Padilla argued in court papers. ``After 20 months, the government has not brought any charges against Padilla stemming from his alleged participation in a plot to commit a terrorist act.''
The Bush administration wants the Supreme Court to hear Padilla's case and overrule a lower federal court that concluded the president lacks the authority to declare Padilla an enemy combatant and hold him in open-ended military custody.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals gave the government 30 days to release Padilla or bring charges against him. That order is now on hold to give the Supreme Court time to decide whether it will hear the case.
Padilla's lawyers are fighting the government's appeal. They argued Wednesday that the appeals court was correct and there is no reason for the high court to get involved.
The justices could say this month whether they will hear the Padilla case. It appears likely the court will say yes and that it will combine the case with that of a second U.S.-born terrorism suspect, Yaser Esam Hamdi.
Hamdi was captured overseas during fighting in Afghanistan. Padilla was arrested as he got off an international flight at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Hearing the cases side by side would allow the Supreme Court to address the legal and constitutional rights of American citizens no matter where they are captured or detained in the fight against terrorism.
Padilla and Hamdi are both held at a military brig in South Carolina. Padilla is being held incommunicado; Hamdi this week was allowed to see a lawyer for the first time. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the Hamdi case, in which the government won its arguments in lower federal courts.
In their filing Wednesday, Padilla's lawyers accused the administration of a power grab in its treatment of enemy combatants. That is a new term describing captives who are neither traditional prisoners of war nor ordinary criminal defendants with a long list of rights in American courts.
``There is a profound difference between the historical practice of detention of prisoners of war on the field of battle and the new power the president claims here to deem the entire nation a battlefield in which any person may be seized and held without trial for the indefinite future,'' lawyer Donna R. Newman wrote.
Padilla, a former gang member and a convert to Islam, was arrested in Chicago in May 2002 in connection with an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb. He was not armed when arrested and the government has not shown he was an immediate threat, Newman argued.
``The risk of error, and the potential for abuse, is much greater in this new context, for the executive's novel argument would allow it to exile any citizen from the protection of our Constitution and laws simply though the artifice of labeling him, without any visible standards, as an 'enemy combatant,''' Newman wrote.
The case is Rumsfeld v. Padilla, 03-1027.
-------- death penalty
Insanity Issue Lingers as Texas Execution Is Set
February 4, 2004
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/national/04EXEC.html
HOUSTON, Feb. 3 - In one of the more extraordinary cases in the nation's leading death penalty state, a murder defendant with a long history of mental illness who fired his lawyers and argued his own insanity defense in a cowboy outfit is scheduled to be executed on Thursday.
The condemned man, Scott Louis Panetti, 45, is to die by lethal injection unless the governor or the courts intervene.
In 1992, Mr. Panetti, who was then 34 and had been hospitalized 14 times for mental illness, smashed his way into the home of his estranged wife and, with her and their young daughter watching, shot her parents to death.
At his trial in 1995, Mr. Panetti dressed in a Tom Mix hat and cowboy garb, rambled incoherently and tried to subpoena Jesus Christ, John F. Kennedy and Anne Bancroft. He went into trances, nodded off, and gestured threateningly at jurors.
Appeals courts up to the United States Supreme Court have declined to intervene. Robert Black, a spokesman for Gov. Rick Perry, said, "No decision has been made."
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the verdict and sentence in 1997, ruling that whether Mr. Panetti was competent to represent himself was not the issue. "The appropriate question is whether he is competent to choose the endeavor," said the court, which ruled that he was.
It found that "a mere mental disease or defect, though it may constitute a form of insanity known to and recognized by medical science, does not excuse one for committing a crime." The court found evidence that Mr. Panetti knew that what he was doing was wrong.
The same issue arose in the case of Andrea Yates, who drowned her five children in a bathtub and, by calling the police afterward, proved to the court's satisfaction that she knew right from wrong at the time.
The National Mental Health Association, based in Alexandria, Va., called Tuesday on the governor to commute Mr. Panetti's sentence to life imprisonment, saying Mr. Panetti "has schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and there is evidence to suggest that he was psychotic at the time of his crime." In addition, the group said his mental illness "hindered his ability to aid in his own defense."
At a news conference in Austin on Tuesday, representatives of the Texas Defender Service, a private nonprofit law firm representing indigent capital defendants, called on Mr. Perry for a 30-day reprieve to allow a review of the case.
"Allowing a schizophrenic in a cowboy costume to represent himself in a death penalty case gives new meaning to the term `frontier justice,' "said Jim Marcus, executive director of the defender service. "Given the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals' history of tolerance for defense lawyers who sleep or use drugs and alcohol throughout death penalty trials, however, its laissez-faire approach is hardly surprising," he said.
Scott Monroe, who was named standby counsel with no authority to aid the defense unless asked, said: "It was very obvious from his mannerisms and the way he conducted himself that he was mentally ill. There was never a question about that. That was very well documented, but still he was allowed to defend himself in that case, and basically I sat around and watched him do it."
Steven Abels, the trial judge who heard the case in Kerrville, said through his office that he could not comment because he might yet have to rule again on the case. The Gillespie County district attorney, Bruce Curry, did not return a call.
Even in a state that has executed 317 prisoners since the death penalty was reinstated in 1982 (Virginia ranks a distant second with 89), the Panetti case stands out. After Mr. Panetti surrendered and confessed, a trial to determine his mental competency resulted in a hung jury, with 10 of the 12 jurors voting for incompetency. The trial was moved to another county, where he was found competent. Mr. Panetti was represented by counsel in both trials.
Mr. Panetti claimed he had nearly drowned as a youth and suffered electric shock as a linesman and twice been brought back from the dead. He was first hospitalized in 1981 for alcohol dependency, and then again for behavior termed psychotic, delusional and paranoid. He was in and out of other hospitals a dozen times for suicidal and homicidal behavior.
"He believed that people in Fredericksburg were plotting against him," said Michael R. Arambula, a psychiatrist who evaluated Mr. Panetti for the defense. Mr. Panetti said he was being punished for being a Nazarite, those the ancient Hebrews said were especially consecrated to God. He also invoked an alter ego that he called "Sarge" who he said was out to kill him.
A psychotherapist, Wolfgang Selck, who treated him in the 1980's, called him "mentally ill and incompetent." It was obvious, he said in an affidavit submitted in the appeals process, that Mr. Panetti "antagonized" the jurors "by his verbal rambling and antics." Clearly, he said, they seemed to see him "as putting on a show," only pretending to be ill. But Dr. Selck added: "Scott was not faking mental illness. Scott was severely mentally ill."
Mr. Monroe, his standby lawyer, said in an affidavit that the jurors grew most hostile when Mr. Panetti harshly cross-examined his former wife, Sonya Alvarado, whose parents he had killed. After that, Mr. Monroe said, "the jury was ready to give him the death penalty."
Afterward, Mr. Monroe said, "I spoke with a couple of jurors who told me Scott probably would not have received the death penalty if the case had been handled differently."
Nate Levy contributed reporting from Austin for this article.
-------- homeland security
Broader security
February 04, 2004
Washington Times
Embassy Row
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040203-092708-9068r.htm
U.S. and Canadian officials are concentrating on securing Canada's border with Alaska and monitoring thousands of waterways in the Great Lakes area.
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan reviewed the success of border security efforts after a meeting last week with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge.
Ms. McLellan, who also serves a public safety minister, told reporters that the level of cooperation between the two countries is "outstanding."
"We will continue to build on the existing level of cooperation, and, of course, part of what we want to do as we move forward is see, in fact, where we need to go next," she said.
Mr. Ridge said Alaska has "some unique needs" that will be addressed, as he reorganizes the Homeland Security Department "a little bit."
"One of the next steps we will take as we build on the existing [border] agreement is to take a look at the maritime security which obviously affects Alaska, perhaps more than another area," he said. "We have literally thousands of waterways that we need to contend with on the Great Lakes."
The United States and Canada signed the "Smart Border" agreement in December 2001 to help secure the world's longest border and provide for convenient crossings for frequent travelers who have undergone extensive background checks.
"Our primary objective was to work toward ensuring that the terrible events of September 11 would never be repeated," Ms. McLellan said.
Mr. Ridge added, "One of the most important challenges we face is protecting the more than 5,000 miles of border we share, keeping it open for business and closed to terrorists."
The United States and Canada have the world's largest bilateral trade, with more than $1.3 billion in business conducted daily across the border.
"We will not falter or leave our work unfinished, for the war on terror means rising to a new standard of protection every day, drawing strength from past accomplishments but never growing complacent about the future," Mr. Ridge said.
•Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.
--------
Incident Illustrates Lapses in Security Net
By Manny Fernandez and Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10415-2004Feb3.html
Mail bound for federal government offices in Washington is shipped daily to New Jersey, where the letters are blasted with electron beams to kill any bacteria that might be lurking inside.
The U.S. Postal Service initiated the time-consuming and costly irradiation procedure after the anthrax attacks of 2001. But the discovery of ricin in a Dirksen Senate Office Building mailroom illustrates how easily another potentially deadly substance can slip through the safety web designed primarily to protect the nation's sprawling mail system from an anthrax attack.
If the ricin had in fact been mailed -- and officials were trying to determine yesterday how it got in an office mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) -- the poison escaped the security precautions built around catching anthrax and other bacteria.
Irradiation is designed to kill bacteria and does not neutralize ricin, which is not a bacterium but a lethal poison. The biohazard detection systems that postal officials plan to install in mail-handling facilities in Washington and other cities in May focus on sampling for anthrax, not ricin. And the instruments that sample air and surfaces at the newly reopened postal plant on Brentwood Road NE, which had been shut for fumigation and renovation for two years since the anthrax mailings, do not detect for the poison.
Thomas G. Day, the Postal Service's vice president for engineering, said yesterday that ricin is a threat that the agency takes seriously. The poison was one of many bioterror agents identified last year in a Postal Service threat assessment.
"Ricin has been on the radar screen as both a threat and a vulnerability," Day said.
Day said the problem with ricin is that the more refined it is, the harder it is to detect. The biohazard detection systems, which sample air in the areas where mail is processed, can be modified to allow for additional technologies, which could include sampling for ricin, Day said.
The Postal Service asked the White House to include $779 million in its 2005 budget request for additional detection equipment to avert bioterrorism, but the request was denied, said postal spokesman Mark Saunders. Instead, the administration asked Congress for no additional money for biohazard-detection equipment. Postal officials said that they now will go to Congress on their own to request the money and that they believe the ricin incident will bolster their case.
Congress has given the Postal Service $587 million over the past two years to purchase biohazard-detection equipment, decontaminate facilities exposed to anthrax and test building ventilation systems. But the anthrax cleanup has proven so costly that the agency has had little left to spend on detection equipment, said a House Appropriations Committee aide.
In response to the ricin incident, postal officials late Monday night closed the V Street NE postal facility that processes U.S. government mail, including letters bound for the Senate. Postal officials, however, said they had not confirmed that they had handled the item.
U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer said the mail handled by Frist's staff had been irradiated, and officials were trying to determine how the powder arrived in the office. "Powder was observed in an area where a letter had been opened," Gainer said. "It has not been associated with a particular envelope as of yet."
Sixty samples were taken from surfaces at the V Street postal facility yesterday morning and sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta for testing, said postal spokeswoman Irene Lericos. She said results most likely would be available today. "We take each and every incident seriously until it's deemed otherwise," Lericos said.
Since the anthrax incidents of 2001, there have been 22,000 false alarms regarding suspicious powder and other materials nationwide that have disrupted postal operations briefly, she said. One postal plant, for example, discovered white powder that later was determined to be coffee creamer sent through the mail.
Many of the 200 workers at the V Street location reported for duty yesterday at the Brentwood Road plant, which began a phased-in reopening in December. The postal plant, which no longer handles government mail, handled two anthrax-tainted letters bound for Capitol Hill in fall 2001. Two of its postal workers died of inhalation anthrax.
The V Street closure unsettled many in Washington's postal worker community. "It's like people are sitting ducks," said postal clerk Dena Briscoe, president of Brentwood Exposed, an employee support group formed in the aftermath of the anthrax mailings.
"Even though the stress is being put on Capitol Hill and making sure they're safeguarded, we have gotten no mention of where [the ricin] came through our mail system."
The discovery of ricin follows a similar incident in October. In that case, a vial containing the poison was found inside an envelope at a South Carolina postal facility. Tests showed that none of the toxin escaped. Last month, the FBI offered a reward of as much as $100,000 for information leading to an arrest.
All D.C.-bound federal government mail, including Senate mail, is shipped to Bridgeport, N.J., for irradiation. The mail is handled at one facility on V Street before it is sent to New Jersey and by a second facility on V Street, the facility that was closed Monday, after it is decontaminated. Irradiated Senate mail is sent to a Capitol Hill mailroom before it is delivered.
--------
Investigators Seek Ties In Anthrax, Ricin Cases
By Dan Eggen and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10286-2004Feb3.html
The discovery of ricin in a Senate office building has prompted the FBI and other federal investigators to consider whether the case could be connected to the unsolved anthrax attacks of late 2001, which killed five people and sickened 17 others.
Investigators and lawmakers stressed yesterday that it was much too soon to determine whether there is any link between the cases. But FBI and postal officials noted a number of superficial similarities.
In Monday's incident, a pile of powder was found in the office of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) and may have come from one of several dozen envelopes that had passed through a mail-opening machine, Frist and other officials said. In the anthrax attacks, letters containing the deadly spores were mailed to, among others, Sens. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) -- who was Senate majority leader at the time -- and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.).
"That is obviously one of the main lines of inquiry that we're pursuing," one FBI official said. "There are a lot of similarities that certainly raise the possibility of a connection."
On the other hand, as of late yesterday, officials had not mentioned finding the envelope that may have carried the powder or a threatening note similar to the ones that accompanied the anthrax mailings. Frist and other officials said the search for such clues was continuing.
Authorities yesterday were also investigating a powder found in an envelope addressed to the Republican National Committee at the same Connecticut mail distribution center where anthrax spores were found in 2001. They determined that the substance was not ricin.
The FBI's anthrax investigation, code-named "Amerithrax," remains unsolved after 28 months of work. The probe has included 5,000 interviews and 4,000 subpoenas, and is assigned to 25 FBI agents and 12 postal inspectors, officials said.
The investigation has entered a "critical" stage, according to recent affidavits and testimony in a civil court case brought by Steven J. Hatfill, a former government biological weapons scientist who was identified by Attorney General John D. Ashcroft as a "person of interest" in the anthrax case. Richard L. Lambert, the FBI inspector-in-charge, said in an affidavit that a new series of more sophisticated scientific tests, expected to identify where the anthrax was produced, will be completed in the next six months.
Hatfill has maintained his innocence and is suing Ashcroft and the FBI for defamation and Privacy Act violations.
Hatfill, who lives in Northwest Washington, no longer appears to be under 24-hour surveillance by federal agents, as he was for much of 2002 and 2003, his attorneys have said. The nonstop surveillance ended soon after an August 2003 encounter in which an agent ran over Hatfill's foot with a car as he tried to photograph the agent, they said.
Friends of Hatfill said he has been in the Washington area and could establish for law enforcement authorities where he has been for the last few weeks. Thomas Connolly, one of Hatfill's attorneys, declined to comment on what the ricin case might mean for his client.
Justice Department lawyers argue that Hatfill's civil case should be postponed indefinitely. They say the FBI cannot turn over internal government documents and investigation records demanded by Hatfill because their release could chill witnesses' testimony and "compromise and frustrate" the probe.
One of Hatfill's attorneys, Mark Grannis, told U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton last week that the government's request for secrecy is unreasonable. "They cared very little about confidentiality . . . until this suit was filed," Grannis said. "For fourteen months, they fed our client's name to the press."
FBI investigators have long speculated that the anthrax attacks were likely carried out by a domestic loner with scientific expertise, rather than an organized terrorist group.
--------
Teams Search Capitol Mail for Ricin
February 4, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Capitol-Ricin.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Senate rattled by a ricin attack began returning to regular business Wednesday, and the lack of any reported illnesses led leaders to plan to reopen office buildings.
Even so, officials continued to say they did not know how the powdery poison arrived Monday in the mailroom of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn. Frist said he assumed it came in the mail because the powder was found on the tray of a machine his aides use to cut open envelopes. ``There's been no smoking letter information that helps tie this thing together,'' U.S. Capitol Police Chief Terrance Gainer told reporters.
As lawmakers awaited the results of tests measuring the ricin's potency, officials said none of the several dozen workers who were potentially exposed seemed ill.
Senators, voting for the first time this week, acted on a judgeship nomination, and at least three Senate committees went ahead with hearings, though they were held in House office buildings.
``I am not following anybody with any symptoms that would be consistent with a toxic exposure,'' said John Eisold, the U.S. Capitol attending physician.
The Postal Service said all tests for ricin at its District of Columbia facility that processes congressional mail were negative. The station, closed as a precaution, was to reopen Wednesday evening.
On Wednesday night, a white powdery substance was found on the first floor of the Capitol, police spokeswoman Sgt. Contricia Ford said. An emergency response unit was called and conducted prelimary tests. The results were not immediately known.
Bowing to growing complaints, Senate leaders were even letting senators and aides briefly re-enter their offices to remove needed documents and equipment. That included the fourth-floor corridor in the Dirksen Senate office building where the deadly toxin was discovered in Frist's mailroom.
``It's completely normal in there,'' said Laurie Schultz Heim, an aide to Sen. James Jeffords, I-Vt., who said she spent less than 10 minutes removing items from his offices, which are next to Frist's.
Yet with the entire Capitol complex subject to continuous air sampling and all congressional mail being collected and examined, no one was willing to say the threat was over.
Although ricin inhaled or injected can kill quickly, the incident -- so far -- seemed to be causing less tension than the anthrax letters sent to Capitol Hill in October 2001.
Lawmakers and aides said that was because being targeted by a biochemical substance is no longer novel for Congress and because initial indications were that the ricin had not spread into the air.
The FBI, Environmental Protection Agency, and 100 Marines from the corps' Chemical Biological Incident Response Force were among those investigating or removing mail for examination.
Officials said they had not yet found a link Wednesday between the ricin in Frist's office and ricin-laden letters found last fall in mail facilities serving the White House and the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport in South Carolina.
Gainer said no one had claimed credit for the ricin attack on Frist. And Frist said officials ``have no earthly idea'' if it may have been the work of international terrorists.
Frist said barring new problems, the Senate's two other office buildings would reopen this week. The Russell building was to reopen Thursday and the Hart building on Friday.
Dirksen was to reopen Monday.
--------
Deconstructing the Bill of Rights
By Alan Caruba,
February 4, 2004
American Conservative Union Foundation
1007 Cameron Street,
Alexandria, VA 22314
Tel: 703.836.8602
http://acuf.org/issues/issue5/040204gov.asp
I do not think our government is evil, but I do think evil men could be elected to lead our government. It happened in Germany in the 1930s.
During the last century, governments given totalitarian powers killed an estimated 169,000,000 people. If you don't think it can't happen here, I would remind you of the flames that destroyed the Waco, Texas compound of a religious cult that, by most accounts, didn't represent a threat to anyone, wasn't engaged in any illegal acts, and, in which, more than 90 men, women and children were gassed and incinerated.
This would suggest that no one is safe from a government intent on serving a subpoena, even if it has to kill you to do it. It was our introduction to the Clinton administration, but no one would have guessed that a conservative, Republican-controlled government would serve up The Patriot Act that became law on October 25, 2001.
Most members of Congress, all of whom take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution, voted blindly on two pieces of legislation that remain a cause for concern. One was The Patriot Act and the other was the establishment of the Department of Homeland Security. The Patriot Act, more than 300 pages in length, was either written at lightning speed or, perhaps, some version of the bill, by some prescient anticipation of 9-11, was sitting on the shelf in the Department of Justice, waiting for implementation.
I am not a lawyer and I am not trained in the interpretation of law. However, I know the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution says, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probably cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or thing to be seized."
The Patriot Act, however, permits the government to delay notice of the execution of a warrant to parties under suspicion of "domestic terrorism." Specifically, in Section 213 it says, "With respect to the issuance of any warrant or court order under this section, or any other rule of law, to search for and seize any property or material that constitutes evidence of a criminal offense in violation of the laws of the United States, any notice required, or that may be required, to be given may be delayed if the court finds reasonable cause to believe that providing immediate notification of the execution of the warrant may have an adverse result..."
Question? If the government can conduct such an investigation of a suspected terrorist, what protects any citizen from being identified as a terrorist and thus subject to "sneak and peak" surveillance? The Act is so broadly written that nothing protects a citizen with the provisions and intent of the Fourth Amendment. It renders anyone subject to a "sneak and peak" investigation in which all actions, communications, and personal records become fodder for prosecution.
Moving along, we come to SEC. 501: Access to Certain Business Records for Foreign Intelligence and International Terrorism Investigations.
"The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation or a designee of the Director (whose rank shall be no lower than Assistant Special Agent in Charge) may make an application for an order requiring the production of any tangible things (including books, records, papers, documents, and other items) for an investigation to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities, provided that such investigation of a United States person is not conducted solely upon the basis of activities protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution."
The First Amendment says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Since, under the Patriot Act, "an authorized investigation conducted in accordance with subsection (a)(2) to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities" is entirely permissible, it is essential to know exactly how the government defines domestic terrorism. That is found in Section 802 of the Patriot Act.
Domestic Terrorism Defined: Section 2331 of title 18, United States Code, is amended in paragraph (1)(B)(iii), by striking `by assassination or kidnapping' and inserting `by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping'; by adding at the end the following: the term `domestic terrorism' means activities that involve acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State; appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping; and occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States."
Question? If the government, under The Patriot Act, determines what "domestic terrorism" is and is not, what protection is afforded the ordinary citizen when, in fact, any violation of state or federal criminal law deemed dangerous to human life, can be identified as an act of terrorism? The Act allows the federal government to seize the assets of the alleged domestic terrorist without prior notice or a hearing and without filing criminal charges.
Waiting on the shelf is the draft of another "anti-terrorism" legislation called the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003. If enacted, it would, in effect, nullify the Bill of Rights. As it is, The Patriot Act already does a pretty good job of that.
Depending on interpretation, anything dangerous to human life that violates the criminal laws of the United States or any State can be interpreted as terrorism. That, to most people, would seem to be a very broad interpretation, particularly since such acts are already deemed criminal under existing laws. Under the Constitution, such crimes require that "No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury..." with some exceptions involving land or naval forces, militia, or in time of war. Such people cannot "be compelled" to be a witness against themselves, "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."
If, however, you are arrested and detained, held without bail and unable to contact your family, let alone an attorney, you have no Constitutional protection whatever.
Does the Patriot Act actually provide more protection against terrorism or less in terms of the First, Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution? If less, doesn't the Patriot Act actually harm the rights of citizens with its broad definition of terrorism? If this commentary is interpreted to be an act of coercion or intimidation, will the First Amendment protect me?
There are other troublesome aspects of The Patriot Act. Take, for example, Title III, aimed at money laundering. This became part of the Act at the insistence of Democrats that include Senators Daschle and Kerry. The Justice Department has used it to investigate corruption allegations against a Las Vegas strip club owner! This is totally unrelated to any threat of terrorism. In this and other ways, the Act has a vast potential to deprive citizens of constitutional protections that, in effect, no longer exist.
Today, our Department of Homeland Security, combining the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and other agencies of law enforcement and intelligence gathering, makes it the single most powerful instrument capable of depriving Americans of the protections afforded by the Constitution's Bill of Rights.
If the Act is challenged in our courts, the case would surely make its way to the Supreme Court. This is the same Court that recently ruled money donated by citizens to political parties to finance campaigns is a form of speech and that such speech can be restricted. This is an appalling assault on the First Amendment. There is no guarantee the current Supreme Court would safeguard the Bill of Rights.
These are things Americans must think about and which only their elected representatives, having voted blindly for the Act, should amend or repeal. As written, The Patriot Act takes away precious elements of our liberty and privacy. I have yet to have seen proof it provides any enhanced security. And that's what we are told it was enacted to do. A piece of legislation, S-1709, the SAFE Act, by a bipartisan group of US Senators, and a companion bill in the House (HR 3352) has been introduced to insure The Patriot Act does not continue to trample on civil liberties has been introduced. Tell your Senators and Representative to vote for this!
I am not and never will be in favor of depriving Americans of the rights granted to them by the Constitution. That would be the death of freedom in America. History is filled with examples of what happens when citizens are deprived of their freedom. Freedom is not negotiable. You either have it or you don't.
Alan Caruba writes a weekly commentary, "Warning Signs", posted on www.anxietycenter.com, the Internet site of The National Anxiety Center.
-------- terrorism
THE OVERVIEW
Finding of Ricin in Office Disrupts Senate
February 4, 2004
By DAVID JOHNSTON and CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/04/national/04POIS.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Feb. 3 - The Senate shut down its three office buildings on Tuesday, disrupting the work of lawmakers and thousands of their aides, after a powder identified as the deadly poison ricin was found in the office suite of the Senate majority leader, Bill Frist.
No illnesses were reported, but Dr. Frist, a Tennessee Republican, said in opening Tuesday's Senate session that the presence of ricin represented an act of terrorism. "Somebody in all likelihood manufactured this with intent to harm," he said. There is no known antidote for ricin, and a speck can be deadly if it is swallowed or injected.
The discovery of the powdery substance on Monday afternoon created turmoil on Capitol Hill, as law enforcement officials sealed off Dr. Frist's offices. Senate leaders ordered closings of Senate offices adjacent to the Capitol as a precaution, locking up buildings that are normally teeming with staff members.
The Capitol itself remained open on Tuesday, with senators continuing to debate a highway bill. But Senate officials said that the three sealed buildings might remain closed for the rest of the week, forcing some senators to set up temporary offices. Some hearings were being moved to House office buildings.
For senators and thousands of Senate employees on Capitol Hill, the finding of ricin stirred memories of the deadly - and still unsolved - anthrax mail attacks in 2001.
In that case, two letters containing deadly spores were sent to two Senate Democratic leaders, Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Two postal workers who handled the letters died, several others were sickened and one Senate office building was quarantined for more than three months.
Law enforcement officials said they had no suspects in the current case. But they were carefully re-examining leads from a case last fall involving two letters contaminated with ricin, which were discovered in Washington and South Carolina. One envelope, addressed to the White House, was intercepted at a military mail sorting office, officials said.
That typewritten letter and a similar letter, discovered at an airport mail office in Greenville, S.C., threatened to contaminate public water supplies with ricin. The letters warned that the threat would be carried out unless the government rescinded a federal trucking regulation limiting the number of hours that a driver could remain on the road.
Both letters were signed "Fallen Angel," according to documents posted on the F.B.I.'s Web site. The federal authorities have no suspects, but have announced a $100,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the case.
In the latest case, several dozen employees were in the vicinity of Dr. Frist's offices when the powder was discovered on a letter-opening machine, but John Eisold, the Capitol physician, said no one had shown symptoms that might be associated with exposure.
Officials said about two dozen Congressional workers who were in the area of the ricin underwent decontamination showers, left behind their clothes and other belongings and went home in police-provided jumpsuits early on Tuesday.
"Although we have no evidence that anybody has received a significant exposure to make them sick at this 12-to-24-hour mark, we remain vigilant," Dr. Eisold said.
At a news conference, Dr. Frist said he did not know the toxicity of the ricin powder. Other officials said tests of air filters showed that the poison lacked floating properties and had not circulated through ventilation systems.
With chemical tests confirming that the substance was ricin, the F.B.I., the United States Postal Service and the Capitol Police began a criminal inquiry to determine who sent the material. The investigation focused initially on a search for an envelope or package in which the ricin was believed to have been sent, officials said.
On Tuesday, Terrance Gainer, the chief of the Capitol Police, said all the materials in the mailroom had been seized. Investigators have not yet identified how the substance, first noticed by an intern, was delivered into the room.
"There was nothing on first blush to lead us to believe there was any visible threat," Chief Gainer told reporters. "But we still have a lot of investigative work to do on the things that are yet in that office and that we've confiscated from the office."
The white powder was found near a pile of recently opened envelopes that has been quarantined, officials said. Investigators hoped to find the contaminated envelope in the stack of opened mail, but so far they have searched with painstaking caution to avoid disturbing even minute quantities of evidence.
But that meticulous approach seemed to be slowing the inquiry. As a result, the authorities have been unable to determine precisely where the material originated or how it was delivered to the Senate.
While there have been reports that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda could be interested in ricin and that ricin was used in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980's, it has been used mainly as an assassination weapon.
In 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian journalist living in London, died after he was attacked by a man with an umbrella that had a tip carrying a device that injected a small ricin pellet.
Ricin operates by getting inside the cells of a victim's body. The poison prevents the cells from making proteins, resulting in cell breakdown and eventually death. Death could take place within 36 to 72 hours, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
As the authorities began their search for the source of the ricin in Dr. Frist's offices, investigators began a broader search of each senator's office to determine whether there might be other packages contaminated with the poisonous material. Thus far, those searches have provided no indication that the material was sent to any other senator.
At the same time, investigators began backtracking through the postal system, looking for traces of ricin from correspondence sent through the mail or by package delivery services. Other investigators began a review of Dr. Frist's correspondence, asking whether anyone might have sent any threatening mail to his offices in the Capitol or in Tennessee.
With little evidence to go on, investigators expressed interest in a mysterious envelope that turned up at a post office in Wallingford, Conn., that contained an unidentified powder and was addressed to the Republican National Committee. But later on Tuesday, the authorities said the powder was found not to be ricin.
At the Capitol, the impression of a professional and orderly approach to the ricin discovery was contradicted by accounts of some Senate employees who described the hours after the find as confused and chaotic. Some employees near Dr. Frist's office went home without any medical screening after the substance was found, and others went about their activities without being advised to seek decontamination.
The authorities said the substance was first seen about 3 p.m. on Monday, when a hazardous-materials team was dispatched to Dr. Frist's offices, in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. After preliminary tests proved negative, an all-clear was given. Such an occurrence is not unusual for Congressional offices, which frequently receive suspect mail that turns out to be harmless.
But when follow-up tests detected the presence of ricin, the Capitol Police returned and began evacuating people to another area of the Dirksen building. By that time, staff members who were present said, many people had left for the day.
"It was a little haphazard," said one Congressional aide who ended up being quarantined.
After further testing of the material, those who had been in the vicinity and remained in the building were directed to shower at a decontamination tent erected in a hallway between the Dirksen building and the adjacent Hart Senate Office Building. There they were interviewed by the police and allowed to go home.
Senate officials said they would review their mail handling system to determine whether changes could prevent another occurrence. Mail sent to Congressional officials is sent to a separate facility to be irradiated to kill toxins and then returned to the Senate to be opened and distributed.
"We have a pretty good process, but this makes you look at how we can do a better job," said William Pickle, the Senate sergeant-at-arms. One Senate official said that under current procedures, a corner of each package is clipped off and that each envelope is placed on a tray and shaken over a table covered by an exhaust hood so that any powder inside would be removed. But in this case, the official said the consistency of the material may have prevented it from spilling out.
Still, with Senate offices vacant and "closed" signs on some office doors, several senators complained that they did not learn of the ricin until they watched morning news reports on Tuesday and were not advised of the gravity of the threat posed by the ricin found in Dr. Frist's offices.
"That was a breakdown, but how important it was I don't know," said Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana.
It was not until Tuesday, when a sample of the ricin was analyzed at a Maryland lab, that there was an authoritative finding that the material was ricin. Senate officials acknowledged some slips in procedure but said the system set in place after the anthrax attacks was working.
"Things are going very well," Dr. Frist said. "Not perfectly, but very, very well."
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Ricin Partially Shuts Senate
3 Buildings Sealed; Toxin Was Mailed to White House in Nov.
By Carol Morello and Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10632-2004Feb3?language=printer
Three Senate office buildings were sealed, all unopened congressional mail was quarantined, and more than 5,000 staffers were locked out of their Capitol Hill offices yesterday after a suspicious powder found in a mailroom was confirmed as the toxin ricin.
Ricin was also found in a vial accompanying a letter addressed to the White House in November, law enforcement sources confirmed yesterday, but the incident was never made public and the Secret Service delayed sharing the information with the FBI and other federal officials.
In October, a package nearly identical to the one intended for the White House was discovered at a mail-sorting facility in South Carolina. It threatened to poison water supplies if demands about trucking regulations were not met. Sources said last night that both bore the signature "Fallen Angel."
U.S. Capitol Police said Senate buildings would remain closed at least another four to five days, as investigators began searching last night for clues to the substance found in a suite of offices used by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, two blocks from the Capitol.
Among lawmakers and staff members, there was a sense that despite the expensive and complex safeguards put in place after the anthrax scare of 2001, Congress remains vulnerable.
"Indeed, this is ricin," Frist announced at an afternoon news conference with Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer and other Capitol officials. "This is an insult, an assault on the Senate side of the United States Capitol. We are in a world where things like ricin, that we never had to think about, we do have to think about."
The Capitol was not the only place where ricin was suspected. In Wallingford, Conn., a letter found Monday containing a powdery substance and addressed to the Republican National Committee was determined to contain wood ash, not ricin, as initially feared.
Senate leaders tried to put on a brave front by proceeding with floor debate, but most meaningful work ground to a halt. The few Senate staff members who found an office to work from were unable to reach their regular telephones or computers. House offices remained open.
No illnesses were reported a full day after the powder was discovered and identified. But dozens of employees were hosed down in the hallway of the Dirksen Senate Office Building for decontamination early yesterday morning, and many others were advised to wash their clothes or throw them in a plastic bag.
Yesterday evening, Frist announced that the Senate would be in session today so that Congress could host a visit from Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain. Senators looked for alternative office space and arranged to retrieve cars from underground garages and gain emergency access under escort to their offices.
"The work of government will continue," Daschle said. "As we speak, the Senate is in session. Terrorist attacks, criminal acts of this kind will not stop the work of the Senate or the Congress, as we have important work to be done."
Daschle acknowledged, though, that without offices, staff and phones, the Senate found "very limited opportunity . . . to do its business." Daschle said reports of ricin in Frist's office "brought back horrific memories" of the anthrax-laced letters sent to his office 28 months ago. The "only consolation," he said, was the "lessons learned" from the anthrax incident that have given Congress "far greater ability to respond effectively" to such an attack.
Since the anthrax attack that left five people dead in October 2001, all mail destined for federal government offices each day is diverted through New Jersey to undergo irradiation to kill bacteria. But the process, designed to destroy live spores, has no effect on ricin, a colorless, odorless and lethal substance. Ricin (pronounced Rye-sin) is readily distilled from castor beans. Once it is ingested or inhaled, death can follow within 72 hours. Ricin is not as easily spread as anthrax, but there is no antidote or specific treatment.
One of Frist's interns discovered the powder about 3 p.m. Monday. In addition to his regular Dirksen office, Frist maintains an office in the Capitol where he spends the bulk of his time.
An FBI official said the intern noticed clumpy dust on a small mail-sorting machine he had been using. The machine was in a 10-by-15-foot mailroom attached to Frist's office. "All you have is dust," said the official, describing why it would be difficult to trace. "How long has it been there? Did somebody walk in and dump it?" Complicating matters, Frist staff members told investigators that the machine was always dusty, the official said.
Law enforcement sources said that while it is unclear how the ricin got into the mailroom, they suspect it was mailed. One source said investigators want to find the envelope but are concerned that it might have been taken from the office. Senate leaders called it terrorism; investigators said only that they have not ruled out terrorism.
"We know that this was sent specifically to the United States Senate, to an individual," Frist said. "Because it is a poison, a toxic chemical that we know is deadly, that we know there is no treatment for that, the assumption is the intent to harm."
In the first hours after the powder was found in the mailroom, concern was tempered by an initial test that came back negative for ricin, according to Senate staff members who were quarantined in the office building until early morning.
So many were surprised when, about 6:30 p.m., U.S. Capitol Police began knocking on fourth-floor doors checking identities and ordering everyone into a large appropriations hearing room on the first floor. By then, many staff members had left for home.
About 40 congressional workers were sequestered in the room, said Erik Smulson, communications director for Sen. James M. Jeffords (I-Vt.), whose office is near Frist's on the fourth floor of Dirksen. Among the sequestered workers were staff aides to Frist and Jeffords, aides to Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) and about 20 police officers.
Smulson and another Senate staff member who was in the room said people were calm, even as they learned what had transpired. Frist spoke to them via speaker phone, listing the symptoms and assuring them that there had never been a case of a person dying from inhaling ricin.
Police suggested that they contact their colleagues who had gone home and tell them to package their clothing in plastic and take a shower. According to one Senate staff member who was present, everyone pulled out their cell phones and Blackberry text pagers to spread the word. After the anthrax incident, staffers began wearing laminated cards around their necks with the names and phone numbers of all their co-workers. Some of the colleagues they reached said they had been met at the door by spouses holding bags for the clothing.
The Capitol physician's office notified them that the powder had tested positive for ricin. He told them they would be decontaminated -- basically, hosed down -- and advised them to monitor themselves and head to a hospital if symptoms arose.
"This was bad news," Smulson said. "That brought a new seriousness to it."
By last night, investigators had begun collecting and sifting through mail from offices, looking for the origin of the residue
Despite an experience some staff members characterized as surreal, few said they were afraid to return to work on Capitol Hill.
"Maybe it's because of what we all went through with anthrax," said one staff member. "During the anthrax scare, a lot of people took Cipro and had vaccinations. And we survived. Maybe we have an odd, false sense of security after that."
Despite a growing sense of relief that no one was reporting symptoms of ricin poisoning, health officials said the consequences could have been grave.
"Ricin is a toxin," said Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "It . . . can be very serious, and that's the whole reason we are taking this event very seriously and working to do everything possible to reduce human exposure."
Gerberding said researchers have significant experience with the course of symptoms from ingesting ricin and slight experience with injection of the poison. But she said, "There is essentially no human experience with the inhalation of ricin. We may not have a full picture of how this will evolve. That is why we are casting a broad net to make sure we are not overlooking any symptoms."
The deadly toxin has been a weapon favored over the years by various terrorists and spies.
In the most infamous case dating to 1978, a Bulgarian defector was pricked with an umbrella tip that slid a ricin-laced pellet under his skin, killing him rapidly. In the mid-1990s, members of a Minnesota militia were convicted of plotting to kill a federal marshal with ricin.
Public warnings about potential ricin attacks have increased since January 2003, when British anti-terrorism police discovered traces of the toxin in a north London apartment, leading to a series of arrests and raids across the country in the following weeks.
But so far, this second biological incident in the Senate has not stopped visitors from coming to Washington.
"It seems as if the American public is taking this a little more in stride than in past cases of threats of this nature," said Bill Hanbury, president of the Washington Convention and Tourism Corp., referring to the anthrax attacks.
"These kinds of stories are clearly put into better perspective by the American public now. I think they're willing to wait and see what will happen rather than go into panic mode."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Norway Praised for Its Peaceful Solutions
Wednesday, February 4, 2004; Page A19
By Nora Boustany
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10855-2004Feb3.html
The National Peace Foundation has awarded its Peacemaker/Peacebuilder Award to the Norwegian government. Former Indiana representative Lee Hamilton presented the award to Norway's ambassador, Knut Vollebaek, at a dinner at the embassy residence on Friday night.
Hamilton, director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, praised Norway, a nation of 4.5 million, for having the world's largest per capita foreign aid program. He also cited its government's dedication to the pursuit of peace in Sri Lanka and Sudan, among other conflicts. He also noted the selection of Iranian lawyer and human rights activist Shirin Ebadi for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The prize is administered in Norway.
International assistance is a trait that has been built into Norway's institutions, Hamilton said. "From Norway we can learn so many lessons. An outside party should not seek to control the process but to sustain institutions," he said.
In accepting the award, Vollebaek said that his country has focused on international aid to less fortunate countries as a moral duty since Christian missionaries traveled abroad in the 18th and 19th centuries. The missionaries would write home to their families in the small valleys and hamlets of Norway, he said, often telling stories that provided more details about tiny villages in places such as Madagascar than they had about their own capital.
Also attending the dinner was Stephen Strickland, a member of the board of advisers of the National Peace Foundation. Strickland, who received a lifetime achievement award, said that peace was not only the absence of war, but also a continued involvement in development. The Washington-based group participated in the establishment of the U.S. Institute of Peace in the 1980s and later broadened its agenda to include international peace, democracy building and conflict resolution training.
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Russian anti-war NGO to set up new pro-democracy party
MOSCOW (AFP)
Feb 04, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040204161415.uy1eq14c.html
A leading Russian anti-war group, the Soldiers' Mothers Committee, announced Wednesday that it was setting up a new pro-democracy political party after the collapse of the liberal opposition.
"We have been thinking about this for several years but the political climate after (parliamentary elections in) December is such that we have no doubts about the need to create a political party," a top member of the organisation, Ida Kuklina said.
"No one is defending democratic values anymore after the crushing defeat" of the Union of Right Forces (SPS) and Yabloko, two liberal parties which lost all but a handful of their seats in the State Duma lower house of parliament, she told a press conference.
The pro-Kremlin United Russia party triumphed in the poll, winning more than two-thirds of seats which would enable the government to change the Russian constitution.
"Who can guarantee today that the constitution will not be changed and that we will still have a parliament?" said the committee's head Valentina Melnikova.
The Soldiers' Mothers Committee is a nationwide non-government organisation set up in 1989 by the mothers of Russian servicemen. It has campaigned strongly against the war in breakaway Chechnya launched in October 1999. As a political party, it will defend the rights of Russian children and women, promote a progressive social and economic programme and will fight to ensure "the authorities respect their obligations towards citizens," Melnikova said.
As for the war in Chechnya, "we have denounced it from the start as a quagmire and we will continue to do so," as thousands of young people have been killed or injured there "which no one cares about," she added.
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