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NUCLEAR
Ownership of Nuclear Weapons: Whose Prerogative?
New Effort To Control, Track And Negate Potential Dirty Bomb Sources
Sick Nuclear Weapons Workers Overwhelm Energy Department
China Seeks Stolen Radioactive Material
US raps China over Taiwan missile build up
WMD demands threaten Syria-EU trade deal
Pakistan to Share Nuke Probe Evidence
Musharraf forced scientist to retire
AP: Pakistan, Nuclear Black Market Linked
IRAN, RUSSIA ARRANGE TO COMPLETE BUSHEHR
U.S. AVOIDS NPT ISSUE WITH ISRAEL
Building the bomb:
N. Korea lists demands for a nuclear freeze
North Korea Must Include Uranium in Talks, South Envoy Says
Libya decided 10 years ago against developing WMD
Bush Official: N. Korea Buys Nuke Info
Russia cites U.S. action for war exercises
Los Alamos Hopes To Lead New Era Of Nuclear Space Tranportion
EU urges India, Israel, Pakistan to sign nuclear treaty
Bush to Outline Plan for Limiting Nuclear Arms
Wisconsin may lift ban on nuclear plant construction
Bush's Nuclear Proposal: Hypocrisy Charged
Bush to Propose Fuel Ban to End Spread of A-Bombs
TEXT Bush's Speech on the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
The wrong side of history
Cheney's future at stake after leaking of CIA agent's name
MILITARY
The Frontline - Afghan Front Is Treacherous
U.N. Official in Warning on Afghan Drugs
Congo's path back from war
Delivery of three Phalcon early warning radar systems to India
E-Bombs future for weaponry
U.S. biodefense campus set for Fort Detrick
PM edges away from US with plan to talk to Gaddafi
GAO: Defense Contractors Owe $3 Billion In US Taxes
U.S. Says Non-Construction Iraq Deals Open to All
China Says It Won't Meddle in Taiwan Elections
Iran's President Criticizes Conservatives
Army probe over Iraqi PoW death
Doubts remain over SDF's use of weapons in Iraq
At Least 47 Die in Baghdad Blast; 2nd Attack in 24 Hours
Up to 80 Killed in Bomb Blasts at 2 Iraqi Sites
Love across the lines
Two Car Bombs Kill at Least 75 in Central Iraq
Scenes of horror at Iraqi hospital
At Least 14 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Raids
Recent Israeli Operations in Gaza Strip
Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created
Pentagon Regularly Shortcuts Operational Testing of Weapons
U.S. Military May Run Out Of Money
Pentagon: U.S. can fund Iraq war beyond Sept.
Pentagon faces challenge in creating armed services information network
Service Chiefs Challenge White House on the Budget
Military Chiefs Testify of Worries About War Funding
Guard Records On President Are Released
Fighter Jet, Copter Assessed for Roles In Military Future
1,188 Americans Killed in Iraq - Your Son Will Be Next
US news commentator apologizes for backing Iraq war
Study of Rhetoric On Iraq Is Urged
U.N. Prosecutor Says War Crimes Suspect Is in Belgrade
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
No 'Smoking Guns' in Reports, Head of Sept. 11 Panel Says
9/11 Panel to Accept Summary of Briefings
Report Questions the Reliability of an F.B.I. Ballistics Test
Study Faults FBI Bullet Tests
Move Against Police Heartens Some in Juarez
Freed Afghan, 15, Recalls a Year at Guantánamo
Pentagon Allows Padilla to See Lawyer
U.S. to Allow 'Enemy Combatant' to See a Lawyer
ENERGY
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Tested for Manufacturing
Wind is near-term renewable fuel for hydrogen
OTHER
Avian Flu Cases Strike Fear in Delmarva
ACTIVISTS
New York Police Sued Over Anti-War Protest Arrests
Subpoenas on Antiwar Protest Are Dropped
After a Year, Students Take a Second Look at the Iraq Invasion
-------- NUCLEAR
Ownership of Nuclear Weapons: Whose Prerogative?
By Yamin Zakaria Editorials
Al-Jazeerah,
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/Feb/11%20o/Ownership%20of%20Nuclear%20Weapons%20Whose%20Prerogative%20By%20Yamin%20Zakaria.htm
Nuclear weapons (A-Bomb, Hydrogen Bomb and Thermo Nuclear) epitomises weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Its sheer destructive power dwarfs the other WMDs: Chemical and Biological. Many view it as the weapon of Armageddon. Therefore, the use of such weapon under any circumstance other than genuine self-defence is apt to classify it as an action of a bloodthirsty criminal, which symbolises the pinnacle of "terrorism" and war crimes.
Nuclear weapons were only ever used against Japan in bombing the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, both were highly populated with civilians. Japan at the time lost all its Air defence capabilities, its military was constantly retreating, the island of Okinawa was occupied by the US and threatening the invasion of the main land Japan. The military operations were reduced solely to the defence its territory, i.e. mere survival. In fact, more people perished in the gratuitous bombing of the civilian areas in Tokyo than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Thus, there was very little to gain in military terms by nuking the two cities as Japan was already on her knees. She was facing total annihilation just from the use of the conventional weapons unless it accepted surrender.
So, President Roosevelt demanded for the unconditional surrender of Japan, to which Hirohito replied through Joseph Stalin, that he was prepared to 'negotiate' the issue. The proud Japanese nation could not just lay down their arms and Hirohito's pretext to 'negotiate' was cosmetic diplomacy, an attempt to mask the humiliation of defeat. However, more to the point, Roosevelt's offer was not rejected outright. Which means the US clearly had the diplomatic option to end the war virtually on its own terms, given the military situation on the grounds. In addition, the US could have simply exerted further pressure by threatening Japan with the nuclear bomb, practically achieving the unconditional surrender. The US regime had ulterior motivations, which was to test the bomb and thereby demonstrate its muscle to the world and satisfy its inherent violent nature. Japan being Orientals was preferred over Germany to be used as a testing ground for the weapon. Hence, one of the first actions carried by the US governor of Japan (General D. McCarthy) was to meticulously collate all the information resulting from the impact of the two bombs.
Therefore, the deployment of the nuclear bombs was not remotely connected with the genuine defence of the US. Which leads to the conclusion based on the above principle (paragraph1 ) that the nature of the US regime is: evil, it exemplifies the apex of state terrorism and personifies war criminals. Such actions coupled with the needless bombing of the civilians in Tokyo easily qualify as war crimes and State terrorism, which exceeds in many folds to the combined casualties of all the victims of all the alleged 'terrorist' actions from 1946 to date. It certainly dwarfs the track record of the US groomed Saddam Hussein or Pinochet. In line with its violent nature, the US then came to brink of using the bomb against China,! North Korea and Egypt.
Nations produces and purchases weapons from the point of view of deterrence and to protect its existing interests as a minimum whilst the more powerful nations may use it to further its interests overseas. One of the axioms of international relationship is that: power is relative. It is not how much firepower you posses in absolute terms but in relation to your adversary. As an example, Britain has more firepower today in comparison to its colonial days in the19 th century, when she exceeded in her power relative to her rival nations, thus became the dominant power at that time. However, despite possessing greater firepower today, her relative power has declined, as has her position.
This is supposed to be the context for nations acquiring its weapons; security and defence forms the backbone of any nations sovereignty. In addition, the UN charter does not prevent any country from pursuing such objective. Thus, every nation has the right to possess Nuclear, Biological and Chemical weapons, especially considering the past track record of the US, some of which has been highlighted above coupled with the recent wanton aggression in Iraq based on its policy of pre-emptive strike. Nations pursuing the policy of non-proliferation of WMD would only increase the relative power of the US, whilst weakening their own position even further. In return, this does not guarantee a more peaceful world but certainly a world where the weaker nations are brought to its knees, run like slaves to serve the Empire. Just examine the US history in terms of the African Slave trade. Examine why North Korea was not invaded or attacked, where the US tone is far more conciliatory.
The US has launched its mission to contain the proliferation of the WMD but selectively focusing on the Muslim countries and North Korea as it turns a blind eye to its European allies and Israel. Which, she trumpets around as a 'peaceful' mission. One should also note the duplicity of such proclamation, as the US is one of the largest producer and exporter of WMDs. The US has refused to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) and furthermore, George Bush stated that he wants to acquire mini-Nukes and 'tactical' Nuclear weapons. No doubt, such weapons would not be classified as WMD until it gets used by one of its opponents or the US itself becomes a victim of one. Mossad in partnership with the Christian-Zionist hawks might be able to help there, thus launch the final crusade against the Islamic world.
Many influential figures within the US do not feel ashamed to openly uphold such discriminatory policy, by proclaiming that nuclear bombs in the 'right hand' (US ally or a colony) is not a problem; diplomacy and subtlety was never a strong point of the US. So, it is not the much ranted about universal principles but self-interest that underpin the US policy. One US based Jewish hawk recently expressed this right by stating that America is God's chosen nation under the leadership ('Prophethood') of Bush, as Bill Clinton would have clearly failed over Monica. This is expected from people who believe to be God's chosen people. One can let the reader ponder of what they think of the rest of humanity.
As the war in Iraq comes to a conclusion, the schizophrenic clown of Libya surrenders its 'WMD' even though it had none to begin with in the first place. It's like a child urinating in its pants just from the verbal threats issued by a bully. Which exposes the real character of these Arab regimes; they have very little courage, vision and support from its own population. Thus any threats results either in capitulation unless they can quash it by resorting to brutal force.
The other remaining 'threat' is Iran, part of the "axis of evil", who never really embarked on this course of developing Nuclear weapons. As the Iranian President suddenly 'discovered', possessing Nuclear weapons is contrary to Islamic teachings. So how does he intend to carry out the liberation of Palestine and confront the great Satan as we have been hearing for years? In fact, if Iraq is anything to go by, there is more probability of Iran using its bombs on Afghanistan.
The selective targeting of Iran by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is explained by the fact that Iran unlike Israel is a signatory to the NPT (Nuclear Proliferation Treaty). However, if non-Proliferation is the real objective than surely some sort of pressure should have been applied in parallel to force Israel to open itself to inspection, to say the least.
That leaves Pakistan, the only Muslim country with Nuclear weapons. The case of Pakistan also proves that you don't have to posses enormous amount of wealth like oil to build such things. The US has already secured its interest otherwise Pakistan would have been declared as part of an "axis of evil" by asserting its complicity with the Taliban regime and hence by implication providing support to Al-Qaeeda. In time the US may well decide to use this card but at present Musharraf is compliant and useful enough.
When Pakistan to its full credit acquired the nuclear bomb, it was labelled by the mass media as the "Islamic Bomb". The sarcastic reference here was to the Islamic character of Pakistan being populated largely by Muslims. Note when India also flexed its Nuclear muscle, with a government that can be definitely described as a Hindu fundamentalist regime, no such labels (Hindu Bomb) were applied. It also demonstrates how and why the mass media uses such politically charged terms.
The security concern of Pakistan from the potential threat from its eastern flank (India) was the reason for acquiring this Nuclear deterrent. Therefore, logic dictates that Musharraf should have taken into account as well as the potential threat arising from the newly formed axis of US-India-Israel before openly and unconditionally cooperating with the US in virtually surrendering the Weapons.
On the contrary, Musharraf was happy to humiliate the hero of Pakistan, Dr. Abdul Qadir Khan. His 'crime' was to proliferate the nuclear technology to other nations. Firstly, such proliferation is in the interest of Pakistan otherwise the unipolar world will become even more polarised to the determent of Pakistan. Secondly, the countries to which the nuclear technology was leaked do not pose any threat to its own interests or borders. Finally, Pakistan has not signed up to the charter of NPT (Nuclear Proliferation Treaty) along with India and Israel, thus any concession should have been linked to India and Israel. Perhaps that is asking too much from a leadership that had no vision and is in constant capitulation to US interests. Thus, it seems that instead of the Nuclear weapons being a deter! rent in protecting Pakistan, to the contrary the Pakistani government is protecting the weapons on behalf of the US interests in the region.
Yamin Zakaria lives in London, UK
Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's.
editor@aljazeerah.info
-------- accidents and safety
New Effort To Control, Track And Negate Potential Dirty Bomb Sources
Feb 11, 2004
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/terrorwar-04b.html
Albuquerque - Small radioactive sealed sources, designed to provide useful tools for measurement and analysis in a variety of industry and laboratory settings, have moved from the beneficial category to the threatening category in the post 9/11 world.
The Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories is working to get a better handle on where these sources are located and how they can be controlled. The recurring loss, theft, or misplacement of radioactive sources, worldwide in scope, has long been an issue for public health and law enforcement officials.
Now, with the added potential for their use in radioactive dispersal devices (RDDs), or so-called "dirty bombs," officials view them as much more of a threat. Such a bomb detonates conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material across a target area. Dirty bombs, experts acknowledge, are likely to cause as much or more damage from fear and reaction to fear as from the dangers of the explosives or the radioactive materials themselves.
Clipping Collection
Joe Schelling, of Sandia's Program Development and Environmental Decisions Department, keeps a collection of news items that suggest the problem. One tells of a small, yttrium-90 sealed source was left in a New York taxicab. It was later recovered. Others tell how radioactive cesium chloride, removed from a sealed source, found its way into the hands of children in Brazil. At least four deaths and the destruction of part of a town, including businesses and 85 homes, resulted. Others detail a regular pattern of losses or misplacement of sealed sources.
"After 9/11, people in government started asking 'where is this stuff (sealed sources) in the country?' And nobody had a good answer," says Schelling. "We definitely started paying attention to missing radioactive sources because of the RDD potential," says Lori Dotson, who is managing Sandia's project to better control the more than two million government and commercial sealed radioactive sources in the US.
Enter RSRT
The project, called the Radioactive Source Registry Tracking System (RSRT), will first track all DOE sealed radioactive sources and provide decision makers with some estimation of the potential threat they may pose. The system is being coordinated with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency to be consistent with national and international source tracking needs.
Following reports from an International Conference on Security of Radioactive Sources in Vienna, Austria, in March 2003 and from the DOE/NRC Interagency Working Group on Radiological Dispersal Devices in May 2003, the Secretary of Energy chartered DOE's Office of Plutonium, Uranium, and Special Materials Inventory (SO 62) to create a database for tracking sealed sources.
The Sandia team's effort has resulted in an initial RSRT system well ahead of schedule, notes Gary "G.D." Roberson, DOE project manager. With anticipated increases in funding over the next few years, he expects the system to make a significant contribution. "It is already significant in the sense that the DOE has a database that is a direct commitment to the charter and is up and running."
Responding to the May charter from Secretary Spencer Abraham, Sandia team members built the RSRT system by using existing data and databases and adding other sealed source data from throughout the DOE complex. "Sandia had an operational database with some 55,000 entries called the National Inventory of Sealed Sources, which contained select nuclear materials, actinide isotopes, and sealed sources," explains Schelling.
The Sandia team set aggressive milestones to demonstrate that it could deliver an online system to meet the immediate needs of the new charter. The team met the first milestone late last year, six weeks ahead of schedule, by placing the interim RSRT online.
Federal regulations set limits on the types of radioactive material that must be controlled. The Sandia system uses those limits as a baseline. Now, acquiring data becomes critical to the ultimate success of the RSRT program. Idaho National Engineering and Environment Laboratory is supporting the team by leading the data acquisition effort.
The team's goal is to track all DOE sealed sources by March 31.
----
Sick Nuclear Weapons Workers Overwhelm Energy Department
By J.R. Pegg
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 11, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-11-10.asp
The U.S. Energy Department predicts it will take at least three years to process all the claims of workers exposed to radioactive contamination while building atomic weapons for the government. Congressional critics need to realize even that is "an incredibly aggressive schedule," U.S. Energy Deputy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow told the Senate Energy Committee on Tuesday.
McSlarrow, testifying before the committee on the Bush administration's Energy Department budget request for fiscal year 2005, said neither Congress nor the agency did "a good job of anticipating the need for resources."
The Bush administration has requested $43 million for the program, well above its earmark of $16 million for the current fiscal year.
The program is tasked with implementing the Energy Department's responsibilities under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Act of 2000.
The law promised each worker or their survivors $150,000 for illnesses caused by radiation exposure, calling on the Department of Labor to pay out benefits, with the Energy Department providing support for the process along with assistance to workers and families in pursuing claims.
Applications for the two programs have topped 70,000 and fewer than half of the application have been completed.
"Everybody vastly underestimated the scope of the program," McSlarrow said.
Congress has acknowledged that a legislative fix may be in order, but the Bush administration has pledged to eliminate the backlog by 2006.
The commitment to work off the backlog by 2006 does not seem good enough, said Senator Jeff Bingaman, considering the deteriorating health of many of the people the program aims to compensate.
"We need to find a way to get these claims processed," said the New Mexico Democrat.
Bingaman called on the Bush administration "not to get into a mindset that Congress has to change the law before you guys fix this program."
Committee Chairman Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, said the committee is "going to pursue this with vigor."
"It does not make sense to build people's enthusiasm up and then have a program of this," Domenici said.
The compensation issue dominated much of the hearing, but lawmakers raised a number of other concerns with the Energy Department's budget proposal, including a decrease in funding for science and research programs.
The Bush proposal cuts the Energy Department's science budget by two percent compared to fiscal 2004 appropriations.
"There is an unfortunate trend in [cuts to] basic research across the executive branch," Bingaman said.
North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan complained that the budget proposal cuts funding for the clean coal initiative by some $120 million, a move he said undermines the President's pledge to spend $2 billion over 10 years on clean coal research.
McSlarrow defended the plan as the "most aggressive pro-coal budget this country has ever seen" and said the administration was on track to meet the overall funding pledge.
The science and research budget proposal is reflective of the administration's focus on new technologies and of the tight spending restraints on most federal activities not related to homeland security or defense, McSlarrow told the committee.
Domenici honed in on a $25.2 million reduction for infrastructure at the department's 17 science laboratories.
"These laboratories have to be the best research institutions in the world and they probably are," he said. "But they are not going to stay that way if we continue to underfund them."
Several senators questioned the administration's proposal to move the vast majority of funding for the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository "off budget."
The Bush administration has asked for $880 million to fund the controversial Yucca Mountain plan, including $749 million in fees received from utilities from the Nuclear Waste Fund toward construction of the facility 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
The White House is keen to make this fund, which has accumulated some $13 billion, a source of direct funds for the Yucca Mountain project, which is estimated to cost some $58 billion.
But currently the money from the fund is available as general revenue and lawmakers are wary of changing this.
Senator Gordon Smith, an Oregon Republican, also queried McSlarrow about the administration's request for Congress to allow it to reclassify millions of gallons of high level nuclear waste as less hazardous.
The Energy Department contends the change is needed to expedite cleanups of nuclear waste - at issue is some 100 million gallons of high level nuclear waste created by the U.S. military.
The majority of the waste is currently stored in underground tanks at federal facilities in South Carolina, Idaho and at the Hanford site in Washington.
The 1982 Nuclear Waste Policy Act requires the Energy Department to bury this highly radioactive waste deep underground - if the waste is reclassified as less hazardous, the department would be permitted to leave it on site where it is now located
In July 2003 environmentalists won a lawsuit in federal court to block the department from changing the classification of the waste without Congressional approval.
State officials have made it clear they do not support the request to reclassify the waste to a lower hazard categoy, and critics fear the reclassification would allow the agency to leave high level waste on site instead of burying the waste deep underground.
"Anything less than full cleanup of the Hanford site is going to be unacceptable," Senator Smith told McSlarrow.
The Energy Deputy Secretary said the administration does not want the reclassification to avoid responsibility, but rather for the flexibility needed to handle the problem.
"We are not going to do anything that is not in compliance with what state regulators want," McSlarrow said. "The most dangerous thing going on at Hanford is that the environmentalists are keeping us from doing the cleanup we want to do."
The cleanup and disposition of nuclear wastes left at Hanford from 60 years of nuclear weapons production is not governed by environmentalists but by the 1989 Tri-Party Agreement between the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the State of Washington, Department of Ecology.
-------- china
China Seeks Stolen Radioactive Material
February 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Radioactive-Theft.html
SHANGHAI, China (AP) -- Authorities are racing to find a canister of potentially deadly radioactive material stolen from a northern China construction site and are urging those who took the material not to risk radiation poisoning by opening it, officials said Wednesday.
The football-sized lead container of cesium-137 was taken from a power plant construction site in Pucheng, a county in northern China's Shaanxi province, about five days ago, according to a county government official, who refused to give his name. He would not provide further details.
A report in the state-run newspaper China Daily said police believe the canister was mistaken for scrap metal -- a material often stolen for sale to salvage companies.
Cesium-137, a highly radioactive material, is used in soil-testing gauges in construction and is found in photoelectric batteries and vacuum valves. It explodes if it comes into contact with water, and exposure can cause blood diseases, sterility and birth defects.
An official in the local police's ``political department'' said that anti-chemical weapons troops had been deployed to try to find the cesium, using Geiger counters, but that so far there were no suspects or leads in the case.
Criminal investigators, who were not available for comment, were in charge, said the official, who refused to give his name.
``We're trying our hardest,'' he said.
Officials at the Pucheng Power Generating Factory directed inquiries to the No. 1 Northwestern Power Construction Co., saying that the contractor was responsible for ensuring the security of the cesium. Staff contacted at the construction company refused comment.
A reward of $600 was being offered to anyone who helps resolve the case, the China Daily said.
None of the officials suggested any suspicion that the canister might have been stolen specifically for the cesium.
In the United States and elsewhere, authorities have stepped up efforts to track down similar stolen materials, fearing the radioactive material might be used by terrorists to build radiological ``dirty bombs.''
--------
US raps China over Taiwan missile build up
BEIJING (AFP)
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040211075704.rinf6pgh.html
The United States Wednesday rapped China for deploying so many missiles targeting Taiwan, saying it did nothing to reduce tensions with elections on the island just weeks away.
"We expressed our concern about the missile build-up across from Taiwan and made the point that we have important shared interests and don't think those interests are being served by the missile build-up," said US Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith.
"That does not contribute to a reduction in tensions," he told a press roundtable after the sixth annual round of Sino-US defense consultations.
The two days of meetings with senior Chinese officials headed by General Xiong Guangkai, deputy chief of general staff of the People's Liberation Army, were dominated by the Taiwan issue.
But the US concerns appear to have fallen on deaf ears.
Asked if China had said whether they were prepared to withdraw any of the missiles, Feith said: "No".
He added, in response to questions on whether he had sensed any change in the Chinese attitude: "I don't think so."
Feith's visit comes after trips to China last month by Deputy US Secretary of State Richard Armitage and US chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers.
The purpose of this week's meeting was to brief China on the realignment of the United States' global military posture.
"We wanted to make sure the Chinese understood the key thoughts that are shaping our thinking on how we want to realign our forces globally," said Feith.
"And we wanted to give them a sense of the fact this is not only global but a very long term view that we are taking.
"Contrary to a lot of reports, it is not focused on any particular country and not on current events. It is a much bigger, longer term picture."
Despite China's reluctance to withdraw its almost 500 missiles facing Taiwan, which it considers a renegade province to be reunified by force if necessary, Feith said both sides agreed everything must be done to avoid war.
"On the broader issue on the talks we had here of Taiwan and the danger of war, both sides made it clear that we have a strong interest in keeping tensions down and avoiding war," he said.
"I don't think anyone should talk lighty about military action and that is an area where I think we have an important common interest. Nobody benefits from talk of war that will get everybody tense and increase danger."
The United States is Taiwan's biggest weapons supplier and has made clear it will help defend the island if it is attacked.
Taiwan holds election next month, alongside a referendum in which Taiwanese voters will be asked whether the island should beef up its defenses against China's military threat, and whether Taipei should start negotiations with China for peaceful co-existence.
-------- europe
WMD demands threaten Syria-EU trade deal
By Judy Dempsey in Brussels
February 11 2004
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982469825&p=1012571727102
A landmark trade and political agreement between the European Union and Syria could be in jeopardy after several EU member states demanded Damascus first take tougher action on curbing weapons of mass destruction.
The move by Britain, Germany and the Netherlands follows Libya's renouncement of weapons of mass destruction and Iran's decision to accept tougher inspections of its nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Some member states feel they can beef up the language on WMD in the EU-Syria accord because of developments in Libya and Iran," an EU diplomat said.
Syria was the last of the 12 north African and Middle Eastern countries to sign an association agreement with Brussels. They are part of the "Barcelona process", established by the EU in 1995 to create a free trade zone in the region by 2010.
The European Commission said the agreement could help modernise the economy and give support to the reformers. Syria sees its relationship with the EU as a way to prevent it being isolated after Washington imposed sanctions in December because it argued Damascus supported WMD and supported anti-Israeli groups.
Clinched in December, the agreement with Syria is the first time the EU has included a "conditionality" clause on WMD in a trade accord with non-EU countries.
The clause states that Syria must comply with its commitments to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty and other related issues such as participating in curbing exports and controlling end-user certificates for goods that could be used for producing WMD. "If Syria does not comply on these issues the agreement could be suspended," another EU diplomat said.
That WMD clause states that Syria should "work towards" implementing all existing obligations related to non-proliferation and disarmament.
Britain, Germany and the Netherlands, however, want the wording to be identical to the EU's "non-proliferation clause" that foreign ministers in November agreed to include in agreements with third countries. That wording states that parties should "take steps" to implement existing obligations. "It is more concrete, I suppose but the sentiment is the same," said a diplomat.
The commission and some member states said Syria had already gone far in accepting tough trade and political conditions. "If we push it too far, Syria might simply refuse to compromise," one official said.
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan to Share Nuke Probe Evidence
By MUNIR AHMAD
Associated Press Writer
Feb 11, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan pledged Wednesday to share information on black market deals that allegedly moved nuclear know-how to North Korea, data that could give other countries a better idea of the communist nation's atomic arsenal.
During a meeting with a Japanese diplomat, President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said Pakistan will hand over information to Japan when its investigation is complete.
Pakistani officials have shied away from saying directly that they will hand over evidence to the United States. Musharraf has drawn strong domestic criticism for his cooperation with the United States' anti-terror campaign in neighboring Afghanistan, and is keen to avoid any appearance that he is a U.S. puppet.
Japan is one of six nations due to join a meeting on North Korea's nuclear program in Beijing later this month. The United States will also be there, and U.S. officials have expressed hope that information from Pakistan could help clarify details about North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
"Pakistan would share with Japan the results of its internal investigations on any illegal transfers to North Korea when the investigations were completed," a Foreign Ministry statement said after the talks with Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Ichiro Fujisaki.
North Korea has denied receiving technology from Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, who was pardoned by Musharraf last week after he confessed to leaking nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Pakistan began its investigation into alleged transfers of nuclear technology in November after the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, requested help in determining if Pakistani scientists were involved in proliferation.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said Pakistan was working with a range of groups interested in stopping the spread of nuclear technology.
"Pakistan is a responsible state and will cooperate so that this underworld is unearthed," said military spokesman Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan.
Six scientists and security officials remain in custody in the investigation, and Khan is being guarded under tight security at his Islamabad home.
Sultan declined to say whether Khan was still being interrogated, or reveal any details of previous questioning on the scientist's ties to North Korea.
"Whenever there is a need to question somebody it can be done," Sultan said.
----
Musharraf forced scientist to retire
James Astill in Islamabad
Wednesday February 11, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,1145261,00.html
Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, has said he forced the disgraced founder of the country's nuclear programme into early retirement three years ago after suspecting him of selling nuclear secrets to other countries.
Last week Abdul Qadeer Khan accepted sole responsibility for sales of nuclear arms technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea, ending a two-month government investigation into the scandal.
He was promptly pardoned by General Musharraf, who refused to let independent investigators look further at a case in which many analysts believe senior Pakistani officials may also be implicated.
Gen Musharraf's claim that he tried to curb the proliferation three years ago, as reported in the New York Times yesterday, is a rebuff to widespread allegations that he was personally involved in the technology deals.
"We nipped the proliferation in the bud, we stopped the proliferation," Gen Musharraf said of Dr Khan's retirement from his nuclear research post. "That is the important part."
He also denied that America had urged him for months to investigate allegations of rampant nuclear proliferation, which he eventually did in November. "If they knew it earlier, they should have told us," Gen Musharraf told the paper.
"Maybe a lot of things would not have happened," he said.
According to UN officials, the nuclear black market supplied by Dr Khan was flourishing until late last year, when UN and American agents began investigating it.
----
AP: Pakistan, Nuclear Black Market Linked
February 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Network.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The black-market network that supplied nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea relied on European businessmen convicted or investigated in the 1980s for selling similar equipment to Pakistan, U.S. officials say.
The evidence developed by the United States points to at least two college friends of Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani nuclear scientist who admitted being the mastermind of the scheme, according to the officials familiar with the intelligence and to proliferation experts assisting the international effort. All spoke to The Associated Press only on condition of anonymity.
One of the friends, Henk Slebos of the Netherlands, was convicted there in 1985 of trying to sell equipment to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. Slebos' wife told the AP this week he would not talk to reporters.
Some evidence came from Khan himself and from admissions that Iran made to U.N. inspectors, while other intelligence was developed during a covert CIA operation aimed at cracking the smuggling ring, the officials said.
Khan last week admitted selling nuclear secrets and equipment. He was pardoned by Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
U.S., international and Pakistani investigations continue into the extent of Khan's network and whether it provided equipment or information to anyone outside the three countries already named. President Bush said Wednesday the United States would ``find the middlemen, the suppliers and the buyers'' and stop them.
That black market figures already suspected of smuggling in the 1980s re-emerged to play a role in Khan's effort has alarmed some weapons experts.
``This should serve as a wake-up call for the need for much more alert and aggressive efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and materials to terrorists and other states,'' said Graham Allison, a Harvard professor and former top Pentagon arms control official under President Clinton. CIA Director George Tenet said agents worked for years to penetrate Khan's nuclear network; their efforts paid off in the October seizure of a ship full of nuclear components headed for Libya. That seizure helped prompt Libya to reveal -- and renounce -- its nuclear weapons program in December.
The network Khan set up to peddle his nuclear knowledge became a comprehensive one-stop-shopping venue for countries wanting their own atomic bombs, experts from the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency and U.S. agencies have said.
From the high-speed centrifuges needed to make uranium bomb fuel to designs for the bomb itself, Khan's network provided the know-how, the materials, even 24-hour technical support if problems cropped up, diplomats and intelligence officials have said.
He even had glossy brochures -- complete with his own photo -- with color pictures and specifications of some of the centrifuge parts for sale.
The network provided Libya and Iran with equipment and know-how to make a large centrifuge plant to separate bomb fuel from ordinary uranium. Libya also got a relatively unsophisticated but workable nuclear warhead design from Pakistan, U.S. intelligence officials and diplomats allege.
The network evolved after Khan's black-market deals to supply Pakistan's nuclear program in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The enterprise started with Khan stealing centrifuge designs while he worked in the early 1970s for Urenco, a European uranium enrichment consortium. He was convicted in absentia in the Netherlands for stealing the designs but the conviction was overturned because Khan was not properly served with court papers.
Several of the European businessmen Pakistan tapped for nuclear help also are believed to have aided Libya and Iran, according to senior U.S. intelligence officials and outside nuclear experts.
One of the businessmen was Slebos, who was convicted in 1985 of trying to ship high-tech equipment to Khan's laboratory in Pakistan. The U.S. officials said evidence points to Slebos as a participant in the Khan network that helped supply Libya with nuclear weapons equipment in the 1990s.
Slebos now runs a company called Slebos Research, which was a corporate sponsor of a conference organized by Pakistan's Khan Research Laboratories last year. Dutch officials have said they intercepted five shipments to Pakistan from Slebos Research and another company in 1998.
The Slebos Research Web site says it offers ``solutions for unusual problems'' and boasts, ``We find hard to get objects for customers all over the world.''
Slebos did not respond to telephone and e-mail messages left at his firm. A woman who answered Slebos' home telephone and identified herself as his wife said Slebos would not talk to reporters.
Iran identified to the IAEA three German businessmen among five middlemen who were sources for some of its centrifuge technology. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has not made their names public.
The U.S. officials and outside experts say they included two former executives, Otto Heilingbrunner and Gotthard Lerch, of a company that made centrifuge components. German prosecutors investigated them in the 1980s for allegedly selling equipment and blueprints to Pakistan's nuclear program.
The two men worked in the 1980s for Leybold AG, which got nuclear-related designs from Urenco while bidding on a centrifuge contract for the uranium enrichment consortium. Leybold has publicly acknowledged it also sold nuclear equipment directly to Iraq and Iran in the 1980s.
Heilingbrunner, reached by telephone at his home near Cologne, said he was involved in selling aircraft engine parts to Iran in the 1980s but denied any involvement with nuclear sales.
``I have nothing to do with Libya, Iraq, North Korea or any others,'' he said.
Lerch could not be located for comment.
Another German supplier named by Iran, the late Heinz Mebus, also was a college friend of Khan. Mebus worked in the early 1980s for Albrecht Migule, who was convicted in the former West Germany of selling equipment to Pakistan to help its uranium enrichment program.
Khan's network also used at least five factories in Malaysia and other countries to make centrifuge components, the U.S. officials and outside nuclear experts said.
The most sophisticated factory was near Malaysia's capital, Kuala Lumpur, owned by Scomi Precision Engineering, or SCOPE. The majority owner of SCOPE's parent company Scomi Group is Kamaluddin Abdullah, the only son of Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
Scomi officials have said they did not know that the precision parts they made were destined for uranium centrifuges. Centrifuge parts made by SCOPE were aboard the ship bound for Libya seized in Italy last October.
The middleman for that deal was B.S.A. Tahir, a Sri Lankan based in the United Arab Emirates port of Dubai, which is a hub for Khan's network, Bush said Wednesday. Malaysian authorities have questioned Tahir, Bush said.
Tahir ordered the centrifuge parts beginning in 2001 on behalf of a company called Gulf Technical Industries LLC, which calls itself a dealer in specialty steel products. The multi-million-dollar contract made GTI Scomi's biggest customer in fiscal 2002, according to Scomi's public financial reports.
Associated Press writers Tony Czuczka in Berlin, Toby Sterling in Amsterdam and John Solomon in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- iran
IRAN, RUSSIA ARRANGE TO COMPLETE BUSHEHR
February 11, 2004
[MENL]
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/february/02_12_2.html
MOSCOW -- Iran and Russia plan to complete the last phase of the Bushehr nuclear reactor in the Persian Gulf.
Representatives from the two countries plan to meet next week to discuss a schedule to complete Bushehr. Officials said the meeting will discuss work schedule, payment schedule and technical issues.
On Sunday, a delegation of the Russian Atomic Energy Ministry will arrive in Teheran to review the Bushehr project. Officials said Bushehr is 90 percent complete and could be ready for operations in 2005.
Russian Atomic Minister Alexander Rumyantsev said the visit will clarify prospects for Russian-Iranian cooperation in nuclear energy. Bushehr has been estimated as a $1 billion project.
-------- israel
U.S. AVOIDS NPT ISSUE WITH ISRAEL
February 11, 2004
[MENL]
http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2004/february/02_12_4.html
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has avoided pressing Israel to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or related accords.
A report by the Washington-based Arms Control Association asserted that the administration has done little more than mouth rhetoric for countries to sign the NPT and related agreements. The report said that neither President George Bush nor senior aides have pressed Israel to sign the NPT or the Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty, which would place a cap on the production of plutonium and highly enriched uranium for weapons.
"Since taking office," the report said, "the current administration has not raised disarmament issues with Israel, contenting itself with continuing the practice of previous administrations of periodically tipping its hat to the importance of the universality of the NPT as a long-term goal but deferring any efforts to pressure Israel on this issue until a broader, lasting peace in the Middle East is achieved."
The report, entitled, "Israel, India, and Pakistan: Engaging the Non-NPT States in the Nonproliferation Regime," said the administration has decided to focus on efforts toward Israeli-Palestinian peace rather than a nuclear-free Middle East. The administration has embraced the view by Israel that peace in the Middle East is a precondition for eliminating nuclear weapons.
-------- korea
Building the bomb:
North Korean exiles reveal 15 year history of nuclear cheating
By Jasper Becker in Seoul
11 February 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=489988
North Korea had developed a nuclear bomb by the end of the 1980s and probably has many such weapons after pursuing its secret programme under the noses of international inspectors, according to defectors from the country.
The defectors have revealed in interviews with The Independent the extent to which the impoverished communist state cheated on its international agreements as it diverted scarce resources into the clandestine programme. They also confirm that Pakistan provided crucial help for North Korea, which yesterday described a confession by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist that he had sold nuclear technology to North Korea as "nothing but mean and groundless propaganda".
Details began to emerge in October 2002, when the United States forced North Korean officials to admit it had been running a uranium-enriching programme to build a bomb. Kim Dae Ho, who worked on the nuclear programme for 10 years until defecting in 1994, said: "I saw classified documents in 1987 in which (the then North Korean leader) Kim Il Sung said we have finally developed a highly enriched uranium programme in a self-reliant way. "Then in 1989 he announced that we finally have the centrifuge technology and are making weapons-grade uranium. He ordered the state to reward scientists with the best available gifts including Toshiba colour TVs."
Mr Kim was smuggled out of China on a Chinese fishing vessel in great secrecy. Until recently he has been forced to keep a low profile, but is now publishing a book.
Another eyewitness, a North Korean nuclear technician who left the country two years ago after working and living for years in North Korea's nuclear-research centre in Yongbyon, confirmed that the country had acquired nuclear weapons by enriching uranium and by extracting plutonium by spent fuel rods from the 5-MegaWatt (MW) experimental reactor at Yongbyon. He said: "By the end of the 1980s we had the bomb. They began hiding the research facilities in tunnels." He refused to go into details for fear of endangering relatives still in the country.
Mr Kim said North Korea extracted 26.4lbs of plutonium from fuel rods during shutdowns of the reactor in 1989, 1990 and 1991 - enough to build three nuclear warheads.
In 1994 Washington and Pyongyang signed a landmark deal under which North Korea agreed to freeze its nuclear-weapons programme in exchange for free oil deliveries and the gift of two light-water reactors worth $4.5bn (£2.4bn). But Mr Kim said: "The work intensified after 1994. It never stopped."
The two technicians are part of a growing stream of North Koreans escaping to the South and providing evidence which undermines the position of the current South Korean government, which wants to present Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, as a reliable partner, and former members of the Clinton administration, who defend the 1994 deal and are horrified by the tough line taken by the current US government.
The Bush administration is believed to have drawn on the testimony of such escapees to gather evidence that North Korea had never intended to stick to any of its promises nor treaties made to Seoul, Washington or the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA). The CIA had accumulated enough evidence of the uranium-enriching programme for James Kelly, the US Assistant Secretary of State, to take to Pyongyang in the autumn of 2002. North Korea first admitted the allegations were true butlater retracted the confession. The 1994 Agreed Framework collapsed and Pyongyang expelled the IAEA inspectors.
North Korea had relied on Soviet help until the 1970s to develop a nuclear industry, but the programme was accelerated in 1984 when Kim Jong Il took control of the government after his father, Kim Il Sung, slipped into semi-retirement.
"Kim Jong Il assigned two army regiments to exploit North Korea's natural deposits of uranium in Pyongyang province and set up a special fund called N710 to finance their work. They were given the very best of everything," Mr Kim said.
More than 30,000 soldiers were assigned to the programme which had three key sites: an underground uranium mine, a subterranean nuclear-test centre, and the 5-MW Yongbyon nuclear reactor near Mount Yaksan.
In the early 1990s, IAEA inspectors focused efforts on monitoring the 5-MW Yongbyon reactor and trying to determine if North Korea had diverted spent fuel rods to extract plutonium.
"We spent months hiding the nuclear processing plant from the IAEA inspectors. The most difficult thing was preventing the release of tell-tale krypton into the atmosphere," Mr Kim said.
Other defectors said North Korea became convinced from the 1991 Gulf war that the US might launch a pre-emptive strike against its nuclear facilities after Saddam Hussein was found to be much closer to building a bomb than suspected. North Korea did everything it could to fortify or hide its facilities.
Although North Korea's leadership claimed that the achievements were the fruits of its self-reliant Juche philosophy, Mr Kim said the uranium-enrichment programme benefited from Chinese know-how and materials. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Pyongyang also recruited large numbers of unemployed former Soviet and East German weapons experts.
Although Mr Kim said he knew little about Pakistan's help, North Korea might not have succeeded without it. In the early 1980s the two countries made a deal under which North Korea delivered medium-range missiles to Pakistan so it could threaten India. In return, Pakistan provided North Korea with the blueprints stolen by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear programme, when he worked in Europe in the 1970s.
----
N. Korea lists demands for a nuclear freeze
February 11, 2004
By Jae-suk Yoo
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040210-115645-4341r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea said yesterday that it has received support from China for its proposal to freeze its nuclear weapons programs in return for free oil and other economic concessions from the United States.
China signaled its support at a meeting in Beijing between North Korea's vice foreign minister, Kim Kye Gwan, and top Chinese officials including Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing. The Chinese side "recognized the rationality" of Pyongyang's proposal to help end the nuclear dispute, a North Korean foreign ministry spokesman told KCNA.
The United States, North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia are scheduled to begin talks on Feb. 25 over U.S. demands that North Korea dismantle its nuclear weapons programs in a "complete, irreversible and verifiable manner."
North Korea has proposed to freeze all its nuclear activities as a first step to resolving the nuclear dispute if the United States provides free oil shipments, lifts economic sanctions and removes the communist country from its list of countries that sponsor terrorism.
The Bush administration insists that North Korea begin dismantling - not just feezing - its nuclear programs before it makes any concessions.
China cautioned against expecting a swift resolution of the standoff, saying all sides should have "realistic" expectations about the upcoming talks. "The question is a very complicated one ... and we have different views about the issue," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue said yesterday.
She added that the sides "should not expect to solve the issue within one or two rounds of talks."
Earlier yesterday, North Korea denied receiving nuclear weapons technology from Pakistan, and accused the United States of spreading false rumors. "This is nothing but a mean and groundless propaganda," a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman told KCNA.
Meanwhile, Radio Free Asia reported yesterday that a man who leaked documents from a North Korean prison camp detailing chemical weapons and gas experiments on political prisoners - including women and children - has been arrested by Chinese authorities after escaping across the border with his family.
"We have pleaded with the American authorities, but we have been disappointed," said South Korean human rights activist Kim Sang-hun, who is conducting an international campaign to pressure Chinese authorities to free the North Korean man and his family.
"These people will be dragged to North Korea, [where] they will face death. This person will be executed, or punished," Mr. Kim said.
A State Department spokesman in Washington declined to comment, saying U.S. officials here were not aware of the arrest.
Mr. Kim did not name the man nor did he give details of the family, all of whom were arrested in China recently.
--------
North Korea Must Include Uranium in Talks, South Envoy Says
February 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea must be prepared to discuss its uranium-based nuclear arms program in negotiations this month with the United States and neighboring countries, South Korea's ambassador to Washington said on Wednesday.
Ambassador Han Sung-joo told reporters in Seoul that the confession by Pakistan's top nuclear scientist that he had sold nuclear arms technology to Pyongyang had ``further confirmed'' the existence of the North's highly enriched uranium program.
Pyongyang said Tuesday that statements by the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, that he had sold nuclear secrets to North Korea, Libya and Iran were a ``sheer lie'' cooked up by the United States to justify an invasion.
Analysts said the combative North Korean reaction was designed to prevent discussion of the issue in negotiations aimed at ending a crisis that erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said that Pyongyang had admitted to pursuing an HEU program.
Pyongyang has since denied it had made such an admission. But Han said such denials wouldn't fly when North Korea sits down with the United States, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia for a second round of six-party talks beginning on February 25.
``Even among U.S. domestic critics of the Bush administration, nobody who has seen the evidence doubts that North Korea has an HEU (highly enriched uranium) program,'' Han said in a briefing with reporters.
``Previous intelligence, what has emerged from Pakistan and other information are more than enough to outweigh (doubts about U.S. intelligence) in the Kay Report,'' he said. The Kay Report said that the United States went to war in Iraq based on faulty intelligence about that country's weapons of mass destruction.
The HEU program makes North Korea's offer to freeze its plutonium-based nuclear program in exchange for compensation unacceptable to the South Korea, the United States and Japan, Han said.
``From the point of view of South Korea, the United States and Japan, North Korea has in the past already agreed to do that, and it will be difficult to compensate them for it,'' he said.
North Korea had frozen its plutonium-based program under a bilateral agreement with the United States in 1994 in exchange for energy aid. That deal unraveled last year and North Korea says it has reprocessed more plutonium for a ``nuclear deterrent.''
Dismantling the plutonium program, the HEU program and any atomic bombs North Korea created before the 1994 freeze was the ultimate goal of the United States and its allies, Han said.
The U.S. has said a verifiable commitment by North Korea to end all those programs would be met by ``corresponding measures,'' include assurances against an American attack and measures to address the North's energy and economic problems.
``The U.S. stance is not that no compensation will be offered until the programs are entirely dismantled, but that North Korea will get aid from the parties at the six-way talks and other countries when it confirms it will do that and begins that process,'' the ambassador said.
The six countries met in Beijing last August but failed to go beyond stating their respective positions in the dispute.
-------- mideast
Libya decided 10 years ago against developing WMD, Foreign Minister says
By Mary Dejevsky
UK Independent
11 February 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=490047
Libya decided more than 10 years ago not to develop any weapons of mass destruction, Abdul Rahman Shalgam, its Foreign Minister said yesterday.
His appeared to contradict the co-ordinated announcements in London, Washington and Tripoli last December that Libya was renouncing its WMDs and would comply with international inspection regimes. Despite the reports that Libya would destroy its illegal weapons and programmes, it was not clear then how advanced Libya's programmes were and whether it had actual weapons to destroy.
The first doubts were cast by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, who said after visiting Tripoli that Libya was several years from developing a nuclear capability. Yesterday Mr Shalgam said it was not true that Libya had made "concessions". This was a view put about by "poisonous" pens in the Arab media. Libya, he said, "reviewed a number of issues, including programmes and equipment called weapons of mass destruction.
"We had the equipment, we had the material and the know-how and the scientists. But we never decided to produce such weapons. To have flour, water and fire does not mean that you have bread."
Libya's renunciation of such weapons, he said, went back to at least 1992, since when it had been in periodic talks with the US, and was well-documented. Mr Shalgam insisted it was Libya that had taken the initiative in renouncing its weapons programmes and it would be subject not to "inspections" but to "verification".
He admitted Libya had possessed "some equipment" that violated the non-proliferation agreement, but this had already been given up to the IAEA. Any suggestion that Libya had been scared into making concessions by the US and British use of force in Iraq had been put about by "malevolent journalists". Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, asked whether the war in Iraq was seen by the British Government as responsible for Libya's apparent change of policy on its weapons, pointed out that the rapprochement with Libya had begun in the late Nineties.
The "breakthrough" had come with the visit of the Foreign Office minister, Mike O'Brien, to Tripoli 18 months ago, "a good while before military action was contemplated in respect of Iraq". But, he insisted, he would not "claim any crude connection ... between military action in Iraq and what has happened in Iraq and in Libya".
It was rather, he said, that the removal of Saddam Hussein in Iraq had made for a "more secure environment" in the region and this, in turn, could have "eased" the delicate negotiations with Libya.
--------
Bush Official: N. Korea Buys Nuke Info
February 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-North-Korea.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Companies across Europe and Asia are providing North Korea with vital technology for its nuclear weapons program, probably without the knowledge of their governments, a senior Bush administration official said Wednesday.
The equipment is being used for a uranium centrifuge system, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The official said that equipment includes rotors -- spinning tubes in which uranium gas is separated.
Negotiations that the Bush administration hopes will end the program are due to resume Feb. 25 in Beijing.
The administration estimates North Korea has produced at least one nuclear weapon and could turn out several more if the program is not halted.
In the meantime, Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan has disclosed he ran a black market operation that provided weapons technology to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
However, North Korea has been shopping worldwide, beyond Pakistan, and making a great effort to cover up its quest for nuclear weapons technology, the official said.
Many companies in Europe and Asia have responded positively, providing the equipment, the official said.
He declined to identify the countries where the companies are located.
Kahn's operation, meanwhile, probably stretches beyond North Korea, Iran and Libya, he said.
Under an arrangement worked out with the United States, the amnesty initially given to the scientist by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was made on condition that Kahn would provide more information about the network, the official said.
That gives Kahn an incentive to reveal more. Otherwise, he could be prosecuted, the official said.
The Bush administration has known about Kahn's operation for three years, but there could be parts of it still unknown to the United States, the official said.
Musharraf said this week that the administration first provided evidence to his government last November.
But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Tuesday that apart from general concerns, American officials have turned over ``pieces of information'' to Pakistan for some time.
-------- russia
Russia cites U.S. action for war exercises
General says maneuvers are response to American nuclear development plan
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Compiled by Our Staff From Dispatches AP, Reuters
http://www.iht.com/articles/129040.html
MOSCOW A huge Russian military exercise that will involve numerous launches of ballistic missiles and flights of strategic bombers is not aimed against the United States but reflects Moscow's concerns about U.S. plans to develop new types of nuclear weapons, a top general said Tuesday.
The exercise, which has been under way since late January at the headquarters level, will involve launches of an unspecified number of sea-and ground-based ballistic missiles and take Russian strategic bombers to the air, said Colonel-General Yuri Baluyevsky, the first deputy chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces.
Baluyevsky dismissed media reports that the exercise would closely resemble Soviet-era simulations of an all-out nuclear war with the United States, saying that it was not directed against any specific country.
"The enemy is imaginary," Baluyevsky said at a news conference. "There is no hint whatsoever that the enemy is the United States, or any other country. The United States holds a similar exercise each year and no one is making a fuss about it."
At the same time, Baluyevsky said that the exercise was prompted in part by Russia's concern about the development of low-yield nuclear weapons in the United States, which he described as destabilizing.
"They are trying to make nuclear weapons an instrument of solving military tasks, lower the threshold of nuclear weapons use," Baluyevsky said. "Shouldn't we react to that, at least on the headquarters level? I'm sure that we should and we are doing that."
The maneuvers will also help develop weapons systems "capable of providing an asymmetric answer to existing and prospective weapons systems, including missile defense," Baluyevsky said.
Moscow informed the U.S. government in advance of the exercise, in keeping with its arms control treaty obligations, Baluyevsky said, adding that Russia was not trying to scare anyone. "It's not saber-rattling," he said. "It's not aimed at scaring our strategic partners, the United States and NATO. We are doing what the military is intended for: getting ready for solving tasks in any possible conflict."
He dismissed media reports that Russian strategic bombers would test-fire missiles over the North Atlantic as part of the exercise, but refused to disclose their flight routes.
During the cold war, Soviet bombers routinely flew over the northern Atlantic on training missions that imitated a nuclear attack on the United States.
Russia last sent its bombers there in 1999, after its relations with the United States had worsened sharply over the NATO air campaign against the former Yugoslavia.
U.S.-Russian ties have been bolstered by President Vladimir Putin's support for Washington after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, but soured again lately over Moscow's opposition to the war in Iraq and U.S. concerns about Kremlin backsliding on democracy and its pressuring other ex-Soviet nations.
Baluyevsky dismissed media assertions that the exercise was a political show aimed at bolstering Putin's popularity in the run-up to the March 14 presidential election, which the president is expected to win easily.
"This is neither the opening of the election campaign nor a demonstration of our nuclear fist to the entire world," Baluyevsky said.
Baluyevsky also said the exercise would reassure NATO that Russia's nuclear arsenal was in safe hands. "In April 2004 we will hold an exercise in the north to show the safety of stored nuclear arms," he said.
Russia has consistently denied Western suggestions that the instability of the early post-Soviet years had made its huge nuclear arsenals inherited from the Soviet Union easy prey for unstable states or terrorist networks.
An Arabic newspaper said Sunday that some ex-Soviet tactical nuclear warheads, which Ukraine should have handed over to Russia after becoming a nuclear-free state, had got into the hands of Al Qaeda.
Baluyevsky echoed an earlier Ukrainian denial of the report. "All weapons deployed in Ukraine were taken away to Russia. I am not aware of any event in which a single warhead went missing," he said. "All nuclear warheads are in place, and not a single warhead now belonging to Russia has been sold or stolen." (AP, Reuters)
-------- space
Los Alamos Hopes To Lead New Era Of Nuclear Space Tranportion With Jovian Mission
Feb 11, 2004
Space Daily
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nuclearspace-04a.html
Albuquerque - A planned U.S. mission to investigate three ice-covered moons of Jupiter will demand fast-paced research, fabrication and realistic non-nuclear testing of a prototype nuclear reactor within two years, says a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist.
The roots of this build and test effort have been under way at Los Alamos since the mid-1990s, said David Poston, leader of the Space Fission Power Team in Los Alamos' Nuclear Design and Risk Analysis Group.
NASA proposes using use electrical ion propulsion powered by a nuclear reactor for its Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter, an element of Project Prometheus, which is scheduled for launch after 2011. However, the United States hasn't flown a space fission system since 1965.
Poston discussed technical requirements for such a fission reactor in two presentations Monday at the Space Technology and Applications International Forum in Albuquerque. Los Alamos is a co-sponsor of the forum. Poston discussed "The Impact of Core Cooling Technology Options on JIMO Reactor Designs" and "The Impact of Power and Lifetime Requirements on JIMO Reactor Designs."
Los Alamos is leading reactor design for the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter mission, which would orbit Callisto, Ganymede and Europa to study their makeup, possible vast oceans beneath the ice, their history and potential for sustaining life.
Los Alamos is responsible for such key reactor technologies as nuclear fuel, beryllium components, heat pipes and diagnostic instruments, as well as nuclear criticality testing of development and flight reactors.
"Nuclear power has long been recognized as an enabling technology for exploring and expanding into space, and fission reactors offer essentially limitless power and propulsion capabilities," Poston said.
The JIMO mission demands a safe, low-mass, high-temperature reactor that can be developed and qualified quickly, can operate reliably in the harsh environment of space for more than a decade, and can meet a wide range of mission and spacecraft requirements, he said.
A science mission to explore the icy Jovian moons will require kilowatts of electrical power for the scientific payloads and up to 100 kilowatts of electricity for ion propulsion to propel the spacecraft to Jupiter, maneuver within the Jovian system and allow rendezvous with the moons. The reactor also must power advanced science experiments and systems to send data to Earth at high rates.
Despite the lack of U.S. space reactor research in recent decades, Los Alamos has continued to examine technologies and concepts for a rapid and affordable development program. Working with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, Los Alamos has resolved many hardware issues at the component and system level.
Los Alamos and NASA-Marshall researchers, working with colleagues from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories, have built successively more powerful nuclear electric propulsion reactor components, including a 30-kilowatt reactor core, one-third of a 100-kilowatt system (core plus heat exchanger) and a single module suitable for a 500-kilowatt reactor core. Extensive non-nuclear testing of these and other components continues.
Most researchers have agreed on the best fuels and reactor construction materials for the proposed fast-spectrum, externally controlled JIMO reactor. The major design choice that remains is how best to transport power from the reactor core to the power conversion system.
Los Alamos and NASA are examining three primary options for core cooling: pumped liquid-metal sodium or lithium; sodium or lithium liquid metal heat pipes; and inert helium or helium-xenon gas. Many of these options have been tested for decades for terrestrial reactors, but the reactor for JIMO will be unique, Poston said.
"The power and lifetime potential of space fission reactors is almost limitless when compared to the requirements of future NASA missions," Poston said.
"However, it is clear that reactor performance and technical risks are tightly coupled to power and lifetime requirements, so we must thoroughly understand these technical risks before developing the first system. For example, there are fewer technical and development challenges for a 500-kilowatt-thermal reactor than a 1,000-kilowatt-thermal reactor.
"The first step needs to be small enough to ensure success and to put into place the experience, expertise and infrastructure necessary for more advanced systems," Poston concluded.
"After that, we can move on to the systems needed for truly ambitious space exploration, such as multi-megawatt nuclear electric propulsion or nuclear thermal rockets. Our near-term efforts must be focused on making the first mission succeed."
Los Alamos National Laboratory is operated by the University of California for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) of the U.S. Department of Energy and works in partnership with NNSA's Sandia and Lawrence Livermore national laboratories to support NNSA in its mission.
Los Alamos develops and applies science and technology to ensure the safety and reliability of the U.S. nuclear deterrent; reduce the threat of weapons of mass destruction, proliferation and terrorism; and solve national problems in defense, energy, environment and infrastructure.
-------- treaties
EU urges India, Israel, Pakistan to sign nuclear treaty
STRASBOURG (AFP)
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040211131553.j0xxw8kz.html
The European Union's Irish presidency Wednesday urged India, Israel and Pakistan to sign "unconditionally" the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).
Addressing the European Parliament, Irish Europe Minister Dick Roche welcomed the accession to the treaty by Cuba and East Timor in the past two years, which he said brought it closer to covering the whole world.
"However, there are three countries, India, Israel and Pakistan, that remain outside the regime and we continue to call upon them to accede unconditionally to the NPT as non-nuclear weapon states," he said.
"The EU has repeatedly stated that the NPT is the cornerstone of the global non-proliferation regime and the essential foundation for the pursuit of nuclear disarmament," Roche added.
EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten expressed concern at last week's admission by the father of Pakistan's nuclear programme, A.Q. Khan, of his involvement in black-market operations trading in nuclear information.
"Recent revelations on the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea have highlighted the importance of maintaining and strengthening effective controls," he told the Strasbourg assembly.
The Irish minister also restated the commitment of the EU, which includes nuclear powers Britain and France, to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT).
He said the EU urged "all states with nuclear capability to abide by a moratorium on nuclear test explosions or any other nuclear explosions and refrain from any actions which are contrary to the CTBT".
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Bush to Outline Plan for Limiting Nuclear Arms
Curbs on Legal Materials Could Stir Controversy
By Peter Slevin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30486-2004Feb10_2.html
President Bush intends to lay out a broad strategy today to stop the spread of nuclear weapons by cracking down on a burgeoning black market and denying sales of some legal equipment to countries that do not submit to close international supervision, a senior administration official said.
In a speech that will detail the U.S.-led pursuit of the nuclear supply network run by Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan, Bush will press for major changes in 30-year-old rules governing the delivery and verification of nuclear technology, the official said.
Bush will try to prevent more states from becoming able to manufacture weapons-grade material by calling on governments to block transfers of nuclear components to nations that are not already equipped with enrichment and reprocessing facilities. The move would go against the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which permits enrichment for peaceful purposes.
He will propose that countries professing a need for nuclear reactor fuel be able to buy it in a "reliable and cost-effective way," discouraging them from perfecting weapons programs under the guise of developing peaceful nuclear power, the official said.
Bush, in his speech to the National Defense University, intends to declare that aspiring nuclear weapons states face a stark choice illustrated by recent history. They can choose the path of Libya's Moammar Gaddafi, who agreed to end his nuclear weapons program in December in return for assurances of economic investment and diplomatic engagement. Or they can persist and endure the isolation faced by North Korea or the regime change imposed on Iraq.
Bush also intends to propose changes to the U.N. nuclear watchdog organization. The administration did not consult with the International Atomic Energy Agency's director general, Mohamed ElBaradei, who has been publicly discussing his own reform proposals for months.
"Quite frankly, some of these proposals will be unsettling to some," said the U.S. official, who said ElBaradei will be briefed before Bush's speech.
Bush's proposals tap into growing international worries about the availability of nuclear technology and the determination of some governments -- and perhaps terrorist organizations -- to develop atomic weapons. But many of Bush's steps may prove difficult to implement.
The United States does not have the power to make many of the changes alone. A number of the proposals depend on voluntary action by other countries. Changes at the IAEA would require considerable consensus, something lacking in recent relations between the Bush administration and the United Nations.
Bush wants to investigate and imprison nuclear suppliers and distributors, which would require countries to draft laws defining the crime. Many of the components essential to manufacturing weapons-grade fissile material have legal uses and little consensus exists on how to proceed.
Bush's national security staff has long been considering a speech on proliferation, seen by the administration as one of its most vexing international challenges.
Most of his Democratic presidential challengers have charged Bush with botching the proliferation account, arguing that he has harmed U.S. security by devoting too much energy to Iraq and too little to North Korea, Iran and other dangers of weapons proliferation.
Recent revelations of a global network that reached Pakistan, Libya and Iran have forced a reassessment of counter-proliferation tactics and the nuclear threat itself.
The world of nuclear nonproliferation has moved far beyond Cold War arms races, during which the superpowers targeted one another with huge missiles as satellites tracked every move.
One challenge is to defeat shadowy networks of traders who have begun procuring, packaging and selling portable nuclear parts and expertise. Another is to solve the riddles of unpredictable realms such as North Korea, which evicted international inspectors in 2002 and declared its determination to perfect its nuclear program.
"You've got an enormously unsettling dimension that's now unfolding. It's a much more elusive target," said Leonard S. Spector, director of the Washington office of the Center for Nonproliferation Studies. "The models are drug lords and organized crime. You suppress them in one area and they show up somewhere else."
Information from Libya and Iran shows that "any country with a decent industrial infrastructure is able to develop an enrichment capacity," ElBaradei said in an interview before learning of Bush's speech.
U.S. officials have already been pressing countries to tighten their export rules and prosecute violators, while working to gather a network of countries prepared to track and stop manufacturers, agents and shippers. So far, 11 nations have joined the U.S.-led Proliferation Security Initiative, an agreement to stop and search vessels suspected of carrying banned weapons or nuclear technology.
Bush will tout the advantages of the interdiction project in his speech today, urging an increase in the number of participants and an expansion of its mission, the senior official said.
"We need very aggressive law enforcement," the official said, likening the approach to the fight against extremist networks. "We need to seize material. We need to seize assets. We need to prosecute those who are participating in this criminal behavior."
In his speech, Bush will describe U.S. efforts to put Khan and his supply network out of business. U.S. and European authorities say the network supplied virtually all of Libya's nascent nuclear program, including bomb designs.
Bush will describe the network's "reach, the members, the experts, the agents, the money men and the fact that we followed their transactions, monitored their travel, recorded their conversations and penetrated their operations."
Turning to the IAEA, Bush will argue for new rules designed to make it easier to monitor prospective nuclear programs and to penalize countries that seek to develop an illicit nuclear capability, the official said.
Any country that wants to purchase dual-use equipment that could be applied to a nuclear program would first have to sign the "Additional Protocol" to the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The protocol, recently signed by Iran, permits more intrusive international inspections. ElBaradei, too, has suggested that the protocol become the norm. A more controversial Bush proposal would establish a new special IAEA committee to monitor compliance.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- wisconsin
Wisconsin may lift ban on nuclear plant construction
11 February 2004
Power Engineering Magazine
http://pepei.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?Section=ONART&Category=INDUS&PUBLICATION_ID=6&ARTICLE_ID=198423
A state ban on construction of new nuclear plants would be rescinded under a measure approved Tuesday by the state Assembly Energy and Utilities Committee.
The committee voted 9-3 in favour of the bill proposed by Rep. Michael Huebsch (R-West Salem) that would overturn the 21-year-old moratorium.
The ban on power plant construction is in place until a permanent site for spent nuclear fuel is available. Huebsch says the projected opening of the Yucca Mountain storage facility in Nevada in 2010 would satisfy that requirement.
Huebsch believes the ban should be reversed so that discussion about building a new nuclear plant could begin to help address the state's energy needs.
"Even if we lifted the moratorium tomorrow, we would still have years of planning ahead," Huebsch said. "We need to anticipate that [the moratorium] is going to go and get nuclear back on the table."
Rep. Scott Jensen (R-Waukesha), chairman of the committee, said the bi-partisan passage of the bill at this stage could be an indicator that the bill would be passed by the full Assembly.
The bill's opponents believe other energy sources such as natural gas, clean burning coal and renewable energy sources should be developed instead.
-------- us politics
Bush's Nuclear Proposal: Hypocrisy Charged
From: "David Broatch" <davidbroatch@xtra.co.nz>
Institute for Public Accuracy
915 National Press Building,
Washington, D.C. 20045
(202) 347-0020
http://www.accuracy.org
ipa@accuracy.org
--
Bush's Nuclear Proposal: Hypocrisy Charged
JOHN BURROUGHS,
(212) 818-1861, cell: (917) 439-4585,
johnburroughs@lcnp.org
http://www.lcnp.org
For Release
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
Burroughs is executive director of the New York-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy. He said this afternoon: "While Bush proposes ad hoc measures to limit the capacity of other countries to produce nuclear materials usable in reactors or bombs, his administration has yet to agree to start negotiations on a verified treaty (the Fissile Materials Cutoff Treaty) that would bar all countries, including the United States, from their production for weapons purposes. All other major countries -- including China -- are ready to work on establishing such a ban.... In the 2005 budget he just proposed to Congress, spending would increase on planning for a facility to produce plutonium triggers for warheads..."
JACQUELINE CABASSO, (510) 839-5877, (510) 306-0119, wslf@earthlink.net, http://www.wslfweb.org
Cabasso is executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation and co-author of the report "Nuclear Weapons in a Changed World." She said today: "The central bargain of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty is indeed flawed. Under Article IV of the treaty, in exchange for giving up the right to possess nuclear weapons, the nonnuclear weapon states were promised an 'inalienable right' to develop nuclear technology for 'peaceful' purposes. In reality, that means that any country with a civilian nuclear power program has the potential to develop nuclear weapons. There are at least 44 of those countries -- not three, as Mr. Bush would have us believe. Only, at the moment, most of those countries, including our World War II enemies Japan and Germany, are our friends. Even more importantly, Article VI of the NPT requires the U.S., Russia, France, China and the U.K. to negotiate in good faith the total elimination of their nuclear arsenals...."
GREG PALAST, (212) 505-5566, greg@gregpalast.com http://www.gregpalast.com
In 2001, the BBC broadcast an expose co-investigated by Palast which reported that Bush's National Security Agency effectively stymied the probe of Khan Research Laboratories.
ARJUN MAKHIJANI, (301) 270-5500, arjun@ieer.org http://www.ieer.org
President of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, Makhijani said today: "President Bush said this afternoon that he wants North Korea to completely dismantle its nuclear weapons program; that he wants governments to stop making nuclear weapons 'under false pretenses.' But he seeks to maintain a huge U.S. arsenal and build new weapons. The consistent assertion by the United States that it needs nuclear weapons for its security and that it retains the prerogative to use them against any country, including non-nuclear states, is in violation of commitments given to them under the Nonproliferation Treaty. These U.S. policies have been a principal part of creating the desire, the demand for nuclear weapons...."
FELICE COHEN-JOPPA, (520) 323-8697, freevanunu@mindspring.com, http://www.nonviolence.org/vanunu http://www.msnbc.com/news/wld/graphics/strategic_israel_dw.htm
Cohen-Joppa is the coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Free Mordechai Vanunu. She said today: "How can Bush pretend to seriously address nuclear weapons proliferation while the U.S. government continues to support the fiction that Israel does not have a massive nuclear arsenal? Israel's nuclear weapons have driven much of the proliferation problem in the Mideast. All the facts need to be on the table. Unfortunately Mordechai Vanunu -- the whistleblower who revealed the scale of Israel's nuclear capacity in 1986 -- has been silenced in an Israeli jail for 17 years, most of it in solitary confinement. He is scheduled for release on April 21, 2004, but there are moves in Israel to keep him imprisoned even longer, or to find some way of keeping him muzzled."
For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy: Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020 or (202) 421-6858; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167
----
Bush to Propose Fuel Ban to End Spread of A-Bombs
By DAVID E. SANGER
February 11, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/11CND-PREX.html?hp
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 - President Bush is to announce a new proposal today to limit the number of nations allowed to produce nuclear fuel, senior administration officials said on Tuesday. He will declare that the global network in nuclear goods set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, developer of Pakistan's bomb, exposed huge gaps in accords to stop the spread of nuclear weapons technology, they added.
In an afternoon speech at the National Defense University, they said, Mr. Bush will call for a re-examination of what one official called the "basic bargain" underlying the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty: that those states that promise not to pursue nuclear weapons will receive help in producing nuclear fuel for power generation.
Iran admitted last year that it had cheated on that agreement for 18 years, secretly building uranium enrichment facilities, though the country denied that it intended to produce weapons. North Korea abandoned the treaty last year and declared it was making nuclear arms.
Dr. Khan's network secretly sold equipment to both countries, and to Libya, American and Pakistani officials have said.
In a briefing on Tuesday evening, one administration official said Iran and North Korea were examples of "regimes which have cynically exploited loopholes in the existing treaty" to build up their capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear fuel.
While proliferation experts have long agreed that the treaty is flawed, Mr. Bush's proposal is bound to raise protests from developing nations, which say the United States and, by extension, the other declared nuclear states Britain, France, Russia and China are trying to extend their rights to produce weapons while denying that status to other states.
In addition to those five, Israel, India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons, and North Korea is believed by American intelligence agencies to have at least two and perhaps several more.
Israel is a particularly difficult case for the United States because it has never declared its nuclear ability and has never signed the nonproliferation treaty. Its Arab neighbors and Pakistan have said that any reopening of nuclear regulation should start with forcing Israel to sign the treaty.
In the briefing, the official also said Mr. Bush would discuss for the first time the details of how Dr. Khan's network operated, being careful to praise President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan and to portray Dr. Khan, the former head of Khan Research Laboratories, as a rogue scientist.
Another administration official said Mr. Bush would cast the Khan case as a victory for American intelligence operations, describing "how we uncovered the reach of the network, how we identified the key individuals, how we followed the key transactions, and how we monitored the movement of material and recorded conversation and penetrated operations."
The director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, made a similar case last week, and administration officials clearly hope the story of the intelligence surrounding the Khan network will be a counterpoint to criticisms of how Iraq's weapons program was misjudged.
The national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was asked today in an interview on the NBC "Today" show whether the White House could explain how General Musharraf could have pardoned Dr. Khan after he admitted giving nuclear secrets to North Korea, Iran and Libya.
"What President Musharraf has done is to give us the opportunity now to wrap up and to destroy what is one of the most active networks, the most active as we know it today, of this kind of shadowy underworld of nuclear entrepreneurs who are out there selling knowledge and expertise on the black market," Ms. Rice said.
"And because of Pakistan's cooperation, because of Pakistan's action based on information that they've been receiving from a number of sources, and because of very good intelligence work by the United States, Great Britain and others, we really now have a chance to wrap up this group. And that's the most important thing."
She said that the administration was pleased that General Musharraf had been willing to "go this far."
"We have to understand that A.Q. Khan was a revered figure in Pakistan, extremely revered figure," she said. "Nonetheless, President Musharraf has taken these steps, and we're going to be able to make progress in an area that has been shadowy and very difficult to make progress in the past."
Mr. Bush is also to identify B. S. A. Tahir, a Sri Lanka-born trader who moved to Dubai as a child, as the "other major node" in the Khan network.
It was Mr. Tahir, who divides his time between Kuala Lumpur and Dubai, who negotiated with a Malaysian company called Scomi to produce parts for high-speed centrifuges, which enrich uranium, Scomi officials have said. It was the interception of one such shipment to Libya in October that allowed American intelligence officials to present Pakistan with evidence about Dr. Khan.
In recent days, efforts to reach Mr. Tahir in Malaysia have been unsuccessful. He owns 49 percent of a computer company, S.M.B. Computers, in Dubai, according to Dubai government documents. Scomi officials have identified him as one of the men who negotiated the deal under which they produced the parts.
Mr. Bush's speech will mark the first time Mr. Tahir has been publicly identified by the United States as a major player, though intelligence officials have mentioned, on background, what they say was his central role in arranging the transfer of centrifuge components from Malaysia to Dubai and on to Libya.
Mr. Bush's proposals appear to be intended to crack down on states like North Korea and Iran without reopening negotiations that could limit the United States' own ability to produce nuclear fuel for weapons and power, or stop allies like Japan from producing such fuel for power plants. China says Japan's program could be diverted to weapons.
He is expected to implicitly reject, for example, an alternative proposal by the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, for an international organization to control the production of all nuclear fuel and how it is used.
The Bush administration has already, in effect, dismissed that approach as unworkable, in part, experts say, because it would limit Washington's ability to produce fuel for its nuclear arsenal.
Mr. Bush's insistence on moving ahead with research on a new class of so-called bunker-busting nuclear weapons has been cited by his opponents including many in Europe as an example of a double standard in which he seeks to stop other states from building weapons while continuing to improve the American arsenal.
The official also said in the briefing that Mr. Bush would propose expanding the Nunn-Lugar program, in which Congress appropriates funds to destroy weapons and retrain former Soviet weapons experts.
His plan would extend the program to scientists in other nations, including Iraq. But Mr. Bush will propose no new financing, and no expansion of the program is included in the budget he sent to Congress last week. Democrats say the existing program is underfinanced.
Mr. Bush will also call for an expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative, a loose affiliation of countries, organized by the United States, to intercept unconventional weapons. The seizure of the Libyan shipment in October was the biggest single success, though other equipment has been seized on the way to North Korea.
In the briefing, the administration official said Mr. Bush would propose several changes to the internal operations of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency, which has had rocky relations with the Bush administration over Iraq, did not know that Mr. Bush planned to speak on nonproliferation until informed by a reporter on Tuesday.
The official said Mr. Bush would call for a new committee within the agency to monitor compliance with "safeguards" agreements, which allow inspection where nuclear fuel or weapons work may be conducted. He will also call on the agency's board to bar from it any country under investigation. Iran was a board member throughout a confrontation last year over allowing full inspections of its facilities.
----
TEXT Bush's Speech on the Spread of Nuclear Weapons
February 11, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/10WEB-PTEX.html
Following is the transcript from President Bush's speech at the National Defense University on Wednesday, as transcribed by Federal News Service Inc.
PRESIDENT BUSH: Thank you all. Be seated, please.
Thanks for the warm welcome. I'm honored to visit the National Defense University.
For nearly a century the scholars and students here have helped to prepare America for the changing threats to our national security. Today, the men and women of our National Defense University are helping to frame the strategies through which we are fighting and winning the war on terror.
Your Center for Counterproliferation Research and your other institution colleges are providing vital insight into the dangers of a new era. I want to thank each one of you for devoting your talents and your energy to the service of our great nation.
I want to thank General Michael Dunn for inviting me here. I used to jog by this facility on a regular basis, then my age kicked in. I appreciate Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger from Germany -- Ambassador, thank you for being here today.
I see my friend George Schultz, a distinguished public servant and true patriot with us. George, thank you for coming. And Charlotte (sp), it's good to see you.
I'm so honored that Dick Lugar is here with us today. Senator, I appreciate you taking time and thanks for bringing Senator Saxby Chambliss with you as well.
I appreciate the veterans who are here and those on active duty. Thanks for letting me come back.
On September the 11th, 2001, America and the world witnessed a new kind of war. We saw the great harm that a stateless network could inflict upon our country -- killers, armed with box cutters, mace and 19 airline tickets. Those attacks also raised the prospect of even worse dangers, of other weapons in the hands of other men.
The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of secret and sudden attack with chemical or biological or radiological or nuclear weapons.
In the past, enemies of America required massed armies and great navies, powerful air forces to put our nation, our people, our friends at risk. In the Cold War, Americans lived under the threat of weapons of mass destruction, but believed that deterrence made those weapons a last resort. What has changed in the 21st century is that in the hands of terrorists, weapons of mass destruction would be a first resort, the preferred means to further their ideology of suicide and random murder. These terrible weapons are becoming easier to acquire, build, hide and transport. Armed with a single vial of a biological agent or a single nuclear weapon, small groups of fanatics or failing states could gain the power to threaten great nations, threaten the world peace.
America and the entire civilized world will face this threat for decades to come. We must confront the danger with open eyes and unbending purpose. I made clear to all the policy of this nation: America will not permit terrorists and dangerous regimes to threaten us with the world's most deadly weapons. Meeting this duty has required changes in thinking and strategy. Doctrines designed to contain empires, deter aggressive states and defeat massed armies cannot fully protect us from this new threat.
America faces the possibility of catastrophic attack from ballistic weapons armed with weapons of mass destruction. So that is why we are developing and deploying missile defenses to guard our people. The best intelligence is necessary to win the war on terror and to stop proliferation. So that is why I have established a commission that will examine our intelligence capabilities and recommend ways to improve and adapt them to detect new and emerging threats.
We're determined to confront those threats at the source. We will stop these weapons from being acquired or built. We'll block them from being transferred. We'll prevent them from ever being used.
One source of these weapons is dangerous and secretive regimes that build weapons of mass destruction to intimidate their neighbors and force their influence upon the world. These nations pose different challenges. They require different strategies.
The former dictator of Iraq possessed and used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. For 12 years he defied the will of the international community. He refused to disarm or account for his illegal weapons and programs. He doubted our resolve to enforce our word. And now he sits in a prison cell while his country moves toward a democratic future.
To Iraq's east, the government of Iran is unwilling to abandon a uranium-enrichment program capable of producing material for nuclear weapons. The United States is working with our allies and the International Atomic Energy Agency to ensure that Iran meets its commitments and does not develop nuclear weapons. In the Pacific -- (applause). In the Pacific, North Korea has defied the world, has tested long-range ballistic missiles, admitted its possession of nuclear weapons and now threatens to build more. Together with our partners in Asia, America is insisting that North Korea completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear programs.
America has consistently brought these threats to the attention of international organizations. We're using every means of diplomacy to answer them. As for my part, I will continue to speak clearly on these threats. I will continue to call upon the world to confront these dangers and to end them.
In recent years, another path of proliferation has become clear as well. America and other nations are learning more about black market operatives who deal in equipment and expertise related to weapons of mass destruction. These dealers are motivated by greed or fanaticism or both. They find eager customers in outlaw regimes, which pay millions for the parts and plans they need to speed up their weapons programs. And with deadly technology and expertise on the market, there's the terrible possibility that terrorist groups could obtain the ultimate weapons they desire most. The extent and sophistication of such networks can be seen in the case of a man named Abdul Qadir Khan. This is the story as we know it so far. A.Q. Khan is known throughout the world as the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program. What was not publicly known until recently is that he also led an extensive international network for the proliferation of nuclear technology and know-how.
For decades, Mr. Khan remained on the Pakistani government payroll, earning a modest salary. Yet he and his associates financed lavish lifestyles through the sale of nuclear technologies and equipment to outlaw regimes stretching from North Africa to the Korean Peninsula.
A.Q. Khan himself operated mostly out of Pakistan. He served as director of the network, its leading scientific mind as well as its primary salesman. Over the past decade, he made frequent trips to consult with his clients and to sell his expertise. He and his associates sold the blueprints for centrifuges to enrich uranium, as well as nuclear design stolen from the Pakistani government. The network sold uranium hexafluoride, the gas that the centrifuge process can transform into enriched uranium for nuclear bombs.
Khan and his associates provided Iran and Libya and North Korea with designs for Pakistan's older centrifuges, as well as designs for more advanced and efficient models. The network also provided these countries with components, and in some cases with complete centrifuges.
To increase their profits, Khan and his associates used a factory in Malaysia to manufacture key parts for centrifuges. Other necessary parts were purchased through network operatives based in Europe and the Middle East and Africa. These procurement agents saw the trade in nuclear technologies as a shortcut to personal wealth, and they set up front companies to deceive legitimate firms into selling them tightly controlled materials.
Khan's deputy, a man named B.S.A. Tahir, ran SMB Computers, a business in Dubai. Tahir used that computer company as a front for the proliferation activities of the A.Q. Khan network. Tahir acted as both the network's chief financial officer and money-launderer. He was also its shipping agent, using his computer firm as cover for the movement of centrifuge parts to various clients. Tahir directed the Malaysia facility to produce these parts based on Pakistani designs, and then ordered the facility to ship the components to Dubai.
Tahir also arranged for parts acquired by other European procurement agents to transit through Dubai for shipment to other customers.
This picture of the Khan network was pieced together over several years by American and British intelligence officers. Our intelligence services gradually uncovered this network's reach and identified its key experts and agents and money men. Operatives followed its transactions, mapped the extent of its operations. They monitored the travel of A.Q. Khan and senior associates. They shadowed members of the network around the world. They recorded their conversations. They penetrated their operations. We've uncovered their secrets.
This work involved high risk, and all Americans should be grateful for the hard work and the dedication of our fine intelligence professionals. Governments around the world worked closely with us to unravel the Khan network and to put an end to its criminal enterprise. A.Q. Khan has confessed his crimes, and his top associates are out of business. The government of Pakistan is interrogating the network's members, learning critical details that will help them prevent it from ever operating again.
President Musharraf has promised to share all the information he learns about the Khan network, and has assured us that his country will never again be a source of proliferation. Mr. Tahir is in Malaysia, where authorities are investigating his activities. Malaysian authorities have assured us that the factory the network used is no longer producing centrifuge parts.
Other members of the network remain at large. One by one they will be found, and their careers in the weapons trade will be ended. As a result of our penetration of the network, American and the British intelligence identified a shipment of advanced centrifuge parts manufactured at the Malaysian facility. We followed the shipment of these parts to Dubai and watched as they were transferred to the BBC China, a German-owned ship.
After the ship passed through the Suez Canal, bound for Libya, it was stopped by German and Italian authorities. They found several containers, each 40 feet in length, listened on the ship's manifest as full of used machine parts. In fact, these containers were filled with parts of sophisticated centrifuge.
The interception of the BBC China came as Libyan and British and American officials were discussing the possibility of Libya ending its WMD programs. The United States and Britain confronted Libyan officials with this evidence of an active and illegal nuclear program.
About two months ago Libya's leader voluntarily agreed to end his nuclear and chemical weapons programs, not to pursue biological weapons, and to permit thorough inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. We're now working in partnership with these organizations and with the United Kingdom to help the government of Libya dismantle those programs and eliminate all dangerous materials. Colonel Qadhafi made the right decision, and the world will be safer once his commitment is fulfilled.
We expect other regimes to follow his example. Abandoning the pursuit of illegal weapons can lead to better relations with the United States and other free nations. Continuing to seek those weapons will not bring security or international prestige, but only political isolation, economic hardship and other unwelcome consequences. (Applause.)
We know that Libya was not the only customer of the Khan network. Other countries expressed great interest in their services. These regimes and other proliferators like Khan should know, we and our friends are determined to protect our people and the world from proliferation.
Breaking this network is one major success in a broad-based effort to stop the spread of terrible weapons. We're adjusting our strategies to the threats of a new era. America and the nations of Australia, France and Germany, Italy and Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the United Kingdom have launched the Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict lethal materials in transit. Our nations are sharing intelligence information, tracking suspect international cargo, conducting joint military exercises. We're prepared to search planes and ships, to seize weapons and missiles and equipment that raise proliferation concerns, just as we did in stopping the dangerous cargo on the BBC China before it reached Libya. Three more governments -- Canada and Singapore and Norway -- will be participating in this initiative. We'll continue to expand the core group of PSI countries. And as PSI grows, proliferators will find it harder than ever to trade in illicit weapons.
There's a consensus among nations that proliferation cannot be tolerated. Yet this consensus means little unless it is translated into action. Every civilized nation has a stake in preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. These materials and technologies and the people who traffic in them cross many borders. To stop this trade the nations of the world must be strong and determined. We must work together. We must act effectively.
Today I announce several proposals to strengthen the world's efforts to stop the spread of deadly weapons.
First, I propose that the work of the Proliferation Security Initiative be expanded to address more than shipments and transfers. Building on the tools that we've developed to fight terrorists, we can take direct action against proliferation networks. We need greater cooperation -- not just among intelligence and military services but in law enforcement as well.
PSI participants in other willing nations should use the Interpol and all other means to bring justice to those who traffic in deadly weapons, to shut down their labs, to seize their materials, to freeze their assets. We must act on every lead. We will find the middlemen, the suppliers and the buyers. Our message to proliferators must be consistent and it must be clear: we will find you, and we're not going to rest until you are stopped. (Applause.)
Second, I call on all nations to strengthen the laws and international controls that govern proliferation. At the U.N. last fall, I proposed a new Security Council resolution requiring all states to criminalize proliferation, enact strict export controls, and secure all sensitive materials within their borders. The Security Council should pass this proposal quickly. And when they do, America stands ready to help other governments to draft and enforce the new laws that will help us deal with proliferation. Third, I propose to expand our efforts to keep weapons from the Cold War and other dangerous materials out of the wrong hands. In 1991 Congress passed the Nunn-Lugar legislation. Senator Lugar had a clear vision, along with Senator Nunn, about what to do with the old Soviet Union. Under this program, we are helping former Soviet states find productive employment for former weapons scientists. We're dismantling, destroying and securing weapons and materials left over from the Soviet WMD arsenal. We have more work to do there. And as a result of the G-8 summit in 2002, we agreed to provide $20 billion over 10 years, half of it from the United States, to support such programs. We should expand this cooperation elsewhere in the world. We will retain WMD scientists and technicians in countries like Iraq and Libya. We will help nations end the use of weapons grade uranium and research reactors. I urge more nations to contribute to these efforts.
The nations of the world must do all we can to secure and eliminate nuclear and chemical and biological and radiological materials. As we track and destroy these networks, we must also prevent governments from developing nuclear weapons under false pretenses. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty was designed more than 30 years ago to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons beyond those states which already possessed them. Under this treaty, nuclear states agreed to help non-nuclear states develop peaceful atomic energy if they renounced the pursuit of nuclear weapons. But the treaty has a loophole, which has been exploited by nations such as North Korea and Iran. These regimes are allowed to produce nuclear material that can be used to build bombs under the cover of civilian nuclear programs.
So today, as a fourth step, I propose a way to close the loophole. The world must create a safe, orderly system to fuel civilian nuclear plants without adding to the danger of weapons proliferation. The world's leading nuclear exporters should ensure that states have reliable access at reasonable cost to fuel for civilian reactors, so long as those states renounce enrichment and reprocessing. Enrichment and reprocessing are not necessary for nations seeking to harness nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. The 40 nations of the Nuclear Suppliers Group should refuse to sell enrichment and reprocessing equipment and technologies to any state that does not already possess full-scale functioning enrichment and reprocessing plants.
This step will prevent new states from developing the means to produce fissile material for nuclear bombs. Proliferators must not be allowed to cynically manipulate the NPT to acquire the material and infrastructure necessary for manufacturing illegal weapons.
For international norms to be effective, they must be enforced. It is the charge of the International Atomic Energy Agency to uncover banned nuclear activity around the world and report those violations to the U.N. Security Council.
We must ensure that the IAEA has all the tools it needs to fulfill its essential mandate. America and other nations support what is called the Additional Protocol, which requires states to declare a broad range of nuclear activities and facilities and allows the IAEA to inspect those facilities.
As a fifth step, I propose that by next year, only states that have signed the Additional Protocol be allowed to import equipment for their civilian nuclear programs. Nations that are serious about fighting proliferation will approve and implement the Additional Protocol. I've submitted the Additional Protocol to the Senate. I urge the Senate to consent immediately to its ratification. We must also ensure that the IAEA is organized to take action when action is required. So as a sixth step, I propose the creation of a special committee of the IAEA Board which will focus intensively on safeguards and verification. This committee, made up of governments in good standing with the IAEA, will strengthen the capability of the IAEA to ensure that nations comply with their international obligations.
And finally, countries under investigation for violating nuclear nonproliferation obligations are currently allowed to serve on the IAEA Board of Governors. For instance, Iran, a country suspected of maintaining an extensive nuclear weapons program, recently completed a two-year term on the board. Allowing potential violators to serve on the board creates an unacceptable barrier to effective action. No state under investigation for proliferation violations should be allowed to serve on the IAEA Board of Governors or on the new special committee. And any state currently on the board that comes under investigation should be suspended from the board. The integrity and mission of the IAEA depends on this simple principle: Those actively breaking the rules should not be entrusted with enforcing the rules.
As we move forward to address these challenges, we will consult with our friends and allies on all these new measures. We will listen to their ideas. Together we will defend the safety of all nations and preserve the peace of the world.
Over the last two years, a great coalition has come together to defeat terrorism and to oppose the spread of weapons of mass destruction, the inseparable commitments of the war on terror. We've shown that proliferators can be discovered and can be stopped. We've shown that for regimes that chose defiance, there are serious consequences.
The way ahead is not easy, but it is clear. We will proceed as if the lives of our citizens depend on our vigilance because they do. Terrorists and terror states are in a race for weapons of mass murder, a race they must lose. (Applause.)
Terrorists are resourceful. We're more resourceful. They're determined. We must be more determined. We will never lose focus or resolve. We'll be unrelenting in the defense of free nations and rise to the hard demands of dangerous times.
May God bless you all.
----
SPEAKING FREELY
The wrong side of history
By Daniel Patrick Welch
Asia Times
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/FB11Aa02.html
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have their say. Please click here if you are interested in contributing.
SALEM, Massachusetts - We were all lied to. We're used to it. If General William Westmoreland's body counts and Watergate and Iran-Contra and the savings and loans and the first Gulf War didn't teach some of us, then I guess some of us were never meant to learn. The fact is that some of us bought it, and some of us didn't. It's a big, glaring, important distinction, one that, without indulging hyperbole, divides the whole of history and places us on one side or the other.
This is not parlor politics or polite, gentlemanly disagreements with our colleagues "from the other side of the aisle". It's a long, older struggle: call it revolution and counter-revolution, progress and reaction - whatever you choose. But those of us who froze our asses off while being herded like cattle along 3rd Avenue in Manhattan a year ago were not "misled". We, and the 10 million who marched with us the world over last February 15, refused to be misled - indeed refused to be led at all by the liars and their sycophants who packaged and sold this war. The world, it can be safely said from the overwhelming hostility now aimed at the United States, was not misled. History itself was not misled, only sidetracked by a power whose bloated military "strength" defies all need or rational excuse.
The world is waiting, too, to see on which side of history post-Bush America will decide to right itself. Will it abandon its insane military buildup and actively disengage from its designs of global domination? The question weighs heavily on the futures of our children. For it does seem, despite its tenacious hold on power and its almost limitless resources, that the administration of President George W Bush is despised not only by most of the world, but also by most of the same electorate that never gave it any mandate in the first place. All this talk of "electability", as if it were some scientific postulate that could actually hold some concrete meaning, all this talk merely inflates defeatism. Bush the mighty cannot be slain! Why not? He's a criminal and a liar, who in any decent society would have been removed from office long ago.
The question is, what will replace the Bush junta? It is a sweeping question, one that, given the pummeling the world has taken at its hand these past few years, should be a grand one. Akin to the rebuilding of Europe, say, or the end of the Cold War. There was a similar opportunity then, when we talked of the "Peace Dividend". But it was handled by men with small minds and greedy palms, and the New World Order busied itself instead with more wars and the global dominion of a tiny handful of gigantic corporations roaming the globe, looking for every last pocket of opportunity to pick for cash.
Now we face a similar choice, and I suggest we should entrust it to a government whose vision is as broad as the epoch requires. Senator John Kerry, alas, does not fit the bill, despite his meteoric rise to front-runner status in the Democratic Party presidential-nomination race since the Iowa caucus. I do not dislike him; have voted for him against Republicans when it seemed the wise thing to do, and I imagine I could do so again if the alternative were an extension of the Bush Destruction Machine. But I do not want him to be my president, and until I have no other choice, I will oppose his climb to the top of the anti-Bush heap. A translator friend from Brazil, who has chided me for focusing narrowly on the US elections recently, had this to say: "The world doesn't want to know how or if the president will be elected. What the world wants to know is how Bush or Not-Bush will affect their lives. Think about that!"
See - it is not, unfortunately, just about Republicans vs Democrats. Both parties have been complicit in the enormous bloating of the military-industrial complex about which that famous Republican, general/president Dwight Eisenhower, so sternly warned us before leaving office. When push comes to shove, we need people in government who ignore expediency and do that which, in their hearts and in their intellect, they know to be right. This is rendered all the more important by the disintegration of independent thought in the United States, the consolidation of corporate media, the immense pressure and resources controlled by the right wing in this country.
There is an inner clock, one that keeps time despite the seeming sway of history and the drums of war. Some people have it, and most do not. I fault Kerry in this regard. I am not bashing him, so please spare me the hate mail - I am not capable of throwing the election by pointing out obvious flaws. Senator Kerry and the Democratic establishment may well do so by overlooking them, however.
With regard to the Iraq war, I am quite sure that I will never forget, nor can I forgive, a vote in favor of the War Resolution. It is not just about pride or my frozen ass, but a deeper truth about leadership and trust. If indeed Kerry was duped, then he missed something most of the world did not, and is not fit to lead at such an important moment in history. The excuse that such a vote could be based on secret information to which the world was not privy is scarier still, as it enshrines a penchant for secret government and renders meaningless the very concept of rule by the people. Not that I favor any particular rationale for supporting a decision that resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives and the shredding of any remaining vestige of international cooperation - but I think scariest of all would be if he knew it to be wrong, but voted for it anyway, out of a willingness to play the game, to be a good soldier.
This, I have come to believe, is the most likely case, and it settles too well with a few other instances where conviction succumbs to expediency. Much has been made of Kerry's status as both a war hero and a war protester. The incongruity is not for nothing - they do seem to be opposite in many ways. And on closer inspection, the dissonance becomes apparent. Shortly after Kerry's Iraq vote, Brian Willson, former supporter and fellow Vietnam veteran, wrote a stinging "Open Letter to John Kerry", which is as poignant as it is sad. Willson wrote:
The first hint of a bit of disconnect in your style was when during your first Senate campaign you denied returning your war medals, with a thousand other veterans, in protest of the war during Dewey Canyon III. That was a bit of a shock, since for most veterans who returned their medals in that emotional ceremony on Friday, April 23, 1971, it was a very proud and healing moment. Your 1984 campaign response: You had returned the medals of a [World War II] acquaintance at his direction. All those 13 years everyone thought you had had the courage and leadership to return medals that to veterans who returned them represented medals of dishonor drenched in the blood of innocent Vietnamese who did not deserve to die for a lie, any more than our fellow Americans. I guess you knew then that you were to be running for office.
Then, more recently, beyond the painful chapter that was Vietnam, comes the issue of gay marriage. I'm not gay (though not, to quote Jerry Seinfeld, "that there's anything wrong with that"). I am, however, in an interracial marriage, and the issue has a personal resonance for me. There are those in this country who are still not ready for interracial marriage. My own marriage would be invalid, and indeed illegal, had not earlier leaders decided that my civil rights need not wait until a majority was "ready" to recognize them.
No one is "pushing gay marriage", except, perhaps, for those couples who are ready to make that commitment to each other. A true leader does not allow the issue to be framed by the right in this way. The courts have not been hijacked by "activist judges" (except for the type that installed the Jackass-in-Chief in the Oval Office). Jurists are simply moving toward an inevitable historic moment: a civil right enjoyed by one group cannot be denied to another, no matter how uncomfortable it makes anybody. Leaders who "seek the center" on issues of right and wrong for electoral advantage are not agents of change.
We do not recognize religious marriage in the United States, and every pastor, priest, rabbi or justice of the peace must sign a civil license acting in the capacity of a state official. This is exactly why this issue sits at the nexus of the struggle to overcome reactionary forces in the US. The correct framing of the issue is right before our eyes: the right wing knows that it must pursue the idea - think of this for a moment - of a constitutional amendment to ban the extension of this right to a certain group. This is an outrageous concept, and should be met head-on. Most people in the US now have family, friends, acquaintances, or workmates who are gay; speaking of "ready", I do not think Americans are ready to change the law of the land to pursue a bigoted witchhunt that would make Anita Bryant proud.
Kerry's so-called "doghunters" have been concerned chiefly with covering his right flank, always assuming that his left was immune to attack. But these stands represent a pandering to the right, which will be equally damning in a time when such pandering is not only unpalatable, but unnecessary as well. To return to the interracial analogy, there's nothing to warm the heart of a recalcitrant old white racist more than the brown face of a mixed grandchild. I have a similar bellweather: when Homer Simpson can ponder on prime-time television whether his gay kiss or a kiss from his wife "is the best kiss I've had all day", I'm betting that America is not ready to put the genie back in the bottle - or the closet, as it were.
In fact, I think Americans are ready for much more than we are given credit for. The experience of the past few years has truly shaken people's consciousness. Broad sections of people are increasingly wary of a distortionist, toadying press; increasingly demanding of true health-care reform, and not just a further bloating of the insurocracy. Even some polls have shown that large majorities back key elements of a progressive agenda.
In an irony that must make the candidate scream, one caucus in Washington ratified all 10 points of Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich's platform, while giving two-thirds of their delegates to other candidates. The world is full of cautious, blow-dried, Ken-doll politicians with their finger in the wind. Caution and timidity will predictably yield what they have thus far: a suffocating stalemate fought on the right wing's turf - and lost, often as not - where two halves of a giant party wrangle over middle-class white votes. What we need is the steely determination in the face of power that makes real change possible. We will get that through an election that electrifies a movement and sweeps Republicans out of power with a broad vision for real change.
Writer, singer, linguist and activist Daniel Patrick Welch lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts, with his wife, Julia Nambalirwa-Lugudde. Together they run The Greenhouse School. His website is at danielpwelch.com.
----
Cheney's future at stake after leaking of CIA agent's name
Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday February 11, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1145390,00.html
Vice President Dick Cheney's political future was at stake yesterday in Washington, where a grand jury investigation was questioning administration officials about his office's role in leaking the name of a CIA operative for political motives.
The inquiry has already questioned the president's spokesman and one of his media advisers over the identification of Valerie Plame, which is developing into one of the administration's main headaches in an election year.
However, informed sources said last night that three of the five officials who are the real targets of the probe work or worked for Mr Cheney.
Until recently, President Bush has insisted that Mr Cheney would be his vice-presidential candidate in the November elections, despite his history of heart trouble.
But recent polls conducted by the White House have suggested that growing unpopularity of the taciturn ex-businessman and powerful administration hawk threatens to sink the president.
Mr Cheney is already under intense fire from Democrats for his personal role in shaping the case for war against Iraq, frequently visiting the CIA to question assessments that played down Saddam Hussein's arsenal.
His former role as head of a giant oil services corporation, Halliburton, is also under scrutiny, as the company is under investigation for bribery when Mr Cheney was in charge and, more recently for war-profiteering in Iraq.
But the grand jury investigation into the CIA leak is potentially the most explosive threat to his long-term political survival.
The case centres around the leaking to the press in July of the name of Valerie Plame, apparently in response to public questioning of the US case for war against Iraq by her husband, Joseph Wilson, a former ambassador.
The leaking of an undercover agent's identity is a serious crime under US law. The hearings are leading justice department investigators towards the vice president's office, according to a source familiar with the investigation.
"Three of the five people who are targets work or worked in Cheney's office," the source said.
He added that members of the defence policy board, a Pentagon advisory group, are also under scrutiny. Sensing the danger to the administration, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman, Terry McCauliffe issued a statement to say: "Now that the FBI is getting closer to finding out who inside the Bush White House put the lives of CIA agents in danger, we hope that President Bush will keep his word and hold accountable those responsible for the White House leak - no matter how high their post."
The chief White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, outlined the president's position. "The leak of classified information is a very serious matter," he said
A parallel grand jury is looking into the forgery of a document that surfaced in Italy before the war, purporting to show Iraqi attempts to buy uranium in Niger. Despite doubts over its authenticity, the document underpinned US and British claims, since proved groundless, that Saddam was reconstituting his nuclear weapons programme.
A third grand jury in Washington is looking into allegations that a Halliburton subsidiary paid $180m in bribes to secure lucrative contracts to build a gas plant in Nigeria, at the time Mr Cheney was chief executive, from 1995 to 2000.
More recently the corporation has been caught overcharging millions of dollars for the delivery of petrol to the US military in Iraq.
The vice president claims to have severed his ties with the controversial company but he continues to receive payments of about $150,000 a year in tax-minimising "deferred compensation" from his time as an executive.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
The Frontline - Afghan Front Is Treacherous
Correspondent Lara Logan spent several weeks covering the 10th Mountain Division's Alpha Company.
Feb. 11, 2004
CBS 60 Minutes II
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/02/09/60II/main598939.shtml
"You can no longer just say Taliban or al Qaeda. You don't know exactly who it is - and for me, I think that's the scary part." Staff Sgt. Christopher McGurk
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
10th Mountain Army Division Public Affairs Office
Attn: AFZS-PO Fort Drum, N.Y. 13602-5028
Telephone: (315) 772-5461 Fax: (315) 772-8295
(CBS) Correspondent Lara Logan goes directly to the frontlines of America's "War on Terror" -- not in Iraq but in Afghanistan, which is still one of the most dangerous places in the world for American troops.
Nearly two years since the Taliban regime was forced from power, American soldiers are still in Afghanistan, fighting al Qaeda and a resurgent Taliban - and they are still dying.
There are approximately 10,000 soldiers, compared to 125,000 fighting in Iraq, but their task is just as great. The problem is, they're fighting an enemy that's so elusive: hard to see and very hard to find.
60 Minutes II joined up with a group of infantrymen from the 10th Mountain Division's Alpha Company at their base. Logan reports on the life and death situations these soldiers face every day. 60 Minutes II traveled to southeastern Afghanistan, near the border with Pakistan, to meet up with the soldiers of Alpha Company. Their leader, Capt. Ryan Worthan, is a farm boy from Iowa.
Worthan showed us the frontline area where he and his men have been fighting for the past seven months - right on the border with Pakistan.
"Very easy to hide. My guys are very fast. They move very quickly, but if we took all of this off of us, we would move a lot faster - and that's how fast the enemy moves," says Worthan.
His soldiers live from moment to moment, never knowing when they're going to get hit. But that's what happened when their base suddenly came under attack. They take cover in the nearest bunker.
Alpha Company has been rocketed many times before, but the enemy isn't usually this accurate. That's the moment Sgt. First Class Vernon Story realizes the bunker they're standing in is being targeted. So they run to another bunker on the other side of the base, knowing the enemy is watching, following, and still targeting them as they run - even as they reach the second bunker, some 250 yards away.
The men at the artillery guns hit back, firing into the mountainside a couple miles away, where they believe the rockets are being launched. Air support is called in, but the attackers disappear before their position can be pinpointed.
As suddenly as it began, the attack is over. There are few casualties, and incredibly, no deaths.
Staff Sgt. Christopher McGurk just had a close call, and is visibly shaken. As darkness falls, the men from Alpha Company come together to talk about the rocket attack. They are often attacked like this without ever seeing their enemy. Their nights on the frontline are often no less dramatic. The artillery gunners fire sporadically throughout the night as a warning to the enemy that U.S. forces are constantly on the alert.
The soldiers build small fires on the base to keep warm, but it's also a place to gather and decompress. 60 Minutes II couldn't film with lights for safety reasons, so we sat down with Sgts. Story and McGurk around one of the fires to talk to them about the enemy.
"You can no longer just say Taliban or al Qaeda. You don't know exactly who it is - and for me, I think that's the scary part," says McGurk. "It's difficult. You don't know where they are. You don't know exactly what tactics they're going to use."
Adds Story, "It may take someone to get hurt before you find out where it's coming from. That's what aggravates me."
Sgt. McGurk grew up in a military family in the small town of Newburgh, N.Y. He'd never faced combat before he came here, and yet in two short months, his bravery earned him a Purple Heart and two medals for valor.
"I think there would be a spike in terrorist activity if we weren't in this country," says McGurk. "That's just my opinion, and I think we should be here."
"I wake up every morning and do what I'm asked to do," adds Story, 35. "Winning, losing? That's something I couldn't tell you."
Sgt. Story, from Arkansas, signed up for the military when he was just 18. Story has escaped death twice here in battle, and has received the military's highest honors for heroism under fire.
"The experience we've had, they hit you, they run, they hide," says Story. "There are trees where we're at. You don't always see who's shooting at you." It's before sunrise a few days after the rocket attack when we head out from the base with Alpha Company -- on a mission to find those responsible. It takes an hour to travel the 15 miles of rugged terrain through hostile territory.
Story is warned over the radio that the enemy is tracking our vehicles through the gorge.
When we reach a village where the soldiers think the men who fired the rockets may be hiding out, Story spots men running off the roof of a compound. The soldiers head straight there, not knowing what lies in wait. By the time they get to the compound, the men have disappeared into the nearby mountains.
The women left behind begin wailing when Story's men search the compound. Inside, they find heavy machine gun ammunition and armor-piercing rounds -- the same type of bullets used against them by the enemy.
The platoon keeps moving though the village, searching houses and people, knowing things can turn nasty at any time.
"We got some information from some of the guys that we got down there that all the young men in the village have left to set up an ambush, so when we leave, they can hit us," says Story. "Whether that's true or not, I don't know."
Story's men uncover more weapons, including homemade grenades and improvised bombs in the village pharmacy. They didn't find any enemy fighters in the village, but the soldiers are relieved to make it out without being ambushed. This is not the same type of enemy U.S. soldiers faced when they first went to war here after 9/11 and defeated a traditional army.
Logan asked the man in charge of all U.S. forces in Afghanistan about the changes in their strategy.
"I think it is essentially an anti-terrorist war, counter-insurgency. You see, there are many different terms you can use to characterize it," says Lt. Gen. David Barno, 49, one of the youngest three-star generals in the U.S. Army. "They are using classic terrorist tactics, car bombings, attacking innocent civilians."
On the front line, Sgt. Story sees the enemy strategy in action: "If they don't want to fight, they're not going to fight. They're not gonna fight. They're not gonna show themselves, so they're gonna hide or not even be there. They'll be somewhere else and then they'll pick and choose when they want to come over here and do what they want to do." While 60 Minutes II was with Alpha Company, a new unit arrived on the frontline.
None of these soldiers had experienced enemy combat before. But that was about to change. We followed them the next morning as Sgt. Story took them on their first combat patrol in the area.
Story warned his men to stay off the road, saying it could be mined. But those words would come back to haunt us. The terrain forced the lead vehicles back onto the road, and we followed behind. That's when we hit the mine.
The impact blasted us into the air, knocking out our camera and flipping the Humvee. We scrambled for cover and quickly got our second camera rolling, as Story ordered his men to open fire. He knew the mine could have been detonated and suspected we were being ambushed.
60 Minutes II cameraman, Jeff Newton, took pictures moments before our vehicle hit the landmine. Staff Sgt. Roy Mitchell, in the front seat, had his leg blown off. Behind him, Sgt. Story, who is next to Sgt. First Class Michael Eichner, also suffered serious injuries.
Sgt. Eichner, Story's best friend, sustained serious back injuries. Sgt Mitchell lost his leg and part of his jaw. Through the chaos, it became clear to Story that there was no incoming fire -- so he silenced the soldiers' guns.
The men were relieved when the Medivac arrived quickly. As we pulled back to base, another platoon came in to search the area. But many of the soldiers thought the enemy would be long gone across the border into Pakistan, where they cannot follow.
Why not? "I don't want to characterize in any detail of our operational limitations are here," says Barno.
The soldiers may be allowed to shoot across the border, but the real issue is the enemy escaping into Pakistan, where American troops aren't allowed to pursue them. Their mission in Afghanistan goes beyond fighting. It's also about re-building the country.
Sgts. Paul Gonzalez and Ben Sledge are part of Army Civil Affairs -- a specialized military unit that works alongside Alpha Company. Their job is to win the trust of the locals. And they hope children like these will remember when American soldiers came to their village and ran races, or gave out blankets, or sat down to tea.
They know they've made progress when they can go to places that were too dangerous. But it's not always so easy. In this village, it quickly becomes obvious that Sledge and Gonzalez aren't welcome. There's no tea on offer here, no smiling faces.
The soldiers say these are signs that tell them the enemy is near, maybe even sitting there with them.
"I wonder sometimes if it's me or one of my friends that's going to be on the next bird home in a coffin," says Sledge.
The U.S. insists it'll stay in Afghanistan as long as it takes to stabilize the country, but no one could tell us how long that would be.
"A victory here will not be measured as a military victory, we know," says Barno. "I tell people there will be no surrender on the deck of the USS Missouri at the end of this conflict. This will be a long, slow, continuous process of improvement here of growing security."
What we learned from Sgt. Story and the men from Alpha Company are they believe that what they're doing in Afghanistan will help prevent another Sept. 11. But they know that comes at a price.
"You can die here, just as fast here as in Iraq," says Story. "So if we're forgetting about Afghanistan, or if we're not forgetting about Afghanistan, I want the guys that are coming here, that are going to relieve me, to know that any day, any second, any night, they can die just as fast as the guy in Iraq can."
----
U.N. Official in Warning on Afghan Drugs
February 11, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/international/asia/11DRUG.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 10 - Foreign troops must move against smugglers and narcotics labs if Afghanistan is to win its war on drugs, the United Nations' top counternarcotics official, Antonio Maria Costa, said Tuesday.
Mr. Costa, in the Afghan capital for an antidrug conference, said a rare bombing run by United States warplanes on a remote northern opium processing lab in January had "sent ripples" through the Afghan drug world. "If more evidence of that emerges from the south and from the east and from the center of the country, I believe we are going to get somewhere," he said.
The Afghan government has pledged to crack down on the booming drug trade this year, destroying crops and arresting traffickers, amid warnings from the United Nations that it risks becoming a "narco state." Afghanistan produced three-quarters of the world's opium - the raw material for heroin - last year.
About 11,000 mainly American soldiers are pursuing suspected members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, while 6,100 NATO-led peacekeepers patrol mostly in Kabul.
United States and NATO commanders acknowledge drug production is complicating their effort to stabilize the country, but they have resisted calls from the Afghan government to tackle drug kingpins.
-------- africa
Congo's path back from war
In the northeast, a vital road reopened last month, offering a route to aid, trade, and returning refugees.
By James Palmer
The Christian Science Monitor
February 11, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0211/p06s01-woaf.html
BUNIA, CONGO - Nyama Baku returned last July to Dele, in this country's northeast, to find his house burned to the ground, his possessions looted, and his once-fertile fields choked with weeds.
The 30-mile stretch that took him back to his war-ravaged village had become a crumbling road to nowhere.
But Baku, a father of five, and about 300 others in the area were hired to help rebuild it, in hopes that the roadway could lead villagers - and the region - toward a calmer, more prosperous future.
"The road has created an acceptable climate for people to return to their homes," Baku says, as he pauses from laboring on the sun-baked clay. "We have gained peace by working on the road."
The road linking Bunia, the main city in the wartorn Ituri district, to the port town of Kasenye along the shores of Lake Albert, opened in mid-January after six months of reconstruction.
Although peace in this region is still fragile, the road has become a path toward reversing some of the damage wreaked on the region by ethnic battles. Its reconstruction financed by the US Agency for International Development, the road is allowing villagers to rebuild their homes, aid organizations to deliver food, and traders to reach urban markets.
German Agro Action (GAA), a humanitarian-aid agency, initiated the $3 million project to restore the road by employing people along the route and by distributing 6,000 tons of food and more than 25,000 packets of blankets, plastic sheeting, and five-gallon jerrycans to help families returning to areas along the road.
"This is an experiment in grass-roots pacification," says Marcus Sack, the GAA project coordinator in Ituri. "We have tried to bring the warring communities together and show them they have nothing to gain from fighting by offering them employment and humanitarian aid with no coercion."
Sedrak Pimbo, the village elder in a community 11 miles southeast of Bunia, says he and other villagers returned to the area in November, and are traveling the road by foot to carry produce and charcoal to area markets. "The war is over, and we are beginning a new life," he says.
James Papi, a trader from Ituri, says he buys fish in Kasenye along the banks of Lake Albert and then takes the road to Bunia, where he sells the fish to shopkeepers. "Business is very good right now," says Mr. Papi, sitting atop a mountain of dried fish covered with canvas in the back of an overloaded pickup truck. Papi says he clears a $50 profit for every 450 pounds of fish he sells.
Dominique McAdams, who heads the UN mission in Ituri known as MONUC, says the road repair is "the beginning of the return to normalcy."
Joseph Ngoma, an immigration officer in Kasenye, says that between 200 and 300 refugees return to the town every day, but he warned that insecurity still plagues the area. "How can you have security when there is fighting every two to three days?" he asks.
Rough passage between Bunia and Kasenye is part of the legacy of Mobutu Sese Seko, the country's former dictator. Under his corrupt 32-year rule, infrastructure throughout Congo was neglected. The recent years of war dealt further damage. Although some hostilities continue, the opening of the road is crucial for distributing humanitarian assistance throughout northeast Congo, and aid organizations have delivered 935 tons of food, says Mr. Sack.
Ms. McAdams says road reconstruction will continue another five miles from Kasenye to the village of Tcomia, and the UN is planning to press forward with additional road repairs throughout the district.
The savage five-year conflict in Congo, formerly known as Zaire, has killed up to 4 million people, according to human-rights groups. In the Ituri district, the struggle for control over the region and its riches - gold, oil, and diamonds - has killed 50,000 people since 1999, and has displaced 500,000 of the 4.5 million population, according to UN estimates.
Bunia became a flash point last May when violence erupted between the Hema and Lendu ethnic communities, forcing more than 300,000 to flee from their homes, according to UNICEF.
Three weeks ago, UN troops disembarking a helicopter were shot at five times by an armed militia, according to MONUC spokeswoman Isabel Abric in Bunia.
Last week, a UN boat convoy on Lake Albert, sent to investigate an alleged massacre in the town of Gobu, about 31 miles northeast of Bunia, had to abandon its mission after being fired on by militia.
Even with 300 UN troops patrolling the Bunia-Kasenye road, the surrounding bush along the road remains unsafe, says Bangladeshi Army Major Jamil Rashid, who is part of the nearly 5,000 UN peacekeeping forces in Ituri. "The armed militias still have camps in the area," he says.
Baku finds it difficult to forget the atrocities he has witnessed, and says the situation in Dele and in the rest of his troubled nation remains uneasy.
"There were too many killed to count," Baku said, referring to the clashes in May that transformed his village into pillars of ashes. "We have peace for now, but we have no sense of security."
-------- arms
Delivery of three Phalcon early warning radar systems to India soon: Shalom
NEW DELHI (AFP)
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040211143317.5x3us33k.html
Visiting Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said Wednesday that Israel would "shortly" be making deliveries of three Phalcon airborne early warning radar systems to India.
"Finally we have succeeded in implementing the deal and we expect to make deliveries shortly," Shalom told reporters in New Delhi after his 40 minute meeting with Defence Minister George Fernandes in New Delhi.
India signed the deal -- believed to be worth about one billion dollars -- with Israel and Russia in October, a month after the visit of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to India.
The deal was signed after a go-ahead from the United States, which had earlier blocked the sale of Phalcons to both India and China.
"We have agreed on the sale of Phalcons," Shalom said Wednesday, adding, "We had some problems with the Americans till recently, we have now opportunity to finalise the deal."
Israel coordinates its military sales with Washington because the two nations' defense industries are closely linked and often share technological advances.
Under the terms of the agreement, Israel would buy Ilyushin-76 cargo aircraft from Uzbekistan which would then be sent to Russia to be fitted with new high-powered engines.
After structural modifications, the aircraft would be sent to Israel to be mounted with cutting edge avionics and the complete aircraft would be delivered to India.
After Russia, Israel in recent years has become India's second largest defence supplier with armament sales from Tel Aviv to New Delhi touching 60 billion rupees (1.25 billion dollars) in 2001.
----
E-Bombs future for weaponry
By Ryan Floersheim
Wednesday, February 11, 2004
U NM Daily Lobo
http://www.dailylobo.com/news/2004/02/11/News/EBombs.Future.For.Weaponry-603632.shtml
High-powered microwave weapons, capable of winning wars without causing human casualties, just may be the future of warfare.
One UNM professor has been working quietly in a laboratory on campus since 1988, trying to work out the kinks in the new microwave technology.
Edl Schamiloglu, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, has received more than $12 million for his research on the high-powered microwaves, called directed energy.
He said the intense waves of energy have countless real-world applications, and one party interested in them is the Pentagon. In fact, a large portion of his funding has come from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research.
It is that relationship with the military that has earned Schamiloglu more than his share of media attention lately.
In 2003, articles regarding the potential military uses of the microwave technology sprung up in national publications such as The New York Times and the Washington Post.
Schamiloglu admitted the technology can and may already be used in special microwave weapons that detonate near a target, and with their blasts of electromagnetic waves, melt communications circuitry without harming nearby humans.
"However, a lot of what we do just goes to support science and engineering education," he said. "Most people just assume that when research is supported by the federal government that it is going toward the military."
However, the Defense Department is already using his research to develop such weapons, he said.
"When the DOD supports a research project, it usually means they have plans for it down the road," Schamiloglu said.
The microwave research at UNM is closely linked to the Air Force's Research Laboratory at neighboring Kirtland Air Force Base, Schamiloglu said.
The lab is the Pentagon's center for research on microwave weapons, more commonly called E-Bombs.
The military presence on UNM's campus, regardless of its purpose, has drawn criticism and protest from many people in the community.
"All these programs are basically the public subsidizing this country's military war machine," said Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space, a national coalition opposed to nuclear research. "It is ironic that the words humane and weapons are in the same sentence."
Gagnon said it is ethically and morally wrong to develop weapons on college campuses, regardless of what kind they are.
Schamiloglu is not the only UNM researcher whose work goes to furthering the military's technological goals.
Mohamed El-Genk, a professor of chemical and nuclear engineering, has had a hand in the development of the Air Force's Prometheus nuclear rocket project, according to national news releases.
Gagnon, the global network and protesters from across the world are in town this week to ask El-Genk and other nuclear researchers attending an annual nuclear symposium here to reconsider their work.
El-Genk could not be reached for comment.
"Bringing in profit at the expense of killing people is not what higher education is supposed to be about," said Bob Anderson, an adjunct professor at UNM, about the weapons research on campus. "The University is trying to increase its military contracts. There are more honorable ways to make money."
Still, Schamiloglu said his research with the microwave technology can be used for many things other than the military.
He said since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials have realized just how vulnerable the country's citizens are to similar weapons.
While the microwave technology itself is very complex, Schamiloglu said it is possible for terrorist groups to construct a crude electromagnetic bomb capable of crippling the country's communications network.
"We are at the forefront of knowledge," he said. "As always, that knowledge can be used for both good and evil purposes. We have to do our job the best we can and realize that we are just a small part of a bigger picture."
-------- biological weapons
U.S. biodefense campus set for Fort Detrick
3 agencies gain 'synergy,' security; critics see waste; High-security campus targets biowarfare agents
By Scott Shane
Baltimore Sun Staff
February 11, 2004
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.biodefense11feb11,0,2891970.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines
Three federal agencies plan to build adjoining high-security laboratories at Fort Detrick for a total cost of more than $1 billion, creating a "national biodefense campus" where scientists will collaborate in the battle against bioterrorism.
The plan would create three new labs in Frederick operated by the Army, the Department of Homeland Security and the National Institutes of Health - and possibly a fourth lab for the U.S. Department of Agriculture - all equipped to handle the most dangerous pathogens in existence.
Federal officials have been meeting quietly for more than a year to plan the biodefense campus, part of a national boom in bioterrorism research in the wake of the Sept. 11 aircraft hijackings and the anthrax attacks of 2001.
The federal biodefense research budget has ballooned from $305 million in 2001 to nearly $4 billion this year, by one official's estimate.
Some public health experts call the proliferation of high-security labs wasteful and say they steal funding from problems more serious than bioterrorism. But federal officials insist all the new labs planned for the biodefense campus are necessary.
"It's a national asset being put together in an area where there's currently a strategic shortfall," said Army Col. John E. Ball, garrison commander at Fort Detrick, who is coordinating construction of the campus.
Building multiple labs within walking distance will not create redundancy but might save money, Ball said: "Because you can share, you can spend less on security, roads, parking, cafeteria, library and other things."
"We'll get a lot of synergy from being on the same campus," said Maureen I. McCarthy, director of research and development for the Department of Homeland Security. "The science may be similar. But we're three different agencies with different mission requirements."
The biodefense campus is an economic prize for Frederick County, bringing lucrative construction contracts and the promise of hundreds of highly paid jobs for scientists and support staff.
And, because Fort Detrick has handled dangerous germs since World War II, most neighbors are not worried about possible expansion, said Frederick Mayor Jennifer P. Dougherty, who supports the plan.
"As long as Fort Detrick continues to be as proactive as it has been in the community and with its neighbors, I don't anticipate any issues," she said.
But critics say biodefense expansion has become a boondoggle for government agencies and universities that are cashing in on fear. They note that only five people died as a result of the biggest bioterrorist attack in U.S. history, the anthrax letters.
And in that case, FBI investigators appear to believe the perpetrator was not a foreign terrorist but an American with ties to Fort Detrick or other U.S. biodefense labs.
"Influenza kills annually about 50,000 people in this country," said Milton Leitenberg, an expert on biowarfare at the University of Maryland's Center for International and Security Studies. "But we don't put our money into that.
"We sink it into bioterrorism. We're putting billions of dollars into a putative threat of disputed relevance at a time when there's a shortage of flu vaccine and measles vaccine."
Dr. David M. Ozonoff, a professor of environmental health at Boston University, also questioned government priorities.
"Bioterrorism is hollowing out public health from within," said Ozonoff. "It's much more likely that bird flu will kill millions of people than anthrax," he added, referring to the possibility that an avian flu strain in Asia could spread among humans.
Rutgers University biochemist Richard H. Ebright said consolidating high-security research at Fort Detrick makes some sense.
But he noted that other federally funded Biosafety Level 4 labs are approved for Boston University, the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and the Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton, Mont. On top of those, he said, the Detrick campus would create "an enormous overcapacity."
"If they proceed with this plan at Detrick, they should cancel Hamilton, Boston and Galveston," Ebright said.
The plan for the National Interagency Biodefense Campus illustrates vividly how the terror attacks of 2001 have transformed funding for biodefense.
Before 2001, the Army's biodefense research center, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, had little competition in research on exotic diseases that might be used as weapons. Nor was there much interest - post-Cold War budget cuts in the mid-1990s forced the Army to reduce the institute's staffing by 25 percent.
But things began to pick up in 1998, after former President Bill Clinton read The Cobra Event, a thriller by Richard Preston about a fictional bioattack, and became convinced that the threat was real.
That was the year that Dr. Donald A. Henderson, leader of the worldwide campaign to eradicate smallpox, opened the first university biodefense think tank at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
But only after the 2001 attacks did the funding spigots open. Dozens of universities have rushed to create bioterrorism research centers to compete for the new money. A variety of federal agencies have also taken a new interest in germs.
The Detrick campus plan, as described by federal officials, will include:
# Army: A replacement for the aging Army biodefense unit at Fort Detrick, known as USAMRIID, estimated to cost $850 million to $1 billion. A congressional report has acknowledged that a new facility is needed, but the project has not yet been funded. USAMRIID's mission is to study diseases that threaten U.S. troops, including those resulting from deliberate attack.
# National Institutes of Health: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease will break ground this year on a $105 million Integrated Research Facility, where animals will be used to study the exotic diseases likely to be used for biological attack.
Dr. Mary E. Wright, chief of the clinical biodefense research branch at NIAID, said the lab will take "a medical approach," using animals to develop standards for diagnosis and treatment. "There was no research on these microorganisms for many, many years," Wright said.
# Department of Homeland Security: The $120 million National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasure Center will work chiefly on "threat characterization" - understanding what organisms, in natural or bioengineered form, pose a terrorist threat.
In addition, a bioforensics unit will study how scientists can use genetic or chemical analysis to trace germs to their source, as FBI scientists are trying to do with the mailed anthrax of 2001. The new lab will create databases and other computer tools to be consulted in case of an attack.
# Department of Agriculture: USDA and the Department of Defense are studying a possible lab to research zoonotic diseases, which pass from animals to humans. Although Fort Detrick officials have assigned space on the campus, no final decision on construction has been made, said Caird Rexroad, acting associate administrator of the Agricultural Research Service.
# National Cancer Institute: NCI's existing facility at Fort Detrick would be considered part of the campus, sharing its expertise on cancer and HIV with researchers working directly on bioterrorism, said Col. Ball.
# Gateway Center: A separate building housing a library, cafeteria, security offices and other shared facilities. The cost has not been estimated, Ball said.
-------- britain
PM edges away from US with plan to talk to Gaddafi
JASON BEATTIE CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT
Wed 11 Feb 2004
Scotsman
http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=165532004
TONY Blair underlined the UK's wish to edge away from Washington's hawkish diplomatic approach by announcing that he would hold talks with Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi, the Libyan leader.
The meeting with Col Gaddafi, which is expected to take place in Tripoli within six months, was announced by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, following talks in London with his Libyan counterpart, Abdul Rahman Shalqam.
Relations between the two countries have been improving steadily since the Libyan government agreed to hand over in 1999 the two suspects behind the Lockerbie bombing. The real breakthrough occurred last December, however, when Col Gaddafi agreed to allow international inspectors to oversee the dismantling of his country's nuclear weapons programme.
A visit by Mr Blair would be regarded as symbolic proof that Col Gaddafi is welcomed back into the international community after a 20-year isolation.
The move coincides with a similar diplomatic effort to improve relations with Iran - another of the countries denounced by the US president, George Bush, as part of the "axis of evil" - which hosted a landmark visit by Prince Charles this week.
The prince continued his tour of the Middle East yesterday with a visit to Saudi Arabia, where he praised British residents for their resilience in the face of the threat of terrorism.
But Britain's conciliatory approach was criticised by some Republicans in the United States and by relatives of those who have suffered in Britain as a result of Libya's one-time sponsorship of terrorist activities.
Mr Straw acknowledged that relatives of the 270 victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and those of WPC Yvonne Fletcher, the policewoman shot dead outside the Libyan embassy in London in 1984, could harbour disquiet about the thawing in British-Libyan relations.
"Although I would fully understand if the views of the relatives and friends were different, I hope they and the wider public will be able to see that it is in everybody's interest for us to have normalised relations," he said.
Mr Straw said that the two countries were engaged in "enhanced co-operation" on ways to bring to justice those responsible for WPC Fletcher's death. But the Metropolitan Police Federation said that Libya still had "blood on its hands" over the murder of Ms Fletcher and there should be no normalisation of relations until justice had been achieved.
In a startling admission, Mr Straw said that though the Iraq war had "eased negotiations" with Libya, it would be wrong to draw "any crude connection" between the Libyan announcement that it was giving up its WMD programmes and the military action.
His words undermined one of the main justifications for the war - it had eased diplomatic efforts with other rogue states.
By contrast, the US has sought to gain leverage by emphasising its willingness to take military action. Britain has moved faster than the US to restore ties with Libya and Iran. Washington has yet to lift economic sanctions on Libya, including a ban on travel there by US citizens.
Doubts about the UK's stance were raised by the former US assistant defence secretary, Frank Gaffney, who described the developments as "worrisome".
"There is no indication that he [Gaddafi] intends to end the brutal repression of his regime or, for that matter, his support for international terror," he told the BBC.
-------- business
GAO: Defense Contractors Owe $3 Billion In US Taxes
Wednesday February 11, 2004
By John Godfrey,
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/040211/1935001424_2.html
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)- More than 27,000 Defense Department contractors owe at least $3 billion in taxes, a General Accounting Office report to be released Thursday says.
Under procedures already authorized by a law allowing the Defense Department to levy up to 15% of each contract to satisfy tax debts, the department could have collected at least $100 million of those tax debts in 2002, the GAO found.
Instead, it collected just $687,000.
The report is the subject of a hearing to be held at 9:30 a.m. EST (1430 GMT) Thursday by the Senate Government Affairs Subcommittee on Investigations.
Subcommittee Chairman Norm Coleman, R-Minn., said the Defense Department may be great at defending the country but it needs to do a better job of protecting its taxpayers.
"These contractors are not only shortchanging the government, they are also cheating their employees and the American people," Coleman said to reporters at a briefing in advance of the hearing.
Part of the problem is because the IRS can't publicly disclose taxpayer information, it can't tell the Defense Department whether any of its contractors are delinquent.
But there is a system in place to deal with these privacy requirements, Sen. Carl Levin (News) , D-Mich., said in a briefing previewing the report's findings.
The IRS sends to the Financial Management System - the federal government's main financial clearing house - a list of delinquent taxpayers. Proposed contractor payments by the Defense Department and every other federal department and agency are sent to FMS, then matched to this list. If taxes are owed, FMS docks up to 15% of the payment and then sends the rest of the money.
"When they are using it, it's working fine," said Levin, who is the highest ranking Democrat on Coleman's subcommittee.
But GAO found that most of the Defense Department's contracts are pouring through the cracks. Just one in 16 of the department's payment systems are connected to FMS.
The Defense Department says it plans to get those systems connected to FMS, a promise congressional staff greeted skeptically. GAO noted that during its investigation the Defense Department said it had 15 such systems, but by the time the report was being finalized, the department said it had 17 of them.
Mostly Small Contracts Involved
The GAO used data mining techniques to find the contractors who owed the most taxes or who owed taxes and held the most contracts.
Because of the taxpayer privacy laws the names of the 47 businesses identified weren't disclosed, but Coleman, Levin and committee staff said it appears all were relatively small businesses.
In the 47 case studies, the amount of taxes owed ranged from over $10,000 to nearly $10 million. The amount paid to these contractors ranged from $100 to $ 4.7 million in 2002.
About 42% of the taxes owed were payroll taxes. Another 39% were corporate incomes taxes. The remaining 19% was excise taxes, unemployment taxes, individual taxes and other fees and taxes.
The most egregious case involved a base support and custodial service contractor which owed nearly $10 million in taxes, but was paid $3.5 million by the Defense Department in 2002.
Another contractor providing medical personnel in Defense facilities was paid $4.7 million in 2002 while owing nearly $6 million.
Coleman said some of the blame lies with the IRS for failing to issue tax levies in a timely manner. Some of those delays stem from a change in tax collection philosophy following a 1998 crackdown on alleged abuses at the agency.
Since then the IRS has shied from moving quickly to impose levies and has moved limited resources from tax law enforcement to customer service, Coleman said.
-By John Godfrey, Dow Jones Newswires; 202-862-6601; John.Godfrey@dowjones.com
----
U.S. Says Non-Construction Iraq Deals Open to All
Wed Feb 11, 2004
By Sue Pleming
(Reuters)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20040211/ts_nm/iraq_contracts_dc
WASHINGTON - The United States has opened up $6 billion in prime contracts to rebuild Iraq to all countries but U.S.-funded construction deals are still limited to nations that supported the war effort, a U.S. government Web site said on Wednesday.
In a notice on an Iraq procurement Web site (www.rebuilding-iraq.net), companies from all countries were invited to apply for new non-construction contracts, with the exception of a $327 million contract for the Iraqi army.
"All countries are also eligible to compete as prime and or subcontractors for the $6 billion non-construction contract efforts," said the notice, which was dated Jan. 29 but posted overnight on the Web site.
The new contracts, which will be rolled out over the next few months, will range from equipment and training to other services.
At the end of last year, the United States alienated many allies who had opposed Washington's decision to occupy Iraq without U.N. approval by announcing all prime deals to rebuild Iraq would go to countries that supported the effort to topple Saddam Hussein.
Trading partners France, Canada, Germany and Russia, whose companies could bid only on lesser subcontracts, were particularly angered by the decision. The White House later appeared to row back on the move and said Canada could apply for future prime work.
Bidding closed last week for $5 billion worth of prime construction contracts in Iraq funded by the $18.6 billion appropriated by Congress for Iraq's reconstruction. Those deals are set to be announced in March.
Companies from 63 eligible countries were allowed to bid on that work, which involved 17 major construction contracts and project management deals to oversee the work.
SUBCONTRACTS OPEN TO ALL
The Web site said that while construction deals were open only to companies from the United States, coalition partners and nations that contributed troops, all countries were eligible to compete for subcontracts for this work.
The Pentagon-run Program Management Office, the procurement arm of the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, is holding back an additional $4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funding for more construction projects in Iraq.
The Web site did not indicate whether these projects, which have not yet been earmarked, will be open to all nations. However, U.S. government officials have said privately these are likely to be open to everyone and will probably be advertised after the U.S. handover in Iraq in July.
Jay Brandes, head of the Iraq Task Force for the U.S. Department of Commerce, said he did not know yet whether a decision had been made on future construction work for Iraq or which countries would be eligible.
"We will have to see what the needs are in Iraq before deciding how that money will be spent," Brandes told Reuters.
Sam Kubba, head of the American Iraqi Chamber of Commerce, said he hoped that this meant all U.S.-funded contracts would be open to all nations and that Iraqis would get a bigger slice of the reconstruction work.
"I think it's very important not to disenfranchise other countries. The more friends we have to help us rebuild Iraq, the better we will all be in the long run," said Kubba.
The first round of contracts to rebuild Iraq came under a barrage of criticism with allegations of cronyism and favoritism over the award of work to well-connected firms such as Halliburton, the oil services company once run by Vice President Dick Cheney.
Iraqis have also complained over who is getting the lucrative work and want a bigger chunk of the deals.
-------- china
China Says It Won't Meddle in Taiwan Elections
February 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-china-taiwan.html?pagewanted=all
BEIJING (Reuters) - China accused Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian Wednesday of endangering peace with his plan to hold the island's first ever referendum but said it would not meddle in Taiwan's presidential election next month.
China, which considers Taiwan a breakaway province and has threatened to attack if it declares independence, sees the referendum as a provocative move toward statehood.
``On the one hand, Chen Shui-bian is bent on having his own way and pursuing a referendum that would provoke confrontation between peoples on both sides, sabotage cross-Strait relations and endanger peace in the Taiwan Strait,'' a spokesman for China's Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhang Mingqing, told a news conference.
``On the other hand, he has professed he would set up a so-called framework for cross-Strait peace and stability. We think Chen Shui-bian's assertion is deceitful words,'' Zhang said.
``He has never shown sincerity to improve cross-Strait relations.''
Ignoring warnings from bitter rival China and Taiwan's top ally, the United States, Chen has said he is determined to go ahead with the referendum alongside the March 20 election.
China and Taiwan have been foes since their split at the end of the civil war in 1949 when the defeated Nationalists fled to the island.
The Nationalists ruled Taiwan for more than five decades before the independence-leaning Chen swept to power in 2000.
U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith said he had conveyed American concerns about China's build-up of missiles pointed at Taiwan during routine consultative talks with top Chinese military and Foreign Ministry officials in Beijing.
``(We) made the point that we have important shared interests and we don't think those interests are being served by that missile buildup,'' said Feith, who met Chinese Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan and Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing.
``That does not contribute to a reduction of tensions.''
The United States, which recognizes Beijing's ``one China'' policy but is Taiwan's biggest arms supplier, has said it opposes any change in the status quo. In December, President George. W. Bush issued a veiled criticism of Taiwan for the referendum plan.
NO PREFERENCE
In a sign that China has no plans to menace Taiwan with missile tests as it did in the run-up to the island's presidential elections in 1996, Taiwan Affairs Office spokesman Zhang said Beijing would not interfere.
``I reiterate here our stand not to meddle in the Taiwan elections,'' he said when asked to comment on Taiwan newspaper reports that China had told mainland-based Taiwan businessmen not to campaign publicly for candidates.
Nationalist supporters have opened a liaison office in Shanghai, giving party faithful the chance to campaign in China for the first time since they were ousted in 1949.
The Nationalists deny any direct association with the office, but Taipei has charged that Beijing is interfering in the island's elections by allowing the office in the first place.
Analysts said Beijing prefers Lien Chan, chairman of the anti-independence Nationalists who are now the island's biggest opposition party, over Chen and his ambitions for independence.
``We don't care who wins the election. What we care about is the winner's attitude toward cross-Straits ties and national unification,'' Zhang said.
But activities by mainland-based Taiwan businessmen must conform with Chinese government regulations, he said.
In Taipei, cabinet spokesman Lin Chia-lung said China should not interfere. ``I urge Communist China to stop meddling in Taiwan's election,'' he told reporters.
-------- iran
Iran's President Criticizes Conservatives
February 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Elections.html?pagewanted=all
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- In a sharp attack against the vast powers of ruling conservatives, Iran's president on Wednesday called the restriction of political freedoms a ``threat to the nation'' that could be hard to contain.
The warnings by President Mohammad Khatami -- made during events marking the 25th anniversary of the Islamic Revolution -- could increase the intense political friction ahead of Feb. 20 parliamentary elections that many reformers plan to boycott.
Khatami bowed to pressure from the powerful theocracy and agreed to hold the elections. But he has described the voting for the 290-seat parliament as unfair because thousands of reformist candidates have been blocked from running.
``Elections are a symbol of democracy if they are performed correctly,'' Khatami told crowds gathered in a huge square to celebrate the collapse of the Western-backed monarchy in 1979. ``If this is restricted, it's a threat to the nation and the system. This threat is difficult to reverse.''
The elections have touched off one of Iran's deepest political crises since the revolution.
More than 3,000 pro-reform candidates were originally disqualified by the 12-member Guardian Council, which has the authority to block people seeking high public office. Liberal lawmakers countered with sit-ins and protests. The council later reinstated about 1,100, but reformists said that was insufficient.
A major boycott -- urged by a wide-ranging coalition from activists to academics -- would likely return control of parliament to conservatives. The backlash, however, could lead to huge political rifts and greater street demonstrations calling for ruling clerics to relinquish some of their virtually unlimited controls.
Iran's largest reformist party, Islamic Iran Participation Front, has joined the boycott camp. The party is led by the president's younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, who is deputy speaker of parliament and one of those barred from the election.
Reformists won control of the parliament in 2000 for the first time since the Islamic Revolution. But hard-liners have used their control of unelected bodies such as the Guardian Council to thwart attempts to liberalize Iran's political system and relax its strict Islamic social code.
In his speech, Khatami called for a ``third way'' avoiding Western-style models and a Taliban-like system led by ``those who don't consider the rights of the people ... and oppose freedom and democracy using religion.''
``Blocking the demands of the people and their right to vote ... causes frustration, especially among the young,'' he said.
The official election campaign period opens Thursday. Khatami has not made it clear whether he will support the boycott movement.
``For the prosperity of the nation, I don't know any path other than reforms,'' he said. ``Whether I succeed or not and whether obstacles keep preventing me from fulfilling my promises or not, I know no other path and won't choose a path other than reforms.''
-------- iraq
Army probe over Iraqi PoW death
Any unlawful action against PoWs would be dealt with, the MoD said
Wednesday, 11 February, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3478133.stm
The Ministry of Defence is probing claims an Iraqi prisoner of war was beaten to death by a British soldier.
The MoD said the Royal Military Police was investigating the death of an Iraqi man while in British custody - thought to have happened in September.
The MoD said reports that a soldier could be charged with manslaughter were "pure speculation at this stage".
It is thought the man who died was taken prisoner during a raid on Pro-Saddam loyalists in Basra in the south.
The MoD said a full and thorough investigation was under way.
The Iraqi man who died is understood to be named Mr Al-Maliki.
Amnesty International Director Kate Allen said: "It is very important that there is an independent inquiry into the circumstances around his death."
'Six complaints'
There are unconfirmed reports the British soldiers were from the Queen's Lancashire Regiment near Basra.
An MoD spokeswoman said: "A Royal Military Police Special Investigations Branch investigation into the death of Mr Al-Maliki is ongoing and it would be inappropriate to speculate about its outcome.
"The investigation is a thorough one, involving interviews in Britain and Iraq, and this inevitably will take time.
"If British soldiers are found to have acted unlawfully, appropriate action will be taken."
If the investigation reveals unlawful treatment of the Iraqis the soldiers could face full courts martial.
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Doubts remain over SDF's use of weapons in Iraq
The Japan Times:
Feb. 11, 2004
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/getarticle.pl5?nn20040211a5.htm
Questions have been raised over how Ground Self-Defense Force members in Iraq would handle themselves if faced with a situation requiring them to use arms against local residents.
A member of the Ground Self-Defense Force guards a truck carrying Japanese journalists near the Dutch military's Camp Smitty.
The GSDF personnel are authorized to use arms only in self-defense or emergencies, and in principle will be subject to the Japanese judicial process if they injure or kill local residents outside these limits. But there are doubts whether the principle would be observed in practice.
GSDF troops are in the southern Iraqi city of Samawah to provide humanitarian aid and reconstruction assistance. They are equipped with weapons and armored vehicles in case they are attacked.
Wearing bulletproof jackets, young GSDF members selected for the mission underwent rifle practice in Hokkaido in November.
When the instructor shouted, "Fire," they each fired two shots in rapid succession at close-range targets representing people who had attacked them.
"Most of them are getting such training for the first time," a senior GSDF officer said. "Their training is aimed at absolutely stopping their opponents. They looked scared at first but they are able to cope."
GSDF troops in Iraq are allowed to shoot people only in self-defense or when evacuating from their bases in an emergency.
Anticipating attacks by Iraqi insurgents, including suicide bombers, the Defense Agency and GSDF have drawn up rules for the use of arms.
Before shooting to kill or injure, the troops must take three preliminary steps: order suspicious vehicles or people approaching them to stop, issue warnings and fire warning shots.
Defense sources said it is difficult to draw a line between acts of self-defense and shots fired out of an excessive fear for safety.
A senior GSDF officer said troops must decide on the spot whether to fire, and they may have to pull the trigger instantly because they do not have enough time to go through the cautionary steps.
A sergeant in his 40s who had some of his subordinates dispatched to Iraq said: "The yardstick for the use of arms does not match the reality. Even in normal training, there are instances of a person not being able to make the right decision. Who is going to make the decision on the situation in Iraq?"
What, then, will happen to GSDF personnel if they harm locals in Samawah?
The U.S.-appointed Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq stipulates that nations with military personnel and civilians there have priority in jurisdiction over their nationals.
If a member of Japan's armed forces injures a local resident, GSDF military police assigned to Iraq would initially handle the case.
The military police would take any troops suspected of injuring or killing local residents back to Japan before handing them over to public prosecutors.
Japanese criminal law would be applied to the person or people charged, and they would be tried under a legal provision covering crimes committed by Japanese outside Japan.
But troops who kill or injure Iraqis by mistake would not be prosecuted. Investigators must establish an intention to harm or kill before a trial can be held.
Judicial sources said military police would only be able to question GSDF personnel if a crime takes place.
The military police would have to rely on the testimony of troops related to such crimes. Such restricted probes would raise the question of whether a fair investigation could be expected, the sources said.
A number of Japanese military personnel were involved in road traffic accidents that resulted in the deaths of local residents between 1992 and 1993 when GSDF troops were sent to Cambodia for United Nations peacekeeping operations.
But they were not tried under the Penal Code for professional negligence leading to death. Instead, they were punished under the Self-Defense Forces Law.
Some officials within the Defense Agency believe Iraqis may develop a strong distrust of the GSDF if its members are not punished for crimes resulting from negligence.
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At Least 47 Die in Baghdad Blast; 2nd Attack in 24 Hours
February 11, 2004
New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN and EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/international/middleeast/11CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 11 - In the second deadly strike in Iraq in two days, a suicide bomber careened a car packed with explosives into a crowd of Iraqi Army recruits in central Baghdad, killing at least 47 and wounding at least 50 others, police officials said. The attack today provoked a new wave of fears that the security situation is spinning out of control.
Several Iraqi politicians said the strike, nearly identical to the bombing of an Iraqi police station in the nearby town of Iskandariya on Tuesday, was timed to intimidate a delegation of United Nations election experts who recently arrived to determine if early elections can be held in Iraq.
"These terrorists want to inflame the area to get the United Nations to give up on the idea of elections," said Wael Abdullatif, a judge from the southern city of Basra who sits on the Iraqi Governing Council. "A week ago, things were quiet. But as soon as the delegation arrived, the violence exploded."
The car bomb in Iskandariya killed at least 54 people and wounded at least 60 others, most of them Iraqi men who were applying for jobs at the police station, a doctor said.
This morning, as hundreds of young men lined up outside the central recruiting office of the fledging Iraqi Army, a man with a scarf wrapped around his face plunged his car into the crowd and detonated powerful explosives, witnesses said.
The blast gouged a seven-foot-deep crater in the street, blew apart barriers made of sandbags and sent bodies flying, said Saad Shilal, one of the recruits.
"I knew this was dangerous work," Mr. Shilal said as he lay in a hospital bed. "But I thought the area was secure."
Hours later, a huge crowd formed around the debris scene, with many people looking for loved ones.
"My son, my son," wailed Saleema Fahad. "What is his destiny?"
Most of the more than 100 casualties in the two blasts were Iraqis applying for jobs with the new Iraqi Army and police forces.
The recruiting station of the Iraqi Army headquarters is next door to the volunteer center run by the Dawa Islamic Party, a prominent Shiite party whose leaders recently returned from exile in London and Iran.
The bombing on Tuesday morning in Iskandariya, 30 miles south of Baghdad, ripped through a police station where many Iraqis had lined up to apply for jobs.
The local police chief said that attack was carried out by a suicide bomber, though the American military could not confirm that.
"This terrorism will never stop us serving the country," the head of the Iraqi police, Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim told Al Jazeera, the Arab-language television network. "These terrorist actions take place all over in the world, such as in Istanbul and Saudi Arabia, and now they happen in Iraq because we have turned into a free country that will never suit them."
Both attacks appeared to be aimed at Iraqi civilians ready to aid occupation forces in securing the country against groups of criminals, terrorists and insurgents. In Iskandariya, the bomb exploded as a line of job applicants, mostly men, snaked out the door of the police station.
The car that detonated held about 500 pounds of explosives, an American military spokesman said. It was the third deadliest bombing since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein in April, and it continued a disturbing pattern of insurgents or terrorists killing Iraqis who are willing to work alongside occupation forces.
The attack came days after American officials released details of an intercepted document supposedly written by a suspected Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which Mr. Zarqawi boasts of directing about 25 suicide bombings in Iraq and requests help from Al Qaeda in igniting a sectarian war.
As usual, no group claimed responsibility for Tuesday's bombing. But a spokesman for the occupation forces, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt of the United States Army, said Mr. Zarqawi was a suspect in all of the major bombings in Iraq, including the one in Iskandariya.
Military officials have said they expect spectacular attacks in the months leading up to the scheduled transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30. Both bombings certainly met that description.
Only two other bombings in Iraq have killed more people. On Feb. 1, two suicide bombers walked into separate offices in Erbil of the main Kurdish political parties and detonated their explosives, killing 109 people. In late August, a car bomb exploded in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, killing at least 80 people, including a respected Shiite cleric.
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COMBAT
Up to 80 Killed in Bomb Blasts at 2 Iraqi Sites
February 11, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/international/middleeast/11IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 11 - Up to 80 people were killed and at least 76 were injured in two car bombs that exploded within almost 24 hours of each other in central Baghdad and in a nearby town, officials said Wednesday. Most of the casualties were Iraqis applying for jobs with the new Iraqi Army and police forces.
The car bomb in Baghdad exploded at 7:40 a.m. on Wednesday outside the recruiting station of the Iraqi Army headquarters, killing at least 25 Iraqis, said Staff Sgt. Shane Slaughter, a spokesman for the American military. The station is next door to the volunteer center of a prominent Shiite political party and near the main railway station.
The bombing on Tuesday morning took place in the town of Iskandariya, 30 miles south of Baghdad. The explosion ripped through a police station where many Iraqis had lined up to apply for jobs with the police.
The local police chief said the attack was carried out by a suicide bomber, through the American military could not confirm that.
It was unclear whether a suicide bomber was responsible for the explosion in Baghdad. The recruiting station was in an area called the Muthana airport, long abandoned but recently taken over by the American military and the new Iraqi Army.
The adjacent volunteer center is run by the Dawa Islamic Party, a prominent Shiite party whose leaders recently returned from exile in London and Iran. Al Jazeera, the Arab-language television station, said at least 16 people were wounded in the Wednesday blast.
Both attacks appeared to be aimed at Iraqi civilians ready to aid occupation forces in securing the country against groups of criminals, terrorists and insurgents. In Iskandariya, the bomb exploded as a line of job applicants, mostly men, snaked out the door of the police station.
The car that detonated held about 500 pounds of explosives, an American military spokesman said. It was the third deadliest bombing since American-led forces ousted Saddam Hussein in April, and it continued a disturbing pattern of insurgents or terrorists killing Iraqis who are willing to work alongside occupation forces.
The attack came days after American officials released details of an intercepted document supposedly written by a suspected Jordanian terrorist, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in which Mr. Zarqawi boasts of directing about 25 suicide bombings in Iraq and requests help from Al Qaeda in igniting a sectarian war.
As usual, no group claimed responsibility for the bombing. But a spokesman for the occupation forces, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt of the United States Army, said Mr. Zarqawi was a suspect in all of the major bombings in Iraq, including the one in Iskandariya.
Body parts and debris rained over the area when the bomb went off at about 9:30 a.m., and flames engulfed nearby cars, witnesses said. The explosion sheared off parts of the police station's yellow brick front wall. Bits of charred metal from the car landed more than a hundred yards away, falling inside a children's playground and near a mosque.
Blackened bodies were taken to the main hospital and placed on a patch of dirt beneath palm trees outside the one-room building serving as a morgue. Hospital workers in white coats carried the bodies one-by-one into the cramped building and piled them like logs on the floor.
"What did they do, these people who were killed?" Col. Abdul Rahim Salih, the local police chief, asked as he stood in the inner courtyard of the wrecked police station, tears welling up in his eyes. "People were hungry, they were suffering. They came here to put food on their table, and they died."
As Colonel Salih spoke, hours after the bombing, several police officers outside the station sprayed the air with their AK-47 rifles to disperse a crowd chanting anti-American slogans. That infuriated the men even more. They began hurling stones at a police pickup truck and rushed toward it as one officer jumped into the cab, started the engine and quickly backed the truck down the street.
Half an hour earlier, a mob had surrounded the chief of the Iraqi police, Brig. Gen. Ahmed Ibrahim, and shouted out that the police station had been destroyed by American fighter jets launching missiles. American soldiers who had set up a cordon leveled their M-16 rifles at the crowd. General Ibrahim leaped into his squad car and hurried off to Baghdad while the men in the crowd fled across the street.
Military officials have said they expect spectacular attacks in the months leading up to the scheduled transfer of sovereignty to an Iraqi government on June 30. This one certainly met that description. Only two other bombings in Iraq have killed more people. On Feb. 1, two suicide bombers walked into separate offices in Erbil of the main Kurdish political parties and detonated their explosives, killing 109 people. In late August, a car bomb exploded in the holy city of Najaf in southern Iraq, killing at least 80 people, including a respected Shiite cleric.
But the attack in Iskandariya most closely mirrors one last month at the northern entrance -- called the Assassin's Gate -- of the American headquarters in Baghdad. There, a suicide bomber detonated 1,000 pounds of plastic explosive in a pickup truck while Iraqis were waiting in line to go to work inside the compound, killing at least 25 people.
The bombing here took place on a Shiite holiday and on the second day of an open-door police job fair. More than 100 people had turned up in the morning to fill out forms, said Colonel Salih, the local police chief. The line stretched out the station past dirt-filled barriers.
One job applicant, Kadum Hamid Kanoosh, lay with a singed face and broken ribs in another hospital bed.
"I felt a fireball, then I fainted," said Mr. Kanoosh, 37. He smiled weakly. "I'm still determined to apply to be a policeman," he said. "I came to protect my country and my society."
Mr. Kanoosh, who said one of his brothers was executed under Saddam Hussein, has another working as a police officer in Baghdad. He and two other brothers were taking the first steps on that same path when they got in line at the police station on Tuesday. Neither of his brothers was wounded in the blast.
The hospital's general surgeon, Muhammad Gumar, said doctors had counted 51 bodies. The hospital also took in 60 of the wounded, nine of them police officers. About 20 critically wounded victims were sent to hospitals in Baghdad and the nearby town of Hilla, where three died, Dr. Gumar said.
Occupation officials say Iraq is in desperate need of police officers as the American military tries to lower its profile on the streets. Baghdad alone needs 10,000 more police officers, because the 9,000 in the city now are not enough, said Brig. Gen. Mark Hertling, a commander with the First Armored Division. At least 300 police officers have died in attacks since last April, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
In Iskandariya, the bombing showed that the Americans still have not won the Iraqis' full trust. Rumors of an American missile attack spread quickly, and dozens of Iraqi men stormed the ruined police station after American soldiers left in the late afternoon. "No, no to America!" they chanted while swarming past the charred hulks of cars.
"This is not a matter of jihad," said the tearful police chief, Colonel Salih, as his men began firing above the crowd. "What kind of jihad is this?"
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Love across the lines
It was never going to be easy for the American sergeant and the Iraqi doctor who fell in love in Baghdad - he was kicked out of the army and the country and she was threatened in the street. But now the couple, who married last August and haven't seen each other since, are to be reunited. They talk to Julian Borger
Wednesday February 11, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1145462,00.html
Saddam Hussein is reputed to be a big Shakespeare fan. He particularly likes The Taming of the Shrew and, more oddly, Romeo and Juliet. For some reason, the ex-dictator believes the tale of the star-crossed lovers teaches children obedience to nation and family. In that case, Saddam must deplore Sean Blackwell and his wife Ehda'a's version of the love story, about which he may even have read before his capture. For a while, they were all over the press - the American sergeant and the Iraqi doctor whose impulsive love affair and speedy marriage briefly united the US army and the nationalist resistance in sheer irritation.
Following their wedding, the US army confined Blackwell to base, stopped him seeing his bride and kicked him out of the military and all the way back home to Florida. Meanwhile in Baghdad, Ehda'a's life was threatened and she still fears for her family, whose name we consequently may not use.
But this particular story of love across the divide looks like it may have a happy outcome. The pair - who have not seen each other since a 20-minute wedding ceremony last August - are due to be reunited this weekend in the Jordanian capital, Amman. After a long struggle with prejudice and military bureaucracy, they will at last be together - bride, groom and the American television documentary team that has been recording every step of their travails.
Yet without the aggressive but sentimental glare of network television, the army might not have let Blackwell go so easily. At one point he even came close to being court-martialled - "for falling in love", as Vickie McKee, Blackwell's mother back in the Florida panhandle, always puts it. It was only after McKee and a local lawyer, Richard Alvoid, made the story world news that the army backed down on the threat of a court martial and dishonourable discharge. Blackwell was given a written reprimand - which he now paraphrases as: "You did this. We told you not to. Bad you" - and given an early ticket out of Iraq.
The story made headlines not just because it was a tale of romantic love on the front line. It also said a lot about Iraq's new occupiers and how they viewed the people they had declared liberated. It was last May, about a month after the fall of Baghdad, that Edhaa, 25, presented herself at the ministry of health, offering her services as a trained doctor at a time when the hospitals were on the point of collapse. She wanted to get out of Qut, the Baghdad satellite town where she was working and where educated, western-dressed women were under threat from resurgent Islamic militants.
The American administrators at the ministry did not want to know. But the sergeant in charge of security at the gate seemed pleasant and helpful. His name, as it turned out, was Sean Blackwell. He was 27 years old and in Iraq pretty much by accident. He had left the army in late 2002, and signed up with the Florida National Guard (the equivalent of the Territorial Army) thinking it would be a question of "barbecue and beers" a couple of times a month, and free tuition. He had planned to get a degree in nutrition rather than go to war. But a month after he signed up with the guard he received his deployment orders and found himself manning the gates of the Iraqi ministry of health four months later.
"He was the first American I had the chance to meet," says Ehda'a in a telephone interview from Baghdad. "He was very handsome with very nice eyes. He was trying his best to help." Blackwell had an idea about how she might find a job. There was some money set aside for clinics run jointly by army medics and local doctors, and there was a shortage of women doctors to examine women patients. In the end, the job did not work out - the army surgeon apparently did not want to work with an Iraqi - but at least it got the couple talking.
"It was kind of funny, I kind of flustered her," says Blackwell, at home outside Pensacola, Florida. "She was telling me [a story], like: 'They want to kidnap me' [referring to the fundamentalists in Qud] and I just kind of smiled and said, 'Well, I can't blame them.' She said: 'What?' and I said, 'I'd kidnap you.' I was just flirting with her. She got a little flustered and forgot how to speak English, and started talking to my interpreter in Arabic and he was translating for her, and then she started speaking English again. She was a little embarrassed. Open flirtation like that... well, it's a big no-no actually over there. But... it happened to work. That was basically it about how we met, and she just continued to visit every two to three days for the next four months."
Ehda'a would bring him food and talk to his friends. The way she tells it, it was as coy as a first encounter at the school gates. "After a few times we met, the translator was saying, 'What did you do to him? He spent all night asking about you and asking how to say [your] name.' "
For their first date, Blackwell took Ehda'a somewhere he knew would take her breath away - Saddam's palace. "It was a great day," says Ehda'a, in effusive English. "It was just like palaces of ancient ages." But she also felt sad. "Iraq is a very rich country and we in Iraq should live like everybody else, but Saddam took all the money because of his delusions of grandeur."
They talked about their families and found out that they had both been abandoned by their fathers as toddlers, and both were anxious to build stronger families. Blackwell's first marriage had collapsed and he had two daughters by two different women, but he insisted he was ready to start again.
Three months after their palace date, Blackwell - fed up with dating across the razor-wire - was already thinking about getting married. "It just felt like the right thing to do," he says now. "It was something that was more than us. I didn't want to give up something like that."
"He doesn't make plans," McKee adds by way of explanation.
Ehda'a says simply: "We just fell in love. We couldn't help it. We are willing to do whatever we have to do."
That initially involved Blackwell arranging to see Ehda'a's mother and brother, asking their permission, and then converting to Islam in an Iraqi court. But the army was a tougher nut to crack. Blackwell's commanding officer in the First Armoured Division, Colonel Thad Hill, was not about to let him marry.
"I'd been pushing for a meeting with him to try and come up with some sort of compromise, but he kept blowing me," says Blackwell. "I did get to speak to the sergeant-major prior to the wedding. His reaction was somewhat racist - 'Have you thought about your lives together, what they eat, the clothes they wear, the way they worship' - talking about Muslims." Blackwell told the sergeant-major he had already converted to Islam. "Oh Jeez, he just about fell out of his chair. It wasn't very well received and he basically told me that he battalion commander felt the same way."
But Blackwell ignored the views of his superior officers and went ahead with his plans. He and Ehda'a arranged to marry in a small garden behind a restaurant in the Baghdad district of Wasiriyah, during a break in one of the groom's patrols. His fellow soldiers stood guard with their rifles and a heavy machine gun.
It all happened very fast. Ehda'a, in a floral dress, was so nervous that she offered Blackwell her right hand by mistake. Blackwell, who wore combat fatigues, claims to have taken it all in his stride. "You're already in Baghdad so you're in sensory overload as it is, so I don't think nervousness was ever a factor."
(Another soldier in Blackwell's unit, a 37-year-old corporal, Brett Dagen, announced he was going to marry too - a friend of Ehda'a's. The two couples exchanged vows side by side, but days later that marriage dissolved.)
When Col Hill found out about the marriage, he hit the roof, and threatened to court-martial Blackwell for putting his fellow soldiers in danger by giving away the time and place of the patrol. It is a charge the former sergeant fiercely denies. He argues that his daily patrol, checking on supplies at petrol stations, was already regular and predictable. He also says Ehda'a's family and the judge did not know the venue for the wedding until the last moment, when they were fetched by an interpreter. As for Ehda'a, he says, she is trusted to mingle with and translate for senior members of the occupation authority.
The army has refused to comment on the case, but under press scrutiny it withdrew the most serious charges against Blackwell, and issued a watered-down reprimand instead. But while Blackwell was tussling with the army, Ehda'a had to deal with an increasingly violent and hostile atmosphere in her neighbourhood. Blackwell describes one incident in which she was approached as she left his base by taxi. "Some guys pulled her over and got out, and said if they ever saw her come out of our compound again dressed the way she was they would kill her," he says. There were more incidents like that, and he pleaded with her to lock herself in her house, but she insisted on continuing to work as a translator. Many of Ehda'a's friends have rejected her or tried to convince her to end the marriage.
Blackwell's experience has left him bitterly disullusioned with both the army and the politicians who sent him to Baghdad. For him, the lies he says the army told about his wedding mirror the ones the nation was told about the war. "When I first joined the military I planned to stay in for life, and I always knew the government would - I don't want to say lie - maybe exaggerate some things or stretch the truth a little but I always thought it was for the better good of the people," he says. "But in this situation I don't think it was."
Now, at least, the couple hope their trials are almost over. Blackwell has negotiated his army discharge and Ehda'a has secured a visa as far as Jordan. The US state department has told them they might get a US visa in as little as a month.
As soon as they get to America, he is going to take his bride on a tour of some states, show her pictures of others, and let her choose where she would like to live. He thinks the Florida panhandle might be a little too "redneck" for her. He will study nutrition and she will get her US medical qualifications. And they are going to have another wedding, barefoot on the beach on Florida's Gulf coast.
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Two Car Bombs Kill at Least 75 in Central Iraq
Many Victims Were Awaiting Interviews for Security Forces
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27943-2004Feb10.html
BAGHDAD, Feb. 11 -- Two large vehicle bombs exploded in central Iraq over a 24-hour period, killing at least 75 Iraqis as many of them were applying for jobs with the new security forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said early Wednesday.
A car bomb ripped through an army recruiting center in Baghdad early Wednesday morning, killing 25 Iraqis applying for jobs as soldiers. The blast followed a truck bombing south of the capital on Tuesday that killed at least 50 Iraqis as they waited to be interviewed for jobs on the police force there.
The two blasts suggested insurgents in Iraq have found a new focus for their violence. With U.S. forces and Iraqi police officers stationed behind tall concrete walls for protection, assailants are increasingly turning to recruits and others waiting outside the walls.
The bombing in Baghdad early Wednesday took place about 7:40 a.m., less than a mile from the Green Zone, the high-security neighborhood where the U.S.-led coalition has its headquarters.
Col. Ralph Baker of the 1st Armored Division said an explosive-packed Chevrolet drove up to the front entrance of the army recruiting center, where more than 50 Iraqis were waiting outside, and then detonated. There were no U.S. casualties.
"This explosion was targeting the security of the Iraqis," Baker said.
The circumstances were similar to those of a blast on Tuesday in the city of Iskandariyah, about 30 miles south of Baghdad.
Lt. Col. Saady Janabi, Iskandariyah's police chief, said a suicide bomber in a pickup truck packed with explosives weaved slowly through traffic at around 9:15 a.m., detonating his load between the police station and courthouse, which were protected by sand and concrete barriers.
The U.S. military said in a statement that the explosion was caused by a vehicle bomb, but that it was unclear whether it was a suicide attack. The incident showed the "fingerprints" of a terrorist attack, the statement said.
Razzaq Jabbar, director of the city's hospital, said he wrote 50 death certificates for victims of the blast. Because he released most of the seriously wounded survivors to other treatment centers, he said, he did not know how many might have died later from their injuries.
Janabi, the police chief, said five of his officers were wounded in the attack but none was killed. No U.S. casualties were reported.
After the explosion, U.S. troops trying to secure the area clashed with angry Iraqis who contended that the explosion was caused by a missile fired by a U.S. warplane. Witnesses said the troops fired into the crowd, hitting civilians. A local surgeon reported treating three Iraqis who had been shot, one of whom died of his wounds.
The witnesses' accounts could not be independently verified. U.S. soldiers at the scene declined to comment, and a spokesman for the military in Baghdad said he had no information about the allegations.
By afternoon, soldiers were still lined up near the police station, their guns pointed at men and women who threw rocks and cursed at them. Periodically, one side would charge the other and scuffles would break out.
"There is no God but Allah. America is the enemy of God," the protesters chanted. "Hell to the Americans. Hell to the Jews."
The bombing occurred at a time when a U.N. team has been assessing security and other conditions in Iraq to determine whether elections are feasible before June 30, the date that occupation authorities are scheduled to transfer political power to an Iraqi government. A transition plan developed by the Bush administration calls for an interim government to be formed through caucuses and appointments. But many Iraqis -- particularly Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the country's top religious leader -- maintain that the next government will be legitimate only if it is chosen through direct popular vote.
Tuesday's attack occurred at the beginning of the workday, when witnesses said the street between the police station and courthouse was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with pedestrians, many of whom were seeking employment with the police.
Insurgents have targeted Iraqis who cooperate with U.S. troops or occupation authorities, leaving warnings at their doorsteps, shooting them and setting bombs in places where they gather. At least 350 Iraqi police officers and security personnel have died in a series of car bombings since May.
Outside the Iskandariyah police station sometime after 9 a.m., there was a loud boom, then everything went silent. Screams then filled the air, said Mohammed Hussein Ali, 26, a laborer who was on a nearby street. He said he ran to the scene to help. The number of dead, wounded and scattered body parts seemed endless, he said.
"I just kept putting bodies in cars. I couldn't tell who was dead and who was just wounded," Ali said.
Trouble between U.S. troops and Iraqi bystanders started almost as soon as soldiers arrived in Humvees to secure the area. Several dozen witnesses said some soldiers stepped on bodies as they tried to set up a perimeter around the blast zone, angering Iraqis trying to assist the wounded.
Mouayed Abdul Kadhim, 35, a construction worker, said he saw one soldier step on the body of a man who had died. When Kadhim asked the soldier for permission to carry the body away, "he said no, so I hit him," Kadhim said.
Sabah Mehdi Ibrahim, 28, a taxi driver, said that he and others tried to get close to the police station to try to help but that the soldiers appeared to misunderstand, thinking he was attacking them.
"Anyone who came to help the wounded, they shot at," Ibrahim said.
Muhammed Gumer Alganabi, a surgeon at the Iskandariyah General Hospital, said three of the people brought in had bullet wounds but no blast wounds. He said one had been shot in the stomach and died as Alganabi tried to stabilize him. He said the two others, who were in stable condition, told him that they had been shot "by the Americans."
As night began to fall, other versions of the day's events spread. Some Iraqis said they had heard aircraft overhead immediately before the blast. Some displayed shrapnel they had gathered at the scene and speculated that it could not possibly have come from a car explosion. Others wondered why U.S. soldiers had not been guarding the line of job applicants at the police station as they had in the past.
"We heard a helicopter" and then something fell from the sky, said Hamza Habeeb, who had been waiting in front of the courthouse and suffered light cuts to his head and legs.
"Look at this piece of metal. It is not from a car," said Saad Karim, 21, who said he was a friend of one of the wounded.
"Why weren't Americans at the police station? We used to see them there," said Ali, the laborer.
Karim Khudhaier Salihy, 55, a sheik who said he was speaking on behalf of the 350 people in his tribe, said he believed the U.S. military fired on the police station and that it did so intentionally. "The Americans, they don't want Iraq to be stabilized," he said. "They want to make ethnic conflict to prolong their presence in Iraq. So they created a crisis."
Mohammed Hamed Ubaid, 21, was wounded by glass in his head and legs as he was waiting to talk to someone about his application to become a policeman. Later, as he waited to be discharged from the hospital, Ubaid said he was still in a daze from the attack and had not thought about whether he would pursue the job. But a half-dozen family members who came to take him home were vehement in their response: absolutely not.
"I won't let him," said his mother, Hadiya Ubaid. "I will lock him down before I let him go back to the police station."
Correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran contributed to this report.
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Scenes of horror at Iraqi hospital
Jennie Matthew
Samawa, Iraq 11 February 2004
Mail&Guardian (South Africa)
http://www.mg.co.za/Content/l3.asp?ao=31006&t=1
Two-year-old Nawaf Mishal lies whimpering on a pile of dirty blankets in an Iraqi hospital, so malnourished his face is deformed, his legs are like pencils and his enormous almond eyes empty with pain.
He vomits everything he eats, and a 10-day course of antibiotics and fluids at the children's hospital in Samawa, about 260km south of Baghdad, has not helped.
Nawaf fell ill when the village drinking water became infused with sewage. No one in his family thought to boil the water first.
Doctors at the hospital say the number of cases of severe gastroenteritis caused by contaminated water have doubled since the 2003 United States-led invasion of Iraq.
In the children's ward, the stench of dried sweat and raw waste is almost unbearable. Mothers, dressed head to foot in black robes, sit cross-legged on the floor or beds, cradling children as many drift slowly into death.
The hospital has only 11 incubator units for more than 20 premature babies. Most date back to the 1980s before international sanctions isolated Iraq from the world in the wake of Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait.
Oxygen supplies run out for days. Doctors have less than half the drugs, fluids and equipment they need. The electricity goes off for hours. The hospital's sewage system frequently overflows.
"We have nothing. Most children die, especially in winter," said Samah Zaher, a 25-year-old junior doctor.
Doctors suspect three-year-old Abdullah Salah, suddenly seized by convulsions three days ago, has meningitis or encephalitis.
But resident paediatrician Ayad Miran thinks the journey to Baghdad for a scan and diagnosis would kill the child.
"I'm a sad man for the condition of these children," says Miran, who works more than 10 hours a day, seven days a week for $150 a month.
The hospital is also woefully incapable of treating hideously disfigured babies, whose illnesses doctors suspect are being caused by depleted uranium ammunition used by US and British troops in the 1991 Gulf War.
"They have different rare diseases and deformities, such as multiple fractures, bone disorders, supernumerary fingers and thumbs. Sometimes they live for a few weeks. When the deformities are very bad they usually die," says paediatrician Abdul Amieer al-Dabbagh.
Two months ago, a woman gave birth to what he could describe only as a "mermaid", with a thick "fishbone tail" in place of the legs, three double chins and partially formed ears. He keeps pictures of all such children.
It was so disfigured, doctors could not tell whether the baby was a boy or a girl and the infant died shortly after delivery.
Unemployment is rife in Samawa and public sanitation almost non-existent. The hospital used to charge for treatment, but with no jobs no one can pay.
"I came to Samawa 12 years ago, at the end of the Iran-Iraq war. I chose the safest town and one year later the embargoes started," says Dabbagh.
In 1995, he was jailed by Saddam's regime for four months after a British pharmacist visited the hospital with vital supplies of medicine.
About 600 Dutch troops have been based in Samawa since Saddam was ousted from power 10 months ago, but no one at the hospital has seen them.
Many have high hopes that Japanese peacekeeping troops, who began arriving last month, will rebuild the moribund city.
But so far the only signed and sealed construction contract is for their military camp outside the city. -- Sapa-AFP
-------- israel / palestine
At Least 14 Palestinians Killed in Israeli Raids
February 11, 2004
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/international/middleeast/11CND-GAZA.html?hp
GAZA, Feb. 11 - Fourteen Palestinians were killed and dozens were wounded today during Israeli army raids into Gaza City and a town in the southern Gaza Strip, Palestinian witnesses and hospital officials said.
In Gaza City, the main city in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian men hid behind walls or sprawled flat on the ground as gunfire rang out in the street during a battle sparked by the raid, which began at about 4 a.m. when Israeli forces, in tanks and other armored combat vehicles, entered the eastern part of the city.
Palestinians burned tires and tried to block off the streets during the raid, which was intended to arrest militants.
Twelve Palestinians were killed and 44 were wounded, said Jumaa al-Saqqa, a spokesman at Gaza City's Shifa hospital. At least five militants and two Palestinian policemen were among the dead, hospital officials said.
In the town of Rafah, two Palestinians were killed during an Israeli army incursion early this morning, said officials at Al Najar Hospital there.
Israeli troops raid Palestinians cities and towns almost daily in search of militants, but such operations in Gaza City, the largest Palestinian city, are relatively rare.
The Israeli Army said its operation today aimed to "thwart continued mortar and missile attacks at Israeli targets," according to Reuters.
On Jan. 28, Israeli troops in armored vehicles charged into an industrial zone on the southern outskirts of the city and fought gun battles that killed eight Palestinians, including militants and civilians, the two sides said.
Israel said it had sent its forces into the industrial zone because Palestinian factions had been firing mortars and shooting from the area at the isolated Jewish settlement of Netzarim, a little over a mile away.
About 7,500 Israeli settlers live in fortified enclaves in the Gaza Strip, among more than 1.2 million Palestinians living in crowded Gaza city, towns and refugee camps.
Palestinians and Israelis have been unable to stem the continued violence and make progress on the road map, the peace initiative sponsored by the Bush administration, in which Israel is supposed to halt growth of Jewish settlements and Palestinians are supposed to begin dismantling militant groups. Officials in the office of Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said last week that Mr. Sharon may seek to move Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip to settlements in the West Bank under his plan for "unilateral disengagement" from the Palestinians.
But the Israeli Army's operations in the Gaza Strip were expected to be stepped up despite talk of plans to withdraw the settlers.
"We warned last week that there would be an Israeli escalation," said Muhammad al-Hindi, a leader of the Islamic Jihad militant group.
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.
--------
Recent Israeli Operations in Gaza Strip
February 11, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinians-Gaza-Glance.html
Here is a look at major Israeli military operations against Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip in recent months:
--Feb. 11: Fifteen Palestinians killed in separate raids in Gaza City and Rafah.
--Feb. 2: Four Palestinian militants killed in Rafah.
--Jan. 28: Eight Palestinians killed in a raids in the Gaza City area. Militants fired anti-tank missiles and set off a bomb near troops, prompting hours of gunbattles.
--Dec. 25, 2003: Five Palestinians killed in helicopter missile attack.
--Dec. 23: Eight Palestinians killed during incursion into Rafah.
--Dec. 11: Six Palestinians killed in shootout sparked by army search for weapons smuggling tunnels in southern Gaza town of Rafah.
--Oct. 20: Fourteen Palestinians, including three children, killed in missile strike in Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza Strip.
--Oct. 10: Nine Palestinians, including an 8-year-old, killed in heavy fighting in Rafah refugee camp, a flashpoint near Egypt-Gaza border.
--Aug. 24: Four Hamas activists killed in helicopter strike in Gaza City, more than a dozen bystanders wounded.
--Aug. 21: Three Hamas members, including top official Ismail Abu Shanab and two bodyguards, killed by helicopter missile strike. One bystander killed and at least 15 others wounded.
--May 1: Thirteen Palestinians killed in battle with Hamas militants in Gaza City.
-------- spies
Pentagon eager to wash hands of Iraq mess it created
BY JOSEPH L. GALLOWAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Wednesday, Feb 11, 2004
http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/news/editorial/7920901.htm
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - What a difference a year can make. If you don't believe it, ask Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
A year ago, testifying before Congress, Wolfowitz predicted that securing postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan. After all, the deputy secretary said, there's no ethnic tension in Iraq.
The immediate reaction of virtually everyone who knew even a little bit about Iraq and its long-simmering tensions, repression, bloodshed and just plain bad blood among Kurds and Turkomen in the north, Sunni Arabs in the middle and Shiite Muslims in the south, was: Say what?
Not since President Ford prematurely declared Soviet-dominated Poland a free country has a public official stuck his foot so deeply and so publicly in his mouth.
Wolfowitz visited Iraq early this month and, at a meeting in the northern city of Kirkuk, he got a long, painful ear pounding on the subject of tension and fear among the country's ethnic groups.
The Sunni Arabs complained that they were being abused and mistreated by the Kurds. The Shia made it clear that the only thing would satisfy them - the long-oppressed majority in this nation of 25 million people - was free and open elections, which they would, of course, win. Other Iraqis complained that local militias, who owe no loyalty to the central government, are intimidating and frightening people.
Central Intelligence Agency officers in Baghdad Station have reported to the home office their own fears that Iraq is on a "glide path to civil war."
The Department of Defense, which is to say Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, is skinning back the U.S. force in Iraq from 130,000-plus today to 105,000 by late spring, when the current round of troop rotations ends. However many soldiers and Marines we have in Iraq, they could end up in the crossfire of a civil war.
Rumsfeld and his key aides, meanwhile, are running for cover.
In one recent high-level meeting, Rumsfeld looked at Secretary of State Colin Powell and said, "Jerry (Ambassador Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian in Iraq) works for you, right?"
Powell looked as if he'd been struck by lightning. Bremer and every other U.S. official in Iraq reports directly to Rumsfeld and the Pentagon. Rumsfeld demanded and got complete authority over the military, over the civilian authority in charge of rebuilding the country, over the administration's $87 billion Iraq budget, over every line of every contract let. And suddenly he forgot that Bremer works for him?
That same week, Wolfowitz and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage were summoned to a closed-door session of the Senate Armed Services Committee to discuss how the U.S. contracting system is working in Iraq.
When Wolfowitz was asked a tough question about the controversies surrounding the U.S. contracting efforts in Iraq, he turned to Armitage and said: "You can answer that one, right, Rich?" Armitage answered by noting that the Department of Defense and the Office of the Secretary of Defense control every American contract let in Iraq, and that the State Department has authority over none of those contracts.
"Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."
The only question is whether Rumsfeld and Company can keep the lid on all the boiling pots until they can pass the CPA and the whole nation-rebuilding buck to the State Department.
The investigations and audits of Halliburton's and Halliburton subsidiaries' alleged contract overcharges, with their uncomfortable proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's former chief, are just the tip of the iceberg.
The real action, knowledgeable American officials say, is in local contracts that are being let under authority of the ruling Iraqi Governing Council. U.S. officials say some less savory Council members are demanding kickbacks on some contracts in hopes of investing the ill-gotten gains in buying or bending the selection of local and regional councils who will help choose a new government and bolstering their own distant hopes of holding onto power.
ABOUT THE WRITER
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and co-author of the national best-seller "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young." Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 National Press Building, Washington, D.C. 20045.
-------- us
Pentagon Regularly Shortcuts Operational Testing of Weapons, Report Says
BY DAVID WOOD
Newhouse News Service
Feb. 11, 2004
http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/wood021204.html
WASHINGTON -- The Air Force has spent $32 billion on its new F-22 supersonic stealth fighter. Twenty aircraft have come off the production line and hundreds more are planned.
But rigorous, independent field testing -- to find out if the F-22 actually works -- hasn't yet begun.
Not until April are Defense Department testers scheduled to fly the F-22 "Raptor" in mock aerial combat to see if it "can dominate adversaries with its superior agility" as the Air Force asserts.
The F-22 situation is not unique. The Pentagon is producing and even fielding billions of dollars' worth of weapons that have not been adequately tested, according to a new report to Congress.
As a result, American war-fighters -- combat infantrymen, fighter pilots, submarine crews -- may be getting weapons "without knowing their operational capabilities and limitations," Thomas P. Christie, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester, wrote in the January report.
Moreover, Christie said in an interview, taxpayers may be required to pay later to redesign and fix problems that rigorous testing could find now.
Does this make sense -- to buy before you fly?
After all, new drugs undergo years of exhaustive clinical testing before being approved for public use. Car prototypes rack up tens of thousands of miles on test tracks and city streets before going into production. Meat is sampled before it's put on supermarket shelves. Government inspectors examine children's pajamas, flashlight batteries and toasters, among hundreds of consumer items.
At the Pentagon, however, the trend is the reverse, as Christie's report documents: -- The V-22 tilt-rotor Osprey has already cost some $11 billion, and operational testing won't start for at least a year.
-- Contractors are already turning out missiles and radars for the trouble-plagued missile defense system, which the Pentagon exempted from operational testing, amid serious concerns among watchdog government agencies about schedule delays and cost overruns. Spent so far: $100 billion. Projected spending over each of the next five years: $8 billion to $10 billion.
-- The Army's new Stryker wheeled vehicle was even sent into combat in Iraq before its testing was completed, amid criticism that its armored skin was too flimsy to protect soldiers against enemy fire.
The Pentagon has always been touchy about "operational testing," or aggressive testing under combat conditions. But a decade ago, Congress -- fed up with poorly performing new weapons -- set up Christie's office, making it accountable not just to Defense Department officials but to Congress itself.
Its mandate: to see if new gear works in the cold and mud, if soldiers and airmen can fix it, if it stands up to the kind of repeated hard use it would get in a war. Under the skeptical eyes of Christie's testers, aircraft are slammed onto carrier decks, armored vehicles are shot at, delicate electronics are heated and frozen, fuel efficiency and repair times are carefully noted.
But critics say the independent office has been overwhelmed and outmaneuvered by powerful political interests, Pentagon bureaucrats and defense contractors, all with a stake in moving costly weapons systems into the field with as little disruption as possible.
Christie, a craggy-faced mathematician and career defense analyst, said the military increasingly brushes aside regulations requiring operational testing, often citing the war on terrorism as a rationale.
"I don't think we deploy something that is dangerous or totally ineffective," he said. "We are deploying systems that purists like myself would have liked to see a lot more testing of, or we've found warts and we didn't fix the warts."
In a telling exchange with Navy Secretary Gordon R. England 18 months ago, Christie complained the Navy was rushing into service weapons "that have not demonstrated acceptable performance." England's curt reply, which reverberated around Washington: "The risks were evaluated and considered acceptable."
In plain English, butt out.
"He doesn't have the power and authority necessary," Iowa Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley, a longtime critic of Pentagon bureaucracy and defense contractors, said of Christie.
During development of weapons, of course, testing takes place almost constantly. This is called "developmental testing," to see whether a piece of hardware conforms to technical specifications. Tightly controlled, these tests are usually conducted by the contractors and officials with a vested interest in success, according to James G. Burton, a retired Pentagon tester whose book, "The Pentagon Wars," was made into a 1998 HBO movie.
Operational testing, in contrast, is designed to stress the weapon under combat conditions.
"No question, the stuff has to work in the field, not just in the lab," Jacques Gansler, under secretary of defense from 1997 to 2001, said in an interview.
But the shortcomings of developmental testing are legendary.
The Air Force and contractors once dangled a developmental heat-seeking missile from a crane, then claimed success when it was dropped and hit the target immediately below. To make sure the missile "found" its mark, contractors had placed an electric hot plate atop the target, according to Burton.
The new ballistic missile defense system will be built piece by piece without a rigorous operational test. And the developmental testing will be done by developers and commercial contractors under a new office called the Responsible Test Organization, said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.
The approach has raised warning flags at the General Accounting Office, the independent investigative arm of Congress. It "increases the risk that significant problems will be discovered as the system is integrated and built, when it is more costly and time-consuming to fix them," Robert E. Levin, senior analyst at the GAO, said in a letter to Congress last month.
The Raptor is an especially noteworthy case. Never before has the government sunk as much money into a weapon system so far in advance of independent testing as the F-22.
"We probably should have held up (production) until we were sure we had all the warts fixed," said Christie, who will oversee independent testing of the F-22 beginning this spring. "That's not to say we've got big warts on the F-22. But the risk is fielding a piece of equipment that will have major fixes to be made after production."
A Lockheed Martin spokesman for the F-22 program, Greg Caires, said the F-22 "has been rigorously tested." He said Lockheed Martin is working with the Air Force to prepare for operational flight testing.
Air Force officials, asked about the risks of delayed operational testing, said the aircraft had already demonstrated "impressive" performance in 4,700 hours of developmental testing. Declining to be interviewed, they instead released a statement saying the testing Christie's office will perform is being done because "federal law requires" it.
The supersonic stealthy fighter is slated to continue in production even before it has the gear and software to fly its other promised mission: ground attack.
That will be added later, and eventually tested to see whether it works. Meantime, a planned fleet of 278 F-22s, at $258.2 million each, will be rolling off production lines.
And if the aircraft is a lemon?
"Well then, we have a problem," Christie said.
(David Wood can be contacted at david.wood@newhouse.com)
----
U.S. Military May Run Out Of Money
United Press International
February 11, 2004
http://www.military.com/NewsContent/0,13319,FL_money_021104,00.html
WASHINGTON - The military will have no money to pay for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for three months beginning Oct. 1 because the White House is declining to ask Congress for funding until December or January, well after the presidential election.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker told the Senate Armed Services Committee the $38 billion he has for 2004 war operations will last only until the end of September, as he spends $3.7 billion a month in Iraq and about $900 million a month in Afghanistan. The Army has about 114,000 soldiers in Iraq and roughly 10,000 in Afghanistan.
"I am concerned on how we bridge between the end of this fiscal year and when we can get a supplemental in the next fiscal year," Schoomaker told the committee.
The fiscal year -- the government's spending year -- runs from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30 annually. Funds for 2004, therefore, run out Sept. 30, 2004.
The Marine Corps, which will send about 75,000 Marines to Iraq in 2004/2005 and expects to need $1.5 billion, is in a similar financial bind.
"I share the concerns of the chief of staff of the army about this," said Marine Commandant Gen. Michael Hagee.
The war has been funded by emergency supplemental appropriations, separate from the Pentagon's annual budget, which is not set up to pay for "contingency operations."
The first Iraq supplemental, requested in March 2003, gave the Pentagon around $63 billion for the war. The second supplemental of $87 billion was requested by President Bush in September 2003. It will run out on Oct. 1. Roughly $19 billion of that total is going toward Iraq civil reconstruction. About $10 billion is for Afghanistan.
President Bush is not asking Congress for a 2005 supplemental until December or January, according to Pentagon comptroller Dov Zakheim.
U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told reporters Tuesday the decision not to request a supplemental rested with the White House. He could not explain why the administration would allow a three-month gap in funding the war on terror, ostensibly its top priority.
"They have so many factors to consider. They have to look at all the departments and agencies. I don't know -- they'll certainly know a lot more," Rumsfeld said.
Rumsfeld and Zakheim have said the delay has to do with wanting to wait to get better detail on what the spending needs will be.
Zakheim said the services can cover the gap by shifting funding around in regular budgets until the White House requests additional money.
"As you move into the fiscal year, Oct. 1, November, December, January, you're going to know an awful lot more than you know today in February," Rumsfeld said Tuesday.
The White House had sufficient detail and foresight last year to request $87 billion for the coming fiscal year on Sept. 7, 2003.
That date however, coincided with a precipitous drop in President Bush's approval ratings, according to polling data from the Gallup Organization.
Between Aug. 25 and 26, Bush had an approval rating of 59 percent. In polls conducted Sept. 8-10, it had dropped to 52 percent. Less than two weeks later, Bush's approval rating was at 50 percent -- the lowest ever in his three years in office. His approval rating bounced back to 63 percent immediately after Saddam Hussein was captured in Iraq in December, but dipped to 49 the last week of January. It has risen back to 52 percent this week.
With early polls suggesting likely Democratic candidate Sen. John Kerry and President Bush very close in approval ratings, the White House may not want to risk a drop related to asking for additional funding so close to the November election.
If the current spending rate continues in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon is likely to need around $50 billion for military operations alone.
----
Pentagon: U.S. can fund Iraq war beyond Sept.
By DREW BROWN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
Wed, Feb. 11, 2004
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/7931211.htm
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon on Wednesday sought to allay concerns that the military would run out of money to pay for the war in Iraq beyond next September, saying it could take funds from other accounts until the White House asks Congress for the extra billions of dollars needed.
The Pentagon's $401.7 billion budget request for fiscal year 2005 doesn't contain money for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That means the military will run out of cash to pay for the war after Oct. 1, when the current funding is expected to run dry. The White House isn't expected to ask Congress for extra money until January 2005 - after the November presidential election.
On Tuesday, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker and Marine Corps Commandant Michael Hagee told the Senate Armed Services Committee that they are concerned about how to fund the gap between Oct. 1 and when the White House's supplemental spending request is approved early next year.
But in a hastily called news conference on Wednesday, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim said the Pentagon could dip into operations and maintenance accounts to pay for the war in Iraq and operations in Afghanistan during the four months between the end of September and January.
"Many of us believe we should hold off ... requesting any supplemental funds until the beginning of calendar year 2005," said Zakheim. "There are just so many uncertainties and variables between now and then."
Zakheim said the Pentagon has adequate funds in its $127 billion operations and maintenance budget to cover the war, and it can pay that money back after Congress approves the additional money.
He said such variables as how many additional foreign troops will be contributed to Iraq and the schedule of Afghanistan's elections, which have yet to be set for 2005, make it impossible to estimate the operational costs for those countries until July.
Some lawmakers, particularly Democrats, have accused the administration of trying to hide the true costs of the war by financing them through emergency spending bills.
Last year, Congress approved two emergency requests totaling nearly $166 billion to finance the war and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Last week, Joshua Bolten, the White House budget director, said a supplemental spending bill for Iraq could run as high as $50 billion.
----
Pentagon faces challenge in creating armed services information network
By Greta Wodele,
National Journal's Technology Daily
February 11, 2004 GovExec.com
http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0204/021104tdpm1.htm
The Defense Department faces strategic challenges as it works to create a joint information network that allows war-fighters to communicate across the armed services, military officials told lawmakers on Wednesday.
In prepared testimony, Major Gen. Marilyn Quagliotti, whose division oversees work on joint communication capabilities, told lawmakers that the department must address two problems to create a global network: It must organize the forces to support, and it must view the networks as an integral part of war-fighting and solve inter-branch communications snags.
Quagliotti added that only solving technical issues would not "achieve the end state of network-centric warfare." The framework for change, she said, includes issues of doctrine, organization, training, material leaders, facilities and personnel, among others.
"Actions must be accomplished in each of these areas for network-centric warfare to become a reality," she said in testimony before the House Armed Services Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities Subcommittee.
John Stenbit, assistant secretary of defense at the Pentagon's networks and information integration division, said in his testimony that the military's "information vision is to empower users through easy access to information anytime and anyplace, with attendant security."
To achieve that goal, the department is employing a global information grid that the department defines as a "globally interconnected." He said the architecture includes many systems that work with each other to provide the "right information to the right places." Stenbit compared the system to a private Internet address.
"In the same manner that the [Web] is transforming industries and societies on a global scale, the [grid] will support the transformation of our war-fighting and business practices," he said.
Rear Adm. Thomas Zelibor, deputy for integration and policy at the Navy, said the architecture has helped Defense make progress on technology initiatives, such as expanded bandwidth, a transformation satellite, joint tactical radio systems and network-centric services. Zelibor also noted challenges with directing resources toward advanced joint architectures.
"The Navy's challenge continues to be synchronizing the integration of our existing systems into joint architectures while ensuring we remain connected to our allies and coalition partners, as well as Homeland Security agencies, such as the Coast Guard," his testimony said.
----
MILITARY COSTS
Service Chiefs Challenge White House on the Budget
February 11, 2004
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/politics/11MILI.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - In an unusual public display of differences with the White House, the top officers of the Army, Marine Corps and Air Force all raised questions on Tuesday about how the Bush administration plans to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan after the current financing runs out at the end of September.
Appearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, three of the four chiefs of the armed services expressed concerns about a financing gap, perhaps of four months, for the two missions, whose combined cost is about $5 billion a month.
They were left out of President Bush's budget request for the 2005 fiscal year, with the administration saying it would make a supplementary request for up to $50 billion, probably next January - after the elections this year.
"I am concerned," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, said in response to a question from Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, "on how we bridge between the end of this fiscal year and whenever we could get a supplemental in the next year."
Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the commandant of the Marine Corps, and Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, agreed with General Schoomaker's concern.
Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, said that unless major combat operations suddenly resumed in Iraq, the Navy would not be affected. But the three other service chiefs warned that they might have to cut activities like training exercises. "We will have a challenge during that first quarter," General Hagee told the senators.
"We're all concerned about maintaining continuity of operations," General Schoomaker said in a brief interview after the hearing. "We want to make sure we minimize the bridge."
General Schoomaker emphasized that the timing and mechanics of seeking a supplemental spending request were up to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and White House officials. He said he was simply describing the possible consequences for the Army.
The Marines and especially the Army are shouldering a vast majority of the costs and providing most of the 110,000 troops now rotating into Iraq. The Air Force flies about 150 missions a day in support of operations in Iraq.
The service chiefs' remarks are certain to fuel accusations by Congressional Democrats that by omitting the costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan operations, the administration has masked the political and financial costs of the missions in an election year.
"It's a deceptive way to finance the operations of the military," Mr. Reed said.
At the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld sought to allay any fears that delaying a supplemental request for several months would harm military operations. The military services have typically borrowed from other spending accounts to pay for unanticipated operations, he said, and are then reimbursed months later by Congress.
"Until the funding is available from the supplemental, they draw down in other accounts," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters. "But you don't want to do it too long, because it can cause distortions."
Independent budget analysts said that financing practice was more complicated to apply this year because the Iraq and Afghanistan operations were costlier and more politically charged than previous missions.
"The chiefs are a bit anxious about this, because it is a lot of money and they can't take it for granted," said Steven Kosiak, a military budget analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington.
Mr. Kosiak noted that the administration submitted its supplemental request for the current fiscal year last September, and said there was no budgetary reason the administration could not do the same later this summer for the 2005 supplemental request.
Michael O'Hanlon, a military specialist at the Brookings Institution, said the discretionary funds readily available to fill any financing gap could be exhausted by February or March. "The military doesn't want to feel like it's living week to week, hand to mouth at the Congress's mercy," he said.
During the three-and-a-half hour hearing on Tuesday, the service chiefs also described the additional training and preparations that soldiers and marines preparing to rotate into Iraq had received.
Marines who are replacing the 82nd Airborne Division west of Baghdad have drawn on neighborhood patrol procedures used by the Los Angeles Police Department as well as tactics the British Army has employed in Northern Ireland.
General Hagee and General Jumper also said they had no doubts about the administration's prewar intelligence about Iraq's illegal weapons program. "I was absolutely convinced that Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, if not biological weapons," General Hagee said, "and that he would use them when we crossed the line of departure."
General Schoomaker described steps the Army was taking to improve combat readiness and the quality of life for soldiers and their families, including a plan to keep troops at their first post for six to seven years.
"We need to ask ourselves the opposite question we've always asked, and the question ought to be why are we moving this soldier?" General Schoomaker said. "If the answer is there's a good answer, then we'll move that soldier. But if the answer is, well, because they've been here two or three years and it's time to move, I don't think that cuts the mustard."
----
Military Chiefs Testify of Worries About War Funding
By Vernon Loeb and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30403-2004Feb10.html
The Army, Air Force and Marine Corps chiefs expressed concern yesterday about funding war operations in Iraq and Afghanistan once the current fiscal year ends on Sept. 30, saying some type of temporary financing will be necessary as they await the passage of a supplemental appropriation.
"I do not have an answer for exactly how we would do that," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee, with Gen. Michael W. Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, and Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief, offering assenting views.
The chiefs' testimony came as senators, for the second time in a week, criticized the Bush administration for failing to include as much as $50 billion for ongoing military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in its proposed $401.7 billion defense budget for fiscal 2005.
Pentagon Comptroller Dov S. Zakheim said last week that those costs would be covered in a fiscal 2005 supplemental measure that will not be proposed until January at the earliest, which means the military services will most likely have to borrow from fourth-quarter accounts to pay for first-quarter military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan until the supplemental is passed.
A senior Army officer involved in budgeting, in an interview last week, expressed concern about the disruption this would cause. The officer said the delay would result in added borrowing costs.
But a senior administration official who works with the services on budgeting issues played down this concern after yesterday's hearing, noting that the Pentagon has considerable experience bridging its cash flows while waiting for supplemental funding.
The official rejected suggestions that the administration is trying to put off the supplemental to avoid another case of sticker shock just before the election.
Joshua B. Bolten, director of the Office of Management and Budget, "has already said publicly that the supplemental will probably be in the range of $50 billion," the official said. "We have enough money in the budget now to get through the fiscal year. We didn't see how the congressional schedule would permit consideration of a supplemental late in the year."
In questioning the chiefs, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) called the administration's supplemental strategy "a deceptive way to finance the operations of the military" and said: "I think it has practical ramifications also. . . . The most remarkable thing about this budget is what it leaves out, not what it includes."
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the administration's decision to fund a temporary increase of 30,000 Army troops through the supplemental "deceives the American people about the size of the deficit."
Asked about the chiefs' comments later in the day at a Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the services would simply have to "draw down in other accounts" until the supplemental is passed.
"And the Congress understands that," he said. "That's been the pattern."
During the hearing, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) pressed Schoomaker about why the administration's budget proposal does not include adequate funding for hundreds of additional "up-armored" Humvees and the "add-on armor kits" needed to protect troops from roadside bombs in Iraq.
Schoomaker said the number of up-armored Humvees in the Iraqi theater has tripled, with a goal of 4,100 vehicles for both the Army and the Marines in 2005. But he indicated that funding for the armor kits for many unarmored vehicles in Iraq will have to come from the fiscal 2005 supplemental appropriation.
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Guard Records On President Are Released
By Lois Romano and Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30494-2004Feb10?language=printer
The White House released yesterday summaries of President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service records and pay documents, which the president's spokesman said demonstrate that Bush fulfilled his Vietnam War-era military obligations in the early '70s.
The documents indicate that Bush performed Guard service in the fall of 1972 and in early 1973, and show that he was paid for work during the period that Democrats have alleged Bush shirked his service.
"When you serve, you are paid for that service," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said. "These documents outline the days on which he was paid. That means he served. And these documents also show he met his requirements. And it's just really a shame that people are continuing to bring this up. . . . These documents clearly show that the president fulfilled his duties."
The documents include payroll sheets never before made public. Summaries prepared by the Defense Financing Accounting Service indicate that Bush was paid for service in October and November 1972 and in January and April 1973. That spans a period -- from May 1972 to May 1973 -- when Bush was assigned to Guard units in Alabama and Houston and that has been the focus of Democratic critics.
But the records -- which McClellan said are all the documents that the White House has -- do not show the exact nature or whereabouts of Bush's service during that period. Military experts -- including one cited by the White House -- said such records should exist.
In addition, according to the new documents, Bush was performing service or unit drills at a time when his commanding officers in Houston said they could not evaluate him because "he has not been observed" at Ellington Air Force Base in Houston -- as they had written in previously released National Guard records. That report was signed by two officers on May 2, 1973, a day that the new documents show Bush was supposed to have been performing service in Houston.
Bush's military record during the Vietnam War was an issue during the 2000 campaign and was revived recently when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terence R. McAuliffe called Bush "AWOL" -- absent without leave -- and contrasted his service with that of Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry (D), a decorated veteran.
The controversy has been growing steadily in recent days. Bush said on Sunday that he would authorize the release of all his National Guard records, as his administration began to mount an aggressive defense of the president's military service. But the documents released yesterday still leave unanswered questions.
National Guard members receive points for the times they appear for drills and other duty. The documents released yesterday were annual summaries of the points Bush earned. The typed documents are in contrast to the other documents in Bush's personnel file, which offer handwritten, detailed pages of dates of service in the earlier years. No handwritten documents of Bush's annual points have ever surfaced for May 1972 through May 1973.
Bush enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard in 1968, two weeks before graduating from Yale and at the height of the Vietnam War. He trained as a pilot and flew out of Ellington until April 1972.
At issue is a 12-month period, commencing in May 1972, when Bush moved to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. He received permission to transfer to an Alabama unit and was instructed to report for duty there. Until now, there has been no definitive evidence in his file that he ever reported to the Alabama unit to perform drills -- and the officer to whom Bush was told to report has said in interviews with reporters that he has no recollection Bush reported.
In a contentious White House briefing yesterday, McClellan repeatedly said that the documents show the president "fulfilled his duties," as reporters asked for specifics not indicated in the documents.
Asked whether the records shown should end the controversy about Bush's service, McClellan said: "You have to ask those who made these outrageous accusations if they stand by them in the face of this documentation that demonstrates he served and fulfilled his duties.''
White House officials said they thought that the documents would calm the controversy. They added that they were stunned at the intensity of the questioning at McClellan's briefings about what the records proved and did not prove. "We were taken aback," one official said.
McAuliffe again questioned Bush's service yesterday, declaring in a statement: "The handful of documents released . . . by the White House creates more questions than answers. The fact remains that there is still no evidence that George W. Bush showed up for duty as ordered while in Alabama. We also still do not know why the President's superiors filed a report saying they were unable to evaluate his performance for that year because he had not been present to be evaluated."
Kerry lowered his stance on the issue yesterday, telling reporters at Dulles International Airport, after arriving from Tennessee, that he did not want to comment. "It's not an issue that I chose to create," he said. "It's not my record that's at issue, and I don't have any questions about it."
White House communications director Dan Bartlett said yesterday that the reason Bush's supervisors could not evaluate him in May 1973 was because he was no longer flying, and was, therefore, performing various odd jobs and not reporting to any one commander. Bartlett also confirmed that Bush's complete personnel file is being forwarded to Washington from an archive in Denver for review.
Albert C. Lloyd, a retired personnel officer in the Texas Air National Guard -- who helped the White House review Bush's file both in 2000 and recently -- said "original documentation" would have been filed when Bush performed his duties stating exactly where they were performed and what he did. "The document goes to the payroll office and shows he performed at X place for X hours on X dates," Lloyd said from his home in Austin.
Lloyd said he voted for Bush in 2000 but that he has not decided whether he will vote for the president again. "I'm not happy with him," he said. He declined to elaborate.
McClellan was pressed yesterday on why no one who served with Bush in Alabama has come forward despite years of publicity on the subject. The spokesman conceded that the White House has not located anyone who served with Bush in Alabama. "Obviously, we would have made people available," he said.
The gap in Bush's records coincides with a period in his life that he has referred to as his "nomadic" years. As Bush's father was considering a job offer in late 1972 from Richard M. Nixon to become chairman of the Republican National Committee, the younger Bush stayed with his parents in Washington for the holidays. In a now famous incident, he took his then-16-year-old brother, Marvin, out drinking and ran over a neighbor's garbage cans on the way home; and when confronted by his father, he challenged him to go "mano a mano" outside. In early 1973, Bush worked for an inner-city youth program in Houston.
Bush received permission to leave the Guard six months early to attend Harvard Business School.
Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.
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Fighter Jet, Copter Assessed for Roles In Military Future
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30737-2004Feb10.html
The Pentagon and Office of Management and Budget are seeking outside reviews of the F/A-22 fighter jet and Comanche helicopter to assess whether the programs conform to the Department of Defense's future vision of the military.
The studies, to be conducted by research groups unaffiliated with the Pentagon, are sparking concern among supporters within the Army and Air Force that the programs could be scaled back.
Both programs have long been criticized for cost increases and schedule delays. "For the people that don't like the programs, this is a way of raising these issues again," said Loren Thompson, a defense industry analyst.
The reviews should examine whether the programs address the "threats and requirements of the next several decades," according to an Office of Management and Budget document. They should also determine whether funding for the F/A-22 and Comanche are draining money from new programs more in line with future combat needs, the OMB said.
The studies will address the concerns of many critics who argue that the F/A-22, also known as the Raptor, and the Comanche reconnaissance helicopter were conceived to deal with old threats that are no longer relevant.
The F/A-22, a key project for Lockheed Martin Corp., was designed for air-to-air combat, but those capabilities were not needed during the war in Iraq and are less likely to be needed in future conflicts, said Marcus Corbin, senior analyst for the Center for Defense Information. The Comanche, made by Boeing Co. and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., a unit of United Technologies Inc., was developed with stealth capabilities to protect against radar-guided missiles. But unsophisticated missiles have been used in Iraq to bring down other types of helicopters, he said.
"These programs -- although they are regarded as advanced in military terms -- they are not too relevant for today's conflicts," Corbin said.
Together the programs are expected to cost more than $100 billion over their lives. President Bush's 2005 budget proposal includes $4.8 billion for the Raptor and $1.3 billion for the Comanche.
"The only way to stop these programs is through a political decision to do so," Corbin said. "It's possible that the OMB request for review indicates that the White House may be considering expending that political capital now."
The Army and Air Force have successfully fought attempts by senior aides to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to cut the programs in recent years, arguing that both programs are central to the agency's modernization efforts, Thompson said. But the studies will largely exclude input from the Army and Air Force and give critics of the programs another opportunity to frame the debate, he said. Army and Air Force officials "will input information but will not have a seat at the table," Thompson said.
The studies will help determine the 2006 budget request, but should not be considered a threat to the programs, said Chad Kolton, OMB spokesman. "We're at the very beginning stages of the next year's budget process," he said. "So it's far too early to draw conclusions about what the process may ultimately determine."
The reviews could broaden to include other programs, said a senior administration official. "We all [OMB and DOD] laid out this path ahead and have been waiting for approval from the deputy secretary [Paul Wolfowitz] so the teams can sit down and begin their work," the official said.
Staff writer Bradley Graham contributed to this report.
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1,188 Americans Killed in Iraq - Your Son Will Be Next
Republican Guard still controls eighty-five percent of the country
Joe Vialls,
11 February 2004
AlterMedia.info
http://joevialls.altermedia.info/yourson.html
According to a well-placed Pentagon source, the White House and corporate media are reporting less than half the actual American military deaths in Iraq. As of 3 February 2004, the 'official' media total stood at 528, while the real total at midnight on the same day was 1,188. This criminal discrepancy in the fatality figures is not the fault of soldiers on the ground in Iraq, but of corrupt civilians in the Pentagon working for Paul Wolfowitz Inc. The Pentagon officer explained it like this.
"If a soldier is completely dismembered by a bomb, then he is dead. Likewise, if a soldier is hit by a full burst of machine-gun fire, then he also is dead. The problems start when the medic [on the ground] is not quite sure whether the injured soldier is dead or not. We all like to save life if possible, so if the medic believes there is the faintest glimmer of hope, the injured soldier is sent immediately to the nearest [medical] aid station."
"The split-second that soldier is removed from contact [wherever the incident took place], he is officially listed as 'wounded', regardless of whether he then dies 3 seconds or minutes or hours or days or months later, as a direct result of injuries sustained in the contact. Deaths in transit to the U.S., or after soldiers return home are also excluded completely, or become 'accidental deaths'. This is how Wolfowitz and his people massage the figures, and how the American public is misled."
Initially these comments sound suspiciously like an angry senior officer exaggerating the case in an attempt to have his unit prematurely withdrawn from the Iraqi killing fields. However, as the officer carefully went on to explain, his claims are borne out and substantiated by the very different way in which the corporate media reports civilian deaths in Iraq.
A good recent example was the synchronized twin-bombing in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil, which targeted the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK], and the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP], both of which groups work in tandem with the American Central Intelligence Agency [CIA], in an ongoing campaign to undermine Iraqi 'resistance' in the north of Iraq.
Most readers will remember being told that 56 people were killed in the twin-bombing, which was the corporate media 'official' figure you were all supposed to remember permanently. Then just a few days later the BBC issued a very quiet, almost unseen, and hard-to-find update on its website, advising, "The death toll from the weekend's twin suicide bombings in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil has risen to 101".
Fine, this seems to be an honest reappraisal of the situation, until you realize that the BBC is an integral part of the corporate media establishment, trying desperately hard to convince the British and American publics in particular, to go "all the way with the USA" in the cynical run-up to their respective Parliamentary and Presidential elections later this year.
To get a better feel for the acute level of danger American, British, and Australian servicemen face in Iraq, we are obliged to look at the reportage of the same event from a relatively 'neutral' country, in this case Pakistan, a largely cosmetic ally of America. There are two Pakistani journalists stationed in northern Iraq, both Muslim, but with no particular axe to grind where either the Muslim Kurds or Muslim Iraqis are concerned. This is how they reported exactly the same event.
"Over 400 people were killed when two suicide bombers blew themselves up at two Kurdish party offices in the northern Iraqi city of Irbil on Sunday morning, a Kurdish minister said. About 160 people were believed to be killed in the attack at two Patriotic Union of Kurdistan [PUK] offices and about 80 others at the Kurdistan Democratic Party [KDP] office. Among the dead was the Deputy Governor of Irbil province" ... "At the time of the bombings the offices were packed with hundreds of people celebrating the Eid al-Adha" [a Muslim festival].
The real truth probably lies midway between the BBC and Pakistani reports, say 250 dead from a single precision asymmetric operation. We can cut these Pakistani journalists a little slack for using the term 'suicide bombers', because just like all other media outlets in Iraq, this is what they are automatically led to believe by the Zionist spin-doctors.
For as long as you the public can be made to believe that 'suicide' or 'suicide car' bombers are responsible for these attacks, your brain involuntarily forms a series of flashing mental images of tiny bands of 'terrorists' desperately fighting a rearguard action, but who, in the fullness of time, will be totally overwhelmed by vastly superior American, British, and Australian forces. There is not even a tiny hint of the reality that 85% of Iraq is still effectively controlled by the Republican Guard.
What would happen in America today if you were allowed access to the truth? What would happen if you managed to work out for yourself that in order to arrive at the real figures, you first needed to increase the level of risk from 56 to 250 for every single attack since the illegal invasion began, i.e. if you knew the actual risk to your loved ones since March 2003 was five times as high as that reported by the American corporate media. Would you be angry? Of course you would! The public backlash would be so savage, that even the most corrupt of politicians on Capitol Hill would be obliged to bring the troops home.
More than 15,000 [yes, fifteen thousand] American servicemen have already been critically injured in this completely insane Zionist attack on the birthplace of civilization, but Wolfowitz and the corporate media never allow you to catch a glimpse of even one of them. These physically deformed and sometimes psychologically tormented creatures, who used to be proud American soldiers, have been deliberately scattered far and wide across the land, a cynical technique that ensures they stay well hidden among 288 million other Americans.
The controlled media propaganda has been so complete and so overwhelming, that initially it seems almost impossible to reverse it in order to expose the unacceptable harsh reality, which is simply that eighty-five percent of Iraq is still controlled by 50,000+ members of the Republican Guard, all of them [originally] trained in asymmetric warfare techniques by Russian Spetsnaz instructors.
Now think about this very carefully people, in particular think about the numbers. What they mean in simple terms is that for every 2.2 inexperienced American infantrymen exposed in full view across the length and breadth of Iraq, there is one carefully hidden and highly trained Iraqi equivalent of a Fort Bragg Green Beret. The Iraqi Special Forces teams have all the cover, know their own areas intimately, have plenty of food, are armed to the teeth, and take no chances whatsoever. They kill Americans on their own terms whenever they want to, which means that the war of attrition is strictly a one-way affair against the invasion forces. The reason you probably do not know this already, is because of deliberate endemic disinformation peddled night and day by the Zionist-controlled corporate media.
The most blatant and continually recycled lie is that 'foreign insurgents' and 'al Qaeda terrorists' are to blame for western soldiers being killed and critically injured in Iraq, but nothing could be further from the truth. Veteran journalist Robert Fisk trashed this lie completely when he visited Baghdad Airport several weeks ago. Out of approximately 5,000 prisoners held at the airport, less than 200 were non-Iraqis, of whom Fisk reported, "more than ninety-percent were already living and working in Iraq before the invasion". The truth of the matter is that the Zionists are now frantic to complete their impossible dream of stealing Iraq's oil reserves, and intend to sacrifice your son in an illegal 'war' that can never be won.
To properly understand Iraq today, we need to look briefly at how the Republican Guard handled the initial invasion, why its members abandoned all of their armored vehicles, and why they deliberately left the Gates of Baghdad open for the American invaders. Then we need to examine the vast arsenals of Iraqi conventional weaponry available to the thousands of small Republican Guard counter-insurgency teams, and some of their asymmetric warfare techniques. Before we do that, let us first work out 'who is who' in this unequal contest, because propaganda used by the western corporate media has led to considerable creative confusion.
Though the New York Times and others would have you believe that Iraqis fighting to free Iraq from illegal occupation are "insurgents", this is not correct. America, Britain and Australia illegally invaded a sovereign nation state recognized internationally as such, then undermined, imprisoned or expelled members of Iraq's recognized government, while committing gross acts of terrorism including mass murder against Iraqi nationals. By strict legal as well as moral definition, America, Britain and Australia are the "insurgents" in Iraq. Those Iraqis who try to defend their families against these gross acts of terrorism on their own sovereign territory, are "counter insurgents".
Try not to be sidetracked by meaningless mumbo jumbo about "Weapons of Mass Destruction", or accusations of President Saddam Hussein committing heinous crimes within Iraq, for both are creative media red herrings. In the first case, America has more weapons of mass destruction than any other nation on earth, and in the second, internal criminal behavior is a national matter, and not a lawful excuse to invade a sovereign country. For example, I currently live in Australia, where obsequious Prime Minister John Howard takes his orders direct from the Zionist Lobby in New York, which amounts to high treason under Australian constitutional law. But distasteful and unlawful though they may be, Howard's proven crimes at the internal national level, do not give China or North Korea a legitimate excuse to invade this sovereign country.
Ever since 1991, Iraq has known that America intended to invade one day, and thus had plenty of time to make elaborate preparations. And as each year passed by after that, with American bombs wantonly raining down and murdering their women and children in the illegal northern and southern "No Fly Zones", Iraqi determination to fight back grew, especially on the part of the Iraqi Military High Command. It was obvious to the generals that Iraq could never hope to defeat American air superiority, nor could it defeat modern American battle tanks like the Abrams, so from late1996 onwards, Iraqi strategy and tactics became exclusively asymmetric.
Crude old-fashioned chemical weapons of the kind Iraq and Iran fired at each during the eighties were a strict "no no", because their very presence would be the only excuse the Zionists would need to shower Baghdad, Tikrit, and Mosul with tactical nuclear weapons. Accordingly, old chemical weapon stocks were destroyed, while at the same time Iraqi military personnel distributed vast quantities of conventional weapons to thousands of different [mostly buried] caches across the country.
By late 1999, the Iraqi military had achieved what many western observers might well think was impossible. Because of the widespread caches and multiple bunkers, members of the Republican Guard would never be more than ten miles away from a weapon supply. Each basic cache contains high explosives for culvert bombs, radio detonators, basic remote control kits for cars and light trucks, rocket propelled grenades, hand grenades, mortar bombs, light machine guns, assault rifles and ammunition.
That is not all. Every tenth cache has another 'special' cache nearby, with each of these containing a different mix of specialist weapons, which vary from area to area depending on projected defense requirements. These weapons include [but are not limited to] spin-stabilized artillery rockets , high performance Kornet anti tank missiles, SA-7 Strela-2 and SA-16 Igla-1shoulder-launched heat seeking missiles, and intermediate altitude Roland [class] surface-to-air missiles with special optical guidance. Note carefully that every individual piece of equipment in every cache across Iraq, can at all times be manhandled by no more than three members of a Republican Guard counter insurgency team.
Shortly after American forces invaded from Kuwait, the world got its first taste of just how devastating Iraqi asymmetric defense would be for the duration of the occupation, though few in the west realized what they were actually looking at on television, because of disinformation hastily applied by the corporate media. Like ghosts rising from the mists, Republican Guard Special Forces teams were everywhere one second, and then gone the next. The whole thing was ethereal.
Suddenly with no warning the road erupted under an American convoy, blasting a medium truck twenty feet up in the air, its occupants falling back to earth like broken rag dolls. Next it was the turn of the formerly 'invincible' Abrams M1 battle tanks, several of which had lethal holes punched through them by laser-guided missiles fired from foxholes more than three miles away. The Iraqis had left all of their inferior T-72 tanks parked at the barracks to be later 'captured' by American forces on CNN television, and instead were using the very latest Russian Kornet laser missiles to destroy American armor.
And so it was that the invaders were spooked and seriously stalled by a relatively tiny number of highly qualified defenders, though not for too long. Convincing though the Spetsnaz techniques were, they were used only to persuade the America authorities that the remnants of Iraq's army were desperately trying to stop the invasion forces from reaching Baghdad, when the opposite was true. In reality, the Republican Guard needed to suck American forces into Baghdad as quickly as possible, but could not afford to make its intent too obvious.
Once inside Baghdad, the oversize American tanks were useless, barely able to turn their turreted 120-mm main guns, and functionally unable to use them at point blank range. They and their lesser armored troop carrier equivalents required vast quantities of fuel and spare parts, which all had to be brought in by multiple exposed supply convoys from Kuwait, making the latter vehicles sitting ducks for any Iraqi civilians with access to a basic rocket propelled grenade launcher [RPG], and a grudge against Americans. There are more than 2 million RPG-toting civilians in Iraq, and they all have a grudge against the American invaders.
Baghdad is a very old city with a vast complex of underground sewers and bunkers, which were booby-trapped well in advance by the Republican Guard. Thus the Baghdad underworld was and still is completely controlled by Iraqi counter insurgency forces, who from time to time place underground weapons [essentially culvert bombs] in sewers under buildings like the UN, with devastating effects.
The corporate media hastily tells you these attacks are launched by 'suicide bombers', but this is a creative lie. On the relatively rare occasions when car or truck bombs are used in locations that cannot be easily reached from sewers or drains, they are either positioned in advance for remote detonation, or guided the last few hundred yards to their targets by crude remote controls, manufactured before the invasion from Iraqi Air Force spare parts. In all cases, detonation is by radio remote control, ensuring that valuable Republican Guard personnel are not placed at risk from the ensuing blast.
In like manner, the corporate media's 'roadside bombs' are also a lie. In the flood plains of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, every Iraqi road has hundreds of culverts [big bore underground pipes] that allow floodwater to flow under from one side of the road to the other, or drain away. Thus from the viewpoint of American convoy drivers, the 'sides' of the road ahead look completely clear, as indeed they are, right up to the point where the tarmac road surface itself suddenly explodes underneath one of the vehicles, triggered by radio remote from an unseen foxhole more than three miles away.
Those Iraqis who collaborate with the invaders are considered prime targets by the counter insurgency teams, as indeed they would be in Houston or Miami if the Chinese invaded America to inject a hefty dose of compulsory communism into your children. What would you do if some obsequious traitor down the street started helping the Chinese troops to strip search your wife and children? This is identical to the situation in Iraq today, where Americans [especially the CIA] humiliate and abuse innocent women and children in front of their fathers or husbands, during their brutal conversion to compulsory Zionism.
Any Iraqi willing to help the invaders against his own people, as a quisling 'policeman' or in any other capacity, is viewed as being far worse than the invaders themselves, branded a traitor and listed for execution. It is only gullible Americans who believe the insane New York propaganda that Iraqis want compulsory Zionism. Take it from me, they do not. Saddam Hussein kicked the Americans and British out of Iraq back in 1972, and the Iraqis really enjoyed being freed from the imperial yoke. Now the yoke has arrived for a second time wearing American military uniforms, and they intend to get rid of it again.
Nowadays predictably isolated inside fortified firebases located within major Iraqi cities and towns, Americans are more and more unwilling to venture out into the country by road, because of the excessive risks to life and limb. It is Vietnam all over again, with massive quantities of American military personnel rendered virtually powerless by highly motivated local residents, all determine to drive the Americans away from their wives and children, and eventually out of the country.
Unfortunately, Wolfowitz and the other Zionists crazies are not about to give up on their impossible dream of capturing and suborning the birthplace of civilization itself, regardless of how many American soldiers have to be ruthlessly sacrificed along the way, including your own father, husband or son. As predicted by the Iraqis long before the invasion, when road convoy deaths reached an unacceptably high level, America promptly commenced "Vietnam Phase 2" and started saturating Iraq with troop carrying helicopters, all of them flying very low, and each nervously popping magnesium flares to decoy heat seeking missiles.
The Republican Guard saw it all coming in advance, and dispatched some of their Special Air Units [SAUs] to the weapons caches, to recover a few dozen SA-7 and SA-16 shoulder-launched heat seekers, out of a total missile count known to exceed 4,600 units. Most of these weapons have been converted for dual-role target acquisition and tracking. Sure the missile initially acquires its target by sniffing the hot infra red exhaust gases of the helicopter, or even the infra red of its magnesium flares, but after launch, each of these devious little Russian equalizers automatically switches to ultra-violet tracking and kill, against which American helicopters have no defense.
Remember that we are not dealing with fictional corporate media 'al Qaeda terrorists' here, but with a highly disciplined force of professionals, most of them fit enough [and intelligent enough] to survive many weeks of grueling Spetsnaz Special Forces training. These men will not expose themselves unless they are certain of target acquisition, and they will not fire unless certain of successful tracking and kill.
As if things were not already bad enough for Americans, they are about to get a whole lot worse. Frightened by angry rumbles from deep within the Pentagon about getting America's premier military units back home out of harm's way, the war criminals on Capitol Hill have authorized unprecedented numbers of reservists and national guardsmen to take their place, "A huge rotation of US forces is under way in Iraq that will see more than 100,000 reservists and national guardsmen deployed in the largest and most hazardous reserve mission since the Vietnam War". [Pentagon]
Put another way, in order to placate an increasingly hostile and potentially very dangerous 'West Point' patriotic mindset inside its military structure, America's Zionist minions in Washington are sending inexperienced bank managers, store clerks and the unemployed to replace experienced full-time line troops in Iraq, who themselves are currently facing more than 50,000 incredibly dangerous Spetsnaz-trained Iraqi Special Forces.
Those reservists and guardsmen interviewed by the corporate media have bravely if somewhat stupidly stated they will "do their duty for America", though many must be vaguely wondering by now what a Zionist attack on Iraq's sovereign oil reserves has to with America at all. Because they have been watching events unfold on CNN, several of these reserve units have been rather ingeniously fitting home-made armor plating to the sides of their jeeps, to protect themselves from 'roadside bombs' after they arrive. Sadly, no one had told them that CNN's roadside bombs are a creative propaganda myth, and that no homemade armor plate on earth can withstand the vertical shock wave from an Iraqi culvert bomb.
These reservists are mere cannon fodder, designed to buy time while academic Zionists try to think of other ways of stealing Middle East oil. As you might expect, no one in New York gives a damn how many reservists get blown sky high by culvert bombs, or shot down by heat seekers.
It is difficult to estimate how much longer ordinary Americans and the regular American military will stand for this rubbish, and the reckless squandering of lives in a foreign land by officials who long ago voided the American Constitution, in their desperate and unlawful attempts to secure America and the world for an insane Zionist 'One World Order'. There is no shortage of names for the war crimes trials, and these are just for those particular war crimes committed against the American People.
We already have Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Rice and a few others to share the limelight, to be followed into the dock by lesser criminals on both sides of American politics, i.e. every single American politician who illegally 'approved' this murderous invasion of a sovereign country, in stark violation of all international protocols and international law.
Those readers who find it difficult to believe that the day of reckoning is fast approaching for those who have dared to undermine America's stability and security, and who continue to breach her constitution, should take a very long hard look at Russia in the early nineteen-nineties. This was a nation that had been under incredibly tight control since 1917, its citizens apparently beaten into a submissive pulp. But their spirits had not been crushed, and they could still tell right from wrong.
In the October of 1993, a mixed crowd of Russian civilians and heavily armed military officers and men laid siege to their own White House in Moscow, which in turn was defended by another group of heavily armed citizens and soldiers. Regardless of the politics involved, the bottom line is that the Russians had finally decided to take their own country back from a tiny elite that had driven them to collective ruin, and the entire recovery process at the White House started with breathtaking speed.
The net result of that 1993 action is a new Russia, that today is completely different from the old. Under the stewardship of President Vladimir Putin, the Russian people have regained much of their self respect, are paid proper wages, and they no longer have to worry about fraudulent Zionist banks and Zionist-controlled corporate media outlets. In fact the Russians don't have to worry about any Zionists at all. Those Zionists who have not been prosecuted for criminal fraud have been chased out of the country, and nowadays sit in London or New York wailing about 'Russian injustice'.
Americans who may be considering similar action in Washington, should not be deterred by the implied threat of military reprisals, for it is most unlikely there would be any. For the first time in more than a hundred years, the forbidden words "coup d'etat" are being whispered by a range of officers in that most dangerous rank band of all, from Major to Brigadier General. These officers are young enough to remember the oath they swore to defend America and her constitution, while at the same time being senior enough to command considerable respect among the lower ranks.
One senior officer has already quietly suggested that it might be appropriate to try corrupt American politicians and officials by military commission, in the political 'al-Qaeda prison camp' located at Guantanamo Bay. It is an attractive idea, but we will have to wait and see.
The author is an independent investigator working alone, and receiving only an inadequate disability pension. If you feel that this report has helped you in any way, or if you would simply like to contribute towards future research costs, please do so by clicking one of the buttons below and making a donation.
Thank you
-------- propaganda wars
US news commentator apologizes for backing Iraq war
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Feb 11, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040211204252.aeycez8m.html
Bill O'Reilly, the news commentator who has called his legions of fans to boycott France and any other nation that opposed the war in Iraq, said he now regrets his support for the conflict.
The Fox News Channel's conservative talk-show host said he had wrongly judged the need to invade Iraq.
"Well, my analysis was wrong and I'm sorry," O'Reilly told ABC News, according to a transcript of an interview released Wednesday.
On his show, "The O'Reilly Factor," the commentator had staunchly supported President George W. Bush's argument for war -- that Saddam Hussein posed a danger to the United States because he possessed weapons of mass destruction.
And he vociferously attacked war opponents such as France, Canada and Germany.
"I don't believe a word (French President) Jacques Chirac says. I think he's a phony," he once said on his show.
But the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq contributed to O'Reilly's change of heart. O'Reilly had promised viewers before the war began in March that he would apologize if no illegal arms were found in Iraq.
"I am much more skeptical of the Bush administration now than I, I was at that time," he said.
When the interviewer asked him again about his new position, O'Reilly responded: "Yeah, I just said it. What do you want me to do? Go over and kiss the camera?"
----
Study of Rhetoric On Iraq Is Urged
Kay: Panel Should Check for Distortion
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A30354-2004Feb10?language=printer
David Kay, the former chief U.S. arms inspector in Iraq, said yesterday that President Bush's new commission on intelligence should study how the president and his senior policymakers used the information they received from intelligence agencies.
"The charges are out there," Kay said during a talk at the U.S. Institute of Peace, "and if there was misuse or distortion, we need to know it." He added that he did not believe that was the case and that he was told to "find the truth" when he was given the job of searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Bush's executive order creating the commission last week spelled out the panel's areas of inquiry, and did not list among them the question of whether the administration accurately portrayed the information in intelligence reports. The panel was directed to investigate prewar intelligence collection and the analysis of deposed president Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, and to compare that analysis with what has since been found by the Iraq Survey Group and other agencies.
Democrats accuse administration officials of exaggerating the threat from Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs as they built a case for war. No such weapons have been found in Iraq, and Democrats are calling for the commission to investigate whether the administration went too far in its rhetoric. Kay told his audience he knew partisan politics played a role in such demands but added, "The commission ought to examine everything."
At the White House yesterday, a senior official would not comment on what the commission would do, but noted that the executive order permits the panel's co-chairmen to set the agenda and meetings after consultation with other members.
Unlike the commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, which was established by a congressional resolution, the executive order creating the intelligence commission does not mention subpoena power or the authority to take testimony under oath or even hold public hearings.
A White House spokesman said yesterday that it was premature to say whether such subpoenas or the legal authority to take testimony under oath would be needed. The spokesman noted that the presidential order grants the panel "complete access to information relevant to its mission" and calls on heads of departments and agencies to "promptly furnish such information to the commission upon request."
The Sept. 11 commission, which had a White House letter sent to all agencies calling for their full cooperation, nonetheless has been forced to use its subpoena power twice to get documents from the Bush administration.
That commission has also had to negotiate complicated agreements with the White House for limited access to the President's Daily Brief (PDB), the highly classified intelligence material sent by the CIA to Bush each day. Reviewing prewar PDB items that dealt with Iraq's weapons program would inevitably be needed to determine whether there was any exaggeration by senior administration officials before the war, a retired senior intelligence official said yesterday.
Meanwhile, the co-chairmen of the new commission, Laurence H. Silberman, a federal appeals court judge, and former senator Charles S. Robb (D-Va.), met with White House officials yesterday on administrative matters. Silberman said yesterday he would not comment on the commission.
White House press secretary Scott McClellan told reporters Monday that the commission would probably not begin work until the final two members of the nine-person body were named, probably this week.
Other administration officials said yesterday that one of the remaining two seats will be filled by Washington lawyer Carla Hills. Hills was secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Ford administration and U.S. Trade Representative under President George H.W. Bush. She was in New York City yesterday and could not be reached for comment, a secretary in her office said.
-------- war crimes
U.N. Prosecutor Says War Crimes Suspect Is in Belgrade
February 11, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-serbiamontenegro-karadzic.html?pagewanted=all
BELGRADE (Reuters) - U.N. war crimes prosecutor Carla Del Ponte on Wednesday asserted that top Bosnian Serb fugitive Radovan Karadzic was living in Belgrade, drawing an immediate challenge from Serbs to ``tell us the address.''
If widely credited, her charge could wreck Serbia's efforts to prove it is cooperating as best it can with The Hague tribunal to capture the genocide suspect, an assurance on which depend continued U.S. aid and vital access to international funds.
``I received just last week information from a credible source that even Karadzic is now in Belgrade,'' Del Ponte told reporters in Brussels. ``So Belgrade is now a safe haven for our fugitives... Karadzic is now residing in Belgrade.''
Del Ponte, a high-profile hate figure for many Serbs, named no source for the information and gave no details of the alleged whereabouts of the former Bosnian Serb wartime leader in Serbia's capital city of 1.6 million people.
The Interior Ministry said ``Serbia does not have information which would confirm the claims of Mrs Carla del Ponte.''
Her allegation was likely to further jangle nerves in Serbia, where party leaders are trying to pick up the pieces from an inconclusive election six weeks ago and form a viable coalition.
One radio report said a new election would be set this week.
The ultra-nationalist Radical Party, whose voters consider the U.N. tribunal an anti-Serb conspiracy that must be defied, came top in the December 28 election but so far has been ostracized from government. Analysts say it may do even better in new poll.
PROVING A NEGATIVE
Del Ponte frequently charges that Karadzic's ex-commander and fellow war crimes fugitive, General Ratko Mladic, lives in Serbia while its authorities look the other way. Belgrade's denials are just as frequent.
Serbia's caretaker prime minister, reformist Zoran Zivkovic, told Reuters Del Ponte had never given ``either information or any other kind of help which would lead to locating or catching the suspects'' or prove they were not on Serbian land.
Until now, Karadzic's pursuers said he had probably shifted hideouts in mountainous Bosnia and Montenegro regularly since 1997.
Earlier this month, Del Ponte said NATO troops who raided Karadzic's former headquarters town of Pale in Bosnia in January had been just two hours behind the fugitive. She predicted he would be caught ``this year,'' as she did in 2003 and 2002.
Radical Party chief Tomislav Nikolic said sarcastically that if Karadzic were in Belgrade the ``pro-American government... would rush to hand him over (and) extradite him in the blink of an eye.''
``Why doesn't she tell us the address? How can it be proven he's not hiding here? She might as well say he's in London,'' Nikolic told Reuters.
Dusan Stojicic of Bosnia's hardline Serb Democratic Party (SDS), founded by Karadzic, said Del Ponte was making another untestable assertion under the heading ``I have confidential information but I cannot reveal it.''
The Hague tribunal's indictments against Karadzic and Mladic accuse them of responsibility for genocide in the siege of Sarajevo and the massacre of Srebrenica, war crimes which claimed a total of 20,000 lives in the 1992-95 Bosnia war.
In U.S. eyes, their capture and trial would complete the tribunal's work. Britain's Guardian newspaper on Wednesday said Washington and London were seeking to curb the powers of Del Ponte and ``Del Ponte is angry at the fresh attempt to rein her in.''
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
No 'Smoking Guns' in Reports, Head of Sept. 11 Panel Says
February 11, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/national/11TERR.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - The chairman of the commission on the Sept. 11 attacks said Tuesday that there were "no smoking guns" in classified Oval Office intelligence reports to suggest that President Bush and senior White House aides fumbled intelligence warning of the possibility of a terrorist strike before the attacks.
The comments from the chairman of the panel, former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, are likely to be welcomed at the White House. Mr. Kean made them on the same day that the White House relented in the face of a subpoena threat and agreed to allow all 10 members of the independent panel to review a summary of the intelligence reports, the President's Daily Brief, that the Central Intelligence Agency prepares each morning for the Oval Office.
Citing executive privilege, White House lawyers had insisted that the information be limited to a four-member delegation from the commission, including Mr. Kean, that was allowed to review edited sections of the reports last year.
Until Tuesday, White House lawyers had blocked the commission from providing all 10 members of the panel with a report summarizing information in handwritten and computer-generated notes taken by the four-member group.
The White House has consistently said since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that Mr. Bush had no credible specific intelligence information that would have let him pre-empt the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and Mr. Kean suggested that his review of the daily briefings that reached Mr. Bush's desk supported the White House view.
"There were no smoking guns, nothing that would make you sit up and say, `Wow,' " said Mr. Kean, who read through parts of the daily briefings that reached Mr. Bush and President Bill Clinton.
The reports are among the most highly classified documents in the government, and the White House has previously acknowledged that a report to Mr. Bush in August 2001 mentioned intelligence that suggested the possibility of a strike by Al Qaeda using commercial aircraft.
"We very much got a flavor of what kind of information was coming to both President Clinton and President Bush," Mr. Kean said, adding that the reports "raise questions that have to be answered that were not there before, and we are going to have to call back some witnesses. But is there a smoking gun? No."
Told of Mr. Kean's comments and after they had been given a copy of the report summarizing what the four colleagues found in the daily intelligence briefings, other commission members did not contradict Mr. Kean.
They suggested that it was too early to make a judgment about whether Mr. Bush and his aides had ignored intelligence warnings before 9/11.
"I'm not going to characterize the report,' said Richard Ben-Veniste, the former Watergate prosecutor who is a Democratic member of the panel. Mr. Ben-Veniste said the report had "important new information that will require us to reinterview a number of people."
Another Democrat on the panel, Timothy J. Roemer, a former House member from Indiana, said that the report contained "startlingly new information from some of the P.D.B.'s," referring to the President's Daily Brief. But Mr. Roemer, too, would not offer details of what was in the report.
Facing an earlier subpoena threat, the White House agreed last year to allow the commission to select the four-member group.
The panel, known formally as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, chose Mr. Kean; Lee H. Hamilton, the vice chairman who is a former House member from Indiana; Jamie S. Gorelick, deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration; and Philip D. Zelikow, the panel's Republican staff director.
They were allowed to take notes that, until this week, remained in the possession of the White House, with the White House permitted to block their distribution to the full commission.
The White House agreement on Tuesday to allow the notes to be shared with all 10 members was made after intensive negotiations with the commission and after several members suggested that they were willing to vote to subpoena the original intelligence briefings if the White House did not relent on the notes.
Despite the concession, some panel members said they still wanted to subpoena the original briefings, if only as a protest over what they considered the failure of the White House to cooperate with the commission.
Commission officials said that a vote on a subpoena was taken in a private meeting of the commission on Tuesday and that the motion failed, with a bipartisan majority opposed.
The Family Steering Committee, an umbrella group of victims' family organizations, said it was outraged by the decision not to seek a subpoena.
"President Bush stated that he is `cooperating' with the 9/11 Independent Commission," the committee said in a statement. "Yet the commission has been negotiating for access to these documents for over 10 months with no success. While the commission negotiates with the executive branch, this nation remains at risk."
--------
9/11 Panel to Accept Summary of Briefings
Legal Challenge Scrapped;
Agreement Angers Some Members, Victims' Families
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30240-2004Feb10.html
The independent commission investigating the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks backed away yesterday from a threatened legal showdown with the White House, agreeing to accept a 17-page summary of the presidential briefing documents it had sought.
The deal will not allow the full 10-member commission to read the original documents or to have access to notes on the documents taken by some of the commission's own members. The summary -- provided to commission members during a closed-door meeting yesterday -- covered several dozen original intelligence documents and was first vetted by the White House, officials said.
The limitations prompted at least three Democratic members of the bipartisan panel to vote in favor of issuing a subpoena to the White House for the documents, known as the President's Daily Brief (PDB).
But the move was rebuffed by Republicans on the commission, and at least one Democrat abstained, according to several commission members.
"You either say you didn't have warning prior to 9/11 and you let us see the documents, or you shouldn't claim that," said Democratic commission member Timothy J. Roemer, a former House member from Indiana. "To say there's nothing in the PDBs that gave the president warning and then put together an agreement that only allows one or two commissioners to see the PDBs is not defensible."
The agreement also angered families of Sept. 11 victims, who have criticized the panel for not being more aggressive in its frequent battles with the Bush administration.
The standoff was the second major dispute between the commission and the White House over the PDBs, highly sensitive compilations of intelligence information prepared for the chief executive. After a similar subpoena threat in November, the panel reached a complicated accord that allowed Executive Director Philip D. Zelikow and three commission members to review limited numbers of the documents.
The earlier deal gave the White House the power to approve what would be passed along to the seven commission members without access to the original PDBs. But the White House and the commission deadlocked in recent weeks over what could be handed over.
Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska who recently joined the commission, said "the White House broke its word" on that earlier agreement, and he contended that the latest deal will hurt the commission's effort to issue a complete report.
"We couldn't even get our own notes," Kerrey said. "If all 10 of us had read the documents, it would be much more likely that we would have a report the American people can trust."
But the commission chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a Republican and a former New Jersey governor, said the arrangement is the best possible outcome given the time constraints on the commission.
"I think this gives us what we need to do our report," Kean said. "Was it everything I wanted? No. But it's certainly enough to do what we need to do."
"We're pleased to work with them closely and in a cooperative manner," White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said.
Yesterday's agreement follows an announcement last week that President Bush would support a two-month extension of the commission's current May 27 deadline.
An extension would require action by Congress, however, and some key Republicans are opposed to the idea, in part because it would mean the release of the controversial report on the terror strikes in the middle of the presidential election cycle.
John Feehery, a spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), said yesterday that Hastert remains opposed to extending the commission deadline. The issue did not come up during a meeting on Monday with the White House, Feehery said.
The Bush administration, which initially opposed the establishment of the independent commission, has frequently clashed with the panel over access to information and witnesses. The commission has issued two subpoenas to federal agencies and is still in the process of negotiating for testimony from Bush, Vice President Cheney, former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore.
When asked during an appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" Sunday whether he would testify before the commission, Bush responded: "Perhaps."
Under the original November agreement with the White House, four commission representatives -- Zelikow, Kean, Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton (D) and member Jamie S. Gorelick (D) -- had access to two dozen PDBs that the White House had preapproved as being relevant to the commission's mandate. In addition, Zelikow and Gorelick were able to comb through several hundred other PDBs from the Clinton and Bush administrations in search of information they deemed relevant.
From notes taken during these reviews, Gorelick compiled the 17-page summary provided to the commission yesterday, which was approved by the White House, officials said. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration, said the summary provides the commission with "the most important and salient facts" from the documents.
-------- police
Report Questions the Reliability of an F.B.I. Ballistics Test
February 11, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/national/11BULL.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 - A study by a group of scientific experts called into question Tuesday the reliability of a process the F.B.I. has used in some 2,500 investigations to trace bullets from crime scenes, and government officials said they would review the findings to determine whether past convictions should be re-examined.
After a yearlong study, a scientific panel of the National Research Council found that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's scientific method for comparing bullets was generally sound but that its examiners had sometimes overstated its reliability in court testimony and had played down the likelihood of false matches.
The F.B.I. asked the research council to conduct the independent study after a metallurgist who had worked at the bureau publicly challenged the process used for comparing and "matching" bullet fragments at crime scenes to bullets found in the possession of suspects. The study cost the bureau $300,000.
It found that although expert witnesses for the bureau had sometimes asserted in court that chemical analysis could trace a bullet fragment to a factory batch or even a single box of bullets, the data did not appear to support such a specific conclusion. In fact, millions of bullets could have similar or nearly indistinguishable characteristics, panel members said.
"It would be like a Nike shoe print, size 10, found at a crime scene," said Paul C. Giannelli, a Case Western Reserve University law professor who served on the advisory panel. If a suspect was found with the same type of sneakers, Professor Giannelli said, "it would be relevant evidence, it would be admissible in court, although there would be a large number of people who might have that type of shoe."
The panel recommended a number of ways the bureau could refine its process for analyzing and interpreting the bullet testing. Dwight E. Adams, director of the bureau's laboratory, said the agency was likely to enact all of the changes.
"I think this report is an affirmation that the technology we use is currently the best available technology," Dr. Adams said.
At the same time, however, he said that officials at the bureau and the Justice Department would review the panel's concerns to determine the impact on past convictions. The F.B.I. has used the bullet-tracing process in about 2,500 criminal investigations since the early 1980's, offering testimony in about 500 of those cases. As a result of the latest review, the Justice Department may decide to notify local prosecutors in some cases that the process has come under scrutiny, Dr. Adams said.
Leading defense lawyers used the findings to attack the reliability of the bureau's forensic methods.
"The bottom line," said Barry C. Scheck, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, "is that F.B.I. experts have been going into courts for years and definitively saying that particular bullets found at a crime scene came from a certain box of ammunition or were manufactured on a certain date, and the researchers are now saying that is wrong. These cases have to be re-examined."
The study brought rebukes from members of Congress as well. Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has been a frequent critic of the F.B.I., said the findings demonstrated that the bureau had to be more careful about how its scientists testified in court, to avoid confusing or misleading jurors.
The study, Mr. Grassley said, "raises serious questions about testimony given over the last 40 years. The F.B.I. reached farther than the science supported."
--------
Study Faults FBI Bullet Tests
Analysis of Lead Called Inconsistent; Court Challenges Expected
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30073-2004Feb10.html
The FBI has sometimes exaggerated the value of tests used to match metals in bullet fragments to other ammunition and does not have sufficient safeguards to ensure that the tests are conducted consistently, according to a study released yesterday by the National Research Council.
The findings by the council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, raises serious doubts about the FBI's use of bullet lead analysis over the past four decades and is likely to result in a significant number of legal challenges from defense lawyers around the country, legal experts said.
At the same time, the study found that the general technique behind the tests is scientifically sound and can provide valuable circumstantial evidence as part of a broader criminal case. Paul C. Giannelli, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University who served on the study committee, said the results of bullet lead analysis are comparable to other pieces of physical evidence commonly used in criminal cases.
"It would be like, for instance, a Nike shoe print, size 10, found at a crime scene," Giannelli said. "It would be admissible in court, although there would be a large number of people who would have that type of shoe."
In the tests, FBI examiners measure trace amounts of seven metals commonly found in bullet lead in an attempt to match bullets found in a suspect's possession with fragments found at a crime scene. The FBI says the technique, pioneered in the 1960s, has been used in about 2,500 cases since the early 1980s, including about 500 cases in which the evidence was used in court.
"The basis of bullet lead compositional analysis is supported by approximately 50 peer-reviewed articles found in scientific publications," the FBI said in a statement yesterday. "Published research and validation studies have continued to demonstrate the usefulness of the measurement of trace elements within bullet lead."
But the NRC study, which was commissioned by the FBI after questions were raised about lead analysis , also found a number of serious problems in the use of lead analysis by the FBI, including numerous examples of courtroom testimony that overstated the specificity of the tests.
In one 1988 Texas murder case, for example, an FBI analyst testified that bullets in the same box generally have the same composition, and that bullets with the same composition were "most likely . . . manufactured at the same place or on the same date." The defendant in that case was convicted and executed.
Kenneth O. McFadden, an independent consultant from Chestertown, Md., who chaired the study committee, said the most that investigators can say about a match of bullets and bullet fragments is that they probably came from the same original source of smelted lead. But such lead batches can be used to manufacture as many as 35 million bullets each, and individual boxes of ammunition often include bullets from different batches of lead. About 9 billion bullets are manufactured annually.
"What we can say is a match of bullets probably came from a homogeneous source, but it's no more specific than that," McFadden said in a conference call with reporters. "It can never be used for anything other than circumstantial evidence, and an entire case can't be built around it."
The study committee was also critical of the FBI's past use of "chaining" -- in which bullets from the same box are compared to one another and the FBI analyst draws conclusions about their similarities -- a practice the FBI has since halted. The committee also warned that, in cases where two bullet samples are close but not identical, the FBI's testing could result in a false-positive rate as high as 20 percent.
Defense lawyers have long complained about the use of lead analysis, arguing that prosecutors and FBI analysts frequently overstate its importance and that juries frequently ignore cautions about its limitations.
Barry C. Scheck, president-elect of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said bullet lead analysis does not have "the unique specificity of techniques such as DNA typing to be used as stand-alone evidence. It is important that criminal justice professionals and juries understand the capabilities as well as the significant limitations of this forensic technique." Scheck called on the FBI to review all the cases in which the technique has been used.
--------
Move Against Police Heartens Some in Juarez
Detention of Officers Strikes at Corruption
By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30317-2004Feb10.html
CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- While federal investigators dug for corpses in a nearby yard, Deonicio Delgadillo Picazo watched over his 11-year-old daughter, who was playing on a seesaw. Delgadillo said he was not surprised that 17 state police officers had been implicated in the deaths of 12 people found buried in the neighborhood. But he was shocked, he said, that some of those policemen were in jail.
"Nobody trusts the police," said Delgadillo, a landscaper. "The roots of corruption are as deep as those of a tree."
After a decade in which hundreds of murder cases have piled up unsolved, the detention by federal authorities of 13 state police officers, along with the issuance of arrest warrants for four others, suggests that the administration of President Vicente Fox might be ready to confront the collapsed law enforcement system in this city of 1.2 million.
The state policemen were detained on Jan. 29, after the bodies were discovered in the yard of a modest home in a middle-class neighborhood here. Investigators, who suspect the killings were drug-related, said the bodies showed signs of torture.
For years the state police in Juarez have been accused by civic leaders of being involved in killings, but no one has been brought to trial, said Oscar Maynez, former chief of forensics for the state of Chihuahua. Maynez said he quit two years ago when he found police planting evidence in a murder case. The state attorney general's anti-drug unit has yet to solve any cases because it has been turned into an "intelligence-gathering unit for traffickers," Maynez said. "Organized crime is the underbelly of many cities, but here it runs the city."
Even though Fox has said little about the latest incident, residents said it was a relief to hear the nation's top organized crime prosecutor, Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, accuse many state police officers here of being "criminals dressed as public servants."
Vasconcelos's organized crime team, which flew the detained policemen to Mexico City, became involved because a drug trafficker -- trafficking is a federal crime -- led them to the house were the bodies were discovered. If those officers now begin naming other corrupt policemen and explaining their connections to underworld figures, authorities said, a diagram of this city's corruption could begin to emerge. That, in turn, they said, could help solve the cases of at least 100 brutal rapes and murders of Juarez women in recent years.
Those cases led human rights groups to organize a march against lawlessness, planned for Saturday and to be led by Jane Fonda and Sally Field. Organizers, hoping to fill the streets, said several thousand people are to join the march after walking across the international bridge from neighboring El Paso.
Following the detention of the police officers, Fox's attorney general, Rafael Macedo de la Concha, appointed Maria Lopez Urbina as special federal prosecutor to review the rape-homicides. Urbina said she would review all the case files, which have been closely guarded by state authorities reluctant to give up jurisdiction. Murder is a state crime in Mexico. "In the case that we find some question of irregularities or negligence, we will have to act immediately against the authorities who were involved in those acts," Urbina said.
Cesar Gustavo Jauregui Moreno, local president of Fox's National Action Party, describes the situation as "an enormous crisis." Party members and many business leaders have called for the resignation of Jesus Jose Solis Silva, the state attorney general, as did a front-page editorial in the local El Diario newspaper. Solis has become a target of public outrage as anti-kidnapping police have committed kidnappings, anti-drug police have been found with cocaine and the killing of women continues.
Solis has said his office has redoubled its efforts to fight crime and corruption. More than 300 state police officers have been fired in the past two years for various offenses, although no criminal charges were brought against them.
Among critics of the state police is Mario Escobedo Salazar, a local lawyer who alleges his son was killed because he criticized corruption. "The police are assassins," he said. His son, Mario Escobedo Anaya, also a lawyer, was killed in a 2002 police chase after publicly criticizing police handling of the women's homicides. Police said that they mistook him for a drug trafficker and that Escobedo Anaya fired first. But human rights advocates said the first photographs showed no bullet holes in the police cars, indicating the scene was altered after Escobedo Anaya was killed. To date, no police officer has been arrested in the case.
In the wealthy Campestre neighborhood, families rumored to be involved in the drug trade live next to well-respected families. The abandoned pink house of the late drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes stands near the grand stone mansion of a lawyer who was gunned down on his doorstep in an apparent drug hit. Over the years the children of families with dubious sources of income have gone to the best private schools and married into some of the city's most prominent families. Such connections have made organized crime harder to dismantle, according to Mexican and U.S. officials. They say too many wealthy and powerful people, from real estate agents to bankers and lawyers, have little interest in seeing the multibillion-dollar drug trade exposed.
"That is why things don't change," said Jaime Murrieta Briones, a photographer for El Diario, who has been at one killing scene after another for nearly a generation.
"This has become normal," he said, displaying a fistful of photos of horrendously bloody scenes: a young girl and a reputed drug dealer killed outside a movie theater, men gunned down in their cars and on the city streets.
The main drug figure in Juarez is now believed to be Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, brother of Amado, who was nicknamed "Lord of the Skies" because he used Boeing 727 passenger jets to ship cocaine, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Vicente Carrillo is accused by Mexican prosecutors and the DEA of running a pipeline of cocaine worth billions of dollars into the United States and of paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year to police and state officials to keep it in operation.
The Juarez cartel has shown a remarkable ability to corrupt government officials and institutions. In 1997, Gen. Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, Mexico's top anti-drug official, was convicted of accepting bribes from the cartel.
More recently, Mario Castillo, an FBI translator in El Paso, pleaded guilty in September to unauthorized use of an FBI computer, which contained information on Juarez drug investigations. Castillo also had access to the transcripts of secret witness testimony in drug cases.
Castillo was turned in by other FBI employees. Maynez said that would probably not happen in Mexico, where it can be difficult to find an honest superior officer to tell of corruption. In Juarez, he said, "There is no support at the top."
-------- prisons / prisoners
Freed Afghan, 15, Recalls a Year at Guantánamo
February 11, 2004
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/international/asia/11AFGH.html?pagewanted=all
KABUL, Afghanistan, Feb. 10 - Muhammad Ismail Agha, 15, one of three young Afghans released 10 days ago from imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has returned home, no worse for wear but bitter at what he went through.
In an interview in his hometown of Nawzad on Saturday, he said he was looking for work when he was arrested by Afghan militia soldiers and handed over to American troops in 2002. They imprisoned him for 14 months as a terrorist suspect, first at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul and then for a year in Guantánamo.
"I got something good from them - I can read and write," he said. He also learned English and studied the Koran in his own language, Pashto, he said. But he is bitter at being locked up for so long when he was guilty of nothing but looking for a job. His captors took away 14 months of his life, and kept him from earning money all that time, he said.
His family suffered not only extra hardship but also anxiety at not knowing what had happened to him. It was not until 10 months after his disappearance that he was able to send a letter.
"We were thinking maybe he went somewhere to work," said his older cousin, Sayed Muhammad Daoud Agha. "But we were wondering whether he was dead or alive."
"His father borrowed a lot of money from people and was looking for him for a long time," he added. "He should get compensation from the Americans, because he was innocent and kept in prison all this time."
Muhammad Agha said he never imagined his ordeal would be so prolonged. "When they first captured me I was thinking they would not imprison me for long because I was innocent," he said. "And then when they took me to Cuba I was also thinking the same, that they would release me soon. I was missing my family."
He also insisted that he held no grievance against the Americans. "They were good people, and they were giving me some lessons," he said. "I am angry with the Afghans who handed me over to the Americans. The Americans did not know what was happening."
Ruhullah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Nawzad, Afghanistan, for this article.
--------
Pentagon Allows Padilla to See Lawyer
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
February 11, 2004
WASHINGTON -- An American citizen held incommunicado by the military for more than a year as an alleged al-Qaida supporter will be allowed to see a lawyer, the Pentagon said Wednesday.
But one of Jose Padilla's lawyers says the government says it will monitor any meetings at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.
That arrangement ``would make it impossible to have an attorney-client conversation,'' said lawyer Andrew Patel.
No meeting has been scheduled.
The Bush administration says Padilla, working under a senior al-Qaida operative in Pakistan, plotted to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in the United States.
In a statement, the Pentagon said it had determined that providing Padilla access to a lawyer would not compromise national security or interfere with efforts to use him as an intelligence source.
Still, the Pentagon maintained it was not required to let him speak with counsel.
``Such access is not required by domestic or international law and should not be treated as a precedent,'' the statement said.
Patel said Padilla's legal team was reviewing the conditions offered by the government.
``It's a step in the right direction,'' he said. ``It's not what they would like people to believe that it is.''
A Human Rights First organization lawyer who also worked on the case, Jonathan Freiman, said it ``a transparent maneuver'' meant to undermine Padilla's arguments on the eve of Supreme Court consideration.
He said restrictions would make it like a humanitarian visit.
``His lawyers might as well be from the Red Cross,'' Freiman said. ``All they can do is see him, see how he's been treated.''
Padilla's lawyers have challenged the government's right to hold him indefinitely, without charges or trial, as a violation of his rights as a U.S. citizen. The government, meanwhile, calls him an enemy combatant who can be held for the duration of the war on terrorism.
The Bush administration lost the case in federal court and wants the Supreme Court to step in. In December, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 ruling, ordered Padilla released from military custody unless the government charges him.
That ruling is on hold while the Supreme Court considers taking the case. A decision on that point may come as early as this month.
The administration also argues that it may keep such prisoners incommunicado, without access to lawyers or other outsiders. Even so, the government recently allowed a lawyer to visit Yaser Esam Hamdi, another American citizen held in South Carolina.
Hamdi is alleged to be a Taliban foot soldier picked up during fighting in Afghanistan shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The Supreme Court has already agreed to hear Hamdi's appeal, filed without his knowledge by an outside lawyer. The government won the Hamdi case in lower courts, and the Supreme Court could now agree to hear both cases side by side.
Also Wednesday, the administration filed additional legal papers in the Padilla case at the high court. Solicitor General Theodore Olson described the lower court's ruling as fundamentally flawed.
``There is no question that the opinion raises issues of extraordinary national significance requiring this court's review,'' he wrote.
Olson specifically asked the court to hear the case on the same day it hears the Hamdi case. Oral arguments in the Hamdi case are to take place sometime in April.
Hearing the cases at once could set up a ruling by summer on whether the president's wartime powers allow the open-ended detention of American citizens, whether captured at home or abroad.
The FBI arrested Padilla, a former gang member from Chicago, in May 2002, as we was arriving in his hometown from overseas. Counterterrorism officials contended he was in the United States to scout targets for attacks, and was working for Abu Zubaydah, a senior al-Qaida planner who has since been captured.
Padilla met with one of his lawyers before he was transferred to military custody in June of that year.
The officials also said he worked on building a dirty bomb, a device that would use conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials over a wide area.
Associated Press writer Anne Gearan contributed to this report.
On the Net:
Background on the Padilla case: www.jenner.com/padilla
-------
U.S. to Allow 'Enemy Combatant' to See a Lawyer
February 11, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/national/11CND-PADI.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 - Jose Padilla, an American citizen accused of supporting Al Qaeda terrorists who has been held incommunicado by the military for more than a year, will be allowed to see a lawyer, the Defense Department said today.
A statement by the Pentagon said the department was allowing Mr. Padilla access to counsel "as a matter of discretion and military authority."
"Such access is not required by domestic or international law and should not be treated as a precedent," the statement said.
The Pentagon said Mr. Padilla's consultations with a lawyer would be "subject to appropriate security restrictions," a phrase that suggested something less than the full, private access to lawyers normally enjoyed by civilian defendants.
Mr. Padilla was arrested in May 2002 after arriving at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago on a flight from Pakistan and was initially held as a material witness on suspicion of involvement in a plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States.
He was subsequently classified as an enemy combatant, a status that the Bush administration has said does not entitle him to counsel, as civilian defendants are. In fact, he is technically not a criminal suspect at all, even though he has been held in a military brig in Charleston, S.C.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled recently that the government lacked authority to hold Mr. Padilla in military custody. The Bush administration is asking the Supreme Court to review the ruling.
The case of Mr. Padilla has inspired intense debate over how far the government can go in the name of national security since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Those who question Mr. Padilla's treatment have noted that he is an American citizen who was taken into custody in the United States. They have argued that the authorities cannot take away what should be his basic rights simply by branding him an "enemy combatant."
In announcing today that Mr. Padilla will be allowed to consult a lawyer, the Pentagon said it had determined that access to counsel "will not compromise the national security of the United States" and will not interfere with intelligence-gathering.
The Supreme Court has already agreed to review the case of another American citizen being held as an enemy combatant: Yaser Esam Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan in late 2001, when the government says he was fighting on the side of the Taliban. He has been held more than two years without charges and was only recently allowed access to a lawyer.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Hydrogen Fuel Cell Tested for Manufacturing
FREEPORT, Texas, (ENS)
February 11, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-11-09.asp#anchor3
For the first time, a U.S. automaker is using hydrogen fuel cells to power manufacturing and buildings. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham, joined by Texas Governor Rick Perry and other dignitaries in Freeport Tuesday to cut the ribbon for new General Motors hydrogen fuel cell test facility.
Inside, hydrogen will be tested as a source of electricity for the Dow Chemical Company's manufacturing facility site. This new facility will conduct field tests to transfer hydrogen into electricity and will demonstrate the viability of fuel cell power generation for chemical manufacturing.
"The Dow-GM transaction typifies the type of creative arrangements that will arise from the new hydrogen economy," Secretary Abraham said. "Not only is this test a first for evaluating the broad industrial use of fuel cell technology, it is the first time a carmaker has used its fuel cell technology to provide electricity and heat for buildings and manufacturing,"
President George W. Bush has called on the Department of Energy (DOE) to develop hydrogen. Over the next five years the DOE has plans to invest $1.7 billion in research and development of hydrogen vehicles and hydrogen infrastructure technologies.
"We are optimistic about the prospects for hydrogen, not just as the transportation fuel of the future, but also for its potential to generate electricity to heat and power our homes and businesses," Secretary Abraham said.
Successful installation of hydrogen fuel cells will give Dow, an energy intensive manufacturer, an additional supply of electricity while reducing emissions. The arrangement will also inevitably drive technological progress in GM's pursuit of cost competitive fuel cell systems.
The initial test will convert hydrogen into 75 kilowatts of electricity, or enough power for 60 homes per year. Ultimately, fuel cells from GM could generate 35 megawatts of power from hydrogen for Dow, equivalent to electricity for 25,000 homes.
--------
Wind is near-term renewable fuel for hydrogen, says NRC report
2004-02-11
(Refocus Weekly)
http://www.sparksdata.co.uk/refocus/fp_showdoc.asp?docid=22341556&accnum=1&topics=
WASHINGTON, DC, US Production of hydrogen from renewable energy sources is "often stated as the long-term goal of a mature hydrogen-based economy," but the United States must also develop natural gas, coal and nuclear as fuel sources for the energy carrier, according to a report from the National Research Council.
The vision of a hydrogen economy would have "fundamental and dramatic benefits" for both energy security and the environment, says 'The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers & R&D Needs.' It says the broad approach of the Department of Energy to produce hydrogen from domestic coal resources as well as from renewables is important for the emergence of a viable transportation system, and it recommends that DOE coordinate hydrogen programs in its renewables, fossil fuel, science and nuclear energy offices.
"A transition to hydrogen as a major fuel in the next 50 years could fundamentally transform the U.S. energy system, creating opportunities to increase energy security through the use of a variety of domestic energy sources for hydrogen production while reducing environmental impacts, including atmospheric CO2 emissions and criteria pollutants," it notes, and recommends that DOE focus its research on distributed natural gas and electrolysis from wind to enable a transition to a hydrogen economy within the next two decades.
"Of all renewable energy sources, using wind-turbine-generated electricity to electrolyze water, particularly in the near to medium term, has arguably the greatest potential for producing pollution-free hydrogen," and it calls for further reductions in the cost of wind turbine technology and generation and optimization of wind turbine-electrolyzers with a hydrogen storage system.
The NRC report examined only distributed-scale wind-to-hydrogen production systems, based on current costs of 4¢ to 7¢/kWh without support, with capacity factors of 30%. At those levels, wind can produce hydrogen for $6.64 per kilogram, which rises to $10.69/kg without grid backup. With improvements, those rates are expected to drop to $2.86 and $3.38, respectively, without government support.
"There are obvious advantages to hydrogen produced from wind energy," including the lack of GHG pollutants, but its "most serious drawback continues to be its intermittence and mismatch with demand" which is an issue both for electricity generation and for hydrogen production. Wind "still faces many barriers to deployment and therefore deserves continued as well as more focused attention in the DOE's hydrogen program," but it has "the potential to play an important role in a future hydrogen economy, particular during the transition and potentially in the long term."
The report points out that 10% of U.S. natural gas is imported now, and imports will increase significantly in future, so long-term reliance on gas as the feedstock for hydrogen would not increase energy independence. Hydrogen is flammable, and safer systems for transporting and storing must be developed, including new systems to ensure safety in the consumer market.
The National Research Council is the principal operating arm of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. The study was sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
-------- health
Avian Flu Cases Strike Fear in Delmarva
Delaware Outbreak Imperils Farms; Bans Imposed on U.S. Poultry
By Nurith C. Aizenman and Nelson Hernandez
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, February 11, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30456-2004Feb10.html
CENTREVILLE, Md. -- Jenny Rhodes won't let her teenage sons bring friends home anymore. As for her fellow poultry farmers in Queen Anne's County, Rhodes won't even stand in the same room with them if she can help it.
Far from being unsociable, Rhodes and other Eastern Shore chicken growers have been locked in a virtual quarantine since the discovery of avian flu on two farms across the border in Delaware, the most recent outbreak surfacing yesterday in Sussex County.
Highly contagious and deadly to birds -- although officials say this particular strain has no history of harming humans -- the disease has the potential to cripple the $1.5 billion poultry industry in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia. Officials in Maryland and Delaware, aware of the huge economic stakes, are asking the public to avoid areas with poultry farms to minimize chances of contagion.
"It's very scary," Rhodes said. "We could lose everything."
The news also sent ripples across the world poultry market yesterday. China imposed a ban on U.S. poultry imports, joining nine other nations, including Russia, Japan, South Korea and Poland.
Those countries say the restrictions are necessary to protect their stock from infection. U.S. chicken producers, who export more than 15 percent of their birds annually for more than $1 billion in revenue, say there has been an overreaction.
"There's no reason for a country to impose an embargo," said USA Poultry & Egg Export Council spokesman Toby Moore. "There's no risk."
The bans are "very disruptive," Moore said, because it takes about a month to get frozen chicken from the processing plant in the United States to foreign markets. The embargo "puts a lot of product in limbo," he said.
Two major domestic chicken producers, Arkansas-based Tysons Foods Inc. and Pilgrim's Pride Corp. in Texas, expressed hope that the bans would soon be limited to poultry from Delaware if the virus is not discovered outside the state.
"That's a precautionary measure they take -- banning from the U.S. But once it's been identified, they usually narrow their ban down," said Ray Atkinson, a Pilgrim's Pride spokesman.
The strain of avian flu identified in Delaware has no history of harming humans, said Anne Fitzgerald, a spokeswoman for the Delaware Department of Agriculture.
Some strains in Asia, where the disease has spread rapidly in recent months, have infected people exposed to the diseased chickens.
It was not clear yesterday exactly how the disease had reached the two Delaware farms. However, officials say the virus is most often transmitted by people carrying it on their shoes, by machinery entering or leaving farms and through the air.
The first Delaware case surfaced Friday in Kent County, on a farm that often does business with a live-chicken market in New York. Authorities immediately ordered the slaughter of 12,000 birds and tested 20 chicken houses within a two-mile radius, but found no cases of avian flu.
Avian Flu Cases Strike Fear in Delmarva
Yesterday's second outbreak, more than five miles away in Sussex County, was found in a flock of roaster-type chickens raised by a contract grower for Perdue Farms. All 73,800 were destroyed, and poultry specialists were testing all farms within a two-mile radius for the disease. About 75 farms within a six-mile radius of the two will be quarantined, Delaware agriculture officials said.
"We will be taking immediate actions to contain this disease, but this is now a serious situation for the Delmarva poultry industry," Delaware Secretary of Agriculture Michael T. Scuse said in a statement.
Delaware yesterday barred the sale of all live poultry, canceled farmers' public meetings and asked for a cancellation of all sales or auctions of farm equipment.
While Maryland farmers can still sell live poultry, they are under similar restrictions. Some rules were in force long before the outbreak in Delaware. Workers must step into disinfectant tubs upon entering and leaving their chicken houses, for instance, and keep the clothes they wear while working with chickens separate from everyday clothes.
Now, those safeguards have been stepped up. Normally sociable farmers are keeping away from stores, coffee houses and public meetings, and banning all visitors to their farms except those carrying chicken feed and other supplies. Those whose work requires them to travel from farm to farm are washing off their vehicles after each visit and wearing disposable boot covers.
Even maintenance workers employed by companies that own the chickens grown on area farms have suspended weekly visits to check on the flocks. Only feed trucks are now allowed on the Eastern Shore. Moving the chickens themselves into or out of farms has been forbidden until the investigation is over.
Such precautions are crucial, said Joseph Chisholm Sr., the president of Delmarva Poultry Industry Inc., which represents chicken farmers in Delaware, Maryland and Virginia -- roughly 15,000 farmers who saw 576,746,300 broilers, roasters and Cornish hens through the industry last year, for a wholesale value of $1.5 billion.
Chisholm praised Delaware and Maryland authorities' reaction to the outbreak but was still worried. "If it spread into the commercial flocks here on Delmarva, it would be a disaster," said Chisholm, who operates a poultry farm in Somerset County on the Eastern Shore. "You have to react very quickly to it. . . . That's critical, because if not this thing could spread in a week. . . . It's unbelievable how contagious this stuff is."
If the contagion broke free, the effects would not be limited to the poultry industry. Nearly everything on the Eastern Shore is connected to the agricultural economy. Sixty percent of Maryland's grain growers provide feed for the poultry industry, according to Sue duPont, the spokeswoman for the Maryland Department of Agriculture, and a number of other jobs, such as barn repair and even farming vehicle dealerships, count on the income the poultry farmers bring to the state. The Delmarva Poultry Industry estimated that each job in the poultry processing industry generated 7.2 jobs elsewhere.
Farmers such as Rhodes, meanwhile, are trying to limit their forays off the farm to a minimum. "You still have to live, so my kids are still going to school, and I'm still going to the grocery store," said Rhodes. "But I try not to do anything I don't have to do."
Rhodes, a soft-spoken single mother, sought comfort in all the precautions she has taken. "We just have to practice bio-security. It all comes down to bio-security," she said, then repeated the word "bio-security" several times more as if it were a mantra.
Asked what the consequences of a flu outbreak at her farm would be, the 42-year-old shuddered. All 80,000 of her chickens would have to be destroyed, she mused, and she might even lose the property she has owned for 18 years.
Raised on a cattle farm nearby, Rhodes said she chose to grow chicken because she wanted her two sons to enjoy the same rural childhood she had. "On a farm you all work together, it's just a wonderful way to live," Rhodes said.
At 111/2 acres, her property is hardly large, she noted. And the chickens generate only enough income to cover the mortgage and electricity bills -- she works a second job off the farm to pay for other expenses. But as viewed from the distance of a nearby road, the modest brick colonial house flanked by majestic pine trees seemed like a peaceful spot. Best of all, Rhodes said, "is that it's mine. I love it. I couldn't imagine living anywhere else."
Staff writer Griff Witte and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
New York Police Sued Over Anti-War Protest Arrests
Wed February 11, 2004
By Grant McCool
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=domesticNews&storyID=4340138
NEW YORK - Civil rights lawyers on Wednesday sued the New York Police Department on behalf of 52 people arrested at an anti-war protest, the latest in a series of lawsuits nationwide challenging police conduct at rallies opposing the U.S.-led war on Iraq.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court charged the NYPD "unlawfully arrested peaceful protesters and detained them for excessively long periods" after the April 7, 2003, rally outside an investment bank they accused of war profiteering.
A spokeswoman for the city's law department said counsel had not yet read the legal papers, but "will be reviewing them thoroughly" when they do.
Center for Constitutional Rights lawyers said their lawsuit, which charged the police with violating free speech rights, was also filed with an eye to demonstrations planned for the Republican National Convention in New York in August.
"We believe these arrests and detentions were part of a nationwide pattern ... a concerted effort to keep people off the streets and deter people who would protest from coming out," lawyer Nancy Chang said.
"We don't want to live in a country where people do not feel free to express themselves," Chang said.
The suit was filed a day after U.S. prosecutors in Iowa dropped subpoenas issued last week ordering anti-war activists to testify before a grand jury. Under pressure from civil liberties advocates, a subpoena was also withdrawn on Drake University to provide information on a campus anti-war forum.
Chang said civil rights groups had filed lawsuits against authorities over police handling of anti-war rallies in cities such as Oakland, California, Washington and Seattle.
CIVIL LIBERTIES DEBATE
These and other cases are part of a raging debate over civil liberties as the Bush administration fights its war on terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America. Law enforcement officials, free speech advocates and courts have all acknowledged the attacks and the U.S. war on Iraq created a different atmosphere for policing and security.
At the April demonstration in New York, an ad hoc group of activists called "M27 Coalition" rallied outside an affiliate of the Carlyle Group, which has ties to the defense industry.
Officers arrested the activists, who said they followed police guidelines for the sidewalk demonstration. Some were held for up to 12 hours, but disorderly conduct charges were dismissed against the 52 named in Wednesday's lawsuit.
The lawsuit seeks unspecified monetary compensation and a declaration that police actions were "retaliatory and unconstitutional."
New York activists organized one of the largest anti-war demonstrations on Feb. 15, 2003, when hundreds of thousands took to the streets five weeks before the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq over its purported stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. No weapons stockpiles have been found.
----
Subpoenas on Antiwar Protest Are Dropped
February 11, 2004
New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/national/11PROT.html
DES MOINES, Feb. 10 - Facing growing public pressure from civil liberties advocates, federal prosecutors on Tuesday dropped subpoenas that they issued last week ordering antiwar protesters to appear before a grand jury and ordering a university to turn over information about the protesters.
The protesters, who had said they feared that the unusual federal inquiry was intended to silence and scare people who disagreed with government positions, declared victory.
"We made them want to stop," Brian Terrell, executive director of the Catholic Peace Ministry here and one of four protesters who received subpoenas, told a crowd at the federal courthouse. "We're here to make them want to never let it happen again."
Representatives of the United States attorney for the Southern District of Iowa, Stephen Patrick O'Meara, declined to comment on what prompted the reversal. Mr. O'Meara's spokesman, Al Overbaugh, said he could not comment on information related to grand jury subpoenas.
On Monday, prosecutors defended their inquiry, saying it was limited to the narrow issue of whether a protester trespassed on Iowa National Guard property on Nov. 16.
A subpoena compelling Drake University to provide information about an antiwar forum on its campus on Nov. 15 was also withdrawn, as was an earlier court order that barred Drake officials from speaking publicly about the case.
David E. Maxwell, president of the private university of 5,100 students, said he was deeply relieved.
"It has been a remarkable several days," Dr. Maxwell said. "I'm still processing this."
The school received a subpoena last week that demanded a broad range of information about the sponsor of the forum on Nov. 15, the Drake chapter of the National Lawyers Guild. The subpoena included its leadership lists, annual reports and location. That subpoena was later narrowed somewhat, university officials said on Tuesday, to include the names of people at the forum and records from campus security that might describe "the content of what was discussed at the meeting."
Dr. Maxwell said the subpoenas concerned him because they threatened essential values of the university like the right to free assembly and the sense of the university as a "safe haven" for ideas, even unpopular ones.
"It raised very troubling issues for us," he said.
In the end, the president said, events played out as they should.
"From that perspective," Dr. Maxwell said, "this has shown that the system works. We felt something inappropriate was being asked of us, and in the end it was resolved the way we wanted."
Civil liberties advocates here and nationally said they had questions about the intent of the investigation and whether it might signal a broader worry for antiwar protesters here and others elsewhere. The Iowa Civil Liberties Union intends to investigate the investigation, said its executive director, R. Ben Stone.
"Despite any retreat by the Iowa U.S. Attorney," Mr. Stone said, "there remain serious questions about the scope of this particular investigation. If it was just a trespassing investigation, why seek the membership records of the National Lawyers Guild? If this was an attempt to chill protests through the aggressive policing of a run-of-the-mill crime, we've got a serious problem in America."
Twenty-one people attended a training session on nonviolent protest at the Nov. 15 antiwar forum, organizers said. On Tuesday, a far larger group, more than 100, stood outside the federal courthouse beside Mr. Terrell in bitter cold, holding a new set of protest signs that said, "Say no to political grand juries," "You can subpoena us, but you will not silence us" and "Investigate Halliburton not Iowans."
----
After a Year, Students Take a Second Look at the Iraq Invasion
February 11, 2004
New York Times
By SAM DILLON
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/education/11student.html
NORMAL, Ill., Feb. 5 - One year ago, when the nation's schoolhouses echoed with debate about imminent war, two Normal Community High School freshmen shared a moral certainty that it was America's duty to invade Iraq and destroy weapons of mass destruction. Today they could hardly disagree more.
Anthony Hamer feels vindicated. "When we captured Saddam, that reduced the threat," he said in a class discussion here.
What threat, countered Alex Oswald, who, like Anthony, is a sophomore. "The government said Iraq's weapons put us in danger, but now they say there may not have been any. So the government has somewhat destroyed its credibility."
For millions of American students, the invasion of Iraq brought a torrent of hard lessons about war, contemporary history and big-power politics. Thousands of high school teachers viewed the invasion as a teachable moment, and they offered crash courses in Mideast geography and Islamic history, and civics lessons on how a democracy goes to war.
A year later, the lessons continue, and many students - once vehemently for or against the war - now offer more nuanced or changed opinions. In recent months, students' debates have focused on how America should secure the peace and what international role is proper for the nation now. In some schools, the realities of war have become a little less abstract. Returning soldiers have told of harsh conditions - the fear, the fatigue, the daily fact of death.
Technology has also brought the war closer, too. Students are discussing the conflict over the Internet with teenage Iraqi pen pals, who tell them the day-to-day details of their lives, including their brushes with violence. Others, in overseas study programs, have heard the sting of reproach from foreign teenagers who resent America's assertive foreign policy.
The fascination with Iraq has not gone away, enabling educators to stimulate even broader interest in international affairs, many teachers say.
"It's like building a house," said Kelly Keogh, the social studies teacher who organized the classroom debates here. "Teach them history. Give them analytical tools. Then let them wrangle with contemporary issues, and they'll take ownership and ask their own questions."
Students in Mr. Keogh's world studies class in this university town 114 miles southwest of Chicago said they had previously paid little attention to foreign news, but since the invasion many are following the Iraq story on television and the Internet and a few read The Pantagraph, the local newspaper. Others are reading books on foreign policy.
They are not alone. Students at high schools from Connecticut to California have been following the invasion's turbulent aftermath.
One student who now sees grays where once the war was black and white is Erin McCann, a senior at John Mall High School in Walsenburg, Colo., 150 miles south of Denver. Most students there were "pro-war, kill 'em all, blow 'em up," she said, and when she stood in the cafeteria during an assembly a year ago to speak in favor of the invasion, they roared their approval. Students remained largely silent, however, when her friend, Karen Bressan, stood to argue that it could be destabilizing to invade Iraq without provocation.
Last fall, after it became clear that America faced a bloody insurgency and that no doomsday weapons were turning up, the two girls discussed the war again. Ms. Bressan said in an interview that she could not resist the temptation to gloat.
"Honey," Ms. Bressan said she told Ms. McCann, "unless you can show me something new, I'd say I win this argument." Ms. McCann said that she learned the importance of being skeptical of government claims but that she is still hopeful the war will have a positive result.
"The more information I get, the more my views shift," she said, "but I still think Saddam was an evil man. So maybe this war will turn out to be a good thing."
Opinion pollsters do not systematically track the views of Americans under 18, but Ms. McCann's skepticism of government-intelligence claims appears to mirror that of a majority of American adults. A recent New York Times poll found that 6 in 10 of those polled felt the Bush administration had been hiding information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction, yet several other recent polls have shown that a majority still believe it was right to invade.
"People say, 'Yes, it would have been better if they'd found weapons, but we still support the decision for war,' " said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center.
Views evolved in a different direction at Granite High School in Salt Lake City, where many students in Nicolle Robinson's American studies class opposed the invasion. But in December one of her former students, now a soldier stationed in Iraq, visited her class while on home leave.
His compelling description of his wartime experiences left many students more sympathetic to the American effort in Iraq. He said soldiers go without sleep, food or water for lengthy periods, and he criticized the news media for under-reporting soldiers' efforts to help Iraqis rebuild. He wept when describing the horrors of combat, and many students wept with him, Ms. Robinson said.
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