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NUCLEAR
Malaysia will not act on nuclear sales affair
Malaysia Opposition Seeks Nuclear Probe
China Seeks Progress As Host of Nuke Talks
This time, depleted uranium questions are coming from the Army first
Japanese split over Iraq mission
Iraqi MD exposes effects of war on Iraq
Implications of the Use of U.S. Depleted Uranium
Malaysia names European nuclear 'middlemen'
Iran acknowledges report of nuke deal
Iran Acknowledges Buying Nuclear Components
Japan: North Korea Ready to Abandon Nukes
North, South Korean Teams to Complete Talks Table
Japan: North Korea Ready to Abandon Nukes
South Korea Eyes 3 - Stage Plan to End North Crisis
U.N. Watchdog Gets Nuke Data From Libya
Britain to Pay for Submarine Dismantling
U.N. Probing Possible Sales of Nuclear Warhead Designs
Administration favors nuclear free-for-all
Sweet deal won uranium plant from Kentucky
Demos zero in on nuke testing
Nader to make fourth run for president
Nader Jumps Into the Presidential Race
Nader to Run As Independent
MILITARY
Pilot Killed in Attack on Helicopter in Afghanistan
Flawed Ally Was Hunt's Best Hope
Insurgents Kill 192 in Uganda
Australia seeks offshore designs for new warships
Australia to Upgrade Radar System
New Horizon For Lockheed
Marines to Protect U.S. Embassy in Haiti
Low Turnout Tells Tale of Iranian Vote
Death Toll Among Iraqi Police Rising
Bremer Says Iraq Interim Constitution on Schedule
Facts about the rotation of US troops into and out of Iraq
At Least 8 Killed in Bombing Outside Iraqi Police Station
Iraqis Say Deal on U.S. Troops Must Be Put Off
In Hague, Israeli Barrier Proves Divisive Issue
Israelis Back Barrier In Wake of Attacks
Peres Lobbies U.S. for End to Settlements
Suicide Bomber Kills 8 in Jerusalem
Drifting NATO Finds New Purpose With Afghanistan and Iraq
Pakistani Offensive Aims to Drive Out Taliban and Al Qaeda
Pakistan to Step Up Border Operations
Pakistan to Test Fire Long - Range Missile
U.S. Air Force Plans for Future War in Space
US still funding powerful data mining tools
MI5 recruitment drive will focus on Asians
CIA Chief, Pakistan Discussed Bin Laden
Analysis U.S., U.N. Play 'After You' Game on Iraq
Pentagon starts probe into Halliburton claims
Hidden defense costs add up to double trouble
'This is war,' Rumsfeld told Bush
Rumsfeld: Insurgency May Alter Troop Shift
Army to End Comanche Helicopter Program
In Season of Campaigns, Halliburton Joins In
Reminders From the White House
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Your papers, please
Color-coded fliers
New powers for 'FBI-style police'
9 Truckers' Files Subpoenaed
OTHER
Superfund Not Funded
Leaked Pentagon Report Warns of Coming Climate Wars
Monsanto Cultivates Biotech Bonanza
Cloned Embryos Could Help Explain Basis for Diseases
ACTIVISTS
To Greet G.O.P., Protests of Varying Volume
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
Malaysia will not act on nuclear sales affair
By Mark Baker,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Singapore and agencies
February 23, 2004
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/22/1077384639211.html
Malaysian investigators have confirmed that a Sri Lankan business partner of the son of the Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi, knowingly exported components for Libya's secret nuclear weapons program from a company in which they were both big shareholders.
Despite the finding, Malaysian authorities say they will take no action against the businessman, Buhary Seyed Abu Tahir - described by the US President, George Bush, as "the chief financial officer and money launderer" of the nuclear trafficking network established by the rogue Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The scandal is looming as a serious embarrassment for Mr Abdullah, who is expected to call national elections within the next few weeks at which he is seeking to rebuild the fortunes of the ruling United Malays National Organisation on a platform of clean and open government.
After promising an unfettered investigation into the affair - and his son's role - Mr Abdullah and his senior ministers have been quick to dismiss US allegations that Malaysia has played a significant role in the clandestine nuclear arms trade.
The police chief, Mohamed Bakri Omar, said on Saturday that no action would be taken against Mr Tahir, who had committed no crimes in Malaysia and was free to leave the country if he wished. But the police were willing to help the International Atomic Energy Authority if it wished to question Mr Tahir, he told The Star.
The police said Mr Tahir, a Malaysian resident, had admitted that he and Dr Khan negotiated with Libyan agents to supply parts for centrifuges used in uranium enrichment that were manufactured by Scomi Precision Engineering at a plant near Kuala Lumpur.
The police inquiry finding was made public at the same time as the IAEA reported that Libya was operating a more advanced and longer-running program to develop nuclear weapons than outside intelligence agencies and nuclear watchdogs imagined.
--------
Malaysia Opposition Seeks Nuclear Probe
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Malaysia-Nuclear-Investigation.html
KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) -- Opposition parties Monday demanded a parliamentary inquiry into a Malaysian company's role in making nuclear parts for Libya, saying a police investigation that cleared it of wrongdoing may have been biased.
The company, Scomi Precision Engineering, is controlled by the only son of Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi. The prime minister is also Home Minister in charge of police.
National police chief Mohamad Bakri Omar last week cleared the Scomi company, known as SCOPE, of knowingly participating in the international nuclear trafficking network of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.
After a three-month investigation, police confirmed that SCOPE made more than 25,000 centrifuge parts under a contract arranged by the alleged chief financier of Khan's network, Sri Lankan Buhary Syed Abu Tahir.
But Mohamad Bakri said SCOPE did not know what the parts were for and had been ``misled'' by Tahir.
The parts, in boxes marked with Scomi's name, were seized last October by authorities on their way from Dubai to Libya. The Malaysian company has not been connected to any other country accused of buying nuclear secrets.
Tahir admitted he was a middleman for Khan's network. He gave Malaysian police names of others involved and details about deals to sell nuclear technology to Libya and Iran, including parts for centrifuges to enrich uranium. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, has admitted selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Opposition groups said investigators need to further examine Malaysia's role in the supply network, in particular Tahir's relationship with Kamaluddin Abdullah, the prime minister's son.
Kamaluddin is a majority shareholder in the Scomi Group, which owns SCOPE through an investment company, Kaspadu. Company records show Tahir was a director of Kaspadu around the time when SCOPE got the contract for the centrifuge parts. Tahir resigned before the contract was completed.
Azizah Ismail, president of the People's Justice Party, said in a statement the prime minister has ``personally defended Scomi's innocence or ignorance from the very outset of the case.''
``How can Malaysians and the world accept (it was) a fair investigation?'' she said.
A government spokesman wasn't immediately available for comment. Previous opposition calls for parliamentary inquiries into other issues have been ignored.
The prime minister promised last month the investigation would be conducted ``without fear or favor.'' Two weeks before the final police report was released, he said the probe had cleared Malaysia of any wrongdoing.
Lim Kit Siang, chairman of the Democratic Action Party, called for a bipartisan parliamentary committee to examine the Scomi deal ``so that the exoneration of SCOPE and Kamaluddin can be completely credible.''
-------- china
China Seeks Progress As Host of Nuke Talks
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Diplomacy.html
BEIJING (AP) -- As host of a new round of talks this week on North Korea's nuclear program, China has more than just diplomatic prestige at stake.
Chinese leaders have grown increasingly alarmed as North Korea revealed it was building a ``nuclear deterrent'' against U.S. attack and as Washington demanded the North disarm if it wants aid for its decrepit economy.
Analysts say China worries that social unrest could cause turmoil in an impoverished but potentially nuclear-armed North Korea and that South Korea or Japan might feel compelled to acquire the bomb themselves, upsetting the regional military balance.
That drove China out of its traditional reluctance to take part in global affairs and into an unaccustomed role as mediator -- and added urgency to its diplomatic offensive.
``The probability of a very bad outcome to their interests is deemed to be too high,'' said Ron Huisken, a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at Australian National University in Canberra.
The last round of talks involving China, the United States, both Koreas, Japan and Russia in August produced no settlement and only vague agreements to meet again.
China has held more than 60 meetings in a flurry of shuttle diplomacy to arrange the second round, said Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zhang Qiyue. The talks are due to start Wednesday.
``Our purpose is to solve the DPRK nuclear issue and maintain peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula,'' Zhang said, referring to North Korea by the initials of its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
With Chinese officials forced onto center stage, ``they're obviously attracted to doing it well and getting a lot of kudos as a result,'' Huisken said, adding that the effort dovetails with China's effort to raise its global profile.
China's message is, ``We want to be an insider. We'll play from inside,'' Huisken said. And it's working: ``Most people now are visibly more relaxed about China, just in the space of two years,'' he said.
The United States has been more than happy to let China wave the carrot while it wields the stick.
``I think it should be clear that China has been in the lead in this activity among the six parties,'' John Bolton, U.S. undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, said last week in Beijing.
China is North Korea's last major ally, but much has changed since the days when they were communist comrades-in-arms during decades of Cold War. China is increasingly capitalist and intertwined with the outside world, while the regime Pyongyang is as hardline and isolated as ever.
Beijing keeps its ally afloat with oil and food aid, but its own top foreign policy aim is to maintain good trading relations with the rest of the world.
China's increasing pragmatism has also strengthened its political ties with the United States, with Beijing agreeing to U.S. efforts to fight terrorism and halt weapons proliferation. If anything, China's challenge at the six-nation talks is to use its influence with North Korea without appearing to help other countries gang up on Pyongyang.
China initially tried to stay out of the dispute over the North's nuclear program.
But the Chinese stepped in after the United States rejected negotiating with North Korea one-on-one and insisted on a multilateral approach, arguing that Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions defied the world community.
``I don't think these countries really enjoy China's role, but then they found that without China's role they can do nothing,'' said Yan Xuetong, director of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
``China can persuade North Korea to continue these talks,'' Yan said. But, he added, ``I don't think China's influence on North Korea is strong enough to tell North Korea to do what it should.''
-------- depleted uranium
This time, depleted uranium questions are coming from the Army first
By Kevin Dougherty,
Stars and Stripes European edition,
Monday, February 23, 2004
http://www.estripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=20636
As concerns over depleted uranium grew in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Army doctors were largely in a reactive mode, waiting for soldiers to broach the subject of radiation exposure.
That approach was partly due to an absence of health and deployment data, which impeded efforts to cure and compensate people.
Now, as the Army manages the largest force rotation in decades, troops returning from Iraq are being asked about depleted uranium - as well as other potentially dangerous toxins - before most have a chance to raise the issue themselves. This and other health-related questions form the basis of an Armywide post-deployment questionnaire.
"We are doing more testing," said Capt. James Mancuso, chief of epidemiology at the U.S. Army Center for Health Promotion and Preventive Medicine-Europe in Landstuhl, Germany.
Mancuso said officials are not finding any significant exposure, however, to depleted uranium, a dense substance used in projectiles to improve armor-piercing capability.
But up and down the clinical chart, medical personnel are doing more these days to check and document a soldier's health before and after deployment. The pace has accelerated in recent months to better capture baseline medical data on the waves of troops leaving and entering Iraq.
Officials say servicemembers are also more involved in the process, partly because they are better educated about possible health threats.
"We have a better trained soldier population," said Army Lt. Col. Gary Matcek, chief of the center's health physics division, "not just on DU, but on the whole litany of toxicants."
The effort to improve the process of collecting health and deployment data comes on the heels of a Government Accounting Office report that focused on 1,071 troops who deployed to Kosovo or Afghanistan between January 2001 and May 2002.
Released in September, the GAO's review found the Army and Air Force not in compliance with Defense Department policies on health protection and surveillance. The report, based on data covering four stateside bases, noted deficiencies in health assessments, immunizations and record-keeping.
It also criticized the Defense Department for a lack of "oversight of department-wide efforts to comply with health surveillance requirements."
The Defense Department concurred with the report.
The report "disclosed that 38 to 98 percent of servicemembers [sampled] were missing one or both of their [pre- or post-deployment] health assessments. ..."
The basis of the GAO review, the second in six years, is rooted in health problems that arose after the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War, giving rise to what is known as Gulf War syndrome.
One of the culprits, some say, was the use of depleted uranium by U.S. and British forces. DU is a byproduct of the enrichment process of natural uranium, and, because of its density, is highly effective in penetrating armored vehicles.
But a lack of deployment data frustrated efforts to fully investigate the matter, the GAO later found.
Today, troops wrapping up their Iraq tour are required to complete a four-page form that includes, among other things, a question about possible exposure to depleted uranium.
The number of soldiers answering "yes" is "very low," said Army Col. Allen Kraft, director of force health protection for Europe Regional Medical Command and U.S. Army Europe.
Exposure to depleted uranium "is just one of the many, many things we are covering" in the survey, Kraft said. "Some are as innocuous as sand and dust."
Regarding health assessments and data collection, Kraft acknowledged Army doctors "learned some good lessons from Gulf War I."
But, he adds, people need to keep things in perspective. Ingesting particles of depleted uranium certainly isn't desirable, Kraft said, but he noted that people who smoke do their body more harm.
In a place such as Iraq, medical officials are just as concerned about other toxicants, from oil field emissions to lead paint. DU, Kraft said, "is on the low end of the totem pole" of things to worry about.
"The word 'radiation' scares people," Kraft said, "but you are exposed to [levels of] radiation every time you step outside."
By anyone's measure, the greatest threat of depleted uranium exposure occurs when a soldier has the added misfortune of being in a vehicle struck by a DU shell, possibly from friendly fire. Upon impact, a round will pierce the metal and then mostly vaporize, sending fragments as well as particles of DU oxides flying.
Matcek, the CHPPME health physics division chief, said the immediate threat soon dissipates and that even rescue personnel are not at serious risk when following basic safety standards. Troops who simply pass by are at no great risk of exposure, either.
A measure of uranium, Matcek said, is in everyone's body: "It's part of the air we breathe."
"The conflict was different than the first time," Matcek said. "... We did a much better job identifying between friend and foe."
Medical officials, Mancuso said, walk a fine line when talking to troops about DU.
If you show too little interest, people wonder; if you show too much interest, people wonder.
He said just because troops were near inert DU munitions or pass by an impact site doesn't mean they're in danger.
Among departing troops, "no health affects have been seen relating to depleted uranium," Mancuso said. "... Nothing has been seen so far."
----
Japanese split over Iraq mission
Chalmers Johnson, for the L.A. Times
February 23, 2004,
Minneapolis Star Tribune
http://www.startribune.com/stories/1519/4620598.html
Japan may have regained its sovereignty in 1952, but the decision to dispatch Japanese troops to Iraq earlier this month has reminded many of its citizens just how little independence the country really has -- and just how much control the United States retains.
If British Prime Minister Tony Blair is President Bush's poodle, then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi is his cocker spaniel.
"We are still occupied by the American military," said an acquaintance of mine who is a former official of Japan's Ministry of Education and now a university president. "We are a satellite. Our foreign policy revolves entirely around the wishes of Washington."
Like many other Japanese, he believes that Koizumi ordered Japan's first military sortie into an active combat zone since World War II because he was too weak to stand up to Bush.
According to a recent Japan Broadcasting Corp. poll, 51 percent of the country opposes getting involved in Washington's war against Iraq, while only 42 percent supports Koizumi's decision. What's more, 82 percent of those polled said they did not trust the prime minister's explanations for marching into the Iraqi quagmire. Most believe that Koizumi had to go along with Bush or risk damaging the alliance with the United States.
There's no question that the United States takes Japan for granted. The Bush administration likes to boast about how successful the U.S. Army was in democratizing Japan after World War II, and it likes to suggest that it will accomplish the same feat in Iraq. But it fails to note that the U.S. military kept the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa as a Pentagon colony for more than 25 years -- until 1972 -- and that the United States still has 38 military bases on that small island.
Okinawa is home to 1.3 million Japanese citizens who since 1945 have repeatedly had to bear the burdens of violent crimes by American soldiers, continuous environmental and noise pollution, hit-and-run accidents, bar brawls and behavior that would never be tolerated in the United States or the mainland of Japan.
The Washington official charged with keeping Japan in the U.S. orbit is Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage. His name probably appears in the Japanese media more frequently than any other U.S. government figure. Armitage has been hammering Koizumi for more than a year "not to miss the boat" this time, referring to Japan's failure to support the United States militarily in the 1991 war against Iraq. (He has apparently forgotten that Tokyo bankrolled operations to the tune of $13 billion.)
After his reelection as prime minister in September, Koizumi railroaded a vote through the Japanese Parliament endorsing the dispatch of Self-Defense Forces troops to Iraq, even though he acknowledged that this was probably a violation of Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution.
Article 9, a key part of Japan's post-World War II constitution, prohibits Japan from using force in the conduct of its foreign relations. Koizumi tried to get around this by endorsing future efforts to amend the constitution and by claiming that the Japanese army would undertake "only humanitarian and reconstruction work" in Iraq.
But this is hardly a risk-free operation -- militarily or politically. Domestic critics charge that sending the troops before amending the constitution suggests that Japan does not believe in the rule of law. Two former secretaries-general of Koizumi's Liberal Democratic Party, Koichi Kato and Makoto Koga, and the party's former policy chief, Shizuka Kamei, declined to vote for the troop deployment.
The first of about 1,000 Japanese troops arrived Feb. 8 in Samawah, 168 miles south of Baghdad, Iraq. Four days later, they came under mortar attack. They've also been threatened by Al-Qaida for joining the U.S.-led coalition -- and given that Al-Qaida delivered painful blows to the Turks in Istanbul after issuing similar warnings, Japan should be braced for military and civilian casualties.
Perhaps even more serious for the Japanese, Samawah was hit by U.S. depleted-uranium ammunition in both 1991 and 2003. Japanese journalist Mamoru Toyoda, equipped with a Geiger counter, found radiation levels in the town 300 times greater than normal. The Dutch troops also based there have refused to remove or go near any of the radioactive debris in the area. Death and disability because of radiation sickness is a particular horror for all Japanese after the World War II bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The British and Australian governments ignored their populations to join Bush's might-makes-right adventure, when they could have stood aside like France and Germany. It is too bad that Japan has now done the same thing, permanently destroying the idealism behind its antiwar constitution.
Chalmers Johnson, president of the Japan Policy Research Institute and author of "The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic," wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.
----
Iraqi MD exposes effects of war on Iraq
Date: Mon, 23 Feb 2004
From: Charles Jenks <charles@mtdata.com>
http://www.traprockpeace.org/jawad_al-ali_iraq.html
Dr. Jawad Al-Ali, manager of the Oncology Center in Basrah, Iraq, has exposed the health effects of wars on Iraq. He has presented the results of cancer studies in Iraq at the World Uranium Weapons Conference in Hamburg and the recent Japan Peace Conference, Naha, Okinawa January 29 - February 1, 2004.
He reveals that cancer mortality has increased 19 fold since Gulf War I in Basra, and the occurrence of unusual phenomena, such as familial clusterings of cancers, double and triple cancers in one patient, and cancers usually associated with elderly patients occurring in the young. Rates of cancer and radiation activity have both shown sharp increases since Gulf War I, when about 340 tons of uranium munitions were expended in Iraq, much of this in the Basrah area. (The US refuses to disclose how much tonnage of uranium weapons it used I Iraq during Gulf War II. Estimates have ranged from over 100 tons up to 2000 tons.)
You can hear and read his presentation at http://www.traprockpeace.org/jawad_al-ali_iraq.html
The page includes a link to the audio of his talk to the World Uranium Weapons Conference, the slide show in pdf format, the text of his talk to the Japan Peace Conference in Haha, Okinawa, January 29-Feb 1, 2004 and photographs of Dr. Jawad Al-Ali from the World Uranium Weapons Conference. The slide show contains tables and graphs explaining the health effects of the war, pictures of Iraq after bombings, and very graphic pictures of Iraqi cancer victims. (Warning: many of these photos are horrific and are not suitable for children in this writer's opinion.) The slide show photographs are the work of Japanese photo journalist Takashi Morizumi.
Thanks to the efforts of Canadian physician Ross Wilcock, we've made available this easy to download 2.25 mg pdf version of the slide show. This version is friendly for download to people with dial-up connections while preserving the content, including photographs, of the original. You could also download the audio of his presentation, and listen to his talk while scrolling through the slide show.
The talk and visual presentation cover most of the same ground do not exactly match given time restraints of his talk (he needed to skip or change the order of some slides.) The webpage above has a key to assist in going through the presentation while listening to the talk. AFSC has published a 42 mg version of the presentation in Powerpoint format. http://www.afsc.org/newengland/pesp/effects-of-wars.ppt
We have audio of other speakers from the World Uranium Weapons Conference that we will be uploading to the Traprock site over the next few weeks. For more information on the conference, including conference reports, go to http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/
For the audio, we wish to thank Martin Voelker, who converted and edited audio we recorded at the Hamburg conference, and Marion Kuepker, a convener of the Hamburg conference and with Gewaltfreie Aktion Atomwaffen Abschaffen (GAAA) - http://www.gaaa.org/ She kindly provided their conference recordings.
Thank you, Charlie Jenks
Charles Jenks, attorney at law President of the Core Group Traprock Peace Center 103A Keets Road Deerfield, MA 01342 413-773-1633; Fax 413-773-7507
charles@mtdata.com http://traprockpeace.org
--------
Implications of the Use of U.S. Depleted Uranium
(Vancouver Cooperative Radio - 102.7 fm)
February 23, 2004
From: Janie Rezner | "carol wolman" <cwolman@mcn.org>
PLEASE CIRCULATE WIDELY, ESPECIALLY TO YOUR U.S. FRIENDS
The Implications of the Use of U.S. Depleted Uranium Weapons in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq
(Don Nordin's interview with Leuren Moret)
Hello, this is Don Nordin. You're listening to the Monday Brownbagger (Vancouver Cooperative Radio - 102.7 fm) of February 23, 2004 and I will have on the line in a moment a guest from Berkeley. Her name is Leuren Moret. She is an independent scientist and international expert on radiation and public health issues. She is on the organizing committee of the World Committee on Radiation Risk, an organization of independent radiation specialists, including members of the Radiation Committee in the EU parliament, the European Committee on Radiation Risk. She is an environmental commissioner for the City of Berkeley. Ms. Moret earned her BS in geology at U.C. Davis in 1968 and her MA in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley in 1978. She has completed all but her dissertation for a PhD in the geosciences at U.C. Davis. She has traveled and conducted scientific research in 42 countries. She wrote a scientific report on depleted uranium for the United Nations sub commission investigating the illegality of depleted uranium munitions. Marian Falk, a former Manhattan Project scientist and retired insider at the Livermore Lab, who is an expert on radioactive fallout and rainout, has trained her on radiation issues.
(Don) So let's get into it. I'll ask you to tell the folks what depleted uranium is.
(Leuren) Depleted uranium basically is the radioactive trash from the nuclear weapons and the nuclear power plant programs, and three isotopes of uranium occur in nature, so when it is mined those three isotopes are extracted from the ore. The DU is about 99.9% U-238, 0.72% U-235 that is the fissionable isotope used in nuclear bombs and reactor fuel, and there's just a trace of U-234 left in a tenth of a percent of the remainder. So what they do is they make a gas out of it, and they extract half a percent of the U-235 and what is left, which is 99.95% of what they mine, is called depleted uranium because it is depleted in U-235. It does not mean that it is depleted in radioactivity; it's actually very radioactive.
(Don) What kind of a half-life do these constituents of the depleted uranium have?
(Leuren) The half life of U-238, which is the majority of what we're talking about, is 4.5 billion years and it's actually a component of meteorites, planets, stars, space dust and it is distributed throughout the earth at about 2.4 parts per million, and because it is radioactive, it releases tiny amounts of heat over time and that is why we have a liquid or molten interior in the earth. It's from the decay of U-238.
(Don) Do you have any idea of how much depleted uranium the U.S. has in its national inventory?
(Leuren) Yes, the U.S. has about a million tons of depleted uranium. Most of it is stored in canisters as uranium hexafluoride, and it's just really an environmental problem. There is no place to dispose of it so in 1974, against the advice of the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense began testing and manufacturing weapons made out of DU and the first system was manufactured by Hughes Aircraft. It was called the Phalanx System developed by the Navy and within six months of the Navy testing it, they had sold it to 14 branches of the U.S. military and other countries. We have now sold DU weapons systems to 29 countries.
(Don) In what kind of weapons is this DU used?
(Leuren) Well, depleted uranium is made in every caliber [and used in projectiles] for handguns, tanks, cannons, all the way up to large bombs weighing more than 5,000 lbs [and also used in the body of] the Warthog airplane. So everything from handguns to bombs practically has...many have conventional weapons for ammunition but they also have them in depleted uranium. A lot of systems are interchangeable. You can put a DU warhead in a bomb or a conventional warhead in the same bomb.
(Don) Did I hear you say they're using depleted uranium in the actual airplanes themselves?
(Leuren) Oh, yeah. The US Air Force and the US Army are the largest users of depleted uranium. For instance, [DU is] very, very frequently used in the A-10 Warthog, but other [military] planes, and weapons systems carried by many planes, have DU.
(Don) Now why would they use it in the construction of an airplane itself?
(Leuren) Oh, depleted uranium or uranium metal is nearly twice as dense as lead and so instead of using larger amounts of a dense material like lead, they can use smaller amounts of depleted uranium as ballast in planes, so they use it in commercial planes and in military planes as ballast along the wings and the tail to balance the plane. [It's] very similar to the lead lugs they put on tires when we go and get our tires balanced.
(Don) Well, I guess, anyway, the DU being in the wings and tail wouldn't be of any significant threat to the occupants of the plane itself.
(Leuren) It's not to the occupants of the plane; it is to crash site investigators when a plane crashes. There was depleted uranium in whatever hit the Pentagon on 9-11 and I'm the only journalist in the world who even wrote an article about it. The German science journal Nature picked up my article and actually wrote its own [article] based on the interviews I did. It's used in golf clubs`it's used in many, many surprising things and because there is so much of it, which the Department of Energy has, they're trying to find ways to dispose of it. And there are proposals now to put it inside building blocks to construct buildings with. So if this continues we'll be living in radioactive buildings and then the terrible thing is that when the aluminum from planes or the metal from planes is recycled, the DU is not removed, so the metal that is re-manufactured will contain radioactive DU mixed in with it.
(Don) Now, of this one million tons of depleted uranium in the United States`how is that stored?
(Leuren) Oh, it's stored at, for instance, Oakridge, Tennessee. There's a big nuclear weapons lab facility there and it's stored as uranium hexafluoride gas in huge drums, and they're just stacked outside on top of each other. It's also stored at Portsmouth, Ohio and other locations--Hanford in Washington State.
(Don) So the storage issue itself must be quite problematic.
(Leuren) It's very problematic and the canisters that it's stored in, the big drums, are subject to corrosion on the outside and the barrels that are stored closest to the ground and subjected to moisture and heat and bacterial action corrode faster.
(Don) Now, in the bombs that were dropped on Iraq and Afghanistan, what percentage of depleted uranium would be typically used in those bombs?
(Leuren) That's a classified piece of information, but I would suspect that much of [the bombs' weight] is the depleted uranium ballast, and because it's so dense and heavy, as it falls there's a lot of kinetic energy [produced] and when it hits the ground or when a uranium shell hits a target, that kinetic energy is converted into heat. So when the bomb hits the ground, you can actually identify depleted uranium bombs because the uranium is very hot. Probably some of it is liquid or molten and there is a shower of tiny pieces of depleted uranium that are on fire. It splutters all over the place and at least 70% is aerosolized into particles and fumes and dust of radioactive depleted uranium oxides that are smaller than bacteria or viruses. These [particles] are hundreds and thousands of times smaller than blood cells, so it's inhaled by anyone in the contaminated areas, both enemy and our own soldiers. And [those particles] go directly into the bloodstream and are distributed like fairy dust throughout the body. And it's insoluble so the body cannot excrete it and it just destroys a person's body over time.
(Don) So it's likely that practically all the individuals, let's say in Baghdad including the U.S. Marines, are contaminated with depleted uranium now.
(Leuren) Anyone within 1,000 miles of Iraq; anyone within 1,000 miles of Afghanistan is potentially contaminated now. It's not just the people [living] in the country. Anyone going to Iraq or Afghanistan now will become contaminated. There's no way to escape it.
(Don) Now, for the average soldier over there, what types of reactions would this likely be causing in the body?
(Leuren) In the first Gulf War they used an estimated 340 or 350 tons of DU and the amount used is increasing every year. So there were terrible effects from that [which people know as] the Gulf War Syndrome. In Afghanistan a thousand tons were used, three times as much. The entire country, the water supplies, the infrastructure were bombed, and now in last March and April they used at least 2,200 tons, which is eight to ten times more than what they used in Gulf War One, and like Afghanistan, they bombed the whole country, the towns, the cities, the villages, the water supplies, the whole infrastructure of the country. So civilians and soldiers will be experiencing skin rashes, which is the heavy metal effect; they will have dental problems, respiratory problems. It's causing heart damage and brain damage. The effects will be much more severe and much faster now than what we know of in Afghanistan or the first Gulf War in 1991.
In Kuwait, which is downwind [of Iraq], and DU was used in Kuwait, doctors are reporting three times the number of congenital heart problems with newborn babies. Those are the birth defects.
Gulf War soldiers who served in 1991 had normal babies before the Gulf War. [In a study of 251 Gulf War veterans by the Department of Veterans Affairs, it was determined that 67% of the babies born to soldiers after the Gulf War had severe birth defects]. They were born without brains, without eyes, [with] organs missing, without legs or arms, or they had terrible radiation related blood diseases for instance.
(Don) How many years is this effect likely to go on?
(Leuren) It will be forever. The half life of depleted uranium is 4 and a half billion years, but even worse, over time as the Uranium-238 decays, it transforms four times into much more radioactive daughter products or daughter isotopes and they are more radioactive than uranium-238 by millions and billions of times, so the level of radioactivity will increase over time, and that's why we call depleted uranium the Trojan Horse of Nuclear War. Depleted uranium is a nuclear weapon and it is a weapon of mass destruction under the U.S. government definition of WMDs.
(Don) Now you have done some comparison, I believe, as to the radiation effects from the bomb dropped on Nagasaki in relation to the radiation in Iraq and Afghanistan. Would you like to talk about that?
(Leuren) Yes. In October 16 to 19, 2003 there was a very, very excellent and very important world conference on depleted uranium weapons held in Hamburg, Germany. Two hundred people from 20 countries and five continents attended [including] scientific, medical, legal experts, organizers, and activists and there were also Iraqi medical doctors and scientists there. And I've never been to a conference like that. It was very, very interesting, very informative and sometimes difficult to have all of the affected parties involved.
But some of the talks presented very important facts, and a Japanese physicist, professor Yagasaki from Okinawa, presented one of them. He had calculated the atomicity equivalent of the Nagasaki bomb to depleted uranium, and the atomicity means the number of radioactive atoms. So he calculated that 800 tons of depleted uranium is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. So [the total atomicity], roughly estimating the amount of depleted uranium weapons used in Afghanistan and Iraq and former Yugoslavia, is approximately equivalent to 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. In all of the testing by the nuclear states during the Cold War, the [atomicity] equivalent of only 40,000 [Nagasaki] bombs was [produced], so this is roughly ten times the amount of radiation that was released during nuclear weapons testing. This is just an absolutely horrendous amount of radiation.
The U.S. has staged a nuclear war in Iraq and in the Middle East and Central Asia, and the northern half of India all the way through Turkey and Iran and the Russian oil-rich states, the Caspian oil region, and half of Egypt, Israel and the Saudi Arabian peninsula. These areas are now all contaminated.
(Don) There are measurable signs of depleted uranium in those countries?
(Leuren) There was before. There was in the Saudi Arabian peninsula, Kuwait, Hungary, Greece--this was all reported after the 1991 bombing. Over time, [with] these very dry climates, the extreme dust storms and wind storms transport the radioactive material. The dust, as atmospheric dust, [is] scattered all over Europe. It's transported across the Atlantic to North Carolina and the southern United States coastal areas, the Caribbean, and these dust storms carry sand all over Europe. I've lived in England in the 1960s and 70s, and sometimes Sahara dust was on our windshields in the morning in the streets. It's known from mediaeval times.
(Don) So it seems to me that, especially now and in future years, not so future either, with the lowering of our quality of food and of our immune system, that even in the fringe areas and areas around the world where there's not so much of this dust, that DU is going to have an effect on [the number of] cancer deaths.
(Leuren) Well I am a geoscientist, so I study the earth and earth processes. [I do] research at U.C. Davis--I haven't finished my dissertation yet, but my research has been on atmospheric dust. I was studying the ice record, glaciers on the top of the Andes and Greenland and Antarctica and on top of the Himalayas, Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa, and [the study of] these ice records on glaciers are like the study of tree rings. They have an annual record of the dust transported around the world and also atmospheric gases, and the radiation released each year is preserved in each layer of ice. So we know from volcanic eruptions, like Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, that the dust from volcanoes, the volcanic dust and ash, is globally mixed throughout the entire atmosphere in one year. So whatever they have been bombing with is, in one year, globally mixed throughout the entire atmosphere.
And right now the world is in a global cancer epidemic and other radiation related diseases, which is a result of the Cold War weapons testing. We've added ten times as much radiation to the Middle East and Central Asia. Much of it will remain in the area recycling through the waters, the dust, the food, and the air. It's inescapable. But a lot of it will also be transported throughout the world. And remember that cancer starts with a single atom of uranium, a single alpha particle or gamma ray released from one atom under the right conditions. So it doesn't just affect humans, it affects all life. Everything will mutate, will be affected, if it's exposed under the right conditions.
(Don) Well, the question that comes to mind is: Do the people who are waging war against the world in the United States and those that are releasing depleted uranium to be used in these weapons, realize the effects of depleted uranium on the environment and on people?
(Leuren) Of course. The United States has since spent 300 billion dollars-that's a conservative estimate up to 1995-on nuclear weapons development. I worked at two nuclear weapons laboratories: The Lawrence Berkeley Lab, and the Lawrence Livermore Lab. This entire time they have conducted detailed and very extensive studies on the biological effects of radiation. They absolutely know everything about the impact on the environment and on human health of what they are doing, and when I worked at Livermore from 1989 to '91, [before] I finally walked out one day and became a whistleblower, I watched teams of radiation experts leaving that lab monthly, weekly, yearly traveling to radioactive contaminated sites all over the world, taking collections of plant materials and living materials like the fish out of the rivers or the lagoons. [They also studied] the human guinea pigs, people at Chernobyl, at the Pacific Islands where nuclear weapons were tested and even Americans [in the] the nuclear weapons program and the nuclear power plant program. They have special laboratories at Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab and Livermore. They have special units with instruments to measure the radiation and samples, freezers to keep the samples in, and in the labs that I've worked in, there are charts with defective sperm on the walls. I remember walking by them every day. They know everything.
(Don) So if they know the effects of depleted uranium on people, does that not then make them the highest type of war criminals?
(Leuren) These are the highest types of war criminals. These people have developed weapons of mass destruction knowing full well what the health and environmental effects are, and they have spent tremendous amounts of money and effort to hide this from not just the American people, but from the global community. They have constructed a huge and a very connected apparatus of scientists, scientific journals, medical professionals, academic institutions, secret radiation labs, and nuclear weapons laboratories. We have over 550 national laboratories in the United States-I think the number has been reduced maybe to 250, but there were over 3,500 facilities in the United States, which functioned as part of the nuclear weapons complex. There's no way that they don't know everything and the international nuclear-I call them the nuclear Mafia-has mostly been controlled by the United States. It's all to hide the health and environmental effects.
(Don) They seem not to be only the highest types of criminals, but they seem to be insane. I mean only an insane...
(Leuren) It's a culture of insanity! You're absolutely right. I worked at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab. I saw people go to work every day. Their friends were dying of cancer. Some of them had cancer. You know that a nuclear weapons lab paycheck is about 30 to 40% more than scientists would make in a private sector academia. So people get addicted to that money and their wives die of brain cancer. Their children die of leukemia and they still go to work every day.
(Don) Yeah, George W.'s son and progeny are going to be affected for all time.
(Leuren) George Bush Jr., our president now, he and all of his siblings have learning disabilities as a result of being exposed to nuclear weapons testing fallout during the Cold War. And his toddler sister died of leukemia when she was just a couple of years old. His whole family has been affected by nuclear weapons testing. This is the insanity of it. They do it anyway.
(Don) Yeah, it doesn't bode very well to be ruled by people that are brain cell deficient, that's for sure.
(Leuren) Well, it's had a tremendous effect on the I.Q. and the learning ability of all American children. The SAT scores, the average SAT scores for the entire population of 18 year-olds, teenagers in their last year of high school when they are given the SAT tests, declined from 475 which was the average score for 20 years before bomb testing started and it started in about 1946. By 1963 the SAT scores for children born that year, [those children] exposed in utero to the radiation and receiving brain damage, [declined nationwide] to 425. As soon as the test ban treaty was signed between the U.S. and Russia in 1963, SAT scores started going up again. But what the United States did was sacrifice an entire generation of children to test nuclear weapons. The same thing is happening now because of nuclear power plants and one out of twelve children have learning disabilities in the U.S. What cost is that to our society?
(Don) Hasn't Baghdad, and maybe even the whole country of Iraq, been made virtually an area that is not suitable for living in now?
(Leuren) Oh, and the regions within a thousand miles. The Middle East and Central Asia are radioactive. People shouldn't be living there; nothing should be living there. And I began to read--I couldn't believe it--when I started researching it, I just couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe what had happened. I couldn't believe they were using depleted uranium in the amounts they were using. And when that Japanese professor calculated the atomicity equivalent of Nagasaki bombs, I started making maps of the areas contaminated and when I saw the map with circles drawn around Afghanistan and Iraq with a one thousand mile radius, I knew there was a deeper purpose. But I still couldn't understand why they'd used it. No other country has used it. The U.S. broke a 46-year taboo in 1991 and used it. No other countries have used it since then.
There has to be a reason, and I began to read The Grand Chessboard by Brzezinski. Anyway he, Zbigniew Brzezinski--it's called The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geo-strategic Imperative--wrote it in 1998 but it's a blueprint, absolutely, for U.S. foreign policy being carried out in Central Asia and the Middle East. And they have basically bombed the major oil rich regions in the Eurasian area. This is not going to stop. It's going to continue.
Call-In Portion of Interview
(Caller #1) Listening to your guest. Great topic. Good guest! I've just got a few things to say. I was just thinking about this. I think you are absolutely right when you say that the people who are doing these kind of things to humanity, there is no other reason: they must either just be insane or incredibly sinister and perhaps another reason exists that maybe we don't really think about. Has anyone ever thought that maybe these leaders, these mad bombers and serial killers such as George W. Bush and his father-what about the theory that these people are really reptilians from another dimension or planet perhaps who have invaded our human areas and who are carrying out their own agenda?
(Don) Well I don't know if I'd like to degrade the reptilian race by saying they're reptilians. (Laugh)
(Caller #1) OK. I don't know what other reason exists other than I didn't realize people are [so] completely sinister and I throw in a guy like George W. Bush, of course. But I'll just hang up now and listen to your comments and perhaps your guest's comments. Thank you.
(Caller #2) Well, I'd just like to discuss for example Helen Caldicott, who has been active in struggling against nuclear weapons proliferation, and there are groups out there struggling against radiation and all different types of organizations fighting to reduce the amount of damage done through militarism and international aggression and so on. But there seems to be a real lack of democratic decision-making processes within these organizations.
(Don) That's for sure.
(Caller #2) Yeah. There is very little in the way of public involvement and there is virtually no democratic decision-making that is taking place just based on the empirical information relevant to the decisions to be made, rather than the persuasive, coercive influence of leadership elements and PR firms, advertising agencies, media organizations, and different groups within these organizations.
I wonder if maybe she could speak to that, if there is any organization she's aware of that are more democratic?
(Caller #3) I just had a question for Leuren. I was wondering which countries in Europe would be safe from contamination? Where would it be safe to visit?
(Don) I think she's said that basically the whole world is contaminated but it's just to a lesser degree. I would imagine that there's a gradual [reduction] of radioactivity away from the central bombing areas, but we'll go back to Leuren.
(Leuren) In terms of less contaminated areas, I would think Europe would be OK. Turkey is in the region of potential contamination and, if you are going for short visits, you have a better chance of not becoming contaminated. Of course there is no safe level of radiation exposure, but the people living in these regions, chronically exposed 24 hours a day to air borne [and] water borne [radiation], and [to] food contaminated with radiation, will be the most affected. It's just everywhere.
It's really, I think, the greatest tragedy that humanity has faced. So I feel terrible about people who went to Iraq as human shields, to media who were there-they're all contaminated. And when I was in Japan last summer I met the human shield people from Japan-they're sick with depleted uranium exposure and over time it just continues to act in the body. So people really need to think about where they are going and be aware of the potential risk.
Now the other question the gentleman had about this need for openness and democracy in the decision-making process [concerning] the nuclear weapons program, nuclear power plants, and now the DU, because it's all the same-it's alpha, beta, or gamma exposure internally whether it's coming out of nuclear weapons, nuclear power plants, or depleted uranium or the radioactive weapons. The problem is that the secrecy has allowed these programs to be developed when they do tremendous harm to human health and all species, as well as the impact on the environment. And right now the United States is gearing up for a nuclear war. We now have nuclear weapons spending at the highest level ever-even [than] during the Cold War. It's higher now than during the Cold War and the United States has no enemies. This is causing other countries to also increase nuclear weapons development and what I was shocked to discover in my research is that Japan and Germany are now tied in second place. They have passed Russia in nuclear weapons development. And the deeper purpose for all of this is to play nuclear blackmail and to frighten other countries into developing their nuclear weapons and thinking they need them. For instance, India is afraid of Pakistan. Pakistan is afraid of India. Japan is afraid of North Korea. North Korea is afraid of South Korea. So everyone is developing nuclear weapons and what's really happening is the US is manipulating these countries rimming China to develop nuclear weapons programs and we are enticing them to be our nuclear partners with China as a common and the real enemy.
(Don) I have so many more questions to ask you. One of the ones I wanted to ask is, what about the groundwater? Is that going to be contaminated for all time and how far away [from the areas of conflict] would it be contaminated?
(Leuren) The groundwater is contaminated of course. Over time, as the leftover bullets and ammunition that did not burn degrade and weather with the heat, and [with] the cold and seasonal changes-rain, snow, and the wind-[depleted uranium contamination] migrates into the groundwater. So there's just a constant new supply of depleted uranium oxides and metal which will be released into the air and migrate through the ground into the groundwater.
A study that the United Nations Environmental Program released last March 2003 reported that 25% of the bare metal, uranium bullets and weapons in the soil in Yugoslavia, had dissolved since 1998. So if 25% of the munitions buried in the ground dissolved in four or five years in a wet climate, it will be slower in desert areas, but it's going to continue contaminating groundwater, soil, food and air.
(Don) And I think-you have mentioned that these particles go down into very fine sizes, so [I would imagine] there's no way they can be filtered out of the water.
(Leuren) There's no way to filter it out. It goes through all gas masks. It goes through all filters. These particles are a tenth of a micron or smaller. A red blood cell is seven microns and a white blood cell is about ten microns, so they are much, much smaller than even blood cells.
(Don) Before we wrap it up, I would like you to give us contacts on the website where people can find more information.
(Leuren) People can go to an excellent website: http://www.mindfully.org and just do a Google search on my name, Moret.
They can also go to: http://www.traprockpeace.org That's the Traprock Peace Center in Connecticut. They have an excellent website. Lots of people get a lot of good information from it and they have a lot of information on depleted uranium.
Those are probably the two best websites that I know of.
There's a letter to Congressman McDermott that I wrote. They could do a Google search on "letter to McDermott". He's a Congressman from Seattle, Washington who has introduced a bill in Congress, and I wrote him a letter with a lot of details. The attachments and the references are also on the website with a letter. That's on the mindfully.org website, and then [there's] my testimony for the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan of December 13, 2003, which is also on the mindfully.org website. That [testimony] has fourteen questions that the prosecutor sent me to answer, and there are questions like: What does the U.S. government know about DU? (My answer was twelve pages long). What is the connection between depleted uranium and fourth generation nuclear weapons? And then, what are the environmental and human effects?
(Don) What I think has to happen is [that] some organizations in Vancouver have to get together and bring you into Vancouver for a large meeting.
(Don asks remaining callers to give comments only)
(Caller #4) Well I was wondering about the possibility of certain plants being used to decontaminate the human body and [the] possible development of bacteria that might be used for that purpose also?
(Don) I was asking for comments. We don't have time for questions now.
(Caller #4) Well my comment is that it is one big inhumane, parasitic, military-industrial, ecocidal and social atrocity.
(Don) Thank you. ` Last comment of Leuren Moret:
(Leuren) I would like to read a quote from Henry Kissinger. "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy". This is what the elite believe about our military.
I am now working with an international group of scientists and radiation experts. We are forming a World Committee on Radiation Risks comprised of honest researchers to help citizens, elected officials, affected populations and individuals to learn the truth about radiation, and to work toward an international moratorium on depleted uranium and other radioactive weapons. So watch for us. The European Committee on Radiation Risk, within the European Parliament, has just published an excellent report on low-level radiation and you can get it at: http://www.euradcom.org
And now the citizens of the world, the scientists of the world, the radiation experts of the world--we have to all work together and it's not hopeless. But people need good information.
-------- europe
Malaysia names European nuclear 'middlemen'
Hi Pakistan
February 23, 2004
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en54689&F_catID=&f_type=source
KUALA LUMPUR: Citizens of Germany, Turkey, Britain and Switzerland were named in a Malaysian police report on Friday as alleged middlemen involved in the nuclear arms black market, citing the alleged chief financier of an international trafficking network.
Police say the information in the report was provided by Sri Lankan businessman Buhary Syed Abu Tahir, named by US President George W Bush as "deputy" to Pakistani nuclear scientist Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan.
The investigation was launched to probe allegations that a Malaysian company owned by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's son manufactured centrifuge parts for Libya's nuclear weapons uranium enrichment programme.
The police also alleged that Dr Khan sent enriched uranium to Libya in 2001 and sold nuclear centrifuge parts to Iran in the mid-1990s.
The report clears the company, Scomi Precision Engineering (SCOPE), saying Tahir never told the truth about the nature of the parts he ordered and the company thought it was involved in a legitimate business.
The company is owned by Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's son Kamaluddin, and Malaysia has strenuously denied that either the company or the country was knowingly involved in the nuclear arms black market.
But the 12-page document concludes with a call on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to "start investigations on several individuals from Europe allegedly involved in the proliferation of nuclear weapons."
According to police, Tahir said Dr Khan asked him to send centrifuges to Iran in 1994 or 1995.
Two containers of used centrifuge units were shipped from Pakistan to Iran via Dubai and were paid for with about three million dollars in cash and kept in an apartment used by Khan each time he visited Dubai, Tahir told police.
Tahir said Khan told him that a "certain amount of UF6 (enriched uranium) was sent by air from Pakistan to Libya" around 2001, according to police.
According to the report, Tahir and Khan met Libyan representatives named as Mohamad Matuq Mohamad and Karim in Istanbul in 1997 when the Libyans asked for centrifuge units.
Between 1998 and 2002 several more meetings were held, one in Casablanca and others in Dubai. The enriched uranium was sent from Pakistan to Libya by air around 2001, and "a certain number of centrifuge units were sent in 2001-2002".
The report says Khan developed a "network of middlemen" that involved not only Tahir, but "several people and companies from Europe seeking to make profits by selling certain materials and equipment."
Tahir named a Swiss citizen, Urs Friedrich Tinner as being "actively involved in the manufacturing operations in the SCOPE factory", according to the police report.
He was always careful to take back his drawings once a component was finished, saying he was safeguarding trade secrets and no suspicions were aroused at SCOPE, the report says.
The report made no mention of whether any action would be taken against Tahir.
A senior Malaysian official said that Tahir will not be arrested because he had broken no laws in Malaysia or in other countries, but that his passport could be impounded if he tries to leave.
Foreign Minster Syed Hamid Albar insisted that the parts made by SCOPE could have had other applications.
The report, which will be handed to the IAEA, names the following as "among the middlemen alleged to have links with" Dr Khan:
SWITZERLAND: Friedrich Tinner, mechanical engineer, is alleged to have had dealings with Khan since the 1980s, preparing centrifuge components and sourcing materials. Urs Tinner, son of Friedrich Tinner, was allegedly actively involved in the manufacturing operations of the Malaysian company, which was the subject of the probe.
GERMANY: Late Heinz Mebus, an engineer, is alleged to have been involved in discussions between Khan and Iran to supply centrifuge designs about 1984/85.
Gotthard Lerch, a German living in Switzerland, allegedly tried to obtain "supplies of pipes" from South Africa for a project called "Machine Shop 1001" which aimed to set up a workshop in Libya to make centrifuge components. He failed "even though payment had been made by Libya earlier."
BRITAIN: Peter Griffin, "a British citizen who is believed to have once owned Gulf Technical Industries based in Dubai", is alleged to have been the middleman involved in the "Project Machine Shop 1001". He is said to be now retired and living in France.
TURKEY: Gunas Jireh "is alleged to have supplied aluminium casting and dynamo to Libya at the request of the nuclear arms expert (Khan)". Selim Alguadis, is alleged "to have supplied electrical cabinets and power supplier-voltage regulator to Libya" through arrangements made by Tahir.
The release of the police report comes as the international investigation into Tahir widened to Kazakhstan. The Kazakh intelligence agency is investigating allegations that an affiliate of a company linked to Tahir, SMB Computers, was dealing with highly enriched uranium, spokesman Kenzhebulat Beknazarov said.
The Swiss authorities have also launched an investigation into whether an engineer from Switzerland was part of the Pakistan-centred network, an official said.
-------- iran
Iran acknowledges report of nuke deal
February 23, 2004
By Ali Akbar Dareini
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20040222-113930-8949r.htm
TEHRAN - Iran publicly acknowledged for the first time yesterday that it once bought nuclear equipment from middlemen on the Asian subcontinent, lending credence to a recent report that detailed black-market nuclear deals between a Pakistani scientist and Iran and Libya.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi did not go into details, but repeated Tehran's claims that its efforts to acquire nuclear technology were strictly energy-related and were never intended for weapons development.
"We purchased some [nuclear] parts from some dealers, but we don't know what was the source or which country they came from," Mr. Asefi told reporters. "It happened that some of the dealers were from some subcontinent countries."
Last week, Malaysian police released a report summing up a three-month investigation that said Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, sold uranium-enrichment equipment via middlemen on the subcontinent to Iran for $3 million in the mid-1990s.
Mr. Khan has admitted selling technology and know-how to Iran, Libya and North Korea. The report also said that Mr. Khan's network had sold the uranium compound UF6 to Libya and helped it set up an enrichment plant.
Mr. Asefi said Iran had already told the International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, that it had bought some equipment. But because it was working through middlemen, it didn't know from whom.
"We have said from the beginning that we acquired some equipment from some dealers. We haven't mentioned any specific scientist or government organization," Mr. Asefi said.
Diplomats say Iran has privately told the IAEA that it bought centrifuge parts from middlemen.
The IAEA is expected by early this week to finish a report on Iran's nuclear program, which is being drawn up for discussion at a top-level agency meeting next month.
At that meeting, the 35-member IAEA board of governors will also discuss a progress report on Libya, which late last year acknowledged trying to develop weapons of mass destruction and pledged to scrap them.
The revelations raise new questions about whether Iran is sincere about dispelling suspicions that it is trying to make atomic arms. Iran signed an additional protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty late last year allowing unfettered inspections of its nuclear sites. It also suspended its uranium-enrichment program.
The United States accuses Iran of pursuing nuclear weapons.
"We remain committed to our obligations under the International Atomic Energy Agency," Mr. Asefi said. "We've never pursued nuclear arms and will never do so."
Diplomats in Vienna, Austria, have revealed that U.N. inspectors searching Iran's nuclear files earlier this month found drawings of high-tech equipment that could be used to make weapons-grade uranium, including a P-2 centrifuge, more advanced than the P-1 model Iran has acknowledged using to enrich uranium.
Mr. Asefi said Iran had informed the Vienna-based IAEA of its research into the P-2.
"There was some research work that was not utilized and we had informed the IAEA about that in due time," he said.
--------
In Face of Report, Iran Acknowledges Buying Nuclear Components
February 23, 2004
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/politics/23NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - Faced with the imminent release of a report by international nuclear inspectors, Iran acknowledged publicly on Sunday that it had secretly purchased components for its nuclear program from a network of international suppliers, but continued to insist that its program was for electricity production, not nuclear weapons.
The statement, by the Foreign Ministry, came after the head of the Supreme National Security Council, Hassan Rohani, met in Vienna with the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei. European and American diplomats say they believe that Dr. ElBaradei summarized the results of a report the I.A.E.A. is expected to release this week about Iran's nuclear program, including details that Iran withheld last fall when, under intense pressure from Europe and the United States, it revealed 18 years of secret nuclear activity.
"The Iranians are admitting to the dimensions of their program bit by bit, as they are confronted with individual pieces of evidence," said one senior American official involved in the investigations of the nuclear trading network set up by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of the Pakistani bomb. "Compare it to what the Libyans are doing. I'm convinced the Libyans are voluntarily showing us everything," the official said, referring to Libya's decision to dismantle all of its nuclear weapons program. "The Iranians are still stonewalling."
Reuters reported Sunday that the spokesman for Iran's Foreign Ministry, Hamid Reza Asefi, said that "we have bought some things from some dealers but we don't know what the source was or what country they came from." He insisted that every purchase had been reported to the I.A.E.A.
Iran's statements are significant because few American or European officials believe they yet understand how far the country's nuclear program has gotten, or how close the country may be to producing a nuclear weapon. Because Mr. Khan's network sold Libya equipment, full warhead designs, and the raw uranium gas that must be enriched to produce bomb fuel, American officials say they assume that Iran received the same package of goods.
On Friday, the Malaysian police released a report of its interrogations of B. S. A. Tahir, whom President Bush has identified as Dr. Khan's chief lieutenant. In the report, the police quoted Mr. Tahir as saying that Iran paid about $3 million for parts to manufacture centrifuges, which turn the uranium into highly enriched bomb fuel. The parts arrived in Iran in 1994 or 1995, officials said, about seven years after the first transactions between Iran and Pakistan. That shipment was something of a surprise to American officials, who until recently only had evidence of Pakistani shipments to Iran in the 1980's.
It now appears that the later shipments were part of an effort to sell Iran a more sophisticated type of centrifuge, called a P-2, which enriches uranium more efficiently than the first models sold to Tehran. The Iranians say they informed the I.A.E.A. last fall that they had worked experimentally with the P-2 design, but some agency officials say the information was only passed along after it became clear that Dr. Khan was being interrogated.
Iran's failure to declare all of its nuclear program is to be described, in muted terms, in the I.A.E.A.'s report this week. "It's a report that no one will like," said one senior European diplomat. "The Americans will not like the fact that the agency does not declare that the Iranians were making a weapon," a charge that President Bush leveled directly in a speech this month. "The Iranians will not like the fact that they are essentially accused of playing a shell game, only revealing the least they think they can get away with."
Iran promised European nations in the fall that it would suspend all of its activities to enrich uranium while the I.A.E.A. inspections of the country continued. But the Iranian government has defined "suspend" very literally, and it continues to manufacture parts for centrifuges that could ultimately improve the capacities of its enrichment facilities at Natanz.
American officials say they are following up on a number of leads in the report about the interrogations of Mr. Tahir, a Sri Lankan who lives mostly in Malaysia. But the Malaysian authorities said Saturday that Mr. Tahir committed no crime and is free to travel.
Raymond Bonner contributed reporting from London for this article.
-------- korea
Japan: North Korea Ready to Abandon Nukes
Monday February 23, 2004
By TED ANTHONY
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3780701,00.html
BEIJING (AP) - Japan said Monday that North Korea has expressed ``readiness'' to abolish its nuclear program and the United States hinted at new flexibility as well, as diplomats streamed into the Chinese capital for a six-nation meeting.
The United States is considering a proposal by Seoul to encourage North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons program, a top South Korean nuclear negotiator said. And a Japanese diplomat, after meeting with his Chinese counterpart, said the North might be willing to ``completely abandon'' its program.
Progress, or the appearance of it, came in a flurry of diplomacy ahead of the first six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear program since August, when the first round ended with little changed and only a loose commitment to meet again.
The new talks convene Wednesday in Beijing, where the Chinese government - longtime communist ally of the North and pivotal economic partner of the United States - has worked for months to broker a new round. The Russian, American and Japanese delegations arrived Monday, and the North and South Koreans were due Tuesday.
At issue is North Korea's nuclear program and, in particular, allegations that Pyongyang has a uranium-based weapons program as well as its known plutonium-based one.
U.S. officials believe North Korea has at least one or two nuclear bombs from plutonium, though some experts believe Pyongyang does not have the technology and resources to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile.
In Seoul, the U.S. delegation leader, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, met with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts to devise a common stance ahead of the talks.
Lee Soo-hyuck, a top South Korean negotiator, said the United States was considering Seoul's proposal. He gave no details but said it entailed delivering ``countermeasures'' to the North in exchange for stopping and eventually dismantling its nuclear programs.
``The United States shares a significant understanding of the conditions we attached to the proposed North Korean nuclear freeze,'' Lee said after a meeting with Kelly and Japanese Foreign Ministry Director General Mitoji Yabunaka.
``We understand that the United States does not have a strong objection to taking the countermeasures proposed by South Korea as long as the nuclear freeze comes with such conditions,'' Lee said.
The United States had no immediate comment.
Meanwhile, Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aisawa quoted Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi as saying North Korea has expressed ``readiness'' to abolish its nuclear program. Aisawa spoke after meeting in Beijing with Wang, China's chief negotiator.
``He said North Korea had expressed to China its readiness to completely abandon its nuclear development, and said that the freeze was premised on that,'' Aisawa said in comments to reporters broadcast in Tokyo by the NHK network.
In December, North Korea proposed freezing its nuclear activities in return for economic aid and other concessions from the United States. Washington has demanded that North Korea start dismantling its nuclear programs first.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said he supported Pyongyang's proposal to freeze its nuclear program, but called it just one step in the process. And South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said he hoped the United States and North Korea would reach a compromise.
``North Korea is expected to propose a concession or two, and if this is the case, our side needs to make a concession to build trust,'' Roh said in an interview with Seoul's Maeil Business Newspaper.
Losyukov, in Beijing, said he was cautiously optimistic about the upcoming talks, but he acknowledged what China's official Xinhua News Agency called ``a number of uncertainties.'' He didn't elaborate, though he said the views of Russia and China are ``very close.'' Later Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Losyukov and Wang had found common ground.
``The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on the well proceeding of the six-party talks and reached wide consensus,'' according to the ministry.
The nuclear crisis flared in late 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had acknowledged privately to Kelly that it had a uranium program in violation of a 1994 agreement. North Korea later denied having a uranium program and on Saturday called the accusations a ``whopping lie.''
It's unclear how that issue will play out during the talks, Kelly said in Seoul. ``We will have to find out in Beijing,'' he said.
----
North, South Korean Teams to Complete Talks Table
February 23, 2004
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - North Korea sounded an upbeat note on Tuesday on the eve of six-party talks aimed at resolving the crisis over its nuclear weapons programs, saying the circumstances were better than at the first round in August.
Analysts have held out scant hope of a breakthrough at the talks starting on Wednesday, citing secretive Pyongyang's denials it is enriching uranium as well as lack of trust between the two protagonists -- the United States and North Korea -- in ending a dispute that has stoked regional tensions since late 2002.
``The circumstances of the talks are better than the previous one, and we hope that we can cooperate closely with China and Russia,'' Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Gye-gwan was quoted by China's Xinhua news agency as saying as he left Pyongyang for Beijing.
``We appreciate the efforts done by the Chinese side. We will do our best to make (a) good result at the talks,'' Kim was quoted as telling the Chinese ambassador.
The talks, starting on Wednesday at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, follow six months of shuttle diplomacy after a first round of talks in Beijing last August failed to narrow the gulf over Pyongyang's atomic arms ambitions.
Washington, Tokyo and Seoul have made clear to Pyongyang that the talks must cover not only North Korea's plutonium-based nuclear arms program, but a second suspected bomb-making scheme based on highly enriched uranium.
North Korea denies it has a program for enriching uranium to make bomb fuel. The secretive communist state dismissed Pakistani nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan's recent confession that he had sold uranium-linked nuclear secrets to North Korea and other states as a ``whopping lie'' spun by the United States.
SOMETHING TO TALK ABOUT
The United States, which says the North may already have one or two atomic bombs, says Pyongyang officials acknowledged such a program in 2002 when confronted with U.S. evidence and only later denied it in the face of international criticism.
In a sign talks this time could go beyond a mere outlining of positions, Japan said this week it understood the meetings could run beyond the previously expected close on Friday.
North Korea, branded by Washington as part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and pre-war Iraq, recently offered to freeze its nuclear activities in return for diplomatic concessions and aid as a first step toward a resolution of the dispute.
The United States wants the North to commit to the ``complete, irreversible and verifiable'' scrapping of its atomic programs.
On Monday South Korea put forward a united front with the United States and Japan, saying the three countries aimed to persuade the secretive North to accept a joint statement pledging to dismantle its nuclear programs, set up a working group to regularize talks and agree to a date for a third round.
China and Russia also said on Tuesday they had reached a separate consensus on tackling the crisis.
Reports from regional capitals suggested North Korea might be prepared to discuss the suspected uranium-enrichment program.
China wants the talks to produce, at minimum, a written consensus on points of common ground as well as agreement on a smaller working group that would meet more regularly.
--------
Japan: North Korea Ready to Abandon Nukes
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
BEIJING (AP) -- Japan said Monday that North Korea has expressed ``readiness'' to abolish its nuclear program and the United States hinted at new flexibility as well, as diplomats streamed into the Chinese capital for a six-nation meeting.
The United States is considering a proposal by Seoul to encourage North Korea to freeze its nuclear weapons program, a top South Korean nuclear negotiator said. And a Japanese diplomat, after meeting with his Chinese counterpart, said the North might be willing to ``completely abandon'' its program.
Progress, or the appearance of it, came in a flurry of diplomacy ahead of the first six-party talks on Pyongyang's nuclear program since August, when the first round ended with little changed and only a loose commitment to meet again.
The new talks convene Wednesday in Beijing, where the Chinese government -- longtime communist ally of the North and pivotal economic partner of the United States -- has worked for months to broker a new round. The Russian, American and Japanese delegations arrived Monday, and the North and South Koreans were due Tuesday.
At issue is North Korea's nuclear program and, in particular, allegations that Pyongyang has a uranium-based weapons program as well as its known plutonium-based one.
In Washington, a senior U.S. official said the six countries involved in the talks may deploy specialists in China on a permanent basis to improve communication.
The possibility is expected to be discussed when the United States and the four regional countries meet with North Korean officials starting Wednesday, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
U.S. officials believe North Korea has at least one or two nuclear bombs from plutonium, though some experts believe Pyongyang does not have the technology and resources to mount a nuclear warhead on a missile.
In Seoul, the U.S. delegation leader, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, met with his South Korean and Japanese counterparts to devise a common stance ahead of the talks.
Lee Soo-hyuck, a top South Korean negotiator, said the United States was considering Seoul's proposal. He gave no details but said it entailed delivering ``countermeasures'' to the North in exchange for stopping and eventually dismantling its nuclear programs.
``The United States shares a significant understanding of the conditions we attached to the proposed North Korean nuclear freeze,'' Lee said after a meeting with Kelly and Japanese Foreign Ministry Director General Mitoji Yabunaka.
``We understand that the United States does not have a strong objection to taking the countermeasures proposed by South Korea as long as the nuclear freeze comes with such conditions,'' Lee said.
The United States had no immediate comment.
Meanwhile, Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Ichiro Aisawa quoted Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi as saying North Korea has expressed ``readiness'' to abolish its nuclear program. Aisawa spoke after meeting in Beijing with Wang, China's chief negotiator.
``He said North Korea had expressed to China its readiness to completely abandon its nuclear development, and said that the freeze was premised on that,'' Aisawa said in comments to reporters broadcast in Tokyo by the NHK network.
In December, North Korea proposed freezing its nuclear activities in return for economic aid and other concessions from the United States. Washington has demanded that North Korea start dismantling its nuclear programs first.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov said he supported Pyongyang's proposal to freeze its nuclear program, but called it just one step in the process. And South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said he hoped the United States and North Korea would reach a compromise.
``North Korea is expected to propose a concession or two, and if this is the case, our side needs to make a concession to build trust,'' Roh said in an interview with Seoul's Maeil Business Newspaper.
Losyukov, in Beijing, said he was cautiously optimistic about the upcoming talks, but he acknowledged what China's official Xinhua News Agency called ``a number of uncertainties.'' He didn't elaborate, though he said the views of Russia and China are ``very close.'' Later Monday, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said Losyukov and Wang had found common ground.
``The two sides had an in-depth exchange of views on the well proceeding of the six-party talks and reached wide consensus,'' according to the ministry.
The nuclear crisis flared in late 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had acknowledged privately to Kelly that it had a uranium program in violation of a 1994 agreement. North Korea later denied having a uranium program and on Saturday called the accusations a ``whopping lie.''
It's unclear how that issue will play out during the talks, Kelly said in Seoul. ``We will have to find out in Beijing,'' he said.
Associated Press writer George Gedda contributed to this story from Washington.
-------
South Korea Eyes 3 - Stage Plan to End North Crisis
February 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-allies.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea will lay out a three-step proposal for freezing, verifying and dismantling all of North Korea's nuclear programs in talks in Beijing this week, Seoul's chief negotiator said on Monday.
South Korean negotiators huddled with U.S. and Japanese counterparts in Seoul to confirm positions before the three delegations join North Korea, China and Russia for a second round of six-party talks opening on Wednesday in the Chinese capital.
South Korean Deputy Foreign Minister Lee Soo-hyuck said the three allies' goals for the talks were to get North Korea to accept a joint statement in which it pledges to dismantle its nuclear programs, to establish a working group to regularize talks and agree to a date for a third round of talks.
``The fundamental position of the three countries at this round is that all nuclear programs, including the highly enriched uranium program, must be dismantled,'' Lee told reporters after meeting the Americans and the Japanese.
Lee, Seoul's chief negotiator, spelled out a three-stage plan for ending the 16-month-old impasse and rolling back Pyongyang's two programs for making atomic bombs. He said it was a refined version of what Seoul presented at the first round in August.
Phase one would have North Korea declare its willingness to dismantle its nuclear programs and the United States state its readiness to provide security guarantees for the secretive communist state. The pledges would be in writing, Lee said.
``NO FREEZE WITHOUT VERIFICATION''
The second phase would start with a freeze of North Korean nuclear activities that, once verified through inspections, would be met by ``corresponding measures,'' such as energy aid and other rewards, Lee said, calling a freeze ``the start of dismantlement.''
``A freeze is meaningless by itself,'' Lee said. ``It is only meaningful when it is the first step toward dismantlement,'' he said, adding that U.S. and Japanese accepted this formulation.
The agreed freeze ``should be in writing that includes commitment to verification,'' said Lee. ``There can be no freeze without verification,'' he said.
Phase three would see the verified dismantling of the nuclear facilities and the resolution of all related issues, Lee said.
``The U.S. was averse to the idea of a freeze, because it reminded it of the Agreed Framework,'' he said. In a 1994 pact with Washington, Pyongyang froze its plutonium-based nuclear program, but reactivated it last year after the deal collapsed.
Seoul's proposal to attach conditions to any North Korean nuclear freeze won the Americans' ``considerable understanding'' that the move was the start of disarmament, Lee said.
``I understand there is now no aversion on the U.S. part to South Korea's proposal,'' Lee said.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly, chief U.S. delegate, did not talk to the media in detail after the three-hour consultations in Seoul.
``We've long had an agreement on all of the basic things,'' said Kelly, who was due to fly to Beijing on Monday evening.
North Korea proposed last month to freeze its nuclear activities in exchange for energy aid and diplomatic rewards.
But the offer apparently covered only its plutonium-based program, centered on the reactor and reprocessing facilities previously frozen under the 1994 agreement.
Washington, Tokyo and Seoul have made clear to Pyongyang that the Beijing talks must also cover a second suspected bomb-making scheme based on highly enriched uranium. North Korea denies having a uranium enrichment program.
The current crisis erupted in October 2002, when the United States said North Korean officials had acknowledged the covert uranium program when U.S. officials showed them evidence.
Washington said Pyongyang's denials came only later in the face of international criticism.
-------- mideast
U.N. Watchdog Gets Nuke Data From Libya
February 23, 2004
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Libya-Nuclear-Agency.html
U.N. Monitors Libya's Vow to Scrap Nukes http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Nuclear-Agency-Libya.html
TRIPOLI, Libya (AP) -- The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Monday that meetings with Libyan officials were producing more names and companies involved in supplying renegade nations with the technology for their nuclear arms programs.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, also said key elements of Libya's nuclear weapons program remain in place three months after its government pledged to scrap them, though Tripoli is committed to their elimination.
ElBaradei did not elaborate, but another delegation member said centrifuge equipment that can enrich uranium to weapons grade still remains assembled and in Libya. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
ElBaradei arrived in Tripoli on Monday where about a dozen U.S. and British experts are overseeing what needs to be removed to strip Libya's nuclear program of all weapons applciations.
After meeting with Libyan officials, ElBaradei said he was confident that stage would be reached by June.
``I think it is going very smoothly, very well, and the Libyans have confirmed again their full cooperation, their readiness to settle all the questions we have,'' ElBaradei told reporters after meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Matoug M. Matoug, who heads the nation's nuclear activities.
Other equipment already has been shipped to the United States, which along with Britain negotiated the process that led in December to Libya declaring its nuclear weapons programs -- and its desire to scrap them. Also in the United States, under IAEA seal, are drawings of a 1960s nuclear warhead.
ElBaradei said new countries with illicit nuclear arms programs may be revealed in investigations by his agency and national intelligence services into the nuclear black market.
Libya, one of the nuclear black market's key customers, has blown the whistle on its head, the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and more than a dozen of his middlemen.
Another delegation member said much of the investigative work into the nuclear supply chain would likely be wrapped up within three months. But ElBaradei urged caution.
``We are still trying to understand the network, we are still trying to see whether other countries have received technology, have received weapons designs,'' he said. ``We are putting the pieces of the puzzle together and trying to understand whether there is any additional work ... for us in the future.''
He did not elaborate. But Iran has been named by diplomats familiar with the IAEA's work as being suspected of buying nuclear warhead drawings, along with the uranium enrichment equipment it now acknowledges having.
Iran, which was also supplied by the Khan network, denies nuclear weapon ambitions, insisting it wanted to enrich uranium to lower grades for power and not produce the highly enriched version used in weapons.
North Korea -- the third country linked so far to the network -- denies any connection, but U.S. intelligence and Khan's associates have said it also received help in its nuclear weapons program from his network.
``We are getting the names of more individuals, more companies,'' not only from Libya but ``many different sources,'' ElBaradei said.
Since the first revelations from Libya in December, Khan has confessed to heading the operation described by ElBaradei as a ``nuclear supermarket.''
Khan and dozens of associates circumvented export controls in Europe, Asia and elsewhere to ship nuclear technology to Libya, which managed to hide experiments geared toward making weapons for nearly two decades.
Among the most startling discoveries were the warhead drawings, and findings in a report by ElBaradei that Libya also managed to process minute amounts of plutonium that -- in much larger quantities -- are used in the core of nuclear warheads.
Talks in Tripoli also were focusing on shipping highly enriched uranium -- an alternative to plutonium in warheads -- from a Libyan research reactor back to Russia, the original supplier, and replacing it with less-enriched fuel without weapons applications.
A diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Libya revelations helped the agency link Iran's illicit program to the Khan operation.
Iran has been less forthcoming than Libya on its sources. It confirmed Sunday it has purchased nuclear equipment from international dealers, including from the Indian subcontinent, but said it doesn't know where the components came from.
It has made the same argument to the IAEA, saying only the intermediaries that supplied it know the origins of the parts.
A report from Malaysian authorities last week said Iran had bought $3 million worth of used uranium centrifuge parts from the Khan operation.
On the Net:
IAEA, http://www.iaea.org
-------- russia
Britain to Pay for Submarine Dismantling
Mon Feb 23, 2004
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=6&u=/ap/20040224/ap_on_re_eu/britain_russian_submarines
LONDON - Britain will pay $21 million for the dismantling of two Russian nuclear submarines as part of an environmental safety deal, officials said Tuesday.
Trade and Industry minister Nigel Griffiths, who was in northwest Russia on Tuesday to see the work under way on the 12,000-ton submarines, said: "We've worked hard with our G8 partners to start to tackle the challenges that the cold war nuclear legacy poses.
"There are serious security, environmental and proliferation threats that need to be very carefully managed and today I am seeing an example of the excellent work being done to meet the threat head on," Griffiths said.
Russia has pleaded for international assistance to dismantle its rusting fleet of Soviet-built nuclear submarines, saying it lacked its own funds to do the job.
The slow pace of Russia's effort had prompted international concern about leaks and the possibility of nuclear materials being transferred to other nations or terrorists.
Russia, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, the United States and the European Union signed an agreement in May clearing the way for billions of dollars worth of foreign donations to help dismantle the mothballed nuclear navy.
-------- u.n.
U.N. Probing Possible Sales of Nuclear Warhead Designs
February 23, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-libya.html
TRIPOLI (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it expects Libya's nuclear weapons program will be completely dismantled by June.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), on Monday urged countries suspected to have similar projects, such as Iran and North Korea, to follow in Libya's footsteps.
``What I preach everywhere I go is full transparency, full cooperation,'' ElBaradei told reporters, adding senior Libyan officials had reaffirmed their commitment to disarming.
ElBaradei, beginning a two-day visit to Libya, said the quick pace of dismantling the country's nuclear arms program, being carried out by U.S. and British experts and verified by the IAEA, meant it might be done in a few months. ``We will make every effort to come to a closure on this issue hopefully by June,'' ElBaradei told reporters after meeting Libya's deputy prime minister in charge of the nuclear program, Matoug M. Matoug.
Several Western diplomats have expressed concern Libya wanted to keep a research reactor and a uranium conversion plant, despite Washington seeking the removal of all such technology.
HALF-HEARTED
Diplomats said Libya's attempt to keep the conversion plant was now half-hearted and expected Tripoli to agree to its dismantling.
ElBaradei said he was not concerned about the reactor or Libya's desire to keep ``peaceful-use'' nuclear technology.
But he said discussions were under way to convert the reactor, which uses weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium, to one using low-enriched fuel.
``They obviously want to keep the research reactor, which is something legitimate, and they would obviously like to expand the peaceful-use activities, which the agency would be eager to support once the dismantling of the nuclear (arms) program (is finished),'' ElBaradei said.
The IAEA began inspections of Libya's nuclear program in December after Tripoli agreed to renounce its covert nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.
Last Friday the IAEA issued a report saying Libya had begun trying to develop nuclear arms as far back as the early 1980s, and that the program was much bigger than previously thought.
ElBaradei praised Tripoli for helping the U.N. body track down the people and companies who helped Libya, Iran and North Korea -- and possibly other states -- buy potential weapons-related nuclear technology through illicit channels.
He expressed concern other countries may have acquired the same nuclear warhead designs that Libya was widely believed to have bought from Pakistan's top nuclear scientist.
``We are still trying to understand the network, to see if other countries have received the technology (and) the weapons designs,'' ElBaradei said.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Administration favors nuclear free-for-all
GLEN MILNER GUEST COLUMNIST
Monday, February 23, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/161479_firstperson23.html
The next nuclear bomb used for war, because of changes in deployment and proximity to new Asian targets, likely will be delivered by a Puget Sound-based Trident submarine.
For the past 40 years, U.S. Navy ballistic missile submarines were deployed as a deterrent to nuclear war. The potential for provoking a full-scale nuclear exchange was too terrifying to consider the limited use of nuclear weapons.
New U.S. war-fighting plans and the promotion of more useable nuclear weapons will affect the deployment of the Trident submarine system. Most notable is the doctrine of pre-emptive first strike, where any nation considered a threat to the United States could be attacked.
In December 2001, the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review called for the development of new tactical nuclear weapons and a resumption of nuclear tests. The review claimed, "Many buried targets could be attacked using a weapon with a much lower [nuclear] yield than would be required with a surface burst." The report also called for more "flexible, adaptable strike plans," including "options for variable and reduced yields, high accuracy and timely employment."
The Bush administration favors a nuclear free-for-all, confident that it will be able to intimidate or destroy all adversaries with a varied arsenal of increasingly sophisticated weapons. Numerous international arms-control treaties, including the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, have been abandoned or ignored by the United States.
In November, Congress approved an administration request for continued research on nuclear earth-penetrators and a new generation of tactical nuclear weapons for possible use against terrorists or so-called rogue states such as Iran or North Korea. By doing so, Congress and the administration repealed a 10-year-old ban on research for the development of new nuclear weapons with yields less than five kilotons, often referred to as bunker-busters or "mininukes."
A Dec. 5 memo from Linton F. Brooks, of the National Nuclear Security Administration, to the three U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, stated, "We are now free to explore a range of technical options that could strengthen our ability to deter, or respond to new or emerging threats without any concern that some ideas could inadvertently violate a vague and arbitrary limitation." Addressing new endorsements by Congress and the repeal of the ban on low-yield nuclear weapons development, Brooks stated, "We should not fail to take advantage of this opportunity."
The Trident missile system has been studied and tested for use with a conventional (non-nuclear) warhead. Also discussed by war planners is the delivery of a low-yield nuclear weapon by a Trident missile.
While specific issues addressing the delivery of small nuclear weapons have been kept secret, there are numerous reasons war planners would choose the Trident delivery system, including high accuracy, speed of delivery and 4,500-mile range for the missiles.
A Trident missile can reach its target in 10-15 minutes, much faster than land-based ballistic missiles, aircraft or cruise missiles. The speed of the missile and high trajectory also provide the burrowing effect desired for bunker-buster bombs.
The secrecy of submarine deployment further advances the use of Trident missiles in a tactical strike. The delivery would not encroach upon the airspace of hostile nations. Those targeted likely would never know the missile was coming.
Nuclear weapons, even ones smaller than used on Hiroshima or Nagasaki, will kill on impact and create a surrounding firestorm. The resulting radioactive dust will cause slow and agonizing death.
With the advancement of tactical nuclear weapons we must ask ourselves, who will give the order to launch? Should we let them?
On Jan. 17, 2004, 12 people were arrested while blocking the entrance to the Trident submarine base at Bangor. The next planned non-violent action at Bangor, on May 8, will honor Mother's Day.
~Glen Milner lives in Seattle and is a member of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action in Poulsbo; www.gzcenter.org
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Sweet deal won uranium plant from Kentucky
Bottom-line cost advantage aided Ohio's courtship
By MALIA RULON
Associated Press
Monday, February 23, 2004
http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2004/02/23ky/met-3-uranium02230-7166.html
WASHINGTON - Ohio's successful campaign for a new uranium enrichment plant will cost taxpayers $15million for state trips and meals, road and water infrastructure projects, worker-training grants, and other enticements.
Paducah, Ky., also had sought the plant.
The $15million is part of a $125million-plus incentive package of state and local tax breaks in Ohio and about $7,500 spent on meals, trips, newspaper advertisements and gifts for company officials, according to state documents released at the request of The Associated Press.
"This is probably one of the most attractive packages that we have offered," Gov. Bob Taft said. The total value of the package for USEC Inc. is expected to be higher than $125million once several of the tax incentives are calculated.
In 1998, the state helped secure a new Jeep plant in Toledo with state and local tax breaks worth about $185million.
USEC announced Jan. 12 that it would build a $1.5billion plant at its southern Ohio site to use updated centrifuge technology to enrich uranium. The plant is expected to employ 500 people and be operating by the end of the decade.
Ohio's incentives come to $250,000 a job. They include $64.3million in state tax incentives for creating new jobs, buying new manufacturing machinery, and conducting research and development; $26million in local property tax breaks and other incentives; and $20million in state financing assistance.
The decision came a year after USEC announced that it would operate a $150million plant at the Piketon, Ohio, site that would test its centrifuge technology and employ 50 people. The state had offered an $11.6million incentive package for that project, which Kentucky also sought. But winning the test plant gave Ohio an advantage.
Other advantages of the Ohio site, according to USEC, also didn't come from the incentive package. Buildings that remained from Energy Department tests of the technology in the 1980s would save about $300million. The cost of securing the Kentucky plant, which is near the New Madrid earthquake fault, was estimated at $75million.
"It's very difficult to recover from that kind of disadvantage and then put an incentive on top of that," said Kentucky Secretary of Economic Development Gene Strong.
He would say only that Kentucky's offer for the plant was considerably larger than Ohio's $125million package.
"We broke out every item and put it into a formula," said USEC spokeswoman Elizabeth Stuckle. "There was a significant economic difference between the two sites."
William V. Ackerman, an economic development professor at Ohio State University, said extras, such as lunches and gifts, help when wooing a business, but cost is the most important factor.
"What they are looking for is keeping their bottom-line costs as low as they can keep them, so they compare all the tax breaks and other incentive packages and whatever gives them the best deal," he said. "Everything else is just one more thing on the pot."
The Ohio Legislature passed two bills specifically to beef up the state's bid, providing a job-creation tax credit, extending a credit for buying new manufacturing machinery and extending from 10 to 15 years the amount of time communities can grant property tax exemptions.
The campaign to get the plant started with an October 2002 lunch at the governor's mansion with Taft, U.S. Rep. Rob Portman, whose district includes the plant, and USEC President Nick Timbers. It was followed by a 10-person steak and potato luncheon - served with buckeye ice cream for dessert - at the governor's mansion a year later.
It was after the first lunch, however, that Portman, excited about the prospect of winning the plant, drove 21/2 hours to Piketon with Timbers to meet with union President Dan Minter.
Community leaders also personally pitched Timbers on the plant.
When USEC cut 530 jobs and shut the Piketon plant to consolidate operations at Paducah, tempers among union workers and community leaders had flared. Eager to put the bad feelings to rest as USEC considered where to put the new plant, seven community leaders took time off from work and drove seven hours to USEC's headquarters in Bethesda, Md., to meet with Timbers.
"We wanted to show him that any misgivings that might have been there in the past were gone and ... we were totally in support of them doing this project here," said Bob Huff, executive director of the Portsmouth Area Chamber of Commerce.
Community leaders also spent $3,500 on advertising in five newspapers so they could collect and send to USEC 8,000 letters supporting the plant from businesses and residents. Several letters also came from West Virginia and Northern Kentucky, where residents would benefit from the permanent plant.
Stuckle said while these efforts were helpful, the final decision was based on an analysis of how each state would affect the cost, schedule and risk of the project.
"If the packages were economically more equal, other kinds of issues would have played a larger role," the spokeswoman said. "We appreciated tremendous community and state support in both locations."
-------- us politics
Demos zero in on nuke testing
Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich talks to supporters and a lot of media Sunday at Salt Lake City International Airport. Kucinich, who has won only slivers of the vote in Democratic presidential primaries, is the only candidate to visit the state leading up to Utah's primary on Tuesday. (Danny Chan La/Tribune)
By Thomas Burr <tburr@sltrib.com>
The Salt Lake Tribune
February 23, 2004
http://www.sltrib.com/2004/Feb/02232004/utah/utah.asp
During a brief stop in Salt Lake City two days before the Utah Democratic primary, presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich vowed that if elected he would stop any nuclear tests and work to rid the world of atomic weapons.
Calling Tuesday's party-run election a referendum on nuclear testing, Kucinich asked voters to check his name to show Utahns oppose tests in the adjacent Nevada desert. Past tests and their fallout have been blamed for cancer throughout the region.
"I want the people of Utah to know that as president of the United States, I will bring an end to all the nuclear testing," Kucinich said Sunday during a rally at Salt Lake City International Airport. "We will stop the sacrifice of the health and the welfare of the people of Utah and every other state [who] would be affected by the testing of nuclear weapons. This must stop."
Kucinich, an Ohio congressman who has yet to win any primary or caucus contests, shook hands with supporters and made a short speech to stump for votes before the primary, at which 23 Utah delegates are at stake. He is the only candidate to visit the state in recent months.
During a telephone news conference earlier Sunday, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic front-runner, said he also opposed the resumption of nuclear tests, as proposed by the Bush administration. Kerry said computers could be used for further simulations.
"I have consistently been opposed to the testing," Kerry told Utah media outlets. "The notion that you have to have domestic ground testing, or any kind of testing beyond simulation, is ridiculous, given the redundancy and the threat level that our redundancy carries compared to any other nation on the planet today."
Campaign officials for North Carolina Sen. John Edwards said he planned to make himself available to Utah reporters today. His and Kerry's campaigns have focused on the bigger states in the March 2 "Super Tuesday" primaries that will yield 1,151 delegates.
Kucinich, who surrounded himself with children for the rally, told about 40 supporters that if elected he would stop the development of biological and chemical warfare agents in the United States. He referred to reports saying the Pentagon was quietly setting up four germ labs at Dugway Proving Ground, west of Salt Lake City.
"Your state is being used as kind of a guinea pig on all of these tests," Kucinich said.
Kerry didn't address that issue Sunday. He attacked President Bush on economic issues, saying Bush is ignoring the outsourcing of jobs to other countries and the increase in deficit spending. "There is nothing conservative or mainstream Republican about the fiscal policies of this administration," Kerry said.
"Their priority is tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans," he said. "We should roll back George Bush's unaffordable tax cuts for the wealthiest people and protect the middle class."
The Kerry campaign has five national staffers in the state working with local officials to promote the candidate. And Kucinich has recorded a voice message that is being sent to Utahns urging them to vote for him.
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Nader to make fourth run for president
February 23, 2004
By Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040223-012314-6970r.htm
Ralph Nader said yesterday he will run for president again this year, to the consternation of Democrats who for months have tried to discourage a Nader candidacy.
Mr. Nader, whom many Democrats blame for draining crucial votes from Al Gore in 2000, made his announcement on NBC's "Meet the Press," telling moderator Tim Russert that he would get into the race to "challenge this two-party duopoly," a term Mr. Nader coined years ago and uses frequently.
"Basically, it's a question of both parties flunking," Mr. Nader said. "There's too much power and wealth in too few hands. They've taken over Washington. And it's time to change the equation and bring millions of American people into the political arena."
Most of his foes are part of the "liberal intelligentsia," Mr. Nader said, adding, "There are liberal Republicans who see their party taken away from them. They may be looking for an independent candidacy. There are a hundred million nonvoters that no one has figured out how to bring back into the electoral system, which I want to try to do.
"So I think the liberal intelligentsia has got to ask itself a tough question. ... For 25 years, they have let their party run away from them."
Mr. Nader's fourth bid for the presidency was preceded and greeted by howls of protest from both the mainstream and the periphery of the left. A Fox News poll released yesterday showed him winning 4 percent of the vote, to 43 percent for President Bush and 42 percent for Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic front-runner.
Mr. Nader, who turns 70 on Friday, has been urged to stay out of the race this year by most Democratic Party heavyweights. They include Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe, who appeared Friday on both CNN and Fox News, beseeching Democrats to contact Mr. Nader and urge him not to run.
"I would hate to see part of his legacy be that he got us eight years of George Bush," Mr. McAuliffe, said yesterday on CBS' "Face the Nation." "It is very unfortunate that Ralph has decided to run. There are people all over the country wishing that he hadn't done it. I have had Green Party members coming into the party, saying they want to help us."
In 1996, Mr. Nader was on the ballot in 20 states as the Green Party candidate, winning 685,128 votes. In 2000, he appeared on the ballot in 44 states, winning 2,882,955 votes, or 2.7 percent, and falling short of the required 5 percent needed to qualify for federal matching funds. During a brief 1992 campaign, he collected nearly 6,300 write-in votes in the New Hampshire primary and pulled sizable crowds.
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a member of the Democratic Party hierarchy, told "Fox News Sunday" that Mr. Nader's fourth run was motivated by "ego" and "vanity." Democratic strategist Donna Brazile said the party cannot allow Mr. Nader's candidacy to be a "distraction."
"We have done a great job of re-engaging voters," Miss Brazile said. "The last thing we need is for Nader to appear in 2004. Democrats have to keep their eye on the ball."
Post-election polls in 2000 show Mr. Nader attracted nearly 50 percent of his votes from Democrats, and another 30 percent from voters who would not have cast ballots otherwise.
In that campaign, Mr. Nader assailed Mr. Gore, calling him a "chronic political coward" and the "ultimate panderer."
Mr. Nader yesterday said he will run as an independent this time, not on the Green Party ticket. This will be difficult in many states, he said, without explaining why he decided to go that route.
"There's a tremendous bias in state laws against third parties and independent candidates bred by the two major parties who passed these laws," Mr. Nader said. "They don't like competition. So it's like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope."
Republicans maintained a gloat-free zone yesterday, with Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie saying that Mr. Bush would be re-elected no matter who runs.
Added Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, a former RNC chairman: "It will make less difference than the Democrats fear, but I know they're very nervous about it."
Certainly, not everyone in the environmental movement was happy about another Nader candidacy.
Rodger Schlickeisen, president of the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund, called it "monumentally irresponsible."
"In the last three years, the Bush administration has mounted arguably the greatest assault on our conservation laws ever seen," Mr. Schlickeisen said. "Mr. Nader's entry into the presidential race only increases the likelihood that assault will continue for a second term."
Precious campaign funds will have to be used to get Mr. Nader on the ballot as an independent. But an effort to make him the Green Party candidate again sprang up almost as soon as Mr. Nader made his announcement.
"There are already some candidates in the party who will cede their delegates at the national party convention in June," Green Party spokesman Scott McLarty said.
Mr. McLarty noted that Mr. Nader had announced in December that he would not run on the Green ticket, which alienated some in the party. Others, though, are ready to bring him back.
"The ultimate answer is his acceptance of the Green Party nomination at our convention, if he gets it," Mr. McLarty said.
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Nader Jumps Into the Presidential Race
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 23, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-23-09.asp#anchor2
Attorney and consumer advocate Ralph Nader, who contested the 2000 Presidential election as a Green Party candidate, announced Sunday that he will attempt to win the White House this year as an Independent.
Appearing on NBC News program "Meet the Press," Nader said, "After careful thought and my desire to retire our supremely selected president, I've decided to run as an Independent candidate for president."
Running as a Green Party presidential candidate in 2000, Nader was accused of tipping the balance away from Al Gore, which helped elect George W. Bush.
In 2000 in Florida, Bush won by 537 votes, and you got 97,488, "Meet the Press" host Tim Russert told Nader on air. "In New Hampshire, Bush won by 7,211, you got 22,000 votes."
In response, Nader said he did not cost Gore the election, because Gore won the election. Nader called his detrators the "liberal intelligentsia" and said, "what they're doing is basically saying that third parties are a second class citizenship."
Nader said there is a "civil liberties crisis affecting third parties and Independent candidates, in the United States. "Historically," he said, "that's where our reform has come from, in the 19th century, against slavery, women's right to vote, trade union, farmer, populist, progressive."
Nader said both Republicans and Democrats are basically reading from the same playbook. "They're taking our country apart: massive poverty, massive child poverty, massive consumer debt, environmental devastation. That didn't occur, that didn't get worse under the Democrats? So, basically, it's a question between both parties flunking, one with a D-, the Republicans; one with a D+, the Democrats."
"There are 100 million people in this country who do not vote. There are plenty of nonvoters for all candidates to attract," Nader has repeatedly said. To attract voters, Nader's first priority now is to get on the ballot in all 50 states.
The Green Party of the United States "welcomed" Nader's entry into the presidential race as an independent, saying that he will "take positions and raise issues of vital urgency" in the 2004 race for the White House.
But the Green Party and its 43 affiliate state parties are preparing to back a Green nominee, not an independent or another party's candidate.
"In running a presidential ticket this year, we're keeping our eyes on the prize. Our mid-term goal is the creation of a multi-party political system, and the participation of a strong Green Party in that system," said Ben Manski, co-chair of the Green Party of the United States. "To move closer to achieving our goal, we run and support Green candidates."
Some Greens have launched a Redraft Nader campaign to persuade Nader to to reverse his earlier decision to not seek the Green Party nomination and instead accept a nomination at the party's national convention in Milwaukee in the last week of June. There is also a campaign among some Green Party members to urge the party not to run a national candidate in 2004.
"We wish Ralph well and thank him for working with us and supporting us all these years," said Jo Chamberlain, also a co-chair of the national Green Party. "Our candidates - and our eventual nominee - are campaigning on a platform similar to his, so we don't consider ourselves in any kind of public competition with him."
But Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund President Rodger Schlickeisen called Nader's candidacy "monumentally irresponsible" and urged Nader to "reconsider his decision."
"The Bush administration's environmental policy has been a boon for the big oil, gas, and timber industries. Clean air and clean water laws have been rolled back. National forests have been opened to increased logging and public lands to more oil drilling. The framework of laws protecting our wildlife and habitat have been all but dismantled. Time and again, the President has placed the needs of corporate special interests ahead of the needs of our environment.
"The damage the President has done to the environment far outweighs the gains Mr. Nader made in this area during his career. Free from the threat of electoral defeat, a second term for the President could spell disaster on many of the issues Mr. Nader claims to hold dear," said Schlickeisen.
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Nader to Run As Independent
Democrats Upset at 'Spoiler' in 2000 Race
By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A61902-2004Feb22?language=printer
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader -- who many Democrats believe played "spoiler" in the 2000 election and helped put George W. Bush in the White House -- announced yesterday that he was going to run for president as an independent.
Nader said neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, awash in campaign contributions, were articulating his concerns for a more involved electorate, a better living wage, a crackdown on corporate crime, for more than two perspectives in presidential debates, and for stronger controls on the influence of money in politics.
"This has to be the only candidacy where the principal opponents are those who agree with you," Nader said in an interview, referring to the hordes of Democrats who have urged him not to run. "It's sad because they've lost their nerve and they've lost their expectations. They're willing to let the Democrats put a nose ring in their nose and say, 'Come along.' "
Spurred by the memory of how Nader siphoned away crucial votes in the 2000 election from Al Gore in Florida and New Hampshire, Democrats yesterday launched a frontal attack on Nader and accused him of being egotistical and irresponsible.
"This is an act of total vanity and ego satisfaction," said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D). Nader, he added, "cost us the White House last time, and he could again."
The Democratic National Committee issued a statement saying Nader had promised Chairman Terence R.McAuliffe that "he would not criticize the Democratic nominee, but rather would focus on the failings of the Bush Administration. We take him at his word."
As he was leaving Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, where he attended morning services, Democratic front-runner Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) was asked about Nader's entry. "I'm going to appeal to everybody in this race and we'll make it unnecessary in the end for an alternative," he said.
Although the Republican National Committee studiously declined to gloat, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty (R) declared, "Republicans love Ralph Nader!"
Nader, 69, made his announcement on NBC's "Meet the Press." In a subsequent interview, he predicted that his candidacy would hurt President Bush more than the eventual Democratic nominee. If the electorate were divided into three groups (Republicans, independents and Democrats), Nader said he expects to get more votes from the first two -- votes that otherwise could have gone to Bush.
Many independents, libertarians and Republicans share his concerns over the erosion of civil liberties and the giant federal deficit, Nader said. As to why he is getting a barrage of complaints from Democrats, and none from Republicans, Nader said operatives in both parties are following "a mantra -- an assumption without data."
Nader won about 3 percent of the vote in the 2000 election; Gore and Bush each won 48 percent. Nader's presence on the ballot proved crucial in at least two states. In Florida, Bush won by 537 votes even as Nader won 97,488. In New Hampshire, Bush won by 7,211 votes as Nader won 22,198.
Nader said polls had shown that in 2000, 25 percent of his supporters were Republicans, and 38 percent were Democrats. In 2004, he predicted, far fewer Democrats will vote for him.
John Pearce, a California activist who launched a Web site called RalphDontRun.net, said that even if Nader's numbers for the 2000 election were correct, he still tipped Florida and New Hampshire to Bush. If Gore had won either state, he would have won the election.
Pearce's Web site has received about 165,000 hits in recent days. Like many Democrats who want Nader out of the race, Pearce said he has mixed feelings about the consumer advocate.
"The irony to me is he was so inspiring and so well informed on so many issues, yet his candidacy will only serve to support the election of those most hostile to his issues," Pearce said. "I ironically continue to be inspired by Nader and very disappointed in his decision."
Nader and the Green Party, on whose ticket he ran in 2000, have steadfastly refused to take responsibility for Gore's defeat. They blame the Democrat's campaign, shenanigans in the Florida election and the intervention of a conservative Supreme Court for the defeat.
Nader dismissed the criticism of his candidacy as coming from "the liberal intelligentsia" -- people concerned about the same issues, but willing to settle for "the least worst option." He described himself as a lifelong progressive, part of a group that was "tougher in their struggle for justice."
Other self-described progressives disagreed. Rep. Bernard Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement that Nader could end up "splitting the vote with the candidate. Middle-income and working families just cannot afford four more years of Bush."
Dante Scala, a research fellow at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at St. Anselm College in Manchester, said Nader is unlikely to do as well as he did in 2000 because Democrats are much more united in 2004. But if the election were close, Nader's presence could tip a state or two, Scala said, including states that Gore carried in 2000.
Tony Quinn, a former Republican consultant in Sacramento who is involved in nonpartisan political analysis, said third-party candidates always do the most damage to candidates who are ideologically similar.
To avoid this, Nader supporters, many chastened by the 2000 election, have tried to mount vote-swapping arrangements. They would allow those who live in swing states to vote for the Democrats, while Democrats who live in solidly Republican or Democratic states would vote for Nader.
The deeply divided Green Party will decide at its Milwaukee convention in June whether to nominate another candidate, try to redraft Nader, not run a candidate at all, or run hard only in non-swing states, spokesman Scott McLarty said.
"People who voted for him the last time recognize they made a mistake, and they won't do it again," predicted Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, who is chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association. "He won't have the resources to mount a major campaign, and people are focused on solutions, not symbols."
Nader has said that Americans should vote their conscience. Among his ideas are better public financing of elections, restrictions on corporate funding and a chance for voters to say they don't like any of the candidates and force a reelection.
These issues do not have anything to do with Nader's hopes of winning the presidency. Even as volunteers recruited through his Web site -- www.votenader.org -- try to get his name on the ballot, Nader acknowledged the election is only part of a broad scheme to involve people in political activism, and to draw attention to issues that the major parties would rather ignore.
If the Democrats paid real attention to the issue of corporate malfeasance, he would be delighted, Nader said. "It's up to them to grab away my votes and my issues," he said.
Staff writer David S. Broder contributed to this report.
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-------- afghanistan
Pilot Killed in Attack on Helicopter in Afghanistan
Associated Press
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62890-2004Feb22.html
THALOQAN, Afghanistan, Feb. 22 -- A lone attacker sprayed a U.S. company's helicopter with gunfire as it prepared to take off from a village in southern Afghanistan on Sunday, killing the Australian pilot and seriously wounding at least one American passenger.
Four foreigners and an Afghan interpreter had come in the helicopter to inspect the construction of a health clinic in Thaloqan, about 40 miles southwest of the provincial capital, Kandahar.
The group was about to leave when a man armed with a Kalashnikov assault rifle fired at the helicopter and then fled, said Khalid Pashtoon, spokesman for the governor of Kandahar province.
The Australian pilot was killed and an American woman who was helping set up health clinics in the region was seriously wounded, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said on condition of anonymity.
Officials said the helicopter belonged to the Louis Berger Group Inc., an engineering firm based in East Orange, N.J., that oversees infrastructure projects in southern Afghanistan.
Mike Staples, a public relations official for Louis Berger in Kabul, would not comment.
Afghan forces were searching for the suspect in the area, where rebels of the former ruling Taliban are active. Pashtoon said the village was home to the Hezb-i-Islami group of warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a key Taliban ally.
After Sunday's shooting, about 100 U.S. troops and 100 Afghan forces cordoned off the site as a U.S. military helicopter hoisted the bullet-riddled helicopter away.
In a statement, the U.S. military condemned the shooting as a "senseless and violent criminal attack." It urged tribal elders and other locals to hand over the assailant.
A U.S. military quick-reaction force evacuated the injured personnel to a military hospital at Kandahar airfield, said Lt. Col. Bryan Hilferty, a military spokesman.
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Flawed Ally Was Hunt's Best Hope
Afghan Guerrilla, U.S. Shared Enemy
By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62889-2004Feb22?language=printer
Second of two articles.
A team of CIA operators from the agency's Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center's Osama bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.
They went to a secluded airfield, boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17 transport helicopter, and swooped toward the jagged, snow-draped peaks of northern Afghanistan.
Their aim was to revive secret intelligence and combat operations against bin Laden in partnership with guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, a ragged coalition of Afghan fighters, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets. Massoud's hardened militiamen clung to their positions in the stark Panjshir Valley.
"We have a common enemy," the CIA team leader told Massoud, according to participants, referring to bin Laden. "Let's work together."
Massoud remained Afghanistan's most formidable military commander. A sinewy man with penetrating dark eyes, he had become a charismatic, popular leader, especially in northeastern Afghanistan. There he had fought and negotiated with equal imagination during the 1980s, punishing and frustrating Soviet occupation forces. He was an impressive tactician, an attentive student of Mao and other guerrilla leaders.
He was above all an independent man. He surrounded himself with books. He prayed piously, read Persian poetry and studied Islamic theology. During the mid-1990s his militia forces had at times engaged in horrendous massacres, however. American and British drug enforcement officials continued to accuse his men of opium and heroin smuggling.
By 1999, Massoud was seen by some at the Pentagon and inside the Clinton Cabinet as a spent force commanding bands of thugs. An inner circle of the Cabinet with access to the most closely guarded secrets was sharply divided over whether the United States should deepen its partnership with him. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton -- reflecting the views of professional analysts in their departments -- argued that Massoud's alliance was tainted and in decline.
But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career officers passionately described Massoud by 1999 as the United States' last, best hope to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan before his al Qaeda network claimed more American lives. Massoud might be a flawed ally, they declared, but bin Laden was by far the greater danger.
This article, detailing the CIA's pursuit of bin Laden from 1999 to 2001, is based on several dozen interviews with participants and officials in the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, as well as documents, private records and memoirs about the CIA covert action program in Afghanistan.
A Deal Is Made
Frightened by swelling intelligence reports warning that al Qaeda planned new terrorist strikes, President Bill Clinton's national security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, and his counterterrorism director, Richard Clarke, approved the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. They were uneasy about Massoud but said they were ready to try anything within reason that might lead to bin Laden's capture or death.
Massoud was at war across northern Afghanistan against the Taliban, whose puritan mullahs had allied themselves with bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters in a drive to control all Afghan territory and destroy Massoud's coalition. Massoud's men often maneuvered in battle against bin Laden's brigade of Arab volunteers, as well as al Qaeda-sponsored Pakistani volunteers and Chechen fighters. Ultimately, Cofer Black, then director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, hoped Massoud would capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and either kill him or hand him over for trial.
In dimly lit Panjshir Valley safe houses in October 1999, Massoud told the JAWBREAKER-5 team that he was willing to deepen his partnership with the CIA, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most of his time near the southern city of Kandahar, in the eastern Afghan mountains, far from where Massoud's forces operated. Occasionally bin Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to the Northern Alliance's lines. In these areas Massoud's intelligence service had active agents, and perhaps they could develop more sources.
Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans directed all of their efforts against bin Laden and a handful of his senior aides, but they failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about the Taliban? What about the Taliban's supporters in Pakistani intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates?
"Even if we succeed in what you are asking for," Massoud told the CIA delegation, his aide and interpreter Abdullah recalled, "that will not solve the bigger problem that is growing."
The CIA officers told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they had their orders. The U.S. government rejected a military confrontation with the Taliban or direct support for any armed factions in the broader Afghan war. Instead, U.S. policy focused on capturing bin Laden and his lieutenants for criminal trial or killing them in the course of an arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA officers argued, perhaps it would lead to wider political support or development aid in the future.
"What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole chaotic situation," recalled one of Massoud's intelligence aides who worked closely with the CIA during this period, "they were talking about this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it would have been very difficult for you to accept that this was the problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem."
Still, Massoud and his aides agreed they had nothing to lose by helping the CIA. "First of all, it was an effort against a common enemy," recalled Abdullah. "Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S. to know better about the situation in Afghanistan."
Cautioned by History
Massoud had a long and checkered history with the CIA. Among those with the proper security clearances, the accusations and stories of perfidy had become legend.
The CIA first sent Massoud aid in 1984. But their relations were undermined by the CIA's heavy dependence on Pakistan during the war against the Soviets. The Pakistani intelligence service despised Massoud because he had waged a long and brutal campaign against Pakistan's main Islamic radical client, the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As the war against the Soviets ended, Pakistani intelligence sought to exclude Massoud from the victory, and the CIA mainly went along. But under pressure from the State Department and members of Congress, the agency eventually reopened its private channels to Massoud.
In 1990 the CIA's secret relationship with Massoud soured because of a dispute over a $500,000 payment. Gary Schroen, a CIA officer then working from Islamabad, Pakistan, had delivered the cash to Massoud's brother in exchange for assurances that Massoud would attack Afghan communist forces along a key artery, the Salang Highway. But Massoud's forces never moved, so far as the CIA could tell. Schroen and other officers believed they had been ripped off for half a million dollars.
Schroen, who has now agreed to be publicly identified, renewed contact with Massoud during a solo visit to Kabul in September 1996. By then bin Laden had found sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the CIA sought allies to watch and disrupt al Qaeda. Schroen and Massoud settled their old dispute. (Massoud claimed he had never received the $500,000.) The guerrilla leader agreed to cooperate on a secret CIA program to repurchase Stinger antiaircraft missiles. He sold the agency eight missiles he still possessed and began to talk sporadically with Langley about intelligence operations against bin Laden.
Schroen met Massoud again in the spring of 1997 at his new headquarters in Taloqan, in Afghanistan's far north. By then, the Taliban had stormed into Kabul and seized the capital as Massoud withdrew. Looking to win American favor for his prolonged war against the Taliban and its foreign Islamic militant allies, Massoud began to buy up Stingers across the north for the CIA. He also agreed to notify the agency if he got a line on bin Laden's whereabouts.
A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash -- up to $250,000 per visit -- began to visit Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The first formal group, code-named NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud's helicopters from Dushanbe to the Panjshir Valley late in 1997.
Three other teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. The electronic intercept equipment they delivered allowed Massoud to monitor Taliban battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange the CIA officers asked Massoud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his top lieutenants were on the move in a particular sector.
Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the CIA's push to deepen its partnership with him faced close scrutiny at the White House. The National Security Council's intelligence policy and legal offices drafted formal, binding guidance.
Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States had declared a policy of official neutrality toward that war as a co-sponsor of all-party peace talks, which dragged on inconclusively. Clinton enacted economic sanctions against the Taliban but was unwilling to fund or arm Massoud. The White House sought to ensure that the CIA's counterterrorism mission in the Panjshir Valley concentrated only on bin Laden. The administration did not want the CIA to use its intelligence-collection and counterterrorism partnership with Massoud for a secret, undeclared war against the Taliban.
Clinton told his top national security aides that he was prepared to work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite what he saw as a record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance, participants recalled. The Pentagon and the intelligence community both provided secret analysis to Clinton arguing that Massoud had all the weapons he needed from other suppliers, the president recounted later to colleagues. In any event, Clinton recalled, Massoud would never be able to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul.
At the White House, some national security aides briefed on the CIA's missions feared that, as with the Salang Highway operation in 1990, Massoud would just take the CIA's cash and sit on his hands.
In the end, the National Security Council approved written guidance to authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud. But the highly classified documents made clear that the CIA could provide no equipment or assistance that would, as several officials recalled its thrust, "fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield."
Afghans Seize the Moment
A few months after the JAWBREAKER-5 team choppered out, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.
It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud's sources reported that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta was a graduate school for elite recruits. The Defense Intelligence Agency had relayed reports that bin Laden's aides might be developing chemical weapons or poisons there. The White House's Counterterrorism Security Group, led by Richard Clarke, routed satellites above the camps for surveillance.
The CIA recruited Afghan agents who traveled or lived in the region, an area of heavy smuggling and trade and relatively weak Taliban control. Through their liaison in the Panjshir, CIA officers pushed intelligence-collection equipment to Massoud's southern lines, near Jalalabad. Besides radio intercepts, the technology included an optical device, derived from technology used by offshore spy planes, that could produce photographic images from a distance of more than 10 miles. Massoud's men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above Derunta and tried to watch the place.
The Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden unit relayed a report to Massoud that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta. Massoud ordered a mission. He rounded up "a bunch of mules," as a U.S. official who was involved later put it, and loaded them up with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He dispatched this small commando team toward the hills above Derunta.
After the team was on its way, Massoud reported his plan to Langley: He was going to batter bin Laden's camp with rocket fire.
The CIA's lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House legal rules for liaison with Massoud had not addressed such pure military operations against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally complicit in Massoud's operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had no authority to be involved.
The bin Laden unit shot a message to the Panjshir: You've got to recall the mission.
Massoud's aides replied, in effect, as a U.S. official involved recalled it: "What do you think this is, the 82nd Airborne? We're on mules. They're gone." Massoud's team had no radios. They were walking to the launch site. They would fire their rockets, turn around and walk back.
Langley's officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically about the absurd intersections of U.S. law and secret war they were expected to manage. Massoud's aides eventually reported back that they had, in fact, shelled Derunta. But the CIA could pick up no independent confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed and the incident passed, unpublicized.
Taking On the Taliban
During 2000 Massoud planned an expanding military campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda. His strategy was to recruit allies such as the guerrilla leaders Ismail Khan and Abdurrashid Dostum and seed them as pockets of rebellion against Taliban rule in northern and western Afghanistan, where the Taliban was weakest. As these rebel pockets emerged and stabilized, Massoud explained, he would drive toward them with his more formal armored militia, trying to link up on roadways, choking off Taliban-ruled cities and towns.
Once he had more solid footing in the north, Massoud planned to pursue the same strategy in the Taliban heartland in the south. He hoped to aid ethnic Pashtun rebels such as Hamid Karzai, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister from a prominent royal tribal family who had been forced into exile in Pakistan. By 1999 Karzai had turned against the Taliban and wanted to lead a rebellion against the militia in its southern homeland around Kandahar. Massoud dispatched aides to meet with Karzai and develop these ideas.
In private talks in person and by satellite telephone, Karzai told Massoud he was ready to slip inside Afghanistan and fight. "Don't move into Kandahar," Massoud told him, Karzai later recalled. "You must go to a place where you can hold your base." Massoud invited Karzai to the north. "He was very wise," Karzai recalled. "I was sort of pushy and reckless."
A Flying Miracle
To pursue his plans in a serious way, Massoud needed helicopters, trucks and other vehicles. Some CIA officers working with Massoud wanted to help him by supplying the mobile equipment, cash, training and weapons he would need to expand his war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Yet as 2000 passed, the CIA struggled to maintain the basics of its intelligence liaison with Massoud.
It was difficult and risky for the agency's officers to reach the Panjshir Valley. The only practical route was through Tajikistan. From there CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the air. On one trip, the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to shoot down Massoud's helicopter. If successful, the militia would have discovered American corpses in the wreckage.
Even on the best days, the choppers would shake and rattle and the cabin would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes were no better. When a CIA team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped over and a veteran officer dislocated his shoulder.
These reports accumulated on the desk of Deputy Director of Operations James Pavitt, who had overall responsibility for CIA espionage. Pavitt was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who had served in Europe during the Cold War. Like Director George J. Tenet, who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics. Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough to justify the possibility of death or injury?
Those opposed to the Panjshir missions argued, as one official recalled it, "You're sending people to their deaths."
The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian helicopters. When Massoud's men opened up one of the Mi-17s, the mechanics were stunned: They had patched an engine originally made for a Hind attack helicopter into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a flying miracle.
Afterward Tenet signed off on a compromise: The CIA would secretly buy its own airworthy Mi-17 helicopter, maintain it properly in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and use CIA pilots to fly clandestine teams into the Panjshir.
But the helicopter issue was a symptom of a larger problem. By the late summer of 2000, the CIA's liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides.
Frustrated by daunting geography and unable to win support for Massoud in Cabinet debates, the CIA's officers felt stifled. For their part, Massoud's aides had hoped their work with the agency would lead to clearer recognition of Afghanistan's plight in Washington and perhaps covert military aid. They could see no evidence that this was happening.
Instead they were badgered repeatedly about mounting a "Hollywood operation," as one of Massoud's intelligence aides put it, to capture bin Laden alive. The aide likened the mission urged on them by the CIA to a game of chess in which they would have to capture the king without touching any other piece on the board.
Massoud's men asked their CIA counterparts, as this intelligence aide recalled it: "Is there any policy in the government of the American states to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid of your most wanted man?"
Disappointments for Massoud
After the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, in which 17 sailors were killed at Aden, Yemen, the CIA's Panjshir teams tried to revive their plan to supply Massoud with more extensive and more lethal aid. CIA officers sat down at Langley in November and drew up a specific list of what Massoud needed. In addition to more cash -- to bribe commanders and to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money -- Massoud needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms, food and maybe some mortars and artillery. He did not need combat aircraft. Tanks were not a priority.
The list of covert supplies they proposed for Massoud would cost between $50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White House wanted to be.
Under the plan, the CIA would establish a permanent base with Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. Rich, the bin Laden unit chief at the Counterterrorist Center, argued that the agency's officers had to be down around the campfire constantly with Massoud's men.
The CIA wanted to overcome the confusion and mutual mistrust that had developed with Massoud over operations designed to capture or kill bin Laden. The plan envisioned that CIA officers would go directly into action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts. There would be no more embarrassments like the mission against Derunta.
In the late autumn, Clarke sent a memo outlining the CIA's proposal to Berger, Clinton's national security adviser. But they were worse than lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election had deadlocked; White House aides were enduring the strangest post-election transition in a century just as the CIA's paper landed on their desks.
The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no new covert action program for Massoud.
As the Bush administration took office early in 2001, Massoud retained a Washington lobbyist. He wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging the new administration to reexamine its policy toward Afghanistan. He told his advisers he knew he could not defeat the Taliban on the battlefield as long as the ruling militia was funded by bin Laden and reinforced from Pakistan. He sought to build up a new political and military coalition within Afghanistan to squeeze the Taliban and break its grip on ordinary Afghans. For this, sooner or later, he told visitors, he would require the support of the United States.
His CIA liaison had slackened, but his intelligence aides still spoke and exchanged messages frequently with Langley. That spring they passed word that Massoud had been invited to France to address the European Parliament.
Gary Schroen and Rich flew to Paris to meet with Massoud. They wanted to reassure him that even though the pace of their visits had slowed because of the policy gridlock in Washington, the CIA still intended to keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. They also wanted to know how Massoud felt about his military position.
Massoud told them that he thought he could defend his lines in the northeast of Afghanistan, but that was about all. The United States had to do something, Massoud told the CIA officers quietly, or eventually he was going to crumble.
"If President Bush doesn't help us," Massoud told reporters in Strasbourg a few days later, "then these terrorists will damage the United States and Europe very soon{ndash}and it will be too late."
A Fatal Blow
Early in September 2001, Massoud's intelligence service transmitted a routine classified report to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center about two Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from Kabul.
The intelligence-sharing between Massoud and the CIA concentrated mainly on Arabs and foreigners in Afghanistan. In this case officers in the bin Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the movement of the two Arab journalists. It did not seem of exceptional interest.
Members of the Bush Cabinet met at the White House on Sept. 4. Before them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al Qaeda, Afghanistan and Massoud.
It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration's senior national security team had not begun to focus on al Qaeda until April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a policy approach until July. Then they took still more weeks to schedule a meeting to ratify their plans.
Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck Clinton White House -- and rejected -- nine months earlier. The stated goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment. The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.
Other aspects of the Bush administration's al Qaeda policy, such as its approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt, remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But on Massoud, the CIA was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert policy -- the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of the Afghan war.
In the Panjshir Valley, unaware of these developments, Massoud read Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of Sept. 9. Later that morning he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab journalists visiting from Kabul.
As one of them set up a television camera, the other read aloud a list of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned bin Laden.
A bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the cameraman's body apart. It shattered the room's windows, seared the walls in flame and tore Massoud's chest with shrapnel.
Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA's Counterterrorist Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.
"Where's Massoud?" the CIA officer asked.
"He's in the refrigerator," said Saleh, searching for the English word for morgue.
Massoud was dead, but members of his inner circle had barely absorbed the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA's help as it prepared to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban.
On the morning of Sept. 10, the CIA's daily classified briefings to Bush, his Cabinet and other policymakers reported on Massoud's death and analyzed the consequences for the United States' covert war against al Qaeda.
Officers in the Counterterrorist Center, still hopeful that they could maintain a foothold in northern Afghanistan to attack bin Laden, called frantically around Washington to find a way to aid the rump Northern Alliance before it was eliminated.
Massoud's advisers and lobbyists, playing for time, tried to promote speculation that Massoud might still be alive. But privately, as Sept. 10 wore on, phone call by phone call, many of the Afghans closest to the commander began to learn that he was gone.
Karzai, who was in Pakistan when his brother reached him, had spoken to Massoud a few days earlier. He was considering a plan to fly into Massoud's territory, work his way south and open an armed rebellion against the Taliban -- with or without U.S. support.
Karzai's brother said it was confirmed: Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead.
Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it: "What an unlucky country."
Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.
-------- africa
Insurgents Kill 192 in Uganda
Refugee Camp Set Afire as Local Defenders Are Overrun
By Geoffrey Muleme
Associated Press
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62934-2004Feb22.html
KAMPALA, Uganda, Feb. 22 -- Scores of rebels armed with assault rifles, mortars and rocket-propelled grenades attacked a refugee camp in northern Uganda and torched huts, killing 192 people and wounding dozens more, a local legislator said Sunday.
The attack Saturday evening on the Barloonyo camp in the Lira district, about 155 miles north of the capital, Kampala, was one of the most deadly in recent years by the Lord's Resistance Army, a rebel group that has been fighting the Ugandan government for 17 years.
As the insurgents surrounded the camp from three sides, many people ran to their mud-and-grass huts instead of trying to escape and were burned to death when the insurgents set fire to the homes, said the legislator, Charles Anjiro.
"It's a hopeless situation; we went there this morning with the Lira district police commander and physically counted 192 bodies," Anjiro said by telephone from the town of Lira, 16 miles south of the camp. "The scene is terrible."
Jane Aceng, head of the Lira hospital, said 56 people were taken there with burns and shrapnel and gunshot wounds.
The camp held about 5,000 people displaced by the insurgency, which has forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes. It was being guarded by members of a local defense force, who were outnumbered and outgunned, said Maj. Shaban Bantariza, an army spokesman.
It was not possible to contact the Lord's Resistance Army, which is led by Joseph Kony, who claims to have spiritual powers. Estimates of the group's size range from hundreds to a few thousand.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Bush administration put the group, which rarely makes contact with the outside world, on a list of organizations suspected of having links to terrorism.
An army spokesman in the region, 2nd Lt. Chris Magezi, said government forces were pursuing the rebels.
Magezi could not confirm the death toll but said the attack appeared to be one of the worst rebel assaults in recent years. In 1995, the rebels rounded up more than 300 villagers in Gulu district and killed them, he said.
The Lord's Resistance Army arose from the remnants of a revolt by soldiers from the Acholi tribe after President Yoweri Museveni, a southerner, seized power in 1986. The Acholi tribe is dominant in northern Uganda.
Most of the rebels had given up by 1988, but those who did not coalesced into the Lord's Resistance Army. The group replenishes its ranks with children it kidnaps to serve as fighters, porters or concubines.
The rebels used to launch attacks into northern Uganda from neighboring Sudan, mainly raiding villages and attacking military posts. But in March 2002, the Sudanese government agreed to allow Ugandan troops to cross the border to destroy rebel bases.
-------- arms
Australia seeks offshore designs for new warships
Reuters,
02.23.04,
http://www.forbes.com/business/newswire/2004/02/23/rtr1272722.html
CANBERRA, Feb 24 (Reuters) - Australia has asked two international shipbuilders for information about their new designs as it prepares to acquire two new troop transport vessels, Defence Minister Robert Hill said on Tuesday.
Hill said the Australian Defence Force had issued a request for information from state-owned Spanish company Izar and French warship marketer Armaris, an arm of state-owned DCN Interational, to help decide which design would best suit its needs.
Acquiring two new amphibious ships is part of Australia's 10-year, A$50 billion ($38 billion) plan to update its military capability to better protect its borders and boost military compatibility with its key ally, the United States.
Hill said the ships needed to carry hundreds of troops, vehicles, at least 12 helicopters and four conventional landing craft. He said recent fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan highlighted the need for better capability to deploy troops and equipment.
"Of course, given the prospect of Australian and U.S. forces continuing to work closely in the future, the ships will need to be inter-operable with our coalition partners," Hill said in a speech to the Australian Defence Magazine 2004 conference.
Australia was one of the first nations to send troops to join the U.S.-led assault on Afghanistan and also committed 2,000 military personnel to the war in Iraq.
The two new ships will replace Australia's current heavy landing ship, the HMAS Tobruk, and one of its two amphibious transport ships, the HMAS Manoora and the HMAS Kanimbla.
Hill said four Australian shipbuilding companies -- ADI, Tenix Pty Ltd, ASC and Forjacs -- had been asked to assist the government with its design evaluation.
Hill also announced on Tuesday that Australia would spend $62 million upgrading an over-the-horizon radar system to better detect the illegal movement of people and goods off its shores.
The current system, activated in May last year, consists of two radars located in the states of Western Australia and Queensland which can monitor air and sea approaches up to 2,000 km (3,700 miles) from Australia's coastline.
"After the enhancement programme, the radars will have a greater range and will be able to detect even smaller aircraft and ships," Hill said in a statement. ($1=A$1.30)
-------- australia
Australia to Upgrade Radar System
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Australia-US-Defenses.html
CANBERRA, Australia (AP) -- Australia is upgrading a radar system that could be used as part of the U.S. missile defense shield, the defense minister announced Tuesday.
Robert Hill said the government is spending $48 million improving the indalee Operational Radar Network that can detect ships and aircraft up to 1,243 miles beyond Australia's northern border.
``After the enhancement program, the radars will have a greater range and will be able to detect even smaller aircraft and ships,'' Hill said in a statement.
He said the enhancement program will make the project potentially a key component of Australia's contribution to the United States program.
Australia announced in December that it would join the American plan to build a missile defense system, calling the threat of ballistic missiles too grave to ignore.
The Bush administration hopes that developing a global shield against ballistic missiles will protect it against potential threats from countries like North Korea. It wants allies such as Britain, Canada and Australia involved in the project, particularly for the use of satellite tracking stations in their countries.
The close cooperation has led critics in Australia and abroad, especially key regional powers Malaysia and Indonesia, to charge that Australia is becoming an American satellite, without an independent foreign policy, at the expense of important regional issues.
So far, the Australian radar has been used mainly to detect illegal immigrants, smugglers and fisherman poaching in Australian territorial waters, Hill said.
The network has two radars, one based in Western Australia state and the other in Longreach in the eastern Queensland state.
-------- business
New Horizon For Lockheed
Pentagon's Changing Priorities Challenge Top Defense Firm
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page E01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A63054-2004Feb22?language=printer
Lockheed Martin Corp. at first seems almost as invincible as the fighter jets and missiles it makes.
Bethesda-based Lockheed, the largest defense contractor in the world, collected almost $22 billion of the $209 billion the Pentagon spent on prime contracts last year, widening its lead over its next biggest competitor, Chicago-based Boeing Co., to $4.6 billion. Many people in the industry expect Lockheed to dominate the fighter-jet market for the foreseeable future. It had orders for five commercial satellites in a dismal market last year, the most of any company. And President Bush has proposed increasing defense spending 7 percent, to almost $402 billion, next year.
So what could possibly worry Vance D. Coffman, the taciturn engineer who has led the company since 1997?
Plenty, experts say.
Lockheed's stranglehold on the military aircraft market is based on two planes, the F/A-22 Raptor and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, both frequently lambasted by members of Congress for their technological problems and growing budgets. While Lockheed dominates the fighter market, it is not secure with unmanned drones, which many experts consider the future of military aviation. And the Pentagon is thinking about radical new ways of changing warfare that could threaten Lockheed's dominance.
Then there is the growing federal budget deficit, expected to top half a billion dollars this year, which could crimp Bush's plans to boost military spending. "If Congress has to choose between eliminating tax breaks, between repealing health care reform or cutting the defense budget, what do you think they're going to do?" said Jeffrey P. Bialos, who was a deputy defense undersecretary for industrial affairs in the Clinton administration.
When Coffman took over six years ago, Lockheed Martin, product of the merger of Martin Marietta Corp. and Lockheed Corp., was still in its infancy. The deal was not unusual: As defense spending fell after the Cold War, many defense contractors merged or bought one another to survive. Lockheed and Martin Marietta said the combined companies would be hugely efficient and save the government billions of dollars.
But soon the new company was in trouble, disappointing Wall Street by missing financial goals, blowing up rockets trying to launch satellites and making the ill-fated decision to join the telecommunications boom. Lockheed spent $2.6 billion for Comsat Corp., a global telecommunications company, and took a $1.7 billion charge when it left the business a few years later.
Business has improved. Coffman purged upper management and reorganized the company. Chief Financial Officer Robert J. Stevens quickly charmed Wall Street. Lockheed reduced its debt to $6 billion last year from $12 billion in 1999. It doubled its stock dividend and this month reported its largest backlog ever, almost $77 billion.
"Our goal is not to be big, our goal is to be good," said Stevens, who now is president and chief operating officer. "There is no complacency. It's a highly competitive marketplace."
Yet complacency is often a problem when you are the biggest company in your business.
"Lockheed's problem is that they're number one, so they have less incentive for across-the-board innovation," said Robbin F. Laird, a defense industry analyst. "These are challenges."
This is a bad time to be complacent. Beginning in the 1990s, the Pentagon rejected as too simplistic the traditional idea of building better ships, tanks or fighter jets. The new focus was on how to connect those weapons through satellites and computer networks, creating a "virtual battlefield." A soldier, for example, could access a satellite picture of a battlefield on a handheld computer and go into combat with an unmanned vehicle trailing with supplies. But just how to create smart battlefield technology can be difficult for defense giants accustomed to requests simply to make weapons faster, lighter or more lethal.
In 2002 Lockheed lost what many people in the industry considered one of the first real tests of whether contractors could adapt to the Pentagon's new manifesto. Boeing Co. won a contract to replace clunky Army tanks with high-tech, lightweight armored vehicles, and to connect soldiers through satellite and computer networks. The deal could be worth $90 billion over the next 20 years.
"Senior Army officials have said Boeing won because it has a vision, a framework under which all soldiers would work," said Loren B. Thompson Jr., a defense industry analyst for the public-policy think tank Lexington Institute. "You can't develop a credible vision unless you can bring everything together -- aircrafts, computers, everything. You have to be able to leverage every part of your capability to stay competitive."
Lockheed reacted to the trend by creating a new unit, Integrated Systems and Solutions, which looks across the company's businesses for opportunities to cooperate and merge expertise. When pursuing a contract, for example, the unit can pull together an aeronautics engineer in one unit with a software technician in another.
The unit's effectiveness will be tested in several competitions this year, including one for a piece of the Joint Tactical Radio System, which will replace thousands of single-band military radios used for voice communication. There are 25 brands and the Pentagon wants to replace them with one "family" of equipment that could be used for voice, data, imagery and video communications.
Lockheed's core business, though, remains fighter jets. Last year, aeronautics re-emerged as the company's largest unit, with the 25-year-old F-16 responsible for much of the increase. But the unit's future is tied up with two next-generation fighters: The F/A-22 and Joint Strike Fighter. The F/A-22 is an Air Force plane; the Joint Strike Fighter would be used by the Air Force, Navy and Marines.
The F/A-22, developed to confront forces of the Soviet Union, has been endangered for more than a decade as skeptics wondered whether the stealthy, supersonic fighter is necessary and whether the military needs two new fighters instead of just one. Lockheed has struggled with some of the plane's software. Some of the plane's functions, such as the flight-control screen in front of the pilot, have shut down during test flights. Restarting that program can take several minutes. Recently the federal Office of Management and Budget asked for another review of the fighter.
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), ranking minority member of the House Appropriations Committee's subcommittee on defense, said he thinks there is no chance the fighter will be canceled. But there is room for concern.
"I think there is a chance they may not get the number of airplanes they want," Murtha said. The Air Force has already cut the number of planes it plans to order to 277 from about 700, although it says it needs 381. The plane, which was to have been delivered in 1996, is now scheduled for next year.
The Joint Strike Fighter is already expected to cost $7 billion more to develop than had originally been expected. It is expected to be sold widely overseas, but as Lockheed struggles to keep the planes from getting too heavy, the Pentagon decided to delay introduction of the fighter by a year.
While Lockheed dominates the fighter market, its position is not so secure with unmanned aerial vehicles, which many consider the future of military aviation.
It's a market from which Lockheed has been largely absent since 1998, when the Pentagon canceled the company's Dark Star, a high-altitude surveillance drone. The Pentagon is expected to spend almost $2 billion on such technology next year.
The company's only unmanned aerial vehicle is the low-flying Desert Hawk, which is used for surveillance, while Northrop Grumman Corp.'s Global Hawk and the Predator made by General Atomics have been stars of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Lockheed, the premier fighter company, needs to participate in that market," said Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at Teal Group, a defense industry research group.
Coffman is vague about his intentions -- possibly, a spokesman said later, because any plans the company has might be classified. "We obviously want to be a player in the market," Coffman said, not just a subcontractor.
Hanging over Lockheed's business prospects is the question of whether defense spending will decline. Bush's budget doesn't include the $50 billion that many experts expect the Pentagon to need in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Thompson, the defense industry consultant.
The Office of Management and Budget wants to limit the supplemental budget to fund operations in those countries to $30 billion and force the Pentagon to absorb the rest, Thompson said. That would mean cuts in budgets for research, development and procurement, which fuel the defense industry, Thompson said. That could hurt defense contractors, including Lockheed.
-------- haiti
Marines to Protect U.S. Embassy in Haiti
By PAISLEY DODDS
Associated Press Writer
February 23, 2004,
http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-haiti-uprising,0,4857169,print.story?coll=sns-ap-nationworld-headlines
CAP-HAITIEN, Haiti -- Fifty U.S. Marines were headed to Haiti on Monday to protect the American Embassy and diplomats after rebels overran Haiti's second-largest city and began detaining supporters of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
Western diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Marines were requested after rebels threatened to attack the capital, Port-au-Prince, soon.
Two police stations outside Port-au-Prince were attacked Sunday, independent Radio Kiskeya reported, and Aristide supporters began building barricades to protect the city.
The Marines are sending a Fleet Anti-Terrorist Security Team, which usually consists of about 50 troops trained in anti-terrorism techniques, a Defense Department official said on condition of anonymity in Washington. The team is used to secure embassies and other facilities or ships.
In Cap-Haitien, where rebels celebrated their biggest victory of a bloody uprising, a rampage of looting continued Monday as supposed Aristide militants were detained.
"I am a brick mason, I didn't do anything wrong!" Jean-Bernard Prevalis, 33, pleaded as he was dragged away, his head bleeding. Residents alleged he was an Aristide activist and a drug trafficker.
"We're going to clean the city of all 'chimere,'" said rebel Dieusauver Magustin, 26, using the Creole word "ghost" to describe pro-government militants.
It was not clear what would happen to those who were detained. One rebel said they were saving them from lynching. Another, Claudy Philippe, said: "The people show us the (chimere) houses. If they are there, we execute them."
The looting began Sunday, when rebel leader Guy Philippe predicted a quick victory over Aristide's partisans, who had erected flaming barricades on the highway into Port-au-Prince.
"I think that in less than 15 days we will control all of Haiti," Philippe said at a Cap-Haitien hotel as he drank a bottle of beer.
Sources close to the government said several Cabinet ministers in Port-au-Prince were asking friends for places to hide should the capital be attacked by anti-government protesters.
On Monday, France urged its citizens to leave Haiti. "We are convinced that all those who have no purpose for being there should not stay," said Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin on RMC-Info radio. He did not indicate if France had evacuation plans.
There are about 30,000 foreigners in Haiti, including about 20,000 Americans, 2,000 French and 1,000 Canadians.
The political opposition has said it will respond by 5 p.m. Monday to a U.S.-backed peace plan that calls for Aristide to remain president while sharing some power with rivals until new elections are organized.
The Red Cross, meanwhile, is trying urgently to avert a collapse of medical care in Haiti, a senior official said Monday.
"The situation is unraveling very quickly, probably more quickly than anybody would have thought," said Yves Giovannoni, head of operations for Latin America and the Caribbean at the International Committee of the Red Cross.'
ICRC staff are reporting 30-50 people a day injured by the fighting.
After protesters drove police from Cap-Haitien, a city of 500,000 on Haiti's north coast, thousands of people went on a looting spree.
The takeover of Cap-Haitien by about 200 fighters was the most significant advance by Aristide's opponents since the uprising began Feb 5. At least 15 people died in Sunday's fighting.
More than 70 people have been killed since the start of the rebellion.
The two-pronged rebel assault quickly engulfed key points in Cap-Haitien. The police station was burned, then looted, as was a pro-Aristide radio station. Thousands of people rushed to the port and carted off goods.
"We're all hungry," said Jean Luc, 11, who strapped four huge sacks of rice to his bicycle and was trying to pedal it home.
Residents also defaced posters of Aristide, who was wildly popular when he became Haiti's first freely elected leader in 1990 but lost support after flawed legislative elections in 2000 led international donors to freeze millions of dollars in aid.
Opponents accuse him of failing to help those in need in the Western hemisphere's poorest country, allowing corruption and masterminding attacks on opponents by armed gangs. Aristide denies the charges.
The rebels say they have no political agenda beyond ousting Aristide, but the man who started the rebellion, Gonaives gang leader Buteur Metayer, on Thursday declared himself the president of liberated Haiti.
Rebels have driven government forces from half the country. As Cap-Haitien stood on the brink of falling, police were barricaded in their posts, saying they lacked the personnel and firepower to fend off the insurgents.
Many people expressed joy at the rebel victory.
"The people are happy. Finally we're free from terror," said Fifi Jean, 30, as she stood in front of the blazing police headquarters, which was burned after the police fled amid the rebel assault. As night fell, fires broke out in the homes of some Aristide supporters in Cap-Haitien.
As the rebel leader predicted victory, his fighters, clad in camouflage uniforms and black flak jackets, sat by the hotel pool in lounge chairs, drinking beer and eating plates of goat, chicken, rice and beans.
Philippe said he wanted to see Aristide thrown in jail and put on trial, although he did not know what charges the president would face, saying it would be up to Haitian judges.
The rebel leader was an officer in the army when it ousted Aristide in 1991 and instigated a reign of terror that ended in 1994 when the United States sent 20,000 troops to end the military dictatorship and restore the president to power.
In taking Cap-Haitien, rebels said their force only met resistance at the airport, where Philippe said eight civilians loyal to Aristide were killed in a gunbattle. Seven other bodies were seen Sunday in Cap-Haitien.
Aristide supporters commandeered a plane from the airport, and witnesses said those who fled on it included seven police officers and former Aristide lawmaker Nawoum Marcellus, whose Radio Africa had been inciting violence against opponents.
"We came in today and we took Cap-Haitien; tomorrow we take Port-au-Prince," boasted Lucien Estime, a 19-year-old who joined the rebellion from the hamlet of Saint Raphael, south of Cap-Haitien. "Our mission is to liberate Haiti."
The United States blames Aristide for the crisis and has said it does not want to send troops to restore order.
The opposition coalition Democratic Platform insists any plan must include Aristide's resignation.
Aristide accepted the plan, but indicated he would not negotiate with the soldiers who had ousted him in 1991.
-------- iran
Low Turnout Tells Tale of Iranian Vote
Conservative Victory Seen as Wide but Shallow
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62933-2004Feb22?language=printer
TEHRAN, Feb. 23 -- Iran's most troubled election in a quarter-century appeared Monday to have produced a record low turnout, leaving religious conservatives with control of parliament but only a dubious claim of representing a greater share of the population than the 10 percent of Iranians who have traditionally provided their base.
In a country that in three previous elections voted overwhelmingly for reformist candidates who were barred from Friday's ballot, about half of Iran's 46 million eligible voters stayed home, the Interior Ministry said.
State-run media repeatedly said the turnout was 10 points higher, about 60 percent. Officials from the Interior Ministry, which conducted the election, alluded to pressure from hard-liners to doctor reports to reflect a more participatory electorate.
"We have that figure, but we cannot release it to you," said one official, when asked how many ballots were used Friday -- the quickest way to assess turnout. With a tight smile, he explained, "The figure has to be approved by the Guardian Council," the hard-line body that barred reformers from running.
Turnout was the only issue left in suspense here after the 12-member council, which is appointed by Iran's top cleric, refused to allow about 2,400 reformist candidates to appear on the ballot. When outraged activists called for a boycott, the hard-line establishment answered with the full force of the state media monopoly, devoting every channel and radio station to around-the-clock exhortations to join the multitudes shown in crowded scenes of voting that critics called staged.
"This was a major mobilization," said Hossein Rassam, an independent political analyst. "The reality is the conservatives took advantage of this spirit of patriotism among Iranians. They manipulated it and were successful.
"The reformists didn't really have a chance."
The conservative victory appeared wide but shallow. In Tehran, the capital, 30 available seats appeared to be going to conservatives.
But four years ago, when reformers were on the ballot, the total for one candidate surpassed by 100,000 the entire turnout of 1.7 million in the capital on Friday. Mohammad Reza Khatami, the brother of the president and a leading reformer whom the Guardian Council barred along with more than 80 other incumbents, collected 1.8 million votes in that election.
"I don't think this was a great success" for conservatives, Rassam said. "It was very illuminating, because conservatives can now see how many people they really have."
Ballots were still being counted in Tehran early Monday, but the top vote-getter this year appeared to be Gholamali Haddad-Adel, head of the minority caucus for the last four years.
Haddad-Adel headed the slate of candidates advertised as approved by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whose daughter married Haddad-Adel's son.
The slate, dubbed Developers of Islamic Iran, included several former commanders of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps, as well as founders of the Basiji militias, the paramilitary groups that led the bloody charges against student demonstrations during the past few years.
"These are the foreigners' words and you had better avoid them," Haddad-Adel said to an Iranian reporter who used a Sunday news conference to ask about Iran's "closed" political system.
But the new parliament will also include moderates and pragmatic conservatives, as well as independents who line up with the majority. And although the new parliament's leadership appears to be closely aligned with the ruling clerics, some conservative analysts said it would look a lot like the old one and would be dominated by reformers.
"In the new phase we'll try to carry the flag of reform," said Amir Mohebian, editor of Rasalat newspaper and a conservative who has worked hard in recent years to tone down the hard edges of the ruling establishment.
Mohebian said the conservatives who take office in May will attempt to rehabilitate the conservatives' image. He predicted legislation aimed at stimulating Iran's economy, which has been unable to produce jobs for a massive baby boom generation. He also said the conservatives would seek to cooperate with Iran's reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.
Khatami, who has been silent since reluctantly overseeing an election he termed unfair, must step down in 2005. Conservatives hope to take his office and thus dominate every official position in Iran, including the appointed offices that rank above all.
"In the parliament, I think we can improve our image with the public and try to shape a new mentality to help us in the presidential election," Mohebian said.
A leading reform strategist saw a different future.
Mostafa Tajzadeh, a leader of the largest reform party, said the dynamics of the law-making body would be driven by the knowledge that the conservative side won its majority by barring competitors. That will give reformers clout well beyond their numbers, he predicted, citing precedents in at least one previous parliament.
"You've got to pay attention to this fact: The minority members will actually be representing a majority of the population," Tajzadeh said.
That calculation assumes the reformers remain in favor with Iranians. Some prominent reformers have questioned whether the public would still support them after the election. Even before the disqualification controversy clouded the legitimacy of Friday's contest, turnout was expected to be low enough to endanger the reformers. Many Iranians have disengaged from politics after years of stalemate between conservative clerics and reformers who have been scarcely able to reduce the clerics' clout.
Analysts said the coming conservative majority in parliament could end the logjam.
Looming over it all, analysts agreed, was whether the unelected clerics who essentially handpicked the new parliament will empower it to act.
"This is the dilemma the conservatives are continually facing," Tajzadeh said. "The principal question is: Even after they have the elected portion of the state, will they give it any power?"
-------- iraq
Death Toll Among Iraqi Police Rising
Mon Feb 23, 2004
By JOHN J. LUMPKIN,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20040224/ap_on_re_mi_ea/rumsfeld_6
BAGHDAD, Iraq - The number of Iraqi police killed in guerrilla attacks is approaching the number of U.S. soldiers killed during the occupation, evidence of both the Iraqis' increased role and the insurgents' strategy of targeting them, military officials said Monday.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld noted the losses on a visit to Baghdad to review security in the occupied nation. "There have been a lot of Iraqi policemen and women killed in the last six to eight months," he said.
As of Friday, 263 U.S. soldiers had died from hostile action since May 1, when President Bush declared major combat operations over. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the deputy operations director for coalition forces in Iraq, said the number of Iraqi police killed approaches and may have exceeded that figure. He had no precise figure.
American officers in Iraq told Rumsfeld the chief threats to stability in the country, once guerrillas dedicated to restoring to power President Saddam Hussein, is evolving to suicide bombers and other terrorists. Some are homegrown; others are arriving from outside Iraq.
Rumsfeld said Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran, should be pressured to interdict fighters trying to cross into Iraq.
"Syria and Iran have not been helpful to the people of Iraq. Indeed, they've been unhelpful," Rumsfeld said. "They've allowed people to move from their countries to Iraq to engage in terrorist activities against the Iraqi people."
Asked whether those countries' governments were condoning the infiltrators or simply not preventing them, Rumsfeld responded with a litany of criticisms of both countries.
"We know that Iran has harbored al-Qaida," he said, referring to senior operatives who crossed into Iran from Afghanistan more than a year ago, many of whom the Iranians said they captured and deported. "We know they've had people moving across the border. They're certainly aware of that; they have border patrols. We know that Syria has been a hospitable place for escaping Iraqis."
"Let there be no doubt, the powers that be in Syria and Iran are not wishing the free Iraqi people well," Rumsfeld said.
It was not the first time Rumsfeld has accused the two countries of actions that harm U.S. interests in Iraq, although other U.S. officials have said there is little sign of direct Syrian or Iranian meddling. Neither country has had a history of friendship with Iraq, especially under Saddam.
A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said last week the Americans believe that Iran has a presence in Iraq, but it is not threatening and is in line with what would be expected of a neighboring country. U.S. officials do not see the Iranian presence as a threat to the development of democracy in Iraq, the official said. Iraq's majority population belongs to Islam's Shiite sect, the same as Iran's, but the Iranians are of Persian stock, not Arab like the Iraqis.
Rumsfeld's visit to Iraq came as an unidentified bomber blew up a white Oldsmobile outside a police station in Kirkuk in northern Iraq, killing at least 10 people and wounding dozens of others.
The origins of those fighting the insurgency inside Iraq remain murky, particularly the extent of their relationship with the al-Qaida network. Some are thought to be from the native Ansar al-Islam group; others are thought to be supporters of the deposed president, Saddam, who have joined Islamic extremist groups, and others might be from al-Qaida itself.
"We've seen a real step up on the part of these professional terrorists from al-Qaida and Ansar al-Islam conducting suicide attacks," Ambassador Paul Bremer, chief of the Coalition Provisional Authority, told reporters after meeting with Rumsfeld.
The best evidence of terrorist ties is in the nature of the attacks and the tactics and weapons used, Kimmitt said. The suicide bombings and other tactics are similar to those used by al-Qaida and related organizations, Kimmitt said.
U.S. officials say their adversaries are targeting American forces less frequently, turning their weapons against police and civil defense stations and trying to foment interethnic and religious violence.
Kimmitt said the new security agencies, financed by $3.2 billion from the last Iraqi funding bill approved in Congress, do not have the training or equipment to handle many security threats. But U.S. authorities are trying to get them to assume most street patrols quickly.
----
Bremer Says Iraq Interim Constitution on Schedule
Mon Feb 23, 2004
(Reuters)
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20040223/ts_nm/iraq_sovereignty_dc_1
BAGHDAD - Iraq's U.S. governor said on Monday he believed the U.S.-appointed Governing Council would approve by a February 28 deadline an interim constitution crucial to plans to turn power over to Iraqis.
A U.S. plan to return sovereignty to Iraqis on June 30 has been complicated by calls from majority Shi'ite Muslims for elections before the handover, and differences over an interim constitution to guide the body that assumes sovereignty.
Disputes among members of the Governing Council over a proposal for autonomy that Iraqi Kurds want to append to the interim constitution may make it impossible to approve the document on time, council members say.
Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian official in Iraq, told reporters traveling with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to Baghdad that the interim constitution would be ready on time, and that the deadline for handing over power would be met.
"The political transition ... is really gaining quite a lot of momentum now. We're in the process of working with the Governing Council to finish up the transitional law which will finish by Saturday," he said.
"Sovereignty will be returned to a transitional Iraqi government on June 30."
The demands for early elections -- opposed by Iraqi Kurds and Arab Sunni Muslims -- disrupted a plan Washington agreed with the Governing Council to use a complex series of caucuses to pick an interim government that would draft a full constitution and see the country though to elections in 2005.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who sent a team to Iraq earlier this month to judge the feasibility of an early vote, is to make his recommendations on the country's political future later Monday.
French President Jacques Chirac was Monday quoted by a Hungarian newspaper as saying sovereignty should be transferred to the Iraqi people by June 30 and that conditions for a NATO mission to the country were not yet fulfilled.
----
Facts about the rotation of US troops into and out of Iraq
By The Associated Press
02/23/04
http://www.staugustine.com/cgi-bin/printme.pl
# By the time the rotation finishes in May, the Pentagon will have shipped nearly 450,000 tons of equipment to the Iraqi theater and shipped home even more -- 700,000 tons.
# Commanders in Kuwait have anointed several "czars" to oversee thorny details. One commands a fleet of 400 private buses that can be seen on the highways ferrying U.S. troops from airports and seaports to local bases. The "wash rack czar" oversees the 250 car wash stations that scrub and disinfect each military vehicle before it gets shipped back to the United States or Germany. The "bed down czar" makes sure there are cots available for each soldier passing through Kuwait.
# In Iraq, the Army completed the rotation of its two largest logistical units in 10 days, even as those units operated convoys across the region. The Army's 13th Corps Support Command, with about 15,000 members now based north of Baghdad, just replaced the Germany-based 3rd Corps Support Command.
# The military moves its hardware using tracking systems perfected in the corporate world -- satellite tracking beacons and radio frequency identification tags that transmit short-range signals to scanners.
# Rotation sideshows are playing out at Iraq's Persian Gulf port of Umm Qasr, where each of the four outgoing Army divisions will ship about 800 shipping containers; and at the U.S. air base in Incirlik, Turkey, to where thousands of U.S. troops are being flown on their way out. The flights to Incirlik are Turkey's first visible cooperation in the war in Iraq since refusing in March to allow U.S. troops to stage an invasion from Turkish territory.
----
At Least 8 Killed in Bombing Outside Iraqi Police Station
February 23, 2004
New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/international/middleeast/23CND-IRAQ.html?hp
A suicide car bomb exploded at an Iraqi police station in northern Iraq today, killing at least eight Iraqi officers, according to a military spokeswoman.
The attack in the northern city of Kirkuk underlined the problems the Iraqi police and security forces will face when they take over more responsibilities from American soldiers after a transfer of power to Iraqis on June 30. And it came as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld arrived in Baghdad to examine the security problems involved in making the transfer.
Mr. Rumsfeld met today with members of Iraq's new security forces and said that he was impressed with their progress. "We're looking forward to seeing Iraqis take over the responsibility for the security of your country," he told them, according to The Associated Press.
The bombing took place early this morning in the northern city of Kirkuk, when a white car sped through an entrance gate at a police station. The Iraqi police "engaged" the vehicle outside the gate but were unable to stop it, and the car bomb detonated inside the courtyard, said Master Sgt. Sonja Whittington in a telephone interview.
At least 33 Iraqi officers and two Iraqi children were wounded, she said.
"This is another example of them targeting the Iraqi civilians," Sergeant Whittington said, referring to attacks by insurgents.
A police official in the northern city, quoted by Reuters, put the death toll at 13 and said 51 people were wounded.
Insurgents have attacked the United States and coalition forces occupying Iraq, as well as Iraqis who are working with them in the security forces.
An international military presence is to stay in Iraq after the sovereign government comes into power the first of July, but Iraq's interim leaders said on Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.
Mr. Rumsfeld's visit comes after the top American administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, said last week that there were dozens of possibilities of how to transfer authority to the Iraqis, but the one fixed point was the June 30 deadline.
Lakhdar Brahimi, a United Nations special envoy, returned to New York last week from a visit to Iraq after determining that a full election would not be practical for the government that is to take office by June 30.
United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan said there were plans to announce today the report by a United Nations team on the feasibility of elections in Iraq.
"I have studied the team's report and recommendations, and I think the team has laid the groundwork for further progress," Mr. Annan, on a visit to Japan, said in a statement published on the United Nations Web site.
He also stressed the importance of outside support for Iraq. "International cooperation would be essential as we move ahead and help the Iraqi people regain their sovereignty and build a peaceful, democratic and stable Iraq," he said.
--------
Iraqis Say Deal on U.S. Troops Must Be Put Off
February 23, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/international/middleeast/23IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 22 - Iraq's interim leaders said Sunday that they could not negotiate a formal agreement with the American military on maintaining troops in Iraq, and that the task must await the next sovereign Iraqi government.
The delay could put the Americans in the position of negotiating an agreement with leaders they did not appoint on such sensitive issues as when the use of force would be allowed.
It also means that another feature of the agreement of Nov. 15, which set out the steps to sovereignty, will not occur on schedule. Other things falling by the wayside are the approval of an interim constitution, which was supposed to occur by next Saturday, and the now abandoned plan to hold caucuses to pick a transitional assembly.
But the Americans have clung to the final date of handing power to a new Iraqi administration - June 30.
Members of the Iraqi Governing Council, appointed by the Americans in July, said they had reached a consensus that the issue was too momentous to handle without a popular mandate.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the region, recently suggested that the military agreement would not occur according to the original timetable, but he expressed confidence that whatever the new conditions might be, the American military would be treated hospitably. Simply put, no Iraqi government could survive without the American forces, according to American commanders.
Almost underscoring the point, a vehicle bomb detonated outside an Iraqi police station in the northern city of Kirkuk on Monday morning, killing at least six people and wounding at least that many more, Reuters reported, citing police officials. Attacks against police and paramilitary forces working with American troops are common in the city. More than 200 Iraqis have died in similar attacks nationwide this month.
A formal agreement governing American forces in Iraq could touch on many issues, including the number of American troops remaining and their location.
While American troops would still be under American command, such an agreement could limit the circumstances under which the soldiers would be permitted to use force. As a guest rather than an occupying power, the United States would probably have somewhat less leverage than it now has over Iraq's leaders.
"Legally and in every other sense, the new sovereign Iraqi government will have the power to say `Thanks very much, we don't need you, go home,' " said Samir Sumaidy, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council. "That is probably unlikely. But legally we will have the power." One issue of paramount interest to the Americans is legal immunity. American officials have said they want their soldiers to be protected against local prosecution, while some Iraqi officials say they would insist on the right to prosecute American soldiers who break Iraqi laws.
About 105,000 American troops operate inside Iraq, in a coalition authorized by the United Nations.
Spokesmen for both the American military and L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, declined to talk about the Governing Council's decision.
It represents a blow to the accord struck in November between American and Iraqi leaders on the transfer of sovereignty. The pact called for a concord on American troops to be worked out by the end of March.
While the council members have not agreed on a mechanism to choose a new government, a team of experts from the United Nations has visited the country to investigate the issue. It concluded last week that direct, nationwide elections were not feasible before June 30.
On Monday, Secretary General Kofi Annan is expected to give a new report on the question. In the meantime, to garner a broader representation, ideas are afoot to increase the size of the Iraqi Governing Council.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a powerful Shiite leader, has pressed hard for elections soon, despite the insecurity of the nation during a time of insurgency. But an elected body of representatives could prove unpredictable for the Americans.
The views of Ayatollah Sistani, and the politically sensitive American presence, appeared to weigh on the Governing Council's members. Some leaders said they had decided to pass the issue to a future government because they felt they lacked sufficient legitimacy to take such a momentous decision.
"We are not 100 percent accepted by the Iraqi people," said Ghazi M. Ajil al-Yawar, a member of the Governing Council. "We have not been elected. We do not want to draft an agreement that a new government would come in and change anyway."
But Governing Council members made it clear that even if an agreement was reached, the relationship between Iraqis and the American military would change.
"Once sovereignty is transferred, the Americans will be an invited guest," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, a Governing Council member.
Anthony Cordesman, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said negotiations over the status of American troops could prove very delicate.
"You are opening Pandora's box," Mr. Cordesman said. "It is a deeply divided country where no one knows the rules."
General Abizaid said, "It's apparent to all of us that Iraqi security institutions will not be mature enough by July to continue or be able to control the situation through the nation without the help of the coalition forces."
Nearly 250,000 American military personnel serve abroad, and the United States government has formal agreements with 53 of the countries where they operate. But the United States has maintained substantial military forces in some countries without any formal agreement. One example, Mr. Cordesman said, was Saudi Arabia, where the United States military had a significant presence until last year.
Proceeding without any agreement, even after the transfer of sovereignty, seemed to be one option that some members of the Iraqi Governing Council were contemplating.
"Sistani said that if there was an agreement, it had to be approved democratically," Mr. Rubaie said. "But not if there is no agreement."
In any case, Mr. Rubaie said, the political calculus in Iraq suggested that the Americans would be welcomed here for a long time by most of the people.
"No Shiite or Kurd will ask the Americans to leave," Mr. Rubaie said. "They would like them to stay for a long time."
-------- israel
In Hague, Israeli Barrier Proves Divisive Issue
February 23, 2004
By GREGORY CROUCH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/international/europe/23CND-COUR.html?hp
THE HAGUE, Feb. 23 - The Israelis sent grieving parents and the singed shell of a bombed bus. The Palestinians sent farmers cut off from their land.
They have come for an International Court of Justice hearing that started today on a planned 450-mile barrier of ditches, watch posts and concrete walls that Israel is erecting in and around the West Bank. The hearing, expected to last three days, was requested by the United Nations General Assembly, which sought an advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the barrier.
The Israeli government calls the barrier a defense against suicide bombers, an argument it repeated on Sunday when a Palestinian suicide bomber attacked a bus in Jerusalem, killing at least eight other passengers. The Palestinian Authority calls it a deceptive land grab, a violation of international law and a new form of apartheid that further oppresses Palestinians on the West Bank.
"This wall, if completed, will leave the Palestinian people with only half of the West Bank within isolated, non-contiguous, walled enclaves," Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinians' permanent observer to the United Nations, told the 15-judge panel today, according to Reuters.
Officially, Israel contends that the court has no jurisdiction. But symbolically, the hearing has become an important variable that could complicate the stalled Middle East peace talks. A ruling that the barrier is illegal, while nonbinding, could be a public relations disaster for Israel.
The Israeli delegation at The Hague said that the Palestinians were using the court to attack Israel for building a fence that could have saved the lives of those killed in the bombing on Sunday.
"The Palestinian statements to the court today confirmed the concerns of many countries about the one-sided nature of the question before the court," said the Israeli statement, posted on the government's Foreign Affairs Web site.
"It seeks to put Israel's measures to stop terrorism on trial, but not the terrorists themselves," the statement said. "It focuses only on Palestinian quality of life and not on the right of Israelis to life itself; and it stresses only Israeli responsibilities without a word about the responsibilities of the Palestinian side."
Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, a violent offshoot of Yasir Arafat's Fatah faction, claimed responsibility for the bombing attack on Sunday, in a statement that called the Israeli barrier "a Nazi wall."
It released a videotape of the bomber, a 23-year-old man from a village near Bethlehem, and said the attack was in retaliation for the barrier and for an Israeli raid into the Gaza Strip on Feb. 11 that killed 15 Palestinians.
With his security officials, Mr. Arafat, the Palestinian leader, issued a statement on Sunday condemning the attack and promising action "as soon as possible" against those responsible. Israel accuses Mr. Arafat of fomenting, if not directing, such violence.
Today, Palestinians demonstrated in the West Bank against the wall, which Mr. Arafat said was intended to prevent the Palestinians from achieving an independent state, the Palestinian news agency WAFA reported.
"The court is being asked to take one part of the Middle East peace process and resolve it in isolation," said Ruth Wedgwood, a professor of international law at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.
The United States and the European Union have criticized the barrier's planned path, which includes the protection of some Jewish settlements. But they prefer to see a diplomatic rather than a legal solution, a position that is closer to the Israeli view of the hearing.
"This is not the place to solve the conflict," said Gideon Meir, leader of the Israeli delegation in The Hague.
Palestinian representatives disagree. "They have no case," said Mr. Kidwa.
The suicide bombing on Sunday in Jerusalem was a reminder in The Hague that the legal issue before the court is part of a larger struggle.
"Had there been a completed fence today in Jerusalem, we probably would have been able to prevent this terror attack," Mr. Meir said. "It reinforces once again why we need the fence."
Mr. Kidwa condemned the bombing. "Whoever is doing this is not doing it in the interests of the Palestinian people," he said in an interview in The Hague.
The court is to hear Palestinian claims that the barrier violates international treaties guaranteeing freedom of movement and the right to earn a living.
"This is an attempt to de facto annex big areas of the Palestinian territory," Mr. Kidwa said. "This is something that, if allowed to continue, will create a walled-in Palestinian population in two or three enclaves or ghettos."
Israel has challenged the court's jurisdiction in a written submission but has decided not to appear at the hearing. Israel says its only concern is the safety of Israeli citizens.
"We are protecting people, we are not protecting land," Mr. Meir said.
Over the next few days, demonstrations and news conferences are planned by the Palestinian and Israeli sides. ZAKA, the Israeli emergency aid group, has had a bombed-out bus flown in to use as a backdrop.
Two demonstrators here find themselves on opposite sides of the fence, literally and figuratively. Sharif Omar, 60, a fruit farmer and olive grower in Jayyous on the West Bank, said he had been denied access to his land since November because Israeli authorities have not issued him a permit to pass through a crossing point in the barrier. "I can't live without my farm. It's impossible," Mr. Omar said in an interview. "I'll become a beggar because I don't have any other resources."
Arnold Roth, 52, said he came to remind the world that his teenage daughter, Malka, was killed in a suicide bombing in downtown Jerusalem in 2001. He said he was not a political person by nature but the barrier should not be the court's concern.
"As the father of a 15-year-old child who was murdered in cold blood by truly evil people," Mr. Roth said, "I'm not sure anyone can tell me and my society how best to protect our children."
Christine Hauser contributed reporting from New York for this article.
--------
Israelis Back Barrier In Wake of Attacks
Hague Court to Weigh Wall's Effects
By John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62950-2004Feb22?language=printer
JERUSALEM, Feb. 22 -- Hanan Michaeli was standing next to the driver of Egged Bus No. 14 Sunday morning when the world around him exploded.
"I saw the smoke, and there were people jumping out of the windows of the bus into the street," Michaeli, 90, said from his hospital bed, his head heavily bandaged and bloody nicks speckling his face.
"When I got off the bus myself, I looked at it, saw how destroyed it was, and saw that it was like the bus they are sending to Holland," he said. Israel has shipped the wreckage of a bus destroyed in a previous suicide bombing to The Hague, where on Monday the International Court of Justice begins three days of hearings on the 450-mile fence complex Israel is building through and around the West Bank. The bus will be put on public display to show why Israeli officials believe the fence is necessary.
Israeli officials and citizens pointed to Sunday morning's suicide bombing, in which eight people and the bomber were killed and more than 50 passengers and bystanders were injured, as a vivid example of why they must have a fence. Such a barrier, they said, would prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from infiltrating Israel.
"I think that a bus has to be sent to The Hague now -- even the bus from this morning -- so they understand that as they protest the fence, people are dying," said David Ben Hamu, 75, who was sitting in the front row when the explosion occurred. "Somehow these people have to understand the lesson. I almost died this morning because the fence has not been completed."
"In The Hague, they are going to argue that the government doesn't have permission to build the security fence," said Jerusalem's mayor, Uri Lupolianski. "But the question is not of permission, it's of necessity. It's vital that the government protect its own citizens."
For the first day of hearings in The Hague, both sides, but particularly the Israelis, had already planned a series of public demonstrations to bring the horrors of the struggle to the streets of the city.
"The most important court is not the International Court of Justice, it's the court of public opinion," said Gideon Meir, a senior spokesman for Israel's Foreign Ministry, which helped coordinate the activities, although many were paid for by private organizations.
Israeli groups are flying in 927 schoolchildren, each carrying the picture of an Israeli citizen or other person killed in Palestinian attacks. The twisted, burned-out carcass of Egged Bus No. 19 -- blown up by a Palestinian suicide bomber Jan. 29 in Jerusalem less than a mile from Sunday's site, killing 11 passengers and the bomber -- will be on display outside the courthouse. Israeli organizations are planning candlelight vigils, a mock trial of terrorists that will run parallel to the court hearing, and testimonials by 16 survivors of Palestinian attacks and relatives of dead victims.
Several Israelis said they hoped the planned public relations blitz would sway people to their side.
"The case against the fence is merely an excuse for institutionalized anti-Semitism, and everyone knows that," said Meni Mualem, 46, a Jerusalem bakery worker with three children. "I hope that when people look at that bus, they can imagine it full of normal, regular people in the morning rush hour -- people just like them -- and then as the site of a massacre."
Others were not sure that would happen.
"No one in the world agrees with Israel -- that we should build the fence," said Pini Sharon, 32, a Jerusalem jeweler. "No matter how good our public relations is, it is not going to help. The world always has sympathy for the weak, and there is no question who is weak in this story."
Last month, Justice Minister Yosef "Tommy" Lapid said the fence and hearing could make Israel "the South Africa of today" and spark a worldwide anti-Israel campaign that could include economic sanctions and boycotts. His fear was echoed by the Israeli press, and some citizens said they had similar worries.
"I am concerned that what happens in The Hague will turn more people against Israel, and then something bad will happen here as a result of international pressure," said Rachel Cohen, 25, as she watched her two children playing in a Jerusalem shopping mall. "The world needs to know the horrible things that happen here, and if they see what happens firsthand, then they will have to support the fence."
The case was referred to the International Court of Justice in December by the U.N. General Assembly, which asked the panel's 15 judges to determine "the legal consequences" of the fence and wall complex. A decision, which is nonbinding and advisory, could take several months.
Israel is boycotting the actual court hearing and will not send representatives. Instead, it has filed a 130-page document arguing that the court "is not the appropriate forum for discussion of this issue" and does not have jurisdiction in the matter, according to a summary of the filing.
On the Palestinian side, a map expert is scheduled to give a PowerPoint presentation on the impact of Israel's barrier on Palestinians in the West Bank. Several farmers separated from their fields by the barrier and a Palestinian school administrator blocked from her school will describe their experiences to what is expected to be a large gathering of international journalists. Palestinian advocacy groups in The Hague are planning conferences, exhibits and protests to coincide with the court case.
Some Palestinians see the hearing as a futile exercise, saying that because any opinion is merely advisory, it will have little, if any, influence on the construction or location of the barrier.
"For so many years we've been trying to score moral victories, and we need practical ones," said Ali Jerbawi, a political science professor at Ramallah's Birzeit University. "We might get a moral victory, but if they take the decision back to the Security Council and the Americans veto it, we'll be back to square one."
But even if the case accomplishes nothing concrete, said Amin Bardian, a Palestinian butcher who will be on the West Bank side of the fence when it is built through his north Jerusalem neighborhood, the hearing will be worthwhile if it exposes the injustice Palestinians are subjected to and embarrasses Israel on the world stage.
Palestinian officials criticized Israel, the European Union, the United States and other nations for arguing that the court should not get involved in the issue.
"They want to prevent us from violent resistance, so we went to the international court, and now they want to prevent us from using political, legal means" to combat Israel, said Ahmed Ghnaim, a West Bank leader of Yasser Arafat's Fatah political movement. "Someone said, 'You'll lose.' That means peaceful methods mean nothing, or they are the wrong choice."
Staff researchers Hillary Claussen and Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
--------
Peres Lobbies U.S. for End to Settlements
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Mideast.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for Mideast peacemaking efforts, took his campaign for dismantling Jewish settlements to the highest reaches of the Bush administration on Monday.
Peres, at a news conference between meetings with Secretary of State Colin Powell and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, repeated his long-standing belief that the Palestinians want peace with Israel and should be encouraged with territorial concessions on Israel's part.
In fact, he said ``good news'' was emerging all over the world, with Libya pledging to end its nuclear weapons program and Cyprus on a path to settle the island nation's 30-year division.
Peres said he was cheered by the proposals of his longtime political foe, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to withdraw from Gaza and from part of the West Bank without any reciprocal moves by Palestinian leaders. Palestinians are leery of the unilateral Israeli actions, and also believe that a security barrier Israel is building could become a land grab by Israel of Palestinian territory.
The pullback by Israel cannot stop at Sharon's proposals, Peres said. ``Before long it will become a plan'' for a deeper withdrawal from land Israel has occupied since a 1967 war, he said.
Peres was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 jointly with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for the Oslo accords that gave the Palestinians wider control of their lives and of parts of the West Bank and Gaza.
Six years later, the accord crumbled amid violence, and Peres became a focus of criticism. Over 80, Peres continues to push for far-reaching Israeli concessions as a pathway to a Palestinian state that he and President Bush say can live in peace with Israel.
Even with peacemaking virtually nonexistent now, Peres said there is ``a new reality in the Middle East and Sharon has to face it like everyone else.''
``We shouldn't be blind,'' he said of Israelis who remain skeptical of Israel giving up land and the Palestinians setting up a state on it.
Most Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel, he said. But Palestinian leaders must decide ``which camp they want to live in,'' the one of terror or the one of counter-terror, which the former prime minister said is how the world now is divided.
Three U.S. officials met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders last week in the Middle East and reported Friday to Powell and Saturday to Bush on their findings.
The White House and State Department gave no public account of the talks or what the officials found in the region.
--------
Suicide Bomber Kills 8 in Jerusalem
Bus Struck on Eve Of Hearing on Fence
By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62975-2004Feb22.html
JERUSALEM, Feb. 22 -- A suicide bomber detonated explosives aboard a Jerusalem bus during the Sunday morning rush hour in an upscale city neighborhood, killing at least nine people including the bomber, wounding more than 50 others and flinging body parts across streets and into a nearby gasoline station, according to Israeli police officials and witnesses.
Israeli officials said the blast, the second bus bombing in the same area of central Jerusalem in a month, was evidence of the need to build a massive wall and fence complex around and through the West Bank. The blast came on the eve of hearings about the barrier project that start Monday in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
"If anyone had even the slightest doubt as to the necessity of Israel's security fence, those doubts have now disappeared," said David Baker, an official in the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. "Israel continues to be compelled to take the necessary steps to contain the Palestinian campaign of terror directed against our citizens in the hearts of our city, on our buses and in our cafes."
A 23-year-old Palestinian from a village near the West Bank city of Bethlehem reportedly set off the explosives in the midsection of the green Egged No. 14 bus, which was jammed with a standing-room-only load of commuters, students and soldiers at 8:27 a.m. on the first day of the Israeli workweek. Police said the bomb was stuffed with metal scraps from a construction site, which sliced through passengers and severed body parts.
"I felt the earth shaking; it was like an earthquake," said Raed Shweiki, 23, a Palestinian from East Jerusalem who was pumping gas barely a dozen yards from the bus at the Sonol service station next to Liberty Bell Park. "I saw the glass from the windows of the bus flying toward us -- and arms and legs. I ran."
Osama Juaba, 31, another Palestinian attendant who was filling a taxi with diesel at the next pump, said he was splattered with bits of flesh: "I heard a boom, and pieces of flesh flew on me and the taxi."
Palestinian officials condemned the attack, and the Palestinian gas station employees, who were visibly shaken and taken by ambulance to a hospital, cursed the bomber.
Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia, speaking to reporters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, called for "an immediate halt to these actions," which he said gave Israel an excuse to keep building the barrier.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a group associated with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement, asserted responsibility for the attack in a statement faxed to news media in the Palestinian territories and identified the bomber as Mohammed Zaul, the married father of a young son, from the village of Hussan, west of Bethlehem. The statement said the bombing was retaliation for a Feb. 11 Israeli military incursion into Gaza City in which 15 Palestinians were killed and to demonstrate opposition to "the Nazi wall" Israel is constructing.
The Jan. 29 Jerusalem bus bombing that killed 11 passengers and the bomber was also carried out by a Palestinian from the Bethlehem area, about three miles south of Jerusalem. Within six hours of Sunday's attack, Israeli military forces had entered the bomber's village and closed off access to Bethlehem and most surrounding communities, a military spokeswoman and area residents said. The bomber's family emptied their house and small grocery shop of possessions in expectation that Israeli forces would destroy their properties, neighbors said.
Gil Kleiman, a spokesman for Israel's national police, said the attack was the 250th suicide bombing or attempted suicide bombing since the Palestinian uprising against Israel began 41 months ago. It was the 24th bombing in Jerusalem and raised the city's death toll from suicide attacks to at least 170. More than 1,250 people have been injured in the attacks.
The blast occurred at the congested intersection of Emek Rafaim and King David streets on the edge of Jerusalem's sprawling Liberty Bell Park, an area surrounded by hotels and within sight of the walls of the Old City.
The force of the explosion gutted the interior of the bus and left the front windshield dangling like a spider web of cracked glass. On a blustery cold winter day, the blood-smeared street was littered with hats, gloves and scarves as well as purses, books and sheaves of paper.
"I was sitting on the left-hand side of the bus, in the second row with my back to the driver," said Meir Aharon, 69, who was treated for light injuries at Jerusalem's Shaare Tzedek Medical Center. "Suddenly I felt a powerful explosion. My hat and my yarmulke caught fire and blew off my head. I pushed others, and I forced my way off of the bus. I had blood on my face. I heard cries, but I couldn't see anything."
Nir Barkat, a Jerusalem City Council member, was waiting for the red light in the intersection opposite the bus. "I saw the bus blow up with my own eyes," he said. Barkat, his hands and clothes crusted with dried blood, said he ran to the bus: "I had to step on pieces of body parts to get to a little girl in a seat," he said.
Israeli television Channel 2 reported that law enforcement officials believe the bomber may have boarded the bus in an industrial area in southern Jerusalem near the start of the bus route and detonated the explosives a few stops after an Israeli bus security official left the vehicle. A spokesman for the Transportation Ministry declined to comment on the report but said the agency employs 900 security officials who randomly board buses throughout the country to check for bombers.
As of Sunday night, Israeli medical officials had released the identities of five of the eight victims. They were Lior Azulai, 18, a student at the Gymnasia Rehavia high school; Nathaniel Havshush, 20, a staff sergeant in the Israel Defense Forces; Benayahu Jonathan Zuckerman, 18, a student at the Experimental School of Jerusalem; Yehuda Haim, 48, a store owner from Givat Zeev; and Yuval Ozana, 32, a Jerusalem resident.
Delegates to a meeting of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations streamed out of their hotel about a block away from the explosion site.
"You see pieces of bloody flesh in front of you blown 50 feet from the bus," U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said after viewing the carnage. "These were just people trying to go to work and school. It's disgusting the Palestinians are waging war against civilians."
Researchers Hillary Claussen and Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.
-------- nato
Drifting NATO Finds New Purpose With Afghanistan and Iraq
February 23, 2004
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/international/europe/23NATO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
BRUSSELS, Feb. 19 - NATO is back.
The much maligned cold war military alliance lost its mission when its primordial enemy, the Soviet Union, collapsed, was ridiculed by this Bush administration and was rendered impotent by its own divisions over the American-led war on Iraq.
Only 17 months ago, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld lectured NATO defense ministers in Warsaw that if NATO did not transform itself, "it will not have much to offer the world in the 21st century."
Now, the Bush administration is desperate to reduce its military presence and vulnerability in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is turning to NATO to expand the alliance's mandate in Afghanistan and play a substantive role in Iraq.
"I believe in NATO," President Bush told Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the new NATO secretary general, when the two met in the Oval Office last month, according to senior NATO officials. "I believe NATO is transforming itself and adjusting to meet the true threats of the 21st century."
When Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, a former Dutch foreign minister, pledged to work to get NATO to do more in Afghanistan, Mr. Bush replied, "I'm with you." When the conversation turned to Iraq, Mr. Bush said, "The more of a NATO role the better."
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer, who was the Bush administration's choice to lead NATO, came home to Europe and pitched the new line. At a speech in Brussels on Tuesday, he said the alliance was willing to deploy forces in Iraq.
"Under the right conditions we could do it," Mr. de Hoop Scheffer told the German Marshall Fund's Trans-Atlantic Center. If a sovereign Iraqi government with United Nations backing were to ask for NATO's help, it would difficult to "abrogate our responsibilities," he added.
Until NATO took command of the force that polices the Afghan capital, Kabul, and the area around it, the organization was in the midst of an identity crisis, uncertain of its role, its future and what constituted a military threat in the post-9/11 era. Its mission in stabilizing Afghanistan represents NATO's first "out of area" mission beyond Europe; Iraq would be the second.
NATO's mission has become so broadly defined that Mr. de Hoop Scheffer announced during a trip to Greece on Thursday that NATO would help with security during the Olympics there in August.
In Afghanistan, the United States is pushing NATO to deliver on an ambitious plan to extend its peacekeeping presence beyond Kabul and create links with the American-led offensive military operation in the south that is struggling to rout the remnants of Taliban rule.
Washington also wants NATO to take command of the vulnerable 9,500-member multinational brigade in central Iraq, which is currently run by Poland, and possibly the larger British-led operation in the south.
The goal is for NATO to make a headline-grabbing commitment to both missions at the NATO summit meeting in Istanbul, just days before the transfer of sovereignty to the Iraqis at the end of June and five months before the United States presidential election.
The problem in expanding NATO into Iraq is that it already has failed to persuade its members to do enough in Afghanistan.
In the four months since the United Nations authorized NATO to expand its peacekeeping mission of about 6,000 beyond Kabul, the alliance has managed to send only a few hundred troops under German command to the relatively safe northern city of Kunduz.
It took months of high-level arm-twisting of NATO members last year to get them to pledge crucial helicopters to Afghanistan.
Lord Robertson, the former secretary general, was forced to lobby hard for the helicopters at the NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels and at every farewell meeting as he completed his term in December, finally getting commitments of three Black Hawk helicopters from Turkey and at least three more from the Netherlands.
"Lord Robertson had to use everything he had to bludgeon the foreign and defense ministers into committing helicopters," said Robert Bell, a former White House and senior NATO official who is now a private defense consultant in Brussels. "NATO can't operate that way."
Gen. James L. Jones, NATO's top military commander in Europe, told a Senate committee last month that Afghanistan was a "defining moment" for the alliance as it adopted a broader global agenda, but complained that NATO members were not providing enough troops for the country's reconstruction.
"The alliance has agreed, the donor countries have been identified and yet we find ourselves mired in the administrative details of who's going to pay for it, who's going to transport it, how's it going to be maintained," he said.
On Wednesday, General Jones presented NATO members with a wish list of what he felt was needed to enable NATO to deploy forces in five provincial cities, senior NATO officials said.
The goal of the planning, which he is hoping to complete in the next few weeks, is to find countries willing to supply forward operating forces, aircraft, logistical and intelligence support and communications.
Mr. de Hoop Scheffer has also acknowledged his failure so far to persuade NATO nations to send more troops to Afghanistan, saying on Tuesday that force protection was a continuing problem. No legislator in any NATO country would approve the new request for troops if there was not an answer to the question of "who will come to the assistance" of the troops "in extreme circumstances," he said.
On the positive side, France, whose opposition to the war in Iraq damaged its relationship with Washington, sees NATO as a vehicle for it to project its own military and political power and repair its American ties.
In recent weeks the United States has quietly welcomed two French one-star generals onto NATO's command, one at alliance headquarters in Mons, Belgium, the other in Norfolk, Va.
General Jones pushed hard for the administration to grant the French request that the two generals be placed, but the issue was so divisive that Mr. Bush himself had to make the final decision, according to NATO officials.
France has not been part of NATO's military command structure since de Gaulle, on a campaign to assert France's military autonomy, withdrew from it in 1966. Now, with about 2,000 troops in the first rotation of the 6,000-troop NATO Response Force, France is the force's largest contributor of troops.
A picture-perfect opportunity for President Bush to patch up differences with President Jacques Chirac of France and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany will come with the 60th anniversary of D-Day on June 6.
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, has recommended that he accept Mr. Chirac's offer to dine at Élysée Palace the night before and visit the Normandy beaches together, but Mr. Bush has not formally accepted, senior administration and French officials said.
Senior American and French officials have said privately in recent weeks that Mr. Bush has no choice but to accept, given the historic importance of the event.
They also noted that a photo of Mr. Bush standing side by side in Normandy with Mr. Chirac and Mr. Schröder could help deflect charges by the Democrats that he has squandered good relations with two of America's closest and most important allies.
-------- pakistan / india
Pakistani Offensive Aims to Drive Out Taliban and Al Qaeda
February 23, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE and CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/international/asia/23TRIB.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 22 - Pakistan is preparing for a major military offensive against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces along its border with Afghanistan in the next several weeks, Pakistani government officials said this weekend.
The operation may be the first act of a violent, and potentially pivotal, spring season along the mountainous border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to Western diplomats, Pakistani military experts and American military officials.
American military officials said they expected Taliban and Qaeda fighters to try to disrupt national elections scheduled for June in Afghanistan. American and Pakistani officials said they would step up their efforts to gain control of the rugged border region, the area where they believe the fugitive Qaeda leader, Osama bin Laden, is hiding.
Pakistani officials denied recent news reports that the whereabouts of Mr. bin Laden and his deputy, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, had been narrowed down to an area of several dozen square miles. Instead, they said the planned offensive was part of a calculated, step-by-step campaign to drive Qaeda members over the border to where American forces would be waiting for them.
"There has certainly been pressure building up on Al Qaeda and their tribal supporters," a senior Pakistani official said Saturday. "They are on the run and we will not let this momentum peter out."
Muhammad Azam Khan, the top Pakistan government official in the South Waziristan tribal agency, said he had requested a steep increase in the number of Pakistani troops in the area - to 12,000 from 4,000. Hundreds of Qaeda members, including Chechen and Uzbek fighters, are thought to be hiding in the border area and mounting attacks on American forces in nearby Afghanistan.
"We are waiting for the troops to come," Mr. Khan said in an telephone interview Sunday. "Ours is a large area that requires a large number of troops."
Last Tuesday, the commander of the American-led forces in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, told reporters that American and Pakistani forces were trying to work together like a "hammer and anvil" to trap and destroy Taliban and Qaeda forces.
Lt. Col. Matthew P. Beevers, director of public affairs for coalition forces in Afghanistan, said Saturday the new tactics included having small groups of soldiers deployed to villages for days at a time. By distributing aid and becoming a more permanent presence, American officials hope to gain the trust of Afghans and collect better intelligence. In the past, large groups of American forces carried out vast offensives and sweeps, and then returned to their bases.
"We are using small units much more than big-scale offensive operations," Colonel Beevers said.
Afghan officials and Western diplomats in Kabul said they were now, finally, getting "full cooperation" from Pakistani forces along the border. Since the fall of the Taliban in December 2001, Afghan officials had complained that Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, was not making a serious effort to crack down on Taliban fugitives.
In recent weeks, however, there has also been a sharp shift in General Musharraf's public statements. After months of playing down the presence of Qaeda and Taliban fighters on the Pakistan side of the border, he has repeatedly stated in speeches that Qaeda members are in Pakistan and must be eradicated. He has also promised that militants who surrender to the Pakistan authorities will not be handed over to the United States.
"I am fully confident that we will combat them," General Musharraf said in a speech to Islamic scholars last Wednesday, referring to foreign militants who he said misused Pakistan territory to advance their own agenda, state-run media reported.
A Western diplomat and senior Afghan official in Kabul, as well as a leading Pakistani military expert and senior Pentagon officials, said the shift occurred after General Musharraf was nearly assassinated by suicide bombers on Dec. 25.
Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani military expert, said the militants, whom the Pakistan Army covertly backed in the past, were now directly challenging the military, which has dominated the country for decades.
"These groups are challenging the army," Mr. Rizvi said. "And the army never likes to let the initiative slip out of their hands."
Pakistani military officials dismissed those explanations and insisted that they had always aggressively tracked Qaeda and Taliban members. They point out that General Musharraf brought the army into the tribal areas in 2001 for the first time in Pakistan history and that Pakistani forces have arrested 500 suspected Qaeda members. Afghan and Western critics, for their part, point out that nearly all those arrested were low-level Qaeda members, and that few senior Taliban have been apprehended in Pakistan.
On Sunday, Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the Pakistan Army's chief spokesman, denied reports from Kabul that coalition forces were now able to enter Pakistan in "hot pursuit" of militants. He also played down talk of an offensive and declined to describe troop movements.
"The president has said many times where we will carry out an operation whenever it is necessary," General Sultan said.
Preparations for a new offensive are being made two months after Pakistan adopted a harsh, British colonial-era tactic of collective responsibility in the tribal areas.
Under this system, Pakistani officials massed troops in South Waziristan and handed tribal leaders a list of Pakistani men suspected of sheltering Qaeda members. If the tribe did not hand over the men, the entire tribe would be punished. The houses of the wanted men would be destroyed, state spending in the area would be cut and, if necessary, tribal members would be detained until the men surrendered.
In recent days, Pakistani officials said the tactic had not produced the desired results. Tribes have handed over only 48 of 82 wanted men, all low-level figures who lack the information Pakistani officials want.
David Rohde reported from Islamabad, Pakistan, for this article and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan. Mohammed Khan contributed reporting from Peshawar, Pakistan.
--------
Pakistan to Step Up Border Operations
With U.S. Help, Army Preparing Major Assault Against Taliban, Al Qaeda
By John Lancaster and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62564-2004Feb22.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Feb. 22 -- Under heavy pressure from the United States, Pakistani army and paramilitary troops are preparing for a major new assault against al Qaeda and Taliban remnants in the rugged border region of Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, two senior Pakistani officials said Sunday.
Pakistan has launched such operations before, but this one will rely heavily on U.S.-supplied intelligence and will be closely coordinated with U.S. forces operating just across the border in Afghanistan, the officials said. The area has long been a focal point of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri.
"Pakistan army contingents are ready to coordinate an expected American sweep against terrorist hide-outs along Afghanistan's border with Pakistan," a senior Pakistani intelligence official said on condition of anonymity. "The decision on the timing of this operation is with the Americans."
In a related development, troops from Pakistan's paramilitary Frontier Corps are preparing to launch a "cordon-and-search" operation aimed at flushing out al Qaeda fugitives in South Waziristan, one of seven semi-autonomous tribal "agencies" along the border with Afghanistan, according to Mohammad Azam Khan, who administers South Waziristan on behalf of the federal government.
On Friday, local authorities warned that tribesmen found to be sheltering such fugitives would be imprisoned for seven years and their tribes fined about $17,800 under a colonial-era doctrine of "collective responsibility," Khan said in a telephone interview from the agency capital of Wana.
"It's a mopping-up job," said Khan, who estimated that there are "dozens" of al Qaeda fugitives in South Waziristan.
Over the last two years, Pakistan has deployed about 50,000 troops along its mountainous 1,400-mile border with Afghanistan as part of a nationwide dragnet that has captured about 500 al Qaeda fugitives since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States.
But as the hunt for bin Laden has dragged on and Taliban fighters operating from the border region have stepped up their attacks on U.S. and Afghan forces in southeastern Afghanistan, the United States has increased the pressure on Pakistan to do more. Now those efforts appear to be paying off.
In a speech to religious leaders last week, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan's president, urged tribal leaders in the border area to hand over al Qaeda and Taliban fighters seeking shelter there. He warned that if Pakistani forces fail to secure the area, "there is a real threat" that U.S. forces could violate Pakistan's sovereignty and attack "Pakistani areas being used to launch terrorism in Afghanistan."
As an incentive, Musharraf said that tribesmen found to be harboring foreign militants "will not be handed over to any other country."
The Pakistani military has traditionally steered clear of the tribal areas, where support for the Taliban and al Qaeda is strong, especially among the ethnically homogeneous Pashtun population that straddles the border. Since January 2002, when Pakistani forces first ventured into the area, about 40 soldiers have been killed in clashes with Taliban and al Qaeda fighters. Lt. Gen. David Barno, the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, last week praised Pakistan for invigorating operations that "show the greatest promise we have seen in a while."
The forthcoming operation, Pakistani security officials said, will focus on a broad swath of territory in the North-West Frontier Province that includes the tribal areas of South Waziristan, North Waziristan, Mohmand Agency, Khyber Agency and Orakzai Agency. Another tribal agency in the province, Kurram, which is dominated by members of the minority Shiite Muslim population, is not thought to be especially hospitable to al Qaeda because of the network's Sunni extremism.
South Waziristan has been the focus of considerable activity since early January, when local authorities demanded that tribal elders hand over 82 tribesmen suspected of harboring foreign fighters. The ultimatum proved effective: Over the last 25 days, 49 of the tribesmen have been taken into custody, said Khan, the agency administrator. Six homes belonging to the suspect tribesmen were demolished.
Paramilitary forces backed by army troops soon will begin search operations in the area on the basis of "real-time intelligence" on the whereabouts of foreign fighters and their local hosts, Khan said.
Khan reported from Karachi.
--------
Pakistan to Test Fire Long - Range Missile
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Missile-Test.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan will test fire a long-range missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, a government official said Monday.
Foreign Minister Khursheed Kasuri declined to specify when the test would take place or the range of the Shaheen series missile.
The announcement comes less than a week after Pakistan and India agreed to resume peace talks. The South Asian nuclear rivals nearly went to war in 2002 over the disputed border region of Kashmir, the source of two of three previous wars between them.
In an apparent effort to allay Indian fears, Kasuri reiterated the government's public position that its missile development program was for defense only.
Pakistan routinely conducts missile tests.
Last year, it test fired the Shaheen 1, which has a range of about 440 miles, putting India's capital, New Delhi, in range.
-------- space
U.S. Air Force Plans for Future War in Space
Sun Feb 22, 2004
By Leonard David Senior Space Writer,
SPACE.com
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=96&ncid=753&e=10&u=/space/20040222/sc_space/usairforceplansforfuturewarinspace
The U.S. Air Force has filed a futuristic flight plan, one that spells out need for an armada of space weaponry and technology for the near-term and in years to come.
Called the Transformation Flight Plan, the 176-page document offers a sweeping look at how best to expand America's military space tool kit.
The use of space is highlighted throughout the report, with the document stating that space superiority combines the following three capabilities: protect space assets, deny adversaries' access to space, and quickly launch vehicles and operate payloads into space to quickly replace space assets that fail or are damaged/destroyed.
From space global laser engagement, air launched anti-satellite missiles, to space-based radio frequency energy weapons and hypervelocity rod bundles heaved down to Earth from space the U.S. Air Force flight plan portrays how valued space operations has become for the warfighter and in protecting the nation from chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high explosive attack.
Now to far-term needs
A number of space-related transformational capabilities are described in the document. While some of these are seen as needed in the near-term (until 2010), others are described as mid-term efforts in 2010-2015, while some efforts are viewed as far-term, beyond 2015.
Among a roster of projected Air Force space projects:
- Air-Launched Anti-Satellite Missile
- : Small air-launched missile capable of intercepting satellites in low Earth orbit and seen as a past 2015 development. Counter Satellite Communications System:
- Provides the capability by 2010 to deny and disrupt an adversary's space-based communications and early warning. Counter Surveillance and Reconnaissance System:
- A near-term program to deny, disrupt and degrade adversary space-based surveillance and reconnaissance systems. Evolutionary Air and Space Global Laser Engagement (EAGLE) Airship Relay Mirrors:
- Significantly extends the range of both the Airborne Laser and Ground-Based Laser by using airborne, terrestrial or space-based lasers in conjunction with space-based relay mirrors to project different laser powers and frequencies to achieve a broad range of effects from illumination to destruction. Ground-Based Laser:
- Propagates laser beams through the atmosphere to Low-Earth Orbit satellites to provide robust, post-2015 defensive and offensive space control capability. Hypervelocity Rod Bundles:
- Provides the capability to strike ground targets anywhere in the world from space. Orbital Deep Space Imager:
- A mid-term predictive, near-real time common operating picture of space to enable space control operations. Orbital Transfer Vehicle:
- Significantly adds flexibility and protection of U.S. space hardware in post-2015 while enabling on-orbit servicing of those assets. Rapid Attack Identification Detection and Reporting System
- : A family of systems that will provide near-term capability to automatically identify when a space system is under attack. Space-Based Radio Frequency Energy Weapon
- : A far-term constellation of satellites containing high-power radio-frequency transmitters that possess the capability to disrupt/destroy/disable a wide variety of electronics and national-level command and control systems. It would typically be used as a non-kinetic anti-satellite weapon. Space-Based Space Surveillance System:
A near-term constellation of optical sensing satellites to track and identify space forces in deep space to enable offensive and defensive counterspace operations.
Rapid launch needs
The newly issued Air Force document makes the following point: "The U.S. space capability rests on the foundation of assured access." There is need to deploy, replenish, sustain, and redeploy space-based forces in minimum time to allow them to accomplish the missions assigned to them - through all phases of conflict.
In this regard, the Air Force is exploring various future system concepts to launch, operate, and maintain space assets responsively. These include the Air Launch System, a dedicated, all azimuth, weather avoiding, on-demand (within 48 hours) system capable of lofting a Space Maneuver Vehicle, Common Aero Vehicle, or a Conventional Payload.
As explained in the Air Force document, a Space Operations Vehicle (SOV) enables an on-demand spacelift capability with rapid turnaround. This SOV can be one of the vehicles that could deploy the Space Maneuver vehicle a rapidly reusable orbital vehicle capable of executing a range of space control missions. In addition, the SOV can be utilized to deploy the Common Aero Vehicle, or CAV.
The CAV is an unpowered, maneuverable, hypersonic glide vehicle deployed in the 2010-2015 time period. The CAV could be delivered by a range of delivery vehicles such as an expendable or reusable small launch vehicle to a fully reusable Space Operations Vehicle. It can guide and dispense conventional weapons, sensors or other payloads world wide from and through space within one hour of tasking. It would be able to strike a spectrum of targets, including mobile targets, mobile time sensitive targets, strategic relocatable targets, or fixed hard and deeply buried targets. The CAV's speed and maneuverability would combine to make defenses against it extremely difficult.
Directed energy beams
Given the growing number of nations that utilize space, Air Force strategists see that trend as worrisome.
"The ability to deny an adversary's access to space services is essential so that future adversaries will be unable to exploit space in the same way the United States and its allies can. It will require full spectrum, sea, air, land, and space-based offensive counterspace systems capable of preventing unauthorized use of friendly space services and negating adversarial space capabilities from low Earth up to geosynchronous orbits.
The focus, when practical, will be on denying adversary access to space on a temporary and reversible basis," the document states.
Air Force scientists and technologists are busy in the labs exploring the possibility of putting a warning energy "spot" on any target worldwide that could be rapidly followed with varying levels of effects.
A possible breakthrough, the document adds, deals with a solid-state directed energy beam systems, operating at 100-kilowatt levels. "If the generation of large quantities of heat could be managed, the Air Force could develop highly effective, cheap, high power energy weapons."
For example, Air Force researchers are looking at ways to collect or generate large quantities of energy on orbit in order to rely on space-based platforms for more missions and provide a greater degree of true global presence. "This would change many equations about traditional ideas of rapid response," the document explains.
Sensor-to-shooter
The report emphasizes that space capabilities are integral to modern war fighting forces, providing critical surveillance and reconnaissance information, especially over areas of high risk or denied access for airborne craft.
Space capabilities also provide weather and other Earth observation data, global communications, precision position, navigation, and timing to troops on the ground, ships at sea, aircraft in flight, and weapons en route to targets.
Space assets are critical to achieving information superiority as they enable predictive and dominant battlespace awareness. As a result there can be a reduction in the "sensor-to-shooter" cycle to minutes or even seconds, the document explains.
Real-time picture of the battlespace would involve an initial space-based Ground Moving Target Indicator capability.
This capacity provides U.S. global strike forces with the ability to identify and track moving targets anywhere on the surface of the Earth. Also desirable is the ability to detect, locate, identify, and track a wide range of strategic and tactical targets that the United States currently has minimal capability to detect. These include weapons of mass destruction, hidden targets, and air moving targets.
A real-time picture of the battlespace enables a commander to know where all friendly forces are, not only to better coordinate operations and avoid fratricide -- accidentally injuring or killing your own troops.
Roadmap to the future
In a February 17 press statement issued from the office of the Secretary of the Air Force, the public document on Air Force transformation is described as "a roadmap to the future".
The Air Force flight plan is a reporting document that enables the Secretary of Defense to evaluate and interpret the Air Force's progress toward transformation.
"Transformation is using new things and old things in new ways, and achieving truly transformational effects for the joint warfighter," said Lt. Gen. Duncan McNabb, Air Force director of plans and programs.
The newly issued, publicly releasable report is the one unclassified document that presents an overarching picture of Air Force transformation, added Lt. Col. James McCaw, from the plans and programs directorate's transformation branch.
"It will help the reader understand where the Air Force is going, and why we chose this path," McCaw concluded.
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US still funding powerful data mining tools
Total Information Awareness projects transferred to other agencies.
February 23, 2004,
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0223/dailyUpdate.html
The Associated Press reports that the US government is still financing research to create powerful software tools that could mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists, despite last year's controversy over how easily and how often the software might implicate people who have nothing to do with terrorism.
Although Congress eliminated funding for the original project, known as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program and run by Iran-Contragate figure retired Adm. John Poindexter, AP reports, lawmakers left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known US government office called Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) that has used some of the same researchers as Mr. Poindexter's program. ARDA, is so secretive it's not listed in the 684-page official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices, reports Tech Central. ARDA researches and develops computer software and equipment to "intercept and analyze foreign intelligence that is transmitted electronically - and to protect the US methods used to obtain and communicate it."
"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by US intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."
Earlier this month, Wired News reported that the US Defense Department's research arm, Darpa canceled its so-called LifeLog project, which was designed to build a database that could track a person's entire existence. The program's supporters said LifeLog would have created a near-perfect digital memory/profile, giving its users computerized assistants with an almost flawless recall of what they had done in the past. But civil libertarians jumped on the project, saying it could turn into the "ultimate tool for profiling potential enemies of the state."
"I've always thought (LifeLog) would be the third program (after TIA and FutureMap) that could raise eyebrows if they didn't make it clear how privacy concerns would be met," said Peter Harsha, director of government affairs for the Computing Research Association. "Darpa's pretty gun-shy now," added Lee Tien, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been critical of many agency efforts. "After TIA, they discovered they weren't ready to deal with the firestorm of criticism."
WiredNews also reports, however, that the Pentagon research will likely be funded under some other title. "I can't imagine Darpa 'dropping out' of such a key research area," says David Karger of MIT.
The Daily Yomiuri of Japan outlines all the various database models that the Pentagon and others would like to create in order to target terrorists.
And another controversial database is Matrix, which is short for Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange. AP reports that by combining state records with databases owned by Seisint Inc., a private company, Matrix details the property, boats and Internet domains people own, their address history, utility connections, bankruptcies, liens and business filings, according to an August report by the Georgia state Office of Homeland Security. The St. Petersburg Times reports that Matrix is being further developed with a $4-million grant from the Justice Department and the promise of another $8-million from the Department of Homeland Security. Matrix is supposed to search behavior patterns to look for indications of criminal behavior.
Matrix is currently being used by states such as Florida and New York, and is funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. But AP reports that privacy advocates at the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) argue that Matrix is a very ominous piece of technology.
"This is a major program with very large ambitions, and it needs to be publicly examined. We shouldn't be forced to read tea leaves," said Barry Steinhardt, who heads the ACLU's technology and liberty program ... "This is the state version of TIA," Steinhardt said, referring to the Pentagon's Terrorism Information Awareness program, which was shelved last year after a public uproar and a Congressional inquiry.
The TIA aimed to spot patterns in a much bigger pool of data than Matrix possesses, reports AP, and people involved in Matrix at Seisint Inc. reject any comparison. They say Matrix is not a surveillance tool, but rather a revved-up search engine.
Meanwhile, United Press International reports that the Department of Homeland Security's privacy commissioner, Nuala O'Conner Kelly, says that employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) acted "outside the spirit of the Privacy Act," in 2002 when they facilitated the transfer of 1.5 million passenger records from the budget airline JetBlue to a defense contractor, but did not break the law, according to the official Kelly report published Friday.
Ms. Kelly found that there was "no violation of the Privacy Act because no data was brought into the control of the Transportation Security Administration." She did tell reporters, however, that without the efforts of six TSA employees, the records would not have been transferred. Kelly did not comment if any other agency had violated the Privacy Act.
The controversy started when Torch Concepts approached the Pentagon in October 2001 and offered to try and develop data mining and analysis techniques to detect potential terrorists by sifting large numbers of personal records, according to UPI. In April 2002, with the assistance of the TSA officials, Torch received data on 1.5 million JetBlue passengers. "There certainly appears to have been a breach of the Privacy Act," said Lara Flint, staff counsel to the Center for Democracy and Technology $#8211; a privacy and civil rights pressure group. "There should have been a notice (of creation of a system of records) published." Information Week reports that the US Senate has also launched an investigation into the role TSA played in compelling JetBlue to provide Torch Concepts with the passenger information.
Kelly's report about the way the TSA handled the personal information of passengers will not help create any more confidence in the Department of Homeland Security's controversial plan to launch its Computer Assisted Passenger Pre-Screening program, known as CAPPS II. CAPPS is designed to help identify air passenger security risks. But a recent report from Congress's General Accounting Office says that CAPPS has a long way to go to meet Congressional mandates that protect privacy and ensure data accuracy. CAPPS failed seven of eight requirements that Congress had mandated before the program can be provided with any more federal money.
A recent survey, the Government Privacy Trust Survey, showed that many Americans don't trust agencies like the Department of Justice, the CIA or Office of the Attorney General with protecting their privacy. But the study's authors said that doesn't mean these agencies are doing anything wrong, but that they need to do a better job of letting people know about the privacy protections that are currently in place.
• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Tom Regan.
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MI5 recruitment drive will focus on Asians
By Kim Sengupta
UK Independent
23 February 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=494205
The counter-intelligence agency MI5 is to focus on Britain's Asian community as it recruits 1,000 more staff in a bid to combat Islamic terrorism.
But MI5 chiefs acknowledge that they face intense competition from private companies and other government agencies for Arabic speakers. Last year 9 per cent of MI5's 250 recruits came from ethnic minorities.
The service's starting salary for graduates is between £20,100 and £21,000, with extra for skills such as languages. Private security firms and financial concerns with Middle Eastern interests can offer higher salaries.
Recruits with ethnic backgrounds are also wanted by MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service), the listening post GCHQ, and the armed forces.
MI5 and MI6 need not only Arabic speakers but also those with a command of specific dialects. Terror groups are said to have become increasingly active in rooting out infiltration by government agents.
As well as linguists for G branch, which deals with international terrorism, the new recruits are likely to be earmarked for A4, the surveillance section, and T branch, which provides security.
The director general of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, warned the Home Secretary, David Blunkett, in November that her service was having difficulty coping with the rise in Islamic terrorism as a result of inadequate resources.
The increase in MI5's numbers - due to be announced by Mr Blunkett on Wednesday - will bring staffing up to 3,000, around the level it was at during the Second World War.
Mr Blunkett will tell MPs that Britain remains in a state of emergency because of the continuing threat of attacks, including suicide bombings, from al-Qa'ida. He is also expected to announce plans for new laws to counter terrorism, including the holding of some trials in secret, lowering the burden of proof for the prosecution to obtain convictions and allowing the use in court of evidence obtained from telephone tapping.
The annual budget for MI5 is secret, but is believed to be £200m. MI6 is said to account for £250m and GCHQ £450m.
Patrick Mercer MP, the Conservative homeland security spokesman, welcomed the announcement, but asked: "Why on earth has it taken them so long? We have been asking for extra resources for the intelligence agencies for over two years."
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CIA Chief, Pakistan Discussed Bin Laden
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Military-Operation.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- The head of the CIA discussed the hunt for Osama bin Laden as well as ways to fight nuclear proliferation during a visit to Pakistan this month, senior government officials said Monday.
``Both sides shared views and information,'' an intelligence official, familiar with the talks between CIA Director George Tenet and Pakistani intelligence officials, told The Associated Press. He spoke on condition of anonymity.
The U.S. Embassy in Islamabad declined to comment and the Foreign Ministry refused to confirm that Tenet had visited.
The meetings came just days after the father of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, acknowledged leaking nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran. News of the scope of Khan's activities has caused worldwide alarm and embarrassed this South Asian country.
Tenet discussed the implications of the nuclear black market with Pakistani intelligence officials, the official said.
President Gen. Pervez Musharraf pardoned Khan on Feb. 5, following his confession. Washington has said the pardon was an internal Pakistani decision, and that it was most concerned with shutting down Khan's network.
Tenet's visit came more than a week before Pakistan began pouring troops into its remote tribal regions in an operation to round up al-Qaida suspects. Bin Laden is believed to be hiding in the region along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
Paramilitary forces in recent days have boosted security in the lawless border region, in Pakistan's ultra-conservative North West Frontier Province. But authorities insist bin Laden is not the military's immediate target.
Still, troops have stepped up patrols in the rugged area, placing heavy guns on key roads and taking positions in sandbagged bunkers in the key town of Wana in tribal South Waziristan.
``I cannot tell you about the exact timing or place of the operation, but it will start very soon,'' said Mohammed Azam Khan, a local government official.
Khan said that all those suspected of being ``foreign terrorists'' will be arrested.
``Tribal elders have given us an assurances that no foreign national is now living in their areas, but still we want to satisfy ourselves,'' he said. ``A house-to-house search will be conducted.''
The operation is the fourth of its kind since the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in the United States. It will center on suspected Taliban and al-Qaida men who authorities believe have married Pakistani women and are living in the tribal areas.
Pakistan has been a key ally of the United States in its war on terror, and Pakistani security forces have captured more than 500 suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fugitives since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Among the captured are key figures in bin Laden's terrorist network.
Musharraf escaped two assassination attempts in December which he blamed on al-Qaida. The government has provided no evidence to support his claim.
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Analysis U.S., U.N. Play 'After You' Game on Iraq
World Body's Input Sought on Transfer of Power as Obstacles Hinder a Solution
By Robin Wright and Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62932-2004Feb22.html
The United States and the United Nations are struggling to come up with a new plan to hand over power in Iraq -- and each would now like the other to take the lead in designing it.
Formulating a new plan is proving to be much harder than it was 10 months ago immediately after former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was toppled -- and before new Iraqi leaders and power blocs emerged. As a result of the changing political dynamics, virtually every option on the table is now vulnerable to opposition or failure to unite a disparate society, leaving Iraq susceptible to internal strife after the occupation ends on June 30, U.S. officials concede.
The Bush administration is reluctant to make the choice for fear another proposal will be rejected -- if simply because the United States designed it -- after Iraqi criticism doomed two earlier plans, U.S. officials say. In Baghdad and Washington, U.S. officials are now deferring to the United Nations, even though the administration is unsure how much control it ultimately wants to give the world body in implementing the plan.
But the United Nations would prefer that Iraqis and the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority try again. Secretary General Kofi Annan wants to send out his chief envoy, former Algerian foreign minister Lakhdar Brahimi, only when that process is already well underway or if the coalition authority and the Iraqis reach an impasse, U.N. and U.S. officials say.
"The reason the U.N. doesn't want to pick [a plan] is because it doesn't have any brilliant new ideas, either. No one wants [the new plan] to be its formula, so both sides are playing the 'after you' game," added a senior U.S. official familiar with the behind-the-scenes negotiations.
With time running out, the United States and Britain are anxious to get a plan in place and had hoped the United Nations would present a roadmap this week -- or soon. But U.N. officials said a report due today from Brahimi, who led a U.N. mission to Iraq earlier this month, would outline ideas that emerged in his talks with Iraqi leaders but not provide a specific proposal for an interim government.
Brahimi told the Security Council in a closed-door session Thursday that Iraqis should be given up to two months to deliberate on the formation of a caretaker government, according to U.N. envoys at the luncheon meeting.
A delay could complicate U.S. efforts to prepare for a transfer of power and jeopardize hopes of leaving behind a stable and credible Iraqi government by June 30, U.S. officials say. The failure to come up with a viable plan since Baghdad fell has already seriously altered Iraq's political landscape in ways that add other obstacles, say U.S. officials and Iraqis.
After Hussein was ousted, the U.S.-led coalition had more maneuverability in implementing what would have been seen as a temporary solution, Iraq experts say. But the coalition got off to a belated start, shifting its approach and leadership. As more time passed, each of Iraq's religious and ethnic groups became more strident in its demands, and some unexpected new leaders emerged.
At the top of the list is Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the leading Shiite Muslim cleric and most popular figure in Iraq today. Sistani was once a virtual unknown outside Iraq, but his objections scuttled the first two transition plans. His stature has only risen, establishing him as a major political force with veto powers, Iraqis and U.S. officials say.
A U.S. official in Baghdad said Sistani now effectively "has a seat at the table" in negotiations, even though he will not meet with coalition officials. "He'll have to sign off on any plan," the official said.
The Iraqi Governing Council has also been emboldened, ironically at a time U.S. officials concede many of their handpicked appointees lack significant domestic support and are not representative of long-term Iraqi interests. But after a slow and troubled start, many council members have taken a tough stand against dismantling the only national political institution now that it is a functioning administration.
"Keeping the Governing Council will give the country a sense of continuity," said Mowaffak Rubaie, one of the body's 25 members. "We have international recognition. We have set up committees. We pass legislation. Why should we disband ourselves and set up something new for just a few months? It does not make sense."
One oft-mentioned option, which may end up as the most feasible, is to expand the council to make it more representative. But U.S. and U.N. officials are wary of preserving the council for several reasons, including that it may forever end up tainted to Iraqis because of its origins.
A minority of Sunni insurgents is also a political factor. Although the Sunni-dominated government lost the war, insurgents have since demonstrated an ability to hurt the transition. The ongoing violence has increased the importance of making sure Iraq's 20 percent minority is well represented in a new government -- at a time when the long-repressed Shiite majority wants its numbers fairly reflected in a caretaker or permanent government.
"The problem now is that everyone is thinking micro here. We cannot go on like this," Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni member of the Governing Council, said in a recent interview. "Everybody now speaks of everything but Iraq. They only care about their own group."
The minority Kurds, who had been the closest U.S. allies inside Iraq after Hussein's chemical weapons killed thousands, have also hardened their position on a federal structure allowing autonomy -- in turn becoming one of the toughest problems for the U.S.-led coalition. With negotiations focused heavily on accommodating Sistani's Shiite followers and ending the Sunni insurgency, the Kurds are concerned about being betrayed by the United States, as has happened in the past, Iraq experts say.
"Each community is intensely worried that whatever is done now will end up as the political picture for the foreseeable future -- whatever is written down on a piece of paper," said a State Department official involved in Iraq. "Fears from past experience are shaping the future. So they want to position themselves as well as they can now."
Some Iraqis say the Bush administration could have avoided the current crisis if it had made plans to hold elections as soon as Hussein's government was toppled. "That has been our request since April 2003, but that was stopped by the Americans," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite political party. "If we had done that, we would have avoided a lot of problems."
Chandrasekaran reported from Baghdad. Staff writer Colum Lynch at the United Nations contributed to this report.
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Pentagon starts probe into Halliburton claims
By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
February 23 2004
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1075982760362
The Pentagon has launched a criminal inquiry into allegations of fraud at Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the oil services company formerly run by Dick Cheney, US vice-president.
The Pentagon inspector-general had been considering a request from military auditors to investigate an Iraq contract awarded to KBR, including allegations that the company overcharged the US government for fuel imports into Iraq.
On Monday, it was confirmed that the inspector-general had launched an investigation into the matter. "The Defense Criminal Investigative Service, the criminal investigative arm of the office of the inspector-general, is investigating allegations of fraud on the part of Kellogg Brown & Root, including the potential overpricing of fuel delivered to Baghdad by a KBR subcontractor," a Pentagon official said.
Halliburton has been at the centre of criticism of the postwar reconstruction process in Iraq with Democrats calling for hearings into the company's activities.
The Pentagon probe comes as Halliburton tries to repair its corporate image, which has been tarnished by allegations of irregularities in Iraq contracts. It recently launched a television advertising campaign in which David Lesar, chief executive, says Halliburton was awarded contracts in Iraq because of "what" and not "who" it knows.
Halliburton on Monday said it had not been informed about the decision to open an investigation. "If it is true, this is a normal, routine step in any kind of high-profile inquiry," said Wendy Hall, Halliburton spokeswoman. "In the current political environment, it is to be expected."
In December, Pentagon auditors found KBR had overcharged the US government by $61m for fuel imported from Kuwait into Iraq. The Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the contract, later appeared to exonerate the company, saying its prices were reasonable. But the following month the auditors asked the inspector-general to open an investigation.
Last month Halliburton was forced to repay the government $6.3m after it confirmed that two employees appeared to have accepted kickbacks from a Kuwaiti subcontractor. The Bush administration knew of the problems when it awarded Halliburton another contract, potentially worth $1.2bn, to repair oilfields in southern Iraq.
Stuart Bowen, inspector-general at the Coalition Provisional Authority, must report to Congress on Iraq contracts by the end of March. With presidential election drawing closer, Democrats are likely to quiz Mr Bowen on Halliburton's deals because of its previous links to Mr Cheney.
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Hidden defense costs add up to double trouble
By David R. Francis
February 23, 2004
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0223/p17s01-coop.html
To measure actual spending by the United States on defense, take the federal budget number for the Pentagon and double it.
That's the "rule of thumb" advocated by economic historian Robert Higgs.
Early this month, President Bush requested $401.7 billion for the Department of Defense (DoD) for fiscal 2005. So doubling that would make total defense/security spending close to $800 billion out of a total federal budget of $2.4 trillion.
In his budget message, Mr. Bush repeatedly notes the "war on terror" in referring to defense, though most of those outlays have little to do with that, according to Mr. Higgs, editor of the Independent Institute's quarterly review.
Like other defense analysts, he adds to the Pentagon cost number the nuclear-weapons activities of the Department of Energy, including cleanup of radiation-contaminated sites. Bush wants Energy Department scientists to develop nuclear "bunker busters" and other new weapons. Energy's total defense spending: at least $18.5 billion, reckons Higgs.
An oft-noted omission from the DoD's 2005 budget is the extra costs for activities in Afghanistan and Iraq. For fiscal 2004, a supplemental appropriation last November provided $58.8 billion for that purpose. The Defense Department hasn't yet put a number on 2005 costs, arguing before Congress that it was unknown.
"They wanted to avoid sticker shock prior to the election," says Christopher Hellman, an analyst with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
But the White House's Office of Management and Budget indicates the 2005 cost would be about $50 billion. Monthly defense expenditures in the two nations - the "burn rate" - are running between $3.5 billion and $4.5 billion per month.
There are more hidden defense costs. Higgs includes some $4 billion in "foreign military financing" plus other foreign aid made with defense goals, rather than economic development, in mind. For example, the US offered Turkey $6 billion to defray the cost of an Iraq war if American troops were allowed to pass through the nation - a deal the Turkish parliament rejected.
Higgs estimates the State Department and international assistance programs "arguably related" to defense add at least $17.6 billion to defense costs.
Other defense-related costs include care of veterans - hospitals, nursing homes, disability payments, pensions, etc. The Bush budget calls for $67.3 billion for the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2005.
Another cost Higgs sees as a matter of defense is the Department of Homeland Security. Bush wants $31 billion allocated here next year.
The largest item noted by Higgs is interest on the national debt related to defense spending. Higgs calculates that the proportional amount for every year from 1916 - when the debt was nearly zero - through 2002 comes to 81 percent of the total debt held by the public. The interest charges he attributes to defense came to $138.7 billion in 2002.
With many numbers still unavailable, Higgs hasn't finished his calculations for fiscal 2004. But doubling the DoD budget request won't overstate the truth by much, he says.
The unwillingness of the Bush administration to ask Congress for extra money for Iraq will have "real consequences," says Winslow Wheeler, a visiting fellow at the Center for Defense Information. To cover additional costs, DoD will "raid" its operations and maintenance accounts. He says that will mean less training for troops and poorer maintenance of military equipment.
Some troops in Iraq lack sufficient body armor and equipment needed to storm buildings, says Mr. Hellman. Soldiers have also reportedly asked families to buy expensive night-vision goggles for them.
Mr. Wheeler terms the Higgs numbers "a legitimate exercise to calculate all conceivable costs of national security."
Other defense analysts don't go along entirely with Higgs's accounting methods. Yet they do agree that the true cost of defense is many billions more than the DoD budget. It's "far in excess of what is formally acknowledged," says Loren Thompson, an analyst at the conservative Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va.
The US is "last of the big-time spenders" on defense in the world, notes a table from Hellman's Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.
At the moment, Petter Stålenheim at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute figures the US will account for between 45 and 50 percent of the world's military spending in 2003. The US boosted spending by 6 percent last year; Britain raised defense spending 1 percent; France 1.8 percent, and Russia 14 percent, says Mr. Stålenheim. Germany cut spending a little. Italy fell 8 percent. The Bush budget for 2005 calls for a 7 percent hike in DoD spending.
Right now, Wheeler says, the defense budget is "gigantic ... compared to any potential foe."
Though US defense costs are high, Democrats are not likely to push for cuts in an election year when polls indicate the public perceives Republicans as stronger than Democrats on defense issues.
Critics charge that defense spending includes too many wasteful "cold war legacy" programs. Here, says Mr. Thompson, critics tend to agree with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. He has been pushing for "transformation" of defense spending by closing unneeded bases and shutting down weapons programs unsuited to today's wars or threats.
With huge budget deficits, the nation can't afford such out-of-date weapons systems and programs, Hellman says.
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'This is war,' Rumsfeld told Bush
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's determination to kill terrorists and transform the military is detailed in "Rumsfeld's War" (Regnery Publishing Inc.), the new book by Rowan Scarborough, defense reporter for The Washington Times. Exclusive excerpts begin today.
February 23, 2004
by Rowan Scarborough
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040223-012306-4708r.htm
Donald H. Rumsfeld sat in a vault-like room studded with video screens and talked with President Bush as the Pentagon burned.
"This is not a criminal action," the secretary of defense told Bush over a secure line. "This is war."
The word "war" meant more than going after the al Qaeda terrorist network in Afghanistan, the fault line of terrorism. Bush said he wanted retaliation.
The setting was the Pentagon's Executive Support Center, where Rumsfeld held secure video teleconferences with the White House across the Potomac or with ground commanders 10,000 miles away.
The time was 1:02 p.m., less than four hours after terrorists steered American Flight 77 into the Pentagon's southwest wall.
Rumsfeld at first had dashed to the impact site. In his shirt and tie, he helped transport the wounded.
Finally convinced to leave the scene, Rumsfeld entered the closely guarded ESC, where whiffs of burned rubble penetrated the ventilation system. The video monitor in front of him was blank, but there was an audio connection with the president at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
Rumsfeld's instant declaration of war, previously unreported, took America from the Clinton administration's view that terrorism was a criminal matter to the Bush administration's view that terrorism was a global enemy to be destroyed.
"That was really a breakthrough strategically and intellectually," recalls Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy. "Viewing the 9/11 attacks as a war that required a war strategy was a very big thought, and a lot flowed from that."
Rumsfeld wanted a war that was fought with ruthless efficiency: special forces, high-tech firepower, a scorecard for killing or capturing terrorists. He had no desire to become the world's jailer. And he refused to be stymied by bureaucracy.
Rumsfeld quickly shared his views in a meeting of his inner circle, the so-called Round Table group including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and the chairman and vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
This would be a global war, Rumsfeld said, and he planned to give Special Operations forces - Delta Force, SEALs and Green Berets - unprecedented powers to kill terrorists.
Special Operations missions lived or died on secrecy, so he would tolerate no leaks. Staff meetings that once attracted 20 or more bureaucrats quickly were shrunk to no more than 10.
Rumsfeld publicly threatened criminal prosecution whenever "classified information dealing with operations is provided to people who are not cleared for that information."
Two generals The defense secretary kept his eyes on two balls - one relatively small, the other as big as the globe:
He authorized Army Gen. Tommy Franks to bring him a war plan for toppling the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, where Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda operated. Perhaps far more importantly, he also summoned his top Special Operations officer, Air Force Gen. Charles Holland, to draw up a blueprint for a broader war on terror.
Holland's Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., was a sleepy outpost at MacDill Air Force Base. U.S. Central Command (CentCom), across the street, got all the press. It fought wars. Holland's command, dubbed SoCom, merely equipped some 35,000 special forces soldiers. When they went into battle, combatant commands such as CentCom took control.
Rumsfeld wanted that changed. Holland, however, was not a door-busting commando. He was a pilot who had flown the lumbering but deadly AC-130 gunships. Colleagues described Holland as courtly, polite and soft-spoken. He was a compromiser, not a bureaucratic infighter like his boss, Rumsfeld.
Holland arrived for his first wartime face-to-face meeting with Rumsfeld on Sept. 25, 2001. Rumsfeld told Holland he wanted SoCom to become a global command post.
Deeply disappointed by Holland's caution, Rumsfeld walked to the Pentagon pressroom that same day and announced: "The United States of America knows that the only way we can defend against terrorism is by taking the fight to the terrorists."
It was a message for Holland and other commanders as well as the public.
Picking targets Rumsfeld's Round Table began to settle on strategy. "We developed what we called the territorial approach to fighting terrorism," Feith recalls. "Instead of chasing every individual terrorist, you recognize that for terrorist organizations over a sustained period to do large-scale operations, they need bases of operations."
Afghanistan was the logical first step. But al Qaeda and its surrogates also thrived in border regions and ungoverned states such as Somalia.
Rumsfeld made a list: •Yemen, where al Qaeda planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
•The Horn of Africa, where terror cells freely moved money and men.
•The Philippines, where a group of Islamic terrorists, Abu Sayyaf, used kidnappings and deadly bombings to try to bring down the pro-American democracy.
Summer of discontent By June 2002, Afghanistan's interim government was functioning amid the U.S.-led coalition's low-intensity conflict with Taliban holdouts. Iraq war planning had been started.
But Rumsfeld's ideas for hunting down terrorists worldwide had not taken hold. And he let Feith know he was not happy.
"I think we need a scorecard for the global war on terrorism," Rumsfeld said in a confidential June 20 action memo to his undersecretary for policy.
Less than two weeks later, Rumsfeld sent another memo to Feith asking, "How do we organize the Department of Defense for manhunts? We are obviously not well organized at the present time."
Rumsfeld wanted action. He wanted it from, among others, Holland.
Stephen Cambone, a close aide to Rumsfeld, told colleagues: "Holland was given the keys to the kingdom and he didn't want to pick them up."
Another aide told Rumsfeld: "You're going to have to put your finger in his chest and tell him what you want done."
On July 15, Holland returned to the Pentagon for another face-to-face with the boss. Holland again expressed caution about assuming new terror-hunt responsibilities. He didn't want to step on the toes of combatant commanders like Tommy Franks.
Rumsfeld castigated the top commando, saying he had made it clear to Holland and other four-stars that he wanted them "leaning forward." He ordered Holland to come up with a plan of action.
A historic change I can reveal for the first time that Rumsfeld didn't wait. On July 22, he initialed a highly classified directive to Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
The Rumsfeld directive is just one page, but its impact was historic: The defense secretary changed the nature of Special Operations forces - and the Pentagon - by giving commanders the authority to plan and execute missions on their own with a minimum of bureaucratic interference. Some excerpts:
"•The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation, or if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in [a] law enforcement exercise.
"•The objective should be that processing of deployment orders and obtaining other bureaucratic clearances can be accomplished in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.
"•Special Operations command will screen DoD for personnel - civilian and military - with languages, ethnic connections and other attributes needed for clandestine and covert activities.
"•Gen. Holland will brief me on initiatives that can disrupt or destroy terrorist operations and additional assets that might be needed to pursue such initiatives."
Holland returned July 31 with a plan that became known as the "30 percent solution," because Rumsfeld wanted it done one chunk at a time.
Holland wanted more men and money. He wanted diplomatic approval to go anywhere, anytime. And he wanted the always elusive "actionable intelligence" that decided whether a mission was successful.
Rumsfeld wanted to make sure he got it. In January 2003, as Rumsfeld's tenure reached the two-year mark, he appeared in the Pentagon pressroom to announce a revamped SoCom. From now on, in-theater SoCom units would have authority to plan hunt-and-destroy missions, requisition weapons and men and run covert actions.
Rumsfeld abandoned the Clinton administration's decree that the military must have an official "finding" signed by the president - a step that meant congressional notification and increased the possibility of leaks - before taking any action. Now, special forces on the scene could react immediately to track and kill terrorists.
By spring 2003, Holland had won commitments from the Pentagon for 5,000 new positions and $1 billion more a year, bringing his budget to $6 billion.
But Rumsfeld demanded results. At a conference of commanders at the Pentagon, he pulled Holland aside.
"Have you killed anyone yet?" he asked.
--------
Rumsfeld: Insurgency May Alter Troop Shift
By Sewell Chan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62204-2004Feb22.html
KUWAIT CITY, Feb. 22 -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld cautioned Sunday that plans to shift the U.S. military presence in Iraqi cities to outlying areas could be disrupted by the continuing insurgency, which he blamed on "terrorist networks" and al Qaeda guerrillas that he said were trying to fracture Iraqi society.
American ground commanders in Iraq have announced plans to move troops away from major cities, where they are conspicuous and potential targets, to surrounding areas from which they could rapidly respond to emergencies in urban areas. The new Iraqi security forces are to be given greater responsibility for maintaining order in the cities. But Rumsfeld, during a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland, on his way to Kuwait, said the process of redeploying troops would be marked by "ebb and flow."
"It may very well be in one section of the country, the military commanders will make a judgment that they can move back and put the Iraqi forces out front, and that that will stick, permanently," Rumsfeld said. "It may also be that in certain parts of the country that will happen and they will make a judgment a month or two, or three or four, later that they need to press back in and support the Iraqi security forces."
Rumsfeld repeated the Bush administration's assertion that al Qaeda guerrillas are behind attacks against the U.S.-led occupation. "They're clearly involved," he said.
Rumsfeld cited a letter released Feb. 11 by the U.S. occupation authority. U.S. officials said the letter was sent to al Qaeda leaders by a Jordanian militant and called for disrupting the creation of a democratic government in Iraq. Rumsfeld said U.S. intelligence officials told him Friday that they believe the letter to be authentic.
Rumsfeld attributed the attacks to a "coincidence of interests on the part of terrorist networks, plus former regime elements, plus criminals." He added that insurgents "are clearly attempting to foment strife among the various religious and ethnic groups in the country."
At the same time, the defense secretary said Iraqis were still eager to join the security forces despite recent attacks that targeted police and military recruiting stations. "Instead of responding by acquiescing, we see that volunteers are still in line to join the police, they're still in line to join the army," he said. "Instead of retreating, they are leaning forward and taking losses, and God bless them for it."
After arriving in Kuwait, Rumsfeld had a closed-door meeting with Kuwait's prime minister, Sheik Sabah Ahmed Sabah. Rumsfeld's aides have declined to disclose the itinerary or duration of his trip, but the Uzbek Foreign Ministry said Saturday that Rumsfeld would visit Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Afghanistan.
Rumsfeld's arrival at the airport in Shannon was wildly cheered by soldiers from the Oklahoma Army National Guard on their way to a one-year deployment in Iraq. The troops were waiting for a flight to Kuwait when they learned that the defense secretary had just landed.
Applause erupted as Rumsfeld entered the airport lounge. The beaming defense secretary shook scores of hands, posed for snapshots and gave an impromptu pep talk
--------
Army to End Comanche Helicopter Program
February 23, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Helicopter-Cancellation.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- In a dramatic about-face, the Army canceled its Comanche helicopter program Monday after sinking $6.9 billion and 21 years of effort into producing a new-generation chopper.
It is one of the biggest program cancellations in the Army's history and comes less than two years after the service's $11 billion Crusader artillery project was dropped after $2 billion had been spent.
At a Pentagon news conference, senior Army leaders said they would propose to Congress that $14.6 billion earmarked to develop and build 121 Comanches between now and 2011 be used instead to buy 796 additional Black Hawk and other helicopters and to upgrade and modernize 1,400 helicopters already in the fleet.
``It's a big decision, but we know it's the right decision,'' said Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff. He said the Army also will invest more heavily in a variety of unmanned aircraft, such as the existing Hunter and the new Raven.
The Comanche decision reflects a growing realization in the Pentagon that the military has more big-ticket weapons projects in the works than it can afford, even after seeing the Pentagon budget grow by tens of billions of dollars since 2001. And it reflects the rising popularity in recent years of unmanned aircraft for surveillance as well as attack missions.
The RAH-66 Comanche helicopter project was launched in 1983 and was eventually to have cost more than $39 billion. The Army said it needed a stealthier, more capable armed reconnaissance helicopter not only to collect and distribute battlefield intelligence but to destroy enemy forces.
The program met with many setbacks and was restructured six times, most recently in 2002. The latest timetable had specified beginning initial low-rate production in 2007, with the first Comanches to have been declared ready for combat in 2009 with full-rate production to have begun in 2010.
The main contractors for Comanche are Boeing Co. and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp.
The per-unit cost of the scrapped helicopter has more than quadrupled, from $12.1 million per aircraft when the Army planned to buy 5,023 of them, to $58.9 million when the purchase was cut back to 650.
Even though the Comanche is dead, Army officials said they would ask the defense industry to propose plans to build a new armed reconnaissance aircraft. Lt. Gen. Richard Cody said no details are available except that an Army study determined a need for 368 new armed scout helicopters.
Andrew Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, said in an interview that he believes Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is killing off big-ticket projects that were conceived during the Cold War and that are threatening to squeeze the financial life out of projects more essential to the military's modernization.
The Comanche, he said, was conceived to meet a valid need but is not crucial to the future.
``It was important to the Army but it wasn't the crown jewel,'' he said. ``Some would say it was the crown.''
Dropping the Comanche is unlikely to stir the kind of controversy sparked by Rumsfeld's decision in 2002 to kill the Crusader. Army leaders openly opposed that decision and they attempted to enlist support on Capitol Hill to keep the artillery program alive. In the case of the Comanche, Schoomaker stressed at Monday's news conference that it was an Army initiative.
Rumsfeld has emphasized leap-ahead technologies like unmanned aircraft. The Predator drone, for example, began as strictly a surveillance aircraft but during the 2001 war in Afghanistan it was armed with Hellfire missiles and used to attack ground vehicles. The Global Hawk unmanned long-range reconnaissance aircraft also saw its wartime debut over Afghanistan.
``They (unmanned aircraft) are a favorite of Rumsfeld's,'' Krepinevich said. ``And they're a favorite for a good reason: They've performed well.''
From the first days of the Bush administration there has been talk of canceling a number of major aviation projects, including the Marine Corps' V-22 Osprey hybrid helicopter-airplane and the Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor fighter jet, but so far the Comanche has been the only casualty.
The White House budget office recently asked the Pentagon to provide independent reviews of the Comanche and the F/A-22, which is much further along in development and the Air Force's top priority.
Congressional lawmakers and company executives associated with the Comanche program were scrambling Monday to figure out what will happen next.
Five Comanche helicopters are in production. Sikorsky officials said they did not know what would become of them.
``What we need to do now is find out how the government wants us to proceed,'' spokesman Matt Broder said. ``We're cataloging everything we know, and we're going to ask, `What do you, the Army, want to do with all of this great technology that you funded? All these manufacturing processes that you funded? All the classified technology that's been developed?''
Broder said it was too soon to predict the effect on Sikorsky jobs.
The Sikorsky plant in Bridgeport, Conn., where the Comanche is being built, opened last year and employs about 400 workers.
``The blow is obviously going to be devastating,'' said Harvey Jackson, president of Teamsters Local 1150, which represents 3,600 Sikorsky workers.
As envisioned by the Army, the Comanche was a twin-engine, two-pilot helicopter with stealth technology designed to make it more difficult to track and target by enemy radar. Its armaments include a 20mm gun, 2.75-inch aerial rockets and an air-to-air missile.
-------- propaganda wars
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
In Season of Campaigns, Halliburton Joins In
February 23, 2004
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/politics/23LETT.html?hp
WASHINGTON - The chief executive of the Halliburton Company, Dave Lesar, never imagined that he would be the star of his own television commercial. But there he is, on the airwaves in Washington and Houston, assuring viewers that his company has billions of dollars in contracts to rebuild Iraq and feed American troops "because of what we know, not who we know."
The unnamed "who" is, of course, Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's chief executive from 1995 to 2000. Mr. Cheney's ties to the huge oil services, engineering and reconstruction company have become a favorite Democratic attack line in the 2004 campaign.
"He did give Halliburton a higher profile," Mr. Lesar said in a telephone interview last week from his company's base in Houston. "I would never in my wildest dreams have thought we would have the profile we have today, but I think that is just part of the political process we're in." The advertising, Mr. Lesar added, will continue until the end of the presidential campaign "because I don't believe we're going to disappear as a political story."
But at a time when President Bush's own campaign commercials have yet to start, the Halliburton spots - two are on the air so far - have created an awkward situation for the White House, which has not fallen over itself to embrace them. Mr. Cheney's office had no comment, and neither did the Bush campaign. But one Republican official close to the administration said the company was clearly thinking of itself, not the president's re-election.
"They get a bum rap, they're acting in their own interest, and that's their prerogative," said the official, who did not want to be named because he did not want to be seen as intertwined with the advertisements. "I'm not sure there's any real benefit for anyone but them."
Among advertising professionals, the commercials, which include videotape of smiling troops in a chow line in Iraq, have created a debate about how much good they are really doing for the company. Halliburton is trying to tamp down continuing accusations and investigations into whether it is overcharging for services in Iraq.
Mr. Lesar addresses the accusations in one advertisement when he says that "you've heard a lot about Halliburton lately" but "criticism is O.K. - we can take it. Criticism is not failure."
Mr. Lesar also says in the advertisement that the company has been in business for 60 years, working for governments led by each party. He does not point out that in the last decade the company has given more than $800,000 to Republican candidates and $80,000 to Democrats, according to Political Money Line, a company that provides campaign finance data.
Donny Deutsch, chairman and chief executive of the Deutsch advertising agency in New York, called the commercials "insane."
" `It's not who you know' - come on, it's doth protest too much," Mr. Deutsch said. "This just puts a spotlight and a megaphone on the issue. Martha Stewart would not take out a paid ad and say, `Before you buy any of my housewares, just remember I'm innocent.' It's a bizarre media strategy."
But Sig Rogich, a major fund-raiser for the president's campaign who was the advertising director for the first President Bush's 1988 and 1992 campaigns, said the commercials made sense: "I think it's smart that they are reminding the world that they've been in business for many, many years, long before they became a political lightning rod. I think it's a good strategy."
A Republican member of Congress was less charitable about the advertisements. "They're pitiful," said the Republican, who did not want to be identified because he did not want the president to be angry at him. "They're about as believable as a crocodile going onto the Senate floor and voting."
Last week, to cite one example of the company's problems, Halliburton said that it had stopped billing the Pentagon for the cost of feeding American troops in Iraq and Kuwait until a dispute over the number of meals served is resolved. A larger question is whether a company subsidiary overcharged the government by $61 million while importing fuel to Iraq, an issue the president was forced to address. "If there's an overcharge, like we think there is, we expect that money to be repaid," Mr. Bush said in December.
All of which adds up, Mr. Lesar said in the interview, to a need for the company to defend itself on the air.
"Essentially it was an attempt to clear up the record," he said, while declining to say how much Halliburton was spending on the campaign or in what other cities the spots would appear.
Mr. Lesar, who said he did not discuss the commercials beforehand with Mr. Cheney - "absolutely not, we make our own decisions" - would not go so far as to call the vice president a liability for the company.
But, Mr. Lesar said, "we are in the middle of an election cycle, he is part of the election cycle and therefore we are getting a level of scrutiny that in my view is unprecedented in the history of corporate America."
--------
Reminders From the White House
By Al Kamen
Washington Post
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62838-2004Feb22?language=printer
Speaking of terrorism and such, it's possible that people are starting to forget why the United States really had no choice but to go to war in Iraq. Maybe with those folks in mind, the White House Web site continues to post the most important reasons:
"The gravest danger we face in the war on terror is outlaw regimes that seek and possess nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
"• Twelve years ago, Saddam Hussein agreed to disarm all weapons of mass destruction. For 12 years, he systematically violated that agreement.
"• Three months ago, the United Nations Security Council gave Saddam his final chance to disarm. He has shown his utter contempt for the U.N.
"• The U.N. and U.S. intelligence sources have known for some time that Saddam Hussein has materials to produce chemical and biological weapons, but he has not accounted for them:
"• 26,000 liters of anthrax -- enough to kill several million people.
"• 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin.
"• 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agents.
"• Almost 30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents."
Saddam was still working hard to get nukes, too. "He recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa, according to the British Government," the Web site posting, put up just before the invasion began in March, says. "He has attempted to purchase high strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons, according to our intelligence sources. Yet he has not credibly explained these activities."
Betcha he's singing now about that uranium.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Your papers, please
February 23, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/op-ed/20040222-103500-1117r.htm
Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case to decide whether or not all Americans must have identification on them at all times. The case has been brought by a cowboy in Nevada who was asked to show ID while he was leaning against his pickup truck on the side of the road near his ranch. The police officer did not offer any specific reason why he demanded proof of identity. Having committed no crime, Dudley Hiibel, the cowboy, refused - and was arrested. He was later convicted for "Delaying a Peace Officer." In America, still a free country, citizens should not be required to provide identification papers at any whim of the authorities.
In the case at hand, Mr. Hiibel gave the arresting officer a chance to justify his request. But when asked why he demanded identification, the sheriff's deputy said only, "Because I'm investigating." When asked what he was investigating, the policeman responded with a wisecrack: "I'm investigating an investigation." The argument before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether requiring identification at any time is a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable searches and seizures or an invasion of privacy by the government.
In a 4-3 decision, the Nevada Supreme Court ruled against Mr. Hiibel, stating that the Nevada statute requiring identification during a police investigation "strikes a balance between constitutional protections of privacy and the need to protect police officers and the public." The argument is that police cannot rule out whether or not a stranger is a suspect in a crime until he is identified. In the dissent, Justice Deborah Agosti argues that merely knowing an individual's identity does not enhance safety. Regarding the Fourth Amendment, she explains, "Anonymity is encompassed within the expectation of privacy, a civil right." The Fifth Amendment also guarantees the right to remain silent, which can be construed as the right to guard one's identity.
The cowboy-ID case is timely because of the momentum in the federal government to mandate various kinds of national identification cards. Even some conservatives, such as Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, support the idea of so-called Social Security cards with biometric identifiers such as retina scans and electronic fingerprints. The Nevada high court's ruling notes that "the right to wander freely and anonymously, if we so choose, is a fundamental right of privacy in a democratic society." The openness of the prairie symbolizes this freedom. It would be a shame if cowboys were required to carry a driver's license to ride a horse while roaming the open range.
-------- homeland security
Color-coded fliers
By Nat Hentoff
February 23, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20040222-103506-6295r.htm
Philip Heymann, a former deputy U.S. attorney and now a professor at Harvard Law School, has a new book, "Terrorism, Freedom and Security"(MIT Press), that probes effective ways of defending us against terrorism. He also warns about the prospect of our becoming a country "where information about citizens is gathered extremely broadly and the activities of the intelligence agencies are unconstrained."
We are already well on the way to having our lives extensively computerized by the government through the Patriot Act's unprecedented powers of electronicsurveillance, some of it with minimal judicial oversight, through the compliant, secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
And the president recently signed the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act, giving the FBI, among other agencies, the authority to gather bountiful amounts of personal records without having to get any permission from a judge.
Some time this year, the Department of Homeland Security is planning a test run of CAPPS II, an advanced version of the Computer-Assisted PassengerPre-screeningSystem that will subject the 100 million people or so who fly on our airlines to a risk analysis. This procedure will give each of them a score regarding their "threat level" of being involved in terrorism.
This system is not the innocuous, though annoying, collection of information done by telemarketers and other solicitors that is used to deluge our postal boxes and computer accounts with targeted junk mail. This is a compilation of private information, from various sources, that you may not want collected and distributed without your knowledge or consent.
Already, congressional auditors, through the General Accounting Office, have warned about the plan's propensity for abuse of privacy, and they have raised questions about the accuracy of the information that will affix "threat level" scores next to each passenger's name.
The following is what Homeland Security is planning to do with the data as soon as you make an airline reservation: After the airline obtains your name, address, phone number, date of birth and intended destination, the information is sent to the Transportation Security Administration.
The data will then be sent to a commercial database company that will authenticate your identity. And this only begins the government's pre-flight investigation into you. On Feb. 2, Ann Brick, an American Civil Liberties Union staff attorney in Northern California, reported in the Los Angeles Daily Journal, a legal affairs newspaper, on some additional screening procedures.
Miss Brick wrote that the government "will next enter the passenger's name into a 'Black Box' - a computer program using a secret set of law enforcement, intelligence and other databases to generate a 'risk assessment' for each passenger based on a secret set of criteria."
As this plan now exists, you will not know what those criteria are or what information about you has determined your threat risk. If it's green, you will get the usual, standard search before you can get to your gate. (Wear shoes with Velcro strips rather than laces. I've learned they're easier to take off.)
If you're rated as yellow, you will be subject to considerably more intensive searching. And if your color is red, your ticket will be useless, you will not be allowed to board the aircraft, and it's very likely that you will be taken to a room where law enforcement agencies will be asking a lot of questions.
Since we don't know what the computer thinks it has learned about us, we won't know how reliable the information is. Further, computer software is under constant threat of attack from hackers, who can potentially alter your security profile or steal all of this personal data that has been readily compiled for them into their one database. No one, not even the software juggernaut Microsoft, is safe from such data crimes.
So, the CAPPS II data's trustworthiness becomes even more critical, which is apparently not a serious enough government concern, as Miss Brick further reported: "The unreliability of CAPPS II is compounded by having the assignment of a threat level to passengers made not by human beings but by computer algorithms. The computer is not simply asked to determine the likelihood that a passenger is a known terrorist or has identifiable links to known terrorists or terrorist organizations. Rather the system is also asked to predict whether the passenger 'otherwise poses a threat to passenger or aviation security.' "
Whatdoes"otherwise" mean? And, once this coloring scheme is in place, why limit it to airline passengers? To maximize homeland security, the government could extend this system to railroad depots, bus stations and beyond. Once a computer system is developed, by its very nature, it's child's play to share its results across a broad range of groups, or, in this case, government agencies. We would then be constantly screened through a network of governmentcheckpoints, which, ironically, is an image often ominously mocked in American movies as part of a communist or fascist nation's modus operandi.
Since most members of Congress are frequent flyers, I earnestly hope they will subject this computerized transformation of America to persistent scrutiny. Can computers guarantee our being able to remain free Americans? Or are the Constitution's built-in protections guaranteeing civil liberties a safer alternative?
-------- police
New powers for 'FBI-style police'
Monday, 23 February, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3512229.stm
Professionals could be forced to abandon client confidentiality New powers giving investigators access to confidential client details held by lawyers, bankers and accountants are due to be unveiled, the Times reports.
The newspaper said the measures are among plans for the new FBI-style Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA).
The powers would reportedly target professionals with links to criminals, who could face fines or prison if they refused to co-operate.
Civil liberties campaigners would oppose the move, said Monday's paper.
The Home Office said nothing would be confirmed before publication of a White Paper on fighting organised and international crime.
The proposed legislation is not due out until next month, but according to the Times the new powers are among a package of measures being discussed for inclusion.
Existing powers
Those with links to gangsters, who use their skills to "legitimise profits" or create offshore accounts and companies to hide the proceeds of crime, would be forced to answer questions, said the paper.
Professionals like lawyers, bankers and accountants are currently bound by strict client confidentiality.
SOCA was dubbed 'Britain's FBI' when it was launched earlier this month.
It has been established to combat crimes like people smuggling and drug trafficking.
It will not deal with terrorism or murder cases.
The new elite agency is a merger of the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service and the investigative branches of Customs and Excise and the Home Office Immigration Service.
The director of civil rights group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, told the Times the suggestion of proposed new powers made her "heart sink".
"It is always talk tough, legislate first and think later," she said.
She said the government should first take a proper look at existing powers.
-------- terrorism
9 Truckers' Files Subpoenaed
Records Sought in November in Investigation of Ricin Mailing
By Marilyn W. Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A62842-2004Feb22.html
A federal grand jury has subpoenaed work records for nine truck drivers employed by a Little Rock company that transports mail for the U.S. Postal Service, part of an effort to determine who might have delivered the first ricin-packed letter last year to a South Carolina postal processing center.
Officials of Mail Contractors of America Inc. say that a subpoena received in late November sought driver logs and time sheets, cell phone and telephone records, delivery receipts and expenses. Eight of the truckers make deliveries to the facility near the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport, where a vial of the toxin was discovered in October, and the other driver is a former employee, said Amy Bunch, a spokeswoman for the firm.
The subpoena came about a month after FBI agents visited Mail Contractors of America to review drivers' records at its Jacksonville, Fla., terminal, including those of Daniel S. Somerson, a former employee who has become a truck safety activist, and a trucker friend who still works for the company. FBI terrorism investigators have interviewed both men. Somerson said he is innocent of any involvement in the letters and believes he is being harassed because he has criticized the trucking industry and Mail Contractors of America.
In recent weeks, attempts to solve three ricin incidents, including one at the Dirksen Senate Office Building, have evolved into a geographic mystery. In the Greenville case, authorities have speculated that on Oct. 14 or 15, someone -- possibly a driver -- dropped a package with a vial of ricin enclosed. The package was left near the Greenville-Spartanburg airport. At the time, Mail Contractors of America had the contract for delivering third-class mail to the facility.
A second letter addressed to the White House and retrieved from a Bolling Air Force Base mail-sorting facility bore a postmark from Chattanooga, and FBI officials there have been trying to track the mailing. The Greenville and White House mailings were sent by someone using the name "Fallen Angel," who threatens in a letter to use ricin unless changes are made to federal rules governing truckers' hours of service.
Authorities say they have found no letter in connection with a small amount of ricin found Feb. 2 in the Dirksen mailroom used by the staff members of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).
The Mail Contractors' subpoena comes as investigators sort through the drivers involved in trucker relay systems that are used to transport mail across the country. A rig packed with cartons of third-class mail might be handed off to several drivers before it reaches its final destination.
Mail Contractors of America, which transports more than 90 percent of the nation's third-class mail and has 1,400 employees, most of them truckers, is cooperating with the federal investigation, said board Chairman James R. Malone.
In an interview, Malone said the packaging system the company uses for its bulk-mail shipments, combined with high-security measures at the postal facilities, leaves little opportunity for drivers to slip unauthorized mail into their deliveries. "I suppose it's possible," he said, "but I've got to believe it would be a hell of a lot easier to just go to a mailbox and drop it in."
The FBI has posted signs offering a $100,000 reward at truck stops and weigh stations along the East Coast. It also has appealed for help on trucker radio shows whose late-night chatter has included discussion of the cases.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
Superfund Not Funded, Congressional Investigator Reports
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 23, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-23-11.asp
The U.S. Congress is failing to fully fund the Superfund program, according to a new analysis by the General Accounting Office (GAO). The investigative arm of Congress states in its report that appropriations for the nation's primary hazardous waste clean up program, when adjusted for inflation, have fallen some 35 percent or $633 million since 1993.
"This analysis shows just how far backward we have moved in cleaning up toxic waste sites," said Senator James Jeffords, a Vermont Independent. "How can we explain to the one in four Americans who live within four miles of a Superfund site that making their community cleaner is not a priority?"
Seventy million people, including some 10 million children, live within four miles of the nation's more than 1,230 Superfund sites. Children are most vulnerable to the arsenic, DDT and brain damaging toxics like lead and mercury that are found in the water and soil at these locations.
According to the analysis released Thursday by the GAO, funding for clean up of these sites has fallen from more than $1.9 billion in 1993 to some $1.2 billion in 2004 in inflation adjusted dollars.
Jeffords and California Senator Barbara Boxer, a Democrat, requested the updated analysis from the GAO. Cleaning up Superfund sites is often a long and costly process. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) Both senators say the Bush administration is allowing the financial burden of the Superfund program to shift from polluters to U.S. taxpayers.
Started in 1980 as a relatively short term project to clean up abandoned hazardous waste sites, the Superfund program has expanded as tens of thousands of waste sites have been discovered.
Many of these sites are owned by the federal government, and cleaning them up has proved to be far more complicated and costly than anticipated. But the sites that are not owned by the federal government are to either be cleaned up by the private parties responsible for contamination or by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is then tasked with seeking reimbursement from those responsible.
Congress created a trust fund to pay for cleanups of nongovernment sites and devised "polluter pays fees" to fund it. These fees consisted of a corporate tax that applies to profits of large corporations in excess of $2 million, a fee on the purchase of harmful chemicals and a fee on the purchase of crude oil by refineries.
The polluter pays provision expired in 1995, when the trust fund was at a historic high of some $3.6 billion.
But the trust fund is now empty and failure to revive the polluter pays tax has increased the share of the share of the program's costs carried by the federal government from 18 percent in 1995 to 100 percent.
The Bush administration opposes reinstating the fees unless reforms of cleanup standards and polluters' liabilities are enacted, a position environmentalists say mirrors that of industry. But Congress has also failed to act - last year a measure to reinstate the provision failed.
"It is time to reauthorize the Superfund fees on polluters and get the program moving again," said Jeffords, who has signed on as a sponsor to the bill authored by Boxer to reinstate the tax.
The drop in funding is having a direct impact on cleanup, critics say.
In the middle and late 1990s, Superfund cleaned up an average of 86 sites per year, but this number has fallen by more than 50 percent in the last two years.
The EPA completed work at only 40 sites in fiscal year 2003, compared to the 87 cleanups achieved in the last year of the Clinton administration. Some 85 percent of all Superfund sites have contaminated groundwater. (Photo courtesy U.S. Army Corps of Engineers) Bush administration officials say such comparisons are misleading because the agency is now focused on larger, more complex Superfund sites.
They contend the budget for the Superfund program goes to much more than just cleanup, including emergency removals, site assessment, site cleanup, enforcement, and administration.
A study by the nonprofit research group Resources for the Future says the Superfund program needs annual funding of between $1.4 billion to $1.7 billion. Using these figures, critics say the Bush administration has under funded the Superfund program by some $1.2 billion to $1.8 billion from 2001 through 2004.
This means that some 522 Superfund sites in 48 states and the U.S. territories - representing 42 percent of all Superfund sites - may be subject to a delayed cleanup or less stringent EPA oversight of cleanup activities conducted by polluters, according to the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
For fiscal year 2005 the White House has requested a $1.4 billion for Superfund - a $124 million increase compared to 2004 appropriations.
But this has not appeased Congressional critics. Internal EPA memos, recently released by the National Environmental Trust, indicate agency officials are also concerned that funding shortfalls are undermining the Superfund program.
"This report proves that the administration has drastically cut funding for Superfund," Boxer said. "The 14 million Californians who live within four miles of a Superfund site are being harmed - perhaps irreparably - as a result of this callous policy. I will fight hard to reverse this dangerous course."
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Leaked Pentagon Report Warns of Coming Climate Wars
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
February 23, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2004/2004-02-23-09.asp#anchor1
A suppressed Pentagon report warning of the catastrophic consequences of global warming in the next 20 years was published Sunday by "The Observer," a British newspaper that is part of the Guardian Unlimited Network.
The threat of a suddenly warming climate to global stability is far greater than that posed by terrorism, the newspaper quotes the Pentagon as warning.
Global warming "should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern," according to the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California based Global Business Network.
The report was commissioned by Pentagon defense adviser Andrew Marshall, who heads the little known office of Net Assessment within the Pentagon. The office was created and Marshall was named its first director in 1973, and he has been reappointed by every administration and Secretary of Defense since then.
The report embarasses the Bush administration, which while acknowledging the existence of climate change, has said it would be too costly to the American economy to join the world's 37 other industrialized nations in limiting global warming.
"The Observer" published key findings of the report, which confirm what some of the world's top climate scientists and environmental organizations have been saying for at least the past five years.
In the future, wars will erupt over survival issues such as water and food, rather than religion or ideology. The Nile, Danube and Amazon are at risk of becoming battlegrounds over access to water.
A "significant drop" in the planet's ability to sustain its present population will occur by 2025. Deaths from war and starvation mount into the millions until the planet's overpopulation burden is reduced.
The proliferation of nuclear weapons is inevitable, the report warns. Nuclear nations will expand to include Japan, South Korea, and Germany Iran, Egypt and North Korea in addition to the present nuclear powers - Israel, China, India and Pakistan.
Sea level rise will inundate low-lying European cities such as Amsterdam and The Hague, and Britain will be locked in a "Siberian" climate, the report says.
Rich regions like the United States and Europe would become "virtual fortresses" to keep out millions of environmental refugees arriving by boat, fleeing barren or inundated lands.
Droughts parch the world's major breadbaskets, including America's Midwest, where strong winds blow the fertile topsoil away. In California, the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached, disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north to south.
In just six years, the United States and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90 Fahrenheit.
China's more than one billion people and food demand make it particularly vulnerable. Bangladesh becomes nearly uninhabitable because of a rising sea levels, which contaminate the inland water supplies. Riots and internal wars tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia, the report predicts.
The Pentagon report states, "By 2005 the climatic impact of the shift is felt more intensely in certain regions around the world. More severe storms and typhoons bring about higher storm surges and floods in low-lying islands such as Tarawa and Tuvalu [near New Zealand]. In 2007, a particularly severe storm causes the ocean to break through levees in the Netherlands making a few key coastal cities such as The Hague unlivable."
"Failures of the delta island levees in the Sacramento River region in the Central Valley of California creates an inland sea and disrupts the aqueduct system transporting water from northern to southern California because salt water can no longer be kept out of the area during the dry season... As glacial ice melts, sea levels rise and as wintertime sea extent decreases, ocean waves increase in intensity, damaging coastal cities."
"Additionally millions of people are put at risk of flooding around the globe (roughly 4 times 2003 levels), and fisheries are disrupted as water temperature changes cause fish to migrate to new locations and habitats, increasing tensions over fishing rights."
The unveiling of this suppressed report may help the presidential candidacy of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic frontrunner. In his environmental policy statement, Kerry says, the Bush administration "has stubbornly refused to confront the serious consequences of rising greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere in the face of overwhelming scientific evidence. It has rejected modest and responsible legislative proposals to curb the growth of greenhouse gas emissions and instead has pursued half-hearted voluntary measures that have simply maintained the status quo."
Kerry promises to "take the aggressive action required to reshape the carbon profile of our economy and put us on a long term path toward meaningful reductions in emissions and, ultimately, stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at levels that will prevent harmful changes in the Earth's climate."
Greenpeace, one of the environmental groups that has been warning of global warming for years, said the Pentagon report shows that President George W. Bush is out of touch with the facts of climate change. "Actually, Mr. Bush, the jury's been in for some time, and now even your own Pentagon is saying you're wrong," the organization said in a statement.
"Perhaps it's time you focused on the real terrorist threat to our planet," said Greenpeace, "the oil companies like Exxon which continue to fund your re-election, and whose interests you continue to defend at the expense of our future."
-------- genetics
Monsanto Cultivates Biotech Bonanza Despite Critics
Story by Carey Gillam
REUTERS USA:
February 23, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/23933/story.htm
ST. LOUIS - When shareholders at Monsanto Co.'s annual meeting earlier this month requested evidence that the company's growing stable of genetically modified crops is safe, Chairman Hugh Grant was quick to reject their plea.
"We believe all of our products ... can be safely used," Grant told the shareholders gathered at the company's headquarters in St. Louis. He said there was no need to fear the company's gene-modified corn, soybean, canola and other seeds because they were "well tested and well regulated."
Officials at Monsanto, the world's leading producer of genetic modifications in corn and soybean seeds, say the technology can safely fight world hunger, make farmers wealthier and reduce the damage agriculture does to the environment.
A diverse community of critics disagrees. They express concern that Monsanto is manipulating the world's food supply, which could cause health problems and irreversible harm to the environment. Meanwhile, farmers chafe at the idea of paying ongoing royalties for seeds that use the patented technology.
But Monsanto is managing to shake off the critics and starting to reap a biotech bonanza. Acreage planted with biotech crops is on the rise in countries around the world, and the company is projecting gross profit from the business at $1.2 billion this year.
"It appears that our bet on ag biotech was a good one," Monsanto Vice President Jerry Steiner said in a recent interview.
The company is banking on biotech crops because its former bread-and-butter product - Roundup herbicide - is rapidly losing market share and profitability to competitors.
Monsanto was once heavily involved in the chemical business, including manufacturing the Agent Orange herbicide blamed for widespread health problems during its use by the military in Vietnam. The company also made polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which were banned in the 1970s after being linked to a range of health problems.
BIOTECH BET
Monsanto has exited industrial chemicals businesses as well as a pharmaceutical business line and now focuses solely on agriculture, including developing technology for genetically modified corn, wheat, cotton and other crops.
This strategy has gained approval from investors, who have sent the company's stock surging, as well as of from the U.S. government, which is expected to offer its first round of approval for Monsanto's biotech wheat - the world's first - any day.
Indeed, the Bush Administration as well as Monsanto is pushing wary foreign governments to eliminate barriers to biotech crops. The successes frustrate and outrage opponents, who say Monsanto has used its power and money to unfairly influence regulators and set up a system that could give it control over much of the world's food supply.
"In the same way that Monsanto claimed that Agent Orange and PCBs were safe despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, they claim their genetically engineered foods are safe," said Jeffrey Smith, author of a new book that examines testing on biotech crops.
"They have suppressed reports about the dangers of GM foods," Smith said. "And the handful of studies used by Monsanto as a basis for their safety claims appear rigged to avoid finding problems."
Smith will be among the speakers at meetings this month in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where representatives to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety will discuss international trade, liability concerns and other issues surrounding biotech crops.
Monsanto says the criticisms are unfounded.
"Biotech foods have been in development and testing for more two decades," Steiner said. "The vigor and validity of the safety testing process has been proven time and again."
Monsanto researchers are working on genetically modifying crops that have higher yields, tolerate drought and insects, and are healthier to eat.
But the company's current products, aimed mostly at helping farmers fight weeds and insects, have little direct appeal to consumers or food companies. This, along with Monsanto's reputation for being overbearing and heavy-handed, has caused resistance in the United States and abroad.
"They have had amazing arrogance," said R.T Jones Equities analyst Juli Niemann. "Acceptance (of biotech crops) could have come a lot earlier had they managed it well. But now it looks like things are moving on their side."
(This article is one of a series of features Reuters is issuing to coincide with the first meeting of parties to the United Nations Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, from February 23 to 27. The legal agreement is intended to regulate international trade in genetically modified organisms.)
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Cloned Embryos Could Help Explain Basis for Diseases
Scientists Expect to Determine Causes, Develop Therapies by Watching Progress of Illness in Cells Implanted in Mice
By Rick Weiss
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A62845-2004Feb22?language=printer
When South Korean researchers announced two weeks ago they had made the world's first cloned human embryos, they emphasized they had no intention of allowing those embryos to grow into cloned babies. Their goal -- like that of others doing similar work -- is to develop new therapies for Parkinson's disease, diabetes and other ailments.
The idea is to make a cloned embryo from a patient's healthy cells and then retrieve from the embryo stem cells that could be used to repair the patient's failing organ -- an approach known as therapeutic cloning. Because the cells would come from an embryo genetically identical to the patient, the theory goes, they would not be rejected by the patient's immune system.
This potential to regenerate ailing organs has been a powerful -- though so far unsuccessful -- selling point as scientists and advocates have tried to persuade Congress and the Bush administration to loosen federal restrictions that preclude the use of federal funds for work involving cloned embryos.
In moments of candor, however, many scientists concede that therapeutic cloning is far down the list of reasons they want to clone human embryos. In the long run, the promise is real, they insist. But the technical and regulatory hurdles are so high that it could be a decade before the first proposal is ready for consideration by the Food and Drug Administration.
The agency has already said it will want answers to tough questions before it will consider allowing cloned embryo cells to be injected into patients: Will the cells go where they're supposed to go in the body? Could they turn into the wrong kinds of cells once they're in the body? Will they start multiplying uncontrollably and form cancers?
By the time those and other questions get addressed in animal studies, an entirely new approach to regenerative medicine -- one that may not depend on cloned embryos at all -- might have emerged.
But there are avenues of research that scientists do want to pursue immediately with cloned human embryos. They fall under the category of basic research and so are unlikely to get patients and politicians excited, researchers acknowledge. But they are experiments that could reveal in spectacular detail the basic causes of many diseases. And they could speed the development of new drugs through already well-established pharmaceutical pipelines, without having to break the new technical and regulatory ground that therapeutic cloning does.
Although the goals of these experiments are less sexy than the almost magical regrowing of sick organs, scientists are starting to talk about them more -- in part out of frustration that Congress remains unconvinced embryo cloning deserves federal support.
Instead of making cloned embryos as a source of healthy stem cells for transplantation into patients, scientists are proposing to make cloned embryos that explicitly bear the genetic glitch or glitches at the root of a patient's disease.
They would start with a diseased cell from a patient -- a degenerating nerve cell, for example, from a person with Lou Gehrig's disease, a neurological disorder that robs people of control over their muscles. Using cloning techniques, scientists would transform that cell into an embryo, which after a few days would produce stem cells. Each stem cell would bear the genetic roots of the disease and each would have the potential, as stem cells do, to turn into any kind of cell or tissue.
In the case of Lou Gehrig's, scientists already have found a handful of genes that appear to play a contributing role. But as with many diseases, they don't know which are most important. They also don't know what environmental influences might determine whether a person with those genes would get the disease or not.
With stem cells from a cloned Lou Gehrig's embryo, however, scientists believe they could quickly answer those questions -- and a host of others.
Here's how it would work: Researchers already know how to force stem cells to become nerve cells, so in one set of experiments they would do so with stem cells taken from a cloned Lou Gehrig's embryo and watch those cultured nerves as they degenerate in a laboratory dish. That alone would be an unprecedented opportunity to watch the disease unfold outside a person, and to test whether certain classes of chemicals or drugs might slow or prevent the process.
But even better, said Irving Weissman, director of Stanford's Institute for Cancer/Stem Cell Biology and Medicine, scientists could inject those fresh but doomed neurons into the brains of mice and watch how the cells grow, die and respond to various drugs.
"You could study them not only in a dish but in the context of the kind of organ in which they normally find themselves," Weissman said.
Studies could go much further than that, others said. Scientists already know how to "fix" broken genes in stem cells by splicing out the bad copies and replacing them with normal copies. Researchers could start doing that one at a time with the handful of genes suspected of playing a role in Lou Gehrig's. Then they could see whether fixing one gene, or another, or a combination of several, prevented the degeneration of nerves.
They could do the same with genes in muscle cells from a Lou Gehrig's embryo. After all, the disease is all about communication between brain cells and muscle cells. And although scientists suspect that muscle cell genes may contribute to the disease along with nerve cell genes, it is not known how big a role each plays.
With key genes identified, it would be much easier to design a drug or other therapy that could target the biochemical essence of the disease.
Finally, since defective genes alone often are not enough to cause a disease but do so only after a specific environmental trigger -- exposure to pollutants, stress hormones or cigarette smoke, for example -- scientists could add those influences in lab dishes or in mice and see how they contribute.
"You could study the multistep progression of the disease," said Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology in Worcester, Mass., a company pursuing human embryo cloning with private money. "This use of clones has been totally missed by the public but is of extreme importance to really understand the molecular basis of disease."
Cloned embryos could also shed light on an entirely different class of diseases, said Douglas Wallace, a geneticist at the University of California at Irvine. More than 125 diseases have been linked to genes not in the central nucleus of people's cells but in the mitochondria -- tiny cellular structures inherited from the mother. Because cloning involves the transfer of nuclei from one cell to another, it would allow scientists for the first time to sort out the respective contributions of nuclear and mitochondrial genes in various diseases.
Such experiments are specifically allowed under an otherwise broad ban on cloning research in Britain, Wallace said, because of their potential to explicate and eventually treat these diseases.
In this country, all such work is off-limits to federally funded scientists, who conduct the vast majority of the nation's basic biomedical research, because of political battles over the ethics of embryo research. There is no good great enough to justify the destruction of human embryos, opponents of the research vehemently maintain.
Because private companies are almost universally unwilling to tread on such controversial turf, Weissman and others said, it is likely -- for better or worse -- that many of the advances to come in the next year will, like the South Korean announcement, highlight foreign scientists.
-------- ACTIVISTS
To Greet G.O.P., Protests of Varying Volume
February 23, 2004
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/nyregion/23protest.html?pagewanted=all&position=
When the Republican National Convention comes to town, the Rev. Peter Laarman hopes to greet it with a quiet, reserved defiance. He wants religious leaders to hold discussion groups on concerns about politicizing Sept. 11. He wants to have seminars to discuss lost jobs. And he wants to bring experts to New York to discuss national security.
What he does not want to do is take to the streets with huge protests. Instead, through a campaign he calls the Accountability Project, he hopes to offer a thoughtful counterpoint when the Republicans stage their nominating convention in New York, scheduled for Aug. 30 through Sept. 2.
But Mr. Laarman may find his tempered voice drowned out in what may well be a tense and angry time on the streets of Manhattan.
Though the Police Department and many protest organizers have been reluctant to predict how many people will ultimately turn out for protests, estimates have ranged from 500,000 people to a million.
Six months before any delegate is to take a seat at Madison Square Garden, it is clear that many groups are already planning strategy and activities. Labor unions, environmentalists, self-declared anarchists and others who merely label themselves as anti-Bush or anti-Republican are making plans to turn out. Barely a week passes without several planning sessions in New York, focusing on everything from housing and tactics to legal strategy and what to expect in interactions with the police.
Organizers have gathered in a private loft in SoHo, in offices owned by the United Federation of Teachers near Wall Street, in a church in the East Village, and in offices around the city. The groups have names like United for Peace and Justice and Not in Our Name, and their intentions run the gamut from wanting to shut the convention down to holding the Labor Day parade on Thursday, Sept. 2, the day President Bush is scheduled to accept his party's nomination.
There are people planning tent cities to accommodate protesters from across the country, lawyers' committees to assist those who are arrested, legal observers to monitor the police, and baby sitters, dog walkers, translators, medics, even clergy members. All are working to help protesters overwhelm the positive message Republicans are hoping their convention generates.
At the same time, some organizers, like Mr. Laarman, do not want to risk clashing with the police and are looking at alternative means to make their point. The group Billionaires for Bush, for example, plans to use humor and satire, holding up signs like "Corporations are people, too" and "More Bush, Less Taxes."
"You see that people understand the stakes, and so there is much more of a judicious view about making sure we do something that is effective, and is heard, and that gets attention, and that doesn't backfire," said Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, which, with other labor organizations, has begun to discuss counter-convention plans.
The problem of backfiring protests is much on the minds of many protest organizers, who say that any violence would serve only to marginalize their message and strengthen Mr. Bush's appeal.
"We all can see that it works very much to the advantage of the administration if the president strikes a heroic pose in New York, identifying with the tragedy of Sept. 11 yet again, and if the people who are registering displeasure are doing so in a violent and disruptive way," said Mr. Laarman, who left his post as senior minister at Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square in Greenwich Village to help plan anti-convention activities for the Accountability Project.
He added: "I am not in the business of predictions, but it is my guess a very significant number of people from New York and from around the world are going to take the position that the convention should be shut down or disrupted. There is a good likelihood of that."
Complicating things for protest organizers, the police, the Secret Service and convention planners have revealed little of their plans. The police have not said where they will allow protesters to demonstrate, though they have said that protest areas would be within "sight and sound" of the convention, a legal threshold. "We're working with protest organizers already,'' said Deputy Police Commissioner Paul J. Browne, "and we will work with them throughout. We want to give them sight and sound proximity, while allowing R.N.C. participants uninterrupted access to and from the convention.''
He added later, "We're looking to save lives, not stifle dissent.''
Nonetheless, many people planning to protest are girding themselves for encounters with the police. Ann Shirazi, 59, a social worker who lives in Manhattan, said she thought the police - in New York and across the nation - were using their powers to silence critics of the government.
"It does frighten me this can happen in my country," Ms. Shirazi said. "It will not stop me from standing on a street corner. But it is terrifying."
Ms. Shirazi, who plans to protest against the convention, was so concerned she accepted the invitation of a group calling itself the Organization to attend a "Know Your Rights" seminar. At the seminar, in a loft at Broadway and Houston Street, about 25 people whose ages ranged from 17 to 59 sat and listened recently as three lawyers gave advice and social commentary on what one lawyer called "these dark times."
"Even if you are aware of your rights, it doesn't mean they will be respected," said Debbie Hrbek, a criminal lawyer who volunteered to address the gathering. "You need to go into every situation with a police officer anticipating they won't do the right thing."
The audience accepted that as a given and then asked questions.
"Is it legal during a protest when the cops swoop in and arrest people?''
"Can the police demand to look in your bag for no reason?"
"Once arrested, how long can they hold you?"
Audience members sat quietly, many taking notes as the lawyers encouraged them not to confront the police.
"The police can do anything they want," said Bruce Bentley, co-chairman of the Mass Defense Committee of the National Lawyers Guild in New York. "Is it lawful or not? That will be decided later. That's why we are saying it is better not to mix it up with the cops."
Others, however, like Mr. Laarman, of the Accountability Project, were focusing on staying off the streets. His goal, he said, is to provide a "third narrative" to the convention - the first being the convention itself and the second direct confrontation. He said he is aiming his approach at people like his mother, whom he described as an independent voter living in Wisconsin.
Mr. Laarman and Carl Lipscombe, operating out of an office on the 24th floor at 50 Broadway, are trying to raise money and enlist help. Their goal, Mr. Laarman said, is to try to counter the convention's message without staging protests.
They plan to start later next month, when his group is the co-host of a town hall forum called "Shock and Awe in New York" - playing off the name the military gave for its opening offensive against Iraq - at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
A university brochure says, in part, that notable New Yorkers will examine the question of "what communities can do when political leaders appropriate emotionally charged icons for their own purposes."
Groups like Anarchists World Fair, Radical Teachers, Time's Up, World War III Arts-in-Action, Campaign to Demilitarize the Police and Still We Rise, to name a few, have also been meeting together and sharing information for months, operating under an umbrella called the No RNC Clearinghouse. Their meetings are drawing more than 100 people, with an abundance of body piercing, tattoos, dreadlocks and army fatigues, and are organized with the precision and language of a business meeting, including flow charts and agendas.
Bill Dobbs, a spokesman for United for Peace and Justice, a coalition that organized an antiwar rally in Manhattan last February that attracted crowds estimated at 100,000 to 500,000 people, said that the size and intensity of the planning were not surprising.
"All signs point to the convention becoming a magnet for protest as so many New Yorkers and others want to speak their mind about Bush policies, foreign and domestic," Mr. Dobbs said after attending the most recent Clearinghouse meeting.
Many people are talking about coming in from around the country and other parts of the world. Using the Internet as an organizing tool, they are trying to set up housing, transportation and other logistical issues.
Jays Janney, 35, a doctoral student in sociology at Indiana University, said she and about seven other graduate students were preparing to come to protest and to document the interaction between the police and protesters. The students have organized reading groups to discuss works about social movements. Next will be direct action training, or the practical aspects of participating in a large and potentially volatile protest, she said.
"One of the students asked her mom for some cash, and the mom said, 'Only if I get to go, too,' " Ms. Janney said.
For all this, the Republicans said they were not much concerned.
"We are confident that the N.Y.P.D. and U.S. Secret Service will create a security plan that will allow the Republican National Convention to conduct its business in a safe and orderly manner, while ensuring that other individuals are allowed to voice their opinions at that time in New York City," said Leslie Beyer, deputy spokeswoman for the campaign.
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