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NUCLEAR
New knowledge about plutonium calms scientists
Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout
Lawmakers briefed on 'serious' nuke incident
The nuclear accident that changed history
Inslee, Dicks briefed on nuclear missile accident
Manley urges more nuclear power
Ontario told it has to rely on nukes
Report urges power-short Ontario to go nuclear
Kazuko Ito: Depleted uranium leads to suffering in Iraq
Soldiers' accounts reveal new details:
Musharraf Cites Nuclear Dealings
India Tests New Medium-Range Missile
India Tests Nuclear - Capable Prithvi Missile
India tests short-range nuclear-capable missile
Non-Nato ally status 'more psychological than substantive'
N. Korea Threatens to Up Nuclear Deterrent
U.S., UN Discuss New N.Korea Nuclear Inspections
N.Korea Tries to Link Nuclear Row with U.S. Drills
North Korea says military drill casts shadow over nuclear talks
Science and technology in Russia
Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout
ElBaradei warns terrorists could go nuclear
Terrorists could go nuclear: IAEA chief
U.N. watchdog and U.S. want to clean up atomic 'mess'
UN Nuclear Head Sees No Tolerance of WMD Seekers
Attorney General Lockyer Files Brief Challenging
Don't fence us out Rocky Flats will be clean enough for public use
Faulty Valve Stalls Restart of Davis Besse Reactor
Nuclear safety review needed
McCain Defends Kerry's Record on National Security
Bush Marks War's Anniversary, Vowing to Fight On
Because of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear dangers are even greater
Which Way John Kerry?
MILITARY
India and Britain Sign Agreement on Jets
Riots Spread Across Kosovo, Serbia
Army May Allow Bids For Some KBR Work
General Dynamics Buys Firm
China silent after shooting of Taiwanese leaders
Ministers in Brussels Reject Idea of a 'C.I.A.' for Europe
Haitians Hesitant to Surrender Weapons
Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis
Iraq Attacks Blamed On Islamic Extremists
Welcome to the quagmire
Sharon is a liar and he always stalls peace process
Syria 'not the enemy'
More NATO Troops Arrive in Kosovo, With More to Come
NATO Expanding Kosovo Forces to Combat Violence
Al Qaeda Leaders May Be Cornered
Pakistan Intensifies Assault in Hunt for a Qaeda Leader
US Monitoring China, Pak's Nuke Activities
U.N. Envoy Returning to Aid Baghdad
Annan Says U.N. Return to Iraq Is Imminent
Iraq conflict stretches U.S. military to the limit
On the run again
Friendly fire
Photo essay reveals why Bush wants to keep the dead and wounded hidden
US Army Corps Must Curb Wasteful Spending
Arab Journalists Protest Shootings as Powell Visits Baghdad
Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq
Donald Rumsfeld's "The Unknown"
'Secret service caught by bluffs and blunders'
Silencing the Truth About the Attacks in Spain
Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Scalia Won't Sit Out Case On Cheney
Scalia Refusing to Take Himself Off Cheney Case
Justice Scalia Refuses to Recuse in Cheney Case
Metro Urges Passengers to Be Alert
Saudis Say U.S. Was Wrong to Criticize Detentions
Charges Dropped Against Muslim Chaplain
OTHER
North Carolina Asks E.P.A. to Force Others to Clean Air
NASA Explains "Dust Bowl" Drought
Fresh studies support new mass extinction theory
Site that prompted creation of Superfund is now clean
Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data
Senate Democrats Claim Medicare Chief Broke Law
Chip industry to probe cancer rates of workers
ACTIVISTS
March in San Francisco Starts Weekend of Anti-War Protests
Iraqis stage anti-US demonstration
Activists Press On To Make Their Peace
-------- NUCLEAR
New knowledge about plutonium calms scientists
March 19, 2004
Innovations Report
http://www.innovations-report.com/html/reports/environment_sciences/report-27167.html
New analyses from KTH in Stockholm are creating order in the uncertainty that has prevailed for the last four years about how plutonium dioxide, one of the most important radioactive compounds in nuclear waste, behaves when it comes into contact with water. The findings are being published in the latest issue of Nature Materials.
In January 2000 an article was published in the American scientific journal Science. A research team had discovered that plutonium dioxide, PuO2, quite unexpectedly could be transformed by oxidation to form a new stable compound PuO2,27.
This sparked heated discussions and a great deal of uncertainty in the scientific community, since the world was now facing a new radioactive compound with unknown characteristics.
The consequences of this would be that hazardous nuclear waste was probably much more easily soluble in water that was previously thought, and thereby much more unstable. Previous risk assessments were turned on end.
A research team at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, with scientists from KTH, Uppsala University, and a research institute in Budapest were commissioned by SKB, the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company, to study this. It has taken four years, and advanced calculations have been carried out in order to explain the earlier findings. The results are considered to be of vital importance.
"It's good news. It seems that this compound PuO2,27, is not stable. It can only be created temporarily under special conditions, which means that there is no reason to revise previous risk analyses. We have filled in a few gaps in our knowledge and found an explanation for the findings of the other scientists," says Pavel Korzhavyi, a researcher at KTH Materials Science.
The team's findings are based on computer simulations, and neither Pavel nor his colleagues have been in contact with plutonium.
----
Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
March 19, 2004
NY TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19NUKE.html
To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis.
The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.
In a secretive effort that began five years ago but whose outlines are just now becoming known, the government's network of weapons laboratories is hiring new experts, calling in old-timers, dusting off data and holding drills to sharpen its ability to do what is euphemistically known as nuclear attribution or post-event forensics.
It is also building robots that would go into an affected area and take radioactive samples, as well as field stations that would dilute dangerous material for safe shipment to national laboratories.
"Certainly, there's a frightening aspect in all of this," said Charles B. Richardson, the project leader for nuclear identification research at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. "But we're putting all these things together with the hope that they'll never have to be used."
Most experts say the risk of a terrorist nuclear attack is low but no longer unthinkable, given the spread of material and know-how around the globe.
Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who in 1999 helped found the Pentagon's part of the governmentwide effort, said the precautions would "pay huge dividends after the event, both in terms of the ability to identify the bad actor and in terms of establishing public trust."
In a nuclear crisis, Dr. Davis added, the identification effort would be vital in "dealing with the desire for instant gratification through vengeance."
Vice President Dick Cheney was briefed on the program last fall, Dr. Davis said. The National Security Council coordinates the work among a dozen or so federal agencies.
The basic science relies on faint clues - tiny bits of radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of evidence can help identify an exploded bomb's type and characteristics, including its country of origin.
Solving the nuclear whodunit could take much more information, including hard-won law enforcement clues and good intelligence on foreign nuclear arms and terrorist groups. For that reason, several federal agencies are involved in the program, among them the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The program addresses true nuclear weapons as well as so-called dirty bombs, ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris.
"It's a very hard job," said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who led a panel that evaluated the identification work.
Mr. Happer said he was worried that a rush for retribution after a nuclear attack might cut short the time needed for careful analysis. "If we lose a city," he said, "we might not wait around that long."
The effort to fingerprint domestic nuclear blasts is part of a larger federal project to strengthen the nation's overall defenses against unconventional terrorist threats. Mostly, the goal is prevention. For instance, the government recently sent teams of scientists with hidden radiation detectors to check major American cities for signs that terrorists might be preparing to detonate radiological bombs.
In contrast, the identification program seeks to increase the government's knowledge and options should prevention fail. "We're trying to resurrect some of our capability," said Reid Worlton, a retired nuclear scientist from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who has been called in to aid the fallout endeavor. "It sort of died. They're not doing radiochemistry on nuclear tests anymore, so it's hard to keep these people around."
The effort draws on work that began at the dawn of the atomic era. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project built an array of devices to monitor nuclear blasts in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later. The experience helped scientists learn what to look for.
The first hunt zeroed in on the Soviet Union. In the late 1940's, military weather planes used paper filters to gather dust particles around the periphery of Russia, and scientists in the United States who analyzed the data at first sounded dozens of false alarms, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert in Washington.
Then, on Sept. 3, 1949, a weather plane flying from Japan to Alaska picked up a slew of atomic particles. "That was the real thing," Mr. Richelson said. Twenty days later, President Harry S. Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their first nuclear device.
The ranks of fallout investigators swelled during the cold war as foreign nations conducted hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests. By all accounts, the sleuths made many important discoveries about the nature and design of foreign nuclear arms.
In time, the ranks dwindled as more and more nations decided to move their test explosions underground, eliminating fallout. The last nuclear blast to pummel the earth's atmosphere was in 1980, and the last known underground test, conducted by Pakistan, was in 1998.
As the terrorist threat rose in the 1990's, the government began to consider the quandary that would arise if a nuclear weapon exploded on American soil. In 1999, Dr. Davis, then head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon, began an effort to address the identification problem by financing research at the nation's weapons laboratories, many of them run by the Energy Department.
The first money came in late 2000, Dr. Davis said, and the attacks of September 2001 "made it clear that a very organized event on a large scale was credible." That perception, he said, helped the effort expand.
The secretive work won rare public praise in a June 2002 report ("Making the Nation Safer") from the National Research Council of the National Academies, the country's leading scientific advisory group. Having the ability to find out who launched a domestic nuclear strike, the report said, could deter attackers and bolster threats of retaliation. The report urged that the program go into operation "as quickly as practical" and that the government publicly declare its existence.
Since then, weapons laboratories and other federal agencies have worked hard on the problem. "They're making progress but they've got a ways to go," said Mr. Worlton, the retired Los Alamos scientist.
In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were broken into teams and given radiological data from two old American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he said.
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said the laboratory was developing a land robot that could roll up to 10 miles to sample fallout and return it to human operators for analysis. It could also radio back some results if it became stuck. Mr. Richardson said the robots, now in development, are to be ready in a couple of years.
Experts say a new aircraft for atmospheric sampling of nuclear fallout is also in development. The Air Force currently has one, the WC-135W Constant Phoenix, for such work. It was first deployed in 1965.
Weapons experts say getting samples fast is important because some radioactive debris can decay rapidly. If captured quickly, they can shed light on a weapon's design.
One way of trying to identify a bomb's origin positively, several experts say, is to match debris signatures with libraries of classified data about nuclear arms around the world, including old fallout signatures and more direct intelligence about bomb types, characteristics and construction materials.
"If you're talking about a stolen device, you might try to do that," Mr. Richardson said. "But if it's improvised, that's less likely to work. It might not look like things you've seen before."
A further complication is that even knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it. In a 1991 Tom Clancy novel, "The Sum of All Fears," Islamic terrorists find and rebuild an Israeli nuclear weapon and set it off at the Super Bowl.
Federal experts say complex threat scenarios (for instance, an American warhead being stolen and detonated in an American city) mean that many types of intelligence might be needed for successful identification. Over all, it is unclear how much money the government is spending on the effort.
Private experts offered suggestions for improvement. Dr. Happer of Princeton, who heads a university board that helps oversee campus research, said the program might be cooperating too little with nuclear allies. "It's to our advantage," he said, "for all of us to share."
Dr. Davis, the former head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, made several policy recommendations last April in an article for The Journal of Homeland Security. He said the F.B.I. should lead the program, presidentially appointed overseers should guide it, goals should be set for how long analyses should take and legal issues of prosecution should be examined.
In an interview, Dr. Davis said his suggestions had made little headway, partly because of the topic's grisly nature. "This is an ugly subject because your best effort is going to be barely adequate," he said. "That's not the kind of phrase people like to hear."
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said that the attribution effort had made good technical progress and had already some ability to identify an attacker.
"We're hoping for deterrence," he said. "We don't want anybody to think they can get away with it."
-------- accidents and safety
Lawmakers briefed on 'serious' nuke incident
Better public disclosure is needed, the congressmen say, even though risks to public safety in this case appeared to be small.
Christopher Dunagan
Bremerton, WA, Sun Staff
March 19, 2004
http://www.thesunlink.com/redesign/2004-03-19/local/428573.shtml
BANGOR - Coming out of a classified briefing with Navy officials, U.S. Reps. Norm Dicks and Jay Inslee agreed Thursday that the Navy needs to develop new ways of releasing information about incidents that could involve public safety -- even when nuclear weapons are implicated. Dicks, D-Belfair, and Inslee, D-Bainbridge Island, told The Sun they were satisfied that the Navy had reacted appropriately after what they called a "serious" incident involving a missile operation at Bangor.
Rear Adm. Charles Young, head of the Navy's Strategic Weapons Facility, Pacific, provided the congressmen with details about the Nov. 7 incident at the Naval Submarine Base at Bangor.
According to unofficial reports, the nose cone of a nuclear missile was punctured as the missile was being hoisted out of its tube aboard the Trident submarine USS Georgia.
A ladder left in the missile tube reportedly sliced a 9-inch hole and nearly struck one of the missile's nuclear warheads before the lifting was stopped, according to a report by military justice activist Walter Fitzpatrick and confirmed by other sources who have requested anonymity.
Because of the classified nature of the congressional briefing, however, Dicks and Inslee could not confirm details of the incident.
"We're obviously under restriction about what we can say," Dicks said. "Most of the information is classified. But it is my opinion that there were mistakes made in this incident."
Dicks said the situation never reached "life-threatening" proportions. The Navy reacted with a thorough review, followed by reassignment of Navy personnel at several levels.
"This was a serious matter, and the (Navy officials) are taking this very, very seriously," he said.
"Without describing the details of this incident," Inslee added, "I was stunned at some repeated failures to follow procedure."
Although the release of "toxic material" was unlikely in this incident, Inslee said he is still troubled by the "potential severity" if it were to happen.
In recent days, some people have suggested that if the ladder -- which should have been removed -- had actually pierced the nuclear warhead, it could have resulted in the release of radioactive plutonium. Some say the radiation could have been scattered widely by a possible detonation of conventional explosives in the warhead or missile propellant.
"A lot of people were speculating and saying things that were not true," Dicks said. "Based on general knowledge, it is extremely difficult to detonate one of these."
Dicks and Inslee both said they would like the Navy to develop new ways of disclosing sensitive information.
"We still wish the Navy and Department of Defense could be more forthcoming when incidents like this occur," Dicks said.
When people feel something is being covered up, they tend to overstate the danger and "the press overreacts because they think they have discovered something," he said. "I think people would understand that certain incidents happen."
If a public hazard truly existed, Dicks said, existing procedures require notification of local authorities. But near-accidents, even serious ones, are another story.
"There are policies about disclosure," Inslee said, "and we are urging the Navy and Department of Defense to review those policies."
He said he thinks the Navy can find a way to disclose information without revealing military secrets.
Dicks said serious incidents should be reported immediately to selected members of Congress with the appropriate security clearance.
If necessary, he said, Congress could adopt a new disclosure law, patterned on one that requires briefings about defense intelligence issues.
Reach Christopher Dunagan at (360) 792-9207 or at cdunagan@thesunlink.com.
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The nuclear accident that changed history
March 19, 2004
Mark Meltzer, OPINION
Atlanta Business Chronicle
http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2004/03/22/editorial1.html
Twenty-five years ago this month, an accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Harrisburg, Pa., changed the course of energy use in the United States. On March 28, 1979, Three Mile Island's Unit 2 reactor suffered a meltdown, sending the nuclear power industry reeling (as staff writer Mary Jane Credeur reports in this week's edition).
Before Three Mile Island, many believed the likelihood of such an accident was extremely rare. But once it actually happened, the public lost faith in the safety of nuclear power. The 1986 nuclear accident in Chernobyl did nothing to improve that image.
Not a single new nuclear power plant has been licensed in the United States since the Three Mile Island accident, and as a result nuclear power contributes only about 20 percent of the power supply here. By contrast, Japan and France get close to 80 percent of their power from nuclear plants, according to Farzad Rahnema, chair of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering/Medical Physics Program at Georgia Tech.
The historic accident also weakened interest among students in nuclear engineering. Enrollment in the program at Georgia Tech dropped to less than five students a year, Rahnema said. Georgia Tech has decommissioned its own nuclear reactor, but that hasn't affected recruiting in recent years, which has been growing. The school has enrolled 51 students for fall 2004, and took in 28 students in 2003 and 42 in 2001.
Nuclear power may be coming back into vogue for a number of reasons, Rahnema said. Existing nuclear power plants are safer today, and modern plants, such as the advanced boiling water reactors in Tokyo and those being built in Taiwan, are cheaper, safer and more reliable than those of a generation earlier, he said.
"The [existing] reactors are very safe, and they've even improved on that," Rahnema said.
Also, there are more concerns over the cost and supply of other kinds of energy. Natural gas is being burned more frequently to produce electricity, but the cost of natural gas has gone up in recent years. The power grid failure last year in the Northeast and the energy crisis in California in 2001 have created more worry about the supply and delivery of electricity.
Finally, President George W. Bush supports the use of nuclear power in the nation's energy portfolio.
Interestingly, fears of an environmental disaster caused by a nuclear accident may have contributed to air quality problems throughout the nation, Rahnema acknowledged. Since burning coal pollutes the air and nuclear energy does not, the air might be cleaner if more of the nation's power came from nuclear energy and less from coal.
If safety is less a concern today for nuclear power, two issues remain of concern. One is terrorism, specifically the fear that terrorists could cause a disaster by destroying a nuclear power plant. Rahnema said the reactor containment buildings in existing plants "are designed to survive a direct hit from a crashing airliner."
The other is waste disposal. Most spent nuclear fuel still is stored at nuclear power plants, in concrete casks.
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are seared into my memory as reasons to steer away from nuclear power, but with technology improved and America always thirsting for energy, it may be time to move forward, cautiously, again.
Contact Mark Meltzer at (404) 249-1020; fax, (404) 249-1058; or e-mail (mmeltzer@bizjournals.com).
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Inslee, Dicks briefed on nuclear missile accident
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF
Friday, March 19, 2004
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/165481_missile19.html
In response to their demand for answers, U.S. Reps. Jay Inslee and Norm Dicks received a classified briefing yesterday from the Navy's top strategic weapons commander about a Nov. 7 Trident nuclear missile accident at Naval Submarine Base Bangor.
While restricted from disclosing details, Inslee, whose district includes Bangor, said that in the briefing from Rear Adm. Charles Young, he learned that lives did not appear to have been in jeopardy nor were toxic materials released when the nose cone of a missile lifted from the USS Georgia was punctured.
Inslee, however, called the accident "troubling, given the potential for any release of toxic material from these missiles." It was serious enough that the commanders of Bangor's strategic weapons facility were fired in December, and the Navy launched a detailed review of its safety procedures, he said.
Inslee was not pleased that Congress and the public, especially civilian emergency responders, were kept in the dark. The accident came to light two weeks ago through the media.
"There is simply no excuse to have a delay of this length in notifying Congress and the public in a secure way, as occurred in this case," he said.
-------- canada
Manley urges more nuclear power
Panel reviewed Ontario's electricity sources, prospects
Critics outraged report ignores renewable energy alternatives
JOHN SPEARS AND RICHARD BRENNAN
Mar. 19, 2004.
Toronto Star, QUEEN'S PARK BUREAU
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1079651409862&call_pageid=968332188774&col=968350116467
Ontario's energy future lies in nuclear technology and provincially owned Ontario Power Generation - even though the horrendous track record of both has caused the current crisis, John Manley says.
A three-person panel Manley chaired looked into alternative power sources - natural gas, coal, hydro, nuclear and imported power.
But in an interview yesterday, Manley said: "We were driven to the conclusion that there has to be continuing commitment to nuclear in this province."
There are few sites suitable for hydroelectric facilities remaining in the province, natural gas is becoming more scarce and expensive, and coal is dirty, he said.
Manley acknowledged that calling for more nukes won't be popular with some folks "because ... they see the history of nuclear in Ontario as not having been a good one ... but there is no reason why Canadians can't run nuclear power as well as others can." But he said fixing OPG will be long and painful.
"We're not going to be able to look at OPG a year from now and say the Manley report has worked miracles. It's going to be a five-year process before anyone can say, `That used to be a dog and now it's performing well.'
"We just think, better someone should take it on than throw up your hands and say `we can't do this in the public sector; we're going to sell off the assets.' Because that's your only choice. If it's not OPG in one configuration or another, then you sell off the assets."
OPG is a provincially owned utility that provides up to 70 per cent of Ontario's power, but its attempt to rebuild the Pickering nuclear facility has been marked by long delays and huge cost overruns.
Manley said OPG "is not the vehicle for delivering conservation measures," adding it is higher prices that will encourage consumers to conserve electricity.
Effective April 1, the price of electricity is rising from the cap of 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour put on by the former Conservative government to 4.7 cents per kilowatt hour for the first 750 kilowatt hours used and 5.5 cents per kilowatt hour for usage after that.
Manley said whatever the government does, the emphasis should be on Ontario becoming largely energy self-sufficient, but he warned that Queen's Park has to quit meddling if OPG is ever to do a better job at managing its assets.
"The fact is that power generation utilities in this province have been subject to political interference since the founding of Ontario Hydro a century ago. This must cease," Manley said.
Besides Manley, a former federal Liberal finance minister, the panel included former Bank of Nova Scotia chair Peter Godsoe, and Jake Epp, a former federal Conservative cabinet minister and interim OPG chair expected to be given the top job shortly. The review of OPG was conducted over three months.
Energy Minister Dwight Duncan, who refused comment yesterday on the report, has promised a government plan for the electricity sector by fall.
Critics were outraged that the panel's 101-page report effectively ignored wind and other renewable sources of power and instead pinned its hope on a nuclear future.
"What you got is a bunch of suited guys here direct from Bay Street clearly captured by the nuclear power fairies, who want to spin us into yet another half century of nuclear power and black-hole spending," said NDP MPP Peter Kormos (Niagara Centre).
Manley said the government has to go ahead with the retrofit of a second nuclear reactor at Pickering A despite the horrendous cost overruns and delays in restarting the first reactor, which cost almost $1 billion - or almost as much as the original projection to retrofit all four. Restarting the remaining two reactors should depend on the success of restarting the second unit, he said.
The Ontario Liberal government's promise to close its five coal-fired plants by 2007 will make the looming energy shortage worse. Duncan said at a news conference Tuesday it is important to the environment and the health of Ontarians these plants are closed.
Manley said fixing up Pickering A "is the quickest, least expensive means for Ontario to meet some of its important energy supply needs" which caused many observers to groan and roll their eyes. At peak times, Ontario uses up to 25,000 megawatts of electricity and is often forced to import power.
Manley's report makes several recommendations:
- OPG's core assets should remain in public hands.
- An independent agency should be set up, at arm's length from the government, to predict the province's electricity needs and make sure enough generators are built to meet the demand.
- OPG should be wary of relying too much on natural gas because the price is too volatile.
- The regulatory role of the Ontario Energy Board should be strengthened to "bring discipline and transparency" to OPG.
- OPG should consider private-public arrangement through joint ventures and long-term leases to get the most of its assets.
- OPG should get out of the business of alternative electricity generation or anything else that is not central to its core business.
- When shopping around for nuclear reactors the province should look for the best price and reliability "and if that's not Canadian, so be it."
To date, Ontario's nuclear reactors have used technology designed by Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., which is now anxious to sell the province reactors using its newest technology.
The panel recommended the money-losing OPG be divided into two clear divisions - nuclear and hydro/fossil fuel - and that managers should be paid based on performance.
Critics harshly condemned the report.
Dave Martin of the Sierra Club of Canada called the report "disgusting ... a travesty."
"We heard yesterday from OPG's auditors that nuclear power has been a disaster," he said. "Today we have Mr. Manley and Mr. Epp suggesting that we have to proceed with a nuclear-based electricity future in the province.
"Nuclear has been a disaster, but we're going to do it again," he said. "When are we going to learn?"
Conservative MPP John Baird, the former energy minister, said Manley's report proves Premier Dalton McGuinty's plan to eliminate coal-fired generating plants by 2007 is unrealistic.
"Dalton McGuinty's getting a message from John Manley: you can't keep your promise to close electricity plants," Baird (Nepean-Carleton) said.
NDP Leader Howard Hampton said in a telephone interview from Santiago, Cuba, that one of the fundamental flaws in the report is that there is "still no real commitment to energy efficiency and energy conservation and I think that has to be number one on the list of priorities."
----
Ontario told it has to rely on nukes
An energy report says nuclear power is vital to meeting future electricity needs.
ALAN FINDLAY,
London Free Press
Queen's Park Bureau
2004-03-19
http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/LondonFreePress/News/2004/03/19/387259.html
TORONTO -- More nukes, no politicians and higher rates are the keys to averting a looming power crisis, according to a high-powered committee's final advice to the provincial government. "Let's get our act together," John Manley, who led a review committee into the future of Ontario Power Generation, said yesterday.
"We believe (nuclear energy) is the quickest, least expensive means for Ontario to meet some of its important energy supply needs."
The committee's report warns that Ontario is on a course to power shortages by 2007, thanks to a history of political interference, managerial incompetence and a Liberal election promise to close down the province's five coal-burning generators by the same year.
It also calls on the government to immediately allow OPG to move ahead on restarting the second of four downed nuclear generators at the Pickering A plant and consider more nukes in the future -- either on their own or with private investment such as leases or joint ventures.
The report estimates the cost of restarting the second Pickering A turbine by next summer at up to $600 million.
The plant's first turbine cost hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and started up years behind schedule.
Several industry watchers and political critics argued the Liberals are headed for the same trouble that led to the demise of the old Ontario Hydro if they take the advice.
"Bad idea," said New Democrat Leader Howard Hampton. "Nuclear power is incredibly expensive."
Manley said nuclear power is working well in several European countries and cited recent examples of Canadian-made Candu nuclear reactors that were up and running on budget and ahead of schedule in China.
"Well if we can do it in China, surely to goodness we can do it in Ontario," he said.
Perhaps the toughest medicine Manley prescribed was regulated rates that cover the real cost of generating power.
"It's gonna cost more," he said.
COMMITTEE RECOMMENDATIONS
Recommendations in a report by a panel led by John Manley:
- The province must look to nuclear power to deal with a looming power shortage as early as 2007. - OPG should go ahead with its project to return the Pickering A nuclear reactor to service at a cost of up to $600 million. - The private sector should be involved in the electricity sector through joint ventures, partnerships, long-term leases. - OPG must stay under government ownership and control and should keep ownership of its major power generating assets. - The utility should separate into two operating divisions, a nuclear division and a hydro/fossil division, with separate management. - OPG should withdraw from certain businesses, including wind, solar, biomass and small hydro projects. - OPG's head offices should be located closer to its facilities rather than in Toronto. - The utility's board should include up to 12 members with relevant power sector experience, all appointed by the government.
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Report urges power-short Ontario to go nuclear
Story by Rajiv Sekhri
REUTERS CANADA:
March 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24355/story.htm
TORONTO - Ontario's sickly electricity sector needs a strong jolt of nuclear power with money from the private sector, a report said yesterday, urging that one nuclear reactor should restart next year at a cost of up to C$600 million ($450 million) to ease a supply crunch.
The report, on future Ontario power needs, said Ontario Power Generation, the debt-ridden, provincially owned power producer, should be broken up into a nuclear unit and one that handles electricity from hydro and fossil-fuel sources. The study warned that Ontario, Canada's most populous province, could face a severe power shortage by 2007 if new capacity does not come on board.
The report was commissioned by the provincial government and drawn up by John Manley, Canada's former deputy prime minister. It said Ontario Power should sell non-core assets like solar and wind power to strengthen its focus.
The emphasis on nuclear power comes at a time of serious concerns about Ontario's existing reactors, some of which are mothballed or running well below capacity, or have seen massive cost overruns for refurbishment.
But Manley insisted that nuclear, which generates about half of Ontario's power, would prevent the need for costly electricity imports during peak periods.
"There is nothing inherent in Canadian companies that says they can't run nuclear (reactors), when the Finns, the French, the Americans and the Koreans can," Manley said. "Let's get our act together because we do not have a lot of other choices."
Noting that Canadian-designed nuclear plants are being build on budget and on schedule in China, he added: "If we can do it in China, surely to goodness we can do it in Ontario."
Ontario's Liberal government, elected in October, wants to shut its polluting coal-fired plants by 2007 - and Manley's report backed that position.
But analysts have criticized the move and questioned how Ontario can quickly replace electricity generated from coal, which makes up about a quarter of current supply.
"Coal-fired plants can be much cleaner, and ultimately be replaced by clean coal technology, as one of the arrows in a new supply picture for Ontario," said Rob McLeese, president of Access Capital Corp., which helps power companies build generating plants. Dwight Duncan, Ontario's energy minister, plans to create 2,800 megawatts of new power by 2007 through a combination of conservation and new, cleaner plants, but that is well below the 6,240 megawatts that will be lost by shutting coal plants.
Manley's report comes days after an independent audit of showed Ontario Power was on the verge of financial collapse if its path does not change.
That report said that by the end of September 2003, only one of four shuttered units at Pickering nuclear power station had returned to service, at cost of C$1.25 billion - triple the original estimate for just that one unit and two years behind schedule.
"You cannot allow another Pickering fiasco to occur," Manley said. "If you do, the credibility of the nuclear sector (in Ontario) will probably be irretrievably damaged."
Manley said Ontario Power, which produces about 70 percent of the province's electricity, should remain in public hands, but governments must stop interfering in its operations.
The previous Conservative government deregulated Ontario's electricity sector but then froze prices to appease voters after a public outcry. Analysts say the flip-flop on policy choked any hopes of private investment in power plants in Ontario.
-------- depleted uranium
Kazuko Ito: Depleted uranium leads to suffering in Iraq
Asahi Weekly (Japan),
March 19, 2004
http://www.asahi.com/english/opinion/TKY200403190179.html
Self-Defense Forces troops have been dispatched to Iraq, where violence shows no signs of abating. It is debatable whether sending the SDF to such a dangerous area constitutes an international contribution that does not violate the Constitution.
And we have to face up to the issue of depleted uranium. Between 800 tons and 2,000 tons of depleted uranium ordnance were fired in the Iraq war. Residual radioactivity from spent shells now contaminates the entire nation.
As a prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan formed under the initiative of a citizens' group, I surveyed scientists' reports on how depleted uranium affects the living. In October, I took part in an international conference on the subject in Germany, where I was shocked to learn that depleted uranium ordnance is causing irreparable damage to the people.
Depleted uranium, a byproduct of the production of enriched uranium, is a highly toxic, radioactive substance with a half-life of 4.5 billion years. When shells made from depleted uranium are fired, they discharge large quantities of radioactivity. If a human being absorbs that radiation in the air or drinking water, contamination continues within the body, damaging cells and triggering diseases such as cancer or causing congenital abnormalities among the children of people exposed to the radiation.
A declassified 1943 memorandum, addressed to a general and written by a U.S. scientist who took part in the Manhattan project, explains in detail the deadly effectiveness of the ``radioactive weapons'' that eventually became the model for depleted uranium ordnance. Records kept by the U.S. Department of Defense that I have read show that the U.S. military has been conducting studies on depleted uranium, including animal tests, since 1974.
At the international conference in Germany, I spoke with Doug Rokke, who led a project that examined the effects of depleted uranium in soldiers at the Pentagon in 1994. According to Rokke, the project's findings made clear to him how serious the effect of depleted uranium is on humans. He urged that such weapons be banned, but his warning was ignored by the military and the project eventually disbanded.
More than 200,000 U.S. soldiers returned from the Persian Gulf War suffering physical disorders, and about 10,000 of them have died, Rokke said. While certain vaccinations are thought to have had an deleterious impact on their health, depleted uranium also contributed to their health problems, he said. Rokke asked whether Japan does not care if its soldiers now face the same danger.
Was this danger taken into account when the government decided to go ahead with the SDF dispatch?
Even more ominous is the effect depleted uranium will have on the health of Iraqis. The southern city of Basra was bombarded with depleted uranium shells during the Persian Gulf War. In recent years, cancer and congenital abnormalities have risen sharply among local children. An Iraqi doctor handed me a large number of photographs of patients suffering from depleted uranium-related disorders. They left me speechless.
If we sit back and do nothing to stop the spread of radioactive pollution during this Iraq conflict, many more people will die. We must put an end to the occupation, and advance Iraqi reconstruction under the initiative of the United Nations as soon as possible, so that international society together can prevent the ravages of depleted uranium from spreading. Research on the contamination must be done, remaining pieces of depleted uranium ordnance must be collected and contaminated soil removed.
An Iraqi doctor told me: ``We don't want you to send us an army. We want you to help us. We need more anti-cancer, antibiotic and intravenous medications.''
Deploying SDF troops is expected to cost tens of billions of yen. If all that money were instead put toward medical aid in Iraq, it would help a great many more people. Japan, a country that endured World War II's atomic bombings, has the medical skill and technology to treat patients suffering from radioactive contamination. We should put medical aid ahead of any other kind of assistance.
Many people are dying slow, quiet deaths because of their exposure to depleted uranium pollution. What can Japan and the world do? To start, the government should withdraw the SDF from Iraq and concentrate on peaceful humanitarian relief, especially medical aid. That, I believe, is the only honorable choice for Japan's international contribution.
The author is a lawyer. She contributed this comment to The Asahi Shimbun.(IHT/Asahi: March 19,2004) (03/19)
--------
Soldiers' accounts reveal new details:
'depleted' uranium rounds devastated US troops at An Nasiriyah
Traprock Peace Center
March 19, 2004
http://www.traprockpeace.org/du_friendly_fire.html
"It's bad enough to be shot, but to be shot with a depleted uranium round that basically turns you into a hand full of mush." - Col. Reed Bonadonna, field historian, talking to NPR's Jackie Northam
Hear an clip (edited for brevity) containing the Colonel's remarks about DU. http://www.traprockpeace.org/audio/du_friendly_fire.mp3
Listen also to the entire NPR reports (first report deals with 'friendly fire' incident). http://www.npr.org/display_pages/features/feature_1779100.html
On March 19, 2004 NPR aired the first of two reports by Jackie Northam on the experiences of US Marines in battle. 11 field historians had entered Iraq with Marine units and interviewed marines after battle. She was given access to 20 hours of interview tapes. Her first report concerns a battle on March 23, 2003 near An Nasiriyah, during which an A-10 repeatedly straffed US troops with 'depleted uranium' rounds. As reported by Jackie Northam, the Marine Corps says that 18 marines died at An Nasiriyah that day but will not reveal how many died from the DU rounds.
It does seem clear though that previous assessments undersestimated Marine deaths from 'friendly fire' that day. Dan Fahey, for example, in his review of media accounts, reported the following as part of his assessment of DU use during Gulf War II:
23 March, near Nasiriyah - A-10 fires on Marine Corps vehicles attached to 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Expeditionary Brigade. At least one vehicle, an armored assault vehicle (possibly AAVP7A1), is hit and penetrated by A-10 fire, killing at least one Marine and possibly wounding others. A total of nine Marines and seven vehicles were destroyed in this incident, although it is believed Iraqi forces caused the majority of the deaths and damage during this engagement. "The Use of Depleted Uranium in the 2003 Iraq War: An Initial Assessment of Information and Policies," page 5. Dan Fahey, June 24, 2003. [Fahey cited media sources for his figures.]
Fahey's reporting of the belief that Iraqi forces caused the majority of the deaths and damage during the engagement appears to this writer to be a repeating of military spin. Listen to the interviews (first report) with soldiers soon after the battle. While the military will not disclose how many soldiers died that day from friendly fire, that is, from 'depleted' uranium rounds from the A-10, it is clearly many more than "at least one" as reported by Fahey, based on US media accounts. Sargeant Lonnie Parker said in the interview said that they lost the majority of their people from 'friendly' fire that day.
Contrast the Fahey assessment with that of retired Air Force Colonel Sam Gardiner:
Gardiner writes: "A disheartening aspect of the white flag story is what is beginning to surface about what might have been the real cause of the Marine casualties near An Nasiriyah on March 23. Marines are saying that nine of those killed may have been killed by an A-10 that made repeated passes attacking their position." Quoted in The not-so-friendly reality of US casualties, by David Isenberg, Aaia Times, Oct 22, 2003.
See also the Charlotte Observer, March 29, 2003 (questioning if 9 marines who were said to have been ambushed by Iraqi's pretending to surrender had actually been killed by 'friendly' fire).
And for identification of individual soldiers killed that day, see the Washington Post, Faces of the fallen, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/world/iraq/casualties/facesofthefallen.htm The Post reports that 18 marines died in or around An Nasiriyah that day, 12 due to an alleged ambush by Iraqi soldiers who reported to have pretended to surrender; and 6 "killed during operations" on the outskirts of the city.
-------- india / pakistan
Musharraf Cites Nuclear Dealings
Powell Told of Government Involvement
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6146-2004Mar18.html
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 18 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday he had received new information from Pakistan's president about the Pakistani government's dealings with Abdul Qadeer Khan, who admitted last month he had sold nuclear designs and components to other countries.
But Powell, who came here saying he would seek details on the links between the disgraced Khan's technology smuggling ring and Pakistani officials, said he would wait to analyze the information in Washington before providing details. "What I want to do is reflect on what he said to me and discuss it with some of my other colleagues back in Washington before I comment on the specifics of it," Powell told reporters traveling with him.
Gen. Pervez Musharraf, the president, pardoned Khan last month after Khan acknowledged a broad scheme that netted him tens of millions of dollars and spread nuclear technology to Libya, North Korea and Iran. But questions have persisted about how Khan's network could operate without the knowledge or participation of senior Pakistani military, intelligence and other government officials. "No responsible government of Pakistan should have tolerated such a thing, and I hope they did not," Powell said, adding, "We got to get all the facts."
The Bush administration has dealt carefully with the matter of Pakistani government links to the Khan network because Pakistan is considered crucial to the war on terror. Reflecting that caution, Powell announced after meeting with the foreign minister here that the administration would grant Pakistan the coveted status of "major non-NATO ally," making it easier for the country to procure military equipment. The announcement came as Pakistani troops waged a bloody battle in a remote tribal area against al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.
Powell rejected any link between the awarding of Pakistan's new status and the Khan investigation. Naming Pakistan a major non-NATO ally is "part of a normal relationship with countries we have military-to-military relations with, and we think it is a sensible thing to do," Powell said. "It is not a reward for A.Q. Khan. It's part of a continuing relationship."
The benefits of the designation for Pakistan are unclear. Easier procurement of surplus military equipment might help Pakistan fight al Qaeda, but the designation does not confer the same mutual defense and security guarantees that members of NATO receive, and Powell acknowledged it can be largely symbolic. In recent months, the Bush administration has awarded the title to Kuwait and Thailand, which joined 10 other nations.
India, Pakistan's South Asia nuclear rival, does not have this status, a fact that Pakistani officials were eager to note. But the Bush administration gave India its own plum this year -- an agreement to help India with its nuclear energy and space technology in return for a promise to use the aid for peaceful purposes and to help block the spread of dangerous weapons.
But Pakistan's Islamic opposition heavily criticized the U.S. offer, saying it would make Pakistan a client of the United States.
"I will be very unhappy if Pakistan is inching towards this alliance with the U.S.," Khurshid Ahmad, a leader of the fundamentalist Jamaat-i-Islami party, told the Agence France-Presse news service.
"This is neither an honor, nor a step towards global security. We have to avoid becoming a mercenary and a client state," Ahmad said, adding it was not a reward but "a new trap."
The fierce fighting in the tribal region, which Pakistani officials said had killed 15 soldiers and 26 militants, has also stirred criticism in Pakistan. The newspaper Daily Times carried an editorial cartoon today showing Powell emerging from his plane and using the coffins of the dead as his steps.
Powell, a retired four-star Army general, also said he and Musharraf had a detailed "soldier-to-soldier" discussion of the fighting. Musharraf seized power in 1999 in a bloodless military coup.
Khan, who ran Pakistan's main nuclear weapons plant for many years and is known as the creator of the country's nuclear bomb, said last month that he had passed nuclear secrets without government authorization. The Pakistani government launched an investigation of Khan last year after receiving evidence from the United States.
But Powell said he believes Musharraf -- who was Army chief of staff and then president during the height of Khan's dealings -- is "serious about this." He noted that Khan is revered in Pakistan and "they are all taken aback by the fact" Khan took the knowledge "he had developed in helping his own nation to help nations that shouldn't have been helped."
After his talks in Islamabad, Powell flew to Kuwait City.
[On Friday morning, he left Kuwait and made an unscheduled visit to Baghdad, where he plans to meet with Iraqi and occupation officials.]
--------
India Tests New Medium-Range Missile
March 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-India-Missile-Test.html
NEW DELHI (AP) -- India on Friday tested a new, extended-range version of its nuclear-capable Prithvi missile that could easily reach the capital of rival Pakistan.
The new version of the missile can reach up to 125 miles and was fired from the Integrated Test Range in Chandipur, in the eastern state of Orissa.
``It is an improved version of Prithvi 2, giving higher accuracy,'' Baljit Singh Menon, a defense ministry spokesman told The Associated Press. ``It was successfully launched ... all the mission objectives were met.''
India has tested the Prithvi about two dozen times since 1988. The Indian Army has already deployed the missile. The new version has been developed for the Indian Air Force, and was fired from a mobile launcher, the defense ministry said.
``Shore-based and ground-range tracking systems ... tracked the flight path until impact, validating the accuracy of the missile guidance,'' Menon said.
In Islamabad, Pakistan Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said India gave Pakistan prior notice of Friday's missile test. The two countries have an arrangement to notify each other ahead of tests of long-range, strategic weapons.
Pakistan on March 9 test-fired a Shaheen 2, the most advanced missile in its arsenal, capable of delivering a nuclear warhead some 1,250 miles, or deep inside India.
``We are not in an arms race with India. We understand that they have conducted this test to validate parameters of their existing system,'' Khan said.
India and Pakistan are currently engaged in wide-ranging peace initiatives to ease five decades of diplomatic and military tensions, mainly over the divided Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
Khan said Friday's test was not likely to have any impact on the ongoing peace process.
He said during the last round of talks between the foreign secretaries of the two countries held on Feb. 18, it was decided that high-level discussions on nuclear weapons programs, including missiles, would take place in May.
The 28-foot Prithvi has a sophisticated computer and an advanced navigation system. It can use both solid and liquid fuel and can travel 90 miles in five minutes.
--------
India Tests Nuclear - Capable Prithvi Missile
March 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-india-missile.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India test-fired Friday its short range nuclear-capable Prithvi missile, which is seen as a deterrent to neighboring Pakistan, the Press Trust of India reported.
A defense ministry official said a test of the surface-to-surface Prithvi had been planned for this month as part of a regular series, but he had no immediate details.
The test came shortly after Pakistan tested on March 9 a ballistic missile, the Shaheen II, which it says is capable of delivering nuclear warheads to all the cities in India.
PTI said the Indian missile, tested from an island in the Bay of Bengal, had a range of between 93 miles and 124 miles.
The two nations, which began peace talks last month to end more than half a century of hostility, carried out underground nuclear tests in 1998 and have since been developing missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.
--------
India tests short-range nuclear-capable missile
BHUBANESHWAR, India (AFP)
Mar 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040319070321.gx5l7pz4.html
India successfully tested a short-range nuclear-capable ballistic missile Friday at an eastern coastal test range, a defence official said. The test of the indigenously built Prithvi (earth) missile that can carry a nuclear warhead took place at the Chandipur-on-Sea test site in the eastern state of Orissa, the official said.
"The test took place from a mobile launcher at 10:10 am to finetune the accuracy of the missile," added the official.
"It is an extended verion being developed for the Indian airforce," he said. The Prithvi missile has a range of 150-300 kilometres (95 to 190 miles) and can carry conventional and nuclear warheads. A variant of it has already been inducted into the Indian army.
A scientist at the test range said he was "happy with the test results."
The 8.5-metre (28-foot) Prithvi missile can be tipped with incendiary and fragmentary munitions or can carry a sub-kiloton nuclear warhead for use against troops or armoured formations.
Nuclear-capable India and Pakistan, which have fought three wars, two over the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, routinely carry out missile tests.
Officials said it was the 24th time the Prithvi missile had been tested.
Friday's test of the Prithvi missile comes just 10 days after Pakistan tested the first of its locally-built Shaheen II or Hatf-VI missiles, which can carry warheads up to 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles).
The tests have come as nuclear rivals India and Pakistan inch towards closer ties after narrowly avoiding full scale conflict.
Soon after Pakistan's test early this month, Washington appealed for restraint in the region.
But Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf said its testing of a Shaheen-II medium range missile would be followed by more tests in coming months.
Shaheen-II is the longest-range missile tested by Pakistan so far.
--------
Non-Nato ally status 'more psychological than substantive'
March 19 2004
Hi Pakistan
http://www.hipakistan.com/en/detail.php?newsId=en57964&F_catID=&f_type=source
ISLAMABAD-The US decision to grant Pakistan the membership of an exclusive club of 'major non-NATO allies' has licensed Islamabad to purchase modern military equipment, satellite technology, depleted uranium ammunition, and enhance cooperation in defence sector research and development.
"We will be making notification to our Congress that will designate Pakistan as a major non-NATO ally for purposes of our future military-military relations," Powell told journalists Thursday in a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri.
Despite the removal of economic and military sanctions after 9/11 there was a ban on the sale of state-of-the-art weapons to Pakistan. It was not yet clear whether Washington would allow Pakistan shop aggressive weapons to upgrade its ageing arsenal. Until now Washington was pursuing a policy to sale only defensive weapons, such as radars or military cargo planes, to Pakistan.
A top Pakistani official later told The Nation that the grant of major non-NATO ally status does not mean Islamabad would get F-16 aircraft. "It's more psychological than substantive," the official said, "and will be more beneficial to the US than Pakistan."
It, however, will entitle Islamabad to get US cooperation in defence research and development, satellite technology and related equipment, depleted uranium ammunition, and priority in the purchase of available defence equipment to Pakistan. "But it is not binding and will depend on the approval of the US administration," the official said.
Despite the membership of this club, delivery of sophisticated defence sector equipment to Pakistan will depend on the level of cooperation between the two countries. "If we behave well, only then we will get few things for defence sector," the top official said requesting not to be named.
The US President can withdraw this status on a 30-day notice. Israel, Egypt, Argentine, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Jordan, South Korea, Philippines, and Kuwait, are the members of this group also known as MNNA. It does not make Pakistan eligible for Defence Export Loan Guarantee Programme to which Israel, Egypt, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Korea qualify because they were given the membership in 1987.
Pakistan, however, will be eligible for joint counter-terrorism research and development projects, to have US-owned War Reserve Stock for Allies (WRSA) on its territory and have the United States Government (USG) add equipment to the WRSA without separate specific legislation amending Section 514 of the FAA, enter into agreement with the USG for the cooperative training on a reciprocal basis (meaning that the USG will charge only direct, not indirect costs).
"It's a process of facilitation for upgrading security and defence relations," Pakistani officials believe. They say the MNNA status will enhance Islamabad's standing among the European capitals. This might help as well to put the lid on anti-Pakistan propaganda in the US media that has been questioning Pakistan's integrity in war against terror.
Powell's surprise announcement came on the final leg of a three-nation South Asian tour that has taken him to New Delhi and Kabul. Islamabad was first rewarded for its cooperation in late 2001 with the lifting of US sanctions - which dated back as far as 1990 - on military cooperation, training, and sales.
Powell also announced the expansion of Ex-Im Bank operations in Pakistan saying it would now support short, medium and long term financing for the sale of American products.
Powell and Kasuri talked to the press ahead of Secretary of State's most important meetings with General Musharraf and Prime Minister Jamali. Before the Press talk both the counterparts had a round of discussion, which they termed "very useful and friendly."
On the third leg of his visit to India, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Powell was here to discuss what he termed "a number of critical challenges that Pakistan is taking on"-fighting terrorism, countering extremism, stopping proliferation and pulling up roots and branch of the network, reforming education, and building stronger democratic institutions.
Asked if he would raise the issue of the involvement of Pakistani officials, past or present, in the nuclear proliferation, Powell said: "I think this is a logical and proper question to ask and I'm sure that Pakistani authorities would want it known.
Powell later called on General Perevz Musharraf and Prime Minister Jamali and discussed all issues with them. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia Christina Rocca, US Ambassador to Pakistan Nancy Powell and other senior officials also attended the meetings. PAK-US RELATIONS: Powell, attired in a dark-business suit and navy blue tie, said he came to Islamabad to say that US was committed to a long-term partnership with Pakistan. "Pakistan has an important role to play in this region as a peaceful, moderate modern Muslim nation, a nation that is becoming increasingly democratic," Powell said. Pakistan and US, he said, had every opportunity to strengthen relationship in strategic ways.
Referring to two suicide attempts on Musharraf's life and that he took control of the country in a military coup, when a questioner asked Powell if the US had a contingency plans for the day when President Musharraf will not be the leader of this country, he said the US was working with the government and had been reaching out to all levels of Pakistani society.
"He (Musharraf) is the President and we will work with him, we are also working with the Government of Pakistan to put in place the appropriate system of democracy that will be vibrant, that rests on sound legislative process, that does not rest on any one single personality," Powell said.
He said although US had no contingency plans because Musharraf had been an excellent partner in working with us on so many issues, the war on terror, economy, education reforms. "We will continue to do so with him." He said he had regular interaction with President Musharraf, Foreign Minister and Prime Minister. "We understand the importance of understanding the views of all the different groups in Pakistan," Powell without elaborating further.
Kasuri, however, hurried to clarify saying Pakistan's current political dispensation is "not a brush with democracy, it's not recent." He, however, made a bizarre comparison between the military-dominated democracy put in place by General Musharraf and colonial system of governance introduced by the British Raj through Minto-Morley Reforms. "We've had democratic institutions for more than a hundred years, at least since Minto-Morley Reforms, before Pakistan became independent," Kasuri said.
Kasuri said Pakistan had a free press.
"It has very powerful NGOs in the civil society, and since its basically pluralistic society with a multi-party system and a parliament in which the opposition is very strong, I don't think that there is any such fear as the type you describe," Kasuri told the questioner.
ARMY OPERATION: Powell said President Bush and the American people appreciated the sacrifices that "Pakistan already has made to keep us all safer from terrorism." He said the US shared Pakistanis sadness over the loss in battle in the past few days of some of the brave frontier soldiers. In addition to fighting terrorism, he said, Pakistan had a very important role to play in promoting Afghan recovery and reconstruction.
He welcomed Pakistan and India's decision to launch a comprehensive dialogue and termed it an act of great statesmanship on the part of President Musharraf and Prime Minister Vajpayee. "An exciting series of cricket matches is one of the most immediate benefits from this process and I congratulate your magnificent team for its recent success," Powell said.
NUCLEAR PROLIFERATION: To a question about nuclear proliferation Powell said the US was interested in going after this network because this network was providing technology to develop nuclear weapons to some very dangerous countries around the world. "And it is in our mutual interest, of Pakistan, the interest of the rest of the world, to make sure the network has been completely pulled up and make sure that all those who were participating in the network in one way or the other have been identified," he said.
Kasuri said that he had assured Powell that it was in Pakistan's own interest as a nuclear power that no proliferation took place. "We are going to spare no effort to try and make efforts, to pull this out root and branch, wherever this network is. And there will complete sharing with the United States and with other friendly countries on that issue of non-proliferation," Kasuri said.
Referring to the talks with Powell, Kasuri said there was satisfaction of the success achieved in curbing nuclear black market. The Secretary of State, he said, commended Pakistan's readiness to address the issues related to nuclear proliferation in a forthright manner.
HELD PAKISTANIS SCREENING: Kasuri said that both the sides had agreed to follow a screening process about Pakistani prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.
Kasuri did not give details of the agreement but said a mechanism would be worked out by interior ministry officials.
'I am glad to announce that we have an agreement. There will be a screening process (for the Pakistani prisoners),' Kasuri said.
'The rest will now depend on the ministry of interior. They will have to work out a mechanism whereby people who are regarded as a threat can be taken care of. I cannot be more specific than that.'
Securing the release of prisoners has been a major concern of Pakistan, which has frequently taken up the issue with the Afghan government at all levels.
In his statement Powell said the two sides recognized that the alliance between Pakistan and the US was crucial to winning the worldwide war on terror. "We must do together more if your region, and if indeed the whole world, is to live in peace."
He said the US stood with Pakistan as both the countries move forward in this new dialogue relationship.
KASHMIR: Answering a question about human rights violations in Indian held Kashmir Powell said: "We know of human rights concerns but this really is an issue that is going to be dealt with by India and Pakistan in this dialogue." He said he was sure both sides would take into account the needs, desires, aspirations, and concerns of the people of the region.
Asked if the Kashmir was a central issue in Indo-Pak relations, he said: I endorse the view that the two sides on the 6th of January agreed to enter into a dialogue on a variety of issues of importance to both sides." He said a very well structured dialogue had already started to show it's success and Kashmir was part of that dialogue.
"I think everyone understands the importance of Kashmir to this dialogue and the importance of many other issues to the dialogue," Powell said, "What I think is significant is that the Prime Minister of India and the President of Pakistan came together in Islamabad and said we have to move forward, and we have to move forward by talking to one another. And I think that was an historic step on their part. And I think they are also doing it because the people of Pakistan and the people of India want this dialogue to take place."
QADEER'S ACTIVITIES: Just hours after his announcement, Powell told reporters en route to his next stop in Kuwait that President Pervez Musharraf had given him new information about the proliferation activities of scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, reports AFP.
He declined to provide details but said the information related to US concerns that current or former Pakistani officials may have known about or encouraged Khan's dealings with Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Musharraf 'gave me a summary of the relationship that AQ Khan had with those who were in authority over that period of time,' Powell said, adding that he wanted to discuss the new information with his colleagues before commenting further.
'No responsible government of Pakistan should have tolerated such thing and I hope they did not,' he said. 'I hope it was something that he was doing on his own. But we got to get all the facts.'
------- korea
N. Korea Threatens to Up Nuclear Deterrent
March 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea threatened Friday to increase its nuclear deterrent force in ``quality and quantity'' if the United States continues its ``increased military threat.''
Earlier, North Korea said joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises were increasing the danger of war on the Korean Peninsula and could derail international efforts to call a new round of six-nation talks on its nuclear weapons programs.
In a subsequent flurry of official dispatches condemning the United States, the isolated communist nation also said it needed a strong defense to guard against U.S. attack.
``The increased military threat the U.S. poses to the DPRK, whiling away time with lip-service to 'dialogue,' will only compel it to increase its nuclear deterrent force both in quality and quantity as a corresponding measure,'' North Korea's official KCNA news agency reported Friday citing a Foreign Ministry spokesman.
``No one can take issue with this measure for self-defense,'' the report said.
Such outbursts are not uncommon from North Korea's official media, but tend to flare at times of tension.
The United States and South Korea are scheduled to kick off annual joint military exercises on Sunday to test the allies' defense readiness, amid a regional nuclear standoff and political uncertainty in South Korea following last week's parliamentary impeachment of President Roh Moo-hyun.
``Such serious military moves of the U.S. forces in South Korea suggest that the day of the outbreak of a war is drawing near hour by hour in Korea,'' said KCNA, Pyongyang's official news agency.
Washington and Seoul have said the annual drills are defense exercises. North Korea has denounced previous exercises as preparations by the United States to invade the North.
In a separate commentary carried by KCNA, Pyongyang's main state-run newspaper Rodong Sinmun said the United States ``seeks to stage a test war reminiscent of a full-scale war aimed to invade the DPRK by force and launch an all-out war on the Korean peninsula so as to exterminate the Korean nation.''
DPRK stands for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the communist state's official name.
A second round of six-nation talks -- held between the United States, the two Koreas, China, Russia and Japan -- ended in Beijing last month without much progress. But the participants agreed to try meeting again before July.
--------
U.S., UN Discuss New N.Korea Nuclear Inspections
March 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-korea-iaea.html
VIENNA (Reuters) - The United Nations and United States are working closely together on a plan for the eventual return of nuclear inspectors to North Korea, the head of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency said on Friday.
Any new program would be more rigorous than previous U.N. inspections missions to the secretive Communist state, Mohamed ElBaradei told reporters.
In a sign of renewed cooperation following tensions over the Iraq war, the North Korean nuclear program was among issues ElBaradei discussed with President Bush on Wednesday, the IAEA chief said as he flew back from Washington to the U.N. body's Vienna headquarters on Friday:
``We are working closely with the U.S. on developing a plan on how to verify the program as and when the time comes.''
Before being thrown out by the Pyongyang authorities at the end of 2002, the IAEA had only limited inspection rights at the Yongbyon nuclear complex. Afterwards, North Korea withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
ElBaradei said this week that his inspectors should have unfettered access if ever they were to return to North Korea.
``We need to consult to see how we can come up with a plan that avoids the pitfalls of the past and makes sure that we have a comprehensive, verifiable action plan that ensures we will be able to have a complete survey of their nuclear program,'' ElBaradei said.
The IAEA and Washington believe North Korea may already have an atom bomb.
After his meeting with Bush, ElBaradei said that if six-party talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Russia and Japan -- reach any deal on the North's nuclear program, it should include unfettered U.N. inspections.
``We need a robust system where we can go at short notice and do environmental sampling, and do all it takes to make sure that we are not being cheated,'' ElBaradei said in Washington.
Asked to describe relations between Washington and the IAEA a year after the tensions caused by the Iraq war, ElBaradei said the United States seemed committed to cooperation:
``The highlight of my visit is the feeling that there is a true commitment in the U.S., at all levels, to work in partnership with the agency,'' he said. ``I sense at all levels, from the president down, a sense of commitment.''
--------
N.Korea Tries to Link Nuclear Row with U.S. Drills
March 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-usa.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - Annual U.S.-South Korean military drills to kick off next week showed the United States was not serious about efforts to resolve a crisis over North Korea's nuclear arms programs, the communist state said on Friday.
A statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry repeated a frequent threat to beef up its nuclear arsenal -- a warning Pyongyang has often issued to show impatience with Washington in a nuclear dispute that stretches back to late 2002.
``The increased military threat the U.S. poses to the DPRK, whiling away time with lip-service to dialogue, will only compel it to increase its nuclear deterrent force both in quality and quantity as a corresponding measure,'' said the ministry in a statement published by the North's state-run KCNA news agency.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official title. U.S. intelligence officials suspect North Korea already has one or two nuclear bombs, but its full capability is not well understood.
Six-country talks in Beijing last month -- involving the two Koreas, Japan, China, the United States and Russia -- agreed to establish working groups to hammer out details of how to end the nuclear crisis.
The crisis erupted in October 2002 when U.S. officials said North Korea had admitted to pursuing a clandestine weapons program in violation of the 1994 Agreed Framework, which froze an earlier atomic bomb-making scheme.
North Korea offered in Beijing to freeze the older nuclear program again in exchange for energy aid and diplomatic relations, but refused to discuss the clandestine uranium enrichment program. Washington wants both programs dismantled, not just frozen.
Friday's statement by the North Korean Foreign Ministry said Washington's stance, coupled with military drills with Seoul, showed ``the true aim sought by the U.S. is not to preserve peace on the Korean peninsula but to stifle the DPRK by force.''
``It is clear to everyone that it is impossible to sit face to face with a party carrying a dagger in its belt and have productive talks with it in good faith for the solution of the issue,'' the statement said.
The annual Foal Eagle/RSOI (Reception, Staging, Onward Movement and Integration) drills involve U.S. and South Korean forces in computer war simulations field maneuvers.
--------
North Korea says military drill casts shadow over nuclear talks
SEOUL (AFP)
Mar 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040319080932.1sl5gd7t.html
North Korea said Friday joint war games planned by South Korea and the United States for next week were casting a shadow over prospects for an end to the stand-off over its nuclear drive.
Rodong Sinmun, the official newspaper of the communist state's ruling Korean Workers Party, urged the United States to scrap the war exercises due to begin on March 22, which it said were a testing ground for full-scale war.
"If the six-way talks are to be continued, an atmosphere favorable for them should be created before anything else," the daily said.
A second round of nuclear talks held in Beijing last month yielded an agreement to establish working groups and to convene again before the end of June but failed to resolve differences over a key US demand for the complete dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programs.
"The United States often talks about dialogue and peaceful settlement of the nuclear issue, but it seeks to stage a test war reminiscent of a full-scale war aimed to invade North Korea by force and launch an all-out war," Rodong said.
It warned the United States it would retaliate with a "strong military deterrent force" should Washington seek to solve the nuclear issue by force.
"The US should not dare test the patience, will and strength of the DPRK (North Korea)," the daily said.
"The US would be well advised to stop kicking up military rackets chilling the atmosphere of the talks and shadowing their prospect if it truly wants the peaceful solution of the issue," it added.
The annual exercise from March 22 will include 37,000 US troops based here, 5,000 US soldiers from abroad and South Korean military contingents.
US authorities say the exercise, aimed at strengthening the teamwork of US and South Korean troops, features anti-commando operations and a computer war game.
South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-Moon reaffirmed Friday that the standoff over North Korea's nuclear weapons drive should be resolved peacefully through six-way talks.
"North Korea should provide clarification on its HEU, or highly enriched uranium, program and be committed to the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement of all nuclear programs, including the HEU program," Ban told a meeting of European businessmen in Seoul.
"In return, the other participating countries have to work out corresponding measures such as a multilateral security assurance."
The two Koreas, Japan, the United States, China and Russia have been in negotiations aimed at resolving the nuclear standoff.
North Korea and the United States have been locked in the impasse since Washington accused the Stalinist state in October 2002 of having a program to enrich uranium in defiance of a 1994 anti-nuclear pact.
The United States considers the 1994 deal ruptured and suspended fuel oil shipments to North Korea.
North Korea has denied having an enriched uranium program but admits it has plutonium bombs.
-------- russia
Science and technology in Russia
2004-03-19
Pravda
http://newsfromrussia.com/science/2004/03/19/52869.html
Russia's prospected and accumulated reserves of uranium and plutonium will ensure the stable development of the country's nuclear power engineering until the end of the 2030s, says a nuclear industry leader Igor Borovkov. After that, the Russian nuclear power engineering will resort to fast neutron reactors and thermonuclear plants.
Russia's nuclear energy is developing at a stable pace. In the past five years, electricity generation at nuclear power plants rose by 40% and their share in the power balance of European Russia topped 20%, annually replacing about 40 bln cubic metres of natural gas in the country's energy balance and increasing replacement by up to 3 bln cu m every year.
The cost of electricity produced at nuclear plants is 10-13% cheaper. Russia's Energy Strategy provides for the development of nuclear power engineering at two times the pace of other energy branches. By 2020, the production of electricity at nuclear power plants will reach 270-300 bln kWh a year, or double the current figure.
-------- terrorism
Addressing the Unthinkable, U.S. Revives Study of Fallout
March 19, 2004
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19NUKE.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
To cope with the possibility that terrorists might someday detonate a nuclear bomb on American soil, the federal government is reviving a scientific art that was lost after the cold war: fallout analysis.
The goal, officials and weapons experts both inside and outside the government say, is to figure out quickly who exploded such a bomb and where the nuclear material came from. That would clarify the options for striking back. Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one.
In a secretive effort that began five years ago but whose outlines are just now becoming known, the government's network of weapons laboratories is hiring new experts, calling in old-timers, dusting off data and holding drills to sharpen its ability to do what is euphemistically known as nuclear attribution or post-event forensics.
It is also building robots that would go into an affected area and take radioactive samples, as well as field stations that would dilute dangerous material for safe shipment to national laboratories.
"Certainly, there's a frightening aspect in all of this," said Charles B. Richardson, the project leader for nuclear identification research at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque. "But we're putting all these things together with the hope that they'll never have to be used."
Most experts say the risk of a terrorist nuclear attack is low but no longer unthinkable, given the spread of material and know-how around the globe.
Dr. Jay C. Davis, a nuclear scientist who in 1999 helped found the Pentagon's part of the governmentwide effort, said the precautions would "pay huge dividends after the event, both in terms of the ability to identify the bad actor and in terms of establishing public trust."
In a nuclear crisis, Dr. Davis added, the identification effort would be vital in "dealing with the desire for instant gratification through vengeance."
Vice President Dick Cheney was briefed on the program last fall, Dr. Davis said. The National Security Council coordinates the work among a dozen or so federal agencies.
The basic science relies on faint clues - tiny bits of radioactive fallout, often invisible to the eye, that under intense scrutiny can reveal distinctive signatures. Such wisps of evidence can help identify an exploded bomb's type and characteristics, including its country of origin.
Solving the nuclear whodunit could take much more information, including hard-won law enforcement clues and good intelligence on foreign nuclear arms and terrorist groups. For that reason, several federal agencies are involved in the program, among them the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The program addresses true nuclear weapons as well as so-called dirty bombs, ordinary explosives that spew radioactive debris.
"It's a very hard job," said William Happer, a physicist at Princeton who led a panel that evaluated the identification work.
Mr. Happer said he was worried that a rush for retribution after a nuclear attack might cut short the time needed for careful analysis. "If we lose a city," he said, "we might not wait around that long."
The effort to fingerprint domestic nuclear blasts is part of a larger federal project to strengthen the nation's overall defenses against unconventional terrorist threats. Mostly, the goal is prevention. For instance, the government recently sent teams of scientists with hidden radiation detectors to check major American cities for signs that terrorists might be preparing to detonate radiological bombs.
In contrast, the identification program seeks to increase the government's knowledge and options should prevention fail. "We're trying to resurrect some of our capability," said Reid Worlton, a retired nuclear scientist from the Los Alamos weapons laboratory in New Mexico who has been called in to aid the fallout endeavor. "It sort of died. They're not doing radiochemistry on nuclear tests anymore, so it's hard to keep these people around."
The effort draws on work that began at the dawn of the atomic era. Scientists working on the Manhattan Project built an array of devices to monitor nuclear blasts in the New Mexico desert in July 1945 and at Hiroshima and Nagasaki a month later. The experience helped scientists learn what to look for.
The first hunt zeroed in on the Soviet Union. In the late 1940's, military weather planes used paper filters to gather dust particles around the periphery of Russia, and scientists in the United States who analyzed the data at first sounded dozens of false alarms, said Jeffrey T. Richelson, an intelligence expert in Washington.
Then, on Sept. 3, 1949, a weather plane flying from Japan to Alaska picked up a slew of atomic particles. "That was the real thing," Mr. Richelson said. Twenty days later, President Harry S. Truman announced that the Soviets had exploded their first nuclear device.
The ranks of fallout investigators swelled during the cold war as foreign nations conducted hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests. By all accounts, the sleuths made many important discoveries about the nature and design of foreign nuclear arms.
In time, the ranks dwindled as more and more nations decided to move their test explosions underground, eliminating fallout. The last nuclear blast to pummel the earth's atmosphere was in 1980, and the last known underground test, conducted by Pakistan, was in 1998.
As the terrorist threat rose in the 1990's, the government began to consider the quandary that would arise if a nuclear weapon exploded on American soil. In 1999, Dr. Davis, then head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency at the Pentagon, began an effort to address the identification problem by financing research at the nation's weapons laboratories, many of them run by the Energy Department.
The first money came in late 2000, Dr. Davis said, and the attacks of September 2001 "made it clear that a very organized event on a large scale was credible." That perception, he said, helped the effort expand.
The secretive work won rare public praise in a June 2002 report ("Making the Nation Safer") from the National Research Council of the National Academies, the country's leading scientific advisory group. Having the ability to find out who launched a domestic nuclear strike, the report said, could deter attackers and bolster threats of retaliation. The report urged that the program go into operation "as quickly as practical" and that the government publicly declare its existence.
Since then, weapons laboratories and other federal agencies have worked hard on the problem. "They're making progress but they've got a ways to go," said Mr. Worlton, the retired Los Alamos scientist.
In a drill this year, dozens of federal experts in fallout analysis met at the Sandia laboratories in Albuquerque to study a simulated terrorist nuclear blast. Mr. Worlton said they were broken into teams and given radiological data from two old American nuclear tests, whose identities remained hidden, and were instructed to try to name them. Some teams succeeded, he said.
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said the laboratory was developing a land robot that could roll up to 10 miles to sample fallout and return it to human operators for analysis. It could also radio back some results if it became stuck. Mr. Richardson said the robots, now in development, are to be ready in a couple of years.
Experts say a new aircraft for atmospheric sampling of nuclear fallout is also in development. The Air Force currently has one, the WC-135W Constant Phoenix, for such work. It was first deployed in 1965.
Weapons experts say getting samples fast is important because some radioactive debris can decay rapidly. If captured quickly, they can shed light on a weapon's design.
One way of trying to identify a bomb's origin positively, several experts say, is to match debris signatures with libraries of classified data about nuclear arms around the world, including old fallout signatures and more direct intelligence about bomb types, characteristics and construction materials.
"If you're talking about a stolen device, you might try to do that," Mr. Richardson said. "But if it's improvised, that's less likely to work. It might not look like things you've seen before."
A further complication is that even knowing who made a bomb may say little about who detonated it. In a 1991 Tom Clancy novel, "The Sum of All Fears," Islamic terrorists find and rebuild an Israeli nuclear weapon and set it off at the Super Bowl.
Federal experts say complex threat scenarios (for instance, an American warhead being stolen and detonated in an American city) mean that many types of intelligence might be needed for successful identification. Over all, it is unclear how much money the government is spending on the effort.
Private experts offered suggestions for improvement. Dr. Happer of Princeton, who heads a university board that helps oversee campus research, said the program might be cooperating too little with nuclear allies. "It's to our advantage," he said, "for all of us to share."
Dr. Davis, the former head of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, made several policy recommendations last April in an article for The Journal of Homeland Security. He said the F.B.I. should lead the program, presidentially appointed overseers should guide it, goals should be set for how long analyses should take and legal issues of prosecution should be examined.
In an interview, Dr. Davis said his suggestions had made little headway, partly because of the topic's grisly nature. "This is an ugly subject because your best effort is going to be barely adequate," he said. "That's not the kind of phrase people like to hear."
Mr. Richardson of Sandia said that the attribution effort had made good technical progress and had already some ability to identify an attacker.
"We're hoping for deterrence," he said. "We don't want anybody to think they can get away with it."
--------
ElBaradei warns terrorists could go nuclear
IAEA chief warns highly sophisticated terrorists might get their hands on any nuclear device or nuclear material.
2004-03-19
middle-east-online
By Michael Adler - VIENNA
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=9324
UN atomic energy agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Friday that successful terrorist attacks such as the train bombings in Spain heighten concern that one day terrorists could go nuclear.
"There's obviously a high level of sophistication in the terrorist community," ElBaradei told reporters while flying back to Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is based, from a trip to Washington.
"That heightens the sense of concern that they (terrorists) might get their hands on any nuclear device or nuclear material," ElBaradei said in answer to a question about the implications of the March 11 Madrid bombings that killed 202 people.
The IAEA has repeatedly warned about the danger from terrorists possibly making so-called dirty bombs, conventional explosives laced with nuclear material that would not cause a chain reaction but would spread radiation and cause panic once they exploded.
ElBaradei had Wednesday urged in a meeting with US President George W. Bush for dangerous nuclear material such as highly enriched uranium used in civilian programs to be recycled or disposed of.
"I think any nuclear material that could be used in pure form or in crude form is dangerous enough," he said.
"One of the first priorities that I put to President Bush and he fully agreed is that we need to clean up all the nuclear materials that lie around, either in highly enriched uranium in research reactors or in fabrication facilities," ElBaradei said.
"I would like to see a civilian cycle completely free from weapons-useable material if possible," he said.
ElBaradei said he had found in his meetings in Washington this week, which also included national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, "a commitment in the United States at all levels to work in partnership with the agency (IAEA), meaning with the international community, to fight this new menace which we are facing, which is (an international nuclear materials) black market and the interests of terrorists to get their hands on nuclear technology."
ElBaradei had said in Washington after meeting Abraham that the US government was working on an "action plan . . . to clean up all the highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium that is still in the civilian cycle."
This includes 100 facilities using highly enriched uranium - over 21 of which are research reactors and the rest fuel production plants - spread over 40 countries, ElBaradei said.
HEU can be used to make an atom bomb but also as fuel in reactors.
ElBaradei said Friday: "We have first to make an inventory of the facilities and what is in them."
He said the US Department of Energy was already working on this and that the IAEA may take part.
"Then we have to contact the countries (involved) . . . in order to take this material and neutralize or dilute it," ElBaradei said.
The IAEA is now overseeing a reactor in Libya from which highly enriched uranium was taken to Russia, which is to return it as low enriched uranium, which cannot be used in a bomb.
ElBaradei said he and Bush had also agreed the time had come to "change many of the rules" in order to strengthen the fight against nuclear proliferation that is the mission of the IAEA.
One measure would be to improve export controls "as a result of A.Q. Khan associates and the lesson we have learned from that," ElBaradei said.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, confessed in January to running an international black market ring that shared sensitive nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea for more than a decade.
----
Terrorists could go nuclear: IAEA chief
SifyHosting
Friday, 19 March, 2004,
http://sify.com/news/international/fullstory.php?id=13434646
Vienna: UN atomic energy agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei said Friday that successful terrorist attacks such as the train bombing in Spain heightened concern that one day terrorists could go nuclear. "There's obviously a high level of sophistication in the terrorist community," ElBaradei told reporters while flying back to Vienna, where the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is based, from a trip to Washington.
"That heightens the sense of concern that they (terrorists) might get their hands on any nuclear device or nuclear material," ElBaradei said in answer to a question about the implications of the train bombing in Spain on March 11 that killed 202 people.
The IAEA has repeatedly warned about the danger from terrorists possibly making so-called dirty bombs, conventional explosives laced with nuclear material that would not cause a chain reaction but would spread radiation and cause panic once they exploded.
ElBaradei had Wednesday urged in a meeting with US President George W. Bush for dangerous nuclear material such as highly enriched uranium used in civilian programs to be recycled or disposed of.
"I think any nuclear material that could be used in pure form or in crude form is dangerous enough," he said.
"One of the first priorities that I put to President Bush and he fully agreed is that we need to clean up all the nuclear materials that lie around, either in highly enriched uranium in research reactors or in fabrication facilities," ElBaradei said.
"I would like to see a civilian cycle completely free from weapons-useable material if possible," he said.
ElBaradei said he had found in his meetings in Washington this week, which also included national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, "a commitment in the United States at all levels to work in partnership with the agency (IAEA), meaning with the international community, to fight this new menace which we are facing, which is (an international nuclear materials) black market and the interests of terrorists to get their hands on nuclear technology."
ElBaradei had said in Washington after meeting Abraham that the US government was working on an "action plan . . . to clean up all the highly enriched uranium (HEU) and plutonium that is still in the civilian cycle."
This includes 100 facilities using highly enriched uranium -- over 21 of which are research reactors and the rest fuel production plants -- spread over 40 countries, ElBaradei said.
HEU can be used to make an atom bomb but also as fuel in reactors. ElBaradei said Friday: "We have first to make an inventory (of the facilities and what is in them)."
He said the US Department of Energy was already working on this and that the IAEA may take part.
"Then we have to contact the countries (involved) . . . in order to take this material and neutralize or dilute it," ElBaradei said.
The IAEA is now overseeing a reactor in Libya from which highly enriched uranium was taken to Russia, which is to return it as low enriched uranium, which cannot be used in a bomb.
ElBaradei said he and Bush had also agreed the time had come to "change many of the rules" in order to strengthen the fight against nuclear proliferation that is the mission of the IAEA.
One measure would be to improve export controls "as a result of A.Q. Khan associates and the lesson we have learned from that," ElBaradei said.
Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, confessed in January to running an international black market ring that shared sensitive nuclear technology with Iran, Libya and North Korea for more than a decade.
-------- u.n.
U.N. watchdog and U.S. want to clean up atomic 'mess'
Friday, March 19, 2004
By Louis Charbonneau,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-03-19/s_14175.asp
WASHINGTON - The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog said Thursday the United States would help it clean up all the weapons-grade nuclear material spread across the globe to keep it from from being used in bombs.
International Atomic Energy Agency chief Mohamed ElBaradei met with Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham to follow up on discussions he had with President Bush this week.
ElBaradei told reporters after the meeting at the Department of Energy that he and Abraham discussed a number of issues, particularly a plan to clean up highly enriched uranium and plutonium still in civilian sites.
"There're about a 100 facilities in 40 countries with research reactors and others that still use highly enriched uranium (HEU). The president agreed that this is unacceptable," ElBaradei said.
The atomic energy agency is pushing a plan under which reactors fueled by HEU would be converted to ones using low-enriched uranium, which would not be suitable for a bomb. The weapons-grade material would be evacuated to Russia, the United States, or elsewhere.
Both the United States and Russia made reactors that used highly enriched uranium, though such reactors have become obsolete.
"A lot of it's Russian," ElBaradei said. "There are 21 Russian HEU reactors around the world."
However, he said, "Irrespective of whether it's Russian, irrespective of whether it's American, we need to clean up the mess, if you like, clean up the potential threat."
Asked who would pay for the recovery of the HEU and conversion of the plants, ElBaradei said, "I don't think the resources are an issue."
Earlier this month, the IAEA supervised an airlift to Russia of enriched uranium from a reactor near Tripoli, the Libyan capital. It said the metal was almost pure enough to be used in a nuclear weapon. Libya has agreed to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs.
The IAEA has often said the chances of terrorists being able to build a full-scale nuclear weapon were slim. It says the real danger was that terrorists would make a "dirty bomb" - a conventional bomb laced with radioactive material.
A dirty bomb would cause more panic than actual physical damage, nuclear experts say.
It would take 55 to 80 pounds of highly enriched uranium to make a conventional nuclear bomb, but a Vienna-based nuclear expert said that it would be possible to make a crude nuclear-fission device with "just a few kilos" of HEU. The result would be "a very badly done - but done - nuclear weapon," he said.
--------
UN Nuclear Head Sees No Tolerance of WMD Seekers
March 19, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-arms-elbaradei.html
VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said Friday fears that terrorists might obtain weapons of mass destruction had created a new environment of scant tolerance for those seeking banned weapons.
Asked if the recent bomb attacks in Madrid had heightened his unease about the risk of a terror attack using nuclear materials, International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei said it had.
``There's obviously a high level of sophistication in the terrorist community ... and that obviously heightens our concern that they might get their hands on nuclear materials,'' ElBaradei told reporters while flying to Vienna from Washington after a four-day official visit to the United States.
He said this concerned all kinds of radioactive and nuclear material, whether or not it was pure enough to use in an atom bomb. He and President Bush had discussed this during their 45-minute meeting Wednesday.
``Any nuclear material that could be used in pure form or in crude form is enough (to pose a threat), and one of the first priorities I put to President Bush, and he agreed, is to clean up all the nuclear materials that lie around,'' he said.
ElBaradei and the U.S. Department of Energy are drawing up plans to remove all the weapons-useable highly enriched uranium and plutonium sitting at some 100 facilities in 40 countries.
Nuclear experts have warned that a terrorist could attack not only with a ``dirty bomb'' -- a conventional explosive laced with radioactive material -- but also with a crude fission bomb that would be much more deadly.
ElBaradei said this was why the international community had far less tolerance for potential WMD threats, and was why he had been telling Iran, which Washington believes is developing nuclear weapons, that it was in its interest to be fully transparent and honest with U.N. nuclear inspectors.
The combined threat of terrorism and WMD had created a ``new environment,'' he said. ``The level of tolerance is becoming much, much lower... So that's why in our work I emphasize to all those who we inspect that what is required is full transparency, full assurance.''
ElBaradei said Bush had reiterated his belief that Tehran is secretly developing nuclear weapons. ``He (Bush) reflects what I hear everywhere in the U.S. -- that is a strong...suspicion there is a military aspect to (Iran's atomic program).''
``My answer to that is that we have to go through the (inspection) process. I hope Iran will cooperate fully, with transparency, providing all the information to dispel these fears,'' he said.
Tehran insists its nuclear program is solely for the peaceful generation of electricity.
ElBaradei told the House subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia Wednesday he could not rule out the possibility that Tehran is working on an atom bomb, though the IAEA had to be careful with its statements as they ``can make the difference between war and peace.''
Asked to explain what he meant by this, ElBaradei said: ``I think Iraq is still vivid in our memories.''
Washington has never let IAEA inspectors back into Iraq and has never found proof to back up its allegations that Saddam Hussein had revived his covert atom bomb program -- a key justification for the U.S.-led war.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Attorney General Lockyer Files Brief Challenging Federal Refusal To Account For Potential Terrorist Attack On Proposed PG&E Nuclear Facility
March 19, 2004
Mothers For Peace
http://www.mothersforpeace.org/newsAndEvents/News_Item.2004-03-19.5349
(SAN FRANCISCO) - Attorney General Bill Lockyer today filed a friend-of-the court brief in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals opposing the Bush Administration's refusal to consider the environmental effects of a potential terrorist attack on a nuclear storage facility proposed by Pacific Gas & Electric Co.
Here you can sign a thank-you letter to Attorney General Lockyer.
http://www.mothersforpeace.org/xactions/forms/petition?petition_id=AttorneyGeneralThankYou
"The position adopted in this case by the Bush Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is more than illegal," said Lockyer. "It's ludicrous, contrary to the President's public statements, and hazardous to the health of California's residents and environment. This Administration, and this President, constantly remind us of the terrorist threat. And yet, in this case, they say the danger is so remote they can deny Californians their right to know the environmental effects of a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility."
The case - San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace v. U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 03-74628 - involves PG&E's proposal to expand the spent nuclear fuel storage facilities at its Diablo Canyon power plant. Specifically, PG&E wants to build and operate an above-ground Independent Spent Fuel Storage Installation (ISFSI).
On January 23, 2003, the NRC unanimously ruled it did not have to address potential terrorism in its environmental assessment of the facility. In making the decision, the NRC concluded the possibility of a terrorist attack "is speculative and simply too far removed from the natural or expected consequences of agency action" to require a study under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Lockyer's brief - filed on behalf of the people of California and joined by Massachusetts, Utah and Washington - challenges that position, using blunt language and the Bush Administration's own statements and actions.
The NRC's position, the brief states, "defies logic, and is inconsistent with statements made and activities undertaken subsequent to September 11, 2001 by the President, the members of the Cabinet and the NRC itself." Some examples:
? President Bush, in his State of the Union Address on January 9, 2002, told the American people U.S. intelligence agencies had found "diagrams of nuclear power plants" at Al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.
? The NRC on January 23, 2002 warned nuclear power plant operators of the potential for terrorists to crash a hijacked jetliner into a facility.
? The U.S. Department of Homeland Security said on May 14, 2002, "We know that Al-Qaeda has been gathering information and looking at nuclear facilities and other critical infrastructure as potential targets."
? On May 24, 2002, the NRC reported the nation's nuclear power plants had been placed on heightened alert due to information obtained by intelligence agencies.
? The FBI on October 24, 2002 issued a "Threat Communication" that warned Al-Qaeda detainees had indicated attacks on the U.S. petroleum industry planned by the group "may be part of more extensive operations against ... energy-related targets, including oil facilities and nuclear power plants."
The brief notes the NRC also contends PG&E's project is exempt from review under NEPA because a terrorist attack on a nuclear facility is a worst-case scenario. "This assertion, again, ignores statements made by senior government officials that serious terrorist attacks on the United States are inevitable, that nuclear power plants are potential targets for attack, and that attacks on American nuclear power plants have already been planned," the brief states.
The Bush Administration, the brief adds, has made clear its belief that "terrorist attacks, like earthquakes, will occur - the only question is whether 'ground zero' will be a nuclear power plant."
Lockyer's brief asks the court to find that the NRC's decision to not follow NEPA was "arbitrary and capricious." It further asks the court to order the NRC to assess the environmental effects of a terrorist attack on the proposed facility, and to conduct public hearings as part of that process.
"The NRC seems uninterested in hearing what anyone besides its own staff and, presumably, PG&E might have to say regarding the vulnerability of the proposed ISFSI to terrorist attack," said Lockyer. "We filed this brief to vindicate California citizens' right under NEPA to participate in federal agency decisions that may significantly affect our public safety and health, and our environment."
Read the full text of the brief here
http://www.mothersforpeace.org/data/2004-03-19CAAGAmicusBrief.pdf
-------- colorado
[Crazy. To reply: mailto:openforum@dailycamera.com ]
Don't fence us out Rocky Flats will be clean enough for public use
March 19, 2004
Boulder Daily Camera
http://www.bouldernews.com/bdc/editorials/article/0,1713,BDC_2489_2740950,00.html
Anybody who lives near Rocky Flats, the now-defunct nuclear-weapons plant south of Boulder, owes a debt of gratitude to the activists who for decades have patiently labored in the cause of public health and safety.
Thousands protested in the 1970s and '80s over the dangers of radioactive contamination and the ethics of nuclear warfare. They applied much-needed pressure when the government was highly secretive.
Since the end of the Cold War, many of those same, dedicated souls have remained relentless in their scrutiny, making sure that the federal government didn't just close up shop and leave Colorado with a poisonous legacy in its back yard.
Even after the government began to respond, activists have continued pushing. But today, no pragmatist really expects their agenda to rule the day.
And that, more or less, is where dedicated Rocky Flats activists find themselves these last few years. When the DOE announced its cleanup plan several years ago, the activists said only a wildly expensive effort to clean the site to "background" levels of radiation would do.
And now, following the passage of the "Rocky Flats National Wildlife Refuge Act of 2001" authored by U.S. Sen. Wayne Allard and U.S. Rep. Mark Udall, activists are asking that there be no public access to the 6,400-acre site, in perpetuity.
The activists may not have gotten their wishes on cleanup, but what they got - what we all got - is very thorough (with, admittedly, some issues yet to be worked out). It is, in fact, more than safe enough to warrant public access when the refuge comes under the management of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Plutonium is highly dangerous to humans in tiny concentrations. A single particle inhaled can cause fatal cancer. And plutonium remains at Rocky Flats, though only in miniscule amounts on the surface. For that, we can thank the activists.
At one point, DOE determined that around 600 picocuries of radioactive material per gram of soil was sufficiently risk-free to allow the public to use the site as open space. As it stands today, the actual concentration has been reduced to 55 picocuries per gram. Compare that to the 35 picocuries per gram that an analyst hired by activist groups determined would be safe - for a rancher who lives and works full-time on the site.
Nobody can say there is no risk of radiation contamination at Rocky Flats. There are even deposits of radioactive materials deep in the soil, which means excavation at the site must be forever prohibited.
Activists note that plutonium has a radioactive half-life of 24,400 years, which means it remains dangerous for a quarter of a million years. They worry that control over the site eventually will fade and someone, sometime, will take that fateful step and, say, propose a housing development there.
That strikes us as a fanciful scenario. Public and private watchdogs are unlikely to lose interest in the site, barring an unforseen catastrophe such as the collapse of the United States. And that remote possibility has no bearing on the practical issue today - whether the public gains access to this land for light recreational use.
The DOE continues to study contamination at the site, and the refuge will stop dead in its tracks if risks are determined to be too high. But there is every reason to believe that risks to the public and to Fish and Wildlife rangers will be infinitesmal. And fencing off the site in perpetuity would go against the informed wishes of most Front Range citizens, who want to be able to enjoy the land.
As for the now-moot hopes of cleaning the site to "background" levels of radiation, a question: Given the immense costs of such an unprecedented undertaking, the scarcity of funds, the plethora of other needs, and the tiny reduction in risk it would have accomplished, would it have been worth it?
-------- ohio
Faulty Valve Stalls Restart of Davis Besse Reactor
OAK HARBOR, Ohio, (ENS)
March 19, 2004
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/mar2004/2004-03-19-09.asp#anchor2
FirstEnergy's Davis Besse nuclear power plant has been shut down again. The company started producing energy from the plant's nuclear reactor Tuesday morning, but was forced to shut it down in order to fix a broken water valve.
Plant officials also reported a steam leak and problems with turbine bypass valves.
The plant was engaged at 22 percent power when operators reported the problem with the valve. Officials with the Nuclear Regulatory Agency said there was little if any danger from the problem, which would have kept the plant from reaching full power.
FirstEnergy says it aims to restart the plant next week.
Critics pounced on the setback as further evidence that the NRC should not have approved the restart of the troubled reactor.
The plant had been offline for more than 2 years due to safety and maintenance concerns - several of which came from the discovery that an acid leak had created a sizeable hole in the protective reactor lid.
The NRC gave FirstEnergy permission earlier this month to restart the reactor.
"While it is appropriate that the plant is being shut down after this discovery, it is troubling that these problems were not identified previously by either FirstEnergy engineers or NRC plant inspectors," said Wenonah Hauter of the interest group Public Citizen.
Hauter says the valves were likely malfunctioning before the plant's February 2002 shutdown and apparently were not adequately tested during pre-startup exercises of the plant late last year and early this year.
"It appears that Davis-Besse is, at best, a mediocre plant that still poses dangers to the surrounding region," Hauter said. "This continuing saga highlights what happens when regulators act as promoters of the industry they are supposed to oversee."
-------- vermont
Nuclear safety review needed
Friday, March 19, 2004
Burlington Free Press
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/bfpnews/editorial/1000h.htm
From the Will Wonders Never Cease Department comes word that the Public Service Board pleased all sides this week in a dispute over whether Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant should increase its generating capacity.
The three-member board agreed Monday to a 20 percent rise in power production at the nuclear facility, noting that the plan "should have minimal additional adverse impacts, while at the same time providing additional energy to the region and economic benefits to the state of Vermont."
The decision means Vermont Yankee's owner, Entergy Nuclear, can go ahead this spring with the estimated $60 million rehab of the plant along the Connecticut River.
In its decision, however, the board also requested that the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission conduct an "independent engineering assessment" of 32-year-old Vermont Yankee in addition to its normal oversight process. The outside review was initially proposed by the New England Coalition, an environmental group, and endorsed Tuesday by the state Senate.
Although Entergy executives and some state officials argued that regular review procedures should be adequate, they expressed satisfaction with the board's decision.
The request to the nuclear commission reflects some tricky bureaucratic stepping. The Public Service Board is primarily responsible for construction aspects of the Vermont Yankee uprate proposal. Safety is mainly the province of the federal government. The state board wants to have an independent review in hand before granting final approval to the uprate plan.
The proposed safety evaluation of Vermont Yankee would be similar to one conducted on the Maine Yankee plant in 1996. That inspection revealed several problem areas, leading to the plant's shutdown because of the high cost of fixing the trouble spots.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has yet to respond to Vermont's request, but a thorough safety inspection of Vermont Yankee can do nothing but good. Any potential dangers stemming from boosting power output can be explored. The overall condition of the plant and its reliability can be examined. Independent scrutiny can address any fears people might have about overall plant safety.
For more than three decades, Vermont Yankee has proved to be a predictable and reasonably affordable source of electricity. The long-term future of the plant is not at issue, but the uprate plan is a chance to re-examine safety issues and address other concerns.
In its request for an independent review of Vermont Yankee, the Public Service Board is looking out for Vermonters' best interests. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission should realize that the public deserves credible answers to questions about Vermont Yankee and order the safety assessment.
-------- us politics
McCain Defends Kerry's Record on National Security
Ariz. Senator Calls for More Civility in Debate
By Charles Babington
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6173-2004Mar18.html
Republican Sen. John McCain yesterday defended Sen. John F. Kerry's record on national security, undercutting the Bush-Cheney campaign's latest attacks on the Democratic presidential challenger and frustrating conservatives hoping for a unified front against the Massachusetts senator.
"I do not believe that he is, quote, 'weak on defense,' " McCain (Ariz.) said on NBC's "Today" show.
Asked on the CBS "Early Show" whether he agreed with Vice President Cheney's assertion that Kerry is a threat to national security, McCain said: "I don't think that. I think that John Kerry is a good and decent man. . . . I think he has different points of view on different issues, and he will have to explain his voting record. But this kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful in educating and helping the American people make a choice."
Although McCain restated his support of Bush's reelection bid, Democrats welcomed his remarks during a week in which the Bush-Cheney campaign sharpened its attacks on Kerry's record on military and diplomatic matters. In a speech Wednesday in California, Cheney portrayed Kerry as a weak-willed lawmaker whose policies would have left Saddam Hussein in Baghdad as well as Kuwait. He said Kerry "has given us ample doubts about his judgment and the attitude he brings to bear on vital issues of national security."
Yesterday, the Bush campaign released a new TV ad attacking Kerry's voting record on funding the war in Iraq.
McCain, who lost a sometimes bitter GOP presidential nomination battle to Bush four years ago, is well-known for opposing Republican orthodoxy on campaign finance laws and other issues. A congressional authority on military affairs, he is a hero to many veterans familiar with his years of torture in a North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp.
Some of Bush's staunchest backers seemed infuriated by McCain's comments, which ran counter to the Republicans' theme of the week and landed on an otherwise quiet day, with Kerry on vacation in Idaho. Conservative talk show hosts, including Laura Ingraham, denounced McCain's remarks, and by midday the senator was declining most interview requests.
Two associates close to McCain said that he is weary of such criticisms from within his party but that he refuses to join what he considers unfair attacks on Kerry, a friend and fellow decorated veteran of the Vietnam War. They noted that McCain was asked point-blank whether he thinks Kerry is weak on defense, not a more nuanced question such as how his and Kerry's voting records differ.
"John Kerry is his friend," McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter, said. "He's not going to attack his friend."
On the "Today" show, McCain urged the Kerry and Bush campaigns to adopt more civil tones on terrorism and national security.
"Both sides have been beating up on the other in the most negative campaign earlier than I've ever seen," he said. "I'd like to see it stop. I'd like to see a serious discussion about Medicare, Social Security, education, what we're going to do about the deficit and overspending."
Hitting the same theme on the "Early Show," he said, "I think we ought to have open and honest debates on those issues. I think the president has led this nation with clarity since September 11th. I'm supporting his reelection. But I would certainly hope that we could raise the level of this debate. Otherwise, we're going to have very low voter turnouts in November."
The Bush-Cheney campaign played down McCain's remarks, noting that the senator has campaigned for Bush this year in New Hampshire. Asked whether the campaign would prefer that McCain stay off television, spokesman Terry Holt said: "In the Republican Party, we have a respect for our public officials to make those decisions for themselves. . . . John McCain said John Kerry would have to explain his record," a record the Bush campaign plans to make "exceedingly clear to voters."
Republican activist Charlie Black, who is close to many Bush advisers, agreed. "I don't think this is a very big deal," he said. "John McCain has done everything the Bush campaign has asked him to do. . . . John's a celebrity; he makes news."
Some Democratic activists, however, said McCain's comments will undercut Cheney's hard-hitting remarks.
"It only takes one person speaking out of school to reveal a lie or distortion," said Joe Lockhart, a former spokesman for president Bill Clinton. "So I think this could have a powerful impact on the Bush attack." Noting that Bush supporters fiercely criticized McCain in the 2000 South Carolina presidential primary, Lockhart said McCain "is probably America's biggest victim of the Bush attack machine."
On both morning TV programs, McCain reiterated that he will not leave the Republican Party or accept anyone's vice presidential offer. He said on CBS, "The vice president only has two duties. One is to break a tie vote in the Senate and the other is to inquire daily as to the health of the president. I prefer being in the Senate."
--------
Bush Marks War's Anniversary, Vowing to Fight On
March 19, 2004
By DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/politics/19CND-PREX.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, March 19 - A year after war began in Iraq, President Bush said today that the campaign there was nothing less than a struggle between civilization and darkness, good and evil, life and death.
"Each of us has pledged before the world we will never bow to the violence of a few," the president told envoys from the 84 nations that are part of the Iraqi effort. "We will face this mortal danger, and we will overcome it together."
Mr. Bush, speaking in the East Room of the White House against a multicolored backdrop of flags from coalition countries, said America and its allies had been summoned by history to stamp out terrorism. There is no turning back, he said in an address aimed at Europeans as well as Americans, nor should there be.
"It is the interest of every country and the duty of every government to fight and destroy this threat to our people," he said. "There is a dividing line in our world, not between nations and not between religions or cultures, but a dividing line separating two visions of justice and the value of life."
The president's speech was ambitious and it seemed to have several purposes, both foreign and domestic.
Mr. Bush sought to disarm critics of his foreign policy and show himself as the steady commander in chief in a time of peril - and in a presidential election year. He sought, too, to smooth over sharp differences with old allies, especially France and Germany.
And, in an attempt to prevent European countries from pulling their troops out of Iraq early, Mr. Bush warned against any "separate peace with the terrorist enemy."
"Any sign of weakness or retreat simply validates terrorist violence and invites more violence for all nations," Mr. Bush said. "The only certain way to protect our people is by united and decisive action."
The new Socialist government of Spain has declared its intention to withdraw Spain's 1,300 troops from Iraq, although the incoming prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has insisted that he wanted to take that step long before the Madrid bombings.
And President Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland said on Thursday that he might withdraw troops from Iraq next year, earlier than planned, adding that Poland had been "misled" about Iraq's weapons programs. But today, the White House said Mr. Bush and the Polish leader had patched up their differences by telephone, and that Poland would keep its 2,500 troops in Iraq.
Mr. Bush went out of his way to thank European, Middle Eastern and Asian countries who have sent troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. As for those who did not come home, he said, "We honor their courage. We pray for the comfort of their families. We will uphold the cause they served."
Mr. Bush sought to link the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the same worldwide struggle against terrorism. The president and his advisers are well aware that many people who backed the American campaign to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan were against the American-led war in Iraq.
The critics of Mr. Bush's Iraq policy have noted that the Taliban regime gave shelter to Osama bin Laden, whose terrorist network is widely blamed for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The critics have argued that there was no comparable justification for the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein in Iraq, since he has never been implicated in the Sept. 11 attacks. The critics have said, too, that the threat posed by chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in the hands of Mr. Hussein were exaggerated by the Bush administration, or even fabricated.
Coincidentally or otherwise, Mr. Bush did not mention Osama bin Laden today. Nor did he mention attacks of Sept. 11. He did mention the recent bombings in Madrid, calling them a reminder "that the civilized world is at war, and in this new kind of war civilians find themselves suddenly on the front lines."
"Each of these attacks on the innocent is a shock and a tragedy and a test of our will," Mr. Bush said a moment later. "Each attack is designed to demoralize our people and divide us from one another. And each attack must be answered not only with sorrow, but with greater determination, deeper resolve and bolder action against the killers."
The president cited a tape, recovered in Madrid after the bombings, in which a man claims to be part of a group that carried out the bombings. The man said, "We choose death while you choose life."
Mr. Bush seized on those words today.
"We don't know if this is the voice of the actual killers, but we do know that it expresses the creed of the enemy," he said. "It is a mindset that rejoices in suicide, incites murder and celebrates every death we mourn. And we who stand on the other side of the line must be equally clear and certain of our convictions. We do love life, the life given to us and to all. We believe in the values that uphold the dignity of life: tolerance and freedom and the right of conscience. And we know that this way of life is worth defending."
"There is no neutral ground - no neutral ground - in the fight between civilization and terror, because there's no neutral ground between good and evil, freedom and slavery, and life and death," Mr. Bush went on. "The war on terror is not a figure of speech, it is an inescapable calling of our generation."
Mr. Bush noted that France and Germany, while siding with the United States in Afghanistan, opposed the war in Iraq. "There have been disagreements in this matter among old and valued friends," he said. "Those differences belong to the past. All of us can now agree that the fall of the Iraqi dictator has removed a source of violence, aggression and instability in the Middle East."
(In another hint of a thaw in United States-French relations, President Bush told President Jacques Chirac of France today that he will attend ceremonies in Normandy on June 6 marking the 60th anniversary of the D-Day landings, the White House said.)
In his East Room speech, Mr. Bush asserted that the war in Iraq, and the peacekeeping there, were part of the struggle against terrorism - and that the terrorists know it.
"For them, the connection between Iraq's future and the course of the war on terror is very clear," he said. "They understand that a free Iraq will be a devastating setback to their ambitions of tyranny over the Middle East, and they've made the failure of democracy in Iraq one of their primary objectives."
Mr. Bush said in closing: "It will surely be said of our times that we lived with great challenges. Let it also be said of our times that we understood our great duties and met them in full. May God bless our efforts."
--------
Because of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear dangers are even greater
By Joan King,
Gainesville Times COLUMNIST
Friday, March 19, 2004
http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/stories/20040319/opinion/108247.html
I was 13, a teen-ager reluctantly cleaning up her room, when the radio announced the United States had dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
I raised three children during the Cold War and remember sending them off to school during the Cuban missile crisis wondering if I'd ever see them again, but it wasn't until they were older that I became actively involved in nuclear issues.
Over the years, I've attended Department of Energy workshops, toured the Savannah River Site (it's a bomb plant, folks; it hasn't produced the first kilowatt of electricity), visited radioactive waste dumps in Nevada and help facilitate educational programs for Congressional staffers in Washington.
Are we any safer now than during the Cold War? I don't think so. The United States still has 2,300 nuclear missiles on high alert (I'm told that means 15 minutes to launch), and you better believe other nuclear nations are equally ready to fire. The world is probably in greater jeopardy today than it has ever been, but public concern is almost nonexistent.
This has allowed our government to all but ignore nuclear proliferation. Now that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's leading nuclear scientist, has confessed to running an international black market in nuclear weapons materials, this is no longer possible. Unfortunately, the Bush administration is so dependent on Pakistan's cooperation with its war on terrorism, there's very little it can do about it.
Pakistan, of course, officially denies any part in this black market. It's all Dr. Kahn's doing, they say, but Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf just pardoned Kahn calling him a national hero. Now it's back to business as usual.
Pakistan continues to receive U.S. support. Nearby the United Arab Emirates continue to get U.S. weapons and missile-defense deals despite the fact that they serve as a black market transfer point, and the international trade in nuclear materials continues.
The problem is not new. International intelligence agencies have known about it for 20 years. As a former CIA director, the first President Bush must have known, but it can't be blamed on one party or one administration. However, no administration has tied its own hands like that of George W. Bush.
President Bush's war on terrorism and his need to capture Osama bin Laden, thought to be hiding in northern Pakistan, require that the administration pretend Pakistan is not involved in promoting nuclear proliferation around the world. The administration's need to maintain troops in the Persian Gulf to safeguard its oil supply requires that it ignore black-market transfer points in the United Arab Emirates.
The White House admits that SMB Computers, a company in Dubai, one of the Emirates' sheikdoms, has served as a front for this underground nuclear network. They know that Malaysian high-speed gas centrifuges used to enrich uranium for Libya's nuclear weapon program were shipped through Dubai.
This is absurd! The administration says it is fighting terrorism, but it turns a blind eye to a network that sells weapons of mass destruction to anyone with enough money to buy them. Meanwhile North Korea openly admits its nuclear ambitions and sells missile delivery systems to nations hostile to the United States.
This is foreign policy run amok. The world is not safer today than when Bush took office; just the opposite. The nuclear balance that afforded some protection during the Cold War years is gone. We are not facing one enemy, we are facing many, and we seem to be making more every day.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know we're headed in the wrong direction. We need to reduce our need for oil, not just foreign oil, though that is the first step. Nuclear energy is not the way to do it. Any country that has a nuclear energy facility can, if it is determined to do so, produce weapons-grade plutonium from the resulting nuclear waste.
Sure, there are safeguards, but they can never be perfect. Dr. Khan's confession demonstrates there is already an international black market in nuclear weapons materials. The Bush administration's lack of response demonstrates how it has tied its own hands.
Writing in the March 8 New Yorker, Seymour Hersh quotes a source in Europe: "Iraq is laughable in comparison with this issue. The Bush administration (has been) hunting the shadows instead of the prey."
My thanks to The Times, which once again provided better coverage on an issue important to all Georgians than did the Atlanta papers.
This concerns a protest at the state Capitol over recent cuts in funding for monitor radioactive contamination around the Savannah River Site on Georgia's border with South Carolina. While the AJC buried the information in its Metro section, The Times printed it on page 5.
Funding for is expected to end next month. The SRS contains a 40-year accumulation of highly radioactive nuclear waste from years of nuclear weapons production, and contamination from the plant is leaking into the ground water and the Savannah River itself.
Without monitoring Georgia has no early warning system and no way to protect its citizens from future leaks. If anyone wants more information, I invite them to contact me through the paper.
Joan King is a resident of Sautee. Her column appears biweekly.
----
Which Way John Kerry?
by John Stanton
03/19/2004
Pravda
http://english.pravda.ru/mailbox/22/98/387/12302_Kerry.html
John Kerry recently chided the incoming Spanish government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero for promising to fulfill a campaign promise to bring back to Spain its troops and support personnel deployed in Iraq. Agence France Press reported that Kerry's view was that if Spain did bring its soldiers home at this point in the US occupation, "it would leave behind a failed state that inevitably would become a haven for terrorists." With this statement, he seems to have some Richard Nixon in him.
On the John Kerry for President website, a section outlines Kerry's plan for "Winning the Peace in Post-Saddam Iraq" which is eerily similar to phrasing used in Nixon's Cambodia Incursion Address delivered in 1970 to the American people. Nixon indicated that his plans to expand the war while ostensibly bringing US troops home would result in "winning the just peace we all desire". Winning the Peace would be a constant refrain of Nixon's as would Peace with Honor. The longer the US stays on Iraq the closer its leaders will come to uttering those phrases.
Why would John Kerry want to prolong the misery of US troops in Iraq and their families here in the USA with such a strangely Nixonesqe policy?
Fiasco
John Kerry must know, or at least his advisors should know, that Iraq is, indeed, "a fiasco" as Zapatero put it. An estimated 10,000 or more non-combatant Iraqi men, women and children have been slaughtered or maimed by US ordnance delivered from air, sea and land. Roughly 10,000 US troops have either been slaughtered (KIA), maimed (WIA) or have contracted illnesses (depleted uranium syndrome among them) that are filling VA hospitals all over the country. The cold-blooded and very capitalist US practice of mistakenly killing an Iraqi family member and subsequently offering $5000 in cash as a replacement for a human soul is sure to make more enemies in Iraq. The use by US forces of time-tested Israeli urban warfare tactics for retribution against rebel attacks--to include destroying homes in urban areas where suspected rebels live and in rural areas plowing up the farms of suspected rebel families-creates more enmity between occupation forces and the general population.
Perhaps most stingingly, no one at the helm is listening to what the Israelis are telling the grand brains running the US military/political apparatus. As reported by MSNBC, Martin Van Creveld-an Israeli urban warfare expert--indicated that the US would eventually be forced to leave Iraq because the occupation is doomed to failure. "They are already doing things that we [Israel] have been doing for years to no avail, like demolishing buildings, like closing off villages in barbed wire. The Americans are coming here to try to mimic all kinds of techniques, but it's not going to do them any good. I don't see how on earth the U.S. can win. I think this is going to end the same way Vietnam did. They are going to flee the country hanging on the strings of helicopters."
When the Going Gets Tough, Chalabi Runs
The Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) created by the US is generally reviled by the Iraqi people not so much because they are the marionettes of the US government but because the composition of the IGC is guaranteed to lead to further rebel activity against Iraqi occupation forces and the cronies who work for them. Iraqi civilians will continue to suffer. The IGC is a trademark American shake-and-bake government. It's artificial to the core and guaranteed to rot under pressure.
According to islamonline.net, some of the most powerful members of the IGC, like Ahmed Chalabi, are not even Iraqi citizens. "The first president of the IGC, Ibrahim Al-Jaafari, trained in medicine at Mosul University, did not consider Iraq to be his home. In an interview with the Associated Press, Al-Jaafari admitted that he considered London, England to be his home." Moreover, according to islamonline.net, the very design of the IGC is guaranteed to ensure sectarian conflict and further rebel attacks aimed at occupation forces. "The very members of the IGC show us just what the United States intends to do.
The Kurds have never been in a stronger position to call for secession and the creation of an independent Kurdistan. In-fighting will eventually tear the council apart, with each faction withdrawing to the protections of its armed militias. Those with foreign passports like Chalabi, will run as soon as the situation worsens."
Read Nixon's Speech, Learn About John Kerry?
What is most frightening about Kerry's negativity towards Spain's intention withdraw its military personnel from Iraq, is that he seems to endorse the view that if an electorate votes against the US occupation of Iraq (and the perpetual war on terror) then one is engaging in appeasement with the "terrorists". Setting aside the tortured logic in this thought, it's clear he agrees with prominent US warlords President Bush, Speaker of the US House Hastert, and the Chair of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff General Myers that somehow the Spanish people are assisting the terrorists by exercising their right to vote out a government whose policies they did not support.
With US political and military leaders condemning the voters and the incoming government of Spain as evil appeasers, they display their contempt for the will of the people and of the individual citizen everywhere.
Why does John Kerry side with them?
Now that John Kerry has the Democratic nomination in hand, those Americans who support him must be vigilant and keep his feet to the fire on the issue of the occupation of Iraq. If not, sometime in the term of President Kerry, he will make the following remarks given by Nixon in the turbulent year that was 1970.
"My fellow Americans, we live in an age of anarchy, both abroad and at home. We see mindless attacks on all the great institutions which have been created by free civilizations in the last 500 years. Small nations all over the world find themselves under attack from within and from without. If, when the chips are down, the world's most powerful nation -- the United States of America -- acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.
It is not our power, but our will and character that is being tested tonight. The question all Americans must ask and answer tonight is this: Does the richest and strongest nation in the history of the world have the character to meet a direct challenge by a group which rejects every effort to win a just peace, ignores our warning, tramples on solemn agreements, violates the neutrality of an unarmed people, and uses our prisoners as hostages? If we fail to meet this challenge, all other nations will be on notice that despite its overwhelming power the United States when a real crisis comes will be found wanting."
Don't take America there John Kerry.
John Stanton is a Virginia Based writer specializing in political and military matters. He is the author-with Wayne Madsen-of America's Nightmare, The Presidency of George Bush II. Reach him at cioran123@yahoo.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
India and Britain Sign Agreement on Jets
March 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-India-Britain-Jet-Deal.html
NEW DELHI (AP) -- India signed an agreement with Britain on Friday to buy 66 British advanced jet trainers worth $1.45 billion, following nearly two decades of negotiations.
India's Defense Secretary Ajai Prasad and British High Commissioner Michael Arthur inked the 795 million- pound deal after agreeing on the details of the sale of the Hawk-115 jets by BAE Systems.
The Indian Cabinet approved the deal last September, but it took both sides nearly six months to work out the details.
India had been trying to buy the Hawks since 1986, but bureaucratic delays and lobbying by rival bidders delayed the sale. The deal was also stalled by sanctions imposed by Western nations after India conducted nuclear tests in May 1998. Those sanctions were lifted in 2001.
According to the agreement, the Indian air force will get 24 Hawk jets already assembled while the remaining 42 will be manufactured in India under license from BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace Systems. The first batch of jets will be delivered in about three years.
Prasad said the British government has assured ``full product support during the life span of these aircraft ... (so) that no hitch takes place during the supply or license production of the aircraft.''
The agreement also included a commitment by the British government to ensure that BAE Systems and associated equipment manufacturers in Britain adhere to price and other conditions of the deal, Prasad told a news conference.
``This is a very good symbol of defense-industrial collaboration between our two countries,'' said Arthur, Britain's ambassador in New Delhi.
While the jets are being built, at least 75 Indian pilots will also be trained in Britain alongside pilots from Britain's Royal Air Force, he said.
The advanced trainers are viewed as a boost to the Indian air force, which has seen more than 50 of its pilots die in more than 100 crashes in the past six years.
The crashes, mostly of Soviet-made MiG jets, have been blamed in part on the lack of training jets that match India's combat fleet. Indian pilots currently learn on slow-moving trainers, then suddenly graduate to faster and more complicated jets such as the MiG.
-------- balkans
Riots Spread Across Kosovo, Serbia
NATO Sends In Reinforcements To Quell Violence
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6216-2004Mar18.html
BELGRADE, March 18 -- Ethnic Albanians burned houses and churches and drove hundreds of Serbs from towns and villages across Kosovo on Thursday, while Serbs outside the province retaliated by setting fire to mosques in Serbia. NATO responded to the violence by sending in reinforcements to head off a broader conflict.
The death toll from two days of marauding reached 31, U.N. officials said, but it was not clear how the numbers broke down between the two sides.
Scenes across the province were eerily reminiscent of the conflict that led to NATO intervention five years ago. But now it is the Serbs who are being driven out rather than the Albanians, who were victims of a policy of ethnic cleansing organized by Slobodan Milosevic, then the Yugoslav president.
Kosovo was effectively separated from Serbia in 1999 when U.S.-led NATO airstrikes drove the Serbian army and police forces from the province. But the region's final status has not been settled, and relations between the majority Albanians and the remnants of the Serb population are tense. The Serbs maintain that Kosovo is still part of Serbia and Montenegro, the successor state to Yugoslavia, but the Albanians demand independence.
On Thursday, columns of smoke rose from houses in isolated Serbian enclaves. In Lipljan, south of the provincial capital, Pristina, 300 Serbs took refuge in a church under the protection of Finnish soldiers, Serbian television reported. Scores of others reportedly fled the town of Obilic in central Kosovo. "There are no more Serbs in Obilic," Mirce Jaklojevic, a Serb, said on Serb radio.
NATO forces evacuated a group of nuns by helicopter from a Serbian Orthodox convent near Srbica in central Kosovo. Albanians in Pristina set a church on fire, one of 16 churches and monasteries burned in the province, according to Serb officials.
Another mob burned a church in the southern portion of Kosovska Mitrovica, a tense town north of Pristina where the violence began Wednesday. Rioting and ethnic clashes there erupted in response to reports that three Albanian boys had drowned after they were chased by Serbs into the Ibar River, which separates the Albanian and Serbian sections of Kosovska Mitrovica. NATO troops patrolled a bridge over the river on Thursday to keep the sides apart.
NATO forces in Kosovo number 18,500, down from 50,000 at the end of the war. Among them are 2,000 U.S. soldiers, down from 5,000 at war's end. The Bush administration has considered further reducing the U.S. contingent, as U.S. forces have been stretched thin by war duty in Afghanistan and Iraq. On Thursday, Britain dispatched 750 reinforcements, the Americans 100 and Italy 80. The U.S. Embassy in Belgrade was closed to the public and ringed by riot police.
"I don't believe there's a possibility of war," said Jamie Shea, a NATO spokesman. "We will do what is necessary to restore and uphold law and order."
At the end of the Kosovo war, NATO failed to protect Serbs from ethnic Albanians who had returned from refugee camps in Albania and Macedonia. Tens of thousands of Serbs fled into Serbia proper or took refuge in guarded compounds in Kosovo and in towns near the Serbian border that remained under Serb control.
Serbs and some independent observers asserted that the ethnic Albanians were using the drowning incident to justify a campaign to sweep Serbs out of Albanian areas. "You can see a form of independence being negotiated in a new and violent way," said Alex Anderson, an official of the International Crisis Group, a nongovernmental observer organization.
Nebojsa Covic, Serbia's representative in Kosovo, said the violence had been "organized in advance" by Albanians.
In Serbia proper, Serbs burned the only mosque in Belgrade, the capital, and another in the city of Nis. A crowd also destroyed an Islamic center in the city of Novi Sad. Demonstrators marched in Belgrade and in other areas Thursday to protest the violence in Kosovo and held prayer services in Orthodox churches. The Serbian government has called for a series of marches and for three minutes of silence at noon Friday.
Serbian and Albanian officials took tentative steps late last year to begin talks about Kosovo's future. But negotiations were limited to exchanges of information about missing persons and supplying electricity to Kosovo.
Albanian politicians have grown impatient about the unresolved status of Kosovo, which remained part of Serbia under U.N. terms that ended the war.
Vojislav Kostunica, prime minister of Serbia, has pressed for Kosovo to remain within Serbia and for Serbs to be given autonomous status in their enclaves. "We need physical separation," he said. "That does not mean the end of Kosovo, but it means autonomy."
-------- business
Army May Allow Bids For Some KBR Work
General Calls Contract Change Normal
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6162-2004Mar18.html
The U.S. Army is considering letting other companies compete for some of the work in Iraq for which a Halliburton Co. subsidiary has been awarded $4 billion under a broad logistics contract.
Maj. Gen. Wade H. McManus Jr., commanding general of the Army's Joint Munitions Command, who is helping oversee the contract, said in an interview that the move is normal when field conditions become more stable, and is unrelated to allegations that the subsidiary, KBR, may have overcharged the government for gasoline and meals in Iraq.
"I am satisfied the process is working," McManus said.
He said the six areas likely to be competed for first are laundry, trash removal, power generation, dining facilities, sanitation and non-tactical vehicle support. "We may have reached a level of stability where we can compete these areas," he said. It could take up to three years to complete the transition once a formal decision is made, he added.
In the Balkans, the military relied on its broad logistics contract for three years before transitioning to longer-term competitive contracts.
KBR provides food, shelter and other logistical support to the U.S. military throughout the world under a broad contract known as the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP. Under the contract, which KBR won in 2001 through a competitive bid, the company is paid its expenses plus a profit instead of a set amount.
"I think that's an important development," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), a member of the House Government Reform Committee, which held a hearing last week on Iraq contracting, said of possible competition. "Right now we've had a few big players having a monopoly over these contracts, and the result has been total disregard for what it is going to cost the American taxpayer. If you bid it out competitively, the expectation is that you'll get the best price and the best performance."
The LOGCAP program was created in 1992 after a study commissioned by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney examined ways the military could outsource certain support functions that the military had traditionally provided for itself. That study was carried out by KBR's predecessor company, Brown and Root, which the Pentagon selected as the first contractor in 1992. Cheney later was chief executive of Halliburton, from 1995 to 2000.
DynCorp won the LOGCAP contract in 1997 and KBR won it again in 2002.
KBR also has been awarded more than $2 billion in Iraq-related work from the Army Corps of Engineers. The corps selected the company in March to repair Iraq's oil fields through a sole-source award that was an offshoot of the LOGCAP contract.
Steven L. Schooner, co-director of the Government Procurement Law Program at George Washington University, said LOGCAP was only intended to deal with crisis and not to provide long-term support for troops.
"I have no doubt people will say there is pressure to do this because KBR is under fire," Schooner said. "But it seems to me that everything KBR has been accused of, the other firms have done as well."
Pentagon auditors have accused the company of overcharging the government under both the LOGCAP and Army Corps contracts. The company is under investigation for allegedly overpaying a Kuwaiti fuel supplier by at least $61 million to import gasoline to Iraq. The Pentagon has referred the matter to the Justice Department.
The auditors also have accused the company of overbilling for troop meals never served. The company agreed to withhold $176 million in invoices. In a conference call last week to discuss the company's yearly earnings, however, Christopher Gaut, Halliburton's chief financial officer, said preliminary results of the company's own review of the meals issue indicates that the amount in dispute "will be far less" than $176 million.
--------
General Dynamics Buys Firm
By Brad Grimes
Washington Technology
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page E05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6632-2004Mar18.html
General Dynamics Corp. yesterday announced it will acquire Gilbert, Ariz.-based Spectrum Astro Inc., a privately held space systems integrator for the government.
Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
According to Falls Church-based General Dynamics, the transaction has been approved by the directors of both companies and is expected to close within 60 days.
Upon completion of the merger, Spectrum Astro will become part of General Dynamics C4 Systems, which is headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz. Spectrum Astro, with approximately 520 employees, manufactures and integrates spacecraft subsystem hardware, software and ground-support equipment.
General Dynamics hopes to leverage Spectrum Astro's expertise to win contracts for new space-based initiatives.
For more information, go to www.washingtontechnology.com.
-------- china
China silent after shooting of Taiwanese leaders
JOE McDONALD,
Associated Press Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/03/19/international0459EST0477.DTL
BEIJING (AP) -- China had no immediate reaction and didn't tell its own public Friday after Taiwan's president was shot and wounded a day before elections that Beijing hoped he would lose.
The shooting of President Chen Shui-bian and his vice president, Annette Lu, came as Taipei was preparing for a presidential election and a referendum vote that the mainland's Communist government has criticized.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry referred questions to the Cabinet's Taiwan Affairs Office, which handles relations with the self-ruled island. Phone calls to the office weren't answered.
The official Xinhua News Agency had not reported the shooting three hours after it occurred. The main state television channel, CCTV-1, showed a chef beating eggs while coverage by international media was filled with live bulletins on Chen's and Lu's medical conditions.
China often is slow to react to international events, especially those involving its tangled relations with Taiwan -- which it regards as a domestic affair. After Chen's surprise upset victory in a 2000 election, Beijing waited several days before issuing a statement.
Beijing has publicly vilified Chen, accusing him of plotting to make Taiwan's de facto independence permanent. Many believe Chen's rival in the election, Lien Chan, would be more conciliatory toward Beijing.
The presidential election Saturday is a challenge to Beijing's claim to sovereignty over Taiwan. During the island's first direct presidential election in 1996, the Chinese military tried to intimidate voters by test-firing missiles into the sea nearby.
Voters are also being asked Saturday whether Taiwan should seek talks with China, and whether Taiwan should increase its defenses against Chinese missiles aimed at the island from the coast across the Taiwan Strait.
China and Taiwan split in 1949 amid civil war and have no official relations. Beijing wants the island to unite with the mainland and has threatened to take it by force if it declares permanent independence or delays talks on unification too long.
Closer ties with Beijing were a key issue in the Taiwan election campaign. The Communist mainland government has refused to talk to Chen.
Both the mainland's government officials and its entirely state-controlled media have employed inflammatory language for years against Chen, calling him everything from a joke to a traitor to his own people.
In 2002, an editorial in People's Daily, the ruling Communist Party's newspaper, said of Chen: "In desperation, he takes a risk on the happiness of 23 million Taiwanese just for political self-interest. He will pay a terrible price for this gambler's act."
In recent days, however, China has lowered the linguistic flame. Premier Wen Jiabao, in a yearly news conference Sunday, didn't mention Chen by name.
"Some people in the Taiwan authorities have been trying to push for a referendum on Taiwan independence based on the pretense of democracy," Wen said. "They have undermined this universally recognized principle of one China and threatened stability in the Taiwan Strait."
-------- europe
Ministers in Brussels Reject Idea of a 'C.I.A.' for Europe
March 19, 2004
By PATRICK E. TYLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/europe/19CND-BRUS.html
BRUSSELS, March 19 - In the wake of the Madrid train attacks, European Union justice and interior ministers today rejected proposals to create a Central Intelligence Agency for Europe, but they agreed that a growing threat to the region makes greater intelligence coordination essential.
The ministers recommended that the European Union have its own intelligence coordinator, who could be appointed as early as next week, as European leaders prepare for a summit meeting, diplomats said.
They also asked Javier Solana, the union's foreign policy chief, to draw up plans for an information board where member states and police agencies could exchange operational intelligence in a crisis management center at the European headquarters here.
One purpose of today's meeting was also to prod countries to implement basic law enforcement tools, such as the European arrest warrant, greater supervision of borders and identity documents, particularly passports. They would also include uniform laws for preserving telecommunications data relating to mobile phones and the Internet, which have become crucial tools in terrorist planning and execution, officials said.
As representatives from the 15-nation union were meeting, the Belgian police said they had conducted some 20 raids against suspected Islamic militants in several cities. One unidentified person arrested was connected to the Moroccan investigation of the May 2003 bombings in Casablanca that killed 45 people, a police statement said.
Meanwhile, French ministers announced that the intelligence chiefs of the five large countries, Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, would meet in Madrid on Monday to reinforce cooperation in the bombing investigation there.
Also next week, intelligence and police chiefs from the enlarged European Union's 25 states will meet in Dublin for what the French interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, said would be exploratory talks on stepped up cooperation against terrorism.
The urgency of these meetings reflects how intensely Europe's political leaders perceive a new threat - and potential political backlash - in Europe, where public opinion is very much unsettled over how the West is managing postwar Iraq and the overall struggle against Islamic extremism.
Today the interior and justice ministers were clearly constrained to hand over any major intelligence function to a European government at a time when ad hoc arrangements among the major intelligence services in Europe - and with the United States - are currently in the forefront in the campaign against Al Qaeda and related Islamic militant groups.
Part of the reason, diplomats said, was that Britain, France, Germany and Italy jealously guard their secret intelligence functions, including counter-terrorism, as an indivisible part of national sovereignty. It is the smaller European states, some of which do not have intelligence agencies, that want the larger nations to share information on terrorist cells and the threat they represent.
In recent weeks, Belgium and Austria proposed a new European intelligence agency. But the larger countries prefer to build their own ties between secret services.
"We don't want new institutions, we want action on those measures which have already been agreed upon," the British home secretary, David Blunkett, said. "What I'm interested in is hard, practical action," he added, "like sharing data on how terrorist groups use mobile phones and the Internet."
Interior Minister Otto Schilly of Germany told reporters that Europe needed an "`information clearinghouse" to collect intelligence data "so we get a clear picture of the potential threat that we face at the earliest possible stage." He added, "The point is to first of all collect the data."
-------- haiti
Haitians Hesitant to Surrender Weapons
By PAISLEY DODDS
Associated Press Writer,
Mar 19, 2004
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/H/HAITI?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- A small pile of rusted, taped and dilapidated weapons was the first to be surrendered in Haiti's disarmament campaign - highlighting the challenges facing a U.S.-led multinational force in trying to rid the nation of guns.
Unlike 10 years ago, when U.S. troops offered money for weapons used by gangs and former soldiers, Haitians today are being asked to give up their guns with little or no incentive and in a very insecure environment.
"I gave up my pistol, but if we don't start seeing schools and clinics in our neighborhood, we'll find other weapons. We'll fight for change with machetes if we have to," said Jacques Pierre as he and other residents of the Cite Soleil slum surrendered about 50 pistols, rifles and machine guns to French troops on Wednesday.
Disarmament and security became key goals after President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the impoverished Caribbean nation on Feb. 29 amid an armed popular rebellion that threatened the capital of Port-au-Prince.
A U.S.-backed interim government took over Wednesday, but it will take months to rebuild a shattered police force and disarm militants who began the insurgency, and Aristide loyalists who vow to fight until the ousted leader returns.
With scant resources, Prime Minister Gerard Latortue is turning to the U.S.-led multinational task force to help police the country of 8 million and begin disarming gangs.
The scenario is vastly different from 1994, when more than 20,000 U.S. troops came to Haiti to restore Aristide to power after a 1991 coup. Those troops were welcomed by Haitians who had voted for the country's first democratically elected president.
This time, U.S. troops - who number fewer than 1,800 - have recovered two shotguns. Their Chilean counterparts have confiscated three weapons.
"Disarmament is extremely important... If the bad guys still have the weapons it won't be a secure country," said U.S. Marine Brig. Gen. Ronald S. Coleman, the peacekeepers' commander.
A U.N. force is to take over by May, but it's not known if it will participate in disarmament, Frederick Schottler, a U.N. spokesman in Haiti, said Thursday.
French troops, better-equipped to communicate with French- and Creole-speaking Haitians, have taken a proactive stance, working with police to talk to residents in pro-Aristide strongholds where gunfights occur almost daily.
Gang leaders said one reason they agreed to surrender their weapons - considered a fraction of what they have - was that the French soldiers talked to residents and sent a military doctor to help staff their clinic.
Some blame the United States, not France, for removing Aristide.
"The French came and talked to us. They gave us a doctor to help in the clinic. We're hoping that others will do the same and help this place," said James "Billy" Petit-Frere, 22, who helped organize the weapons handover.
Other pro-Aristide groups worry they'll be arrested or killed if they keep their weapons. Still others refuse to disarm unless Aristide returns.
"Whenever there is a lack of security and material base in the country, there's a need to protect yourself," said Alix Fils-Aime, a former legislator and a political and security adviser in Aristide's first government. "That's why there are so many weapons in the country. There was never any real disarmament that was done in 1994 and 1995."
Fils-Aime said weapons have flowed freely in the last few years through Haiti's largely unmonitored ports. He said Aristide's administration bought many guns and gave them to government supporters.
Sending U.S. troops into maze-like shantytowns where anti-American sentiment is high adds to the risks, Fils-Aime said.
"When you get into shantytowns, a rock will become an M-16 and a bottle will become a submachine gun for the U.S.-led troops," he said. "For many Haitians, Aristide was their only lifeline, and now that their lifeline is cut they are desperate and angry."
Larry Saunders, 55, a police chief from Lakeland, Wash., was in Haiti in 1995 as a brigade commander for the U.S. troops and worked to prepare a blueprint for U.N. forces that helped establish and train a national police force. He said some 20,000 to 30,000 weapons were recovered throughout buyback programs and other programs but the effort was weakened by a lack of economic development.
"We never cleared the island," said Saunders, speaking in a telephone interview. "There has to be some genuine redevelopment this time. Expectations have to be met this time. I don't think they'll cooperate with disarmament until they feel safe."
U.S. Ambassador to Haiti James Foley agreed. "There were good things done back then but the ultimate result was failure," Foley said.
-------- iraq
Off the Mark on Cost of War, Reception by Iraqis
By Dana Milbank and Robin Wright
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A6338-2004Mar18?language=printer
A year ago tonight, President Bush took the nation to war in Iraq with a grand vision for change in the Middle East and beyond.
The invasion and occupation of Iraq, his administration predicted, would come at little financial cost and would materially improve the lives of Iraqis. Americans would be greeted as liberators, Bush officials predicted, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein would spread peace and democracy throughout the Middle East.
Things have not worked out that way, for the most part. There is evidence that the economic lives of Iraqis are improving, thanks to an infusion of U.S. and foreign capital. But the administration badly underestimated the financial cost of the occupation and seriously overstated the ease of pacifying Iraq and the warmth of the reception Iraqis would give the U.S. invaders. And while peace and democracy may yet spread through the region, some early signs are that the U.S. action has had the opposite effect.
Much of the focus on prewar expectations vs. postwar reality has been on the failure to find weapons of mass destruction. But while that was the central justification for the war in Iraq, the administration also made a wide range of claims about the ease of the invasion and the benefits that would result. Though comparisons between expectations and results are complex, it appears that the administration, based on limited human intelligence and conversations with a small corps of Iraqi exiles, was overly optimistic.
White House officials, who did not respond to requests for information for this report, acknowledge that the financial costs have been greater than expected but say they are pleased with the progress toward democracy, security and prosperity in Iraq.
Bush, who will deliver a speech today outlining the successes of the past year, gave a taste of his themes in an address in Kentucky yesterday to troops just back from Iraq. "A year ago, Iraq was ruled by the whims of one cruel man," Bush said. "Today, Iraq has a new interim law that guarantees basic rights for all: freedom of religion, the right to cast a secret ballot and equality under the law." Iraqis, he said, are "building a country that is strong and free, and America is proud to stand with them."
On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of rebuilding Iraq. "The American part of this will be $1.7 billion," he said. "We have no plans for any further-on funding for this."
That turned out to be off by orders of magnitude. The administration, which asked Congress for another $20 billion for Iraq reconstruction five months after Natsios made his assertion, has said it expects overall Iraqi reconstruction costs to be as much as $75 billion this year alone.
The transcript of that interview has been pulled from the USAID Web site, the agency said, "to reflect current statements and testimony on Iraq reconstruction." The earlier $1.7 billion figure was "the best estimate available at the time, based on very limited information about the conditions inside of Iraq."
Natsios was far from the only one to offer low-ball figures. Similarly, a report by the White House Office of Management and Budget in late March 2003, said: "Iraq will not require sustained aid." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, in February 2003, dismissed reports that Pentagon budget specialists had put the cost of reconstruction at $60 billion to $95 billion during the first year -- in retrospect, relatively accurate forecasts. In testimony to Congress on March 27, 2003, Wolfowitz said Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." In fact, the administration has already sought more than $150 billion for the Iraq effort.
In its predictions a year ago, the Bush administration similarly underestimated the resistance the United States would face in Iraq. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Cheney said in a March 16 interview.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz derided a general's claim that pacifying Iraq would take several hundred thousand U.S. troops. And Rumsfeld, in February 2003, predicted that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months."
The capture of Iraq did proceed rapidly, allowing Bush to proclaim on May 1 that "major combat operations" were over and to declare "victory" in the "Battle of Iraq."
But those upbeat assertions were undermined by an Iraqi resistance that proved much more difficult. Washington had not counted on the scope, capabilities and endurance of the resistance after formal hostilities had ended -- or that Iraqis might eventually turn on their liberators. By yesterday, 574 American and 100 other coalition troops had died in Iraq. As many as 6,400 Iraqi soldiers are believed to have died in combat, and the insurgency continues to claim the lives of Iraqi civilians.
The "coalition has been unable to ensure a safe and secure environment within critical areas of Iraq," concluded a Council on Foreign Relations task force led by former defense and energy secretary James R. Schlesinger and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Thomas R. Pickering.
"This lack of security has created widespread fear among Iraqis, inhibited growth of private sector economic activity, distorted the initial development of a robust and open civil society, and places important limitations on the normal routines of life for most Iraqis," said its report, "Iraq: One Year After."
Iraqis, who had high expectations that the United States could make them secure, have been disappointed, analysts say.
"Unfortunately, it's been 11 months since the fall of Baghdad, and the U.S. still hasn't fulfilled those expectations of [providing] basic security or services," said Kenneth Pollack, research director of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center and a former National Security Council staff member in the Clinton and current Bush administrations. "At this point, Iraqis are beginning to think that, if those services have not been provided, it may be because we're unable or unwilling to do so."
A poll of Iraqis released this week by ABC News found that 42 percent of Iraqis, and 33 percent of Arab Iraqis, said the war liberated Iraq, but that 41 percent of Iraqis, and 48 percent of Arab Iraqis, said it humiliated the country. The presence of U.S.-led forces in Iraq is opposed by 51 percent of Iraqis.
Administration forecasts that the invasion would improve Iraqis' lives were closer to the mark. On March 17, 2003, Bush promised to help "build a new Iraq that is prosperous and free." Secretary of State Colin L. Powell vowed days later: "We will show the Iraqi people a better life. We'll deal with those segments of the population who have been . . . absolutely brutally deprived for years, and they will start to see a better life very quickly."
Thanks to the massive injection of foreign aid, an important transformation has begun in rebuilding an Iraqi society emaciated by a dozen years of tough economic sanctions and Hussein's preference for personal luxuries over public necessities, analysts say.
Considerable economic activity has resumed in Baghdad and other major cities, while living standards are better than at any time since the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the country's oil revenue is gradually climbing. "What's impressive -- and maybe more credit goes to Iraqis than to us -- is that economic activity has picked up. Clearly, there's money out there. People are going to jobs and working," said Henri Barkey, former State Department expert on Iraq and now chairman of Lehigh University's International Relations Department.
The ABC News poll confirms this. Fifty-six percent of Iraqis said things are better than before the war, and 71 percent expect that their lives will be even better next year.
The administration's forecast that the toppling of Hussein would start a wave of democracy and a disavowal of terrorism in the region has not yet happened. There has been progress; Libya, for example, has since relinquished its nuclear weapons program. But while the administration had often predicted that Hussein's ouster could resolve the impasse between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the standoff between the two has worsened.
A poll released this week by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center found that Muslim countries are highly skeptical that the ouster of Hussein will make the Middle East more democratic.
"Iraqi democracy will succeed -- and that success will send forth the news, from Damascus to Tehran -- that freedom can be the future of every nation," the president said in October.
But Iraqi democracy has proved messy in the making. Almost immediately, divisions within the Bush administration led to a temporary breakdown over the postwar plan for Iraq. The Pentagon abruptly jettisoned the State Department's plans for assembling a post-Hussein government and started from scratch -- a move from which analysts believe the United States has not recovered.
"Because we didn't have anything concrete to put in place the day after, it left a vacuum," Barkey said. The early chaos led the administration to change course. A plan to hold an Afghan-like national conference to select an interim Iraqi authority was tossed out in favor of appointing a 25-person Iraqi Governing Council, largely exiles and dissidents allied with Washington.
Two transition plans designed by the United States and its allies in the Coalition Provisional Authority were rejected out of hand by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, a Shiite cleric virtually unknown before the war. With about four months left before the U.S. occupation is due to end, there is still no plan for how to pick a new government.
"The challenges for U.S. policy in postwar Iraq, given the geopolitical stakes, the threat of ethnic conflict and armed resistance, and the political complexities of administering a legal occupation, were far more formidable than those that confronted U.S. officials in previous cases," from Haiti to the Balkans to East Timor in the 1990s, the Council on Foreign Relations report said.
Still, there is hope that democracy may yet take hold. "Iraqis are engaged in free and vigorous debate about their collective political future and the adoption of a Transitional Administrative Law represents a major success both for U.S. policy and for the people of Iraq," the report concluded.
Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this article.
--------
Iraq Attacks Blamed On Islamic Extremists
U.S. Says Hussein Loyalists No Longer Dominate
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A5997-2004Mar18?language=printer
BAGHDAD, March 18 -- U.S. military commanders across Iraq say that a combination of foreign and indigenous Islamic extremists have eclipsed loyalists of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party as the dominant organizers and financiers of attacks on American and Iraqi security forces and civilians.
The Islamic radicals have been deemed by the commanders to be largely responsible for not just a series of high-profile suicide car bombings that have killed more than 1,000 people, but also a spate of recent attacks on U.S. troops, foreign civilians and Iraqis working with American forces. In many cases, the commanders said, religious extremists have begun to exercise leadership over cells of low-level Baathist fighters whose superiors have been captured or killed, by offering money and weapons to conduct mortar strikes, drive-by shootings and assassinations.
On the eve of the Iraq invasion's first anniversary, Islamic extremists have emerged as "the principal threat" to security in Baghdad, said Brig. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, commander of the U.S. Army's 1st Armored Division, which controls the capital. Officers based in restive areas outside Baghdad, including the commander of an Army battalion in Fallujah and the commander of a brigade in Baqubah, said the same trend has emerged in their areas.
In the intelligence operations room at the 1st Armored Division's headquarters, wall-mounted charts identifying and linking insurgents depict the changing battlefield. Last fall, the organizational chart of Baathist fighters and leaders stretched for 10 feet, while charts listing known Islamic radicals took up a few pieces of paper. Now, the chart of Iraqi religious extremists dominates the room, while the poster depicting Baathist activity has shrunk to half of its previous size. Smaller diagrams identify what is known about foreign Islamic extremists who have set up operations in the capital.
Military officials said evidence and intelligence from informers and interrogations suggest that foreign fighters still constitute a relatively small component of the insurgency. Dempsey said he estimated there were only about 100 "foreign terrorists" in Baghdad, organized into about six cells. In Anbar province, which stretches across western Iraq and includes the strife-torn cities of Ramadi and Fallujah, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr. of the 82nd Airborne Division said he believed there were a total of 50 to 80 foreign fighters in eight to 10 cells.
Military officials said they suspected that the foreign fighters were making up for what they lacked in numbers by plugging into networks of Iraqi Sunni Muslim extremists who adhere to the same radical Wahhabi brand of Islam as Osama bin Laden. The officials believe the foreigners are bringing money, technical expertise and encouragement to get hundreds of Iraqis to plant roadside bombs, assassinate people collaborating with occupation forces and detonate explosive-packed vehicles.
"We see a large connection between them," said Lt. Col. Ken Devan, the 1st Armored's senior intelligence officer, referring to indigenous extremists and foreign fighters.
Devan and other military officials said foreign fighters were trying to join several cells of indigenous religious extremists around the capital. The officials said they believed these cells drew inspiration from a handful of hard-line clerics in Iraq, but making precise connections has proved difficult.
"We know they're there based on the intelligence we've got, but we don't have, with any degree of granularity or precision, enough intelligence to be attacking them as our principal focus," Dempsey said.
Military intelligence officials said they believed three linked groups of foreign extremists were the most dominant actors in Iraq today: Ansar al-Islam, Ansar al-Sunna and an organization headed by the Jordanian militant Abu Musab Zarqawi.
Ansar al-Islam, a terrorist group with links to al Qaeda, was based in the autonomous Kurdish area of northern Iraq before the war. Intelligence officials believe many Ansar al-Islam operatives have relocated south and have affiliated themselves with other extremists, although it is not clear how large a role they have played in the recent run of suicide bombings and even whether Ansar al-Islam still exists as an organization. Some military officials believe its operatives were responsible for the car bombings of the headquarters of both the United Nations and International Committee for the Red Cross in Baghdad, as well as several attacks on Iraqi police stations last year.
Ansar al-Sunna is a newer group of foreign and indigenous militants that is suspected of being linked to remnants of Ansar al-Islam. The group has asserted responsibility for several suicide bombings, including attacks on the offices of two Kurdish political parties in the northern city of Irbil on Feb. 1 that killed more than 100 people.
Lately, however, intelligence officers have shifted their focus to Zarqawi, once linked to Ansar al-Islam. U.S. officials allege that he wrote a 17-page letter claiming responsibility for two dozen bombings in recent months and outlining his plans for future attacks aimed at sparking civil war and disrupting a planned June 30 handover of sovereignty. Although Zarqawi has worked with al Qaeda, intelligence officials now believe he operates independently of bin Laden's organization and has developed his own network in Iraq.
Senior U.S. officials in Baghdad have named Zarqawi as a prime suspect in several recent bombings, including that of a Baghdad hotel Wednesday night, but they have not presented any definitive evidence to link him or his organization to the blasts.
"Whether it was Zarqawi's group, Ansar al-Islam, al Qaeda -- we don't have definitive proof of that yet," Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, the U.S. military's deputy director of operations in Iraq, said of Wednesday's bombing of the Mount Lebanon Hotel, in which seven people were killed. The death toll was revised downward Thursday based on new information from Iraqi officials.
The U.S.-led occupation authority has offered a $10 million reward for information leading to the capture of Zarqawi. But some U.S. intelligence officials in Baghdad question whether he is as central to the bombings as spokesmen for the military and occupation authority have suggested.
"To think that Zarqawi is organizing all of these car bombings is a little much," said one U.S. intelligence officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "He is probably just one of several ringleaders. There is no single organization that's behind all this. It's far more decentralized than that."
Another intelligence officer also cast doubt on the role of Zarqawi or bin Laden lieutenants as the chief organizers of the violence. "Are al Qaeda operatives here? Certainly. But are the remnants of al Qaeda directing the attacks here? We don't have clear evidence to suggest that is the case," the officer said.
Devan, the 1st Armored's intelligence director, also said the presence of al Qaeda operatives in Iraq was small.
The intelligence officers said the most significant impact of al Qaeda involvement may be funding foreign and Iraqi extremists, who in turn have paid low-level Baathists to conduct non-suicide attacks. The Baathists are willing to work for the Islamic extremists, military officials said, because many of their leaders, who had been paying them between $100 and $5,000 to mount attacks, have been arrested, killed or forced to run.
"The Baathist money has dried up, and the leadership is largely gone," Devan said. "The new money and leadership is coming from the extremists."
As a consequence, Dempsey said, "Baathist operatives and trigger pullers are now working, in many cases, for the religious extremists."
"It's a marriage of necessity," he said. "The religious guys have the money. And both share the goal of trying to drive us out."
One of the clearest indications of the new alliance occurred last month in Fallujah, where military officials believe a combination of former Baath Party operatives and Islamic radicals attacked the police station, killing 23 people. "There was a collaboration," said Lt. Col. Brian Drinkwine, an 82nd Airborne battalion commander who is responsible for the city. "It appeared to be directed by the extremists, but many of the guys who attacked had a level of training that goes beyond your average Islamic extremist."
Military intelligence officers said identifying cells of religious extremists is proving to be much more difficult than tracing the flow of cash and orders among the Baathists. In Fallujah, for instance, Drinkwine had identified the chief Baathist financier by early fall. The number of attacks fell dramatically after the man was caught in January, he said.
"The Baathists had a clearer structure," he said. "It was easier to know who was in charge. But now, it's a whole new structure -- and it's much tougher to determine who the enemy is."
--------
Welcome to the quagmire
The Bush administration invaded Iraq a year ago expecting a shower of rose petals. Today, the country is on the verge of chaos, and there may be no way to stop it.
Salon
By Juan Cole
March 19, 2004
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news1/cole-salon.html
The Bush administration's hope for a clean, quick transition to a sovereign Iraqi government on June 30 has been dealt a series of blows by local Iraqi political forces, of which the bombing campaign by insurgents is only one. Only a year before, the Americans who planned the invasion were largely ignorant of these groups and their leaders. In their haste to hand over Iraq to someone, the Americans have ceased even trying to find solutions to the most divisive issues, creating a series of political time bombs for the future.
Last summer, the U.S. civil administrator, Paul Bremer, said: "We dominate the scene and we will continue to impose our will on this country." But by early November, it had become absolutely clear that the U.S. could not hope to rule Iraq by fiat for a matter of years, as the Bush administration had earlier envisioned. The ongoing Sunni Arab insurgency and widespread lack of security had already made the center-north of the country ungovernable. It even made the capital unsafe, as the recent horrific bombings at Kazimiyah and at the Mount Lebanon Hotel have demonstrated.
The Kurds had blocked an American attempt to bring in 12,000 Turkish troops to fight the insurgents in the Sunni Arab areas, ensuring that U.S. soldiers remained on the front line in Fallujah and Ramadi. The U.S. was weak in the north and relied heavily on the Kurdish militias, or peshmergas. Were the majority Shiites to grow weary of Coalition Provisional Authority rule and begin an uprising of their own, the Americans in Baghdad came to recognize, the entire country could fall into chaos.
By Nov. 15, Bremer had hammered out an agreement with Iraqis on the appointed Interim Governing Council that would allow a transition to a sovereign and more legitimate Iraqi government by June 30. But then everything fell apart, as Bremer's plan smashed into one brick wall after another.
Today, a year after the invasion, the dream of a democratic Iraq sits on a foundation that is fractured by rivalries, conflicts and schisms. Will Iraq be a secular state or governed by Islamic law? Will it have a strong central government or a loose federalism? Will women retain their legal rights or face fundamentalist patriarchy? Will the ethnic Kurds become semi-autonomous and gain a consolidated Kurdish super-province?
Any one of those questions, by itself, could be enough to tear the country apart. The hopes of some in Washington that Paul Bremer would be a second Gen. MacArthur, crafting a permanent Iraqi constitution and imposing a new government, were brought down by the unexpected guerrilla resistance. And the administration of President Bush, for all of its early optimism, has found that it has at best limited leverage over the underlying conflicts.
Imposing solutions by force of will has proven impossible. Bremer struck temporary compromises with the Shiites, who make up a majority of Iraq's population, and with the Kurds, who have been longtime allies, but all the difficult decisions have been put off because of weakness or fear. And now, as the administration looks for a way to resolve the quagmire before it turns into an election-year debacle, it must seem to Bremer that even with superlative diplomacy, the U.S. risks extraordinary turmoil no matter whether it pulls out or stays.
The Bush administration plan for democratizing Iraq implied from the very beginning that the country would be dominated by Shiites, who comprise 65 percent of the population. Not only would that be unacceptable to the Sunni Muslim minority who make up the nation's elite, but a Shiite-led Baghdad is highly likely to enjoy warm relations with Shiite Iran, as well as with the Arab Shiites of southern Lebanon (think Hezbollah). The administration of the first President Bush in the early 1990s declined to overthrow the Baath regime or to help the Shiite uprising in the spring of 1991 precisely because it feared this outcome.
Most of the obstacles to the Nov. 15 plan were rooted in ethnic politics. Bremer had wanted the new government to be elected by provincial councils. He recognized that for elections to be held, an interim constitution would have to be hammered out. In turn, the negotiations would have to settle a number of outstanding conflicts. Would the Kurds be allowed to create a semi-autonomous ethnic enclave? Would the religious parties accept a separation of religion and state? Would the long-dominant Sunni Arabs (about 15 percent of the population) acquiesce in their demotion to a small minority in a democratic system?
Only days after the announcement of the Nov. 15 accord, Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani came out against it, on two main grounds. First, there had been no mention of the place of Islam in the initial plan, nor any guarantee that the new government would avoid passing laws that contradicted Islam. Second, the plan called for elections by provincial and municipal councils rather than by the electorate at large.
Those provincial and municipal councils had in some instances been appointed by the Coalition or by military officers, or had been chosen by a handpicked group of local notables gathered for that purpose by the Coalition or its subcontractors. In short, they were not democratic.
Sistani had read some Western political science in translation, and adopted into his reading of Islamic law Jean-Jacques Rousseau's principle that the only legitimate government is one that "derives from the will of the people." He wrote in November that the council-based method of election "does not guarantee the formation of an assembly that truly represents the Iraqi people. It must be changed to another process that would so guarantee, that is, to [direct] elections. In this way, the parliament would spring from the will of the Iraqis and would represent them in a just manner and would prevent any diminution of Islamic law."
Sistani mattered, as Bremer had already discovered to his dismay. In the Shiite Muslim system, each believer is expected to choose a great cleric and to follow implicitly his rulings on disputed matters in Islamic law. The more learned and upright the cleric is perceived to be, the greater authority he tends to have.
As the leading scholar of Islamic law in the holy city of Najaf, Sistani is the cleric most widely respected and obeyed (the technical term is "emulated") by Iraqi Shiites. His authority extends beyond Iraq, as well, to Lebanon, Pakistan, India and Afghanistan. Sistani came to Najaf from Iran in 1952, and spent years studying with the great scholars of Najaf, rising to become one of a handful of grand ayatollahs by the 1980s. In 1992, the mantle of "Object of Emulation" or most-respected religious jurisprudent, fell on his shoulders.
Under Saddam, Sistani was under constant threat of execution, and he tended to stay quiet and to avoid conflict with the regime. He also was at odds with Ayatollah Khomeini and the clerical leaders of the Islamic Revolution in Iran, since he rejected Khomeini's doctrine that clerics must rule society. Sistani believes that clerics should stay out of day-to-day government, but should intervene in social matters with their rulings or fatwas. These are legally non-binding, but exercise great moral authority, rather like papal encyclicals for believing Catholics.
Bremer responded to Sistani's demands in two ways. He immediately gave in to the insistence that the interim constitution recognize Islam as the religion of state, attempting to neutralize that hot-button issue. But on the issue of direct elections, he succeeded in convincing even Shiites like Ahmad Chalabi on the Interim Governing Council to vote against the grand ayatollah. Bremer held that without voting rolls or voting laws, elections were not possible.
Sistani would not be put off. He demanded that United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan become involved, by sending a commission to Iraq that would investigate the situation and certify whether direct elections were possible. The Bush administration had long attempted to keep the U.N. out of decision-making on Iraq. When the members of the Interim Governing Council warmed to the idea of meeting with Annan on the issue, the Americans were reportedly "extremely offended."
By setting a fixed date, June 30, for the end of their rule, the Americans and the Coalition had made themselves lame ducks. They had also set in motion a scramble for power among the major Iraqi leaders. In late December, two sets of politicians on the Interim Governing Council made their move.
Shiite cleric Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and a member of the Interim Governing Council scheduled a vote at the interim council on the issue of personal status law. Al-Hakim wanted to abolish the 1959 civil code that governs marriage, divorce, inheritance and other such issues and go back to religious law. He held the vote when two women members of the IGC were absent, and it passed 11 to 10.
The new law was highly controversial, especially among women. Most Muslim clerics interpret Islamic personal status law in ways that make women unequal to men. In Iran, a woman receives only half the inheritance that her brother does. Her testimony in court is worth half that of a man (making it impossible for her to convict her own rapist if she has no witnesses). She is not owed alimony on being divorced. A man can take up to four wives, and, in Shiite Islam, can have temporary wives with whom he signs a contract. Women's groups took to the streets in protest, and the only female minister appointed by the IGC, Nasrin Barwari, joined the demonstrations.
In the meantime, the two major Kurdish leaders made their play. Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani had battled shoulder-to-shoulder against Saddam, but occasionally had also fought one another. Kurds probably make up around 15 percent of Iraqis, with a current population of nearly 4 million, and they predominate in the far northeast of the country. The Kurds have run their own mini-government in the north since the early 1990s, when the U.S. established its no-fly zone.
Barzani and Talabani announced that they would form a unified provincial government of the Kurdistan region, and that they sought the addition to their territory of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk and other regions with substantial Kurdish populations. Kurds marched in favor of the plan, carrying their firearms.
Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk organized counter-demonstrations, but were told by the largely Kurdish police that they had to disarm. Turkmen, a Turkic-speaking people close to a million strong, predominated in Kirkuk traditionally. Oil-driven urbanization in the north, combined with Saddam's expulsion of Kurds and his policy of relocating hundreds of thousands of Arabs to the north, left the city of 900,000 evenly divided among Turkmen, Arabs and Kurds.
When Arabs demonstrated against the annexation of the city to the planned Kurdish canton, they came into armed conflict with the largely Kurdish police. Later in January, Coalition authorities arrested a high Kurdish official whom they charged with ordering peshmergas to shoot at protesting Arabs and Turkmen.
As if the Kirkuk situation were not sufficiently complicated by ethnic divisions, religion also enters into the disputes. A significant proportion of Turkmen belong to the Shiite branch of Islam, and some follow the radical young cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr. Some of the transplanted Arabs in the city are also Shiite. Al-Sadr preached against annexation of Kirkuk by the Kurds, and denounced Kurdish plans for semi-autonomy. He is said to have sent fighters up to Kirkuk to help the Shiites there. The Kurds have many more trained fighters than the other communities, and their decade-old experiment in self-rule made them politically savvy, so that they seem confident they can meet these challenges from smaller ethnic groups in the north.
In mid-February, the Kurdish regional government presented a blueprint to Baghdad that laid out its aspirations. They want a provincial national guard, which will absorb the Kurdish guerrillas or peshmergas. They declaim, "Except for the Iraqi Kurdistan National Guard ... the Armed Forces of Iraq shall not enter the territory of the Kurdistan Region without the consent of the Kurdistan National Assembly." The latter is not a demand to which any sovereign government could accede, but the Kurds harbor deep bitterness about the history of Baghdad's military interventions in their territory.
The Kurds would like to merge the three provinces in which they form a substantial majority into a single canton. They would like to add to it tracts from three other neighboring provinces where there are significant Kurdish populations. Not surprisingly, they would like to annex to this Kurdish super-province the city of Kirkuk and the hundreds of petroleum wellheads around it. Their plan states, "The natural resources located on the territory of the Kurdistan Region, including water, petroleum and subsoil minerals, belong to the Kurdistan Region."
The CPA decided leave the semi-autonomous Kurdish parliament and government temporarily intact in the north as Iraq moved toward self-rule. The future Iraqi government and the constitutional convention will have to hammer out a compromise on Kurdish semi-autonomy. This process will be fraught with dangers for the new Iraqi state, since any decision reached on the disposition of Kirkuk and its petroleum will displease some faction, and all the factions are heavily armed.
Meanwhile, the Shiite leader Grand Ayatollah Sistani was growing impatient with the failure of the U.S. to acquiesce in holding early direct elections. Now he played his trump card. On Jan. 15, he had his lieutenants in the southern Shiite city of Basra bring 30,000 disciplined protesters into the streets, demanding direct elections. It was the largest demonstration postwar Iraq had yet seen.
Then on the following Monday, he had 100,000 protesters rally in Baghdad. A mass movement among the Shiites, at a time when the Sunni Arab provinces were the site of a guerrilla war, was precisely the development that the new government had been intended to forestall. Instead it seemed set to provoke it.
In the face of Sistani's demonstration that he could turn out the masses at will, and could keep them at home if he so ordered, the United States and the United Nations suddenly became more cooperative. Kofi Annan agreed to send special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi to assess the possibility of elections. Brahimi's team produced a report confirming the American position, that direct elections before June 30 were impossible, much to the disappointment of Sistani and the Shiites.
The U.N., along with the Americans and the Interim Governing Council, worked out a two-stage plan for a new government. Sovereignty would be handed over to an expanded Interim Governing Council in the summer. It would then arrange for direct elections, of the sort that Sistani demanded, in December of 2004 or January of 2005. There would be no provincial council-based elections. Sistani got what he wanted, with only a six-month delay.
The entire point of the hand-over of sovereignty in the summer of 2004, however, had been to create a new Iraqi government with legitimacy. Now, the Coalition would likely be handing power over to its own appointees, most of whom lacked any real grass-roots popularity.
By early March, the Interim Governing Council passed a basic law or interim constitution. It set Islamist Shiites against Kurds and secular women. The women and secularists on the council reversed the earlier decision to abolish civil personal status, reinstating the secular code. The religious Shiite party leaders on the council were so furious that they stormed out of the meeting. They pledged to agitate for Islamic law in subsequent negotiations.
The interim constitution was roundly denounced as illegitimate and a foreign imposition by mosque preachers the following Friday. Kurds in Kirkuk, who mistakenly thought it gave the city to them, fired off their guns in celebration, accidentally killing a Turkmen, and setting off an ethnic riot. Sunni Arab insurgents paid no attention to the document, simply continuing their deadly bombing campaign in a bid to destabilize Iraq so as to expel the Americans and forestall a Shiite and Kurdish takeover of the country. Many Sunni Arab militants are convinced that democratic rule is a big mistake that will allow the rabble of the other communities to dictate Iraqi politics. They seek some sort of Sunni oligarchy, backed up by arms. Since Sunnis have long been the best-educated Iraqis, who occupied high government posts and dominated the officer corps, many are confident they can return to power as a minority regime (though they would insist they are in fact the majority).
Any transitional government that comes to power in Iraq will have to hold elections and will have to arrange for the drafting of a new constitution. All the issues and conflicts that have bedeviled the writing of the basic law will at that point be revisited. A spokesman for one of the holdouts, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, had said that it was thought unnecessary to fight too hard over the text of the basic law, since it was only temporary. The drafters of the permanent constitution will be less willing to compromise because they will have to live with the resulting document for a long time.
If acceptable compromises cannot be reached among the major players, the country could easily fall into chaos. All the leading factions, including the Kurds and the more militant Shiites, have large, well-armed militias at their beck and call. The low-grade guerrilla insurgency of the Sunni Arabs also is likely to continue for some time. It may not, however, be the most challenging issue Iraqis face as they attempt to hammer out a new destiny -- a destiny not imposed on them by the will of the Bush administration.
About the writer Juan Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and author of "Sacred Space and Holy War" (IB Tauris, 2002).
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon is a liar and he always stalls peace process - Israeli writer
By Rene Gralla and Peter Orzechowski,
Gulf News
19-03-2004
http://www.gulfnews.com/Articles/news.asp?ArticleID=114810
By Rene Gralla and Peter Orzechowski, Special to Gulf News Hamburg He is an Israeli but speaks up for peace in Palestine. He has founded a couple of peace organisations and has warned of the escalating militancy in the Middle East.
Recently, he criticised the building of the wall and the policies of the Sharon government. He has received a German peace award (Aachener Friedenspreis 2003). Following are the excerpts of an interview with Israeli author Dr. Reuven Moskovitz.
Gulf News: All of a sudden there seems to be a push in the Middle East peace process. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon announced the removal of all Israeli colonies in the Gaza strip. Has the wolf turned into a sheep?
Reuven Moskovitz: No. Sharon is Israel's king of lies. He is convinced that he can fool the whole world.
You think, Sharon is a liar?
I say it again: Sharon is lying. It's his speciality to start seemingly sensational initiatives and to run a new duck through the village, like we say in Israel. But in reality, he has always stalled peace proposals coming from the US, Europe or from Saudi Arabia.
Sharon promised in an interview with the newspaper Haaretz to give up 17 colonies with 7,500 Israelis in the Gaza Strip within two years.
It will not happen. Even if Sharon starts removing some colonies and relocate them on the West Bank, how could little Gaza be big enough to be the only homeland of the Palestinians?
So you are saying that Sharon is not willing to give up one squaremetre of Palestinian land?
The world has to know: The only chance for peace is, Israeli troops have to withdraw from the entire West Bank and international troops have to be stationed there instead.
Israeli author Uri Avnery believes that Sharon's promise could be the first step to the so called 'Hitnatkut' - the complete separation of Palestinian territory from Israel. Meaning: The Palestinians would keep Gaza and some isolated territories on the West Bank - a total of not more than ten per cent of their original territory. Do you share this opinion?
Okay, let it be 15 per cent of their territory. The whole thing is a joke. There is a straight policy of Israel and that is to shatter all hope for a self rule of the Palestinian people.
And even if Israel starts to withdraw soon, militancy will only come to a halt when Israel leaves the Palestinians at least the territory they are now living in - Gaza plus at least 20 per cent of the West Bank. Otherwise, militancy will never stop, even if they try to root out all militants.
The Sharon government is aiming at a different solution. It is building a wall to separate Israelis and Palestinians.
I am afraid the building of the wall will end up the same way as the building of the Berlin Wall. It is only done to distract people from the real problem which is the Israeli occupation and the humiliation of the Palestinians.
But isn't the building of the wall an act of self-defence? There is hardly a day when there is no attack and no Israeli operation of revenge.
I am no sympathiser of Hamas. But any Israeli mission against Hamas or Islamic Jihad is followed by an attack by their fighters who commit innocent Israelis to death.
So, what is the alternative to violence?
You cannot go to war against militancy. The only remedy for militancy is to create an environment where everybody can live in peace and prosperity. With that you stop the motive and the motivation for militancy.
What could the EU and Germany do to help?
Berlin should demand from Israel to withdraw from the West Bank.
But then everybody in Israel would call the Germans Nazis again and the whole Holocaust trauma would come up again.
You could just say: We expect from Israel to treat its neighbours just as we, the Federal Republic of Germany treat ours.
When you received the peace award in Aachen, you tried to push a new lobby for peace. Why did you especially address Germany?
Germany has been a model to me. After WW II Germany stood for reconciliation, peace, the ability to find just agreements and not to use old prejudice for new solutions.
There are people in Germany who try to re-arrange history in a very positive way. To those people I said: The Israeli government is acting in a criminal, I repeat: criminal way. And this policy is leading straight down into the abyss.
In the last three years of intifada there has grown so much hatred within the hearts of the Palestinian people that it will take 10 to 15 years for it to disappear. This spiral of hatred cannot go on until the big bang.
It cannot be that a civilised world on the begin of the third millennium, that the United Nations would tolerate a government of a small country - Ariel Sharon and his team - which violates the human rights and doesn't care about them at all. I am founding a peace lobby to make an end to that.
Dr Rene Gralla and Peter Orzechowski are freelance journalists based in Hamburg, Germany.
-------- mideast
Syria 'not the enemy'
Embassy Row,
By James Morrison
March 19, 2004
Washington Times
http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/embassy.htm
Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha insisted that his country is a friend of the United States and considers it the only nation that can broker a Middle East peace.
Even though the State Department lists Syria as a nation that sponsors terrorism, his government "amazingly enough" agrees with many of the Bush administration's goals in the region, Mr. Moustapha said at a Washington forum this week.
Syria, however, criticizes U.S. support for Israel as a double standard. The Bush administration, meanwhile, is considering sanctions against Syria for its support of Hamas and Hezbollah, two terrorist groups that target Israeli soldiers and civilians.
"We are not the enemies of the United States. We have never, ever been the enemies of the United States," he said. "Yes, we disagree with policies of the United States administration vis-a-vis the Middle East conflict. Amazingly enough, we do not disagree with the principles that the United States always repeats when they talk on principles."
Mr. Moustapha added, "Everybody knows that the United States always advocates a peaceful resolution of the Middle East conflict. They advocate an independent Palestinian state. They talk about their vision for a Middle East absolutely free from all weapons of mass destruction.
"We do not disagree with their vision. Where we actually disagree with the United States is on how they apply their policies - what we call in our region the double-standards approach to the Middle East."
Nevertheless, he said, his government recognizes the clout of the United States in the Middle East peace efforts.
"We still believe in Syria that the United States of America is the only feasible broker for a Middle East peace," he said. "We know that it is, right now, not considered by the Arab people - nor by lots of Americans, themselves, nor even by lots of international leaders - as a fair and honest broker of peace in the Middle East.
"But it is the only broker with leverage. ... The United States is the unique world superpower, and with this privilege, the United States has a responsibility."
Mr. Moustapha blamed Israel for the "vicious cycle of violence" in the Middle East, although he did not mention the Jewish state by name.
"Syria is not responsible," he said. "We do not occupy somebody else's land. We do not uproot olive trees. We do not send our bulldozers to demolish houses. We do not send out Apache [helicopters] and our jets to destroy houses and kill people. ...
"We do not do this. Somebody else is doing this."
Mr. Moustapha, criticizing sanctions authorized by the U.S. Syria Accountability Act, said Washington should hold "the culprit" accountable for the "troubles of the Middle East."
-------- nato
More NATO Troops Arrive in Kosovo, With More to Come
March 19, 2004
By NICHOLAS WOOD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/europe/19CND-KOSO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
PRISTINA, Kosovo, March 19 - NATO reinforcements began arriving in Kosovo today, with more on the way, as peacekeepers struggled to stem a wave of ethnic violence across the province, in southern Serbia.
A French battalion of about 500 troops was beginning to be deployed today, along with 150 British forces and a similar number of German forces, a NATO spokeswoman in Brussels said.
The British say another 600 troops will arrive in Kosovo by late today, and Germany is to contribute another 650 forces, Defense Minister Peter Strück said today.
They are joining forces sent in Thursday from Bosnia - a contingent of about 100 American troops and about 90 Italian Caribinieri, the paramilitary police force - with more troops to be sent from Italy, a NATO spokesman in Naples, Capt. Jeff Gradeck of the Navy, said by telephone today.
The additional troops, which will bring the overall NATO force to 19,000, began arriving Thursday evening, at the end of a second day of violence between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in which at least 31 people have been killed and hundreds injured, according to United Nations officials. Most of the dead were Serbs.
Meanwhile, about 60 troops have been wounded in the violence between Albanian and ethnic Serbs, a NATO official in Pristina said today, adding that the figure was not exact.
Security forces appeared at a loss as to how to reassert their control over the predominantly Albanian province as crowds attacked Serbian neighborhoods for a second night.
Throughout the day on Thursday, scores of Serbian houses were set on fire, and according to a spokesman for the Serbian Orthodox Church, at least 20 churches were burned.
"There is a pattern emerging," said the Rev. Sava Janjic, speaking by phone from Decani monastery in western Kosovo. "The U.N. evacuates Serbs, and immediately afterwards Albanians come in and burn" houses and religious sites. Most Albanians are Muslim.
In one of the most serious incidents on Thursday, Swedish soldiers opened fire when gunmen emerged from a large group of Albanian protesters near the ethnically mixed village of Caglavica, south of Pristina, the provincial capital. The demonstrators had been trying force their way through a barricade set up to protect Serbs' houses.
The shooting appeared to reflect a toughening of the peacekeepers' response to the violence. Earlier in the day, the German commander of the force, Gen. Holdger Kammerhoff, announced at a news conference that "proportionate force" would be used to ensure the troops' safety.
Gunmen exchanged fire with United Nations police in Pristina and in Lipjan, according to a police spokesman, Derek Chappell.
Many Serbian leaders voiced outrage that the United Nations seems unable to protect Serbs, who make up just under 10 percent of the population. But local leaders also noted that some Albanians had shielded Serbian neighbors from attack.
In Decani, the Albanian mayor intervened to prevent youths from marching on the monastery, Father Sava said.
In Kosovo Polje, a mixed town three miles west of Pristina, heavily armed United Nations police evacuated up to 50 Serbs who had sought refuge in the town headquarters. Riot police lined the road as three white buses carried the Serbs, most of whom appeared to be elderly, out of the town.
As they drove down the road, groups of Albanian youths gathered by the side of the road and stared. Nearby, smoke rose from the remains of six houses that had been set alight the night before.
The scenes were reminiscent of the evacuation of Serbian refugees at the end of the Kosovo war, in 1999, when about 100,000 fled the province.
In the same town, forensic teams began to pick their way through the remains of burned houses and the Serbian hospital in search of human remains. None had been found by Thursday evening.
In Pristina, hundreds of demonstrators roamed the streets at intervals throughout the day, sometimes chanting the initials of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group that fought against Yugoslav security forces during the war.
By nightfall, dozens of riot police officers had gathered in the center of the city to protect the main United Nations buildings from possible attack. The crowds chose not to take them on and moved on to attack the last remaining Serbian Orthodox church in the city. By 11 p.m., two buildings next to church, a priest's house and the offices of a foreign charity were on fire. Police and soldiers attempted to disperse the crowds with tear gas, but their action came too late to save the buildings from destruction.
Earlier, foreign United Nations employees were advised to restrict their movement. Charred wrecks of United Nations vehicles served as reminders that the unrest was aimed as much at them as at Serbs.
The United States shut its embassy in Belgrade temporarily and advised Americans in the country to avoid public places.
As the United Nations sought to restore law and order, many international officials were trying analyze how and why their control seemed to fall apart so quickly.
The clashes appeared to have begun as a spontaneous response to the drowning of two Albanian children in Mitrovica. One boy who had been with them said they had been chased by a group of men with dogs. Albanians blamed Serbs for the deaths.
But the fact so many people took so quickly to the streets was seen by some as evidence that problems stemming from the 1997-99 war in Kosovo have not been resolved.
The events of the past two days, said one senior Western diplomat "should remind us that we froze an insurgency in 1999," referring to NATO's intervention in the fighting between ethnic Albanian gunmen pressing for Kosovo independence and Yugoslav security forces. "But we did nothing to solve the political reasons underlying it."
The United Nations mission was established after NATO troops forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw in June 1999. The Yugoslav Army and the Serbian police were accused of committing widespread atrocities during the conflict.
Almost five years later, no timetable has been established for the United Nations' withdrawal, and Kosovo's final status has yet to be decided. Albanians want independence, while Serbs want to remain a part of Serbia.
Leading Albanian politicians condemned the violence, but many said part of the blame lay elsewhere.
"We condemn the acts of violence, as well as the slow pace of the U.N. mission towards a resolution of Kosovo's final status," said Arsmim Bajrami, parliamentary leader of the province's second largest Albanian party, the Democratic Party of Kosovo.
"The partnership between Albanians" who welcomed the United Nations and NATO forces as liberators when they first arrived in Kosovo "and the international community, is coming apart," said Alex Anderson, Kosovo project director of the International Crisis Group, a political think tank with offices throughout the Balkans. "It is an incredibly dangerous situation."
Terence Neilan contributed reporting for this article from New York.
--------
NATO Expanding Kosovo Forces to Combat Violence
March 19, 2004
By NICHOLAS WOOD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/europe/19KOSO.html
PRISTINA, Kosovo, March 18 - NATO ordered reinforcements to Kosovo on Thursday as peacekeepers struggled to stem a wave of ethnic violence across the province, in southern Serbia.
The additional 1,000 troops, which will bring the overall NATO force to 19,000, began arriving Thursday evening, at the end of a second day of violence between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in which at least 31 people have been killed and hundreds injured, according to United Nations officials. Most of the dead were Serbs.
Security forces appeared at a loss as to how to reassert their control over the predominantly Albanian province as crowds attacked Serbian neighborhoods for a second night.
Throughout the day, scores of Serbian houses were set on fire, and according to a spokesman for the Serbian Orthodox Church, at least 20 churches were burned.
"There is a pattern emerging," said the Rev. Sava Janjic, speaking by phone from Decani monastery in western Kosovo. "The U.N. evacuates Serbs, and immediately afterwards Albanians come in and burn" houses and religious sites. Most Albanians are Muslim.
In one of the most serious incidents on Thursday, Swedish soldiers opened fire when gunmen emerged from a large group of Albanian protesters near the ethnically mixed village of Caglavica, south of Pristina, the provincial capital. The demonstrators had been trying force their way through a barricade set up to protect Serbs' houses.
The shooting appeared to reflect a toughening of the peacekeepers' response to the violence. Earlier in the day, the German commander of the force, Gen. Holdger Kammerhoff, announced at a news conference that "proportionate force" would be used to ensure the troops' safety.
Gunmen exchanged fire with United Nations police in Pristina and in Lipjan, according to a police spokesman, Derek Chappell.
Many Serbian leaders voiced outrage that the United Nations seems unable to protect Serbs, who make up just under 10 percent of the population. But local leaders also noted that some Albanians had shielded Serbian neighbors from attack.
In Decani, the Albanian mayor intervened to prevent youths from marching on the monastery, Father Sava said.
In Kosovo Polje, a mixed town three miles west of Pristina, heavily armed United Nations police evacuated up to 50 Serbs who had sought refuge in the town headquarters. Riot police lined the road as three white buses carried the Serbs, most of whom appeared to be elderly, out of the town.
As they drove down the road, groups of Albanian youths gathered by the side of the road and stared. Nearby, smoke rose from the remains of six houses that had been set alight the night before.
The scenes were reminiscent of the evacuation of Serbian refugees at the end of the Kosovo war, in 1999, when about 100,000 fled the province.
In the same town, forensic teams began to pick their way through the remains of burned houses and the Serbian hospital in search of human remains. None had been found by Thursday evening.
In Pristina, hundreds of demonstrators roamed the streets at intervals throughout the day, sometimes chanting the initials of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the ethnic Albanian guerrilla group that fought against Yugoslav security forces during the war.
By nightfall, dozens of riot police had gathered in the center of the city to protect the main United Nations buildings from possible attack. The crowds chose not to take them on and moved on to attack the last remaining Serbian Orthodox church in the city. By 11 p.m., two buildings next to church, a priest's house and the offices of a foreign charity were on fire. Police and soldiers attempted to disperse the crowds with tear gas, but their action came too late to save the buildings from destruction.
Earlier, foreign United Nations employees were advised to restrict their movement. Charred wrecks of United Nations vehicles served as reminders that the unrest was aimed as much at them as at Serbs.
The United States shut its embassy in Belgrade temporarily and advised Americans in the country to avoid public places.
As the United Nations sought to restore law and order, many international officials were trying analyze how and why their control seemed to fall apart so quickly.
The clashes appeared to have begun as a spontaneous response to the drowning of two Albanian children in Mitrovica. One boy who had been with them said they had been chased by a group of men with dogs. Albanians blamed Serbs for the deaths.
But the fact so many people took so quickly to the streets was seen by some as evidence that problems stemming from the 1997-99 war in Kosovo have not been resolved.
The events of the past two days, said one senior Western diplomat "should remind us that we froze an insurgency in 1999," referring to NATO's intervention in the fighting between ethnic Albanian gunmen pressing for Kosovo independence and Yugoslav security forces. "But we did nothing to solve the political reasons underlying it."
The United Nations mission was established after NATO troops forced Yugoslav forces to withdraw in June 1999. The Yugoslav Army and the Serbian police were accused of committing widespread atrocities during the conflict.
Almost five years later, no timetable has been established for the United Nations' withdrawal, and Kosovo's final status has yet to be decided. Albanians want independence, while Serbs want to remain a part of Serbia.
Leading Albanian politicians condemned the violence, but many said part of the blame lay elsewhere.
"We condemn the acts of violence, as well as the slow pace of the U.N. mission towards a resolution of Kosovo's final status," said Arsmim Bajrami, parliamentary leader of the province's second largest Albanian party, the Democratic Party of Kosovo.
"The partnership between Albanians" who welcomed the United Nations and NATO forces as liberators when they first arrived in Kosovo "and the international community, is coming apart," said Alex Anderson, Kosovo project director of the International Crisis Group, a political think tank with offices throughout the Balkans. "It is an incredibly dangerous situation."
-------- pakistan / india
Al Qaeda Leaders May Be Cornered
Pakistani Forces Wage Battle on Afghan Border
By Dana Priest and Kamran Khan
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6337-2004Mar18.html
Pakistani security forces backed by U.S. spy planes were engaged in a pitched battle with tribal fighters and Islamic militants who were believed to be protecting key members of al Qaeda, senior Pakistani and U.S. officials said yesterday.
"There are indications someone important" has been surrounded by the Pakistani troops, said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official. U.S. and Pakistani officials said they could not confirm reports circulating in Pakistan that commanders had evidence the cornered militants included Osama bin Laden's chief deputy, Ayman Zawahiri.
Hundreds of Pakistani troops backed by artillery and helicopter gunships were on the attack around the villages of Azam Warsak, Kaloosha and Shin Warsak in remote southern Waziristan province, officials said. Witnesses in Azam Warsak described artillery barrages and intense crossfire.
The battle came as part of what U.S. and Pakistani officials describe as a major spring offensive aimed at capturing al Qaeda leaders believed to be hiding in the rugged, ungoverned tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.
Within the past 24 hours, Pakistani paramilitary and military troops have pushed farther west into those areas, officials said, encountering the heaviest fighting since Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, sent in 70,000 troops two years ago to hunt for al Qaeda militants.
As part of the coordinated spring offensive, U.S. troops are working the other side of the border in Afghanistan. The forces include the clandestine Task Force 121, a recently reconstituted Special Operations and CIA unit, other Special Forces teams and 11,000 soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division, said several U.S. defense officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Small CIA paramilitary teams are also active in the region, several counterterrorism officials said.
Supporting the U.S. and Pakistani troops is a newly refined technology that allows for the quick processing and analysis of images and communications intercepts from U.S. Air Force spy planes, CIA drones and National Security Agency satellites. New techniques allow for speedy transfer of the information to commanders in the field, said counterterrorism officials.
The springtime operation, called Mountain Storm, has also focused on capturing people suspected of having knowledge of bin Laden's support system -- a technique that paid off in the capture of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Captives are being questioned by CIA and military interrogators with the aim of identifying and apprehending individuals with direct knowledge and access to bin Laden and Zawahiri.
Military officials and others have expressed optimism that they are closer to bin Laden than they have ever been.
"Operations are underway and the difference between coming up empty-handed and having [bin Laden] and Zawahiri are quite thin," said J. Cofer Black, director of counterterrorism at the State Department. "It's not a linear problem; it's more like a net," said Black, who headed the CIA's counterterrorism center until last year. "The net is wider and longer, and the mesh is finer, and we're moving at a higher rate of speed."
Yesterday, Musharraf told CNN that the commander of troops in the tribal area of South Waziristan had reported "fierce resistance" from fighters who have taken refuge in walled compounds and who he believes are protecting an important al Qaeda leader.
"He's reasonably sure there's a high-value target there," Musharraf said.
Pakistani officials, however, cautioned that they have no specific information on the whereabouts of Zawahiri or any other particular senior al Qaeda leader.
Officials said local commanders believe they may have surrounded a key figure because of the intensity of the resistance from tribal fighters and Islamic militants, whose usual tactic is to fade away when confronted with significant force. "We have no reports whatsoever to claim that Osama or Ayman al-Zawahiri have been trapped," Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, Pakistan's chief military spokesman, said late Thursday.
Since 2002, Pakistan has deployed about 70,000 troops in the tribal areas along the 1,400-mile border, where the central government has traditionally exercised little authority. Pakistani forces recently stepped up operations in South Waziristan. They initially threatened fines and other forms of "collective punishment" against tribes that shelter foreign fighters, but as deadlines have come and gone they have begun to use tougher methods.
The resistance has been deadly. On Tuesday, 15 soldiers were killed by militants holed up in a walled mud-brick compound in the village of Kaloosha. Security forces killed 26 militants, most of them foreigners, in the same operation, Pakistani officials said.
One tribal elder reached in Azam Warsak said some of the fighters were residents who could not leave the area when combat began. "Those who have been trapped are longtime Uzbek, Tajik and Chechen residents of the area," said Malik Behram Khan. "No way to go, they have no other choice but to fight."
A senior Pakistani army officer in Peshawar described the fighters as "trained combatants." He said there were "solid reports" that Zawahiri was in the area about three months ago. "We are not sure if he was still hanging out there."
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell told reporters en route from Pakistan to Kuwait yesterday that "the people they are going after are terrorists. They are people who mean no good to Afghanistan and, if left alone, they will try to destabilize Afghanistan again, and that is not in Pakistan's interest. . . . The actions the other day triggered a larger action, and now they are piling on today." Powell also announced the United States had declared Pakistan a "major non-NATO ally," a move that will make it easier for Pakistan to buy military equipment for the fight against terrorists.
The United States has offered a $25 million reward for information leading to Zawahiri's capture. On Thursday, the House of Representatives doubled the reward for bin Laden's capture, to $50 million.
Khan reported from Karachi. Staff writers John Lancaster in New Delhi and Glenn Kessler in Kuwait contributed to this report.
--------
Pakistan Intensifies Assault in Hunt for a Qaeda Leader
March 19, 2004
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/asia/19CND-STAN.html?hp
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, March 19 - Thousands of Pakistani soldiers backed by artillery and helicopter gunships made limited progress today advancing into a 10-square mile cluster of farming villages where 400 to 600 suspected foreign militants have been surrounded near the border with Afghanistan, Pakistani officials said.
The officials said they continued to believe that a senior figure, possibly Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, may be trapped with the surrounded group. But it appeared today that blasting the militants out of fortified positions they have occupied in hundreds of fortress-like family compounds could take days, and possibly cost dozens of lives.
Brig. Mahmood Shah, director of security in Pakistan's tribal areas, said paramilitary forces advancing from the east and west were entangled in house-to-house fighting with the militants. A Pakistani official who spoke on condition of anonymity said an additional 17 Pakistani soldiers had been killed in fighting on Thursday and Friday, bringing the government death toll to at least 32.
"They are still facing resistance, said Brig. Shah, who called the Pakistani advance "very slow."
"I think it(tm)s going to take time," he said. "At least tomorrow, maybe more."
Pakistani officials said that the militants made two attempts break out of the cordon surrounding them Thursday night, but had been forced back after taking casualties. Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, the chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, said at a news briefing here today that two groups of suspected fighters had been apprehended, one of them heavily armed.
But he said none of those apprehended appear to be high level Al Qaeda members, and he gave no information on the possible whereabouts of Dr. al-Zawahiri. On Thursday, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf said that the level of resistance could indicate that there was a high level Al Qaeda target in the area. Pakistani military and intelligence officials have said they believe it is Dr. Zawahiri, an Egyptian surgeon said be Al Qaeda's master planner and a trusted right-hand man of Osama bin Laden.
Some 7,000 Pakistani troops have been brought in to set up a double cordon around clusters of farmhouses west of the town of Wana and some 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) from the Afghan border, where foreign fighters, along with local tribesmen, have been fighting since Tuesday. Fighting has centered around the houses of several local tribespeople at Kalloshah, and in another area by Shin Warsak a few kilometers away.
Gen. Sultan said Pakistani forces were communicating with the militants via loud speakers and sending emissaries to tell them to surrender.
"The security forces will try to overcome them with minimum use of force," Gen. Sultan said. "We would like to capture them without large-scale destruction, but we have the force available if need be."
Mr. Musharraf earlier in the week offered amnesty to anyone who surrendered peacefully, Gen. Sultan added. "All they have to do is show a white flag and no one will shoot," he said.
As for any high level Al Qaeda targets purported to be in the area, he said "We will get them dead or alive."
There was little let-up in the combat. The Pakistani army continued shelling targets all night and into the morning, Gen. Sultan said. About 10 militants tried to break out of the cordon this morning near Shin Warsak, in the south-eastern corner of the cordon. As Pakistani forces opened fire, one fighter was killed and the rest fled back into the compound.
Another group attempted a similar breakout further west and Pakistani troops again repelled them, Gen. Sultan said, killing one fighter who still lay on the battle field. Four men, one of them a foreign fighter, were detained north of the battle area, and another four, two of whom were foreigners, were apprehended east of the cordon, toward Wana. One of the latter group was wounded. They were in possession of a huge cache of arms, he added.
An Afghan security official with connections in the area said that Dr. Zawahiri was safe in a place some 10 to 20 kilometers (6 to 12 miles) away from the actual fighting. He also said that Osama bin Laden was also in the area of South Waziristan, but not in the area under attack. Qari Tahir, a leader of Islamic fighters from Uzbekistan and other Russian-speaking republics and strong ally of the Taliban movement, was leading the fierce fighting against the Pakistanis, he said.
"Qari Tahir is a famous commander of the Uzbeks and he is fighting very hard," the official said. Some Al Qaeda members had reportedly moved up into the mountains before the fighting began and some were now also moving south or north out of the area, he said
-------- spies
US Monitoring China, Pak's Nuke Activities Since 1960s, Says Report
March 19, 2004
IndoLink
http://www.indolink.com/printArticleS.php?id=031904092249
Islamabad, Mar. 20 (NNN) : The US has been carrying out intelligence operations on Pakistan's territory since 1960s - first to monitor the nuclear activities of China and later on to spy on Islamabad's nuclear programme itself , even at times when permission was refused by the government, official documents reveal. According to the Dawn, for the purpose of intelligence gathering the US government deployed a variety of detection systems, including US Air Force planes, spy drones, satellites, human intelligence and acoustic, seismic, and radiological equipment to monitor nuclear activities such as the production of fissile materials, plutonium and enriched uranium.
A November 18, 1964 telegram from the US embassy in Karachi to the US State Department records formulation of a proposal to monitor secretly, from Pakistani territory, China's nuclear activities. Even though the proposal was rejected by the then President Ayub, declassified US Department of State documents reveal the US secretly went ahead with its planned proposal.
According to the report sent by the US delegation after meeting President Ayub, it was said: " ... I observed that several weeks ago we had asked for standby permission to bring in C-130s for atmospheric samplings over Pakistan as needed within 24 hours after the next Chinese detonation. Ayub said he knew about (the) request. But he (was) unable to agree to it."
An outgoing joint state/defence message titled 'Project Clear Sky' said (according to the declassified US document): AEDS (Atomic Energy Detection Systems) activities were planned for 31 countries, including Pakistan with the operational responsibility assigned to the USAF (US Air Force).
A document from US deputy chief AF Technical Applications Centre to the US State Department shows that one of the assigned tasks performed by the USAF as part of the AEDS was the determination of rare gases produced as a result of nuclear activities in different target countries.
"This is accomplished by analysis and evaluation of atmospheric samples collected by a world-wide network of stations." Some AEDS projects took up so little space that the US government could operate the applicable equipment at embassies or consular offices without the knowledge of the host government and without any approval.
Documents (a letter from the department of the US Air Force to special assistant for US atomic energy agency dated April 1,1962) show that during the 1960s, circumvention became possible through use of the B/20-4 'heat exchangers' of the size of a refrigerator which could be used to measure levels of 'rare gases.'
"The equipment we employ in this operation is called a B-20- 4 atmospheric sampling unit or 'heat exchanger.' This equipment is installed in a cabinet which is approximately 7.5-foot high, 1.5-foot wide, two-foot deep and weighs approximately 500 pounds," an official document reveals.
Moreover, documents (telegram from US State Department to embassies, including the US embassy in Karachi dated October 7, 1964) show Ground Filter Units (GFUs) were scheduled for installation at various posts, including Karachi.
"Experience has proven units can be installed and operated without reference to host government," the documents said. Another document reveals the American consulate in Karachi was listed as one of the recipients of related equipment which said "USAF has high priority requirement to obtain air samples in addressee countries."
"Samples would be obtained with up to six USAF C-130 or WB- 50 aircraft operated by the Air Weather Service." A 1964 telegram to the US embassy in Karachi said that Pakistan's Mauripur airport would be used for operations to monitor China's nuclear capabilities.
"Cover story for flights would be "weather research carried on with USAF weather research aircraft." "The primary use for the air samples obtained from these flights is to compare the total amount of a rare gas given off in the process of producing plutonium, which is a prime element in the construction of nuclear weapons," the document said.
According to another secret document: "Although this project is related to the US Atomic Energy Detection System (Project Clear Sky) in that sense the AEDS is primary 'customer' for information on rare gas, the aircraft are to be operated by the USAF Weather Service, and there would be no outward connection with the AEDS."
"The unclassified cover story is that the aircraft are obtaining air samples for use in studying radioactive fallout." A secret but now declassified US State Department document dated June 23, 1983 reveals the US had access to information about various nuclear activities in Pakistan, despite efforts of successive governments to keep the plans under wraps.
According to the document, "Pakistan's major fuel cycle facilities include the Canadian supplied, CANDU-type power reactor located on the coast near Karachi."
"A uranium ore concentration plant and UF6 (uranium hexafluoride) production plant are located (at) Dera Ghazi Khan near deposits of uranium." By 1983, the Americans intelligence agencies believed the UF6 plant was externally complete and could "produce more than enough for the Kahuta enrichment."
"There are two major fuel cycle facilities located at the Chashma Barrage on the Indus River," the document said. "Pakistan's uranium enrichment facilities are located at Kahuta near Islamabad," the document relating to the year 1983 shows.
About spent-fuel reprocessing, the US document said: "We believe that facilities exist in the basement of the main building of Pinstech which would allow laboratory experiments with solvent extraction. A still larger, the so-called New Labs, is nearing completion near the main building."
"The New Labs seem to be large enough to allow for expansion of reprocessing facility," the document said. "Spent-fuel from Kannup is the only source of suitable quantities of irradiated uranium to support a nuclear weapons programme."
The 1983 intelligence report expressed fear that Pakistan was introducing indigenously-produced fuel rods into Kannup and the IAEA was unable to monitor the amount of fuel flowing through the reactor. The document also raised concerns regarding the "possible diversion of spent fuel from the reactor to the unsafeguarded nuclear facilities."
At present US operating at least two satellite imaging systems. The LACROSSE/VEGA satellite, launched in October 1997, was the first of a new generation of radar imagery satellites.
Since October 2001, at least two US spy drones have crashed inside Pakistani territory with little information about their activities from official quarters. According to US Central Command data regarding support provided by Pakistan for Operation Enduring Freedom till October 2002 included "provision of five air bases/airfields."
"A total of 57,800 sorties have been generated from Pakistan's air space/ soil," the US CENTCOM's data says. With so much US air traffic criss-crossing Pakistani air space since October 2001, there is hardly anything, specially domestic nuclear activity, which would have missed the highly sensitive hi-tech recording equipment mounted on the US aircraft.
-------- un
U.N. Envoy Returning to Aid Baghdad
Friday, March 19, 2004
Colum Lynch
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6928-2004Mar19.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 18 -- The chief U.N. envoy for Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, will return to Baghdad "as soon as possible" to help pave the way for Iraqi self-rule by June 30 and organize national elections by year's end, Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday.
Annan confirmed in letters Thursday to the Iraqi Governing Council and to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority that Brahimi would lead a U.N. delegation.
Last week, key Shiite Muslim leaders on the Iraqi council blocked the issuance of an invitation to the United Nations. The Iraqi leaders were reluctant to accept a central U.N. role in Iraq's transition, U.N. diplomats say.
But the 25-member council agreed to send the United Nations an invitation after Iraq's most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, personally appealed to Annan this week to continue to play a role in the country's transition.
------
Annan Says U.N. Return to Iraq Is Imminent
March 19, 2004
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/middleeast/19NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 18 - Secretary General Kofi Annan said Thursday night that he was sending a United Nations team to Iraq "as soon as practicable" to assist in the transfer of power scheduled for June 30.
Letters from the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council and the American-administered Coalition Provisional Authority requesting that the United Nations return to Iraq arrived Thursday morning, and Mr. Annan said he would be sending a positive response back overnight.
The letter from the head of provisional authority, L. Paul Bremer III, asked that Mr. Annan send electoral experts to Iraq next week. The letter from the governing council, several of whose members have complained recently about the United Nations role in Iraq, said only that the team should arrive "as soon as possible."
Mr. Annan said the team would be led by Lakhdar Brahimi, his special envoy to Iraq. Mr. Brahimi, 70, Mr. Annan's representative in Afghanistan for the past two years, led a mission to Baghdad last month that set the stage for United Nations involvement in helping shape the interim government to take over on June 30 and in planning for national elections to be held in 2005.
-------- us
Iraq conflict stretches U.S. military to the limit
Fri, Mar. 19, 2004
BY RICHARD WHITTLE
The Dallas Morning News
http://www.sunherald.com/mld/sunherald/news/politics/8229565.htm
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - In the early hours of last March 20, Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley sat in a high-tech nerve center at a remote Saudi Arabian air base, waiting for the war on Iraq to unfold as planned, when his phone rang. On the secure line was Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling from a White House meeting of President Bush's top national security advisers. A "human intelligence source" had reported that Saddam Hussein was hiding in an underground bunker at a palace outside Baghdad.
Their question for the commander of all U.S. and coalition air forces mustered for the war: "Can you strike him?"
"You bet we can strike him," Moseley, now Air Force vice chief of staff, recalls responding.
Two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers dropped the first bombs of the war into the dictator's bunker. He escaped.
Thus began a military campaign that, three weeks later, appeared to have delivered an astonishingly swift victory. By May 1, Bush was celebrating the "end of major combat." Yet just as the war didn't begin as expected, it hasn't ended as easily as it seemed it might. Iraqi insurgents have sustained a protracted conflict that continues to claim American lives - one reason the Iraq war is having major effects on the U.S. military.
Three of the most visible are:
_A demand for manpower that is driving the Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard to reorganize to ease the strain of keeping more than 100,000 troops in Iraq for what could be years to come.
_An Army decision to cancel a two-decade-old $39 billion project to build a new, radar-evading reconnaissance helicopter in light of Iraqi successes using small arms against U.S. attack helicopters.
_Budget pressures caused by billions of dollars in unanticipated occupation costs, aggravated by rising deficits, that threaten high-priced procurement programs such as the Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor fighter plane.
"Three weeks was about enough to fight the kind of war we were trained and optimized to fight," judges West Point-trained military analyst Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "We had a military that was designed for sprints."
But in Iraq today, he said, "The problem is that it's not a sprint anymore, it's a marathon."
Three decades after the draft was abolished, the demands imposed by Iraq are putting the all-volunteer Army to its greatest test. Last year, 24 of the regular Army's 33 combat brigades were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. This year, 20 will be.
The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, are being used more than ever before in their history. As of Feb. 25, officials said, 155,028 Army National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized - 21,726 more than were on duty last August. By the time the Army finishes rotating new units into Iraq this spring, 40 percent of American forces there will be National Guard or Army Reserve members.
U.S. officials are worried that many are fed up - some have been mobilized two or three times since 9-11 - and will quit when their contracts expire.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration official don't dispute that the force is under strain, but they say they are coping with it.
"We've taken some 25 or 30 steps to find ways to reduce the stress on the force," Rumsfeld said at a recent Pentagon briefing. He noted that he also has used emergency authority to temporarily add 30,000 troops to the Army.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, meanwhile, has ordered the Army's 10 traditional divisions of 10,000 to 20,000 troops and its 33 combat brigades reconfigured into 48 smaller brigades that include units such as military police so they can handle the Iraq mission more smoothly.
The Army National Guard and Army Reserves are reorganizing along similar lines.
Rumsfeld contends that the demand for troops in Iraq is merely a "spike" that will subside as sovereignty is handed over to Iraqis this summer and newly constituted Iraqi forces take over security functions.
Other experts note that stabilization and peacekeeping operations have a history of lasting far longer than planned. U.S. troops have been Bosnia for nine years. They were supposed to stay one.
On the night of March 23, four days into the war, AH-64 Apache helicopters of the 11th Aviation Regiment of the Army's 101st Airborne Division launched a nighttime attack on an Iraqi armored formation south of Baghdad. But they flew into an ambush.
Forewarned by spies using cellphones, Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen Saddam - a private militia loyal to Saddam Hussein - positioned themselves on rooftops along the attack route, among trees, behind bushes and every other conceivable form of cover. The Apaches flew into a gantlet of bullets, anti-aircraft missiles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Every one of the 32 aircraft was hit. One was shot down and its crew captured. The mission was aborted. And the Army's faith in helicopters was shaken, according to many analysts.
After an Army aviation study begun last fall, Schoomaker and acting Army Secretary Les Brownlee last month canceled the high-tech Comanche program - long an Army priority and a prime target for defense spending critics.
"The cancellation of the Comanche is a direct consequence of the war," said Army expert Krepinevich. "The Army took a good, hard look and said the greatest advantage the Comanche gives you is that it's stealthy against radar, but we're not combating enemies right now who have radar."
Other factors went into the Army decision to scrap the $6.9 billion program.
The success of unmanned aerial vehicles in providing reconnaissance over Afghanistan and Iraq made UAVs a better option, Army officials said.
And with improvements in communications and targeting technology, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps jets can hit the targets the Army needs destroyed without a helicopter's vulnerability to ground fire.
"I heard the chief of staff (Schoomaker) say this directly," said Loren Thompson, an analyst with the defense industry-backed Lexington Institute. "The Army is already moving to rely more on `joint fires' - meaning the Air Force - because it's a cheaper and more effective way to go when you need close air support."
Beforehand, Rumsfeld and most other administration officials refused to estimate how much the Iraq war would cost, although Bush's budget director at the time, Mitch Daniels, guessed $50 billion to $60 billion.
The total will be $105 billion by Sept. 30, said Stephen Kosiak, an analyst with the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington. The total for fiscal 2005 is "likely to be in the $25 billion to $35 billion range," Kosiak said.
Arguing that the situation in Iraq is in too much flux to make accurate advance budgeting possible, the administration left it out of its $401.7 billion fiscal 2005 Pentagon budget request.
The effect on programs such as the F/A-22 is indirect, said Kosiak, but the billions of dollars the Iraq occupation is costing are giving additional ammunition to critics both outside and within the administration.
A General Accounting Office study released this week reported that although the Air Force wants at least 277 F/A-22s, only 218 could be bought under a $36.8 billion congressional cap on production costs. That would jack the price up to about $153 million a plane - roughly five times the cost of an F-16.
"The F/A-22 program's affordability is uncertain," concluded the GAO, auditing arm of Congress. And it noted that in January the Office of Management and Budget told the Pentagon to study whether it could justify continuing two programs: the F/A-22 - and the Comanche.
The F/A-22 remains the Air Force's top priority, and with $40 billion already sunk into it, neither the administration nor Congress is likely to cancel it, said Thompson of the Lexington Institute.
But few expected the Army to cancel the Comanche.
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On the run again
During the Vietnam war, I hid deserters - and watched it unravel as the GI movement grew. Iraq could go the same way
Clancy Sigal
Friday March 19, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1173091,00.html
Staff Sergeant Camilo Mejia, a squad leader in the 53rd infantry brigade of the American army fighting in Iraq's Sunni triangle, has been in hiding and "living like a criminal" in the United States ever since he went absent without leave from a brief furlough five months ago. He was afraid even to see his three-year-old daughter in New York.
This week he surrendered to military authorities in Boston, where he claimed conscientious objector status in opposition to "a war for oil, based on lies". He was accompanied by a GI buddy, Oliver Perez. "I fought next to him," Perez said. "He is not a coward."
Mejia's lawyers claim that an estimated 600 soldiers have deserted to avoid service in Iraq or have gone awol after being granted home leave. It is impossible to tell the true numbers. The Pentagon doesn't like talking about deserters or suicides because such statistics can be seen as a reliable index of soldiers' morale.
A recent Pentagon-commissioned survey in Stars & Stripes, the US army newspaper, found morale among American troops in Iraq to be very low. A briefing on the results of a new mental health survey of troops in Iraq was abruptly cancelled this week because military officials did not want bad news to come out on the first anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the military campaign in Iraq - which happily coincides with the launching of President Bush's re-election campaign.
As a deserter - anyone who is awol for more than 30 days - Sgt Mejia is a test case for conscientious objector status based on political rather than religious reasons. It's a tough rap. If the Vietnam war is anything to go by, he may find fighting Iraqi guerrillas easier than being called a coward, a traitor and a shame to the flag.
During Vietnam there was a global underground railway for American deserters and draft resisters. I was a "stationmaster" at the London end because I hated the war, but, as a former GI, I also identified closely with rank-and-file "grunts". My main qualification was that I spoke barracks language. This was important because of the vast cultural gap between older antiwar activists, such as myself, and awol teenagers for whom Jimi Hendrix rather than Gandhi was the most evocative peace symbol.
Our London hideout, through which scores of American deserters passed or took refuge, was an apartment in Marylebone's Queen Anne Street, above the Royal Asiatic Society - that remarkable relic of Britain's failed imperialist adventure. The irony was not lost on these young military fugitives for whom desertion was often the defining moment of their lives. Once a soldier steps across that 30-day line he becomes, existentially, a different person: free, scared and living purely by his survival guile. Desertion can break him psychologically - it's so lonely - or make him think for the first time.
Then, as now, most awols were southern rural poor or working-class city kids who had volunteered for "travel, education, pay", as the recruiting posters promised. (The present Iraq casualty lists are full of home towns like Tickfaw, Louisiana, and Calumet City, Illinois.) Stigmatised by the deserter label, they were an embarrassment to their families, the Pentagon and even the peace movement. When four awol sailors off the aircraft carrier USS Intrepid sought refuge in Moscow in 1967, thus triggering the "GI movement" against the war, the Soviets couldn't get rid of them fast enough. And I recall with what horror and contempt even some British Labourites regarded awols, and how they refused to help us. "We stood and fought. We didn't whine," a fiercely radical Labour leader told me.
Yet the GI movement, spearheaded by deserters and resisters in the army, may well have been the tip ping point in the unravelling of the Vietnam war. Their resistance - wearing peace signs, "fragging" (attacking) officers - shook the military's confidence in its mission and caused the Pentagon to start thinking of an exit strategy. Senator John Kerry, then a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War and now the presumed Democratic presidential nominee, was part of that broad movement.
Sgt Mejia and his 600 co-deserters could well be the harbingers of a new GI movement. More than 560 GIs have been killed in Iraq, one-third of them aged between 18 and 21. The American media has begun to shake off its self-censorship to show pictures of the maimed and limbless wounded at army hospitals. Army recruiting has become a tough sell, a far cry from the upsurge of patriotic enlistments after 9/11.
Among combat troops there is seething resentment at Pentagon mismanagement that, for example, has sent them into battle without the Kevlar ceramic inserts for body armour necessary to protect them against snipers and roadside bombs. It's now common for parents of GIs to privately mail to young soldiers life-saving equipment that the Pentagon has "forgotten" to include in standard issue.
If these trends continue - and they are likely to - desertion from the US armed forces and vocal protest from hitherto obedient military families may in the long run prove the most potent signal to Washington that the American desert invasion has run its course.
During the Vietnam war, deserters' families often slammed the door in their sons' faces or even grassed on them to the police. Sgt Mejia has the support of his family, his closest buddy and an organised peace movement with deep roots in the Vietnam experience. The American public is split and increasingly sceptical about President Bush's war in Iraq. Who knows? Sgt Mejia may run for president some day.
· Clancy Sigal is a screenwriter and novelist in Los Angeles. During the Vietnam war he helped American deserters and draft resisters
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Friendly fire
March 19, 2004
Washington Times
Inside The Ring
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Supporters of Maj. Harry Schmidt, whom the Air Force is court-martialing for dropping a bomb on friendly Canadian troops in Afghanistan, ask this question: Why hasn't the military filed such serious charges against other pilots in a series of "friendly fire" deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Maj. Schmidt, an F-16 pilot in the Illinois Air National Guard, dropped a bomb on the Canadians after seeing flashes of gunfire he thought were antiaircraft guns. It turns out the fire came from the Canadians' live-fire exercise.
A spot check of after-action reports in other "friendly fire" cases show similar mistakes.
.An F-15E pilot flying over southern Iraq saw gunfire flashes near the town of Karbala on April 2, 2003. Minutes before, a Patriot battery had mistakenly shot down an F-18, killing the pilot. The F-15 pilot thought this meant enemy air defenses were in the area and mistook the fire of a U.S. Army rocket launcher as an Iraqi air defense gun. Three U.S. soldiers were killed.
"The F-15E, and his wingman, believing that they had just witnessed an enemy SAM launch and unaware of the presence of any friendly forces, began a bombing run, dropping one GBU-12 bomb," a U.S. Central Command report says.
.Over the Godoria Range of Djibouti in Africa, a B-52 crew mistakenly targeted a group of Marines on the range instead of the target they were pointing out for the bomber. One Marine officer was killed.
A investigation discovered that one of the navigators moved the bull's-eye from the target to the Marines to judge the distance between the two, but then never moved it back to the target before nine, 750-pound bombs were dropped.
Paper drop
The U.S. military has dropped hundreds of thousands of leaflets over Iraq beginning in November 2002 and ending with the last aerial drop on April 4, 2003. Those leaflets told Iraqis that they could tune to several radio stations to hear coalition broadcasts.
After ousting Saddam Hussein's regime a few days later, U.S. military officials were surprised to find how the Iraqis were using the leaflets. Many of the thin papers were being used as toilet paper by the Iraqis, U.S. officials tell us.
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Photo essay reveals why Bush wants to keep the dead and wounded hidden
By Teresa Simon-Noble
Online Journal Contributing Writer
March 19, 2004
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/NucNews/pending?view=1&msg=9730
-Photojournalist Nina Berman's photo essay, The Damage Done in Mother Jones magazine, of young wounded soldiers in the Iraq invasion is a visual explanation as to why George W. Bush does not want pictures of the dead or wounded returning home to be flashed across the nation's television screens or on the pages of our newspapers.
It is heart gripping to see the pictures of these young men who have lost a leg, or two, or an arm, or whose bodies are covered with shrapnel, or who have become quadriplegic, or have suffered any degree of brain damage and whose lives have forever been derailed by a man whose greed for oil and whose need to avenge his father mattered more to him than the duty to care for our soldiers by not sending them to any unnecessary wars.
What a reprehensible Bush misuse of people's lives and of people's sense of patriotism and of love of country!
What an unselfish, generous gift these young men and women-and the thousands more like them, have made to this country and to the unelected commander-in-chief who sent them in harm's way through a series of lies, manipulation of facts and mythologized need for war in Iraq and wherever in the world the pursuit of "evil" tickles his fancy.
Like my friend Chuck, a young soldier who tells me that he cannot pause to think about why he joined the army when he did, or why he has been sent to Iraq, or why he is even in Iraq because he has to stay focused on the job at hand in order to survive not just the snipers but keep his own emotional stability. Perhaps other soldiers, too, who say they would do it over again, need to stay focused as a way of keeping anger or desperation out of their systems.
What would they have to face, otherwise? They would have to face not only the emptiness of a needless war and the savagery of war itself, they would have to face the meaninglessness of their invaluable sacrifice to us in the face of so many questions about a war so fraught with lies and in manipulation. They would have to face the purposeless derailment of their own life's journey.
All of which is powerful stuff and not easy to have to contemplate in the blossoming of their youths.
What a dizzying effect: the battle between what is real and what is fabricated; between what is and what should not have been. Between the potential and possibilities for one's life's journey and that journey as it has become truncated by the effects of Bush's greedy, narcissistic invasion of another country.
How dizzying it must be too for Bush to have to stand before the carnage of wounded soldiers returning home, knowing that he did not do right by them or by the country that he claims to love and the constitution that he swore to "preserve, protect and defend." That is why he must flee, like a serpent that flees from the grace of God that is love and truth, when the dead and wounded return home. He knows he lied to them and to the country. He knows he only cared about himself, his greed, the avenging of his father, and the showing off of his ill begotten power.
Bush and his father (whose tacit support for the Boy's policies and the Boy's actions makes him as complicit as the Boy), as well as all of the Bush handlers and his corporate media propaganda machine, know that scenes of our returning dead and wounded across our television screens would end Bush's sell of his mythological war against phantom evildoers seen only by Bush's mind and ever changing color coded alerts.
Borrowing a page of cynicism from the Bushes, the Democrat's presidential contender ought to place a couple of those Bush, War is Glory, speeches to the troops, against a backdrop of pictures of returning Iraq occupation dead and wounded with a stream flashing on screen that reads 'THIS IS THE REALITY OF WAR."
People might just pause long enough to think about what kind of a man they'd want their leader to be, and about the sort of qualifications they'd want him to have; not just those qualifications that are learned in an institution of higher learning and are posted in any resume, but in experiences as rounded by the man's life's journey and in the buzz of his every day family life.
People might have cause to pause and think long and hard whether they want to vote for a "war president," or whether they want to vote for a "peace president." A man with enough understanding to know that war is not the way to peace, that carnage is a road to nowhere, and with enough courage to stand ready to face the consequences of his actions, the carnage of wounded and maimed soldiers returning home, the body bags and draped coffins that paid for Bush's fabricated war. A man ready to pronounce: Never again. Never in the name of greed. Never, ever in the name of oil.
Teresa Simon-Noble is a computer activist for peace and social justice. She is a former mental health clinician. A poet and a freelance writer, her work has been published in several online publications.
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US Army Corps Must Curb Wasteful Spending - Activists
REUTERS USA:
March 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24358/story.htm
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plans to spend $12 billion on more than two dozen unneeded projects because of pressure from special interest groups and individual members of Congress, two activist groups said yesterday.
The Corps, the agency responsible for building federal dams and designating flood plains, has been criticized in recent years for frivolous spending and rigging data to justify projects that create jobs at the expense of the environment.
A two-year review by the National Wildlife Federation and Taxpayers for Common Sense targeted 29 projects they described as unneeded and likely to damage some 640,000 acres of land and nearby wildlife.
Together, the group of projects spanning from California to Florida would cost taxpayers $12 billion, the report said.
"There is so much damage being done by some of the worst Corps projects right now that we cannot imagine continuing on this course," said David Conrad with the National Wildlife Federation who coauthored the study.
Army Corps chief Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers did not address the findings in the study, but he acknowledged the agency is in dire needs of legislative reform.
"What we are hoping is that there will be some legislation (from Congress) which will give us some direction and authority," he told Reuters.
Congress is set to review legislation this spring that authorizes Corps civil works projects for the next two years. The Corps has more than $50 billion in unfinished projects.
Among the Corps projects criticized in the report was a controversial $60-million study that endorsed spending about $1 billion to upgrade the 70-year-old lock-and-dam system that dots the Mississippi and Illinois rivers.
The Corps' planning process for the project came into question after it said grain imports in the region would rise between 1995 and 2000 when, in fact, they fell.
A bipartisan team of senators including Democratic leader Tom Daschle introduced a measure last week that would create an independent panel to monitor the Corps and require the agency to update the process it uses to determine if a project should proceed.
Many of the same suggestions were included in the report issued yesterday.
Several unsuccessful bills have been offered in Congress in recent years. Corps critics have vowed to oppose any legislation that does not call for reform.
(Additional reporting by Sue Pleming)
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PTSD: The American Plague -- The Most Immeasurable Cost Of War
by Gary G. Kohls, M.D. <gkohls@cpinternet.com>
Fri, 27 Feb 2004
Wars have been fought ever since men started using fists, sticks and stones to get what they couldn't get by less violent means. Now wars are fought by men and women who are paid to kill those humans who are fingered as enemies of the state by those above them in the chain of command. The sense of honor in "just doing my job," the threat of court martial, the fear of summary execution if one refuses to kill in battle, the promise of rape and pillage, a false sense of patriotism: all these are motivating factors for the soldier who risks his body, psyche and soul in making murder for the state. Instilling a strong sense of patriotic duty to "Volk und Vaterland" is a constant among all militaristic societies who have to fool recruits into the anti-human willingness to kill and be killed.
But if history is read honestly, every war has been fabricated and has therefore been avoidable. The exhortations to go to war always come from the elite economic and political war profiteers, the military careerists and many others who have ulterior motives. In other words, the warriors who do the killing are not consulted; they are simply expected to unthinkingly "serve their nation" and act like patriots rather than the paid mercenaries they are. They are compelled to "just follow orders" -- even if the orders are illegal, immoral or result in an actual war crime.
One of the most common yet covered-up consequences of war is a mental disorder called posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The killing, raping and wounding of civilians, animals and property are predictable outcomes of the war zone (the civilian casualties are euphemistically called "collateral damage"), but the psychological trauma that "surviving" soldiers experience often results in devastating mental anguish for them and their loved ones back home, suffering that lasts a lifetime -- or two or three.
PTSD is a mental disorder caused by the effects of a psychologically distressing event or events usually of a severity or duration that is beyond the range of normal human experience.
War zone PTSD results from the perpetrating or witnessing of gruesome death or injury or experiencing the threat of death or injury of oneself or of other human beings. The psychological terror of living in a "kill or be killed" situation is stress enough to cause PTSD in most people. But the "adrenalin rush" that accompanies violence in all its many forms can be additive and each traumatic experience, starting with the psychological rape that is a routine part of basic training, proceeds inexorably toward a breaking point.
Anybody (except those soldiers who have been hardened into quasi-criminals and who thrive on the violence) can and will crack under the strain of combat war. In the post-mortem analysis of WWII, the Department of War (now called the Department of Defense) observed that after approximately 200 to 240 days of combat, virtually everybody got disabling, full-blown PTSD (aka combat fatigue in WWII). About the only ones who weren't affected psychologically were the conscienceless psychopaths who actually enjoyed the killing.
Another relatively unaffected group were those rare individuals who were able to maintain their spiritual selves during the war. These men tried to find meaning in their circumstances, avoided acts of cruelty, did not participate in mutilation of enemy corpses, did not rape or do violence to civilians, were merciful to those around them and then were lucky enough to have a nurturing family group to genuinely care for them after their discharges from their hellish existence.
Because of the military experience gained in WWII, limits were placed on the length of front line tours of duty for the combat soldier in Vietnam. Therefore, 12-13 month tours were instituted (vs. "for the duration plus 6 months" in WWII). This strategy, hotly debated at the time in the Pentagon, backfired in many ways. Unit cohesiveness and effectiveness suffered dramatically. Green recruits were continuously being rotated into every unit to replace those who had been killed or injured in battle, and they were inexperienced soldiers who couldn't be trusted for months. In addition, the "shorts" (those who were nearing the end of their tours of duty) started thinking more about ways to survive than about being effective soldiers -- and were therefore a liability to the unit.
To make things worse, the officers of combat units were on 6 month, rather than 12 month rotations, resulting in a similar problem, i.e., as soon as they obtained the necessary experience that would make them useful and trustworthy leaders, they were rotated out, making way for another dangerous greenhorn officer that took another 3-6 months of seasoning!
12 month tours and PTSD were related in another way. The discharged survivors were sent back to the states abruptly, oftentimes arriving home within 48 hours. Returning from the hell of jungle warfare -- where smells and sights and sounds of gruesome death were all around -- to an oblivious citizenry who had no concept of the realities of war, was the ultimate culture shock. And to top it off, the soldier was often subjected to verbal attacks from both anti-war activists, who were outraged over the atrocities of the war, and veterans of past wars, who abused them for being "losers."
However, those psychological abuses were minor compared to the malignant combat experiences that couldn't be unremembered. The horrific images of death, cruelty, rape and mutilation -- of both the enemy and the suffering innocent civilians -- were indelibly etched into their brains, just waiting to emerge at the most unwelcome times. Nightmare images of terror and suffering often made sleep a horrific experience to be avoided, with terrible consequences flowing from the resultant sleep deprivation.
It is not difficult to understand why insomnia, depression, chronic fatigue, guilt, drug abuse, anxiety and hostility are common in combat-induced PTSD. Because of the sleep disturbances, PTSD victims have trouble concentrating, making understandable their inability to hold onto creative jobs. Disastrous marriages and troubled parent-child relationships are common. And, because of the resulting mental anguish, mood-altering drugs, tobacco and alcohol are commonly used to relieve the pain, thus aggravating every other mind/body problem.
PTSD now represents real science and psychology; it is not just theory anymore. A massive amount of research has been done into the science and is expanding exponentially. This new knowledge, however, is slow to reach the mainstream of medicine. And thus the benefits of the new understandings are also slow to trickle down to the affected veterans.
And to make everything even worse, short-sighted economic cutbacks, many made to fund future crazy-making wars, are happening in medical programs that affect all segments of society, especially for veterans programs. VA hospitals and clinics everywhere are downsizing precisely when the need for attention is increasing.
Despite the brevity of the Gulf War I, the incidence of PTSD turned out to be substantial and, like Vietnam, is getting worse rather than better. Studies have shown a high incidence of both full-blown and partial PTSD. Those studies have confirmed particularly high rates of PTSD in the military police, medical units and graves registration units (those who handle the bloody dead bodies and putrid body parts of the dead). We can be certain that a substantial part of the Gulf War Syndrome is due to the psychological trauma of war.
One disturbing characteristic of PTSD is that the onset of the disease is unpredictable, sometimes not manifesting itself for decades after the original trauma. Some WWII vets only started manifesting the syndrome after the 1995 50th anniversary media events started being aired on television. And it's instructive to note that many cases of delayed-onset PTSD were brought on in some WWII vets who viewed the graphic battle scenes in "Saving Private Ryan."
Because PTSD is "contagious," there are numerous secondary victims of the affected perpetrator soldiers, mainly the families -- the ones who sent their adolescent boys off as innocent recruits and received them back unrecognizable, "insane," addicted, criminal and "changed forever," as the Marine Corps ironically advertises itself.
Communication problems between the traumatized veteran, his family and therapy team were often insurmountable, the soldiers being unable to talk about their painful war experiences, and the rest of us not wanting to hear their stories anyway. So misunderstandings were common, with frustrations, anger, fear, and hostility easily emerging. Family dysfunction and marital breakdowns were the norm, and the ingrained homicidal violence of combat, which took too much effort to suppress continuously, often erupted -- with disastrous results for the family and society.
Veterans tried everything they could think of to cope, but nothing helped for very long. Very few trusted the VA system, which seemed unresponsive to their needs, in denial over the realities of PTSD and therefore unprepared to deal with issues they couldn't understand. And besides, the Pentagon didn't want the public to know there were problems in the war business, so it was the rare Vietnam vet that stuck with the system. And, when they did partake in VA treatment programs they were given large doses, in various combinations, of experimental prescription drugs, which only seemed to "zombify" them which just seemed to keep the demons in the brain only partially under control. So, with no effective help and considerable confusion about what was going on, the traumatized vets wandered from one unsatisfactory, addicting self-treatment to another, getting more disillusioned, more hopeless and more homeless as time went on.
Sadly, the depression and guilt was often too much to bear and suicide was an attractive way out of the pain, sometimes preceded by violent retribution along the way. (It is often said that 200,000 Vietnam vets have committed suicide since they came home from the war, although, with 30% of the huge US homeless population being nameless and homeless Vietnam veterans, the precise number is unknown and actually may be larger!)
The comprehensive National Vietnam Veteran Readjustment Study (NVVRS), published in 1988, revealed that 480,000 Vietnam vets have full-blown PTSD, with another 350,000 having partial PTSD. Over 50% of the Vietnam combat vets were victims of the full-blown disorder, as were 20-30% of Vietnam theater vets overall!
With, on average, 4 other people being significantly psychologically traumatized by the original affected vet, America's massive mental health problem is understandable. As surely as love begets love, violence begets violence, but violence spreads more quickly through the generations, and it is acting like a plague. Therefore PTSD can be truly regarded as a contagious, familial and epidemic disease, often spreading exponentially through the generations and through the neighborhoods, with the victimized children at high risk of victimizing others later, especially their own children, spouses, siblings, parents, neighbors and assorted "loved ones."
What can be done? Veteran's organizations must do their part in raising this serious issue to the consciousness of the public as well as to themselves and their traumatized families. War zone PTSD is eminently preventable, but the killing has to stop first.
Since PTSD is a serious spiritual issue, the churches must become involved as well by starting to teach and implement the clear nonviolent teachings of Jesus. (As a sobering example of how serious this issue is for the churches, 75% of Vietnam era pre-recruits attended worship services regularly, but when they returned home from the war, church attendance dropped precipitously to below 25% -- actually approaching zero in the PTSD-affected population!) Retention, and not just recruitment, of souls should be job #1 for any church that wants to grow. Combat violence is a sure-fire way to lose church members and their families.
Combat-induced PTSD is as complex as it is serious, but it can be easily understood if intentionally taught. And since effective treatment is difficult and real "cures" virtually impossible, prevention appears to be the only real hope.
And that prevention can only be accomplished if society and its policy-makers are willing to be totally truthful about the real costs of war, a highly taboo subject for militarists, super-patriots, conservatives and nationalists and therefore one that has so far not been adequately dealt with.
Total truthfulness is the only way to start any healing of this or any dysfunctional group or nation, and it's the only way to start the reversal of the disastrous economic costs of American militarism.
But, what is more important is this: the immeasurable and unaffordable costs of war and violence must be thoroughly understood if the decline and fall of the American Empire is to be averted.
Gary G. Kohls, MD, Duluth, MN, for Every Church A Peace Church (http://www.ecapc.org).
-------- propaganda wars/press
Arab Journalists Protest Shootings as Powell Visits Baghdad
March 19, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/middleeast/19CND-POWE.html
BAGHDAD, March 19 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, making a quick stop in Iraq, acknowledged today that bombing attacks had increased recently and got a taste of the political problems related to the violence when 30 journalists walked out of his news conference to protest the killing of two colleagues.
Mr. Powell's visit, which was unannounced and carried out under extremely tight security, was intended to highlight the progress under way in Iraq on the first anniversary of the start of the war, complementing a week of activities by President Bush and others.
Instead, his major public appearance in the Iraqi capital was jolted by the walkout by a group of Iraqi and Arabic journalists who charged that the occupation by American-led military forces had led to the killing of two journalists from Al Arabiya television network on Thursday.
Al Arabiya, a satellite news channel based in Dubai, reported that one of its cameramen had been killed and a reporter wounded by American soldiers. According to the report, the two men were in a car when American soldiers opened fire on another vehicle that was racing toward a checkpoint in Baghdad. An American military spokesman said the command was checking the report.
Mr. Powell said today that he regretted the incident and that "it will be looked into," but said he was "confident that it wasn't anything that was deliberate."
Noting the anniversary of the start of the war, Mr. Powell opened the news conference after the Iraqi walkout by hailing what he said were the signs of progress in Iraq, including the establishment of "freedoms to Iraqis of the kind they have never enjoyed before, as you just saw exercised a few moments ago."
At the secretary's side was L. Paul Bremer III, the American administrator, who had joined in discussions earlier with military leaders and with seven members of the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, the handpicked group that is still struggling to decide what sort of interim government will take power in Baghdad on June 30.
There was no sign of progress in the impasse over the composition of that government, which is to take power when Iraq's sovereignty is restored on that date. A decision on the makeup of the interim government was supposed to have been made by the end of February but it has been postponed because of disagreements among Iraqi leaders.
Mr. Powell arrived in the early morning from Kuwait aboard a military transport plane and was then taken by helicopter to the occupation headquarters at one of Saddam Hussein's presidential palaces inside the secure perimeter on the Tigris River known as the green zone.
Meeting with a couple of hundred occupation employees in a cavernous meeting room that has been converted into a dining facility, Mr. Powell sought to assure everyone that the debate in the United States over the war did not mean that their work was unappreciated.
"You can be proud of what you and your buddies have done," Mr. Powell said as the audience cheered. "Let no one ever tell you otherwise."
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Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq
March 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Media-War-Coverage.html
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) -- Competitive pressures and a fear of appearing unpatriotic discouraged journalists from doing more critical reporting during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, according to reporters and others at a conference on media coverage of the war.
The journalists on the panels at the University of California at Berkeley this week blamed the Bush administration for leaking faulty information, but said the media also has itself to blame for not being more skeptical about the case for war.
``The press did not do their job,'' said Michael Massing, who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books that found The New York Times and The Washington Post particularly at fault.
Journalists fear they will be seen as unpatriotic if they challenge White House statements, said Robert Sheer, a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
``There is no doubt that there is an atmosphere of fear in the media of being out of sync with the punitive government,'' Sheer said.
Much of the criticism focused on a Sept. 8, 2002, New York Times article by Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, which said Iraq was importing aluminum tubes that could be used in centrifuges to enrich uranium, a critical step in making an atomic bomb.
Massing said nuclear experts or weapons inspectors would have refuted the evidence had the Times consulted them. Experts later verified the tubes were not used for nuclear weapons, but The New York Times and other papers buried that news in their inside pages, he said.
Massing noted that a phrase from the article -- ``The first sign of a smoking gun may be a mushroom cloud'' -- made it into a speech given by President Bush in the fall of 2002, days before Congress gave him war powers, as well as speeches by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell to justify the war.
A call to the Times for comment was not immediately returned on Friday.
John Burns, the Times' bureau chief in Baghdad, speaking by satellite phone from Iraq, said American reporters are doing a good job of covering the war's aftermath. In fact, reporters accused of being insufficiently critical are going too far in the other direction when they suggest Iraq is already descending into chaos and civil war, Burns said. He called it ``a growing deception among the press and others that there is an air of error and disillusion'' in Iraq.
The only government representative at the conference that ran Tuesday through Thursday was Lt. Col. Rick Long, a Marine Corps spokesman. He deflected accusations that the Pentagon decision to embed about 700 journalists with troops fighting in the Iraq war allowed the government to influence their coverage.
``The reason we embedded so many journalists is that we wanted to dominate the information environment,'' Long said. ``We wanted to beat any kind of disinformation or propaganda by beating them at their own game.''
--------
Donald Rumsfeld's "The Unknown"
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Mar 19, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040319224245.fdcwbrm4.html
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's jousts with the Pentagon press corps are legendary, but hardly music to anyone's ears -- until now.
Herewith, the lyrics of "The Unknown."
"The Unknown"
As we know,
There are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know
There are known unknowns.
That is to say
We know there are some things
We do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don't know
We don't know.
-------
'Secret service caught by bluffs and blunders'
19/03/2004
By Alec Russell in Washington
telegraph(uk)
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/03/19/wirq119.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/03/19/ixhome.html
Lunchtime on a sleepy Friday in late January in the Pentagon; the bureaucratic elite would soon be heading home. And then a news alert flashes up on computer screens. "Kay: no weapons stockpiles."
Within moments government offices across Washington were thrown into possibly their greatest frenzy of activity - and spinning - since the Iraq war.
"Here we go, I thought," recalled one senior official.
"Sure enough within minutes Condi [Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser] and the State Department were on the telephone."
After six months leading the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction David Kay had resigned and in a deadly parting shot he had made clear that Saddam Hussein almost certainly had not had the WMD that America and Britain had cited as the reason for last year's war.
Dr Kay is an improbable pin-up of the anti-war lobby. At the time of the war he was a passionate believer in the need to disarm Saddam. Even today he remains a supporter of the war.
"You look at the mass graves and you look at the trauma of life under Saddam and it's hard not to say that Iraq is better off, the region is better off and the world is better off without Saddam."
But in an interview with The Telegraph his critique of the West's intelligence failings in Iraq was devastating.
He cited four major problems: a lack of agents on the ground; an over-reliance on defectors, almost all of whom lied; a failure to appreciate the true nature of Saddam's Iraq; and a failure in Washington to take an overview of all the intelligence. He blamed the lack of agents - and hence the over-reliance on signals and satellites - on the culture of the post-Vietnam War era when America sought to avoid potential embarrassment by scaling down CIA operations.
More damaging was the dependence on defectors. Different agencies all but competed with each over their intelligence without realising that much of it came from the same source, Ahmad Chalabi, the leader of the Iraqi National Congress, a former exile group that is now competing for power in Baghdad.
While the CIA was wary of Mr Chalabi, the Pentagon's Defence Intelligence Agency decided he was reliable.
"And because they came out with such a volume of [intelligence], just as bad currency drives out good currency, it became an acceptable source of information." Dr Kay says he had no evidence that hawks politicised the intelligence, as some Democrats contend. But without naming names he is scathing about Washington's apparent failure to appreciate that America's competing agencies and the West's agencies all effectively had a single - and he believes flawed - source. "There was no adult leadership at the top forcing a realistic assessment."
Indeed he has a sneaking admiration for Mr Chalabi for his success in spreading his message. "He did not just funnel people to the United States, he funnelled people to other governments."
He also advocates wholesale reform of the use of intelligence. "Policy makers tend to read the front pages of documents, the summaries never have the caveats on the first page."
Dr Kay points out that everyone, including Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector before the war, and the intelligence agencies of the leading anti-war nations, believed the dictator did have the banned weapons.
His conclusion is that everyone had failed to understand that Saddam had become a classic delusional tyrant, spending most of his money on palaces, and bluffing about his weaponry to keep the world at bay.
"Iraqi behaviour made it difficult. Because in the Nineties they clearly were trying to conceal weapons, we didn't detect that the behaviour [the defiance] had continued but for different reasons.
"Spies aren't very good at understanding societal changes. Witness the fall of the Soviet Union, the collapse of the Eastern bloc . . ."
He argues that there is still a case for last year's pre-emptive strike, albeit not the one made by President George W Bush and Tony Blair.
While Saddam may not have had WMD, he says, Iraq was so close to collapse that it could soon have become a source of technology and scientists for rogue states, just as Pakistan has sold secrets to Libya and Iran.
But he accepts that if the intelligence had been more accurate we would almost certainly not have gone to war. "It's one of the unfortunate things, we'll go to war over the threat of deadly WMD but we won't go to war over a government that kills a million of its people."
While he remains a fan of Mr Bush, he says the president badly needs to apologise. "In American politics there is a view that you can never admit error, or they will hammer you.
"We now have a generation that believes you never have to admit errors. We can spin anything to make it look acceptable.
"I think he's going to run into credibility problems because he hasn't acknowledged the intelligence was wrong and that he's determined to fix it."
--------
Silencing the Truth About the Attacks in Spain
March 19, 2004
Inter Press Service
http://antiwar.com/ips/ips.php?articleid=2151
A group representing reporters and editors at Spain's state-run news agency, EFE, says the agency knew about evidence pointing to involvement by Islamic terrorists in the Mar. 11 train bombings in Madrid that very morning, but kept it under wraps due to pressure from the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar.
"EFE knew, from the very morning of (last) Thursday's attacks in Madrid, about the existence of a cell-phone configured in Arabic and about the van found in Alcalá de Henares, and knew that one of the dead was a terrorist," the committee of EFE employees said in a press release.
But "Reporting or broadcasting information pointing to involvement by extremist Islamic terrorists that was obtained from primary sources by our national news service writers was expressly prohibited," the committee said Monday.
The heads of the Madrid Press Association (APM) met Wednesday with the committee of EFE employees, who are now demanding that the agency's news director, Miguel Platón, resign.
The EFE writers accuse Platón of imposing "a regime of manipulation and censorship in this company over the last few days, to favor the interests of the Popular Party (PP) with a view to the Mar. 14 elections."
They maintained that the government's manipulation of information was aimed at ensuring a victory at the polls last Sunday by the conservative PP, which ended up being trounced by the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE).
A little over an hour after 10 explosions tore through three commuter trains during the morning rush-hour last Thursday, killing 200 and injuring 1,500, the government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA, and was echoed by the Spanish media, political parties, trade unions and social organizations.
Decades of terrorist attacks staged by ETA in demand of an independent Basque homeland and two similar aborted attempts made it logical that the group would be viewed as a likely suspect.
The on-line editions of Spain's main newspapers carried headlines that day with different versions of "Massacre by ETA." The first IPS report in Spanish was also titled "ETA Votes with Bombs and Dead Civilians," while the headline of the agency's first article in English was "ETA Main Suspect in Rail Blasts, More Than 170 Killed."
Not until Thursday evening did the government announce that in the town of Alcalá de Henares, the starting-point of several of the trains carrying explosives, police found a stolen van carrying detonators and an audiotape of Koranic verses in Arabic.
Investigators also found a sports bag containing an unexploded bomb, a detonator and a cell-phone configured in Arabic at one of the sites of the explosions.
Shortly after the government reported the discovery of the van, a London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi reported that it had received an e-mail in the name of a group with links to the al-Qaeda Islamic terrorist network claiming responsibility for the blasts.
Nevertheless, Aznar personally called the directors of El País, Jesús Ceberio, in Madrid, and El Periódico, Antonio Franco, in Barcelona, to tell them there was not the slightest doubt that ETA was responsible.
"It was then that I, under the conviction that the prime minister of my country was incapable, in the exercise of his duty, to give me assurances about something he was not completely sure about, decided on the headline: 'ETA's M-11'," Franco wrote in an editorial that was posted on the Catalan newspaper's website.
"The prime minister gave his word to the heads of the media so they would present the attacks as the work of the ETA terrorist group," wrote El País in an editorial on Sunday, the day of the elections, in which the PP, previously expected to win handily, was defeated by Spain's socialists.
The association of foreign journalists, to which the IPS correspondent in Madrid belongs, also complained that a dozen of its members had received phone calls from the State Secretariat of Communication, "explicitly requesting that our reports state that ETA was the perpetrator of the attacks."
The association of employees (APM) of the Madrid public TV station also complained of "outright manipulation," "censorship," "falsification of news," and the "concealing" of information.
"In the future, we demand that ethical standards be respected, so journalists are able to work freely and provide truthful information," APM president Fernando González Urbaneja told IPS.
On the day of the attacks, Foreign Minister Ana Palacios sent instructions to Spanish embassies around the world. According to El País, her memo stated: "You should use any opportunity to confirm ETA's responsibility for these brutal attacks, hence helping to dissipate any type of doubt that certain interested parties may want to promote."
"The Interior Ministry has confirmed that ETA was responsible" she added in the message, which she later said was aimed at "providing guidance" to embassies at their request.
Even the United Nations Security Council issued a resolution on the day of the attacks blaming ETA, on the insistence of Madrid, which said it had irrefutable evidence of involvement by the Basque separatist group.
The embarrassed Security Council is now preparing to annul the resolution.
Senior European officials also complained this week that their governments felt misled by the Aznar administration's insistent blaming of ETA.
EU Foreign Policy chief Javier Solana, a Spaniard, said in interviews with Spanish television that it seemed certain that ETA was involved because of the characteristics of the attack and the kind of explosive that was used.
The government erroneously reported on the day of the blasts that the explosive was Titadyne dynamite, which ETA used in earlier attacks after stealing several tons of it in France.
"It is clear that there was pressure," Enrique Bustamante, international relations expert and member of PSOE prime-minister-elect José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero's advisory team, told IPS.
"This was the first time that the head of government called all of the major media and that censorship and control of information was applied in the official news agency (EFE)."
When the SER radio station, the most popular in Spain, reported that "99 percent" of the evidence found by the military intelligence National Information Center pointed to extremist Islamic groups, "the phone immediately rang, and a 'denial' came from the director of the Center himself," said Bustamante.
While the government repeated "ETA" over and over again, like a kind of mantra, the evidence that increasingly suggested Islamic involvement continued to pile up.
Analysts say the public's anger at the way the government handled the information arising from the investigation, as well as the fact that Spaniards overwhelmingly opposed Spain's support for the U.S.-led war on Iraq, led to the Sunday defeat of the PP.
Despite the fact that surveys indicated that over 80 percent of Spaniards were opposed to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Aznar administration dispatched 1,300 Spanish troops to take part in the occupation.
The Madrid train bombings, apparently staged by one of the radical Islamic groups that have threatened to take reprisals against the allies of the George W. Bush administration in that war, reactivated the public's memory of its opposition to the war.
While the Spanish media continued to echo the government line that ETA was responsible, thousands of Spaniards took to the streets on Saturday, Mar. 13 to repudiate the attacks and protest the government's manipulation of the facts.
Outside PP offices in cities around Spain, demonstrators shouted "We Said 'NO' to the War!" and "Your War, Our Corpses."
Bustamante pointed out that the spontaneous outpouring of anger and grief was "prompted by cell-phone, e-mail and Internet messages" that circulated widely throughout Spain.
The initial conviction that ETA was responsible might be compared to what occurred after a car-bomb destroyed a U.S. federal building in Oklahoma City on Apr. 19, 1995.
A total of 169 people were killed in that terrorist attack, for which no one claimed responsibility. Immediately after the blast, the media reported that it was the work of "Arab terrorists" - a version that continued to be echoed for two days.
IPS, on the other hand, stated just hours after the explosion that certain signs suggested involvement by far-right white supremacists.
Timothy McVeigh, who fit that description, was eventually found guilty and put to death for the bomb attack.
"It was a cultural question," journalist Jim Lobe told a fellow IPS writer.
"Americans don't see their young as capable of the kind of violence that was visited on the federal building, but, through movies, news coverage, and facile assumptions by so-called 'terrorism', experts (many of whom are Islamaphobes), and an occasional off-the-record official, the notion that it must have been Middle Eastern or more precisely Arab in origin simply took hold.
"We in the Washington bureau were 36 hours ahead of the rest of the media in pointing to the (far-right) militias," said Lobe.
"As a person from the US west with experience with Posse Comitatus and other far-right groups in the court system, I was convinced that some Americans were perfectly capable of such an outrage, and that the target itself, a federal building, made perfect sense," he added.
"With Pratap Chatterjee, our former colleague, quickly scoping out sites on the web, we saw the chatter from far-right groups and realized that April 19 was an important anniversary. It was a matter of 'connecting the dots'," said Lobe.
---------
Spinning the Past, Threatening the Future
March 19, 2004
by Norman Solomon
http://antiwar.com/solomon/?articleid=2155
Political aphorisms don't get any more cogent: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell's famous observation goes a long way toward explaining why - a full year after the invasion of Iraq - the media battles over prewar lies are so ferocious in the United States. Top administration officials are going all out to airbrush yesterday's deceptions on behalf of today's. And tomorrow's.
The future they want most to control starts on Election Day. And with scarcely seven months to go in the presidential campaign, the past that Bush officials are most eager to obscure is their own record. In late 2002 and early last year, whenever the drive to war hit a bump, they maneuvered carefully to keep the war caravan moving steadily forward.
There was no doubt, they were a hard-driving bunch. The most powerful squad of the Bush foreign-policy team ran on the fuel of certitude at such a prodigious rate that even their momentum had momentum - maybe, in part, because their lives' trajectories seemed to demand it. War had been declared first within themselves.
Perhaps such steeliness has been almost boilerplate in history; excuses for aggressive war have never been hard to come by. In this case, no amount of geopolitical analysis - from media pundits, academics and other commentators - could really do more to shed light than the lightbulb comprehension that these people in charge had from the outset made the determination that war it would be.
So, every attempt at civic engagement and demonstrations against the war scenario was, in effect, trying to impede "leaders" who had already gone around the bend. A very big bend. One of the American mass media taboos was to seriously suggest the possibility that the lot of them - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and, yes, Powell - were, in their pursuit of war on Iraq, significantly deranged.
Working back from their conclusion of war's necessity, top Bush administration officials - with assistance from many reporters and pundits - were reading the calendar backwards, hellbent on getting the invasion underway well before the extreme heat of summer.
There was also political weather to be navigated. Though much more susceptible to manipulation than the four seasons, the electoral storms would be starting for the 2004 presidential contest, and a secured victory over Iraq well in advance seemed advisable.
The peace-seeking pretense was dripping with charade in the months before the invasion. Journalists kept writing and talking about the chances of war as though President Bush hadn't already made up his mind to order it. Yet what Bush said in public was exactly opposite to reality - a "one-eighty." When he talked about preferring to find an acceptable alternative to war, he was determined to bypass and destroy every alternative to war.
Rational arguments would not work to forestall the presidential order to unleash the Pentagon. Despite the obstacles, which included vital activism and protests for peace, the chief executive easily got to have his war - the best kind, to be fought and endured only by others.
Eighteen months ago, looking out at Baghdad from an upper story of a hotel, I thought of something Albert Camus once wrote. "And henceforth, the only honorable course will be to stake everything on a formidable gamble: that words are more powerful than munitions." Later, any and all words were to be vastly outmatched by the big guns trained on Iraq.
One afternoon, 14 months ago, inside a little shop in Baghdad's crowded souk, a young boy sat behind an old desk, brown eyes wide, quietly watching his father unfurl carpets for potential customers, and I wondered: "Will my country's missiles kill you?"
Key questions of the past are also crucial for the future. For instance, can the United States credibly wage a "war on terrorism" by engaging in warfare that terrorizes civilians?
Close to 10,000 Iraqi civilians have died because of the war during the past year.
Does the mix of mendacity and deadly violence from the Oval Office really strike against terrorism, or does it fuel terrorist cycles?
And, in the realm of news media, how many journalists are willing and able to go beyond reliance on official sources enough to bring us truth about lies that result in death?
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Scalia Won't Sit Out Case On Cheney
Justice's Memo Details Hunting Trip With VP
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6214-2004Mar18.html
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia fired back yesterday at critics of his recent duck-hunting trip with Vice President Cheney, issuing an unusual 21-page memo rejecting demands that he disqualify himself from a case involving Cheney.
Responding to a motion for his recusal filed by the Sierra Club, which is suing for access to records of a White House energy task force Cheney headed, Scalia said the justices have never been required to sit out cases involving friends in government who are being sued in their official capacities. To do so now, he wrote, would set a dangerous precedent.
"[W]hile friendship is a ground for recusal of a Justice where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue, it has traditionally not been a ground for recusal where official action is at issue, no matter how important the official action was to the ambitions or the reputation of the Government officer," Scalia wrote.
"A rule that required Members of this Court to remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling," Scalia added, noting that, historically, justices have frequently been appointed precisely because they are close to the president or other members of an administration.
Scalia's point-by-point rebuttal of the Sierra Club's motion and much of the media coverage of his trip with Cheney was unusual, both because he was not required to explain his decision publicly -- justices rarely do so -- and because of the combative manner in which a sitting justice took on what he called "a good deal of embarrassing criticism and adverse publicity."
Scalia's statement means that he will be on the bench April 27 when the court hears oral arguments in the case, Cheney v. U.S. District Court, No. 03-475. His decision cannot be appealed to the full court because on March 1 the justices issued an order saying that Scalia alone would rule on the Sierra Club motion.
"It is probably over at this point," said David Bookbinder, Washington legal director of the Sierra Club. "Obviously, we are going to consider and think about it, but we think it is probably time for the Sierra Club to move on to the merits of the case against Dick Cheney."
Still, Scalia's memo did not end the debate over his contacts with the vice president and the Supreme Court's recusal procedures generally.
The justice's statement set out "the reasons to stay in the case if one wanted to stay in the case," said Steven Lubet, a professor of legal ethics at Northwestern University who had called on Scalia to recuse. "But one would have a lot more confidence in it if it had been made by the other eight members of the court," Lubet said.
He noted that, although Scalia wrote that his conduct was consistent with friendships such as those between Justice Byron R. White and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, and between Justice Robert H. Jackson and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which did not lead to calls for recusal, those cases took place before the enactment of the federal law on judicial recusal. That statute, cited by the Sierra Club as the basis of its motion, requires judges to recuse when their impartiality might "reasonably be questioned."
Scalia laid out the kind of information about his life off the bench that members of the court rarely discuss, offering his most detailed description yet of his trip aboard Cheney's official plane to a Louisiana duck-hunting camp Jan. 5, shortly after the court agreed to hear the case.
According to the memo, Scalia has spent part of the Supreme Court's past five annual winter recesses duck hunting in Louisiana on the property of Wallace Carline, an oil services entrepreneur whom he met through mutual friends.
The idea of bringing Cheney to Carline's camp came from Scalia, who suggested that Carline invite the vice president after Scalia, during a December 2002 visit to Carline's hunting camp, "learned" that Carline was a Cheney "admirer." Scalia himself conveyed Carline's invitation to Cheney a few months later, and Cheney accepted -- offering Scalia a ride to Louisiana aboard his official Gulfstream jet, according to Scalia's account.
But, Scalia wrote, this was done merely for convenience, and he did not benefit financially from the use of Cheney's jet, because he and his son and son-in-law, who also flew with Cheney, ended up buying round-trip commercial tickets to secure a return flight.
At Carline's camp, Scalia and Cheney were part of a group of 13 hunters who slept two or three to a room, except for Cheney, who had a room to himself, Scalia wrote. "It was not an intimate setting," Scalia wrote, noting that he and Cheney were never alone together and did not discuss the case. He took particular issue with newspaper editorials that had suggested he and Cheney actually waited for ducks together in the marshes, noting that "[a]s it turned out, I was never in the same blind with the Vice President."
Cheney left the hunting camp on Wednesday, Jan. 7. Scalia stayed there with his son and son-in-law until Friday, Jan. 9, when they flew back to Washington.
In its motion, the Sierra Club argued that Scalia's trip might appear improper to a reasonable person, citing the newspaper editorials and editorial cartoons and even a monologue by comedian Jay Leno that chided or mocked Scalia.
But Scalia, citing what he said were errors in a dozen newspapers' accounts of his trip, wrote that "a blast of largely inaccurate and uninformed opinion cannot determine the recusal question."
Bookbinder said he was "not sure" Scalia's memo "cures the underlying problem of an appearance of impropriety. No one accuses him of improper conduct; it's the appearance.
"He should have released this stuff in January and then not blamed the press for not writing facts, when neither he nor the vice president would tell them," Bookbinder added.
--------
Scalia Refusing to Take Himself Off Cheney Case
March 19, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/politics/19SCAL.html?pagewanted=all&position=
ASHINGTON, March 18 - Invoking history, law and the upper social strata of Washington, Justice Antonin Scalia said on Thursday that he would not remove himself from a case before the Supreme Court involving his good friend, Vice President Dick Cheney.
In a 21-page memorandum, a rare public explanation and rarer still for describing what it means to have friends in the highest of places, Justice Scalia said it was not improper that he hunted ducks in Louisiana with Mr. Cheney in January, just three weeks after the court agreed to consider the case.
Justice Scalia not only justified his participation in the case, he also disclosed new details of the trip. "I never hunted in the same blind with the vice president," he wrote. He also recounted other cases in which presidents and justices socialized without concerns about appearance. Citing historical accounts, he wrote of a time when Justice Harlan F. Stone "tossed around a medicine ball with members of the Hoover administration mornings outside the White House," and when Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson "played poker with President Truman." And who could forget those days when Justice John Marshall Harlan and his wife sang hymns at the White House with President Rutherford B. Hayes or when Justice Byron R. White skied in Colorado with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy?
In a more contemporary glimpse into the coziness of Washington's elite, Justice Scalia wrote, "A rule that required members of this court to remove themselves from cases in which the official actions of friends were at issue would be utterly disabling." Many justices, he said, were appointed to the court precisely because they were friends with the president or other senior officials.
Justice Scalia argued forcefully that friendship is a basis for recusal only "where the personal fortune or the personal freedom of the friend is at issue," not a friend's actions on behalf of the government. As a result, he wrote, he had no justification to step aside. A Supreme Court justice's decision on recusal is final and cannot be challenged.
The case before the court that involves Mr. Cheney is the effort by the Sierra Club to force him to provide information about the energy task force he led as the Bush administration, in its early months, was formulating environmental policy. After an appeals court ruled in favor of the Sierra Club and another plaintiff, Judicial Watch, a government watchdog group, the administration appealed to the Supreme Court on behalf of Mr. Cheney. The club, alone, petitioned Justice Scalia to step aside, arguing that his participation in the Louisiana trip created the appearance of favoritism undermining "the prestige and credibility of this court."
But in an obvious jab at the Sierra Club's reasoning that social contact by justices compromises their objectivity, Justice Scalia noted almost sarcastically that two days before the club opposed Mr. Cheney's appeal to the court, the club's lead lawyer in this case, Alan B. Morrison, a friend of Justice Scalia for nearly 30 years, invited him to address his Stanford Law School class.
"It was an open invitation," Mr. Morrison said, acknowledging Justice Scalia's reference as a not-so-subtle reminder that friendships transcend even political lines.
In his decision, Justice Scalia also took issue with critics who would assume he could not rule impartially simply because Mr. Cheney accepted his invitation to hunt ducks and he accepted Mr. Cheney's invitation to fly to Louisiana on a government jet. An account of the trip was published in The Daily Review in Morgan City, La., in early January, and The Los Angeles Times subsequently reported on the potential conflict of Justice Scalia serving on the case involving Mr. Cheney.
"If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap," Justice Scalia wrote, "the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined."
David Bookbinder, the Washington legal director for the Sierra Club, criticized Justice Scalia's decision, calling it "a splendid example of how secrecy corrodes public trust and the integrity of government."
"If Justice Scalia believes the facts as he laid them out," Mr. Bookbinder added, "he should have released them two months ago before the public started to ask questions."
The decision also drew strong criticism from Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee.
"There is no question that the very fact of this episode had raised appearance and impartiality issues," Mr. Leahy said. "To many, the very fact that this vacation weekend happened while this decision was pending is enough to make the situation quack like a duck."
Decisions on recusals by Supreme Court justices are not unusual, but most are voluntary, rather than in response to a petition from a litigant. And most come without comment, let alone one as long as Justice Scalia's.
In choosing to offer an expansive rationale, Justice Scalia provided colorful details of the January duck hunting trip as well as a snapshot of a friendship that began when he and Mr. Cheney both worked in the Ford administration. Justice Scalia was an assistant attorney general and Mr. Cheney was White House chief of staff.
The trip, he wrote, had been planned for the court's winter recess - and long before the court agreed to hear the case involving Mr. Cheney. Mr. Cheney accepted the invitation, noting that national security required him to fly in a government jet, and he offered Justice Scalia the chance to ride along if seats were available. They were, for Justice Scalia, for one of his sons and a son-in-law.
In Louisiana, Justice Scalia said the hunting party numbered about 13, including Mr. Cheney, his staff and security detail. They hunted over three days in two boats and ate all their meals together.
"Sleeping was in rooms of two or three, except for the vice president, who had his own quarters," Justice Scalia wrote. "Hunting was in two- or three-man blinds. As it turned out, I never hunted in the same blind with the vice president. Nor was I alone with him at any time during the trip, except, perhaps, for instances so brief and unintentional that I would not recall them - walking to or from a boat, perhaps, or going to or from dinner."
"Of course," he added, "we said not a word about the present case."
He and his relatives stayed in Louisiana two days longer than Mr. Cheney, Justice Scalia said, flying back to Washington on a commercial flight from New Orleans.
He wrote: "Since we were not returning with him, we purchased (because they were the least expensive) round-trip tickets that cost precisely what we would have paid if we had gone both down and back on commercial flights.
"In other words, none of us saved a cent by flying on the vice president's plane."
--------
Justice Scalia Refuses to Recuse in Cheney Case
Story by James Vicini
REUTERS USA:
March 19, 2004
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/24353/story.htm
WASHINGTON - U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia refused yesterday to remove himself from a case about Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force and said his impartiality could not be questioned despite their recent duck-hunting trip.
"Since I do not believe my impartiality can reasonably be questioned, I do not think it would be proper for me to recuse," he said in a 21-page memorandum.
The Sierra Club environmental group, which sued Cheney for the task force papers, filed a motion last month asking that Scalia be disqualified from the case because the January trip had created an appearance of impropriety.
Scalia was Cheney's guest on Air Force Two on a Jan. 5 flight to Louisiana. The trip was hosted by Wallace Carline, who runs his own company that provides services and equipment rental to oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.
"The vice president and I were never in the same blind and never discussed the case," Scalia said, referring to a shelter used to conceal duck hunters.
"Nor was I alone with him at any time during the trip, except, perhaps for instances so brief and unintentional that I would not recall them - walking to or from a boat, perhaps, or going to or from dinner," Scalia said.
"Of course, we said not a word about the present case," said Scalia, one of the court's staunchest conservatives who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, in 1986.
Cheney is being sued by the Sierra Club and another group. They want him to release documents about White House contacts with the energy industry in 2001. The vice president has appealed to the Supreme Court a ruling ordering him to produce the documents.
Scalia said the flight down to Louisiana cost the government nothing because space was available on the plane. Scalia, who went with his son and son-in-law, said they did not come back with Cheney and had bought round-trip tickets.
"Justice Scalia misses the point. There's a problem when a justice and a litigant meet secretly at a private hunting retreat - regardless of what happens behind closed doors," David Willett, a Sierra Club spokesman, said.
"It is the appearance of secrecy and impropriety that creates the problem, and it clearly has caused a public outcry here," he said, adding that if Scalia and Cheney had disclosed the facts two months ago the reaction might have been different. "We wish that Vice President Cheney would be as forthcoming with the details of the secret energy task force as Justice Scalia has now been with their vacation together," Willett said. A spokesman for Cheney said, "Justice Scalia has addressed this issue and I will defer to comments he has made."
Both Scalia and Cheney worked in the government when Gerald Ford was president in the mid-1970s. Scalia described Cheney as "an enthusiastic duck hunter" and as a friend "with whom I am well acquainted."
He said his impartiality had not been questioned before the trip, despite his friendship. He said the question was whether someone would think he could not decide the case impartially because he went hunting with Cheney and accepted an invitation to fly with him on a government plane.
"If it is reasonable to think that a Supreme Court justice can be bought so cheap, the nation is in deeper trouble than I had imagined," Scalia said.
He said the trip had been set long before the court agreed in December to decide the case and even before the government's appeal on Cheney's behalf had been filed. (Additional reporting by Deborah Charles)
-------- homeland security
Metro Urges Passengers to Be Alert
Friday, March 19, 2004
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6627-2004Mar18.html
Metro has launched a new advertising campaign known as "Hey, is that your bag?" in which passengers are asked to be on the lookout for unattended items. Bombs detonated on Madrid commuter trains last week were placed in backpacks left on the rail cars.
-------- human rights
Saudis Say U.S. Was Wrong to Criticize Detentions
March 19, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/international/middleeast/19SAUD.html
RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, March 19 - Saudi Arabia's government said Thursday that it was "disappointed" by Washington's criticism of its detention of 13 intellectuals and called the matter an internal security issue.
"The U.S. State Department should have consulted with us to learn the truth regarding the issue before its spokesman made his remarks," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.
On Wednesday the State Department criticized Saudi Arabia for the arrests of 13 liberals this week, calling it a step backward that was "inconsistent with the kind of forward progress that reform-minded people are looking for."
The Foreign Ministry statement said the detainees had been involved in "incitement and using the names of well-known and reputable people, without getting their permission, to create confusion at a time when the country most needs a clear vision and national unity and is under attack by terrorists."
The liberals - who include professors, lawyers and writers - had planned to issue a statement criticizing the new National Human Rights Association, which was formed last week and includes members who work for the government, one activist, Ibrahim al-Mugaiteeb, said. The liberals also planned to announce the establishment of a new, independent rights group.
They were detained without a court order, Mr. Mugaiteeb said. Three detainees have been released.
The Interior Ministry said the men were "arrested for interrogation about issuing statements that do not serve the unity of the homeland or the integrity of the society."
When asked Thursday about Saudi Arabia's complaint about American criticism of the detentions, a State Department spokesman said the United States wants to see Saudi steps toward reforms and democratization continue.
"We'll speak up in favor of that as well as noting areas where there's been backsliding in Saudi Arabia and if it happens elsewhere," Adam Ereli told reporters in Washington.
Meanwhile, the National Human Rights Association said it was "following" the detentions.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Charges Dropped Against Muslim Chaplain
Mar 19, 2004
(AP)
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040320/D81DP83G0.html
MIAMI (AP) - All charges have been dropped against the Army Muslim chaplain accused of mishandling classified documents at Guantanamo Bay, which houses suspected terrorists, the Army said Friday.
Capt. James Yee will be allowed to return his previous duty station at Fort Lewis, near Tacoma, Wash., said Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo.
The Army charged Yee last September with mishandling classified material, failing to obey an order, making a false official statement, adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer for allegedly downloading pornography on his government laptop.
His lawyer said last week that a proposed settlement was in the works.
Miller said Yee will be offered nonjudicial punishment for allegations of adultery and pornography.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- environment
North Carolina Asks E.P.A. to Force Others to Clean Air
March 19, 2004
By JENNIFER 8. LEE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19ENVI.html
WASHINGTON, March 18 - In a move that opens a new front in the clean air wars, North Carolina has petitioned the Environmental Protection Agency to crack down on pollution that it says is seeping across its borders from power plants in 13 other states.
If the petition succeeds, states as far away as Michigan would have to cut power plant pollution by more than 50 percent, while states nearer North Carolina would face reductions of 70 percent to 80 percent.
"We believe we have done as much as we could in informal negotiations with other states," said Roy Cooper, the North Carolina attorney general. "I believe it's up to the states to move forward to clean our air. I don't believe we can depend on Washington. We have to do it ourselves."
In addition to Michigan, the states named in the petition are Alabama, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia.
Traditionally, Northeastern states and California have led the legal battles for clean air. North Carolina's action is a reflection of pressure on state and local governments, which face economic repercussions if they are not in compliance with tough new ozone standards that take effect on April 15 under the federal Clean Air Act. States are considering such actions as cracking down on power plants, lowering speed limits and discouraging house painting during sweltering summer months in an effort to reduce the dangerous combination of ingredients that produce ozone. Those ingredients are heat, nitrogen oxides and the volatile organic compounds that are often found in consumer products like paint and barbecue fluid.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that more than half the nation's population will be living in areas that are in violation of the Clean Air Act after April 15. North Carolina, despite enacting one of the nation's strictest power plant pollution laws in 2002, says it will not be able to meet the new standards in part because of pollution wafting in from other states. Gov. Michael F. Easley and Mr. Cooper, both Democrats, sent warning letters over the past several months, urging neighboring states to adopt strict pollution controls.
In its petition, North Carolina is invoking a little-used but powerful section of the Clean Air Act that allows states to ask the environmental agency to address pollution from out-of-state sources. The section was last invoked in 1997, when eight Northeastern states petitioned the agency to reduce smog from the Midwest. In granting the requests of four of those states, the agency tightened pollution controls for smog nationwide.
The agency has 60 days to respond to North Carolina's petition. If it grants the petition, the pollution sources must halt operations within three months unless the E.P.A. approves a plan that will bring them into compliance as quickly as possible.
Agency officials could tell North Carolina that its concerns have been addressed in proposed regulations to reduce power plant pollution in Eastern states. The proposal, called the interstate air quality rule, would gradually tighten limits on emissions of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide through 2015.
Cynthia Bergman, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday that the rule would allow the agency to "address the needs of all states grappling with the regional transport of air pollution rather than addressing individual petitions from multiple states."
But North Carolina officials said they hoped the E.P.A. would still grant their petition. "We believe that the remedies are not mutually exclusive," Mr. Cooper said.
At the least, environmental advocacy groups say North Carolina's petition could help push the rule toward approval. There is no deadline for its adoption.
"This petition reinforces and strengthens the need for E.P.A. to finalize its interstate air quality rule currently under consideration," said Michael Shore, who directs the air quality initiative in the Southeast for the advocacy group Environmental Defense.
--------
NASA Explains "Dust Bowl" Drought
Greenbelt - Mar 18, 2004
AFP
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-04p.html
NASA scientists have an explanation for one of the worst climatic events in the history of the United States, the "Dust Bowl" drought, which devastated the Great Plains and all but dried up an already depressed American economy in the 1930's.
Siegfried Schubert of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., and colleagues used a computer model developed with modern-era satellite data to look at the climate over the past 100 years.
The study found cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned America's breadbasket into a dust bowl from 1931 to 1939. The team's data is in this week's Science magazine.
These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains.
"The 1930s drought was the major climatic event in the nation's history," Schubert said. "Just beginning to understand what occurred is really critical to understanding future droughts and the links to global climate change issues we're experiencing today," he said.
By discovering the causes behind U.S. droughts, especially severe episodes like the Plains' dry spell, scientists may recognize and possibly foresee future patterns that could create similar conditions. For example, La Niņas are marked by cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface water temperatures, which impact weather globally, and also create dry conditions over the Great Plains.
The researchers used NASA's Seasonal-to-Interannual Prediction Project (NSIPP) atmospheric general circulation model and agency computational facilities to conduct the research. The NSIPP model was developed using NASA satellite observations, including; Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System radiation measurements; and the Global Precipitation Climatology Project precipitation data.
The model showed cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean temperatures and warmer than normal tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures contributed to a weakened low-level jet stream and changed its course.
The jet stream, a ribbon of fast moving air near the Earth's surface, normally flows westward over the Gulf of Mexico and then turns northward pulling up moisture and dumping rain onto the Great Plains. As the low level jet stream weakened, it traveled farther south than normal. The Great Plains dried up and dust storms formed.
The research shed light on how tropical sea surface temperatures can have a remote response and control over weather and climate. It also confirmed droughts can become localized based on soil moisture levels, especially during summer. When rain is scarce and soil dries, there is less evaporation, which leads to even less precipitation, creating a feedback process that reinforces lack of rainfall.
The study also shed light on droughts throughout the 20th century. Analysis of other major U.S. droughts of the 1900s suggests a cool tropical Pacific was a common factor. Schubert said simulating major events like the 1930s drought provides an excellent test for computer models.
While the study finds no indication of a similar Great Plains drought in the near future, it is vital to continue studies relating to climate change. NASA's current and planned suite of satellite sensors is uniquely poised to answer related climate questions.
--------
Fresh studies support new mass extinction theory
Friday, March 19, 2004
By Jeremy Lovell,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-03-19/s_14176.asp
LONDON - Fears that Earth is undergoing a mass species wipe-out similar to that which destroyed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago gained new ground Thursday with the publication of two British studies.
They found that the rate of loss of insect and plant species across Britain was running at several times what would be considered normal, and had been doing so for a long time.
"The world is experiencing a new mass extinction," Andrew Sugden of Science International magazine told a news conference in London. "These studies are milestones in global change research."
The studies, funded largely by Britain's Natural Environment Research Council, are published in the latest issue of the journal Science.
Earth has undergone five mass extinctions in the last 600 million years, and scientists have speculated for some time that it is in the throes of a sixth.
The two studies of the losses of British butterflies, birds, and plant species by Jeremy Thomas of the Center for Hydrology and Ecology in southwestern England and Carly Stevens of the Open University give new backing for the theory.
"The current rates of extinction over recent centuries are a couple of hundred times greater than normal," Thomas said. "Most ecologists accept that we are approaching the rates of extinction seen in the past five mass extinctions."
Thomas found that 71 percent of butterfly species and 54 percent of bird species in Britain had experienced dramatic losses or extinctions, while Stevens found numerous plant species had already disappeared or were under severe stress.
And while all previous mass extinctions had been due to extra-terrestrial events, the culprit for the current wipe-out was far closer to home.
"As far as we an tell, this one is caused by one animal organism: man," Thomas said.
Habitat loss and degradation as well as human-made pollution were to blame for the steep declines, both scientists said.
In contrast to its impact on some species of flora and fauna, global warming had actually helped boost butterfly numbers by expanding their territory northwards, Thomas said.
"Yet despite this, most of the species have declined," he said. "If it wasn't for global warming the species loss would have been even greater."
Thomas said that while it was a giant leap to extrapolate from the findings on 58 species of butterflies in Britain to the millions of species across the world, it was justifiable.
While it was true that in the cases of the previous five mass extinctions life had bounced back strongly, it had done so over 5 million to 10 million years. That is the blink of an eye in geological terms but considerably longer when viewed against human life expectancy, said Thomas.
--------
Site that prompted creation of Superfund is now clean, EPA says
Friday, March 19, 2004
By Carolyn Thompson,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-03-19/s_14185.asp
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. - Cleanup work at a former chemical dump that gave rise to the Superfund list has been completed, more than two decades after the environmental disaster forced the evacuation of an entire neighborhood, federal officials said.
Love Canal should be taken off the Superfund list now that its cleanup work is done, said the Environmental Protection Agency this week.
"By taking the Love Canal site off the Superfund list, we will mark a turning point for the nation," said Jane Kenny, EPA's regional administrator. "This was the site that really started Superfund."
The Niagara Falls neighborhood had been built on and around a former chemical dump, and by the 1960s and '70s contaminated groundwater was leaching into back yards and school grounds.
President Carter declared a federal emergency in 1978 and 1980, which led to the evacuation of some 900 families and the bulldozing of an elementary school and two streets built on the canal and the 21,800 tons of World War II-era chemical byproducts it holds.
Passage of the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act, known as Superfund, soon followed.
The cleanup at Love Canal has centered on containing the waste under a thick clay cap and high-density polyethylene liner and surrounding it with a barrier drainage system. Areas deemed safe again have since been resettled as Black Creek Village.
Under the new EPA proposal, the 70-acre site would continue to be monitored and remain eligible for any cleanup that might become necessary. The EPA's recommendation started the clock on a 30-day comment period.
Lois Gibbs, a former Love Canal homeowner and environmental activist, questioned the timing of the EPA proposal. Gibbs said the Bush administration was seeking to deflect criticism after a March 11 Senate vote against reauthorizing an expired user fee on corporations to fund environmental cleanup.
"This is a way for them to talk about how this is a turning point and that we're cleaning up these sites, when in fact, there's no money to clean up these sites," Gibbs said. "We have less cleanup, and I think it's a big (public relations) thing and they're using Love Canal to cover their tracks."
EPA spokesman Mike Basile said that the proposal's timing was related to last year's dissolution of a government-created agency that completed its mission to refurbish and sell off abandoned homes and the completion last September of a five-year review of the site.
"This is very typical for EPA to delist sites once we've completed our work at the sites," Basile said.
Former Love Canal resident Barbara Quinby doubts the area is safe to inhabit.
"If it was safe I'd be living there," said Quinby, who grew up in Love Canal. "How much longer before what they've contained leaks back out?"
Occidental Chemical Corp., formerly Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corp., used the abandoned canal for its waste in the 1940s and 1950s. The company has paid more than $233 million since 1995 to cover cleanup costs and medical expenses for victims of the contamination and continues to pay for the site's monitoring.
Exactly how the crisis has affected the long-term health of former residents remains unknown. The results of a five-year state study tracking birth defects, illness, and deaths are expected in the near future.
-------- health
Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data
HHS Actuary Feels Bush Aide Put Hold on Medicare Data
By Amy Goldstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, March 19, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6339-2004Mar18.html
Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last year if he disclosed too much information to Congress, said last night that he believes the White House participated in the decision to withhold analyses that Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be far more expensive than lawmakers knew.
Foster has said publicly in recent days that he was warned repeatedly by his former boss, Thomas A. Scully, the Medicare administrator for three years, that he would be dismissed if he replied directly to legislative requests for information about prescription drug bills pending in Congress. In an interview last night, Foster went further, saying that he understood Scully to be acting at times on White House instructions, probably coming from Bush's senior health policy adviser.
Foster said that he did not have concrete proof of a White House role, but that his inference was based on the nature of several conversations he had with Scully over data that Congress had asked for and that Foster wanted to release. "I just remember Tom being upset, saying he was caught in the middle. It was like he was getting dumped on," Foster said.
Foster added that he believed, but did not know for certain, that Scully had been referring to Doug Badger, the senior health policy analyst. He said that he concluded that Badger probably was involved because he was the White House official most steeped in the administration's negotiations with Congress over Medicare legislation enacted late last year and because Badger was intimately familiar with the analyses his office produced.
The account by Foster, a longtime civil servant who has been the Medicare program's chief actuary for nine years, diverges sharply from the explanations of why cost estimates were withheld that were given this week by White House spokesmen and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson. They suggested that Scully, who left for jobs with law and investment firms four months ago, had acted unilaterally and that he was chastised by his superiors when they learned of the blocked information and the threat.
Two days ago, Thompson told reporters: "Tom Scully was running this. Tom Scully was making those decisions." Thompson said the administration did not have final cost estimates until late December predicting that the law would cost $534 billion over 10 years, $139 billion more than the Congressional Budget Office's prediction. Foster has said his own analyses as early as last spring showed that the legislation's cost would exceed $500 billion.
Last night, White House deputy press secretary Trent Duffy said, "It is my understanding that Mr. Badger did not in any way ask anyone to withhold information from Congress or pressure anyone to do the same." Duffy said he asked Badger this week whether he had done so and that Badger replied he had not. Duffy said that Badger was traveling last night and was unreachable to comment. Calls to his home were not returned.
Foster suggested the White House had been involved as new details emerged of the manner in which he had been threatened. The actuary released an e-mail, dated last June 20, from Scully's top assistant at the time regarding one GOP request and two Democratic requests for information about the impact of provisions of the Medicare bill on which the House would vote a week later.
In a bold-faced section of the three-paragraph note -- reported in yesterday's Wall Street Journal -- Scully's assistant, Jeffrey Flick, instructed Foster to answer the Republican's question but warned him not to disclose answers to the Democratic queries "with anyone else until Tom Scully explicitly talks with you -- authorizing release of information. The consequences for insubordination are extremely severe."
The warning came in response to an e-mail Foster had sent to Scully that same Friday afternoon, 22 minutes earlier, in which he said the three questions "strike me as straightforward requests for technical information that would be useful in assessing drug and competition provisions in the House reform package." Foster offered in that e-mail to show Scully his proposed replies in advance.
Flick, who now oversees the Medicare agency's regional office in San Francisco, did not return several phone calls.
Scully was out of town and did not respond to efforts to reach him via e-mail last night. He said in an interview this week that he and Foster had disagreed over how helpful an executive branch employee needed to be to Congress. He called it "a separation of powers issue."
In 1997 budget legislation, Congress sought unsuccessfully to require the Medicare actuary to respond to all of its requests. Such language was included in a conference report on the bill but does not carry the force of law.
Foster said that the e-mail was the only instance in which he had been explicitly threatened in writing, but that "there were other instances in which Tom in an e-mail or just over the phone would clearly be unhappy and would say less formally something to the effect, 'If you want to work for the Ways and Means Committee, I can arrange that.' "
The actuary said that in June 2001, shortly after Scully arrived, he directed Foster to send weekly reports of any requests for information he had received from Capitol Hill or elsewhere in the administration.
Congressional Democrats yesterday called for the General Accounting Office to investigate the episode. Thompson announced Tuesday he had ordered HHS's inspector general to conduct an inquiry.
--------
Senate Democrats Claim Medicare Chief Broke Law
March 19, 2004
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/politics/19FOST.html
WASHINGTON, March 18 - Senate Democrats, reacting to disclosures that Thomas A. Scully, the former Medicare administrator, prevented his chief actuary from sharing information with Congress, said Thursday that they believed a federal law had been violated and called on the General Accounting Office to investigate.
In a letter signed by 18 senators, including the minority leader, Tom Daschle of South Dakota, and John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, the lawmakers cited a provision in an appropriations measure that bars using federal money to pay the salary of any employee who "prohibits or prevents, or threatens to prohibit or prevent" another employee from communicating with Congress.
The letter was sent amid a growing furor on Capitol Hill over recent accounts by the actuary, Richard S. Foster, that Mr. Scully threatened to fire him if he disclosed cost estimates of the prescription drug legislation Congress passed last year.
The issue is important because Mr. Foster's estimates were considerably higher than those lawmakers used, and support for the measure, which passed narrowly, could have eroded had the higher figures been widely known.
"I believe these actions by Bush administration officials to block Mr. Foster from providing Congress the true costs of the prescription drug bill clearly break federal law," said Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, Democrat of New Jersey and the lead author of the letter. Mr. Lautenberg added, "The questions that need to be answered are: how many administration officials knew about it, and who in the administration gave the order to conceal the information?"
Mr. Scully has denied threatening to fire Mr. Foster, but has confirmed telling him to withhold some information from Congress.
Republicans accuse Democrats of exploiting the controversy for political gain. "My view is, it's much ado about nothing," said Representative Jim McCrery, Republican of Louisiana.
But Democrats are ratcheting up attacks. Representative Henry A. Waxman of California said Thursday that he was drafting a letter to the White House asking who, beyond Mr. Scully, was involved in preventing the actuary from sharing his estimates. A spokesman for Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts said Mr. Kennedy was considering a measure to make the Medicare agency independent.
With Mr. Foster scheduled to testify next Wednesday before the House Ways and Means Committee, at a hearing that is the actuary's annual appearance on Capitol Hill, both parties are bracing for the controversy to intensify.
Democratic aides on Capitol Hill say they have known for months of Mr. Foster's dispute with Mr. Scully. But the story spilled into the open over the weekend. In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Foster said he had kept quiet about his figures because he was told that "the consequences of insubordination would be very severe."
On Thursday, Mr. Foster shared an e-mail message from Mr. Scully's chief aide, Jeffery Flick, containing that warning in nearly identical language. The message, first published Thursday in The Wall Street Journal, instructed Mr. Foster not to share his responses to inquiries from Cybele Bjorklund, a House Democratic aide, "with anyone else until Tom Scully explicitly talks with you - authorizing the release of information." It added, "The consequences for insubordination are extremely severe."
The reports are creating a growing problem for the White House and Congressional Republicans, who had hoped the bill would be a political plus in this election year. Now, it carryies the baggage of what Mr. Daschle has called "a growing scandal."
On Wednesday, the House ethics committee announced that it would investigate accusations that some lawmakers tried to induce Representative Nick Smith, Republican of Michigan, to vote in favor of the measure by promising financial assistance to his son's Congressional campaign. Mr. Smith voted against the bill.
And on Tuesday, Tommy G. Thompson, the health and human services secretary, announced that he had ordered the inspector general of his agency to investigate Mr. Foster's assertions.
"There is an ethical cloud hanging over the Capitol and hanging over the White House," Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, said Thursday. "In the Capitol, there are allegations of bribery on the House floor. In the executive branch, there are documentations of threats of severe consequences on the job for telling the truth."
Asked if the bill was becoming a political liability for Republicans, Mr. McCrery took a deep breath. "So far," he said, "I think the Democrats and their allies have done a good job of blunting the positive potential value of this to the president and the Republicans in Congress."
But, he added, "It doesn't change the fact that a health care plan for senior citizens without prescription drugs is sorely deficient, and we cured that."
--------
Chip industry to probe cancer rates of workers
Friday, March 19, 2004
By Daniel Sorid,
Reuters
http://www.enn.com/news/2004-03-19/s_14174.asp
SAN FRANCISCO - The U.S. semiconductor industry, facing allegations that its members knowingly exposed workers to dangerous chemicals, will investigate the cancer rates of chip industry employees, its trade group said Thursday.
The Semiconductor Industry Association said it made the decision on the recommendation of researchers from Johns Hopkins University's Bloomberg School of Public Health, which found that an investigation was scientifically feasible.
The study will aim to determine "whether or not wafer fabrication workers in the U.S. chip industry have experienced higher rates of cancer than non-fabrication workers," the SIA said in a statement. Planning for the study starts immediately, the group said.
Employee lawsuits against National Semiconductor Corp. and International Business Machines Corp. portray the chip industry as rife with chemical safety hazards that the companies overlook in the pursuit of profits.
Both companies dispute those charges. The SIA has pointed to U.S. labor safety statistics that show the chip industry ranked in the top 5 percent of all durable goods manufacturing industries.
Existing studies on the risks to microchip factory workers have raised more questions than answers.
A report on existing health data commissioned by the SIA in 1999 and completed in October 2001 found no evidence to support the view that work place chemical exposure increased cancer risk, but it refused to rule out that cause.
A study by United Kingdom health officials of cancer death rates among employees at a National Semiconductor plant in Scotland called for more detailed studies to clarify any links to work place conditions.
IBM earlier this month settled a lawsuit related to claims that an employee's exposure to chemicals in a New York microchip factory caused her daughter's severe birth defects. In February, IBM prevailed in a lawsuit by two former workers who claimed their cancers were caused by chemicals in a California computer hard-disk drive factory.
National Semiconductor also faces litigation in California state court by former employees who blame the company for various illnesses.
-------- ACTIVISTS
March in San Francisco Starts Weekend of Anti-War Protests
March 19, 2004
By DEAN E. MURPHY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19CND-PEACE.html
SAN FRANCISCO, March 19 - Several hundred people marched through San Francisco's financial district during the morning rush hour today to protest the one-year anniversary of the start of the war in Iraq.
The action, led by the anti-war group Direct Action to Stop the War, kicked off a weekend of demonstrations across the country by people opposed to the Bush administration's policies in Iraq. The biggest protests are expected Saturday here and in New York.
The San Francisco police said the demonstration was progressing peacefully, with eight people arrested for blocking sidewalks as the group assembled outside the headquarters of the Bechtel Corporation about 9 a.m.
A security guard at Bechtel said the company had encouraged employees to arrive early so as to avoid the protesters. About 25 people sat in a line on the sidewalk outside the building, hands locked together in a challenge to the police.
One of the people in the line, Cissy Sims, a retired gardener and a member of the anti-war group Code Pink, said she the expected more people would be arrested as the day progressed..
"I am angry at the administration for spending tax dollars on war and imperialism and spreading suffering," Ms. Sims said. "I think the world is less safe today as far as terrorism."
Last year during the early days of the war, thousands of people were arrested as they blocked intersections and disrupted commerce in a scene that one police official described as anarchy. This time, scores of police officers dressed in riot gear stood on the periphery of the demonstration, and officers kept most of the marchers within crosswalks on busy Market Street.
"Stay on the sidewalk!" one officer shouted, as the pedestrian signal turned from green to red. The leader of a protest group from Seattle, marching with musical instruments, began sounding his whistle and waving the marchers off the street.
Though one organizer with a loud speaker encouraged participants to take "autonomous action" and engage in "civil disobedience," the police described the crowd as largely cooperative and most demonstrators seemed intent on making a peaceful statement of their opposition to the war.
"We want to show the world there is not total acquiescence in the United States in support of Bush," said Dr. Michael Kozart, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital who marched under a banner, "Health Care not Warfare." "We are exercising our constitutional right to free speech. There has been a criminalization of dissent in this country."
At Pine Street, some marchers shouted profanities at a man who stood on the sidewalk yelling, "Support the war!" The man, John Price, a meat cutter in San Francisco, said he had served in the Navy during the first Gulf War and wanted to offer a counterpoint to the anti-war action.
"They like to suggest that what happens in San Francisco represents the United States, but it doesn't," said Mr. Price. "Anytime in this town when I voice my opinion, I am treated like a warmonger and a hater of mankind. People who support the war believe in law and order not giving the police a hassle."
Organizers of today's protest said the goal was to draw attention to the effects of the war and the United States presence in Iraq on the people both in Iraq and the United States. Speakers at a rally before the march said money spent on the military action has meant less money was available for health care, education and housing.
"The tide is turning against George Bush," said one of the speakers, Sister Bernice Galvin of the San Francisco group Religious Witness with Homeless People. "The tide is turning against the Bush war. Today and tomorrow, we will hit the streets and keep this tide turning."
--------
Iraqis stage anti-US demonstration
Iraqi Sunnis, Shiites stage joint anti-US protest calling for end to American occupation on eve of war anniversary.
2004-03-19
Middle East Online
http://www.middle-east-online.com/english/?id=9332
BAGHDAD - Up to three thousand Iraqi Sunni and Shiite Muslims staged a joint protest here Friday calling for an end to "American occupation" of their country, on the eve of the first anniversary of the US-led war.
They took to the streets in a peaceful march after weekly midday prayers, saying they were opposed to US military presence in Iraq as well as the deposed regime of former leader Saddam Hussein.
"No to Saddam. No to the Americans. Yes to Islam," the worshippers chanted before leaving the Kazimiya mosque, which is home to the mausoleum of Imam Mussa al-Kazem and is the holiest Shiite shrine in Baghdad.
During the service, imam Saeed Hazim al-Araji deplored the situation in Iraq and blamed the post-war situation on the US troops deployed in the country.
"Some Iraqis speak of liberation but most consider that it is an invasion and we are against this occupation," Araji said in his sermon.
"What have the Iraqis gained from this occupation," he asked, listing among the current woes the detention by US troops of Muslim clerics and "10,000 Iraqis" and roadblocks that cripple life in the country.
"We are all time-bombs at the service of the Hawza (the Shiite religious authority)," the imam told the worshippers, urging them to join ranks "with our Sunni brothers" and protest against US presence in Iraq peacefully.
The Americans, he said, "are violating Iraq".
The Shiite worshippers left the mosque and headed for the neighborhood of Azamiya across the Tigris River to link up with Sunni protesters gathered outside one of their mosques.
There they mingled, holding up placards in Arabic and English denouncing "American terrorism".
"Human rights have disappeared" said one sign. Another called for the "end to destruction" in Iraq and a third condemned the "indiscriminate" firing of US troops on suspects in the Iraqi capital.
"Before the war, Iraq had no links whatsoever to international terrorism," Sunni cleric Jawad al-Khalissi said.
"Occupation brought international terrorism to our land," he added, blaming the US presence in Iraq for nearly daily bombings and attacks that have rocked the war-battered country since major combat was declared over last May 1.
Khalissi also denounced the US military for detaining thousands of Iraqi and said: "The Americans refuse to allow journalists to visit thousands of Iraqi prisoners and won't allow them (detainees) to have access to lawyers".
The Shiites, who were the target of deadly attacks on March 2 in Kazimiya, blamed the US troops for the lack of security in the country.
The protesters also denounced an interim constitution signed on March 8 by the US-appointed Governing Council and called for speedy elections in Iraq.
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Activists Press On To Make Their Peace
By MICHELLE BEARDEN mbearden@tampatrib.com
Mar 19, 2004
http://www.tampatrib.com/FloridaMetro/MGADZS2EYRD.html
John Stewart doesn't get so many hostile glares any more.
When he first began protesting U.S. plans to go to war, drivers passing reacted angrily.
That was more than a year ago. As the fighting in Iraq drags on and Americans continue to die, peace activists such as Stewart are sensing an appreciation for their stand.
``Now that people know they've been lied to and the numbers were cooked or misrepresented, they're having a change of heart,'' says Stewart, an Osceola High School teacher and a member of St. Pete for Peace. ``We're getting a lot more thumbs-up and honking horns than ever before.''
With demonstrations at the front gates of MacDill Air Force Base and street corner protests during rush hour, the antiwar crowd gathered frequently after Congress gave President Bush permission to use force in Iraq in fall 2002. After the first bombs fell on March 20, their efforts intensified. So did public reaction.
``There was a sense we were being unpatriotic,'' Stewart, 48, recalls. ``But I don't feel I have any choice but to do this. As a citizen, I feel it's my duty to speak up against something I find morally wrong, and to keep ideas in front of people that I don't see reported or talked about elsewhere.''
Stewart meets twice weekly with a dozen or so like-minded citizens, standing on St. Petersburg street corners to carry signs and wave to drivers. As international and political developments unfold, the messages on the placards change. Among Stewart's favorites: ``Bush Lied, Thousands Died'' and ``Bush's Policies Violate Jesus' Teachings.''
``I don't feel powerless,'' he insists. ``If nothing else, I've done something for a few hours that live out my spiritual and political beliefs.''
`Sad And Discouraging Year'
Some activists have slowed or stopped their efforts. Karen Putney, a Tampa Quaker and homemaker, was among public protesters at the onset of the war; now she writes letters to representatives. Fearful of action by the government, she and her teenage daughter recently attended training to consider options should the draft be reinstated - a session offered by the Quakers' Center on Conscience and War.
She is resigned to the prospect of never seeing peace in her lifetime, so she views her efforts as part of a long-term commitment. Groundwork that can be laid today for peace might have a positive effect on future generations.
``For people of conscience, it's been a very sad and discouraging year,'' says Putney, 52. ``Some people have acted so surprised about no weapons being found. But for us in the peace community, it really wasn't. We were listening very carefully to what the inspectors were saying all along.''
Others took their activism to the source. Haven and Rose Whiteside of Tampa, a semiretired couple, left Christmas Day for a five-week mission to Iraq with the Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams.
The trip cost them about $2,500 each and allowed them to witness postwar conditions. Having seen the destruction firsthand, they ask: What did the war achieve?
``It did remove Saddam Hussein and his government. It did settle any concern over Iraq having weapons of mass destruction and it did put an end to the burden of economic sanctions on Iraq,'' Haven Whiteside, 72, says.
But all that came at a great cost, he notes: more than 500 American lives, and six times that number injured; by some accounts, nearly 10,000 Iraqi civilians killed, plus an unknown number of military personnel.
Call For Social Justice
Whiteside worries about the ``risky, unstable political situation'' in Iraq and the disruption of the lives of the country's 25 million citizens. He learned many were grateful to be rid of Saddam, but their lives were no better.
``Mainstream politicians and leaders from both political parties are asking many questions about the wisdom of war,'' he said. ``We hope that will help prevent the next one.''
Rose Whiteside, 71, says the present situation is ``quite hopeless.'' But frustration has not deterred her from activism.
``None of us can sit back and say it is too difficult and no one listens,'' she said. ``When you are on the side of truth and justice, healing not hurting, and reconciliation, there is an inner peace and I can say like the song `It is well with my soul.' ''
That vow to continue challenging the status quo doesn't surprise the Rev. Warren Clark, founder of the Tampa Interfaith Peace with Justice Network. He expects it will become more apparent come November, when Americans will be energized to vote and ``tip the scales in this election against those who misled the country into war.''
He is hopeful that Americans are starting to accept the global view that there cannot be real peace in the world without social justice.
``There is a deepening awareness that our very survival as a species depends on our ability as a world community to use our economic, military and information power to enhance basic social justice. If we do not do this, we will simply destroy ourselves.''
Reporter Michelle Bearden can be reached at (813) 259-7613.
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