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NUCLEAR
Majlis security committee to study European proposal: top lawmaker
Diversified energy options should include nuclear power
Depleted Uranium Released During Canadian Plane Crash
Second round of Indo-Pak talks from November 29
Nuke powers warned against technology denial to India
India Unaware of U.S. Plans of More Nuclear Curbs
Iran: Europe Nuke Proposal'Unbalanced'
Iran says uranium conversion plant nearly finished
Iranian uranium facility '70 percent' operational: official
Let me leave and be free, pleads Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
N. Korea threatens more nukes
Powell Presses N. Korea on Weapons Talks
N. Korea's Condition For Talks Rejected
Powell and Japan Ask North Korea to Resume Talks
Powell Rejects North Korean Demand on U.S.
Lab Tests Not Serious: US
U.S., S Korea Agree to Increased Defense Cooperation
Moscow protests at Star Wars plan for UK
Bush policies against terror fail to cover home base
NRC takes dirty-bomb data off Web site
Tycoon foils 'nuclear bomb sale' plot
Strangelove strategy defended
MILITARY
Karzai is unofficial winner of Afghan vote
Yusuf to request security forces
Somali Leader Seeks African Peacekeepers
Dismay as Serbs shun Kosovo poll
Black Watch will not blindly follow US orders
British officers lobbied US to send troops to danger zone
Suicide bombers kill 22 Iraqis
50 Iraq Soldiers Apparent Ambush Victims
Rebels Mount Grisly Ambush, Executing 49 Iraqi Soldiers
Car Bombings Kill 17 Iraqis;
Rebel Attacks Kill 18 Iraqis; G.I.'s Injured
Iraqis protest after silence greets plea for hostage
Why America Has Waged a Losing Battle on Fallouja
Israel Cabinet OKs Settlers' Compensation
EU: Israel's pullout from Gaza Strip will not suffice
NATO's New Colonial Order:
Memo Lets CIA Take Detainees Out of Iraq
Report on CIA Action Concerns Senators
Analysis: Military expert wants better U.S. policy
Army Badge Of Honor Now In Contention
Army Captain Sues U.S. To Block Iraq Deployment
U.S. army has denied most compensation claims by Iraqis
Former soldier remembers near-invasion of Alabama
U.S. dead in Iraq honored
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
After Terror, a Secret Rewriting of Military Law
California Rethinking '3-Strikes' Sentencing
Pentagon breaks with Bush on intel reform
Senators Balk at Intelligence Proposal
Border Patrol consolidates training centers
Boston Police to Use a Weaker Pepper-Ball Gun
Boston Police to Change Pepper-Spray Guns
Abu Ghraib team bids to run UK prisons
POLITICS
Kerry record in Senate put premium on probes
Lauded for 9/11 Work, but Under Scrutiny
Karl Rove: America's Mullah
Rivals Stick to Issue of Security
OTHER
U.S. Stem Cell Policy Delays U.N. Action on Human Cloning
Pandemic pandemonium
-------- NUCLEAR
Majlis security committee to study European proposal: top lawmaker
Tehran Times
October 24, 2004
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=10/24/2004&Cat=2&Num=005
TEHRAN (MNA) -- The Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee will study the European offer presented to Iranian negotiators in Vienna and will then make appropriate decisions, committee chairman Aladdin Borujerdi said on Saturday.
On Thursday diplomats from the European Union big three states of Germany, Britain, and France offered Iran a deal to receive technology, including a light-water reactor, if Iran indefinitely suspended all uranium enrichment activities. They have also threatened possible UN sanctions if Iran rejected the offer.
"Our red line is clear. We cannot forgo the right of the Iranian nation stipulated in the NPT (nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), and therefore we will continue efforts to gain access to nuclear technology and the right to enrich uranium under the supervision of the (UN nuclear) agency," Borujerdi told the Mehr News Agency.
"If the main concern of these countries is diversion of nuclear activities to a military application, we have repeatedly announced that we will never seek such a goal," he argued.
In the past Iran has kept the world abreast of the peaceful nature of its nuclear activities and will continue to do so in the future through the International Atomic Energy Agency, he said.
However, the Europeans are making illogical demands, the top lawmaker observed.
"The offer made by the Europeans runs contrary to all international regulations on nuclear activities in the world, and we will try to convince these countries that such an approach will never lead to the resolution of this dossier," he asserted. Asked about the proposal Iran made to the Europeans in Vienna, he said, "I have not received any report about the negotiations yet, but in the coming days the negotiators must fully brief the representatives of the people about the details of the talks. However, Iran's only proposal will be insistence on using nuclear technology for peaceful purposes as an inalienable right."
"The Islamic republic of Iran will not accept a (Western) monopoly on nuclear technology and will pursue its activities with determination," AFP quoted Borujerdi as saying.
"The enrichment of uranium is a question of national dignity and no-one can force the leaders of the country to renounce it, said Hamid Reza Hadji-Babaie, an MP and member of the speaker's office. "The negotiations were positive but the Europeans must take account of our red lines, that is Iran's refusal to renounce the nuclear fuel cycle."
The official state news agency IRNA quoted an anonymous diplomat in Vienna saying that the next round of talks between Iran and the European Three would start Wednesday.
On October 5, the parliamentary committee headed by Borujerdi approved a bill that would force the government to resume uranium enrichment in defiance of the IAEA.
"The plan to oblige the government to resume enrichment has the support of 238 deputies" out of a total 290, Borujerdi said Saturday.
Iran's former representative to the IAEA, Ali-Akbar Salehi, said the European proposals contained both positive and negative points, and urged the country's leaders to examine them without hesitation.
"I believe the two sides do not want to reach a deadlock. So the Europeans must move some way towards our position," Salehi told AFP.
But another conservative MP dismissed the European offer.
"A light-water reactor is useable only for medical and agricultural needs but a heavy-water reactor can also produce plutonium for use in nuclear power plants," another MP Heshmatollah Falahat-Pisheh said, quoted by the Kayhan newspaper.
U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Saturday that Washington had seen no sign that Iran would comply with international demands on its nuclear program and would push next month for the matter to be sent to the UN Security Council unless Tehran reversed its course.
--------
Diversified energy options should include nuclear power
boston globe
By Charles Stein,
October 24, 2004
http://www.boston.com/business/globe/articles/2004/10/24/diversified_energy_options_should_include_nuclear_power/
With the price of oil and natural gas at nosebleed levels, you might imagine that energy policy would be a high priority in the current presidential campaign.
No such luck.
The subject rarely comes up, and when it does the candidates revert to simplistic partisan answers: Republicans like to drill; Democrats prefer to conserve. The truth is it will a take a range of options to build the energy future. As with investing, the correct approach is to diversify our choices so we don't place too big a bet on any one solution. One of those choices should be nuclear power, especially if we are serious about preserving the environment.
Nuclear power dropped off the radar screen about 15 years ago. The plants became prohibitively expensive to build and the public lost confidence in the industry's ability to produce energy safely.
But nuclear power didn't go away. Instead it got better. Utilities learned to shrink the amount of time the plants are out of service, which means those same plants operate for more hours and produce more electricity than they once did. Nuclear power today supplies 20 percent of the nation's electricity, second only to the 52 percent generated by coal. The industry doesn't make headlines because the plants don't blow up or make people glow in the dark.
Nuclear power has other advantages. It doesn't come from politically unstable countries and it doesn't release greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming. That last point is critical. Consider: A year ago, a team of scientists and economists from MIT released a report on nuclear power. The project started with a simple premise: that eventually the world is going to have to get serious about reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
"Without nuclear in the mix, it will be impossible to achieve the reductions most people feel will be necessary," said Richard Lester, director of MIT's Industrial Performance Center, who participated in the study.
The MIT report is not a love letter to nuclear power. The authors concede upfront that nuclear plants are expensive to build.
The economics of nuclear look better if traditional energy prices stay high. They look better still if the costs of pollution are built into the equation.
If the United States adopts limits on greenhouse emissions, coal plants, for instance, would pay a penalty based on the amount of carbon dioxide they emit.
Then there is the issue of nuclear storage. The United States has spent the past 15 years trying to establish a repository in Yucca Mountain, Nev., to hold the radioactive waste created by nuclear plants. The people of Nevada are bitterly opposed to the idea.
Last summer the opponents got a boost when a court ruled that the federal government failed to prove the storage facility would keep people safe for more than 10,000 years.
On one level the court decision was extreme (Do we know if Nevada will be around in 10,000 years?), but the judges had a point: Nuclear power comes with its own set of risks.
So here's my question: How does that make nuclear power different from any other energy choice?
Oil comes from the volatile Middle East; natural gas is getting harder to find; liquefied natural gas could be a target for terrorists; coal pollutes the air; wind power is great unless you have to look at the ugly turbines; hydropower requires damming up rivers. Each energy option involves tradeoffs and each involves some degree of uncertainty. The future is always hard to see and the energy future is no different.
In investing, people cope with uncertainty by making sure they don't put too many eggs in one basket. The same approach makes sense for energy. The MIT report doesn't beat the drum for the revival of nuclear power. Instead it says this: "The nuclear option should be retained, precisely because it is an important carbon-free source of power that can potentially make a significant contribution to future electricity supply."
That sentiment wouldn't fit neatly on a bumper sticker or even in a 30-second television spot. But that doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Charles Stein is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at stein@globe.com.
-------- depleted uranium
Depleted Uranium Released During Canadian Plane Crash
Little-Known Use of DU in Commercial Jets Exposed
bellaciao.org
By Christopher Bollyn
24th October 2004
http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php3?id_article=3926
The recent crash of a Boeing 747 in Halifax, Canada, raises a number of questions about the use of depleted uranium (DU) in airplanes, public health concerns and the 9-11 attacks. When a Boeing 747 crashed and burned on takeoff at Halifax International Airport in Nova Scotia, Canada, on Oct. 14, an official accident investigator said the aircraft probably contained radioactive depleted uranium.
Bill Fowler, an investigator with the Transportation Safety Board of Canada, said the plane was likely equipped with DU as counterweights in its wings and rudder.
"A 747 may contain as much as 1,500 kilograms [3,300 lbs.] of the material," the Canadian Press reported. It took 60 firefighters and 20 trucks about three hours to control the fire.
Fowler said: "there is no threat or concern" about DU exposure to those working on the wreckage. "That's baloney," Marion Fulk, a retired staff scientist from Lawrence Livermore National Lab, told American Free Press. Fulk, 83, is currently researching how low-level ionizing radiation causes cancer, birth defects and a host of other health problems. Burning depleted uranium creates a "whole mess of oxides," Fulk said, "which is what makes it so wicked biologically."
In 1988, American physicist Robert L. Parker wrote that in the worst-case scenario, the crash of a Boeing 747 could affect the health of 250,000 people through exposure to uranium oxide particles. "Extended tests by the Navy and NASA showed that the temperature of the fireball in a plane crash can reach 1,200 degrees Celsius. Such temperatures are high enough to cause very rapid oxidation of depleted uranium," he wrote.
"Large pieces of uranium will oxidize rapidly and will sustain slow combustion when heated in air to temperatures of about 500 degrees Celsius," Paul Lowenstein, technical director and vice-president of Nuclear Metals Inc., the company that has supplied DU to Boeing, wrote in a 1993 article.
Now, some researchers are turning to the large number of sick firefighters and workers from the World Trade Center site and reports of elevated radiation levels around the Pentagon after 9-11. They contend that the Boeing 757 and 767 aircraft involved in the attacks may have also contained depleted uranium counterweights.
PENTAGON RADIATION LEVELS
Around the Pentagon there were reports of high radiation levels after 9-11. American Free Press has documentation that radiation levels in Alexandria and Leesburg, Va., were much higher than usual on 9-11 and persisted for at least one week afterward.
In Alexandria, seven miles south of the burning Pentagon, a doctor with years of experience working with radiation issues found elevated radiation levels on 9-11 of 35 to 52 counts per minute (cpm) using a "Radalert 50" Geiger counter.
One week after 9-11, in Leesburg, 33 miles northwest of the Pentagon, soil readings taken in a residential neighborhood showed even higher readings of 75 to 83 cpm.
"That's pretty high," Cindy Folkers of the Washing ton-based Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) told AFP. Folkers said 7 to 12 cpm is normal background radiation inside the NIRS building, and that outdoor readings of between 12 to 20 cpm are normal in Chevy Chase, Md., outside Washington.
The Radalert 50, Folkers said, is primarily a gamma ray detector and "detects only 7 percent of the beta radiation and even less of the alpha." This suggests that actual radiation levels may have been significantly higher than those detected by the doctor's Geiger counter.
"The question is, why?" Folkers said.
If the radiation came from the explosion and fire at the Pentagon, it most likely did not come from a Boeing 757, which is the type of aircraft that allegedly hit the building.
"Boeing has never used DU on either the 757 or the 767, and we no longer use it on the 747," Leslie M. Nichols, product spokesperson for Boeing's 767, told AFP. "Sometime ago, we switched to tungsten, because it is heavier, more readily available and more cost effective."
The cost effectiveness argument is debatable. A waste product of U.S. nuclear weapons and energy facilities, DU is reportedly provided by the Department of Energy to national and foreign armament companies free of charge.
DU is used in a wide variety of missiles in the U.S. arsenal as an armor penetrator. It is also used in the bunker-buster bombs and cruise missiles. Because no photographic evidence of a Boeing 757 hitting the Pentagon is available to the public, 9-11 skeptics and independent researchers claim something else, such as a missile, struck the Pentagon.
A white flash, not unlike those seen in videos of the planes as they struck the twin towers, occurs when a DU penetrator hits a target.
Photographs from the Pentagon reveal that large round holes were punched through six walls in the three outer rings. The outside wall is 24 inches thick with a six-inch limestone exterior, eight inches of brick and 10 inches of steel reinforced concrete; the other walls are 18 inches thick.
The object that hit the Pentagon on 9-11 penetrated several feet of reinforced concrete, leaving holes with diameters between 11 and 16 feet.
Bill Bellinger, then head of the EPA's Radiation Program for Region III, which includes Virginia, told AFP that he had received information of elevated radiation levels and contacted EPA officials at the Pentagon.
"I was concerned about that," Bellinger said. "I didn't disregard it at all."
Bellinger told AFP that he thought the radiation was from DU in the aircraft.
Bellinger, who was based in Philadelphia, did not personally visit the Pentagon site and said that EPA personnel at the site had not reported high levels of radioactivity. However, the EPA official who Bellinger said had worked at the Pentagon, Craig Conklin, now at FEMA, told AFP that he had not been involved at the site, "directly or indirectly."
Workers and FEMA officials at the Pentagon were seen wearing special protective outfits and respirators. FEMA photos show the workers going through decontamination procedures.
Bellinger told AFP that the Department of Defense was responsible for on-site safety procedures at the Pentagon.
In New York, however, considerably less attention was paid to the health risks the burning rubble posed to workers at the WTC site. A recent screening done by Mount Sinai Hospital found that nearly three-quarters of the 1,138 first responders had experienced respiratory problems while working at Ground Zero, and half had respiratory ailments that persisted for an average of eight months afterward.
"We were dumfounded by how many people were sick, and how sick they were, and how sick they still are," said Robin Herbert, co-director of the program.
Thomas Cahill, professor of physics and atmospheric sciences, analyzed the plumes from a station one mile north of the burning WTC rubble. "The small particles worried me the most," Cahill told AFP, referring to the sub-micron-size particles, which can pass through the filters of respirators.
Cahill said the high levels of silicon, vanadium, nickel and sulfuric acid concerned him. The fine concrete dust, he said, acted "like Drano" in the lungs of the workers, where it irritated and burned the wet membranes.
Until Dec. 15, the pile was so hot, a piece of paper would ignite on contact with the rubble, Cahill said. "You had the workers working on top of a huge incinerator in the rush to get Wall Street going again," Cahill said. "It was really dumb.
"Only 30 percent of the firefighters working at the site in October were wearing any protection at all," he said.
A class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 800 people who suffer health effects was filed against WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein and the companies that supervised the cleanup: AMEC, Bovis Lend Lease, Turner, and Tully Construction.
The suit was filed on Sept. 10, the last day set by a federal three-year statute of limitations for lawsuits related to 9-11.
"Under state labor law, employers have a duty to provide a safe place to work," lead attorney David Worby said. "They violated that duty. Everyone knew what was on the ground."
As many as 100,000 workers at Ground Zero and hundreds of thousands more people in the area were exposed to airborne toxins, Worby said.
"If you expose a person to this amount of lead, cadmium, benzene, asbestos and glass shards, they are going to be sick," he said. "More people could die from this than died on the day of 9-11."
AMEC Construction Management, a subsidiary of the British engineering firm AMEC, renovated Wedge One of the Pentagon before 9-11 and cleaned it up afterward.
AMEC had also renovated Silverstein's WTC 7, which collapsed mysteriously on 9-11, and then headed the cleanup of the WTC site afterward. The AMEC construction firm is currently in the process of closing all its offices in the United States.
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/depleted_uranium.html
-------- india / pakistan
Second round of Indo-Pak talks from November 29
Daily Times
October 24, 2004
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_21-10-2004_pg1_1
ISLAMABAD: Foreign Office spokesman Masood Khan on Wednesday announced the schedule for the second round of talks between Pakistan and India, which will begin from November 29.
At his weekly news briefing, Mr Khan said the two countries had agreed on a schedule for the meetings. According to the schedule, meetings between narcotics control authorities will be held on November 29 and 30 in New Delhi. They will include a meeting to finalise a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU). Meetings between railway authorities on the Munabao-Khokhrapar rail link will be held on December 2 and 3 in Islamabad.
Meetings between the Indian Coast Guard and the Pakistan Maritime Security Agency to discuss the MoU for communication links will be held on December 3 and 4 in New Delhi.
Meetings on all issues related to beginning a bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad will be held on December 7 and 8 in New Delhi.
Committee of experts meetings on trade and related issues will be held on December 9 and 10 in New Delhi.
An experts-level meeting on nuclear confidence building measures (CBM) to discuss the agreement draft on advanced notification for missile tests will take place on December 14 and 15 in Islamabad. Similarly, expert-level meetings on conventional CBMs will be held on December 15 and 16 in Islamabad.
A meeting for a joint survey of the boundary pillars on the horizontal segment of the Sir Creek area will be held on December 14 and 15 in Karachi.
The spokesman said the two countries agreed in principle to hold meetings during the foreign minister's visit to India in September.
To a question, the spokesman said Pakistan has given new vigour to attempts to resolve the Kashmir issue in line with the wishes of the Kashmiri people to ensure peace and security in the region.
He said Pakistan appreciated the United States and the international community, particularly China, Japan and Organisation of Islamic Conference states, for encouraging Pakistan and India to move forward to resolve all issues, including Kashmir. He said there is a need for more trust and a deeper understanding between the two sides to move forward.
Responding to a question about a statement by All Parties Hurriyat Conference (APHC) Chairman Syed Ali Shah Geelani, Mr Khan said Pakistan appreciated the efforts by Kashmiri leaders, particularly of the APHC, and their work to resolve the Kashmir issue.
The spokesman said finding a solution to the Kashmir issue was Pakistan's main objective and it was trying to do this through informal and formal channels simultaneously. "Informal channels are deliberately kept out of the media so they can work effectively," he added.
Mr Khan said the foreign secretaries of both countries would discuss Kashmir and peace and security in the region and they would meet twice a year to do this.
He said Pakistan had proposed foreign secretary-level talks in the third or fourth week of December this year and he expected India would respond positively.
Asked if US Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca was in Pakistan to give dictation, he said Pakistan did not take dictation from anyone. He said the US official visited Islamabad to discuss bilateral issues.
He said the main focus during the talks was on dialogue with India, particularly some new developments on the sidelines of President Pervez Musharraf meetings in New York. He said both sides exchanged views on all issues.
He said the Pakistani government had taken strict security measures to protect all foreign nationals, particularly Chinese citizens working in Pakistan.
He said commonwealth secretary general would be visiting Islamabad on Friday and Pakistan would have wide-ranging talks with him on all issues, including technical assistance, information technology, higher education and global trade.
He said the Kuwaiti ban on Pakistani workers tarveling to Iraq had been lifted and they could now go to Iraq, but at their own risk.
He said Pakistan was paying a heavy price in the war on terrorism and Pakistani soldiers had given their lives in this war.
--------
Nuke powers warned against technology denial to India
PM launches FBR programme
newstodaynet.com
Oct 24, 2004
http://newstodaynet.com/24oct/rf3.htm
Kalpakkam, -- India's nuclear programme scaled one more notch with the launch of the commercial phase of fast breeder programme by Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh, who, besides pledging the government's supprt to the endeavours of the Department of Atomic Energy, also issued a veiled warning to advanced nuclear powers that have imposed sanctions against the country in the aftermath of Pokhran II.
Stating that the functions of the DAE were 'closely intertwined with our nation's needs and aspirations', the Prime Minister said, 'technololgy denial and closing avenues for international cooperation in such an important field is tantamount to the denial of developmental benefits to millions of people, whose lives can be transformed by the utilisation of nuclear energy and relevant technologies.'
He was speaking a function organised to commomerate the golden jubilee of DAE, which was set up in 1954, and also the launch of the commercial phase of the fast breeder programme at Kalpakkam, where the indigenous technology for the fast breeder reactor programme was developed.
The fast breeder technology marks the second phase of the three-stage nuclear programme enunciated by Homi Bhabha, the father of India's atomic energy development. After the government constituted the Atomic Energy Commission on 10 August, 1948, Bhabha designed the three-stage programme for most efficient utilisation of the available fuel in the country.
Since India has limited deposits of uranium but vast quantities of thorium, Bhabha drew up a plan based on 'closed fuel cycle concept', which in other words meant reprocessing of spent fuel from every reactor to judiciously reutilise all available fissile material.
'Uranium 238', the dominant isotope of Uranium, is a fertile material but cannot make the reactor critical by itself. However, it can be converted to fissile plutonium 239 in a nuclear reactor. Similarly thorium is a fertile material but needs to be converted into fissile Uranium 233 in a reactor.
So in the first stage of the nuclear programme, Pressurised Heavy Water Reactors - the country now has 14 units in six locations, including the two units of the Madras Atomic Power Station in Kalpakkam, and eight others are being built - were set up. The spent fuel of these plants are reprocessed at the various fuel cycle facilities, including the Kalpakkam Reprocessing Plant (KARP).
The second stage of the nuclear programme, in to which India has just embarked, Fast Breeder Reactors will be set up to multiply the fissile plutonium, which is essential to establish a higher power base for using thorium in the third stage of the programme.
Yesterday, among the various things that Manmohan Singh did at Kalpakkam was to formally pour the concrete at the site where the country's first Fast Breeder Reactor is being built. The reactor with the capacity of 500 MWe is expected to be completed by 2010.
The technology for fast breeder reactors was developed at the Indira Gandhi Centre of Atomic Research at Kalpakkam, where a Fast Breeder Test Reactor (FBTR) was earlier set up. Having mastered the technology, DAE is constructing the Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor (PFBR) at a cost of Rs 3492 crore.
DAE has floated a seperate company - Bharatiya Nabhikiya Vidyut Nigam Limited (BHAVINI) - to undertake the construction, commissioning, operation and maintence of the PFBR and also for setting up more fast breeder reactors in future.
Work on the PFBR has already started with the excavation of soil in a 250 metre by 270 metre area, about 500 metres away from the Bay of Bengal.
The Prime Minister was earlier scheduled to pour concrete formally on 29 August but called off his visit at the eleventh hour. However, yesterday he did it, besides visiting an exhibition set up at the stie displaying models of the various machinery and equipment that will go into the making of the PFBR.
The Prime Minister also unvelied a 'Minar', a stone monument erected outside the IGCAR building to mark the golden jubilee of DAE. The Minar was sculpted by an artisan from Mahabalipuram.
As of now nuclear power generated through the heavy water reactors accounts for just two per cent of the overall installed capacity in the country. However, India hopes to generate 20,000 megawatts of nuclear power by 2020. In the meantime, the two 1000 megawatt reactors at Kudankulam, which are being built with the help from the Russia, will start generating electricity by 2008. The Kudankulam reactors are light water reactors.
--------
India Unaware of U.S. Plans of More Nuclear Curbs
(Reuters)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=CG3GLAB2Q5ZU2CRBAELCFFA?type=topNews&storyID=6590089
NEW DELHI - India said it was unaware of any U.S. plans to slap sanctions on additional Indian persons, companies or institutions which Washington says are aiding Iran's nuclear program.
The Bush administration has already imposed curbs on two Indian scientists -- former heads of India's Nuclear Power Corporation -- late last month for alleged nuclear cooperation with Iran, which Washington says is developing nuclear weapons.
Tehran denies the charge and says its atomic program is for peaceful purposes.
Official U.S. sources told Reuters last week that further curbs on one to three Indian entities were being considered.
"We are...not aware of plans to sanction three entities as mentioned in these press reports," the Indian Foreign Ministry said in a statement late Saturday.
Any plans for further sanctions, if any, should be discussed at the India-United States forum for high-technology trade, termed as the "Next Steps in Strategic Partnership," the statement added.
New Delhi has already asked Washington to lift curbs on its scientists saying they were based on "faulty evidence." The Bush administration said last week it may reconsider the curbs provided India offered "convincing" proof they were not involved.
The sanctions bar the scientists from doing business with Washington.
The spat over sanctions and U.S. concerns about India's nuclear capabilities have marred the increasingly warm ties between New Delhi and Washington.
India-U.S. relations were boosted when New Delhi was quick to offer support to the war on terror after the September 11 attacks.
India's booming technology sector and huge market has led to deeper economic ties.
Last month, the U.S. lifted decades-old curbs on the export of equipment to India's commercial space program and nuclear power facilities.
But the United States remains suspicious of New Delhi's close ties with Tehran, which India sees as an important ally in the Middle East.
Saturday, Indian Prime Minister Singh, speaking to nuclear scientists at a function in the south of the country, said India would never be the source of nuclear proliferation.
-------- iran
Iran: Europe Nuke Proposal'Unbalanced'
October 24, 2004
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran called a European proposal seeking indefinite suspension of its nuclear activities "unbalanced" but said Sunday the Europeans made the right decision to engage in dialogue.
In talks Thursday in Vienna, Austria, envoys from Britain, France and Germany reportedly offered civilian nuclear technology and a trade deal to the Iranians in return for Iran permanently giving up all uranium enrichment activities - technology that can be used to produce nuclear fuel or nuclear weapons.
"The proposal by the Europeans is unbalanced," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said. "However, the Europeans have chosen the correct path of dialogue."
Britain, France and Germany have warned that most European countries will back Washington's call to refer Iran's nuclear dossier to the U.N. Security Council for possible economic sanctions if Iran does not give up all uranium enrichment activities by the Nov. 25 meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
In a German newspaper interview published Sunday, the European Union's foreign policy chief pressured Iran to cooperate.
"We cannot accept Iran developing nuclear weapons," Javier Solana told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper. "The situation in the region is tense enough - it shouldn't get any more critical."
Iran was still studying the European proposal, Asefi said.
"We think we have to reach a solution acceptable to both sides so that European concerns are eased and, at the same time, our rights under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty are recognized and met," Asefi said.
Iran had its own proposals, Asefi said, but he refused to elaborate. Detailed talks with the three key European powers would resume Wednesday, he said.
However, Asefi said Iran would not accept a permanent suspension of its nuclear activities, and he maintained that the Europeans did not want that, anyway.
"The discussion is not about permanent suspension of enrichment. The Europeans have proposed indefinite suspension until an agreement is reached. They didn't call for a permanent suspension," he said.
Iran insists its nuclear activities are peaceful and geared solely toward generating electric power. The United States contends it is running a covert atomic weapons program, prompting President Bush to label Iran part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
Last month, the IAEA unanimously passed a resolution demanding Iran freeze all work on uranium enrichment and related activities, such as uranium reprocessing and the building of centrifuges used for enrichment. The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency will judge Iran's compliance at its Nov. 25 meeting.
Iran already has defied the IAEA resolution by continuing to build centrifuges and by converting a few tons of raw uranium into hexafluoride gas, a stage before enrichment.
Iran has said the agency has no authority to ban it from enriching uranium, a right granted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. However, while not prohibited from enrichment activities under that treaty, Iran faces growing international pressure to suspend them.
--------
Iran says uranium conversion plant nearly finished
(Reuters)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=6590847
TEHRAN - A key Iranian nuclear facility which the U.N.'s nuclear watchdog has urged Tehran to shut down is nearing completion, a senior Iranian nuclear official said on Sunday.
The Uranium Conversion Facility in the central city of Isfahan is part of nuclear fuel cycle activities which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has given Tehran until late November to suspend.
If it does not it faces being sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions.
Washington says Iran's efforts to produce its own nuclear fuel are part of a covert bid to produce nuclear arms. Iran says it wants the fuel for nuclear reactors that generate electricity.
"Right now, the Isfahan UCF facility is 70 percent operational," said Mohammad Ghanadi, deputy head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organisation.
"I can say that 21 out of the 24 workshops in this facility have become operational," he added in a speech at the plant to visiting lawmakers, extracts of which were broadcast on state television.
The Isfahan plant is designed to convert uranium ore, or yellowcake, into uranium hexafluoride. This in turn can be spun in centrifuges to produce enriched uranium.
Moderately enriched uranium can be used to fuel nuclear power reactors. But uranium can also be enriched further to make bomb-grade material.
Iran has announced plans to convert 37 tonnes of yellowcake at Isfahan -- enough to produce material for five atomic warheads according to nuclear experts.
But diplomats close to the IAEA say Iran has so far produced only a few kilograms of uranium hexafluoride in experimental tests at Isfahan.
Iran's Foreign Ministry on Sunday rejected a proposal made by European Union officials last week for Iran to scrap its fuel cycle activities in return for assistance with a civilian nuclear programme and the possibility of an EU trade deal.
But Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran was keen to pursue further negotiations with the EU over its nuclear programme ahead of the IAEA's November 25 meeting.
Ghanadi also said Iran's first uranium mine at Saghand in central Iran would become operational by March 2005 and said there were good prospects for other mines elsewhere in the country.
-----
Iranian uranium facility '70 percent' operational: official
TEHRAN (AFP)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041024192313.rp4xwyn2.html
A uranium conversion facility in the Iranian city of Isfahan, whose activities European states want to suspend, is now "70 percent" operational, an official from the country's nuclear agency said on Sunday.
"Most of the equipment of the Isfahan factory has been built by Iranian scientists and it is 70 percent operational at the current time," said Mohammad Ghanadi, in charge of activities related to the combustion cycle at Iran's atomic agency.
"After the end of cooperation with the Chinese, we grouped together our scientists and in less than four years we managed to complete the construction of these installations," he said in comments broadcast on state television.
"The installations in Isfahan cover a space of 60 hectares (150 acres) and have 60 units and 15,000 machine tools, most of which were built by Iranian experts," he added.
The Isfahan facility should allow Iran to convert uranium yellow cake into uranium hexafluoride, a gas used in the centrifuges that are employed to enrich uranium.
Depending on the level of purification, enriched uranium can be used either as fuel for a civilian reactor or as the explosive core of a nuclear bomb. Iran insists it only wants to generate electricity.
Ghanadi also revealed that Iran was "prospecting in most regions of the country to find uranium mines", and said that four such mines had already been discovered.
"We hope that we will be able to exploit the mine in Saghand (central Iran) from the second quarter of 2005," he said.
On Thursday European countries had asked Iran to suspend the activities of the Isfahan factory as they offered a deal to Tehran to halt uranium enrichment activities in exchange for technical assistance.
On September 18, the UN nuclear watchdog -- the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) -- passed a resolution calling on Iran to suspend all parts of the nuclear fuel cycle, including conversion activities at its Isfahan facility.
-------- israel
Let me leave and be free, pleads Israeli whistleblower Vanunu
LONDON (AFP)
Oct 24, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041024105153.q67xjbby.html
Mordechai Vanunu, who was freed in April after 18 years in an Israeli prison for revealing the country's nuclear program, told the BBC in a television interview from Israel on Sunday that he was desperate to start a new life elsewhere.
"I want to feel free, I'm not free here," said the 50-year-old Vanunu, who on release was subjected to a series of sweeping restrictions, including a ban on travelling abroad as well as holding unauthorised meetings with foreigners.
"The only way to feel and enjoy freedom and start my new life as a free human being will be when I can leave Israel and live my life in the US, in Europe or in London," he said.
Vanunu was sentenced in 1986 to 18 years in prison for "treason" and "espionage" after leaking top-secret details about the Dimona nuclear plant, where he was employed, to The Sunday Times.
"I tried to inform the world and to try to stop this nuclear proliferation," he said on Sunday in the live television interview with BBC's Breakfast with (David) Frost programme.
"My hope was that by revealing the nuclear secrets I would bring new states towards real peace in the Middle East and the abolition of nuclear weapons in all the Middle East," he said.
-------- korea
N. Korea threatens more nukes
October 24, 2004
By Sang-hun Choe
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041024-124550-5225r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea warned it will double its nuclear deterrent force if the United States persists in challenging the North's nuclear-weapons programs.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, en route to Japan on his Asia trip, rejected Pyongyang's demands that the United States "reward" the communist country before it will agree to return to six-party discussions on its nuclear programs.
North Korea, which says it has several atom bombs and insists it needs nuclear weapons to deter a U.S. invasion, said yesterday that talks can recommence only when Washington drops its "hostile policy" and promises a "reward for freeze" on its nuclear activities.
"If the U.S. persistently pursues its confrontational, hostile policy toward the DPRK from the viewpoint of escapism, it will only compel the DPRK todouble its deterrent force, much less any solution to the nuclear issue," Pyongyang's official Rodong newspaper said, using the acronym for Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the North's official name.
On his weekend trip, Mr. Powell intends to consult with Japan, China and South Korea on how to assure the North that Washington is not interested in attacking the country and on how to revive the stalled multilateral talks.
The six-party negotiations include the two Koreas, the United States, Russia, China and Japan. Three rounds of talks, held in Beijing, have yielded little progress. A fourth round was set for September, but North Korea refused to attend.
Pyongyang dismissed Powell's Asian trip as pre-U.S. election trickery.
The nuclear negotiations started after U.S. officials said North Korea admitted to running a secret atomic bomb program in violation of international agreements. That assertion prompted President Bush to say North Korea was part of an "axis of evil" with Iran and prewar Iraq.
Some U.S. intelligence analysts say North Korea may have up to six nuclear weapons instead of the one or two the Central Intelligence Agency estimates. North Korea says it has several plutonium-based nuclear weapons and denies U.S. charges that it admitted having a secret uranium-based nuclear-weapons program.
North Korea sneered yesterday at Mr. Powell's trip, with a spokesman from its Foreign Ministry describing Washington's diplomatic effort as a "sleight of hand in the run-up to the [U.S.] presidential elections."
The North also demands that the six-nation talks address its charges that South Korea is developing nuclear weapons. Seoul denies the accusations, although it recently admitted its scientists had conducted secret nuclear experiments in the past.
"The resumption of the six-party talks depends on whether the U.S. is ready to fully consider the demands raised by the DPRK," the Foreign Ministry spokesman said. Washington has said it would provide economic benefits to the North once Pyongyang has demonstrated a credible commitment to permanent and verifiable disarmament.
The visit could well be Mr. Powell's last to East Asia because it was scheduled within two weeks of the U.S. presidential election. The timing of his trip could be intended as an attempt to show resolve on one of the U.S. government's most difficult foreign-policy issues.
The Democratic presidential candidate, Sen. John Kerry, contends that the government has mishandled the North Korean problem and should have embraced former President Bill Clinton's policy of bilateral talks with Pyongyang rather than the six-nation talks.
--------
Powell Presses N. Korea on Weapons Talks
October 24, 2004
By GEORGE GEDDA
Associated Press Writer
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/POWELL_ASIA?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TOKYO (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell pressed North Korea on Sunday to return to nuclear disarmament talks even as he branded the communist country a "terrorist state" that has "no respect for human rights."
Powell's strong comments came after North Korea accused the United States of "evermore hostile acts," including U.S. participation in a multinational naval exercise set to begin Monday off the Japanese coast.
The maneuvers are part of an effort to curb the smuggling of missiles and nuclear technology on the high seas.
North Korea dominated Powell's discussions in Japan with Prime Minister Junichiro and other officials. Later, Powell flew to China where he planned talks on Monday with President Hu Jintao on North Korea, Taiwan and other issues.
Powell's final stop during his trip to East Asia will be South Korea.
At a news conference, Powell gave assurances that President Bush seeks a peaceful solution to the long-running impasse over North Korea's nuclear weapons programs.
The United States is seeking the permanent dismantling of these programs. Three meetings involving the United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia have been held in China, with little evidence of progress.
Blaming what it said were hostile U.S. policies, North Korea boycotted a meeting that was to have been held in September. Powell said it was urgent to resume the talks.
Responding to North Korea's wariness about the naval exercises, Powell said, "The only thing North Korea should be concerned about is whether or not they're going to be caught in the act of participating in ... illicit traffic. This is not hostile to any nation that is acting in an appropriate manner."
In the past, North Korea has exported missiles to the Middle East.
The United States, Japan and seven other countries will participate in the naval exercise; some 14 more nations will serve as observers.
The U.S. undersecretary for arms control, John Bolton, will monitor the exercises on Tuesday. Long an outspoken critic of North Korea, he was once derided by officials there as "human scum."
North Korea says U.S. hostile intent also was reflected in a human rights law that was signed by President Bush last week.
The law urges North Korea to allow freedom of speech and religion and calls for the appointment by the president of a human rights monitor for North Korea. In the absence of a reduction in rights abuses, the law would forbid U.S. assistance to North Korea except for humanitarian purposes.
Interviewed by Japanese journalists, Powell said the desperation of North Koreans is apparent by the number of them who jump over fences and penetrate embassy compounds "to get away from this regime that made life so difficult for them - not only economically difficult but by having no respect for human rights."
He also highlighted North Korea's role in kidnaping Japanese citizens and smuggling them into North Korea. "A state did this, not terrorists, but a state, a terrorist state did this," Powell said.
Powell's comments on North Korea were unsually harsh. The administration normally has refrained from such rhetoric as it has pursued renewed North Korean participation in the six-party talks.
Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry has said direct U.S.-North Korea talks are the best way to reach a settlement. Powell said North Korea itself is "desperate" for that kind of negotiation.
"I think anybody who would approach the problem that way, after we have gotten the six-party framework moving forward, will be disappointed, whether it's Mr. Kerry or anybody else," Powell said.
--------
N. Korea's Condition For Talks Rejected
Powell Rules Out Advance Compensation
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A56508-2004Oct23.html
TOKYO, Oct. 23 -- Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Saturday that the United States would not provide "up-front" benefits to North Korea if it agreed to dismantle its nuclear programs, rejecting a key condition laid out by the North Korean government Friday for its return to six-nation negotiations on its weapons programs.
North Korea, which had refused to attend a planned session of the talks in September, said it would consider rejoining the negotiations if the United States was prepared to contribute to a compensation package in return for North Korea's agreement to freeze its nuclear programs. The government in Pyongyang also reiterated its previous demands that the Bush administration drop what North Korea calls a hostile policy and accept its proposal to discuss South Korea's recently disclosed -- and unauthorized -- tests with nuclear materials.
North Korea's insistence that the United States join in providing up-front compensation appeared to be aimed at driving a wedge between the United States and its four allies in the talks -- Japan, South Korea, China and Russia. Japan and South Korea have offered to provide North Korea with fuel oil if it commits to ending its programs, and the Bush administration has been under pressure to provide some symbolic contribution, such as paying administrative expenses. The United States has maintained that it would provide benefits, such as a security guarantee, only after North Korea discloses and allows the verification of the full extent of its programs.
Powell, arriving in Tokyo on the first leg of a three-day tour of East Asia to discuss the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions, noted to reporters traveling with him that South Korea and Japan have offered to immediately assist North Korea. But he said the United States would not agree to such conditions.
"President Bush is committed to assisting the Korean people to a better life and to help the Korean people to deal with problems of food sufficiency, energy," Powell said. "But we can't start putting things up front on the table, from our perspective, because we do not think that is the way to ultimately achieve our mutual objective, which is complete removal of a nuclear weapons program and all of its parts from North Korea."
Powell added that North Korea should not be setting conditions for returning to the talks. "Any outstanding issues that are holding up progress should be dealt with in the context of the discussions, not press statements or rhetoric going back and forth," he said.
North Korea has long insisted that the United States has a hostile policy toward it. A key goal of Powell's tour through Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul is to emphasize that Bush, who once labeled North Korea part of an "axis of evil," has no plans to invade the country and has no hostile intent.
But that message has been complicated by the fact that the United States will join Japan and other countries in a naval exercise next week in Japan's Sagami Bay. The exercise is aimed at stemming weapons proliferation.
As Powell departs Tokyo on Sunday, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton, the driving force behind the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), will arrive to observe the exercise. Bolton, considered one of the administration's hard-liners on North Korea policy, has been labeled "human scum" and a "bloodsucker" by North Korea for his tough speeches about the country.
In its statement Friday, Pyongyang denounced the exercise, saying "the U.S. is becoming evermore undisguised in its hostile acts as evidenced by PSI exercises staged to blockade and stifle" North Korea.
Powell insisted that the exercise, the first held in Asia, "is not a hostile act toward North Korea." He said there is "nothing wrong with naval forces coming together to exercise for the purpose of seeing if we can do a better job of keeping the most dangerous cargoes from reaching the most irresponsible purchasers of such cargo."
But in a speech last week, Bolton made it clear that the exercise was aimed at North Korea. "The threats posed by proliferation from North Korea in the Asian region are obvious," Bolton told the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. "In addition to training, these exercises serve a useful deterrent to companies that otherwise might be tempted to do business with proliferators like North Korea."
Shortly before Powell arrived here, North Korea issued another threatening statement. The government's KCNA news agency said Pyongyang would double the size of its "nuclear deterrent" if the United States did not drop its confrontational policy. Many U.S. intelligence officials have said they believe that in the past two years, North Korea has quadrupled its stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium, giving the country enough material to produce at least eight weapons.
--------
Powell and Japan Ask North Korea to Resume Talks
October 24, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/asia/24cnd-diplo.html?hp&ex=1098676800&en=6f095e35126899fb&ei=5094&partner=homepage
TOKYO, Oct. 24 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell joined with Japanese leaders today to appeal again to North Korea to resume the stalled negotiations over the future of its nuclear program, and not to see a set of upcoming naval exercises as provocative or an excuse for further delay.
Addressing another sensitive matter on his stop in Tokyo, Mr. Powell also said the United States and Japan would intensify discussions in coming months on a possible reduction of American forces in Japan, particularly Okinawa, in tandem with a similar reduction that is being implemented in South Korea.
The subjects of troop strength in East Asia and how to deal with the threat of North Korea were among several matters taken up by the secretary in his first trip to Japan in a year and a half. He also met today with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.
From here, Mr. Powell is to go to China and South Korea, where he is also expected to press the cause of resuming negotiations with North Korea.
Perhaps not by coincidence, Mr. Powell's trip comes at a time of a well-publicized naval exercise to be conducted off the coast of Japan, aimed at thwarting the shipment of ingredients that could be used to make nuclear, chemical and biological arms. The exercises have drawn criticism from North Korea, which sees them as hostile.
The exercises - with American, French, Australian and Japanese forces scheduled to participate - have stirred unusual publicity in the region in recent weeks.
As he has before, Mr. Powell asserted here that the exercises were not directed at North Korea, though other American officials have made it clear that they are intended to send a message to the Pyongyang government to stop exporting weapons material.
"The only thing North Korea should be concerned about is whether or not they're going to be caught in the act of participating in this kind of illicit traffic," Mr. Powell said.
Mixing that blunt dismissal with a more conciliatory comment, the secretary added that the only way North Korea could get badly needed economic and energy help was for an accord to be reached in talks with the United States, Russia, China, South Korea and Japan to dismantle its nuclear arms program.
"The sooner North Korea understands that there's only one way to solve this problem - that is, through the six-party framework - the better off we will be," he said, adding: "We're all pressing hard. There is a sense of urgency."
Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura, speaking with the secretary at a government guest house, echoed his comments and added that Japan would urge North Korea to return to the negotiating table at a meeting next month with North Korean envoys to discuss the contentious issue of Japanese citizens abducted by North Korea several years ago.
Talks aimed at ending the north's nuclear program have sputtered for a year and a half with a small breakthrough last summer when the Bush administration agreed to let Japan and South Korea suggest that they could provide energy and economic aid to North Korea if it started on the road to ending its program.
Then just as the first signs of progress were glimmering, North Korea boycotted what was supposed to be another round in September, prompting comments from Japanese and South Korean diplomats that the Pyongyang government was evidently waiting to see how the American presidential election turned out.
Among other things, the north's delaying tactics have deprived President Bush of the opportunity to boast that diplomacy was working with North Korea, even as hardliners in Congress and elsewhere have begun quietly floating the idea that the only thing that will work with the north is "regime change" - either by replacing or reforming the government led by President Kim Jong Il.
Earlier this month, a coalition of both conservatives and liberals in Congress passed a resolution calling on the United States to make human rights reform an element of any discussions with North Korea on its nuclear ambitions. In addition, the resolution calls on the United States not to grant any economic aid to the north - which Mr. Bush has hinted would be forthcoming in a final deal - without measurable progress on human rights.
The resolution, which Mr. Bush signed on Monday on the eve of Mr. Powell's trip to the region, has also caught the attention of the media in Japan, China and South Korea - not to mention in North Korea, where it has been denounced along with the naval exercises as hostile in intent.
Supporters of the resolution in Congress say that, although there is nothing explicit in it calling for the overthrow of the current government, they want such a change at least to be discussed.
The resolution did not have the enthusiastic backing of those in the Bush administration who are trying to push for negotiations with the north, and Secretary Powell has been careful not to say that he would definitely make human rights changes a part of negotiations with the Pyongyang government.
Before arriving in Tokyo, he said he had not brought up this idea yet with China, Japan and South Korea, where it is considered likely to be greeted unenthusiastically.
American officials also do not emphasize the signal that might be sent by the planned reduction of American forces in the region. Instead, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld has been saying the reduction of the 37,000 troops in South Korea would lead to increased capacity to defend the south because of technology improvements in the military.
There are 40,000 American troops in Japan, which welcomes them as a signal that the United States is ready to defend Japan against attack, but which also sees them as an irritant in various communities, especially in the southern island of Okinawa where most of them are based.
An administration official said Japan and the United States had agreed to step up their discussions on the issue, perhaps reaching some kind of agreement before the end of Mr. Bush's term of office in January.
--------
Powell Rejects North Korean Demand on U.S.
October 24, 2004
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/24/international/asia/24diplo.html?pagewanted=all
TOKYO, Oct. 23 - Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Saturday rejected North Korea's latest demand that the United States drop its "hostile" policy toward that nation and agree to other steps before the stalled regional talks on its nuclear weapons program resume.
Mr. Powell, speaking to reporters on his plane before arriving in Tokyo for a three-day visit to Japan, China and South Korea, said that "to put forward these kinds of conditions, which may lead to yet another set of conditions, is not the way to approach this problem."
He added that North Korea should take up any of its concerns at the talks themselves rather than lay out preconditions for the talks. He was responding to a statement from North Korea the day before that three conditions had to be met before it would return to talks on its nuclear program after more than three months of delay.
The North Korean demands were laid out by a Foreign Ministry spokesman to the official KCNA news agency. North Korea is believed by Western experts to have amassed enough weapons-grade nuclear fuel for at least two nuclear bombs, and possibly several more, in the past two years.
On Saturday, North Korea said that if the United States persisted in its approach, it would double the size of its "deterrent force,'' a commentary by the KCNA news agency said in the official daily Rodong Sinmun, Reuters reported.
Addressing a separate matter, Mr. Powell said that in response to a recently enacted Congressional resolution on North Korea, the Bush administration would press for human rights concerns there to be discussed "by the international community" but that no plans had been set to make that issue a part of the nuclear talks.
The North Korean Human Rights Act, signed into law earlier in the week, links any economic aid to North Korea with progress on political prisoners, free speech and other human rights, and it says that concerns about human rights must become part of the talks on North Korea's nuclear programs.
The law has been denounced by North Korea and has met with skepticism in China and South Korea, where some officials say it might complicate the drive to get cooperation from the highly secretive and suspicious government in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital.
Mr. Powell said that human rights is "something we should talk about" and that he had assured sponsors of the resolution that the United States would do so, but that he and his aides had not yet decided on how best to approach the subject.
The human rights law also authorizes expenditures for aid for civilians and for North Korean refugees, and to private groups pressing for reform in North Korea. Some Asian experts say such steps could prompt charges of inappropriate interference by North Korea, but there is also a strong constituency in Congress for not overlooking the problem of North Korea's dictatorship in any solution on the nuclear issue.
Besides the demand that the United States drop its "hostile" policy, North Korea said that the United States must agree to discuss South Korea's own nuclear program and that there must be American participation in the aid package put forward by Japan and South Korea as an incentive for the North to abandon its nuclear weapons aspirations.
North Korea's nuclear program has been the focus of talks involving the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, but North Korea boycotted a round scheduled for September, citing several reasons, including the disclosure earlier this year of nuclear weapons technology experiments conducted in South Korea several years ago.
Mr. Powell suggested Saturday that even the subject of the South's nuclear experiments, which he said were minor and being investigated by international inspectors, "should not be an obstacle" to talks, and that North Korea was welcome to bring up its concerns in discussions.
Some Bush administration officials say they believe that North Korea has been stalling its return to the talks until after the outcome of the American presidential election. Mr. Powell said he would not attribute any motives to North Korea, but that, whoever is elected, the framework for dealing with the talks with all six nations would continue.
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, has said he would continue the six-party format but also engage in two-way talks between the United States and North Korea.
Another recent irritant in American relations with North Korea was dismissed as inconsequential by Mr. Powell: the North Korean government's denunciation of a planned naval drill in the coming week off the coast of Japan, where American, French, Australian and Japanese ships will practice intercepting a ship as if it were carrying chemical weapons.
Several such drills have been conducted around the world in the last year and a half under a program known as the Proliferation Security Initiative. Mr. Powell said North Korea's concerns were unwarranted. "It does not threaten North Korea," he said. "It protects the rest of the world."
Mr. Powell said that the United States would, meanwhile, continue to supply North Korea with food aid to ease starvation. The State Department has said that 50,000 tons of food was recently authorized.
--------
Lab Tests Not Serious: US
10-24-2004
koreatimes.co.kr
By Reuben Staines
http://times.hankooki.com/lpage/nation/200410/kt2004102417174011970.htm
A senior U.S. official has reassured South Korea that its recently disclosed nuclear experiments are not a major worry, quelling reports that Washington is distrustful of Seoul's nuclear activities.
U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told South Korea Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung over the weekend that the United States is comfortable with the Seoul government's handling of the controversial experiments.
``Condoleezza Rice told me that South Korea's uranium and plutonium experiments are not a serious problem and the government does not need to be overly concerned about them,'' Yoon said during a briefing with South Korean correspondents in Washington.
``South Korea's efforts for nuclear transparency are a good example for other countries,'' the defense minister quoted Rice as saying.
Yoon met Rice on the sidelines of his annual bilateral security consultation with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Washington's reassurance comes after claims last week that the U.S. was considering dispatching a team of nuclear experts to investigate the circumstances surrounding the lab tests, which are already being examined by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Another report suggested the U.S. would push to have the issue referred to the U.N. Security Council.
The tests _ one conducted in 1982 to extract plutonium and the other in 2000 to enrich uranium _ were revealed by Seoul last month and initially triggered speculation of a government-funded nuclear weapons research program.
But the government has asserted they were isolated academic exercises and promised to cooperate fully with the U.N. nuclear watchdog to prove it has no ambitions to possess nuclear weapons.
The IAEA will discuss the findings of its probe into the lab tests at a meeting next month but its chief, Mohamed ElBaradei, has downplayed the seriousness of the investigation.
North Korea, however, has denounced the South's nuclear activities, citing them as one reason for refusing to return to six-party talks on dismantling its nuclear weapons programs.
It accuses the U.S. and the IAEA of setting a double-standard by condoning Seoul's lab tests while condemning Pyongyang for developing nuclear weapons.
-----
U.S., S Korea Agree to Increased Defense Cooperation
chosun.com
Oct.24,2004
http://english.chosun.com/w21data/html/news/200410/200410240005.html
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and South Korean Defense Minister Yoon Kwang-ung agreed to establish a Strategic Policy Initiative (SPI) to discuss long-term alliance tasks, during the annual Security Consultative Meeting at the Pentagon on Friday (local time). Assistant Defense Minister for Policy Ahn Kwang-chan said that the initiative will help the two countries to discuss the future of their alliance over the next one to two years. The two defense chiefs announced a 13-clause joint statement, which confirms the two nation's willingness to strengthen their alliance and the U.S.'s pledge to continue to improve the defense and nuclear umbrella for South Korea.
When asked what he thought about bilateral talks between the U.S. and North Korea, during the press conference, the South Korean minister said that the Korean government has never considered bilateral meetings or talks between North Korea and the United States, but if the negotiation were to happen, he would assume there should be close consultations between Washington and Seoul first. Also, in a meeting with Korean reporters, he cited U.S. National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice as saying that South Korea's experiments to enrich uranium and plutonium are not serious problems and that South Korea does not need to worry about it. In regards to North Korea's possession of nuclear weapons, he said that his country assumes that the North might have extracted 10 to 14 kg of plutonium in the early 1990s and produced 1 to 2 nuclear weapons.
(Heo Yong-beom, heo@chosun.com )
-------- missile defense
Moscow protests at Star Wars plan for UK
24 October 2004
independent.co.uk
By Severin Carrell and Francis Elliott
http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/story.jsp?story=575481
The Russian government has angrily protested about a secret deal - revealed last week by The Independent on Sunday - to site US missiles in Britain as part of the "son of Star Wars" programme.
A spokesman for the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov, warned that the move would "represent a disturbing new step" in international relations and posed a "possible threat to the security of Russia".
The Foreign Ministry also hinted heavily that siting US missiles in Britain or elsewhere in Europe could lead to a new arms race with the US - a threat that will alarm ministers and opponents of the proposal.
Moscow's criticisms came after the IoS disclosed that Tony Blair has privately given President George Bush an agreement in principle to host interceptors in Britain as part of the US "ballistic missile defence" system.
The true extent of Britain's deepening co-operation with the Pentagon on bringing the system to the UK was revealed in an official document on missile defence released by the Secretary of State for Defence, Geoff Hoon, last week.
It confirms that detailed studies into how the "son of Star Wars" weapons system would extend to cover Britain have begun. They include how and where US missiles will be sited and how effective they would be in shooting down an enemy's ballistic missiles.
These further disclosures led Nicholas Soames, the Shadow Defence Secretary, to demand in the Commons last week that Mr Hoon "come clean" about the Government's thinking. As ministers continued to insist no formal decision had been taken, Mr Soames claimed the Government had a history of taking sensitive military decisions in secret without informing MPs.
The "son of Star Wars" agreement - signed in June last year by the MoD's chief scientist, Professor Roy Anderson, and the head of the US Missile Defence Agency, Lieutenant-General Henry Obering - confirms the MoD is working on the "development and analysis of options for the extension of the US system to make missile defence capabilities available to the UK".
It also reveals that the MoD is investigating whether shooting down nuclear-armed, biological or chemical weapons over the UK could contaminate Britain or other parts of northern Europe with fallout.
-------- terrorism
Bush policies against terror fail to cover home base
October 24, 2004
By TOM THOMPSON
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/196204_focus24.html
The threat we face from Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida, made so savagely real by the 9/11 attacks, has mostly been followed, under President Bush, by "taking the battle to the enemy" policies abroad that have missed their mark in making us any safer here in Seattle and throughout the United States.
We have diverted our initial focus on Afghanistan, and we are mainly losing the war in Iraq. In the process, the invasions and occupations of both of those countries -- our most aggressive response to 9/11 -- has made homeland defense the frightening, soft underbelly of the security of our nation as we know it.
The quagmire abroad has left us exposed to the growing grass roots of Muslim anger in a breeding ground for even more terrorism, perhaps this time with a nuclear component. Here in Seattle, as is the case throughout the country, we continue to receive a steady diet of "stay-calm" pronouncements that we are winning the war on terror. The threat-warning indicator is illustrated by way of a tacky and confusing traffic-light-looking device. As if to comfort children who don't know any better, we are told to buy "disaster supply kits" that include duct tape and plastic sheeting to make our homes WMD-proof fortresses.
Fortresses they are not, as evidenced by the knowledge that terrorists are striving to acquire and then use nuclear weapons against us. The battlefield realities, which include Seattle realities, are too chilling to ignore. We know, for example, that Seattle landmarks are on the top-10 target list of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We know that some of these landmarks, including the ferry system, have been under suspicious surveillance. And we have a number of documents discovered in Afghanistan that have clearly revealed al-Qaida's detailed knowledge of nuclear weaponry.
Literally nobody doubts that a small group of perhaps four or five expert scientists with adequate design and specifications expertise might be able to build a crude nuclear bomb if they could acquire enough essential fissile material, either highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium.
Acquiring fissile material is the hard part of nuclear weapons construction. Creating material from naturally occurring or reactor-grade materials is a complicated, expensive process. When a nation, for example, wants a completely indigenous, self-sustaining system to build a nuclear arsenal, the enrichment process is crucial and difficult to develop in secret.
But because only a relatively small amount of HEU or plutonium is needed to build a bomb, terrorists such as al-Qaida could feasibly steal or buy enough material to build a weapon. A crude nuclear device might use a hundred pounds of HEU. A more sophisticated design would require less than half that much HEU or maybe just 10 pounds of plutonium. For a device to be finally assembled within U.S. borders, these would hardly be cumbersome packages.
A terrorist doesn't really need the best "weapons grade" material. Building a ballistic missile warhead with limited payload weights would not be the goal. The final product might even "fizzle" and yield a smaller-than-expected blast. The terrorist with limited resources certainly isn't going to mind.
It needs to be said that we are talking about high-risk/low-probability nuclear terror. But aren't we ignoring a straightforward CIA estimate last year that a terrorist nuclear weapon is far more likely to arrive in a cargo container than on the tip of a missile? We live in an area where, of the 3.2 million ocean containers coming through the Ports of Seattle and Tacoma each year, at least 3 million are arriving without screening or content verification.
It's a "needle in a haystack" challenge, especially with perhaps a lead-shielded weapon in one of those containers. But let's at least make it much more difficult for the bad guys to succeed. A massive effort at container tracking from point of origin is one essential example. No matter what the possible delivery method, we are talking about the ultimate security nightmare.
Against this growing reality is the current approach to homeland security -- to mainly leave the home game largely to state and local governments or to the private-sector users of critical infrastructure, our port and inland waterways being prime examples.
The new federal outlays for homeland security in the two years after 9/11 commanded an investment equal to only 4 percent of the Pentagon's annual budget. From another perspective, as Stephen Flynn writes in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs magazine, the federal government is spending more every three days to finance the war in Iraq than it has provided over the past three years to secure all U.S. seaports.
Doubters of the possibilities for a Seattle Doomsday Scenario should have the sobering experience, as I have, of looking over a blast map of Seattle as a nuclear target should a nuclear device be detonated here. The path of destruction of a crude 10- or 12-kiloton bomb (on the order of what was dropped on Hiroshima) is staggering.
Yes, weather conditions and blast elevation matter, but certainly the downtown core would be cratered and vaporized. At ground zero, temperatures would rise to 10 million degrees Fahrenheit. At a mile out, ambient temperatures would be equal to the temperature of the sun (with the scale of death and destruction from fires to complete the metaphor). The blast's overpressure and radiation would kill thousands, both quickly, as well as more slowly. Then there is the prospect for a nationwide panic and economic chaos if terrorists subsequently claimed to have another bomb.
Traditional deterrence is likely to fail, because a perpetrator would likely believe there was no return address against which to retaliate. "Even if the perpetrator of such an attack was known," says Stanford University's Scott Sagan, "Jihadi terrorists might welcome U.S. threats to retaliate in kind, since the U.S. use of nuclear weapons could hasten the downfall of allied regimes in the Muslim world through protests and riots."
Ironically, the U.S. invasion of Iraq has not only created more terrorists, it also has encouraged nuclear proliferation. Few analysts doubt that if Saddam Hussein had acquired such weapons, he would still be in power and possibly still in Kuwait. Iran's leaders certainly believe that, and they have seen how North Korea rivets the world's attention. Iran wants that attention and respect for its borders, too. The problem, of course, is that as nuclear states proliferate, the list of potential sources for the first nuclear terrorist's weapons also increases, either by theft, purchase or through sympathizers inside the government.
It would be disingenuous to ignore the fact that 95 percent of the nuclear bombs and most of the nuclear weapons fuel in the world are in the hands of Russia and the United States. Russia has huge, poorly guarded stockpiles of nuclear bomb fuel, which fortunately has been reduced as a result of the U.S. Nunn-Lugar Act. Still, in the two years after 9/11, fewer potential weapons in Russia were secured than in the two years before the attack.
Meanwhile, in the United States, we continue "Strangelovian" plans on unneeded new nuclear weapons. At the same time, the Bush administration has endorsed and promoted reconsideration of "advanced reprocessing" of spent reactor fuel. Why such a problem?
Simply because separated plutonium could be diverted within a plant, or simply stolen, and then readily transformed back into metal plutonium suitable for a bomb.
In contrast to President Bush, Sen. John Kerry has repeatedly claimed that he would do a better job in rallying, and pressuring, other countries to a genuine coalition for a worldwide effort to safeguard all fissile material.
Maybe? Maybe not. Is anybody in North Korea or Iran listening? There is no reason for easy optimism.
Aside from our enemies, we seem to have plenty to fear from our allies -- Pakistan, for example, where it was discovered late last year that A.Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, had been selling nuclear technology and services on the black market. The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency called Khan's efforts the equivalent of a "Wal-Mart of private sector proliferation," a decades-old illicit market in nuclear materials, designs, technologies and consulting services, and it was all run out of Pakistan.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has tried to bury the whole affair. But nobody denies that Pakistan's nuclear genie is out of the bottle. We just need to identify the now-unknown extent of the metastasis. Even after Musharraf decided to support the war against bin Laden and the Taliban, we do not know how many secret Jihadi supporters are operating inside the shadows of Pakistan's military intelligence agencies.
It is, of course, the unknowns in the scenario of nuclear terrorism that are so frightening. What is known is that our guard at home is down. We are exposed, and we are tempting targets for people who believe that it is their "religious duty" to use nuclear weapons against us. It is certainly not a time when our armed forces should be organized only abroad for what also appears to be a long and deadly struggle at home. Tom Thompson is president of Analytics Inc., a local consulting firm with both business and government clients.
-----
NRC takes dirty-bomb data off Web site
The Patriot-News
BY GARRY LENTON
October 24, 2004
http://www.pennlive.com/news/patriotnews/index.ssf?/base/news/1098609613111490.xml
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has taken eight or nine documents off its Web site, acknowledging they contained information that could be of value to terrorists.
And more of the same kinds of documents, which pinpoint the location of weapons-grade radioactive materials that could be used in a nuclear device or dirty bomb, might also be removed from the public records database, the agency said. The NRC also decided to stop posting documents to the Web until they have been reviewed by staff.
"We are developing a criteria for what should be released [to the public] and what should be withheld," said Beth Hayden, a spokeswoman for the NRC.
The action comes two weeks after The Patriot-News reported that the NRC's Web site included documents showing the exact location of nuclear materials used at colleges, universities, hospitals and research facilities. Some of the records included floor plans showing the building, office number, and location of storage vaults, even which doors were locked.
The documents provided information about plutonium, uranium, strontium, cesium and cobalt.
When told of the discovery by a reporter, an NRC official responsible for safeguarding information admitted that portions of the records should not have been made public.
Joel Lubenau, a former senior assistant to two NRC commissioners and now a consultant for the Monterey Institute for International Study, praised the agency for taking the step.
"Better late than never," said Lubenau, who lives in Lititz, Lancaster County.
Lubenau, who specializes in stopping the proliferation of nuclear materials, urged the NRC to move quickly to review its records. "My only question would be, 'What is your time frame for doing this?'" he said. "What resources will you need and from what program will they be taking resources away?"
Scott Portzline, the Harrisburg resident who discovered the records on the NRC's site, said he was encouraged by the agency's move, but also frustrated.
"It's regrettable that they had to be embarrassed into this situation," said Portzline, who has spent years studying nuclear security issues. "The NRC has had to be dragged kicking and screaming every step of the way to improve security at nuclear plants and in its documentation."
Since the 9-11 attacks, the NRC has imposed stricter security requirements on the nuclear industry. Guard numbers have been increased, weaponry upgraded, and the level of attack plants must be able to defend against was toughened. But it took the agency nearly three years to implement some of those changes.
In the days after 9-11, the agency focused its attention on the high-risk targets, the nuclear plants, the NRC's Hayden said. Now, it is turning greater attention to what it calls "second level" information, information that when used together may be helpful to terrorists, she said.
A task force could be convened to study the documents currently being made public, Hayden said.
The records identified by Portzline, The Patriot-News, and subsequently by NBC News, were routine applications to renew licenses to use radioactive materials. The NRC, which regulates and licenses the use of radioactive materials, tracks more than 21,000 users.
Most possess only small amounts of materials for use in research, medicine, or industry. Alone, they are not enough to pose a threat. But most of the institutions that use the materials are not highly protected, as nuclear plants are. Security experts worry that terrorist groups could steal enough radioactive materials from several locations to build a dirty bomb.
The NRC is working to provide licensees, such as the Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and Penn State University, with guidelines on what information to leave out of applications, Hayden said.
In the meantime, the NRC must decide which information is in the public interest to reveal and which is not.
The letters removed from the Web site might eventually be returned, but with pages missing, Hayden said.
"We do have to keep openness in mind," Hayden said. "The ideal would be to keep out sensitive portions and return the rest to the Web site."
GARRY LENTON: 255-8264 or glenton@patriot-news.com
--------
Tycoon foils 'nuclear bomb sale' plot
Times Online David Leppard October 24, 2004 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1325302,00.html
THE London-based Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky has claimed that the intelligence services helped to foil a plot by Chechen terrorists to sell a nuclear device on the international black market.
Berezovsky last week described the curious events that led to him tipping off the authorities about the plot.
The exiled Russian oligarch, who according to The Sunday Times Rich List is the 14th richest man in Britain, said that he had contacted British and American intelligence after being approached by a Chechen at his home in Surrey.
The Chechen said he was acting as an intermediary for a man who wanted to sell a nuclear bomb concealed in a suitcase for $3m (£1.6m).
The tycoon arranged for a member of his staff to meet the Chechen at the Bristol hotel in Paris. The two-hour meeting was taped on Berezovsky's instructions and the tycoon handed the tape to the CIA at the American embassy in London.
A senior Whitehall security official confirmed that MI5 was aware that Berezovsky had approached the authorities on several occasions "offering to assist in investigations into the supply of illicit nuclear and radiological materials".
"He has made these allegations to the authorities in private, but we can't discuss the details," the official said.
After the Beslan school siege last month, for which Shamil Basayev, the Chechen warlord, claimed responsibility, the possibility that rebels in the breakaway republic may be able to acquire a small nuclear device is causing alarm among senior officials in Moscow and the West.
Two years ago American officials revealed their fears that Chechen rebels had stolen radioactive materials, possibly including plutonium, from a Russian nuclear power station in the southern region of Rostov.
The disappearance of the materials from the Volgodoskaya nuclear power station, near the city of Rostov-on-Don, heightened fears that weapons-grade material, including caesium, strontium and low-enriched uranium. had been obtained by Chechen terrorists.
The theft was reported by Russian officials to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which told the US energy department. Speaking for the first time about the plot, Berezovsky said that he had been approached in 2002 by a Chechen living in Paris whom he knew as Zakhar.
The Russian tycoon had previously helped Zakhar by giving him $5,000 when the two men were in exile in Paris. He said: "I didn't hear from him again until he rang me when I was in England and said he had enormous, very important information about nuclear weapons.
"I informed the American embassy in London. I told them it could be serious or it could be a provocation." Berezovsky asked Yuli Dubov, a business associate and fellow exile, to investigate the background to the plot. Dubov said that Zakhar had claimed that the portable bomb was one of several made by Soviet scientists during the early 1990s.
"One of them disappeared during the mess of the early 1990s," Dubov wrote in a report. "The person who holds this suitcase with a bomb wants to sell it and he (Zakhar) is empowered to act for him.
"Zakhar approached Berezovsky. The price asked for it is not large, only $3m. The idea is that Berezovsky pays $3m and advises on whom the A-bomb should be delivered (to). Zakhar will then organise everything in the best possible way."
During a subsequent meeting, arranged at the behest of the CIA in London, Zakhar was asked by Berezovsky's aide to provide evidence that the nuclear device existed. But Zakhar, by this time suspecting a trap, failed to do so. Berezovsky said that he reported the matter to British intelligence through an intermediary.
That was end of the affair, as far as Berezovsky was aware. It could have been a hoax and he does not know whether the intelligence services tried to retrieve the nuclear device. The plot is the latest in a series of strange incidents to involve Berezovsky, who was granted political asylum by David Blunkett, the home secretary, last year.
Once Russia's most influential tycoon, Berezovsky, 58, has a £1.8 billion fortune and recently bought a Surrey estate for £10m from Chris Evans, the radio DJ. He was forced to flee Russia after falling out with President Vladimir Putin.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Strangelove strategy defended
The Union Leader
By ROBERT KOEHLER
October 24, 2004
http://www.theunionleader.com/articles_showa.html?article=46020
NUKE CHINA in order to win the Korean war? Fruitcake bellicosity never seemed so attractive. Such is the charm of Niall Ferguson, the dapper Scot historian who can turn thermonuclear Armageddon and the probable death of vague yellow-skinned millions into nothing worse than a regrettable necessity, an act of tough love.
At least I got a chance to look him in the eye.
The occasion was two intense days of discussion and counter-discussion at Macalester College, in St. Paul, Minn., where my daughter is a heart-melting month and a half into her freshman year. By wonderful design, the school's annual International Roundtable occurs during Family Weekend, so I not only got to visit my kid but also drink my cup of tea - that is, listen, talk and spit out politics.
This year the topic of the roundtable was: "America and Global Power: Empire or . . ." Ferguson, author and Harvard professor, was one of three distinguished academic heavies invited to sit in on panels, present papers and collide with one another and with faculty, students and even parents. The others were Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute and Tariq Ali, author, editor of New Left Review and the only liberal of the bunch (but the school itself is so liberal, things more or less balanced out).
I'd forgotten how heady ideas can get in the ivory tower, where they are not mere servants of policy but ends in themselves, precisely articulated, nuanced, volatile. I had to keep reminding myself that this debate, however academic the setting, was not academic. It was about the real world - the actual future. What the panelists said mattered intensely. Does America constitute an empire? Should it? What are its constraints? Do its ends justify its means? Which principles should control history?
If I have a slight criticism of the event, it might be an insufficiency of urgency about it, a general understatement of the stakes, but that of course is where I come in.
On Saturday morning, I did the best I could to up the ante in my 30 seconds at the Q&A mike. I set my sights on Ferguson, who is not merely professor, author and scholar, but also TV personality. As the star of the multi-episode BBC production "American Colossus" - a history of the United States that calls on the reluctant superpower to stop being such a girlie man and rule the world, damnit - he is the embodiment of what I would call, in memory of the late Herman Kahn, "unthinkable chic."
In 1962, Kahn wrote "Thinking About the Unthinkable," which dared to postulate what winning a nuclear war would look like and called the difference between 10 million and 100 million deaths "tragic but distinguishable outcomes." This was pretty shocking 40 years ago and earned Kahn screen immortality as the real-life model for Dr. Strangelove.
But Ferguson's demeanor is anything but Strangelovian - he was positively witty as he refought the Cold War in "American Colossus" with the nuclear weapons of the day (presumably the H-bomb) and didn't so much as hint that their use might have had messy moral, political and strategic consequences.
Here's my worry - militarily, we're just going to get more and more efficient, even as "victory" in the war on terror grows more elusive. Ferguson and his ilk give no hint that there need be any moral limits on our military efficiency.
I asked him this: "How can you have a moral issue with terrorism and not with nuclear war - including the de facto nuclear war we're waging right now in Iraq with the use of depleted uranium munitions?"
It took him no more than a minute to answer. He ignored the part about DU, with which we're poisoning both Iraqis and our own troops, and cited the alleged shortening of World War II by bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the no-brainer precedent for using nuclear weapons to win subsequent wars. Next question! Nuclear weapons didn't come up again. Ho-hum.
Robert Koehler is an editor at Tribune Media Services.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Karzai is unofficial winner of Afghan vote
October 24, 2004
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20041024-104650-5944r.htm
Kabul, Afghanistan, Oct. 24 -- Interim leader Hamid Karzai has taken an unofficial simple majority in the Afghan presidential election -- enough to avoid a runoff, the BBC reported Sunday.
With 94 percent of the ballots counted, Karzai had 55 percent, 39 points ahead of his main rival, Yunus Qanuni.
Qanuni's spokesman Sunday conceded Karzai as the winner, but no official declaration will be made until all votes are counted and the United Nations completes its investigation of voting irregularities.
Karzai's office said it appears he is the winner, but will not claim victory until all the ballots are counted.
Election organizers say on their Web site Karzai took more than 4.2 million votes, more than half the estimated 8.1 million ballots cast in the Oct. 9 election.
The election period has been largely free of the violence threatened by the Taliban, but the group claimed responsibility for a street bombing Saturday in Kabul that killed two shoppers and the bomber.
-------- africa
Yusuf to request security forces
October 24, 2004
(Agence France-Presse)
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041023-112816-1453r.htm
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia - Somali President Abdullahi Yusuf today will request the African Union (AU) to deploy about 20,000 peacekeepers to the Horn of Africa country to help disarm militias and restore stability, an AU spokesman said.
Mr. Yusuf will make the request while addressing the AU's Peace and Security Council, spokesman Adam Thiam told reporters in Addis Ababa.
"The president on Monday will make an official request for a peacekeeping force of around 20,000 troops to help disarm the warlords in Somalia," Mr. Thiam said.
"[Mr. Yusuf] estimates that there are around 15 million small arms in the streets of Somalia," Mr. Thiam said.
The pan-Africa body's spokesman did not estimate the cost of sending the force to Somalia.
Mr. Yusuf, who is on a three-day visit to Addis Ababa, where the AU is headquartered, was expected to meet AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Ethiopian government officials to discuss issues of peace and development.
Mr. Yusuf, a veteran Somali faction leader and soldier, was sworn in as the new president of Somalia on Thursday in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, by members of the Somali transitional federal assembly.
During his swearing in, Mr. Yusuf urged the international community to help his nascent administration disarm the hundreds of gunmen allied to various clan-related factions across the country.
--------
Somali Leader Seeks African Peacekeepers
Reuters
By Tsegaye Tadesse
Sunday, October 24, 2004; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57466-2004Oct23.html
ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, Oct. 23 -- Somalia's newly elected president, Abdullahi Yusuf, has asked the African Union to send 20,000 peacekeepers to disarm militias controlling his lawless Horn of Africa country, a spokesman for the organization said Saturday.
"The president has formally asked the AU for a 20,000-strong peacekeeping force to help in collecting millions of small arms known to be owned by the Somali people," the spokesman, Adam Thiam, told reporters.
Thiam said the request would be considered by the union's Peace and Security Council, which is scheduled to meet Monday. Yusuf made the appeal to the chairman of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, during a meeting Saturday in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.
Yusuf was elected president earlier this month by Somalia's transitional parliament after almost two years of frequently interrupted talks that were held in neighboring Kenya because of insecurity at home. Yusuf, a former army colonel, made his first appeal for peacekeepers at his swearing-in ceremony last week.
The European Union foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, also on a visit to African Union headquarters in Addis Ababa, said the E.U. would offer funding for a peacekeeping mission and consider training Somali security forces.
"The president has not given me any specific request. But if the request comes . . . the E.U. will assist Somalia and finance a peacekeeping mission as it has done for Darfur," Solana said at a news conference, referring to the troubled region in western Sudan. Solana added that the E.U. would host a donor conference for Somalia on Nov. 28.
Somalia descended into chaos after clan-based factions ousted dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991 and then turned on each other, transforming the country of 7 million people into a patchwork of fiefdoms.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan issued a warning last Tuesday against a hasty expansion of U.N. nation-building activities in the failed state, saying there must first be greater political progress coupled with serious efforts by Somali leaders to improve security. The international community is also wary of engaging in Somalia after a failed U.S. peacekeeping mission forced the United States and later the United Nations to withdraw in 1993.
Matthew Bryden, a senior analyst at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based research organization, said that "the heavy lifting has to be done by the Somalis first."
"No one is going to send troops in to fight, which is what peace enforcement entails, especially after what happened in '93," Bryden added, referring to a botched raid in which two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, and the bloodied corpses of U.S. servicemen were dragged through the streets.
-------- balkans
Dismay as Serbs shun Kosovo poll
BBC
24 October, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3946649.stm
The UN's administrator in Kosovo has lamented outside interference after Serbs shunned elections there.
Reportedly fewer than 1% of eligible Serbs cast a vote in the second poll since the UN took over Kosovo in 1999.
UN governor Soren Jessen-Petersen said some had "had their democratic right to vote hijacked" through intimidation.
Most of Kosovo's vast majority of ethnic Albanians want independence for the province, which technically remains part of Serbia and Montenegro.
Total turnout in the poll was put at 53%, compared with 64% in 2001.
The Serbian Prime Minister, Vojislav Kostunica, and church leaders called on Serbs to boycott the ballot because of security fears.
Tens of thousands of Kosovan Serbs who have fled the province since the war in 1998-99 were allowed to vote, as were those still in Kosovo.
Some said they were intimidated by their own people.
Asked by a Reuters reporter if he planned to vote, a Serb in the divided city of Mitrovica replied: "Are you joking? They'd knee-cap me."
Only 15 people were reported to have cast ballots there in eight hours.
"Obviously some decided not to vote and that's their democratic right," said Mr Jessen-Petersen.
"Others obviously have had their democratic right to vote hijacked, who may have wanted to vote but were afraid."
'Great date'
Security remains a major concern following riots in March which left 19 people dead and saw Serb houses and churches burned to the ground.
The violence highlighted the continuing tensions between the two communities and a deep frustration at the lack of any long-term political solution for the province.
Voting passed off peacefully, with only a few minor voting irregularities reported.
Kosovo President Ibrahim Rugova, said the election was "a great and important date of the independence of Kosovo".
"I believe that all citizens will vote as these elections are important for the formal recognition of independence," he said after casting his vote.
Many Serbs were reported to have attended church services instead of going to vote.
"We haven't noticed that elections are being held today," said Milan Ivanovic, one of the Kosovo Serb politicians who led the boycott.
Election results are expected on Monday.
-------- britain
Black Watch will not blindly follow US orders
sundayherald
Trevor Royle
24 October 2004
http://www.sundayherald.com/45626
Senior British military commanders are determined that the Black Watch will be kept on a tight rein throughout their 30 day deployment under US command in their new tactical area of operations 20 miles south of Baghdad.
While the Black Watch's commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Cowan, will come under the tactical control of his superior officer in the US Marine Corps, all sensitive decisions about command and control will be referred back to British headquarters in Basra and, if necessary, to Whitehall. Conceding that the decision to deploy the Black Watch under US control had ultimately become "a political decision" , a senior military source told the Sunday Herald: "The Watch will not be ordered to follow US orders blindly and without regard to their own rules of engagement, which are well understood by all British soldiers in Iraq."
What this means is that Cowan will be in daily contact with the US divisional commander, but will run his battle group under British rules of engagement, which will allow him to operate using British military doctrine. This is an important point, as the British Army has an entirely different way of tackling insurgency in the kind of low- intensity warfare which is endemic throughout Iraq. While US forces tend to apply overwhelming force - hence the indiscriminate aerial bombardment of Fallujah - British units prefer a lower profile approach of foot patrols and engaging the local population. A senior officer put the matter in perspective by saying that when confronted by a house used by snipers, the US would invariably call in an air strike or an armoured attack, while a British commander would send troops to search the building to clear it of civilians before using extreme violence.
The US has not signed up to the International Criminal Court by which soldiers accused of committing war crimes can be prosecuted for unlawfully killing civilians. Britain is a signatory, and there was concern within the army that British soldiers operating under US orders could be prosecuted at a later date if they were ordered to act outside their own rules of engagement. According to senior sources, this danger has been avoided.
At the end of what has been a tumultuous week for the Basra garrison, there is widespread dismay in army circles about the way in which the deployment of the Black Watch was handled in London. Under normal circumstances, a routine request for military assistance would have been handled by the senior British officer in Basra, Major-General Bill Rollo, who would have dealt with it after taking the advice of his staff officers. When the call came a week ago from General George Casey, commander of US forces in Baghdad, Rollo was initially responsive and wanted to get the deployment under way without further ado. But because the British military operations in Iraq are unpopular and liable to create political minefields back home, the question was referred to the Ministry of Defence and a week-long debate began.
As the Black Watch begin their deployment - the advance party are on the move this weekend and the battle group should be in position by the end of next week - senior commanders hope that they can be left to get on with their job. But it is not the end of the matter. While it will be easy enough for army planners to make good Tony Blair's boast that the Black Watch will be home by Christmas, the deployment in Iskandariyah could continue well into the new year, and perhaps even longer.
A new British battle group headed by the 1st Scots Guards is already on its way to Iraq to replace the Black Watch as theatre reserve in Basra, and the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir Michael Walker, admitted yesterday that the mission could take longer than expected: "If there is a need to replace the troops there within the multinational force, the resources are there so to do."
-----
British officers lobbied US to send troops to danger zone
The Times
October 24, 2004
Nicholas Rufford and Peter Almond
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1326095,00.html
THE decision to send Black Watch troops into Iraq's "triangle of death" followed requests by British military chiefs to take over a US- controlled area.
British officers have been "champing at the bit" for months to be allowed the chance to demonstrate what they believed are superior skills in restoring order, according to a senior military source.
Some officers believe that American 'heavy-handedness' in Iraq is prolonging the conflict. The revelation casts new light on the decision to send 850 British troops to boost American forces. The official position remains that Washington asked for support. It led to accusations that Britain was boosting President George W Bush's election ambitions by supporting the campaign.
However, the request came only after British officers made it clear to their American counterparts that they would be receptive to an approach. Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, has not revealed the extent of the British Army's enthusiasm for the mission for fear of appearing critical of America.
General Sir Mike Jackson, chief of the general staff, is among senior British officers who have praised British successes in southern Iraq and regretted that the forces had not taken over an area in or around Baghdad at the start of the war.
Jackson has come closest to disapproving of some American tactics, saying that US military culture "differed significantly" from Britain's. During the 2003 Iraq conflict he said: "We have a very considerable hearts and minds challenge."
The deployment is set to go ahead despite an appeal by Margaret Hassan, the British aid worker kidnapped in Baghdad, not to send British troops nearer the city.
Tahseen Ali Hassan, her husband, responded to a video released by her captors by making a fresh call for her release.
"It was very painful to see my wife crying," he told the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television station. "The scene pained, distressed and saddened her friends and loved ones."
British troops could remain in central Iraq next year if the Black Watch mission is successful and there could be pressure on the American military to modify its approach.
British military chiefs believe that they are better than American forces at turning civilians against insurgents by winning hearts and minds.
The Ministry of Defence would not comment directly on the claim but reiterated that "one of the great strengths of multinational operations is that they bring together different nations with different procedures. This allows the coalition to call upon the strengths of each nation".
The British battle group will attempt to restore order in an area around the lawless towns of Mahmudiya, Iskandariya and Latifiya. Significantly, the Black Watch will not be taking its Challenger II tanks because it does not see the need for heavy armour.
Growing resistance in the area since April has claimed more than 200 American military casualties, including at least 10 deaths. It is also thought to be the location where foreign hostages, including Ken Bigley, have been held and murdered. Its population of 900,000 people include the ancestors of tribesmen who in 1920 launched a ferocious rebellion against British rule.
A British military spokesman in Basra said that the troops were "raring to go".
The US military said yesterday that it had captured a lieutenant of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant blamed for hostage beheadings and suicide bombings. Five others were arrested in the same raids yesterday in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
Violence continued in other parts of Iraq. Twenty members of Iraq's security forces were killed in a spate of insurgent attacks across the country, including 16 police who died in a suicide bombing at an Iraqi police post near the al-Asad base of the US marines west of Baghdad. Up to 40 people were wounded in the attack.
The Army of Ansar al-Sunna, an Iraqi militant group, said it had beheaded an Iraqi man accused of collaborating with US forces in the northern city of Mosul and posted pictures of the killing on the internet.
# In Britain yesterday 250 people demonstrated in Camperdown Park, Dundee, against plans for the merger of Scottish regiments.
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Suicide bombers kill 22 Iraqis
October 24, 2004
By Tini Tran
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20041024-124554-4805r.htm
BAGHDAD - Suicide bombers struck Iraqi security targets yesterday north and west of Baghdad, killing 22 Iraqis, officials said. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded in an ambush on the road to Baghdad International Airport - one of the country's most dangerous routes.
Elsewhere, the U.S. military announced the arrest of what it said was a newly promoted senior leader in Abu Musab Zarqawi's terror movement - taken into custody during an early morning raid near Fallujah.
At least 16 Iraqi policemen were killed and 40 others were wounded when a suicide driver detonated his car at a police station near a U.S. Marine base in Khan al-Baghdadi, 140 miles west of the capital, according to police. No Americans were hurt in the 7 a.m. attack, the U.S. military said.
A second suicide driver killed four guardsmen and injured six others in an attack yesterday near an Iraqi national guard checkpoint in Ishaqi, 6 miles south of Samarra, police said. Another two guardsmen were killed in a convoy attack in the northern part of the city.
The six American soldiers were injured when a roadside bomb exploded near their patrol about 7:15 a.m. on the main road linking the Baghdad airport with the city center. One armored vehicle was destroyed, but none of the soldiers sustained life-threatening injuries, the U.S. military said.
Terrorist attacks have increased by 25 percent across the country since the Islamic holy month of Ramadan began last weekend. Most of the recent attacks have been by car and roadside bombs.
The purported Zarqawi aide was arrested along with five other persons in a pre-dawn raid outside Fallujah, the military said. The person's name was not released, but a U.S. statement said the individual had risen in rank as other Zarqawi associates had been killed in U.S. attacks on Fallujah.
Fallujah residents identified those arrested as Abdel-Hamid Fiyadh, 50; his sons Walid, 18, and Majid, 25, and three relatives. Relatives insisted the men had nothing to do with Zarqawi.
Zarqawi's group has claimed responsibility for numerous beheadings of hostages - including Americans - and suicide car bombings, including recent twin bombings inside Baghdad's Green Zone, where the U.S. and Iraqi leadership are housed.
A videotape posted yesterday on Islamic Web sites showed Iraqi militants claiming to have beheaded a man who said he worked for the U.S. military in the northern city of Mosul for the past year. The man, who identified himself as Seif Adnan Kanaan, said he fixed vehicles and delivered beverages to U.S. forces based at Mosul airport.
Responsibility for the killing was claimed by the Ansar al-Sunnah Army, which claims to have killed at least 14 other hostages.
Also yesterday, the husband of the kidnapped director of CARE International's operations in Iraq appealed for her release. Margaret Hassan, 59, who has British, Irish and Iraqi citizenship, was seized Tuesday in western Baghdad.
On Friday, she made an emotional televised plea to British Prime Minister Tony Blair to save her life by withdrawing his country's troops from Iraq.
On Saturday, her Iraqi husband, Tahseen Ali Hassan, begged for the kidnappers to free her "in the name of Islam."
"It hurts to watch my wife cry," Mr. Hassan said on Al-Arabiya television. "This scene has saddened and worried her friends and loved ones. I plead with you, in the name of Islam and Arabism - while we are in the most sacred Islamic month - that my wife and beloved return to me."
The secretary-general of CARE International made his own appeal yesterday.
"She is a naturalized Iraqi citizen and always holds the people of Iraq in her heart," Denis Caillaux said. "CARE joins with many of the people whose lives Mrs. Hassan has touched over her decades of service in Iraq in reaching out to her captors to appeal to their humanity."
Militants have kidnapped at least seven other foreign women over the past six months, and all were released. By contrast, at least 33 foreign male hostages have been killed, including three Americans beheaded by their captors.
In other developments yesterday:
• A mortar round landed in a central Baghdad neighborhood, killing two persons and injuring one.
• An unexploded mortar round was found inside Japan's military base in Samawah. It was the first such incident since hundreds of Japanese troops arrived on a humanitarian mission, a Japanese official said. There were no injuries.
• Gunmen opened fire on a convoy of Turkish trucks in Mosul, killing two drivers - a Turk and a Yugoslav - and wounding two others, hospital and police officials said. The attack occurred about noon in the city center.
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50 Iraq Soldiers Apparent Ambush Victims
By TINI TRAN
Associated Press Writer
October 24, 2004
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The bodies of about 50 unarmed Iraqi soldiers - many killed execution style with gunshots to the back of the head - were found on a remote road in eastern Iraq, victims of an ambush as they were heading home on leave after basic training, Iraqi authorities said Sunday.
A State Department security officer was killed during a mortar or rocket attack against a U.S. base near Baghdad International Airport, the U.S. Embassy announced. A U.S. soldier was also injured in the attack on Camp Victory, the headquarters of the U.S.-led coalition's ground forces command.
Edward Seitz, an agent with the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security, was killed about 5 a.m., said embassy spokesman Bob Callahan. He is believed to be the first State Department employee killed in Iraq since Operation Iraqi Freedom began in March 2003.
The Iraqi soldiers, who had recently finished a training course, were on their way home when they were ambushed and killed about sundown Saturday on a road about 95 miles east of Baghdad near the Iranian border, said Interior Ministry spokesman Adnan Abdul-Rahman.
The nature of that attack suggested an increased boldness and organization by insurgents, who, until now, have mainly used roadside bombs and suicide car bombs in their attacks on the Iraqi military and police.
Diyala province's deputy governor Aqil Hamid al-Adili told Al-Arabiya TV he believed the ambush was an inside job.
"There was probably collusion among the soldiers or other groups. Otherwise, the gunmen would not have gotten the information about the soldiers' departure from their training camp and that they were unarmed," he said.
"In the future we will try to be more careful when the soldiers leave their camps. We will provide them with protected cars that can escort them home."
Gen. Walid al-Azzawi, commander of the Diyala provincial police, said the bodies were laid out in four rows each, with 12 bodies in each row.
"After inspection, we found out that they were shot after being ordered to lay down on the earth," he said.
Lt. Ali Jawad Kadhim, from the nearby Mandali police station, said all the victims had been shot in the back of the head. Kadhim, who said he took photos of the bodies, said all had their hands were crossed behind their heads.
An Associated Press reporter on the scene reported seeing the burned frames of two minibuses. Bloodstains were visible on the ground, along with human remains. Witnesses said the attackers stole some buses. Police said they had found 51 bodies at the site of the attack.
A U.S. military source in the region confirmed the incident, but was uncertain of the number of dead.
Iraqi security forces are constant targets of insurgents, who consider them collaborators with American forces. Attacks have increased by 25 percent in Iraq since the start of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan last weekend.
Most of the targets have been civilians and Iraqi police or National Guard. Just a day earlier, suicide bombers had struck Iraqi security targets north and west of Baghdad, killing 22 Iraqi policemen and National Guardsmen, officials said.
But U.S. forces also come under daily fire. Six U.S. soldiers were wounded in an ambush on the road to Baghdad airport - one of the country's most dangerous routes.
The early morning attack that killed Seitz had fallen on a trailer where he had been sleeping, said a U.S. Embassy official who asked not to be named.
The Diplomatic Security Bureau is the State Department's own security unit. Its agents conduct a range of tasks, from designing physical security for U.S. diplomatic buildings and personnel, to assessing threats, investigating attacks and devising responses.
Secretary of State Colin Powell and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, John D. Negroponte, issued statements of condolences Sunday to Seitz's wife, co-workers, family and friends.
"The Department of State and I mourn the loss of one of our own today in Baghdad," Powell said, while on a tour of Asia. "Ed was a brave American, dedicated to his country and to a brighter future for the people of Iraq."
"Ed's death is a tragic loss for me personally, and for all of his colleagues at the Department of State," Powell said. "Ed Seitz died in the service of his country and for the cause of liberty and freedom for others. There is no more noble a sacrifice."
Negroponte said Seitz was a "committed professional" who served with distinction. The American community in Iraq mourns his loss and will "rededicate ourselves to the cause he served so valiantly and selflessly," Negroponte said.
"He came to Iraq, as did his fellow Americans here, to help the Iraqis defeat terrorism and the insurgency, establish democracy, and rebuild their economy," Negroponte said.
Recently, Seitz was involved in a U.S. investigation of a suspected terror cell in Detroit. In April 2002, Seitz testified that three suspects were attempting to wage "economic jihad" against the government and American businesses, especially Jewish-owned ones.
But last month, the Justice Department acknowledged its prosecution was filled with a "pattern of mistakes and oversights" that warranted dismissal of the convictions.
In other developments:
- Muslim al-Taie, the Karbala representative of a senior Shiite cleric, Hussein al-Sadr, was killed in a Sunday drive-by shooting in Karbala. One of al-Taie' s bodyguards was killed and another injured, according to an official in Karbala city.
- Militants targeted Iraq National Guard forces near the central town of Baqouba, wounding seven in bomb attacks since Saturday that included an explosives-rigged flashlight, officials said.
Attackers detonated on Sunday an explosive near a vehicle carrying guardsmen to work, injuring three and a civilian driver. Late Saturday, militants tossed a bomb concealed in a flashlight at a National Guard checkpoint 12 miles south of Baqouba, wounding three of the security forces there, the official said.
- On Sunday, a U.S. Marine warplane bombed a suspected rebel target in the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah, hitting at militants as they tried to rebuild a command post, a Marine official said. Witnesses said six people died in the strike, and at least one fresh corpse lay at the Fallujah General Hospital. The official had no information on casualties.
- In three separate incidents Saturday, insurgents hit Iraq Army and National Guard forces on patrol in and around the central city of Samarra, lightly wounding two Iraqi soldiers, the U.S. military said.
- Gunmen abducted a 7-year-old Lebanese boy and were demanding $150,000 for his release, Lebanon's official news agency reported Sunday. The boy was kidnapped two days ago while returning from school in the Diyala province east of Baghdad, the state-run National News Agency said. The boy's father has lived in Iraq for 30 years.
The Lebanese government was trying to secure the boy's release, the report said.
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Rebels Mount Grisly Ambush, Executing 49 Iraqi Soldiers
October 24, 2004
By EDWARD WONG
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