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NUCLEAR
Today in history - Nov. 13
Activists: Chernobyl Radiation Lingers
Sudanese Fearful Following Relocation
Ivory Coast Violence Breaks French Connection
Foreigners Flee Ivory Coast as Violence Lingers
Japan Protests To China Over Incursion by Nuclear Sub
China Urges Calm Over Submarine Dispute
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
US report links toxins to Gulf war syndrome
Iran Says EU Nuke Negotiations in Final Stages
Iran Says Nuclear Talks in 'Final Stages'
A Review of the Duelfer Report
South Korea Urges Atomic Talks, North Softens Tone
IAEA clears South Korea in nuke probe
DPRK rebuts US allegation on nuclear talks
S. Korean Leader Won't Tolerate Aggression
Safety at Hope Creek questioned
MILITARY
Details of anti-personnel bombs and weapons
China urges calm after Japan demands apology for submarine intrusion
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Squeezing jello in Iraq
U.S. Forces Meet Fierce Resistance In Fallujah
U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
Fallujah 101
U.S. Officers: Main Assault On Fallujah Is Over
Amid Gunfire and Chaos, Palestinians Bury Arafat
Arafat Is Buried in Chaotic Scene in the West Bank
Nicaragua Agrees to Destroy Antiaircraft Missiles
Yasser on Yasser: Martyr par excellence
CIA whistleblower sees 'long war'
Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA
The C.I.A. Versus Bush
CIA agent publicly chides White House for terror war
No. 2 CIA official McLaughlin quits
Homeless Vets Already Overload Safety Net
Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
Gulf-stress study dropped
US wounded in Falluja hits 412
Louisiana teens getting driver's license also register
Rights Lawyers See Possibility of a War Crime
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Airlines Must Hand Over Records
Ashcroft Decries Court Rulings
Gov't Order for Air Data Draws Protests
Hispanic gang plots to ambush Maryland cops
POLITICS
Bush vows Mideast peace effort
Analysis: Bush Facing Domestic Challenges
For the First Time Since Vietnam, the Army Prints a Guide
OTHER
Reports Point to Proof of Global Warming
WHO Meeting Warns of Flu Pandemic
FDA Bars Critic From Meeting
ACTIVISTS
"Let Them Drink Sand!"
-------- NUCLEAR
Today in history - Nov. 13
By The Associated Press
http://www.boston.com/news/history/articles/2004/11/12/today_in_history___nov_13/
Today is Saturday, Nov. 13, the 318th day of 2004. There are 48 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Nov. 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Okla., died in a car crash while on her way to meet a reporter.
-------- accidents and safety
Activists: Chernobyl Radiation Lingers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Living-With-Chernobyl.html?oref=login
SVETILOVICHI, Belarus (AP) -- The signs say ``KEEP OUT'' and warn of radiation contamination, but the mushroom-pickers trudge right past them carrying their pails. Eighteen years after the reactor at Chernobyl in neighboring Ukraine exploded, spewing a cloud of radiation that blew north and contaminated 22 percent of this ex-Soviet republic, activists warn of a new threat facing Belarusians: the longing to return to normal life.
The government -- and many Belarusians -- are eager to put the world's worst nuclear accident behind them. President Alexander Lukashenko, branded Europe's last dictator, has made it a priority to repopulate much of the Chernobyl-infected region beyond the hardest hit areas.
But opposition parties and advocacy groups such as the Belarus-based Children of Chernobyl accuse the government of overriding warnings that radiation continues to contaminate this region of pine forests and mud-splattered farming villages.
Belarusians, many of them poor and ill-informed about radiation, are returning home to villages that still require permanent monitoring because of higher than average radiation levels. Tractors till farmland, cows graze and residents fill their yards with vegetable gardens. Others are venturing into the ``exclusion zones'' -- the worst hit areas -- to forage in the forests for berries and wild mushrooms, which are then sold throughout the region.
The critics claim that the government of this tightly controlled nation of 10 million is capitalizing on the plight of desperate jobseekers to repopulate still dangerous areas and boost agricultural production.
In the last five years, Belarus has struck 1,000 population centers from the danger list. It has boosted regional farm production by 30 percent, cut Chernobyl-related welfare funding from 14 percent of the approximately $3 billion annual budget to 4 percent, and censored health statistics of rising death and cancer rates, the opponents say.
``We must now worry about the children of the children of Chernobyl,'' said Gennady Groushevoy, head of Children of Chernobyl. ``The health danger is reaching into a second generation ... but the government has retreated into a Soviet-era attitude of silence.''
In all, 7 million people in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are believed to have suffered medical problems as a result of the April 25, 1986, accident. In Ukraine, more than 2.32 million people, including 452,000 children, have been treated for radiation-linked illnesses, including thyroid and blood cancer and cancerous growths, according to Ukrainian health officials.
Most villages around the plant remain off-limits today, though some Ukrainians are moving back despite government warnings.
Sixty percent of the fallout landed over Belarus, contaminating a region that was home to more than 1.5 million people. Some 125,000 families were evacuated, and large swaths of forest and farmland were declared ``exclusion zones,'' sealed by checkpoints.
Many of the evacuees still complain bitterly that household belongings, left behind during their hurried retreat, later turned up for sale in regional markets, while they lived in limbo in shabbily constructed apartment blocks. Nikolai Nagorny, director of the International Committee of the Red Cross' Chernobyl program, said that cases of thyroid cancer -- one of the few radiation-related illnesses that has been well studied around Chernobyl -- have skyrocketed among children in Belarus' affected regions, from just two cases of thyroid cancer before the accident to at least 1,000 in the 10 years after.
``I don't feel any danger, and even if I did -- what would it matter?'' said Raisa Stradayeva, 62, as she and her grandson, Andrusha, trudged home through the rain in Svetilovichi, a village just outside the highly contaminated exclusion zone.
``I have to live somewhere and this is my home,'' she said.
Besides, she said, the health risks can't be that severe because ``People are returning all the time.''
Not only Belarusians; foreigners are coming too, mostly from poorer ex-Soviet republics, seeking jobs and housing.
Yuri Kuzmich, head of Belarus' Chernobyl exclusion and monitoring zone, rejects accusations that the government is intentionally sending anyone into danger. In his office in Gomel, a city of 500,000 that has suffered increased radiation-related illnesses, Kuzmich said his staff does all it can to keep people out of the worst-hit areas and provide information to those living in the surrounding region.
But, he admits, not everyone is on the same page. State-run farms ``have plans to fulfill ... and they want to fulfill these no matter what,'' he said. Those farms need workers, and farm workers come.
``The passage of time and economic necessity take their toll,'' he said, sitting beneath a portrait of Lukashenko. ``Human memory is short. Eighteen years might as well be 100.''
Kuzmich's team oversees the exclusion zone, manning checkpoints, escorting visitors into the region and collecting scientific and medical data. Some employees are also assigned to oversee the villages under radiation monitoring.
However, a reporter visiting recently was never questioned when entering the exclusion zone, checkpoints appeared deserted and the mushroom- and berry-pickers walk through on the main road, via forest paths or on buses that still pass through the zone.
Margarita Artemyeva, who moved here from Kazakhstan, was helping her 25-year-old daughter, Natasha, wallpaper her new home -- a damp bungalow identical to its neighbors.
``I don't even think about it. I'm not scared at all. If there was a real danger, we'd know it, wouldn't we?'' said Artemyeva, 44. She rejected the claim that the poor are being used to repopulate the area.
Critics claim vegetables, milk and meat from Chernobyl-contaminated regions such as Svetilovichi are being sold throughout Belarus. But in a nation where the average monthly salary is about $150, few have the option of putting health concerns first and buying imports.
Besides, the berries and wild mushrooms supplement meager diets and also sell well.
After Artemyeva mentioned she loved mushrooms, one of Kuzmich's employees took her aside and gently warned her against collecting them in the exclusion zone.
-------- africa
Sudanese Fearful Following Relocation
Officials Call Isolated Refugee Camp 'Ideal'
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46494-2004Nov12.html
NEW AL-JEER SUREAF, Sudan, Nov. 12 -- Hawa Khary, nine months pregnant and clutching two terrified young children, watched helplessly last week as police armed with sticks and tear gas bulldozed her flimsy grass hut in a crowded refugee camp. Within hours, the little family was herded into a truck and driven 14 miles into the countryside.
When the trucks stopped, to Khary's astonishment, she was shown to a spacious, clean white tent with a patch of grass outside for washing and cooking. It was identical to hundreds of other tents, laid out in perfect rows across a field. Latrines had been dug and food supplies stocked.
But Khary, like many of the 1,500 people now living in what the government calls an "ideal camp" for families displaced by conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region, said she was afraid to stay here and, given the choice, would quickly return to rebuild her twig shelter in the old camp near the bustling provincial capital, Nyala.
"Better tent, but much worse security. I don't trust the government to protect us," said Khary, 25, curtly summing up her new circumstances. Her son, born Thursday in her new tent, yawned in her arms.
Sudanese officials have been displaying the new camp to international visitors this week. They said it was cleaner, healthier, safer and better supplied than many of the 158 sites across Darfur where about 1.5 million people have fled a 20-month conflict between African rebels and government troops and their allied Arab militias.
They also dispute complaints made by camp occupants, aid workers and U.N. officials over the forced relocation of hundreds of families, carried out last week by Sudanese police officers and soldiers who raided Old al-Jeer Sureaf on three days, wielding sticks and teargas as they destroyed huts and rounded up families to be moved.
"We differ on the issue of the violence," said Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan's foreign minister, during a tour of the new camp Thursday with Jan Pronk, the U.N. envoy to Sudan. "Nobody was killed. These displaced were in the middle of the city, directly near military security, and suffering from health hazards. Now they have a clinic, water, food and services."
Ismail said the displaced families had been warned three months ago that they would be moved because the land where they were living belonged to a private owner. He also said teargas was used only on Nyala residents who impersonated the displaced people and were infiltrating the camp to collect free food.
"I'm really happy that this visit is completely different. For the first time, I can see confidence between the [displaced people] and local authorities," Ismail told journalists. "In all the camps and villages we didn't find any complaints. People really praise the police for a marvelous job they were doing" at the new camp and in villages where displaced people had been returned home.
But Pronk was tight-lipped and grim during his visit to several camps with Ismail and other Sudanese officials. Sitting next to them at a news conference, Pronk said he did not oppose the relocation in principle but criticized the government for using "too much violence." In the future, he said, "relocation should take place with dignity and without undue violence on [an] already vulnerable population."
When a Sudanese journalist suggested that the refugees had exaggerated the degree of violence, Pronk slammed his hand on the table. "When a doctor tells me that police sent him out of a clinic at gun point, I believe him," he said.
In a separate interview, Ismail said the next relocation effort would be arranged with help from Pronk, who is trying to set up talks between the government, aid groups and the displaced.
Still, the conflicting accounts of the relocation operation have highlighted a widening gap between the Khartoum government, which says it is trying to protect and help civilians in Darfur, and the growing legions of displaced war victims whose distrust of the government is growing deeper.
Aid workers said services at the camp were better, with clean latrines and regular distributions of sorghum, sugar, cooking oil, salt, pasta, rice and tomato paste.
But they also said it was close to an Arab militia camp and the homeland of Arab tribes, who tend to be hostile to displaced Africans. They said the old camp was evacuated because the government suspected it was a base for African rebels close to Nyala.
Nearly 2 million Africans live in shabby tent cities across Darfur after being driven from their farms by fighting. According to the United Nations, the government has bombed villages and armed Arab militias to retaliate against the rebels. Tens of thousands have died from hunger, disease and violence.
In the cool shade of their new tents Thursday, displaced women expressed anger at both police abuse and at being forced to move far from Nyala, where they were able to earn a little money collecting firewood or doing laundry for city residents.
A school teacher in the camp said many displaced people faced a "pattern of humiliation" because they can neither farm nor earn a living. Sadia Hidel, a midwife, said she was especially outraged that over 10 pregnant women were forced to move.
"It's hard to trust people who bomb and burn your village. Then they burn your shelter and beat you while you are living in a camp," Hidel said. "We are already off our land, and they do this to the weakest members who already have poor nutrition. I've never seen any pregnant women treated like this. It's foolish to trust."
--------
Ivory Coast Violence Breaks French Connection
Angry Mobs Rampage Through Areas and Businesses Identified With Former Colonial Ruler
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46478-2004Nov12?language=printer
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 12 -- Chanting, "We want the French!" a crowd of armed and angry young men swept past La Planta, a club owned by an Ivorian. They started to attack the nearby Byblos restaurant, then stopped when the owner pleaded, "No, no! I'm Lebanese!"
But when it came to Club Le Saint Germain, the mob showed no restraint. The elegant eatery had not only a French owner but also a predominantly French clientele, including soldiers from the nearby military base.
Last Saturday night, witnesses said, men armed with wood planks, iron rail spikes and a lust for revenge battered down the club's steel doors. They yanked bars from the windows and bashed a gaping hole through the concrete wall.
As the owner and a friend watched from an adjacent roof, the mob stole everything that could be taken and destroyed what remained, witnesses said. The posh establishment was reduced to little more than a dirt-streaked shell.
Across this shaken West African city, the pattern of selective destruction was evident Friday after two days of relative calm. Burned and battered buildings stood beside others that had been virtually untouched, with targets apparently singled out because they were identified with France, Ivory Coast's former colonial ruler.
The centuries-old relationship, which had enjoyed an extended period of calm after independence in 1960, became increasingly frayed after the current Ivorian government took power four years ago and subsequent political unrest persisted.
In recent weeks, growing tensions between President Laurent Gbagbo's camp and French peacekeeping troops finally erupted in five days of street violence, beginning when an Ivorian airstrike last Saturday killed nine French troops and a U.N. aid worker, and a retaliatory French attack wiped out several Ivorian warplanes and helicopters.
Ivorians disagree about whether to blame Gbagbo, the activists known as Young Patriots who have become the enforcers of his political will, or the French themselves, who often seemed to have everything that Ivorians did not: wealth, education, lavish homes and fancy cars.
But as hundreds of French nationals have continued to flee each day in an air evacuation to Paris, many Ivorians agree that, in the end, it is they who will suffer most from this bitter turn of events. Every one of the 38 employees at Club Le Saint Germain, for example, was Ivorian. Now, all are out of work.
"For one white person, 38 people had jobs," said Kone Ibrahim Dotoulougo, 31, a doorman at the club, referring to the French owner.
Trouble first broke out Nov. 4, when Gbagbo broke a longtime cease-fire by attacking rebels who control the largely Muslim areas in the northern half of Ivory Coast. That same day, a mob of young men arrived in two city buses at the offices of the Patriote, an opposition newspaper, said employees there.
While more than a dozen journalists scrambled to safety over an exterior wall, the frenzied crowd rammed through a padlocked steel door, overturned furniture, battered the printing press and set the building on fire. The paper has not published since.
"We are sure if they had caught some of us, we would have been killed," said Toure Moussa, the editor. He said the men who attacked his paper and two others were from the Young Patriots and acting on government orders.
"It's to make us mute, to make all opposition voices mute," Moussa said.
The Young Patriots leader, Charles Ble Goude, has insisted that the movement is nonviolent.
Two days after these attacks, the Ivorian warplane bombarded the French peacekeepers, according to French officials, and France responded by destroying Ivory Coast's tiny air force and seizing the international airport in Abidjan, the country's commercial capital.
That night, tensions boiled over. Reportedly at the urging of Ble Goude and others, the Young Patriots took to the streets. Violent clashes with the French military erupted through the weekend, and riots and looting continued for several days. An estimated 4,000 prison inmates also escaped.
Most of the damage occurred the first night, especially in sections with concentrations of French people, residents said.
Tens of thousands of French nationals once lived and worked in this country of 16 million, and Abidjan was regarded as one of Africa's most stable and prosperous cities. But after years of rising unrest, that number has dwindled to 15,000 or less. At least 2,000 have left in the past week.
Sylviane Aka, 43, was returning from a wedding last Saturday in the largely French area known as Zone 4. She described seeing mobs of young men marching down the street, wielding planks and knives and shouting, "We want white French to eat!"
As an Ivorian, Aka said she did not feel endangered, but with news of the French counterattack spreading rapidly, she sympathized with the urge for revenge.
"To French people, in their minds Ivorians are like monkeys in the trees," Aka said. "They have everything here . . . but it is from our raw materials that they get everything."
In other cases, Ivorians said, the mobs did not discriminate in choosing their targets. In one part of Zone 4, gangs destroyed and looted a pharmacy, a craft store, a lingerie shop, a hair salon, a computer center and a French restaurant. Several were owned by Ivorians.
Fatoumata Fondio, 54, said she heard the gangs moving through the neighborhood but didn't think her computer and business service was in danger. On Sunday, she learned that the uninsured business had been attacked. When she arrived to survey the damage, she said, she collapsed in tears. All that was left were a handful of documents and a pair of mouse pads.
Fondio, who said she had visited France twice, blamed the Young Patriots for the destruction. "We live with the French people," she said. "We used to live together."
--------
Foreigners Flee Ivory Coast as Violence Lingers
November 13, 2004
By LYDIA POLGREEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/africa/13ivory.html?pagewanted=all
DAKAR, Senegal, Nov. 12 - The exodus from Ivory Coast continued Friday, prompted by reports of widespread looting and several rapes, according to a spokesman for the French military, Col. Henri Aussavy. About 900 foreigners fled Friday on three evacuation flights, and a thousand more waited to leave at a French Army base, Colonel Aussavy said.
While Westerners crowded the airport, relative quiet returned to the capital, Abidjan, as Ivoirian soldiers fanned out in the city, which had been beset by mob violence, much of it aimed at French citizens.
The show of force by Ivoirian troops was intended to reassert control, said Lt. Col. Jules Yao Yao, a spokesman for the Ivoirian Army.
"We want people to be reassured," Colonel Yao Yao said. "The situation is coming back to normal. Traffic is returning, shops have reopened and companies that were looted are cleaning up to get back to work."
Talks aimed at easing tensions are under way, but a spokesman for the rebel forces that control the northern half of Ivory Coast said Friday that the rebels had not been invited to talks led by South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, who met with government and opposition leaders this week.
But the rebels said that even if they were invited to take part in continuing talks, they would insist on the removal of the embattled president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, as a precondition to any peace deal.
"We are not going to talk to anyone about coming back to the peace process and about how to give Mr. Gbagbo a new chance," said Sidiki Konate, a spokesman for the rebel group, known as New Forces, in a telephone interview from Abidjan. "Mr. Gbagbo is the past. He cannot be included in any discussion of our future."
The rebel group's stance underscored the difficulty facing the multiple efforts to bring to a close a week of violence in Ivory Coast, once one of West Africa's most prosperous and stable nations. The turmoil has led thousands of French citizens and other foreigners to flee amid anti-French demonstrations by Mr. Gbagbo's supporters in Abidjan.
The African Union is planning to hold an emergency summit meeting in Nigeria on Sunday to seek a resolution to the current crisis, which began last Thursday when Ivoirian Air Force planes bombed some rebel towns, and intensified two days later when planes strafed French soldiers, killing nine of them and one American civilian in the rebel-held north. The tensions worsened when the French military destroyed much of the Ivoirian Air Force in retaliation.
But the talks held by Mr. Mbeki were seen to hold some promise. He met with Mr. Gbagbo (pronounced BAG-bo) in Abidjan this week, and received the former prime minister and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara - who was barred from running for president in 2002 because he was deemed not to be pure Ivoirian - in Pretoria on Wednesday, before leaving for Cairo to attend Yasir Arafat's funeral.
Bheki Khumalo, a spokesman for Mr. Mbeki, said the talks had only the modest goal of restarting conversations that could lead to fulfillment of the conditions of the most recent accord reached between the rebels and the government, in July. " We have not yet reached a stage where we could say we are in fully fledged negotiations," Mr. Khumalo said in a telephone interview from South Africa, adding that "attempts are being made" to reach the rebels and include them in the talks.
-------- asia
Japan Protests To China Over Incursion by Nuclear Sub
Associated Press
Saturday, November 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46479-2004Nov12.html
TOKYO, Nov. 12 -- Japan lodged a formal protest with the Chinese government on Friday after determining that an unidentified nuclear submarine that entered its territorial waters this week belonged to China.
Japan's navy went on a rare alert Wednesday when the sub was first spotted in Japanese waters between the southern island of Okinawa and Taiwan. The sub spent about two days in Japanese territory before heading north, and Japanese reconnaissance aircraft and naval destroyers pursued the sub for two days in an attempt to identify it.
Officials said Friday there were enough signs to believe the craft was Chinese, including the direction it traveled and the fact that it was nuclear-powered. Tokyo formally protested the incursion with the Chinese Embassy.
"It is extremely regrettable, and we've lodged a protest," said Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. "In order to prevent a recurrence, we must know why this happened, and we are awaiting a response from the Chinese."
The Chinese envoy, Cheng Yonghua, was summoned by Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura and said afterward that the incident was being investigated. In Beijing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, said that "the relevant parties are still trying to understand the situation."
Tokyo has been watchful of increased activity in the region, which lies near a disputed underwater gas field and a cluster of islands surrounded by rich fishing waters jointly claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.
China has begun surveying the gas fields despite Japan's claims that they extend into its territorial waters near Okinawa.
Japan also has complained of unauthorized activity by Chinese research ships near the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
--------
China Urges Calm Over Submarine Dispute
November 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Submarine-Chase.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan and China should try to resolve their differences calmly, China's ambassador to Japan said Saturday, a day after Tokyo filed a protest with Beijing over the intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine.
The incident has strained relations between two of Asia's biggest economic and military powers.
Japanese officials protested to the Chinese Embassy on Friday after Tokyo determined that the submarine, which had entered territorial waters days earlier, belonged to China.
China has yet to respond but on Saturday, Chinese Ambassador Wang Yi urged the countries to work toward improving relations.
``China and Japan have some problems, but we want both countries to respect each other and calmly find a solution,'' Wang said, avoiding specific reference to the incursion.
The nationally televised remarks came during a speech in Koya, a town in the Wakayama prefecture about 280 miles southwest of Tokyo.
Wang also said the Chinese are pained by Japanese homage to a Tokyo war shrine that Beijing says glorifies Japan's World War II atrocities in Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid annual visits to the shrine honoring the country's war dead.
Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Akira Chiba said he hadn't heard Wang's remarks.
``I know of no comments from China directed to the Japanese government,'' Chiba told The Associated Press.
Relations between Japan and China have cooled in recent months as the two sides have wrangled over underwater natural gas fields and several islands -- known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China -- surrounded by rich fishing waters.
Tokyo is uneasy with China's growing military and economic might. Many Japanese worry about Beijing's military posture, which they see as increasingly hostile, amid China's booming demand for energy and marine resources and a historic rivalry with Taiwan.
Japan's navy went on alert Wednesday when the submarine was first detected in Japanese waters between the southern island of Okinawa and Taiwan. The submarine left after just two hours and headed north, and was shadowed by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft and naval destroyers.
Koizumi said Friday he did not expect long-term damage to ties with China but much depended on Beijing's response.
Japan's media have speculated that the incursion was the Chinese military's attempt to expose the Japanese navy's vulnerabilities and test its response.
On Saturday, newspaper editorials criticized Tokyo for being too soft on Beijing and urged the government to take military action against such intrusions at sea.
``It is not enough for Japan just to demand that Chinese vessel never invade Japanese waters again. Japan must make its own preparations to prevent China from repeating its violation of Japanese territory,'' the national Yomiuri newspaper said in an editorial Saturday that called Tokyo's response a ``grave error.''
``The way the Japanese government responded to China's violation of its territory was untenable,'' the paper said.
-------- china
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Radar Planes Intended For Use in Taiwan Strait
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46477-2004Nov12.html
BEIJING, Nov. 12 -- The Chinese military, undeterred by a U.S. veto that blocked the purchase of Israeli planes, has developed its own radar surveillance aircraft and is test-flying the first models for early deployment in the Taiwan Strait, according to military specialists.
The Chinese airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, uses domestically produced advanced radar mounted on a Russian-made Il-76 transport aircraft. Analysts said the AWACS marks an important step in the government's campaign to develop the modern military necessary to back up its threat to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary. Electronic weaponry -- in this case, equipment to monitor the skies and control warplanes over a wide battlefield -- has been a major focus of extensive military improvements in recent years. In particular, AWACS has long been seen by the military as an indispensable tool for air superiority over the 100-mile strait separating Taiwan from the mainland.
"You've got to have those AWACS up there or you're not going anywhere," said a foreign military attache in Beijing describing China's need for such a system in the event of conflict with Taiwan.
Chinese military technicians have been struggling to acquire AWACS-type equipment since the United States pressured Israel in 2000 to back out of a $1 billion agreement to sell China four of its Phalcon phased-array radar systems. The systems also would have used Il-76 aircraft as a platform.
The main U.S. concern in blocking the sale was that China would gain a military advantage over Taiwan. Moreover, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. government has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself against any Chinese attack, meaning U.S. forces could become involved should fighting erupt.
For the same reasons, People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force leaders were determined to acquire such a plane. "After the 2000 Israeli fiasco, the PLA made it a matter of high pride to prove to the Americans they would not be denied AWACS," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., a U.S.-based specialist on the Chinese military.
At first, China turned to Russia, its traditional source of military equipment. The Beijing government concluded a deal to buy four Beriev A-50 Mainstay radar planes, which are roughly the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Air Force's E-3 Sentry AWACS. The purchase was believed to be the first phase of an agreement for up to eight of the Russian aircraft.
At the same time, however, Chinese scientists were at work on their own radar equipment. It is not known whether any of the Russian craft were ever delivered, which would have provided a look at the technology, or whether the technicians obtained help from Israeli or Russian counterparts. In any case, the Chinese AWACS that has begun test flights bears a strong resemblance to the A-50, which also uses the Il-76.
The AWACS could be operational within one or two years assuming the tests are successful, the specialists said. It was not known how many are planned for production, but Fisher noted eight would allow for a 24-hour patrol at both ends of the Taiwan Strait.
The Defense Ministry, which treats most military subjects as secret, did not reply to a request for information on the AWACS project.
Whatever the ultimate production schedule, AWACS development fits into a steady growth in the amount and sophistication of armaments on both sides of the strait, making a confrontation between China and Taiwan potentially one of the world's most dangerous.
The leadership has steadily increased military budgets in recent years and sought to reform the manpower-heavy but technology-short PLA as swiftly as possible. According to U.S. and Taiwanese officials, the government has deployed nearly 600 short-range ballistic missiles in southern China aimed at targets in Taiwan. The number grows by about 75 a year, they say.
Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, who began a second four-year term in May, has insisted the 13,500-square mile territory is independent and should stay that way. Soon after taking office in May, his government decided on an $18.2 billion arms purchase from the United States, including 12 P-3C Orion submarine-hunting planes, eight diesel-electric submarines and six PAC-3 batteries equipped with more than 350 Patriot anti-missile missiles.
But the opposition Nationalist and People First parties, which have a majority in the legislature, declined this week to approve Chen's budget for the purchase, arguing it was too expensive and in some ways inappropriate for Taiwan's needs. The issue is unlikely to be resolved until after the next legislative elections, scheduled for Dec. 11.
In the meantime, both sides have continued individual purchases that notch up the technology level of their militaries by matching threat for threat.
China, for instance, in 2002 bought from Israel a number of Harpy anti-radar drones, which can loiter over enemy territory and drop munitions on radars turned on to guide air defenses. Meanwhile, Taiwan has obtained authorization from the Bush administration to buy high-speed anti-radiation missiles, which also can target air defenses by homing in on radar emissions, Chin Hui-chu, a Taiwanese legislator on the National Defense committee, recently told the Taiwan News.
-------- depleted uranium
US report links toxins to Gulf war syndrome
The Guardian
November 13, 2004
James Meikle, health correspondent
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1350345,00.html
Troops who have fallen ill since the first Gulf war may have fallen victim to a ticking toxic timebomb, advisers to the US government said last night.
Scientists and veterans from the 1991 conflict went further than any previous official body either side of the Atlantic in identifying a complex chemical cocktail of nerve agents, pills to protect troops from those agents and multiple pesticides as a possible cause for their health problems.
Psychiatric illness, combat experience or other stresses from deployment did not explain ill health in the "vast majority" of 100,000 sick US veterans, according to the advisers' report. On the contrary, evidence supported a "probable link" between the toxins and veterans' illness.
Many troops had been exposed to substances belonging to a class of compounds that affected the nervous system and a "growing body of research" indicated that ill veterans differed from healthy ones "on objective measures of neuropathology and impairment."
Animal studies indicated that exposure to nerve agents at levels too low to produce acute symptoms could result in "chronic adverse effects on the nervous and immune systems". In addition, research suggested that if the neurotoxins were combined, they would be more poisonous.
Lord Morris of Manchester, who has campaigned for veterans both here and in the US, said: "This is a major development in unravelling the truth about thousands of still unexplained Gulf war illnesses. Scientific opinion in the US increasingly rejects the old medical consensus attributing the illness to wartime stress and psychiatric illness. I am calling for an urgent ministerial statement here in the UK."
The report was published by the US department of veterans affairs. The committee responsible included Robert Haley, the scientist who has suggested that three types of Gulf-related cell damage exist in veterans, the worst associated with confusion and vertigo, another related to thinking problems, depression and sleep disorders, and a third to pain.
This is not accepted here although there is consideration as to whether some of the 6,000 British veterans who have complained of illness should undergo similar brain scans. The Ministry of Defence insists there is no Gulf war syndrome, and no more deaths among veterans than among troops who never went to the Gulf.
It accepts that many more veterans who served there report illness. Research led by Simon Wessley of King's College, London, has suggested that people who had a battery of vaccinations and received them in the Gulf area, rather than before deployment, were more likely to report illness.
The new report says no further research into stress as a primary cause of the illnesses should be funded under federal Gulf war programmes. Instead, more work should be done to investigate the chronic effects of exposure to pesticides and nerve gas, as well as the effects of tablets taken to protect against nerve gas.
Earlier this year, a Congressional investigation blamed the bombing of weapons dumps during the war, or their destruction aftewards, for releasing chemical agents that might have spread wider than previously thought.
It said the destruction of weapons bunkers at Khamisayah in southern Iraq in March spread into Saudia Arabia and well into Iran. This is not accepted by the British government.
The research committee also wants the health of veterans' children monitored, and will pursue further research into infections diseases, vaccines, smoke from burning oil wells and depleted uranium in anti-tank shells.
-------- iran
Iran Says EU Nuke Negotiations in Final Stages
November 13, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's negotiations with the European Union over a deal which would spare Tehran from possible U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program are in their final stages, Iran said Saturday.
``Negotiations with Europe were intense and important and... they are in their final stages,'' Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told state television. ``We have given them our final response and await their final decision and we hope to pass this stage smoothly.''
Iran and the European Union's big three powers -- Britain, Germany and France -- have been negotiating a deal for the past few weeks under which Tehran would agree to freeze sensitive nuclear work such as uranium enrichment.
In return, the EU would not support U.S. calls for Iran's case to be sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions and would sit down with Iran to work out a lasting solution to the nuclear dispute.
Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are limited to generating electricity from atomic power plants, not making bombs.
Tehran gave its response to the EU deal Thursday but there has been no announcement yet of a final agreement. EU diplomats say Iran has been trying to change some of the terms of the deal, including the scope of the enrichment suspension.
President Bush, who has labeled Iran an ``axis of evil'' member, Friday gave public backing to the EU initiative to try to resolve the dispute through talks.
``We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon and we're working toward that end,'' Bush said at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House.
``And the truth of the matter is the prime minister gets a lot of credit for working with France and Germany to convince the Iranians to get rid of the processes that would enable them to develop a nuclear weapon.''
IAEA REPORT DELAYED AGAIN
The IAEA has delayed release of its of eagerly-awaited report summarizing its two-year investigation of Iran to give the EU and Iran a chance to come to a final agreement.
``The stakes are very high on both sides,'' a Vienna-based Western diplomat who follows IAEA issues very closely told Reuters. The report was originally due Friday but will not likely reach Vienna diplomats until early next week.
The suspension of enrichment was demanded by the IAEA board of governors in September. Although the IAEA resolution called for an immediate freeze of all enrichment-related activities, Iran has continued producing centrifuge parts.
``They now have enough parts for 1100 to 1200 centrifuges,'' said one diplomat, adding that this was enough to make enough highly-enriched uranium for a weapon in two to three years.
Diplomats said IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had told the Iranians that if the results of their negotiations with the EU were positive, he would be able to present a relatively upbeat report to the agency's 35-member board on Nov. 25.
Unlike previous reports, which were technical updates about the investigation, this report will cover the entire probe.
Diplomats said that ElBaradei plans to say that while he has found no evidence Tehran diverted resources or materials to a weapons program, Iran's nuclear fuel production capabilities are suspiciously far ahead of the rest of its atomic program.
Kharrazi said it was time for Iran's case to be closed.
``We have done all we could to cooperate with the agency. Most of the questions are addressed now. There is nothing more Iran can do... We think it is time to close Iran's case with the agency,'' he said.
--------
Iran Says Nuclear Talks in 'Final Stages'
Associated Press
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Nov 13, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran is in the "final stages" of negotiation with diplomats from the major European powers in a dispute over nuclear arms, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Saturday. But European envoys warned that a lasting agreement remains a long way off.
Iran has been asked to make a commitment not to enrich uranium - a process that can provide material for nuclear reactors as well as bombs.
Last month, envoys from Britain, France and Germany offered Iran a deal that included a light-water research reactor if Iran pledged to abandon uranium enrichment and related activities. In a subsequent round of talks that finished in Paris on Nov. 6, a tentative agreement was reached, according to representatives from all sides.
"The negotiations we had with Europeans were very intense and important," Kharrazi said in an Iranian TV broadcast Saturday. "It's in the final stages." Washington believes Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons under cover of a peaceful nuclear program, and President Bush has accused Iran of being part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
In a television interview to be aired Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States is not seeking a regime change in Iran and has no plans to invade the country.
"That is our policy: no regime change. It is up to the Iranian people to decide what they are going to do with respect to their future and how they are going to be led," Powell told CNBC's The Wall Street Journal Report. He added, however, that "we don't approve of this regime." Iran denies developing nuclear arms and has offered to provide guarantees that its program is strictly about producing electricity. "Most of the questions have been answered. There is nothing else Iran can do," said Kharrazi, who was interviewed in Cairo, where he attended the funeral of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Friday.
However, European diplomats in Vienna have said the Iranian government had come back this week with a version of the Paris agreement that was unacceptable.
In his comments Saturday, Kharrazi sounded optimistic about the status of the negotiations.
"We have given them our final response and we are awaiting their final response. We hope to pass this stage in a good way," Kharrazi said.
The Europeans have warned Iran that unless it ceases all enrichment activities, they will back the U.S. push to have Iran's nuclear file referred to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions on the country. The issue is to be discussed at a meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna on Nov. 25.
The IAEA has delayed a report on Iran's nuclear activities that had been scheduled for limited circulation Friday among diplomats accredited to the agency.
A four-person team of IAEA inspectors arrived in Tehran on Saturday, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. It said the visit was part of routine inspections and the team would leave Nov. 23.
Iran has long argued that its signature to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to enrich uranium, and it wants to produce nuclear fuel rather than depend on imports.
However, Iran concealed aspects of its nuclear program until recently, and this has generated intense international pressure for it to forgo enrichment as a safeguard against the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear program, and enrichment, enjoys wide support in Iran and is perhaps the only foreign policy issue on which all political factions agree.
Iran suspended enrichment temporarily last year, but it has refused to stop related activities such as reprocessing uranium or building centrifuges.
-------- iraq / inspections
A Review of the Duelfer Report
Forget Ernest Hemingway, Where's the RDX?
By Werther
November 13, 2004
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c530.htm
The Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD is commonly called "The Duelfer Report," after its director, Charles Duelfer. This long (966 page) three-volume report is the U.S. Government's final word on whether the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pursuing chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles of prohibited type and range.
Given the manifest political pressure from their superiors to document evidence of prohibited weapons programs, the report's authors spared no effort or expense. For 16 months, 1,500 U.S. and British inspectors searched Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. The team was called the Iraq Survey Group. The cost of the search by these 1,500 personnel was $600 million. [1]
As the world now knows in abundant detail, the team found no evidence of the prohibited articles. But what illuminates the policy making process in the United States Government is the elephantine manner in which the report grudgingly comes to that conclusion.
As such, the report attempts to make lemonade out of lemons by providing long-winded "context" for the absence of any actual evidence of prohibited weaponry. The document - which ought to be first and foremost a painstaking inventory of physical evidence of weaponry - takes several lengthy detours into secondary or even irrelevant matters, as will be seen below.
It also displays a symptom of what appears to be a growing tendency of government documents that attempt to rationalize away the stupidity or misfeasance of government officials: the curse of "fine writing." Like its sister effort in alibi-making, the 9/11 Commission Report, [2] the Duelfer opus swathes inconvenient facts in the soft bandages of English Lit. Therefore, the paramount question - did Saddam Hussein develop weaponry banned by United Nations resolutions - recedes before a psychoanalytic portrait of a fiend in human form who obviously intended to get those weapons, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
The report even hilariously quotes Ernest Hemingway (more an expert on the drinking emporia of Havana than contemporary Middle Eastern developments, surely) in order to illuminate the Beast of Baghdad's singular personality. It is as if in 1945, British Intelligence had dispatched a team of technical experts to defeated Germany for a report on the state of German rocketry and received instead a character study of Hitler. [3]
Such focus on Saddam is not merely misleading to the public who had a right to expect a dispassionate inventory of facts, it is also delusory in that it confirms the American governing class's obsession with demon figures as opposed to an acceptance of the fact that the current state system inevitably involves nations with clashing interests. The American equation of [fill in the blank with favorite dictator here] with Hitler not only allows the Washington elites to dupe themselves and the public that military action is not merely necessary but morally compulsory; it also fools them into thinking the "natives" will be properly grateful for having their property invaded and their houses bombed.
Likewise one senses that the report team's innumerable interviews with Iraqi scientists, military leaders, and government bureaucrats yielded rather less than claimed. It is certainly possible that the Nuremberg Syndrome revealed itself in the witnesses' eagerness to say that they were mere putty in the hands of the capricious tyrant Saddam. If such were the case, lower level culpability would of course be conveniently removed. And since Saddam was maniacally secretive, it becomes impossible to prove he wasn't thinking about obtaining WMD. In a legal case, this would be the equivalent of the prosecutor going to enormous lengths to establish an alleged perpetrator's motives when there was no physical evidence a crime had been committed.
Another diversionary theme of the report is its hectoring reportage of the Saddam Hussein government's attempts to evade or legally end sanctions. This theme scratches numerous ideological itches, including: (1) the alleged futility of sanctions, particularly under the auspices of the U.N., as an alternative to pre-emptive military invasions; (2) the corruption of the U.N. itself as a convenient counterpoint to copious evidence of fraud and mismanagement by U.S. military contractors in Iraq; (3) the inherent perfidy of foreign governments, particularly the French. The ideological utility of these themes is apparent from Fox News's Herculean labors to make the oil for food program into the latest Whitewater scandal. Needless to say, Duelfer edited out the names of American companies that were violating sanctions in collusion with Saddam. It is certainly a refreshing precedent that, Patriot Act or no, the administration is showing a keen regard for privacy issues. [4]
So much for what the Duelfer Report covers, at numbing and Joycean length. What the report does not cover is also illuminating. It is true that Iraq's 377 metric tons of Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine [RDX] and High Melting Point Explosive [HMX] that have gone missing - presumably by looting - are not chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. They are, however, one of four or five essential components in triggering nuclear weapons: HMX was developed specifically for that purpose, because its high energy would allow both a smaller nuclear weapon package and in order to trigger fission more efficiently. Given that the insurgents in Iraq are making some pretty energetic bombs that are light and concealable (lugging low explosive to a site under cover and making a mine big enough to damage an Abrams tank is a lot more difficult than using stable, concealable plastic explosive) one can apply Occam's Razor and conclude that RDX and HMX were looted by insurgents and have been used locally ever since.
The big question is whether the explosives have leaked out internationally. The twin airplane disaster in Russia was probably plastique. If President Vladimir Putin were actually collaborating with Muslims to move plastic explosives around the world, as alleged by John Shaw, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense [5] it would be suicidally stupid of him.
One suspects that the author of the piece on Shaw's allegations, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, is effectively acting as Charlie McCarthy to the neoconservative faction's Edgar Bergen in a desperate attempt to muddy the waters. And Charles Duelfer's own comment that the looting of the plastic explosives was no big deal because it's only a small percentage of the explosives in pre-war Iraq is equally transparent and devoid of logic. It is the equivalent of saying the U.S. has an inventory of 10,000 nukes and who cares if a half dozen go missing
Granted, RDX and HMX are not nukes, but they are among the most energetic non-nuclear explosives. In addition to triggering fission in a nuclear warhead, they are also non-metallic, moldable, do not smell, and are stable in transport; i.e., they can probably go through most standard detectors. Less than a pound brought down the Boeing 747 over Lockerbie. The amount missing from the Iraq inventory would make approximately 800,000 Lockerbie bombs.
The reaction of the U.S. Government to the explosives looting - a mixture of nonchalant indifference, prickly defensiveness, and diversionary accusations - is particularly insulting given the security stakes involved. The government's own efforts to ban truck traffic on the streets proximate to key locations in Washington, D.C. and some other cities (in order to prevent a Tim McVeigh-style use of tons of low explosives in a truck) are potentially defeated by the availability of a much more energetic explosive, 50 lbs. of which could be hidden in a smaller vehicle.
The Duelfer Report's handling of the explosives fiasco is depressing. Volume I of the report makes on page 81 an incidental mention of RDX as one of several types of explosives that Iraqi Intelligence could use for covert assassinations. Oddly, though, the report's authors, who were otherwise so free with supposition about Iraqi intentions in other matters, did not surmise that this kind of tactic could be transferable to non-state actors, and that securing the stockpile was an urgent priority. The volume makes no mention of HMX.
In Volume II, on pages 14, 16, and 96, the report states that the composition of some Iraqi missile warheads was 30 percent RDX. There is no mention of HMX.
In Volume III on page 237 (page 11 of the glossary), the acronym RDX is defined. There is no mention in that volume of HMX.
By contrast, the much derided (or ignored) January 2003 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] on the state of Iraq's WMD is a model of concision: it contains all of 16 pages. [6] Yet this report, while economizing on literary quotations and psychoanalytic portraits, contains two substantive paragraphs on plastic explosives which I reproduce in full below with paragraph numbering as in the original:
2. HMX
53. The relocation and consumption of HMX (a high explosive of potential use in nuclear weapons), as described in Iraq's backlog of semi-annual declarations, has been investigated by the IAEA. In those declarations, Iraq stated that, between 1998 and 2002, it had transferred 32 of the 228 tonnes of HMX which had been under IAEA seal as of December 1998 to other locations. In addition, Iraq stated that a very small quantity (46 kg) of HMX had been used at munitions factories for research and development. At the request of the IAEA, Iraq has provided further clarification on the movement and use of the HMX. In that clarification, Iraq indicated that the 32 tonnes of HMX had been blended with sulphur to produce industrial explosives and provided mainly to cement plants for quarrying, and that the research and development using the small quantity of HMX had been in the areas of personnel mines, explosives in civilian use, missile warhead filling and research on tanks.
54. IAEA inspectors have been able to verify and re-seal the remaining balance of approximately 196 tonnes of HMX, most of which has remained at the original storage location. The movement of the blended HMX and the other small quantity of HMX has also been documented by Iraq. However, it has not been possible to verify the use of those materials, as all of it is said to have been consumed through explosions and there are no immediately available technical means for verifying such uses. The IAEA will continue to investigate means of verifying the Iraqi statements about the use of the HMX and blended HMX.
It is nice to know that with only $600 million and a thousand pages at their disposal, the loyal servants of the American people are almost up to the standards of a 16-page U.N.-sponsored report written in haste while Saddam was still in control of Iraq.
The distressing saga of the looted plastic explosive, and the government's studied incompetence and denial in dealing with the issue, illustrate in bold, primary colors how Washington's elites squander the public's money to make us all less safe while at the same time coercing the bureaucracy to write bogus reports justifying their actions.
Postscript:
As expenditures for the conquest and occupation of Iraq approach $200 billion, Time magazine reports that the rate of illegal immigration into the United States has actually increased since September 11, 2001. [7] And now that the election is over, the administration's proposal to amnesty up to 10 million illegal aliens is back on the table - a proposal which Customs and Border Protection agents say has already stimulated an increased flow of illegal immigration.
Consider carefully what your government is doing: (1) by besieging foreign towns like a medieval army, it is providing the anti-American motive to millions of people who were heretofore favorable or indifferent to the United States and its people; (2) by following the crackpot military theories of Donald Rumsfeld - thereby providing too few troops to guard munitions depots (but not the oil ministry) - it has provided the means for those angry millions to take revenge upon us; and (3) by leaving our border open so as to reward Wal-Mart, agribusiness, and other interests who show their gratitude in the form of political contributions, it is providing the opportunity for those vengeful persons to strike in the homeland of their enemy.
If, God forbid, such a fearful scenario eventuates, we can be sure that an aspiring Tom Keane or Charles Duelfer will be summoned from the bench to explain in beautiful prose that it wasn't the government's fault.
- Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia based defense analyst.
Notes:
[1] This was the amount budgeted for the purpose in the fiscal year 2004 Iraq supplemental appropriation (P.L. 108-106).
[2] Literary connoisseurs were so taken by the 9/11 Report's description of the blue of the sky that they failed to notice that nowhere in the report's 567 pages is any individual in government condemned for nonfeasance, misfeasance, or malfeasance, nor is any removal for cause recommended.
[3] Which is in fact what the British got: MI6 operative and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler has enough Wagnerian Sturm und Drang for the most jaded palate. Alas, Lord Trevor-Roper's expertise did not prevent him from pronouncing the fake Hitler diaries as genuine during the 1980s.
[4] To spare the reader the suspense, the American companies whose names were blacked out in the report are Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Bay Oil as well as three individuals: Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. of Houston, Samir Vincent of Annandale, Virginia, and Shakir al-Khafaji of West Bloomfield, Michigan. These companies and individuals were given vouchers and got 111 million barrels of oil between them from 1996 to 2003. The vouchers allowed them to profit by selling the oil or the right to trade it.
[5] "Russia Tied to Iraq's Missing Arms," The Washington Times, 28 October 2004.
[6] The report is available online here: http://www.mideastweb.org/inspectionreports.htm
[7] "Who Left the Door Open?" Time, 20 September 2004.
Chuck Spinney
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
-------- korea
South Korea Urges Atomic Talks, North Softens Tone
November 13, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-roh.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea urged the United States to try talking to North Korea instead of taking a hard line over its nuclear plans, while Pyongyang said it would be ``quite possible'' to solve the crisis if Washington changed its stance.
The United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea have held three rounds of talks with the communist North since mid-2003. Pyongyang ducked an agreed meeting in September and has made clear another round would be difficult this year.
``I'm saying here that there's no other way than dialogue,'' South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said in a speech during a stopover in Los Angeles on his way to South America, where he will meet re-elected President Bush.
``A hardline policy means too much for the Korean peninsula,'' said Roh, referring to the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War and the consequences of any new conflict.
The Bush administration is seeking the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the North's atomic projects and arsenal.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry took a sideways swipe at Bush's approach on Saturday, mixing standard but toned-down rhetoric with possible flexibility.
A ministry spokesman said U.S. media had spread nonsensical reports that the six-way talks could not succeed because the North insisted on bilateral negotiations.
``The DPRK does not feel any need to ask the United States for the bilateral talks as it is not ready to hold them,'' the North's official KCNA news agency quoted the spokesman as saying.
DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
During the presidential election campaign, the difference between Bush's approach and that of Democratic rival John Kerry was boiled down to multilateral versus bilateral talks, although the gap between the two was actually more nuanced.
In the coded language of the North, the spokesman's comments were a sign Pyongyang was not closing the door on Bush.
``If the U.S. drops its hostile policy aimed at bringing down the system in the DPRK and opts for co-existing with the latter in practice, it will be quite possible to settle the issue,'' he said.
AXIS OF EVIL
North Korea has yet to comment officially on Bush's win. Diplomatic analysts say Pyongyang is waiting to see who heads North Korea policy in Bush's second administration and what changes, if any, are made to Washington's approach.
At the beginning of his first term, Bush branded North Korea part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
Japan and China said on Thursday the North had made clear an early resumption of the six-party talks would be difficult.
Earlier, North Korea said it would step up its ``nuclear deterrence,'' saying Washington was preparing an emergency scenario to attack it using nuclear arms.
``No matter what others may say, the DPRK will as ever strive to increase its self-defensive nuclear deterrent force to cope with the U.S. moves for a nuclear war,'' KCNA quoted a spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland as saying.
The committee is North Korea's official channel for dealing with the South, the counterpart to Seoul's Unification Ministry. The Foreign Ministry deals with the six-party talks.
The latest nuclear crisis erupted two years ago when U.S. diplomats said North Korean had admitted to running a covert uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang has since denied this.
--------
IAEA clears South Korea in nuke probe
(UPI)
Nov. 13, 2006
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041113-073603-9604r.htm
Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 13 -- A U.N. atomic agency has cleared South Korea of military intent in laboratory experiments that produced tiny amounts of nuclear material.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday South Korea's recently revealed nuclear activities were not part of any secret military plan, the Korea Times reported Saturday.
The IAEA's conclusions have been circulated to the 35 member states on its board of governors, who could refer the matter to the Security Council or drop the matter at their Nov. 25 meeting.
According to the 8-page report, the average enrichment level of the 0.2-gram uranium produced during the 2000 experiment was 10.2 percent, but a very small amount was close to 77 percent. As far as the quality is concerned, uranium enriched to 90 percent is generally considered weapons grade, The Times said.
The average enrichment level of the plutonium produced during 1982 tests was about 98 percent, according to the report, but the tiny amount, 0.7 gram, was regarded as far too small to have any link to a clandestine atomic weapons program.
-----
DPRK rebuts US allegation on nuclear talks
Xinhuanet
Nov. 13, 2004
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/13/content_2214897.htm
PYONGYANG, Nov. 13 ) -- The Democratic People's Republicof Korea (DPRK) on Saturday denied a US allegation that the DPRK only wants to hold direct bilateral talks with the United States for solving the nuclear issue of the DPRK, and reiterated that thekey to solving the deadlocked issue is an end of Washington's hostile policy toward the DPRK.
A DPRK Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected some recent reports in US media that blamed the deadlock of the six-party talks on Pyongyang's demand of talks with the United Sates only.
"This is nothing but sophism making profound confusing of the right and wrong," the spokesman said.
"As for bilateral talks, the DPRK has neither expected nor waited for them as the US has been opposed to it. Accordingly, theDPRK does not feel any need to ask the US for bilateral talks. Moreover, it does not stand to reason for the DPRK to try to hold any bilateral talks with the party which is hatching plots 'to bring down the DPRK's system'", he said.
He reiterated that "for the US to make its policy switchover isthe key to finding a solution to the issue."
If the United States drops its hostile policy aimed at "bringing down the system" in the DPRK and opts for co-existing with the latter in practice, "it will be quite possible to settle the issue," he said.
The spokesman noted that the DPRK has clarified on various occasions its willingness to settle the nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations and that "it does not stick to the form of the talks."
"The DPRK will go ahead to attain its desired goal strictly according to its independent judgment and in the state interests,"he added.
The nuclear issue of the DPRK erupted in October 2002 when US officials said DPRK was pursuing a covert uranium-enrichment program.
The DPRK, however, has since denied running such a program, andhas repeatedly demanded food and energy aid and diplomatic concessions in return for refreezing an older, plutonium-based nuclear program, mothballed in 1994.
But the US decision in November 2002 to halt offering heavy oilto the DPRK on the excuse that the DPRK was continuing its nuclearprogram escalated the situation.
The DPRK then decided to resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity. It said the steps were taken just to make up the huge power hole due to the heavy oil suspension, adding that it was the US government who violated the 1994 Agreed Framework signed by the US and the DPRK.
The accord in 1994 stipulates that the DPRK freeze its nuclear program in return for the provision of 500,000 tons of heavy oil ayear by US and for the help to build two sets of light waters reactors in the DPRK before 2003.
In August 2003, mediated by China, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea, along with Russia and the DPRK held the first round six-party talks in Beijing, aimed at realizing the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Up to June this year, three rounds of the six-party talks have been held, all in Beijing. The fourth round scheduled for September failed to take place.
Pyongyang has said that the US turning down the proposal of "reward for freeze" advanced by the DPRK and applying "double standards" make the fourth round of the six-party talks abortive. Endit
-----
S. Korean Leader Won't Tolerate Aggression
Saturday November 13, 2004
By CHRIS T. NGUYEN
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4612695,00.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) - South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Friday he will not tolerate the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea, but warned a ``hard-line policy'' against the communist country could lead to grave consequences.
``Our commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula is ... clear. As to our position that North Korean nuclear capability can by no means be tolerated - this issue must be resolved peacefully through the six-party talks,'' said Roh, referring to negotiations that involve both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
``You might have noticed that I've been undutifully blunt and direct in terms of stressing that the fact there is no alternative left in dealing with this issue other than dialogue,'' added Roh, speaking through an interpreter.
``And it should also be noted that a hard-line policy will have very grave repercussions and implications for the Korean peninsula.''
Roh's appearance, sponsored by the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, came on the first leg of a 12-day trip that will culminate with his attendance at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 20-21.
At the forum, he will seek support for a peaceful solution to the dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. He will also meet privately with President Bush and others.
During his speech, Roh avoided discussing a report by the United Nations atomic watchdog agency that his country's nuclear experiments produced minute amounts of plutonium and near-weapons-grade uranium.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday there was no evidence linking those experiments to an attempt to make nuclear arms. Its report urged South Korea to provide more details of its experiments.
South Korean officials confirmed the experiments, saying they were conducted by scientists who withheld their work from government officials.
The IAEA report highlighted tensions between North Korea and South Korea.
Though the countries reached an agreement in 1992 aimed at keeping the peninsula free of nuclear weapons, North Korea expelled inspectors in 2002 and said it was developing nuclear weapons.
The report said South Korea refused two requests by the IAEA to visit the Daejon government nuclear center - and even after giving inspectors access in March, initially refused to allow them to take environmental samples.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
Safety at Hope Creek questioned
Whistle-blower says nuclear plant operator risks catastrophe
By JEFF MONTGOMERY
The News Journal (Delaware)
11/13/2004
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2004/11/13safetyathopecre.html
A New Jersey woman who said she was fired from PSEG last year after continuing to press top managers on nuclear plant safety concerns says the company is risking a catastrophe if they restart the idled Hope Creek reactor along the Delaware River without an extensive safety check and overhaul.
Nancy Kymn Harvin, a communications and organization specialist who filed a "whistle-blower" complaint that is pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said a company focus on "earnings per share" sidetracked reforms launched after a safety crisis and self-imposed shutdown in the mid-1990s.
Harvin said documented problems at Hope Creek earlier this year were neglected, only to become factors in a sudden, costly shutdown on Oct. 10 that remains under investigation.
"We're going to do everything we can to not allow that unit to restart" until the company addresses chronic maintenance problems that compromise safety, Harvin said. "Workers have said that instead of taking a systematic and systemic view, the modus operandi is to look at finite, discrete problems and fix them as minimally as possible, not to take the broader view and find out what all the ramifications are."
Skip Sindoni, a spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said Harvin's job was eliminated in 2003 during a reorganization of the utility, and said safety would guide the company's decisions about Hope Creek.
"Hope Creek won't restart until we're confident that we've made the necessary repairs," Sindoni said.
PSEG Nuclear operates the Hope Creek and twin Salem Units 1 and 2 reactors, which can generate more than 3,300 megawatts and together rank as the nation's second-largest nuclear complex. More than 24,000 people in Delaware live inside the plant's 10-mile-radius emergency planning zone.
Harvin, who joined PSEG in 1998, said she was given a 45-day termination notice in February 2003 and then saw her remaining time with the company abruptly cut short after she continued attempting to relay worker and manager warnings about a dangerous steam valve problem at Hope Creek to the utility's top officers.
"What they were really saying is: You know too much, and you've become a problem to us," said Harvin, who has filed a separate civil whistle-blower lawsuit against the company.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan confirmed the agency is investigating Harvin's complaints, but said he was unable to estimate when the commission would issue a ruling.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said his organization has been working with Harvin while conducting its own examinations of PSEG's troubles at Hope Creek and Salem. "We've been working with Kymn since September of 2003," Lochbaum said, adding that the NRC usually declines to discuss whistle-blower cases unless the individual already has become a public figure.
The NRC earlier this year issued a rare, pre-emptive order to PSEG nuclear demanding immediate efforts to reform its "safety culture," an action that came about four months after Harvin's whistle-blower action.
Harvin said she was told to leave the plant ahead of schedule in March 2003 after drawing attention to a plant director's concerns about a safety problem with a stuck valve that allowed steam to bypass a generating turbine at Hope Creek.
"The operators didn't believe it was safe to resume operations without fixing the bypass valve, yet there's this pressure coming from corporate to start back up as soon as possible," Harvin said. "One of the managers came to me and said 'Kymn, we're dangerous. If the NRC knew what we were doing, they would take the keys away.' "
In another instance, Lochbaum said pressure to maintain production led a plant supervisor to wrestle open a stuck valve without following safety precautions.
"Throwing all caution to the wind, one of the shift supervisors went in and manually used elbow grease to get the thing working, putting himself at great risk and violating all kinds of procedures," Lochbaum said. "Many of the workers were concerned that that sends the wrong message - to keep the plant on line was more important than safety."
Harvin said PSEG needs to shut down all three of its reactors and fix safety problems. She said the company also needs to investigate and repair a crucial cooling water recirculation pump at the core of Hope Creek.
NRC and company officials have acknowledged a serious vibration problem in the pump, which, if it failed, would lead to what the NRC considers a "worst case" loss-of-cooling-water accident.
"Certainly our resident inspectors have been made aware of any problems involving testing of the recirculation pump, and we're going to continue to engage them on that issue," said Sheehan.
"Starting with the vibration would be stupid," Lochbaum said. "We're not talking about a little bit of shaking. There's a whole lot of shaking going on."
Harvin said she came to PSEG as the company was emerging from a similar safety and maintenance crisis in the mid-1990s. She said the utility was making steady progress until about 2002, when pressure from the nuclear plant's parent company began to increase and tolerance for safety-related delays fell.
Under NRC pressure, PSEG this year hired an outside consultant whose findings tended to back up some of Harvin's complaints. Utilities Service Alliance, found the plants fell short of "competence" in 72 of 90 critical areas reviewed in March 2004.
A report last year noted that Hope Creek inadequately managed 20 of 33 problems that had some connections to reactor management, such as control rod drive and reactor monitoring issues.
"I wouldn't want to go to a hospital, I wouldn't want to put my parents in a nursing home, I wouldn't even want to eat in a restaurant where 72 of 90 critical areas are less than competent," Harvin said. "And yet the Salem and Hope Creek reactors were deemed safe by the NRC and the company to operate with these degraded conditions. I find that preposterous."
Hope Creek was idled on Oct. 10 after a steam line break was later traced to a support bracket that may have been missing or unattached for up to 15 years. PSEG chose to begin an ahead-of-schedule, two-month refueling operation shortly after the shutdown.
Sheehan said the NRC plans to meet in public with PSEG on Dec. 2 to review the company's progress on improving its management of safety issues. Another meeting also is planned to review the results of company and federal investigations into the Oct. 10 steam pipe break.
Meanwhile, there is no court date set for Harvin's New Jersey civil lawsuit. The NRC could take weeks or months to rule on her complaints. Under federal rules, nuclear utilities or their contractors can face fines and orders to provide back pay and reinstatement to workers if managers are found guilty of retaliatory acts against whistle-blowers.
Contact Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Details of anti-personnel bombs and weapons
againstbombing.org
13 November 2004
http://www.againstbombing.org/Washbombs.htm
Bomb Types
2,000-pound Mark 84 JDAM -- Workhorse of U.S. Military: A Bomb With Devastating Effects
Varieties of Cluster Bombs
CBU-52B
The bomblets in the CBU-52 are softball-sized and are intended primarily to shred and dismember human bodies. The dispenser holds 220 of the bomblets and can be used against both people and light-skinned vehicles.
CBU-58A/B
This cluster bomb is also used to butcher human bodies and destroy light skinned military or civilian vehicles. The dispenser holds 650 baseball-sized bomblets to be dispersed indiscriminately over a wide area.
CBU-59B Rockeye II
A newer version of the MK-20 Rockeye cluster bomb, the CBU 59 is used against both modern armor and human bodies. Rockeye II and the older Rockeye I are dart shaped bomblets with a small fuze in the pointed end of each bomblet. The CBU-59 dispenser holds about 700 bomblets.
CBU-71/B
The CBU-71/B is very similar to the CBU-58, carrying 650 baseball-sized bomblets. The CBU-71 bomblets have what the U.S. authorities call "a random delay fuzing option."
Translation: these cluster bombs are used as land mines which will explode by themselves at random times to terrorize a local population.
CBU-72 Fuel Air Explosive
This cluster bomb is different from all the others. It's an extremely destructive incendiary bomb, rather than a shrapnel bomb, sometimes compared to a mini-nuke.
It's used to detonate minefields, to destroy aircraft parked in the open - and also to burn the occupants alive in armored vehicles, and to burn alive or suffocate people taking shelter in bunkers or over demolished city areas where people may be hiding in basements and rubble.
The bomb is made up of three separate bomblets dispensing an aerosol fuel cloud across the target area. As the fuel cloud descends to the ground it is ignited by an embedded detonator to produce what the U.S. military calls "an impressive explosion," which sucks out all the oxygen over an extended area.
The rapidly expanding wave front due to overpressure flattens all objects and burns all people alive within close proximity of the epicenter of the aerosol fuel cloud. It also produces "debilitating damage" well beyond the flattened area from oxygen deprivation.
Fuel air bombs also can be used as asphixiation weapons, without being exploded, but this is in violation of international treaties.
CBU-87 CEM Combined Effects Munition
According to the "Jane's Air-Launched Weapons" directory, the U.S.-made CBU-87 "combined effects munition" is a "free-fall cluster bomb" composed of 202 "multi-purpose bomblets." Each bomblet is capable of penetrating up to 177 mm (seven inches) of armor and has fire-starting capabilities as well.
The CEM dispenses the 202 bomblets over an area of 800 feet by 400 feet. The U.S. calls it "an area denial cluster weapon."
Translation from military-speak: the bomblets create an 800 by 400 foot mine field.
This cluster bomb is intended to destroy both lightly armored vehicles and human beings.
The CBU-87 was used extensively during the Desert Storm terror campaign.
CBU-89
The "GATOR" family of scatterable mines is another favorite body-butchering weapon used by "fighter aircrews." The dispenser holds 72 anti-armor mines and 22 anti-personnel mines. These mines arm immediately upon impact.
The GATOR has two integrated "kill mechanisms," a magnetic influence fuze to sense armor, and deployed trip wires that explode the bomb when adults, children or an animal walks on or disturbs them.
Another feature of the GATOR is the "random delay function" detonating over several days for "highly effective area denial and harassment operations."
Translation: these weapons are highly effective for the terrorization of human beings.
CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon
This "cosmic cluster munition" combines 10 bomblets with 4 "skeet type" warheads in a single dispenser, providing 40 weapons total. After release, a fuze causes the dispenser to disperse the 10 bomblets, each stabilized by a parachute.
At a preset altitude a rocket fires, propelling the bomblet in an upward vector. As the bomblet climbs, it is spun to disperse the 4 internal skeet warheads randomly by centrifugal force.
An infrared sensor in each warhead searches for a motorized vehicle or living being, and upon discovery detonates over it, firing a "kinetic fragment." The fragment drives itself through the lightly armored top of the vehicle - or warm blooded animal or human.
If no isolated victim is found, the sensor detonates the warhead above ground to spray the battlefield - or the village - with a myriad of lethal fragments.
This American weapon is very effective against armor and human bodies, covering a 4,800 square yard area.
CBU-97/B Sensor Fuzed Weapon
The CBU-97/B cluster bomb was used in the American/NATO terror campaign of 1999 to kill civilian people all over Yugoslavia. For example, this is probably the model that slaughtered the old men and women doing their shopping on the market street in the town of Nis.
This cluster bomb destroys armored vehicles like tanks, and can spray a "battlefield" (read: market square) with metal fragments, making it lethal against people and other "soft" targets. Like horses, cows, sheep and family pets.
According to Jane's Defense Weekly, which predicted its use in early April 1999 (by which time it had already been used), each sensor fuzed weapon carries forty SKEET warheads that use infrared sensors to home in on armored vehicles and people.
Each warhead is a copper-plated, 1 kg Explosively-Formed Projectile that spins at 1,600 rpm. The SFW can be dropped from 200 to 20,000 feet from B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers, as well as from A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft and F-15 and F-16 fighters. The SFW can cover an area the size of about 12 football fields (or 6 hectares).
A B-1B bomber can carry 30 SFWs, or 1200 individual cluster bombs, with the potential to blanket a populated area equal to 360 football fields.
Five B-1B Lancer bombers were deployed on April 1, 1999, at RAF Fairford, England, and used to terrorize the civilian men, women and children of Yugoslavia. The A-10 Warthog and F-16 can be fitted with four SFWs. At the beginning of April, only the B-1B had been "certified" for using the SFW, which suggests that any other aircraft using the weapon was conducting experiments in the so-called "combat" situations.
MK-20 Rockeye
The Rockeye is a clamshell-shaped dispenser holding 247 dart-shaped bomblets. The bomblets free fall over a 3,300 square yard area and detonate on impact. The shaped warhead charge in the bomblet is intended for use against armor and people.
British cluster bomb - the RBL755
The British, have their own version of the cluster bomb. They too used it to butcher civilian men, women and children all over Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Each RBL 755 weighs 600 lb and breaks up in the air releasing 147 bomblets. About the size of a soft-drink can, parachutes slow the bomblets' fall, and each has the explosive power to destroy a tank - if it hits it in the right place.
Of course, that's a big "IF" - considering the safe-for-the-pilot altitude from which the bombs are dropped. The high altitude delivery ensures that there will be much less accuracy. That means more dead civilians.
The 'R' BL755 uses a different fuze from the original low-level delivery variant allowing it to be dropped from a high enough altitude - above 10,000 ft (3,305 m) - where there is very little threat from hand-held, infrared-guided, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery.
Downloaded Courtesy of http://www.humboldt1.com/~016910/DomesticOppression.html
Concrete Piercing Bombs --New technology used in Afghanistan and the DAISYCUTTER----
1 square kilometer kill range. For this and more bomb information see--- http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-82.htm
See Also Bombs for Beginners from the Federation of American Scientistshttp: Lots of details and infomration.
-------- asia
China urges calm after Japan demands apology for submarine intrusion
TOKYO (AFP)
Nov 13, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041113100032.o4jk9abv.html
China on Saturday urged Japan to stay calm in solving bilateral disputes a day after Tokyo demanded an apology for the intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine into Japanese waters.
"Sometimes there are problems between China and Japan, but we should respect each other and need to seek a solution in a calm manner," Chinese Ambassador Wang Yi told a meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in western Japan.
Wang made no direct reference to the submarine incident, according to Jiji Press, but used the speech to take a new swipe at Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine which honors Japanese war dead including convicted war criminals.
If Japan "justifies class-A war criminals, who were the symbols of Japanese militarism, it not only hurts the feelings of Chinese people but reverses the foundation of Sino-Japanese relations," Wang said.
China harbors deep resentment over its brutal occupation by Japan from 1931 to 1945. Bilateral friction has been growing, including over Koizumi's visits to the shrine and a gas field disputed by the major energy importers.
Japan says the submarine violated its waters for two hours Wednesday near the disputed gas field, triggering a two-day chase on the high seas.
After initial caution about blaming its neighbor, Japan said Friday that the submarine belonged to the Chinese navy and demanded an apology. It summoned Chinese embassy number two Cheng Yonghua, as the ambassador was out of Tokyo.
Cheng told Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura he could not apologize as his government's investigation over the submarine was pending, a Japanese diplomat in Beijing said.
Japanese newspapers said Saturday the country's distrust of China had grown due to the submarine's intrusion.
"Tokyo had every reason to request an apology from Beijing for its violation of Japanese sovereignty and demand it ensure nothing like the recent incident will ever happen again," the best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.
"The Chinese submarine's behavior was enough to arouse our great distrust," it said.
The Mainichi Shimbun, which is known for its liberal views, said Beijing should respond promptly to the apology demand.
"The fact is clear that (China) has entered our territorial waters," the Mainichi said in an editorial.
"China must immediately disclose the outcome of its investigation and come up with preventive measures," it said. "We demand China's honest response."
The conservative daily Sankei Shimbun called China's behavior "unforgivable."
"At least China must clarify the cause of the incident and promise us it will never do this again," the Sankei said in an editorial, adding that Japan should take unspecified "counter-measures" if China failed to show an "honest response."
"If we are soft in handling the incident, China will likely repeat illegal acts over and over," the Sankei said.
The major liberal daily Asahi Shimbun did not have an editorial on the submarine intrusion, but quoted a senior foreign ministry official as saying: "This is a game of diplomacy. We'll see how they respond and find out whether China is a country like North Korea or a country with transparency."
-------- china
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Radar Planes Intended For Use in Taiwan Strait
The Washington Post Company
By Edward Cody
November 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46477-2004Nov12?language=printer
BEIJING, Nov. 12 -- The Chinese military, undeterred by a U.S. veto that blocked the purchase of Israeli planes, has developed its own radar surveillance aircraft and is test-flying the first models for early deployment in the Taiwan Strait, according to military specialists.
The Chinese airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, uses domestically produced advanced radar mounted on a Russian-made Il-76 transport aircraft. Analysts said the AWACS marks an important step in the government's campaign to develop the modern military necessary to back up its threat to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary.
Electronic weaponry -- in this case, equipment to monitor the skies and control warplanes over a wide battlefield -- has been a major focus of extensive military improvements in recent years. In particular, AWACS has long been seen by the military as an indispensable tool for air superiority over the 100-mile strait separating Taiwan from the mainland.
"You've got to have those AWACS up there or you're not going anywhere," said a foreign military attache in Beijing describing China's need for such a system in the event of conflict with Taiwan.
Chinese military technicians have been struggling to acquire AWACS-type equipment since the United States pressured Israel in 2000 to back out of a $1 billion agreement to sell China four of its Phalcon phased-array radar systems. The systems also would have used Il-76 aircraft as a platform.
The main U.S. concern in blocking the sale was that China would gain a military advantage over Taiwan. Moreover, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. government has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself against any Chinese attack, meaning U.S. forces could become involved should fighting erupt.
For the same reasons, People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force leaders were determined to acquire such a plane. "After the 2000 Israeli fiasco, the PLA made it a matter of high pride to prove to the Americans they would not be denied AWACS," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., a U.S.-based specialist on the Chinese military.
At first, China turned to Russia, its traditional source of military equipment. The Beijing government concluded a deal to buy four Beriev A-50 Mainstay radar planes, which are roughly the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Air Force's E-3 Sentry AWACS. The purchase was believed to be the first phase of an agreement for up to eight of the Russian aircraft.
At the same time, however, Chinese scientists were at work on their own radar equipment. It is not known whether any of the Russian craft were ever delivered, which would have provided a look at the technology, or whether the technicians obtained help from Israeli or Russian counterparts. In any case, the Chinese AWACS that has begun test flights bears a strong resemblance to the A-50, which also uses the Il-76.
The AWACS could be operational within one or two years assuming the tests are successful, the specialists said. It was not known how many are planned for production, but Fisher noted eight would allow for a 24-hour patrol at both ends of the Taiwan Strait.
The Defense Ministry, which treats most military subjects as secret, did not reply to a request for information on the AWACS project.
Whatever the ultimate production schedule, AWACS development fits into a steady growth in the amount and sophistication of armaments on both sides of the strait, making a confrontation between China and Taiwan potentially one of the world's most dangerous.
The leadership has steadily increased military budgets in recent years and sought to reform the manpower-heavy but technology-short PLA as swiftly as possible. According to U.S. and Taiwanese officials, the government has deployed nearly 600 short-range ballistic missiles in southern China aimed at targets in Taiwan. The number grows by about 75 a year, they say.
Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, who began a second four-year term in May, has insisted the 13,500-square mile territory is independent and should stay that way. Soon after taking office in May, his government decided on an $18.2 billion arms purchase from the United States, including 12 P-3C Orion submarine-hunting planes, eight diesel-electric submarines and six PAC-3 batteries equipped with more than 350 Patriot anti-missile missiles.
But the opposition Nationalist and People First parties, which have a majority in the legislature, declined this week to approve Chen's budget for the purchase, arguing it was too expensive and in some ways inappropriate for Taiwan's needs. The issue is unlikely to be resolved until after the next legislative elections, scheduled for Dec. 11.
In the meantime, both sides have continued individual purchases that notch up the technology level of their militaries by matching threat for threat.
China, for instance, in 2002 bought from Israel a number of Harpy anti-radar drones, which can loiter over enemy territory and drop munitions on radars turned on to guide air defenses. Meanwhile, Taiwan has obtained authorization from the Bush administration to buy high-speed anti-radiation missiles, which also can target air defenses by homing in on radar emissions, Chin Hui-chu, a Taiwanese legislator on the National Defense committee, recently told the Taiwan News.
-------- iraq
Squeezing jello in Iraq
By Scott Ritter
Saturday 13 November 2004
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/718AE278-58EE-431F-8045-5A3F505021B8.htm
The much-anticipated US-led offensive to seize the Iraqi city of Falluja from anti-American Iraqi fighters has begun.
Meeting resistance that, while stiff at times, was much less than had been anticipated, US marines and soldiers, accompanied by Iraqi forces loyal to the interim government of Iyad Allawi, have moved into the heart of Falluja.
Fighting is expected to continue for a few more days, but US commanders are confident that Falluja will soon be under US control, paving the way for the establishment of order necessary for nationwide elections currently scheduled for January 2005.
But will it? American military planners expected to face thousands of Iraqi resistance fighters in the streets of Falluja, not the hundreds they are currently fighting. They expected to roll up the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign militants, and yet to date have found no top-tier leaders from that organisation. As American forces surge into Falluja, Iraqi fighters are mounting extensive attacks throughout the rest of Iraq.
Far from facing off in a decisive battle against the resistance fighters, it seems the more Americans squeeze Falluja, the more the violence explodes elsewhere. It is exercises in futility, akin to squeezing jello. The more you try to get a grasp on the problem, the more it slips through your fingers.
"The goal is to kick out the invaders"
Alloy, Iraq
More comments... This kind of war, while frustrating for the American soldiers and marines who wage it, is exactly the struggle envisioned by the Iraqi resistance. They know they cannot stand toe-to-toe with the world's most powerful military and expect to win.
While the US military leadership struggles to get a grip on a situation in Iraq that deteriorates each and every day, the anti-US occupation fighters continue to execute a game plan that has been in position since day one.
President Bush prematurely declared "mission accomplished" back in May 2003. For Americans, this meant that major combat operations in Iraq had come to an end, that we had won the war. But for the Iraqis, it meant something else. In Iraq, there never was a 'Missouri moment', where the government formally surrendered. The fact is, Saddam Hussein's government never surrendered, and still is very much in evidence in Iraq today in the form of the anti-US resistance.
"It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the interim government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive" While we in America were declaring victory, the government of Saddam was planning its war. The first battles were fought in March and April 2003. Token resistance, no decisive engagement. The Iraqis fought just enough to establish the principle of resistance, but not enough to squander their resources.
Since May 2003, the resistance has grown in size and sophistication. Some attribute this to the incompetence of the post-war occupation policies of the United States. While this certainly was a factor in facilitating the resistance, the fact remains that what is occurring today in Iraq is part of a well-conceived plan the goal of which is to restore the Baath Party back to power. And the policies of the Bush administration are playing right into their hands.
The terror attacks carried out against the United Nations and other international aid organisations succeeded in driving out of Iraq the vestiges of foreign involvement the Bush administration relied upon to present an international face to the US-led occupation. In the chaos and anarchy that followed, the United States was compelled to use more and more force in an attempt to restore order, creating a Catch-22 situation where the more force we used, the more resistance we generated, requiring more force in response.
The cycle of violence fed the resistance, destabilising huge areas of Iraq that are still outside the control of the Iraqi government and US military. High profile operations in Najaf, Sadr City and Samarra did little to bring these cities to bear.
"While we in America were declaring victory, the government of Saddam was planning its war" Today, fighters in Iraq operate freely, continuing their orgy of death and destruction in order to attract the inevitable heavy-handed US response. Falluja is a prime case in point. While the US is unlikely to deliver a fatal blow to the Iraqi resistance, it is succeeding in levelling huge areas of Falluja, recalling the Vietnam-era lament that we had to destroy the village in order to save it.
The images from Falluja will only fuel the anti-American sentiment in Iraq, enabling the anti-US fighters to recruit 10 new fighters for every newly-minted "martyr" it loses in the current battle against the Americans.
The battle for Falluja is supposed to be the proving ground of the new Iraq army. Instead, it may well prove to be a fatal pill. The reality is there is no Iraqi army. Of the tens of thousands recruited into its ranks, there is today only one effective unit, the 36th Battalion.
This unit has fought side by side with the Americans in Falluja, Najaf, and Samarra. By all accounts, it has performed well. But this unit can only prevail when it operates alongside overwhelming American military support. Left to fend for itself, it would be slaughtered by the resistance fighters. Worse, this unit which stands as a symbol of the ideal for the new Iraqi army is actually the antithesis of what the new Iraqi army should be.
While the Bush administration has suppressed the formation of militia units organised along ethnic and religious lines, the 36th Battalion should be recognised for what it really is - a Kurdish militia, retained by the US military because the rest of the Iraqi army is unwilling or unable to carry the fight to the Iraqi resistance fighters.
The battle for Falluja has exposed not only the fallacy of the US military strategy towards confronting the resistance in Iraq, but also the emptiness of the interim government of Iyad Allawi, which is so far incapable of building anything that resembles a viable Iraqi military capable of securing its position in Iraq void of American military support.
"The images from Falluja will only fuel the anti-American sentiment in Iraq" Falluja is probably the beginning of a very long and bloody phase of the Iraq war, one that pits an American military under orders from a rejuvenated Bush administration to achieve victory at any cost against an Iraqi resistance that is willing to allow Iraq to sink into a quagmire of death and destruction in order to bog down and eventually expel the American occupier.
It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive. Unfortunately, since recent polls show that some 70% of the American people support the war in Iraq, it is a war that will rage until the American domestic political dynamic changes, and the tide of public opinion turns against the war.
Tragically, this means many more years of conflict in Iraq that will result in thousands more killed on both sides, and incomprehensible suffering for the people of Iraq, and unpredictable instability for the entire Middle East.
[Scott Ritter was a senior UN arms inspector in Iraq between 1991-1998. He is now an independent consultant.]
----
U.S. Forces Meet Fierce Resistance In Fallujah
Push South Greeted By 'Hornet's Nest'
By Jackie Spinner and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45043-2004Nov12?language=printer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 12 -- Insurgents in trenches met advancing U.S. and Iraqi forces in southern Fallujah with a burst of bullets and rockets Friday in what commanders described as one of the fiercest days of fighting since the battle to retake the city began five days ago.
Marines and soldiers said they encountered guerrillas dug into traditional defensive positions from which they could pop up, shoot and quickly take cover. The Americans said they and their Iraqi allies fought back with rifles, automatic weapons, belt-fed machine guns, mortars and hand grenades.
"It was a hornet's nest," said Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, the officer in charge of the Army's 1st Infantry Division Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center.
Military officials also reported that fighting had resumed Thursday night in Fallujah's Jolan neighborhood, an insurgent stronghold in the city's northwest. Elsewhere in Iraq, intense fighting continued for a third day in the northern city of Mosul and other flash points in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the Marine commander in Iraq, said 22 U.S. troops have been killed and more than 170 seriously wounded in and around Fallujah since the offensive began Monday night. An additional 40 troops suffered wounds but were able to return to duty, he said.
In addition, Sattler said, five members of the Iraqi security forces have been killed and 40 wounded.
At a Marine outpost near the city, a steady stream of ambulances carried casualties to a naval field hospital where troops lay on stretchers, their wounds covered by white gauze.
Since moving into Fallujah on Monday, U.S. forces have largely gained control of the city's northern half while driving insurgents south. The U.S. military said it now controls about 80 percent of the city.
Sattler said Friday that U.S. and Iraqi forces had broken the insurgents' "back and spirit. The goal right now is to continue to keep the heat on them. The concern now is to take care of this fight, reestablish the rule of law and return the town to the Fallujah people."
Commanders had warned, however, that insurgents might try to make a last stand in southwestern districts.
By midmorning, after reportedly taking heavy casualties, the units trying to capture the area called in artillery and air support, unleashing a barrage of shells and bombs that engulfed the southern neighborhood in flames and smoke. Witnesses reported another big battle in central Fallujah at the Rawtha Mohammediya mosque, which had served as the insurgents' headquarters but is now controlled by the Marines. About 200 to 300 fighters came from southern neighborhoods to stage the assault, but it ended after two hours with their suffering heavy losses, according to witnesses.
Insurgents had returned late Thursday to the Jolan neighborhood, where they engaged Marines for more than six hours, long enough to gather for Friday prayers in its Maathid mosque.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have detained 450 suspected insurgents. Thaer Hasen Naqib, spokesman for interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said they included men from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
"It really doesn't matter from which group they are," Naqib said during a news conference at a military outpost near Fallujah. "They are foreigners. They are not invited to come to Iraq. We want to get rid of them as soon as possible."
In Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, Iraqi authorities and U.S. forces were struggling to maintain control as insurgents moved at will through large sections of the city, residents said. The military said 10 Iraqi National Guardsmen and one American soldier were killed in Mosul on Thursday.
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who commands U.S. forces in Mosul, said combat was "sporadic" Friday and less intense than the day before. Still, the situation was deemed sufficiently difficult that an Army light-armored unit was peeled away from Fallujah to reinforce the U.S. force in Mosul.
The provincial governor called for massive reinforcements to supplement the Mosul police force, which splintered under a wave of insurgent attacks on at least five police stations Thursday. Iraqi National Guard units were being rushed to the city from three directions, as were Kurdish forces from Irbil to the south, the Associated Press reported. The offices of Kurdish political parties were among the buildings attacked in Mosul on Friday.
"We asked the central government in Baghdad, and God willing, they should arrive today," said the provincial governor, Duraid Kashmoula.
He said insurgents had penetrated the local security forces, hastening their partial collapse. Iraq's Interior Ministry fired the city's police chief, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Kheiri Barhawi.
Ham, the American commander, said in an interview with the BBC that "some police did not perform as well as we might like." He told CNN: "It's fair to say there are some with ties to the insurgents. We'd be kidding ourselves if we thought that was not the case."
Insurgents also launched attacks this week in smaller cities across Iraq's midsection, including Baqubah, a restive provincial capital northeast of Baghdad.
Bands of armed men continued to operate in Baghdad. Clashes were reported in the suburb of Abu Ghraib and the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya. South of Baghdad, a U.S. soldier was killed and three people were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol with a roadside bomb, rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
An overflow crowd of worshipers cheered the American setbacks at Baghdad's largest Sunni mosque, where Friday prayers ended with grenade explosions, rifle fire and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is great!"
"Maybe you are not aware that Mosul is now under the control of the resistance, and all of the province of Anbar beyond Fallujah," said Mohammed Bashar Faydhi, who delivered the sermon. "The Americans have to realize that they need 25 million soldiers to defeat this population of 25 million Iraqis. They don't realize that the more oppressive they become, the more the resistance will grow."
Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who officials say turned Fallujah into a nerve center for terrorist attacks across Iraq, issued a five-minute audiotape urging on insurgents in Fallujah. His organization, now known as al Qaeda in Iraq, accounts for a significant share of the fighters in the city, but officials said they believed Zarqawi left Fallujah before the fighting began.
"The banner of the jihad has been raised and is waving," he said on the tape. "The arms of the heroes of Islam have grown stronger in Iraq, and the hearts of the people of Islam are pounding with joy and awaiting a growing hope."
Vick reported from Baghdad. Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
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THE INSURGENTS
U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
November 13, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13iraq.html?pagewanted=all
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 12 - American forces moved into position on Friday for a decisive battle with bands of insurgents, pounding some of their remaining strongholds with airstrikes and repelling attempts by some fighters to shoot their way out through the desert countryside south of the city.
But other fighters, among the most resilient the Americans have encountered in five days of battle, seemed resigned to making a last stand in Falluja's southern residential neighborhoods.
"Right now they've got no place to go," said Col. Craig Tucker, commander of a regimental combat team encompassing several battalions of American troops. "I think they've come here to die."
Twenty-two American servicemen have been killed and 170 wounded in Falluja since the invasion began on Monday evening, said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq. Of the Iraqi forces, 5 have been killed and 40 wounded, Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, an Iraqi commander, said.
An audio recording posted Friday on the Internet and attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who has become the Americans' enemy No. 1 in Iraq, praised the efforts of the jihadists in Iraq and said the blood spilled in Falluja "will light the way to God's victory."
"I call for the heroes of Islam in Falluja to endure just for a short time," he said, "and victory will come soon. I want you to remember our Prophet Muhammad when he fought in the past."
In the north, Mosul remained restive on Friday as the government deployed national guardsmen from outside the area to fill a security vacuum after hundreds of Iraqi policemen fled Thursday in the face of a guerrilla uprising.
The police chief of Mosul was fired, another senior Iraqi security officer was assassinated and the top American commander in the region said the loyalty and reliability of the city's entire 4,000- to 5,000-member police force was now suspect.
On Friday morning, Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television network, showed a videotape of a Lebanese-American hostage who had been kidnapped earlier. Reuters also reported that a Syrian driver who had been kidnapped in August with two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, had turned up in Falluja. No further details were available.
One prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said the increasing mayhem raised questions about whether the United States could win the fight against a wider insurgency, whatever the outcome in Falluja.
"The insurgency is not abating," the member, Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who is a former officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, said in a telephone interview with reporters after he visited American forces in Iraq on Friday. "In some respects, it's becoming more pronounced in many parts of the country - not all parts of the country, but many parts of the country. It's hard to determine whether that's the last gasp or continued building momentum."
On Thursday, insurgents overran at least a half-dozen police stations in Mosul, set fire to squad cars and made off with weapons.
The crisis in Mosul has raised serious doubts about the ability of Iraqi security forces to take over policing duties anytime soon from the more than 140,000 American troops here.
"There is a struggle going on," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander charged with controlling the north, said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Mosul. "I don't want to kid you and tell you that every neighborhood is one you can walk down the middle of," he said. "There are some very dangerous neighborhoods. It's not over."
The American military said one soldier was killed Thursday in Mosul.
General Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq, declared that the American military controlled 80 percent of Falluja. But many remaining insurgents waged intense gun battles and appeared determined to make a last stand in Shuhada, a neighborhood on the southern edge of the city.
There are indications that the remaining insurgents are running low on weapons, supplies and morale, military officials said. "We feel we've broken their back and spirit," General Sattler said.
Some insurgents are firing at the American military cordon to the south, in an apparent effort to fight their way out, military officials said. At the same time, insurgents in rural areas south of Falluja have begun firing more rockets on the American positions ringing the city.
Iraqi military forces have been going through houses in the city's northern half, taking prisoners and seizing weapons caches. "We are doing it very methodically, block by block, going into each room," said Lt. Col. Rod Symons, the senior advisor to the Third Brigade of the Iraqi Armed Forces. A wave of coordinated attacks across Baghdad and the area to the west appears to be a loosely organized counteroffensive to the invasion of Falluja. American commanders say insurgent leaders are likely to have fled Falluja before the invasion and are now at work elsewhere.
In one building, Iraqi troops discovered a box Thursday containing insurgent DVD's and pamphlets, along with the passport, driver's license and Defense Department identification card of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American Marine believed to have been kidnapped in June who later surfaced in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the building were a new Marine uniform and four large sacks of gunpowder and wire. In the building's basement was a room with what appeared to be blood on the walls and floor, officials said.
In at least one area of central Falluja, insurgents were already infiltrating neighborhoods that they had just been rousted from, forcing commanders to send troops to areas behind the main battle lines.
About 300 fighters surrendered to Iraqi forces on Friday in a mosque, General Jassim said at a news conference.
Elsewhere, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed after being struck by antiaircraft fire near Taji, north of Baghdad, military officials said. The three crew members were wounded but the helicopter was recovered. It was the third American helicopter forced down this week; two others crash-landed Thursday after being fired on near Falluja.
In southern Baghdad, an American soldier was killed and three others wounded Friday in an ambush.
In Baghdad, American and Iraqi forces arrested Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaydai, a prominent fundamentalist Sunni cleric, and more than a dozen of his followers after finding weapons in his sheik's mosque, officials said. Mr. Sumaydai was arrested by the Americans last winter and was released several months ago. His mosque is the largest religious sanctuary in the capital for devotees of the Salafiya branch of Sunni Islam, which Mr. Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden practice.
A cleric representing Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gave a lukewarm condemnation of the invasion of Falluja on Friday. The ayatollah advocates following "a peaceful means of settling the security situation and restoring peace in the restive cities," said the cleric, Ahmed al-Safi.
It was the first statement attributed to Ayatollah Sistani on the fighting in Falluja. Some Sunni leaders, including Mr. Sumaydai, have criticized the ayatollah in recent days for not taking a stand on Falluja.
Though the streets were quieter in Mosul than they had been Thursday, insurgents carried out sporadic attacks against Iraqi and American forces there.
Gunmen raided the home of Brig. Gen. Mowaffak Daham, the head of the anticrime task force, and led him, his brother-in-law and a son out onto the lawn, said Salim al-Samedi, 29, a neighbor. The insurgents stood them up against a wall and shot them dead while chanting "God is great!" and then set fire to the house.
A fire engine rushed to the scene, and the gunmen shot dead two of the fire fighters, Mr. Samedi said.
The governor of Ninevah Province had his home burned down on Thursday, said Yasir Abdul-Razzaq, a relative, though the governor was still safe in the confines of the government center, which is protected by American armor and Iraqi troops.
The governor's office fired Mosul's police chief, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Kheiri Barhawi. The police chief of Samarra, Taleb Shamel, told The Associated Press that he had also been fired.
Iraqi officials said national guardsmen from near the Syrian border were being sent to Mosul to help put down the uprising. The brigades are made up of Kurdish militiamen. Kurds, Christians and Sunni Arabs are the largest population groups in Mosul, and it was unclear how the Sunni Arabs, who are leading the attacks, will take to the heavy presence of Kurdish soldiers.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Mosul and Karbala; and James Glanz and Edward Wong from Baghdad.
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Fallujah 101
A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying.
By Rashid Khalidi
November 13, 2004
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1683/
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities." T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920
There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It's on an ancient trade route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down that north-south desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that great desert, a place that binds together people in what are today Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are linked by tribe, family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas-those of a man named Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab-took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920, before T. E. Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That