NucNews October 27, 2006



-------- NUCLEAR 


-------- britain

UK Agency Raises Estimated Cost of Nuclear Clean-Up

Story by Adrian Croft
REUTERS UK: October 27, 2006

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38691/story.htm

LONDON - The agency overseeing the dismantling of old British nuclear power stations raised the estimated cost of operations, closure and clean-up to 72.3 billion pounds (US$136.2 billion) on Thursday.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority's (NDA) latest estimate compares with a previous figure of 70.2 billion pounds.

Britain gets about a fifth of its power from nuclear energy but is committed to closing all but one of its ageing nuclear power plants over the next 20 years.

A government-commissioned energy review came out in favour of building a new generation of nuclear generators, arguing nuclear power had an important role in reducing carbon dioxide emissions and guaranteeing energy supply.

Nuclear power has also benefited from a debate over energy security after disruptions to Russian gas exports in January.

The total includes 50.8 billion pounds for decommissioning and clean-up of the 20 civil nuclear sites supervised by the NDA, 7.5 billion pounds for cleaning contaminated land and 14 billion pounds for operating sites during their remaining life.

NDA officials said the 14 billion pounds was roughly covered by income from operations and would not fall to the taxpayer.

The NDA, created in 2005, said the rise in its estimate of decommissioning costs was due to its better understanding of the costs involved in cleaning up the nuclear reprocessing plant at Sellafield in northwest England.

SUBSTANTIAL CHANGES

The NDA said it was still refining its estimate of the costs and there could still be substantial changes.

NDA Chairman Anthony Cleaver, presenting the agency's annual report, said the NDA had committed to giving the government an accurate figure for decommissioning costs by March 2008.

"It is our firm belief that over time we will bring these costs down significantly," he told a news conference.

Current plans called for the costs to be spread over up to 120 years in the case of Sellafield, he said. "Our belief is we should accelerate many of those processes. We believe that in accelerating we will also bring down the cost," he said.

The NDA's estimate does not include the cost of building an underground dump to hold Britain's growing pile of nuclear waste, although it does include waste recovery, treatment, storage and transport to the dump, NDA officials said.

The British government on Wednesday approved a recommendation that the estimated 470,000 cubic metres of waste, built up over many years, should be buried deep underground and put the NDA in charge of implementing the plan.

"The key assumption at the moment in all of our baselines is that the repository (the underground dump) opens its doors in 2040 for intermediate level waste and 2075 for high level waste and spent fuel," NDA Engineering Director Richard Waite said.

If those dates could safely be brought forward, it could save money on storing waste at sites such as Sellafield, NDA officials said.

The NDA said in its 2005/06 annual report that it had increased generation output from the ageing Magnox fleet of reactors by 12 percent from the previous year and had raised 17 percent more revenue than expected from electricity generation.

Britain's nuclear decommissioning sector is currently dominated by British Nuclear Group. The government is planning to split up the state-owned company in a four-part sale.

----

£20bn nuclear waste scheme to be funded through taxes

Government's plans to build and pay for underground nuclear waste dump questioned by MPs

David Jetuah, Accountancy Age, 27 Oct 2006

http://www.accountancyage.com/accountancyage/news/2167426/20bn-nuclear-waste-scheme

Controversial plans to bankroll a nuclear waste disposal programme through taxes, at a possible cost £20bn, have been unveiled by the government.

Environment secretary David Miliband told the Commons that the debate over financing the operation would be ‘difficult and complex’.

Government figures estimate the project will cost in the region of £10bn-£20bn, but doubts were raised by opposition members over speculations of an alternative funding scheme. 

Planners of this alternative scheme rested their hopes on private operators building new nuclear reactors in the near future and contributing to the project’s biggest costs, which centre on disposal and the construction of bunker 1km underground.

The eventual disposal programme will be overseen by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA), which also owns nuclear facilities, a fact that has led shadow environment minister Peter Ainsworth to voice concerns regarding a possible conflict of interest.

The NDA defended the government's tax-funded scheme, believing the costs would span the lifetime of the project and the bill would be paid over more than 100 years.



-------- business

Areva offers technology transfer to win contract for China's 3rd generation nuclear power units, Chairperson

Xinhua  October 27, 2006

http://english.people.com.cn/200610/27/eng20061027_315538.html

French nuclear group Areva is offering an all-round technology transfer in its new bid for China's third generation nuclear power generation units, said visiting Areva Group Chairperson Anne Lauvergeon on Thursday.

Lauvergeon, who accompanied visiting French President Jacques Chirac to China, told Xinhua that Areva would offer China its European Pressurized water Reactor (EPR) technology provided it builds at least one EPR unit.

According to Lauvergeon, this is Areva's eighth bid since China launched international tenders for its third generation nuclear reactor units. The units will be used in the Yangjiang nuclear power project in South China's Guangdong Province and the Sanmen nuclear power project in East China's Zhejiang Province in September 2004.

Areva, Toshiba-owned Westinghouse and Russia's ASE are the three candidates for the contract.

Lauvergeon said that Areva had promised that if it wins the bid, it will expand its cooperation with China to such fields as uranium exploration and mining as well as the disposal of spent fuel.

Areva is currently the only provider of third generation nuclear power technology which has a firm order. Its first EPR unit will go into operation in Finland in June 2009.

The Chinese government wants to raise the proportion of nuclear power in the country's total from the current 1.6 percent to four percent by 2020. This means that in the next 15 years, China will build 30 million kilowatts of nuclear power capacity.

Continuity and standardization are critical aspects of nuclear power technology and the safe operation of nuclear power units. This means that when a country opts for a particular technology, the supplier potentially has a very big market and great commercial opportunities.

China has already adopted Areva technology for some of its nuclear power generation units. Lauvergeon said that this meant that Areva's EPR would mesh well with China's current second generation nuclear reactor technology.

Areva entered the Chinese market in 1986, supplying nuclear equipment for the Dayawan and Ling'ao nuclear power projects in Guangdong Province and technology and equipment for the four nuclear reactors in the Qinshan II and Tianwan nuclear power stations in East China's Jiangsu Province.

Lauvergeon said that Areva is also cooperating with China in fuel management, nuclear services and electrical power transmission and distribution.

Areva's cooperation with China in nuclear power is all-round, stable and in-depth. "We hope to win the tender and make China a showcase for Areva's EPR," she said.



-------- china 

China to train more talents for nuclear fusion research

2006-10-27 (Xinhua) 

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-10/27/content_5258354.htm

    HANGZHOU, Oct. 27 -- A training center for nuclear fusion research has been established at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, capital city of east China's Zhejiang Province, to boost expertise in the nuclear fusion field.

    Zhejiang University State Fusion Theory and Simulation Center will be China's first research institute specializing in nuclear fusion training.

    The center will train outstanding talents for the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER, which will be commissioned in 2016. China is one of the seven participants in the international cooperation program. The other six are the United States, the European Union, the Republic of Korea, Russia, Japan and India.

    The program has been included in China's long-term plan for scientific development. It is hoped that reactor ignition can be achieved in 2020. To achieve the goal, plasma physics talents are desperately needed.

    However, there are only two or three universities in China that offer plasma physics studies. The shortage of talents in this field is a brake not only on nuclear fusion research but also on China's other high-tech programs, including deep space exploration and high-energy-density physics.

    Hence the new talent training center. Major sponsors of the center include Zhejiang University, the Research Institute of Plasma Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Southwestern Research Institute of Physics and State Program 863 for high technologies.

    The center will have 15 to 20 full-time researchers and 10 to 15 visiting scholars. They will include Chinese academicians as well as top plasma physics scientists from abroad, according to Sheng Zhengmao, deputy head of the center.

    The center will offer 20 masters, 30 PhD and another 20 post-doctoral research positions to young candidates both from home and abroad, Sheng said.

    The ITER program will offer scientists an opportunity to achieve their dream of controlling nuclear fusion energy.

    Controlled nuclear fusion, which replicates the energy generating process of the sun, is considered to be an efficient source of unlimited, clean energy to offset the dearth of fossil fuels such as oil and coal.

    Scientists believe that deuterium can be extracted from the sea and enormous amounts of energy obtained from a deuterium-tritium fusion reaction at a massive temperature of 100 million degrees Celsius. After nuclear fusion, the deuterium extracted from one liter of sea water would produce energy equivalent to 300 liters of gasoline.

    If the nuclear fusion technology is commercialized, it could provide energy for mankind for more than 100 million years, scientists believe.

    Nuclear fission has been dogged by as many problems as benefits, whereas nuclear fusion will be a more viable solution for the world's energy supply, said Werner Burkart, Deputy Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    China's self-designed full superconducting experimental Tokamak fusion device, dubbed EAST (experimental advanced superconducting Tokamak) has now been completed and has entered trials. It is the first of its kind in the world.

    Since EAST operates in a similar way to ITER devices, it should provide useful research and experimental expertise for ITER, said Xu Guanhua, Minister of Science and Technology. 


<a name="du"></a>

-------- depleted uranium

NY Candidate calls for action on depleted uranium before election day

Friday, October 27, 2006 Mid-Hudson News

http://www.midhudsonnews.com/News/DU_Zimet-27Oct06.html

New Paltz - State Senate candidate Susan Zimet is asking why, more than three months after both houses of the state legislature passed legislation providing better testing and treatment of veterans exposed to hazardous substances, has not been sent to the governor.

Democrat Zimet blames the stall on the Republican-controlled senate, demanding that they either fix whatever problem they have with the bill, or send it to Governor Pataki to sign.

“Every day that this bill sits there is another day that soldiers come home, that soldiers don’t get registered, they don’t get tested, they don’t get treated.”

Matthews: "we are all misdiagnosed"

Gerard Matthews, an Iraq War veteran, returned home in September 2003, with a variety of medical problems, most notably, the effects of exposure to depleted uranium, a low-level radioactive metal used by the Pentagon to harden artillery shells.

The effects can be devastating.  For Matthews, it was a birth defect in his daughter, born nine months after his homecoming.

Matthews says veterans deserve better, and a unified effort at the state level might attract attention higher up.

 “We got 92 soldiers dead already, and who knows what else is happening.  We got soldiers coming back sick.  We got soldiers at Walter Reed on the fourth floor; they don’t even know what’s wrong with them.  They are misdiagnosed.  We are all misdiagnosed.  They don’t want to say the real reason.  Without this, from a state level … and hopefully we can get New York and get all the different states to do it … hopefully the federal government will really listen to us.”

The effort started close to home.  Last year, Zimet, an Ulster County legislator, persuaded her colleagues to unanimously adopt a resolution calling on the state to act.  



-------- europe

Germany Considering Revival of Atomic Power

Story by Muriel Boselli
REUTERS FRANCE: October 27, 2006

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/38697/story.htm

PARIS - Germany will rethink its energy mix, including a possible revival of its nuclear programme which the previous government decided to phase out, a senior government official said on Thursday.

"We have to talk again of the use of nuclear," said Joachim Wuermeling, Secretary of State at the German Economy and Technology Ministry.

Germany's previous government aimed to end nuclear power production by around 2020 but Chancellor Angela Merkel said last week it was a mistake for the country to turn off nuclear power plants, even though her coalition government was committed to the plan.

Nuclear currently supplies a third of German power.

Wuermeling said the government was working on a new energy programme which it would decide on in the autumn of next year.

"We need to have a balanced energy mix because having one anchor is not enough during stormy weather," he told a Franco-German energy conference.

"In Germany, the debate has never stopped but had not been led by the government," Wuermeling told reporters on the sidelines of the conference.

He added that the debate over nuclear had resumed as a direct consequence of a rise in energy demand, an increased dependency on energy resource imports, global warming and also in the light of technological progress in the nuclear sector.

Opinion polls regularly show the vast majority of the public is opposed to any further extension of nuclear power.

But Wuermeling said it would be wrong to scrap nuclear until it was clear that renewable sources could replace it.

"We have to think before we cut off the tree branch and before we know whether renewables can fill in the gap," he said.

The previous Social Democrat (SPD) and Greens government passed laws gradually decommissioning nuclear power stations. Merkel's Christian Democrats narrowly beat the SPD in a 2005 election but were forced into a coalition with the SPD.

The SPD said the nuclear phase-out was not negotiable. Merkel agreed to that last year even though other conservatives, especially Economy Minister Michael Glos, had called for the phase-out to be scrapped due to rising oil prices.



-------- iran

Iran has begun uranium enrichment in second centrifuge cascade, agency says

Updated 10/27/2006 (AP) 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-27-iran-enrichment_x.htm

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran has doubled its capacity to enrich uranium by successfully executing the process with a second network of centrifuges, a semiofficial news agency reported Friday, sending a defiant new message to the U.N. Security Council.

ON DEADLINE: Why the centrifuge count matters

Council members are working on a draft resolution that would impose limited sanctions on the Islamic republic because of its refusal to cease enrichment, a process that can produce fuel for a civilian nuclear reactor or fissile material for a warhead.

The Iranian Students News Agency quoted an anonymous official as saying Iran has successfully begun injecting gas into a second network of centrifuges.

"We are injecting gas into the second cascade, which we installed two weeks ago," the official said, according to ISNA.

The news agency said the second cascade had doubled Iran's capacity to enrich uranium.

"We have already exploited the product of the second cascade," the official was quoted as saying.

Iranian authorities are believed to leak ISNA information that they want published but consider too sensitive for release to official media.

France's Foreign Ministry called Iran's expansion of its nuclear program a "negative signal" that should be taken to account at U.N. talks over possible sanctions.

A spokesman for the ministry, Jean-Baptiste Mattei, said the Iranian announcement was not a great surprise because the International Atomic Energy Agency had said in August that Iran was developing new nuclear capacities.

"The door to negotiations is always open, but at the same time the priority goes to the negotiations for a U.N. Security Council resolution," Mattei said at a news conference.

French President Jacques Chirac, meanwhile, expressed support for sanctions against Iran but insisted that they be temporary and reversible.

In a separate report on Friday, ISNA quoted Ail Larijani, Iran's top nuclear negotiator, as saying his country's enrichment program should not hinder negotiations with the West.

"It is possible to review both nuclear and regional issues through negotiation," Larijani was quoted as saying.

Larijani called for an open negotiation on the enrichment issue, and blamed the West of being irrational in its opposition to an Iranian nuclear program, which Tehran says is geared toward purely civilian use.

Diplomats, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to divulge the information to media, told The Associated Press on Monday that even the decision to "dry test" the 164 centrifuges in the second Iranian pilot enrichment facility showed Iran's defiance of the Security Council. The council had set an Aug. 31 deadline for Tehran to cease all experiments linked to enrichment.

Iran produced a small batch of low-enriched uranium — suitable as nuclear fuel but not weapons grade — in February, using its initial cascade of 164 centrifuges at its pilot plant at Natanz.

The Iran official quoted by ISNA said the nuclear watchdog was fully aware that Tehran was injecting the gas in its new centrifuges, and that nuclear inspectors had already arrived in Iran.

The Vienna-based IAEA would not comment on the report.

Iran says it plans to install 3,000 centrifuges at Natanz by the end of this year. Some 54,000 centrifuges would be required to produce enough nuclear fuel for a reactor.

Although Iran is nowhere near that goal, its successful operation of more cascades of centrifuges indicates that the country is gradually mastering the complexities of producing enriched uranium.

The United States accuses Iran of secretly trying to build an atomic bomb under the guise of a civilian nuclear program. But Iran denies this, saying its program is strictly for the generation of electricity.

The U.S. and its European allies are circulating a draft U.N. Security Council resolution that would ban the sale of missile and nuclear technology to Iran and deny the country certain assistance from the U.N. nuclear watchdog.

China and Russia, which can veto Security Council resolutions, are reportedly pushing for continued dialogue with Iran instead of punishment.

The enrichment process takes gas produced from raw uranium and aims to increase its proportion of the uranium-235 isotope, needed for nuclear fission.

The gas is pumped into a centrifuge, which spins, causing a small portion of the heavier, more prevalent uranium-238 isotope to drop away. The gas then proceeds to other centrifuges — thousands of them — where the process is repeated, increasing the proportion of uranium-235.

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Iran starts up second nuclear fuel network: ISNA

By Edmund Blair Fri Oct 27, 2006 (Reuters)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061027/ts_nm/nuclear_iran_dc_5

TEHRAN - Iran has started enriching uranium in a second experimental network of centrifuges, Iran's student news agency ISNA said on Friday, expanding a program which the West fears is intended to make nuclear bombs.

ISNA quoted an "informed source" as saying "the injection of gas was carried out" in the past week. "We have obtained the product of the second cascade," the source said.

UF-6 gas, converted from uranium ore, is injected into cylindrical centrifuges which spin at supersonic speeds to heighten the product's fissile content. Enrichment can yield fuel for power plants or, ultimately, material for atomic bombs.

Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, says its atomic program aims to meet energy needs. But it has failed to convince world powers, who are threatening U.N. sanctions after Tehran failed to heed a U.N. demand to halt enrichment work.

Iran is running two test cascades of 164 interlinked centrifuges each. It would need thousands running non-stop for months to yield enough high-enriched uranium for one atom bomb. Analysts say Iran is at least three years away from that point.

President Bush said in Washington he was aware of "speculation" that Iran had started enriching uranium in a second cascade (interlinked network) of centrifuges.

"Whether they doubled it or not, the idea of Iran having a nuclear weapon is unacceptable," Bush said.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said it was too early to speak about Iran being able to produce weapons-grade uranium, and that he "did not share the concerns about this."

"These are empty centrifuges, you can't produce anything with them, so to speak about enriching uranium is premature," Ivanov said, Itar-Tass news agency reported.

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors confirmed Iran enriched token amounts of uranium with an initial pilot cascade in April, although it appears to have more often vacuum-tested them without UF6 inside.

U.N. INSPECTORS NOT ON SITE AT MOMENT

A diplomat familiar with the IAEA's operations said it could not verify the second cascade's reported enrichment activity until inspectors returned to the site next week.

France's Foreign Ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said the ISNA report raised international concern about the growth of Iran's capacity to produce fissile material.

"The priority is to move toward the negotiation of a Security Council resolution," Mattei told reporters in Paris.

A British government source said: "The fact that they've now started to feed stuff through the centrifuge isn't going to shock anyone. But it will demonstrate further Iranian intransigence and that will all be taken in the round."

Iran now faces possible sanctions for failing to shelve its enrichment project, as demanded by the U.N. Security Council. A draft sanctions resolution has been drawn up by European states but Russia has expressed misgivings about the proposal.

Iran has shrugged off the prospect of sanctions. Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani has threatened retaliation, possibly by halting U.N. inspections of Iranian facilities.

"By imposing sanctions, you yourselves will be hurt more than Iran. Give up these games," an influential Iranian cleric, Ahmad Khatami, told worshippers during Friday prayers.

Russia, the United States, Britain, France and China -- the five permanent council members -- plus Germany held their first meeting on Thursday on the draft resolution, which would ban Iranian trade in nuclear materials and ballistic missiles.

French President Jacques Chirac said in Beijing on Friday he supported temporary, reversible and specially adapted sanctions against Iran if talks over its nuclear program failed.

Speaking in Russia, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the draft did not match previous agreements among the major powers seeking to rein in Iran's nuclear ambitions, and predicted long negotiations before the issue is resolved.

No agreement on the resolution text is expected until next week at the earliest after which the document goes to the full 15-member Security Council.

(Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer in Paris, Caren Bohan in Washington, Guy Faulconbridge in Moscow and Mark Heinrich in London) 



-------- japan

Japan, U.S. agree on airspace over U.S. base

10/27/2006 (AP) 

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-27-japan-us_x.htm

TOKYO — Japan and the United State reached an agreement Friday on a plan to return to Japan control of 40% of the airspace over a U.S. air base in Tokyo, a Japanese defense official said.

Returning the airspace to Japanese control could shorten flight times, save fuel and ease congested air traffic in the metropolitan sky.

Under Friday's agreement, the U.S. would return 40% of the airspace adjacent to Tokyo's Haneda Airport to the Japanese side in time for the airport's planned expansion in 2009, an agency spokeswoman said on condition of anonymity, citing departmental policy.

----

Government backs atomic plant sales

10/27/2006
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200610270138.html

The government and industry are joining in a double-team promotion of nuclear power plants in Asian export targets.

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry is leading the drive to better compete with overseas rivals, such as France, which is conducting aggressive public-private campaigns.

The Japan External Trade Organization (JETRO) organized a meeting this summer with the Vietnamese government to study nuclear power plant projects.

"We are prepared to send nuclear experts from Japan to help Vietnam train government regulators, researchers and plant operators," a JETRO official said at the meeting.

Vietnam plans to build two nuclear power reactors between 2017 and 2020.

A senior industry ministry official said the government plans to establish cooperative relationships in safety regulations and other areas where the government is involved.

The official added that such relationships will help domestic nuclear power plant contractors enter the Vietnamese market.

The government's promotion of nuclear power plants started in spring.

The industry ministry sent delegations to Vietnam and Indonesia in March. The missions included representatives from nuclear power plant contractors and electric power suppliers.

The delegates asked what the two countries expect from Japan through meetings with ministers and executives at electric utilities and other companies.

When Purnomo Yusgiantoro, Indonesian minister of energy and mineral resources, visited Japan in July, Toshihiro Nikai, then industry minister, proposed support for Indonesia's nuclear power plant projects.

Indonesia plans to build four nuclear power reactors by 2025.

The industry ministry has allocated 55 million yen in the current fiscal year for projects such as sending nuclear experts overseas. It plans to spend the same amount annually over four more years.

The government, which had refrained from aggressive promotions, has taken an active role because demand is static at home but growing in fast-developing Asian countries.

China, which has nine nuclear power reactors in operation and is building two, plans to construct 30 more reactors by 2020.

South Korea, where 20 reactors are operating and four are under construction, intends to build 12 reactors by 2015.

Domestic demand will remain extremely weak until around 2030, when existing plants will have to be replaced, according to Japan Atomic Industrial Forum Inc., a nonprofit organization for promotion of peaceful use of nuclear energy.

Domestic nuclear power plant contractors will have to depend on overseas demand to maintain their operations and expertise.

France, where nuclear power accounts for about 80 percent of electric power production, started seminars on nuclear power plant projects in Vietnam in spring 2005.

South Korea has invited Indonesian government leaders for tours to local nuclear power plants. It has also pledged free support to Vietnam.



-------- korea

S Korea, US plan nuclear war: North

From correspondents in Seoul

October 27, 2006 Agence France-Presse

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,20656886-5005961,00.html

NORTH Korea today claimed the US and South Korea were planning a nuclear war against the communist state, accusing them of devising a war plan and stocking up on the latest weapons.

"The madcap nuclear war moves against the DPRK (North Korea) are extremely reckless proactive acts that make the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula all the more difficult to resolve and drive the situation to its worst," the Korea National Peace Committee said in a statement carried on the North's KCNA news agency.

The statement also said the North's own nuclear test was part of preparations to defend itself against an US attack. It claimed US outrage over the regime's test was a smokescreen for its own war plans.

"The people and its army are prepared for any provocations, any nuclear war moves," it said.

It warned South Korea against relying on the US for protection which would only make the country more vulnerable to an attack.

North Korea carried out its first nuclear test on October 9, sparking international condemnation and UN Security Council sanctions.

South Korea says it will consider revising its policy of reconciliation toward the North to bring it more in line with international sanctions.

Under a joint military alliance, the US has reaffirmed its commitment to extend a nuclear umbrella over South Korea amid an escalating nuclear threat from North Korea.

Seoul reportedly wants Washington, which withdrew all its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula in 1991, to elaborate on what types of tactical nuclear weapons could be provided under the deterrent strategy.

South Korea gave up its quest for nuclear weapons in the 1970s under strong US pressure.

The US has stationed tens of thousands of troops in South Korea ever since the 1950-53 war sparked by an invasion from the North.



-------- mideast

Assad: Syria not seeking to be nuclear state

10/27/2006
BY DAIJI SADAMORI ,AND JUNJI TACHINO
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN

http://www.asahi.com/english/Herald-asahi/TKY200610270143.html

DAMASCUS--Far from seeking nuclear weapons of its own, Syria's ultimate aim is to make the entire Middle East nuclear-free, according to President Bashar Assad.

Assad recently granted an exclusive interview to The Asahi Shimbun, his first with a Japanese media organization since he assumed the presidency in 2000 following the death of his father, Hafez Assad.

In response to North Korea's first underground nuclear test on Oct. 9, Assad reiterated that Syria was not seeking to become a nuclear power.

He said the international community should also apply pressure on Israel to abandon its nuclear arsenal.

A long-time foe of Syria and Lebanon, Israel is the only nation in the Middle East believed to possess nuclear weapons.

Assad also defended Iran, an ally of Syria, in its efforts to develop nuclear power.

"The Iranians are not looking for nuclear weapons," Assad said. "It is for peaceful purposes and it is an international right for any country."

In addition to the Palestine question, other major issues facing the Middle East center on Lebanon, which was invaded by Israel this summer, and the Golan Heights, Syrian territory that Israel has occupied since 1967.

Assad said Syria was seeking a comprehensive resolution of these issues, and he criticized the Bush administration for lacking the will and vision to bring peace to the region.

The United States has designated Syria as a state that supports terrorism, along with North Korea.

That designation has meant that, as with Pyongyang, no direct diplomatic dialogue exists between Washington and Damascus.

While saying that Syria was prepared to enter into dialogue with the United States, Assad complained that Washington has avoided direct negotiating channels.

In answer to questions regarding Tokyo's dispatch of Ground Self-Defense Force members to Iraq to provide support for reconstruction, Assad said that "many people think that Japan obeyed the United States in sending troops to Iraq, and that has left us with some negative image."

But, he added: "Japan can still play a positive political role. We expect Japan can play a more political role in the Middle East peace process."

----

Nuclear holocaust: A risk too big even for martyrs?

By Noah Feldman
October 27, 2006 New York Times Magazine

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/27/news/bombforweb.php

For nearly 50 years, worries about a nuclear Middle East centered on Israel. Arab leaders resented the fact that Israel was the only atomic power in the region, a resentment heightened by America's tacit approval of the situation. But they were also pretty certain that Israel (which has never explicitly acknowledged having nuclear weapons) would not drop the bomb except as a very last resort. That is why Egypt and Syria were unafraid to attack Israel during the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. "Israel will not be the first country in the region to use nuclear weapons," went the Israelis' coy formula. "Nor will it be the second."

Today the nuclear game in the region has changed. When the Arab League's secretary general, Amr Moussa, called for "a Middle East free of nuclear weapons" this past May, it wasn't Israel that prompted his remarks. He was worried about Iran, whose self-declared ambition to become a nuclear power has been steadily approaching realization.

The anti-Israel statements of the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, coupled with Iran's support for Hezbollah and Hamas, might lead you to think that the Arab states would welcome Iran's nuclear program. After all, the call to wipe the Zionist regime from the map is a longstanding cliché of Arab nationalist rhetoric. But the interests of Shiite non-Arab Iran do not always coincide with those of Arab leaders. A nuclear Iran means, at the very least, a realignment of power dynamics in the Persian Gulf. It could potentially mean much more: a historic shift in the position of the long-subordinated Shiite minority relative to the power and prestige of the Sunni majority, which traditionally dominated the Muslim world. Many Arab Sunnis fear that the moment is ripe for a Shiite rise. Iraq's Shiite majority has been asserting the right to govern, and the lesson has not been lost on the Shiite majority in Bahrain and the large minorities in Lebanon and Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah of Jordan has warned of a "Shiite crescent" of power stretching from Iran to Lebanon via Iraq and (by proxy) Syria.

But geopolitics is not the only reason Sunni Arab leaders are rattled by the prospect of a nuclear Iran. They also seem to be worried that the Iranians might actually use nuclear weapons if they get them. A nuclear attack on Israel would engulf the whole region. But that is not the only danger: Sunnis in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere fear that the Iranians might just use a nuclear bomb against them. Even as Iran's defiance of the United States and Israel wins support among some Sunnis, extremist Sunnis have been engaging in the act of takfir, condemning all Shiites as infidels. On the ground in Iraq, Sunni takfiris are putting this theory into practice, aiming at Shiite civilians and killing them indiscriminately. Shiite militias have been responding in kind, and massacres of Sunni civilians are no longer isolated events.

Adding the nuclear ingredient to this volatile mix will certainly produce an arms race. If Iran is going to get the bomb, its neighbors will have no choice but to keep up. North Korea, now protected by its own bomb, has threatened proliferation - and in the Middle East it would find a number of willing buyers. Small principalities with huge U.S. Air Force bases, like Qatar, might choose to rely on an American protective umbrella. But Saudi Arabia, which has always seen Iran as a threatening competitor, will not be willing to place its nuclear security entirely in American hands. Once the Saudis are in the hunt, Egypt will need nuclear weapons to keep it from becoming irrelevant to the regional power balance - and sure enough, last month Gamal Mubarak, President Mubarak's son and Egypt's heir apparent, very publicly announced that Egypt should pursue a nuclear program.

Given the increasing instability of the Middle East, nuclear proliferation there is more worrisome than almost anywhere else on earth. As nuclear technology spreads, terrorists will enjoy increasing odds of getting their hands on nuclear weapons. States - including North Korea - might sell bombs or give them to favored proxy allies, the way Iran gave Hezbollah medium-range rockets that Hezbollah used this summer during its war with Israel. Bombing through an intermediary has its advantages: deniability is, after all, the name of the game for a government trying to avoid nuclear retaliation.

Proliferation could also happen in other ways. Imagine a succession crisis in which the Saudi government fragments and control over nuclear weapons, should the Saudis have acquired them, falls into the hands of Saudi elites who are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden, or at least to his ideas. Or Al Qaeda itself could purchase ready-made bombs, a feat technically much less difficult than designing nuclear weapons from scratch. So far, there are few nuclear powers from whom such bombs can be directly bought: as of today, only nine nations in the world belong to the nuclear club. But as more countries get the bomb, tracing the seller will become harder and harder, and the incentive to make a sale will increase.

II.

The prospect of not just one Islamic bomb, but many, inevitably concentrates the mind on how Muslims - whether Shiite or Sunni - might use their nuclear weapons. In the mid-1980's, when Pakistan became the first Islamic state to go nuclear, it was still possible to avoid asking the awkward question of whether there was something distinctive about Islamic belief or practice that made possession of nuclear technology especially worrisome. Most observers assumed that Islamic states could be deterred from using nuclear force just like other states: by the threat of massive retaliation.

During the last two decades, however, there has been a profound change in the way violence is discussed and deployed in the Muslim world. In particular, we have encountered the rise of suicide bombing. In historic terms, this development is new and unexpected. Suicide bombing has no traditional basis in Islam. As a technique, it was totally absent from the successful Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union. Although suicide bombing as a tool of stateless terrorists was dreamed up a hundred years ago by the European anarchists immortalized in Joseph Conrad's "Secret Agent," it became a tool of modern terrorist warfare only in 1983, when Shiite militants blew up the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon.

Since then, suicide bombing has spread through the Muslim world with astonishing speed and on a surprising course. The vocabulary of martyrdom and sacrifice, the formal videotaped preconfession of faith, the technological tinkering to increase deadliness - all are now instantly recognizable to every Muslim. And as suicide bombing has penetrated Islamic cultural consciousness, its list of targets has steadily expanded. First the targets were American soldiers, then mostly Israelis, including women and children. From Lebanon and Israel, the technique of suicide bombing moved to Iraq, where the targets have included mosques and shrines, and the intended victims have mostly been Shiite Iraqis. The newest testing ground is Afghanistan, where both the perpetrators and the targets are orthodox Sunni Muslims. Not long ago, a bombing in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, killed Muslims, including women, who were applying to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. Overall, the trend is definitively in the direction of Muslim-on-Muslim violence. By a conservative accounting, more than three times as many Iraqis have been killed by suicide bombings in the last 3 years as have Israelis in the last 10. Suicide bombing has become the archetype of Muslim violence - not just to frightened Westerners but also to Muslims themselves.

What makes suicide bombing especially relevant to the nuclear question is that, by design, it unsettles the theory of deterrence. When the suicide bomber dies in an attack, he means to send the message "You cannot stop me, because I am already willing to die." To make the challenge to deterrence even more stark, a suicide bomber who blows up a market or a funeral gathering in Iraq or Afghanistan is willing to kill innocent bystanders, including fellow Muslims. According to the prevailing ideology of suicide bombing, these victims are subjected to an involuntary martyrdom that is no less glorious for being unintentional.

So far, the nonstate actors who favor suicide bombing have limited their collateral damage to those standing in the way of their own bombs. But the logic of sacrificing other Muslims against their own wills could be extended to the national level. If an Islamic state or Islamic terrorists used nuclear weapons against Israel, the United States or other Western targets, like London or Madrid, the guaranteed retaliation would cost the lives of thousands and maybe millions of Muslims. But following the logic of suicide bombing, the original bomber might reason that those Muslims would die in God's grace and that others would live on to fight the jihad. No state in the Muslim world has openly embraced such a view. But after 9/11, we can no longer treat the possibility as fanciful.

Raising the question of Islamic belief and the bomb, however, is not a substitute for strategic analysis of the rational interests of Islamic governments. Like other states, Islamic states act on the basis of ordinary power politics as much as or more than on the basis of religious motivation. Pakistan, which tested a series of warheads in 1998, at the height of tensions with India, has not used its atomic power as a tool of the faithful in a global jihad. The proliferation operation spearheaded by the nuclear scientist - and sometime Pakistani national hero - Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan appears to have been based on a combination of national interest and greed, not on religious fervor. Khan found buyers in Iran and Libya, but also in decidedly non-Islamic North Korea. (In a twist much stranger than fiction, Saddam Hussein apparently turned down the offer.)

Some observers think that Iran, too, wants the bomb primarily to improve its regional position and protect itself against regime change - not to annihilate Israel. According to this view, Iran's nuclear push reflects a drive to what is sometimes called national greatness and might more accurately be defined as the ability of a country to thumb its nose at the United States without fear of major repercussions. A televised pageant hastily arranged to celebrate Iran's atomic program in April of this year featured traditional Persian dancing and colorful local garb intermixed with make-believe vials of enriched uranium. To an Iranian audience accustomed to decoding official symbols, these references were nationalist, not pan-Islamic. (They were also subtly subversive of the mullahs: singing and dancing are not favored forms of expression in the clerical enclave of Qom.)

But at the same time, Ahmadinejad has emphasized Iran's pan-Islamic aspirations to act on behalf of Muslims everywhere. An emerging nuclear power needs friends. Right now Iran wants to reduce, not promote, division between Sunnis and Shiites - and promoting broader "Islamic" interests by going after Israel is one way to lessen Sunni fears about Iran's rise. Ahmadinejad has put his money where his mouth is, providing Hezbollah with medium-range missiles - though apparently not chemical warheads - to use against Israel. The nationalist language he has sometimes used at home may be a cover for sincerely held pan-Islamic ends - a version of the old revolutionary strategy of making nationalist claims in order to attract the support of those fellow Iranians who do not respond well to Islamist ideology. That it is convenient for Iran to emphasize Islamic unity does not mean that at least some of its leaders do not believe in it as a motivating goal.

It is common among foreign-policy realists to suppose that a country acting on nationalist motives is easier to deter than a country moved by religious ones. There is no especially strong evidence for this assumption - plenty of nationalist regimes have done crazy things when they logically should have been deterred - but the claim has a common-sense ring to it. Nationalists care about peoples and states, which need to be alive to prosper. It is a basic tenet of nationalism that there is nothing higher than the nation-state itself, the pinnacle of a people's self-expression. Religious thinkers, on the other hand, believe almost by definition that there is something in heaven greater than government here on earth. Under the right circumstances, they might sacrifice lives - including their own - to serve the divine will as they interpret it.

III.

We urgently need to know, then, what Islam says about the bomb. Of course there is no single answer to this question. The world's billion-plus Muslims differ regarding many aspects of their 1,400-year-old religious tradition. Furthermore, nuclear weapons are a relatively new technology, unforeseen by the Prophet and unmentioned in the Koran. Nevertheless, contemporary Muslims are engaged in interpreting their tradition to ascertain how and when nuclear power may be used. Their writings, contained in fatwas and treatises that can be found on the Web and in print, tell a fascinating and disturbing story.

The Islamic discussion of nuclear weapons is profoundly intertwined with a parallel discussion of suicide bombing that is also taking place in the Muslim world. Suicide bombing and nuclear weapons typically kill without discrimination, murdering soldiers or civilians, men or women or children. And using nuclear force against another nuclear power can be suicidal, in the broad sense that retaliation may destroy the nation that attacked first. Beyond these commonalities is the fact that the rise of suicide bombing is driving a historic reconsideration of what might be called the Islamic ethics of violence. To consider Islam and the bomb today must thus inevitably draw us into the complex legal and political thinking of those Muslim authorities who justify the use of force.

The story starts with traditional Islamic law. The Shariah never followed the Roman adage that in war the laws are silent. Because jihad is a pillar of Islam, and because in Islam God's word takes legal form, the classical scholars devoted considerable care to identifying the laws of jihad. In common with the just-war doctrine developed in Christian Europe, the law of jihad governed when it was permissible to fight and what means could lawfully be adopted once warfare had begun. There were basic ground rules about who was fair game. "A woman was found killed in one of the battles fought by the Messenger of God," runs a report about the Prophet Muhammad considered reliable and binding by the Muslim scholars. "So the Messenger of God forbade the killing of women and children." This report was universally understood to prohibit the deliberate killing of noncombatant women and children. Some scholars interpreted it to mean that anyone incapable of warfare should be protected and so extended the ban to the elderly, the infirm and even male peasants, who as a rule did not fight. Muslims living among the enemy were also out of bounds. These rather progressive principles were broadly accepted by the Islamic legal authorities, Sunni and Shiite alike. For well over a thousand years, no one seriously questioned them.

Such black-and-white rules were well suited to the hand-to-hand or horse-to-horse combat characteristic of limited medieval wars. A few quirky challenges did arise, and the Muslim lawyers had to deal with them. The great theologian and jurist al-Ghazali, who wrote in the 11th and 12th centuries and was widely noted for his revival of religious piety and his skepticism of secular philosophy, dealt with the problem of human shields. He ruled that if the enemy drove captured Muslims before him, the Muslim army could still fight back, even if it might mean killing some of those Muslims. The reason he gave was that "we know that the law intends minimizing killing." There was also the catapult - precursor of artillery and air power - which was capable of sending a burning projectile into a populated city, where the resulting fire might kill women or children. Authorities differed on whether that tactic was permissible. Some disallowed the catapult when children or Muslim captives were in the city. In support, they cited a verse from the Koran that reads, "Had they been separated clearly, then We would have chastised the unbelievers among them with a painful chastisement." According to this school of thought, the "separation" of permissible targets (i.e., non-Muslim men) from impermissible targets is the precondition for a general attack. Another school of thought, by contrast, permitted the use of the catapult regardless of collateral damage in order to serve the general interest of the Muslims.

No law can exist for a millennium without being broken, and there are scattered historical reports, mostly from Christian chroniclers, of Muslim forces acting outside the bounds of lawful jihad, without the authorization of the scholars. Men were always considered legitimate targets, and Muslim armies sometimes slaughtered them just as Muslims could be slaughtered by their enemies. Remarkably enough, though, the legal principles of jihad protecting women, children and fellow Muslims survived well into the modern era, when the secular regimes of the Muslim world began to fight according to secular ideas. The World War I Armenian genocide, which took place in the last, secularizing gasp of the declining Ottoman Empire, was the first really substantial systematic violation of the ban on killing women and children in recorded Islamic history. In the bloody 20th century, when mass exterminations took place in Europe, Africa and Asia, Muslim states had a relatively better record, marred of course by Saddam Hussein's gassing of the Kurds. And there have been the genocidal killings in Darfur in this new century. Even these horrific events, however, were not dignified by the claim that they were permitted under the law of jihad.

IV.

The last two decades have seen a challenge to this Islamic tradition of warfare under law, a challenge driven mostly by the attempt to justify suicide bombing despite its evident inconsistency with Islamic tradition. On the subject of suicide, the Koran could hardly be clearer: "Do not kill yourselves; for surely God has been merciful to you." Faced with this explicit text, the solution of the militant Islamist ideologues has been to avoid the category of suicide altogether and to treat the bomber as a martyr rather than as one who has taken his own life. This interpretation is not very convincing in historical terms: martyrdom classically meant that another person killed the Muslim warrior, not that he pushed the button himself. Nevertheless, many Muslims now seem to find the argument convincing. Even among rather secular Muslims, it has become standard to refer to suicide bombers as martyrs.

The killing of women, children and Muslim men, however, has proved harder to explain away as a permissible exercise of jihad. The reaction to 9/11, which has (so far) been the high-water mark of suicide bombing, illustrates the nature of the difficulty of reconciling suicide bombing with Islamic law. One problem concerns the offensive nature of the attack at a time when the United States was not at war with any Muslim entity. Offensive jihad requires the authorization of a legitimate Muslim leader, absent on 9/11. A more serious concern was the obvious reality that the 9/11 attacks were certain to kill - and did kill - women, children and Muslims, all in direct contravention of classical jihad principles. Since the whole point of 9/11 was to announce and embody jihad on the international stage, the attacks quickly became the centerpiece of a high-stakes debate about whether they did or did not qualify as legitimate acts of jihad.

In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, it was sometimes asserted in the West that there were no Muslim voices condemning the attacks. This was never true. Prominent Muslim scholars expressed their disapprobation in public arenas like television and the Internet. These included senior Sunni scholars like the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia and the head of Al-Azhar, in Egypt, nominally the flagship institution of Sunni higher learning - who gave a news conference. More popular figures, like Al Jazeera's resident cleric, Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi, explained that Islam "considers the attack on innocent human beings a grave sin." Shiite scholars also spoke out, including Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran.

The position of the Muslim scholars and observers who condemned the 9/11 attacks was simple and consistent across the Sunni-Shiite divide: this was not jihad but an unlawful use of violence. Offensive jihad was prohibited in the absence of formal authorization by a Muslim leader. But even if the attacks could somehow be construed as defensive, the perpetrators of 9/11 broke the rules with their willingness to kill women and children. In confident and insistent tones, these critics cited the classical scholars and insisted that nothing in Islamic law could justify the tactics used by Al Qaeda. Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, the Lebanese cleric whose spiritual authority is recognized by Hezbollah, gave an interview to the Beirut newspaper Al Safir in which he asserted that given their impermissible choice of targets, the 9/11 bombers were not martyrs but "merely suicides."

At the same time, it is important to note that in 2001 few prominent Muslim scholars - the Saudi grand mufti was the main exception - condemned the use of suicide bombings in all circumstances. Fadlallah approved the attack on the U.S. Marines in 1983 and, according to the United States, played a role in ordering it. Qaradawi, whose television presence gives him reason to stay within the Islamist mainstream, distinguished the 9/11 attacks from the permissible defensive jihad of the Palestinians. He was happy to praise a God who "through his infinite wisdom has given the weak a weapon the strong do not have, and that is their ability to turn their bodies into bombs as Palestinians do." Qaradawi has also repeated the common view that the killing of Israeli women is justified on the grounds that all Israelis must serve in the military, and so no Israeli is a true noncombatant: "An Israeli woman is not like women in our societies, because she is a soldier."

The equivocation by Muslim scholars with respect to the technique of suicide bombing reflected the reality that throughout the Muslim world, Palestinian suicide bombers were by 2001 identified as martyrs dying in a just cause. This, in turn, was the natural outgrowth of the decades before suicide bombing, when Palestinian terrorists were applauded for killing Israeli civilians, including women and children. Given that embracing Palestinian suicide bombing had become a widespread social norm, it would have been essentially unthinkable for an important Muslim scholar to condemn the practice without losing his standing among Muslims worldwide. In the Islamic world, as in the U.S. Supreme Court, the legal authorities cannot get too far away from their public constituency without paying a price.

What happened, in other words, is that without the scholars paying too much attention to the question, the killing of Israeli women and children had become a kind of exception to the ordinary laws of jihad. Opportunists like bin Laden then began to widen the loophole to include new victims. With respect to the unauthorized nature of his offensive jihad, bin Laden asserted that in fact the attacks were defensive, since in his mind the U.S. was occupying the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia - just as Israel was occupying the Muslim land of Palestine. Once all of Saudi Arabia was placed on a par with the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, traditionally closed to non-Muslims, the presence of American soldiers anywhere on the Arabian Peninsula (even if their presence was with the permission of the Saudi government) could be depicted as a profanation, a violation of the Prophet's deathbed directive to "banish the pagans from the Arabian Peninsula."

Bin Laden was embroidering on the theories of his onetime mentor Abdullah Azzam, the intellectual godfather of Al Qaeda. Azzam was a Palestinian Islamist who made his way to Afghanistan via Saudi Arabia and established the so-called Bureau of Services to channel Arab youth into the Afghan jihad. As Azzam trod his personal path from Palestinian militancy to universal pan-Islamic jihadism, he wrote an influential treatise called "Defense of Muslim Lands." In it, Azzam argued that not a single hand span of Muslim territory anywhere could ever be ceded to the enemy "because the land belongs to Allah and to Islam." Though Azzam would never have acknowledged it, his account of the divine ownership of Muslim lands was probably influenced - unconsciously, to be sure - by religious-Zionist claims about the holiness of the Land of Israel.

When it came to the killing of civilians, bin Laden's thought developed more gradually. In early pronouncements, before 9/11, he spoke as if the killing of women and children was inherently an atrocity. "Nor should one forget," he admonished an interviewer in 1996, "the deliberate, premeditated dropping of the H bombs [sic] on cities with their entire populations of children, elderly and women, as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki." After 9/11, however, the argument changed. Now bin Laden began to suggest that American civilians were fair game. He could not argue that like Israelis, all Americans were subject to mandatory military service. Instead he proposed that because "the American people are the ones who choose their government by their own free will," and because they "have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their government," attacks on American civilians were justified. Voting was now playing the role for Americans that military service played in the case of Israelis: the active step transforming civilians into fair game.

Such an appeal to collective responsibility was, however, pretty weak in Islamic legal terms. It might suffice for bin Laden's videotaped self-justifications, and it might salve the consciences of potential jihadis hoping to join the rank and file of Al Qaeda. But it would never satisfy serious students of classical Islamic law, who found the 9/11 attacks problematic from an Islamic legal perspective.

In Saudi Arabia in particular, radical Muslim scholars with much more learning than bin Laden have sought to develop legally persuasive justifications for civilian killings. Probably the most sophisticated effort from a legal standpoint is a document titled "A Treatise on the Law of the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction Against the Unbelievers," written in 2003 by a brilliant Saudi dissident named Sheik Nasir bin Hamad al-Fahd. (Fahd, a theorist rather than an activist, is currently back in prison, as he has been off and on for almost a decade.) The treatise begins with the assumption that the world's Muslims are under attack. But how are today's Muslims supposed to defend themselves, given their military inferiority? Fahd's response is that, if they have no other choice, they may use any means necessary - including methods that would otherwise violate the laws of jihad. "If the unbelievers can be repelled . . . only by using" weapons of mass destruction, then "their use is permissible, even if you kill them without exception."

Lest his argument prove too much, Fahd tempers it by the claim that the Muslims fighting the jihad may not inflict disproportionately more harm on the enemy than the enemy has inflicted on them. That raises the question of the extent of American guilt. "Some Brothers have added up the number of Muslims killed directly or indirectly by [American] weapons and come up with a figure of nearly ten million," the treatise states. This total, Fahd concludes, would authorize the use of weapons of mass destruction to kill 10 million Americans: indeed, "it would be permissible with no need for further [legal] argument." (The number is never explained or analyzed, and you might assume that it was meant to correspond very roughly to the population of New York.)

Fahd's arguments sit uneasily with the classical Islamic discussions of the laws of jihad. The classical Islamic law never explicitly says that women and children may be intentional targets if it is the only way to win the jihad. It does not allow violations of the law just because the enemy has broken the rules or killed many Muslims. So the treatise must fall back on whatever evidence it can muster from the classical sources that seems to modify the basic rules. The catapult rears its head and is cited as precedent for nonspecific killing. The right to fight even when Muslim hostages may be killed is brought out as proof of the permissibility of collateral damage when there is no other choice.

The legal arguments in use here are stronger than bin Laden's makeweights, but they, too, would probably not be sufficient on their own to justify the deviation from the legal traditions of jihad wrought by today's jihadis. The notion that it's right because it's necessary is doing the real work, and old-fashioned legal arguments are following along. It is no accident that the argument from necessity has been so prominent in modern Western writing about modern warfare in general and the nuclear bomb in particular. If the technology of mass destruction can be exported, why not the justification that comes with it?

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

V.

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans; then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem that no one is out of bounds.

It is therefore now possible to imagine that the classical Islamic principles governing war would not be applied even by a self-consciously Islamic regime deciding when and if to detonate a nuclear device. The traditional ban on killing women, children and fellow Muslims would have gone a long way toward banning most potential uses of nuclear power by a sincerely Islamic state actor. As those prohibitions have eroded, the reassurance that might be afforded by a state's Islamic commitments has waned.

This means that a nuclear Islamic state would be at least as willing to use its weapons as a comparable non-Islamic state. But would an Islamic state be prepared to take the jihad to the enemy even if it would result in what amounts to collective suicide through the destruction of the state and its citizens? If the leaders of Iran or some future leaders of a radicalized, nuclear Saudi Arabia shared the aspiration to martyrdom of so many young jihadis around the world, might they be prepared to attack Israel or the United States, even if the inevitable result were the martyrdom of their entire people?

The answer depends to a large degree on whether you consider Islam susceptible to the kind of apocalyptic, millennial thought that might lead whole peoples, rather than just individuals, into suicidal behavior. It is important to note that for all his talk of the war between civilizations, bin Laden has never spoken of the end of days. For him, the battle between the Muslims and the infidels is part of earthly human life, and has indeed been with us since the days of the Prophet himself. The war intensifies and lessens with time, but it is not something that occurs out of time or with the expectation that time itself will stop. Bin Laden and his sympathizers want to re-establish the caliphate and rule the Muslim world, but unlike some earlier revivalist movements within Sunni Islam, they do not declare their leader as the mahdi, or guided one, whose appearance will usher in a golden age of justice and peace to be followed by the Day of Judgment.

From this perspective, the utter destruction of civilization would be a mistake, not the fulfillment of the divine plan. Even the most radical Sunni theorists of jihad invoke a passage from the Koran according to which civilization itself - "the crops and the cattle" - must not and cannot be destroyed completely. Bin Laden might seem to have few qualms about killing millions of Americans or other Westerners. He might well use a nuclear device if he gambled that there would be no enemy for the United States to bomb in retaliation. But even he might not be prepared to unleash a global nuclear conflagration on the expectation that a better order would emerge once many millions of Muslims and infidels died. (Bin Laden has called for Muslims to acquire nuclear weapons, and in the 1990's reportedly tried to acquire them himself - but there is little hard evidence that he has made subsequent efforts in that direction.)

With respect to Shiite eschatology, there is greater reason for concern. Iran's Shiism is of the "Twelver" variety, so called because the 12th imam in the line of succession from the Prophet disappeared into a state of occultation - or being hidden - from which he is expected to return as the mahdi. Ayatollah Khomeini played on the messianic overtones of this belief during the Iranian revolution, in which some of his followers went so far as to hint that he might be the returning imam. Moktada al-Sadr's Shiite militia in Iraq is called Army of the Mahdi. Recently, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, contributed to renewed focus on the mahdi, by saying publicly that the mission of the Islamic revolution in Iran is to pave the way for the mahdi's return, and by visiting the mosque at Jamkaran, on the outskirts of Qom, where, according to one tradition, the vanished imam was last seen. Some reports suggest that youth religion in Iran in increasingly focused on veneration of the vanished imam.

Islam has a vision of the end of days, with wars between the faithful and the tribes of Gog and Magog (Yuj and Majuj in their Arabic incarnation). Twelver Shiism is, at its core, an eschatological faith, focused on the ultimate return of the imam-mahdi, who will restore the Shiites to their rightful place and redeem their generations of suffering. Since the vanished imam is by tradition a human who has never died, but remains in occultation, he is also believed to affect the course of events even from his hidden place. And Shiite tradition fills in the picture of the mahdi's return with an elaborate account of signs that will herald the event, including advance messengers, earthquakes and bloodshed.

But belief in redemption - even accompanied by wars and death and the defeat of the infidels - need not translate into a present impulse to create a violent crisis that would precipitate the messianic situation. Like their Jewish counterparts, Shiite religious authorities have traditionally sought to resist speculation about the imminence of a messianic return. Shiite messianic thought is less focused than its messianic Christian counterpart on generating global crisis and letting God sort things out. Khomeini himself believed that the mahdi's advent could be hastened - but by social justice, not by provoking war. This put him on the activist side of Shiite teaching about the mahdi, much as he was also an activist about the exercise of worldly power by the mullahs. A popular revolutionary slogan urged the imam's coming but asserted that Khomeini would govern alongside him.

Other Shiite thinkers, by contrast, take a more fatalist stance, and prefer to believe that the mahdi's coming cannot be hastened by human activity - a view that corresponds loosely to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's belief, with regard to Iraq and elsewhere, that the clerics should not themselves govern. One small, semi-secret Iranian organization, the Hojjatiya Society, was banned and persecuted by Khomeini's government in part for its quiescent view that the mahdi's arrival could not be hastened.

Ahmadinejad is not the only or even the most important player in Iran's nuclear game. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, still makes the ultimate decisions on armaments and other matters, and there are numerous factions in the country with opposed interests and ideology and goals. Nevertheless, Ahmadinejad has in some respects succeeded in making the nuclear issue his own, and as a result his personal views about the end of days have been the subject of much speculation and innuendo, inside Iran and out. The Mideast scholar Bernard Lewis, in a recent Wall Street Journal column, hinted darkly and without much evidence that Ahmadinejad might be planning a nuclear attack on Israel for the Night of Power (this year it fell on Aug. 22), when the Prophet Muhammad made his mystical journey to the Furthest Mosque, associated in tradition with al-Aqsa in Jerusalem. Rumors, possibly spread by Ahmadinejad's enemies, have tied him to the outlawed Hojjatiya - a link mistakenly interpreted outside Iran as evidence that he might want to bring back the imam by violence, rather than that he might prefer to wait piously and prepare for the imam's eventual return on his own schedule. It is of course impossible to gauge the man's religious sensibilities perfectly. Yet the relative absence of a contemporary Shiite trend to messianic brinkmanship suggests that Ahmadinejad's recent emphasis on the mahdi may be interpreted more in terms of an attempt to summon Khomeini's legacy and Iran's revolutionary moment than as a desperate willingness to bring the nation to the edge of war. When Ahmadinejad invoked the mahdi in his now-famous letter to George Bush, he seemed to be using the doctrine in ecumenical terms, emphasizing the Islamic tradition that Jesus - revered as a prophet, though not as the Son of God - will return alongside the mahdi and govern in tandem with him.

So although a renewed Shiite messianism does create some cause for concern about the potential uses of an Iranian bomb - in particular because it suggests that Ahmadinejad may be more a utopian than a realist - it is almost certainly a mistake to anticipate that Iran would use its nuclear power in a way that would provoke large-scale retaliation and assured self-destruction. Iranian leaders have been more than ready to sacrifice their own citizens in large numbers. During the Iran-Iraq war, major efforts went into recruiting young boys to the Basij militias, which were then sent to the front lines on what were essentially suicide missions. Religion played the central part in motivating the teenage soldiers, and it is reasonable to believe that religion helped salve the consciences of those who ordered these children into battle. Yet even this discounting of the value of human life - in a war started by Saddam Hussein, not by Iran - fell short of voluntarily putting an entire nation at risk. Ahmadinejad surely understands the consequences of using a nuclear bomb, and Shiite Islam, even in its messianic incarnation, still falls short of inviting nuclear retaliation and engendering collective suicide.

VI.

These worries about an Islamic bomb raise the question of why we trust any nation with the power that a nuclear capacity confers. Why, for instance, do we trust ourselves, given that we remain the only nation actually to have used nuclear weapons? The standard answer to why we keep our nuclear bombs - a response developed during the cold war - is that we must have the capability to deter anyone who might attack us first. The promise of mutually assured destruction was its own kind of collective suicide pact, albeit one supposed to scare both sides out of pushing the button. That is why, throughout the heyday of the unilateral disarmament movement, critics of this justification pointed out that our threat was only credible if we were, in fact, prepared to kill millions of civilians in a rapid act of retaliation. If this kind of killing was morally unjustified, went their argument, then the threat to use it was also immoral.

The truth is that we hold on to our nuclear capability not only as a matter of deterrence but also to maintain our own global strategic position. If we do not want Islamic states - or anyone else for that matter - to have a nuclear capability, it is not necessarily because we consider them especially likely to bring on their own destruction by using it. It is, rather, that we do not want to cede some substantial chunk of our own global power to them. This principle - if it is a principle - lies behind the general strategy that is embedded in the international nuclear-nonproliferation treaty. Everybody involved understands that if any government got a chance to acquire nuclear power before the other treaty members had a chance to notice and impose sanctions, it would jump at the opportunity.

So the nonproliferation regime is not and could never be based on some principle of international fairness. But it does not follow that the United States and its allies should simply accept the development of nuclear technology by just anyone. It should be relevant to our deliberations that a particular candidate is our enemy. When it comes to Islamic states, there is serious reason to worry that, both now and in the immediately foreseeable future, popular anti-American sentiment is especially likely to play an important role in the shaping of foreign policy. Over the next quarter-century, it is conceivable and certainly desirable that Islamism and anti-Americanism may be unlinked. But we must be honest and acknowledge that in the short term at least, the U.S. democratization strategy has done almost nothing to reduce Islamist anti-Americanism, whether Shiite or Sunni - this despite the fact that the same strategy has benefited Islamists across the region by allowing them to run for office and enter government.

Much of the reason for this close linkage between Islamism and anti-Americanism comes from Iran. As an enemy of the United States, which has worked consistently against American interests, Iran is in a category by itself, most nearly matched by North Korea, the other still-standing member of President Bush's axis of evil. In this, Iran's motives have been primarily Islamic-ideological, not pragmatic.

For many years under the shah, Iran was a natural American ally - precisely because it was Shiite and non-Arab, and uncomfortably close to the Soviet Union and its fantasy of a warm-water port. Even after the 1979 revolution and the hostage crisis, it is possible that the United States would have eventually reopened relations with an avowedly Islamic Iran had the government softened its anti-Americanism. The United States has never made secularism a condition of friendship. It has been fully prepared to support Islamic states like Saudi Arabia, and even used religion to cement the anti-Communist alliance during the cold war. The Iraqi Shiite Islamists have been willing to work alongside the Americans, and the United States has in return treated them as its allies, democratically chosen by the Iraqi electorate.

Islamist anti-Americanism is the direct legacy of Ayatollah Khomeini's success in marrying Islamic faith to anti-imperialism - making "Death to America" into a religious chant, not just a political slogan. Of course the United States was hardly blameless. It did everything it could to open itself to the imperialist charge, including, in Iran, backing the famous 1953 countercoup that removed from power Iran's first democratically legitimate prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh. Contemporary Islamists can also point to America's continuing hypocritical support of regional authoritarian regimes.

Iranian-rooted Islamist anti-Americanism has worked far better than its designers might have imagined, spreading to Sunni Islamists who have little love to lose for Iran. The marriage of Islamism and anti-Americanism will probably be considered by history as the most significant consequence of the Iranian revolution. Anti-Americanism has become a staple of Islamist sermons and Web postings, an effective tool for drawing to the movement angry young people who might not naturally be drawn to religion. Bin Ladenism, in this sense, owes much to the Iranian revolution even though Al Qaeda was never Iran's direct ally. United States support for Israel has always been an important part of the argument for Islamist anti-Americanism, but today it is by no means a necessary component. If U.S. support of Israel were to weaken, the American presence in Iraq and elsewhere in the gulf would easily substitute as a basis for hatred.

The United States therefore has strong reason to block its enemy Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons - not simply because Iran will seek to become a greater regional power, as any nation might do, but because the Islamic Republic of Iran as currently constituted is definitionally anti-American. There need not be a direct threat of Iranian first use against either the United States or Israel for this reason to weigh heavily. A nuclear Iran will be a stronger and more effective enemy in pursuing anti-American policies under the banner of Islam. That will not change until the Iranian state abandons either its Islamic identity or its association between Islam and anti-Americanism. Iran's eagerness to acquire nuclear capacity need not be a result of a particularly Islamic motivation, but if and when Iran does have the bomb, its enhanced power and prestige will certainly be lent to policies that it conceives as promoting the Islamic interest.

Whether force, negotiation or some combination is the right path to take to keep Iran from going nuclear is of course a hugely important question. It turns on many uncertain facts, like the true progress of Iran's nuclear program and how much it can be affected by air attack; Iran's capacity and will to retaliate against an attack; whether there is any chance Iran would respond to negotiations; and the ability of the United States to withstand any retaliation while 150,000 U.S. troops are in Iraq. As we have recently learned in Iraq, it is not enough to think you have a good reason to go to war - you must also have a realistic understanding of the practical and moral costs of things going horribly wrong. Any choice, though, must be made against the backdrop of the reality that the Islamic government of Iran is not only unlikely to collapse soon - it is also very unlikely to become less anti-American in the near future.

The same, unfortunately, is true of the world's Islamist movements, for whom anti-Americanism remains a rallying cry and a principle of belief. Perhaps the promotion of democracy in the region, pursued consistently by the United States over the long term, might someday allow the rise of leaders whose Islamism is tempered by the need to satisfy their constituents' domestic needs - and who eschew anti-Americanism as wasteful and misguided. Iraq was the test case of whether this change could occur in the short term. But we failed to make the experiment work and gave Iraq's Islamist politicians, Shiite and Sunni alike, ample grounds to continue the anti-American rhetoric that comes so easily to them. In the wake of our tragic mismanagement of Iraq, we are certainly a generation or more from any such unlinking of Islamism and anti-Americanism, if it is to occur at all. And Islamism itself shows no signs of being on the wane as a social or political force.

That means that the best we can hope for in nuclear Islamic states in the near term is a rational dictator like Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, who sees his bread buttered on the side of an alliance with the West. Such rulers can be very strong and can bring stability, but we also know that their rule (or reign) promotes Islamist opposition, with its often violent overtones. When such rulers die or otherwise fall from power, the Islamists will be poised to use the international power conferred by nuclear weapons to pursue their own ends - ends for now overwhelmingly likely to be anti-American.

None of this is inherent in the structure of Islam itself. Islam contains a rich and multivocal set of traditions and ideas, susceptible to being used for good or ill, for restraint or destruction. This interpretive flexibility - equally characteristic of the other great world religions - does not rob Islam of its distinctiveness. An Islamic bomb would not be just the same as the nationalist bomb of a majority-Muslim state, nor would it be the same as a Christian bomb or a Jewish one. But its role in history will depend, ultimately, on the meaning Muslims give it, and the uses to which they put their faith and their capabilities. In confronting the possibility of the Islamic bomb, we - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - need to remember that Islam exists both as an ideal system of morals and values and as a force that motivates actual people living today, with all the frailties and imperfections that make us human.




-------- missile defense

US hails airborne laser as weapons milestone

27 Oct 2006 21:16:37 GMT
Source: Reuters
By Jim Wolf

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/N27431705.htm

WASHINGTON, Oct 27 (Reuters) - The head of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency on Friday hailed what he described as epochal progress toward putting a high-energy laser aboard a modified Boeing Co. <BA.N> 747 to zap ballistic missiles that could be fired by North Korea and Iran.

But the Pentagon's former top weapons tester cast doubt on project, calling it far from militarily effective and perhaps easily defeated by a simple countermeasure.

The so-called Airborne Laser has been developed at a cost so far of about $3.5 billion with the aim of destroying, at the speed of light, all classes of ballistic missiles shortly after their launch. If successful in flight testing and deployed, it would become part of an emerging U.S. anti-missile shield that also includes land- and sea-based interceptor missiles.

"You've demonstrated capability on the ground," Air Force Lt. Gen. Henry Obering said at a ceremony at which the aircraft was rolled out of a Wichita, Kansas, hangar where it has been undergoing modifications.

"Not since that time nearly twenty-two hundred years ago, when Archimedes reflected the sun's rays to set the Roman fleet on fire off Syracuse, has the world seen a weapon that puts fresh meaning into the phrase 'in real time'."

"Let's do it now in flight," Obering told employees of Boeing, the prime contractor, and chief subcontractors Lockheed Martin Corp. <LMT.N> and Northrop Grumman Corp. <NOC.N> at the event.

Philip Coyle, the Pentagon's chief weapons tester under former President Bill Clinton and now at the private Center for Defense Information, said in an e-mail reply to Reuters that its real effectiveness appeared doubtful.

"If a laser can be developed with enough power to penetrate the atmosphere and still be lethal once it reaches a target, an enemy would only need to put a reflective coating on the outside of its missiles to bounce off the laser beam, making it harmless," he said.

"The Romans could have done the same thing in the myth about Archimedes. Any grade schooler knows that you can set a dry leaf on fire with a magnifying glass. The challenge is to achieve militarily effective damage," he added.

Neither Boeing nor the Missile Defense Agency responded immediately to an offer to rebut Coyle's comments.

PENTAGON SEES BIG POTENTIAL

Engineers are to start installing a high-energy chemical oxygen iodine laser on the modified jumbo jet next year, with the first missile intercept test to take place in late 2008.

Pat Shanahan, vice president and general manager of Boeing Missile Defense Systems, said engineers had demonstrated "enormous progress toward ushering in a new age of technology, namely directed energy weapons."

Obering said the technology had the potential to change the nature of warfare.

"The news from North Korea and Iran has been consistently bleak," he said, referring to programs to "arm ballistic missiles of increasingly long range with lethal payloads."

In Wichita, engineers fully integrated the Lockheed-designed systems that control the beam and firing mechanisms in the aircraft, a modified 747-400F, Boeing said.

"The program achieved most of the objectives of the ground tests and expects to satisfy the remaining ones in the coming months," the company said in a statement.

Coyle said Boeing had omitted the "basic scientific and technical limitations that stand in the way of achieving an effective system."

Northrop Grumman supplies both the high-energy laser and a beacon illuminator laser used to measure atmospheric turbulence that it would encounter on its path to the target. 



-------- pakistan

INSIGHTS: Balochistan: Pakistan's Nuclear Wasteland Up in Arms

By Ahmar Mustikhan, October 27, 2006 (ENS)

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/oct2006/2006-10-27-insmus.asp

LEXINGTON PARK, Maryland - As a Buddhist who believes in Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence - an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind - I am at a loss to understand how to get peace, freedom and environmental justice without bloodshed for my ancestral land - Balochistan.

My people are extremely poor, they have one of the highest levels of illiteracy anywhere in the world and as a nation they are stateless, with a significant chunk of the population still nomadic. In their psyche and political outlook, they resemble the Kurds further to the West, who also are stateless.

Living in the opulence of the United States, I shudder to think about the abject poverty of the people of Balochistan despite the richness of their land in southwestern Pakistan. The majority is suffering from malnutrition, and many of the Baloch folks in the countryside have never watched television.

Yet the land is rich in mineral resources. Just last week the Voice of America announced the world's fifth largest gold and copper reserves were discovered in the Chagai District, on the Afghan border.

Chagai is the nation's nuclear testing ground. On May 28, 1998, Pakistan conducted five nuclear tests at Chagai. Generals of the Pakistan Army used Chagai though they very well understand the sentiments of the local Baloch population against Pakistan.

Though no scientific evaluation was ever carried out on the specific effects of the nuclear tests on the local populace, there were news reports of an unusually high number of deaths of both camels and nomads.

Baloch locals allege that the nuclear tests have devastated the ecology of the area and their fruits do not taste as sweet as they used to prior to the nuclear tests. Water has been contaminated by radiation caused by the nuclear tests, press reports have suggested, saying that skin diseases, and mental and physical disorders have been recorded in Chagai and surrounding areas.

Most Americans seem never to have heard the name Balochistan, a Texas sized region divided among Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. Some who have heard the name mispronounce the "ch" in Balochistan as "k," though it should be pronounced like the "ch" in the word China.

Still, Balochistan is a vast territory - 43 percent of Pakistan's land mass - and it is very rich in oil and gas. According to Frederic Grare, a Balochistan expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Balochistan has an estimated 19 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and six trillion barrels of oil reserves both on-shore and off-shore.

The area under Pakistani army occupation is slightly bigger than New Mexico. The area under Iranian mullahs is the size of Nevada, and that under Afghan control is the size of West Virginia. The total Baloch population in these areas is eight million, and seven million Baloch live elsewhere in the world.

Since 1980s, several hundred Baloch have made North America their home.

On September 22 when Pakistani dictator-turned-president Pervez Musharraf was visiting President George W. Bush at the White House for promotion of his book, "In the Line of Fire," I stood outside the building and showed my five fingers as his black limo entered the president's official residence. I showed him five fingers, which means "Get Lost," for the harm that the Pakistan Army had done at Chagai.

A severe drought descended on the region after the May 28, 1998 nuclear tests, sending tribesmen to relief camps. Sardar Akhtar Mengal, a former chief minister, insisted the drought had a connection to the nuclear explosions.

"Even in the world's top industrialized countries, any atomic blast is never entirely safe," Mengal told this correspondent at the time. "How can these blasts be safe in Pakistan or India?"

With most of the world and the U.S. media focused on the disaster in Iraq, a war that has claimed thousands of lives in Balochistan has been ignored. The Baloch call it the Fifth War of Independence. For almost six decades, the cries of anguish of the Baloch people as they struggle to become masters of their own destiny have gone unheard. Over the years, 10,000 Baloch tribesmen and 3,000 Pakistani soldiers have been killed.

In fact, when the British granted independence to India and Pakistan on August 14, 1947 Balochistan got its independence as a separate entity from Pakistan as it was never a part of the British Indian Empire. Both houses of the Balochistan Parliament unanimously rejected the idea of joining Pakistan.

Still, under threat of being arrested by Pakistan Army as some of his ancestors had been arrested during the British era, Balochistan ruler Mir Ahmedyar Khan signed an Instrument of Accession on March 27, 1948 with Pakistan's founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Under that agreement, Balochistan did exist as an independent nation on the map of the world for seven-and-half months. Even that controversial accession document promised semi-sovereignty to Balochistan, now governed as a province of Pakistan.

A grand Baloch jirga, or assembly, decided last month to approach the International Court of Justice at The Hague to force Pakistan to honor its commitments under the 1948 Instruments of Accession.

Against the backdrop of this forced annexation, Pakistan's nuclear testing in Balochistan appears even more sinister.

The Baloch complain they are being "Red Indianized."

They compare their situation to what happened when the United States broke the Treaty of Ruby Valley and took a huge chunk of Western Shoshone Indian land to turn it into the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. The Shoshone now call themselves "the most bombed nation on earth."

Numbering less than five million in Pakistan-controlled Balochistan, the Baloch fear if Islamabad's plans of transferring the ethnic Punjabi population from the north are not checked, the demography of their land would be altered for good in no time and they would be marginalized much like the Native Americans in the United States.

The Baloch feel the "trail of tears," a phrase used by the Cherokee people to describe their forcible relocation from western Georgia to Oklahoma in 1838, is being re-enacted today in Balochistan.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the key scientist who ran the Manhattan Project which created the first atomic bomb, said after the first explosion, "We knew the world not be the same... a few people cried, most people were silent."

In the same way on May 28, 1998, I cried my heart out on learning about the nuclear blasts in Chagai. I mean the forcible and illegal annexation of Balochistan, the looting of Baloch resources at the point of gun, the killing of the people and finally the destruction of their land.

For international expediencies, these injustices and the environmental rape perpetrated on Balochistan have been forgotten. Even the danger Pakistan's armaments pose to the world, and to the United States in particular, has been glossed over.

J. George Pikas, recently wrote in a letter to the "Wall Street Journal" that, "Pakistan is for sale to the highest bidder and is cleverly walking the line between the Taliban, Osama, China, Iran, the U.S. and India - quite a mix."

Pikas wrote, "One can agree that the general [Musharraf] is the only thing standing in the way of an Islamic takeover of Pakistan but he won't be there very long, and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal may then fall into the hands of 'raving Islamic fanatics.'"

To make the American public aware of this ongoing conflict in a strategic area at the hub of South Asia and Middle East, Baloch activists have joined hands with concerned Americans to form the American Friends of Balochistan.

I helped form the organization and two of its points are of particular interest to me. One calls for winding up of Pakistan's nuclear program. As the mission statement of the American Friends of Balochistan says, "Nuclear testing on the soil of Balochistan as practiced by Pakistan is against the wishes of its people and must stop."

The second point calls for making Pakistan's nuclear facilities compliant with International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards. "At the least, the Chagai nuclear test range should be opened for international inspections," the American Friends of Balochistan urges in its mission statement.

The Baloch deplore lack of Western interest in their plight. Said Professor Dr. Sabir Badalkhan, a Baloch expert on folklore who now lives in Naples, Italy, "The West has no idea of what it means to be occupied by others, not being able to speak in your language, wear your national dress, celebrate your national days, commemorate the days of your national heroes, read and learn about your national land and feel proud, or sometimes be ashamed, of your forerunners."

{Ahmar Mustikhan can be contacted at ahmar_reporter@yahoo.com}

Questions or Comments:
news@ens-news.com 



-------- MILITARY 


-------- africa

U.N. report says Somalia deteriorating

10/27/2006
NAIROBI, Kenya (AP)

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2006-10-27-somalia-un_x.htm

There are thousands of foreign troops inside Somalia and their presence could lead to "an all out war" between Somalia's transitional government and an Islamic group that controls much of the country, according to a confidential U.N. report obtained by The Associated Press.

The report dated Oct. 26 cites diplomatic sources in estimating that "between 6,000-8,000 Ethiopians and 2,000 fully equipped Eritrean troops are now inside Somalia supporting" the internationally recognized government and the Islamic group known as the Council of Islamic Courts.

"Both sides in the Somali conflict are reported to have major outside backers — the government supported by Ethiopia, Uganda and Yemen; the Islamic courts receiving aid from Iran, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Gulf States," the report added.

The briefing paper was written to help senior U.N. officials map out a strategy on how to provide aid to one of the most impoverished countries in the world, one that has not had an effective central government since 1991.

"In order for us to do this, a clear policy of engagement with the (Islamic courts) must be put in place," the report said. "The fact is that there is new found stability in Mogadishu, extending to areas that they have begun to control, which has not been seen for many years."

One problem facing the United Nations is the listing of the Islamic courts' leader, Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys, on a list of people with ties to terrorism. U.N. policy severely restricts how much contact U.N. officials can have with people with alleged ties to terror organizations.

Both the transitional government and the Council of Islamic Courts have been girding for battle. Government forces, supported by Ethiopian military advisers, have been seen digging trenches near Baidoa, the only town the U.N.-backed government controls.

The Islamic courts have deployed forces at a strategic town between Baidoa, and their headquarters in the capital, Mogadishu, 150 miles to the southeast.

Ethiopian officials have insisted they have only a few hundred military advisers assisting the government, but international and local officials have previously put the number in the thousands.

Islamic leaders called for nationwide protests on Friday against Ethiopian troops in Somalia. Some Islamic leaders have called for a holy war against Ethiopia until it pulls its forces out of Somalia.

The Somali transitional government has repeatedly accused Eritrea of arming and supporting their rivals in the Islamic courts, something that both Eritrean and Islamic officials have repeatedly denied.

Ethiopia and Eritrea fought a two-year border war that remains unresolved. The top U.S. diplomat to Africa, Jendayi Frazer, last week accused Eritrea of using Somalia to open a second front against Ethiopia.

In Washington on Thursday, U.S. State Dept. spokesman Sean McCormack called on Ethiopia and Eritrea not to further aggravate the tense situation in Somalia.

"This is a country that has been ravaged by violence and civil conflict for decades and it's a sad story, so we would hope that countries in the region would try to play a positive role ... to not take any steps that would aggravate what is already a very tough, sad situation," he said.

The U.N. refugee agency said Friday that the flow of Somali refugees into neighboring Kenya had slowed down, but expressed concerns over reports the Islamic courts were preventing people from leaving Somalia.



-------- arms 

WE ARM THE WORLD
William D. Hartung, TomPaine.Com
October 27, 2006

http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2006/10/27/we_arm_the_world.php

While the U.S. hangs its foreign policy on preventing the spread of “weapons of mass destruction” (a worthy goal, however grossly the Bush administration goes about achieving it), it continues to ignore a more immediate threat—the proliferation of small arms and light weapons—that deserves serious attention as well. These low-tech arms have been described as “slow motion weapons of mass destruction,” because they are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past dozen years, from the genocide in Rwanda to the ongoing civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Yet yesterday, the United States, the world's largest supplier of small arms, was the only country to vote against an historic United Nations proposal to curb traffic in arms.

The United Nations vote was the culmination of the work of a network of prominent individuals and diverse non-governmental organizations. They set out to address the problem of small arms and light weapons—as well as larger systems like tanks, fighter planes and attack helicopters—by putting forward a proposal for an Arms Trade Treaty. The thrust of the proposed treaty is to curb arms transfers to major human rights abusers and areas of conflict. It would also urge weapons suppliers to limit weapons sales that are likely to undermine development in poor nations.

Other elements of an arms treaty could include the creation of common international criteria for assessing particular exports, and movement toward global enforcement mechanisms such as licensing of the arms brokers and shippers who are all too often at the center of illegal deals that have fueled conflicts in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola and Rwanda.

As a first step—by a vote of 139 to 1 with 24 abstentions—the U.N. General Assembly agreed yesterday to create a two-part process aimed at pursuing such a treaty. The United States was the only vote in opposition to the resolution.

Now, as a result of the successful vote, the first step will be a survey of U.N. member states by the secretary general’s office. The survey will seek the views of U.N. members on the feasibility and practicality of a legally binding treaty that would set international standards on arms transfers. In 2008, these same questions will be addressed by a group of experts that will delve more deeply into the subject. 

However long it takes, a treaty will be an historic step forward in the global arms control regime. Up until now, the arms trade has been the “orphan of arms control”—bound by no international treaties of the sort that govern the possession or spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry.

How can it be that the Bush administration was the only government in the world that voted against even thinking about an Arms Trade Treaty? U.S. security has suffered more harm than good from the widespread availability of small arms and light weapons, which often end up being used against U.S. troops. A recent study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University has found that over half of U.S. casualties in Iraq have been inflicted by AK-47s.

In fact, American-made weapons also frequently end up pointing at American soldiers. For example, the early foundations of al-Qaida were built in part on relationships and weaponry that came from the billions of dollars in U.S. support for the Afghan mujahadin during the war to expel Soviet forces from that country. U.S. military personnel in Somalia and Panama faced U.S.-supplied weaponry that had been given to those nations when they were U.S. allies. In Panama, the issue at hand was a change in Panamanian and U.S. government policies. In Somalia, warlords got hold of U.S.-origin weapons in the wake of the overthrow of the Siad Barre dictatorship. These patterns are likely to continue if nothing is done to stem the wholesale trade in weapons.

The specific impacts of runaway arms trafficking on U.S. forces are amplified by broader concerns. Relatively inexpensive and readily available small arms and light weapons can be used to destabilize countries, creating political chaos and economic devastation. In turn this can contribute to making these countries havens for terrorism while undermining their ability to achieve economic self-sufficiency and accountable governments.

So, the question remains, why is the United States opposed to taking measures to stop this deadly trade? The first answer is strategic. The executive branch wants to preserve its “freedom of action” to arm U.S.-allied groups like the Nicaraguan contras, the Afghan mujahadin, Jonas Savimbi’s UNITA movement in Angola, the Iraqi National Congress and groups opposed to the current regime in Iran. Even if one accepts the right of the United States to attempt to overthrow governments that oppose its short-term political or economic imperatives—which this author does not—the short-term “benefits” of these arms-supply relationships are inevitably outweighed by the long-term costs to U.S. and global interests. Unfortunately, short-sighted policymakers in Washington—of both parties—have failed to understand or accept this fundamental principle.

As the world’s number one arms exporting nation, the United States has a special responsibility to take the lead in regulating the trade. A 2005 report  by the World Policy Institute found that of the largest U.S. arms recipients in the developing world, over 70 percent were undemocratic regimes, major human rights abusers or both.

The United States is not alone in the business of unsavory arms exports. A recent report by the research group Saferworld found that in the past year, the United Kingdom provided weapons to 19 of 20 nations that had been singled out by its own government as “major countries of concern” for human rights abuses. And the Control Arms Campaign has found Russian, Greek, Chinese and U.S.-origin bullets in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which is engaged in one of the deadliest civil wars in living memory.

A second factor in U.S. opposition to any substantial measures to curb the weapons trade is the role of the domestic gun lobby. Both the National Rifle Association and its allied organization, the World Forum on the Future of Sport Shooting Activities, have gone on record against an Arms Trade Treaty. National Rifle Association propaganda has made the false claim that a treaty would lead to the confiscation of guns owned by U.S. citizens.

The good news is that, despite U.S. opposition, the U.N. General Assembly has voted to support steps towards the creation of a treaty regulating the arms trade. This is due in large part to the strenuous efforts of organizations like Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International Action Network on Small Arms, which includes over 500 member organizations in more than 100 countries.

There is a long way to go before there will be an international treaty curbing the arms trade, but this week’s action at the United Nations is an important step forward, and an indication that progress can be made even in the face of opposition by the Bush administration and the gun lobby. A change in U.S. policy is urgently needed, but in the mean time the rest of the world is moving ahead without us.



-------- un

Next UN chief in China to discuss NKorea nuclear crisis

by Verna Yu Fri Oct 27, 2006 (AFP)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20061027/wl_afp/chinaskoreankoreanuclearweaponsunban_061027141241

BEIJING - Incoming United Nations chief Ban Ki-Moon arrived in China for talks with Chinese President Hu Jintao that focused on North Korea's recent nuclear test.

Ban, currently South Korea's foreign minister, met with Hu and State Councillor Tang Jiaxuan, who was the first foreign diplomat to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il since the declared October 9 nuclear test.

The North Korean nuclear issue was discussed during the meetings, according to South Korean officials, but details were not immediately made public.

At the start of the talks, Hu congratulated Ban on his appointment as UN secretary general.

"It is the first time in 35 years that an Asian has been elected to the post," the Chinese president told Ban Friday.

"I believe... you will be able to play a greater role in the maintenance of world peace and common development."

Ban thanked the Chinese government for supporting his candidature.

"The Chinese government offered me extensive help and support, I want to express my heartfelt gratitude," he told Hu.

"I will make my best efforts on the issue of reform of the UN and other issues concerning the UN."

Tang told Ban in the opening minutes of their meeting that "our two countries are close neighbors and have very close relations. Your election as the UN secretary general is a big event for us, not just for South Korea."

"As your Chinese friends, we have great hope and expectations for you."

North Korea staged its test on the same day the Security Council voted to elect Ban as Kofi Annan's successor.

In the lead-up to his visit, officially part of Ban's tour of UN Security Council member states to express thanks for his election, both China and South Korea said Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions would be high on their agenda.

China is regarded as one of the most important players in global efforts to curtail North Korea's nuclear program as it is the isolated nation's strongest ally, its biggest provider of aid and largest trade partner.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao emphasized on Thursday that China would focus on ways to restart the stalled six-nation talks aimed at convincing North Korea to abandon its nuclear program.

"We hope we can strengthen our cooperation with the ROK (South Korea) to promote the resumption of the six-party talks and relax the current tensions," Liu said.

The six-nation talks -- involving hosts China, the two Koreas, the United States, Japan and Russia -- have been stalled since November last year, with Pyongyang refusing to attend in protest at US financial sanctions against it.

A resumption is one element of a Security Council resolution on North Korea following its atomic test which sparked international concern.

Spokesman Liu said China hoped Ban's visit could help "achieve the objective of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and preserve peace and stability in Northeast Asia."

China was also hoping to have an exchange of views with Ban on China-UN relations, Liu said.

Ban said in Seoul this week he intended to play an active part in finding a peaceful settlement to the North Korean crisis.

Ban, who has spent years dealing with the North Korean nuclear issue, has promised to end a "crisis of confidence" and heal divisions hampering the work of the UN. He has also pledged to appoint a special UN envoy on North Korea when he takes over in January.

Ban is scheduled to travel to Russia and France next week.



-------- us

Iran will notice Persian Gulf naval exercise next week, U.S. says

The Associated Press
Published: October 27, 2006

http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2006/10/28/america/NA_GEN_US_Iran_Ships.php
http://nctimes.com/articles/2006/10/28/military/16_34_2210_27_06.txt

WASHINGTON Ships from the United States and five other countries will interdict a British vessel in the Persian Gulf on Monday in a mock interception of dangerous weapons technology, an exercise the U.S. expects nearby Iran to notice.
 
For the first time, an Arab nation, Bahrain, will participate in an exercise under the three-year-old proliferation security initiative. That U.S. program is aimed at getting countries to cooperate in halting shipments of materials that can be used for advanced weapons.
 
France, Italy, Britain and Australia also will participate in Monday's exercise, the 25th held under the initiative and the first held in the Persian Gulf.
 
The practice interception comes as the United States is seeking support for U.N. sanctions against Iran for its nuclear program. On Friday, Iran stepped up its uranium enrichment program, according to a semiofficial news agency.
 
"From Iranian news reports we know the exercise got the attention of Iran," Robert Joseph, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, said Friday.
 
The exercise also comes as the United States is urging northeast Asian countries for strict enforcement of U.N. sanctions against North Korea, which detonated a nuclear explosion Oct. 9. Those sanctions ban Pyongyang's weapons trade and suggest that North Korean ships be searched for suspected illegal materials.
 
The Bush administration and the several dozen countries who support the proliferation initiative say stopping ships in international waters on suspicion they are carrying illicit traffic is legal, but there is some uncertainty about whether the suspect cargo can be seized.
 
In any event, conducting an exercise within range of Iran could be taken by Tehran as a demonstration of international resolve to curb its nuclear programs.
 
Bahrain will provide a frigate for the exercise, while Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, three other Arab countries, also will offer a measure of support as observers. Other observers include Russia, Japan and South Korea. Saudi Arabia, the largest of the Gulf countries, has not joined them.



-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE


-------- justice

US will not impede nuclear arms debate in Japan: ambassador

TOKYO (AFP) Oct 27, 2006

http://www.spacewar.com/2006/061027113309.s1c0i0up.html

The United States sees no need for Japan to develop nuclear weapons but will not try to stop an emerging debate in the country on the long-taboo issue, the US ambassador said Friday.

Senior officials have called for Japan to discuss the nuclear option in the face of the threat from communist neighbor North Korea, which said on October 9 it had tested its first atomic bomb.

Japan, the only nation to be attacked with atomic bombs, has a four-decade policy against the possession, production and presence of nuclear weapons on its soil.

"The United States also understands very well the three nuclear principles here in Japan and they are not inconsistent with American foreign policy goals here," US Ambassador to Japan Thomas Schieffer told reporters.

"From our standpoint, we have been able to work under those guidelines for a long time and we see no necessity for changing that today," he said.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, known for his passionate support of a larger military role for Japan, has ruled out developing nuclear weapons.

But one of his top policy aides, Shoichi Nakagawa, and Foreign Minister Taro Aso have said Japan needed at least to debate the nuclear option, in light of North Korea.

Schieffer said Washington had no objections to the debate in Japan, one of its closest allies.

"What the Japanese talk about with themselves or with their government is up to the Japanese. It is not up to the United States to decide what is appropriate or not appropriate for the Japanese to say," Schieffer said.

Abe said Friday that individual lawmakers were free to express their opinions, even though the government and his ruling Liberal Democratic Party would not take up the issue.

"It is clear that it will not be discussed by the government or a formal party organ," Abe told a meeting of newspaper editors.

But he added: "Other than that, discussions cannot be suppressed because Japan is a free country."

Former prime minister Eisaku Sato proposed developing nuclear weapons in the 1960s, as China built the bomb, but dropped the plan in the face of objections from the US.

Sato later declared the three non-nuclear principles and won the Nobel Peace Prize.

The United States destroyed the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II, in the world's only atomic attacks. More than 210,000 people died instantly or from horrific burns.

The US forced Japan to renounce the right to wage war after its defeat, and has since provided it with a security umbrella.

Abe wants to revise the US-imposed constitution's Article Nine, under which Japan renounced the right to maintain a military or even threaten to use force.

Such changes are viewed with unease in China and the two Koreas, which remain resentful of Japan's past aggression.

Schieffer said the US did not have concerns about constitutional revision, a process expected to take several years.

"I don't know that there is an overriding concern that we have about Article Nine," Schieffer said.

"I don't think revision of Article Nine would stand in the way of us being able to do things together for our mutual benefit," he said.

Despite its official pacifism, Japan has about 240,000 troops on active duty and an annual military budget of more than 41 billion dollars, the fourth-highest in the world.



-------- torture

INTERVIEW WITH TERROR EXPERT RON SUSKIND
"The President Knows more than He Lets on"

October 27, 2006 Der Spiegel

http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,445117,00.html

One hundred suspected terrorists from all over the world are still being held in secret American prisons. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, CIA expert Ron Suskind accuses Washington of "running like a headless chicken" in its war against al-Qaida. He reserves special criticism for the CIA's torture methods, which he argues are unproductive.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Mr. Suskind, the Red Cross recently visited all of the prisoners at Guantanamo who had been transferred from secret CIA prisons, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. Do we know more about these CIA prisons, or "Black Sites" as a result of this visit?

Suskind: We know that almost everything from the tool kit was tried: extraordinary techniques that included hot and cold water-boarding and threats of various kinds. We tried virtually everything with Binalshibh. But he was resistant, and my understanding of that interrogation is that we got very, very little from it. At one point, there was some thinking that we should put out misinformation that Binalshihb had been cooperative, he had received money and he was living in luxury. So that would mean that his friends and family, who obviously are known to al-Qaida, might face retribuition, and we ended up not doing that.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And what happened to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed?

Suskind: He was really the prize. He is the 9/11 operational planner, a kind of general in the al-Qaida firmament. He was water-boarded, hot and cold, all matter of deprivations, beatings, threats. He told us some things, but frankly things that professional interrogators say could have been gotten otherwise.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With waterboarding, the prisoner is made to feel as though he is drowing, even if he isn't really at risk of dying. There are reports that Mohammed was a kind of unoffical record-holder when it came to waterboarding.

Suskind: With extraordinary minutes passing he earned a sort of grudging respect from interrogators. The thing they did with Mohammed is that we had captured his children, a boy and a girl, age 7 and 9. And at the darkest moment we threatened grievous injury to his children if he did not cooperate. His response was quite clear: "That's fine. You can do what you want to my children, and they will find a better place with Allah."

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Why do you think the 14 prisoners were transferred from the Black Sites to Guantanamo?

Suskind: There was a debate simmering inside the US government for over a year. Since early 2004, when things really started to congeal, we were saying we need to think about an end game. People said you need to have a process that has a finish. We didn't have one. We were moving with a kind of improvisional urgency in that first year after 9/11 -- the thinking was, just do anything. We need to find these people, we have almost no human intelligence, and these interrogations may be our most precious material. The years started to pass -- and some of these people were not giving us much information in. Essentially we felt as through their yield had been harvested.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: It seems clear that at a certain point CIA agents were asking for some clear assurances that they wouldn't be prosecuted.

Suskind: Absolutely. That cry has been at CIA for years, but it was not until recently that Bush decided to act. I think the White House decided that the fall of this election year would be the ideal time. So now they acknowledge that the Black Sites exist. I don't think there is any doubt that terror would be a key issue this fall in a mid-term election year.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: And maybe they thought that everything has already been squeezed out of the 14 men and that there is nothing more they could tell.

Suskind: Well, here is the problem. Whether or not they currently are holding information is a supposition, based on a relationsship between interrogator and captive. You don't want them to talk for minutes or a day, they need to talk for years. For that you need relationships that are nuanced and deep. My sense is that they are not doing that now, for whatever reason. Maybe it is because of the way we interrogated them, or maybe because they have nothing more to say. My guess would be the former rather than the latter.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: With all your access to high-level sources, have you come across anyone who still thinks it is a good idea for the US to torture people?

Suskind: No. Most of the folks involved say that we made mistakes at the start. The president wants to keep all options open because he never wants his hands tied in any fashion, as he says, because he doesn't know what's ahead. But those involved in the interrogation protocol, I think are more or less in concert in saying that, in our panic in the early days, we made some mistakes.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Because they could have gotten information through normal interrogations ...

Suskind: ... yes, and without paying this terrific price, namely: America's moral standing. We poured plenteous gasoline on the fires of jihadist recruitment.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So the average interrogator at a Black Site understands more about the mistakes made than the president?

Suskind: The president understands more about the mistakes than he lets on. He knows what the most-skilled interrogators know too. He gets briefed, and he was deeply involved in this process from the beginning. The president loves to talk to operators.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: The government's tenor seems to be that, with the transfer of the 14 prisoners, the system of Black Sites is ending.

Suskind: They were the prizes, the most significant of them. Are there others? Of course, they are in various places, in the sort of loose confederation of prisons that are housed simply within countries. The prisoners are farmed out but not beyond the purview of the United States, which is still interested in what they say. The Egyptians, Jordanians and others keep us informed. I assume there are still about 100 prisoners and that the system of Black Sites is continuing. The president has preserved his right to do that.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Does the transfer to Guantanamo mean that the system of the Black Sites will come to an end?

Suskind: No, the president reserved the right to continue this program.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: Do you expect the announcement of court proceedings against the Sept. 11 masterminds anytime soon?

Suskind: No. Can you imagine what discovery would look like for their attorneys? Constitutional crises are knitted into every step of that traditional legal process. The process of discovery for who was overseeing the (Black Sites) program would be very complex for the United States, and would lead right into the White House. My guess is that there will be some push-and-shove and court rulings and challenges and that nothing really significant will happen until January 2009, when a new president is in office.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: You quote former CIA director George Tenet in your book as saying after Sept. 11: "There is nothing we won't do, nothing we won't try." Are there any other dirty stories?

Suskind: Logically, I would have to say yes. You're dealing with an oddity here, a secret war. Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches. This is a new conflict, fought largely in secret. The public is only informed a kind of "need to know basis." Based on that, I would assume that there remains something of an undiscovered country of activity in terms of what we have done over the past five years.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: What will Americans say in 10 years about Bushs "War on Terror"?

Suskind: They will say what I said: That the United States and its allies were winning this struggle up until around the end of 2002. Think back to September 12th. That arguably is the most important day, when we mustered ourselves to a response ...

SPIEGEL ONLINE: ... and most of the world stood in unity with the Americans.

Suskind: There were candellight vigils in Tehran -- a nice marker of where much of the world was. Even virulent radicalized Islamists were saying: "That is not my Islam." And virtually all were saying, in unanimity, "Well, the United States is certainly justified in doing whatever it sees fit in Afghanistan with the Taliban and al-Qaida. If any goal of foreign policy is to unite your allies and divide your enemies, it is fair to say that we were successful. Even countries that were not naturally inclined to be helpful were being helpful, especially in the Arab World. Our allies said, "How can I help?"

SPIEGEL ONLINE: During that time there were also defections from al-Qaida.

Suskind: Yes, dissent (inside al-Qaida) helped to provide the seabed for human intelligence that the United States harvested, including Ali. He provided important tips right up until early 2005. And the Emir of Qatar gave us intelligence that helped us to catch Binalshibh, and Mohammed was turned over by another source. He got a $25 million reward and is now living somewhere in America with his family. These are human intelligence assets and they are the how you win these wars.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: So things were going well ... at least until the Iraq war?

Suskind: You can almost mark by the day how our human intelligence assets have withered. The chances of someone coming to the US authorities in this period are slim to none and that will blind us at a time when the terrorist threat has metastasized into what I call the franchise model. It is particulary difficult to discover prior to the operational moment.

SPIEGEL ONLINE: That has been a source deep frustration for the intelligence community.

Suskind: And that is why people in the counter-terrorism community in the United States are terrified at this point and why many cooperated with this book. They wanted to send out a signal and say: "We need to have a real strategy here that is not only tactically forceful, but where the left hand of the US foreign policy doesn't undermine what the right hand is doing." Right now we often run like a headless chicken. We need a strategy. And we need it immediately because, in some ways, we are less safe then we were on Sept. 12.

This interview was conducted by Matthias Gebauer and Georg Mascolo in Ron Suskind's Washington office.

TERRORISM AUTHOR RON SUSKIND

For years, Ron Suskind has been considered one of the best- sourced reporters when it comes to the CIA or the US government. The author and former Wall Street Journal reporter has high- level access to sources in the US administration. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for his investigative reporting and his new book, "The One Percent Doctrine," has been the subject of critical praise around the world. In the book, Suskind describes how George W. Bush and his advisors completely reshaped US foreign and security policy after Sept. 11, how they hunted in vain for Osama bin Laden and turned torture into a regular part of CIA interrogations of suspected terrorists. In the exposé, Suskind also reports for the first time about terror attacks that have been successfully foiled and about one al- Qaida turncoat who served for years as an informant against bin Laden and Co. Suskind lives and works in Washington, DC.



-------- POLITICS


-------- corruption

Report: Halliburton unit exploited rules

10/27/2006
By Anne Plummer Flaherty, 
Associated Press

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-10-27-halliburton_x.htm

WASHINGTON — The Halliburton subsidiary that provides food, shelter and other logistics to U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan exploited federal regulations to hide details on its contract performance, according to a report released Friday.

The special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction found that Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root Services routinely marked all information it gave to the government as proprietary, whether it was or not. The government promises not to disclose proprietary data so a company's most valuable information is not divulged to its competitors.

By marking all information proprietary — including such normally releasable data as labor rates — the company abused federal regulations, the report says.

In effect, Kellogg, Brown & Root turned the regulations "into a mechanism to prevent the government from releasing normally transparent information, thus potentially hindering competition and oversight."

Halliburton spokeswoman Cathy Mann said that since the current contract is being reviewed and may be divided among several contractors, "It is clearly appropriate to mark data as proprietary that could potentially be used for competitive purposes" as would be the case in any new contract.

She said such proprietary markings have been used on a majority of the data for at least the last decade, and the company will work with the military on matters outlined in the interim report as the final audit is completed.

The Iraq reconstruction audits have routinely found significant problems with contracting and rebuilding in the country, ranging from high costs for security and overhead to alleged fraud and lack of oversight.

Sen. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, chairman of the Democratic Policy Committee, said that in 13 oversight hearings on the war in Iraq the committee found more than $1 billion in waste, fraud, abuse and what it called "shoddy work" by contractors.

"I'm convinced that this is the most significant waste, fraud and abuse in the history of this country," Dorgan said.

If the Democrats take control of the Senate, he said, they will launch oversight hearings on war matters ranging from faulty intelligence leading up to the war to wrongdoing by contractors.

AP Writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report.