Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
UN worried about nuclear "dirty bomb" material
Generator's Cash Crunch Tests UK Nuclear Policy
Ten Reasons Why Many Gulf War Veterans Oppose Re-Invading Iraq
Iraq takes reporters on tour of suspected nuclear weapons site
Iraq 'months away' from nuclear missile
U.S. reprisal to be 'annihilation'
London Group Says Iraq Lacks Nuclear Material for Bomb
Iraq Challenges U.S. on Evidence
Iraq Denies Trying to Produce Nuclear Bomb
Japan officials probe TEPCO on reactor cover-up
Sinking South Korea nuclear plant is safe
Original September 11 plan 'was to strike nuclear plants'
Al Qaeda Is Said to Have Weighed Nuclear Targets
US agency seeks to keep energy plant info secret
Ex - Nuke Workers to Talk to Doctors
Government to allow nuclear plant workers to talk
Tennessee to Get Uranium Fuel Plant
Rumsfeld rejects calls for more Iraq proof
Hard to Build Coalition if Iraq Gets Nuke - Cheney
Polls show decline in support for Bush as fears mount in America
Bush officials: First strike justified
MILITARY
ICC Unlikely to Touch Military Environmental Crime
US forces launch strike in Afghanistan
Bush will call on Australian troops
Many Worry That Nation Is Still Highly Vulnerable to Germ Attack
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
Colombian paramilitary groups vow to reform
No war on Iraq unless the United Nations allows
War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack
Ex-Arms Inspector Says Attack on Iraq 'Not Justified'
Doubt cast on PM's 'nuclear threat' claim
Former weapons inspector: Iraq not a threat
Study: Iraq could arm nukes soon
Arafat Condemns Acts of Terror
Arafat Condemns Acts of Terror, but Skirts Cease-Fire Call
Pakistan Worried About India Attack
MI6 urged to release intelligence
Steps the U.S. Needs for UN Approval to Strike Iraq
Gulf war general says U.S. attack on Iraq is legal
US Jets Again Attack Iraqi Air Defenses
POLICE / PRISONERS
Were Civil Liberties a Casualty of 9/11?
INSIDE THE NEW CAMP X-RAY
Sept. 11 Families Wary on Civil Rights Threats
Civil Liberties: What's Wrong with the TIPS Program?
FBI nets suspects in global manhunt
Report: D.C. taping spawns alert
Exclusive: The Informant Who Lived With the Hijackers
Telling the truth about lie detectors
Locked Up and Patted Down: A Year of Making U.S. Safer
ENERGY AND OTHER
Long Island Farm Hosts Wind Turbines
Energy-Trading Chief Fired [etc.]
US agency seeks to keep energy plant info secret
Court agrees men jailed illegally, but rejects release
ACTIVISTS
IMF Protesters Plan Day-Long Strike in D.C.
US News & World Report Poll
">
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
UN worried about nuclear "dirty bomb" material
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
September 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17680/story.htm
VIENNA - The United Nations' nuclear watchdog is increasingly worried about huge amounts of discarded and unregulated radioactive material in the world that could be used to make "dirty bombs", a top official said last week.
A year after the September 11 attacks in the United States, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) believes world leaders understand that militants could make weapons out of radioactive material left over from everyday uses.
"It's very difficult for nuclear reactors to fall out of regulatory control - to be orphaned - because they're usually owned by governments and are in a few places that everyone knows about," Abel Julio Gonzalez, Director of Radiation and Waste Safety at the IAEA, told Reuters in an interview.
"With radioactive material, the opposite is the case. It is usually owned by private people - hospitals, small clinics, companies that do radiography (X-rays) of piping. It's much easier for this material to be orphaned," he said.
The IAEA's big worry is that it could fall into the hands of terrorist groups who could use them to make "dirty bombs" - not involving any nuclear reaction or great physical damage, but using conventional explosives to spread radioactivity and panic.
POST-SOVIET PROBLEM
Perhaps the main worry is the former Soviet Union.
After it fell apart, much radioactive material that had been used there was simply abandoned. Nuclear fuel rods lie unattended on Arctic beaches, portable generators using radioactive sources sit in forests, dump trucks stand idle full of radioactive powder.
"We are talking here about simple radioactive material that is used for thousands of applications, used for so many things that our life would be completely different without it. This material can easily be orphaned and severely contaminate areas."
Caesium is one of the more worrisome radioactive sources for the agency.
In 1987 a canister of caesium-137 powder, used to keep grain from rotting, was abandoned in a junkyard in Brazil. It contaminated 240 people, four of whom later died.
Gonzalez said an unknown number of trucks with a large amount of caesium appear to have disappeared in the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Moldova.
The agency is cooperating with the United States and Russia to try to recover them, though the number of trucks and their location is still unclear.
"They are as secure as they can be in a place like Georgia...or Moldova," he said. "These are the kinds of sources that no one knows about and only appear when somebody gets hurt.
Last December parts from abandoned Soviet-era portable generators containing deadly strontium-90 were found in a remote Georgian forest near the breakaway Abkhazia region. Three woodsmen who discovered them were severely burned by radiation.
Fortunately the events of September 11 have helped to change Russia's attitude towards complying with international controls on radioactive and nuclear materials, Gonzalez said.
"Before, the basic attitude of Russia was non-engagement - that this was not their problem but a problem of the former Soviet Union," he said. "Now I believe things have changed and there really is engagement from Russia."
-------- britain
Generator's Cash Crunch Tests UK Nuclear Policy
September 9, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-09-02.asp
LONDON, UK, A cash crisis at the UK's largest nuclear electricity generator today forced the government to pledge up to £410 million (US$638 million) in emergency funding, that may be followed by a longer term restructuring program.
The near demise of British Energy has brought into sharp focus a rumbling debate over the future of nuclear power in the UK in the context of a major official review of energy policy.
British Energy, Britain's largest private nuclear operator, generates 20 percent of the UK's electricity, from eight nuclear power stations and one coal fired generator.
British Energy's Hunterston Generating Station (Photos courtesy British Energy)
The roots of its near insolvency spread in many directions, but a key factor has been a 40 percent fall in wholesale electricity prices since 1998, driven by the introduction of new power trading rules early last year.
Options being offereded for rescuing the company and the power stations it operates in the longer term include exempting nuclear electricity from the UK's eco-energy tax, the climate change levy.
Cutting the amount of money British Energy has to pay nuclear services firm British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. (BNFL) for fuel and spent fuel reprocessing also has been proposed. This would be opposed by BNFL, which has financial problems of its own.
Environmental groups would like to see such an outcome as it would undermine BNFL's controversial nuclear fuel reprocessing business.
Green groups oppose any exemption of nuclear power generation from the climate change levy, arguing that it is in fact an energy and not a carbon tax.
Bryony Worthington, nuclear campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK, said of the loan, "It's outrageous. The government should have allowed British Energy to go into administration rather than bailing it out with a loan. With a market value of just £404 million and existing debts of around £850 million, no commercial lender would have lent this incompetent company any more money. Yet we the taxpayers are being asked to carry the risk."
"This financial fiasco must force the government to realize the folly of building new nuclear power stations," said Worthington. "They are uneconomic, unsafe and deeply unpopular and are not needed to combat climate change. Nuclear power should be phased out and replaced with clean, safe and renewable forms of energy."
The setback comes just as an extensive advertising campaign by British Energy is in full swing highlighting the "environmental benefits of nuclear power," primarily that it does not contribute to global warming.
British Energy's Eggborough Generating Station
Sally Smedley, British Energy's communications director, said, "We are rapidly heading towards dependency on gas and dependency on overseas supplies. Without nuclear we cannot reach our Kyoto targets and in the long term, the alternatives are likely to be far more expensive than nuclear - particularly renewables."
The ads are scheduled to continue through September, through the energy review consultation period.
In 1997 British Energy expanded internationally by forming a U.S. joint venture AmerGen with PECO Energy of Philadelphia, now part of Exelon Corporation. To date AmerGen has purchased one pressurized water reactor and two boiling water reactors in the United States.
In May 2001 British Energy's Canadian subsidiary, Bruce Power, completed the proposed lease transaction of the Bruce nuclear power plant for 17 years in southwestern Ontario, consisting of eight Candu reactors, four of which are currently laid up.
British Energy has some small interest in renewables. The company has partnered with wind farm developer Renewable Energy Systems Ltd and marine design and construction expert Sir Robert McAlpine to form Offshore Wind Power Ltd.
A site off the Lincolnshire coast near Skegness has been chosen for Offshore Wind Power's first wind farm. Consultation and discussions are currently under way, which will include consent processes, capital grant applications and negotiation with the Crown Estate Commissioners, who own the seabed.
Its subsidiary, British Energy (Canada) Ltd., and Ontario Power Generation in March 2001 announced a 50/50 joint venture, Huron Wind, to develop a wind energy facility near Kincardine, Ontario. The project, to be located on land near the Bruce A and B nuclear generating facility on Lake Huron, will be subject to an environmental review.
{Published in cooperation with ENDS Environment Daily, Europe's choice for environmental news. Environmental Data Services Ltd, London. Email: envdaily@ends.co.uk}
-------- depleted uranium
Ten Reasons Why Many Gulf War Veterans Oppose Re-Invading Iraq
By Anonymous,
AlterNet
September 9, 2002
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14067
With all the war fever about re-invading Iraq, the press and politicians are ignoring the opinion of the veterans of our last war in the Gulf. But we veterans were there, and we have unique and critical first-hand knowledge of the course and consequences of warfare in Iraq. Our opinions should be solicited and heard before troops deploy for battle, not after they have returned wounded, ill or in body bags.
Another invasion of Iraq in 2002 will be very different from the invasion of 1991. The war's mission has changed in the intervening years, from removing Iraq from Kuwait to removing the entire Iraqi government and military establishment from power. Because the goal of the U.S. military has changed, the Iraqi army may retreat to the cities, where they may face better odds than in the desert.
During the open desert tank battles of '91, U.S. tanks out-classed and out-fought obsolete Iraqi tanks, and U.S. infantry captured tens of thousands of poorly supplied Iraqi soldiers operating without command and control from Baghdad. But in the urban warfare scenario of 2002, pitched infantry skirmishes and ambushes in cities may present a more level battlefield for Iraqi troops fighting in their hometowns. The Iraqi military can be expected to fight for each block within each city with the most ruthless means available. When faced with the impending overrun of their nation, the Iraqi military didn't hesitate to use chemical weapons against Iran.
Because of these significant differences, here are 10 reasons why, as a Gulf War combat veteran, I oppose a second Gulf War as a costly and preventable mistake.
1. U.S. troops are vulnerable to Iraqi chemical and biological warfare agents -- if Iraq is capable of using them. The gas masks, detection alarms and protection suits don't work, according to internal Department of Defense documents uncovered during investigations by the U.S. General Accounting Office. This leaves U.S. troops highly vulnerable to chemical and biological attack. U.S. chemical and biological warfare agent casualties in 2002 could be significantly higher than in 1991. Only a few months ago, the Pentagon sent out a press release stating 140,000 U.S. soldiers were exposed to low-levels chemical agents near Khamisiyah, Iraq during the Gulf War. While these soldiers appeared to return home healthy, many tens of thousands face long-term disabling medical problems that are difficult to treat.
2. Scientific evidence shows that even low-level chemical exposures are dangerous. According to a recent National Academy of Sciences report (Gulf War and Health, September 2000), low-levels of chemical warfare agents cause long-term medical problems. This conclusion is based on research resulting from the sarin attack in Japan in 1995.
3. Research shows long-term adverse side effects from mandatory vaccines given to U.S. soldiers deploying to the war zone. According to the product label insert made by BioPort in Michigan, the sole producer, the experimental anthrax vaccine has caused several deaths. The National Academy of Sciences this year concluded there are some risks to the hotly debated vaccine.
4. The Gulf War battlefield remains radioactive and toxic. Scientific research funded by the military and released two years ago links exposure to depleted uranium (DU) ammunition with cancer in rats. Solid depleted uranium bullets, ranging in size from 25mm to 120mm, are used by U.S. tanks, helicopters and planes to attack enemy tanks and armored personnel carriers. The Gulf War battlefield is already littered with more than 300 tons of radioactive dust and shrapnel from the 1991 Gulf War. Another war will only increase the radioactive and toxic contamination among U.S. soldiers. As of today, U.S. troops are not fully trained about the hazards of depleted uranium contamination, even though Congress enacted a law in 1998 requiring extensive training, especially for medical personnel.
5. Research shows long-term adverse side effects from mandatory pills given to U.S. soldiers deploying to the war zone. According to testimony before Congress (Rand Corporation, 1999), the experimental pyridostigmine bromide (PB) anti-chemical warfare agent pills "can't be ruled out" as linked to Gulf War illness. During the war, soldiers were told to take one pill every eight hours. After the chemical alarms sounded, some soldiers, out of legitimate fear for their lives, took more than the prescribed amount. To date, the long-term consequences of PB pills remain largely unknown.
6. The Iraqi civilian opposition was abandoned by U.S. troops in the first Gulf War. After U.S. troops had liberated Kuwait and conquered southern Iraq at the end of February 1991, former President George H.W. Bush encouraged the Iraqi opposition, mainly civilians, to rise up against the Iraqi dictatorship in March 1991. However, former President Bush left the rebels twisting in the wind to be ruthlessly killed by the Iraqi army's Republican Guard flying helicopters allowed by the cease-fire arranged by U.S. military and political leaders. U.S. troops in southern Iraq in March 1991 were ordered not to interfere. How can U.S. troops or Iraqi rebels be confident this won't happen again? Long oppressed by the Iraqi military, what will the civilian population do if Iraq is liberated? The American public won't support a long-term occupation and high casualties.
7. Many post-cease-fire military actions of the first Gulf War were deplorable. In March 1991, the Iraqi army was in a full route inside Iraq. Against orders, former General Barry McCaffrey slaughtered thousands of retreating Iraqi soldiers after the cease-fire (documented in the article, "Overwhelming Force," by Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 2000). Many U.S. soldiers returned home with serious objections about the course and consequences of such actions, including the horrific carnage of the "highway of death," littered with hundreds of destroyed cars, tanks and human remains (see "Prayer at Rumayla" by Gulf War veteran Charles Sheehan-Miles, Xlibris, 2001). Will there be another massacre of Iraqi soldiers? Will Iraqi troops slaughter U.S. soldiers in retaliation, killing U.S. prisoners or retreating U.S. soldiers? And will the press be allowed onto the battlefield to record what really happens?
8. No one has been held accountable for arming Iraq with chemical and biological weapons from 1980 to 1990. A recent news article reported that top aides for former presidents Reagan and Bush armed Iraq with these weapons during Iraq's war against Iran between 1980 and 1988 ("Officers Say U.S. Aided Iraq in War Despite Use of Gas," New York Times, Aug. 18, 2002). Some of these former George H.W. Bush aides now work for President George W. Bush. These advisors did nothing to stop the sale of the chemical agents to Iraq, did nothing to stop the use of the agents by Iraq, and did nothing to tell the world about Iraq's crimes, even when the world learned Iraq used poison gas against civilians. These top political aides have remained silent for more than 14 years, and many refused to comment on the recent news reports.
9. U.S. allies in Europe oppose invading Iraq. They have refused to supply soldiers, funding or logistical support. Some of the serious U.S. battlefield casualties from 1991 were sent to U.S. military hospitals in Germany. Where will our casualties be flown to for emergency care if Germany follows through on its policy to remain neutral and not allow the use of German airspace? This contrasts sharply with the more than 30 nations allied with the U.S. during Desert Storm in 1991. Today, the U.S. has no Arab allies. In 1991, the U.S. forgave billions in outstanding loans owed by Egypt to buy its support. Now Egypt and other Middle Eastern nations oppose a second invasion of Iraq. If something goes wrong, where will U.S. troops retreat if Saudi Arabia won't allow U.S. troops within its borders? We must avoid another Gallipoli.
10. The Department of Veterans Affairs will not be able to care for additional casualties because VA can't even take care of current VA patients. Most veterans now wait six months to see a VA doctor, and most veterans wait more than six months to receive a decision on a VA disability claim. Many of those waiting in line are Gulf War veterans, many with unusual illnesses. According to VA, of the nearly 700,000 veterans who served in Desert Shield and Desert Storm, more than 300,000 have sought VA healthcare, and more than 200,000 have filed VA disability claims. Two weeks ago, President Bush slashed $275 million from the healthcare budget of the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Although the Iraqi government is a corrupt dictatorship that must eventually be removed, current proposals to remove the government by deploying hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops are deeply flawed. A premature attack against Iraq, especially when the public opposes it, would be a horrible mistake. Since 1990, more than 400 U.S. soldiers have died in the Gulf War theater of operations. Untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, both soldiers and civilians, also died. A second invasion of Iraq for one man is not worth one more life; let's use common sense and avert a second Gulf War.
The author is a Gulf War combat veteran.
-------- iraq
Iraq takes reporters on tour of suspected nuclear weapons production site
Mon Sep 9
By SAMEER N. YACOUB,
Associated Press Writer
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020909/ap_wo_en_po/iraq_17
BAGHDAD, Iraq - Iraq said Monday that construction at a nuclear site it said had concerned U.N. weapons inspectors was for four new buildings devoted to peaceful research, continuing a campaign to prove it is innocent and its enemies are lying to build a case for military action against President Saddam Hussein.
Reporters were escorted to the site, al-Twaitha, 40 kilometers (25 miles) south of Baghdad. The site was destroyed twice, first by the Israelis in 1981 and then by the allied during the 1991 Gulf War, according to Iraqi officials.
It was the fifth such visits in four weeks. Iraqi authorities have taken reporters to what were described as a livestock vaccination laboratory, a complex of food warehouses, an insecticide plant and a fertilizers factory. Critics say experts in chemical, biological or nuclear weapons programs given unfettered access should be conducting the inspections.
The United States, with British support, accuses Saddam of possessing weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorism. U.S. President George W. Bush has declared he wants Saddam toppled, but says has not yet decided whether the United States should attack to achieve that goal.
In a report released Monday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading independent center for strategic analysis, said Iraq could assemble a nuclear weapon within months if it could steal or buy radioactive material, and it is working to develop equipment to make bomb components.
The report added Iraq has a small force of missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon and probably managed to hide some chemical and biological weapons which pose a limited threat.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who traveled to the United States last week to discuss Iraq with Bush, has said his government hoped soon to publish a dossier of evidence on Iraq's attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
The head of a U.N. atomic weapons team said Friday that satellite photos show new construction at several sites linked to Saddam's past nuclear efforts.
French physicist Jacques Baute, based at the International Atomic Energy Organization in Vienna, did not identify the sites. But Iraqi officials said Monday at least one was al-Twaitha, which they said was destroyed twice, first by the Israelis in 1981 and then by the allies during the 1991 Gulf War.
"The threat from Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction - chemical, biological, potentially nuclear weapons capability - that threat is real," Blair had said, citing the satellite photos.
"Blair and the British media have waged in the recent days a new media campaign saying that Iraq has reactivated and they have shown satellite photos saying that there are four facilities in this site conducting activities in the nuclear field," said Saeed Al-Moussawi, a foreign ministry official who escorted journalists to al-Twaitha. "These claims are full distortion of facts about these four buildings and there functions."
Al-Moussawi claimed that the four new buildings were used for environmental, medical and agricultural research and "they are purely dedicated for peaceful purposes."
The buildings were surrounded by rubble. Inside, workers operated lathes. Bags of mushrooms said to be used in agricultural research were scattered on the floor. Samples of what was described as kidney disease medicine were kept in a laboratory.
It was not clear when the four buildings were constructed. A fifth that also looked new but was not shown to the reporters appeared to be a warehouse.
The U.S.-British position that Iraq is a threat that must be contained has met skepticism around the world, with opposition to a U.S. strike from all of Iraq's neighbors and such countries as France, Germany, Russia, China and New Zealand.
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said intelligence gathered in the last 12 to 14 months suggests the "the United States may well become the target" of an Iraq attack. Cheney and other top Bush administration officials took to U.S. TV talk shows Sunday as part of Bush's effort to persuade the public, Congress and other countries that action against Saddam is urgently needed.
Bush will address the United Nations on Thursday. His secretary of state, Colin Powell, said that whatever the world organization decides, Bush will reserve the right to go it alone against Iraq.
Many of the same countries urging the United States to proceed with restraint also have called on Iraq to end its four-year ban on U.N. weapons inspectors to defuse the crisis.
Scott Ritter, an American who was once on the inspections teams, visited Baghdad on Sunday, saying Iraq posed no threat and urging it to prove that by opening up to inspections.
Iraq, while denying it still has weapons of mass destruction, has offered only to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors. It has not responded to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's demand that inspectors be allowed to return unconditionally as a first step to further talks.
Sanctions imposed on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of neighboring Kuwait cannot be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify that the country has surrendered nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
In a related development, the leaders of the two main Kurdish factions that control northern Iraq - the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan - signed a reconciliation agreement over the weekend.
The two sides are apparently keen to present a united front as Iraqi opposition groups discuss the future for the country if Saddam is ousted. Both Kurdish factions oppose Saddam but have been hesitant to support possible U.S. action against Saddam.
----
Iraq 'months away' from nuclear missile
BILL JACOBS Westminster Editor
Mon 9 Sep 2002
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?id=1003972002&tid=518
IRAQ has the technology and skills to build a nuclear bomb within months if it were able to acquire the necessary atomic material, a major report reveals today.
It says Saddam Hussein managed to keep the necessary bomb-making expertise after his nuclear weapons factories were destroyed following the Gulf War.
And in addition, the widely respected International Institute of Strategic Studies said the Baghdad dictator, despite international efforts to disarm him, has managed to stockpile biological and chemical weapons including the deadly Sarin nerve gas.
The report - the most comprehensive so far on the state of Saddam's secret programme to arm himself with weapons of mass destruction - said all Iraq needs now to build its own atomic bomb and join the nuclear club is weapons grade "fissile" nuclear material.
The IISS warned this could possibly be bought on the international black market which has grown up since the collapse of the iron curtain or
provided by a friendly foreign power. The report reveals Saddam has around a dozen Al-Hussein missiles with a range of up to 400 miles which could be used to launch a nuclear attack or warhead containing toxic gas or lethal bacteria at Israel.
These missiles, the longest range launch device Saddam possesses, were hidden following the 1991 Gulf War. However he has no missiles with the range to strike at Britain, the United States or western cities. He would be forced to use special forces or terrorist squads to do this.
The IISS report says Saddam also possesses dozens of shorter range Al-Samoud and Scud missiles which could be used to bombard a US/UK invasion force with at least chemical and biological weapons.
The report says that Saddam has kept vast stock piles of biological and chemical weapons including:
Thousands of litres of Anthrax; Thousands of tonnes of Mustard gas; A few hundred tons of Sarin nerve gas; The lethal VX nerve agent.
The report says Saddam retains the capacity to make more chemical and biological weapons as well as the knowledge and personnel to develop nuclear weapons if he could obtain either highly enriched uranium or separated plutonium.
The report will be a major boost to Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George Bush as they step up the international effort to persuade the world community that Saddam must be stopped, by war if necessary, before he has either a nuclear capability or the means of delivering a major chemical or biological attack on the west.
The two leaders had talks at the President's country retreat Camp David over the weekend and made clear that Britain and the US will go into action alone if other countries refuse to support them.
Last night there were further signs of preparations for war as US aircraft bombarded an Iraqi anti-ship missile battery near the Port of Basra to take out the potential threat to allied ships ferrying troops and tanks to the area.
The report says Saddam's main nuclear programme was eradicated by a combination of the 1991 bombings and subsequent UN inspections. It says: "Against this scenario, however, there is a nuclear wild card. If somehow, Iraq were able to acquire sufficient nuclear material from foreign sources, it could probably produce nuclear weapons on short order, perhaps in a matter of months."
The IISS says the west faces a difficult choice between war and diplomacy in trying to disarm Saddam's regime. The report concludes: "Either course of action carries risks. Wait and the threat will grow. Strike and the threat may be used."
More War with Iraq?:
http://www.news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=518
Websites:
FCO - Policy towards Iraq http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pagename=OpenMarket/Xcelerate/ShowPage&c=Page&cid=1007029394374
FCO site - Britain, UNSCOM & Iraq http://special.fco.gov.uk/
Iraqi Presidency http://www.uruklink.net/iraq/
John Pilger on Iraq http://pilger.carlton.com/iraq
UN - Office of the Iraq Programme http://www.un.org/Depts/oip/
US Dept of State - Iraq Update http://usinfo.state.gov/regional/nea/iraq/
----
U.S. reprisal to be 'annihilation'
By Joyce Howard Price
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020909-14050288.htm
Vice President Richard B. Cheney said yesterday that Saddam Hussein is "actively and aggressively" trying to build a nuclear bomb, and two key senators disclosed that U.S. officials have warned the Iraqi dictator that he and his country face "annihilation" if he deploys a weapon of mass destruction.
"We have recently let Saddam Hussein know what the consequences of his use of a weapon of mass destruction - chemical, biological, or, if and when he acquires it, nuclear - against any of his neighbors, and that would be annihilation," Sen. Bob Graham, Florida Democrat and chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said on CNN's "Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer."
Mr. Graham said it has "been conveyed to Baghdad" that using a weapon of mass destruction would result "not only in the annihilation" of Saddam, "but of much of his society."
Sen. Richard C. Shelby, Alabama Republican and vice chairman of the intelligence committee, who was also on "Late Edition," when asked if Saddam has been "formally warned" of extinction if he uses such a weapon, said: "Absolutely. We've done that before. The first President Bush in 1990, '91 did that. I think it was clear, unmistakable language."
Interviewed yesterday on NBC's "Meet the Press," Mr. Cheney offered the most detailed information the Bush administration has made available yet why the United States should act now to remove Saddam.
Senior Bush administration officials blanketed network news talk shows yesterday in preparation for a key speech the president will deliver to the U.N. General Assembly on Thursday. In the speech, Mr. Bush is expected to make a case for military action against Iraq, though aides said yesterday that he has not decided whether to invade Iraq.
Mr. Cheney and others yesterday raised the specter of Iraq attacking this country with his deadly weapons. The United States "may well become the target," the vice president said.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, interviewed on CBS' "Face the Nation," agreed. "Imagine a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000 [dead]. It's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Though some critics have challenged the legal right of the United States to make an unprovoked attack against Iraq to oust its leader, Mr. Cheney said the United States would be justified to strike first against any government that plans to attack this nation.
"We find ourselves, on the one hand, with the demonstrated greater vulnerability of September 11, and, on the other hand, with the very clear evidence that this is a man who is resuming all those [weapons] programs that the U.N. Security Council tried to get him to forgo some 10 or 11 years ago" after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Persian Gulf war, Mr. Cheney said. "And, increasingly, we believe we will become the targets of those activities."
He added: "If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the United States, has developed that capability, harbors those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force."
On CNN, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said, "There is no doubt that Saddam Hussein's regime is a danger to the United States and to our allies, to our interests. It simply makes no sense to wait any longer to do something about the threat that is posed here."
Miss Rice said it is not safe to wait for the "100 percent surety" that Saddam has a "weapon of mass destruction that can reach the United States." Such certainty might not come until "something lands in our territory."
"There will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
Mr. Cheney said that based on intelligence acquired in the past 12 to 14 months, the United States can conclude that Saddam has "stepped up his capacity to produce and deliver biological weapons, that he has reconstituted his nuclear program to develop a nuclear weapon, that there are efforts under way inside Iraq to significantly expand his capacity."
In the NBC interview, Mr. Cheney confirmed a report in yesterday's editions of the New York Times that Saddam is "now trying through the illegal procurement network to acquire the equipment he needs to be able to enrich" low-grade uranium for a weapon.
Specifically, he said, the United States has been able to "intercept and prevent" Saddam from acquiring a kind of aluminum tube "necessary to build a centrifuge." Mr. Cheney said a centrifuge is required to enhance the quality of uranium to make it usable in a nuclear bomb.
This news follows release of a report from the International Atomic Energy Agency that cites satellite photographs showing new construction at several Iraqi sites linked to Saddam's development of nuclear weapons. "I don't know what more evidence we need" that Saddam is a threat and should go, Mr. Bush said Saturday at Camp David.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair agrees with Mr. Bush, but other European allies and Arab nations continue to oppose intervention in Iraq. Mr. Blair said Saturday at Camp David that he anticipates opponents would change their minds after seeing the evidence.
In Baghdad, Iraqi Vice President Taha Yassin Ramadan yesterday denied reports Iraq is trying to collect materials for nuclear weapons and building up sites once targeted by U.N. weapons inspectors. He told the Associated Press that such claims were "lies" by the United States and Britain to justify an attack on his country.
"There is no such a thing. They are telling lies and lies to make others believe them." He predicted the "whole world" will oppose the United States if it attacks.
A week ago, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell set off frenzied speculation when he said in an interview on the British Broadcasting Corp. that the first step should be an attempt to get the United Nations to order weapons inspectors back into Iraq. His comments contradicted those of Mr. Cheney, who had said a few days earlier that inspections, which were halted in 1998, would not be useful.
Mr. Powell appeared yesterday to soften his comments, telling Fox interviewers that Mr. Cheney was "expressing well-deserved skepticism" about the value of inspections.
"We shouldn't rest our total policy and give full confidence to any inspection regime. And no inspection regime would be of any use unless it's anywhere, anytime, anyplace, anybody."
"You should have a skeptical attitude as to how much such inspections can do, especially in the presence of a regime that's going to do everything they can to hide things from inspectors."
Mr. Cheney said the war would be very costly. Some have put the likely price tag at between $60 billion and $80 billion. However, he said on NBC: "The danger of an attack against the United States by someone with the weapons Saddam Hussein now has or is acquiring is far more costly than what it would cost to go deal with the problem militarily."
--------
London Group Says Iraq Lacks Nuclear Material for Bomb
New York Times
September 9, 2002
By WARREN HOGE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/international/09CND-LOND.html
LONDON, Sept. 9 - Saddam Hussein has substantial stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and the capacity to expand production of them on short notice, but Iraq will be unable to build a nuclear weapon for years unless it obtains radioactive material on the black market, a leading security affairs research organization said today.
The group, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, which is based in London, said that while there remained many doubts about the quantities and capabilities of Mr. Hussein's war matériel, there was no question that his government's priority was developing weapons of mass destruction.
"War, sanctions and inspections have reversed and retarded but not eliminated Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and long-range missile capacity, nor removed Baghdad's enduring interest in developing these capabilities," John Chipman, the institute director, said at a news conference.
"The retention of weapons of mass-destruction capacities by Iraq is self-evidently the core objective of the regime, for it has sacrificed all other domestic and foreign policy goals to this singular aim," Mr. Chipman said. "Sooner or later, it seems that the current Iraqi regime will eventually achieve its aims."
While the report explicitly took no sides in the current debate over the urgency of blocking Mr. Hussein's ambitions, Gary Samore, the report's author, said the argument for taking action now was stronger than it was before the Persian Gulf war because Mr. Hussein had proved in the 11 years since that he will not respond to political and military pressure.
"We have tried a lot of means - sanctions, inspections, airstrikes - to force Iraq to cooperate with inspectors, and that has not happened," Mr. Samore said.
Mr. Chipman noted that both courses of action under discussion held risks. "Wait, and the threat will grow," he said. "Strike, and the threat may be used."
Mr. Chipman also cast doubt on the ability of inspectors to make quick determinations of what weapons of mass destruction, or W.M.D., Iraq now holds. He noted Mr. Hussein's ability to disguise and hide weapons development and said, "No on-site inspections of Iraq's W.M.D. programs can succeed unless inspectors develop an imaginative and carefully coordinated counterconcealment strategy."
The report said United Nations inspectors would need an unspecified period of time to develop and refine their techniques and accumulate the "necessary tradecraft to deal with Iraqi obfuscation efforts." Mr. Chipman said that Iraq's extensive efforts at concealment should be taken as a measurement of how dedicated it was to developing weapons of mass destruction.
The institute publishes annual inventories of the world's armed forces, rebel forces and organized armed groups, and it said it was producing its special report on Iraq because of the increased attention to the threat posed. While today's report put forward no arresting new conclusions, it was praised by experts for its thoroughness and immediately fueled comment in the intensifying debate over Iraq.
A spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Blair, a vocal proponent of swift action, said the report painted a picture of "a highly unstable regime, with access to biological and chemical weapons." He suggested that a dossier on the Iraqi weapons buildup to be made public later this month by Mr. Blair would be even starker because it would have access to classified intelligence not available to the institute.
Menzies Campbell, a Liberal Democrat who opposes attacking Iraq, dismissed the report, saying it contained "nothing startling, nor anything that could not have been inferred from Iraq's previous behavior."
Paul Beaver of Jane's Defense Weekly said: "This report is a very good document, the best compilation of the facts I have seen. But there's nothing new here, no killer fact that makes me believe that we should go to war tomorrow."
The report said Iraq has probably retained substantial amounts of biological warfare agents from pre-gulf-war stocks undetected by inspectors. It said production could resume on short notice and could have produced thousands of liters of anthrax, botulinum toxin and other agents since the departure of the inspectors in 1998, on the eve of an American-British bombing campaign.
As for chemical weapons, the report said Iraq probably had a "few hundred tons" of agents to make mustard and sarin nerve gas. Mr. Samore said this was less alarming in the context of any attack on Baghdad since invading soldiers would come protected.
In neither case, biological or chemical, had Mr. Hussein developed the means of delivering weapons that could cause vast loss of life, the report concluded. But it warned that Iraq had retained about a dozen short-range missiles that could be fitted with chemical and biological warheads for striking Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran or Kuwait.
Mr. Chipman said that had it not been for the gulf war, Iraq would have probably developed "a dozen or so" nuclear weapons by the end of the 1990's. "Most importantly," the report concluded, "the scientific and technical expertise of Iraq's nuclear program survived, and Baghdad has tried to keep its core nuclear teams in place working on various civilian projects."
Mr. Chipman said Mr. Hussein did not have the radioactive material he would need to build a nuclear device and would be unlikely to get the necessary components soon because of strict monitoring. But he added, "Were he able to obtain fissile material from abroad - steal it or buy it in some way - we certainly believe he has the ability to put together a nuclear weapon very quickly, in a matter of months."
Noting a concern raised by advocates of imminent action, Mr. Samore said that even success in constructing a crude nuclear weapon "would dramatically change the balance of power in the region."
--------
Iraq Challenges U.S. on Evidence
September 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- Iraq challenged the United States on Monday to produce ``one piece of evidence'' that Baghdad is producing weapons of mass destruction.
Iraqi officials also took reporters on two tours in an attempt to refute accusations President Saddam Hussein is rebuilding sites linked to past nuclear efforts and training terrorists.
The head of a U.N. atomic weapons team, Jacques Baute, said Friday that satellite photos show unexplained new construction at several sites the team used to visit when it was still allowed into Iraq for inspections. Baute did not identify the sites in his comments.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair, President Bush's main ally in the Iraq standoff, has cited the satellite photos as proof Saddam had a weapons of mass destruction program that posed a threat.
Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said such assessments ``are pretexts for ... aggression against our country, they know very well that these are false pretexts, false accusations.''
``We challenge them to present one piece of evidence, a single piece of evidence for these accusations,'' Sabri said.
Bush has threatened Iraq with unspecified consequences if he does not allow the return of U.N. weapons inspectors to certify Iraq is not producing weapons of mass destruction.
Iraq agreed to such inspections after the Gulf War in 1991, but the inspectors left in December 1998 ahead of U.S. and British airstrikes, and Baghdad has not allowed them back.
Sanctions imposed by the U.N. Security Council on Iraq for its 1990 invasion of Kuwait cannot be lifted until the inspectors certify Baghdad has surrendered nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
Iraq has denied it still has weapons of mass destruction and has offered only to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan has demanded that inspectors be allowed to return unconditionally as a first step to further talks.
``We've never put conditions,'' Sabri said. ``We call for the implementation of Security Council resolutions.''
The United States not Baghdad, he charged, was preventing the functioning of the U.N. resolutions.''
Bush has declared he wants Saddam toppled, but says he has not yet decided whether the United States should attack to achieve that goal.
Sabri pledged that Iraqis would defend their country.
``If we don't have weapons, we shall fight with palm tree branches,'' Sabri said. ``We shall fight with knives, we shall fight with our hands but we shall never allow these colonialists, these invaders to occupy our country.''
``This is a religious duty that we defend our honor, we defend our religion, we defend our people.''
Monday's two tours brought to six the number of escorted media visits Iraq has conducted in the past month.
Iraqi officials said the site shown to reporters Monday, al-Twaitha, 25 miles south of Baghdad, was one of those referred to by Baute, of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency.
IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming would not say Monday whether al-Twaitha was one of the locations cited by Baute.
However, she noted that the agency does make annual visits to Iraq for one very limited purpose: to inspect a storage facility at al-Twaitha that contains 1.8 tons of low-enriched uranium and several tons of natural and depleted uranium.
The material is of such low radioactivity that it could not ``easily be turned into weapons,'' she said, and thus it was not seen as necessary that it be removed.
Iraq allows the inspection under the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty it has signed. The deal, Fleming said, is extremely limited. ``It does not allow us to look anywhere other than this particular storage facility,'' she said.
Iraqi officials said the site at al-Twaitha was destroyed twice, first by the Israelis in 1981 and then by the allies during the 1991 Gulf War.
Saeed Al-Moussawi, a foreign ministry official, escorted journalists around four new buildings at al-Twaitha, dismissing the allegations based on the satellite photos that work on nuclear projects was underway.
Al-Moussawi claimed that the four buildings were used for environmental, medical and agricultural research and ``they are purely dedicated for peaceful purposes.''
On the other tour, reporters were accompanied by Scott Ritter, a former U.N. weapons inspector who has become a critic of Washington's Iraq policies. He was in Baghdad this week on a trip organized by the Iraqi government.
Ritter supported Iraqi government claims that the camp 25 miles east of Baghdad he visited Monday had been used to train security forces to respond to hijackings. Iraqi dissidents have said it was a terrorist training camp.
``If there is a time and place to go to war (for my country), I will be there,'' said Ritter, a former U.S. Marine intelligence officer. ``But I am not going to go to war based on a fabrication especially from politically motivated Iraqi defectors who intend to misuse the tragedy of Sept. 11 by saying somehow those who perpetrated that crime were trained here.''
In a report released Monday, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a leading independent center for strategic analysis, said Iraq could assemble a nuclear weapon within months if it could steal or buy radioactive material, and it is working to develop equipment to make bomb components.
The report added Iraq has a small force of missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon and probably managed to hide some chemical and biological weapons. But it said those pose a limited threat.
Also Monday, the leaders of the two main Kurdish factions that control northern Iraq -- the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan -- signed a reconciliation agreement over the weekend.
Sabri sounded confident that Iraqi Kurds would not rebel against Baghdad. ``We've our contacts with our brothers in the north. I don't think our Kurdish brothers will accept to be used as pawns against their brothers.''
-------
Iraq Denies Trying to Produce Nuclear Bomb
September 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-nuclear.html
TUWEITHA, Iraq (Reuters) - Iraq denied Monday fresh U.S. accusations it was trying to make a nuclear bomb and opened to reporters a former nuclear facility it said was now being used for agricultural and medical research.
The media tour was part of an Iraqi campaign to repudiate U.S. claims it is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction and trying to make a nuclear bomb.
Saeed al-Mousawi, a senior Foreign Ministry official, told foreign reporters at Tuweitha nuclear plant, 12 miles south of Baghdad, the new charges were a ``distortion of facts.''
He showed a satellite picture of the plant -- largely destroyed by U.S.-led allied bombing in the 1991 Gulf War -- which he said had been recently produced by the West to prove that Baghdad was developing a nuclear bomb.
``The site was completely destroyed and it cannot be used (for any nuclear activity) any more,'' the head of the site, Fa'iz Hussein, said.
Reporters touring the site saw piles of debris and damaged structures and equipment, as well as buildings which Iraq erected in 1994.
``These buildings...they are either for environment research, medical or pharmaceutical facilities or a plant for agricultural research,'' Mousawi said.
Reporters were taken inside the buildings, where they saw workers producing medical kits for the treatment of kidney and liver diseases.
At another building, staff were working in laboratories which officials said were used for agricultural research.
U.S. ACCUSATIONS
The media tour of Tuweitha came one day after top advisers to President Bush cited evidence that President Saddam Hussein is trying to make a nuclear bomb. Bush has called for Saddam's ouster to block what Washington says is his goal of developing weapons of mass destruction.
Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair held a summit in Camp David Saturday focusing on what they said was Baghdad's potential nuclear weapons threat. They called for firm action to counter it.
``What Mr. Tony Blair and Mr. Bush are telling the international community is full distortion of facts...to justify an evil aim which is targeting Iraq and imposing U.S. hegemony in the region,'' Mousawi said.
After the 1991 Gulf War over Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) dismantled Tuweitha plant, Iraq's former main nuclear center, and other nuclear facilities.
IAEA teams carry out annual inspections in Iraq, including inspecting radioactive material at Tuweitha plant. The IAEA had sealed the material on earlier visits to the plant, which was badly damaged in U.S.-led allied bombing in the Gulf War.
The last inspection was in January this year.
The IAEA teams have no connection with U.N. arms inspections imposed on Iraq after the war and suspended since 1998. The IAEA inspection is governed by the 1968 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of which Iraq is a signatory.
A new U.N. report said last week that U.N. inspection teams had stepped up their use of satellite imagery and briefings from intelligence agencies around the world in the absence of any deal from Iraq that the arms experts could resume work.
Nuclear weapons are under the jurisdiction of the IAEA. Its experts, who work in tandem with the U.N. arms inspectors, said the satellites showed photos of new construction on sites linked in the past to nuclear-related activity.
A leading independent think-tank said Monday Iraq could build a nuclear bomb within months if it obtained fissile material from abroad but lacks the ability to make its own nuclear material.
John Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, told BBC radio that if Saddam acquired enriched uranium with foreign aid, Iraq could put a nuclear warhead on a missile capable of hitting Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel, Turkey, Jordan and Iran within a year.
-------- japan
Japan officials probe TEPCO on reactor cover-up
REUTERS JAPAN:
September 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17663/story.htm
TOKYO - Officials began searching for evidence at the headquarters of Japan's biggest power utility last week after it admitted falsifying records of repairs at its nuclear plants.
The investigation at the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) began after plants involved in the scandal were inspected earlier in the week, an official at the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency said.
TEPCO said last week that evidence of cracks at nuclear reactors was covered up during inspections in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The company planned to shut down for safety checks five reactors thought to have been operating with cracks in their shrouds, the stainless steel envelope that helps to encase and support the core reactor.
Two have already been closed, with the remaining three to be shut down by the end of October, a company spokesman said.
Senior executives at TEPCO said on Monday they would resign to take responsibility for the attempt to hide the existence of cracks at several of the company's nuclear reactors.
But the incident has sparked outrage among opposition lawmakers.
Mamoru Kobayashi, opposition Democratic Party member of the Lower House and chairman of a parliamentary committee on nuclear safety, hit out at both TEPCO and government safety officials last week.
"This is not a problem that can be solved through resignations - there must be a thorough investigation of the cover-up," he said.
"It is an extremely serious matter that is generating considerable public anxiety," he added.
The scandal came to light last week, more than two years after an employee at a unit of U.S.-based General Electric Co that conducted safety checks told the authorities that there appeared to be problems with TEPCO's reports.
Kobayashi said this indicated government checks were not working and called for a complete overhaul of nuclear safety inspections.
Fellow opposition parliamentarian and Socialist Party leader Takako Doi asked TEPCO's President Nobuya Minami to close all the company's nuclear reactors for checks.
In response to widespread concern, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency, said it was launching a new committee, headed by an engineering professor from Tokyo University, to look at ways to improve nuclear safety.
Public faith in the nuclear power industry, which provides about one-third of resource-poor Japan's energy, was already low after a 1999 accident at a plant at Tokaimura, 140 km (90 miles) northeast of Tokyo.
Japan's worst ever nuclear accident, it exposed hundreds of residents, plant workers and emergency personnel to radiation. Two plant workers died.
-------- korea
Sinking South Korea nuclear plant is safe - officials
REUTERS SOUTH KOREA:
September 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17666/story.htm
SEOUL - South Korean nuclear power officials and geology experts said last week that subsidence at a nuclear plant built near its southeast coast was within accepted limits and did not threaten safety.
The Dong-a Ilbo daily had said last week part of the Ulsong nuclear power plant had sunk 7.54 mm (0.2968 inch) since 1978. The report was said to have been based on information from the Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co, which operates the power plant.
Quoting some geological experts, the newspaper also said the situation could get worse, particularly if there was a geological fault in the ground below the plant's number one nuclear reactor.
But Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co, a wholly-owned unit of state-run Korea Electric Power Corp (KEPCO) , said in a statement the subsidence was "within permissible limits of 12.95 mm" and rejected the suggestion of a (geological) fault near the plant.
"It does not threaten the safety at all and it is not sinking any more," Ham Young-seung, a senior engineering official at Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power told Reuters.
The company said they had expected the subsidence before they started building the plant completed in 1983, but went ahead with their plan as geological experts said it was not a problem.
A geology professor at a local university also said the newspaper report appeared alarmist.
"It is more like an assumption that a fault is near the plant. And I don't see the ground would sink further," said the professor, who asked not to be identified.
The power plant has four nuclear power reactors with combined power generation capacity of 2,770 megawatts (MW).
Nuclear power supplies about 40 percent of South Korea's total electricity demand.
-------- terrorism
Original September 11 plan 'was to strike nuclear plants'
September 9 2002
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/08/1031115973590.html
Two leading al-Qaeda members have claimed the initial plan for the September 11 hijackers was to crash aircraft into nuclear power plants in the United States, a London newspaper reported yesterday.
The plan had been rejected for fear "it would get out of control", but future nuclear targets were not ruled out.
The Sunday Times was quoting from a documentary by Yosri Fouda for the Arab television station Al-Jazeera, who interviewed Ramzi bin al-Shaibah and Khaled al-Sheikh Mohammad in the Pakistani port city of Karachi. The date of the interview was not given.
Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television says the second part of the documentary will include confessions by the two men that al-Qaeda was responsible for the September11 attacks.
The newspaper quoted the men as saying the fourth target, after the World Trade Centre towers and the Pentagon, had been Capitol Hill in Washington. But the aircraft crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
The newspaper identified Sheikh Mohammad, 38, as head of the al-Qaeda military committee, and Shaibah, 30, as co-ordinator of the operation from his base in Germany. It said Sheikh Mohammad had devised the idea of targeting "prominent" buildings in the United States.
"The attacks were designed to cause as many deaths as possible and to be a big slap for America on American soil," Sheikh Mohammad was quoted as saying.
----
Al Qaeda Is Said to Have Weighed Nuclear Targets
By Alaa Shahine
Associated Press
Monday, September 9, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55107-2002Sep8.html
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Sept. 8 -- Al Qaeda considered striking U.S. nuclear facilities last year on Sept. 11 and has not ruled out such attacks in the future, an Arab television reporter who interviewed two plotters of the terror attacks said today.
Yosri Fouda, a correspondent for the satellite station al-Jazeera, said he was blindfolded and taken to a secret location in Pakistan to meet Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh in June for an interview arranged by al Qaeda operatives.
Fouda said he waited until now to air the audiotaped interview -- it is scheduled to run Thursday on al-Jazeera -- because he wanted to include it in a documentary marking the anniversary of the attacks.
Fouda wrote about the interview for London's Sunday Times in a story that appeared this week. He wrote that during the interviews, he learned that the U.S. Capitol had been the fourth target. Hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while another airplane crashed in a Pennsylvania field after passengers apparently stormed the cockpit and attacked the hijackers.
A videotape of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden released by U.S. officials in December established for many people al Qaeda's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks. According to Fouda's account, Mohammed and Binalshibh spell out the link even more clearly.
U.S. officials regard Mohammed as one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda leaders at large and believe he is planning attacks against U.S. interests. U.S. officials say Binalshibh was a member of a Hamburg-based cell led by Mohamed Atta, the Egyptian-born suspected lead hijacker on Sept. 11.
Fouda, speaking by telephone from London, said al Qaeda operatives told him not to bring any electronic equipment -- including a camera or recorder -- to the interview. The al Qaeda members videotaped the interview but instead of sending a copy of the video, as promised, they sent him only the audiotape, he said.
Fouda said that during the two days he spent talking to the two, Mohammed once referred to bin Laden in the past tense and that a sense of disarray led him to believe that bin Laden could be dead.
Fouda, an Egyptian reporter, said he flew to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, and then to Karachi on al Qaeda instructions. In Karachi, he was taken via a complicated route to an apartment where he met the two men.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
US agency seeks to keep energy plant info secret
Story by Tom Doggett
REUTERS USA:
September 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17675/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Federal energy regulators last week proposed rules to prevent terror groups and the public from obtaining sensitive information about proposed U.S. power plants, large transmission lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines.
The changes by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would expand the agency's policy after last year's Sept. 11 attacks to halt public access to certain documents on existing energy facilities, and also would keep secret information about proposed energy projects.
"As we approach the Sept. 11 anniversary, there still appears to be a need to protect critical information from getting into the hands of terrorists," FERC staff said in a presentation to the full commission on the proposed rules.
Shortly after last year's attacks, FERC joined other agencies, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, in quickly withdrawing public information on critical energy facilities.
But FERC says its proposal makes it the first government agency to develop formal rules and guidelines on how to handle such sensitive records.
The type of information the agency would keep secret includes pipeline and electric grid flow diagrams that could reveal congested areas when moving energy supplies.
Other sensitive information would include pipeline inspection reports, detailed layouts of power plants and other energy facilities, and the emergency action plans at energy plants.
Under FERC's proposal, interested parties like landowners concerned about a pipeline project crossing their property could request access to the information.
In what could be the most controversial part of the proposed rules, FERC would use new authority granted to itself to question why a person or group wants any restricted information. If the agency decided to make the information available, it could require recipients to sign a nondisclosure agreement or restrict how they share it.
FERC could take action against somebody who violated such agreement, such as barring a lawyer - who gave sensitive information to a news reporter for example - from appearing before an agency judge in cases involving regulated energy companies that are clients.
Currently, when companies, journalists, state officials or advocacy groups ask FERC for documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the agency said it was not allowed to consider what the parties will do with those documents or restrict who they can be showed to.
Agency staff said they don't believe the new proposal would raise any freedom-of-the-press or other free-speech concerns, based on advice from the Justice Department.
The FERC proposal will be published in the Federal Register, and the agency is expected to take public comments on its proposed rules though mid-October.
Agency staff will then review the comments and possibly fine-tune the rules with suggested changes. The full commission could vote on the final regulations later this year.
------- iowa
Ex - Nuke Workers to Talk to Doctors
September 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Ammunition-Plant.html
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- The federal government will allow former employees at a nuclear weapons plant in Iowa to talk to doctors and researchers about their exposure to harmful materials, despite an oath the workers took not to discuss details about their jobs.
The oaths have been a hurdle for thousands of employees seeking medical care or federal benefits, or who want to take part in health studies.
Word of the easing of restrictions came in a Pentagon report released Monday. It said letters will soon be mailed to employees alerting them to the change.
Workers will still be prohibited from divulging any classified nuclear secrets. According to a copy of the employee letter, workers will be able to say which harmful materials they worked with, but not how each substance was used.
From the late 1940s through the mid-1970s, the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown assembled and test-fired nuclear weapons components. It continues to produce conventional weapons. The employee letter says workers may have been exposed to silica, beryllium, solvents, explosives, epoxies and heavy metals.
The report also identifies more than 38,500 workers who are eligible for a new study on the health effects of exposure to radioactive and hazardous materials, and says the government has identified nearly 4,000 who were assigned to the section where nuclear components were assembled and test-fired.
The report comes more than a year after Congress demanded more information on the health risks to workers. Last year, Congress authorized compensation to former workers with health problems blamed on contact with radioactive and other hazardous materials at the 19,000-acre facility.
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who sponsored legislation demanding the report, said giving workers clearance to talk to doctors and researchers is a long-awaited victory. But he said the report misses the mark on several key areas.
``The report is woefully short on information about possible radioactive and toxic exposures at the plant,'' Harkin said.
Researchers with the University of Iowa, working under Department of Energy grants, have been locating and interviewing hundreds of former workers or their survivors in the last year. They hope to determine whether certain illnesses may have been caused by exposure to radiation and other hazardous materials.
Evidence of radioactive releases have been found in several locations at the factory.
On the Net:
Labor Department, Energy Employees Compensation Program: http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/owcp/eeoicp/main.htm
-------
Government to allow nuclear plant workers to talk about their exposure to harmful materials
TODD DVORAK,
Associated Press Writer
Monday, September 9, 2002
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2002/09/09/national2129EDT0746.DTL
IOWA CITY, Iowa (AP) -- The federal government will allow former employees at a nuclear weapons plant in Iowa to talk to doctors and researchers about their exposure to harmful materials, despite an oath the workers took not to discuss details about their jobs.
The oaths have been a hurdle for thousands of employees seeking medical care or federal benefits, or who want to take part in health studies.
Word of the easing of restrictions came in a Pentagon report released Monday. It said letters will soon be mailed to employees alerting them to the change.
Workers will still be prohibited from divulging any classified nuclear secrets. According to a copy of the employee letter, workers will be able to say which harmful materials they worked with, but not how each substance was used.
From the late 1940s through the mid-1970s, the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown assembled and test-fired nuclear weapons components. It continues to produce conventional weapons. The employee letter says workers may have been exposed to silica, beryllium, solvents, explosives, epoxies and heavy metals.
The report also identifies more than 38,500 workers who are eligible for a new study on the health effects of exposure to radioactive and hazardous materials, and says the government has identified nearly 4,000 who were assigned to the section where nuclear components were assembled and test-fired.
The report comes more than a year after Congress demanded more information on the health risks to workers. Last year, Congress authorized compensation to former workers with health problems blamed on contact with radioactive and other hazardous materials at the 19,000-acre facility.
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, who sponsored legislation demanding the report, said giving workers clearance to talk to doctors and researchers is a long-awaited victory. But he said the report misses the mark on several key areas.
"The report is woefully short on information about possible radioactive and toxic exposures at the plant," Harkin said.
Researchers with the University of Iowa, working under Department of Energy grants, have been locating and interviewing hundreds of former workers or their survivors in the last year. They hope to determine whether certain illnesses may have been caused by exposure to radiation and other hazardous materials.
Evidence of radioactive releases have been found in several locations at the factory.
On the Net:
Labor Department, Energy Employees Compensation Program: www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/owcp/eeoicp/main.htm
------- tennessee
Tennessee to Get Uranium Fuel Plant
September 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/business/AP-Uranium-Plant.html
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A private consortium picked Tennessee's Trousdale County as the site of a $1.1 billion high-tech uranium enrichment plant to make fuel for nuclear reactors, company officials announced Monday.
The site in Hartsville is on property where the Tennessee Valley Authority began building a nuclear power plant more than two decades ago before eventually abandoning construction.
Hartsville was selected by Louisiana Energy Services, a consortium of U.S. and European companies including Westinghouse and three major domestic power companies. The other finalist was another site adjacent to where TVA began building a nuclear power plant years ago near Hollywood, Ala.
LES said its next step is to buy the land, which is now owned by a regional development authority in a five-county region north of Nashville.
LES officials said they hope to have a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission by 2004, begin construction in 2005 and begin production in 2006 or 2007.
``We are delighted to welcome them to Tennessee and look forward to the new jobs and economic benefits that their $1.1 billion investment will bring to Hartsville,'' Gov. Don Sundquist said at the announcement.
LES officials said one of their first tasks will be to inform the public about the plant's function.
The Tennessee Environmental Council said it would fight the plant proposal.
``This type of uranium enrichment does not fit with U.S. policy, and the generation of tons of radioactive waste is not welcome in Tennessee,'' council director Will Callaway said in a statement.
LES President and CEO George E. Dials said about 400 people would be hired to build the new plant -- at 4.6 million square feet about the size of 25 Wal-Mart Supercenters -- and about 250 would be hired to work there permanently.
-------- us politics
Rumsfeld rejects calls for more Iraq proof
By Richard Wolffe in Washington and Alexander Nicoll in London;
September 9 2002
Financial Times
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1031119181922&p=1012571727102
Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, rejected calls on Monday for the US to provide further evidence of Iraq's attempts to develop nuclear weapons in order to justify any strikes against Saddam Hussein's regime.
Mr Rumsfeld said the US was not seeking to place the Iraqi leader on trial or to "punish somebody for doing something wrong".
"That really isn't the case here," he told ABC's Good Morning America. "This is self-defence. And the United States' task is to see that we don't allow an event to happen that then one has to punish someone for."
However, a study yesterday cast doubt over Iraq's ability to develop nuclear weapons.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies said Iraq could have designed, tested and produced key components for a small number of nuclear weapons but it lacked the fissile mat- erial necessary to complete them.
In a 78-page assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capacity, the London-based think-tank said weapons-grade nuclear material, plutonium or highly enriched uranium, was the "vital missing ingredient for an Iraqi bomb". But the study warned that if Iraq managed to obtain it, the country might be able to produce a nuclear weapon "in a matter of months".
The Bush administration has walked a fine line between providing limited information about Iraq's attempts to develop nuclear weapons and its insistence that such evidence is unnecessary in confronting Iraq.
President George W. Bush failed to win any commitment from Canada to back intervention in Iraq during a 45-minute meeting with Jean Chrétien, Canadian prime minister, in Detroit on Monday. Mr Chrétien said he urged Mr Bush "to go and convince other countries through the United Nations" of the need to attack Iraq.
Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, has said there is no evidence that Iraq represents a growing threat to the west, while President Jacques Chirac of France says he has seen no evidence that Iraq has links with the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
The IISS, which drew on non-classified data as well as its own government contacts for its report, said domestic production of highly enriched uranium without detection was unlikely because of the large facilities needed and the equipment it would need to import.
Acquisition of fissile material on the black market "is not a high probability but has to be seen as a real risk that could dramatically and quickly shift the balance of power". Of the three types of weapons of mass destruction, nuclear arms were "furthest from Iraq's grasp".
----
Hard to Build Coalition if Iraq Gets Nuke - Cheney
Mon Sep 9
By Randall Mikkelsen
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=615&ncid=615&e=5&u=/nm/20020909/pl_nm/iraq_usa_cheney_dc_1
Vice President Dick Cheney said it would be "virtually impossible" to assemble an international coalition against Iraq if President Saddam Hussein got hold of a nuclear weapon.
In an interview with public television's "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" for broadcast Monday, Cheney also said that the potential for leaks from Congress could limit the Bush administration's ability to give members classified information about Iraq's weapons capabilities.
The vice president said time was not on the side of the United States when it comes to preventing what he said were the Iraqi president's plans to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
"Once he's got a nuclear weapon I think it'll be virtually impossible to put together an international coalition to deal with this problem," Cheney said in a transcript of the interview.
Asked why, he suggested that a nuclear-armed Iraq would upset the regional balance of power and intimidate potential coalition members in the region.
"There were 30 countries that signed up for the coalition in the Gulf War -- I think most of them would take a pass based on that kind of problem. So time is not on our side," he said.
"Eventually the international community has to come to grips with the facts that this is a growing threat and all the efforts to date to deal with it diplomatically and through the U.N. have failed," said Cheney, one of the government's leading advocates of pre-emptive action to oust Saddam.
CASE AGAINST IRAQ
The interview was recorded on Thursday and embargoed by the White House until Monday. President Bush on Thursday will lay out his case against Saddam in a U.N. speech. Officials said Bush would challenge the U.N. to prove its legitimacy by taking strong action to rein in Iraq's weapons program.
U.S. officials said on Saturday Iraq had been intensifying its bid for nuclear weapons with a global search for materials to make a nuclear bomb.
Faced with congressional demands for more evidence to bolster the administration's case against Saddam, Cheney suggested the administration would provide information to only a limited group of senior congressional leaders.
"We are certainly going to share a good deal of information with selected members of Congress," Cheney said. However, he said, "we've got a problem here."
"If you brief 535 members of Congress ... you're likely to have a leak in very short order," he said.
Bush would also seek to provide as much information as possible to the public and international partners, Cheney said.
"But there has to be some kind of understanding that there's a limit beyond which we can't go without destroying our capacity to be able to know what's going on in a crucial, crucial area," he said.
----
Polls show decline in support for Bush as fears mount in America
By Andrew Buncombe in Washington,
09 September 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=331731
George Bush's public approval rating has slipped yet further, driven down by concern over the way he is handling the war on terror and preparing to launch a military strike against Saddam Hussein.
Two polls published at the weekend highlight genuine concerns about Mr Bush's foreign policy, usually an issue that has little effect on voters.
They specifically suggest that despite the increasingly frenzied atmosphere in Washington over Iraq, the American public has yet to be convinced of the need for a unilateral strike.
A New York Times/CBS poll found that while 68 per cent of people agreed with taking military action against President Saddam, 56 per cent felt it was important to give the United Nations more time to try and secure the return of weapons inspectors. Sixty-four per cent said they believed the Bush administration had failed to explain its position in regard to Iraq and why military action was required.
Overall, the poll found that 63 per cent approved of the way Mr Bush is doing his job.
While that is a strong rating for a president almost two years into the job, the figure is down three points on his rating of 66 per cent in the summer and down 24 points on his 87 per cent approval record soon after the attacks of 11 September.
The poll found 54 per cent support for his foreign policy. Only two months ago 68 per cent approved of his foreign policy and last autumn the level stood at almost three-quarters approval.
A separate poll in The Washington Post put Mr Bush's approval rating at 69 per cent, down 23 points from a high of 92 per cent registered by the newspaper last October. Seventy per cent now approve of the way he is managing the war on terrorism, down 13 points from July and 22 points from last October's high.
The polls give a clear insight into the uncertainty felt by many by many as America gears itself up for action against Iraq.
These concerns have worsened in recent weeks as a number of high profile figures who served in previous Republican administrations have voiced their own doubts about President Bush's actions, particularly his unilateral approach. How such concerns will be reflected in this November's mid-term election results is hard to predict but there is little doubt that foreign policy will be an important consideration for voters.
One respondent in the New York Times/CBS poll, Leona Miller, 75, from Washington state, said: "I oppose the attack on Iraq. George Bush is on a vendetta started by his father. It is getting-even stuff."
Another respondent, Tom Tully, 35, from Columbus. Ohio, said he approved of a strike sooner rather than later. "Every day we wait to attack, Saddam Hussein is building more chemical weapons and some sources say he already has nuclear weapons. If not now, when? Might as well do it now than later when it gets more difficult."
----
Bush officials: First strike justified
Cheney says Iraq is 'actively and aggressively' seeking nuclear weapons Vice President Dick Cheney argues that Iraq's actions have become a mortal threat to the United States.
MSNBC STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
Sept. 9, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/805226.asp
Top Bush administration officials took to the Sunday talk shows as part of President Bush's effort to convince the public, Congress and other countries that action against Iraq's Saddam Hussein is urgently needed. Arguing that the United States would be justified in striking first, Vice President Dick Cheney and other officials said the world cannot afford to wait to find out whether the Iraqi president has weapons of mass destruction.
SADDAM is aggressively seeking nuclear and biological weapons and "the United States may well become the target" of an attack, Cheney said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" as the Bush administration pressed its case for toppling the Iraqi leader.
"The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly he can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told CNN's "Late Edition."
"How long are we going to wait to deal with what is clearly a gathering threat against the United States, against our allies and against his own region?" she said.
'IMAGINE ... TENS OF THOUSANDS'
Added Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on CBS's "Face the Nation": "Imagine, a September 11 with weapons of mass destruction. It's not 3,000; it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children."
Cheney said that the United States is justified in striking any country it believes is planning an attack against America, applying the Bush administration's new foreign policy doctrine on pre-emptive military action to Iraq.
A chorus of voices has urged the administration to move cautiously, including former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter.
Ritter, on a visit to Baghdad, said he believes Iraq is incapable of producing weapons of mass destruction and should prove it by allowing in U.N. weapons inspectors.
"My country seems to be on the verge of making a historical mistake," Ritter told Iraq's parliament.
Iraqi cooperation on inspections would leave the United States "standing alone in regards to war threats on Iraq, and this is the best way to prevent the war," he said.
Cheney, citing unspecified intelligence gathered over the past 12 to 14 months, said Saddam has the technical expertise and designs for a nuclear weapon, and has been seeking a type of aluminum tube needed to enrich uranium for a weapon. The tubes have been intercepted through one known channel, Cheney said.
'PART OF THE PICTURE'
"We know we have a part of the picture, and that part of the picture tells us that he is in fact actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said.
Cheney said he did not know for sure whether Saddam already has a nuclear weapon. Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not think so.
Bush will address the United Nations on Thursday to build his case for action against Iraq. But Secretary of State Colin Powell said whatever the world body decides, Bush will reserve the right to go it alone against Iraq.
"The president will retain all of his authority and options to act in a way that may be appropriate for us to act unilaterally to defend ourselves," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday."
Bush outlined a new doctrine in June warning he will take "pre-emptive action, when necessary, to defend our liberty and to defend our lives." He mentioned no specific nations at the time. On Sunday, Cheney pointed a finger directly at Iraq.
"If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbors those aspirations, then I think the U.S. is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force," Cheney said.
Powell added, "When you can intercept a terrorist act that is heading your way or you can deal with a regime or a situation before it comes to a crisis level and threatens you, then it is an option that you should keep in mind and on the table."
IRAQI DENIAL
Iraq's vice president denied Sunday that his country is trying to collect nuclear material or building up sites that U.N. weapons inspectors once visited. Taha Yassin Ramadan, speaking to reporters in Baghdad, charged that the United States and Britain are seeking an excuse to attack Iraq.
"They are telling lies and lies to make others believe them," Ramadan said.
Bush administration officials expressed deep skepticism about giving Saddam another chance to open his country to weapons inspectors. Officials say Bush is considering giving Saddam a last-ditch deadline for allowing unfettered access to weapons inspectors.
"The issue is not inspectors or inspections. That is a tool," Powell said. "Disarmament is the issue. And we will stay focused on that, and we believe that regime change is the surest way to make sure that it's disarmed."
Cheney said that if the United States led an attack on Iraq, American forces would have to stay there for a prolonged period afterward to ensure "we stood up a new government and helped the Iraqi people decide how they want to govern themselves until there was a peaceful stability."
War could be very costly, he said. But, he added, "The danger of an attack against the U.S. by someone with the weapons that Saddam Hussein now possesses or is acquiring is far more costly than what it would cost us to go deal with this problem."
EX-INSPECTOR CRITICIZES U.S.
Former weapons inspector Ritter - who has been a sharp critic of U.S. policy on Iraq - joined a long list of officials from European and Arab nations who have urged Baghdad to accept inspectors to defuse a crisis with the United States.
Ritter, a former U.S. Marine intelligence officer, spoke to members of parliament and to journalists on his third trip to Iraq since he resigned from the U.N. inspection team in 1998.
"The truth is Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors and it is not acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its borders," Ritter said. "Military action against Iraq cannot be justified."
Powell dismissed Ritter's statement, telling "Fox News Sunday": "There is no doubt in my mind that he (Saddam) does have (weapons) capability and he is trying to improve that capability and build upon that capability."
Iraq, while denying it has banned weapons, has offered only to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors. It has not responded to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan's demand that inspectors be allowed to return unconditionally as a first step to further talks.
-------- MILITARY
ICC Unlikely to Touch Military Environmental Crime
September 9, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-09-03.asp
WASHINGTON, DC,The International Criminal Court is not likely to prosecute environmental crimes due to military actions, a new report prepared for the U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute concludes. It examines the possibilities of environmental damage during military action becoming a criminal liability for military personnel and/or their contractors before the newly formed International Criminal Court (ICC).
The report, entitled "Environmental Crimes in Military Actions and the International Criminal Court (ICC) - United Nations Perspectives," was written by The Millennium Project. This international think tank including more than 1,000 futurists, scholars, business leaders, scientists and policymakers from more than 50 countries, acts under the auspices of the American Council for the United Nations University.
NATO bombing of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia during the Kosovo conflict, May 1999. (Photo courtesy Centre for Peace in the Balkans)
Military actions aim to destroy and often damage the environment - toxic munitions, land mines, unexploded weapons, oil spills, depleted uranium shells, the destruction of forest ecosystems with herbicides as in the American war in Vietnam, millions of barrels of Kuwaiti oil burned off by Iraq during the Gulf War, emitting tons of pollutants such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the air.
But after examining a range of perceptions within the UN Secretariat, selected UN Missions, and relevant academic and nongovernmental organizations, the Millennium Project report concludes that there is no intention in the United Nations and UN Missions to prosecute environmental crimes due to military actions before the ICC.
No plausible scenarios of military action were found that would lead to ICC cases of environmental crime.
The report lists the factors that would have to come into play for prosecution to happen, as well as a number of scenarios that trace probable actions by the ICC in case of environmental damages.
The bar is set very high for prosecution before the ICC. The one paragraph that refers to environmental damages - article 8(2)(b)(iv) - states that for the purpose of the Rome Statute, "war crimes" means, "Intentionally launching an attack in the knowledge that such attack will cause incidental loss of life or injury to civilians or damage to civilian objects or widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment which would be clearly excessive in relation to the concrete and direct overall military advantage anticipated."
Jerry Glenn, Millennium Project director, said while it is unlikely that military actions could result in ICC prosecution, there is no ironclad guarantee.
"While our findings indicate that it would be highly improbable that there will be any prosecutions for environmental crimes due to military actions in the ICC, one cannot say that it is certain that no peacekeeper or unilateral military personnel could be charged with environmental crimes and tried by the International Criminal Court," he said.
500 pound aerial bombs filled with chemical warfare agents awaiting destruction in Iraq. 1996. (Photo courtesy NATO)
The International Criminal Court (ICC), which now has 79 state parties, came into force on July 1, 2002 and will try individuals accused of committing genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. The Court exercises its authority only if the home country of the impeached does not want to prosecute. The court does not have retroactive jurisdiction.
The United States is not a party to the ICC. President George W. Bush said on July 2, "The International Criminal Court is troubling to the United States...President [Bill] Clinton signed this treaty, but when he signed it he said it should not be submitted to the Senate. It therefore never has been, and I don't intend to submit it either, because it - you know, as the United States works to bring peace around the world, our diplomats and our soldiers could be drug into this court and that's a very troubling - very troubling to me."
"We'll try to work out the impasse at the United Nations. But one thing we're not going to do is sign on to the International Criminal Court," the President said.
The mission of U.S. Army Environmental Policy Institute is to assist the U.S. Army Secretariat in developing proactive policies and strategies to address environmental issues that may have significant future impacts on the Army.
Robert Jarrett of the Army Environmental Policy Institute said the Millennium Project report is "of immense help to us." It "helps us reliably fulfill our obligation to look ahead and around the corner to understand emerging environmental issues in their many facets," Jarrett said.
In addition to its flagship "State of the Future" report, the Millennium Project also produces studies in other specialized areas, including counter-terrorism strategies, future issues of science and technology, environmental security, United Nations Millennium Summit analysis, early warning and decision making, long range goals for governance, "African Futures 2025" and "Future Research Methodology."
The Millennium Project's "State of the Future" report addresses the international situation on 15 global challenges, many of them environmentally related.
The 15 challenges include: sustainable development, water, population and resources, democratization, global, long term policymaking, the globalization of information technology, the rich-poor gap, threats to health, decisionmaking capacities, conflict resolution, improving women's status, transnational crime, energy, science and technology and global ethics.
Find out more at: http://www.StateOfTheFuture.org.
-------- afghanistan
US forces launch strike in Afghanistan
Lucy Morgan Edwards In Kabul,
Tue 10 Sep 2002,
The Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1005002002
AMERICAN forces have launched a large-scale operation in south-eastern Afghanistan, aimed at Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, the US army said last night.
Details of Operation Champion Strike were released as the Arab satellite channel al-Jazeera aired excerpts from a videotape in which bin Laden praises the 19 hijackers involved in the 11 September terror attacks.
Champion Strike began a few days ago and is centred in the Bermel valley near the town of Shkin, about 150 miles south of Kabul, close to the border with Pakistan, Major Richard T Patterson said.
Major Patterson would not say when Champion Strike was launched or when it would end. He said there had been one firefight involving US soldiers, but there were no US casualties nor deaths among the enemy. However, soldiers taking part in the operation had detained a number of people, and seized weapons caches, including land mines and rockets.
The new al-Jazeera tape also appears to show the "will" of Abdul Aziz al-Omari, one of the hijackers. He pays tribute to "all those who trained me and made possible this glorious act", notably bin Laden.
During the tape, a voice thought to be bin Laden said: "As we talk about the conquests of Washington and New York, we talk about those men who changed the course of history and cleaned the records of the nation from the dirt of the treasonous rulers and their followers."
The male voice said of the hijackers: "Those are great men who deepened the roots of faith in the hearts of the faithful and reaffirmed allegiance to God and torpedoed the schemes of the crusaders and their stooges, the rulers of the region."
The voice named four men - Mohammed Atta, Marwan Al-Shihhi, Hani Hajour and Ziad Jarrah - as the ringleaders of the attacks, praying for their souls and heaping lavish praise on their personal traits. The tape showed several young men looking at aviation maps, one of them of the Washington DC area.
Bin Laden, whose whereabouts are unknown, did not appear on the excerpts. The full tape will be shown on Thursday, according to al-Jazeera, who said it was filmed in Kandahar a few months before the 11 September attacks.
Meanwhile, 10,000 people crammed into Kabul's sports stadium yesterday to commemorate the life of one of Afghanistan's most renowned mujahideen fighters, Commander Ahmad Shah Masood - a year to the day after he died.
The mood was tense, following an assassination attempt on President Hamid Karzai in Kandahar last week and a series of bomb attacks. Fighting continued in the eastern city of Khost between the forces of Hakim Taniwal, the governor of Khost, and the forces of Padsha Khan Zadran, a renegade commander who formerly helped the coalition in routing al-Qaeda, but has now turned against Mr Karzai's administration.
At the stadium yesterday, International Security Assistance Force helicopters circled at the outset of the event and thousands of Afghan police were present. Extra checkpoints were set up in the city.
As ministers, warlords and former mujahideen fighters gathered in the stadium, the mood was one of sombre reflection, but yet festive, as women and soldiers carried banners and photographs of their former leader, festooned with flowers.
A year ago, this was the site where the Taleban carried out their brand of extreme sharia law, with public beheadings and amputations.
Cmdr Masood's birthplace was the steep and impregnable Panjshir valley to the north-east of Kabul, in the Hindu Kush mountain range. Partly by virtue of its geographic nature, its entrance being narrow, where the Panjshir river takes snowmelt down from the mountains, and partly by virtue of Cmdr Masood's tHence, the country was not entirely conquered by either.
It is mostly for this reason that Cmdr Masood, who was briefly defence minister during the early 1990s, is revered for his tactical skills as a military commander, which meant large swathes of his home territory in northern Afghanistan were never taken by the Russians or the Taleban. If he had not died, he may have become president.
Mr Karzai was not present at yesterday's ceremony, having on Sunday attended a low-key celebration of Cmdr Masood's life at the shrine where his body lies. Following this, he flew from Bagram airbase to the US, where he will be attending 11 September memorial celebrations in New York.
Speeches were made by Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim and Minister of Education Yunus Qanooni from a stand where a row of Ministers and religious leaders, some of them with less than pristine human rights records, sat.
Mohammad Qasim Fahim, the defence minister, said in a speech: "We are proud of a man who killed himself for the sake of peace and for Afghanistan."
He also referred to the recent bomb attack as being the work of al-Qaeda, although many in Kabul are starting to feel the problem could lie closer to home, relating to a power struggle within the Afghan government itself.
Masud Khalili, Cmdr Masood's former assistant, who had been present with him at the time of his assassination, said that they had asked Cmdr Masood one question and then killed him with a camera which had fired a grenade at him. Mr Khalili was blinded in the blast.
He referred to the Taleban, who, he said, had wanted to dominate, to make war and had used the stadium as a sinister place. He thanked the international community for helping to liberat Afghanistan from them.
Sher Zaman, a soldier, told The Scotsman: "Masood was a brave man and we can never find one like him in the future."
He said he had fought with Massoud on the front line of the Shamali plains, north of Kabul, against the Taleban.
More War on terror:
http://www.news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=1
Websites:
Afghan Network http://www.afghan-network.net/
Iraqi Presidency http://www.uruklink.net/iraq/
North Korea News Agency http://www.kcna.co.jp/
Presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran http://www.president.ir/
The war in context http://warincontext.org/
UK Ministry of Defence http://www.mod.uk/
US Department of Defense http://www.defenselink.mil/
-------- australia
Bush will call on Australian troops
By Marian Wilkinson in Washington, Mark Metherell and agencies
September 9 2002
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/08/1031115974219.html
The United States wants Australian military support if President George Bush decides to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iraq's President Saddam Hussein.
As the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, added weight to the prospect of military action, the US Deputy Secretary of State, Richard Armitage, told the Herald: "If that is the President's decision, as in every major endeavour since 1941 we'd want to be involved with our Australian allies." But he added: "That's a decision that rests with Canberra and not with Washington".
Two senior Howard Government ministers left open the possibility of Australia joining a US attack without the blessing of the United Nations. Mr Bush and Mr Blair emerged from a meeting at Camp David on Saturday pointing to an International Atomic Energy Agency report that said satellite photographs of Iraq had identified new construction at several sites linked to Baghdad's past efforts to develop nuclear weapons.
They also cited a 1998 report from the same regulatory arm of the UN that said Saddam could be six months away from developing nuclear weapons.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," Mr Bush said. Mr Blair added: "The policy of inaction, doing nothing, is not something we can responsibly adhere to."
In a wide-ranging interview with the Herald days before the September 11 anniversary, Mr Armitage
underscored Washington's increasingly tough stand by saying it would be "a just war" and that the US was seeking out allies to outline its case against Iraq.
Before meeting Mr Blair, Mr Bush found little support for a unilateral strike when he spoke by phone to the leaders of Russia, France, China and Australia.
John Howard told Mr Bush it would be "very desirable" to win UN support. But yesterday the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, asked if Australia would support the US without a UN mandate, said: "It would depend very much on the circumstances."
The Attorney-General, Daryl Williams, said it was "a very difficult question to answer" as to whether the US legally required a UN mandate to invade Iraq. Any request to Australia would be considered on its merits, and the Government would take account of its own interests and the international legal position.
Mr Armitage is a key Bush Administration figure and a close friend of the Secretary of State, Colin Powell. His comments suggest that the Administration may be more united on Iraq than media reports indicate, and is moving closer to military action.
In a reinvigorated campaign to persuade allies that Saddam should be removed, the US has distributed new classified intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, particularly about activity at the old nuclear sites.
Mr Armitage believed an unclassified version of the material could be made available to the Australian public.
While stressing that Mr Bush had yet to make a decision, he disagreed with critics who argued that there were insufficient grounds - legal or moral - for a pre-emptive strike.
"If the President decides that a military move on Iraq is warranted, it would certainly fit the classical definition of a just war. But I'll leave that to the philosophers."
He added: "As a policymaker, the spectre of a nation armed with weapons of mass destruction who has historically invaded her neighbours, subjugated her own people, has committed undeniable acts of terror, is attempting to acquire further weapons of mass destruction and, finally, has used these weapons on her own people, [that] is something that cannot be allowed to continue."
It is clear from Mr Armitage's comments that the US and Australia are now co-operating closely to build support for a "regime change" in Iraq and a possible military strike.
In recent days Mr Downer and other senior Australian figures have publicly and privately echoed the Bush Administration arguments.
Mr Armitage's points, especially on the UN, are expected to be made by Mr Downer in his speech on Friday to the General Assembly, the day after Mr Bush lays out his case against Iraq in his UN address.
Mr Armitage also said:
Al-Qaeda could still launch a terrorist attack on US soil even though it was in some disarray and parts of its financial network had been disrupted.
The Afghanistan campaign had moved from a conventional military conflict to counter-insurgency, and the US would want Australian forces to stay "as long as they feel they can". This, however, was a decision for the Howard Government.
The former Opposition leader, Kim Beazley, warned against Australia committing ground forces to any war with Iraq, saying the military was overstretched and not equipped or trained for such an operation.
-------- biological weapons
Many Worry That Nation Is Still Highly Vulnerable to Germ Attack
New York Times
September 9, 2002
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/national/09BIOT.html
Although the Bush administration has invested hundreds of millions of dollars over the past year to strengthen the nation's defenses against a biological attack, experts say the United States remains highly vulnerable to bioterrorism, particularly strikes on the food supply.
The long-neglected public health system, which was stretched thin during the anthrax attacks of last fall, has received nearly $1 billion. States have used the money for plans to cope with a germ attack, and some are already hiring workers who can respond to intentional attacks or natural outbreaks of diseases like West Nile virus.
"Each day we are getting stronger," said Tommy G. Thompson, the secretary of health and human services. Even so, significant shortcomings remain.
Many experts, including Mr. Thompson, say the administration has not paid enough attention to protecting the plants and animals in the food supply from biological attacks. The Food and Drug Administration doubled the number of food inspectors, to 1,500, this year, but even so, Mr. Thompson said, the government is "woefully inadequate in this area." He called this his biggest concern.
Battles persist within the federal bureaucracy, particularly over the role of the new Department of Homeland Security in preparing for germ attacks. John J. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a research organization devoted to security, says the bioterrorism effort is still "years away" from being properly organized.
"We're better prepared as a society, but not necessarily as a government," said Mr. Hamre, a deputy secretary of defense in the Clinton administration.
Meanwhile, a deep philosophical divide has emerged between scientists and intelligence officials over whether to withhold scientific information in the name of national security. A case in point is a rift over a study on agricultural bioterrorism prepared by the National Research Council.
The report, a draft of which was obtained by The New York Times, says the government lacked a comprehensive plan to respond to agricultural bioterrorism. But it has yet to be published, its authors say, because of fears that it could aid potential terrorists.
"There's a possibility of it being literally classified," said Dr. Joshua Lederberg, a microbiologist and Nobel laureate who served on the committee that wrote the report. "Some people think it shouldn't be released."
So while government officials say considerable progress has been made against bioterrorism, they acknowledge that there is a long way to go.
"There are still some gaps," said Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "There is a kind of mosaic of capacity right now."
While public health agencies have received a big lift, hospitals have received far less money from the federal government, and many hospital executives say they cannot afford to prepare for bioterrorism on their own.
Although the budget of the National Institutes of Health has grown considerably to accommodate more research into new drugs and vaccines, the next generation of therapeutics is still years away.
"That just doesn't happen overnight," said David Franz, former commander of the Army's bioterrorism defense laboratory in Fort Detrick, Md.
Indeed, Dr. Franz and others say, the biggest change has been one of attitude.
Doctors and nurses who have never seen a case of smallpox - a disease that was eradicated two decades ago - are now learning how to identify its distinctive rash and how to administer the vaccine, which has not been routinely given to Americans since 1972.
Health officials pay closer attention to infectious disease. For example, Dr. Georges Benjamin, who runs the Maryland health department, now has his staff compile a monthly e-mail report of disease outbreaks overseas.
"We didn't feel threatened by that before," said Dr. Benjamin, who is also president of the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "The world has changed. Every time we get an outbreak at all, the first question we ask is, `Was this intentional?' "
The Agencies: Boom Times
As director of the Iowa public health laboratory, Mary J. Gilchrist has long worried about germ attacks, but long had trouble getting colleagues interested.
"People thought I was from outer space," Dr. Gilchrist said.
Last year, her bioterrorism preparedness budget was scant: $100,000, all of it from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
This year, with $1.5 million in federal bioterrorism money, Dr. Gilchrist is hiring laboratory workers and buying equipment to enable her technicians to conduct rapid tests on infectious agents. She says she worries that she will be unable to fill new positions because other public health agencies are also hiring.
"There's going to be a brain drain," Dr. Gilchrist predicted.
Bioterrorism has brought boom times to public health agencies. In January, President Bush signed a bill authorizing $1.1 billion for bioterrorism preparedness, with the bulk of it, $930 million, designated to be parceled out among the states for improvements in public health.
The Office of Public Health Preparedness, created by Mr. Thompson, reviewed state plans and had disbursed nearly all the money by June, said Jerome M. Hauer, the office's director and an assistant secretary.
Now the states must carry out their plans.
In Massachusetts, for example, Nancy Ridley, assistant commissioner of the state's Department of Public Health, said it took several months just to get officials in 351 local health departments to agree on how to divide the state into regions so the federal dollars could be distributed. "Everybody wants a piece of the pie," she said.
In Texas, Dr. Eduardo Sanchez, the commissioner of health, is trying to determine how to handle an attack that would involve the state's neighbor, Mexico. Could Mexican hospitals care for American patients, and vice versa? Would Mexicans be eligible for smallpox vaccine from the United States stockpile?
Dr. Rex Archer, the director of health for Kansas City, Mo., said: "We as a nation have not defined how well we want to protect our public. We have not said that we need to be able to manage a major bioterrorism attack in, say, 50 states, and keep the number of casualties down to a certain level. Until you do that, you can't see how adequate your staffing is."
The Hospitals: Getting Ready
The nation's hospitals are not nearly as far along as public health agencies in preparing for a bioterrorist attack, Mr. Hauer says. They received an extra $135 million from the federal government, he said, but that is not enough. In his budget for 2003, President Bush has proposed $518 million for hospital preparedness.
A major concern is what experts call "surge capacity," the ability of hospitals to accommodate a sudden increase of patients. Mr. Thompson, the health secretary, says he wants each state to develop regional plans that would enable hospitals to handle an extra 500 patients on any given day this year, and 1,500 on any given day next year.
"Five hundred patients is feasible so long as people understand that not everybody is going to be in a hospital-style bed with all the accouterments," said James D. Bentley, a senior vice president at the American Hospital Association. "If we have to start using elementary schools or armories or other kinds of settings, that's what we will have to do."
Hospitals that ordinarily compete have begun joining forces. Dr. Paul Pepe, who runs the emergency department at Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, said hospitals in the region were talking about "cross-credentialing" doctors so that they could treat patients anywhere.
"We're talking about buying in bulk, in economies of scale, with everybody participating," Dr. Pepe said. "Everybody is anteing up."
But, Mr. Bentley said: "There is a long way to go. It is going to probably take five years to get where we ought to be."
The Vaccines: Bolstering Supplies
As fear of anthrax swept the nation last fall, much of the public discussion about bioterrorism centered on the question of whether there would be enough drugs and vaccines to go around. Today, those worries have largely eased.
The biggest fear last fall was an insufficient supply of vaccine against smallpox. Mr. Thompson, the health secretary, signed contracts with two companies - Acambis, a biotechnology concern, and Baxter, the pharmaceutical giant - for a total of 209 million doses.
But in the interim, scientific studies have shown that the nation's existing stockpiles of smallpox vaccine could be diluted to provide 300 million doses, enough for every American to be inoculated, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which did the work.
The existing vaccine is old - some of it dates to 1952 - so the government still intends to buy the new vaccine. But, Dr. Fauci said, "If we had an emergency tomorrow we'd be good to go."
Still unresolved is the question of whether the government should offer the vaccine to health care and emergency workers as a precaution against a bioterrorist attack. In June, a national advisory panel recommended vaccinating about 15,000 health care professionals.
The issue has proved a vexing and politically delicate one, because the vaccine is made from a live virus that itself can lead to fatal complications in people who receive it or come into contact with people who receive it. People with impaired immune systems are especially vulnerable. The decision now rests in the hands of the White House; Mr. Thompson said an announcement was expected by the end of the month. (The new vaccine is also made from a live virus, vaccinia, but under safer conditions. )
The Food Supply: Another Front
Many officials and scientists say bioterrorist threats to the nation's food supply have had too low a priority in the war against terrorism. Understandably, one administration official said, the government initially concentrated on countering threats to people, and the relative complacency about agriculture was partly a result of the nation's success in controlling disease.
"Most people take the programs for granted because we have been so well protected," Ann M. Veneman, the secretary of agriculture, said in an interview yesterday. But countering bioterrorist threats has the highest priority for her, she said. Since Sept. 11, with a $328 million budget appropriated by Congress, she has formed a homeland defense council to advise her and has taken other steps to reduce vulnerability, among them increasing border inspections and spending on research.
Critics say too little is still being done, partly because of bureaucratic inertia and a passion for secrecy at the top.
"There is a true crisis in agricultural biosecurity that stems in part from from hostility to the very notion of vulnerability at the top of the Department of Agriculture," said Thomas W. Frazier, president of GenCon, a nonprofit group that promotes scientific and educational projects affecting agriculture.
The issue is reflected in a dispute over the delayed release of the National Research Council's draft report, "Countering Agricultural Bioterrorism: A Framework for Action," commissioned by the government a year before the attacks but partly written after them.
The report warns that "gaps in biological and intelligence data on foreign-plant and foreign-animal pest and pathogens" and inadequate inspection at the nation's borders increase the chance that a terrorist armed with, say, foot-and-mouth virus or soybean rust could enter the country and deliberately spread diseases that could cripple the nation's livestock and plants.
It notes that only 1 percent of all private vehicles entering the country are inspected by the Agriculture Department. It concludes that the government has not developed "in-depth plans for defense against the intentional introduction of biological agents directed at agriculture."
Dr. E. William Colglazier, the executive director of the National Academy of Sciences, which conducted the study, said that lawyers for the Department of Agriculture and the White House's Office of Homeland Security had asked the the academy not to publish the report because it might give terrorists a "road map" to striking American agriculture.
Dr. Colglazier said the academy had been willing to omit from the published version of the study secret data or passages that could be harmful to national security, but the government had not identified such material. Scientists and other experts who worked on the study said it contained no secret information and the vulnerabilities it discusses could be found in publications on the Internet. He also said the academy planned to publish a version of the study, which it would edit.
Ms. Veneman said she had not read the report. But Alisa Harrison, an Agriculture Department spokeswoman, said her agency and the homeland security office had not requested that the report be suppressed.
At the same time, critics say, the government has been slow to spend money for initiatives like the creation of a new national laboratory network to detect infectious disease in animals.
Last year, Congress appropriated $23 million to plan the design of a new facility at Plum Island, off Long Island, the nation's only laboratory authorized to study and develop vaccines for such highly contagious animal diseases as foot and mouth. But nine months later, no design plans have been made. Agency officials say Congress has insisted that first a new study must be completed on whether a new, higher-security lab should be built on the island or the mainland.
Anne K. Vidaver, chairwoman of the department of plant pathology at the University of Nebraska, said that plant research in general, despite the recent increases, remained underfinanced, and that federal and state labs communicate poorly with one another. In addition, she said, the response to a blight might be delayed by the Agriculture Department's concern about the effect of such a discovery on trade.
"The United States is not unique in this respect," Dr. Vidaver said, "but if soybean rust shows up tomorrow, we might be ordered not to talk about it."
Gordon D. Johndroe, a spokesman for the Office of Homeland Security, noted that President Bush listed bioterrorism prevention as one of his top four priorities this year, and that the White House had requested $7 billion for it in next year's budget.
He counseled patience as the government mobilizes for a long-term campaign against germs directed at people, plants and animals. "We're much better prepared than we were last fall," Mr. Johndroe said, "and we'll be twice as prepared a year from now as we are today."
Forewarned and Forearmed?
Most public health and intelligence officials agree that no matter how much money is spent, and how many plans are drawn, the nation will never be fully prepared for or protected against a biological attack.
"Prepare for what?" Dr. Benjamin, the Maryland health director, asked. "We are better prepared today to identify smallpox and anthrax than we were a year ago. There is still a whole list of organisms that we are not as prepared for."
In the end, experts say, the most important achievement since last September has been raising the nation's consciousness.
"Our biggest success is not related to vaccines or drugs," said Dr. Franz, the former Fort Detrick commander. "It is related to awareness: Awareness among physicians to think about unusual diseases. Awareness among emergency responders, that if it looks like the flu, maybe it isn't the flu. Awareness among law enforcement, and the guys that walk around in those white shirts in airports. I don't think they would let a sick person, maybe with smallpox, sit in an airport and cough on people. That's the big difference, and that is all education and experience."
-------- business
FEDERAL CONTRACTS
By States News Service
Monday, September 9, 2002; Page E09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55166-2002Sep8.html
Resource Consultants Inc. of Vienna won a $113.11 million contract from the Navy for hazardous material management and operations.
Lockheed Martin Corp. of Gaithersburg won a $108.71 million contract from the Missile Defense Agency for the development and integration of battle management, command and control and communications capabilities.
AMSEC of Virginia Beach won a $92.89 million contract from the Navy for engineering and technical support services.
MVM Inc. of McLean won a $49.72 million contract from the Marshals Service for court security officers.
Willcor Inc. of Clinton won a $44.04 million contract from the Navy for technical and administrative support services.
Bell-Boeing Joint Program Office of Patuxent River, Md., won a $30 million contract from the Navy for the MV-22 engineering and manufacturing development program.
Pragma Corp. of Falls Church won a $27 million contract from the Agency for International Development for an enterprise development project.
Holiday International Security Inc. of Silver Spring won a $19.21 million contract from the Social Security Administration for guard services.
Atlantic Research Corp. of Gainesville won a $10.52 million contract from the Navy for development of an aircraft propulsion steering control section.
Resource Consultants Inc. of Vienna won a $9.25 million contract from the Navy for operation and maintenance of four hazardous material minimization centers.
DDL Omni Engineering of McLean won an $8.27 million contract from the Navy for technical support services for tactical warfare development and evaluation and naval warfare publication.
AMDEX Corp. of Silver Spring won a $7.5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Hourigan Construction Corp. of Virginia Beach won a $7.22 million contract from the Navy for design and construction of a personnel support facility.
EMC Corp. of McLean won a $5.98 million contract from the Army for a disaster recovery project-storage area network.
J.K. Hill and Associates Inc. of Norfolk won a $5.88 million contract from the Air Force for base supply, fuels and logistic material control activity services.
Virtexco Corp. of Norfolk won a $5.62 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for design and construction of a military entrance and processing station.
Science Applications International Corp. of McLean won a $5.3 million contract from the National Institutes of Health for database services.
Casals and Associates Inc. of Alexandria won a $5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Sentech Inc. of Bethesda won a $5 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Corman Construction Inc. of Annapolis won a $4.44 million contract from the National Park Service for work on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park aqueducts.
Environmental Design and Construction LLC of Washington won a $3.43 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for a breaching assault test and training facility.
Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore won a $3.42 million contract from the National Institutes of Health for a study of violence prevention among high-risk early-adolescent youth.
Lewin Group of Falls Church won a $3.3 million contract from the Health and Human Services Department for a coordinating center.
Carter and Associates of Silver Spring won a $3.09 million contract from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. for premium compliance audit services.
Bert Smith and Co. of Washington won a $2.94 million contract from the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp. for premium compliance audit services.
Computer and Hi-Tech Management Inc. of Virginia Beach won a $2.75 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
KCI/SHW of Hunt Valley won a $2.58 million contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for architect-engineer services.
Pro-telligent LLC of Washington won a $2.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
CMS Information Services Inc. of Vienna won a $2.1 million contract from the Air Force for a budget information system.
Science and Engineering Services Inc. of Burtonsville, Md., won a $1.92 million contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for development of an automated identification sampling system.
Edwards Industries LLC of Ellicott City won a $1.75 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Moon Engineering Co. of Portsmouth, Va., won a $1.69 million contract from the Navy for services on the USS Ross.
HCD Inc. of Largo won a $1.25 million contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Sensor Systems Medical Services of Sterling won a $950,000 contract from the Health and Human Services Department for radiology image processing system maintenance support.
Raytheon Systems Co. of Baltimore won a $922,306 contract from the Navy for electronic components.
Z-Tech Corp. of Rockville won a $799,180 contract from the Health and Human Services Department for substance abuse-related violence support.
AT&T of Vienna won a $778,329 contract from the Air Force for local exchange services.
Northrop Grumman Corp. of Linthicum Heights won a $755,326 contract from the Navy for software development.
North American Communications Inc. of Bethesda won a $574,557 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for cable plant maintenance and relocations.
Lear Siegler Services Inc. of Annapolis won a $543,812 contract from the Army for contracting services.
Symplicity Corp. of Arlington won a $500,000 contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Shinkuro Inc. of Bethesda won a $499,991 contract from the Air Force for contracting services.
Cottrell Contracting Corp. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $490,467 contract from the Army Corps of Engineers for maintenance dredging services.
Qwest Government Services Inc. of Fairfax won a $452,761 contract from the Air Force for local exchange services.
Government Technology Services Inc. of Chantilly won a $288,756 contract from the Air Force for ruggedized laptop computers.
I.A. Construction Corp. of Cumberland, Md., won a $247,390 contract from the Agriculture Department for removal of a mine waste slide.
ITT Industries Inc. of Roanoke won a $207,654 contract from the Navy for mounting plates.
Service Machine and Welding Co. of Ashland won a $189,963 contract from the Navy for air drop containers.
C.R. Daniel of Ellicott City won a $184,400 contract from the Justice Department for cotton ducks.
Northrop Grumman Systems Corp. of College Park won a $173,540 contract from the Navy for power radio dividers.
Anteon Corp. of Chesapeake, Va., won a $168,775 contract from the Navy for habitability upgrades.
PeopleSoft USA Inc. of Bethesda won a $147,920 contract from the Navy for software modules and licenses.
C LON International Inc. of Washington won a $138,900 contract from the Defense Information Systems Agency for information-technology equipment.
AEPCO of Virginia Beach won a $131,907 contract from the Navy for work on the USS Anzio.
Kaseman LLC of Chantilly won a $125,000 contract from the General Services Administration for recreational, hospitality, law enforcement, facilities, industrial and environmental services and products.
Electronic Systems of Linthicum Heights won a $105,528 contract from the Air Force for spare parts and prime power protection.
Impact Training Systems Inc. of Springfield won a $100,000 contract from the General Services Administration for management, organizational and business improvement services.
Technology Assessment and Transfer Inc. of Annapolis won a $99,999 contract from the Air Force for corrosion resistant coating.
Hiller Systems Inc. of Chesapeake, Va., won an $87,501 contract from the Defense Supply Center for fire-fighting systems.
Obbco Safety and Supply Inc. of Chesapeake Va., won an $86,822 contract from the Navy for nuclear tape.
Columbia Telecommunications Inc. of Columbia won an $86,000 contract from the Federal Highway Administration for an intelligent transportation system telecommunications overview.
Litton Systems Inc. of Blacksburg, Va., won an $85,520 contract from the Navy for torque motors.
Virginia Sprinkler Co. of Ashland won an $81,970 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for sprinkler systems.
Turnbull Enterprises Inc. of Baltimore won an $80,410 contract from the Navy for pedestal chairs.
McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry of Charlottesville, Va., won a $78,750 contract from the Air Force for environmental concept development.
Cenna International Corp. of Waldorf won a $77,484 contract from the Defense Supply Center for module assemblies.
Sydnor Hydro of Richmond won a $70,385 contract from the Navy for a vertical turbine pump.
Comptech Corp. of Rockville won a $70,359 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for mechanical power transmission equipment.
APCOM Inc. of Gaithersburg won a $68,500 contract from the Air Force for frequency converters.
Protocol Controls Inc. of Richmond won a $65,000 contract from NASA for hydraulic power units.
DBKB Technologies of Silver Spring won a $61,888 contract from the Defense Supply Center for radio frequency switches.
Cenna International Corp. of Waldorf won a $55,510 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for pressure indicators.
Dela Technology Corp. of Rockville won a $54,414 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for steel alloy connecting links.
Fairfax Precision Manufacturing Inc. of Sterling won a $52,500 contract from the Defense Supply Center for clamps.
Ademone International Corp. of Owings Mills won a $51,330 contract from the Defense Logistics Agency for hoses.
The contracts listed were awarded by the federal government to companies and other vendors in Virginia, Maryland and the District. For more information, contact states2001@aol.com, or 202-628-3100, ext. 266.
-------- colombia
Colombian paramilitary groups vow to reform
By Jeremy McDermott in Medellin,
UK Telegraph
09/09/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/09/wcol09.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/09/09/ixworld.html
Colombia's Right-wing paramilitaries are to give up drug trafficking and massacring opponents, they claimed yesterday.
Carlos Castano, the warlord who founded the United Self Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), dissolved the group a month ago after widespread abuses by its members.
Since then paramilitary organisations have operated independently, but have taken a battering from Marxist guerrillas and the state.
Leaders of 18 paramilitary groups met last week at a ranch in Uraba in north Colombia and voted to reform and re-invent themselves.
"We have decided to abolish the practice of drug trafficking which served as a source of finance for our organisation - and we have made a commitment to comply with and respect human rights," said a letter signed by the leaders of the group.
The announcement was met with scepticism. Castano's brother Fidel, who founded the paramilitary force that evolved into the AUC, was a member of the Medellin drug cartel until he fell out with its leader, Pablo Escobar.
Sources from the American Drug Enforcement Administration said that the paramilitaries were deeply involved in the drugs trade.
The AUC was also responsible for more than two thirds of the human rights abuses committed last year, according to rights groups. Massacring suspected guerrilla sympathisers was the main tactic in their anti-subversive war.
-------- iraq
No war on Iraq unless the United Nations allows the use of force, top Vatican official says
Mon Sep 9, 2002
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&cid=524&u=/ap/20020909/ap_wo_en_po/vatican_us_iraq_1&printer=1
VATICAN CITY - Military action against Iraq should only be undertaken if the United Nations authorizes it, the Vatican's foreign minister said Monday in the first statement on the issue by the Vatican.
In an interview with the Italian Catholic newspaper L'Avvenire published Monday, Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran also warned the international community of the consequences that a war might have on both the Iraqi population and the stability of the whole region.
"We can't impose the law of the jungle," Tauran was quoted as saying by L'Avvenire. "Obviously we can't fight evil with evil."
"Should the international community ... conclude the use of force is opportune and justified, this should only happen with a decision made in the framework of the United Nations," the archbishop said.
He added that it should be undertaken only "after assessing the consequences for the Iraqi people, as well as the repercussions that it could have on the countries in the region and on world stability."
U.S. President George W. Bush is seeking foreign and domestic support for a possible attack to topple President Saddam Hussein, whom Washington accuses of continuing to make weapons of mass destruction in violation of U.N. resolutions calling for Iraq's disarmament.
Iraq says it wants to continue negotiations with the United Nations, but has not responded to Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for a return of weapons inspectors, who left the country in 1998 and have been barred from returning since.
The international community should "always give precedence to dialogue, never isolate a country or a government," said Tauran.
The comment came as many in Europe and elsewhere insist the crisis be dealt with through the U.N. Security Council and its resolutions.
Pope John Paul II has decried terrorism several times since Sept. 11. But while the Vatican has acknowledged the right of legitimate defense against terrorists, it has made clear that any "just war" needs to avoid harming innocent people.
In the interview with L'Avvenire, Tauran said: "We must be careful not to confuse justice with revenge and make sure that entire peoples suffer for the cruelty of those who carried out the attacks."
----
War Cabinet Argues for Iraq Attack
Bush Advisers Cite U.S. Danger
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 9, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54988-2002Sep8?language=printer
President Bush, preparing to make his case against Iraq at the United Nations, deployed five members of his war cabinet to yesterday's talk shows to argue that Saddam Hussein is aggressively assembling nuclear weapons and that waiting any longer to disarm him could prove catastrophic for the United States and its allies.
Vice President Cheney struck a newly measured tone, reflecting a decision by White House officials to show deference to Congress and the United Nations while not backing away from Bush's determination to deal swiftly with Hussein. The administration officials suggested that Bush would accept a last-chance effort by the United Nations to deploy weapons inspectors in Iraq but would not agree to a prolonged process.
"We're trying very hard not to be unilateralist," Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in his first televised interview in four months. "We're working to build support with the American people, with the Congress, as many have suggested we should. And we're also, as many have suggested we should, going to the United Nations."
Nevertheless, the officials said Bush remains committed to a timetable so rapid he may ask Congress to authorize military force within weeks. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Bush wants lawmakers to approve a resolution before their pre-election recess, which is scheduled for Oct. 4 but could slip a week or more.
"The president thinks it's better to do this sooner rather than later," Rice said on CNN's "Late Edition." "I don't think anyone wants to wait for the 100 percent surety that [Hussein] has a weapon of mass destruction that can reach the United States, because the only time we may be 100 percent sure is when something lands on our territory."
The appearances by Bush's war planners provided a detailed preview of the logic and evidence Bush will use in his address to the U.N. General Assembly in New York on Thursday, the day after the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush also will meet privately this week with leaders of Canada, Portugal, India, Pakistan, Japan and South Africa. As a measure of the hurdles he faces, a poll on the front page of Saturday's Toronto Globe and Mail found that 69 percent of Canadian respondents said the United States bears some responsibility for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon because of its policies in the Middle East and around the globe.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made clear that Bush will turn many of his skeptics' arguments back at them by emphasizing Hussein's failure to comply with U.N. resolutions in conjunction with the Persian Gulf War ceasefire of 1991, which called for him to destroy his chemical and biological weapons stocks, cease his nuclear program and allow unfettered inspections.
"This is the time to deal with a problem that's been there for years -- violation of international law, violation of the will of the international community," Powell said on "Fox News Sunday." "The United States, often accused of being unilateral, is now bringing the problem back to its original source, the United Nations."
Rice said the U.N. Charter "certainly endorses self-defense." She said the burden of proof is on Hussein, "not on the United States, not on Great Britain."
"The United Nations and Security Council have teeth, and in 1991, they bared those teeth to try to deal with this real threat," Rice said. "There's been plenty of ultimatums. . . . We can't continue to have the kind of defiance of the United Nations, the defiance of the international community, that we've had."
The officials offered clues that Bush does not think a new U.N. resolution is the solution. "Let's be very clear that the absence of resolutions is not the problem," Rice said. "Nobody is going to negotiate anything with this regime."
A Kremlin official said Russian President Vladimir Putin told Bush on Friday that he sees "serious doubts regarding the basis, from the point of view of international law or global policy, for applying force to Iraq." Cheney suggested that the administration views a first strike on Iraq as justified under international law as a matter of self-defense.
"He is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons," Cheney said. "If we have reason to believe someone is preparing an attack against the U.S., has developed that capability, harbors those aspirations, then I think the United States is justified in dealing with that, if necessary, by military force."
A refrain of Bush's critics, on Capitol Hill and abroad, has been that they want to see new evidence of Hussein's weapons developments, and administration officials were cautious not to raise expectations. The dossier that British Prime Minister Tony Blair plans to release, for instance, is said to contain mostly familiar material. "We don't have all the evidence," Cheney said. "We have 10 percent, 20 percent, 30 percent. We don't know how much. We know we have a part of the picture. And that part of the picture tells us that he is, in fact, actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons."
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on ABC's "This Week" that the U.S. consensus is that Hussein "does not have a nuclear weapon, but he wants one."
None of the officials claimed to have direct proof of a connection between Iraq and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. "I'm not here today to make a specific allegation that Iraq was somehow responsible for 9/11," Cheney said. "I can't say that." But he said intelligence reports since Sept. 11 have documented "a number of contacts over the years."
Parisoula Lampsos, who said she was Hussein's mistress for 30 years, told ABC News in an interview for "Primetime Thursday" that the Iraqi president met twice with bin Laden and in 1996 gave him money.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said on CBS's "Face the Nation" that the country's task is to "connect the dots before the fact and behave in a way that there won't be books written about why we slept."
Staff writers Karen DeYoung, Glenn Kessler and Bill Miller contributed to this report.
----
Ex-Arms Inspector Says Attack on Iraq 'Not Justified'
By Sameer N. Yacoub
Associated Press
Monday, September 9, 2002; Page A12
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55144-2002Sep8.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Sept. 8 -- Iraq is incapable of producing weapons of mass destruction and should prove it by allowing in U.N. weapons inspectors, an American who was once on the inspections teams said today.
With his comments during a visit to Baghdad, Scott Ritter -- a sharp critic of U.S. policy on Iraq -- joined a long list of officials from European and Arab nations who have urged Iraq to accept inspectors to defuse a crisis with the United States.
Iraqi cooperation on inspections would leave the United States "standing alone in regards to war threats on Iraq and this is the best way to prevent the war," Ritter said.
Ritter, a former Marine intelligence officer, spoke to members of parliament and to journalists on his third trip to Iraq since he resigned from the U.N. inspection team in 1998. As in the past, his trip was organized by the Iraqi government. The rest of his schedule has not been made public.
"The truth is, Iraq is not a threat to its neighbors and it is not acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its borders," Ritter said. "Military action against Iraq cannot be justified."
Iraq, while denying it possesses banned weapons, has offered only to continue dialogue with the United Nations about the return of inspectors. It has not responded to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan's demand that inspectors be allowed to return unconditionally as a first step to further talks.
President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, meeting Saturday, insisted that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is developing chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and represents a threat that must be dealt with. The Bush administration is considering how to remove Hussein.
Other members of the U.N. teams that investigated Iraq's weapons of mass destruction from 1991 to 1998 have told the Associated Press that Iraq probably possesses large stockpiles of nerve agents, mustard gas and anthrax.
A U.S. intelligence official said Saturday that Iraq has recently stepped up attempts to import industrial equipment that could be used to enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons.
Many former inspectors say Iraq's arsenal is not much of a threat because Hussein has been deterred so far by fear of U.S. retaliation and apparently has been reluctant to share his weapons with terrorists.
Ritter quit the U.N. inspection team in August 1998, accusing the Clinton administration of undermining its mission.
----
Doubt cast on PM's 'nuclear threat' claim
Evidence inconclusive, say sources
Richard Norton-Taylor
Monday September 9, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,788469,00.html
The International Atomic Energy Agency has no evidence that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons at a former site previously destroyed by UN inspectors, despite claims made over the weekend by Tony Blair, western diplomatic sources told the Guardian yesterday.
After his talks on Saturday with President Bush at Camp David, Mr Blair referred to the "real" threat of Saddam Hussein's nuclear programme. He said: "We only need to look at the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency showing what has been going on at the former nuclear weapons site to realise that."
The prime minister was speaking after the agency issued a statement insisting it had "no new information" on Iraq's nuclear programme since December 1998 when its inspectors left Iraq. Only through a resumption of inspections in accordance with UN security council resolutions "can the agency draw any conclusion", it said.
Sources said yesterday that claims made by Mr Blair and in the New York Times were based on commercial satellite pictures bought by the agency. The pictures showed a reconstructed building, a well-placed source who asked not to be identified said yesterday.
But he added: "You cannot draw any conclusions. The satellites were only looking at the top of a roof. You cannot tell without inspectors on the ground."
The New York Times also reported that Iraq had tried to procure special aluminium tubes US officials said were wanted as components to enrich uranium.
Scott Ritter, former US marine and member of the UN inspectors team, said yesterday Iraq was incapable of producing weapons of mass destruction and should prove it by allowing in inspectors.
Speaking in Baghdad, he said Iraq's cooperation on inspections would leave the US "standing alone in regards to war threats on Iraq and this is the best way to prevent the war". He added: "The truth is Iraq is not a threat to its neighbours and it is not acting in a manner which threatens anyone outside its borders. Military action against Iraq cannot be justified."
It also appears the Bush administration is itself unsure as to how close President Saddam is to acquiring nuclear weapons. The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said in an interview on the BBC's Breakfast with Frost: "You can debate whether it is one year, five years, six years or nine years; the important point is that they are still committed to pursuing that technology."
Britain's defence secretary, Geoff Hoon, will today spell out the circumstances in which Britain will join an American-led attack on Iraq.
A text of his planned speech to the Brandeis school of law, University of Louisville, where he was once a visiting professor, says: "Saddam Hussein has the opportunity now to eliminate his weapons of mass destruction and a further ultimatum may be issued."
Mr Hoon adds: "Just like the international community's response to the events of September 11, diplomacy should and must come first. Military action, if needed, should follow diplomacy."
British defence sources say the idea is to mount a "psychological squeeze" on the Iraqi regime. Pressure will be asserted incrementally, they say, insisting it will "not be a repeat of the Gulf war", with more emphasis this time on bombing by US and British aircraft of Iraqi air defence sites.
The US is building up its forces in Kuwait and Qatar as well as weapons at its bomber base on the British Indian ocean island of Diego Garcia - a key facility for an American attack on Iraq.
US troops - possibly with British paratroopers and special forces - would be ready to enter Iraq if it ignored an ultimatum and after a spate of US air strikes, according to one plan being drawn up by US military chiefs.
----
Former weapons inspector: Iraq not a threat
CNN
September 9, 2002
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/meast/09/08/ritter.iraq/index.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter told the Iraqi National Assembly on Sunday that his country, the United States, "seems to be on the verge of making a historical mistake" in its calls for ousting Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Ritter is in Baghdad as a private citizen to voice his criticism of the U.S. threat of military action against Iraq. He looked for weapons in Iraq from 1991 until 1998, when he was called back to the United States two days before a U.S. attack on Iraq.
But a report, to be published in Britain on Monday by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, is said to detail Iraq's efforts to stockpile weapons of mass destruction.
Ritter said Sunday that Iraq was not a threat to the United States.
"Iraq is not a sponsor of the kind of terror perpetrated against the United States on September 11 and in fact is active in suppressing the sort of fundamental extremism that characterizes those who attacked the United States on that horrible day," Ritter said.
In an interview after the speech, Ritter denied allegations that the Iraqis had interfered with the inspection process.
U.S. President Bush is trying to garner international support for military action against Saddam, who he said harbors weapons of mass destruction and the intent to use them.
Bush is expected to issue an ultimatum to the Iraqi leader -- either allow weapons inspectors unfettered access or face unspecified consequences -- during a speech Thursday to the U.N. General Assembly.
In his address Sunday, Ritter denied that Iraq possessed any weapons of mass destruction but acknowledged that concerns exist about the country's weapons programs.
"These concerns are almost exclusively technical in nature and do not overcome the reality that Iraq, during nearly seven years of continuous inspection activity by the United Nations, had been certified as being disarmed to a 90 [percent] to 95 percent level," he said.
He warned that if the United States unilaterally launches any military action against Iraq, it would "forever change the political dynamic which has governed the world since the end of the second World War, namely the foundation of international law as set forth in the United Nations charter, which calls for the peaceful resolution of problems between nations."
Ritter resigned as chief weapons inspector for the United Nations in August 1998, saying that the U.N. Security Council and U.S. government had fatally undermined his team's attempts to locate and eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
He has said U.S. intelligence agents used the weapons inspectors as a cover for spying and destroyed the inspection teams' credibility.
Before his speech, Ritter said that the Bush administration was "using weapons inspections as an excuse" to go to war with Iraq.
"One of the problems with President Bush issuing that kind of ultimatum is that he has no credibility," Ritter said. "Members of his administration have said inspections don't matter.
"Members of his administration have said that, even if they get back in Iraq and succeed in disarming Iraq, that they're still going to seek regime removal."
----
Study: Iraq could arm nukes soon
Bush sharpens focus ahead of key U.N. speech
NBC, MSNBC AND NEWS SERVICES
Sept. 9, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/802167.asp?0bl=-0
Iraq could build a nuclear bomb in a matter of months if it were to obtain radioactive material from abroad but Saddam Hussein's regime currently lacks the ability to make its own nuclear material, a leading independent think-tank said Monday. The report, which also said Iraq was working to develop equipment to make bomb components, will sharpen debate over how to deal with Saddam as President Bush prepares to make a key Iraq policy speech before the United Nations later this week.
JOHN CHIPMAN, author of a study on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program, said the Iraqi leader is trying to build nuclear weapons. He said that the Iraqis are developing machines to make nuclear material for weapons, but would need assistance and material from foreign sources to build a nuclear bomb soon.
"However, were he able to obtain fissile material from abroad, steal it or buy it in some way, we certainly believe he has the ability to put together a nuclear weapon very quickly, in a matter of months," Chipman, director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, said at his report's release on Monday.
Iraq possesses a small force of missiles capable of delivering a nuclear weapon despite international efforts to destroy such weapons, Chipman said. The report estimates Iraq has up to 12 missiles with a range of about 400 miles, which could reach Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Israel, Iran and Turkey.
Iraq has also probably managed to hide some chemical and biological weapons, Chipman's report concludes.
Iraq is trying to build gas centrifuge machines that could produce weapons grade nuclear material, but is still far from success, Chipman said.
"We certainly confirm that it would be difficult for him in the absence of substantial foreign assistance or the lifting of sanctions soon to be able to develop his own fissile material," he said.
U.S. DRIVE TO OUST SADDAM
The United States has been calling for action to stop Iraq's efforts to build weapons of mass destruction, saying Baghdad poses a threat to U.S. and international interests.
Britain has pledged strong support for Washington, but most of America's allies are hesitant, urging Bush to work through the United Nations for a political solution.
After meeting with Tony Blair at the presidential retreat at Camp David this weekend, Bush and the British prime minister highlighted Saddam's potential to develop nuclear weapons.
British officials said on Sunday that Blair, who also warned of the "real threat" Saddam posed, had seen an advance copy of the IISS report.
Bush was meeting with Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien in Detroit on Monday.
In a private meeting, the president was expected to air his concerns about Saddam and the need for a change in leadership to Chretien, who has expressed doubts about the need for military action.
Chretien has said he has yet to see evidence that would justify Canadian support for a military campaign against Iraq, but said he was ready to hear Bush's reasons for wanting to topple Saddam.
"I will see what he has to say, I will listen and we will decide," Chretien said on Thursday.
Canada has supplied special forces troops, other soldiers, ships and planes as logistical support in the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan.
PRESIDENT MISSTATES 'FACTS'
In his meeting with Blair, Bush cited a satellite photograph and a report by the U.N. atomic energy agency as evidence of Iraq's impending rearmament. However, in response to a report by NBC News, a senior administration official acknowledged Saturday night that the U.N. report drew no such conclusion, and a spokesman for the U.N. agency said the photograph had been misinterpreted.
Blair cited a newly released satellite photo of Iraq identifying new construction at several sites linked in the past to Baghdad's development of nuclear weapons. And both leaders mentioned a 1998 report by the U.N.-affiliated International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, that said Saddam could be six months away from developing nuclear weapons.
"I don't know what more evidence we need," Bush said, standing alongside Blair. "We owe it to future generations to deal with this problem."
In a joint appearance before the summit, the two leaders repeated their shared view that Saddam's ouster was the only way to stop Iraq's pursuit - and potential use - of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
"The policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to," Blair said as he joined Bush in trying to rally reluctant allies to deal with Saddam, perhaps by military force.
IAEA: NUCLEAR ABILITY DESTROYED
Contrary to Bush's claim, however, the 1998 IAEA report did not say that Iraq was six months away from developing nuclear capability, NBC News' Robert Windrem reported Saturday.
Instead, Windrem reported, the Vienna, Austria-based agency said in 1998 that Iraq had been six to 24 months away from such capability before the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the U.N.-monitored weapons inspections that followed.
The war and the inspections destroyed much of Iraq's nuclear infrastructure and required Iraq to turn over its highly enriched uranium and plutonium, Windrem reported.
In a summary of its 1998 report, the IAEA said that "based on all credible information available to date ... the IAEA has found no indication of Iraq having achieved its program goal of producing nuclear weapons or of Iraq having retained a physical capability for the production of weapon-useable nuclear material or having clandestinely obtained such material."
WHITE HOUSE ADMITS ERROR
A senior White House official acknowledged Saturday night that the 1998 report did not say what Bush claimed. "What happened was, we formed our own conclusions based on the report," the official told NBC News' Norah O'Donnell.
Meanwhile, Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the U.N. agency, disputed Bush's and Blair's assessment of the satellite photograph, which was first publicized Friday. Contrary to news service reports, there was no specific photo or building that aroused suspicions, he told Windrem.
The photograph in question was not U.N. intelligence imaging but simply a picture from a commercial satellite imaging company, Gwozdecky said. He said that the IAEA reviewed commercial satellite imagery regularly and that, from time to time, it noticed construction at sites it had previously examined.
Gwozdecky said the new construction indicated in the photograph was no surprise and that no conclusions were drawn from it. "There is not a single building we see," he said.
IRAQIS MET WITH U.N. OFFICIALS
Windrem reported that of all the international inspection regimes - chemical, biological, missile and nuclear - it is the U.N. inspectors who are most comfortable with Iraq's cooperation on nuclear matters. In fact, the United Nations said last week that Iraq had been in contact with U.N. representatives about a possible new round of talks on weapons inspections.
A Security Council report Tuesday on the work of UNMOVIC - the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission - found that personnel from UNMOVIC and the atomic energy agency met in Vienna in July with Iraqi officials and Dr. Jaffar Jaffar, a high-level Iraqi contact on nuclear weapons issues.
The head of UNMOVIC also took part in what the report called a "dialogue" between Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri.
Tuesday's report stated that Sabri wrote Annan expressing "the desire of the Government of Iraq to conduct a round of technical talks" between Iraqi officials and UNMOVIC representatives to review work on inspections between May 1991 and December 1998 and to discuss other matters to be resolved "when the inspection regime returns to Iraq."
Sabri extended "the offer of Iraq to take part in a further series of technical discussions" in a letter last month, the U.N. report said.
U.S. officials insisted Saturday night that there was plenty of evidence nonetheless that Iraq was intent on developing weapons of mass destruction.
A senior administration official told NBC News that Iraq had also tried to acquire thousands of aluminum tubes over the past 14 months that would specifically be used in developing nuclear weapons. The shipments were blocked, said the official, who would not say where they originated.
"There continues to be ample evidence that Saddam Hussein has relentlessly tried to acquire and develop weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons," the official said.
The tubing is needed to build gas centrifuges, which can be used to enrich uranium to weapons grade.
NBC's Robert Windrem and Norah O'Donnell; The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
-------- israel / palestine
Arafat Condemns Acts of Terror
By JAMIE TARABAY
Associated Press Writer
SEPTEMBER 09, 2002, 11:34 ET
http://wire.ap.org/?SLUG=ISRAEL%2dPALESTINIANS
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - In a speech to the Palestinian parliament Monday, Yasser Arafat condemned terror attacks on Israeli civilians, announced elections for early January and offered - apparently in jest - to give up executive powers.
The rambling speech was the Palestinian leader's first to the legislative council in 18 months. His lower lip quivering, Arafat repeatedly fumbled with the microphones and strayed from the text, launching into asides that were sometimes incomprehensible.
Speaking just hours after 60 Israeli tanks encircled three Gaza refugee camps and blew up the home of a suspected militant, Arafat gave an address that was both conciliatory and packed with accusations against Israel. He skipped over some passages of an earlier draft, including one that called on parliament to ban suicide attacks.
Israeli banned 12 legislators from making the trip from Gaza to the West Bank town of Ramallah, saying they were involved in attacks on Israelis. In solidarity, other Gazan lawmakers stayed behind and participated by video conference.
Several Palestinian legislators complained that Arafat had failed to present his new Cabinet to parliament for approval - a vote seen as an important test for Arafat - and that he had not set a specific election date.
When Arafat mentioned that presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections would be held in January, one of the legislators shouted: ``What is needed is a presidential decree with a specific date.''
Arafat's confirmation of the January date appeared to defy the United States, which has sought a delay in presidential elections in hopes of winning Palestinian agreement to installing a prime minister. The prime minister would take over day-to-day governance and render Arafat a figurehead, an idea Arafat has resisted.
Still, he touched on it in his speech. At one point, Arafat said that reforms should be based on a separation of powers, then added: ``Unless you want to bring somebody else in the executive authority. I wish you could do it and give me a rest.''
Arafat aides later said he has repeatedly made the offer, always in jest, in internal meetings.
The 88-seat legislature was to reconvene Tuesday and was expected to tackle the issue of whether to vote on the Cabinet that Arafat drew up in June. It was not clear whether he commands a majority in the council, with several lawmakers saying they would withhold approval.
The Palestinian leader has been weakened in recent months, with the United States shunning him and Israel trying to sideline him. Since a major Israeli military offensive that began in March, he has been largely confined to his Ramallah headquarters.
Raanan Gissin, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, said the speech was meaningless and that Palestinian reform would not work with Arafat in power. ``Peace and reforms can only happen when Arafat is not there,'' Gissin said.
Paul Patin, a spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv, said Arafat would be judged by his actions, not his words.
In the Gaza Strip, Ismail Abu Shanab, a spokesman for the Islamic militant group Hamas, said Arafat's speech was a disappointment and that he had no clear strategy on how to confront Israel.
``We need to ... find a way to challenge the Israeli aggression,'' said Abu Shanab, whose group has carried out scores of suicide attacks that have killed more than 250 Israeli civilians in the past two years.
Monday's parliament session was held at Arafat's sandbagged headquarters, which has been heavily damaged during Israeli raids. Arafat's aides said he preferred to stay in the compound to avoid encounters with Israeli troops controlling the city.
At the opening of the session, the council re-elected speaker Ahmed Qureia, who has held the job since 1996. Qureia, a key player in previous peace talks with Israel, is a confidant of Arafat, but also seen as a potential successor.
In his speech, Arafat said he condemned ``attacks against Israeli civilians and at the same time of any attacks against Palestinian civilians.'' But he did not explicitly call for an end to attacks on Israelis.
He said such attacks served Israel's interest by drawing attention away from the suffering of the Palestinians under Israel's occupation. He asked legislators to uphold the national interest, but did not specify what this would mean.
Addressing the Israeli public, Arafat called for new peace negotiations and said: ``I would like to say that we want to achieve peace with you. We want security and stability for us and for you... This peace is still ahead of us.''
Arafat also said the world expects from the Palestinians a ``clear stance and firm answers regarding peace with Israel ... as well as with regard to democracy and reforms in our society.''
The legislature has convened only sporadically, and usually with a low turnout, during the past two years of fighting because of Israeli travel restrictions.
Israeli hard-liners criticized Sharon for permitting the session to go ahead, arguing it would give new credibility to Arafat at a time when Israel is trying to sideline him. Sharon in the past has blocked the parliament from meeting.
In other developments Monday, a senior Palestinian official said Sharon would meet in the coming days with Arafat's deputy, Mahmoud Abbas, to try to find a way to end the fighting. Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, is seen by the United States and Israel as a moderate.
Sharon's aides declined comment.
However, Sharon said recently he has been contacted by a senior Palestinian official and was ready to meet with him. Sharon did not name the official, but said it was not Arafat.
In Gaza, meanwhile, troops blew up the house of a suspected Palestinian militant in the Boureij refugee camp. During the operation, about 60 tanks encircled Boureij and two adjacent camps.
The army said the suspect, a fugitive, is responsible for firing mortar bombs and for an attack on a tank in February that killed three soldiers. During the raid, troops found a building used to manufacture anti-tank missiles and mortar bombs and blew it up, the army said in a statement.
Tensions have been running high in Gaza, despite efforts to turn the coastal strip into a test area for a gradual cease-fire. On Tuesday, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was to meet with five Palestinian Cabinet ministers to try to revive the truce deal.
--------
Arafat Condemns Acts of Terror, but Skirts Cease-Fire Call
New York Times
September 9, 2002
By SERGE SCHMEMANN with TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/international/middleeast/09CND-MIDE.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Sept. 9 - Yasir Arafat told Palestinian legislators today that he condemned acts of terror against Israeli and Palestinian civilians, and said he believed that peace with Israel was still possible.
But he stopped short of calling for an end to all attacks against Israelis.
"The peace of the brave is still ahead of us and is not behind us," he told members of the Palestinian Legislative Council, meeting for the first time since May. "After 50 years of struggle and bloody suffering, enough is enough. Enough of the struggle and enough bloodshed."
He also made a lighthearted reference to the possibility of his stepping down as the Palestinian leader.
Mr. Arafat addressed the legislators in his battered Ramallah headquarters, where he has been cooped up for months out of fear that it would be demolished if he ventured out. Both the United States and Israel have called for him to be replaced as leader of the Palestinian Authority.
Seventy-five of the council's 86 legislators took part in today's session: 47 in Ramallah and 28 by video link in the Gaza Strip. Israel said 14 Gaza-based lawmakers had been banned from attending for "security reasons." It turned out that one man on the list died five months ago, and another was already in Ramallah.
After the ban the Gaza legislators decided not to make the trip to Ramallah but to use the video link.
Mr. Arafat said the steadfastness of the Palestinian people depended on "the strength of our institutions and first of all on the legislative, the judiciary and the executive," adding, "unless you want to bring someone to replace me."
"I wish you would, and give me a rest," he said with a smile, bringing laughter from the lawmakers.
Mr. Arafat then reaffirmed plans for presidential, parliamentary and municipal elections elections to be held in January. His aides have said he will run for re-election, and opinion polls show him the clear favorite to win.
"Our national interest is to preserve international support for our legitimate right to resist the military and settlement occupation," Mr. Arafat said, alluding to areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip still under Israeli control.
"We have to reiterate our condemnation of attacks against Israeli civilians and at the same time of any attacks against Palestinian civilians," he said.
Before today's session started, Israeli armored vehicles and infantry raided the central Gaza Strip, destroying a suspected militant's home and a suspected weapons factory before withdrawing hours later.
An Israeli tank shell killed two Palestinians near the southern Gaza town of Rafah, Palestinian security officials said. Israeli military officials told Reuters that an Israeli force had opened fire at figures crawling toward an Israeli border fence.
The fact that the Palestinian council was allowed to convene drew angry charges on Sunday from right-wing Israelis, who would like to see the entire Palestinian leadership dismantled, and who view such a meeting as a reprieve for Mr. Arafat.
Last week Mr. Sharon reversed an earlier ruling and said he would allow the council to meet, but not those members "involved in terrorism." Israeli reports said he did so under pressure from the Bush administration, as well as from Defense Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer, the leader of the moderate Labor Party.
Since the start of the Jewish New Year holiday on Friday, Israel has effectively barred any movement by Palestinians.
Though he yielded on the meeting, Mr. Sharon went on to start what is likely to become a major dispute with the Labor Party when he said in an interview published Friday that the Oslo peace agreements, and all subsequent agreements with the Palestinians, "no longer exist."
The Palestinian Legislative Council was one of the products of the 1993 Oslo agreements.
The Israeli news media have been effectively silent since then because of the three-day Jewish holiday. But the comment drew furious blasts from Palestinians and from Egypt, including a threat by Ahmed Abdel Rahman, the secretary general of the Palestinian cabinet, that the Palestinians should reconsider their recognition of the state of Israel.
The prime minister's statement also drew an unusually stern rejoinder from Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, an architect of the Oslo agreements, which was published on Israeli Web sites.
"The Oslo agreement is the only base for reaching a settlement between Palestinians and Israel," he declared, adding that had the Labor government not lost the 1996 election, there would already be a settlement.
The growing rift in the coalition government over how to proceed is likely to be fanned by the Palestinian council meeting.
"The P.L.C. should not be allowed to convene, and certainly not for a meeting at which they are due to elect a new cabinet under the leadership of Arafat," declared a right-wing minister, Danny Naveh, on Army Radio. "It should be made clear that the P.L.C. is a thing of the past, together with the path of terror and murder."
Conversely, the Palestinian legislators said they viewed the session as a chance to demonstrate that the council had not been destroyed. "Since the first day of the uprising the Israelis have been trying to prevent us from communicating and meeting," said Ibrahim Abu al-Naja, the deputy speaker. "They were trying to cancel our role, the same way they destroyed our institutions."
Most of the Gaza members barred from going to the West Bank are members of Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement. Two are members of Islamic movements, one is a member of the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and two others are not affiliated with any organization.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Worried About India Attack
September 9, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-UN-Pakistan.html
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Pakistan's U.N. ambassador said Monday that U.S. military action against Iraq could lead India to launch an attack or provoke a conflict with Pakistan.
Pakistan and India have fought three wars, two over Kashmir, since they won independence from Britain in 1947. The nuclear-armed neighbors came close to another war after an attack on the Indian parliament in December that New Delhi blamed on Pakistan.
``India needs a diversion,'' said Ambassador Munir Akram. ``If the U.S. attention is now shifted elsewhere, we will have the possibility of Indians using that diversion.''
India's U.N. Mission was closed and no diplomats were available to comment.
Akram said U.S. diplomacy -- including visits to the region by Secretary of State Colin Powell, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage -- has been crucial in cooling tensions.
``The United States ... is the one country that has mediated in order to contain the confrontation,'' he told a press luncheon.
Washington is anxious to maintain the relative calm, as another war in South Asia would hinder its anti-terrorism efforts in neighboring Afghanistan. The escalating tensions also generated world fears that a war could result in the use of nuclear weapons.
Though India and Pakistan have toned down their battlefield rhetoric, they're still on a war footing and have massive numbers of troops deployed along the border.
Akram said Pakistan's friends have been asking what impact a U.S. attack on Iraq would have on Pakistan and its stability, and on the international coalition trying to fight the remnants of the Taliban and Al-Qaida in Afghanistan.
``A more relevant question is what would happen if India were to take advantage of an attack against Iraq in order to launch a strike, or to provoke a conflict with Pakistan,'' he said. ``I think that is our real worry.''
Pakistan's Minister of Information Nisar Memon said India might see a U.S. attack on Iraq ``as an opportunity for hot pursuit'' across the border, which could provoke a new conflict.
Memon said Pakistan has exercised ``a lot of restraint'' with India and has contained terrorist threats from Al-Qaida and from Pakistani extremists who have carried out sporadic sectarian-related attacks.
Pakistan is building roads, schools and hospitals in tribal areas along the border which were previously closed to Pakistani forces and the government of President Pervez Musharraf has ``spread the intelligence network on the border'' to track people crossing from Afghanistan, he said.
-------- spy agencies
MI6 urged to release intelligence
By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor,
UK Telegraph
09/09/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/09/09/nirq09.xml&sSheet=/news/2002/09/09/ixnewstop.html
Downing Street and the Foreign Office are exerting strong pressure on MI6 to allow publication of intelligence on Iraq's weapons programmes in the Government's long-awaited dossier, according to senior Whitehall sources.
Seeking to placate opponents of war against Iraq, Tony Blair has brought forward publication of the evidence on Iraq's quest for nuclear, biological and chemical weapons and the missiles to deliver them.
But officials have expressed frustration over the reluctance of Britain's intelligence community to release fresh information.
"The secret services live in a world of their own and don't understand why the information should be released in public," said one British source. "Ministers are breathing down their necks to release the evidence."
Before flying back to Britain from Washington, the Prime Minister said that once the public had seen the evidence "people will see this is not something that has been invented or dreamt up in the last few weeks. This is a real and serious issue."
But several officials who have seen early drafts of the dossier said it added little to what is publicly known about Iraq's quest for weapons of mass destruction.
Part of the reason for the delay in releasing it has been the need to improve it.
One official said he had to play "spot the difference" between the dossier and a briefing paper handed out to Labour MPs earlier this year.
The briefing paper, drawn from reports prepared by United Nations weapons inspectors after they left Iraq in 1998, said Iraq had failed to account for 4,000 tons of precursor chemicals for chemical weapons, 610 tons of precursors for VX nerve agent and 31,000 chemical weapons munitions.
"If Iraq's weapons programmes remain unchecked Iraq could redevelop chemical and biological capabilities within a very short period of time and develop a crude nuclear device in about five years," Labour MPs were told.
Inspectors have formed a clear picture of Iraq's chemical, nuclear and ballistic missile programmes up to the 1991 Gulf war. But they admit they made little progress in finding and destroying large stocks of biological agents, which Iraq only admitted to producing in 1995.
-------- un
Steps the U.S. Needs for UN Approval to Strike Iraq
September 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-iraq-un-usa.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - With the United States apparently seeking United Nations approval to attack Iraq, Washington will have to make its case to all 15 U.N. Security Council members individually, not just the big powers.
President Bush will lay out his arguments to the 190-member U.N. General Assembly on Thursday, one day after the nation marks the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that sparked his war on terrorism.
A year later, all eyes are on Iraq, with talk about capturing Osama bin Laden, held responsible for the attacks, having slipped into the background.
A U.N. resolution on any ultimatum for weapons inspectors to return to Iraq or enforcing inspections through military means must have at least nine votes in favor to pass and no veto from the five permanent Security Council members -- Britain, France, Russia, China and the United States itself.
The other 10 members, elected for two-year terms, are: Bulgaria, Cameroon, Colombia, Guinea, Ireland, Mauritius, Mexico, Norway, Singapore and Syria.
Secretary of State Colin Powell is meeting with the 10 on Friday morning, followed by lunch with Britain, France, China, Russia and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
The inspectors, responsible for accounting for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, were pulled out of Baghdad in December 1998, shortly before a bombing raid by the United States and Britain. They have not been allowed to return since, without conditions set by Baghdad.
Most nations dismiss at this stage the idea of ``coercive inspections'' -- backing up U.N. weapons inspectors, who come from 44 countries, with U.S. or multinational troops in or around Iraq.
One diplomat, who asked not to be identified, called the proposal ``lunacy.'' The soldiers would either need Iraq's permission or there is a war, at which point the inspectors would have no role.
``It is difficult enough to sell the idea to Iraq of inspectors armed only with pencils,'' one U.N. arms expert said.
No draft of a resolution has come to the council yet. French President Jacques Chirac, in Monday's New York Times, suggested a need for two measures: one giving Iraq a deadline to admit U.N. inspectors and a second to enforce it.
Some U.S. officials have spoken about one measure that would give Iraq a tight deadline it might not be able to meet, as well as authorize the use of force.
RUSSIA IS KEY
Syria would be expected to vote ``no'' on any measure and China to abstain and not use its veto power unless Russia does so also, diplomats speculated. But Moscow so far has shown no sign of supporting Washington, with council sources saying Russia is worried about its financial ties with Baghdad as well as political implications in the Middle East.
When the United States in 1990 wanted to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait, former Secretary of State James Baker took a 10-day odyssey around the world, meeting 13 of the 15 U.N. Security Council members and other nations.
The final result on Nov. 30, 1990 was a vote of 12 to 2, with China abstaining and Cuba and Yemen, then council members, voting against. The resolution gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein six weeks to pull his troops out of Kuwait before the United States and its allies were free to attack.
The United States has argued that Iraq, by not permitting weapons inspections, has breached an April 1991 Gulf War cease-fire resolution but only Britain agrees with this view. Almost all other U.N. members believe a new resolution is necessary, legally as well as politically.
Other than Britain, almost all the members of the Security Council and beyond have said they need more evidence that Iraq will imminently obtain a nuclear weapon. And they fear the consequences to the Middle East and Iraq after an invasion.
``What sort of Iraq do we wake up to after the bombing, and what happens in the region?'' Annan asked on Monday. ``What impact would it have? These are questions leaders I have spoken to have posed.''
-------- us
Gulf war general says U.S. attack on Iraq is legal
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020909-25469100.htm
The military architect of the United States' first air war against Iraq says a new attack on Baghdad is justified by previous U.N. resolutions demanding an end to the country's weapons of mass destruction program.
In his first public comments on the Iraq war debate, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson said in an interview that President Bush already has international backing for military action in the form of U.N. resolutions. Those resolutions, accepted by Baghdad, state that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein must get rid of his weapons of mass destruction as a condition of the 1991 Persian Gulf war cease-fire.
"We should not forget the Gulf war ended with a cease-fire, not a peace treaty," Gen. Glosson said.
Some prominent retired generals have expressed grave reservations about an attack, fueling critics of the administration in Congress. But Gen. Glosson, a respected war strategist, sees ample justification for an assault on Iraq.
In fact, he said the Clinton administration should have used the same resolutions in 1998 to oust Saddam after his regime forced the exit of U.N. weapons inspectors. At the time, President Clinton ordered limited bombing of weapons facilities, command and control units and some of Saddam's top troops.
"The Clinton administration should have attacked in 1998 instead of just moving sand around in the desert," said Gen. Glosson, a combat fighter pilot in Vietnam known for his bold and innovative approach to war planning. "They should have designed an attack that forced Saddam to comply with the U.N. resolutions or be ousted."
He said British aircraft during the 1998 Desert Fox campaign spotted sprayer drones being stored on the ground in Tallil air base, south of Baghdad. The unmanned aircraft were designed to dispense chemical or biological weapons. He said there is no post-campaign assessment that the drones were ever destroyed.
Mr. Bush, along with Vice President Richard B. Cheney, have vowed to remove Saddam from power on the grounds that Baghdad continues to pursue weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear arms. The administration argues these destructive weapons could be turned on the American people and their allies. The president has launched a concerted public offensive to make his case and is scheduled Thursday to address the United Nations in New York.
Gen. Glosson believes that three U.N. resolutions - No. 678 that authorized the 1991 war to evict Iraqi troops from Kuwait and Nos. 686 and 687 that declared a cease-fire and ordered Saddam to get rid of weapons of mass destruction - give Mr. Bush all the authority he needs.
The war resolution authorized the allies to "use all necessary means" to uphold previous U.N. resolutions, which includes weapons prohibitions. It also authorized war to "restore international peace and security in the area."
Gen. Glosson, and some legal scholars, believe these words alone authorize an attack, since Saddam's weapons arsenal threaten "peace and security in the area."
The U.N. cease-fire resolution also gives Mr. Bush additional authorization. It commands Iraq to "unconditionally" rid itself of weapons of mass destruction and submit to inspectors. Baghdad accepted the agreement in 1991 as a condition for a cease-fire. Since then, the United States and its allies say Saddam has failed to live up to either clause.
Gen. Glosson argues that the cease-fire resolution protected Iraq from military intervention only as long as it complied with resolution No. 687. Because it has not, the general says, Mr. Bush is justified to order an attack.
"When Vice President Cheney [then defense secretary during Operation Desert Storm] agreed to the cease-fire at the end of the Gulf war, he insisted that Iraq accept unconditional inspections. And, if violated, military power could be used to force compliance," Gen. Glosson said.
"Vice President Cheney, like other military and civilian leaders, understood that the probability of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons not being totally destroyed during the Gulf war was high. Everyone wanted to make sure we didn't leave Saddam with weapons programs that could be rebuilt quickly," he said.
The highly decorated three-star general designed an air campaign against Iraq in 1990 that employed the first extensive use of stealth technology (the F-117 radar-evading fighter) and precision-guided weapons. Subsequent air wars in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan have relied on the Gulf model.
--------
US Jets Again Attack Iraqi Air Defenses
September 9, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-usa-warplanes.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. warplanes on Monday attacked an air defense command target in a ``no-fly'' zone in southern Iraq in response to continuing attempts to shoot down patrolling American and British jets, the U.S. military said.
The Pentagon said it was the 37th such strike against air defenses in northern and southern no-fly zones of Iraq this year. The exchanges have increased sharply in the last month as speculation has mounted that the United States might invade Baghdad to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
The U.S. Central Command said from its headquarters in Tampa, Florida, that the jets launched guided weapons against a command and control facility near Al Amarah, about 170 miles southeast of Baghdad at 1:30 a.m. EDT.
In Baghdad, an Iraqi military spokesman said in a statement carried by the official Iraqi news agency INA that U.S. and British jets from bases in Kuwait on Monday bombed civilian targets in Meisan Province, where Al Amarah is located. He reported no casualties.
The spokesman also said Iraqi air defenses fired at U.S. and British warplanes patrolling the northern no-fly zone from Turkey on Monday and that evidence indicated one of the planes might have been hit. Pentagon officials denied that any coalition warplanes had been damaged.
The Central Command statement did not say how many planes were involved in Monday's southern raid. The Pentagon last week dismissed a British newspaper report that 100 U.S. and British warplanes had conducted a very large raid in southern Iraq in what could be a prelude to war.
INCREASING TIT-FOR-TAT ATTACKS
But defense officials did say last Thursday's strike against a military airfield 240 miles west of Baghdad was bigger than usual, involving a dozen warplanes using 25 guided weapons.
Marine Corps Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters in an interview on Monday that coalition warplanes policing the zones, set up after the 1991 Gulf War, would not let Iraqi threats to the aircraft go unpunished.
``Although a missile may be fired at our planes from a particular area, we may choose to go after a different part of their air defense system, whether it be a communications node, or radar, or missiles, or their ability to have aircraft take off from runways, Pace said.
``It will correspond from the standpoint of being against their air defense capabilities. It may, or may not, be in the exact location from which the missile was fired.''
Many U.S. allies, meanwhile, have voiced firm opposition to any American invasion of Iraq, although President Bush accuses Saddam of continuing to press ahead with development of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons since the Gulf War.
In television interviews on Sunday top advisers to Bush cited new evidence that Saddam was trying to make a nuclear bomb as they made the administration's case to topple the Iraqi leader.
Baghdad has repeatedly denied it is continuing weapons of mass destruction programs, but has refused to allow U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country following their withdrawal in 1998.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS
Were Civil Liberties a Casualty of 9/11?
Monday, September 09, 2002
By Catherine Herridge and Eric Shawn,
Fox News
http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,62406,00.html
WASHINGTON - The Sept. 11 attacks shattered the American sense of freedom, casting the very idea of freedom in a new light.
They also raised the question of whether Americans should be willing to surrender some of their rights in exchange for security against terror.
Some lawmakers and security experts say, yes, absolutely -- despite a drumbeat from privacy advocates who say it doesn't have to be that way.
"With regard to civil liberties, what people refer to as civil liberties, I think there are certain things that need to be given up to a certain extent," according to radio talk show host Michael Smerconish.
Americans may take for granted that they are protected from government intrusion. But federal agents have enjoyed expanded investigatory powers in the wake of Sept. 11 that allow them more than ever to track e-mail, poke through financial transactions, peruse library and consumer histories -- even sign up neighbors to spy.
"I believe some of these tools would have helped in the events of 9/11," said security consultant Bill Daly. "I'm not saying it would have stopped 9/11 from occurring, but they would have been helpful tools for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. I think now the time is right to be able to use them."
Before Sept. 11, the federal government already had wide-ranging powers to secure warrants. But new authority under the USA Patriot Act has broadened those powers, and has made it easier for agents to conduct their surveillance.
Critics say law-abiding citizens' rights are being abridged, while terrorists will continue to subvert the law. They also fear the government is setting a dangerous precedent with new spying powers that might be abused in the future by less well-meaning administrations.
"I think it raises real serious concerns for the potential precedents they set and how they might be abused down the road," said James Lyndsey, an analyst with the Brookings Institution.
"I think if you actually look at Sept. 11 ... it's not at all clear that civil liberties were the problem," Lyndsey continued. "What really seemed to be the problem was foremost a lack of vigilance, a real lack of conviction within the American public, within the federal government, that a catastrophic terrorist attack could really happen here in the United States."
But that's why Americans should not be wary about giving the government the tools it needs to prevent another terrorist attack, say supporters of increased security measures.
"This country needs a gut check," said Smerconish. "Are we at war or are we not at war?"
Ethnic Profiling
The Patriot Act also allows the government to indefinitely detain immigrants -- even permanent residents -- without criminal charges. Profiling for Middle Easterners and Arabs has become a major debate as airport officials and law enforcement officials try to plug the holes in the nation's security.
Some point out the terrorists who committed the heinous Sept. 11 attacks share a common thread: They are all radical Muslims with Middle Eastern and Arab backgrounds. So, they reason, targeting men who fit that description is not only common sense -- it's a necessary law enforcement tool.
"Usama bin Laden has called on all Muslims to destroy Americans," said Heather MacDonald, of the Manhattan Institute. "He has not called on all Jews or Catholics to destroy Americans -- it's a Muslim appeal. Law enforcement needs to keep that in mind."
Many Americans seem to agree. A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics Poll found that 54 percent of Americans favor profiling Arabs or Muslims outright. Only 34 percent thought it was a bad idea.
Arab-American advocates have a different take on the situation.
"A profile is a whole bunch of behavioral characteristics of which race or religion or gender may be one," said Jean Abinader, of the Arab American Institute. "The problem is when you give it to people who are untrained in the situation or who are looking for shortcuts, race becomes the dominant feature and that's where profiling fails."
John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute says treating potentially innocent people as though they were criminals is not the American way.
"What we're saying is we're willing to subject innocent people to suspicion. Treat them as if they were criminals," he said. "The question is, where do we stop? It completely guts our Constitution's freedoms."
-------
INSIDE THE NEW CAMP X-RAY
Sep 9 2002
UK Mirror,
RICHARD WALLACE, US Editor at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/mirror/sep2002/4/6/000DC427-59DC-1D7C-BC7F80BFB6FAFE6C.jpg
THIS is the first glimpse of Camp Delta, the new Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
CAMP DELTA: The heavily guarded steel-cell blocks of the prison's dusty acres
Here 598 al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects from 38 countries - including seven Britons - are held without charge, without legal rights and for some, without hope.
For 167 of the 168 hours in a week their world is a cramped 8ft x 6ft 8in cell.
Their day-to-day existence in a remote corner of the US Naval Base on the south-east of the island is pitiful.
The strain of living in such conditions - condemned by human rights groups again last week - has taken a severe toll. The Daily Mirror has learned that more than 30 of the men have attempted suicide.
Occupying five dusty acres on a clifftop half a mile from the old Camp X-Ray, the new facility is no temporary jail.
Camp Delta is designed as a permanent prison - a grim monument of rigid metal, steel and razor wire to President Bush's determination to continue offending basic human rights. As the weeks and months crawl by, more and more unidentified prisoners arrive.
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/mirror/jan2002/1/9/00030AE5-0835-1C4C-A5B980C328EC0182.x-ray
CAMP X-RAY: Masked and manacled captives at the former prison for terror suspects
Last month 34 were flown in from Afghanistan. Their arrival left just 14 vacancies, but phase three of the prison will be finished by next month, allowing the camp to incarcerate 816.
So far £30million has been poured into the project - that's £36,764 a cell - and blueprints for the facility to be expanded to detain 2,000 prisoners have been approved.
Senior officers have also earmarked a site near the base airfield for a bricks and mortar prison. A fully-equipped permanent hospital with 116 beds is being built at high speed to replace the medical centre of scruffy, beige tents where 50 major surgeries have been performed since the detainees began to arrive in January.
Guantanamo's business is banging up suspected Taliban and al-Qaeda. And business is clearly good for the Americans.
But the mental health of the detainees is cause for concern. One of the 30 who attempted suicide tried to slash his wrists with a plastic razor while three others tried to hang themselves.
US officials also confirmed to us that 37 other detainees are being treated for severe mental health problems.
And 18 of those psychiatric cases are so severely traumatised that they are receiving daily treatment and powerful drugs to stave off a variety of symptoms.
http://images.icnetwork.co.uk/upl/mirror/sep2002/3/6/0001A2A2-59CB-1D7C-BC7F80BFB6FAFE6C.jpg
QUIZZED: Richard Wallace interviews the camp's commander Rick Baccus, left
The psychiatric problems include major depression, post-traumatic stress, personality disorders, psychotic attacks and suicidal tendencies.
A new Amnesty International report says the detainees are in legal limbo and face a serious breach of their human rights.
They are routinely denied the right to see lawyers, although they could face trial by special US military courts with power to pass death sentences.
The Mirror quizzed guards, doctors, nurses and military officials during a heavily-escorted three-day visit.
Our every move was monitored. And it was difficult to get any information, either on or off the record.
But despite the tight restrictions the Mirror has pieced together the most accurate picture yet of life for the detainees. And it's not pretty.
The cramped cells, cut from steel shipping containers and even smaller than X-Ray's notorious cages, are collected in 10 blocks.
Delta, surrounded by thick green netting to keep out prying eyes, is brightly lit by powerful arc lights 24 hours a day and the camp is ringed with seven wooden guard towers manned by sharpshooters.
There are regular incidents when some prisoners go stir crazy, shouting and screaming as they climb and claw their cell walls in despair.
But most of the time there is an eerie, pathetic silence. On our two visits to the camp there wasn't a sound and it was hard to believe there was any life behind the wire at all.
Overhead, like extras in a bad movie, huge black turkey vultures lazily circled the parched landscape.
The 30 who have tried to end their lives have taken desperate and pathetic measures. A few have used the plastic utensils issued with their meals to try and slash their wrists.
Some repeatedly banged their heads against the metal wall in their cells or punched the walls in frustration.
Other men suffer from insomnia which in turn makes them anxious and then depressed. A few pace their cells manically or pass the time doing endless press-ups.
Extraordinarily, the military insist none of men's mental health has degenerated since being incarcerated in either camp and that all 37 had their psychiatric problems before being captured.
Doctor Commander James Radkee said: "Some have maladaptive, life-long behavioural problems."
When we confronted Delta commander Brigadier General Rick Baccus he admitted there had been problems.
"We are concerned about their mental health," he said. "So we have expert personnel trained in such issues who take care of that aspect of medical treatment."
But army chaplain Major Mike Merrill, a 35-year-old Southern Baptist preacher from Maryland who ministers to the guards and some of the detainees, admitted talk of suicide was common.
He said: "They are going through a very rough time. There are issues of loneliness, frustration, anger, emotional mood swings.
"They miss their families, they lose hope and lose sight of tomorrow. Like any prison there are a few individuals who will say, 'I don't want to live any more. I have no purpose'."
Merrill initially saw the one Christian detainee, but has converted five Muslims to Christianity and has lent them Bibles translated into Arabic. "I didn't try to convert them, they approached me," he added.
Along one wall of the cells is a welded metal bedframe 4ft off the floor on which the detainee places his inch-thick foam mattress.
Underneath they store approved personal possessions - prayer mat and beads, a pair of flip-flops, a bucket, towel, flannel, toothpaste, soap, shampoo and a copy of the Koran. They have access to books on religious texts and vocabulary and are allowed to send four letters and two postcards a month. Writing materials are confiscated as soon as their letters are completed.
The rear section of the cell has a 4ft x 4ft mesh window which allows - in theory - the breeze from the Caribbean to blow through the prison.
But the desert heat which sends temperatures soaring into the high 90s by 8am, coupled with intense humidity, means there's little fresh air, let alone wind, to cool off in.
A big steel dome on the roof of each cell houses a cooling fan which is turned on or off at the discretion of the guards.
Prisoners are sometimes treated for dehydration, but the military insist they do have a permanent supply of water and that it is often their own fault.
In one corner of the cell is a flushable toilet built into the concrete floor alongside a lowered wash basin to allow Muslim prisoners to wash their feet before prayers.
They get three meals a day, all halal approved, totalling around 2,700 calories.
Food is served on plastic plates and passed through a slot in the wire cell door.
Each week they receive just two opportunities to exercise for a strict 15-minute period. That's it. They exercise in a purpose-built yard shielded from the rest of the population. Most run around in circles and it is no wonder the detainees have all gained an average of a stone locked up in their cells for such long stretches.
Disgracefully, yet just within the guidelines of the Geneva Convention, they are allowed only two 15-minute showers a week when they are also given a freshly laundered orange two-piece prison suit.
Each time they are required to leave their cell they are shackled at the hands, waist and feet and escorted by at least two guards who tightly grip either arm.
Detainees needing medical help - one in three has dormant tuberculosis - are strapped to a trolley to be taken to hospital and are also restrained and manacled by their ankle to hospital beds during treatment.
Five times a day a taped message calls them to prayer. Inmates attempt to engage the guards in conversation, calling out in English. The guards are under orders to be be polite, but businesslike.
Occasionally, in a rare moment of good humour, some of the captives sing Britney Spears or Madonna songs. Oddly, country singer Garth Brooks is a particular favourite.
It is camp policy that inmates use a normal speaking voice. Any shouting or attempts to communicate with other prisoners over distance are punished severely. The ultimate punishment is The Cooler, a metal box which is air-conditioned and lit, with just enough room for the offender to move around in.
All detainees have been interrogated - some more often than others.
The manacled men are seated throughout interviews lasting from 30 minutes to four hours and running from 9am to 9pm.
US officials insist detainees are not harmed or threatened. They even secretly reward co-operative prisoners with a McDonald's meal from the base's only fast-food joint.
Outside interrogations and the hour of exercise and showers each week, the detainees just languish in their cells. General Baccus, 49, insisted that their human rights had not been ignored although their conditions had significantly improved since the closure of Camp X-Ray.
He said: "Remember, we believe they are very dangerous individuals who took up arms against American servicemen and women in an attempt to do them harm.
"Yes, the facilities in Camp Delta are a great improvement over Camp X-Ray, from both sides of consideration."
Baccus could not say how long Guantanamo Bay would continue to hold prisoners.
"It would be hard for me to speculate in terms of how long we'll be here," he said.
"But it's safe to say that I will probably have a follow-on commander here when my tour finishes in four to six months time. Whether he will have a follow-on commander I can't speculate."
For the detainees each day is the same. They all ask what's going to happen to them. They all ask for lawyers. They all ask for some glimmer of hope.
To each question the guards have only one answer: "We don't know".
And it seems that at this time nobody knows, not even the President of the United States himself.
---
Sept. 11 Families Wary on Civil Rights Threats
Mon Sep 9, 2002
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=578&e=1&cid=578&u=/nm/20020909/ts_nm/attack_families_dc
WASHINGTON - Families of Sept. 11 victims criticized President Bush on Monday for eroding civil rights in the U.S. war on terror, and said they believed airport security was no better than a year ago.
Stephen Push, head of the Sept. 11 Homeland Security Alliance, gave the Bush administration a "C-" grade on a report card in urging the government to temper military gusto with fair treatment of those placed under arrest.
Push said he did not believe suspended judicial rights -- such as denying terrorist suspects access to a lawyer or expeditious trial -- were needed or desirable.
"I'm not sure it is really necessary in order to protect us," he told reporters.
"The fact that over a thousand people were swept up and there have been no reports of them being terrorists, it raises questions on whether these people were really being treated well."
The Homeland Security Alliance is made up of lobby groups representing those who lost family in last year's attacks in New York and Washington, including Families of Sept. 11, Voices of Sept. 11 and the Skyscraper Safety Campaign.
Push said the alliance report card was penned by 18 members most active in various groups' lobbying efforts to Congress and the White House.
Their report criticized Bush for persistent aviation security troubles, reflected in media reports of guns and knives being carried onto planes.
"For all the delays at airports and all the money that has been spent, aviation security is not much better than it was on September 11," Push said.
But the group praised the president for the U.S. military effort in Afghanistan ( news - web sites), where the administration dislodged the ruling Taliban in retaliation for the hijacked airliner attacks that killed some 3,000 people. The United States blames Osama bin Laden ( news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network for the attacks.
----
Civil Liberties: What's Wrong with the TIPS Program?
A WW I Horror Story Ripped from the History Books
9-09-02
History News Network
http://hnn.us/articles/960.html
Ms. Jensen is a historian at New Mexico State University and the author of many books on civil liberties.
In March 1917, with the United States on the brink of war with Germany, the administration of President Woodrow Wilson decided it needed help to secure the country internally from German saboteurs and spies. During a period of neutrality, from August 1914, when the European war began, to April 1917, when the United States formally entered what later became known as World War I, the Wilson administration had struggled with the question of internal security. It was especially concerned with activities by German aliens believed to be involved in espionage, sabotage, or what came to be called generally "German intrigues." Secretary of Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo argued his Secret Service be given control over any suspected German agents who should all be rounded up and sent back to Germany.
Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory, meanwhile, who was concerned about legal authority to act against suspected agents, claimed jurisdiction for his Bureau of Investigation (BI, which later evolved into the Federal Bureau of Investigation, FBI), and worked to obtain legal authority from Congress to expand counterespionage work and his Bureau. Locked in competition with a Secretary of Treasury, who was urging his agents to expose "German intrigues," and apparently intent on exploiting publicity for these stunning revelations, Attorney General Gregory accepted the offer of a Chicago advertising executive to organize a volunteer group of businessmen to assist in investigating German suspects.
This volunteer group, known as the American Protective League (APL), headquartered in Washington with branches throughout the county became a quasi-official investigating arm of the Justice Department, with the official task of investigating war-related internal security cases. The APL led the Wilson administration deeply into controversy over the question of how much authority the United States government could or should give to volunteers in investigating suspected spies and saboteurs. What began as an agreement to allow patriotic citizens to help the Justice Department defend the country, and coincidently maintain its dominance in internal security, eventually led the government deeply into citizen quarrels, such as personal grudges, labor disputes, and serious differences over economic and political policy.
After the fears of the first few months of war abated, there was little for the volunteers to do. With few German agents to investigate, after the early days of the war the Justice Department assigned APL units a variety of more prosaic tasks for the military. These ranged from plant protection to hunting for slackers, jobs which quickly involved volunteers, with their quasi-official authority and "auxiliary to the Justice Department" badges, in the affairs of ordinary citizens. APL units frequently organized plant protection inside factories with government contracts, establishing a secret hierarchy that stretched from company officials and War Department agents to the shop floor where privates watched fellow workers. Volunteer operatives searched for men who refused to register for the draft. They patrolled zones established around cantons where the military wanted liquor and prostitution restricted.
The Justice Department kept its APL volunteers working, in part to preempt the expansion of the Secret Service and Military Intelligence Division (MID) into internal security. After forcing the Secret Service out of the field, the Justice Department negotiated with the War Department to use the APL instead of its own volunteer groups. Although the APL worked for Military Intelligence and assigned one of its national directors as a liaison with it, the Justice Department nominally controlled the volunteers. The Justice Department agreed to supply APL members for the many tasks the military felt it should perform at home, but had insufficient trained military personnel. The plan also fit into a larger administration goal, to separate the military from civilians. The Selective Service, as the draft was called, had as its goal maintaining a civilian buffer between the military and the groups from which young men were now being called for military training.
The Wilson administration presided over a country divided about the wisdom of going to war, and that fact also dictated the caution with which officials used the military on the home front. Still, the fear of foreign danger fueled support for the war and the expansion of the government at home. The line between countering espionage and sabotage and stifling dissent was difficult to maintain. Volunteers often interpreted opposition to war policies as even more dangerous than enemy spying or sabotage because it hindered the war effort at the front. What was acceptable activity during war was unclear, and the guidelines about which laws could be applied to which activities were vague. Who was to determine what should be done and where the line should be drawn?
The APL had inherent weaknesses because of its volunteer status. Members were not selected, trained, or disciplined by the federal government. The group self-selected members, exercised only limited authority over its far-flung units, and had no way to discipline members, who often defined a broad range of legal activities as disloyal and in need of investigation.
Some APL units were composed of previously formed groups. The Minute Men was one such private organization that had already ruthlessly suppressed the Industrial Workers of the World in many areas of Washington State when the APL merged with it. Once recognized as authorized investigators, members went after a wide variety of suspects, including teachers accused of teaching "hun" courses in history. In four months, the Minute Men branch of the APL conducted over two thousand investigations in Seattle alone.
In a number of states the APL worked with Committees of Public Safety (CPS), which directed state war efforts and had broad powers to protect persons and property. Ostensibly formed for state defense, these committees were sometimes under the control of men who saw enemies everywhere and who were eager to use the APL in all kinds of vendettas. Judge John McGee, a member of the Minnesota CPS, whose very active intelligence bureau cooperated with APL members, attacked Swedish and German aliens as a whole, attempted to oust the Socialist mayor of Minneapolis, and opposed the attempts of farmers to organize the Non Partisan League because it wanted more government control of the economy. In April of 1918, McGee went before a Senate committee to argue the government should have formed firing squads after the declaration of war against Germany. They should be formed immediately, he urged, and "work overtime in order to make up for lost time." Behind such overblown rhetoric was the argument by men like McGee that the civilians should hand over control of the home front to the military.
These attacks led the Justice Department to expand the APL still further. The "web," as the APL called its network of operatives, claimed over 300,000 members by the end of 1918. As it expanded and spread through the United States, the APL turned its attention first from aliens to dissenters, and then eventually to larger numbers of ordinary citizens. By 1918, the APL was probing deeply into the lives of ordinary citizens as it collected domestic intelligence for the War Department. Those reports helped convince the War Department that the government needed protection against its own civilians. In the early 1920s, it developed plans coded War Plans White to counter a domestic revolution.
The Justice Department tolerated the APL because of necessity. It had too few agents for the investigations it wished to make. It also exploited the APL to preempt internal security work by other federal agencies at the national level, and by states at the regional level. It used a private group of investigators against whom the Bill of Rights provided no defense. In the 1950s, the federal government obtained legal sanction from the Supreme Court for supremacy in guarding the home front, but at that time, Congress also extended constitutional safeguards to protect against possible abuse of that power. Any strengthening of federal posers in internal security seemed dangerous to American freedoms unless accompanied by a similar expansion of protections of civil liberties.
By the end of World War I, Attorney General Gregory and his Director of the War Emergency Division, John Lord O'Brian were concerned about growing APL involvement in the lives of Americans. General Gregory ordered the APL disbanded in early 1919. He offered members the government's thanks for their work, granted them "honorable discharges," and at various mustering out celebrations in major cities had his subordinates tell the volunteers to go home.
A number of APL units vigorously protested their dismissal, arguing the group should become a permanent "auxiliary" of the federal government. When Gregory and John Lord O'Brian stood firm, disgruntled volunteers found local support for their continued activities and reappeared under a variety of new names. In Chicago, APL veterans formed the Patriotic American League, in Cleveland the Loyalty League, in Cincinnati they became part of the Home Guard. In Minneapolis, APL members transformed themselves into the "Committee of Thirteen." Even when officially gone, the APL provided a model for citizen sleuthing. Ku Klux Klan founder William Simons claimed the idea for his surveillance of Americans came from the Atlanta APL. Northern factory owners copied plant protection formulas in forming surveillance groups to report on their workers' union activities.
APL members were recalled to serve government agencies of various sorts in the 1920s. Former members worked again for the Justice Department under Attorney General Mitchell Palmer during the Red Raids and for the War Department's head of the Military Intelligence Division, Brigadier General Marlborough Churchill, as well as for assorted state and local investigative bodies concerned with what they considered disloyal or un-American activities. Gregory had attempted to collect all the case files opened by the APL during the war, but instead local units held many of them for future use, often by local police or regional military intelligence offices. The national government finally ceased using APL veterans only in 1924.
On the eve of another war in 1940, both civil libertarians and professionals within the Justice Department--including J. Edgar Hoover--opposed the use of volunteers. They all agreed that counterespionage was the proper province of a small group of highly trained and organized professionals rather than volunteers. Hoover did encourage the public to report neighborhood subversives in the 1950s, and volunteers similarly formed private intelligence units, but he never gave them official sanction.
John Lord O'Brian, who had insisted the APL be abandoned in 1919, always defended their use in World War I, even for investigations, but specifically for helping patrol and protect munition plants and harbor fronts and for running down draft dodgers, then called "slackers." Ironically, it was such activities as running down slackers which first brought unfavorable publicity to the APL in the summer of 1918, when they held massive dragnets to locate men who had dodged the draft. Such visible activities alerted the public to the presence of the APL and to the fact that many of the purported "government agents" had actually been volunteers without legal authority to act on behalf of the government. Whatever Hoover may have done later to promote neighbor spies and support the organizations that hunted radicals, he steadfastly condemned the official use of organizations such as the APL.
There is a long history of of government using private groups for domestic surveillance and encouraging individuals to spy on their neighbors. We should at least be aware of that history, as well as the history of official civilian and military government surveillance, as once again many Americans are concerned about security. Internal security policy deserves the most careful discussion and analysis, not only by those who understand the many legal and political issues involved, but also by those who are being called upon to engage in these activities. The basic rights that have insured our existence as a people are greatly affected by internal security policy. It is well worth the time and effort to discuss these issues of safety, freedom, and security that are so often consciously shrouded by governments in secrecy. Sources:
This material is drawn primarily from my trilogy on internal security and surveillance: on the APL generally, The Price of Vigilance (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1968); for the use by the Military Intelligence Division of APL and APL veterans, Army Surveillance in America, 1775-1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); and for an analysis of the experiences with surveillance by one group of immigrants, some of whom were involved in anti-colonial movement against Great Britain, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988).
----
FBI nets suspects in global manhunt
By Guy Taylor
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 9, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020909-13656147.htm
The FBI became engaged last year in its most expansive suspect search ever, a massive manhunt involving law-enforcement agencies across the globe and united by the goal of exposing and neutralizing Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorism network.
Having indicted more than 20 suspected terrorists believed to be linked to the elusive network since the early 1990s, federal law-enforcement authorities have possessed intelligence on al Qaeda for more than a decade.
But September 11, 2001, pushed the process of tracking the network into a new spotlight. More than ever, citizens and governments worldwide were overcome by an itch to expose al Qaeda and the plot behind the deadliest terrorist attacks in history.
A shift in the FBI's priorities became clear in the months after the attacks, when newly tapped FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told reporters in Washington: "The hardest thing for all of us is to think that another such attack will occur and we have not done everything possible we can - overturned every stone - to try to prevent [it]."
Hundreds of arrests have been made, many during the U.S. military's raid on Afghanistan. While dozens of those in custody are suspected of having al Qaeda connections, media coverage has focused most heavily on two men: accused September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui and "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh.
Moussaoui, the 34-year-old French Moroccan, is tentatively scheduled for a January trial in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, where Lindh, 21, negotiated a plea agreement with the government in July.
Much of the FBI probe has focused inside the United States with more than 150 separate investigations into groups or individuals suspected of al Qaeda ties. The bureau has also refocused priorities abroad.
Agents hunting for terrorists in Europe and across Asia, in Pakistan, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and the Philippines reportedly have learned that the al Qaeda network spans across an estimated 60 countries.
With Saudi-born bin Laden topping it, a list of 22 of the world's most dangerous terrorism suspects posted on the FBI's Web site indicates that most of those connected to the network remain at large.
The tactic of posting suspects on www.fbi.gov has proved worthwhile, however. One suspect whose name made the site last month recently surrendered to authorities in Saudi Arabia.
Alerting police worldwide that Saud Abdulaziz Saud al-Rasheed is suspected of being "associated with the September 11, 2001, hijackers," the bulletin was posted after investigators discovered al-Rasheed's passport photo next to photos of some of the September 11 hijackers on a CD-ROM.
Charges have not been brought against him.
Dozens of other suspects not posted on the Web site have been rounded up by the FBI and police in other countries, and many of the arrests have been made during the past four months.
•In May, FBI agents in Chicago arrested a man coming off a flight from Pakistan. Jose Padilla, 31, a U.S. citizen who took the name Abdullah al Mujahir, is suspected of plotting with al Qaeda to attack the United States with a radioactive "dirty bomb." Although charges have not been filed, he's being held by the U.S. military in South Carolina.
•In May and June, authorities in Morocco arrested a 10-member group suspected of al Qaeda involvement and of plotting an attack on U.S. and British warships in the Mediterranean Sea. Members of the group, which includes three Moroccan women, are charged with criminal conspiracy, among other things.
•In July, authorities in Hamburg, Germany, raided six apartments and an Islamic book store before arresting six men suspected of ties to al Qaeda. Hamburg is widely believed to have housed an al Qaeda terrorist cell directly involved in plotting the September 11 attack. Hamburg police continue to investigate, although it is not clear what charges, if any, will be filed against the arrested suspects.
•In July, FBI agents in Denver arrested James Ujaama, suspected of offering material support to al Qaeda members engaged in a conspiracy to attack persons and property outside the United States. The 36-year-old was indicted Aug. 28 by a federal grand jury in Seattle on charges he provided al Qaeda with "training facilities, computer services, safe houses and personnel," according to court papers.
Another arrested earlier in the year is Richard C. Reid, the "shoe-bomber" suspect, indicted in January by a federal grand jury in Boston on charges he was trained by al Qaeda in Afghanistan to destroy a commercial jetliner during a trans-Atlantic flight.
Reid, a 28-year-old British citizen and convert to Islam, was arrested Dec. 22 after crew members and passengers aboard American Airlines Flight 63 bound from Paris to Miami overpowered him as he reportedly attempted to ignite explosives hidden in his shoes.
The Boeing 767 jetliner was diverted for an emergency landing in Boston and escorted to Logan International Airport by two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighter jets. Authorities said he was trying to ignite 10 ounces of plastic explosives hidden in his sneakers.
On Jan. 16, the Wall Street Journal reported that data found on a computer believed to have been used by a top al Qaeda commander in Afghanistan described the path of an "al Qaeda operative" closely resembling the path of travel Reid made before his arrest.
A week after the report appeared, Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped in Karachi, Pakistan, while researching links between Reid and Pakistani extremists. Mr. Pearl was brutally murdered by his captors on videotape four weeks after his kidnapping.
In March, the Justice Department suggested that as many as 100 of the more than 1,200 people detained on immigration and other charges in the United States after the September 11 attacks on America were suspected of having links to al Qaeda.
Federal law-enforcement authorities say information gleaned during intense interrogations of the more than 300 prisoners being held at a detention center on the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay has given rise to dozens of leads in the ongoing al Qaeda investigation.
The newly-passed USA Patriot Act gave broad new powers to federal law-enforcement authorities to question and detain indefinitely noncitizens suspected of having ties to terrorists.
But Moussaoui remains the only man indicted on charges linked directly to the September 11 attacks. He is accused of conspiring with the 19 hijackers who executed the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which killed more than 3,000 people.
Prosecutors say Moussaoui would have been "the 20th hijacker" had he not been arrested and held on immigration violations before the attacks occurred. FBI agents detained him Aug. 26, 2001, after employees at a Minneapolis flight school reported him as a suspicious foreigner wanting to learn how to fly and steer an aircraft without learning takeoff and landing techniques.
Since being indicted, Moussaoui has filed dozens of handwritten motions - winning the right in June to defend himself.
During a hearing before a packed courtroom on July 18, Moussaoui referred to September 11 by telling U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema that as a self-proclaimed member of al Qaeda, he knows "who done it." Moussaoui also said undercover FBI agents participated in the attacks - one even riding on a hijacked airplane.
Federal prosecutors have said they would seek the death penalty for Moussaoui if he is convicted.
Weeks after the Moussaoui case began making headlines, the U.S. District Court in Alexandria - under the leadership of U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty - was assigned the Lindh case in late November. U.S. Special Forces had captured Lindh among members of al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. He was found among war prisoners in a temporary jail near Mazar-e-Sharif.
Bearded and weary from combat, Lindh appeared in an interview with a CNN war correspondent and said he had been in Afghanistan six months. He also admitted that he had been assigned to a branch of Arab fighters in the Taliban.
Lindh, who was born in Maryland, had graduated high school in a suburb of San Francisco at the age of 16 before devoting his life to Islam, traveling to Afghanistan and taking up arms in support of the Muslim holy war there.
During the weeks after his capture, he told FBI agents he had met bin Laden at a training camp, where the terrorist leader thanked him for taking part in the jihad, according to court papers.
On July 15, Lindh's lawyers plea-bargained with federal prosecutors, who dropped such charges against him as the conspiracy to kill Americans, which could have put Lindh in prison for life. In exchange, Lindh pleaded guilty to supplying services to the Taliban and to carrying a firearm and explosives while fighting in Afghanistan.
He also agreed to help the government with any future investigations into the Taliban and al Qaeda.
Lindh was not the only American-born man captured in Afghanistan last year.
Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American citizen of Middle Eastern decent, was captured in November and his case also is being played out in Virginia.
After having sent him with other detainees from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, U.S. officials learned that Hamdi, 21, was born in Baton Rouge, where his father had worked as an engineer in a U.S.-Saudi venture. When he was 3 years old, Hamdi's family moved back to Saudi Arabia.
Once at Guantanamo Bay, Hamdi began demanding a lawyer and a fair trial as an American citizen. On April 5, authorities transferred him to the Norfolk Naval Station brig, where he has been held since. But unlike Lindh, no charges have been filed against Hamdi.
Hamdi has, however, been appointed a public defender to represent him in federal court in Norfolk, where his case has become a source of contention between civil liberties activists and the government.
The government argues that enemy combatants detained in America's war against terrorism can be held indefinitely without charges being filed against them.
Hamdi's father filed a petition to the Justice Department in June, seeking his son's release on grounds he has not been charged with anything. The petition was contested by the government, as was the appointment of Hamdi's public defender. The government argued that Hamdi might try to use the public defender to communicate with other suspected terrorists who have been detained.
In July, the government presented to the court a description of Hamdi's capture in Afghanistan, saying there was proof Hamdi is a devotee of the Taliban.
But U.S. District Judge Robert Doumar rejected the description and on Aug. 16 demanded more evidence be provided to explain why Hamdi is being held without charges.
The government's response is still pending.
Last month, a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan, Youssef Hmimssa, Farouk Ali-Haimoud, and Abdella, all of Arab origin, with conspiring to support al Qaeda. They were accused of operating a "covert underground support unit" and a "sleeper operational combat cell" for the radical Islamic movement Salafiyyah, an al Qaeda ally.
All but Abdella have been in custody on immigration violations since shortly after the September 11 attacks.
According to the indictment, the men also plotted terrorist attacks in Turkey and Jordan and possessed a videotape showing Disneyland in California and the MGM Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
•Jerry Seper contributed to this report.
----
Report: D.C. taping spawns alert
AP
September 9, 2002
USA Today
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2002-09-09-washington-alert_x.htm
United States security agencies here are on alert to a potential terrorist attack after a man videotaped the Washington Monument, Pentagon and other buildings, it was reported Monday.
Officials said, however, they had no specific threats.
The alert was issued Wednesday after U.S. intelligence officials obtained a copy of a videotape that contained pictures of the Washington Monument, Pentagon and other buildings, The Washington Times reported, quoting sources that it did not name.
The man, whom the paper described as being of Middle Eastern origin, videotaped the buildings and also paced off several distances around the monument, the Times reported.
Similar surveillance was discovered near the Port of Los Angeles in June.
The Times said surveillance of potential targets is considered a sign that a terrorist attack is being planned.
----
Exclusive: The Informant Who Lived With the Hijackers
NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the bureau's informants had a close relationship with two of the hijackers
By Michael Isikoff
MSNBC September 9, 2002
NEWSWEEK Sept. 16 issue
http://www.msnbc.com/news/805186.asp
At first, FBI director Bob Mueller insisted there was nothing the bureau could have done to penetrate the 9-11 plot. That account has been modified over time - and now may change again. NEWSWEEK has learned that one of the bureau's informants had a close relationship with two of the hijackers: he was their roommate.
THE CONNECTION, JUST discovered by congressional investigators, has stunned some top counterterrorism officials and raised new concerns about the information-sharing among U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. The two hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were hardly unknown to the intelligence community. The CIA was first alerted to them in January 2000, when the two Saudi nationals showed up at a Qaeda "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. FBI officials have argued internally for months that if the CIA had more quickly passed along everything it knew about the two men, the bureau could have hunted them down more aggressively.
But both agencies can share in the blame. Upon leaving Malaysia, Almihdhar and Alhazmi went to San Diego, where they took flight-school lessons. In September 2000, the two moved into the home of a Muslim man who had befriended them at the local Islamic Center. The landlord regularly prayed with them and even helped one open a bank account. He was also, sources tell NEWSWEEK, a "tested" undercover "asset" who had been working closely with the FBI office in San Diego on terrorism cases related to Hamas. A senior law-enforcement official told NEWSWEEK the informant never provided the bureau with the names of his two houseguests from Saudi Arabia. Nor does the FBI have any reason to believe the informant was concealing their identities. (He could not be reached for comment.) But the FBI concedes that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house. (On one occasion, a source says, the case agent called up the informant and was told he couldn't talk because "Khalid" - a reference to Almihdhar - was in the room.) I. C. Smith, a former top FBI counterintelligence official, says the case agent should have been keeping closer tabs on who his informant was fraternizing with - if only to seek out the houseguests as possible informants.
"They should have been asking, 'Who are these guys? What are they doing here?' This strikes me as a lack of investigative curiosity." About six weeks after moving into the house, Almihdhar left town, explaining to the landlord he was heading back to Saudi Arabia to see his daughter. Alhazmi moved out at the end of 2000.
In the meantime, the CIA was gathering more information about just how potentially dangerous both men were. A few months after the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, CIA analysts discovered "in their Malaysia file that one of the chief suspects in the Cole attack" Tawfiq bin Attash - was present at the "summit" and had been photographed with Almihdhar and Alhazmi. But it wasn't until Aug. 23, 2001, that the CIA sent out an urgent cable to U.S. border and law-enforcement agencies identifying the two men as "possible" terrorists. By then it was too late. The bureau did not realize the San Diego connection until a few days after 9-11, when the informant heard the names of the Pentagon hijackers and called his case agent. "I know those guys," the informant purportedly said, referring to Almihdhar and Alhazmi. "They were my roommates."
But the belated discovery has unsettled some members of the joint House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the 9-11 attacks. The panel is tentatively due to begin public hearings as early as Sept. 18, racing to its end-of-the-year deadline. But some members are now worried that they won't get to the bottom of what really happened by then. Support for legislation creating a special blue-ribbon investigative panel, similar to probes conducted after Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, is increasing. Only then, some members say, will the public learn whether more 9-11 secrets are buried in the government's files.
- with Jamie Reno
--------
Telling the truth about lie detectors
09/09/2002
By Dan Vergano,
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2002-09-09-lie_x.htm
A long-time law enforcement favorite, the lie detector, now finds itself sweating the hot lights of scientific inquiry.
Crime dramas have long depicted the polygraph's tangle of wires and wiggling chart lines uncovering lies during a hard-boiled criminal interrogation. As suspects are questioned, the device checks for sweaty skin or racing hearts to root out deception, but the machine's accuracy has long been in dispute.
Nonetheless, the polygraph has a higher-than-ever profile. It's an ongoing bone of contention on Capitol Hill and a factor in recent spy investigations of FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen and physicist Wen Ho Lee. In the Lee case, the FBI's contention the physicist had lied on a polygraph test in 1998 led to 59 charges, all but one dropped in a plea bargain two years later. That sparked a request for a National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report, due as soon as the first week of October, on the validity of the polygraph.
Now, some of the same politicians who called for polygraphs of federal employees are involved in an FBI investigation aimed at finding who's responsible for a classified intelligence leak about two intercepted messages that hinted at the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Many House-Senate intelligence committee staffers and legislators, perhaps most prominently Sen. Richard Shelby, R.-Ala., have declined to take polygraph tests.
"Allowing the executive branch to submit the legislative branch to lie-detector tests raises constitutional issues of separation of powers," Shelby says, in a statement.
Polygraph critics such as Alan Zelicoff of Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico find the sensitivity of Shelby and his committee peers ironic, noting two years ago that the committee helped instigate the polygraph screening of weapons scientists designed to root out spies.
A physician biodefense researcher at the weapons lab, Zelicoff has led opposition to the polygraph there, saying that for screening purposes, the device's measures - pulse, blood pressure, breathing and sweating - reveal deception about as well as a coin flip. He likens the polygraph to a defective medical test, one whose high false-positive rate, depicting honest people as liars, makes it unreliable as a diagnostic tool. Last year, Attorney General John Ashcroft estimated the false-positive rate of polygraphs at 15%, about a one-in-six chance, at a news conference.
Polygraphs are perhaps the most controversial tool in law enforcement. Some states and federal court judges now accept lie-detector results, but many states ban them outright. A 1998 Supreme Court decision allowed such bans, but read in part, "There is simply no consensus that polygraph evidence is reliable: The scientific community and the state and federal courts are extremely polarized on the matter."
The disagreements have become so entrenched that the NAS deliberately sought members for its report committee who had never staked out a position on the issue. "My primary qualification is I've never worked on the topic," noted committee chair Stephen Fienberg, a statistics expert at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
The key question before his committee is whether the lie-detector test is a scientific test of deception.
In theory, the polygraph relies on the different responses of the guilty and innocent to "relevant" and "control" questions during an interview. People innocent of the case under investigation, whether stealing or spying, would feel more stress about the control questions (e.g. "Before 1992, did you ever tell a lie?"), which discuss common crimes or lapses. Guilty people should show more stress during the relevant questions (e.g. "Did you shoot your husband?"), whether out of fear, effort to hide their deception or guilty remorse.
"Lying drives everything," says Dan Sosnowski of the American Polygraph Association. People inherently act differently when they are being deceptive, he and other advocates suggest. In the hands of a well-trained examiner, he says, the polygraph reveals deceptive answers in more than 90% of cases.
Studies offer a mixed picture. In 1996 the Journal of General Psychology looked at 41 criminal cases and found that control-question tests were 93-96% accurate. Tests where some study participant pretended to steal $5-20 have produced similar findings.
"We know it works, the basic idea behind the procedure is sound," says criminologist Frank Horvath of Michigan State University in East Lansing. He argues polygraphy is most effective when police can structure questions around knowledge known only to the person who committed a crime.
However, in some studies, researchers may toss "inconclusive" tests results, which if added back in, may lower the accuracy rate for detecting deception to the 70% range. Critics like retired FBI scientist Drew Richardson suggest the high accuracy rates reported in some studies result more from the high likelihood of guilt among those tested - criminals or study volunteers who act as faux criminals.
A 1997 survey of 421 psychologists estimated the test's average validity at about 61%, a little better than chance. And University of Utah psychologists published a 1994 report that suggested biting your tongue, pressing your toes to the floor and counting backwards by 7's during control questions would screw up the accuracy of polygraphs.
"A big problem is that it's not really a test of anything," says psychophysiologist William Iacono of the University of Minnesota. He agrees the polygraph can measure physical reactions, but beyond that, nobody knows how the nervous system acts when it is lying. People who don't believe in the polygraph may be more likely to fail tests, he says. Their disbelief and non-responsiveness may look like deception.
Horvath says polygraphy should be compared against other techniques for solving crimes, for accuracy. "Even if we split the difference in the debate about polygraphy and assume it's only 80% accurate, how good are the alternatives? The evidence is clearly on the side of polygraphy."
Iacono suggests that spy catchers and police officers have historically embraced the device, regardless of its lack of a truly scientific rationale, because people do spontaneously confess on occasion during exams. Obviously, guilty people who pass an exam don't turn around and confess, he suggests, with the result that polygraphers never learn about any of their mistakes.
Until then, "I would just tell Shelby and his colleagues to answer the 'relevant' questions and pass on the rest," says Zelicoff. That's what he advises scientists taking the polygraph tests at the national labs.
"I believe that the National Academy of Sciences report will be a significant milestone in the field and I hope that it will encourage those within and without the field to engage in more and better quality research," says Horvath. "Plainly there is more going on here than meets the eye."
-------- terrorism
Locked Up and Patted Down: A Year of Making U.S. Safer
New York Times
September 9, 2002
By TODD S. PURDUM
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/09/national/09SAFE.html
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 - Cockpit doors are stronger, but not all cargo is screened for bombs. The directors of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency now jointly brief the president on terrorist threats, but there are still critical gaps in intelligence gathering and analysis. The Super Bowl has become a superfortress, but the local cineplex remains a soft target. The government issues a rolling rainbow of threat alerts, but Congress and the White House are still battling over the creation of an agency to coordinate security. One year after the worst terrorist attacks on United States soil, Americans are safer but still far from safe.
In recent days, the top Bush administration officials charged with securing the nation at home and abroad have all cited progress but also acknowledged the continuing threat in their public comments. Tom Ridge, the homeland security chief, considers another attack almost certain. Vice President Dick Cheney says the problem is "obviously not" solved, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, says "there will continue to be vulnerability."
Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said: "I think we're clearly safer than we were a year ago, because the No. 1 force that could hurt us, Al Qaeda, while not destroyed, is on the run. And over all, the war on terrorism overseas is going quite well. But you worry three to five years from now whether we'll be safe when the next Al Qaeda arrives, because what we're doing domestically to make ourselves safer is very halting, slow and incomplete."
The Immigration and Naturalization service has put the names of more than 300,000 foreigners with criminal records into the F.B.I. database, so law enforcement can track them. But it still has no precise count of foreign students who have overstayed or violated their visas.
The F.B.I. has reassigned hundreds of agents to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks and has redirected resources in an effort to prevent future ones. But the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, has said that he cannot be certain that the government will thwart another attack, which many officials regard as almost certain.
The C.I.A. is trying to recruit more people fluent in Arabic but still has a critical shortage of sources who have actually penetrated terrorist cells. Although the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have made some strides in coordinating their intelligence gathering and analysis, and more federal agencies, especially the Pentagon, are vying to collect intelligence on terrorists, rivalries among federal agencies still hobble timely analysis and coherent dissemination of the stream of overseas intelligence that floods into the government.
Safety, of course, cannot be guaranteed, especially in a democracy that holds individual freedom among its most cherished values. The real issue is whether the institutions of American life have taken reasonable precautions to protect the public; for the most part, neither the government nor private organizations have taken more than the first halting steps.
Washington is spending about $1 billion a year on programs aimed at keeping nuclear material out of terrorists' hands, but experts say the efforts are uncoordinated. The Federation of American Scientists has just issued a report concluding that emergency workers around the nation still lack training to deal with an attack using weapons of mass destruction.
Baltimore now tests its drinking water three times a day, instead of once, but assessments of the vulnerability of water systems nationwide are not even scheduled for completion until next year.
Over all, the Bush administration has sought to roughly double spending on counterterrorism efforts at home and abroad, to $45 billion next year. But President Bush has threatened to veto the Senate version of the bill creating his Department of Homeland Security on the ground that it maintains civil service rules that he says hamstring managers' ability to fire or promote workers.
"Safer compared to what?" asked Ivo H. Daalder, an expert at the Brookings Institution here. "I would argue safer compared to Sept. 10. We are more likely to make it more difficult, but it doesn't mean we're not going to be attacked. It doesn't mean we're safe. We're not."
Mr. Ridge's office has compiled a list of 71 signs of "progress since Sept. 11," including the expanded use of air marshals, the arrests of more than 500 illegal immigrants on a variety of charges and the restructured counterterrorism efforts at the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.
But many of the 71 items are still only proposals, and with the vast bulk of the nation's vital infrastructure - including shipping, banking, communication networks, power grids and transportation - under private, not public, control, measuring comprehensive progress is all but impossible.
The fiscal and economic aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks has left about half of all United States cities less able to meet their financial needs, according to a recent survey by the National League of Cities. Two-thirds cited a need for more money for equipment and training to support local efforts. While 80 percent of all cities cited cyberterrorism as a concern, barely a quarter of cities reported that their contingency plans addressed that problem.
Mr. Daalder, the Brookings expert, said that perhaps the biggest problem was a continuing "failure of imagination" about the range of potential threats. "We haven't even started to put into place people we will pay to think about the impossible happening, and how to guard against it," he said.
In a speech last week, Richard L. Armitage, deputy secretary of state, said: "Today, America has unprecedented pre-eminence - we've got power, prestige, influence and clout far beyond that known in the history of man. And this is true in all respects: economic, military, cultural and political. In a way, you'd think that this should be all we need to address any challenge to our security, and yet we've never been more aware of our vulnerabilities."
The Nuclear ThreatTracking the Goods And the Guardians
There is no evidence that Al Qaeda has nuclear weapons, experts say. But the cold war left the world awash in the materials and knowledge needed to create nuclear weapons, and indeed awash in the weapons themselves.
Last month, after two years of delays, the Department of Energy decided to move several tons of weapons-grade plutonium and uranium from a poorly guarded laboratory in Los Alamos to keep it from being stolen.
The same month, heavily armed Serbian troops, under the supervision of Russian, American and United Nations officials, flew 100 pounds of bomb-grade uranium from the Vinca nuclear reactor near Belgrade to Russia, where it will be blended with ordinary uranium and made unusable for weapons. The Bush administration recently signed an agreement with Uzbekistan to remove a similar stash of dangerous fuel from the Ulugbek reactor there.
The United States spends about $1 billion a year on various programs to reduce this threat, and is deploying better sensors to detect radioactive material.
But these activities are spread among the Energy, State and Defense Departments and numerous smaller agencies and laboratories, and some experts say a lack of coordination leaves the nation at risk. In June, the National Academy of Sciences recommended that a single agency be in charge of all research on nuclear terrorism.
Nuclear materials - even the kind used in hospitals and other civilian applications - can be used with conventional explosives in what antiterror officials call a dirty bomb to spray radioactive material over a wide area. While they admit that the threat of such an attack is high, scientists say that it would do more economic and psychological harm than physical damage.
Worse, terrorists could set off a fire in the used fuel at a nuclear reactor, perhaps by crashing a plane into the pool where the highly radioactive fuel rods are kept underwater, said Dr. Frank von Hippel, a Princeton physicist.
Nuclear experts worry even more about the detonation of a stolen or homemade nuclear bomb.
An analysis by the Institute for Science and International Security recently concluded that Al Qaeda would be capable of building a crude bomb - one that could be delivered by truck or ship - if it had the right amount of enriched uranium, about 100 pounds.
According to recent estimates by the Federation of American Scientists, Russia has produced about 1,000 tons of enriched uranium. Strategic and tactical nuclear weapons should eventually account for about 150 tons based on the cuts Russia has agreed to make in the arsenal. Russia has agreed to blend about 500 tons of this enriched uranium with ordinary uranium and sell it to the United States as reactor fuel, removing it from the potential black market. But this still leaves several hundred tons not covered by any agreement.
Moreover, tons of enriched uranium are at civilian research reactors scattered about the world, said Matthew Bunn, a research associate and nuclear expert at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. Many such institutions lack robust security, he and other experts say.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, since 1993 there have been around 400 instances of trafficking in nuclear fuel or other radioactive materials. In all about 26 pounds of enriched uranium and almost a pound of plutonium have been seized in various arrests. Because of sloppy or nonexistent accounting, Mr. Bunn said, nobody knows how much has been stolen and not recovered.
To help shore up security and thwart nuclear smuggling, the Department of Energy has been providing training and surveillance equipment, including 30,000 Customs manuals, to Russian officials over the last decade. Some of this technology is now coming back home and being retrofitted, said H. Terry Hawkins, director of the division of nonproliferation and national security at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Last spring, scientists from several national laboratories unveiled a handheld device that will allow customs inspectors to get a reading on what is inside a cargo container, based on radioactive emissions. Scientists hope to begin testing a larger device soon that will probe the contents of cargo containers by beaming neutrons or gamma rays at them, said Dr. William Dunlop, a nuclear physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The hope, officials say, is to install such devices in distant ports.
"The battle for homeland security," Mr. Hawkins said, "begins in places difficult to pronounce." DENNIS OVERBYE
AviationBeyond Screening People and Bags
The federal government is trying to meet new deadlines set by Congress to improve the screening of passengers and checked bags, but security experts inside and outside government say that even in the unlikely event that both goals are met this year, they will not make aviation secure enough.
The public focus has been on two measures linked to deadlines: by Nov. 19 all screeners at checkpoints are supposed to be federal employees; by Dec. 31 all baggage loaded into cargo holds is supposed to be checked for explosives.
Representative John L. Mica, the Florida Republican who is the chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, said the Nov. 19 requirement for federalizing the screeners would probably be met. He added, "We probably will have the passenger screening army in place." The baggage screening deadline may not be met, he said. But, he said, "Far worse, we're losing sight of the other areas that could have great potential risk, like cargo security and the airport perimeter and general aviation."
Steve Elson, a former Navy Seal who was a security official in the Federal Aviation Administration but quit in frustration, asked: "Who is watching the ramps? I guarantee you I can walk onto ramps. So can you, and so can Al Qaeda."
Another hole is in the integration of intelligence information about possible plotters and the dissemination of that information.
In August, the Transportation Department awarded a major contract to build the computers to search databanks for information about travelers and workers to detect possible security risks, selecting, for example, foreign visitors living for long periods without fixed addresses or steady jobs.
Measuring how much has been achieved in aviation is difficult, intentionally so. From the number of air marshals on the planes to the fraction of checked bags selected for search, many details are classified. Nobody can say how many pilots will arm themselves if a bill approved by the House and Senate takes effect.
The airlines, meanwhile, are losing money at record rates. In the first half of the year they carried 258.6 million passengers, down 11.4 percent from the first half of 2001; the number of takeoffs and landings in that period fell by about 16 percent. No one is sure how much of the falloff is the economy and how much is fear. But despite the federalization of the security work force, security may suffer when the airlines are short of cash.
On the other hand, there has been a long-term change in the psychology of air travelers, as demonstrated by the passengers who tackled Richard C. Reid, the man accused of trying to blow up a jet last December with explosives hidden in his shoes. Anyone walking toward a cockpit now is likely to be noticed and challenged.
MATTHEW L. WALD
The InfrastructureNational Smorgasbord For Terrorists
For all the attention paid to high-profile, symbolic targets like the John Hancock Tower in Chicago or the Mall of America outside Minneapolis, experts on domestic security see a far more complex challenge in the seemingly endless array of sites known as critical infrastructure.
The Golden Gate is, after all, just one of 590,984 bridges around the nation. There is one Hoover Dam, but 54,065 public and private water systems. Eighty-five deep-draft ports. One hundred and three nuclear power plants. Untold miles of highways, railroads, underground tunnels and oil pipelines, innumerable electricity grids and telecommunications hubs, each vulnerable to attacks with the potential to disrupt commerce if not endanger lives.
"You've got to boil it down in such a way so that people don't roll their eyes and say it's too big," said Mayor Martin O'Malley of Baltimore, who has been a leading advocate of domestic security. "No, you can't protect every inch of American soil, and you know what? You don't need to. But there are critical areas that warrant better protection, smarter eyes, fences, cameras."
Nowadays, ships must give 96-hour notification before pulling into the nation's ports. Most nuclear plants have doubled their fenced-in perimeters, spending about $200 million on security upgrades. Florida bought two mobile $1 million gamma-ray devices to inspect truck cargo.
In Gilbert, Ariz., two police officers are freed from radio calls during heightened security alerts to patrol power plants and water wells, among other critical sites. Pembroke Pines, Fla., like scores of other cities, has posted a 24-hour armed guard outside its water plant; other places, like Palatine, Ill., simply changed the locks or, as in St. Charles, Mo., added a security camera. In Gary, Ind., visitors to the sanitary district facility must now be escorted by employees. In Elizabeth, N.J., new No Parking signs ring the natural gas tank.
But vulnerability assessments of the water systems will not be complete until next year. Port authorities received only 13 percent of the $700 million in federal grants they requested for security measures. In Boston, inspection of cargo containers at the harbor has tripled, but is still only 15 percent.
"We still have yawning vulnerabilities," said Stephen Flynn, senior fellow in the national security studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations. "Virtually all the focus has been on the narrow issues of physical security, which are necessary baseline steps. What they have not done very well is, let's assume those measures fail, the attack is successful, what's our response?"
Juliette Kayyem, who runs the domestic preparedness program at the Kennedy School of Government, said the Bush administration was ideologically disinclined to impose mandates on the private sector or on local governments and that officials in smaller cities are losing their focus on terrorism in favor of more pressing issues, like the economy.
Donald F. Kettl, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin who is studying domestic security for the Century Foundation, said, "There are still a lot of cracks in the system because of the basic fissures in American federalism."
JODI WILGOREN
ImmigrationWho's Here, Why And for How Long?
With a heightened priority on tightening the nation's borders, few few federal agencies have faced as much scrutiny since Sept. 11 as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Long saddled with a reputation for antiquated computers and staggering paperwork backlogs, the agency increased the scrutiny of foreigners entering the United States after the attacks.
The immigration service is working more closely with the Treasury Department and the F.B.I. to track possible terrorists. Inspectors at ports and other border crossings now have access to the State Department's consular database to prevent visa fraud.
To crack down on foreigners who remain in the United States despite deportation orders, the agency has entered the names of 314,000 "criminal aliens" into the F.B.I.'s database so local police officers can identify them.
But the immigration service still has no firm data on how many foreign students have overstayed or violated their visas - despite a 1996 law requiring a tracking system for the 547,000 people holding student visas. A computer network to track foreign students is expected to be doing the job early next year.
As part of the effort to screen out potential terrorists, new Justice Department regulations will take effect beginning Sept. 11 that ultimately would require some 100,000 foreign students, tourists, researchers and other visitors to register with the federal government, officials said.
Visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan and Syria, as well as many residents of about 20 largely Muslim and Middle Eastern nations, will be fingerprinted, photographed and required to fill out a long form. The regulations would not affect those with green cards.
Separately, the immigration service has proposed shortening the length of a standard tourist visa to as little as 30 days.
The Justice Department has issued new rules that allow the attorney general to authorize state or local law enforcement officers to track illegal immigrants. This reverses a longstanding legal tradition and has prompted some police departments to express concern that the new measure could jeopardize their relations with immigrants, who would be less willing to report crimes.
The Justice Department also decided to start enforcing a 50-year-old law that requires immigrants to report their change of address to the immigration service within 10 days of moving. But in July, the I.N.S. acknowledged that 200,000 change of address forms were sitting in boxes in underground storage.
"The federal government has taken a number of sensible steps and made tremendous progress in deterring the admission of potential terrorists," said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, an immigration policy group. "But inside the country, the government has acted in a heavy-handed way that hasn't made us any safer."
ERIC SCHMITT
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Long Island Farm Hosts Wind Turbines
September 9, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/sep2002/2002-09-09-09.asp#anchor6
ALBANY, New York,A new wind project on Long Island will generate 100,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity for New York state every year.
The first of five wind turbines, to be located on a working farm in Suffolk County, was dedicated on August 31 by New York Governor George Pataki, the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) and the Long Island Farm Bureau. The project will produce enough electricity to power about 12 average sized homes on Long Island.
The primary purpose of the turbines, funded through LIPA's $170 million Clean Energy Initiative, is to demonstrate how the wind can be harnessed on Long Island to generate electricity.
"This is an exciting step forward for the development of wind power as an alternative energy technology on Long Island," Pataki said. "Working in partnership with the Long Island Farm Bureau, LIPA is demonstrating how innovative thinking can bring new and environmentally sound solutions to help address New York's energy needs."
The wind project is located on the Zeh Farm behind the Windy Acres Farm Stand in Calverton. The first turbine cost about $225,000 to construct and put into operation.
In return for allowing the wind turbine to be placed on their farmland, the Zeh family will receive an annual energy credit on their electric bill equal to 25 percent of the power generated by their farm's wind turbine. This credit is expected to be worth about $3,000 per year. The term of the lease is 20 years.
"Increased energy use on Long Island has made it necessary for the Long Island Power Authority to investigate sources that could help the utility meet consumer demand," noted State Senator Kenneth LaValle. "Wind turbines are known to provide a clean source of energy. This pilot program will help determine whether they could help meet the growing energy demand on Long Island and, quite possibly, provide significant savings for the consumer."
More than 1,200 letters were sent to Long Island Farm Bureau members last year explaining LIPA's willingness to erect a wind turbine on leased farmland. About 40 farm owners expressed interest, and sites were reviewed for favorable wind characteristics, favorable distances from residential areas, and nearness to LIPA's distribution system.
"This green energy initiative should help to control the cost of energy not only for the participating farmer but indeed for everyone," said Farm Bureau executive director Joseph Gergela. "Wind energy is an untapped resource, and the turbines being sited on East End farms are the first step in providing green energy that is safe for the environment while helping Long Island with its energy needs."
LIPA has also begun an initiative, under its CEI program, to develop 100 megawatts of offshore wind turbines. These turbines, much larger than the land based units LIPA is using now, would be located off the south shore of Long Island in a yet to be identified area one to six miles offshore.
"These wind farms and our aggressive approach to developing indigenous renewable resources are emblematic of New York State's commitment to protecting the environment and preserving our natural resources for future generations," Pataki concluded. "Clean energy technologies like wind farms will help New York State and the nation accommodate the growing demand for electricity in an environmentally responsible manner that avoids air pollution. Wind power has the added benefit of diversifying the energy mix that powers the Empire State and boosting energy security by reducing our need for imported energy."
-------- energy
Energy-Trading Chief Fired [etc.]
Business Briefs,
Monday, September 9, 2002
Washington Post; Page E02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A55155-2002Sep8.html
Allegheny Energy said it fired the president of its energy trading division, Daniel Gordon, for violating the company's conflict-of-interest policy.
The company would not say what he did. The Associated Press quoted a source familiar with the company's internal investigation as saying Gordon had a financial interest in a computer software services company that had contracted to do business with Allegheny Energy Supply, that he was part owner of real estate that the company had agreed to lease and that he lied about his age and educational background in a deposition taken by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Gordon declined to comment Friday when reached by the AP.
Allegheny Energy spokeswoman Cynthia Shoop said company officials do not believe that Gordon's transgressions could affect Allegheny's financial performance, so the company did not report its findings to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Allegheny announced in July it planned to reduce its trading operations, and that Gordon would leave the company next year.
Allegheny's stock price declined $1.49 a share to close at $17.69 on Friday.
VIRGINIA
Dominion, the Richmond energy company, completed its $217 million acquisition of Cove Point, owner of the nation's largest liquefied-natural-gas import facility, from Williams. The facility on the Chesapeake Bay near Baltimore is expected to reopen in the spring and provide 5 billion cubic feet of storage. An additional 2.5 billion cubic feet of storage capacity is planned. Dominion announced the agreement to acquire Cove Point last month.
AES, an Arlington global energy company, said its subsidiary AES Panama closed on $275 million in financing for construction of two hydroelectric power plants in Panama. The seven-year non-recourse loan is with a syndicate of 17 banks.
Stanley Associates of Alexandria, an information technology and professional services government contractor, acquired CCI, another government service contractor, and will make it a subsidiary. CCI's services, employees, and management will be kept, Stanley said. Both companies are privately owned, and terms were not disclosed.
MARYLAND
USEC, the Bethesda maker of enriched uranium for use in nuclear power plants, received initial proposals from Kentucky and Ohio for a test facility for the Energy Department's centrifuge uranium enrichment technology, which USEC plans to use. Later this year, USEC will choose either the Paducah, Ky., or Portsmouth, Ohio, as the site for centrifuge facility.
Sodexho, a Gaithersburg food and facilities management company, acquired Patriot Medical Technologies. Nashville-based Patriot, formed in 1997, provides clinical services, including the maintenance and repair of medical equipment. Terms were not disclosed.
Compiled from reports by the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones News Service and Washington Post staff writers
--------
US agency seeks to keep energy plant info secret
Story by Tom Doggett
REUTERS USA:
September 9, 2002
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/17675/story.htm
WASHINGTON - Federal energy regulators last week proposed rules to prevent terror groups and the public from obtaining sensitive information about proposed U.S. power plants, large transmission lines, and oil and natural gas pipelines.
The changes by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission would expand the agency's policy after last year's Sept. 11 attacks to halt public access to certain documents on existing energy facilities, and also would keep secret information about proposed energy projects.
"As we approach the Sept. 11 anniversary, there still appears to be a need to protect critical information from getting into the hands of terrorists," FERC staff said in a presentation to the full commission on the proposed rules.
Shortly after last year's attacks, FERC joined other agencies, like the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency, in quickly withdrawing public information on critical energy facilities.
But FERC says its proposal makes it the first government agency to develop formal rules and guidelines on how to handle such sensitive records.
The type of information the agency would keep secret includes pipeline and electric grid flow diagrams that could reveal congested areas when moving energy supplies.
Other sensitive information would include pipeline inspection reports, detailed layouts of power plants and other energy facilities, and the emergency action plans at energy plants.
Under FERC's proposal, interested parties like landowners concerned about a pipeline project crossing their property could request access to the information.
In what could be the most controversial part of the proposed rules, FERC would use new authority granted to itself to question why a person or group wants any restricted information. If the agency decided to make the information available, it could require recipients to sign a nondisclosure agreement or restrict how they share it.
FERC could take action against somebody who violated such agreement, such as barring a lawyer - who gave sensitive information to a news reporter for example - from appearing before an agency judge in cases involving regulated energy companies that are clients.
Currently, when companies, journalists, state officials or advocacy groups ask FERC for documents under the federal Freedom of Information Act, the agency said it was not allowed to consider what the parties will do with those documents or restrict who they can be showed to.
Agency staff said they don't believe the new proposal would raise any freedom-of-the-press or other free-speech concerns, based on advice from the Justice Department.
The FERC proposal will be published in the Federal Register, and the agency is expected to take public comments on its proposed rules though mid-October.
Agency staff will then review the comments and possibly fine-tune the rules with suggested changes. The full commission could vote on the final regulations later this year.
-------- human rights
Court agrees men jailed illegally, but rejects release
By Mark Baker,
Herald Correspondent in Singapore
September 9 2002
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/09/08/1031115973344.html
Malaysia's highest court has refused to order the release of four opposition leaders jailed without trial for 17 months despite finding that their arrests were illegal and politically motivated.
In a ruling that has dealt a severe blow to the Mahathir Government's use of the infamous Internal Security Act (ISA), the Federal Court found that there was no evidence the group had been plotting to overthrow the Government, that the police had acted in bad faith, and that the law breached the constitution by denying the men access to lawyers.
But in an equally dramatic twist, the court later rejected a plea for the release of the detainees, finding that a technicality required them to lodge fresh appeals - which could take months.
Human rights groups and opposition parties denounced the court's failure to free the four and the Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, is likely to face strong domestic and international protests if the Government does not approve their early release.
"It will be a standing indictment of Malaysia's system of justice, the rule of law, undemocratic governance and human rights if the authorities fail to release them," the leader of the Democratic Action Party, Lim Kit Siang, said.
Ten members of the opposition Reformasi movement - formed after the jailing of the former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim on discredited sex and corruption charges - were arrested under the ISA in April last year, soon after organising a series of big anti-government rallies.
The 10, including Anwar's former political secretary, Ezam Mohamed Noor, were accused by police and Dr Mahathir of stockpiling explosives and weapons as part of a conspiracy to topple the Government.
After their initial detention and interrogation - during which several claimed to have been tortured - six were released but the Government signed orders extending for a further two years the detention without trial of the remaining four.
In a decision handed down on Friday after a six-month delay, the Federal Court said police had produced no evidence that the men posed a threat to national security and their interrogations showed the arrests were politically driven.
"They were not interrogated on the militant actions and neither were they questioned about getting explosives materials and weapons," Chief Justice Dzaiddin Abdullah said.
"The questions that were asked were more on the appellants' political activities and for intelligence gathering. I find there is much force in the contention ... that the detentions were for the ulterior purpose and unconnected with national security."
The court further found that the ISA was unconstitutional because it denied the detainees their right to legal representation during the initial period of their detention - a decision with implications for more than 100 other political prisoners held under the colonial-era law.
But the judges refused applications for the release of the four, saying that because their appeal had been made on the basis of the initial temporary police detention orders, a fresh appeal would have to be lodged to challenge the subsequent administrative order extending their detention signed by the Deputy Prime Minister, Abdullah Badawi.
The Malaysian human rights group Suaram attacked the decision as illogical and unfair. "If the 60-day detention is unlawful, the two-year detention just cannot be right," the group said in a statement.
-------- ACTIVISTS
IMF Protesters Plan Day-Long Strike in D.C.
Activists Hope to Shut Down City, Interrupt Traffic Flow on Sept. 27
By Manny Fernandez and David A. Fahrenthold
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, September 9, 2002; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54857-2002Sep8?language=printer
Police and protesters are marshaling their forces for the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in downtown Washington this month, with police seeking to boost their ranks with officers from other jurisdictions and one group of activists calling for a citywide strike and actions to snarl traffic.
In what has become one of Washington's rites of fall, protesters plan five days of marches, demonstrations, teach-ins and vigils beginning Sept. 25. The focus of the events are the Sept. 28 and 29 meetings of the World Bank and IMF, held at the institutions' Foggy Bottom headquarters, but a group of anarchists and anti-capitalists aims to shut down the city Sept. 27.
District police and city officials are attempting to recruit hundreds of officers from other jurisdictions but had difficulty getting the federal government to help pay security costs. D.C. Police Chief Charles H. Ramsey said last week that regardless of receiving federal aid, he would not pull police patrols from neighborhoods, saying his priority was to protect city residents.
Critics of World Bank and IMF policies say the events of Sept. 11, which led to cancellation of last year's Washington meetings and protests, may have momentarily disrupted the anti-globalization movement's momentum but not its dedication. "Rumors of the movement's death are greatly exaggerated," said protest organizer David Levy, 44, of Vienna.
The Mobilization for Global Justice, a District-based coalition that helped organize the raucous demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank in Washington in April 2000, is planning a Sept. 28 rally and march. Protesters are seeking permits for some events but plan other actions without permits, and they expect some activists to risk arrest.
The day before that, a Friday, the Anti-Capitalist Convergence (ACC), a District-based network of anarchist and anti-capitalist protesters, is calling for a citywide action, called "the People's Strike." Organizers say the event will be an effort to block traffic and disrupt the city in what protesters call a "day of noncompliance and resistance."
The ACC and Mobilization groups say they are preparing for thousands to attend, but organizers said it was too early to predict crowd sizes. The two groups are coalitions that are meeting separately to organize protests.
Ramsey also said he was unsure how many protesters would arrive and whether activists would try to make good on threats to shut down the city. Regardless of numbers, he said, motorists "can expect some traffic tie-ups," and he urged people to take public transportation during the protests.
Such uncertainty is a far cry from the situation last year. By this time last September, D.C. police were preparing for 100,000 protesters, and they planned to cordon off downtown areas with steel fencing and bring in a few thousand police from other cities. Demonstrators were predicting the biggest anti-globalization protest in the United States since thousands disrupted a trade summit in Seattle in 1999. But after the Sept. 11 attacks, the meetings, the bulk of the demonstrations and the security buildup were canceled.
In the two years between the Seattle protests and Sept. 11, protesters of all stripes were marching against international financial institutions under a general anti-oppression banner. These days, global summits do not grab the world's attention as they did then, and activists divide their time between a multitude of newly prominent causes, including antiwar, pro-Israel, pro-Palestinian, pro-civil liberties and local grass-roots issues.
But many in the anti-globalization movement say the recent corporate scandals -- involving such companies as Enron Corp. and WorldCom Inc. -- have restored some of the old spirit. "Our opponents have given us the best weapons to reduce their power -- namely, their own greed," said Levy, a Mobilization organizer. "The movement has gained a lot of energy from this outrage."
Whether that will translate into large numbers in the streets remains unclear. Some protesters say it is unlikely that the demonstrations will get the 20,000-plus who protested in April 2000, although others think the numbers will be large. "It's very, very hard to say, but I think there will be a substantial turnout, on the scale of April 2000," said Robert Weissman, 36, a Mobilization organizer.
This year, Weissman and other Mobilization members are organizing a rally at the Ellipse and a march downtown. They also are working out the details of an evening demonstration called a "quarantine," in which activists plan to encircle part or all of the World Bank and IMF headquarters Sept. 28 to hem in "those who would infect us with economic smallpox," said organizer Nadine Bloch, 41.
The group wants the global financial bodies to cancel poor countries' debts, open meetings to the public and end policies that they say hinder access to food, health care and education.
The People's Strike is intended to be a different kind of demonstration. ACC organizers said the strike is meant to oppose capitalism, which the group says thrives on the misery of the many for the luxury of the few. The ACC seeks outright abolishment of the World Bank and IMF and demands cancellation of all debt owed by developing countries and of all personal debt, as well as "an end to imperialism and terrorism by the U.S. government and all states."
ACC organizers are urging people to stay home from work or school Sept. 27 or to go to work and give away their businesses' products. "Businesses, governmental institutions, schools and streets will be shut down, and in many senses reopened to new uses," ACC materials state. Such uses might include sit-ins, art exhibits or food redistribution, organizers said.
"We're calling on all workers of the city to join us," said Andrew Willis, 19, an American University sophomore and ACC organizer. Willis said the majority of events will be separately coordinated by small groups of fellow activists working in "affinity groups." He said organizers are not specific about a lot of the plans because they want participants to be creative.
The ACC, whose protests are often attended by masked, black-clad activists, is encouraging protesters to consider not dressing the part to keep authorities guessing.
One strike poster shows a wrench destroying a "Homeland Security" video camera. But Adam Eidinger, 28, a D.C. Statehood Green Party candidate for shadow representative in Congress who is helping organize the protest, said the event is meant to grab attention, not destroy property.
"I don't think people should be worried about that at all," Eidinger said. "One day of inconvenience in Washington, D.C., is a small price to pay for people living in the wealthiest country on earth."
Margret Nedelkoff Kellems, the city's deputy mayor for public safety and justice, dismissed any threats to snarl major traffic arteries. "They won't block entrances to the city," she said. "We will not let that happen."
District officials said last week that they had not been guaranteed reimbursement by the federal government for the cost of handling the protests. In August 2001, the Bush administration said the government would reimburse the District for up to $16 million of last year's security plan, which included recruiting 3,600 officers from nearly a dozen cities.
Kellems said the city this year set a deadline for tomorrow, and if no agreement with federal authorities had been reached by then, it would be too late to arrange hotels, food and other services for the 1,500 police the District wants to bring in from other jurisdictions. But without the money, the city faces another hurdle. Kellems said other agencies have agreed to provide 1,100 officers, but most are contingent upon a guarantee of reimbursement.
She said D.C. police could, nevertheless, handle the protests. But she said: "We are not, under any circumstances, going to be diminishing the police contingent in our neighborhoods."
The World Bank and IMF had initially planned to meet at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel on Woodley Road NW but were told by U.S. authorities last month to move the sessions downtown.
The two institutions announced in July that the meetings would be conducted in a "streamlined manner" and consolidated to Sept. 28 and 29.
The changes echo precautions taken in the months leading up to last year's sessions. This year's arrangements have been "driven purely by the advice of U.S. and District law enforcement and other agencies," said IMF spokesman William Murray. "It's really driven by the fact that we need to conduct business with the least amount of disruption to the District of Columbia."
----
US News & World Report Poll
September 9, 2002,
US News & World Report front page
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/home.htm
Should the United States go after Saddam Hussein?
• Yes 57%
• No 43%
Note: This is not a scientific poll and does not test a representative population sample. The poll continuously recalculates its response percentages as the number of participants increases.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.