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NUCLEAR
Bush Photo
DOE website
IAEA Head Says Iraq Agrees to Meet Dec 8 Deadline
Iraq Says It Will Meet Disclosure Deadline of Dec. 8
U.N. Arms Team Taking Up Its Task
N. Korea Quiets Buzz On Nuclear Assertion
North Korea Clarifies Statement on A-Bomb
U.S. Sees Missile Defense in Five Years
Pentagon puts hard sell on Europe over missile defence
Liability row delays Russian nuclear sub clean-up
U.S. official wants review of nuclear test freeze
Agency Overseeing Nuclear Security Orders a Hiring Freeze
Security bill provisions criticized
Bush Defends Putin In Handling of Siege
Lugar to pursue N. Korea nuke deal
Seeking to Lead Sioux
MILITARY
Hungry Ethiopia rejects Eritrean offer of ports
U.S. Discusses Aid for Turkey to Defray Costs of an Iraq War
Report: U.S. Aerospace Dominance Threatened
Close to Joining EU, Czechs Confronted With Darker Past
Why 'No-Fly' Zone Clashes Won't Trigger an Iraq War
U.S. Warns Iraq Over New Attacks on Patrol Planes
Analysis: The NATO revolution-Part 3
Bush Arrives for NATO Summit Meeting
Executed Pakistani's Funeral Stirs Anti - US Feeling
Military Sees Potential in Unmanned Weapons
U.S. Base in Japan Hit by Mystery Raid
Boeing Delays Rocket Launch
U.S. Forces Prep for Iraq in Kuwait
U.S. Navy Ship to Visit China
Reserves May Get Alert on Iraq War
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
New Surveillance Powers Scrutinized
What the secret court decision means for citizens
Internet Provisions in Security Bill
US Government Flunks Computer Security Tests
U.S. Meets Airport Security Deadline
Uncle Sam wants your data
DNA database cracks 1,000th case
Court lifts limits on intelligence wiretaps
Appeals court overturns limits on secret wiretaps
Broad U.S. Wiretap Powers Upheld
Ashcroft Praises Surveillance Ruling
U.S. to Target Drugged Drivers
Cases hint of terrorism, fizzle into the mundane
ENERGY AND OTHER
Warming up to corn stoves
A Monument to Eco-Mindedness
Energy Costs Boost Consumer Prices in Oct
Safety helps the markets flow
Russia's Lukoil pulls out of Azerbaijani oil field
Oil tanker off Spain 'major eco-threat'
Oil Tanker Sinks Off Spain, Threatening Disaster
U.N. Seeks $3 Billion to Aid 50 Million
ACTIVISTS
High Court to Weigh Nonprofits' Political Contributions
Iran Militia Protests Against Pro - Reform Students
Militia Force and Students Clash in Continuing Tehran Protest
Caracas Riot Police Battle Anti-Chávez Marchers
-------- NUCLEAR
Bush Photo
http://mirrors.meepzorp.com/geocities.com/george-bush-antichrist/index_files/bushsat.jpeg
-------- accidents and safety
DOE website
From: Pameno47@aol.com
To: nukenet@envirolink.org
Hi All... I recently came across this DOE web site which is the DOE's Office of Enforcement under the Price-Anderson Act. (interesting isn't it)? Anyway, as I was reading through the numerous pdf files, I found that they contained a wealth of information regarding violations of recent. (some things never change) DOE's Enforcement & Investigation - Enforcement Actions - http://tis-nt.eh.doe.gov/enforce/eas/eas.html-ssi
The civil penalties are far more than were EVER imposed here in the Kiski Valley against B&W/ARCO or NUMEC in 40+ years. Do they (the true eco-terrorists) really ever pay those penalties?
Frankly speaking, I think the corporate heads of these companies need to face the risk of jail sentences for lax safety.
Constitutionally and Anti-nuclearly yours :) Patricia J. Ameno Chairperson-C.A.S.E. 724-845-9573
-------- inspections
IAEA Head Says Iraq Agrees to Meet Dec 8 Deadline
Reuters
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; 2:13 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10443-2002Nov19?language=printer
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi officials have agreed to produce a full account of the country's weapons program by December 8, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency Mohamed ElBaradei said on Tuesday.
"They are working on that declaration and they will produce it by December 8," ElBaradei said after meeting Iraqi officials in Baghdad.
Under a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted on November 8, the first big test is a December 8 deadline for Iraq to submit a full account of all banned weapons programs. By January 27 the inspectors must have given their first report to the Security Council.
ElBaradei said Iraqi officials had agreed to produce a declaration covering biological, nuclear and chemical weapons.
ElBaradei, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix and an advance team of 30 experts returned to Baghdad on Monday after a four-year break to search for weapons of mass destruction that Iraq may have.
--------
Iraq Says It Will Meet Disclosure Deadline of Dec. 8
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq vowed Tuesday to meet a Dec. 8 deadline to produce a full account of its weapons program and said U.N. inspectors would be given free access to all sites across the country.
``Within 30 days, as the (U.N.) resolution says, a report from Iraq will be submitted on all the files -- nuclear, chemical, biological and missile files,'' President Saddam Hussein's adviser General Amir al-Saadi told reporters.
Under a U.N. Security Council resolution adopted Nov. 8, the first big test is a Dec. 8 deadline for Iraq to submit a full account of all banned weapons programs. The inspectors must give the Security Council their first report by Jan. 27.
Washington accuses Baghdad of possessing weapons of mass destruction and has threatened war if Iraq does not disarm.
Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said Saadi and Iraq's Foreign Minister Naji Sabri had assured him that Baghdad would meet the deadline.
``I think they made it very clear and understandable that their declaration has to come before Dec. 8. They are working on compiling that declaration,'' ElBaradei said.
``What we confirm ... today to Iraq is the need that the declaration of Dec. 8 should be comprehensive, accurate and complete.''
ElBaradei and chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix returned to Baghdad Monday with an advance team of 30 experts after a four-year break in U.N. arms monitoring in Iraq.
``We are hopeful. We are in fact quite sure that things will work much better than before,'' Saadi said.
FULL ACCESS
Asked if the inspectors would have unfettered access to all sites in Iraq, Saadi said: ``Yes, that is as stipulated in the resolution and as we have agreed with them.''
Blix described the talks as constructive and said they had agreed on many practical arrangements and produced a mechanism to resolve problems that may arise later.
``So we look forward to starting inspections in about a week's time,'' he said.
As inspectors dusted old offices, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Iraq's firing on U.S. and British aircraft enforcing ``no-fly'' zones over northern and southern parts of the country did not violate the U.N. resolution -- contrary to a U.S. interpretation.
The day after the return of weapons inspectors, the Iraqi media again accused the United States of plotting war.
``The problem is not related to the arrival of the inspectors or starting their work in Iraq,'' al-Iraq newspaper said in a front-page editorial. ``The American regime wants to launch an aggression under the pretext that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.''
President Bush arrived in Prague for a NATO summit where he will seek political support for his hard-line Iraq policy, although he has signaled he will not request military help from the 19-nation alliance.
Bush has said the inspections, on the tough terms set out in Security Council resolution 1441, are Baghdad's last chance to abandon peacefully its alleged chemical, biological and nuclear arms programs.
DIFFERING VIEWS
The White House said Monday that Iraqi fire on U.S. and British aircraft -- which is frequent -- breached U.N. provisions.
State Department spokesman Philip Reeker said Tuesday, ``We're not looking for triggers. We are looking for Iraqi compliance and disarmament. And we'll continue watching that very closely in coming days.''
But Annan said he doubted the Security Council would see it as a trigger for war.
``Let me say that I don't think that the Council will say this is in contravention of the resolution of the Security Council,'' he said. Security Council member Russia also said the U.S. argument had ``no legal grounds,'' but fellow member France urged Iraq to avoid ``any act ... that could accentuate tensions.''
In London, a Foreign Office source reaffirmed that Britain sought other justifications under international law for the zones, but the new resolution was not one of them.
U.S. and British warplanes raided Iraqi air defenses Monday. The no-fly zones were set up after the 1991 Gulf War that drove Iraqi invasion forces from Kuwait.
Iraq said Tuesday the attacks had been on civilian targets and four people had been hurt.
In Baghdad, the inspectors' spokesman Ewen Buchanan said team members were putting the U.N. monitoring center in Baghdad's former Canal Hotel back into action.
The initial inspection team proper, of about a dozen people, is expected around Nov. 25, with inspections starting two days later. Full strength will be some 100 inspectors.
``There will be a range of (inspection) sites, civilian and military ... hundreds, possibly,'' Buchanan said. Under the terms of the U.N. resolution, the team will give Iraqi authorities no advance notice of where they will look.
U.N. Security Council diplomats said Tuesday the Council was expected later this week to extend for another six months the humanitarian program that lets Iraq sell oil to buy food and other civilian goods.
--------
INSPECTIONS
U.N. Arms Team Taking Up Its Task
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/middleeast/19INSP.html
Armed with stringent United Nations requirements and the latest equipment, arms inspectors are picking up where their predecessors left off in the hide-and-seek world of deadly Iraqi weapons. If they are half as successful as their forerunners, they will uncover mountains of data and equipment bearing on the development of weapons of mass destruction, despite President Saddam Hussein's assertions that he has already come clean.
The real surprise for inspectors in the 1990's was how close Iraq was to producing a nuclear weapon. While its chemical and biological arms posed a terrifying threat, the paramount concern in the West was over the shift in world strategic power that would occur if Iraq became a nuclear-armed nation.
The nuclear inspectors who arrived in Iraq in 1991, after the Persian Gulf war, succeeded in documenting a major Iraqi atomic push. The International Atomic Energy Agency, which led the nuclear inspections, discovered that Iraq had imported nearly 50 kilos (110 pounds) of highly enriched uranium from France and Russia.
The Natural Resources Defense Council calculates that this would have been enough material, depending on the builder's skill, to make 3 to 10 bombs the size of the one that destroyed Hiroshima.
The inspectors also found that Iraq planned to build a centrifuge designed to produce 10 kilos of highly enriched uranium a year, and had drawn up bomb designs.
By February 1994, the agency had removed the nuclear-arms fuel from Iraq; it eventually supervised or verified the destruction of all of Iraq's known nuclear-arms installations and gear.
But even after combing Iraq from 1991 to 1998, and after uncovering and destroying tons of forbidden weapons, the inspectors left with as many questions as answers.
"We still don't know why they wanted nuclear weapons and what they intended to do with them," noted David Albright, a former inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington research group.
Among the nuclear riddles remaining: Where are the key technical documents, including design drawings for nuclear arms and gas centrifuges, which Iraq failed to turn over to inspectors then?
As for the new inspectors' chances, Dr. Albright, a physicist, cited new gear that is smaller, more powerful and easier to use than in the 1990's. "That's really important," he said. "It makes for much better investigative tools."
Moreover, the new inspection rules are more aggressive, demanding "immediate, unimpeded, unconditional and unrestricted access" to Mr. Hussein's presidential palaces.
But to the White House, which said on Sept. 12 that Iraq was awash in new activity, the challenges have kept pace with the progress. "Iraq has stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and has embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb," the White House said. As evidence, it cited Iraq's attempts to buy thousands of specially designed aluminum tubes, which American officials said were meant for centrifuges to enrich uranium.
Some private experts, like Dr. Albright, say that the aluminum tubes have benign uses and that they doubt that Iraq wants them for nuclear enrichment. The British government said in a report on Sept. 24 that "no definitive intelligence" linked the tubes to a nuclear program but concluded that Baghdad was "almost certainly seeking an indigenous ability to enrich uranium to the level needed for a nuclear weapon."
The group investigating deadly chemicals in the 1990's, the United Nations Special Commission, found vast industrial-scale production. The commission eventually destroyed more than 38,000 filled and unfilled chemical munitions and oversaw the destruction of thousands of tons of chemical-warfare agents and precursor chemicals, according to the Arms Control Association in Washington.
Those inspectors also uncovered Iraq's VX program. VX, a nerve agent, is so potent that a drop on the skin can kill an adult within minutes. Iraq claimed to have produced 3.9 tons of VX but failed to account for its destruction.
A remaining riddle for the new chemical warfare inspectors is: Did Iraq really lose, as it claimed, 550 shells filled with mustard gas, which causes chemical burns and blisters?
In its Sept. 12 report, the White House said Baghdad was "seeking to purchase chemical-weapons agent precursors and applicable production equipment, and is making an effort to hide activities at the Falluja plant," previously a production site for chemical arms.
Britain said in its Sept. 24 report that its intelligence community believed that Iraq "retained some chemical warfare agents, precursors, production equipment and weapons" and could "produce significant quantities of mustard gas within weeks and of nerve agent within months."
Britain also said Iraq had chemical weapons that could be readied for use in 45 minutes.
As for biological weapons, they were among Iraq's most closely guarded secrets, and it was only in 1995, after four years of United Nations pressure, that Baghdad told inspectors it had made enough deadly microbes to kill all the people on earth several times over.
Before the gulf war, Iraq told the inspectors that it had produced 5,125 gallons of deadly botulinum toxin and 2,245 gallons of anthrax, a germ of livestock that causes high fevers and death in humans.
Iraq also produced evidence that it had field-tested germs in sprayers, rockets, artillery shells, aerial bombs and tanks dropped from jet fighters. In the opening days of the gulf war, Iraq said, it had loaded botulinum toxin and anthrax into bombs and missile warheads.
Finally, Baghdad said, it had secretly destroyed all its biological agents and weapons in May or June 1991 - a violation of the surrender accord because the destruction was not supervised. The United Nations concluded that the quantities of biological agents made by Iraq could be "far greater than those declared" and expressed doubt that all had been destroyed.
Now the White House and the British claim Iraq is hard at work on its biological program and developing mobile germ-weapon laboratories mounted on trucks. Most aspects of Baghdad's biological effort, the Defense Intelligence Agency warned last month, "are larger and more advanced than before the gulf war."
The detection of mobile labs is considered quite challenging, and is one reason the United Nations is considering the use of unpiloted observation drones.
Finally, last month, in an overview of the Iraqi programs, the Defense Intelligence Agency said Baghdad might also be rebuilding its nuclear program and renewing production of nerve agents like sarin and VX.
-------- korea
N. Korea Quiets Buzz On Nuclear Assertion
By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7851-2002Nov18?language=printer
TOKYO, Nov. 18 -- Say that again? North Korea sent analysts scrambling for a day to try to decipher what appeared to be a claim that it had nuclear weapons, before quieting the buzz today by revising the broadcast.
A commentary on Radio Pyongyang on Sunday night had included a sentence that seemed, to some ears, to move North Korea's official position beyond its often-stated stance that the country is "entitled" to possess nuclear weapons. According to a report by South Korea's Yonhap news agency, the broadcaster said North Korea had "come to have" the weapons.
Yonhap's report caused analysts in Seoul and Tokyo to play and replay tapes of the broadcast today. After much straining and repetition, the verdict was mixed.
But Radio Pyongyang late today rebroadcast the commentary, substituting a clearly enunciated segment for the confusing sentence. The rebroadcast stuck to its long-held position on entitlement, quietly ending the flap.
The North Korean government has asserted its right to have nuclear weapons for what it calls its self-defense. But it has never acknowledged actually having them, and its silence has spawned a long-running guessing game.
International inspectors concluded nearly a decade ago that the North Koreans had the opportunity to divert spent nuclear fuel from old Soviet-made nuclear power plants before 1993. The CIA concluded they could have taken enough to produce one or two nuclear bombs.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said he believes Pyongyang has done so, though he admits he cannot prove it. Sources in China, North Korea's ally, have estimated the country has enough plutonium for five or six bombs. Revelations last month that North Korea tried to obtain equipment to process uranium into more weapons-grade fuel has resulted in a diplomatic uproar.
But skeptics doubt North Korea has developed the technical expertise to make a working bomb or missile payload. Pyongyang has never carried out an atomic test, a standard step toward developing a nuclear weapon. And though the government has blustered about having "powerful weapons," it has never clearly claimed to have an atomic weapon.
Most experts today said they doubted North Korea would announce its official membership in the nuclear club in such an offhand remark on the radio. Even Yonhap suggested it might have been a mistake for the usually super-cautious propagandists at Radio Pyongyang, for whom leeway is not permitted.
The revised broadcast seemed to confirm that interpretation. But North Korea offered no explanation for the change -- or on the fate of the broadcaster.
Special correspondent Joohee Cho in Seoul contributed to this report.
--------
North Korea Clarifies Statement on A-Bomb
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/asia/19KORE.html
TOKYO, Nov. 18 - North Korea today clarified a statement made in a weekend radio broadcast that appeared to claim publicly, for the first time, that the country possesses nuclear weapons.
The unusual move followed a flurry of statements of concern in this region over the radio commentary, which was interpreted by some as saying the country "has come to have nuclear and other strong military weapons to deal with increased nuclear threats by the U.S. imperialists."
But in a commentary broadcast on Monday by the official Korean Central Broadcasting Station, instead of saying it had come to have such weapons, the government said more clearly that it was "entitled" to have nuclear arms because of what it said were continuing threats from the United States.
"To safeguard our sovereignty and right to exist, we are entitled to have powerful military countermeasures, including nuclear weapons," the passage read in its entirety.
The difference in the language between the Sunday and Monday messages hung on as little as a single syllable in the Korean language - a nuance attributable by some to regional differences in pronunciation - which led to drastically different interpretations of the initial commentary. The first reports by foreign news organizations of Sunday's commentary came from the South Korean news agency Yonhap, which suggested that North Korea had made an affirmative statement that it possessed nuclear weapons.
Japanese and British broadcasting monitoring services, though, interpreted the Sunday commentary along much the same lines as today's clarification. With the differing interpretations of the broadcasts, experts emphasized that it was impossible to understand with any certainty the North Korean government's intentions.
"It was either a broadcaster's mistake in North Korea, a mistake in transcription or translation, or a distortion by Yonhap, which is pretty well known for propagating rumors, especially by hard-line elements in South Korea," said Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute, a California-based nonprofit research organization for international security and conflict resolution.
He noted that "in the same breath, the announcer was saying they want to continue to negotiate nuclear agreements."
A possible interpretation that was widely discussed in the region is that North Korea was engaging in a bit of deliberate ambiguity to warn its neighbors Japan and South Korea as well as the United States while maintaining a scrap of deniability.
Since 1994, American intelligence estimates have said North Korea probably possesses enough plutonium to make as many as two nuclear warheads. Recent estimates from China have reportedly placed the number as high as five.
North Korea is also a producer and exporter of rudimentary but operational intermediate-range ballistic missiles, which are based on the shorter-range Scud missiles developed by the Soviet Union.
North Korea shocked Japan in 1998 when it launched an unannounced test flight of a Taepodong missile over Japanese airspace. Today North Korea threatened to resume flight tests of ballistic missiles, saying it might end a three-year-old test moratorium if Japan went ahead with developing a missile defense shield with the United States.
Tensions have risen sharply in East Asia since early October, when visiting American diplomats confronted the North Korea government with intelligence evidence showing that North Korea had a secret nuclear weapons development program in violation of a 1994 arms control agreement.
North Korean officials reportedly acknowledged the program and warned the American diplomats that they possessed a variety of other dangerous weapons.
-------- missile defense
U.S. Sees Missile Defense in Five Years
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-usa-shield.html
LONDON (Reuters) - The United States will have an effective missile defense system up and running within five years, possibly in partnership with NATO or a European agency, the U.S. military officer leading the project said on Tuesday.
Lieutenant-General Ronald Kadish said extensive tests had shown the technology behind the missile shield -- designed to knock out incoming missiles launched by ``rogue states'' with interceptor missiles -- genuinely worked.
``We no longer need to experiment, to demonstrate or prevaricate. We need to get on with this and I'm confident we will,'' Kadish told a conference on missile defense in London.
``Some time in the next five years or so we will have effective defenses against a multiple range of threats.''
Answering charges that the program, which has already cost tens of billions of dollars in research and development, would prove too expensive, he said allies could come under its protective umbrella without a hefty cash payment.
``We have offered potential partners government-to-government agreements, in-kind investments -- not necessarily monetary,'' Kadish said.
``Or we could cooperate with entities such as NATO or a European missile defense agency, or some other construct that might arise out of this discussion,'' he said.
``Our invitation is real for people to join us.''
``NO GRAND DESIGN''
Critics say the United States, which has pulled out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty as a first step down the path toward missile defense, could trigger a new arms race.
U.S. officials dismiss the charges and, in a clear change of emphasis over the last year, have sought to portray missile defense as a broad international project which could be shaped by the response of Washington's allies.
``We don't have an architecture (for missile defense) yet,'' Kadish said. ``Let me tell you why there is no grand design. The reason is we don't know exactly what it should be.''
European and Japanese firms could provide much-needed expertise, he told the conference of academics, government officials and industry representatives.
``Don't think for a minute that because we expended $50 billion we have all the answers,'' he said. ``We have a lot, but not all.''
Kadish was due to visit an early warning radar base in northern England on Wednesday which may have to be upgraded in preparation for the missile shield. British officials have described it as a ``private familiarization visit.''
He declined to speak about the trip to reporters and said the timing of any formal U.S. request for upgrading the base was up to politicians.
``We depend on our allies for a lot of things and we will continue to do so, particularly with the UK,'' he said.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair supports the project in principle but has not committed himself to approving the upgrade, saying no formal U.S. request has been made.
----
Pentagon puts hard sell on Europe over missile defence
Richard Norton-Taylor
Tuesday November 19, 2002
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,842961,00.html
The US yesterday stepped up pressure on its European allies to embrace missile defence and said it was poised to ask Britain for the use of bases here for the controversial project.
"Nato's vulnerability to political coercion and blackmail will only increase" without a missile defence system, said John Bolton, America's under secretary of state for arms control and international security.
Mr Bolton and other US officials made clear that they were referring to such "rogue" states as Iraq, Libya and Iran.
They were speaking at a conference at the Royal United Services Institute sponsored by Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon, three large US corporations with strong vested interests in the development of missile defence programmes.
"It is no longer a question of whether missile defence will be deployed," Mr Bolton said, but of "what, how and when". He added: "The train is about to pull out of the station. We invite friends and allies and the Russian federation to climb on board."
American officials held out the prospect of contracts for European companies if their governments agreed to join the US in developing missile defence systems.
Officials in the Ministry of Defence and Foreign Office have been deeply sceptical about missile defence partly on grounds of money - it would cost Britain up to Ł10bn, according to official estimates - partly because the technology is far from proven and partly out of concern that it might encourage a new arms race.
Geoff Hoon, the defence secretary, last week gave missile defence his most enthusiastic support so far. Yesterday, Lord Bach, the arms procurement minister, appeared more circumspect. There was "no essential need at the present time" for Britain to invest in a missile defence system here, he said. The government would agree "only if it was convinced the security of the UK and Nato would be enhanced". He repeated the government's line that it would consider "very seriously" an American request to use radar and satellite stations at Fylingdales and Menwith Hill, both in North Yorkshire.
It is widely assumed that the government would never refuse such a request which senior US officials at yesterday's conference indicated would come very soon. "Decisions on requests will be made in the very near future," said one. "The time to be pussy-footing is over," said another.
The US wants this week's Nato summit in Prague to endorse missile defence, whereby missiles would knock out incoming missiles.
"If Nato countries participated that would facilitate industrial cooperation [between the US and Europe]," said one senior official clearly hoping that European defence companies would apply pressure to their governments.
Interactive guide to missile defence at www.guardian.co.uk/interactive
-------- russia
Liability row delays Russian nuclear sub clean-up
REUTERS RUSSIA:
November 19, 2002
Story by Jon Boyle
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/18650/story.htm
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia - From the warm seas of Russia's far east to the numbing cold of the bleak northwest, scores of ex-Soviet nuclear submarines rot in menacing silence, sinking rustbuckets with the potential to devastate a continent.
But billions of dollars needed to help neutralise the environmental threat are on hold because Western states say Russia refuses to exempt them from legal liability should anything go wrong while they help Moscow clean up its mess.
Experts at an international forum in the Pacific port of Vladivostock said an inter-ministry fight, pitting Russia's Foreign Ministry against the Defence and Atomic Energy Ministries, appeared to be at the heart of the controversy.
Russian scientists say the radiation locked inside the corroding hulls of 122 decommissioned nuclear-powered submarines, once the pride of the Soviet fleet, represents 3,000 times the levels of the A-bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
"Early generation submarines are in a desperate state" because they were not designed with dismantling in mind", Ian Downing, the man in charge of British efforts to help Russia put its nuclear house in order, told Reuters.
"They haven't been looked after, they are sinking. Most of them have still got the spent fuel on board," while others risk capsizing, he said on the sidelines of the British-funded forum on decommissioning Russia's nuclear submarines.
ALARM BELLS
Some fear that early submarines still have their weapons on board, corroded into place, said Downing, director of the Nuclear Industries Directorate at Britain's Department of Trade and Industry. "But that's informed speculation, shall we say."
Downing said he was absolutely mystified why Russia was refusing to grant Britain the same liability exemptions written into U.S. and Norwegian accords.
"Nuclear liability never goes away so you need to extend the exemption from liability into the future. All previous agreements with the Russians have done that.
"When we came to put that condition into our agreement, they said 'no, we no longer accept the idea of continuing liability'.
"So we said to them, what about all these agreements you've already signed? To which they replied, 'they are not enforceable in Russian law.'
"That's set some alarm bells going around the world. It's one of the reasons the G8 Global Partnership might never fly, unless we get this issue sorted. So my parochial problem has become an international problem."
That agreement, forged during the June G8 summit of leading industrial nations in Canada, would provide Russia with $10 billion from the United States and $10 billion from the club's other rich members (excluding Russia) over a decade.
Several projects agreed with Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy only need the dispute to be resolved to commence. British Prime Minister Tony Blair raised the issue in Moscow talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in October.
SUMMIT HAGGLING
The liability issue "caused a lot of trouble at the Kananaskis summit", said one British official familiar with the debate. "It was quite clear, but not explicit, that they were trying to do a deal. They would give in on liability if the G7 would give in on debt relief.
"Because they've got into this wider kind of trading thing, they cannot do a deal that would undermine their wider objective," the official said.
U.S. projects are also suffering from the liability issue, says Dieter Rudolph, programme director of the U.S. national Arctic Military Environmental Cooperation programme.
"We have been trying to get our own legal agreement for over three years and not had any success", said Rudolph, whose programme comes under the U.S. Department of Defense.
He has only been able to help develop a spent nuclear fuel cask for U.S. and Russian submarines by using the existing Cooperative Reduction Threat programme with Russia, which provides the legal protection Rudolph needs.
"I think we all have concluded that the problem really is within the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that their priorities do not appear to be the same as the priorities of the Ministry of Defence and the Ministry of Atomic Energy", Rudolph said.
RUSSIAN DEFENCE
Valery Lebedev, Russia's deputy minister for Atomic Energy, told Reuters that the stumbling block was a gap in Russian legislation which needed "half a year" to be resolved.
"The law on civilian liability for nuclear damage has not yet been passed, but is being considered by the State Duma," Lebedev said. It has received a first reading already, he added.
The lower house of parliament had also yet to ratify the Vienna Convention on civil liability for nuclear damage, which sets mimimum standards on financial protection against damage from peaceful uses of nuclear energy.
The Foreign Ministry, which has come in for most criticism over its "blocking" role, told Reuters after repeated requests for comment that its experts were unavailable.
GARGANTUAN TASK
The scale of the task facing Russia and whoever eventually agrees to help in the great Soviet nuclear clear up is daunting.
Rough British estimates of the cost of cleaning up the Soviet nuclear legacy in the northwest alone - where around two thirds of the submarines are anchored - are enormous.
Defuelling the fleet, placing the spent fuel in safe interim storage and a modest environmental clean-up programme would cost $300-$400 billion over 30 to 40 years, they say.
Rudolph quoted Russian officials as saying 15 to 20 submarines in the Russian far east were close to sinking, making defuelling a doubly hazardous process. Two in fact sank, but were subsequently refloated.
But despite the frustrations, he retains a qualified optimism. "Five years ago when I started, I think the picture we had at that time was rather pessimistic.
"Since that time, Russia has put into place a concrete plan to address these issues, and we see a way ahead.
"But the two key issues are the legal agreement, the liability issue, and funding. But I think a lot of countries have the money available but can't spend it until this legal agreement is in place."
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
U.S. official wants review of nuclear test freeze
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
By Jonathan Wright,
Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/11/11192002/reu_48977.asp
WASHINGTON - A senior U.S. military official has recommended the United States consider resuming nuclear tests, which were suspended in 1992, according to a memorandum made available Monday.
In the Oct. 21 memo to members of the Nuclear Weapons Council, Defense Undersecretary Edward Aldridge said, "It would ... be desirable to assess the potential benefits that could be obtained from a return to nuclear testing with regard to weapon safety, security, and reliability."
A leading arms control specialist, Daryl Kimball, said the memo was another sign the Bush administration is moving toward a resumption of nuclear weapons tests, a step that would probably generate an international outcry.
When the tests ended, the United States said it was confident it could manage and maintain its stockpile of thousands of nuclear warheads through computer simulations and "sub-critical" tests that do not produce nuclear explosions.
Aldridge, who is undersecretary of defense for acquisition, logistics, and technology, argued in the memo that the United States faces "major challenges" in maintaining the reliability of its nuclear arsenal and deterrent. "We will need to refurbish several aging weapon systems, but the limitations of the nuclear weapon complex will not permit us to perfectly replicate the original designs. We must also be prepared to respond to new nuclear weapon requirements in the future," Aldridge added.
He did not specify any new requirements, but in a review of nuclear policy in 2001, the administration said it was assessing the need for weapons to penetrate bunkers and nuclear warheads that reduce collateral damage.
OVERCONFIDENT
Aldridge appeared to be preparing the groundwork for new tests by saying that nuclear experts may have been overconfident about their ability to assess weapon components. Aldridge made a series of recommendations for reviewing the system of stockpile management that began when the United States gave up testing.
One suggestion was the nuclear weapons laboratories "readdress the value of a low-yield testing program."
Kimball, who is executive director of the Arms Control Association in Washington, said, "I think this is yet another sign that some in the Pentagon are trying to move the White House toward a resumption of testing. He is saying two things: that the labs need to be prepared to respond to new nuclear weapons requirements in the future and that maintaining confidence in the existing arsenal will be very challenging."
The Bush administration has asked Congress for money to improve the readiness of the nuclear test sites and to explore the idea of bunker-busting weapons.
U.S. officials say the administration has not made any decision to resume nuclear tests. But the administration has abandoned its predecessor's commitment to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban all nuclear tests in perpetuity.
----
Agency Overseeing Nuclear Security Orders a Hiring Freeze
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/politics/19NUKE.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 - The federal agency that oversees security for the nation's nuclear stockpile and its weapons laboratories has imposed a hiring freeze, in part because of budgetary constraints, less than a week after the F.B.I. issued a dire terrorist alert that warned that nuclear facilities were at special risk of attack by Al Qaeda.
In a memorandum to his deputies last Friday, the acting administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, Linton F. Brooks, ordered "an immediate freeze on most categories of personnel actions, as well as a freeze on interim organization changes."
Mr. Brooks said that he had ordered the freeze with "the greatest of reluctance" and that "I am taking this action for two primary reasons: budget and re-engineering." A copy of the memorandum was made available by Congressional officials on condition that they not be identified.
Officials at the agency, which is part of the Energy Department and which oversees several weapons laboratories and nuclear storage sites around the country, insisted today that the hiring freeze was aimed at managers and administrative staff and that it would have no effect on security. Its facilities include the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.
The officials said that overall security at the agency's nuclear sites had been greatly expanded since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and that the security staff would not be cut, despite the hiring freeze, since exemptions were allowed.
"Security is first and foremost, and we would not do anything that would compromise it in any way," said Anson Franklin, the agency's chief spokesman, noting that the Office of Transportation Safeguards, which is responsible for the safe transport of nuclear weapons and other nuclear material, was specifically exempted from the freeze.
Last Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a vague but alarming terrorism alert to state and local law enforcement agencies, suggesting that the Qaeda terror network might be planning "spectacular attacks" on American soil and that "the highest-priority targets remain within the aviation, petroleum and nuclear sectors."
The decision only two days later to announce a hiring freeze at the nuclear security agency prompted Democratic Congressional aides to step up their criticism of the Bush administration and what they call its failure to provide adequate resources for counterterrorism.
They said that any reduction in staffing, whether among administrators or security guards, could damage an agency that has direct responsibility for nuclear safety.
"In front of the cameras, George Bush pretends he's a big shot on homeland security, but behind the scenes, he has repeatedly denied funding for critical security," said David Sirota, the spokesman for Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee.
The White House has asked for more money for the security administration for the new fiscal year - an increase of about $400 million, raising its budget to $8 billion.
But the agency's budget has been caught up in the larger, partisan fight on Capitol Hill over spending bills for the federal government.
According to figures provided by Congressional officials, the Republican-controlled House approved an appropriation of $7.9 billion for the nuclear agency, about $100 million below the administration's request, while the Democratic-controlled Senate appropriated about $8.3 billion, about $250 million more than the administration sought.
The agency's final appropriation must still be worked out in a House-Senate conference committee. While the White House has blamed recalcitrant Senate Democrats for the larger appropriations stalemate, Democrats have charged that the administration is manipulating the process to block spending increases, even for vital national security projects.
In his memorandum, Mr. Brooks said he was imposing the hiring freeze in part because "the outcome is uncertain" in the appropriations process and "we must do all we can now to ensure that we don't overspend the financial resources that will eventually be available to us."
He said he also wanted to freeze hiring because the agency was on the verge of an "organizational transformation" that, aides said, was expected to cut overall staffing by nearly 20 percent over five years.
"I am compelled to freeze personnel actions and organizational changes as much for re-engineering reasons as for budgetary reasons," Mr. Brooks wrote. "I do not want to compound the difficulty of successfully standing up N.N.S.A.'s new operating model by hiring new employees and promoting others into new assignments."
He said he would permit exceptions to the hiring freeze, but added, "I will personally review each request for an exemption to this freeze, and I expect to approve very few."
-------- us politics
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---
Security bill provisions criticized
Senate Democrats want protections removed By Nick Anderson
Special To Baltimore Sun
November 19, 2002
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.homeland19nov19,0,5614024.story
WASHINGTON - The Senate divided sharply yesterday on a Democratic proposal to strip a handful of special-interest provisions from the bill that would create a new homeland security agency.
The Democratic amendment has prompted a heated debate over legal protections for vaccine makers and other businesses at a moment when Bush stands on the verge of achieving the most significant government reorganization since the start of the Cold War.
At issue are seven provisions in the House-passed homeland security bill. They include liability protections for certain industries, a waiver of open-meeting law, and a proposal for a research center that may be aimed at a lawmaker-favored university.
Senate Democrats criticize most of these provisions as gifts to big business that have nothing to do with the creation of a new Cabinet-level Department of Homeland Security to defend against terrorism.
The provision drawing the most attention would grant liability protection to Eli Lilly & Co. and other companies that make a mercury-based vaccine preservative. Several lawsuits have alleged that such preservatives cause autism in children.
Several Senate Democrats, led by Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, have attacked this provision.
Some prominent Republicans and the White House, though, have said it is necessary if drug companies are to join the war on terror with products meant to thwart biological attacks.
Other senators have criticized the provision, but so far have stopped short of saying they would vote for the amendment to delete it from the bill.
The swing votes include independent Sen. Dean Barkley of Minnesota, whose short tenure as the replacement for the late Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone will end with the lame-duck session.
GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona plans to vote for the amendment, said his spokesman, Marshall Wittmann. He said McCain believes the special-interest provisions in the House bill are "a poor way to do business." Republican and Democratic aides said yesterday the vote appears to be too close to call. Democrats would need a simple majority to pass the amendment.
Nick Anderson writes for the Los Angeles Times, a Tribune Publishing newspaper.
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Bush Defends Putin In Handling of Siege
By Mike Allen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7598-2002Nov18?language=printer
President Bush fervently defended Russian President Vladimir Putin yesterday for using opiate gas to end the siege at a Moscow theater, and equated the hostage-takers with the Pentagon and World Trade Center attackers.
The gas, which the Russian government at first refused to identify, killed at least 123 of the captives. Among those who died in the raid was an electrician from Oklahoma.
Bush called Putin a "good friend" in the fight against terrorism, and praised him for the "very tough decisions" he made during the standoff in late October.
"People tried to blame Vladimir," Bush told European reporters on the eve of a five-day trip to a NATO summit and then to Russia, where he will meet with Putin. "They ought to blame the terrorists. They're the ones who caused the situation, not President Putin."
Rebels demanding an end to the war in Chechnya held more than 800 people hostage for 58 hours. Commandos killed most of the guerrillas but also scores of hostages when the gas was pumped into the theater's ventilation system. The gas probably was an aerosol form of carfentanil, normally used to sedate big-game animals.
The Bush administration was reluctant to criticize Putin after the siege, while seeking his support for a U.N. Security Council resolution ordering Iraq to disarm. Russia voted for it and Bush continued his solidarity with Putin.
"Eight hundred people were going to lose their lives," Bush said. "These people were killers, just like the killers that came to America. There's a common thread -- that any time anybody is willing to take innocent life for a so-called cause, they must be dealt with."
White House press secretary Ari Fleischer made similar comments immediately after the siege. That was right before the Nov. 5 elections, and Bush was not taking questions from reporters. At the time, Fleischer said the United States did not know what type of gas had been used.
Bush told Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that Russia "should be able to solve their issue with Chechnya peacefully."
"That's not to say that Vladimir shouldn't do what it takes to protect his people from individual terrorist attacks," Bush said.
The president told the European reporters that the renewed inspections were "not a free pass for Saddam [Hussein]" but a mandate to disarm. "If he doesn't, then we, of course, will consult, like we said we would do -- we'd hold a meeting," Bush said.
The United States would use the talks to enlist other nations in enforcing the resolution, likely by military force. Putin, while supporting the return of inspectors, has publicly opposed an attack on Iraq. Bush said the unanimous Security Council vote puts the word out that "we intend to enforce the serious consequences if there's not disarmament; and that we're able to work with our friends."
In a move that Bush aides said was designed to underscore support for a free press in Russia, Bush also gave an interview yesterday to NTV, an independent network.
----
Lugar to pursue N. Korea nuke deal
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021119-2449652.htm
Some form of the 1994 deal to constrain North Korea's nuclear-missile program must be preserved, despite Pyongyang's admission last month that it has violated the accord, incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard G. Lugar said yesterday.
"I know there are some who think this agreement was bad from beginning to end, but for the moment we need a construct that stops the production of more weapons by North Korea," said Mr. Lugar, the five-term Indiana Republican who will take over the committee when his party assumes control of the Senate in January.
The low-key Mr. Lugar, a confirmed multilateralist in foreign policy who has clashed with hard-liners in his own party, said he did not criticize the Bush administration's decision last week to suspend fuel oil shipments to North Korea under the 1994 Agreed Framework deal. The oil is intended to compensate the North for supposedly abandoning its quest for nuclear weapons and allowing international monitors of its nuclear programs.
"That was a judgment call, and I respect their judgment," said Mr. Lugar.
But he insisted the only long-term solution to the crisis involved "creative diplomatic solutions" that preserve a role for international inspectors in the North and hold out the prospect of better ties if the country mends its ways.
Mr. Lugar's tone differs markedly from some in the Bush administration, but Mr. Lugar plays down predictions that he may be heading for conflict with the Republican president or the more conservative incoming Republican Senate leadership.
"Those looking for fights are misunderstanding the situation," said Mr. Lugar. "I strongly support President Bush and [Secretary of State] Colin Powell and have a good working relationship with them. Our work won't be about finding fault or looking for fights."
But he also said he planned a bipartisan approach to his committee, on which Republicans will hold only a slight majority in the new Congress.
When he briefly served as Foreign Relations Committee chairman in 1985 and 1986, "I worked hard to get 15 or 16 votes" on issues in the 17-senator panel, Mr. Lugar recalled. "I know it's not easy. It takes a lot of patience, a lot of accommodation of other points of view."
An admitted foreign policy wonk and a firm supporter of the United Nations, Mr. Lugar has shown a willingness to take on his own party's president on high-profile issues.
In 1986, he helped override President Reagan's veto of a bill imposing new sanctions on the apartheid regime in South Africa.
Earlier this year, Mr. Lugar annoyed many in the White House by co-sponsoring a resolution authorizing military action against Iraq with then-committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr., Delaware Democrat, that was markedly less expansive than the text submitted by President Bush.
Mr. Lugar criticized the administration for failing to build support domestically and internationally for military action against Iraq. He said in the interview that not enough attention has been paid to the postwar scenarios for Iraq, including relations with other Middle East countries and the shape of a new Iraqi regime once Saddam Hussein is eliminated.
But Mr. Lugar in the end supported a modified Iraqi war resolution, after an early September meeting where Mr. Bush pledged to seek U.N. backing for the U.S. hard line.
Mr. Lugar is best known abroad for the 1991 program he co-sponsored with former Sen. Sam Nunn, Georgia Democrat, to finance the securing and eventual destruction of the old Soviet Union's vast nuclear, chemical and biological weapons stocks.
He said one of the early priorities for his committee will be extending the Nunn-Lugar model to Iraq, in anticipation of the campaign to disarm Saddam's illicit arsenals.
The future of Iraq and Afghanistan will be two early topics for committee hearings, the Indiana senator said yesterday.
"It is vitally important that Afghanistan succeed" in the long term, he said, "and there's a concern out there that we are not committed to this."
As he did in the mid-1980s as chairman, Mr. Lugar said he plans a barrage of hearings early in his tenure on a broad range of foreign policy subjects, including economic and political instability in South America, AIDS and poverty in Africa, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The hearings in part will be designed to educate a slew of new members from both parties on a committee where some of the most distinctive voices will be missing.
Sen. Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Democratic liberal who was killed in a plane crash last month, and retiring Sen. Jesse Helms, the North Carolina Republican who is one of the Senate's most well-known conservative voices, had been on the panel.
Mr. Helms, who chaired the committee from 1995 to 2001, made himself a foreign policy power by confronting both Democratic and Republican administrations, clashing repeatedly with the State Department and blocking ambassadorial nominations to get his points across.
Mr. Lugar said that won't be his style.
"Presidents ought to be able to nominate the people they want to serve them, and those people should get a hearing and a vote," he said. "When I was chairman, almost everyone who was nominated got a vote, no matter what I personally felt."
----
Seeking to Lead Sioux, Means Hasn't Mellowed
By Robert E. Pierre
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7689-2002Nov18?language=printer
PINE RIDGE, S.D., Nov. 18 -- Russell Means is all about the revolution. He was a leader in the 1973 armed takeover for American Indian rights at Wounded Knee, site of the U.S. Army's 1890 massacre of Indian men, women and children.
And between roles in Hollywood films and on television, Means has fought for the oppressed across the globe, including an attempt in 1985 to recruit American Indians to fight alongside the Miskito Indians against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. His language is inflammatory and he takes aim at Republicans, Democrats and fellow Native Americans who have "spun a web of rules and regulations" that he says have smothered too many hopes and dreams.
That's why, at age 63, Means, the international traveler, is back here on the Pine Ridge Reservation, still talking about the revolution. After failed bids to become president of the United States and governor of New Mexico, Means once again has his eyes on the Oglala Sioux tribe presidency today. It's a job that most agree he was robbed of in 1974 when at least one-third of the votes were found to be fraudulent by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
But in the Nov. 5 primary, Means was the top vote-getter by 10 percentage points and has won wide support for his pledges to press the federal government to get out of Indian affairs, to share casino profits directly with each resident and to begin the arduous task of lifting his people from the abject poverty that blankets this place. More than a third of reservation homes have no electricity and many Indians live in abandoned buildings and raggedy cars.
"All my adult life I have been struggling for my people's right to self-determination," said Means. "Now I want their freedom, freedom from repression, oppression and suppression that the United States government has forced upon us. I want to free us from American apartheid."
But to some, including the man he hopes to replace as tribal leader, Means is a thrill-seeker who skips from one place to another, making pronouncements but never staying to do the real work. While Means was traveling the globe, incumbent president John "Yellow Bird" Steele said he was working to make things better. Except for a four-year stint in Vietnam, Steele has always lived on the reservation, serving in tribal government since 1978. He has been on the school board, the parks board and trustee at the tribal college. There's no doubt, he said, that the federal government stole native land and reneged on its promises.
The best way to improve the lot of his struggling nation, said the 56-year-old Steele, is to work for incremental change. Currently, one of his pet projects is graveling all the roads to people's homes. "They call them driveways but they range from 100 feet to a few miles," he said. "I need to continue it."
A pragmatist, Steele scoffs at what he considers Means's outlandish campaign promises to renegotiate all the existing reservation contracts and upset everything that exists, including thumbing his nose at the U.S. government. Steele said Means is essentially an outsider who has spent more time in Hollywood and at his other home in New Mexico than at Pine Ridge.
"He doesn't know the reservation," Steele said of Means. "He doesn't know our relationships with people outside the reservation. He's like a visitor. He's not knowledgeable about what's been tried and hasn't worked, what's been going on at the reservation. There are promises he makes that are going to be very hard to keep or he's not going to be able to do it."
Still, people are drawn to Means's message of change. Today, he was working the halls of the Bureau of Indian Affairs office in Pine Ridge. One person after another came up to shake his hand, pledging their support for today's election. He had two meetings. One was with a family who wanted his assistance with an elderly, illiterate uncle who, they said, had been swindled out of his land. Another was with a family who had initially had their children taken away from them but had since gotten a tribal order to get them back. The order was never served because, though it was ordered in July, it was not typed until this morning.
"That's why I'm running," said an exasperated Means, looking dapper in his black jeans, white shirt, black leather vest and leather tassels hanging from his braids down to his thighs. "Everyone passes the buck."
Simone Siouxbob, 39, admires his zeal to change things now. "He's the only one with balls who's not afraid," she said, noting that some are concerned that he might be too radical for the times.
Means said he has no intent of following the status quo if he wins office. In a six-person primary two weeks ago, Means won 31 percent of the vote, compared with 21 percent for Steele, the second-highest vote-getter. He survived legal challenges, filed after the first primary, arguing that Means's candidacy violated election laws that bar a convicted felon from serving. He was convicted in 1975 of rioting and obstruction of justice in Sioux Falls.
Though he has was raised in San Francisco and has lived elsewhere, Means said his direct -confrontation style of management is just what Pine Ridge needs. Alcoholism and joblessness are high. And there is little industry -- not even a bank -- for residents of the reservation.
"Eighty-two million dollars in federal money comes through this reservation every year and it doesn't even bounce once here," he said with disgust. "It immediately flies off to the surrounding communities. We have enriched non-Indians that live nearby."
Means said that Indians here, and elsewhere, must use sovereignty to secure favorable contracts with outside vendors and businesses that wish to come here to make money. He also wants to revise the tribe's constitution to give new power to regulate non-Indian affairs on the reservation and to collect taxes. And if he wins, he plans to challenge the government requirement that people participating in programs such as welfare and food stamps have to take a blood test. It's a violation, he said, of the U.S. Constitution and native sovereignty.
"A treaty is equal to the U.S. Constitution," he said. "With our sovereignty, we're in the driver's seat."
But before he can change things he has to win, Means reminded voters today who came up and offered their support.
"Just get people to the polls," he said. "If they don't vote, they're voting for the status quo."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Hungry Ethiopia rejects Eritrean offer of ports
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
By Reuters
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/11/11192002/reu_48975.asp
NAIROBI, Kenya - Land-locked Ethiopia on Monday rejected an offer from neighbor and former foe Eritrea of the use of its Red Sea ports to transport food aid to drought victims.
Eritrea, itself facing food shortages, said this week it would allow Ethiopia to use its Assab and Masawa ports to transport food to 14 million Ethiopians facing the risk of famine next year because of the failure of crucial rains.
"We have no problem with ports; we have so many ports in the Horn of Africa region to bring food aid into the country," said Ethiopia's Minister of State for Information Netsanet Asfaw. "Our concern is not lack of ports. Our problem at the moment is that there is not enough food to be transported into the country," she said by telephone from Addis Ababa.
Ethiopia is already importing some food aid through the port of its tiny neighbour Djibouti, but the United Nations says the amount provided by the international community is inadequate.
An estimated 70,000 people were killed in a brutal war between Ethiopia and Eritrea between 1998 and 2000 triggered by long-simmering disputes over the border and economic issues. Two years after the war ended, relations between the Horn of Africa neighbours remain in deep freeze.
Eritrea's ports are a touchy issue in Ethiopia, which granted independence to Eritrea in 1993 and at a stroke turned itself into one of the largest landlocked nations in the world.
The Ethiopian opposition was outraged when Ethiopia, in the final stages of the war when its forces were driving deep into Eritrean territory, decided not to take Assab.
Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said this month the food crisis in the country could be worse than the 1984 famine that killed nearly 1 million people in Ethiopia.
-------- arms sales
U.S. Discusses Aid for Turkey to Defray Costs of an Iraq War
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7542-2002Nov18?language=printer
The United States has begun discussions about compensating Turkey for economic losses and other costs likely to be incurred in a U.S.-led war against Iraq, according to American and Turkish officials.
Both sides described the discussions as still at an early stage and marked by a wide gap in what the Turks would like to receive and what the United States is willing to pay. But the mere existence of the talks, which participants said were initiated by the United States within the past two months, reflects the importance that U.S. officials place on Turkey in any war with Iraq.
A longtime NATO ally bordering northern Iraq, Turkey is in position to serve as a crucial base for U.S. military operations. Its bases and airfields would likely be prime staging areas for American forces, and Turkish troops could play a significant role policing the flow of refugees from Iraq or guarding prisoners of war. At the same time, U.S. officials have expressed concern that Turkish forces may attempt to take advantage of a war and occupy northern Iraq to block the creation of an autonomous Kurdish region, which could serve as a base of operations for Turkey's own separatist Kurds.
Preparing for possible military conflict with Iraq, the Bush administration has launched a number of diplomatic and military moves to secure basing, overflight rights and other crucial assistance from countries in the Persian Gulf region and elsewhere. But U.S. officials described the offer of economic assistance to Turkey as unusual, saying similar discussions have been initiated with only one other ally in the region -- Jordan.
"We've told them that if there is military action against Iraq, we would recognize that Turkey would have some losses and we would have to move in some fashion to help them," a senior administration official said.
As another sign of the high-level attention that Turkey is receiving within the administration, President Bush got involved yesterday in furthering Turkey's bid to join the European Union. He phoned the EU president, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and stressed the importance of "advancing Turkey's evolution toward" membership when EU leaders convene in Denmark next month, according to a White House spokesman. Bush also plans to meet with Turkish President Ahmet Sezer on Wednesday while the two leaders are in Prague for a NATO summit.
Turkey already allows U.S. and British warplanes to use an air base at Incirlik to patrol a "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq established after the 1991 Persian Gulf War. U.S. authorities express little doubt that Turkey would support the United States in another war with Iraq.
But Turkish officials fear the potential economic and political consequences. Turkey lost billions of dollars in tourist revenue and trade with Iraq as a result of the 1991 war and confronted a surge in Kurdish refugees. With their economy now in recession, many Turks see another war as undercutting the prospects of recovery and further straining their country's massive debt burden, which is being helped by $16 billion from the International Monetary Fund. They also express concern that a war could reignite unrest in Turkey's mainly Kurdish southeast, where the military has spent much of the last two decades fighting Kurdish separatists.
It was public outrage over the state of the economy that helped fuel a victory in Turkey's national election earlier this month by the Justice and Development Party, whose leaders hold strong Islamic beliefs. So far, however, U.S. officials say they have been encouraged by some of the new leading party's initial moves. "We're favorably impressed with the quality of people being mentioned for the top economic posts and other ministerial jobs," another senior administration official said.
U.S. and Turkish officials familiar with the discussions over a war compensation package said several options have been mentioned, including outright grants, preferential trade terms for Turkish exports to the United States, U.S. military equipment transfers and contracts for Turkish firms to help in the reconstruction of a post-war Iraq.
"We've heard a wish list from the Turkish side," a senior official said. "There's a whole host of ways it could be structured."
Turkish authorities said they also hope for a significant boost in U.S. aid even if no war comes. They say just the talk of war has shaken Turkey's economy, discouraging tourism and trade, raising oil prices and limiting access to international financial markets.
Turkey already has begun to see an increase in some U.S. assistance. Congress recently appropriated $200 million in grants to support Turkish economic reforms and approved another $28 million to help cover Turkey's expenses as head of the international peacekeeping force in Afghanistan. The House also has passed trade legislation that would give Turkish goods duty-free access to the U.S. market. But the measure has yet to be taken up in the Senate.
While congressional sources report bipartisan sentiment in favor of expanding economic benefits to Turkey, they said an administration move to provide new weapons could run into resistance. U.S. military sales to Turkey have been stymied since the late 1990s by human rights concerns over treatment of Turkish Kurds.
-------- business
Report: U.S. Aerospace Dominance Threatened
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page E06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7478-2002Nov18.html
The U.S. aerospace industry is facing increasing European competition, an aging workforce and a lack of long-term investment that could threaten its global dominance, according to a government report released yesterday.
But the report by the 12-member Commission on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry immediately came under attack by industry experts and some of its own members for failing to offer specific solutions.
"This report is too general and diffuse to have the impact that I believe is needed," said John J. Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, who served on the commission. The aerospace industry is in deep financial distress and "too much of our report is devoted to secondary and tertiary concerns," said Hamre, president and chief executive of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
The report concluded that Congress and the White House should increase research and development funding, eliminating regulations that make it difficult for U.S. defense contractors to sell overseas and developing a national aerospace policy.
There are no funding parameters or sense of priorities in the report, said Robbin F. Laird, a defense industry analyst. "They have several good things buried in here, but it is very unrealistic, it doesn't tell us anything about trade-offs," he said.
The commission, mandated by Congress, defended its report. "We're laying out what needs to be done, we know [it will cost] substantially more than what we have now, but we don't know how much," said Charles H. Huettner, the commission's executive director.
The report noted that the Defense Department's aerospace procurement budget fell from $118 billion to $55 billion from 1987 to 2000, that 26 to 27 percent of the industry's workforce will be eligible to retire by 2008 and that the European Union wants to be the world's leader in aerospace by 2020.
At the same time, the recent economic downturn is challenging the industry, the report said. In October, Chicago-based Boeing Co. reported a 43 percent drop in profit during its third quarter and predicted sales and earnings would keep falling next year. Boeing also faces increasing competition from European jet firm Airbus SAS, which is poised to surpass Boeing in airplane deliveries in 2003, according to the report.
The commercial satellite market is also suffering, with the number of commercial orbital launches at 16 last year, compared with 35 in 2000 and 39 the previous year, the report said.
But the situation may be even more serious, said Robert J. Stevens, president and chief operating officer of Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin Corp., who also served on the commission. "There have been only two commercial satellite sales during 2002, with limited prospects for additional sales before the end of the year," Roberts said in a dissenting opinion, included in the report.
The report also didn't go far enough in addressing workforce issues, according to R. Thomas Buffenbarger, president of the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers. In Washington, more than 30 percent, or 36,000, jobs in the aircraft and parts sector were lost between July 1992 and July 2002, Buffenbarger said. In California, half the jobs in that sector, or more than 67,000, were lost.
-------- europe
Close to Joining EU, Czechs Confronted With Darker Past
Reparations Sought for Treatment Of Ethnic Germans After WWII
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A16
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7486-2002Nov18?language=printer
KRAVARE, Czech Republic -- Horst Kostritza was 15 at the end of World War II, and he remembers well the retribution meted out by the newly liberated Czechs against local ethnic Germans like him who were caught on the wrong side of history. There were executions. There was imprisonment for those deemed Adolf Hitler's collaborators. And there were mass expulsions of many of the rest.
"They were told to get out the next day," he recalled. People could take only 80 to 90 pounds of baggage. It was well organized in this town, he said. There were no forced marches like elsewhere. The deportees were collected on trucks, taken to a regional center and deposited on trains bound for Germany.
Those who were expelled had their property confiscated, said Kostritza, one of the few to stay behind. The Czechs took over.
Historians estimate that 3 million ethnic Germans were forcibly removed from their ancestral homes in the Czech areas bordering Germany widely known as the Sudetenland. Now those events are the focus of a dispute between the Czech Republic and two of its neighbors, Germany and Austria. Ancient sensibilities are clashing with national pride in a struggle over who gets to write this messy chapter of history.
With the Czech Republic set in December to receive an invitation to enter the European Union, some advocates of the Sudeten German deportees say the time is right for the government in Prague to issue a formal apology and to repeal the Benes decrees -- named for the Czech leader of the time, Eduard Benes -- that legalized the expulsions. They are also calling for compensation for ethnic Germans whose property was confiscated.
But for Czech officials, the matter is closed. Whatever happened to the ethnic Germans, they said, was fair retribution for their role in supporting Hitler's aggression and compensation for the years of Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.
German deportees have formed potent lobbying groups that keep the debate alive, and the issue has reached the highest levels of government. In March, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder canceled a trip to Prague after Czech Prime Minister Milos Zemen called the Sudeten Germans "Hitler's fifth column." Austrian Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel has come out in favor of repealing the expulsion decrees.
The long-simmering issue was revived among Germans after the 1989 Velvet Revolution overthrew communism in Czechoslovakia. The new government allowed property confiscated by the Communists after 1948 to be restored to its previous owners. But nothing was given to Sudeten Germans whose property had been seized earlier.
Czech officials said most Czech victims of Nazism never received compensation from Germany. It linked the payment issue to a general property settlement with the Sudeten Germans. When Czechoslovakia peacefully divided in 1993, the western segment, the Czech Republic, inherited the Sudeten issue.
Czech political leaders are adamant that there can be no formal apology or repeal of the Benes decrees, which were ratified by the parliament of Czechoslovakia. While some leaders concede that certain conciliatory gesturesmay be needed to assuage Germany and Austria once the country enters the European Union, they also warn that any outside pressure on the Czech Republic could create a backlash.
"Strictly from the legal point of view, we have no problems," Foreign Minister Cyril Svoboda said in an interview. "But we still have the problem of political or moral gestures." He said, "It is up to the Czech cabinet to decide if, when and what" gestures might be coming. But he warned, "to us, it is very counterproductive if there are initiations coming from outside."
"There is no question of any official repeal of the decrees," said Michael Zantovsky, who chairs the foreign affairs, defense and security committee of the Czech senate. He said a recent EU report bolstered the Czech position, that nothing in the decrees is incompatible with EU laws.
"Legally, we're off the hook," Zantovsky said. "Morally, I think there is a sense that during the Second World War, atrocities were committed by the Nazis for which Germany and Austria took responsibility, and after the war, acts were committed by the newly liberated countries, including Czechoslovakia, which were morally indefensible, and that any decent person should say 'I'm sorry' for."
Germany and Austria have said they will not veto Czech membership in the EU over the Sudeten issue. But their demands for a repeal of the decrees have helped make many Czechs lukewarm about joining the group. Only about half the population supports EU membership, according to published opinion polls. Many Czechs say that repealing the decrees would amount to a revision of history and would fail to recognize that the Germans were the aggressors in the war and that many ethnic Germans supported Hitler's territorial claims.
For ethnic Germans like Horst Kostritza, who heads a group called the Circle of the Friends of Germany, it is a matter of setting the historical record straight. "I know the Germans are the main guilty party," he said. "They started the war, and millions of people were killed. But that doesn't give a right to the other side to retaliate." While he said the decrees should not be repealed entirely, he added, "The Czech government should also recognize that it did some bad deeds."
This region had been variously Prussian and German since the mid-1700s, and only became part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. "All the people who lived here during those 200 years accepted Prussian and German culture," Kostritza said. "After 1920, the local inhabitants became strangers in their own country."
He said ethnic Germans here looked to Germany because of linguistic ties, and the men moved freely across the border to work in Germany.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, he used the presence of the Sudeten Germans to make territorial demands on Czechoslovakia. The 1938 Munich Pact gave large swaths of Czechoslovakia to Hitler in an attempt at appeasement, but later he invaded and annexed the rest. Many Germans moved into the area during the Nazi occupation. Ethnic Germans were given German citizenship.
After the war, when Czechs began their expulsions, they did not discriminate between those who had lived in the area for generations and the newcomers. Many of the men had fought in the German army and were expelled, and many others had joined political parties and associations that supported the Nazis.
Kostritza recalled some 40 families in this small town who were expelled or imprisoned for being pro-German. "Life was very tough here," said Marie Kromer, another ethnic German resident of Kravare. "When the resettlement was carried out after the war, even many people who had Czech citizenship were expelled."
Those who managed to stay did not fare much better. Because he held German citizenship, Kostritza said, he was denied Czech citizenship, leaving him in legal limbo. "I had no ID card, I had nothing," he said. "Because I didn't have an ID, I couldn't move freely around the country. I could stay in the place where I lived and worked. Because we didn't have Czech citizenship, we were not allowed to get married."
Kostritza and other ethnic Germans interviewed said they feel no lingering discrimination. "I came to terms with everything that happened, because it was a post-war situation," he said. "Things happened that wouldn't otherwise have happened.
"Life was good, life was bad," he said. "But I wouldn't want this history to be repeated."
-------- iraq
Why 'No-Fly' Zone Clashes Won't Trigger an Iraq War
The U.S. says by firing on coalition planes, Baghdad has violated the latest UN resolution. But the UN won't see it that way
By TONY KARON
Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2002
Time Magazine
http://www.time.com/time/world/printout/0,8816,391985,00.html
The Bush Administration insists its policy is zero tolerance of Iraqi violations of the latest UN Security Council resolution. Administration officials announced Monday that Iraq had violated that resolution by firing on coalition planes patrolling the "no-fly" zone over northern Iraq. But, in the same breath, they said the U.S. would not take the matter up at the UN Security Council, where any move to punish Iraqi violations would have to begin. What's going on?
The reason the Bush Administration won't take the latest firefight to the Security Council is that most of the Council doesn't share Washington's interpretation of the resolution as it applies to the "no-fly" zone. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has made clear that the international body does not view "no-fly" zone confrontations as a violation of the resolution. "Let me say that I don't think the Council will say that this is in contravention of the resolution that was recently passed," Annan told reporters Tuesday during a visit to Kosovo.
The White House called Monday's attacks on U.S. planes by Iraqi air defenses - which were then bombed - a violation of Clause 8 of the resolution, which states that "Iraq shall not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or the IAEA or of any Member State taking action to uphold any Council resolution." The problem is, the flyers aren't enforcing a Council resolution. The U.S., Britain and France began in 1991 denying Iraq the right to fly in parts of its own airspace as a way of implementing UN resolutions urging protection for the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiites in the south from the wrath of Saddam. But the "no-fly" zone was never specifically mandated by the UN Security Council, and was rejected from the outset by Iraq as a violation of its sovereignty. Iraq's objections were backed by Russia and China, and in 1996 France withdrew its participation.
Iraq has for years fired on U.S. and British planes patrolling the zone, hoping to bring one down in the belief that this would force Washington to back down. (These days, of course, it would likely have the opposite effect.) Provoking the U.S. and Britain to drop bombs in Iraq also runs the constant risk of inflicting civilian casualties, which play well for Baghdad's propaganda effort to win Arab support against the U.S. Coalition pilots fly under rules of engagement that allow them to bomb any Iraqi air-defense facilities as soon as those facilities begin targeting the warplanes with radar. Lately, their list of targets has expanded to include not only missile- and anti-aircraft artillery batteries, but also air defense command centers in what many analysts see as a preparation for an eventual invasion.
Administration officials concede that although the U.S. regards the "no-fly" zone confrontations as a breach of the latest resolution, that position would be unlikely to carry the day at the Security Council, and would therefore not serve Washington's interest in establishing a consensus on Iraq. A divided Council, after all, is the principal reason Saddam has managed to get away with thumbing his nose at the UN until now. While the U.S. may continue to cite the "no-fly" zone combat as evidence of Iraq's belligerent intentions, the violations that will count in the international conversation over how to deal with Iraq will be those concerning weapons inspections - either obstructing inspectors, or proof of continued deception or concealing of weapons programs. And for that, chances are, Washington may have to wait.
----
INCIDENT IN THE AIR
U.S. Warns Iraq Over New Attacks on Patrol Planes
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/middleeast/19MILI.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 18 - The Bush administration warned the Iraqis today that they had breached the latest United Nations resolution by firing on American and British warplanes patrolling no-flight zones over Iraq, but it stopped short of casting the violation as sufficient reason to go to war.
Faced today with the latest in a recent string of attempts by Iraq to shoot down allied aircraft in the zones, the administration insisted that the confrontations violated terms of the resolution, adopted by the Security Council on Nov. 8. The resolution bars "hostile acts" toward any United Nations representative or member state seeking to uphold the world body's efforts to contain Iraqi aggression.
But the administration left its position on the seriousness of the incidents deliberately ambiguous, administration and Pentagon officials said. The administration sought both to underscore the seriousness of the threat to American and British pilots, they said, and to reserve the idea that Iraqi attacks on allied warplanes were part of a pattern of intransigence that ultimately could be used to make the case for war.
The administration also appeared to be acknowledging that it would be difficult to use confrontations between allied planes and Iraqi forces on the ground in the no-flight zones - the equivalent of a low-level war that has been going on for years - as the sole reason for taking new military action against Saddam Hussein. The main goal of the Security Council resolution is to require Mr. Hussein to give up any weapons of mass destruction he possesses.
Faced with the near certainty that Russia and some other countries would not agree that Iraq's firing on the patrol planes violated the resolution, administration officials said they would not bring the issue before the Security Council for the moment.
Instead, they said they would remain focused primarily on pressing Mr. Hussein to cooperate in giving up his arsenal.
United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in Iraq today to begin their search for evidence of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and programs to produce them.
"The United States believes that firing upon our aircraft in the no-fly zone, or British aircraft, is a violation - it is a material breach," said Scott McClellan, a spokesman for the White House.
Mr. McClellan said President Bush's policy toward Mr. Hussein remained one of "zero tolerance" when it came to enforcing the resolution. Iraqi attacks on allied planes are "something that we will assess and review" and reserve the right to bring before the Security Council.
"But the issue here is disarmament, and this goes to the heart of the intentions of Saddam Hussein and his regime," Mr. McClellan said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, in Chile for a meeting with defense ministers from the hemisphere, said today that Iraqi attacks on American and British warplanes were "unacceptable." But he declined to state whether those attacks should be the impetus for war.
At the United Nations, an American official acknowledged that there was disagreement among Security Council members as to whether the Iraqi attacks amounted to a violation of the resolution.
Paragraph 8 of the resolution says, "Iraq should not take or threaten hostile acts directed against any representative or personnel of the United Nations or of any member state taking action to uphold any Council resolution."
"It wouldn't be our strong suit if we brought it back into the Council," the American official said, adding that in any case it was "not the key element of the resolution."
But a senior administration official noted today that one of the ideas behind Paragraph 8 was that it could apply to the no-flight zones.
The zones were established by the United States, Britain and France after the Persian Gulf war, although France no longer takes part. They are conducted without the explicit authorization of the United Nations.
In establishing the zones, American officials cited Security Council resolutions that demanded that Iraq halt the violent repression of its civilian populations in those regions - Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south - as well as comply with the gulf war cease-fire requirements.
The Security Council broadly authorized the use of necessary means to enforce these resolutions, which Democratic and Republican administrations have since cited as implicit authority for the no-flight zones.
Mr. Hussein's government in Baghdad has decried the missions as an illegal violation of Iraqi sovereignty.
Despite some complaints about the no-flight zones, the Security Council has never taken formal action to restrict or end the operations.
Iraq attacked American or British warplanes patrolling the no-flight zones as recently as today, military officials said, and allied forces responded.
The European Command, which operates the no-flight zone over northern Iraq, said Iraqi forces had fired antiaircraft artillery from sites northeast of Mosul. Coalition aircraft responded by dropping precision-guided munitions, a European Command statement said.
In a separate incident today, coalition warplanes struck two air defense communications facilities and one air defense radar site in southern Iraq after attacks on American or British warplanes, the United States Central Command announced.
The attack took place a day after allied aircraft dropped 120,000 leaflets over the town of Ar Rumaytha, about 100 miles southeast of Baghdad, in a continuing psychological operation to urge Iraqi military personnel not to fire at coalition warplanes, the Central Command said. The leafleting mission on Sunday, the fourth carried out in the last eight weeks, dropped fliers that said in Arabic, `Do not track or fire on coalition aircraft,' and included a cartoon of a warplane striking a radar and missile site.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. David Lapan of the Marines, said Iraq had fired antiaircraft artillery or surface-to-air missiles at coalition aircraft more than 30 times since the Security Council vote. The Central Command, which manages the southern no-flight zone, said in a statement that Iraqi forces had fired on allied warplanes four out of the five days since Iraq officially accepted the new resolution.
In addition to protecting minorities in northern and southern Iraq, the no-flight patrols over large swaths of Mr. Hussein's territory "have an added benefit in intelligence and training," said Eliot A. Cohen, who directed the Air Force study of the Persian Gulf war bombing campaign.
-------- nato
Analysis: The NATO revolution-Part 3
By Gareth Harding
UPI Chief European Correspondent
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021118-093016-7689r.htm
BRUSSELS, Belgium, Nov. 18 (UPI) -- Two years ago, when NATO General-Secretary George Robertson was asked what the future priorities of the 19-member military alliance should be, he replied: "Capabilities, capabilities, capabilities."
The Nov. 21-22 meeting of NATO leaders in the Czech Republic might have been billed as the 'enlargement summit' -- seven former communist states are expected to be welcomed to the club in Prague -- but it is likely to go down in history as the moment when the world's most powerful military alliance finally got serious about arming itself for 21st century warfare.
Ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall, most European states have been happy to cash in the peace dividend and divert defense spending to other areas like pensions and healthcare. Over the same period, the United States has been busy equipping its forces with the latest military hardware.
The result is a gaping chasm between American defense capabilities and those of its NATO allies, with the possible exception of Britain.
European Union member states, with their 375 million inhabitants and a combined gross domestic product of nearly $10 trillion, spend only $150 billion a year on defense. In contrast, the United States, with 280 million citizens and a GDP of nearly $7 trillion, is set to fork over $380 billion on defense in 2003.
What galls Americans -- and for that matter, many Europeans -- is not just that EU countries spend so little on defense, but that it makes so little impact.
The EU has more soldiers than the United States, but only half are deployable. There is also no way of getting troops to conflict zones on time because European states have only 11 wide-bodied transport planes between them. The United States has 250.
Europeans argue that though it is the United States that smashes in the doors, it is the EU that clears up the mess left behind.
The 15-member bloc may indeed be the world's largest aid donor and the biggest contributor to reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere, but its inability to play more than a bit part in military operations is a continuing source of Transatlantic friction.
Says Robertson: "Concern about U.S. unilateralism risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy unless Europe makes a more equal contribution to our common security. This is not because the United States wants to act alone but because Europeans do not have the capacity to cooperate effectively with U.S. forces."
Europe is slowly waking up to the problem. The decade-long decline in defense expenditure has been reversed in Britain, France, Luxembourg, Norway and Portugal, while the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland have also pledged to boost military spending.
Announcing a $900 million a year increase in defense spending in July, French President Jacques Chirac said: "If we want a powerful Europe...we need the military means and we no longer have them."
Chirac's point was driven home by a confession from his Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie that half France's planes and tanks are immobilized because of a lack of spare parts.
"The Alliance needs capabilities for the future, not for the past," says the NATO secretary-general. "We need forces that are slimmer, tougher and faster, forces that reach further and can stay in the field longer. Such capabilities cost."
NATO's 'capabilities deficit' will become even more glaring if heads of state agree to set up a 20,000 strong rapid reaction force able to sustain operations over time and distance.
Under strong U.S. pressure, Alliance leaders are set to give the go-ahead to launch such a force in Prague.
They are also expected to sign up to a raft of commitments designed to make up NATO's shortfall in readily-deployable troops, wide-bodied transport planes, ground-surveillance systems, precision guided missiles and air-to-air refueling tankers.
Critics point out that a similar exercise -- the Defense Capabilities Initiative -- was launched in 1999, but failed to bridge the gap between American and European forces.
NATO officials point out that the difference this time round is that leaders will be asked to provide specific weaponry within an agreed timeframe. At Prague, there will also be greater emphasis on pooling resources and drawing on national specializations -- such as those enjoyed by the Czechs in the decontamination field.
"The blunt choice for NATO is modernization or marginalization," says Robertson.
If members make good on their Prague promises, the Brussels-based organization could cement its reputation as the world's most powerful military bloc.
However, if there is a repeat of the back-sliding that has characterized previous attempts to upgrade NATO capabilities, the Alliance could be in danger of becoming the 21st century equivalent of the League of Nations.
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Bush Arrives for NATO Summit Meeting
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/19CND-IRAQ.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 - This week, President Bush is in Prague for his first NATO summit meeting, seeking to redefine the mission of the trans-Atlantic alliance and to win support from its members for a possible assault on Iraq, officials said.
Mr. Bush arrived in Prague today for meetings with heads of state on Wednesday and a two-day summit meeting on Thursday and Friday. He will then make a four-hour stop in St. Petersburg to meet with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. On Saturday, Mr. Bush will make speeches in Lithuania and Romania before returning to Washington that evening.
White House officials say the purpose of the president's trip is formally to welcome seven eager former Communist nations, including Lithuania and Romania, into an alliance that will expand to 26 members. But they say it is also to prod a creaky organization formed to contain the Soviet threat into a new, aggressive role in the fight against terrorism.
"This is a summit that is going to celebrate an historic moment for NATO, which is the expansion of NATO into territories that I think nobody ever thought NATO would expand into," Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser said on Monday. "It is also the central purpose of this summit to talk about how to improve NATO's capabilities to deal with the threats that we face today."
White House officials said they expected the alliance to issue a statement in support of the United Nations resolution on disarming Iraq. The president, they said, would also seek support for possible military action against Iraq.
"I suspect that we will hear from NATO partners what they are prepared to do, and what they can do," Ms. Rice said. Iraq, Ms. Rice added, "is typical, or the most important example, of the kind of threat that NATO will face in the future."
Asked by Eastern European journalists at the White House on Monday if he would ask allies in Prague to contribute to military action in Iraq, Mr. Bush responded: "I will - first of all, I believe that the NATO alliance understands the issue."
In addition to Lithuania and Romania, NATO will extend invitations for membership to Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia, Slovakia and Bulgaria.
White House officials said Mr. Bush would deliver a significant speech to a student forum on Wednesday, calling for NATO to move toward an alliance capable of fielding a streamlined force for dispatch anywhere in the campaign against terrorism.
Many senior officials in Europe have said they detect a waning American interest in NATO, particularly after the United States led the war into Afghanistan virtually alone. Mr. Bush's speech will therefore be watched closely in Europe.
"There's something about going to a NATO summit that focuses a president's mind in a different way," said Ronald Asmus, a former aide to the former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, and the author of "Opening NATO's Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era."
"He has his opportunity to put his own personal stamp on NATO's future," Mr. Asmus said.
For now, the Bush administration expects the alliance to endorse an idea, proposed earlier this year by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, of a NATO rapid reaction force of 5,000 to 20,000 troops that could be sent to battle within a month. It would not be ready for action in Iraq this winter, administration officials said.
Mr. Bush will see several European leaders, including Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, President Jacques Chirac of France, President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic and President Ahmet Necdet Sezer of Turkey. Notable for its absence is a separate meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany. The chancellor angered Mr. Bush this fall by running on a platform opposing a war in Iraq. Mr. Bush was further infuriated when a minister in Mr. Schröder's outgoing government was reported to have compared the president's tactics to those of Hitler. That minister was dropped from the new German government.
Although German and American diplomats say that the ice has thawed, a senior White House official said last week that the president's relationship with Mr. Schröder would never be personal again.
In St. Petersburg, officials said, Mr. Bush will speak to Mr. Putin about Iraq. Mr. Bush will also urge Mr. Putin to seek a diplomatic solution to war in Chechnya, Ms. Rice said.
It will be the first meeting between the two leaders since the takeover last month of a Moscow theater by Chechen guerrillas, and Mr. Putin's subsequent public outburst in which he made a coarse remark about circumcision and accused the Islamic rebels of wanting "to kill all non-Muslims, all cross-bearers."
Mr. Bush defended Mr. Putin over the siege, in which all of the approximately 50 hostage takers and some 120 hostages died - most of them after a deadly gas was pumped into the theater. "He made some very tough decisions," Mr. Bush told the Eastern European journalists. "People try to blame Vladimir. They ought to blame the terrorists."
The president also suggested that there were Qaeda terrorists operating in Chechnya. "To the extent that there are Al Qaeda members infiltrating Russia, they need to be dealt with," Mr. Bush said.
-------- pakistan
Executed Pakistani's Funeral Stirs Anti - US Feeling
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-kansi-funeral.html
QUETTA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Thousands of people gathered in southwestern Pakistan Tuesday for the funeral of a Pakistani executed in the United States for killing two CIA employees, and hailed Mir Amil Kansi as an Islamic hero.
The country's new national assembly, meeting for the first time this week after three years of military rule, also interrupted its proceedings Tuesday to offer a brief prayer for Kansi.
Kansi, 38, was executed by lethal injection last week in a case that sparked protests in Pakistan and fears of retaliation against U.S. interests.
A Islamist political leader led the prayer in parliament in the capital Islamabad condemning those who helped in the arrest of Kansi in Pakistan in 1997 and allowed him to be taken back to the United States for trial.
``God, destroy those who handed him over to America,'' said Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a religious party leader from Kansi's native city of Quetta, which borders Afghanistan. ``God, his murderers whether in America or in Pakistan, may they meet their fate soon.''
In the southwestern city of Quetta, thousands of people gathered at a stadium to mourn Kansi.
``Kansi is a soldier of Islam,'' an Islamic cleric told the crowd. ``He did not bow his head in front of America, he gave his life.''
Kansi is to be buried later in the day in his ancestral graveyard in Quetta.
He was convicted in the United States for killing two CIA employees outside the organization's Langley, Virginia, headquarters in 1993 in anger over U.S. policy in the Middle East.
Witnesses said it was the largest funeral prayer in Quetta in living memory but seemed to be taking place peacefully. The city was in mourning with shops closed, streets deserted and black flags hoisted on roof tops.
The arrival of Kansi's body Monday was greeted by a crowd of several thousand people chanting anti-U.S. slogans, including ``crush the United States.''
Kansi's family has called for calm after protests last week that condemned the United States for Kansi's execution.
Kansi back flew to Pakistan the day after the 1993 shootings. He disappeared for four years, spending most of his time in Afghanistan.
He was arrested in Pakistan by the FBI in 1997 and was taken to the United States for trial.
-------- us
Military Sees Potential in Unmanned Weapons
By Tabassum Zakaria
Reuters
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; 2:34 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A10497-2002Nov19?language=printer
The U.S. military sees an "enormous" potential in the future for using unmanned vehicles as part of its war-fighting capability, the Navy's top submarine commander said Tuesday.
But while the idea has been floated, there have not been any concrete efforts to arm underwater unmanned vehicles, Vice Adm. John Grossenbacher, commander of U.S. submarine forces, said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast.
"Technology is delivering us capability in unmanned vehicles that we think is unprecedented in all dimensions: unmanned undersea vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, unmanned ocean bottom vehicles," he said. "We think the potential there is enormous."
The CIA has used Predator drones equipped with Hellfire missiles to fire on suspected "terrorist" targets, including recently in Yemen when a car carrying six suspected al Qaeda members was blown up.
The Navy has successfully tested controlling a Predator drone from a submarine but has not used that capability in an actual combat situation, Grossenbacher said.
Any time a submarine transmits energy or launches a vehicle, it risks losing stealth, but in some cases that is not much of an issue because the adversary does not have the capability to take action against it, he said.
The Navy is converting four Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines into conventional guided missile submarines that can carry more than 150 Tomahawk cruise missiles and a contingent of special operations forces.
In January, experiments will be conducted in the Bahamas to test the capabilities of the submarines being converted. The exercise will include for the first time launching a large unmanned underwater vehicle from one of the Trident's missile tubes and two Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Communications experiments planned included links between the submarine and an unmanned aerial vehicle and a P-3 reconnaissance plane.
The scenario used in the test will be launching the unmanned vehicle to conduct mine reconnaissance and find a safe path to the beach for Navy SEALS special operations forces.
Also tested will be sensors to detect nuclear, chemical or biological weapons, Grossenbacher said.
U.S. and British submarines launched 37 percent of the Tomahawks used in the campaign in Afghanistan, he said.
Submarines are used to collect intelligence, conduct surveillance, and for warfare against surface ships.
The Navy has not changed any submarine deployment patterns in anticipation of a war with Iraq, Grossenbacher said. "If the decision is made to conduct a campaign in Iraq, the submarines will be involved. We'll surge submarines to support that campaign and we can do it," he said.
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U.S. Base in Japan Hit by Mystery Raid
November 19, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/asia/19JAPA.html
TOKYO, Tuesday, Nov. 19 - Two projectiles were fired at an American military base near here on Monday night and a two-foot-long firing tube with burn marks was found in a park nearby, the Japanese police said today.
Neighbors heard several explosions and saw streaks of fire, but no injuries were reported at Camp Zama, a 578-acre, parklike base about 10 miles south of Tokyo. Two men in their 30's were seen running from the firing site, but there were no arrests, the Japanese police said.
About 50,000 G.I.'s are based in Japan under a mutual security pact. In the past, leftist radicals have used similar launchers against American military targets. Last February, an explosion occurred near the United States Navy's Koshiba Fuel Terminal south of Tokyo in Yokohama.
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Boeing Delays Rocket Launch
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-BRF-Rocket-Debut.html
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- With just two minutes remaining in the countdown, Boeing called off the launch of its newest rocket Tuesday night because of technical trouble.
Launch managers said they would try again Wednesday.
The countdown was interrupted several times, first by trouble with the swing arm at the pad, then by other technical concerns and gusty wind. Everything quickly fell into place, but computers detected a potential problem with a liquid-oxygen valve and Boeing gave up for the day.
The Delta IV is part of an Air Force program to develop more reliable and more economic rockets. Its debut is months overdue.
On the Net:
Boeing: www.boeing.com
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U.S. Forces Prep for Iraq in Kuwait
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Kuwait-Preparing-For-War.html
UDAIRA RANGE, Kuwait (AP) -- Apache helicopter-fired Hellfire missiles and high-explosive artillery shells rocked the desert just miles from the Iraqi border on Tuesday as U.S. forces prepared for a possible war on Iraq.
The live-fire exercises, conducted by combat-ready U.S. troops, are taking place as U.N. weapons inspectors in Baghdad resume their daunting task of trying to track down Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction.
If Iraq obstructs the inspectors' work, U.S. soldiers on maneuvers in northern Kuwait may be called on by President Bush to attack Saddam's forces and topple the Iraqi leader.
While all hinges on the results of inspections led by chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix, U.S. forces based in Kuwait say they are ready to wage war on Saddam's regime if Bush gives the green light.
``He (Saddam) should have been taken care of last time, and this is why we are here again,'' Sgt. Golden Brown, 29, of Petersburg, Va., told The Associated Press. ``I just want to get it over and done with so I can get home to my son.''
Brown belongs to a 90-strong mechanized artillery outfit attached to the 2nd Brigade Combat Team from Fort Stewart, Ga.
Seven Apache helicopters firing Hellfire missiles and six earth-shuddering, Paladin self-propelled artillery guns, Bradley fighting vehicles and a range of communications and logistics units all took part in the live-fire exercise Tuesday just 20 miles south of the Iraqi border.
Artillery brigade commander Col. David Perkins said his forces were trained and prepared to respond if Bush gives the order. ``We are here on the ground with all our forces, poised a few miles from the border, well aware of what is going on in the political arena with regards to weapons inspectors and resolutions,'' said Perkins, of Keene, N.H.
``So we understand that if called upon, we have to be ready to act immediately.''
Perkins said Iraq's traditional mechanized army and potential to launch chemical weapons at U.S. troops make it a real threat.
``(But we) stay abreast of both his (Saddam's) capabilities and current disposition and I will tell you neither create undue concern for us,'' Perkins said.
Some analysts believe the Iraqi army is still a formidable force of about 400,000 active soldiers, 2,200 tanks and 8,000 other armored vehicles and an air force of over 300 combat planes -- as well as battle experience with surface-to-surface missiles.
Many U.S. officials and lawmakers believe 200,000 or more American soldiers could be needed to topple Saddam, a force that would require months to move to the region.
The Bush administration has not yet made a decision about waging war on Iraq, but has warned Saddam that he faces serious consequences if he does not comply with the latest round of U.N. inspections.
Some 10,000 U.S. troops are in Kuwait on normal rotations, based at U.S. Army outposts including Camp Doha and smaller camps closer to the Iraqi border. The smaller camps provide a range of services, including medical, supplies and combat forces.
The U.S. Air Force also uses two Kuwaiti bases, Ali Salem air base about 43 miles northwest of Kuwait City, and Ahmed Al Jaber air base, 47 miles west of the capital.
Gulf War veteran Sgt. Ronald Knowles, of Windsor, N.C., said base and battlefield conditions in Kuwait have changed greatly since the 1991 conflict, with air-conditioned tents, hot water showers and higher-powered artillery available to U.S. troops.
But returning to the barren Kuwaiti wastelands, knowing Iraqi forces were just over the horizon, gave him a sense of ``been there, done that.''
``When I left here I didn't think I would ever come back again, but here it is 12 years later with the same old rerun,'' Knowles, 48, said while watching a battery of Paladin Howitzers thunder high-explosive rounds toward a target some 10 miles away.
``But I'm not scared about being back. I think this time around, we will do the same thing we did last time, but a bit faster,'' he said of America's 43-day demolition of Iraq's forces in the 1991 conflict. ``If they tell us to go north, off north we'll go.''
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U.S. Navy Ship to Visit China
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-US-Ship-Visit.html
BEIJING (AP) -- A U.S. Navy ship is scheduled to call at a Chinese port next week, the first such visit since military ties were ruptured following the collision of an American spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet.
The USS Paul F. Foster, a destroyer in the U.S. Seventh Fleet operating in the western Pacific, will stop at the eastern port of Qingdao, the U.S. Embassy in Beijing said Tuesday. It didn't say what day the ship would arrive.
China-U.S. military relations soured after the April 1, 2001 collision over the South China Sea. Both sides accused the other of causing the crash, and China detained the American plane's 24 crew members for 11 days after the EP-3 made an emergency landing on China's Hainan island.
China's handling of the incident angered the Bush administration, which called a halt to military cooperation.
Although U.S. ships have since visited the Chinese-administered port of Hong Kong, which operates with considerable autonomy, the visit to Qingdao would be the first to a mainland port by a U.S. Navy ship since March 2001.
With the war on terror and security concerns such as North Korea's nuclear weapons program bringing Beijing and Washington closer, Chinese President Jiang Zemin and President Bush recommitted to military cooperation during a meeting in Texas last month.
As part of improved ties, the United States will host nearly two dozen Chinese generals next month. The admiral who commands all U.S. forces in the Pacific will visit China. Senior-level defense talks not held since 2000 will also resume Dec. 9 in Washington.
The Paul F. Foster, whose home port is Everett, Wash., has a crew of about 340.
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Reserves May Get Alert on Iraq War
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Military-Reserves.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- National Guard and Reserve members whose special skills would be needed in a war with Iraq might get advance notice of possible mobilization, even though President Bush has not yet decided whether to use military force, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.
Reservists would like some warning so they can make arrangements with employers and family members, even if the call to active duty never comes, said Thomas Hall, the assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs. But there are concerns about such a plan, he said.
``If you elect to do that, then are you giving potential enemies and others advance information of what you're going to do? Are you also unnecessarily alerting people that they might be mobilized, ... and then it turns out they aren't called up?''
Still, Hall said, ``It's something we are looking at.''
Currently, 51,358 reservists are on active duty, most assigned to positions in the United States in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. That number peaked in late July above 85,000. If the United States goes to war in Iraq, Pentagon officials expect to need at least 100,000 more and possibly twice that.
Although Hall said the Pentagon has no list of reserve units likely to be called up, war in Iraq would demand a wide variety of reserve specialists, including linguists, special operations forces, military police and other security forces, pilots and logisticians.
Under the partial mobilization that President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11 attacks, as many as 1 million of the military's 1.3 million reservists could be called to active duty for as long as two years. The number who have served on active duty since then is about 130,000, according to Lt. Col. Dan Stoneking, a Pentagon reserve affairs spokesman.
Hall said he would like to give reservists as much notice as possible so they can make necessary personal arrangements. He said they normally should have about 30 days to report for active duty, once given a mobilization order. But he did not rule out that there could be some no-notice call-ups if war comes.
``If it has to be zero (warning time), and we call them up and say, `Report tomorrow,' we will do that,'' he said.
``If I were a reservist, I certainly would want to know as long ahead as I could that I was perhaps going to be mobilized,'' said Hall, a retired Navy rear admiral whose final military post was as chief of the Naval Reserve.
Hall would not discuss the Pentagon's specific plans for a wartime call-up. ``It's just premature,'' he said.
Another senior official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Pentagon is reviewing its reserve mobilization needs for Iraq with an eye to minimizing the number who would be called up to ``backfill,'' or temporarily replace, active-duty troops deployed away from their home bases. Many reservists would be kept in the United States to provide security at military posts and possibly civilian sites.
Over the longer term, the Pentagon is looking at the possibility of moving some military missions that are mainly or exclusively in the National Guard and Reserve into the active-duty force, and vice versa. Reservists who specialize in missions like civil affairs -- helping civilian authorities rebuild a society after a conflict -- are increasingly in demand, thus facing the prospect of being called to active duty more than once.
Hall said he is uneasy that people who are called up repeatedly will quit, and that this strain will discourage others from joining.
``That's a major issue and concern,'' Hall said.
Having been in his job only five weeks, Hall said he has become aware that some communities are hurting from the loss of police officers, fire fighters and emergency service workers who are reservists and have been mobilized for home defense.
``That message is coming across loud and clear,'' he said.
On the Net: Defense Department's Reserves page: http://www.defenselink.mil/ra/
Committee for support of National Guard and Reserves: http://www.esgr.org/
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
New Surveillance Powers Scrutinized
By GINA HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer
11-19-02
http://www.austin360.com/aas/news/ap/ap_story.html/Washington/AP.V0043.AP-Spy-Court.html
WASHINGTON (AP)--Getting spied on by the government got easier with a court ruling that was focused on the war on terrorism but also raised concerns that new surveillance powers will be used on innocent citizens.
Civil liberties groups say the decision makes it easier for the government to listen to telephone conversations, read e-mail and search private property of people who have done nothing wrong.
``The barrier between the citizens and their government has been lowered significantly,'' said Vermont Law School professor Stephen Dycus, who specializes in national security. ``I don't think the American public has even begun to grasp the kind of sacrifices we've been called to make in civil liberties in this war on terrorism.''
The court decision Monday will make it easier for the Justice Department's criminal and intelligence staffs to work together to gather information. Attorney General John Ashcroft moved immediately to increase surveillance of suspected terrorists.
The Bush administration had sought more power after being thwarted this spring in seeking a wiretap to collect information for both national security and law enforcement uses. The administration was a winner in the unusual case--settled by a court that had never met in its 24-year history in a ruling that may be final.
The decision by a three-judge panel erased restrictions on information sharing and upheld the government's powers under a new law passed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Lino Graglia, a constitutional law professor at the University of Texas, said national security was most important. ``I have very little to hide. From my point of view that's an excellent tradeoff,'' he said.
Viet Dinh, a special assistant attorney general, said last week during a Federalist Society discussion of surveillance that the government would not be heavy-handed. ``We have absolutely no interest in gathering information simply for the sake of gathering information,'' he said.
At the same event, Graglia said without surveillance limits ``The World Trade Center towers would still be standing.''
But Michael Greenberger, who worked on counterterrorism projects in the Clinton administration's Justice Department, said, ``The minute you start hearing prosecutors say `I'm not going to abuse the right,' citizens' ears ought to perk up.''
Greenbeger, who now teaches law at the University of Maryland, said he was concerned that Americans will be monitored with little evidence they are tied to terrorists.
``The first response would be `That couldn't happen in America.' Under this court's decision, it could happen,'' Greenberger said.
Ruth Wedgwood, an international law professor at Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities, said the government still must get permission for monitoring. The requests are processed by a special espionage panel, created nearly 25 years ago as a check on the government's power to conduct domestic spying.
The so-called spy court must approve wiretaps and other surveillance specifically for suspected spies, terrorists or foreign agents in the United States. It approved 934 applications in 2001.
That panel turned down one wiretap request this spring, prompting the first ever appeal to the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which issued Monday's decision.
The review panel questioned whether the Justice Department was too cautious over the past 20 years for separating the surveillance operations of the criminal and intelligence divisions of the department. The two were treated differently because the standard for criminal wiretaps is considered more difficult because of the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
An appeal to the Supreme Court was unlikely because the Justice Department is the sole party to the case. The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups unhappy with the outcome may have to find another option, such as a criminal case involving intelligence surveillance, to get a challenge to the high court.
On the Net:
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit: http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov
----
What the secret court decision means for citizens
By LANCE GAY
Knoxville News-Sentinel
November 19, 2002
http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/national/article/0,1406,KNS_350_1556029,00.html
Over the protests of civil libertarians, the courts are clearing the way for a massive expansion of police powers to wiretap and conduct surveillance on people inside the United States under the name of the war against terrorism.
Ruling for the first time in its history, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review this week gave the green light to police listening in on phone calls, reading e-mails and conducting "no-knock" clandestine searches of Americans' homes and offices to collect criminal intelligence on terrorist activities. The ruling came in response to a warrant turned down by a lower court.
There are only hints of how extensive this sort of snooping might be, and the public probably will never know how federal agencies are using the expanded powers that Congress gave the FBI in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. The warrants for the snooping are issued in secret, and agents keep secret what they find and hear.
Many people who will come under government scrutiny may never know about it. The scope of government activity could emerge in court suits, but those instances are likely to be rare because government agencies are collecting intelligence - not evidence. Normal legal challenges to evidence collected by surveillance, which provide a wealth of information on police activities, aren't likely to crop up.
Here in question and answer form is a discussion of the issues raised by defenders and opponents of the process.
Q: Is government snooping constitutional?
A: Yes. The Supreme Court has held that police can conduct clandestine surveillance under warrants issued by courts without violating Fourth Amendment restrictions on search and seizure. In 1968, Congress set up the procedure police follow in domestic criminal investigations. A decade later, in response to Cold War spying, lawmakers passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a special court that sits in secret to hear requests for warrants when the government's "primary purpose" is tracking foreign agents. Last year, under the USA Patriot Act, Congress expanded the scope of that secret court, saying the government only had to show a "significant purpose" of the snooping involved foreign intelligence matters to obtain the warrants.
Q: How much snooping is going on?
A: The government made 934 requests for warrants from the secret court last year, but some requests could involve multiple individuals. Until this year, the court had never rejected a government request for a warrant to snoop.
Q: What sort of surveillance is approved?
A: The secret court can approve clandestine break-ins of people's homes; monitor how suspects use the Internet and the sites they visit; and use "roving warrants" to cover various phones suspects might use. The USA Patriot Act also allows police to collect financial, medical and library records of those targeted.
Q: Can material gathered under warrants issued by the special court later be used in a criminal trial?
A: Yes. Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said the purpose of the USA Patriot Act was to break down a division between criminal and foreign intelligence surveillance activities, and enable police to carry out clandestine surveillance even of criminal suspects. This week's ruling by the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance appeals court upholds using secret investigations in probes of criminal violations.
Q: How does the secret court differ from a normal court?
A: Under regular procedures, police have to show they have "probable cause" of a crime being committed before they can obtain a court warrant to snoop on individuals. Under these procedures courts also monitor what the police are doing to ensure any evidence collected is directly connected with what the government said it wanted. But under the special FISA court, warrants are sought from the secret court only under certification of Attorney General John Ashcroft that the warrant is needed. Unlike regular courts, the secret court does not supervise what data the government is collecting.
Q: Doesn't this give an awful lot of power to executive agencies?
A: That's a central complaint of civil libertarians, who contend the attorney general has been given extraordinary powers. Brooklyn Law School professor Susan Herman said Congress and the judiciary have very little role in the process, and the surveillance laws have transferred extraordinary powers to the executive branch.
Q: Can innocent Americans not a target of a government terrorist investigation be brought under scrutiny of a FISA warrant?
A: Yes. It's already happened. The Justice Department this year told Congress of a case where a target of a FISA investigation unexpectedly changed his cell phone number, and the conversations of the cell phone number's new owner were collected. Because the new owner of the number spoke in a foreign language, the intercepted conversations were kept. Innocent people could also be involved if the target of a clandestine probe moved around the country, using phones in homes of people he visited. The FBI could continue to collect and scrutinize conversations over those phones, even after the target left.
Q: Will Americans know they are being spied on?
A: No. The secret system is set up to prevent tipping off anybody that is under investigation. Congress could determine the extent of snooping in oversight hearings, but that's unlikely in the midst of a war. Historians may be able to judge from declassified records the extent of government surveillance, but that won't happen for 30 years or more.
On the Net:
www.usdoj.gov
www.aclu.org
(Contact Lance Gay at gayl(at)shns.com or visit SHNS on the Web at http://www.shns.com.)
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Internet Provisions in Security Bill
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Homeland-Security-Police.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Internet providers such as America Online could give the government more information about subscribers and police would gain new Internet wiretap powers under legislation creating the new Department of Homeland Security.
Provisions of the bill tucked into a section about ``cyber-security enhancements'' received scant attention during debate.
Most of these provisions passed the House as part of separate legislation in an overwhelming 385-3 vote during the summer, but they were never considered in the Senate. Many are similar to changes made last year under the USA Patriot Act, which included new laws affecting Internet wiretaps and hacker investigations.
One new provision raises possible criminal penalties to life in prison for hackers caught during electronic attacks that cause or attempt to cause deaths. An attack aimed at causing ``serious bodily injury'' could result in 20 years behind bars.
The debate over appropriate penalties for serious hacker attacks has intensified since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. Experts have increasingly focused on Internet threats to important computer systems that control power grids, pipelines, water systems and chemical refineries.
``We must not ignore the growing threat of cyber attacks,'' said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who first introduced the proposals as the Cyber Security Enhancement Act.
Just a few years ago, hackers vandalized popular commercial and government Web sites, including those for the Pentagon, White House and Senate. But compared with the threat of electronic shutdowns of critical services, such attacks seem like simple nuisances.
Supporters of the sentencing changes for hackers say they eliminate differences with penalties for other crimes that might also result in deaths. Critics noted that some prosecutors have been accused of exaggerating the scope and financial damages from hacker attacks.
The bill also calls for greater legal protections for Internet providers, such as AOL or Microsoft Network, for giving government officials information about their subscribers during computer emergencies. If companies believe ``in good faith'' that there is risk of death or injury to any person, they can turn over details about customers -- even their e-mails -- without a warrant, under the bill.
Civil liberties groups, such as the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, contend the bill's language lets Internet providers reveal subscriber information to any government officials, not just investigators. Traditionally, U.S. companies have refused to act as agents for prosecutors without court-approved warrants, said Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC's legislative counsel.
The legislation requires government officials who obtain such information to report details to Attorney General John Ashcroft within 90 days. It also requires Ashcroft to report results to Congress after one year.
Another part of the Homeland Security bill gives U.S. authorities new power to trace e-mails and other Internet traffic during cyber attacks without first obtaining even perfunctory court approval. That could happen only during ``an immediate threat to national security,'' or an attack against a ``protected computer.'' Prosecutors would need to obtain a judge's approval within 48 hours.
Experts have noted that U.S. law considers as ``protected'' nearly any computer logged onto the Internet. And civil liberties groups have frequently complained that obtaining permission from a judge is too easy for this type of e-mail tracing; if an investigator merely attests that the information is relevant to an ongoing investigation, a judge cannot deny the request.
----
US Government Flunks Computer Security Tests
By Brian Krebs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; 2:55 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9496-2002Nov19.html
The U.S. government has earned failing marks for computer security for the second year in a row, according to a report released today by a congressional oversight committee.
More than half of 24 major federal agencies flunked the latest "computer security report card," according to a House Government Reform subcommittee. The Justice, Defense, Energy and Treasury departments earned failing grades; the Department of Transportation received the lowest score.
The Social Security Administration won the highest mark, with a "B minus."
"Sept. 11 taught us that we must be prepared for attack," said Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Calif.), who chairs the House Government Reform subcommittee on government efficiency, the panel that issued today's report cards. "We cannot allow government operations to be compromised or crippled because we failed to heed that lesson."
The report comes at a time when the Bush administration is concerned that international terrorist groups like al Qaeda not only are planning attacks against U.S. citizens, but also intend to disrupt or disable the Internet and other global communications networks.
Former Sen. Gary Hart (D), now co-chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, has said that the government has not paid as much attention to "cyber-threats" as it should.
The computer security grades were based on data federal agencies submitted to the White House Office of Management and Budget as required under a law passed two years ago.
Investigators from the General Accounting Office (GAO) used the data to determine whether agencies met network security standards, such as limiting access to privileged information and eliminating easily guessed passwords.
The GAO noted marginal improvement in computer security at a few agencies, but said all 24 agencies continue to have "significant information security weaknesses that place a broad array of federal operations and assets at risk of fraud, misuse, and disruption."
Nine agencies actually earned worse grades this year than in 2001, including the Defense, State and Energy departments, as well as the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
GAO Information Security Director Robert Dacey said that the additional weaknesses detailed in the report do not necessarily mean that information security at federal agencies is getting worse, but may instead reflect a growing awareness of security holes.
Nevertheless, "the results leave no doubt that serious, pervasive weaknesses persist," Dacey said in the GAO report.
The Department of Transportation earned the lowest score -- a total of 28 points out of a possible 100. The department blamed its poor score in part on a lack of leadership: it hasn't had a chief information officer (CIO) for the past 18 months.
The department also said many of its computer systems are still vulnerable because of a proliferation of unsecured network entry points, such as dial-up connections put in place by contractors that can be used from almost anywhere to access the agency's networks.
Transportation's low score also was due to repeated security breaches. Department Inspector General Kenneth M. Mead told the House subcommittee today that Transportation's network has suffered more than 25,000 security "incidents" this year alone, though he said the department did not determine how many of the incidents were actual intrusions versus innocent mistakes, such as an employee making an error when entering a password. The department also failed to report at least three occasions in which hackers defaced agency Web sites, Mead said.
At today's hearing, James B. Lockhart, deputy commissioner for the Social Security Administration, said his agency earned a high grade partly because it has made information security a central, "routine agenda item" at executive staff meetings. In addition, he said the administration placed the agency's IT budget directly under the CIO's control.
Mark Forman, the OMB's associate director of information technology and e-government, said the White House office is warning federal department heads that it plans to slash funding for IT programs that consistently lack security protections.
Alan Paller, research director for the SANS Institute, a nonprofit security consortium based in Bethesda, Md., said the second consecutive year of failing grades handed down by the GAO indicates that the annual review process may have turned into a bureaucratic exercise that merely encourages agencies to delay strengthening network security.
"There is a huge amount of money being spent on consultants for these thick, agency-specific reports. But the fact that these scores aren't getting better shows that while the law has impacted the reporting process, it hasn't really affected security," Paller said. "This simply measures how well agencies write reports -- not the actual security of their systems."
Here is a list of what grades the GAO assigned to the agencies:
B-minus: Social Security Administration
C-plus: Labor Dept.
C: Nuclear Regulatory Commission
D-plus: Commerce Dept., NASA
D: Education Dept., General Services Administration
D-minus: Environmental Protection Agency, National Science Foundation, Dept. of Health and Human Services
F: Depts. of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Justice, State, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Treasury and Veterans' Administration. Also, U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Personnel Management, Small Business Administration, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
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U.S. Meets Airport Security Deadline
By ERIC FIDLER
Associated Press Writer
Nov 19, 2002
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AIRPORT_SCREENERS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Hall reports the government has put the program together from scratch over the past year. (Audio)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- More than 47,000 airport security workers are now in place at 424 airports nationwide as part of the new federal Transportation Security Administration, replacing a private work force that was often criticized as inefficient, inattentive and poorly trained.
As the government met Tuesday's deadline for having federal employees handle security at the nation's airports, travelers praised the efficiency of the new system but said they suspected there still would be problems.
Bob Balzco of northwest Indiana, who was headed to Seattle from Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, said terrorists could still get through security posts.
"Look at El Al. A pen knife got on there. It's supposed to be the most secure airline," he said, referring to an incident on the Israeli airline over the weekend.
Federal screeners have been phased in at various airports for the last few months. Tuesday was the deadline for having the federal screeners in place everywhere.
Sarah Marr, who was flying home to England from Boston's Logan International Airport with her 2-year-old son, said the new system made her more comfortable but she doesn't spend much time worrying about security.
"I feel that everything is working very well," she said. "But when your time comes, it comes. You just have to continue."
At Philadelphia International Airport, Louie Bardic of Chicago said things had gone smoothly on his business trip. "It was a little more in-sync. Everybody's on the same page," he said.
Also in Philadelphia, Ellen Haag of Norfolk, Va., said she felt comfortable with the federal screeners. "There will be tighter guidelines and stronger systems to answer to," she said.
Many travelers praised the efficiency of the federal screeners, citing shorter lines at checkpoints as a major plus.
"I'm waiting less now," said Mark Turner, who was flying from Newark, N.J., to Dallas. "They've been able to perform in a fairly efficient manner."
Jeffery Nutting of Dennisport, Mass., was traveling from Boston to Thailand. He said he suspects there are still lapses in security.
"If I were a terrorist, I think I could probably outsmart the system," he said.
It is hard to find anyone who thinks the new federal work force is a bad idea, although some industry experts remain skeptical.
"I'm thrilled that they accomplished it. I credit them for it and I applaud it," said Kevin Mitchell, chairman of the Business Travel Coalition.
But Mitchell said much work remains to be done.
Starting a brand new federal agency with tens of thousands of employees who must provide both customer service and security is a formidable challenge, he said.
While he praised the goal of reducing waits at checkpoints to 10 minutes or less, Mitchell said the system needs to focus less on people - and things - that are not a threat and more on people who are.
"We have to get away from this fixation on tweezers and tie bars," he said.
Mitchell said his research shows business air travel declined 14 percent in 2001 compared with 2000 and will be down an additional 11 percent this year compared with 2001. He said airlines will need to improve a number of factors other than security to lure back business travelers.
"It's so complicated out there the airlines themselves don't understand what the rules are.
"Taking a trip now is like going to get root canal."
Associated Press Writers Jeffrey Gold in Newark, N.J., Jennifer Kay in Philadelphia, Jennifer Peter in Boston and Daniel Yee in Atlanta contributed to this report.
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Uncle Sam wants your data
Clarence Page
November 19, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021119-37273914.htm
Some people read George Orwell's "1984" with a sense of dread. Others read it and think, "Hmmm, cool idea."
It must have taken such a mind to dream up the "data-mining proposal that is included in the Homeland Security Act that passed the House last week in a Republican-brokered agreement by a 299-121 vote.
It would enable law enforcement to peek into just about every public and private act of every American - and without the ubiquitous cameras and "telescreens" that "Big Brother" used to control folks in Orwell's nightmare.
Just think of it. Think of all the stuff about you that is now stored in some computer somewhere.
In the commercial world, there are your credit card purchases, your academic record, your bank records, your vacation trips, your medical prescriptions, the Web sites you surf, your e-mails.
Then there's the stuff the government has on you, like your driver's license, passport records, tollway EZ-Pass records, marriage and divorce records.
Yup, there's all kinds of good stuff people would like to know about you that you might not like others to know.
Now the Defense Department reportedly wants to set up "a virtual, centralized grand database," a computerized dossier on everyone's private life, a "Total Information Awareness" about every U.S. citizen.
And who's seeking all of this? John Poindexter, the national security adviser to President Ronald Reagan who was convicted of misleading Congress and making false statements in connection with the Iran-Contra scandal. An appeals court later overturned the verdict because Congress had given Mr. Poindexter immunity for his testimony.
The retired vice admiral now heads the "Information Awareness Office" in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which gave us Internet and stealth aircraft technology.
"Data-mining" is his idea, according to stories that first appeared in the New York Times and The Washington Post.
Computers and analysts could sift through this available information to determine patterns of behavior, detect and identify terrorists, decipher plans and presumably enable the United States to pre-empt terrorist acts.
"This is not some far-out Orwellian scenario," New York Times columnist William Safire, a veteran of the Nixon administration, opined. "It is what will happen if John Poindexter gets the unprecedented power he seeks."
Privacy is not a partisan issue. It's a tough question of what price is too high to pay in President Bush's "war on terror."
That's a big question lurking deep in the fine print of the Homeland Security Act, a question that has received surprisingly little attention as the measure speeds on a fast-track toward passage with President Bush's backing.
You could sort of understand how the U.S.A. Patriot Act zipped through Congress. It was right after the September 11 terrorist attacks. We, the public, were in a panic and grieving deeply.
So we let Congress and President Bush hastily sign away more than a dozen privacy laws, expand the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and relax some of requirements for government agents to report secret eavesdropping to Congress and the courts.
In an atmosphere of fear and tragedy, Americans surrendered some of their privacy rights and gave law-enforcement officials more powers of surveillance than they really needed.
Make their jobs easier, goes the logic of such circumstances, and everyone will feel safer. Feeling safer is what security is all about.
But it's less easy to forgive us, the public, the media and the rest of the chattering classes for refusing to pay attention as more and more of our privacy protections are sucked into the dark abyss of legislative fine print.
That's what governments often itch to do - take more power than they need when nobody's looking, or when nobody much cares.
Most of media attention the Homeland Security Act has received has been directed at the Republican-Democratic squabbles over Civil Service protections for government workers.
We in the media love such old-century partisan squabbles. They're easy to cover. Meanwhile, some of our most cherished liberties could go up in smoke.
Government needs to have access to information about potential bad guys and gals, but there also have to be limits. America's enduring form of government rests on a delicate system of checks and balances and oversight by one branch or agency over another.
Americans need to vigorously discuss and debate the new definitions of oversight that government officials want to have over the private lives of the rest of us.
It's easy to understand why government officials want these new powers. It is less easy to understand why the rest of us would surrender them without an argument.
Clarence Page is a nationally syndicated columnist.
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DNA database cracks 1,000th case
By Arlo Wagner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021119-77938691.htm
Virginia investigators say a groundbreaking decision made 13 years ago to help solve crimes has helped them crack their 1,000th case: the rape of a young Richmond woman.
No arrest has been made, but police said yesterday that a database of genetic evidence, or DNA, created in 1989 has linked the suspect to the April 2001 crime.
In 1989 Virginia became the first state to collect DNA evidence from sex offenders and compare it to evidence found at crime scenes. The project expanded to include every convicted felon at least 14 years old. Today the database has more than 187,000 DNA samples, which officials say has helped solve 109 homicides, 241 rapes, 12 rape-homicides, nine malicious woundings, 14 carjackings, 57 robberies, 465 burglaries and 86 other crimes. They also say that each month the database links 24 suspects to unsolved crimes.
"Our scientific edge has not only produced leads in cases that have confounded police for years, it also has taken lethal criminals off the street," Gov. Mark R. Warner, a Democrat, said last week at the Virginia Forensic Science Academy, which trains officers to spot, collect and preserve such DNA evidence as blood, hair and semen.
DNA has replaced fingerprints as the key evidence that helps tie criminals to crime scenes, and it is more accurate, eliminating one of every four suspects.
But the process is also expensive. Virginia spends about $6 million annually for testing, analyzing and processing. Entering new evidence into the system, which is run by a contract company, costs about $50. But processing it costs more than $5,000, says Paul B. Ferrara, director of the Forensic Science Division.
There now are 29 other states that collect DNA evidence from convicted felons.
However, critics are upset with the commonwealth's plan to expand the database next year to include everybody charged with a violent crime, despite Mr. Warner's vow that samples will be destroyed after an acquittal or dismissal.
"Our greatest concern is the path that DNA is on," said Kent Willis, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. "But how much privacy are we willing to give up in order to fight crime?"
He also said that forcing somebody only accused of a crime to take DNA tests is tantamount to police searching homes without warrants.
-------- courts
Court lifts limits on intelligence wiretaps
New wide powers upheld in terrorist prosecutions
By David G. Savage and Henry Weinstein
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
November 19, 2002
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.intelligence19nov19,0,6938748.story
WASHINGTON -- Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and the FBI have broad power to wiretap the phones and secretly search the computers and homes of individuals who can be linked to foreign terrorists, a special spy review court ruled Monday.
Proclaiming a major victory in the war on terrorism, Ashcroft said the decision "revolutionizes our ability to investigate and prosecute terrorists" because it permits criminal investigators and intelligence agents to work together and to share information.
Ann Beeson, who heads the American Civil Liberties Union's Technology and Liberty program, said she was "deeply disappointed with the decision, which suggests that this special court exists only to rubber-stamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants." Other lawyers were uncertain whether the case could be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Until now, the government has been told to maintain a "wall" between its spying on foreign agents and its investigation of ordinary criminals.
In Monday's opinion, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review cast aside that concept. "There is simply no basis [in law] to limit criminal prosecutors' ability to advise FBI intelligence officials" on undertaking searches or sharing the results -- and vice versa, the review court said.
In addition, as a policy matter, the court said, "counterintelligence brings to bear both classic criminal investigation techniques as well as less focused intelligence-gathering. Indeed, effective counterintelligence, we have learned, requires the wholehearted cooperation of all the government's personnel who can be brought to the task. A standard which punishes such cooperation could well be thought dangerous to national security."
The court's three federal appeals court judges were appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist with the sole mission to review rulings from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was created in 1978 to oversee particularly sensitive law-enforcement activities, including wiretaps and other forms of surveillance, against suspected spies, terrorists and foreign agents.
All three judges on the review court -- Ralph B. Guy of the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, Edward Leavy of the 9th Circuit in San Francisco and Laurence H. Silberman of the D.C. Circuit -- were originally named to the federal bench by President Reagan.
In May, the seven-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ruled that Ashcroft was improperly trying to broaden the FBI's spying abilities. His actions were based on the USA Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which appeared to lower the wall between intelligence gathering and criminal investigations.
That decision, made public in August by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had been pushing for information about the secret court, contained blistering criticism of the FBI and the Justice Department. The decision accused the FBI of misleading the FISA court in 75 cases, all during the tenure of FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.
The spy court spurned a request from the Justice Department to permit broader cooperation between criminal prosecutors and counterintelligence investigators, saying the request was "not reasonably designed" to safeguard the privacy of Americans.
Monday's ruling reverses that decision and upholds Ashcroft's initiative.
In response, Ashcroft ordered an immediate stepped-up use of "the powerful tools of foreign intelligence surveillance."
Officials said the ruling allows the CIA and the FBI to work together and share information on potential terrorists. However, they also stressed that there would be continued limits on the government's power.
The expanded wiretap power applies only to cases involving "serious foreign threats to national security," not to "ordinary crimes," the review court said.
The Cold War-era division between intelligence-gathering and criminal investigation grew from much-publicized abuses of the government's spying power under Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon. Civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and Vietnam War protesters were spied upon in the guise of protecting national security.
In reaction, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 to limit the government's power to wiretap and break into homes. But after Sept. 11, the wall between criminal investigation and intelligence-gathering was faulted as outdated and dangerous. The FBI and the CIA were accused of failing to "connect the dots" in a way that might have prevented a terrorist group from carrying out an attack in the United States.
For example, an FBI agent in Phoenix expressed concern about Middle Eastern men taking flight lessons, yet this information was not shared with the CIA, which had learned of Al Qaeda's plans to hijack planes.
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the accused 20th hijacker, also illustrates the gaps in the previous policy.
In August 2001, weeks before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Moussaoui was taken into custody by FBI agents in Minnesota because of his strange behavior. He was taking lessons on how to fly a jumbo jet, but said he did not need to learn to land it.
But the Minneapolis agents were blocked from examining his laptop computer because they had no evidence he was a criminal. However, CIA agents in France had learned of his ties to suspected terrorists.
Had this information been fully shared among agents, the government might have obtained a FISA warrant that could have revealed key information before Sept. 11.
In a normal criminal probe, government investigators must have good evidence of wrongdoing before they can obtain a search warrant. The 4th Amendment says warrants should be issued only when there is "probable cause" to believe a crime is taking place.
In contrast, the FBI can obtain a wiretap warrant for "foreign intelligence surveillance" simply by showing the target is linked to a foreign power or an international terrorist group. The individual may be entirely innocent, but the government can obtain an order to tap his phone or secretly break in to his residence.
FBI agents can obtain these search warrants rather easily through the secret FISA court. In fact, legal experts said that until the ruling in May, the department had never been turned down on any of these requests.
At a news conference, Ashcroft stressed that the government was not being given a free hand to spy on ordinary Americans.
"We haven't really changed the threshold" for undertaking a search, he said. Agents must still show that the target is tied to a foreign terrorist group.
Rather, "this will greatly enhance our ability to put the pieces together" to make better use of intelligence information, Ashcroft added.
Several civil liberties organizations filed friend-of-the-court briefs in the case, but they were not permitted to argue in court against U.S. Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, who presented the government's case. That is because when the government seeks a wiretap order under FISA, it is the only party in the case. And the same holds true for the review court.
Consequently, attorneys who challenged the government actions are not clear whether they have standing to file an appeal, said Beeson of the ACLU and Marc Rotenberg of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, one of the groups that filed a brief. That alone is troubling, said Rotenberg.
"It can't be the case that a government search fundamentally escapes review by the highest court in the land," Rotenberg said.
"Congress should not lose sight of the fact that when FISA was created there was an intent to assure some accountability" in the way intelligence surveillance was conducted, Rotenberg added. "It is too easy to view FISA as an exception to the 4th Amendment. Neither the courts or Congress have reached that result, but this decision gets very close to that."
Joshua L. Dratel, a New York attorney who was the co-author of a friend-of-the-court brief filed by the National Assn. of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said he was very troubled by the ruling -- particularly that it seemed to ignore the May findings of the spy court.
"Having discovered that the fox had been eating chickens for the last 25 years, the court decided that the solution was to give the fox more authority over the chicken coop and to stop monitoring it," said Dratel, who was the co-counsel for Wadih El-Hage, who is now serving a life sentence in the United States for helping plan the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya.
Dratel said that it would now be easier for the government to use the FISA court to obtain a judicial order to wiretap or search the offices of a businessman suspected of money-laundering if the case involved activity in the Middle East or South America or some other place that has "a terrorist penumbra." Moreover, Dratel said that unless the person eventually was charged with a crime, he might never know that the search or the wiretap had been conducted.
Legal scholars were divided on the merits of the ruling. "I think the court got it right," said Robert F. Turner, associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia. "The government is trying to protect our lives by inconveniencing us some," said Turner, who was an attorney in the Defense and State departments during the Reagan administration.
But Eric M. Freedman, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University Law School in Hempstead, N.Y., said the decision "was an abrogation of judicial responsibility to enforce the Bill of Rights."
"This is an extraordinarily ominous moment for civil liberties in this country," Freedman said.
"If we don't believe in civil liberties in a time of crisis, how can we persuade other countries to do that?"
Savage reported from Washington; Weinstein from Los Angeles.
----
Appeals court overturns limits on secret wiretaps
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021119-91275390.htm
The Justice Department can use secret wiretaps and other sophisticated surveillance equipment to track terrorism and espionage suspects, a federal appeals court panel said yesterday.
The three-judge panel, in a 56-page order, said the ultrasecret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court erred in May when it ruled against an expansion of wiretap and surveillance guidelines sought by Attorney General John Ashcroft under the new USA Patriot Act.
The panel said restrictions imposed by the lower court, which operates under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), were "not required by [the act] or the Constitution" and that the government's proposed use of the Patriot Act was "constitutional because the surveillances it authorizes are reasonable."
The unanimous ruling was signed by Judges Ralph B. Guy Jr. of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati, Edward Leavy of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco and Laurence H. Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, all of whom were appointed by President Reagan.
"Not surprisingly, this case raises important questions of statutory interpretation and constitutionality," the panel said. "After a careful review we conclude that FISA, as amended by the Patriot Act, supports the government's position, and that the restrictions imposed by the FISA court are not required by FISA or the Constitution."
The special panel, named by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to hear this appeal, was sitting as the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review.
Mr. Ashcroft said the ruling "revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts." He said the Patriot Act already had adequate safeguards to ensure the government does not overstep its authority.
In response to the ruling, Mr. Ashcroft announced the development of a computer system to help investigators get quick court approval for surveillances, a doubling of the number of FBI attorneys who will handle surveillance applications and the appointment of a lawyer at each of the nation's U.S. attorney's offices to serve as the contact person for the cases.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which argued against the broader snooping powers, said it was "disappointed" with the ruling, adding in a statement that the FISA court "exists only to rubber-stamp government decisions."
At the Cato Institute, Robert A. Levy, senior fellow in constitutional studies, and Timothy Lynch, director of Cato's project on criminal justice, said the ruling undermines Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
They argued that the ruling means foreign intelligence need only be "a significant purpose" of an investigation rather than the sole purpose.
"That sounds like a trivial change, but it isn't," they said in a statement. "FISA requires probable cause only that a target is connected to a foreign power or terror group, but not probable cause that crimes are being committed. Now because FISA now applies to ordinary criminal matters if they are dressed up as national security inquiries, the new rules could open the door to circumvention of the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements."
In August, the Justice Department said the FISA court misinterpreted the Patriot Act when it ordered the department to alter its guidelines in pursuing wiretap and surveillance warrants. The department said the court wrongly ruled that the law did not justify new investigative techniques, including federal agencies' sharing information and surveilling people in cases where law enforcement was the primary interest.
In an appeal argued by Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson, the department said that under the new law it could undertake searches and wiretaps "primarily for a law-enforcement purpose, so long as a significant foreign intelligence purpose remains."
Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock said at the time that the court's ruling, as a practical matter, limited the department's ability to engage in the kind of cooperation "both helpful and necessary" to protect national security.
The appeal was the first time the Justice Department had challenged a ruling by the FISA court and the first time an appeals court panel had overturned a ruling by the court.
On May 17, the FISA court said the Justice Department's revised guidelines were "not reasonably designed" to safeguard the privacy of Americans and that they allowed the misuse of information in criminal investigations.
The court's rulings, signed by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, were sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had raised questions about the department's use of wiretaps.
The court, made up of seven federal district court judges appointed by the chief justice of the Supreme Court, reviews applications by the Justice Department for authorization of secret surveillance warrants under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The court's records and files are sealed and may not be revealed even to people being prosecuted based on evidence obtained under a FISA warrant. FISA rules have no provision for the return of an executed warrant, much less with an inventory of items taken, or for certification that the surveillance was even conducted.
The 1978 law was aimed at regulating the collection of "foreign intelligence" data in U.S. counterintelligence efforts, whether or not any laws had been broken. It defined counterintelligence as information gathered and activities conducted to protect against espionage, other intelligence activities, sabotage, or assassinations by or on behalf of foreign governments, organizations, people or international terrorists.
The law was criticized after the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, charged as a conspirator in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
FBI agents in Minneapolis, told that Moussaoui was seeking flight lessons, sought a FISA warrant to search his computer, but FBI officials in Washington refused, saying there was insufficient probable cause. The agents already had information, including intelligence from officials overseas, that Moussaoui was tied to terrorism suspects.
---
Broad U.S. Wiretap Powers Upheld
Secret Court Lifts Bar on Terror Suspect Surveillance
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7720-2002Nov18?language=printer
A secretive appeals court yesterday cleared the way for the Justice Department to use broad new authority to conduct wiretaps and other surveillance of terrorism and spying suspects in the United States, overturning a lower court that had blocked Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's efforts out of fear the new powers would be abused.
The special three-judge panel, issuing its very first ruling, found that the USA Patriot Act -- enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- allows intelligence investigators and criminal prosecutors to more easily share information about ongoing terrorism and espionage cases.
The decision represents a clear legal triumph for Ashcroft, who has aggressively attempted to implement new procedures governing Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) wiretaps and search warrants, which are never revealed to suspects and are approved by a special court that meets in secret at Justice Department headquarters.
The appeals court's action "revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts," Ashcroft said at a Washington news conference. "The decision allows the Department of Justice to free immediately our agents and prosecutors in the field to work more closely and cooperatively in achieving our core mission -- the mission of preventing terrorist attacks."
In a sign of the ruling's potential reach, Ashcroft yesterday announced a slate of new actions designed to intensify the use of secret surveillance in the United States, including the designation of special intelligence prosecutors in every federal court district and the creation of a new FBI unit that will seek intelligence warrants.
Civil libertarians and defense attorneys described the 56-page ruling as a tremendous setback, arguing that it would allow the government to aggressively spy on innocent U.S. citizens with few restrictions and little oversight. The lower court ruling that had rejected the new guidelines proposed by Ashcroft accused the FBI of misleading the special intelligence court in 75 separate cases, all of them under then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh.
"Having found out that the fox has eaten half the chickens, the court has decided the fox should have more authority over the chicken coop with virtually no oversight," said Joshua L. Dratel, who argued against Ashcroft in a brief filed by the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers. "When you start expanding authority like this to where there's no standards, all you increase are the number of innocent people who are surveilled unnecessarily."
Yesterday's ruling comes amid preparations to thwart domestic terror strikes if the United States goes to war with Iraq, including ongoing efforts by the FBI to monitor and interview Iraqis in the United States.
"This is a very big win for this administration," Stewart Baker, a former general counsel for the National Security Agency, said of the ruling. "It is going to be the definitive statement on this issue for years to come."
The decision came on the same day that a San Francisco-based federal appellate court blocked a challenge to the detention of more than 600 suspected terrorists and Taliban fighters at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that a group of clergy and professors has no legal standing to represent Afghan war prisoners, effectively ending that attempt to mount a court challenge on their behalf.
In a third case yesterday, the government told a federal appeals court in Washington that releasing the names of hundreds of domestic detainees in the terrorism investigation could help the al Qaeda terrorist network. The Justice Department is appealing the ruling of a U.S. District Court judge, who ordered the names released.
Under the rules that govern surveillance of terror and spy suspects, Justice Department lawyers applying for authority to use wiretaps and conduct searches face less formidable legal obstacles than they would in seeking similar measures in regular criminal courts. In essence, they must persuade the FISA court only that there is probable cause to believe that the suspect is an agent of a terrorist group or foreign power.
Under yesterday's ruling, they will now be able to obtain those warrants more easily and pass on the information they gather to criminal prosecutors.
Bush administration officials stressed that, in their view, the appeals court was not granting authority to wiretap a wider range of suspects. Rather, Ashcroft and other officials said, the ruling simplifies the process for running such investigations by avoiding the need to halt an intelligence probe once investigators observe evidence of a crime by the suspected terrorist.
"We think the procedures and government showings required under FISA, if they do not meet the minimum Fourth Amendment warrant standards, certainly come close," the three-judge panel wrote in the ruling, parts of which were classified. "We therefore believe firmly . . . that FISA as amended is constitutional because the surveillances it authorizes are reasonable."
The appeals court also found that government lawyers appear to have been misinterpreting secret wiretap law since the 1980s by construing limitations that did not exist within federal statutes. Many lawmakers and other critics have argued since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that Justice and FBI attorneys had grown too timid in their pursuit of secret warrants, citing, for example, their failure to seek one in the case of alleged terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained weeks before the strikes on New York and Washington.
Victoria Toensing, who oversaw terrorism prosecutions in the Reagan Justice Department, said the court's ruling was long overdue, and that misinterpretations of surveillance law had severely hampered prosecutors and investigators.
But Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union said she was "deeply disappointed" in the decision, contending that it sets up the intelligence court as a "rubber stamp" for "intrusive" surveillance warrants.
"As of today, the attorney general can suspend the ordinary requirements of the Fourth Amendment in order to listen in on phone calls, read e-mails and conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices," Beeson said.
Because the targets of the intelligence court's warrants do not know they are being monitored, there is no provision for an appeal of yesterday's ruling by anyone other than the government. But leaders of the ACLU and other groups said they were investigating other options to challenge the decision.
Legislative reaction to the ruling was mixed. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) said the decision "should untie the government's hands and help prevent terrorist attacks." But Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), who has wrangled with the Justice Department over FISA provisions, cautioned that the ruling still imposes important restrictions on the government's conduct.
The ruling issued yesterday involves two obscure and usually secretive courts: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which oversees intelligence warrants sought by the FBI; and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, a special panel set up to handle any appeals. Both were created by Congress in 1978 as part of FISA, which was approved after revelations of CIA and FBI abuses during the Cold War and civil rights eras.
Appointed by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, the current intelligence appeals panel comprises three semi-retired appellate court judges: Ralph B. Guy, Edward Leavy and Laurence Hirsch Silberman. All were originally Reagan appointees to the bench.
The intelligence court had never publicly issued a joint ruling until May, and the appeals panel had never heard a case. The current legal wrangling began six months ago, when the intelligence court ruled against procedures proposed by Ashcroft to allow criminal prosecutors and intelligence investigators to more freely share information.
In arriving at its decision, which was not made public until August, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court outlined dozens of past abuses of the surveillance law and concluded that Ashcroft's proposals "were not reasonably designed" to safeguard the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.
In seeking review, government lawyers wrote in court papers that the intelligence court had "wholly exceeded" its authority in refusing Ashcroft's requests. They argued that Congress had clearly approved broader surveillance authority in the wake of Sept. 11.
---
Ashcroft Praises Surveillance Ruling
By CURT ANDERSON
Associated Press Writer
Nov 19, 2002 10:59 AM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/S/SPY_COURT?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
Jaffer says A-C-L-U doesn't care for the way the decision was reached (Audio)
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal court ruling ensures that the Justice Department can take full advantage of broad new surveillance powers to track suspected spies and terrorists, Attorney General John Ashcroft says.
"This will greatly enhance our ability to put pieces together that different agencies have. I believe this is a giant step forward," Ashcroft said.
Monday's unprecedented ruling by a specially appointed three-judge review panel overturned a decision by the ultra-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which had sought to impose restrictions on how and when the surveillance authority could be used under the USA Patriot Act passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
A key part of the ruling removes legal barriers between FBI and Justice Department intelligence investigators and prosecutors and law enforcement personnel.
Ashcroft announced a number of immediate steps, including development of a computer system to help investigators get quick court approval for surveillance; doubling of the number of FBI attorneys working with surveillance applications; and designation of one lawyer in each U.S. attorney's office as the local point of contact for these cases.
FBI Director Robert Mueller also created a new unit to handle cases brought under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was amended by last year's anti-terrorism Patriot Act to boost surveillance powers. The upshot, Ashcroft said, is improved coordination and cooperation between federal agencies, which have drawn heavy criticism for failing to detect and stop terrorists within the United States.
But the American Civil Liberties Union and several other groups contend the ruling will harm free speech and due process protections by giving the government far greater ability to listen to telephone conversations, read e-mail and search private property.
"We are deeply disappointed with the decision, which suggests that this special court exists only to rubber-stamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants," said Ann Beeson, who argued the case for the ACLU.
An appeal to the Supreme Court was unlikely, at least any time soon. The Justice Department is the sole party to the case, and as the winner had no plans to appeal, officials said. The ACLU and others would have to find another option, such as a criminal case involving intelligence surveillance, to ask the high court for a hearing.
"This is a major constitutional decision that will affect every American's privacy rights, yet there is no way anyone but the government can automatically appeal this ruling to the Supreme Court," Beeson said.
Robert F. Turner, a conservative who is associate director of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, said the decision will enhance government coordination in the war against terrorism and should not unduly infringe on the constitutional protection against unreasonable searches and seizures.
"The balance we have to make right now is, some decisions might infringe upon some liberties, but on the other hand might cost a lot of lives," Turner said.
Reaction was mixed on Capitol Hill. Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called the ruling "despicable" and contended it adds to what liberals consider the Bush administration's sustained assault on civil liberties.
"Piece by piece, this administration is dismantling the basic rights afforded to every American under the Constitution," Conyers said.
But Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said the decision "should untie the government's hands and help prevent terrorist attacks." Grassley added, however, that lawmakers must keep a close watch to guard against possible abuses.
The decision was issued by a trio of judges sitting as the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which is appointed by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
The intelligence court, created in 1978, is charged with overseeing sensitive law enforcement surveillance by the government. The so-called spy court must approve wiretaps and other surveillance specifically for suspected spies, terrorists or foreign agents.
Its May 17 ruling was the first-ever substantial defeat for the government on a surveillance issue, and its unprecedented, declassified public opinion issued in August documented abuses of surveillance warrants in 75 instances during both the Bush and Clinton administrations. It approved 934 applications in 2001.
The spy court concluded that Ashcroft's proposed rules were "not reasonably designed" to safeguard the privacy of Americans.
In reversing that decision, the three-judge panel found that "the definition of an agent of a foreign power ... is closely tied to criminal activity" and that the 1978 law never specifically banned cooperation between the intelligence and criminal parts of the Justice Department, or between it and the CIA.
On the Net:
U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit:
http://www.cadc.uscourts.gov Advertisement
------- drug war
U.S. to Target Drugged Drivers
November 19, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Illegal-Drugs-Driving.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal officials embarked Tuesday on their most comprehensive effort to reduce the thousands of deaths blamed on drivers under the influence of illegal drugs.
The campaign will include public service announcements warning motorists of the dangers and a program to train police officers to identify drugged drivers.
More than 17,000 people are killed each year in alcohol-related accidents. Around 4,500 drivers who were killed in crashes in 2000 -- almost one in five -- had used drugs other than alcohol, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
NHTSA Administrator Jeffrey Runge said police departments will step up enforcement this holiday season, including more checkpoints to catch drivers impaired by alcohol or drugs.
In addition, the government will fund programs to teach police officers to identify drugged drivers through such tactics as checking the size of a motorist's pupils, pulse and blood pressure and gauging reactions. About 5,500 officers have been trained in 35 states so far.
``We are losing thousands of individuals to drug-impaired driving,'' said John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. ``This is not something we are powerless to do something about.''
While motorists who have a specified amount of alcohol in their blood are automatically considered to be driving while impaired, only 11 states have similar regulations for drugs -- Arizona, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Utah, and, in certain cases, Nevada, North Carolina and South Dakota, according to NHTSA.
In the other states, prosecutors must prove that a person's ability to drive was impaired by drugs, relying largely on the testimony of police officers who pulled over the motorist. For example, the officer might say that a motorist was driving erratically or couldn't respond to simple commands after being pulled over.
Federal officials said they would work with states to pass legislation establishing drug limits.
States haven't passed such laws despite new technology that makes it easier for police to determine whether drivers are using drugs, according to a report issued this month by the Walsh Group and the American Bar Association's Standing Committee on Substance Abuse. The report said improved tests of urine samples, blood and saliva make it easier to detect drugs.
Eileen Doherty of the National Conference of State Legislatures said the federal government should offer states increased aid to pass such laws.
``We would rather see them provide the states with incentive dollars than to apply a one-size-fits-all approach or sanctions and mandates,'' she said.
What concerns some organizations that support overhauling drug laws is that the standard will be zero tolerance, meaning a trace of illegal drugs could be enough to convict a motorist of driving while impaired. For people who use marijuana, traces may remain in the body for days after smoking a small amount.
``The likely result will be to treat somebody who smokes a joint a week before they got pulled over the same as a drunk driver,'' said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. ``It's not testing for impairment; it's testing for the presence of marijuana. It says nothing about you being impaired. It just says this was in your system.''
John Bobo, director of the National Traffic Law Center, affiliated with the National District Attorneys Association, said police can't just pull over a driver and give him or her a drug test. They have to have a reason.
``If you're driving recklessly, and you have drugs in your system, I'd be hard-pressed to show how drugs weren't affecting your driving,'' Bobo said. ``If we have laws saying it's illegal to possess a drug, we should also have laws that say it's illegal to have used a drug, especially if you're going to be on the highway.''
On the Net:
Anti-Drug Media Campaign: http://www.theantidrug.com
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: http://www.nhtsa.dot.gov
National Conference of State Legislatures: http://www.ncsl.org
Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org
National Traffic Law Center: http://www.ndaa-apri.org
-------- terrorism
Cases hint of terrorism, fizzle into the mundane
Investigations: As the nation sorts out how to deal with threats, the burden falls on law enforcement and Muslim visitors.
By Scott Shane,
November 19, 2002
Baltimore Sun
http://www.sunspot.net/bal-te.md.suspects19nov19.story
What Baltimore police discovered in a Northwest Baltimore apartment during a routine arrest Sept. 10 made them wonder: Had they stumbled onto a secret al-Qaida cell?
Police Commissioner Edward T. Norris thought it quite possible and said so on television. FBI counterterrorism agents rushed in to assess what police had found on the eve of the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks:
At least six young, male Muslim immigrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Morocco, sharing a sparsely furnished apartment. A computer with links to Web sites of flight schools and local airports. Equipment apparently used to make false documents. Photographs of Union Station in Washington and Times Square in New York. Writings in Arabic and English mentioning jihad.
With America on edge, the story made national news. Immigration agents detained five of the men on visa violations. FBI affidavits describing the suspicious evidence persuaded judges to keep four men in jail, awaiting deportation.
But two months later, the terrorism investigation appears to have fizzled. Based on court testimony and interviews, the men appear to be exactly what they claimed: immigrants hustling at Afghan-owned New York Fried Chicken restaurants to make enough money to survive and send a little to family overseas.
Their only crime appears to be overstaying their visas.
"We're not the people they think we are," says Shamsudin Mohammed, 26, a Somali who has been incarcerated since his arrest Sept. 10. "This is the place we are eating and finding our freedom. We'll be the first to protect this country."
It is hard to be sure what the FBI learned because neither the FBI nor the U.S. attorney's office will comment.
But Mohammed, a skinny, smiling man in an orange jumpsuit interviewed through a glass screen at the York County Detention Center in Pennsylvania, says FBI agents last questioned him a month ago. Immigration and Naturalization Service officials say they believe the case to be a routine visa matter.
The rise and fall of the New York Fried Chicken case is a compelling study in the ways terrorism has changed America.
It shows the challenge to investigators as they patrol for al-Qaida cells among millions of immigrants, for whom language and cultural barriers, evasive answers, aliases and fake documents are commonplace.
For agents who ordinarily hunt for perpetrators of crimes already committed, the new and unfamiliar task is to figure out who might be plotting an attack.
FBI agents, criticized for "failing to connect the dots" before the Sept. 11 attacks, now err on the side of caution, pursuing even the slightest hint of terrorist ties. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III has declared prevention of attacks to be the bureau's top priority.
But the case also reveals the anguish of Muslim immigrants who feel their lives shadowed by suspicion. Their fears are confirmed when they see other immigrants held up publicly as potential mass murderers, jailed for months - and then released or deported with no official acknowledgment that they are innocent of terrorism.
'Very frustrating'
"It's very frustrating for the Muslim community," says Abid Husain, director of the Islamic Center of Baltimore. "There's a fear that anybody can be picked up at any time."
The fear taints aspects of American life that drew the immigrants here in the first place.
"The best part of this country was everybody was innocent until proven guilty," says Dr. Hasan Jalisi, a physician and president of Muslim Community Support Services, a Baltimore-based advocacy group formed last year. "But for Muslims that no longer seems to be the case."
At the root of the tensions is the fact that the Sept. 11 hijackers lived for months in the United States undetected by law enforcement before launching their murderous plot.
Since then, investigators have uncovered "sleeper cells" of al-Qaida sympathizers in the United States, some of whom trained in terrorist camps abroad. In August, six men from Detroit and Seattle were accused of terrorism. In September, six men of Yemeni origin living near Buffalo, N.Y., were charged with providing material support to al-Qaida.
But of hundreds of Muslims detained over the past year, only a tiny fraction has been linked to terrorist groups. The Sept. 10 detentions in a quiet neighborhood off Park Heights Avenue typify the false alarms occurring across the country.
Baltimore police, who went to Labyrinth Road to arrest Moroccan immigrant Abderrahim Houti for threatening a woman with arson, found seven other "individuals of Middle Eastern descent" on the premises.
When some of the men could not produce identification, officers notified the FBI and INS, which took five of the men into custody for visa violations.
They all worked at a New York Fried Chicken on Park Heights Avenue or at other Afghan-owned chicken outlets in Baltimore, Washington and Delaware.
Detainee Khoshal Nasery, 24, for instance, was born in Kabul, raised in Pakistan and moved as a teen-ager to Canada, where he became a cricket standout. He moved to Baltimore two years ago to join his school pal, Reza Zazai, now also a detainee, who was working at the Park Heights restaurant and hoped to open his own place.
"I'm a cook," Nasery said in court. "I can work anywhere."
He kept his living expenses low and sent much of his pay to his mother in Pakistan, who suffers from depression.
The Afghan-chicken niche in the immigrant economy is based not on culinary tradition but historical accident.
A few Afghan-owned chicken joints opened in New York in the 1980s, and new immigrants followed their example. Today scores of outlets called New York Fried Chicken, Kennedy Fried Chicken, Super Kennedy Fried Chicken and other names are run by Afghan natives, mostly Pashtuns who fled during the Soviet war or the chaos that followed.
The shops often locate in poor, urban neighborhoods. As in other industries, immigrant workers often stay beyond the time limits on their visas. If they're caught, they are commonly released on bond, given a hearing and then either leave voluntarily or are deported.
Ehrlich weighs in
This case took that course until the FBI flagged it for possible terrorist links, with the vocal public support of Norris and Rep. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., who were upset when two of the detainees were released on $5,000 bail.
Given the alleged document forgery and other suspicious finds, Ehrlich, then in the midst of his successful campaign for governor, wrote to INS District Director Louis D. Crocetti Jr.: "I do not understand why INS did not consider these actions to be 'engaging in terrorist activity'" under the USA Patriot Act.
Crocetti ordered the rearrest of the men the day he got the letter, but not because of Ehrlich's demand, he says. "The letter was received after I'd already made my decision based on information received from the FBI," he says.
The appearance of political intervention did raise eyebrows in Canada, however, because two of the men, Zazai and Unsir Hafeez, are Canadian citizens and Nasery is a "landed immigrant" on his way to citizenship.
"There are some, let's say, non-legal elements to this situation," Canadian Foreign Affairs spokesman Reynald Doiron said of Ehrlich's involvement.
Norris, in addition to speaking to the media about his suspicions of terrorism, described the case in testimony to Congress. He mocked the initial willingness of the INS to permit the men to go free on bail.
"I mean, if they're waiting for a notarized plan with a list of terrorists, it's going to be a long wait," the police commissioner said. He said the Labyrinth Road detainees were "chillingly, eerily similar" to a terrorist cell he once encountered as a police officer in New York City.
Men held in jail
Immigration judges kept the men in jail. They based their decisions on FBI affidavits asking for time to complete the terrorism investigation.
The bureau won't say what it found. But it appears that none of the initial suspicions panned out. According to court filings and interviews:
# Contrary to initial police impressions, the apartment contained neither forgery equipment nor false documents, says Crocetti.
# The flight school and airport computer links were created by Ahmad Shah Malgarai, a Canadian and the brother of detainee Zazai. In an affidavit, Malgarai said he took a single, $49 flying lesson in Delaware in late 2000 or early 2001. Malgarai, who also has used the last name Khattab, said he used the computer more recently to research an article on the challenge facing Muslims who want to learn to fly since the Sept. 11 attacks.
# The alleged "jihad writings" were verses from the Quran or other religious texts, some written by hand in a prayer notebook, according to lawyers for the detainees. Jihad, they note, is Arabic for "struggle" and often refers not to "holy war" but to the internal struggle of a person to resist bad habits and do the right thing.
"Anything the police don't understand can be called 'jihad material,'" says Jalisi, of Muslim Community Support Services.
# Rather than surveillance photographs of terrorist targets, the pictures in the apartment turned out to be tourist snapshots or postcards, according to a government source.
The system worked
Crocetti, the INS district director, says he believes the system has worked reasonably well in the Labyrinth Road case. The 2,000 INS agents nationwide cannot keep constant track of the estimated 8 million illegal immigrants in the country, so they depend on random encounters like that on Sept. 10 to find violators, he says.
Still, while not passing judgment on Baltimore police or the FBI, Crocetti says investigators should not overreact in their hunt for terrorists. "Just because a person looks foreign doesn't mean they're not in the country legally, let alone that they have anything to do with terrorism," he says.
His agency is launching a training program for local police departments on immigration matters, Crocetti says.
Meanwhile, the Baltimore detentions have generated some negative publicity in Canada. Two weeks ago, in response to new U.S. immigration policies, the Canadian government warned Canadians born in five Muslim countries to think carefully before traveling to the United States.
Hard feelings
In Baltimore's Muslim immigrant community, the case has left bruised feelings. The detentions coincided with an Abell Foundation study, which concluded that Baltimore will rebound only if it can attract far larger numbers of immigrants.
Proprietors of the city's dozen New York Fried Chicken outlets say business is down.
"People saw the publicity and stopped coming," says Ashuqullah Ahmadi, 35, who owns a New York Fried Chicken outlet on West North Avenue. "You hear people say, 'Here come the bin Laden people.'"
The Afghan-born Ahmadi, who emigrated 20 years ago, says the splashy handling of such cases scares off the very people who would be most likely to know of immigrants with terrorist ties: fellow immigrants.
"If there really is a terrorist, you'll find out from the people around them," Ahmadi says. "To make so much publicity just embarrasses everyone."
Seeking balance
Sameer M. Ashar, a University of Maryland law professor who represents Nasery, says he's disturbed by several aspects of the case: the appearance of political pressure, ethnic and religious profiling, and Justice Department secrecy.
As co-director of the law school's civil rights clinic, he says, he fears Attorney General John Ashcroft is "trying to create a sense of security by warehousing a large number of Middle Eastern men."
Still, Ashar says, he was just 10 blocks from the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks, and he appreciates the danger posed by al-Qaida.
"As a country, we're trying to work out a rational way for the legal system to deal with the threat of terrorism," Ashar says. "I don't think we've found it yet."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Warming up to corn stoves
By Jon Ward
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20021119-85983335.htm
Twelve families in Takoma Park, citing concerns about global warning, will heat their homes this winter with corn-burning stoves fueled with kernels from the 3.5 tons of corn stored in a new 25-foot-tall silver silo - the first of its kind to be built in the country in an urban neighborhood.
The silo was installed last week at the city's Department of Public Works, and yesterday public officials, activists and residents gathered to dedicate the site.
Mike Tidwell, director of the global-warming awareness group Chesapeake Climate Action Network, said he hopes that the new alternative-heating source, which he called a "testament to American creativity and moral awareness," catches fire around the country.
Corn stoves have been used to heat houses for over 15 years in the Midwest.
Mr. Tidwell, 40, of Takoma Park, is a free-lance journalist who has written on environmental issues for 20 years. He became increasingly alarmed about global warming while working on an article about the issue in the summer of 2001, and in September he saw a report on the evening news about corn stoves and purchased one.
Other Takoma Park families heard of the corn stoves, and soon a dozen households joined to form the Save Our Sky Home-Heating Cooperative. They began to work toward having a silo built, which was made possible by a $3,000 grant from a stove manufacturer in Minnesota and a couple of $500 grants from a local corn stove distributor and CCAN.
The stoves, which burn 75 pounds of corn at a time, cost between $2,600 and $2,800. A typical house can be heated for 24 hours by about 30 pounds of corn, and members of the cooperative often fill six or seven 100 pound bags at a time. They have paid $425 for 3.5 tons of corn in advance.
There are many fuel alternatives to fossil fuels, including cherry pits and wood chips, but corn is the best alternative because "the result of burning corn is a positive affect on the environment," said Mike Haefner, president of American Energy Systems, which manufactures the stoves.
That is because corn removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it grows, and emits a minimal amount of carbon dioxide when burned. The stoves are installed to ventilate out through a wall, but they create little smoke and a faint odor.
Collectively, the 12 families will keep 104,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, according to CCAN.
Corn stove owners use field corn as fuel, which doesn't pop, Mr. Tidwell said, but he adds there is nothing that says you can't throw a few popping kernels in the stove, "just to entertain your guests."
"It won't heat your house, but it will pop," he said.
Ashley Flory, a member of the cooperative, attended the rally yesterday with 7-month-old daughter Grace. Mrs. Flory, 43, and her husband, Mark, 45, are both government workers, and although they have yet to meet every other family with a corn stove, she said she felt inspired by a "pioneer spirit."
"You feel united in doing something that's good for the planet, and it's kind of a hoot," she said.
Mr. and Mrs. Flory expect to save about $300 by using their corn stove, although they won't be discarding their furnace just yet.
"We could use this as a supplement. We're not going to let it get cold upstairs, but it seems to be working quite well," Mrs. Tidwell said.
The corn stove industry is also a bright spot for farmers, giving them another outlet to which to distribute their corn.
----
A Monument to Eco-Mindedness
Takoma Park Silo to Fuel Corn-Burning Stoves
By Susan Levine
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7459-2002Nov18?language=printer
Some cities trumpet their skyscrapers. Others, their coliseums and ballparks. But few cities have ever flaunted a grain silo, likely because few have ever considered the edifice something to brag about.
Until yesterday, that is, when the city of Takoma Park -- that small, nuclear-free municipality that so often marches to the beat of a different activist -- proudly unveiled a 25-foot-tall, "first in the world" urban grain silo.
The spindly-legged silo will hold 21 tons of organically fertilized, no-tilled corn, fuel to heat the dozen homes of the Save Our Sky Home-Heating Cooperative. It also will help fight what cooperative members call the 21st century's most pressing problem: the scourge of global warming.
"We're the pioneers," Mike Tidwell declared yesterday after a ceremony at the city's public works compound, which is where the corrugated-metal cylinder has been incongruously grounded, miles and miles from the nearest cornfield.
Collectively, the pioneers expect to keep more than 100,000 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere over the next year by switching from natural gas and electric heat.
"This is not just a wacky thing," Tidwell said. Every jurisdiction, big or small, urban or suburban, "should start thinking about a place [it] could put a corn silo."
The story of how the silo came to Takoma Park starts with a story Tidwell was researching for The Washington Post in fall 2001 on the impact of global warming on the travel industry. He read the scientific reports, considered the projections of hotter climates and higher seas, and became utterly convinced "and totally freaked out" by the looming disaster.
Overnight, he switched from freelance journalism to global activism and founded the Chesapeake Climate Action Network. He convinced his wife, a nutritionist, that they should take out a $7,500 home-equity loan and convert their two-story 1915 house into the most energy-efficient habitat possible. They installed solar-electric panels, purchased a solar hot-water system, screwed in new energy-conserving light bulbs.
Then he suggested buying a corn-burning stove to heat the home. "Her face went pale," he remembered.
But she quickly became a true believer, and over the last year, as hundreds have trooped through Tidwell's cozy abode on tours, others have come around, too. Neighbors also bought stoves, and they banded together to haul tons of dried, shelled corn from their farmer-supplier in Mount Airy.
The novelty of making corn runs wore out fast. At which point the light bulb (the energy-efficient one) went on again.
"We needed a corn filling station," Tidwell said.
Cooperative members persuaded a stove manufacturer, dealer and the climate action network to front the $4,000 that a silo and its concrete pad would cost. They persuaded the city to allow it to be sited in the valley of the public works compound. And when they couldn't get liability insurance on the structure -- not even from that company called State Farm -- the city agreed to accept the silo as a gift and cover it through its municipal policy.
The cooperative pays the additional $18 charge.
All in all, a win-win-win in Takoma Park, which is possibly the only jurisdiction in Maryland with an official greenhouse-gas-reduction policy.
"This is something the city can do easily to support a worthy cause," said council member Joy Austin-Lane, who just this week ordered her own corn-burning stove. "There's no better way to support something than to put your money where your mouth is."
Advocates say corn as a fuel is cleaner and less expensive than virtually all others, as well as a perpetually renewable resource. With such positive public relations, the local converts hope that dozens more families will join them in the coming year. If that necessitates a second urban grain silo, so much the better.
But what slogan to put on the first one? Apparently, that has caused debate. Nothing too negative, nothing too cataclysmic.
Maybe something like, "It's cool to burn corn," Tidwell explained. "We want to put a global warming message on it that's upbeat."
-------- energy
Energy Costs Boost Consumer Prices in Oct
Reuters
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; 9:00 AM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A9218-2002Nov19?language=printer
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. consumer prices rose in October, boosted by the biggest gain in energy costs in six months, the government said on Tuesday.
The Consumer Price Index, the main U.S. inflation gauge, increased by 0.3 percent in October after advancing by 0.2 percent in September, the Labor Department said.
The rise, which was completely in line with Wall Street expectations, left economists with little worries about inflation.
"I don't think it's going to change ... (Federal Reserve) policy in any way. The focus is on reviving economic growth and inflation is not going to be a big concern," said Asha Bangalore, economist at Northern Trust Co. in Chicago.
In its latest report, the department said a 1.9 percent rise in energy prices accounted for half of the overall October advance in the CPI. Excluding volatile food and energy prices, the so-called core CPI rose 0.2 percent after inching up 0.1 percent in September.
Gasoline prices rose 3.8 percent last month after rising 1.0 percent in September. They were up 7.2 percent from the same period last year.
Prices for new automobiles were up 0.4 percent, but they were down 1.1 percent from the same period a year ago.
But in another sign of continued economic stress in the airline sector, passenger fares shrank 2.4 percent last month, the biggest monthly decline since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.
----
Safety helps the markets flow
Martin L. Allday
November 19, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021119-64715074.htm
During the first week of December, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission will conduct one of its most important hearings in years regarding the operations of multistate natural-gas pipelines. As it considers issues with vast ramifications for pipelines across the nation, the commission should keep one all-important principle foremost in mind: Safety comes first.
During the years I was chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) (1989-93), the natural gas pipeline industry underwent significant restructuring, enhancing competition and benefiting the nation's consumers. Some estimate that consumers have benefited by more than $100 billion as a result of these actions.
Throughout this process, however, FERC never lost sight of the fact that safety always must come first. We took great pains to ensure that interstate pipeline service would be reliable and safe. In doing so, we expressly recognized the Department of Transportation's (DOT) exclusive authority to promulgate federal safety standards for facilities used in natural gas transportation. The result has been the creation of one of the safest pipeline industries in the world.
In a recent decision involving El Paso Natural Gas Co., however, a FERC administrative law judge seems to have called into question major aspects of this successful regulatory scheme. The recommended decision deals with aspects of what has been termed the California energy crisis, the period of extreme electric and gas price volatility in California during the winter of 2000-2001. Although I have no intention of getting into the middle of the seemingly endless debate over who was at fault for California's energy problems, I do want to remind my former FERC colleagues to refrain from getting caught up in this ongoing blame game and allow themselves to start-second guessing a pipeline's legitimate safety and operational decisions.
Safety and reliability considerations underlie the literally hundreds of operational and engineering decisions pipelines make every day. We should not - with the benefit of hindsight, but without reference to sound engineering principles - try to identify instances where different operational, not commercial, decisions made by pipeline engineers in good faith might have caused more gas to flow into a particular market.
Instead, the FERC should recognize that operational decisions are driven by safety and reliability factors, which often are the direct result of DOT regulations and instructions. For example, maximum allowable operating pressure (MAOP) is a safety-based constraint on pipeline operations imposed by DOT. DOT safety regulations prohibit sustained operations above MAOP. I am hard-pressed to understand how a pipeline can be faulted for failing to operate its system at - and even above - MAOP. This is especially troubling where, as in this case, the pipeline effectively was precluded from operating at MAOP by a DOT directive resulting from a tragic pipeline rupture it experienced on its system near Carlsbad, N.M.
FERC also must recognize that the amount of gas that physically can flow on a pipeline, and its ability to operate at MAOP, is based on many factors outside its control. Flow is not only dictated by DOT requirements, but also by weather conditions, necessary maintenance and the daily (even hourly) decisions of third-party shippers on how much gas they will ship and where it will be delivered.
In fact, the central tenet of FERC's historic industry restructuring was that shippers, rather than pipelines, decide how much gas to flow or not flow. A policy whereby a pipeline is deemed to have "withheld" capacity because different shipper decisions might have resulted in increased gas flow flies in the face of FERC-mandated pipeline restructuring. Indeed, FERC mandated that the shipper - not the pipeline - decide when and where to deliver any given quantity of gas to a pipeline for the pipeline to transport at the shipper's direction.
FERC historically has refused - for good reason - to second-guess the engineering and operational practices of interstate pipelines when acting according to DOT safety rules. FERC has never allowed its review of pipeline operational and engineering decisions to be driven by an after-the-fact evaluation of market conditions. And, in opening up the pipelines to competition, it never was FERC's goal to have economic considerations eclipse safety considerations.
The California energy debacle should not claim as another victim the historic discretion pipelines have been given by FERC to conduct prudent operations. If this occurs, pipelines will be faced with one of two choices: either they will be forced to seek FERC approval to decrease the amount of capacity available under their FERC certificates or they will be forced to conduct operations that DOT and the pipeline's own engineers deem to be unsafe. This is a bad choice for pipelines, their shippers and the country.
Martin L. Allday served as chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from 1989 to 1993.
----
Russia's Lukoil pulls out of Azerbaijani oil field, sells stake to Japanese
Tuesday, November 19, 2002
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/11/11192002/s_48984.asp
MOSCOW - Dealing the second blow to the Caspian oil sector in a week, Russia's largest petroleum producer pulled out of a joint venture developing the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli fields off Azerbaijan.
Lukoil said Saturday that it had sold its 10 percent stake in the Azerbaijan International Operating Company to what it called a leading Japanese oil company for US$1.25 billion.
The deal signals the withdrawal of Russian interest from one of the largest oil fields currently under development in the Caspian region. The Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli complex holds an estimated 4.5 billion barrels of crude.
Vafa Guluzade, a former adviser to the Azerbaijani government on international affairs, said Lukoil's withdrawal was connected to Russian opposition to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which will bring oil from Azerbaijan to Turkey. Russia, which has pushed for pipelines that run across its territory, has opposed the U.S.-supported project.
"This is pressure on official Baku by Russia with the goal of slowing down the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan project," Guluzade said. Lukoil has strong ties to the Russian government, and Azerbaijani President Geidar Aliev has called the company "a connecting link" between the two countries.
Lukoil said in a statement that it continues to see Azerbaijan as one of its most strategically important regions and that it intends to continue investments in the country. The BP Amoco-led Azerbaijan International Operating Company also includes Unocal and ExxonMobil.
On Thursday, Tengizchevroil, the ChevronTexaco Corp.-led consortium developing Kazakhstan's largest oil field, Tengiz, said that it had put investments in the second phase of the project on indefinite hold. The decision froze an estimated US$3 billion of investments into Kazakhstan's oil sector, without which the country will almost certainly not be able to achieve its long-term plans to increase oil output.
In addition to burdensome bureaucracy, western businesses see increased political risk in Kazakhstan, where the harsh treatment of the political opposition and independent media have prompted criticism from the U.S. and European governments.
------- environment
Oil tanker off Spain 'major eco-threat'
By Al Webb
United Press International
November 19, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021119-103553-8043r.htm
LONDON, Nov. 19 (UPI) -- The World Wildlife Fund warned Tuesday that an oil tanker that broke in half and was sinking off the coast of Spain could trigger an ecological disaster far worse than the one Exxon Valdez wreaked in Alaska 13 years ago.
Radio and television reports said the Greek-owned but Bahamian-registered tanker Prestige, which left Latvia loaded with 77,000 tons of heavy fuel oil, snapped in half Tuesday morning about 150 miles off the northwest coast of Spain, and that the rear section immediately plunged to the ocean floor.
"The aft section has sunk," Lars Walder of the Dutch salvage company Smit Salvage told British ITV television news. "The front part is still floating," he said, "but it will sink. A lot of oil went down with the aft part."
Some 5,000 tons of the vessel's cargo were spilled shortly after the Prestige's tanks were ruptured in rough seas and gale-force winds off Spain's Galician coast six days ago, spreading what the WWF said was an oil slick 20 miles long. The slick quickly rolled onto scenic Spanish beaches.
The WWF said in a statement it was worried that "an environmental and human catastrophe" was in the making. If the Prestige's entire cargo -- more than 20 million gallons of fuel oil -- leaked into the sea, it warned "this would be one of the largest oil spills in the world."
The environmentalist organization said it would be "approximately twice as large as the Exxon Valdez disaster" of 1989, when that tanker struck a reef in Prince William Sound in Alaska, dumping an estimated 11 million gallons of crude oil across 1,300 miles of coastline.
"An oil spill of this magnitude would have a devastating effect on both marine life and on the population living along the coast," it said.
WWF spokesman Raul Garcia said the organization was working with the Spanish government "to see what mitigation measures we can help to put in place."
Meanwhile, a diplomatic row threatened to erupt between Spain and Britain over responsibility for the safety of the stricken tanker, which the WWF described as an aging, single-hulled ship that was en route from Latvia to the British colony of Gibraltar when it ran into trouble.
The London Times newspaper reported Spanish authorities were holding Britain responsible because the Prestige had visited Gibraltar in the past "and no inspection of an allegedly dangerous and unsafe ship had been carried out."
It quoted Spanish EU Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio describing it as "yet another case of tax evasion, smuggling and inappropriate behavior."
The British government has insisted that only once in the past four years has the Prestige called at Gibraltar, and on that occasion it anchored offshore, not in the colony's port.
British Ambassador Peter Torry in Madrid told the British Broadcasting Corp. that reports the tanker's final destination was Gibraltar was "complete nonsense" and that the ship was headed for Singapore.
Britain and Spain are involved in negotiations over an agreement under which Madrid would share sovereignty over the colony with London -- negotiations that have drawn sharp opposition from angry Gibraltarians, most of whom want to remain British.
--------
Oil Tanker Sinks Off Spain, Threatening Disaster
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By EMMA DALY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/19CND-SHIP.html
MADRID, Nov. 19 - In a sinking foretold by anxious environmentalists and fishermen, the crippled tanker Prestige, carrying more than 77,000 tons of fuel oil, split in two and sank in the Atlantic Ocean 133 miles off the Spanish coast, threatening to cause an environmental catastrophe in the area's rich fishing grounds.
The aft sank at around lunchtime, leaking fuel oil into waters already stained by a slick that has followed the ship on its tortuous journey out to sea, but the fore remained afloat for several more hours before finally sinking beneath the waves just before nightfall.
There were no immediate signs that the ship had shed its entire load.
Optimists hope that the sinking, in waters 11,800 feet deep, will avert any further pollution, arguing that the fuel should solidify and rest on the bottom.
But environmentalists fear that the ship's tanks could burst on the way down, exacerbating a situation they already classify as "catastrophic" for Spain's northwest region of Galicia.
The crisis, played out in agonizingly slow motion for almost a week amid foul weather, recriminations and political fallout, has prompted the European Commission to demand that European Union member states speed up implementation of new maritime safety rules agreed in 1999 after the Erika spilled 11,000 tons of fuel off Brittany.
Spain, which blames the British colony of Gibraltar for the crisis on the ground that the aging tanker was headed there, has also tussled with Portugal, both countries insisting that the other now take responsibility for the Prestige.
The ship's Greek managers, Universe Maritime, held back from criticizing Madrid's decision to haul the ship as far away as possible from Galicia, rather than offering a port of refuge where the tanker might have been repaired and its cargo offloaded with a minimum of damage.
"The fact that the vessel did have to go out 120 miles into some fairly hostile conditions has no doubt contributed to the situation we are in, but one has to look at it from an environmental point of view," a spokesman said. "It's a brave politician who says perhaps the best thing to do is to beach her."
Environmentalists, and even Galician fishermen interviewed by the Spanish news media, were not so sure.
"No one knew how long the ship could survive, but the time and the conditions have been in place since last Wednesday to transfer the cargo to another ship and avoid this problem," said Luis Suárez of the Worldwide Fund for Nature-Adena. "It was not done and we don't know why not, it does not seem logical."
Mariano Rajoy, the deputy prime minister and a native of Galicia, toured the region on Monday by helicopter, seeing miles of cliffs and beaches stained black by the evil-smelling tar leaked by the Prestige last week.
Several other slicks threaten pristine stretches of coastline north and south of the area that has been already hit, and thousands of fishermen fear for their livelihoods.
Galicia is an important source of shellfish, producing mussels, clams, crabs and the exotic and highly-prized goose barnacles, which look prehistoric and grow on rocks at the shoreline. Christmas is the most important period for the fishermen, who say compensation payments simply cannot make up for their losses.
Prices have already risen to reflect a ban on fishing in the affected area, with goose barnacles selling for an exorbitant $120 a kilo.
Mr. Rajoy told reporters that the government's action had averted "a greater catastrophe," and that the impact of the incident "is less 145 miles out than near the shore."
He added that Portugal and Spain were cooperating to resolve the problem, though as the ship moved out to sea Lisbon and Madrid each claimed the other had responsibility for the Prestige.
Its managers say that on Monday night a Portuguese destroyer insisted that the ship turn west, away from Portuguese waters, and on to a course the salvage team had not chosen; "and then we see the ship breaking up," added the spokesman.
The managers also defend the ship's captain, who has been jailed by the Spanish authorities, accused of failing to cooperate with the salvage operation.
Spanish officials say he obstructed a tug's efforts to secure a line and then refused to start up the ship's engines, which were subsequently blamed for widening a crack in the hull.
Universe Maritime blame the tug for the 14-hour delay in securing the line, during which time the ship drifted 20 miles to within 5 miles of the coast.
Britain strongly denies any link between the accident and negligence on the part of Gibraltar, and says the ship was not heading for the colony, a statement backed by the ship's managers and by Crown Resources, the Russian company that chartered the Prestige. They say it was heading from Latvia to Singapore, and was told to wait off Gibraltar for further orders.
-------- human rights
U.N. Seeks $3 Billion to Aid 50 Million
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-un-appeal.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United Nations launched its annual global appeal in eight cities around the world on Tuesday, seeking to raise a record $3 billion in aid in 2003 to help some 50 million people in crisis.
The world body said its consolidated annual appeal would focus this year on providing hope to areas ravaged by war and other crises.
The theme ``underscores the need to remember that humanitarian assistance is not an end in itself but must be accompanied by efforts to build a bridge from disaster to development, and from the ravages of war to the resumption of normal life,'' Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette said.
``We must bring not only material relief but also -- and above all -- hope,'' she said in remarks prepared for a launch ceremony in Bern, Switzerland.
Once again this year, most of the countries on the U.N. list are in Africa, where the effects of poverty and conflict are aggravated by the world's highest AIDS infection rates.
These include Angola; the Great Lakes region including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi and Uganda; Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan in northeastern Africa; the Southern Africa region, and West African states including Guinea, Ivory Coast and its sub-region, Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Asian nations targeted by the appeal include Afghanistan and Tajikistan in central Asia, North Korea in the Far East and Indonesia in southeastern Asia.
Also on the U.N. list are the occupied Palestinian territories in the Middle East and Russia's Chechnya province and neighboring republics.
2002 APPEAL SOUGHT $2.5 BILLION
On instructions from the 191-nation U.N. General Assembly, the United Nations has issued an annual consolidated appeal for the past decade in search of funding to help feed the world's hungry, heal the sick and shelter those driven from their homes by war and other crises.
Last year's appeal sought $2.5 billion to aid some 33 million people worldwide.
But later developments, including famine in broad swathes of southern and northeastern Africa and a faster-than-expected rate of refugee returns to Afghanistan, swelled the total U.N. aid request to some $4.3 billion by mid-November.
Nonetheless, just over half of the request has actually been raised, Frechette said, urging donors to increase their donations in 2003.
``Overall levels of humanitarian funding have remained the same for the past decade, despite increasing levels of need. And efforts to address the fallout of major crises often divert resources from other appeals, instead of prompting the new aid flows that are needed,'' she said.
A key advantage of the consolidated appeal is to be able to distribute aid according to need rather than on the basis of media attention, U.N. officials said.
While the public quickly focuses on some causes, such as the humanitarian plight of Afghans after the collapse of their Taliban rulers a year ago, it ignores others, such as a brutal civil war in Burundi that has claimed as many as 300,000 civilian lives, the officials said.
-------- ACTIVISTS
High Court to Weigh Nonprofits' Political Contributions
N.C. Antiabortion Group Says First Amendment Protects Its Support of Candidates
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 19, 2002; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A7409-2002Nov18?language=printer
In a warm-up for the anticipated legal battle over the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, the Supreme Court announced yesterday that it will decide whether a ban on political contributions by profit-making corporations should also encompass donations to candidates by advocacy groups that are organized as nonprofit corporations.
At issue in the case is a challenge to a federal law that prohibits corporate contributions to candidates. The challenge was filed by North Carolina Right to Life, a tax-exempt, antiabortion organization that says it is primarily engaged in community activism and political advocacy and funded by voluntary contributions from supporters.
The organization contends that the First Amendment guarantee of free speech gives it the right to donate money from its own treasury directly to candidates, a practice that would be forbidden if it were a for-profit corporation.
Earlier this year, the Richmond-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit, by a vote of 2-1, sided with North Carolina Right to Life. The court ruled that the risk of corruption associated with corporate donations to candidates in federal elections "is not present when the corporation at issue is a nonprofit advocacy corporation."
The court noted that, in a 1986 case, the Supreme Court had approved independent campaign expenditures by nonprofit advocacy corporations and that the same free-speech logic could apply to direct financial support for candidates.
The 4th Circuit's ruling conflicted with a decision in a different case by the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, but the Federal Elections Commission decided not to appeal.
However, the Justice Department asked the Supreme Court to review the matter, with Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson urging the court to provide "guidance" on the issue. "There is a clear need for uniform campaign financing rules governing federal elections across the country," Olson's petition told the court.
The case is FEC v. Beaumont, No. 02-403. Oral arguments are expected in March and a decision by July.
Though the case requires the court to consider a perennial issue in campaign finance law -- defining the types of contributions that could undermine public confidence in the integrity of elections -- it touches only indirectly on the issues in the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA), known as the McCain-Feingold law, such as a ban on "soft money" donations and regulation of "issue ads."
Litigation over that statute is still going on before a three-judge panel in the U.S. District Court in Washington, with Supreme Court review considered all but in- evitable, perhaps as early as this spring.
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Iran Militia Protests Against Pro - Reform Students
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-iran-protests.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Some 3,000 members of an Iranian hardline militia demonstrated on Tuesday against pro-reform students who have staged strikes and sit-ins for more than a week for freedom of speech in the Islamic Republic.
The protest by the bearded men and black chador-clad women of the Basij militia at Tehran University came as police tried to lock out thousands of reformist students from another campus in the capital and prevent them from holding a rally.
``We are ready, we don't have tolerance any more,'' said one Basij leader addressing the Tehran University meeting.
The pro-reform student protests, the biggest in Iran for three years, have heightened political tension at a time when moderate President Mohammad Khatami is gearing up to take on powerful conservatives who have frustrated his reform efforts.
Hundreds of hard-liners clashed with reformist students on Monday in the first serious violence to erupt in 11 days of protests sparked by the death sentence on history lecturer Hashem Aghajari for questioning clerical rule.
One student leader was rendered unconscious for 20 hours after a similar clash with hard-liners in the southwestern town of Yasouj on Monday, the ISNA student news agency said.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's most powerful figure, attempted to calm tension on Sunday by ordering a judicial review of Aghajari's death sentence.
But the row over the sentence continues unabated. Judiciary Chief Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi-Shahroudi defended his judges saying: ``Justice in the judiciary is not based on expediency.''
``His remarks show they do not want to step back,'' said student leader Saeed Razavi Faqih. ``If this continues, they should be ready to pay a heavy price for judicial despotism.''
Reformists accuse conservatives of trying to trigger clashes as a pretext for a crackdown and the arrest of top reformers. Hard-liners say the students have insulted Khamenei.
``Our red lines are the leader and the leadership. We will not remain silent. Passing those red lines has a heavy price,'' the Tehran University speaker said.
``Long live Khamenei,'' the militia forces responded.
``POPULAR FORCES''
Khamenei warned the reformist government and parliament to make up with the hardline judiciary or face ``popular intervention,'' comments seen as a reference to the Basij, a volunteer force answerable only to the leader.
Basijis gathered at Tehran University, the scene of a large pro-reform student protest last week, echoed Khamenei's words.
``If the three powers are not able to solve the problem, I will use popular force,'' they chanted.
Meanwhile, police locked some 2,000 pro-reform students out of another Tehran campus for some two hours until the weight of numbers outside obliged security forces to let them in.
Khatami has introduced two bills to parliament aiming to curb the powers of the conservative judiciary and Guardian Council which can veto laws and election candidates.
The ascetic, mid-ranking cleric has previously stepped back from the brink of confrontation with powerful conservatives who have blocked his attempts at reform despite two landslide elections wins in 1997 and 2001 behind him.
But this time he appears to be serious and has threatened to resign if his reforms are foiled once more.
One deputy warned, in an apparent reference to Khamenei's words, the reformists could also summon popular forces.
``We also know how to drag people on to the streets,'' Jasem Shadidzadeh told parliament. ``Right now, we do not consider it to be to the benefit of country, but if one day it is, we will pour people on to the streets to slap their faces.''
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Militia Force and Students Clash in Continuing Tehran Protest
November 19, 2002
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/middleeast/19IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Nov. 18 - Hundreds of hard-line paramilitary forces clashed here today with protesting students who had gathered at Industrial Sharif University downtown in support of a reformist scholar sentenced to death.
Demonstrations are continuing for a second week in support of the scholar, Hashem Aghajari, a university professor who had called for separation of religion and state.
Pro-reform students held protests despite an order over the weekend by the supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to an appeals court to review the case, using language that indicated that the death sentence might be dismissed.
More than 4,000 students came out to march today, the Iranian Student News Agency said, and student leaders said their demands went beyond Mr. Aghajari's release. They said they would press for the release of all political prisoners and for a guarantee of freedom of speech.
"We demand unconditional release of Mr. Aghajari but demand freedom of speech and opinion for everyone and forever," Abdullah Momeni, one of the speakers at the university today, said in a telephone interview afterward.
Mr. Momeni added that the students did not consider apostasy, the charge against Mr. Aghajari, a crime. He said the judiciary, which generally supports the hard-liners in the government, was acting like courts in the Middle Ages.
"Apostasy has no meaning in the world today, which favors freedom of speech and opinion," he said.
Apostasy charges were brought against Mr. Aghajari after he said in a speech that people were not monkeys who should follow religious leaders blindly.
About 300 members of a hard-line militia force, which clashed with students at another university on Sunday, turned up today and attacked the protesters, said local journalists, the only ones allowed inside the campus. One student had a severe head injury, students said, and seven others were arrested.
Protests continued at universities around the country in support of Mr. Aghajari, and there were clashes elsewhere as well, including at a university in the city of Isfahan.
Student protests received little coverage in the domestic press, even in reformist newspapers. Local journalists say their newspapers have refused to publish their accounts.
The judge who has shut down more than 60 pro-reform newspapers, Saeed Mortazavi, summoned editors of reformist newspapers as the protests started and warned them about covering demonstrations, said the Emrooz Internet site, which belongs to the leading pro-reform party, the Participation Front.
Ayatollah Khamenei said last week that he would unleash the "public force," a reference to the militia force, to intervene if the heads of the regular law enforcement agencies failed to settle problems.
The leading student movement, the Office for Consolidating Unity, said today that it would hold its last major protest on Tuesday, and that local student associations would then decide whether to continue demonstrating on their own.
"We feel that we have stated our demands for change clearly and now have to follow them in other ways," said Mr. Momeni, who is a member of the Office for Consolidating Unity.
"If our political system wants to survive and regain its legitimacy, it has no choice but to give in to our demands for freedom."
Students have recently been boldly critical of the government, including the supreme religious leader, who is normally beyond criticism. They have called for secularization of the religious system and resignation of the country's chief justice, Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, and even of the moderate president, Mohammad Khatami.
Mr. Khatami's Interior Ministry refused to issue a permit for students to protest today.
Some reformist politicians acknowledged that part of the reason they wanted the protests played down was because of their own fear that the demonstrations could get out of control and provide the opportunity for hard-liners to use violence against students.
"Reformers can only play chess, but conservatives' favorite game is boxing, which reformers cannot play," said Fayaz Zahed, the political director of the daily Etemad and a member of the policy-making board of the daily Hambastegi, both pro-reform newspapers.
"It is to no one's interest for the student movement to become revolutionary at this stage," he added.
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Caracas Riot Police Battle Anti-Chávez Marchers
November 19, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/19/international/americas/19VENE.html
CARACAS, Venezuela, Nov. 18 (Reuters) - National Guard troops fired tear gas and shotgun pellets to disperse antigovernment demonstrators here today as President Hugo Chávez's struggle with his political foes persisted.
The disturbances followed a weekend of tumult caused in part by the government's decision on Saturday to wrest control of the Caracas city police from Mayor Alfredo Peńa, an outspoken opponent of the president.
Adding to the tension, a powerful explosion rocked downtown Caracas today, killing three people and causing widespread panic. Firefighters said they had traced the explosion to a fireworks store.
Riding motorcycles and wearing gas masks, troops in the eastern part of the capital swooped on flag-waving anti-Chávez protesters to disperse them from highway roadblocks that they had used their own cars to form. "We are protesting against the government's violation of human rights," said a demonstrator, Armando Morante, 25. "We are creating chaos."
The soldiers fired shotgun pellets and canisters of gas. Demonstrators responded by throwing stones and garbage as the eye-stinging, throat-burning gas enveloped them and the cars backed up in both directions.
The demonstrators contend that Mr. Chávez, a former paratrooper elected in 1998 who survived a coup in April, has begun a military crackdown on his opponents. He has resisted fierce opposition pressure to step down and call an early referendum on his rule.
The disturbances have increased the likelihood that opposition leaders could mobilize a general strike.
In a combative speech today, Mr. Chávez challenged them to go ahead. "If the coup-plotting opposition calls another strike," he told students in eastern Sucre, "then get ready, because we are going to defeat them again."
The weekend events were certain to strain struggling peace talks, which were to have resumed today. Opposition leaders accused the government of trying to sabotage the talks, which began a week ago.
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