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NUCLEAR
In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter
Afghanistan UMRC Report
Pakistan Dismisses N.Korea Arms Deal Report
Iraq Says U.N. Plan Is Pretext for War
N Korea calls for South's help to fight US pressure
Yucca Mountain Project workers say site problems kept quiet
Energy Dept. Contractors Due for More Scrutiny
Snoopers With Blind Spots
MILITARY
Stability of Africa Is Threatened as AIDS Infects Armies
Gaza security agency denies arms charges
Yugoslavian officials 'sold chemical weapons to Iraq'
U.S. Warship Docks in China in Show Ties on Course
Dead Man's Bluff
Kuwait May Be Key in Iraq Invasion
US forces told to destroy supply lines of terror
The Military's New War of Words
Military Recruiting Law Puts Burden on Parents
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Material Witness Law Has Many In Limbo
Proposal to Enlist Citizen Spies Was Doomed From Start
Lawmakers say FBI is being soft on Saudi terror link
In the Name of Security
Native Americans flex vote muscle
Justice Dept. Seeks to Use New Power in Terror Inquiries
L.A. 'Skid Row' Sweeps Spark Debate
Osama issues new call to arms
OTHER
Why Millions in Drugs Get Flushed Away
ACTIVISTS
Pentagon Papers' Ellsberg Sees Deja Vu in Iraq
Scott Ritter's Iraq Complex
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
In North Korea and Pakistan, Deep Roots of Nuclear Barter
November 24, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/international/asia/24KORE.html
SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 21 - Last July, American intelligence agencies tracked a Pakistani cargo aircraft as it landed at a North Korean airfield and took on a secret payload: ballistic missile parts, the chief export of North Korea's military.
The shipment was brazen enough, in full view of American spy satellites. But intelligence officials who described the incident say even the mode of transport seemed a subtle slap at Washington: the Pakistani plane was an American-built C-130.
It was part of the military force that President Pervez Musharraf had told President Bush last year would be devoted to hunting down the terrorists of Al Qaeda, one reason the administration was hailing its new cooperation with a country that only a year before it had labeled a rogue state.
But several times since that new alliance was cemented, American intelligence agencies watched silently as Pakistan's air fleet conducted a deadly barter with North Korea. In transactions intelligence agencies are still unraveling, the North provided General Musharraf with missile parts he needs to build a nuclear arsenal capable of reaching every strategic site in India.
In a perfect marriage of interests, Pakistan provided the North with many of the designs for gas centrifuges and much of the machinery it needs to make highly enriched uranium for the country's latest nuclear weapons project, one intended to put at risk South Korea, Japan and 100,000 American troops in Northeast Asia.
The Central Intelligence Agency told members of Congress this week that North Korea's uranium enrichment program, which it discovered only this summer, will produce enough material to produce weapons in two to three years. Previously it has estimated that North Korea probably extracted enough plutonium from a nuclear reactor to build one or two weapons, until that program was halted in 1994 in a confrontation with the United States.
Yet the C.I.A. report - at least the unclassified version - made no mention of how one of the world's poorest and most isolated nations put together its new, complex uranium project.
In interviews over the past three weeks, officials and experts in Washington, Pakistan and here in the capital of South Korea described a relationship between North Korea and Pakistan than now appears much deeper and more dangerous than the United States and its Asian allies first suspected.
The accounts raise disturbing questions about the nature of the uneasy American alliance with General Musharraf's government. The officials and experts described how, even after Mr. Musharraf sided with the United States in ousting the Taliban and hunting down Qaeda leaders, Pakistan's secretive A. Q. Khan Nuclear Research Laboratories continued its murky relationship with the North Korean military. It was a partnership linking an insecure Islamic nation and a failing Communist one, each in need of the other's expertise.
Pakistan was desperate to counter India's superior military force, but encountered years of American-imposed sanctions, so it turned to North Korea. For its part, North Korea, increasingly cut off from Russia and China, tried to replicate Pakistan's success in developing a nuclear weapons based on uranium, one of the few commodities that North Korea has in plentiful supply.
Yet while the United States has put tremendous diplomatic pressure on North Korea in the past two months to abandon the project, and has cut off oil supplies to the country, it has never publicly discussed the role of Pakistan or other nations in supplying that effort.
American and South Korean officials, when speaking anonymously, say the reason is obvious: the Bush administration has determined that Pakistan's cooperation in the search for Al Qaeda is so critical - especially with new evidence suggesting that Osama bin Laden is still alive, perhaps on Pakistani soil.
So far, the White House has ignored federal statutes that require President Bush to impose stiff economic penalties on any country involved in nuclear proliferation, or, alternatively, to issue a public waiver of those penalties in the interest of national security. Mr. Bush last year removed penalties that were imposed on Pakistan after it set off a series of nuclear tests in 1998.
White House officials would not comment on the record for this article, saying that discussing Pakistan's role could compromise classified intelligence. Instead, they noted that General Musharraf, after first denying Pakistani involvement in North Korea's nuclear effort, has assured Secretary of State Colin L. Powell that no such trade will occur in the future.
"He said, `Four hundred percent assurance that there is no such interchange taking place now,' " Secretary Powell said in a briefing late last month. Pressed about Pakistan's contributions to the nuclear program that North Korea admitted to last month, Secretary Powell smiled tightly and said, "We didn't talk about the past."
Intelligence officials say they have seen no evidence of exchanges since Washington protested the July missile shipment. Even in that incident, they cannot determine if the C-130 that picked up missile up missile parts in North Korea brought nuclear-related goods to North Korea.
But American and Asian officials are far from certain that Pakistan has cut off the relationship, or even whether General Musharraf is in control of the transactions.
Yet in the words of one American official who has reviewed the intelligence, North Korea's drive in the past year to begin full-scale enrichment of uranium uses technology that "has `Made in Pakistan' stamped all over it." They doubt that North Korea will end its effort even if Pakistan cuts off its supplies.
"In Kim Jong Il's view, what's the difference between North Korea and Iraq?" asked one senior American official with long experience dealing with North Korea. "Saddam doesn't have one, and look what's happening to him."
A Meeting of Minds in 1993
Pakistan's military ties to North Korea go back to the 1970's. But they took a decisive turn in 1993, just as the United States was forcing the North to open up its huge nuclear reactor facilities at Yongbyon. Yongbyon was clearly a factory for producing bomb-grade plutonium from spent nuclear fuel.
When North Korea refused to allow in inspectors headed by Hans Blix, the man now leading the inspections in Iraq, President Bill Clinton went to the United Nations to press penalties and the Pentagon drew up contingency plans for a strike against the plant in case North Korea removed the fuel rods to begin making bomb-grade plutonium.
In the midst of that face-off, Benazir Bhutto, then the prime minister of Pakistan, arrived in Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. It was the end of December, freezing cold, and yet the North Korean government arranged for tens of thousands of the city's well-trained citizens to greet her on the streets. At a state dinner, Ms. Bhutto complained about the American penalties imposed on her country and North Korea.
"Pakistan is committed to nuclear nonproliferation," she said, according to a transcript issued at the time. However, she added, states still have "their right to acquire and develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, geared to their economic and social developments."
Ms. Bhutto's delegation left with plans for North Korea's Nodong missile, according to former and current Pakistani officials.
The Pakistani military had long coveted the plans, and by April 1998, it successfully tested a version of the Nodong, renamed the Ghauri. Its flight range of about 1,000 miles put much of India within reach of Pakistan's nuclear warheads.
A former senior Pakistani official recalled in an interview that the Bhutto government planned to pay North Korea "from the invisible account" for covert programs. But events intervened.
Months after Ms. Bhutto's visit, the Clinton administration and North Korea reached a deal that froze all nuclear activity at Yongbyon, where international inspectors still live year-round.
In return, the United States and its allies promised North Korea a steady flow of fuel oil and the eventual delivery of two proliferation-resistant nuclear reactors to produce electric power. That was important in a country so lacking in power that, from satellite images taken at night, it appears like a black hole compared to the blazing lights of South Korea.
But within three years, Kim Jong Il grew disenchanted with the accord and feared the nuclear power plants would never be delivered. He never allowed the International Atomic Energy Agency to begin the wide-ranging inspections required before the critical parts of the plants could be delivered.
By 1997 or 1998, American intelligence has now concluded, he was searching for an alternative way to build a bomb, without detection. He found part of the answer in Pakistan, which along with Iran, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Egypt was now a regular customer for North Korean missile parts, American military officials said.
A. Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's nuclear bomb, who had years ago stolen the engineering plans for gas centrifuges from the Netherlands, visited North Korea several times. The visits were always cloaked in secrecy.
But several things are now clear. Pakistan was running out of hard currency to pay the North Koreans, who were in worse shape. North Korea feared that without a nuclear weapon it would eventually be absorbed by the economic might of the South, or squeezed by the military might of the United States.
In 1997 or 1998, Kim Jong Il and his generals decided to begin a development project for a bomb based on highly enriched uranium, a slow and difficult process, but relatively easy to hide.
They did so even while sporadically pursuing a better relationship with Washington. In the last days of the Clinton administration, the North negotiated with Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright for a deal to restrict North Korean missile exports in return for a removal of economic penalties, a de-listing from the State Department's account of countries that sponsor terrorism and talks about diplomatic recognition. The deal was never reached.
President Bill Clinton even considered an end-of-term trip to North Korea, but was talked out of it by aides who feared the North was not ready to make real concessions. The nuclear revelations of the past few weeks suggest those aides saved Mr. Clinton from embarrassment.
"Lamentably, North Korea never really changed," said one senior Western official here with long experience in the topic. "They came to the conclusion that the nuclear card was their one ace in the hole, and they couldn't give it up."
Caves and Clues
American intelligence agencies, meanwhile, suspected that North Korea was restarting a secret program. In 1998, satellites were focused on a huge underground site where the C.I.A. believed Kim Jong Il was trying to build a second plutonium-reprocessing center. But they were looking in the wrong place: after American officials negotiated access to the suspect site, they found only a series of man-made caves with no nuclear-related equipment, and no apparent purpose.
"World's largest underground parking lot," one American intelligence official joked at the time.
Rumors of a secret enriched-uranium project persisted, however. The C.I.A. and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee evaluated the evidence but reached no firm conclusion.
But there were hints. One Western diplomat who visited North Korea in May 1998, just as world attention focused on Pakistan, which had responded to India's underground nuclear tests by setting off six of its own, recalled witnessing an odd celebration. "I was in the Foreign Ministry," the official recalled last week. "About 10 minutes into our meeting, the North Korean diplomat we were seeing broke into a big smile and pointed with pride to these tests. They were all elated.
"Here was a model of a poor state getting away with developing a nuclear weapon."
When the Clinton administration raised the rumors of a Pakistan-North Korea link with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, who succeeded Ms. Bhutto, he denied them. It was only after General Musharraf overthrew Mr. Sharif's government, and after Mr. Bush took office, that South Korean intelligence agencies picked up strong evidence that North Korea was buying components for an enriched-uranium program.
The agencies passed the evidence along to Washington, according to South Korean and American officials. It looked suspiciously similar to the gas centrifuge technology used in Pakistan. "My guess is that Pakistan was the only available partner," said Lee Hong Koo, a former South Korean prime minister and unification minister.
A. H. Nayya, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, who has no role in the country's nuclear program, agreed: "The clearest possibility is that the Pakistanis gave them the blueprint. `Here it is. You make it on your own.' "
Under American pressure, Dr. Khan was removed from the operational side of the Pakistani nuclear program. He was made an "adviser to the president" on nuclear technology.
Here in Seoul, nuclear experts working for the government of President Kim Dae Jung say they were subtly discouraged from publicly writing or speculating about the North's secret programs because the Korean government feared it would derail President Kim's legacy: the "sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea and encouraging investment there.
By this summer, however, the C.I.A. concluded that the North had moved from research to production. The intelligence agency took the evidence to Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, who asked for a review by all American intelligence agencies.
Such a request is usually a prescription for conflicting interpretations. Instead, the agencies came back with a unanimous opinion: the North Korean program was well under way, and had to be stopped.
Confronting North Korea
After sending senior officials to Japan and South Korea in August to present the new evidence, Mr. Bush decided to confront the North Koreans. On Oct. 4, James A. Kelly, the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, was in North Korea and told his counterparts that the United States had detailed information about the enriched-uranium program.
"We wanted to make it clear to them that they were busted," a senior administration official said.
The North Koreans initially denied the accusation, but the next day, after what they told the American visitors was an all-night discussion, they admitted that they were pursuing the secret weapons program, several officials said.
"We need nuclear weapons," Kang Sok Joo, the North Korean senior foreign policy official, said, arguing that the program was the result of the Bush administration's hostility.
Mr. Kelly responded that the program began at least four years ago, when Mr. Bush was governor of Texas. The Americans left after one North Korean official declared that dialogue on the subject was worthless and said, "We will meet sword with sword."
Since then, the North Koreans have been more circumspect. They have talked publicly about having the right to a nuclear weapon, even though they have signed the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and an agreement with South Korea to keep the Korean Peninsula free of nuclear weapons.
The Bush administration has been uncharacteristically restrained. President Bush led the push for an oil cutoff, but also issued a statement on Nov. 15 stating that the United States had no intention of invading North Korea. His aides hoped this would give Kim Jong Il the kind of security guarantee he had long demanded - and a face-saving way to end the nuclear program.
Mr. Bush's aides say the way to deal with North Korea, in contrast to their approach to Iraq, is to exploit its economic vulnerabilities and offer carrots, essentially the strategy the Clinton administration used. Many here in Seoul believe it may work this time.
"The North Koreans are a lot more dependent on us, and on the West, than they were in the 1994 nuclear crisis," said Han Sung Joo, who served as South Korea's foreign minister then.
But the reality, officials acknowledged, is that Mr. Bush has little choice but to pursue a diplomatic solution with North Korea.
Kim Jong Il has 11,000 artillery tubes dug in around the demilitarized zone, all aimed at Seoul. In the opening hours of a war, tens of thousands of people could die, military officials here say.
"Here's the strategy," one American official said. "Tell the North Koreans, quite publicly, that they can't get away with it. And say the same thing to Pakistan, but privately, quietly."
-------- depleted uranium
Afghanistan UMRC Report
From: "Piotr Bein" <piotr.bein@imag.net>
Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002
Excerpt from Dr Durakovic'c paper to The Third GCC Conference of Military Medicine and Protection Against Weapons of Mass Destruction, Doha, Qatar, October 20th-23rd, 2002:
"Our current data of biological samples from Kandahar, Kabul, and Jalalabad obtained by state of the art mass spectrometry analysis confirm over 100 times higher concentration of uranium isotopes in the biological specimens as compared with the control group. The several thousand hard target guided weapons used in Afghanistan and in the Iraq "no fly zones" should be addressed by the UN general assembly before any further use in future military conflicts."
Quotes from Afghanistan Field Team's Trip Report:
"The UMRC field team was shocked by the breadth of public health impacts coincident with the bombing. Without exception, at every bombsite investigated, people are ill. A significant portion of the civilian population presents symptoms consistent with internal contamination by Uranium."
"They (the bombs) combined significant explosive force with hard-target penetration features. These weapons punched through three or more layers composed of steel reinforced roofs and two or more concrete walls without detonating. They then passed through the concrete floor/foundation slabs, to bury 3 to 4 meters in the earth before exploding."
www.umrc.net
-------- india / pakistan
Pakistan Dismisses N.Korea Arms Deal Report
November 24, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-nkorea-arms.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Pakistan on Sunday strongly denied a report that it had helped North Korea develop its nuclear weapons program in return for missile technology that would strengthen its hand against India.
``There is no truth in these reports whatsoever,'' said presidential spokesman Major-General Rashid Qureshi.
``I do not know where the New York Times gets its information from. I am convinced that they need to update their intelligence gathering system,'' he told Reuters.
The newspaper said in a report on its Web site on Saturday that the relationship between North Korea and Pakistan ``now appears much deeper and more dangerous than the United States and its Asian allies first suspected.''
Quoting unnamed sources in Washington, Pakistan and South Korea, it reported Pyongyang had provided Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf with missile parts allowing him to build a nuclear arsenal able to reach ``every strategic site in India.''
In return Islamabad provided North Korea with designs for gas centrifuges and machinery needed to make highly enriched uranium for the country's latest nuclear weapons project.
``If the country has cooperated (with North Korea on nuclear weaponry) we would have known,'' Qureshi said.
``When these reports first came out I spoke to the president, so it is not as if we do not know about them.''
General Musharraf, who has just formally handed power to a civilian government in Pakistan after three years at the helm, is a key ally of President Bush in his campaign against the Taliban, al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.
Musharraf backed the U.S. military campaign in neighboring Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington last year.
He has also allowed U.S. forces to operate out of an air base in Pakistan and there are U.S. military and intelligence personnel hunting al Qaeda and Taliban operatives inside Pakistan, close to the Afghan border.
-------- inspections
Iraq Says U.N. Plan Is Pretext for War
November 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Inspectors.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- In a point-by-point protest, the Iraqi government complained to the United Nations Sunday that the small print behind the weapons inspections beginning this week will give Washington a pretext to attack.
The new U.N. resolution on the inspections could turn ``inaccurate statements (among) thousands of pages'' of required Iraqi reports into a supposed justification for military action, Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan.
``There is premeditation to target Iraq, whatever the pretext,'' Sabri said.
His lengthy letter, a detailed commentary on the Security Council resolution, was not expected to affect the inspections, which resume Wednesday after a four-year suspension. Iraq had accepted the resolution in a Nov. 13 letter from Sabri to Annan.
Preparations moved steadily ahead on Baghdad's outskirts Sunday, where technicians at the U.N. inspection center worked to establish a ``hot line'' with liaisons in the Iraqi government.
The first working group of 18 inspectors arrives Monday on a flight from a U.N. rear base in Cyprus. Their numbers are expected to swell by year-end to between 80 and 100 at a time in Iraq.
In seven years' work after the 1991 Gulf War, U.N. experts destroyed large amounts of chemical and biological weapons and longer-range missiles forbidden to Iraq by U.N. resolutions, and dismantled Iraq's nuclear weapons program before it could build a bomb. The inspections were suspended amid disputes over U.N. access to Iraqi sites and Iraqi complaints the United States inserted spies in the inspection teams.
A new focus on Iraq by the Bush administration led to adoption of Resolution 1441 and the dispatch of inspectors back to Iraq with greater powers of unrestricted access to suspected weapons sites. Washington alleges Iraq retains some prohibited weapons and may be producing others.
The resolution, adopted unanimously Nov. 7, demands the Iraqis give up any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or face ``serious consequences.''
It requires Iraq to submit an accounting by Dec. 8 of its weapons programs, as well as of chemical, biological and nuclear programs it claims are peaceful. Any ``false statements or omissions'' in that declaration could contribute to a finding it had committed a ``material breach'' of the resolution -- a finding that might lead to military action.
The Bush administration has threatened war to enforce Iraqi disarmament, with or without U.N. sanction. But other governments, including France, Russia and China, say that decision can be made only by the Security Council.
Sabri's letter, dated Saturday and released Sunday, complained that a key passage on providing documentation is unjust, ``because it considers the giving of inaccurate statements -- taking into consideration that there are thousands of pages to be presented in those statements -- is a material breach.''
Sabri wrote that the aim was clear: ``to provide pretexts ... to be used in aggressive acts against Iraq.''
After talks with the Iraqis last week, chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said they had expressed ``particular concern'' about what was expected of them in reporting on their chemical industry, a complex area in which many toxic products can be diverted to military use.
The foreign minister's letter disputed the allegations that his government retained chemical or biological weapons and rebuilt weapons programs. ``The United States and Britain failed to give one credible proof on this matter,'' Sabri wrote.
Sabri also complained that the resolution gives the inspectors ``unjust power'' like ``conducting interviews with citizens inside the country without the presence of a representative of their government or asking them to leave their country with their families for interviews or demanding lists of the names of all scientists and researchers and removing equipment without notifying the Iraqi government.''
Sabri complained of what he called arbitrary powers being granted to inspectors, including ``meeting people inside their country without the presence of a representative of their government, or asking them to leave the country with their families to meet (for interviews) abroad.''
In notifying Annan of Iraq's acceptance of Resolution 1441, Sabri had advised the U.N. chief he would follow with this second letter commenting on supposed violations of international law and other problems with the resolution.
The Iraqi official urged that Security Council member nations ensure that the weapons inspectors are committed ``to their obligations according to the U.N. charter and ... the United Nations' goals.'' If they do so, he wrote, they will ``uncover the false U.S. accusations.''
The U.N. experts' first missions are expected to be visits to Iraqi sites previously inspected in the 1990s, where they will check on cameras and other monitoring equipment left behind in many cases by earlier inspectors.
A top priority was establishing operational security at the U.N. offices, to maintain secrecy surrounding the targets of the inspectors' surprise visits.
``We are still testing our communications equipment to make sure we have secure lines,'' said Hiro Ueki, spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, UNMOVIC.
-------- korea
N Korea calls for South's help to fight US pressure
AFP
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2002
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/uncomp/articleshow?artid=29264789
SEOUL: Stalinist North Korea has appealed for help from South Korea to resist pressure from the United States over the country's suspected nuclear weapons programme.
The appeal was issued on Saturday by the Central Committee of the Democratic Front for the Reunification of the Fatherland through the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).
The committee called for a concerted campaign to quell "the US nuclear hysteria intended to bring disasters" to the Korean peninsula, insisting a non-aggression accord should be signed between Pyongyang and Washington.
The committee said all Koreans should "turn out in the nation-wide struggle to force the United States to conclude the treaty."
"At a time when the destiny of the nation is at stake the South Korean authorities should lodge a legitimate protest with the US against its infringement upon the fundamental interests of the nation and confidently advance along the road of cooperation between compatriots," it said.
On Sunday, Rodong Sinmun, the newspaper of the North's ruling Workers Party, described the non-aggression treaty as "a prerequisite and master key to solving the nuclear issue."
"In order to prevent this crisis it is necessary to conclude a non-aggression treaty between the DPRK (North Korea) and the US," it said.
Rodong said the treaty would "free both sides from each other's threat, put an end to their hostile and belligerent relations and provide a legal and institutional mechanism for durable peace" on the Korean peninsula.
"Then, this would help find a smooth solution to the delicate nuclear issue between the DPRK and the US and clear the US of its security concern," it added.
Washington has accused Pyongyang of violating the deal and pronouncing it "nullified" while North Korea says the United States destroyed the accord.
The United States said last month that Pyongyang had admitted that it was developing nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 arms control agreement.
Under the accord, Pyongyang pledged to freeze its atomic ambitions in return for the construction by an international consortium of two light-water reactors and the delivery of 500,000 tonnes of heavy fuel oil a year.
To punish Pyongyang, the consortium building the reactors decided to suspend fuel oil deliveries from December until the North pledged to dismantle its nuclear programme.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- nevada
Yucca Mountain Project workers say site problems kept quiet
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 24, 2002
Information from: Las Vegas Review-Journal
http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/nevada/2002/nov/24/112410627.html
LAS VEGAS (AP) - Some workers at the Yucca Mountain Project said there were flaws in the process scientists used to determine whether the site was suitable for disposing the nation's nuclear waste.
At least two workers claim they were either fired or transferred after raising concerns about the project's safety, the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported in its Sunday editions.
Robert Clark and Jim Mattimoe, both quality assurance specialists, said they were shoved aside so lingering problems would remain silent at Yucca.
U.S. Labor Department records show the men might have been mistreated because they believed the project was cutting corners to meet looming deadlines.
The Department of Energy earlier this year recommended that more than 77,000 tons of the nation's deadliest nuclear waste be buried at Yucca Mountain, located 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.
President Bush and Congress have since approved plans to build a repository at Yucca Mountain. The first shipment of nuclear waste could arrive in 2010.
Mattimoe, 52, said he was fired after he made allegations of wrongdoing and corruption to Lake Barrett. At the time, Barrett was in charge of the DOE's Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management, which oversaw the Yucca Mountain Project.
Barrett declined to comment on Mattimoe's termination or Clark's transfer other than to say, "I'm personally satisfied with the actions that I took."
Mattimore said wrongdoing included withholding evidence and attributing statements to people who had never been interviewed about concerns with the project.
"The concerns program, which is much like an internal affairs division in a police department, is chartered to perform unbiased, independent investigations into any type of concern that could impact the safety of the project and the public," he said.
"I identified that the concerns program was corrupt and thereby raised questions about the credibility of all investigations for a period of nearly 10 years," Mattimoe said.
Mattimoe was fired by Navarro Research and Engineering, a quality assurance contractor hired by DOE.
A Labor Department investigator later determined that part of the reason Navarro fired Mattimoe was it had been urged to do so by Barrett. The inspector described Barrett's actions as "extraordinarily egregious."
In a Sept. 13 report, the Labor Department ordered Navarro to reinstate Mattimoe, expunge his personnel file and reimburse him for costs incurred.
The report states that Susana Navarro, president of Navarro Research and Engineering, was motivated to fire Mattimoe "at least in part to her fear that she might not receive future extensions or contracts with DOE unless she took this action."
Navarro is appealing the Labor Department ruling. Mattimoe now is working at the Los Alamos, N.M., national laboratory.
Susana Navarro said an audit by a prominent law firm found "among other things, that Mr. Mattimoe's conduct as a program manager for SAIC (the previous contractor) was inconsistent with a safety conscious work environment.
"I based my decision on the findings of this report, and I really believe that I did the right thing," she wrote.
But the Labor Department report says the law firm's audit is nothing more than a "sophisticated recitation of anonymous charges."
Some of the federal documents cited by the Review-Journal were obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.
------- us nuc waste
Energy Dept. Contractors Due for More Scrutiny
November 24, 2002
New York Times
By JOEL BRINKLEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/politics/24CONT.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 - When the Bush administration announced this month that it intended to turn about half of the federal government's civilian jobs over to contractors, some officials at the Department of Energy reacted with rueful shakes of the head.
Since it was founded 35 years ago, the department has relied on contractors for almost everything it does. More than 90 percent of its budget is paid to 100,000 outside workers.
Next month, the Energy Department will field the first employees whose job is to supervise the contractors' work because, its leaders acknowledge, it has a dismal record of contract management. The department's experience serves as a sobering counterpoint to the White House proposal.
In particular, an internal Energy Department report this year concluded that the agency's largest program, which pays contractors to clean up the waste left by the nation's nuclear weapons programs, has been fundamentally mismanaged since its founding 13 years ago, and much of the $60 billion it has spent over that time was wasted.
The internal report's denunciation of agency practices and its prescriptions for changes echoed findings by outside auditors dating to 1990 - conclusions that are repeated in reports by auditors published in September, October and this month.
What astonished agency employees, officials said, was that the department had finally acknowledged its problems. The office in question is the department's Environmental Management Program, formed in 1989 to clean up the radioactive waste left from cold war nuclear development programs at 114 sites nationwide. For years it has been criticized for cost overruns and delays projected to last decades.
In one of the Energy Department's most infamous examples, which is far from unique, it began a program in 1985 to clean radioactive waste from 34 million gallons of liquids in storage in South Carolina. The project was to take three years and cost $32 million. Fourteen years later the department abandoned the project, saying it was unworkable because of mismanagement. By then, $500 million had been spent.
Jessie Roberson, assistant secretary of energy for environmental management, said: "I have been embarrassed by our lack of progress. We owe the taxpayers more."
Ms. Roberson and the department's other leaders say they are now addressing the problems. The agency says it is scrutinizing contracts more closely and training 200 people to be project supervisors. Today, no one at the department actively supervises multibillion-dollar cleanup projects that are let out to contractors.
This month, department leaders also made public a plan to shorten the time by which contractors will have cleaned up all the radioactive sites nationwide - to 2030 from 2070. Ms. Roberson, who has been with the agency or one of its contractors for 21 years, acknowledges that most administrations come in with "plans for some new initiative or program to fix the problems."
The environmental management program engenders extraordinary criticism from within the government. The White House, in a current budget document, says the program "is less focused on cleaning up sites and has instead turned into a local jobs program." A senior Office of Management and Budget official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said in an interview, "They have spent a lot of money, but producing results seems to be an alien concept over there."
Since 1990, the General Accounting Office has classified the Energy Department's contract management as "high risk." It is one of just six agencies whose procurement practices were judged dysfunctional.
In the Clinton and Bush administrations, the Office of Management and Budget has described the department as among the dozen or so most troubled in government.
A General Accounting Office audit published in September found that, even as agency officials spoke of change and reform, problems were actually worsening. Auditors examined a sample of 16 projects costing $200 million or more and said, "We found no indication of improved performance." The number of projects for which cost estimates had at least doubled in five years and completion deadlines had slipped by at least five years had increased to 38 percent.
An Energy Department inspector general's report published last month said one current cleanup project, in which price has escalated to $214 million from $64 million, had "problems with project plans, cost estimates and project oversight."
Ms. Roberson observed that critical audits like that quickly lose their sting and in a perverse way even encourage agencies to stick with the offending practices. "There has been a learned pattern of co-dependency between the department and the G.A.O and the inspector general," she said. "When they identify problems, our job is to stand firm and explain the problems away. And with that posture, the problems don't get better over time. The debate could go on forever."
When Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham took office last year, he ordered three of the department's major divisions - energy efficiency, fossil fuels and environmental management - to examine their operations closely. But former Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and others had also ordered tough reviews.
Environmental Management's review was the first one published, in February. It found that "there is a systemic problem with the way Environmental Management has conducted its activities."
The program had estimated that cleaning up all the nuclear weapons sites would ultimately cost $300 billion and be completed in 2070. But, the internal report said, "it is clear that on the current path, the cost of the program will continue to increase and increase, with the real possibility that the ultimate cleanup and closure goal will never be met."
"I think people were actually quite surprised that we said all this ourselves because we had denied and defended for so long," said Ms. Roberson, who was on the review team.
Bruce M. Carnes, the department's chief financial officer, said it had decided "that to obtain results in 70 or 75 years is not satisfactory." The White House agrees.
The internal report and other audits this year show that the agency awards contracts to clean up radioactive sites without actually examining the property to see what the work will entail.
Once a contract is awarded, the department seldom checks back. The department "has virtually abdicated its role of owner in project oversight," the National Research Council said in a report last year that had been requested by Congress. That report found that half the money the department spends on contracts each year - more than $17 billion in the last fiscal year - is wasted and called Energy "one of the most inefficient organizations in the federal government."
The agency's leaders all vow that the changes they are making are real and will bring results. Early this year Secretary Abraham said, "We will no longer give contractors a license for unending cleanup and open-ended budgets."
In an interview, Mr. Carnes said: "We are serious. We are changing the tires on this car while it's driving 60 miles an hour. And this is not something that comes and goes. It's rock bottom truth."
But the senior O.M.B. official complained, "So far, we've had more discussions about what they are planning to do than anything they have actually done."
-------- us politics
Snoopers With Blind Spots
By Mary McGrory,
Washington Post
Sunday, November 24, 2002; Page B07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28342-2002Nov22?language=printer
As far as I can make out, Adm. John M. Poindexter wants to know everything about me. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft is curious too, but he has limits: He draws the line at my gun purchases.
The thought of me armed with an assault weapon strikes terror in the hearts of those who know me and have watched my struggles with a can opener; it shatters the security they are supposed to derive from passage of the homeland security bill, which George W. Bush said was as essential as oxygen for him.
Poindexter, whom I remember from the Iran-contra hearings, is welcome to paw through my records -- I hope he can make better sense out of them than I can. As I understand it, he wants to check my credit card charges and telephone records.
But I am afraid the phone bills would be a disappointment to him -- most of my outgoing calls are to lost-and-found departments of airports, banquet halls, restaurants and other public places where I may have dropped my keys, glasses, notebook or speech text. If absent-mindedness is a crime, I could get life -- or even death -- from this crowd.
Of course, it is flattering to have an admiral sniffing through your stuff, and I suppose he thinks he is defending the homeland while heading up the Information Awareness Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Its acronym, DARPA, may sound like a ballet troupe, but to him it could be an aircraft carrier steaming toward Iraq. I don't especially like the idea of someone who barely escaped the slammer on charges of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra scandal passing judgment on us. I mean, it's okay for him to know that I like Jane Austen and chunky peanut butter, but if we're going much further than that I have to say I have reservations.
The admiral's emergence from obscurity bothers the administration not at all, because it's the kind of in-your-faceness that delights the right-wing constituency Bush so prizes. The wingers probably think the admiral should be secretary of the Navy and that his confederate, Oliver North, should be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As I say, John Ashcroft, author of the infamous "TIPS" (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) scheme -- which sought to convert truckers, plumbers and others pretending to serve you into James Bonds -- seems almost moderate by comparison. But his TIPS proposal was too much even for the crazy House of Representatives.
Ashcroft may have been a cheerleader for secret detentions, secret court hearings and other undemocratic practices that he justifies in the name of fighting terrorism, but he is a stickler for privacy in one respect: Gun purchases are sacred. So says the National Rifle Association. So says he. If Ashcroft finds out you have bought an assault weapon, and is shown the bill, he will avert his eyes and reprimand the aide who brought to him this forbidden fruit of domestic surveillance.
The way for me to test this liberalism on Ashcroft's part is to buy an assault weapon. The dealer might mistake me for a terrorist -- several airport screeners have made me take my shoes off. On the other hand, the homeland security bill authorizes the arming of airline pilots, and they might think that, late in life, I am aspiring to a second career.
Ashcroft says it's none of the government's business. The FBI differs; the G-men thought it would be helpful to trace bulk purchases of assault weapons, that such a check might lead to terrorists. But according to a recent report on National Public Radio's "All Things Considered," Ashcroft "stopped them in their tracks." The FBI was forbidden to see the gun purchasers' background check records.
Why? Because, said Ashcroft piously, "The only permissible use for the National Instant Check System is to audit the maintenance of that system. And the Department of Justice is committed to following the law in that respect."
At a Senate hearing, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.) expressed the general bewilderment: "I can't understand the logic, frankly, particularly when you have him [Ashcroft] talking about the unremitting effort that they are waging against terrorism, and then there's this blind spot about the NRA and guns and lists of people who buy them."
But instead of asking senators, who wrote the law, what their intent was, Ashcroft said sternly, "I intend to enforce the law as it has been written."
The hullabaloo over homeland security shows us again the GOP's solicitude for its big givers and high rollers -- and its ambivalence about government. Government is the enemy, the problem, the damper on free enterprise, the stumbling block to unfettered capitalism. It is, paradoxically, a fragile damsel that has to be protected from a treacherous, mischief-making citizenry that needs to be investigated, spied upon, wiretapped and hounded to do right. The attorney general will tell you what that is.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Stability of Africa Is Threatened as AIDS Infects Armies
November 24, 2002
New York Times
By HENRI E. CAUVIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/international/africa/24ANGO.html
LUANDA, Angola - First Sgt. Domingos Leiria may be the future of the Angolan Armed Forces.
Like thousands of other soldiers in Angola, and thousands more across Africa, Sergeant Leiria has H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS.
Struggling to stay fit for duty, he is fighting a battle he does not expect to win. But the war is one that the armed forces of Africa, already the epicenter of the epidemic, cannot afford to lose.
For better or worse, no institution is more central to the stability of many African nations than the military, and few institutions in Africa are more threatened by AIDS.
At Angola's central military hospital here in the capital, AIDS has surpassed malaria as the leading cause of death, and after the long civil war, the situation will almost certainly worsen.
"With the end of the war, we expect there will be an explosion in numbers," Dr. Francisco Ernesto, the commander of the military health service, said in an interview.
But leaders here are not the only ones who have reason to be alarmed. Africa is figuring in American foreign policy more than at any other time since the end of the cold war, both in terms of economic security and military strategy.
The United States is importing more and more oil from West Africa, particularly Angola and Nigeria, to reduce its reliance on the volatile Middle East. On the other side of the continent, the United States is establishing an antiterrorist command center in the tiny nation of Djibouti and stepping up contacts with Ethiopia and Kenya, all in an effort to build alliances in a region where Al Qaeda has been active, especially in Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.
AIDS in the military will undermine such efforts, and that helps explain why the Pentagon is spending several million dollars this year to help Angola and 20 other African countries begin dealing with the crisis. A new Central Intelligence Agency report on AIDS cites Nigeria and Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa's two most populous countries, as crucial American security concerns, and the rising toll on their armed forces is part of the reason.
"A key ingredient of regional cooperation is national militaries that are capable and competent and not dying off because of AIDS," Theresa Whelan, director of the Defense Department's office of Africa policy, said in a telephone interview from Washington.
Angola's civil war made travel around the country difficult and dangerous, and that kept H.I.V. from spreading as much as it has in the rest of southern Africa.
But the war ended this year, after nearly three decades of fighting, and millions of Angolans are on the move, making their way back to villages and towns they abandoned long ago. H.I.V., now estimated to infect 5.5 percent of adults in Angola, will not be far behind, experts say. "People couldn't move," said Dr. Eric Bing, an assistant professor at Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science in Los Angeles and the civilian coordinator of the Defense Department project here. "That's about to change."
Soldiers are already among the sick. Some, infected on missions in foreign capitals like Kinshasa and Brazzaville, will carry the virus to their home villages, passing it on to wives and girlfriends. Others risk being infected as the cycle of transmission gathers pace, and prostitutes and truckers also spread the virus as they ply their trades in areas that had long been inaccessible.
Angola has only to look around the continent, to countries like Ethiopia, Nigeria and South Africa; they are all at peace after long periods of upheaval, and like Angola, all aspire to influence and power on the continent. Yet the stability they are trying to entrench and the ambitions they are trying to realize are threatened by AIDS.
In Nigeria, at least 6 percent of adults are H.I.V.-positive, with the spread fueled by many factors, among them the Nigerian military's emerging role as regional peacemaker.
In Ethiopia, at least 10 percent of the adult population has H.I.V., and the number has been climbing, driven in part by the demobilization of tens of thousands of soldiers after the country's long civil war and more recently after the war against Eritrea.
In South Africa, which has more H.I.V.-positive people than any other country, roughly one in four soldiers are infected, the Ministry of Defense says.
Sergeant Leiria, a 31-year-old commando, has been an Angolan soldier since 1990. Along with missions around the country, he has been sent to Congo and the Congo Republic, countries where Angola has been instrumental in shoring up embattled governments.
These days, he is fighting for his own survival.
He seems fit enough, but he is not. He suffers from thrush, a fungal infection that makes swallowing difficult. He has fought off tuberculosis. He endures debilitating headaches and diarrhea. He is dogged by fever that gives way to chills.
"Usually, from 4 o'clock, I feel too cold," he says. "Even at the moment, I am too cold." Asked how he contracted H.I.V., he says he does not know. It might have been from shaving with a fellow soldier's razor or perhaps from a battlefield blood transfusion, he says.
What about sex? he is asked.
Sent away from home for long stretches, soldiers strike up relationships with local women or prostitutes, though like Sergeant Leiria they often have wives at home. Such liaisons have long spread sexually transmitted diseases like syphilis, and now H.I.V.
"I think it s possible," Sergeant Leiria said. "I cannot lie to you. I walked a lot of places."
Indeed, many soldiers do. The sex is cheap, and in war, life itself seems cheap. Fatalism creeps into their thinking. "People used to say we should enjoy life," Sergeant Leiria said. "If we get it, we get it."
Slowly, though, he and others in the military say, reckless behavior is waning, but too late for Sergeant Leiria.
Sitting in a quiet corner of a downtown hotel, he was dressed in gray jeans, a dark T-shirt and calf-high combat boots that were the only obvious hint of his work. Soon, he said, he will be shedding the uniform altogether.
"I want to be demobilized, because of the AIDS, because I need to rest," he said. "I fought a lot and I didn't manage to do almost anything with my life. Now I want to do something in my life. I have children. I have a wife."
It is a painful decision for a man who has known little besides a soldier's life. When he tested positive in 2000, horrified relatives turned their back on him, and he contemplated killing himself.
Since then, he and some of his relatives have come to accept his fate, helped by an AIDS support organization. None of that has helped to arrest the march of the disease. Without consistent access to the anti-retroviral drugs that have made the disease manageable for many people in the West, Sergeant Leiria has little hope. "If I was like other people who have a lot of money - they go abroad to buy medicines, they go to South Africa for treatment - then I could continue," he said.
While Angola is a long way from wielding the broad influence of South Africa or Nigeria, it has fashioned itself into a regional power, and its military, as the fulcrum of power in the country, will remain for now an important engine of the country's aspirations - and a crucial component in the fight against AIDS.
Like other countries, Angola does not know exactly how many soldiers are H.I.V.-positive, and so it is planning a survey with the help of Dr. Bing and other specialists.
The United States military does not enlist anyone who has tested positive for H.I.V., but does not discharge people solely on the basis of infection with the virus unless the symptoms of AIDS render them physically unfit to serve.
Experts say the survey is likely to show that the prevalence is higher than the current estimate of 5.5 percent of adults, and likely to increase. The question is whether Angola will contain the surge. Like many African countries, Angola is too poor to think about providing treatment for most of its H.I.V.-positive people, so for now the efforts focus on prevention.
On the main military base here in the capital, 18 young soldiers were training to teach their colleagues to defend themselves against H.I.V. This is the military's new war, symbolized by the soldier depicted in the class manual, his old weapon - a gun - in one hand, his new weapon - a condom - in the other.
Maj. Fernando Paxião Damião, the doctor in charge of the training, wants to think that his efforts will do some good, but on the future of the armed forces sees little to be cheerful about. "We're going to have an army of sick people," he said.
-------- arms sales
Gaza security agency denies arms charges
By SAUD ABU RAMADAN
From the International Desk
11/24/2002 6:27 PM
(UPI)
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021124-062623-1929r
GAZA, -- Security officials in the Gaza Strip Sunday denied Israeli media reports that the security service had built a clandestine factory to produce weapons and explosives for use by terrorists.
A high-ranking official of the Palestinian Authority's Preventive Security agency, who asked not to be identified, blasted reports that the organization was linked to the alleged bomb-making factory as grossly "untrue accusations."
"It is not true at all," he declared to United Press International. "The Israeli accusations are made by high-ranking Israeli officials inside the right-wing government against Preventive Security. It is a plan to undermine our security apparatus."
The Preventive Security group was established in 1994, a year after the Palestinian Authority was formed by the Oslo peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.
The agency was quite active even before the outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada, and has boasted over the years of apprehending dozens of Palestinian militants bent on carrying out suicide bomb attacks in Israel.
"After the Israelis failed to carry out the same accomplishments that Preventive Security was doing, they are putting their failures on us, and want to destroy this strong security apparatus," the official pointed out.
The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz said earlier Sunday that Preventive Security had set up a factory for producing large quantities of nitric acid, a key chemical ingredient used in making explosives.
The paper had said the information about the alleged factory came from a secret PA document seized in an Israeli army raid last week carried out on the Preventive Security headquarters.
The latest controversy came as the Israeli army intensified its military operations in the West Bank and Gaza, and has reoccupied most of the towns on the West Bank, with the exception of Jericho.
In Gaza, the Israeli army enforced a curfew on the beaches and prevented dozens of fishermen from going out to sea after two Islamic Jihad militants blew up an Israeli patrol boat north of the Gaza Strip. Four Israeli troops were injured and the two guerrillas were killed in the Friday night attack.
Meanwhile, an elderly Palestinian was killed Sunday night after being hit by shrapnel from an Israeli tank shell in the outskirts of the West Bank town of Nablus, which is under curfew, Palestinian sources told UPI.
The sources said that Ahmed Eshtaya, 70, from the village of Salem, was killed as he was heading past Nablus to visit his daughter who lived in a neighboring village.
------- chemical weapons
Yugoslavian officials 'sold chemical weapons to Iraq'
Sunday Herald -
24 November 2002
http://www.sundayherald.com/print29454
A new report finds the Yugoslavian government has helpedSaddam Hussein build up a terrifying arsenal. Russ Baker in Belgrade reports
High-level military and civilian officials of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) have clearly known about, and therefore been implicitly involved in, a massive arms-for-cash trade with Iraq that has continued in the last two years, in violation of international agreements and explicit promises to American and European authorities. The assistance to Iraq, illegal under UN sanctions imposed in 1990 , could end up being used against allied forces should military action be launched against Iraq .
The extent of this Yugo-Iraqi axis is the subject of a detailed report, Arming Saddam: The Yugoslav Connection, from the non-profit international research and advocacy organisation, The International Crisis Group (ICG).
By asserting the large-scale sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein could not, and apparently did not, proceed without the approval of top military brass and key figures in the FRY's civilian leadership, the ICG report, to be released tomorrow, is likely to cause tumult on Capitol Hill and in European capitals. One outcome might be a serious re-evaluation of Western policy towards Yugoslavia, which involves hundreds of million of dollars in aid to the purportedly reformist post-Milosevic government, as well as fast-track efforts to ease the country back into the international community. The country, a federation of Serbia and Montenegro, is struggling to recover from war and sanctions.
The ICG report makes clear the illicit Yugoslav arms trade with Iraq is not the result of unauthorised, 'rogue' operations, as previously claimed by FRY leaders, but a steady pipeline that has generated hundreds of millions, perhaps billions, of dollars for state-run and private companies with ties to political parties and military and civilian leaders -- monies believed to have largely migrated to illegal offshore bank accounts.
The report, a final draft of which was obtained by the Sunday Herald, is based on an analysis of internal Yugoslav government documents, local and inter national news reports, scholarly and technical journals and ICG's extensive interviews with high-ranking Yugoslav government and military officials, defence experts, munitions industry figures and sources within the US government and international community.
ICG was founded in 1995 after concerns over an inadequate international response to crises in Rwanda, the Balkans and elsewhere. The report's main author is James Lyon, director of the ICG's Serbia Project, who has a PhD in Balkan history and is known for his high-level contacts . Shortly after the report was filed, he left the region over concerns for his safety.
The report exposes a rift between the Yugoslav leadership and the country's foreign ministry, which repeatedly warned the FRY government about the illegality of the arms trade to Iraq. Each time such warnings were issued, says the report, officials made cosmetic changes, but the trade continued unabated.
The report concludes that despite recent statements of disavowal from top officials, including the Yugoslav president and Serbian premier, internal documents indicate they must have had prior knowledge of the Iraqi trade. 'Top Yugoslav authorities, including President Kostunica ... knew about the sales, some of them at least as early as July of 2001, and did nothing to halt them.'
The report raises the question of the continuing influence of the Yugoslav old guard in the new government. The report explores the transfer not only of weapons and technology from such entities as Jugoimport-SDPR, (a state- controlled company whose role in sending jet engines and spare parts to Iraq was revealed when international peacekeeping troops in Bosnia seized incriminating documents in October) but also from the stocks of the Yugoslav military. It lays out the procedures and approvals required for the goods and personnel to move from their origin via third countries (chiefly Syria) to Iraq, and focuses on Velimir Radojevic, federal defence minister.
'It is ... inconceivable that Radojevic -- on the basis of his position as defence minister, board member of Jugoimport-SPDR, and his close ties inside the military -- was unaware of the ongoing plunder of VJ [Yugoslav Army] stocks, the arms sales to Iraq, the use of VJ ports, or the travel of VJ officers and military scientists to Iraq. It is inconceivable that he did not inform the federal president, interior minister, foreign minister, Army chief of staff and KOS [military counter- intelligence] of these activities.'
It notes that 'it is inconceivable' that the chief of the KOS, General Aco Tomic, did not know about the weapons sales or inform Kostunica or other key officials 'given the size and sophistication of his intelligence network, as well as his legal responsibility to sign off on weapons exports'.
ICG cites high-level sources in the Democratic Opposition of Serbia, the ruling government coalition, as affirming that the deliberately mislabled cargoes were escorted to the Montenegrin ports of Bar and Tivat by the Serbian, Montenegrin and Yugoslav federal interior ministries.
Although the federal government in October fired key officials in the wake of the Jugoimport revelations, the report lays out the contradictory statements by top leaders and the connections of those men and their parties to people involved with the arms trade. It notes that the general who headed Jugoimport was not fired, but reassigned as a special advisor to the man who replaced him, until US pressure forced his departure. It notes obstructionism by members of a government-appointed commission appointed to look into the allegations -- a body that includes Radojevic, one of those whose approval would have been necessary .
The report spells out some of the potential consequences of Yugo-Iraqi arms trade. 'Over the past two years, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia appears to have sold cruise and ballistic missile and pilotless vehicle technology to Iraq. Chemical and biological weapons and possibly their manufacturing technology and equipment also appear to have been sold. Yugoslavia appears to have sold Iraq anti-aircraft systems, artillery, munitions, and constructed underground bunker complexes inside Iraq. The combination of technologies provided by Yugoslavia could enable the Iraqi government to create an inexpensive cruise missile with weapons of mass destruction.'
If true, Yugoslavia would have been one of Iraq's key suppliers of weaponry and human assistance, including the building and revamping of military facilities. Among the examples of Iraq dealings described in the report:
- Cites 'reliable sources with connections to Kostunica's cabinet' and military counter-intelligence as telling ICG that, beyond the sale to Iraq within the past two years of 'biological and chemical equipment', as reported in the Belgrade press, chemical weapons have been sold. Bilateral co-operation in this area dates to the 1980s, when Yugoslavia assisted Iraq in building a chemical manufacturing compound. Other sources allege the manufacture, during the 1999 Nato bombing campaign, of the gas sarin.
- Asserts that a delegation from the Democratic Party of Serbia (DSS), the political organisation of federal President Kostunica, attended a conference in Baghdad in November 2001 'intended to create a counterweight to the US and globalisation'. The head of the delegation is a key figure in a web of trading companies implicated in the arms traffic, a consortium owned by a man who is also a key financier of the DSS.
- Cites a Yugoslav foreign ministry letter noting that as of January this year, Yugoslavia had construction contracts with Iraq, mostly for bunkers and other defense-related purposes, worth in excess of $120 million.
- Quotes a 'technical source' in Belgrade asserting that Yugoslav scientists 'have -- at the very least -- developed a model of a turbojet engine with a diameter that could fit in a cruise missile'.
ICG paints a picture of almost unavoidable temptation, with politicians and military figures who are mortal enemies dividing the spoils of a spectacularly lucrative opportunity. Most of the companies involved in such weapons production are aligned with competing political parties and politicians and it is nearly impossible to track the ultimate recipients of the profits .
Jugoimport, despite tremendous sales volume, claimed 2001 profits of only two million dinars (roughly $33,000). According to a January 2002 foreign ministry letter, one company, EnergoProjekt, may alone have had over $120m in construction contracts with Iraq.
Officials at the Yugoslav foreign ministry and the US Embassy in Belgrade are known to have viewed advance copies of the ICG document. Embassy officials, who were last week hosting a delegation of US arms investigators looking into the trading issue, would not comment, nor would foreign ministry officials.
Zoran Zivkovic, federal interior minister, a member of the federal inquiry panel on the arms transfers -- who was a Jugoimport board member -- declined to respond , but questioned the motivations of ICG, which is known to be a tough critic of the pace of reforms in the country.
'I don't care about their opinion, especially given what I know about their associates in Yugoslavia,' Zivkovic said.
-------- china
U.S. Warship Docks in China in Show Ties on Course
November 24, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-china-usa-navy.html
QINGDAO (Reuters) - A U.S. naval destroyer docked smoothly on China's eastern coast on Sunday, displaying how well ties fractured by a mid-air plane collision and discord over Taiwan have healed during the war on terror.
The USS Paul Foster nudged into a naval pier in Qingdao, headquarters of China's Northern Fleet, after a Chinese destroyer greeted it at sea by flying maritime flags for the letters ``W,'' ``T'' and ``C'' -- meaning ``Welcome To China.''
Some 340 black-uniformed crew stood at attention along the guardrails of the American warship, face to face with blue-suited Chinese sailors striking similar poses along the dock.
A local navy brass band hailed the arrival of the American warship, the first to pull into a mainland port since an April, 2001, mid-air collision between a U.S. plane and a Chinese fighter off China's southern shore.
The port call came a month after a summit between Presidents George W. Bush and Jiang Zemin in Crawford, Texas, where China's Foreign Ministry says the two reached agreement to resume full military exchanges and consultations.
Military officials from the U.S. embassy in Beijing said this stop was finalized around that time but planned months in advance.
Two U.S. carriers with around 12,000 sailors dropped anchor in Hong Kong two days ago in another sign of military ties on the mend.
The captain of the Paul F. Foster, Commander Chuck Nygaard, was met with a handshake from Guo Shouqian, deputy chief of staff of China's Northern Fleet, at the end of a red-carpeted gangplank.
``I know that there has been some turbulence'' in relations, said Nygaard, who last visited China aboard the USS Blue Ridge, which docked in Shanghai weeks before the spy plane incident.
``We are a part of renewed relations and improved relations between our two countries,'' he told an audience of reporters and Chinese military brass.
Guo stressed Jiang's latest visit with Bush. Jiang stepped down as boss of the Communist Party this month but stayed on as head of the military and made clear he would continue to play a highly influential role in policy.
COOL HEADS
A wave of crises, from terrorism to Iraq and North Korea, have pushed Beijing and Washington closer over the past year, despite obstacles like weapons proliferation and Taiwan.
U.S. navy Vice-admiral Paul Gaffney II met China's defense minister Chi Haotian in Beijing last month, the highest American military man to visit since the spy plane incident.
``Our two very powerful navies can do so much for stability in the region,'' said Nygaard.
His late 1970s-era destroyer -- carrying ground and surface-to-air missiles, two five-inch guns and a helicopter -- had sailed in from Yokosuka, Japan and after a half-year tour in places like India, Indonesia and Hong Kong.
On the other side of the pier was the destroyer Qingdao, which returned home two months ago after what was billed as the Chinese navy's first circumnavigation of the globe, a four-month foreign relations tour and show of military might.
And just a few miles along the coast of the former German treaty port, China's flotilla of nuclear submarines is stationed underwater.
They sit on watch over Taiwan, the island China regards as a rebel province and has threatened with force, if necessary, to return it to the fold. Bush has pledged to do whatever it takes to help the island protect itself.
But heads were cool on both sides during Sunday's port call, the United States' sixth in Qingdao, right down to the rank-and-file.
``Since September 11, the United States has become more realistic toward China,'' said Major Liu Qinggang, 30, as he watched the U.S. ship drift in. ``They seek the truth from facts, and they know now where their overall interests lie.''
``Just because China's a rising power doesn't mean it's going to be a threat like in the Cold War,'' said American Christian Trexel, 20, a fire control technician who works on Tomahawk missiles.
``We're here. And hopefully there will be more after us.'
-------- colombia
Dead Man's Bluff
By Steven Dudley
Sunday, November 24, 2002
Washington Post; Page W10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A11783-2002Nov19?language=printer
Was Colombia's most feared paramilitary chieftain really killed in the jungles of his war-torn country eight years ago? Or did Fidel Castano simply disappear, leaving his brother responsible
The rain came down in sheets the night Carlos Castano returned to his older brother Fidel's grave in the jungles of northern Colombia.
Carlos and two of his cousins dug furiously into the muddy terrain on the edge of one of his brother's many cattle ranches. But the hole that held the legendary paramilitary chieftain's body kept filling with water, which turned an eerie white.
Carlos didn't want to move Fidel's body, but the hastily dug grave was eroding. The stench from the grave site made him double over and vomit, he recounted last year in his authorized biography, My Confession. His cousins looked at him in consternation and kept digging until they uncovered Fidel's casket with their shovels. The rudimentary wooden box was so waterlogged they couldn't move it.
Carlos and his cousins reached in to retrieve the body, but the bones came apart in their hands. Carlos was left holding the skull. The exhumation was almost more than he could handle. He fell into a trance, he told his biographer, and watched aimlessly as his cousins finished the job.
He thought about abandoning the decades-old civil war that had left his father and now his brother dead. He thought about the randomness of battle, the way some died and others lived. He thought about the burden of taking his brother's place, of leading the struggle against leftist insurgents that had splintered the country. Then Carlos helped his cousins rebury his brother on the side of a nearby mountain, for what he prayed would be the last time.
Colombians were aghast and delighted at Carlos's tale (and bought his book in record numbers). This is, after all, the land of magical realism, an Andean country where myths flourish and stories about larger-than-life figures like Fidel Castano grow more powerful over time.
For almost 15 years, Fidel was at the center of Colombia's chaos, enmeshed in its massacres, land grabs and cocaine deals. He was the founding father of the country's right-wing paramilitaries, which financed their fierce war against the leftists with drug money. He was a self-made millionaire, amassing a cattle empire and trafficking in illegal drugs and stolen art. He was the man who had taken on one of the world's most fearsome drug lords, Pablo Escobar, and helped snuff him out.
Then, on January 6, 1994, it all came to an end, Carlos told his biographer, with a single bullet to the heart near a guerrilla roadblock. With that shot, Fidel Castano was dead at 45.
Or was he? It was hard to believe, even for those who read Carlos's book cover to cover. Carlos maintains he learned of his brother's death immediately, but hid the news from the country for months while he consolidated his control of the Castano empire. When rumors began circulating in newspapers that Fidel was dead, Carlos was tight-lipped about what had happened. What's more, there was no corpse, no fingerprints, no eyewitness testimony, no death certificate. For years, there were only rumors of his whereabouts, not his grave. He was living in Portugal. He had an apartment in Paris. He ran a kibbutz in Israel. He was spotted in Monteria, at an inauguration of a military battalion in central Colombia, on a balcony in Madrid. The stories came from lawyers, politicians, shop owners, peasant farmers, fishermen and taxi drivers. People talked about Fidel in the present tense. Even the government didn't buy Fidel's death. Prosecutors continued to charge him with crimes long after his disappearance.
Why were so many Colombians convinced that his death had been staged? Was it possible that he was still operating from the shadows, still contributing to Colombia's tumult and reaping profits from its travails? I decided to find out more about what had happened to Fidel--and to the forces he'd unleashed on his country.
I started by poking around a lonely village called Valencia, where Fidel owned land and had spent most of the last years of his public life. Valencia is in the province of Cordoba, at the base of the Sinu Valley, a vast wetlands that stretches from the mountains in the south to the coast in the north. Aside from cattle ranchers like Fidel, the area is dirt poor. The town itself has a few dozen one-story houses and no paved roads. The local government was just putting in a sewer system. A few donkeys roamed freely in the town market, and peasants walked the streets with the plodding pace of poverty. Occasionally, the local bus passed by, kicking up dust in their faces.
To get to the village, I had to cross the torrential Sinu River on a crude ferry that maintained its course by attaching itself to two reinforced steel wires that stretched across the fast-moving muddy water. Fidel used to swim the river for exercise. A visiting professor once saw him dive into whirlpools that would suck the life from most. Fidel, of course, came up some 20 yards away and swam freestyle for another hour. He often complemented his swims with long jogs. And he was an avid chess player.
"He was always attacking, never on the defensive," said one old compatriot who played with Fidel frequently. "And when he was waiting for me to move, he used to just sit there and say, 'I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill you,' and tap the pieces on the table and whistle."
The two would play until Fidel had outmaneuvered his opponent in a sufficient number of matches. "Sometimes we'd play until 8 or 9 in the morning. He never lost."
The few townspeople in Valencia who would speak to me remembered Fidel as an "uncomplicated" person, a man of the countryside. He owned a big ranch outside of town, they said, but he dressed like them: a pair of jeans, boots and a cowboy hat. He was tall and fit, built like a soldier, with wide shoulders and a firm torso. He had a stern, serious face, but soft eyes that charmed. He greeted everyone he saw with a smile and a strong handshake, remembering their names and asking after their wives, their children, their businesses. They called him "Tio Fidel," or Uncle Fidel. "Whatever you need, you just come by the house," he would urge at the end of conversations.
As I traveled through the countryside around Valencia, I passed dozens of ranches with hundreds of Cebu cattle grazing behind the wooden fences. Much of the land belongs to the Castano family. Following his move to Valencia, Fidel bought two large farms, which added to his holdings in the neighboring provinces of Choco and Antioquia. His timing was impeccable. The neighbors were fleeing increasingly aggressive and brash guerrilla forces. Two rebel groups--one Maoist, the other Marxist--had extorted the region to death, and the cattle ranchers were looking to sell at any price.
Sensing opportunity, Fidel bought more tracts of land, many of them in rebel-held territory. Then he went to work. By Carlos's account, Fidel recruited a fighting force of close to 100 men and trained them on his farm, Las Tangas. The "Tangueros," as Fidel's army became known, eliminated suspected guerrillas and their supporters with startling efficiency. People began calling him Rambo. The nickname fit perfectly. Like the Sylvester Stallone antihero, Fidel was a loner who fought battles that the government couldn't or wouldn't. In one particularly brutal massacre, one of his men told investigators, the Tangueros dragged some 40 people from a neighboring village back to Las Tangas. There they tortured them all night with crude instruments before shooting some and burying others alive.
Valencia, once an area teeming with rebels, was "liberated" in months. The land values shot up, and the shrewd Fidel started to sell. It was a pattern he would repeat wherever he went. Others, particularly drug traffickers, did the same in different parts of the country.
While Fidel grew fabulously rich, he also gave away large tracts of land and set up a school, which I visited while I was in the Valencia area. An administrator named Lola Martinez showed me around the one-story building, where teachers were holding physics, chemistry and English classes. Martinez said they tried to teach the kids values, and each classroom had a slogan like "Tolerance" or "Respect" pasted above the door.
"I should say that I had the honor to meet Fidel," Martinez told me as we walked into the library. "He was a great man, an intellectual. He was very nice and gave his life to humanitarian causes. He was one of those people who had a certain charisma."
And it was apparently every bit as potent as his ruthlessness.
After Fidel was gone, his mantle fell to Carlos, who didn't speak publicly about his brother's death until 1996. At that time, he told Semana magazine that Fidel disappeared as he traveled with a five-man entourage toward the Darien Gap, a thick canopy of trees and undergrowth that runs along the Panama-Colombia border.
"The jungle swallowed him," Carlos was quoted as saying, comparing his brother to the main character of a popular novel who suffered a similar fate. He said nothing more until the publication of My Confession. By then, his account of Fidel's death had grown far more detailed and dramatic, with his brother felled by a single bullet to the heart. Not surprisingly, Carlos didn't like being pressed about the contradictions in his stories. "I don't lie," he growled during one interview. The reporter backed off.
When I flew to Valencia to see Carlos, one of his paramilitary commanders gave me a lift in a two-seat airplane from the banana-growing region along the northern coast. The plane skimmed the tops of banana trees, then skirted some mountains and entered into cattle country. We touched down on a grassy 500-foot airstrip on the edge of a dirt road. Two paramilitary guards in a jeep drove me to a small village: a dozen houses clustered around a run-down basketball court that functioned as a park. There I met my guide, Commander 04, a towering, mustachioed figure who walked with a limp and grunted short answers to questions.
How did you injure yourself? I asked.
"Hurt my hip in battle," he muttered.
As we bounced down the road toward our destination, I dragged out of him that he'd joined Fidel Castano's troops in the late 1980s.
"A great man, great commander," he said.
How did Fidel die? I ventured.
04 paused. "Don't know," he finally mumbled.
As we pulled into camp, Carlos was yelling at 20 paramilitary soldiers dressed in camouflage and lined up in two rows. Spit flew from his mouth as he barked at them. He was sweating when he entered the tent where I was waiting.
"I'm Carlos Castano," he said in a thick, hoarse voice. He took off his camouflage baseball hat to reveal a dark-haired crew cut atop a handsome, stubbled face. He exuded authority, and it was easy to see why he'd emerged as one of the country's most visible paramilitary leaders after Fidel was gone.
"In our war, the enemy is difficult to see," he began explaining to me once we sat down. "It's like a snake; it comes from the bushes, it comes out of a bunker. It attacks and then disappears into the shade without anyone knowing where it is."
For the last several years, Carlos, now 37, has had close to 10,000 troops under his command as head of the loosely knit United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC. The AUC is a greatly expanded version of the Tangueros, and many believe it's the only thing keeping the powerful leftist guerrillas from overrunning more of Colombia's countryside. But the group, which has long operated with the tacit approval and at times direct support of the Colombian government, is also responsible for killing thousands of civilians suspected of collaborating with the guerrillas. And it has enlisted the country's most powerful drug traffickers to help finance its war.
The United States has spent nearly $2 billion in the last three years trying to help Colombia break the grip of its drug traffickers. It considers the AUC a terrorist organization. And it considers Carlos Castano a criminal. In September, he was one of three paramilitary leaders indicted in Washington on charges of bringing more than 17 tons of cocaine into the United States and Europe over the past five years. The United States is seeking his extradition.
In a recent interview, Carlos acknowledged that he "taxes" traffickers to finance his war, but denied profiting from the drug trade himself. When he took over the paramilitaries from his brother, he wanted to shake their image as cocaine-enriched mercenaries. He thought of himself as an intellectual and frequently invited professors to stay with him for weeks at a time. Carlos once told reporters that he wanted to study sociology in the United States when the conflict in Colombia was over. Now, in the wake of the indictment, he was holed up in a jungle hideout, struggling to maintain his grip on the AUC and giving mixed signals about whether he would surrender to U.S. authorities. His greatest fear, he said, is of being thrown into a U.S. jail "without any light, without any access to anyone." It is a fate his brother was determined to avoid.
Carlos was just 14 in 1979 when Marxist guerrillas from the country's largest rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, kidnapped his father, Jesus, from a cattle farm his father and Fidel owned together in the province of Antioquia. Fidel paid two ransoms. The guerrillas demanded more. But Fidel, believing his father was already dead, balked.
"Even if I had the money," he wrote back, "I would use it to fight you." Jesus Castano's body was never found. In his book, Carlos said the guerrillas shot his father between the shoulder blades because they thought the army was closing in on them.
"For me, the death of my father was a tragedy that affects me even today," Carlos told me during our meeting at his camp. "It ended my childhood."
Carlos was much closer to his father than Fidel was--a point of tension between the brothers. There were other differences. Fidel was a shadowy, secretive figure far more focused on protecting his ever-growing assets than on rescuing Colombia from the guerrillas' grip. It was Carlos who transformed the paramilitaries into a large army and stepped forward as its public leader in recent years. And it was Carlos who relished the limelight, granting interviews, posing for photos and writing a bestseller.
Carlos acknowledged some differences, describing himself as fiery and impulsive and his brother as colder and more calculating, but he dismissed reports that he hated Fidel. "We were always the most united in the house," Carlos said. "He was like my father. The union was absolute."
The Castanos didn't start out as wealthy landowners. Jesus owned a modest farm with about 200 cattle and made his children work just as hard as the hired hands, Carlos said. As a teenager, Fidel rebelled against his father's authoritarian ways, and set off for Venezuela and Guyana, where he made a fortune in smuggled diamonds and other contraband. Carlos stayed behind, tending cattle for Jesus, the man he would later call his hero.
After their father's death, Fidel "got us together," Carlos said. "And he said, 'They're going to continue killing us,' if we don't fight back."
Thus began the Castano war against the guerrillas. Carlos, Fidel and a handful of brothers and cousins became guides for the Colombian army. But when they located suspected guerrillas or collaborators, the army seemed to have little power to arrest or punish them. So, Carlos explained, "we would get on our civilian clothes, grab our rifles or whatever, and--tan! tan! tan!--we would kill them." The Castano cadre was relentless. The first to fall were Jesus's kidnappers, but the Castanos didn't stop there. One witness reported a week-long killing spree in a neighboring province by men "dressed in ponchos, white hats and carrying new machetes, rifles, knives, pistols and grenades." Dozens were killed, including women and children.
"The first year after they kidnapped my father, all I wanted was revenge," Carlos explained. "I wanted to destroy everything. At that time, the border between justice and vengeance was very difficult to decipher, very vague . . . We killed a lot of civilians."
My paramilitary guide, Commander 04, took me on a tour of the area under AUC control. We drove past some more large cattle ranches and through a few small towns. There were men with radios on bicycles, at vending booths and in doorways. The paramilitaries maintain close contact with one another and the local authorities to keep the rebels out of their domain.
The ties between the military and the paramilitaries go back to the time of Fidel. Although the army denies it, there is a mountain of evidence that officials have provided the paramilitaries with intelligence, and given them free passage past checkpoints and protection from the rebels. These days, by Carlos's own admission, the AUC and government forces split up regions, but the paramilitaries still do most of the dirty work. I found a few AUC radio-men drinking beer in a cantina one day in the poor village where I'd met 04. I tried to get them talking about Fidel, but they were as reluctant as 04.
"One day he was gone," one finally said. "Like he went on vacation. It was like the Bermuda Triangle."
Another man, who called himself "Churoto," said Fidel was a real leader, challenging people to defy the guerrillas: " 'I need 150 men,' he would say. And sure enough, 150 men would arrive. Old men, teenagers, husbands, workers. They all came ready to fight."
Without Fidel, who knew where the country would be now? "There should be a monument to Fidel," insisted Churoto, who was less voluble on the subject of Fidel's fate.
Is Fidel dead? I pressed.
"Yeah, he's dying," Churoto told me with a smile. "He's dying of laughter."
Yet as I sped down the road leading out of the area, my new paramilitary guide, nicknamed "the Russian," assured me that Fidel was indeed dead and pointed to the area along the road where Carlos, in My Confession, said he'd been shot.
"Didn't you read the book?" he asked.
The Russian--who was called that because he'd lost part of his face to a grenade and spoke with a slur--had started out as a teen assassin for Pablo Escobar before joining the "House of Castano," as Carlos likes to call it.
Escobar and Fidel were close for years, according to Carlos, respecting and using one another. Escobar frequently brought Fidel to his ranch to show others that he had Rambo's muscle behind him. Fidel made loads of money from his association with Escobar. But Carlos stopped trusting Escobar because of the kingpin's increasingly aggressive attacks on the government. Like Carlos today, Escobar feared spending the rest of his life in a U.S. prison for drug trafficking. And the government was threatening extradition. In response, the drug kingpin launched a campaign of terror, using bombs and assassinations to gain political leverage and negotiate his way out. Escobar was widely considered responsible for placing a bomb on a commercial jetliner that exploded in midair, killing 110 people in 1989.
That same year, Carlos said in his biography, he began working as an anonymous informant for the government without his brother's knowledge. He was waiting, he said, for the right moment to bring Fidel into the fight. When Escobar killed several of his own closest allies for allegedly withholding money from him, Carlos convinced Fidel he might be next. Soon the war was on. Working with a former bodyguard of an Escobar victim, Carlos and Fidel formed the Pepes, or Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar).
By then, Escobar was holding the government hostage, detonating car bombs in the middle of major cities and kidnapping prominent Colombians. The United States was calling for a war without quarter, and the vigilante group began waging it. The Pepes bombed Escobar's houses and burned his relatives' and associates' offices; they threatened, harassed and assassinated dozens of Escobar's friends, relatives and business partners. Escobar hit back with more terror, but Fidel and Carlos thwarted some of the attacks and led authorities to safe houses, and drug and weapons depots. They acted as chiefs and guardians for the police. On one particular raid, several policemen fell into a river they were crossing. Fidel jumped into the rapids and pulled one of the officers to safety. Two others died, but Fidel's allegiance to them--and theirs to him--had become as unquestioned as his leadership.
The U.S. government knew all about the Pepes' dirty war against Escobar. Both the Drug Enforcement Administration and the CIA worked closely with the police in the Escobar manhunt. A 1993 memo written by the U.S. ambassador shows that the agencies knew the Pepes were running the show. Another government document indicates that the DEA had at least one direct contact with close associates of the Castano brothers. The agencies couldn't claim ignorance about whom they were dealing with. A May 1990 U.S. Embassy memo reads: "Authorities now believe that [Fidel] Castano was responsible for many of the most notorious of the massacres of rural inhabitants which have plagued Colombia over the past several years." Other memos detailed Fidel Castano's role in assassinations, massacres and mass graves throughout the north of the country. But the U.S. agents didn't complain. They wanted Escobar too much.
The chase continued for months. Escobar deftly eluded authorities, but his associates kept falling, and his scramble to find a safe place to hide his family from the Pepes kept drawing him into the open. By now, the Pepes had destroyed Escobar's organization, leaving him desperate and isolated. On December 2, 1993, Colombian government agents tracked Escobar to one of his Medellin safe houses. He was fleeing across the tin roofs of some ramshackle houses when police gunfire cut through his beefy body. Fidel didn't pull the trigger, but there was no doubt that he and the Pepes played a crucial role in bringing Escobar down.
The campaign against Escobar was Fidel's last public battle. He was tired of war, but he was even more tired of not getting his due. Like Rambo, he believed he'd fought all the dirty wars without the recognition he deserved from the government or anyone else. Nothing irked him more.
"I don't need forgiveness from anyone," Fidel told some guests on his farm once. "I saved this country from communism." He also saved it from Escobar, he thought. But neither victory seemed to bring him any closer to what he really wanted: a way out of the war without fear of prosecution.
Fidel was under investigation by the Colombian government for multiple assassinations, massacres and his involvement with the Pepes. In the early 1990s, other paramilitaries had made deals with the government to avoid being prosecuted as drug traffickers and murderers. Instead they'd managed to win some of the same legal protections as the guerrillas, who were treated as political combatants rather than common criminals. Now Fidel, too, wanted political recognition, which could eventually lead to amnesty. He sent letters to Colombian officials, but they were mute. The government had stopped talking about deals for paramilitaries; it was talking about jail.
"If I can't resolve my legal situation," he told his guests, "I can live in Europe or Israel. I'm not bound to this land."
Fidel already owned a posh apartment in Paris, where he traveled frequently on art-hunting expeditions. He'd become quite a connoisseur since the late 1980s. Expensive black market paintings and sculptures were even more lucrative than dealing cocaine, he told one acquaintance. He acquired only pieces he thought he could sell for at least a $50,000 profit and peddled them to drug traffickers longing for social acceptance. Fidel became their main supplier. He traveled to galleries in New York and Paris. He had photographs of himself with Salvador Dali, had his portrait painted by Ecuadorean artist Oswaldo Guayasamin, and was said to own dozens of Fernando Botero's depictions of corpulent Colombians.
He learned English and French, stayed in five-star hotels, bought the finest clothes and dined at the best restaurants. It was a life far removed from Colombia's ruthless power struggles--one that Fidel seemed eager to embrace permanently.
More than a month after Escobar was gunned down, Fidel vanished. But the rumors and sightings of him have yet to die away.
In May 1994, five months after Carlos says Fidel died, the U.S. State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research produced a dossier titled "Profile of Fidel Castano, Super Drug-Thug" that treated its subject as very much alive.
In Colombia, the attorney general's office continued to charge Fidel with crimes long after he disappeared. In 1998, four years after "the shot right to the heart," as Carlos described it in his book, the office indicted him and his brother for the 1997 murder of two human rights activists, one of them a former Jesuit priest, in Bogota.
One ex-government investigator told me he had good reason to believe Fidel was living in Medellin as late as 1997. That impression was reinforced by a later encounter with a paramilitary assassin, who told the investigator that "Professor Yarumo," one of Fidel's aliases, had sent him to kill the ex-priest in Bogota. An internal investigation by the attorney general's office in 1997 said Fidel was running the paramilitaries in the province of Antioquia.
Other leads continue to come in. A London source told me Fidel lives in Israel, where he bought some land. A former Colombian security agent said that Fidel was in Portugal, buying and selling black market art. Sightings also include Madrid and Paris, his old stomping grounds. In Cordoba Province, a security agent told me that high-level politicians talk openly about Fidel as if he were alive. And few in Valencia believe he's dead.
"If the guerrillas had really killed him," an elderly shop owner asked me incredulously, "don't you think they would have said something?"
When I asked Carlos why so many people believed Fidel was still alive, he offered an intriguing answer: "Fidel always said, 'When we kill Escobar, I'm going to disappear, and you're never going to know anything more about me . . .' " Otherwise, Fidel believed, he risked becoming the most wanted man in Colombia--in effect, Escobar's successor.
It sounded like a more plausible explanation for Fidel's disappearance than a ravenous jungle or a single bullet to the heart. But only Carlos knows what is fact and what is fiction. And only Carlos knows whether, in the end, he will be the one to take responsibility for the sins of the House of Castano.
Steven Dudley, a journalist living in Bogota, is writing a book about Colombia to be published next fall by Routledge.
-------- mideast
Kuwait May Be Key in Iraq Invasion
November 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iraq-Staging-Troops.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even without the use of Saudi Arabia's vast desert expanses to launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the U.S. military would have plenty of room to operate from tiny Kuwait and elsewhere, defense experts say.
There already are more than 12,000 U.S. forces in Kuwait -- mostly Army soldiers -- training in desert warfare. At least another 14,000 are in other Persian Gulf nations, and the Navy has an aircraft carrier, the USS Lincoln, in the northern Persian Gulf with more than 5,500 sailors and dozens of warplanes aboard.
If President Bush decided to go to war, thousands more forces would flow into the area.
Saudi Arabia was the key to assembling the massive allied force used in the 1991 Gulf War, starting shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990. By February 1991, about a quarter-million combat troops were ready to push into occupied Kuwait and southern Iraq, and the fighting was declared over in 100 hours. Those combat troops were backed by a similar number of support forces, mostly at bases in Saudi Arabia.
This time Saudi Arabia almost certainly will not permit a buildup of U.S. ground forces or strike aircraft on its territory.
Ideally, the United States would position its ground troops on Iraq's perimeter in every direction, said Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But political realities -- especially the rising tide of anti-Americanism in the region -- have forced the Pentagon to assume from the start of its war planning early this year that no ground forces will operate from Saudi soil.
``Planning has always been based on Kuwait as the primary point of access,'' Cordesman said.
Kuwait remains indispensable as a staging ground, despite shootings there that killed one Marine and wounded another on Oct. 8 during a training exercise, and wounded two Army soldiers on Thursday.
It remains possible that the Saudis will allow U.S. support aircraft such as aerial refuelers and surveillance planes to fly from Saudi bases, or at least permit U.S. attack planes to fly through Saudi airspace.
Kuwait, an oil-rich desert state slightly smaller than New Jersey, has hosted a virtually permanent U.S. Army presence since the Gulf War ended. This time it would be the key launching pad for invading ground forces, should President Bush decide force is required to disarm the Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's government.
Already there are more than 7,000 Army soldiers training for war at Kuwait's Camp Doha, a large base about 35 miles from the Iraqi border, and thousands more could be positioned in that area. The Kuwaiti government has condoned off the western part of the country to accommodate American military exercises.
``Kuwait allows you access for heavy forces to Iraq's western desert,'' Cordesman said. Iraq's own armored forces could not move into position to try to stop the onslaught without risking attack by U.S. planes.
In all, there are about 12,000 U.S. military personnel in Kuwait. The Air Force flies from 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.
The Pentagon's current plan for attacking Iraq calls for up to 250,000 troops -- land, sea and air, but an invasion might begin with a much smaller force -- perhaps 50,000 -- from a wide range of bases in the Persian Gulf. The Marines, for example, might stage from Bahrain, headquarters for the Navy's 5th Fleet, and the Air Force would have more bases to operate from elsewhere in the Gulf than it did during the 1991 War.
Jordan, which borders Iraq on the west, is unlikely to allow a buildup of U.S. ground forces on its territory. There has been speculation that U.S. and perhaps British special operations forces are prepared to slip across the Jordanian border to sabotage or destroy Iraqi Scud missile batteries that might be aimed at Israel.
A contingent of U.S. special operations forces conducted a little-publicized exercise in Jordan in October.
To the north of Iraq, Turkey has at least a few air bases that would be useful to U.S. forces. American and British fighter and support planes already fly regularly from Incirlik air base in south-central Turkey. There are no U.S. ground forces in Turkey, although it could be a staging area for special forces.
Bill Arkin, an independent military analyst who studied the U.S. military campaign in 1991, said it is likely that U.S. forces would establish forward air bases inside Iraq, perhaps in areas of the north that are controlled by independence-minded Kurds, and perhaps in the south and the extreme west. Army airborne forces, perhaps, would secure such bases after an initial wave of intense airstrikes elsewhere by U.S. fighters and bombers.
The United States has forces stationed in other countries within striking distance of Iraq -- Afghanistan and Uzbekistan, for example -- that it did not have in 1991. It also has built up its presence in key Gulf states like Oman; Air Force B-1 bombers operated from an Omani base portions of the air war in Afghanistan.
Tens of thousands of U.S. forces would operate from aircraft carriers and Marine amphibious groups in the Gulf.
On the Net:
The Defense Department at http://www.defenselink.mil
-------- us
US forces told to destroy supply lines of terror
By Charles Laurence in New York, David Wastell, and Jack Fairweather in Kuwait
24/11/2002
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/11/24/wiraq24.xml/
American special forces commandos have been ordered to launch covert operations against arms supply lines to terrorists and the three rogue nations referred to by President George W. Bush as the "axis of evil".
George W Bush: gave the order last month
Mr Bush has signed a classified executive order giving special forces unprecedented authority to combat and, if necessary, destroy arms suppliers who aid terrorism and any attempts to develop weapons of mass destruction.
Last night the Pentagon confirmed that Mr Bush gave the order last month, shortly after the White House confronted North Korea with evidence that it was secretly buying nuclear technology.
His move followed a debate within the administration over the wisdom of allowing military special forces to operate clandestinely in countries where America is not openly at war, and where in some cases the local government may not even be aware of their presence.
Earlier this month, the Central Intelligence Agency used a remote-controlled Predator aircraft to launch a missile at suspected al-Qaeda members in Yemen, killing six. America considers al-Qaeda members to be military targets, "combatants" under international law.
However, the United Nations charter forbids a nation to intervene in the internal affairs of a country with which it is not at war.
The new Pentagon-led operations will be directed at shipments to Iraq, Iran and North Korea, and at terrorist groups including al-Qaeda, wherever they are based. The targets include arms and any scientific equipment suspected of having a "dual use" for the manufacture of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
Mr Bush's decision comes as United Nations weapons inspectors prepare to make the first checks on suspected Iraqi weapons sites for four years, beginning on Wednesday. Iraq is suspected of attempting to import materials for its weapons programmes by covert routes.
As American officials continued to threaten military action at the first sign of Iraqi deception or obstruction, Jacques Baute, the chief nuclear weapons inspector, urged Western governments to be patient.
He also took aim at hawks within the Bush administration, who have questioned the ability of inspectors to unravel Saddam's weapons programmes. "The inspectors should be given a chance," Mr Baute told The Sunday Telegraph. "It's easy to criticise us in advance, but now we can start to explore the real stance of Iraq in terms of co-operation.
"Weeks and even months will demonstrate that both sides can do a very professional and useful job . . . Undermining the inspections right now will not help solve the problems we have."
Even if Iraq co-operated fully it would take "several months to a year" before inspectors could be "reassured" that Saddam was not trying to make nuclear weapons.
Saddam has been given a deadline of December 8 to produce a list of all his weapons stocks and production lines which could be used to make weapons.
The growing threat of American-led military action in the region is stirring Islamic extremism and anti-American violence even in countries thought to be staunch allies.
In Kuwait, likely to be at the forefront of military operations against Iraq, officials last night announced the extradition from Saudi Arabia of a Kuwaiti policeman accused of shooting at and seriously injuring two American soldiers, the latest in a series of attacks against Americans which have raised serious questions about Washington's crucial ally.
Other violence has left one marine dead and three soldiers injured in the past six weeks. One Kuwaiti defence official said the attacks were part of "a worrying new trend". The real threat, he said, is to be found not in the mosques or religious schools but in the pool halls and cyber cafes frequented by young, wealthy and disaffected Kuwaitis.
Noah is one such Kuwaiti, a self-styled terrorist who shoots pool all night long, describes Osama bin Laden as a hero and claims to be in regular contact with al-Qaeda operatives on the internet
"I see what the Americans are doing in Palestine, hear that they are threatening war with Iraq and it fills me with anger," he said. "I want to get the Americans out of this whole region, by any means."
He claimed to know the 17-year-old boy who last month tried to attack a residential complex housing Western businessmen - known as the Twin Towers of Kuwait - with 10 molotov cocktails.
But such a clearly amateurish attempt, and the bravado of Noah and others like him, should not disguise the fact that they are prime recruiting material for al-Qaeda networks operating in the Gulf region.
Kuwaiti authorities last weekend announced the arrest of Mohsen Fadhli, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a 21-year-old "graduate" of the cyber cafes and pool halls, who confessed to trying to raise funds for a terrorist atrocity in Yemen.
The linking of Kuwaiti money with Yemen, already a hotbed of terrorist activity and as The Telegraph revealed last week, the possible refuge of Osama bin Laden, has also raised grave concerns.
-------- propaganda wars
The Military's New War of Words
November 24, 2002
Los Angeles Times
By William M. Arkin E-mail: warkin@igc.org.
http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin24nov24001455,0,4926254.story
DEFENSE STRATEGY
SOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- It was California's own Hiram Johnson who said, in a speech on the Senate floor in 1917, that "the first casualty, when war comes, is truth."
What would he make of the Bush administration?
In a policy shift that reaches across all the armed services, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and his senior aides are revising missions and creating new agencies to make "information warfare" a central element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will eventually rank with bombs and artillery shells as an instrument of destruction.
What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare is that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime activity involving communications that have traditionally been separated by a firewall of principle.
The first is purely military. It includes attacks on the radar, communications and other "information systems" an enemy depends on to guide its war-making capabilities. This category also includes traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets or broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.
The second is not directly military. It is the dissemination of public information that the American people need in order to understand what is happening in a war, and to decide what they think about it. This information is supposed to be true.
Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the steps senior commanders are taking to implement it -- blurs or even erases the boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand, and public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the other. And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its most likely victim will be the American electorate.
One of Rumsfeld's first steps into this minefield occurred last year with the creation of the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence. Part of its stated mission was to generate disinformation and propaganda that would help the United States counter Islamic extremists and pursue the war on terrorism.
The office's nominal target was the foreign media, especially in the Middle East and Asia. As critics soon pointed out, however, there was no way -- in an age of instant global communications -- that Washington could propagandize abroad without that same propaganda spreading to the home front.
Faced with a public outcry, Rumsfeld declared it had all been a big misunderstanding. The Pentagon would never lie to Americans. The Office of Strategic Influence was shut down. But the impulse to control public information and bend it to the service of government objectives did not go away.
This fall, Rumsfeld created a new position of deputy undersecretary for "special plans," a euphemism for deception operations. The special plans policy czar will sit atop a huge new infrastructure being created in the name of information warfare.
On Oct. 1, in a little-noticed but major reorganization, U.S. Strategic Command took over all responsibilities for global information attacks. The Omaha-based successor to the Strategic Air Command has solely focused up to now on nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the country's most venerable and historic bombing command, the 8th Air Force, which carried the air war to Germany in World War II, has been directed to transfer its bomber and fighter aircraft to other commands so that it can focus exclusively on worldwide information attacks.
The Navy, meanwhile, has consolidated its efforts in a newly formed Naval Network Warfare Command. And the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan, or JSCP, prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, now declares information to be just as important in war as diplomatic, military or economic factors.
The strategic capabilities plan is the central war-fighting directive for the U.S. military. It establishes what are called "Informational Flexible Deterrent Options" for global wars, such as the war on terrorism, and separate plans written for individual theaters of war, such as Iraq.
To a large extent, these documents and the organizational shifts behind them are focused on such missions as jamming or deceiving enemy radar systems and disrupting command and control networks. Such activities only carry forward efforts that have been part of U.S. military tactics for decades or longer.
But a summary of the strategic capabilities plan and a raft of other Pentagon and armed forces documents made available to The Times make it clear that the new approach now includes other elements as well: the management of public information, efforts to control news media sources and manipulation of public opinion.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception and "influence operations" as basic tools in future wars. According to another Defense Department directive on information warfare policy, military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten public awareness; promote national and coalition policies, aims, and objectives ... [and] counter adversary propaganda and disinformation in the news."
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of five missions for information warfare, along with electronic attack, electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs. A September draft of a new Air Force policy describes information warfare's goals as "destruction, degradation, denial, disruption, deceit, and exploitation." These goals are referred to collectively as "D5E."
In order to do a better job of deception, the joint chiefs have issued a "Joint Policy for Military Deception" that directs the individual services to work on the task in peacetime as well as wartime. Specifically, it orders the Air Force to develop better doctrine and techniques for incorporating deception into war plans.
The Air Force, in response, now defines military deception as action that "misleads adversaries, causing them to act in accordance with" U.S. objectives. And, like the other services, it is increasingly folding its "public affairs" apparatus -- that is, the open world of media relations -- into the information warfare team.
"Gaining and maintaining the information initiative in a conflict can be a powerful weapon to defeat propaganda," the Air Force said in its January doctrine.
That echoes a statement by Navy Rear Adm. John Cryer III, who worked on information warfare in the Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi Arabia during the Afghanistan war: "It was our belief ... we were losing the information war early when we watched Al Jazeera," Cryer said at an October conference, meaning that the U.S. perspective was inadequately represented on the Arab world's equivalent of CNN. "We came around, but it took a lot longer than it should have."
Of course there is nothing wrong with making sure the U.S. point of view gets represented in the news media, both abroad and at home. Done properly, that is a prescription for more openness and less unnecessary secrecy.
The problem is that Rumsfeld's vision of information warfare seems to push beyond the notion that American ideas and information should compete with the enemy's on a level playing field. And Rumsfeld's vision, with its melding of public information and deception, is taking root in the armed services.
The new Air Force doctrine, for example, declares that the news media can be used not only to convey "the leadership's concern with [an] issue," but also to avoid "the media going to other sources [such as an adversary or critic of U.S. policy] for information." In other words, information warfare now includes controlling as much as possible what the American public sees and reads.
The disinformation campaign being constructed goes against even the military's own stated mission. Truthfulness, the Air Force says, is a key to defeating adversaries. Accordingly, the service branch adds, "U.S. and friendly forces must strive to become the favored source of information."
The potential for mischief is magnified by the fact that so much of what the U.S. military does these days falls into the category of covert operations. Americans are now operating out of secret bases in places like Uzbekistan and the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; Special Forces units are said to be inside western Iraq as well. In the meantime, the armed forces are making use of facilities in the Arab states along the Persian Gulf.
In all these cases and more, the U.S. and other western news media depend on the military for information. Since reporters cannot travel into parts of Iraq and other places in the region without military escort, what they report is generally what they've been told.
And when the information that military officers provide to the public is part of a process that generates propaganda and places a high value on deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed likely to be high on the casualty list.
That is bad news for the American public. In the end, it may be even worse news for the Bush administration -- and for a U.S. military that has spent more than 25 years climbing out of the credibility trap called Vietnam.
William M. Arkin is a military affairs analyst who writes regularly for Opinion.
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Military Recruiting Law Puts Burden on Parents
By Elaine Rivera
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 24, 2002; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31807-2002Nov23?language=printer
Christopher Schmitt is careful to protect his son from companies that want to give the teenager credit cards or sell him sneakers. So at this year's parents night at his son's Fairfax County high school, Schmitt was dismayed to see a new form in the usual stack of permission slips and reminders.
This one invited him to sign if he wanted his son's name, address and telephone number withheld from the Pentagon. Otherwise, the information would be included in a directory of the school's juniors and seniors that will be given upon request to military recruiters.
Schmitt signed the form -- quickly.
"Most people probably missed [the form], and it'll probably be too late," Schmitt said. "There is a commodity with your consumer history. With the military, the commodity happens to be your children's information. . . . Once there's a point of entry, you don't know where the information is going to go."
High schools across the nation must provide the directory -- what one school official called "a gold mine of a list" -- under a sleeper provision in the new No Child Left Behind Act, which was enacted this year. Military officials pushed for it to counter a steady decline in the number of people who inquire about enlisting.
Many schools already allow military recruiters on campus, sponsor ROTC programs or provide student information to the Pentagon if parents give permission. But many school officials say the mandatory provision -- which puts the burden on parents to opt out rather than in -- has them in an uncomfortable position.
Part of their role as educators, they say, is to minimize intrusions so students can learn. Now, they risk losing federal funds if they don't hand over students' names to recruiters who, in the words of Chantilly High School Principal Tammy Turner, "want to capitalize on our captive audience."
Michael Carr, spokesman for the 38,000-member National Association of Secondary School Principals, said: "Student privacy is a big, big issue with schools. There are a lot of people trying to get identities of students -- to get to that market."
There has been no uprising against the provision. Many parents and teachers see the armed forces as a possible career path and say that recruiters should have a chance to make their pitch.
"There are great opportunities for these kids in the military," said Donna Geren, a retired Navy commander whose son, Kyle, is a senior at West Potomac High School in Fairfax. "A lot of times, kids don't find out about the scholarships they offer if schools are not allowed to share this information. I don't see any downside to this."
Fairfax School Superintendent Daniel A. Domenech said that few parents have returned opt-out forms, but he thinks it may reflect a lack of attention rather than lack of opposition. "It makes me believe parents basically glossed over it," he said. "I'm sure I'll start getting calls from parents when they hear from the recruiters."
Although the number of military enlistees has remained fairly constant, the pool of prospective recruits continues to shrink, according to William Carr, director of military personnel policy for the Defense Department.
More students are going to college, and in the 1990s, the tech boom created plenty of jobs, so the military was no longer the employer of last resort. Even students who express an interest say their parents don't approve, especially as talk of war with Iraq escalates.
In the past decade, the number of high school graduates who said they intended to join the military dropped from 32 percent to 25 percent, Carr said. At the same time, one-third of the nation's 22,000 high schools refused recruiters' requests for students' names or access to campus, and the cost of recruiting one person rose from $6,000 to $12,000.
After the military took its complaints to Congress, Rep. David Vitter (R-La.) sponsored an amendment to the No Child Left Behind Act, a sweeping federal measure passed last year that makes schools accountable for student achievement. Vitter said that military recruiters, who offer scholarships and jobs, deserved to be on par with college recruiters.
The student directories will be used to contact students by phone and mail, William Carr said. The recruitment effort should not be compared to telemarketing in any way, he said, and it would be illegal to use the data for any purpose other than recruiting.
"You cannot equate military readiness to a free baseball cap," Carr said. "There's a considerable difference."
The provision isn't a perfect solution for recruiters, said Charles Moskos, a professor and military recruiting expert at Northwestern University, but it is more realistic than trying to persuade Jenna Bush -- or, better yet, rap star Eminem -- to join the Marines.
"That would change people's minds," said Moskos, who was in the Army in 1958 when photographs of a newly drafted Elvis Presley in uniform gave the military a Cold War boost. When he asks recruiters whether they would rather have their advertising budget tripled or see Chelsea Clinton enlist, he said, "they unanimously choose the Chelsea option."
The directory, Moskos said, is partly aimed at improving the quality of enlistees, seeking to attract students who stay in school and have other career options. But he isn't sure it will work. "I don't think the prime market is high school anymore," Moskos said. "My research says the most effective recruiter is a friend or family member who made it a career."
Rick Jahnkow, program director for the California-based Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft, said the measure misplaces the responsibility. Recruiters "had a lot of pressure to meet their quotas, so they decided to pass the buck to schools," he said. "Now it's a huge hammer over the heads of schools, parents and students who will have their privacy invaded."
Part of the burden is turning out to be administrative. Shannon Tully, director of student services at South Lakes High School in Fairfax, said a recruiter came to ask for a computer disk with the names on it before she had time to prepare it. "We told him we didn't have it, and a week later we get an e-mail saying we were a non-cooperating school.
"They didn't even let us know" he was coming, Tully said. "What are we supposed to be -- a fast-food restaurant?"
William Carr, of the Defense Department, said he was unaware of that incident and could not comment on it.
John Porter, principal of T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, said he doesn't see any problems with the law. In the past, the school gave the Pentagon the names of students whose parents opted in, and now it will reverse the process.
"I see it as one of many opportunities for kids to consider post-graduation," said Porter, who opposes directories being released to any other group. "It's a good career choice for some people."
Arlington's assistant superintendent, Alvin Crawley, said that until now, the district has refused to release student directories to anyone, including military recruiters. This year, opt-out forms were sent to all 2,500 of the county's juniors and seniors, he said, and 130 were returned. So far, he said, recruiters have requested the student directory for only one of the district's three high schools, Yorktown.
Jack Parker, principal of Potomac High School in Prince William County, said his school already was in the habit of giving names to military recruiters and letting them recruit on campus during lunch periods.
"They are not trying to solicit anything," Parker said. "And if a student doesn't want to be called, we strike them off the list."
Christine Boehm, 17, who attends Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, is less concerned about privacy than about the expense of the unsolicited mailing she received from recruiters. "It's a waste of government money," she said. "I'm not planning on going into the military."
Kyle Geren, 17, said he has already been contacted by a military recruiter at home -- and went to visit him. "I think it's a good idea the recruitment office knows how to get hold of students before they leave school," Geren said. "I'm keeping it open as an option."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Material Witness Law Has Many In Limbo
Nearly Half Held in War On Terror Haven't Testified
By Steve Fainaru and Margot Williams
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, November 24, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31438-2002Nov23?language=printer
Authorities have arrested and jailed at least 44 people as potential grand jury witnesses in the 14 months of the nationwide terrorism investigation, but nearly half have never been called to testify before a grand jury, according to defense lawyers and others involved in the cases.
Although they had not been charged with any crimes, these "material witnesses" were often held under maximum security conditions, in detentions ranging from a few days to several months or longer. At least seven of the witnesses were U.S. citizens.
The accounts offer the clearest indication to date of how the government has used an obscure federal statute, the material witness law, to detain and investigate a wide range of terrorism suspects without having to charge them with a crime.
Under the 1984 statute, prosecutors may seek an arrest warrant if a potential witness's testimony is "material" to a criminal proceeding and the individual is likely to flee. A judge must approve the warrant, and the witness is entitled to a bond hearing and a court-appointed attorney.
The Justice Department has refused to say how many material witnesses have been taken into custody since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, or to reveal any information about them, including their names or which courts are supervising the cases. Officials said the detentions are related to grand jury proceedings, which are secret under federal law.
In 20 of 44 cases reviewed by The Washington Post, material witnesses were never brought before a grand jury, their attorneys said.
The only known material witnesses to face terrorism charges are James Ujaama, who was detained July 22, then indicted Aug. 28 on charges he provided material support to the al Qaeda terrorist network, and Zacarias Moussaoui, who was detained as a material witness before being indicted as a conspirator in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Another material witness, Jose Padilla, who allegedly was plotting to explode a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, was held for a month in jail before President Bush declared him an enemy combatant. The government transferred Padilla to a naval brig in Charleston, S.C., where he is today.
It is unknown whether these 44 cases represent all material witnesses taken into custody since Sept. 11, 2001, or some fraction of them. Law enforcement officials previously estimated that about two dozen material witnesses were arrested in connection with the probe. The Justice Department declined to comment on the figures, citing court orders and grand jury secrecy rules.
Criminal defense attorneys and civil liberties advocates argue that the cases show how the government has bent the material witness statute -- originally designed to compel testimony from frightened or recalcitrant witnesses -- into a tool to detain suspects indefinitely while investigating them for possible links to terrorism.
This week, for example, prosecutors in Chicago obtained a material witness warrant for Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cab driver from Kuwait, who was arrested one week after the attacks. Almarabh has been in custody for 432 days on a variety of charges but has not appeared before a grand jury, even though law enforcement sources previously identified him as a material witness and a terrorism suspect.
Almarabh presents authorities with a classic dilemma. They have found members of an alleged terrorism cell living in his former apartment in Detroit, and Almarabh has admitted taking advanced weapons training in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. But officials have acknowledged in court that they lack evidence to charge him with terrorism.
He was held in solitary confinement in New York's Metropolitan Detention Center for more than eight months before he was assigned a lawyer or taken before a judge. His current lawyer, John A. Meyer, said he believes the government sought the new material witness warrant to head off Almarabh's pending deportation.
Michael Chertoff, assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division, declined to talk about specific cases. However, he said it was not uncommon for an individual taken into custody as a material witness to provide information in ways other than testifying, including interviews with federal investigators.
The law does not require that a material witness be brought before a grand jury. "It's an important investigative tool in the war on terrorism," Chertoff said. "Bear in mind that you get not only testimony -- you get fingerprints, you get hair samples -- so there's all kinds of evidence you can get from a witness."
However, Neal R. Sonnett, a defense attorney and former chief of the criminal division with the U.S. attorney's office in Miami, said it is "unusual" that some material witnesses never testified, which he said shows how the government has misapplied the statute.
"It would tend to indicate that the use of the material witness statute was more of a ruse than an honest desire to record the testimony of that person," Sonnett said.
The government employed the statute immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. In some of the first arrests, authorities detained eight men from Evansville, Ind., on material witness warrants. The wife of one of the men, all of Egyptian origin, had alerted authorities.
At the bail hearing, federal prosecutors initially balked at allowing defense lawyers to view the evidence used to obtain the arrest warrants. "After much discussion with the U.S. magistrate, it was finally determined that the lawyers could read the applications for the warrants but could not reveal to our clients any of the details," said Michael C. Keating, an Evansville attorney. "It was the strangest thing I have ever participated in."
The men were flown to Chicago, but prosecutors made no move to bring them before a grand jury. "If these are material witnesses, the government is supposed to take them before a grand jury to find out what they know and release them," said Kenneth L. Cunniff, who represented one of the men, Tarek Albasti, in Chicago. "That was clearly not being done."
Cunniff suggested that his client provide a "proffer" in which Albasti would tell prosecutors everything he knew without immunity from prosecution. Albasti and the others were soon released.
In all, 29 of the material witnesses have been released. Nine are still in custody -- as material witnesses, criminal suspects, convicted felons or immigration violators -- and it is unclear what has happened to six more.
The material witnesses are a subset of the Bush administration's overall detention strategy since Sept. 11, 2001. The government also has detained more than 1,200 foreign nationals on immigration violations, and has deported the vast majority.
The detentions have touched off legal battles in courts across the nation between civil liberties advocates and government officials concerned about the preservation of national security. Many believe the U.S. Supreme Court will ultimately decide the legality of much of the domestic war on terror.
Two federal judges from New York's Southern District issued conflicting rulings earlier this year on whether the government has legally applied the material witness statute to grand juries investigating terrorism.
In the first ruling, Judge Shira A. Scheindlin said authorities cannot legally use the statute to detain terrorism suspects for grand jury proceedings. In a separate decision, Chief Judge Michael B. Mukasey upheld the use of the statute in the terrorism probe. The Justice Department has appealed Scheindlin's decision.
The material witness cases have been adjudicated in unusual secrecy. Most, if not all, are subject to judicial sealing orders, and there is confusion among defense attorneys across the nation about what information they can make public. In five cases, attorneys confirmed that detainees were material witnesses but refused to release their names, citing judicial orders and privacy concerns. Other lawyers refused even to confirm or deny that they represented material witnesses.
In a June address to Brooklyn Law School graduates, Mukasey, who has overseen several material witness cases, asserted that the detainees "were not, as has been suggested, held incommunicado.
"Although the court proceedings were sealed because they related to grand jury matters, the lawyers for the witnesses were free to talk about the cases or not, as they chose," Mukasey said. "Some chose to speak publicly, and others didn't. That is the unremarkable truth behind the breathless half-truths and outright falsehoods you may have heard."
Informed of Mukasey's comments, the federal public defender in San Francisco, Barry J. Portman, said: "All I can do is smile listening to Judge Mukasey's remarks. There's nothing much I can do." Portman, citing a sealing order, refused to confirm or deny whether he had represented a material witness.
Legal experts said the material witness statute is an attractive tool to investigators for several reasons. The statute, which runs a paragraph in length, says that a judicial officer may order a witness's arrest if the testimony is critical and it "may become impracticable" to ensure the person's presence by subpoena. No material witness may be detained if the testimony can be obtained by deposition, the statute says.
Before Sept. 11, the statute was most commonly used by prosecutors seeking to hold illegal immigrants to testify in smuggling cases. Its transformation into a counterterrorism weapon appears to stem largely from its ambiguity. The statute does not set limits on how long the government can hold a witness, or whether it must compel the witness to testify.
Chertoff said the statute has built-in safeguards.
"This is always supervised by a federal judge," he said. "It doesn't happen in the back room of a stationhouse somewhere. . . . That's the bedrock point: The judge always supervises. If the judge has a problem, then he can order the removal of the witness."
Others note that the legal landscape changed forever on Sept. 11, 2001, forcing the government to look for creative ways to prevent another terrorist attack.
"Prevention has to be factored into our enforcement," said Victoria Toensing, a Washington attorney who served as assistant deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration. "So when you factor in prevention, you have to see what tools you have to utilize."
Laurie Levenson, a former prosecutor in Los Angeles who is now a professor at Loyola Law School in that city, acknowledged that material witnesses can appeal their detentions, but said judges offer little supervision in such matters.
"The statute was not created as an alternative detention device for people whom you are suspicious of," Levenson said.
In another case, Ahmed Abou El-Kheir, an Egyptian, was taken into custody in College Park on a material witness warrant shortly after the attacks. El-Kheir was initially charged with trespassing after a motel clerk told authorities that he looked suspicious.
"They just wanted to hold him," said his lawyer, Martin R. Stolar. El-Kheir was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and placed in solitary confinement in 9 South, a high-security wing.
El-Kheir was never brought before the grand jury, Stolar said, and within two weeks the material witness warrant had been dropped. After El-Kheir was deported back to Egypt, Stolar reviewed the U.S. code and discovered a law requiring that material witnesses be paid $40 compensation for each day that they are incarcerated and do not appear in court.
He filed an application and received a check from the government for El-Kheir in excess of $700, then forwarded the check to the former terrorism suspect.
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Proposal to Enlist Citizen Spies Was Doomed From Start
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 24, 2002; Page A11
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A31833-2002Nov23?language=printer
The Justice Department's Operation TIPS program, which would have enlisted tens of thousands of truckers, bus drivers and other workers as citizen spies, was doomed before it began.
The Homeland Security package approved by the Senate last week and slated to be signed by President Bush includes language explicitly prohibiting the government from implementing the controversial initiative. It was hounded by criticism from civil libertarians and targeted for elimination by key lawmakers.
The ill-fated program was first announced by Bush in March as part of a package of "Citizen Corps" initiatives aimed at getting regular Americans involved in fighting terrorism.
But as details about the program began to leak out, parties as divergent as the American Civil Liberties Union and House Majority Leader Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) rallied to condemn the effort. They argued it would encourage citizens to snoop on one another while doing little to safeguard the nation.
The initiative quickly became a public-relations disaster for Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other Bush administration officials. It served as a symbol for anti-terrorism policies that many Democrats and civil liberties groups considered heavy-handed.
"This program epitomized the government's insatiable appetite for surveillance of law-abiding citizens," said Laura W. Murphy, director of the ACLU's Washington office. "Too many people thought that the government's anti-terrorism policies wouldn't have an impact on their lives, but this showed that they would."
TIPS -- the Terrorism Information and Prevention System -- was envisioned as a "national system for reporting suspicious and potentially terrorist-related activity" involving "millions of American workers who, in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to see potentially unusual or suspicious activity in public places," according to a description posted last summer on the Justice Department's Web site.
The ACLU and other groups, alarmed by the possibility that utility workers or delivery drivers might be enlisted to spy on customers, said the program was akin to creating "government-sanctioned Peeping Toms." Armey, a soon-to-be-retired conservative lawmaker with a decidedly libertarian bent, inserted language into the original Homeland Security bill slating the program for elimination, while Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) proposed cutting the initiative's funding.
Justice officials attempted to rescue the effort by issuing rules in August explicitly excluding any mail carriers, utility repair personnel or other workers with access to private homes. Ashcroft also told lawmakers he had scrapped plans for a centralized database to compile suspicious reports.
But the retreat did little to calm lawmakers' fears, leading to language in the final version of the Homeland Security package prohibiting "any and all activities" to implement the program.
Glenda Kendrick, a spokeswoman with the Justice Department's Office of Justice Programs, said last week that Operation TIPS "was never operational, so there's nothing to shut down."
"It never made it past the proposal stage," she said.
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Lawmakers say FBI is being soft on Saudi terror link
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 24, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021124-10975876.htm
Lawmakers investigating the September 11 attacks believe the FBI has not been sufficiently aggressive in pursuing whether Saudi Arabia provided money that helped support two of the hijackers, aides said yesterday.
The White House denied the assertion as well as claims that the FBI has not done enough to examine the financing of the 19 hijackers, 15 of whom came from Saudi Arabia.
Questions about the investigation could become troublesome for the Bush administration, which is seeking the Saudis' help in any military campaign against their neighbor, Iraq.
Members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, which are conducting a joint inquiry into the September 11 attacks, expressed misgivings about the FBI investigation. Lawmakers believe the bureau has not examined vigorously the possibility that the Saudi government might have given money to two men who provided financial help to hijackers Khalif al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.
A congressional aide, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the issue is part of a broader concern that the FBI has done too little to determine how last year's attacks were paid for and by whom.
Dan Bartlett, an administration spokesman who accompanied President Bush to a NATO summit in Europe, said the FBI has been investigating the Saudi link, "and I'm not going to prejudge the conclusion of that investigation."
"As anyone who knows this issue will tell you, it's very difficult to track financing of terrorist networks, because most of it is done in cash," he said. "I don't agree with the assessment it's not been aggressively pursued."
Sen. Ron Wyden, Oregon Democrat and a member of the intelligence committee, would not discuss details of the financing investigation but said: "So much of the focus on Iraq has clearly taken a toll with respect to some of the vigilance and oversight that needs to apply to others in the region."
He also said he has been dissatisfied with Saudi cooperation in the congressional investigation.
Both al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were aboard the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. They lived briefly in San Diego and are believed to have received help there from Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan.
Newsweek reported on its Web site that the FBI uncovered financial records that show payments to an al-Bayoumi bank account from a Washington account in the name of Princess Haifa al-Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador and a daughter of the late King Faisal.
Sources cited by the magazine said the payments were about $3,500 a month. The money filtered into the family bank account of Mr. al-Bayoumi in early 2000, just a few months after al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi arrived in Los Angeles from an al Qaeda planning conference in Malaysia, Newsweek said.
Payments for roughly the same amount began flowing every month to Mr. Basnan.
A spokesman for the Saudi embassy said the accusations that the wife of the Saudi ambassador supported terrorists are "untrue and irresponsible."
Nail al-Jubeir, the spokesman, said the princess is fully cooperating with the FBI. He added that the princess hasn't given any money to Mr. al-Bayoumi.
She did help the Basnan family with a check for $15,000 in April 1998 and regular payments from Dec. 4, 1999, through May of this year, and Saudi officials are trying to find out why they needed assistance, Mr. al-Jubeir said.
They do know the wife is sick and received medical treatment in San Diego, he said.
In a statement, the FBI refused to give details of its investigation but said: "Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, the FBI has aggressively pursued investigative leads regarding terrorist support and activity."
It said Mr. al-Bayoumi and Mr. Basnan face visa-fraud charges. Mr. al-Bayoumi was detained on that charge in Britain, but it was not an extraditable offense and he was released. It is not known whether Mr. Basnan is in custody.
Preliminary reports from the congressional inquiry have criticized the FBI and CIA's efforts to fight terrorism before the September 11 attacks.
Mr. Wyden said he expects the questions about Saudi financing will be included in the joint inquiry's final report.
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In the Name of Security
November 24, 2002
New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/weekinreview/24LIPT.html
IN the spring of 2001, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist sounded an alarm.
"Technology now permits millions of important and confidential conversations to occur through a vast system of electronic networks," he wrote in a First Amendment case. "These advances, however, raise significant privacy concerns. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who might have access to our personal and business e-mails, our medical and financial records, or our cordless and cellular telephone conversations."
From the Vietnam and Watergate era until Sept. 11, 2001, legal protection of privacy rights was moving in only one direction, with judges and legislators across the ideological spectrum working hard to create what is in many ways a new legal right.
"Before 9/11, the American concern with invasion of privacy was growing," said Rodney A. Smolla, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "The law of privacy was poised to absorb and reflect some of the public concern. It was about to become the new civil right."
Sept. 11 changed everything, and last week those changes came into sharper focus, suggesting that any comprehensive rethinking of the right to privacy will have to wait. On Monday, two federal appeals courts endorsed vastly expanded government intrusions into the private affairs of Americans, finding privacy interests less compelling than those of rooting out terrorists and child pornographers.
The Pentagon also attracted considerable attention this month for a proposed database of unprecedented scale to help in government antiterrorism efforts. It would collect every sort of information imaginable, including student grades, Internet activity and medical histories. The USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, also altered the balance between privacy and government power in countless ways.
Public opposition to greater government surveillance has been muted, even as many people continue to voice concerns about the commercial use of data about themselves. That dichotomy is a little hard to explain, given that intrusion by the government can be life-altering while most businesses can do little more than annoy people with phone calls at dinner time.
The answer, it appears, is that many people believe the government will invade only someone else's privacy. Privacy for me, they seem to be saying, but not for thee.
Recent legal developments have in many ways mirrored these attitudes.
In the battle between consumers and business interests, consumers are winning, said Susan Crawford, a Washington lawyer and an expert in privacy law. But in the battle between citizens and law enforcement, she argued, citizens are losing. The public, it seems, is pleased with both results.
Public opinion polls taken immediately after Sept. 11 as well as more recent surveys indicate substantial public support for domestic security measures like wiretaps approved by secret courts, informants recruited from the ranks of delivery personnel and government surveillance at rallies and in churches and mosques. Yet, national surveys consistently show that consumers are concerned about how commercial information about them is used, said Joel Winston, associate director for financial practices at the Federal Trade Commission.
What exactly these consumers fear is hard to say.
"Privacy is a totally overused and poorly understood term," said Diane Zimmerman, a law professor at New York University.
At bottom, privacy may be about an almost metaphysical sense of vulnerability, akin to the fear in some cultures of having one's photograph taken.
INDEED, the talk turns abstract pretty fast when people are asked what a right to privacy is meant to protect.
"It is about a sense of tranquillity, a sense of autonomy," said Floyd Abrams, the constitutional lawyer.
But metaphysical vulnerability, Mr. Abrams was quick to add, starts to seem less oppressive if the alternative is life-and-death vulnerability, and recent court decisions and legislation reflect that calculation.
In the commercial realm, too, the government is now more concerned with concrete harms.
"What most consumers care about is not an abstract concept but actual injury," Mr. Winston of the trade commission said. "They care about unwarranted intrusions like telemarketing, to someone stealing your identity, to someone using your credit information improperly."
Still, the essential paradox in the post-Sept. 11 era is that people seem willing to accept government intrusions but not commercial ones, even though the government's power is enormous and often wielded in secret, while consumers retain substantial control over their commercial information.
In the commercial arena, "you can always opt out," said Jane Kirtley, a professor of law and media ethics at the University of Minnesota. "In the commercial private sector we really do have a certain amount of choice. In terms of government surveillance, we really do not."
She added: "The private sector can't garnish your wages, can't take your child away, can't arrest you. The government can do all those things."
The government's power was vividly illustrated in the two federal appeals court rulings last week.
On Monday, a special federal appeals court, the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, issued its first decision ever, granting the Justice Department broad new powers to use wiretaps obtained for intelligence operations in criminal cases. It reversed a lower court's decision that had limited those powers out of concern for citizens' privacy.
For 20 years, other court decisions and Justice Department policy had erected a wall between the department's intelligence and criminal arms. In its reversal, the special appeals court relied in part on the Patriot Act, but it also said the wall had never been required in the first place.
"This is a giant step forward," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "This revolutionizes our ability to investigate terrorists and prosecute terrorist acts."
ALSO on Monday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, based in St. Louis, held that the police could obtain e-mail messages of an accused child pornographer by faxing a warrant to Yahoo, the Internet service, and relying on Yahoo's technicians to produce the materials. The case turned on whether the technicians could in effect be deputized by the government.
But the courts' actions are nothing, critics said, compared with the Total Information Awareness program of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The office plans to construct, according to materials posted on its Web site, "ultra-large all-source information repositories." They will include, the site says, "associated privacy protection technologies."
That is small comfort, said Ms. Crawford, the Washington lawyer.
"What people are really worried about is that someone not have a fine-grained picture of their life," she said.
But they worry differently depending on who is looking. "There is now a dramatic split, almost a schizophrenia, in society," Professor Smolla of the University of Richmond said. "There is no diminution in trying to address privacy rights against the media, in commercial settings, in property rights, in business. But we all see that there is a dramatic change in our attitude toward government intrusions."
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Native Americans flex vote muscle
By Al Swanson
United Press International From the National Desk
11/24/2002
http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20021122-030202-6277r
Democratic Party efforts to register American Indians for November's midterm elections paid off for South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson and tribes whose members showed up at the polls this fall are feeling their political muscle.
Johnson defeated Republican Rep. John Thune, the hand-picked candidate of President George W. Bush, by 524 votes despite four presidential trips to South Dakota.
American Indian Movement activist Russell Means, who lost a runoff for Oglala Sioux tribal president on the Pine Ridge Reservation Tuesday to Yellow Bird Steele by 500 votes, said Indians should not ally with one party, to prevent their support from being taken for granted.
"I know it was good for Tim Johnson," Means said of the Nov. 5 Indian turnout. "I don't think it was good for anything else on this reservation."
Means plans to urge Indians to vote Republican in the next election to oust Senator Tom Daschle, who has served as majority leader. Native Americans comprise just 9 percent of the state's population but they are the majority in some key counties.
"If we vote with the Republicans, we'll make a statement to South Dakota and the national Republican and Democratic parties that we are a force to be reckoned with, so when we go to Washington, the doors of power will be open just a bit wider than they are now," the 63-year-old former firebrand told the Chicago Tribune.
Means, who led the 72-day standoff at Wounded Knee in 1973, said the tribes have to realize that not voting is a vote for the status quo.
South Dakota State University political scientist Robert V. Burns said Means' ambition to turn Indians into an independent voting bloc was unlikely to succeed. "Typically, Native Americans vote 9 to 1 in favor of Democrats in South Dakota," Burns told United Press International. "While the turnout was higher than usual this time, it (the percentage) was about half that of the general population."
Burns said the Democrats' get-out-the-vote campaign was "very focused, very committed and very efficient" and Johnson was rewarded for his long record of support for programs benefiting tribal members.
Democrats had registered about 17,000 new voters by the Monday before Election Day, about a quarter on or near reservations. There were allegations of voter registration fraud but South Dakota Attorney General Mark Barnett said there was evidence of just one contractor wrongly registering Native Americans.
Becky Red Earth-Villeda was hired as an independent contractor by the Democratic Party, which fired her when suspicious signatures, mismatched birth dates and wrong addresses appeared on some voter registration cards and absentee ballot applications. Barnett said there was no evidence of fraud at the ballot box.
Nearly 30 years ago, Means and about 350 other Indians took over the Wounded Knee, S.D., site where the 7th Calvary massacred hundreds of Indians in 1890. Two Indians were killed and a federal marshal wounded in a series of pitched gun battles. Indian activists said the Nov. 5 election may also be historic.
"On Nov. 5, 2002, the dream was realized by so many who wished there would be a day when Native Americans registered and voted in large numbers and made their effort felt all the way to the mightiest offices of power," The Native American Times said. "In Montana, Native Americans sent half a dozen Indians to the state Legislature. In South Dakota some of that state's most oppressive political leaders were sent packing by the poorest people in America."
A state canvas found no voting irregularities on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where outreach by Democrats boosted voter registration by 20 percent.
Thune went to bed early on the morning of Nov. 6 leading Johnson by some 3,000 votes but about 4,000 votes from districts including the reservations had not been counted. Some Indian county ballots had to be hand tallied.
The Sioux Falls Argus Leader said the turnout ranged from 44.6 percent in Shannon and Todd counties, where the Rosebud Sioux tribe makes up a large portion of the population, to 56.7 percent in Dewey County, home of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe.
In the portion of District 27 on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Johnson received 2,856 votes to Thune's 248. Two Democrats, Paul Valandra, a Sicangu Lakota, and Jim Bradford, who claims partial Lakota ancestry, were re-elected to the South Dakota Legislature. On the Rosebud Reservation the tally was 2,027 for Johnson to 464 for Thune, and on the Cheyenne River Reservation, 1,678 to 598.
Indian voting power gave Charlie Cummings, a Lakota, a 72-vote victory over incumbent Bennett County Sheriff Rus Waterbury in a county with a 60 percent Native American majority.
A grateful Johnson, who was elected by fewer than 6,000 votes in 1996, thanked several communities for his re-election "but one group I take particular satisfaction in is the growing political presence of our Native American community."
He said the turnout by American Indians made the difference.
"The state is better because of Indian voter participation," Johnson told Indian County Today. "I needed the Native vote in 1996, but this one was more dramatic, the margin and timing for the Pine Ridge (Village) precincts being counted among the highlights."
Historically, American Indians have been a reluctant voting bloc and Daschle acknowledged Democrats had to work hard to win their support.
"It would be accurate to say we would not have won without the Indian vote," he said.
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Justice Dept. Seeks to Use New Power in Terror Inquiries
November 24, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/politics/24JUST.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 23 - The Justice Department, moving quickly to use its expanded powers for spying on possible terrorists, plans to assign federal lawyers in counterintelligence to terrorism task forces in New York and Washington to help secure secret warrants against suspects, officials say.
The deployments, along with other changes under discussion by top Justice Department officials, are seen as a crucial first step in breaking down the wall between intelligence gathering and law enforcement, officials said.
The moves grow from a decision last week by a special appellate panel of the Foreign Intelligence Court of Review in Washington that validated the Justice Department's broad surveillance powers under an antiterrorism law passed last year. The appeals court found that prosecutors were permitted to use wiretaps obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in prosecuting people accused of being terrorists. For more than 20 years restrictions had deterred criminal investigators and intelligence agents from sharing information.
Justice Department officials, emboldened by last week's decision, say they are moving quickly to allow prosecutors and intelligence agents to share information routinely to avoid missteps.
"We're working very quickly, and we want to get as much help out to the field as possible," said a senior Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The senior official said two lawyers from the department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review in Washington had already been chosen to work in field offices with F.B.I. investigators and local prosecutors.
Officials said that the lawyers were expected to be transferred within weeks to joint terrorism task forces in New York and Washington, which have two of the most active forces in the country, and that lawyers should soon be assigned to other large field offices.
Law enforcement authorities and civil libertarians agree that the court's decision is tremendously significant, but for different reasons.
Some civil libertarians charge that the policy will make it much easier for the authorities to justify secret wiretaps and surveillance, using lower thresholds of evidence than traditional criminal warrants require. Critics worry that it could mean a return to the days of J. Edgar Hoover's F.B.I. in the 1960's, when agents routinely spied on people and groups for political reasons.
But Justice Department officials insist that the appellate decision does not make it any easier for them to single out someone for surveillance.
Despite concerns about the accuracy of some of the information that the F.B.I. has provided, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, which considers surveillance applications, approved all 932 requests for intelligence warrants from the Justice Department last year. Department officials said they did not expect a large increase in wiretaps and surveillance, even with the expanded authority.
"Who you can tap is no different now than it ever was," a Justice Department official who has been working on the issue said.
Even so, the official said: "In practical terms, on a scale of 1 to 10, this decision is about an 11 for us. There aren't these artificial barriers anymore. The wall is down."
Officials say the ability of intelligence agents and prosecutors to interact more freely could prove critical in avoiding the confusion and missteps that dogged the high-profile investigations of Wen Ho Lee and Zacarias Moussaoui.
In the investigation of Dr. Lee, a nuclear physicist who was suspected of passing secrets to the Chinese, investigators were delayed in searching Dr. Lee's computer in 1999 because they were uncertain whether they needed a warrant. While he was under investigation, Dr. Lee downloaded extensive information onto computer disks, some of which were never found. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of having improperly downloaded information.
The behavior of Mr. Moussaoui at a Minnesota flight school in the summer of 2001 set off a fierce internal debate at the F.B.I. over whether it could seek a criminal warrant or an intelligence warrant against him. The F.B.I. did not get either until after the Sept. 11 hijackings, leading to months of second-guessing by officials in and out of the agency. Mr. Moussaoui is now awaiting trial in the hijacking conspiracy.
The deployments of the lawyers will be a significant change because a lack of communication between department lawyers and the task force field offices hampered past intelligence cases, said John L. Martin, who once was in charge of the Justice Department section that prosecutes national security cases. "Having experienced, well-trained lawyers in major U.S. attorney's offices where the action is taking place can be nothing but helpful," Mr. Martin said.
Justice Department officials said they were also planning to double the number of F.B.I. agents in the bureau's National Security Law Unit, create an electronic system that would allow field agents to draft surveillance applications instantly and require extensive training in surveillance law for agents and prosecutors.
Even as the Justice Department moves ahead with its plans, civil libertarians are considering ways to challenge last week's decision in court. "Everybody agrees it's a good idea for the intelligence people to share information with the criminal people," said Ann Beeson, litigation director for the American Civil Liberties Union's technology and liberty program.
"But the big area of concern in terms of civil liberties is what the government has to show initially to get the warrant, and that standard has been lowered," Ms. Beeson said.
The civil liberties union's concern is that the Justice Department could, for example, use secret warrants to watch and eavesdrop not only on someone at a mosque who is suspected of terrorism, but also on anyone else at the mosque who might innocently come into contact with the suspect, Ms. Beeson said.
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L.A. 'Skid Row' Sweeps Spark Debate
November 24, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Homeless-Sweeps.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- After 21 years living amid the tent encampments of downtown Los Angeles, friends call Tyrone Taylor the ``Mayor of Skid Row.''
These days, the mayor is not happy.
On two afternoons last week, police officers, accompanied by correction officials and federal agents, made an estimated 200 arrests on Skid Row.
They said they were targeting parole and probation violators hiding amid the homeless. But Taylor and others fear police are moving to take them off the streets.
``They are stopping us at random,'' Taylor said as he pushed his shopping cart along the street Sunday. ``They searched me. I'm not on parole. I'm not on drugs.''
The crackdown came just days after a consortium of downtown business and development groups, along with two city council members, called for initiatives to combat homelessness downtown. Officials estimate there are between 3,000 and 5,000 people on Skid Row.
Capt. Charlie Beck of the LAPD said the raids were designed to get criminals off the streets. City officials say there are no plans to relocate the homeless.
Despite official assurances, tensions are running high on Skid Row. A brawl broke out at one outdoor soup kitchen on Sunday.
Barry Laskey, 40, was in a crowd along waiting for a ticket to eat when the violence erupted. Blacks fought Hispanics, and one man ended up with a gash across his head.
``You can feel the tension,'' Laskey said. ``The cops have disrupted the normal life down here.''
But some downtown residents, like 44-year-old Donald Miller, who lives in a residential hotel, said the police sweeps could be a good thing.
``It's hard to say what is the right solution, but this is a start.
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Osama issues new call to arms
Observer Worldview
Jason Burke, chief reporter
Sunday November 24, 2002
The Observer
http://www.observer.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,846511,00.html
A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the 'Islamic nation' as 'eager for martyrdom'.
Details of the 4,000-word letter from the terrorist leader emerged as the British Government issued its strongest warning yet last night that attacks by bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation on the UK are 'inevitable'.
Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien said: 'We face an enemy who will attack us in Britain as well as overseas... British workers in New York or tourists in Bali or residents of London or Birmingham.' O'Brien said there was a threat of 'well planned attacks' on 'British national institutions, commercial and financial infrastructure and on many aspects of our everyday life'.
Security authorities in Europe and America are concerned al-Qaeda is planning a major strike. Two weeks ago bin Laden issued a message on an audio cassette, proving he was alive and raising fears it presaged new attacks.
Britain, with its close support for America in the war on terror and Iraq, is a prime target and analysts believe any military action against Saddam Hussein would provoke a spate of revenge attacks by Islamic militants. Sources described the mood in Whitehall and at Scotland Yard as 'jumpy'.
The translated letter was originally posted in Arabic on a Saudi Arabian website previously used by al-Qaeda to disseminate messages. Within the last two weeks British Islamists have translated the letter, the most comprehensive explanation of bin Laden's ideology to be issued for several years, and posted it on English-language websites run from the UK.
The letter was sent to hundreds of subscribers to an email list run by Mohammed al-Massari, the UK-based Saudi Arabian dissident whose Committee for the Defence of Legitimate Rights has opposed the al-Saud regime for more than a decade. Yesterday al-Massari denied he supported terrorism in any way. Al-Massari has recently been granted permanent residence in Britain, a move which angered foreign governments who claim that the UK is still a haven for extremists.
Al-Massari's email and bin Laden's letter show ideological similarities. Both stress that the 'holy war' is defensive.
Bin laden issues a direct threat to the West: 'Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities. Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians.'
Most of his letter comprises a lengthy list of grievances against the West. The fugitive terrorist, who is believed to be hiding in the border regions between eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan, mounts a sustained attack on the 'immorality' of Western society.
The letter has been posted on a number of Islamist websites. One carried bomb-making information. Another offered a link to a site with information on chemical and biological weapons.
Although there is no way to confirm the authenticity of the letter beyond all doubt, senior Arab journalists in the Middle Eastern media believe the letter is from bin Laden. 'It is an extraordinary glimpse into his mind,' one told The Observer.
Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'
Online document: the full text of Osama bin Laden's "letter to the American people", reported in today's Observer. The letter first appeared on the internet in Arabic and has since been translated and circulated by Islamists in Britain.
In the Name of Allah, the Most Gracious, the Most Merciful,
"Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory" [Quran 22:39]
"Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan."[Quran 4:76]
Some American writers have published articles under the title 'On what basis are we fighting?' These articles have generated a number of responses, some of which adhered to the truth and were based on Islamic Law, and others which have not. Here we wanted to outline the truth - as an explanation and warning - hoping for Allah's reward, seeking success and support from Him.
While seeking Allah's help, we form our reply based on two questions directed at the Americans:
(Q1) Why are we fighting and opposing you? Q2)What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
As for the first question: Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:
(1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.
a) You attacked us in Palestine:
(i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.
(ii) It brings us both laughter and tears to see that you have not yet tired of repeating your fabricated lies that the Jews have a historical right to Palestine, as it was promised to them in the Torah. Anyone who disputes with them on this alleged fact is accused of anti-semitism. This is one of the most fallacious, widely-circulated fabrications in history. The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites. It is the Muslims who are the inheritors of Moses (peace be upon him) and the inheritors of the real Torah that has not been changed. Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.
When the Muslims conquered Palestine and drove out the Romans, Palestine and Jerusalem returned to Islaam, the religion of all the Prophets peace be upon them. Therefore, the call to a historical right to Palestine cannot be raised against the Islamic Ummah that believes in all the Prophets of Allah (peace and blessings be upon them) - and we make no distinction between them.
(iii) The blood pouring out of Palestine must be equally revenged. You must know that the Palestinians do not cry alone; their women are not widowed alone; their sons are not orphaned alone.
(b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.
(c) Under your supervision, consent and orders, the governments of our countries which act as your agents, attack us on a daily basis;
(i) These governments prevent our people from establishing the Islamic Shariah, using violence and lies to do so.
(ii) These governments give us a taste of humiliation, and places us in a large prison of fear and subdual.
(iii) These governments steal our Ummah's wealth and sell them to you at a paltry price.
(iv) These governments have surrendered to the Jews, and handed them most of Palestine, acknowledging the existence of their state over the dismembered limbs of their own people.
(v) The removal of these governments is an obligation upon us, and a necessary step to free the Ummah, to make the Shariah the supreme law and to regain Palestine. And our fight against these governments is not separate from out fight against you.
(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of you international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.
(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.
(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.
(g) You have supported the Jews in their idea that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and agreed to move your embassy there. With your help and under your protection, the Israelis are planning to destroy the Al-Aqsa mosque. Under the protection of your weapons, Sharon entered the Al-Aqsa mosque, to pollute it as a preparation to capture and destroy it.
(2) These tragedies and calamities are only a few examples of your oppression and aggression against us. It is commanded by our religion and intellect that the oppressed have a right to return the aggression. Do not await anything from us but Jihad, resistance and revenge. Is it in any way rational to expect that after America has attacked us for more than half a century, that we will then leave her to live in security and peace?!!
(3) You may then dispute that all the above does not justify aggression against civilians, for crimes they did not commit and offenses in which they did not partake:
(a) This argument contradicts your continuous repetition that America is the land of freedom, and its leaders in this world. Therefore, the American people are the ones who choose their government by way of their own free will; a choice which stems from their agreement to its policies. Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
(b) The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq. These tax dollars are given to Israel for it to continue to attack us and penetrate our lands. So the American people are the ones who fund the attacks against us, and they are the ones who oversee the expenditure of these monies in the way they wish, through their elected candidates.
(c) Also the American army is part of the American people. It is this very same people who are shamelessly helping the Jews fight against us.
(d) The American people are the ones who employ both their men and their women in the American Forces which attack us.
(e) This is why the American people cannot be not innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.
(f) Allah, the Almighty, legislated the permission and the option to take revenge. Thus, if we are attacked, then we have the right to attack back. Whoever has destroyed our villages and towns, then we have the right to destroy their villages and towns. Whoever has stolen our wealth, then we have the right to destroy their economy. And whoever has killed our civilians, then we have the right to kill theirs.
The American Government and press still refuses to answer the question:
Why did they attack us in New York and Washington?
If Sharon is a man of peace in the eyes of Bush, then we are also men of peace!!! America does not understand the language of manners and principles, so we are addressing it using the language it understands.
(Q2) As for the second question that we want to answer: What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them - peace be upon them all.
It is to this religion that we call you; the seal of all the previous religions. It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honour, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah's Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their colour, sex, or language.
(b) It is the religion whose book - the Quran - will remained preserved and unchanged, after the other Divine books and messages have been changed. The Quran is the miracle until the Day of Judgment. Allah has challenged anyone to bring a book like the Quran or even ten verses like it.
(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest.
We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.
(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:
(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You flee from the embarrassing question posed to you: How is it possible for Allah the Almighty to create His creation, grant them power over all the creatures and land, grant them all the amenities of life, and then deny them that which they are most in need of: knowledge of the laws which govern their lives?
(ii) You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.
(iii) You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.
(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.
Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?
(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.
(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.
(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.
(viii) And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.
(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.
(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.
(xi) That which you are singled out for in the history of mankind, is that you have used your force to destroy mankind more than any other nation in history; not to defend principles and values, but to hasten to secure your interests and profits. You who dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan, even though Japan was ready to negotiate an end to the war. How many acts of oppression, tyranny and injustice have you carried out, O callers to freedom?
(xii) Let us not forget one of your major characteristics: your duality in both manners and values; your hypocrisy in manners and principles. All manners, principles and values have two scales: one for you and one for the others.
(a)The freedom and democracy that you call to is for yourselves and for white race only; as for the rest of the world, you impose upon them your monstrous, destructive policies and Governments, which you call the 'American friends'. Yet you prevent them from establishing democracies. When the Islamic party in Algeria wanted to practice democracy and they won the election, you unleashed your agents in the Algerian army onto them, and to attack them with tanks and guns, to imprison them and torture them - a new lesson from the 'American book of democracy'!!!
(b)Your policy on prohibiting and forcibly removing weapons of mass destruction to ensure world peace: it only applies to those countries which you do not permit to possess such weapons. As for the countries you consent to, such as Israel, then they are allowed to keep and use such weapons to defend their security. Anyone else who you suspect might be manufacturing or keeping these kinds of weapons, you call them criminals and you take military action against them.
(c)You are the last ones to respect the resolutions and policies of International Law, yet you claim to want to selectively punish anyone else who does the same. Israel has for more than 50 years been pushing UN resolutions and rules against the wall with the full support of America.
(d)As for the war criminals which you censure and form criminal courts for - you shamelessly ask that your own are granted immunity!! However, history will not forget the war crimes that you committed against the Muslims and the rest of the world; those you have killed in Japan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Lebanon and Iraq will remain a shame that you will never be able to escape. It will suffice to remind you of your latest war crimes in Afghanistan, in which densely populated innocent civilian villages were destroyed, bombs were dropped on mosques causing the roof of the mosque to come crashing down on the heads of the Muslims praying inside. You are the ones who broke the agreement with the Mujahideen when they left Qunduz, bombing them in Jangi fort, and killing more than 1,000 of your prisoners through suffocation and thirst. Allah alone knows how many people have died by torture at the hands of you and your agents. Your planes remain in the Afghan skies, looking for anyone remotely suspicious.
(e)You have claimed to be the vanguards of Human Rights, and your Ministry of Foreign affairs issues annual reports containing statistics of those countries that violate any Human Rights. However, all these things vanished when the Mujahideen hit you, and you then implemented the methods of the same documented governments that you used to curse. In America, you captured thousands the Muslims and Arabs, took them into custody with neither reason, court trial, nor even disclosing their names. You issued newer, harsher laws.
What happens in Guatanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces - you hypocrites, "What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?"
(3) What we call you to thirdly is to take an honest stance with yourselves - and I doubt you will do so - to discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which you yourself must adhere to.
(4) We also advise you to stop supporting Israel, and to end your support of the Indians in Kashmir, the Russians against the Chechens and to also cease supporting the Manila Government against the Muslims in Southern Philippines.
(5) We also advise you to pack your luggage and get out of our lands. We desire for your goodness, guidance, and righteousness, so do not force us to send you back as cargo in coffins.
(6) Sixthly, we call upon you to end your support of the corrupt leaders in our countries. Do not interfere in our politics and method of education. Leave us alone, or else expect us in New York and Washington.
(7) We also call you to deal with us and interact with us on the basis of mutual interests and benefits, rather than the policies of sub dual, theft and occupation, and not to continue your policy of supporting the Jews because this will result in more disasters for you.
If you fail to respond to all these conditions, then prepare for fight with the Islamic Nation. The Nation of Monotheism, that puts complete trust on Allah and fears none other than Him. The Nation which is addressed by its Quran with the words: "Do you fear them? Allah has more right that you should fear Him if you are believers. Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of believing people. And remove the anger of their (believers') hearts. Allah accepts the repentance of whom He wills. Allah is All-Knowing, All-Wise." [Quran9:13-1]
The Nation of honour and respect:
"But honour, power and glory belong to Allah, and to His Messenger (Muhammad- peace be upon him) and to the believers." [Quran 63:8]
"So do not become weak (against your enemy), nor be sad, and you will be superior (in victory )if you are indeed (true) believers" [Quran 3:139]
The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life:
"Think not of those who are killed in the way of Allah as dead. Nay, they are alive with their Lord, and they are being provided for. They rejoice in what Allah has bestowed upon them from His bounty and rejoice for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a grace and a bounty from Allah, and that Allah will not waste the reward of the believers." [Quran 3:169-171]
The Nation of victory and success that Allah has promised:
"It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad peace be upon him) with guidance and the religion of truth (Islam), to make it victorious over all other religions even though the Polytheists hate it." [Quran 61:9]
"Allah has decreed that 'Verily it is I and My Messengers who shall be victorious.' Verily Allah is All-Powerful, All-Mighty." [Quran 58:21]
The Islamic Nation that was able to dismiss and destroy the previous evil Empires like yourself; the Nation that rejects your attacks, wishes to remove your evils, and is prepared to fight you. You are well aware that the Islamic Nation, from the very core of its soul, despises your haughtiness and arrogance.
If the Americans refuse to listen to our advice and the goodness, guidance and righteousness that we call them to, then be aware that you will lose this Crusade Bush began, just like the other previous Crusades in which you were humiliated by the hands of the Mujahideen, fleeing to your home in great silence and disgrace. If the Americans do not respond, then their fate will be that of the Soviets who fled from Afghanistan to deal with their military defeat, political breakup, ideological downfall, and economic bankruptcy.
This is our message to the Americans, as an answer to theirs. Do they now know why we fight them and over which form of ignorance, by the permission of Allah, we shall be victorious?
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- health
Why Millions in Drugs Get Flushed Away
An attempt to rescue unused drugs finds only wasted opportunity.
By Steven Luxenberg
Sunday, November 24, 2002
Washington Post; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28469-2002Nov22?language=printer
On Dec. 31, my wife and I will welcome the new year by throwing away $668.80 worth of unused medication.
We won't be celebrating. We'll grit our teeth and try not to think about the months of phone calls to find someone, anyone, anywhere, who could benefit from the respiratory drug left behind when my wife's mother died in June at the age of 95. Then we'll carry the six never-opened boxes -- each containing 12 foil pouches of 5 individually packaged doses that expire on the last day of the year -- and dump them into the trash. Maybe, if I'm still feeling as discouraged as I do right now, I will raise a glass to the forces of inertia that favor waste and thwart creative thinking.
I apologize for that bit of sarcasm, but I come by it honestly. In the past six months, I have learned a lot about how different states' policies, some of which date back to the days when pharmaceutical packaging was primitive, have continued to hold sway long past their own expiration dates. I understand that it's difficult to ensure that medication, once it has left a pharmacy's control, has been stored properly and therefore is still safe and effective. I now know the Food and Drug Administration is worried that unused drugs can be diverted to a thriving underground market. And I suspect that there's probably no way to overcome fears that I might have left the medication in the back seat of my car on a hot summer's day.
But that doesn't explain why many nursing homes and long-term care facilities -- licensed institutions where drugs must be maintained safely so they can be dispensed to patients -- are destroying leftover medications worth tens of millions of dollars a year. In some states, it's a custom. In others, it's the law.
I can't be more precise about the volume because no one has come up with precise figures. One study, published in 2000 by researchers at Oklahoma State University, estimated that the nation's nursing homes alone account for between $73 million and $378 million worth of discarded drugs. That's a huge range. And the people I've contacted -- including regulators, nursing home officials, physicians and lawmakers in states that have tried to addressed this issue -- say the higher figure is probably too low.
At a time when prescription drug costs threaten the federal Medicare budget, state Medicaid programs and the pocketbooks of senior citizens, it's hard to believe that we're flushing so much money down the toilet. That's not just another tired cliché, by the way: In many states, including Maryland (where I live), that's exactly how most nursing homes destroy medication after someone has died or their prescription has changed.
Some states allow, under tight restrictions, some "re-use" of leftover medication within a nursing home or a hospital. A handful have passed or considered legislation in the past few years that permits nursing homes -- under stringent safeguards -- to return medication to the originating pharmacies for "re-direction" to indigent patients. But they are the exception. They should be the rule.
I suspect that, once you hear the story, you will recognize the plot. You see, there's nothing unique about what we experienced. After my wife's mother died, we were left with a three-month supply of a respiratory medication that had arrived at her suburban Baltimore house two days before her death. She suffered from emphysema, the result of six decades of smoking. In the final year of her life, she strapped a mask to her face as often as six times a day to inhale a medication that helped her breathe better.
As someone with a lifelong habit of searching the refrigerator for leftovers and buying used furniture, I felt a duty to find out if the medication could have a second life. I began my quest with low expectations. Once, a few years ago, a doctor had prescribed the wrong dosage of a drug that my son was taking. I didn't realize it, however, until I got home. When I went back to the pharmacy, I was told to discard the whole bottle. As galling as that was, it was understandable: The medication was in pill form, 30 doses counted out by hand and dispensed in an unsealed container. In these days of risk aversion and liability lawsuits, there was no way I could persuade the pharmacist that someone hadn't tampered with it during the half-hour that it had been in my possession.
But my mother-in-law's medication presented a wholly different case. It was still in its original packaging, untouched by human hands. Each foil pouch contained sealed "unit dose" vials of DuoNeb, a solution of albuterol sulfate and ipratropium bromide that works to prevent bronchospasms. The foil packs included specific instructions: The medication must be stored at temperatures between 36 degrees and 77 degrees Fahrenheit (a big margin for error) and it must be protected from light (easily accomplished by keeping it in the foil pack).
At each treatment, an aide would twist off the top of the vial and squirt the 3 milliliters of DuoNeb into a cup attached to a machine known as a nebulizer. The machine would convert the liquid into a mist that my mother-in-law would take into her damaged lungs.
About 2.8 million Americans have been diagnosed with emphysema, according to American Lung Association statistics. Chronic obstructive lung disease, which includes emphysema, is the fourth-leading cause of death in the United States. Surely, I thought, another emphysema sufferer could use this medication. And surely someone can. But as I have learned, there is no mechanism to make the connection -- at least, none that I could find after several weeks of effort.
I called the dispensing pharmacy. No help. I called several local agencies that serve the medical needs of the uninsured. No suggestions. I called several international relief agencies, thinking they might have more flexibility. No interest.
I called the local chapter of an organization that works on issues related to asthma, hoping that someone there might have a brighter idea than I did. This time, I found a sympathetic ear. "It's a real waste, isn't it?" said Mary Jo Harris of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. "We hear about this all the time." But, she said, Maryland law prohibits such re-use. She promised, though, that she would ask several physicians and pharmacists if they had any ideas.
No luck.
As much as I would like someone to have my mother-in-law's DuoNeb, I know that wouldn't save the federal government much money. But the nursing home industry, which now cares for more than 1.5 million Americans older than 65, offers a huge opportunity to cut prescription drug costs, help indigent patients and prevent the waste of usable medication -- not to mention the waste of the staff time it takes to get rid of it
George Nikstaitis knows this firsthand. He has worked as director of nursing at several Maryland facilities, and it is his job to certify that all leftover medication is destroyed. He or his assistant personally supervise the weekly process, which has become more laborious because of the tamper-proof packaging that's now ubiquitous in nursing homes. Pills come in blister or bubble packs, each dose individually sealed in plastic and covered with foil, so someone has to punch out each pill before it can be flushed down the toilet.
Nikstaitis says he isn't worried about harming the water supply because he believes the dilution factor is large enough to prevent any problems. But not everyone is convinced of that, and some researchers believe that studies should be done. (Michael Lapolla, director of the Center for Health Policy Research at Oklahoma State University, said he knows a nursing home physician who quips, "I never go fishing the day after we dispose of our drugs.")
I asked Nikstaitis why the toilet is the preferred method of disposal. "I don't feel comfortable just putting it out back in a trash bag. There's powerful stuff, morphine and other narcotics. Anyone could get into it. I don't even feel comfortable putting it in that red biohazard bag. I'm legally responsible for destroying it, and once it goes in the bag, it's no longer in my control."
But he, too, thinks that there's something absurd about the current practice. "I've thrown away thousands and thousands of pills, and in my opinion -- and it is just my opinion -- they could be used. It is a waste."
In Charlottesville, there's a member of the Virginia House of Delegates who not only agrees, but has taken up the cause and done something about it. Mitch Van Yahres, a Democrat who has served in the House since 1981, was walking in his neighborhood when he ran into a constituent who works as a doctor in a nursing home. "He was upset about all this wasted medication," Van Yahres said. "He showed me a photo of a bucket with thousands of pills in it," all destined for destruction.
Van Yahres calls himself a "recycler, a re-user." It's probably relevant that his family owns a tree service and that Van Yahres is trained as an arborist. He sees the world as a place that renews itself yearly. In the 2002 session, he sponsored legislation that "permits" nursing homes to enter into voluntary agreements with pharmacists to return unused drugs, which could then be dispensed free to indigent patients under strict conditions. The initial opposition, he said, came mostly from regulators and pharmacists. The pharmaceutical industry had no major objections. The legislation passed, and the state is now drawing up regulations.
A handful of other states -- Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana -- have taken small steps recently as well. Why? Because in 2000, after Oklahoma advocates had urged the American Medical Association to make new inquiries, the FDA "clarified" its policy.
The original three-paragraph statement, issued in 1980 and often cited as the main obstacle to action, said in part: "It could be a dangerous practice for pharmacists to accept and return to stock the unused portions of prescriptions that are returned by patrons, because he would no longer have any assurance of the strength, quality, purity or identity of the articles." Pharmacists call that language unambiguous.
In a Feb. 25, 2000, letter to the AMA, the FDA relented just enough to give the creative thinkers a chance. In a subsequent letter in August, the agency stressed that it still had concerns about safety, and about the "potential for drugs to be diverted and then sold [illegally] on the gray market." But if specific criteria were met -- primarily, if nursing homes could prove that they had handled the drugs properly and that the medication was in its unbroken, original packaging -- the FDA had no objection to allowing states to decide for themselves what to do.
That's a start, but it won't be enough by itself to overcome the nervousness of those who want a guarantee that nothing will go wrong. Lapolla, whose center has been instrumental in the Oklahoma effort, said: "I'd love to say that things are going great, but once state regulators got their hands on it, they scaled it back." The legislature approved only a pilot project in a few Tulsa County nursing homes, and in Lapolla's view, the small size of the project makes it more difficult to prove that the idea is cost-effective.
There are no villains in this story. That's what so frustrating. The FDA wants to protect patients and make sure that good intentions don't open a pipeline for the illegal diversion of drugs. The states want to make sure they have the resources to handle their oversight responsibilities. The pharmacists want to ensure that they don't become a conduit for medication that is no longer safe or effective. But it seems to me that if we can invent bubble packs in response to tampering, surely we can design a system to make use of medication that is perfectly good.
As for my mother-in-law's DuoNeb, I'm glad that the law doesn't require that we break open all 360 vials and dispose of the liquid through the method that George Nikstaitis uses once a week. So until the ball drops in Times Square and the expiration date passes, we have 360 doses looking for a good home. I'm not holding my breath.
Steven Luxenberg is the editor of Outlook.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Pentagon Papers' Ellsberg Sees Deja Vu in Iraq
November 24, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-people-ellsberg.html
MIAMI (Reuters) - When Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg wrote a new memoir chronicling his decision to leak secret U.S. military documents exposing official lies about the Vietnam War, he had no inkling the United States could soon be at war with Iraq.
A week after the October release of his book, ``Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,'' Congress authorized President Bush to wage war if necessary to disarm Baghdad.
Ellsberg is busy doing what he wishes he had done earlier during the Vietnam War -- sounding the alarm.
``I would give anything that is mine to give to avert this war, anything truthful and nonviolent to avert this war, which I think will be a catastrophe, and it will usher in an age of catastrophes,'' Ellsberg told Reuters during a weekend visit to the Miami Book Fair.
``The future is bleak but not hopeless. I am trying to do what I can to at least warn people. The risks are too great.''
Ellsberg's view of the probable future is bleak indeed.
If Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network launches a ``spectacular'' terrorist attack on the United States as the FBI has warned, it will trigger a U.S. invasion of Iraq even if Baghdad is not involved, he predicts.
If there is no attack soon, the United States will provoke Iraq into shooting down one of its aircraft in the ``no-fly'' zones in southern and northern Iraq, he said.
``If Saddam doesn't manage to shoot down one of our planes, our planes will fly lower and lower,'' Ellsberg said. ``We're going to be at war with Iraq well before Christmas.''
Saddam would then use poison gas against U.S. troops, triggering a retaliatory U.S. attack on his bunkers with earth-penetrating nuclear weapons that would inadvertently cause mass civilian deaths and ``create hundreds of thousands of new recruits for suicide training,'' he said.
``I believe they (the U.S. government) are very smart. They would have to be very stupid to believe that this would reduce the chances of terrorism. It will increase it sharply.''
Saddam would make his weapons of mass destruction available to al Qaeda, allowing them to stage attacks that will wipe out Israel and many of its neighbors and prompt armies sympathetic to Islamist causes to take over Pakistan and Indonesia and set off a grab for Pakistan's nuclear weapons.
A NEW AGE OF BARBARISM?
``It will make it impossible for these countries whose cooperation in hunting for al Qaeda cells is absolutely essential,'' Ellsberg said. ``We will no longer be able to reduce al Qaeda's strength. ... Osama will be a hero for the Muslim world for the next thousand years.''
End result: A new age of barbarism, he said. ``The world is going to look eventually like Afghanistan outside of Kabul.''
Others have posed such doomsday scenarios, but in the case of Iraq, the United States' military superiority has grown so overwhelming since the 1991 Gulf war that even NATO has been left behind. Iraq's military is much smaller than it was. U.S. officials have said they have no intention of using nuclear weapons against Saddam, but have warned that if he unleashes biological or chemical agents, all bets are off.
In making his predictions, Ellsberg does have unique credentials, albeit from a different age and a different conflict.
The former Marine and ex-Pentagon official was part of a defense think tank that wrote a secret study of U.S. policy in Vietnam. The 7,000-page study, which became known as the Pentagon Papers, revealed that four presidents had steadily lied to the public and Congress about the U.S. war in Southeast Asia.
Disillusioned, Ellsberg leaked it to newspapers in 1971, setting off a furor that helped pave the way for the U.S. pull-out from Vietnam.
Ellsberg was imprisoned on espionage charges that were thrown out in 1973 and says he regrets only that he did not blow the whistle sooner.
``The worst thing I ever did was help get the bombing started'' in Vietnam, he said.
He wrote his book, he said, because it holds timeless lessons on ``the folly of self-delusion.''
It opens with Ellsberg's discovery that the supposed North Vietnamese attack on a U.S. Navy ship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 probably never happened and that President Lyndon Johnson knew it when he used the purported attack to persuade Congress to authorize U.S. military force in the region.
Ellsberg calls the Iraq war authorization ``Tonkin Gulf II,'' adding: ``I've studied this government's decision-making for 44 years. I don't know these specific individuals but I know some of their advisors. I understand that thinking.
``This war will look very, very bad within months after it starts,'' he said. ``This war is an abomination that must not happen.'
--------
Scott Ritter's Iraq Complex
By BARRY BEARAK
November 24, 2002
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/magazine/24RITTER.html?ei=1&en=96d6ca18a8f6ba2c&ex=1039271365&pagewanted=all&position=top
At the back of the auditorium, a man cupped his hands over his mouth, improvising a megaphone, the better to bellow: ''Iraq is not the problem. Enron is!'' By then, the waiting crowd had already overstuffed Old Snell Hall on the campus of Clarkson University in northern New York. With all 500 seats filled, 100 people wedged themselves onto spare patches of the peeling linoleum floor. Most of the crowd wanted to hear the case against war, and they were exuberant to be hearing it from Scott Ritter, the onetime United Nations arms inspector and now America's most unlikely peacenik.
Ritter did not disappoint them, talking powerfully without notes for nearly an hour and drawing the kind of prolonged ovation he has come to expect and relish. President Bush is force-feeding Americans ''a whole bunch of oversimplified horse manure,'' he told them boldly. ''None of what you are being told remotely resembles the truth. Facts do matter, and it is time that you, the American people, start demanding the facts.'' War is not a video game where a reset button resurrects the corpses, Ritter said. ''War is about dead people.''
At 6-foot-4, Ritter is a man of imposing bulk, with arms long enough to bear-hug a podium. An astonishingly tireless talker, he buries listeners in an avalanche of opinions, anecdotes and details. The pile-up of his words seems all the weightier because he draws on his seven years as a weapons sleuth. He is also astonishingly self-confident. The day we first met, he spoke of a rare capacity to distill truth. ''I'm a great analyst,'' he said, firmly and without irony. ''I've never been wrong.''
Ritter's current view, which he dispenses with the earnest vigor of a revivalist, is that the administration's case against Saddam Hussein is based on elaborate falsehoods and exploited fear. He says he would ''be surprised if there is anything in Iraq worth finding,'' claiming inspection efforts between 1991 and 1998 resulted in the Iraqis giving up 90 to 95 percent of their most deadly weapons, rendering Saddam ''fundamentally disarmed'' -- if still unrepentantly evil. His suspicion is that the renewed inspections soon to begin will be but a show trial before the hanging. ''The U.N. resolution is worded to allow President Bush to act militarily without Security Council approval,'' he scoffs. ''For evidence, he'll pull the same unquestioned charade he has been pulling right along.''
When listening to Ritter on stage, speaking as he does with the authority of first-hand experience, it can be easy to overlook that his present renown as a dove is his second turn at celebrity. The first was his renown as a hawk, in August 1998, when he very publicly quit his job, complaining that Iraq was blocking inspections and the Security Council was disinclined to stop them. ''The sad truth is that Iraq today is not disarmed anywhere near the level required,'' Ritter wrote in his letter of resignation, quickly becoming a hero to many of the same people who now revile him. The following week, in a widely reported Senate hearing, the former major in the Marine Corps said that even if disarmed, the Iraqis had a ''breakout scenario'' to fully replenish their biological and chemical weapons within six months. He beseeched America to pressure Iraq into ''full compliance.'' Then, writing for the New Republic, he offered a long list of horrors likely to remain viable in Iraq's remnant arsenal if inspections were discontinued, including ''biological agents like anthrax, botulinum toxin and clostridium perfringens in sufficient quantity to fill several dozen bombs and ballistic-missile warheads.''
This seeming contradiction is routinely called a ''flip-flop'' by critics, and the perplexity it has created now dogs Ritter as he travels. Recently, I made two road trips with him as he kept to a grueling schedule of speechmaking. At each stop, even among the friendliest of audiences, he was asked about it. In public, his tendency is to be brusquely dismissive: ''I don't see where I've changed one iota.'' In private, however, he is prone to answer this and other questions with harangues, loosing a stream-of-conscious flow that churns and circles, carrying along glimmers of brilliance, incoherence and self-pity. He is not easy to fathom.
''It's not that I was lying or misleading anyone,'' he said of his earlier remarks. ''It's just that I said things very forcefully when the fact is there should have been a statement afterward, a 'but' kind of thing.'' Back then, he said, he was using his ''quantitative filter,'' speaking as an arms inspector about an unfinished job, seeing a cup 10 percent full. Later, he switched to his ''qualitative filter,'' seeing Iraq as 90 percent empty and enfeebled.
This is typical of Ritter. Even when admitting he is wrong, he is insisting he is right. His self-image requires it, for more than a life story, he has a personal mythology. Ritter, 41, loves the telling of it, which he does exceptionally well. In each chapter, he is the courageous man of principle, a stout-hearted citizen up against the dimwitted, the wicked and the power-mad.
For what it's worth, I found him very likeable and, as he burst into his diatribes with my tape recorder spinning, I rooted for him, wanting to warn him not to do what he so often does, shooting himself in the foot by shooting off his mouth. So much sincerity is rarely companion to so much vainglory, and so much certainty rarely accompanies such vacillation. Ritter is reliably convincing. He just doesn't always agree with himself.
Yet there has been constancy, too. His foremost goal remains unchanged, he said. ''I've always wanted the inspectors back at work, and I wanted to preserve the integrity of the inspection process.''
So ''flip-flop'' is actually an inapt word, he protested, suggesting as it does a lack of integrity. ''I think 'evolved' is a term I am comfortable with, because it implies a passage of time and everything changes over time. I mean, my taste in beer might evolve over time.''
Besides, as Scott Ritter tells the saga of the past decade, with all the intrigues and double-dealing -- it wasn't he who flip-flopped on America.
It was America that flip-flopped on him.
That story begins in Baghdad, but for me, the hearing of it began last month on U.S. 87, heading north in Ritter's Dodge Caravan from his home in suburban Albany. ''So I said, I want to be an intelligence officer,'' he told me, recounting a favorite tale. He was a newly commissioned second lieutenant in the Marines. There was a rule: intelligence work first required three years in the combat arms. With stunning moxie, he wrote the Marine commandant. ''I said, My name is Lieutenant Ritter, and I'm the best damn intelligence officer you're ever going to meet.'' For him, they changed the rules, he boasted.
Being the best was important to him. Both his parents were career Air Force. But he chose the Marines. In 1988, four years into his career, he was sent to Votkinsk, a Russian city in the foothills of the Urals, well known for producing Tchaikovsky, the composer, and SS-25's, the missile. Ritter monitored compliance to a ballistic-missiles pact.
When the gulf war began in 1990, his missile expertise was valuable. But as Ritter tells it, his analytical skills only got him in trouble. His job was to assess battle damage to Iraqi forces, and his analyses, while dependably correct, differed from those of the generals, who saw only what they wanted. He was told to ''sit down at a desk and shut up,'' he said.
Ritter would eventually leave the Marines in June 1991. He had been looking for a civilian job when he was contacted by one of his superiors from the days in Votkinsk. There was a chance to do something challenging. The gulf war, however crushing a defeat for Saddam, left him in power. Among the cease-fire conditions, Iraq was to fully disclose its weaponry for mass destruction so that the stockpiles and means of production could be gutted under United Nations auspices. For this, the Security Council formed a special commission, called Unscom.
As a whip, earlier economic sanctions were to stay in place until the disarmament was complete. But this was not lash enough for Saddam. With shell games and outright obstruction, he kept his weapons as best he could. Unscom was expected to end its main task within months and then set up a system of long-term monitoring. Instead, the job went on year after year, with Ritter, as he later wrote, at the center of it, passing ''through the looking glass of Saddam Hussein's hellish netherworld.''
Ritter frequently led Unscom inspection teams. Several of his former colleagues make him sound like an action figure in a kid's cartoon: honest, intrepid, smart, pathologically patriotic. Rolf Ekeus, the Swedish diplomat who was Unscom's first chief, said Ritter lacked ''a good understanding of the complexity of the political issues,'' but he had total confidence in him as an ''excellent operational planner.'' Roger Hill, an Australian, marveled at Ritter's snapshot memory: ''We'd be in an Iraqi office and he'd memorize things in Arabic script -- and he wasn't even an Arabic speaker.''
By Ritter's count, he was nearly killed three times while on Unscom business. The retelling of one incident injects drama into his speeches: his United Nations convoy stopped at multiple gunpoint, AK-47's and pistols aimed every which way, two directly at his head. ''A day in the life of the inspector in Baghdad!'' he says, as the story crescendos to its conclusion.
Ritter describes inspections that required up to six months of meticulous study and rehearsal. Imagine the choreography of it, he says. With helicopters hovering above, his people hit the site from four directions, intercepting the radio traffic, cameras recording everything. ''That's an inspection, ladies and gentlemen!''
Unscom destroyed more of Saddam's doomsday weapons than the heavy bombardment of the gulf war. But it was always impossible to know what percentage of the total had been eliminated without knowing what the total was to begin with and whether that total was somehow expanding. Increasingly, nations took morbid notice of the effect of the sanctions on the Iraqi people. Support began to wane for an equation that would always have an uncertain answer: Iraq minus how many weapons equals enough?
For his part, Ritter enjoyed being such an important gumshoe. It was hard to catch the Iraqis red-handed, but sometimes when you confronted them, they tripped up like second-rate burglars, he said: ''There wasn't anyone there I couldn't crack. They were putty in my hands.''
As time passed, though, it became clear that high-tech surveillance was needed. And, of course, this was a problem. The United Nations had no resources for that kind of spy gear. It would have to come from member nations, which had their own political agendas. Ekeus gave Ritter the O.K. to solicit such help, and in time this strategy gave rise to several odd arrangements. Among them, Unscom used an American U-2 spy plane, which, though piloted by the Air Force, flew under a United Nations logo and followed a United Nations flight plan. The aerial photos required interpretation, and when Ritter thought the Americans were not supplying the required decipherment, he received permission to get help from the Israelis, who became one of his best sources.
Saddam would complain that Unscom was being used as a cover for American and Israeli espionage operations, and it was true that the relationships between inspectors and the intelligence agencies they relied upon were complicated and sometimes compromised. Ritter was enveloped by spy games, and they thrilled him. He had stuff going with the Brits, the Aussies, the Kiwis. He joined the Romanians in a ''major intelligence sting.'' But the clandestine work, however vital, occasionally had his head doing somersaults about vying loyalties. This arrangement -- an American citizen mingling with foreign operatives while being responsible only to the United Nations -- was highly unusual. Ritter felt compelled to ask the Central Intelligence Agency for guidance, but, he says angrily, ''the U.S. government would never commit -- never commit -- to modalities or rules and regulations.'' Ritter sorted it out this way in his mind: America supported the Security Council, which oversaw Unscom, which oversaw him. He felt he was on solid ground as long as he informed his U.N. bosses of everything.
But in January 1998, he learned the Federal Bureau of Investigation was investigating him for espionage with the Israelis. ''The idea of it, questioning me on the subject of patriotism!'' he said. To add to his ire, he had been told that the F.B.I. also held concerns about his wife, whom he had met in Votkinsk, where she had worked as a Soviet translator. Some in the F.B.I. thought she might be an agent, ''a hostile penetration attempt.'' He was furious.
These personal woes also accompanied other disappointments. By 1998, Unscom itself was flagging. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had earlier declared that even if Iraq disarmed, sanctions would continue as long as Saddam was in power. Iraqis had one less reason to cooperate. They grew more brazen in blocking inspections, and the Security Council was letting them get away with it.
At the same time, Ritter was contending with a reputation as a cowboy. Some promising inspections were canceled from above at the last minute. Richard Butler, the Australian who succeeded Ekeus as Unscom's chief, told me these missions were of the ''kick-the-door-down variety'' and he thought them ''ill conceived and possibly dangerous.'' But Ritter suspected other reasons. He was in a turf battle with some elements of the C.I.A. The Americans were leaning on Unscom, freezing him out of the loop.
After thinking it through, resigning seemed the thing to do. Concerned that he might be arrested, he consulted a lawyer and began talking to the news media even before he quit, protecting himself by preparing to get his story out, raising his profile. People in the American government worried that he might become dangerously talkative. He got a nervous call from someone attached to the National Security Council, he said. So Ritter laid down his terms: ''I'm going to walk away, very critical of your policy. You've got to be grown up about that. What I don't want, though -- if you come after me and call me a liar, I'm going to tell the truth. If you question my patriotism, I'm going to demonstrate how I was a patriot. Come after my family, I will [expletive] you all.' Those were my words.''
The day Ritter resigned, CBS News reported that the F.B.I. was investigating him for showing classified intelligence to the Israelis. Though the report added that ''officials say it appears Ritter did nothing wrong,'' for him, it was the fateful tripwire. He declared war.
When he testified at the Senate hearing eight days later, he constrained his criticisms to those things his adversaries could be ''grown up about,'' speaking of the ''ugly threat'' of Iraq. Along with that, he stressed his main theme: arms inspection works, and when Saddam thwarts the inspectors, America and the rest of the Security Council must intervene. The senators, especially Ritter's fellow Republicans, commended his eloquence, his patriotism, his guts. Only Joe Biden, the Democrat from Delaware, suggested that perhaps the timing of military action against Iraq might better be decided by people at a higher pay grade than Scott Ritter's.
In settling his more personal scores, Ritter went to the press, and when he wasn't going to them, they went to him, aware that his tap was turned on with stories flowing into everyone's notebooks. The most surprising venue for his revelations was the English-language Israeli daily Ha'aretz, where, in a Q. and A., he discussed Israel's featured role in Unscom's intelligence operations.
Some of the Arab world feasted on that. ''What did I say in the Ha'aretz interview that was incorrect?'' Ritter asked me. ''Nothing! What did I say in the Ha'aretz interview that was politically inflammable? Just about everything!'' But hadn't he warned the American government? When he recalls these events now, he seems to relive them, as if the words were the vital dialogue in a play's climactic turn: ''If you want to play the game of truth, I'll tell the truth, and the truth will burn. It's not going to burn me. It'll burn you. Why did you play the Israel card? Why did you play it, America? To try to discredit me?''
Many of Ritter's Unscom friends, who had cheered him on before, were now disturbed by what they read. ''I like Scott, but the fact that he disclosed all this Unscom activity was a very big mistake,'' said a fellow inspector, Fouad El Khatib.
Ritter was in high demand. The talk shows applied their makeup. Some of the super-rich invited him to a retreat in Aspen. Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell listened to his take on foreign policy. NBC used him as a military analyst. At the network, he tried to wow his new colleagues. William Arkin, another NBC analyst, remembers joining Ritter in the company cafeteria. ''Unbelievable diarrhea of the mouth,'' he said. ''He's got a serious case of I've-got-a-secret.''
Simon & Schuster paid him a $250,000 advance for a book. Ritter's preference would have been to bang out the whole cloak-and-dagger story, something to ''out-Tom Clancy Tom Clancy and out-John le Carre John le Carre.'' But the editors wanted more of a policy book, and they needed it in a hurry, while Ritter and Iraq were still in the news. The deal was signed in early December, three and a half months after his resignation. Ritter saw the writing task as straightforward: explain what a brute Saddam was and how to get rid of him.
But then, in the middle of his high-velocity writing, the author suffered a jolt of analytical whiplash. On Dec. 16, 1998, the United States, with British support, launched Operation Desert Fox, four days of bombing. With the Clinton administration finally hammering Saddam, one might have expected Ritter to be elated, but in fact, he thought it a travesty. Desert Fox had come without the approval of the Security Council. In Ritter-think, America was bound to the United Nations by treaty, and treaties were backed by the United States Constitution. ''We've broken the law and compromised our morality,'' he says. Besides, speaking as a Marine intelligence officer, he also thought the operation nothing more than a futile pinprick. If they wanted to bomb, they should have hit Saddam for a full 60 days. ''I could've shown them the targets,'' he says.
Ritter's book, ''Endgame: Solving the Iraq Problem Once and for All'' would have to end with a different solution, he realized. Further complicating things, Simon & Schuster moved his deadline up to Jan. 15. He had but a month more to write and think. This frenzy of introspection resulted in a turnabout. In the final chapter, Ritter's ''endgame'' swerves from the use of overwhelming military force to patient diplomacy. Several reviewers thought it a muddle.
At any rate, the book sold poorly. By the time it came out in April, Kosovo had elbowed Iraq from the news. The world was looking elsewhere.
Though Ritter's celebrity withered, his urge to speak out did not. He was willing to go anywhere, said Jennifer Horan, a Boston peace activist who knows him well: ''He went from being taken in limos to 'The Today Show' to driving himself to the basements of ill-heated churches to talk to 30 people.'' His messianic side, once solely directed at finding Saddam's lethal weapons, had reversed compass and was targeted now at Washington's failed policies. He spoke often of the thousands of Iraqi children dying because of the sanctions. And at least once he publicly regretted his own part in America's misreading of the situation. In May 2000, appearing at a Congressional briefing, he said Saddam was incapable of ''world or regional domination'' and admitted that ''a lot of the blame for the perceptions'' to the contrary could ''be laid at my doorstep.''
That briefing proved significant, not for what Ritter said but for whom he met. Shakir al-Khafaji, a wealthy Iraqi-American businessman, was in the audience. The two men struck up a conversation. Within weeks, Ritter was telling al-Khafaji about a documentary he hoped to make, a film about Unscom that might find the audience that ''Endgame'' had missed. The two agreed to become partners in Ritter's production company, with al-Khafaji's real-estate development firm, the Falcon Management Group of Southfield, Mich., investing $400,000. While the businessman did not have any control over the editorial content, both men say, al-Khafaji would be supplying his connections as well as his money, easing Ritter's way back into Iraq.
As a veteran intelligence officer, Ritter knew he ought to be wary of this deal. The F.B.I. probe had not resulted in any charges, but here he was, about to receive cash from a wealthy Iraqi with important friends in Baghdad. Ritter said he went to great lengths to check things out, though on this score he is less than convincing. Where did he get his information? ''I called a reporter who has sources in the C.I.A.'' Does he know where the $400,000 came from? ''They showed me the stocks and bonds that were being liquidated.'' Was al-Khafaji getting any quid pro quo from the Iraqi government? ''Shakir said he didn't,'' Ritter told me on one occasion. On another he said, ''That was always in the back of my mind, that the Iraqis have an interest in funding the movie.'' Before going to Baghdad, Ritter informed the F.B.I., he said. This candor was a supposed safety net. ''I raised our profile so high that the F.B.I.'s got us dead to rights. If he is getting a quid pro quo, you'd think the F.B.I. would know about it.''
Al-Khafaji, 46, has lived in America for 27 years. I spoke with him twice on the phone. While he is an active critic of American policy, he had no praise for Saddam either. On the other hand, he does have many friends in the Iraqi government. He comes from a prominent family. Tariq Aziz, Iraq's deputy prime minister, ''is our neighbor,'' he said. Scoffing at any notion of a quid pro quo, he said to the contrary, it was hard to convince the Iraqi government to cooperate. ''They didn't trust Ritter,'' he said.
The businessman, like Ritter, said he had hoped the film would make money. If so, this was a naive miscalculation. ''In Shifting Sands'' presents a 92-minute story Americans are unused to, with the United States at least the equal of Iraq in bad faith. Indeed, America is portrayed as a bully, needlessly inflicting pain on a woebegone nation. Ritter bemoans the shame of it, the United States ''pursuing a brutal dictator to the point of debasing our own moral and intellectual values.''
Whatever the film's merits, TV stations and movie theaters had little interest. All investors, including Ritter, lost money, they say. This of course was a disappointment. More important for the former arms inspector, it denied him the influential role he believed he deserved. Not only did he consider himself one of America's leading experts on Iraq, he says he thought he could become a peacemaker between the nations. Last August, he began to feel a greater urgency for that mission as carrier of the olive branch. He expected President Bush to use the anniversary of 9/11 as a ''jingoistic springboard'' for attacking Saddam. To prevent war, he believed the Iraqis needed to respond to worldwide pressure and allow the weapons inspectors back in, and he wanted to go to Baghdad to convince them. ''My feeling was that -- and it's not an ego thing -- but in military terms I am a silver bullet. I can generate attention quickly. I have a credibility on the subject that most people don't.''
He phoned al-Khafaji. ''I need to speak to the Iraqi National Assembly,'' he remembers telling him, adding two requirements: ''It has to be televised live. And it has to be before Sept. 11.'' Impressively, al-Khafaji was able to arrange a meeting with Tariq Aziz, who asked, Why do you want to speak to the National Assembly? They're nothing. ''I know they're nothing,'' Ritter says he replied. ''But I'm looking for something symbolic. It's theater being played out here. We are staging an event, a media event!''
Ritter loves this new chapter to his myth. ''The Iraqis trust me because for seven years I held their feet to the fire,'' being tough but fair, he told me. No American had previously addressed the Iraqi National Assembly. Ritter wrote his speech on his laptop, on the drive into Iraq from Jordan. On Sept. 8, parliamentarians listened politely as Ritter told them that America ''seems on the verge of making a historical mistake.'' We Americans are a good -- no, a great -- people, he told them. But because of 9/11, ''we are a nation fearful of the unknown and more easily prone to exploitation by those with agendas other than legitimate self-defense.'' He said in the current crisis, the truth was on Iraq's side. He praised the Iraqis for their ''full cooperation'' with past arms inspections.
That last part, certainly, was an ''evolution'' in thinking. But one thing had remained the same. Ritter still wanted the inspectors back to work.
War, definitely by Christmas, is Ritter's prediction. He told me this the other day, just after the latest Security Council resolution demanding the return of the inspectors was passed. As it turns out, even with the resumption of inspections, he sees no room for optimism. ''Just a setup, a smokescreen,'' he said. The Bush administration has put its reputation on the line. Whether or not weapons are found, expect the bombing to begin. When he hears Bush speak of underground facilities, he says, ''I know I spent five years investigating that with ground-penetrating radar, with the best geophysicists around.'' The presidential palaces may have underground bunkers, but not underground factories. ''There's no James Bond; there's no Dr. Evil. The Iraqis are incompetent! They can't do it.''
Well, maybe they could. Occasionally, Ritter is scrupulous in pointing out that he doesn't know for sure what the Iraqis have been up to these past four years. Mostly, however, he shuns such overcomplication.
These days, Ritter is in greater demand than ever. The schedule is crazy: Madrid on the weekend, Texas on Monday, over to Strasbourg on Tuesday. In Europe, he speaks at political forums, while in America, he mostly appears on college campuses and on talk TV.
The Baghdad trip opened his flank to a fusillade of criticism. He has been ridiculed as Ritter of Arabia and Hanoi Jane. But the slight that seems to wound him the most is that he too much loves the limelight. ''I'm going to unplug from this thing so quickly people will be shocked,'' he told me huffily, saying what he wants most is time with his family and his golf clubs. Then he made a surprise announcement. ''I'm going to graduate school next fall; I'm getting a Ph.D. I'm going to teach. O.K.? Is that seizing the spotlight?''
Actually, I can envision this quite well, Ritter eventually with a faculty position, a class of students taking notes. There are plenty of professors who believe their analyses have never been wrong. In time, though, he said, academia could conceivably lose him to public service. ''If my country ever calls upon me to serve, if someone thought I could ever be a good assistant secretary of defense or state, I would smartly salute and go off to serve my country,'' he said, immediately worrying that this sounded as if he longed for the limelight. ''If you write that, people will say I am lobbying for it. I'm just being honest with you here.''
On the drive back to Albany, we took the road through Lake Placid. I pondered the prospect of Ritter without the limelight. He would sorely miss it, just as he now misses his wife and twin daughters and a good tee shot.
As the highway turned east, trees seemed to be tossing leaves into the wind. Everywhere, brilliant oranges and yellows were afloat, though the scenery was more serene than the conversation. Ritter had launched into one of his better rambles, the one where he hates Saddam as much as the next guy, probably more. ''Blow the hell out of him, 60 days of bombing, kill them all,'' he said. I inquired, Who's them? ''All the senior Iraqis. They're poison. They are absolutely poison.''
I asked, But isn't that what Bush wants to do? ''Bush isn't smart enough,'' he said. ''There are only a handful of people that are smart enough to do this'' -- Ritter himself among them.
But in mid-harangue, his peaceable side resurfaced. He was talking again about the Constitution and how Americans needed to honor their commitments to the United Nations. ''The Constitution defines what I have to do,'' he said.
I thought the matter might end there, but Ritter was still in turmoil. ''My heart's telling me to kill Saddam, or, I don't know, maybe my gut tells me that,'' he said. ''My heart's telling me to do what the Constitution says, but the gut's saying kill Saddam. And my brain has no clue which way to go here. It's just twisted. And I'm honest when I say I get up every morning and I just want to get the hell out of this.''
Barry Bearak is a staff writer for the magazine.
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