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NUCLEAR
70 U.N. Arms Monitors Extend Scope of Searches Into the Iraqi Desert
Iran Orders Nuke Plant Feasibility Study
U.S.: Iran Sites May Be Used to Make Nukes
North Korea issues nuclear threat
For North Korea, missiles pay
North Korea to Reopen Nuclear Plant Over Oil Cutoff by U.S.
N. Korea Believed to Have Nuclear Bombs
Report: N.Korea Tells IAEA to Unseal Nuke Plant
U.S. Missile Defense Test Is Failure
Defense strategy includes nukes
Nuclear Panel Chairman to Leave in March
Danger at Indian Point
U.S. scorned for foreign arms stand
9/11 Panel Criticizes Secrecy on Saudi Links
MILITARY
Ivory Coast Army Admits Role in a Mass Killing
U.N. team to shield Iraq's arms suppliers
Reluctant U.S. Gives Assent for Missiles to Go to Yemen
U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis
500,000 GIs must get smallpox shot
Smallpox Shots Will Start Soon Under Bush Plan
Iraq Denies Giving al - Qaida Nerve Agent
Explosion in the Homeland Security Field
Colombia Defuses 5 Bombs
Explosion of European Rocket Threatens Program
U.S. Approved Sale of Atropine
White House Orders Plans to Debrief Iraqi Scientists
PA seeks to unmask al-Qaida 'conspiracy'
5 Unarmed Palestinians Killed by Israelis in Gaza
Tiny desert nation bids to host troops
A Pass on Preemption
NATO Quietly Slips Into Afghan Mission
Russian president orders referendum on Chechnya
Inquiry Is Critical of Intelligence Agencies
Unseen when the U.N. calls
Study urges wider authority for covert troops vs. terror
U.S. Military Helicopter Crashes in Honduras
U.N. Court Grants Special Legal Protection to War Reporters
Tribunal in landmark ruling on war correspondents
Missile Seizure Backfires on U.S. - European Press
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
In Era of Cameras, Keep an Eye on Civil Liberties
Reporter Wins Tribunal Appeal
Canada Committee Urges Laxer Pot Laws, U.S. Upset
U.S. Frets Canada May Ease Marijuana Law
U.S. Officials Reject Drug War Claims
Canada Plan to Gather Travel Data Criticized
Warnings From Al Qaeda Stir Fear That Terrorists May Attack Oil Tankers
Al - Qaida Suicide Teams Train in Pakistan
ENERGY AND OTHER
Smart Windows, Ethanol Technique Among Grantees
Governents Craft Hazardous Waste Strategic Plan
Bush Sets Rules to Speed Logging in U.S. Forests
New Stanford Institute Is to Study Controversial Stem Cell Manipulation
Class of Estrogens Labeled Carcinogens
Carcinogens: Estrogens, Ultraviolet, Wood Dust
ACTIVISTS
Opera's Atomic Energy Commission
Iran Students Say Ministry Has Arrested 12 Protesters
Tens of thousands protest against government
Protesters in Mexico Storm Congress
December 2002 Statement of Leonard Peltier
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- inspections
THE INSPECTIONS
70 U.N. Arms Monitors Extend Scope of Searches Into the Iraqi Desert
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By JOHN F. BURNS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/middleeast/12BAGH.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 11 - Teams of United Nations weapons inspectors began their third week of surprise visits to Iraqi industrial and scientific sites today in a mood of growing confidence that they can counter doubts voiced by senior Bush administration officials about their work.
In the first week after they started work on Nov. 27, the inspectors made two or three site visits a day. They have now stepped up the pace, visiting eight sites today. On Tuesday, their busiest day so far, they went to 13. Rarely ranging more than 100 miles from Baghdad, and mostly much less, they have begun long-distance probes hundreds of miles into the Iraqi desert.
From an initial group of 17 inspectors, there are now more than 70 experts in nuclear, biological and chemical warfare, as well as missile experts; by Christmas, this number is expected to rise to nearly 100.
Early each morning, the inspectors set a course for some of the 900 "declared" sites on their checklists, meaning sites where Iraq has conducted weapons work in the past, or has laboratories or plants with "dual use" capabilities that could be turned from civilian purposes to weapons-related work.
With foreign reporters following them on every inspection, the United Nations teams have covered a wide range of installations representing all the major weapons programs Iraq had under way in the 1990's, when its defeat in the Persian Gulf war led the Security Council to impose a wide-ranging ban on Iraq's possession or development of weapons of mass destruction.
Among these sites have been the principal centers of Iraqi work on nuclear weapons, on deadly biological toxins like botulinum and anthrax, and on chemical weapons like VX gas.
The scattered irregularities found so far - mostly involving the unnotified transfer of equipment monitored by earlier groups of inspectors in the 1990's - have almost all been quickly resolved. Iraqi officials and scientists have identified other sites to which the parts have been moved, allowing the inspectors to confirm, in most cases, that the equipment is at the new locations.
The byword of United Nations officials who have briefed reporters, in Baghdad and by telephone from New York, has been caution, with the officials saying the inspectors, and experts outside Iraq, need time to determine whether there is any evidence that Iraq has resumed work on banned weapons programs, as the Bush administration has alleged.
"We haven't disclosed anything, but that doesn't mean that we haven't found any trace of evidence to suggest to our inspectors that there may be something" that indicates new Iraqi work on banned weapons, one United Nations official with access to inspectors' reports said. "It's just that we cannot tell you anything yet."
The deadline for an initial report to the Security Council by the chiefs of the two separate inspection teams is Jan. 25. That is 60 days from the start of work by the teams from the New York-based United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission - or Unmovic - responsible for checking biological, chemical and missile sites, and the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency, which is charged with checking nuclear sites.
Yasuhiro Ueki, spokesman for the two teams in Baghdad, said this was likely to be the first occasion for public disclosure of findings, unless Hans Blix and Mohamed ElBaradei - the heads of the two inspection teams - "feel they have something they need to say before that."
United Nations officials who have spoken to reporters about the inspections have been sensitive to criticisms from Washington.
These have followed on from the policy split of last summer, when hawks in the administration were deeply reluctant to enmesh American policy on Iraq with a resumption of United Nations weapons inspections. Since inspections started, some senior officials in Washington have implied that the program could quickly founder in a morass of Iraqi harassment and deceit, accompanied by United Nations indecisiveness, as happened in the 1990's.
The critical American officials have called for the new round of inspections to be rapidly intensified, and for the United Nations teams to use the full range of powers written into the tough new inspections mandate approved by the Security Council on Nov. 8.
A number of these powers, like the right to swoop down on sites across Iraq in helicopters and the power to fly Iraqi scientists and their families outside Iraq for questioning, have not been invoked so far. Others, like the right to "freeze" inspection sites and prevent movement of people or materials in or out during the inspections, have been imposed, as far as accompanying reporters have been able to determine, with a wide latitude for the Iraqis.
United Nations officials in Baghdad say their ability to surprise the Iraqis, and their need to, will come together in the weeks ahead as weapons experts complete their analysis of the 12,000-page Iraqi weapons declaration delivered last weekend, and as helicopters become available to the inspection teams.
So far, 34 days after the new weapons inspection mandate was approved by the Security Council, only one United Nations helicopter has reached Baghdad, a transfer from the United Nations administration in Kosovo.
Mr. Ueki said contracts for more helicopters, to total about six, were "in the final stage of the bidding process" with private companies that charter aircraft to the United Nations. He was unable to say when they would arrive.
An example of the handicaps facing the inspectors came on Tuesday, when a team of nuclear inspectors set out on a 240-mile trip across the desert to a phosphate complex at Al Qaim, on the Syrian border, where the Iraqis produced about 100 tons of uranium as a byproduct in the 1980's.
The desert journey of more than five hours would have allowed accompanying Iraqi officials to alert the complex by radio that an inspection was imminent.
-------- iran
Iran Orders Nuke Plant Feasibility Study
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iran-Nuclear.html
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran is considering construction of a second major nuclear power plant, state-run television reported Thursday, despite U.S. concern that byproducts from Iranian plants could be used to manufacture nuclear weapons.
Iran's Atomic Energy Council ordered a feasibility study on a second plant as the country's first nuclear power station at Bushehr prepares to go on line next year with Russian help.
``The council has authorized Iran's Atomic Energy Organization to study the construction of a new 1000-megawatt plant with due consideration of environmental standards using the experience achieved from the completion of the first unit of Bushehr nuclear power plant,'' Tehran television reported.
It said the decision was made during a council meeting Wednesday attended by First Vice President Mohammad Reza Aref.
It was not clear if Russia would be involved in the construction of the new plant. The Kremlin has floated preliminary plans to help Iran build five more nuclear reactors over the next 10 years.
However, the Russian news agency Interfax quoted Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev as saying in September that Bushehr is the only actual nuclear program Russia has with Iran.
Russia has hundreds of specialists working at the Bushehr plant, which is expected to be operational by the end of 2003. The United States fears the plant will help Iran manufacture nuclear weapons.
Both Russia and Iran insist that the Bushehr plant will be strictly for civilian purposes and open to international inspection. However, successive U.S. administrations have expressed concern over the plant.
The Bush administration has offered Russia economic incentives to abandon the Bushehr project but the Russians have not accepted the offer. Russia has denied consistently it is helping Iran develop nuclear weapons or with its missiles program.
In September, Russia drew up a plan in September for the return of spent nuclear fuel from Bushehr, seeking to allay U.S. concerns that the fuel could be used by terrorists and others to build weapons of mass destruction.
The Bushehr plant was begun by the West Germans but was interrupted during the 1979 Islamic revolution. It's worth about US$800 million to Russia, which has been reluctant to abandon the project both for economic reasons and matters of international prestige.
Meanwhile, Iran's Atomic Energy Council has approved a broad plan to dramatically increase the country's nuclear energy capabilities by 2021, a newspaper reported Thursday.
``The council approved (a plan stipulating) that the share of electricity provided by nuclear energy should reach 6000 megawatts by 2021,'' the daily Mardom-Salari, or Democracy, reported. It gave no further details. Iranian atomic energy officials were not available for a comment.
--------
U.S.: Iran Sites May Be Used to Make Nukes
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-US-Iran-Nuclear.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Two construction sites in central Iran may be used for a clandestine program to develop nuclear weapons, U.S. officials said Thursday.
The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, generally endorsed reports issued by an Iranian resistance group this summer that accused Iran of building facilities for their nuclear programs at the two sites.
U.S. intelligence officials do not believe Iran has made any nuclear weapons. Iran denies having a nuclear weapons program.
In August, officials with the National Council of Resistance of Iran said the sites, once completed, will be a nuclear fuel production plant and research lab at Natanz and a heavy water production plant at Arak. Both sites are in central Iran, south of the capital of Tehran.
The rebel group cited their own sources inside the Iranian government.
The Natanz plant also may include a uranium-enrichment facility, U.S officials said. A heavy water plant at Arak would be part of a plutonium program.
U.S. officials say Iran's lack of fissile material -- either enriched uranium or plutonium -- remains a key stumbling block for its nuclear goals.
Iran has not declared either site to international monitors, U.S. officials said. The National Council of Resistance of Iran, based in Paris, is a government-in-exile that advocates violent overthrow of Iran's religious government. Officials say they want to install a democratic government in Iran that protects human rights.
Although the U.S. State Department says the council is a terrorist organization, its members operate freely in the United States, and some in Congress support removing the terrorist label.
Earlier this year, CIA Director George J. Tenet said U.S. intelligence is worried countries like Iran may make ``sudden leaps'' in their nuclear programs.
``Tehran may be able to indigenously produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon by late this decade,'' Tenet told a congressional committee in March.
Much of the public attention given to Iran's nuclear effort focuses on a power reactor at Bushehr, which is being built with Russian assistance. But the design of the reactor, as well as international agreements for oversight of its operation, are expected to prevent it from being used to make material that can be used in nuclear weapons.
Instead, the primary concern about the reactor is that it will lead to more expertise in nuclear matters in Iran, benefiting its weapons program, U.S. officials say.
Separately, Iran is considering construction of another major nuclear power plant, state-run television reported Thursday.
-------- korea
North Korea issues nuclear threat
BBC
Thursday, 12 December, 2002
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2568543.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38182000/gif/_38182147_nuclear_capabilities2_300.gif
http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38352000/jpg/_38352523_missile300ap.jpg.jpg
North Korea has said it will immediately reactivate a mothballed nuclear power plant, frozen under a 1994 agreement with the US.
We have to see if the North is actually about to implement this or if it is using it as a negotiation tactic
South Korean official The North Korean foreign ministry said it was responding to a US-led decision to suspend oil aid to Pyongyang as a punishment for a separate, alleged nuclear weapons programme.
North Korea said it was reactivating the plant to make up for the electricity shortfall caused by the ending of the heavy oil shipments.
North Korea's threat represents a major escalation in tensions between Pyongyang and Washington.
The US and its regional allies - South Korea and Japan - are worried that the plant could also be used as part of a wider nuclear weapons programme, which North Korea has regularly stated the "right" to possess.
US White House spokesman Ari Fleischer described the move as "regrettable".
He said it "flies in the face of international consensus that the North Korean regime must fulfill all its commitments, in particular dismantle its nuclear weapons programme".
Mr Fleischer said the United States sought a peaceful resolution to the North Korean dispute and would not enter into dialogue with the North Koreans "in response to threats or broken commitments".
Pyongyang's announcement follows the seizure and subsequent release of a ship on Wednesday carrying what US officials said were North Korean missiles bound for Yemen.
Both developments, says the BBC's Rob Watson in Washington, represent a very low point in US - North Korean relations in just one week.
'No choice'
The North Korean foreign ministry, in a statement carried by state news agency KCNA, said the frozen nuclear reactor was needed for power generation, following the US halt on heavy fuel oil shipments to Pyongyang.
Text of North Korean announcement
"A spokesman for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) Foreign Ministry in a statement today said that the prevailing situation compelled the DPRK government to lift its measure for nuclear freeze taken on the premise that 500,000 tons of heavy oil would be annually supplied to the DPRK," said the statement.
North Korea would "immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity," the statement added.
If you read the North Korean announcement carefully, their consistent stance is to seek a peaceful resolution
Junichiro Koizumi, Japanese Prime Minister Pyongyang's move threatens to kill off the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which North Korea agreed to close down a nuclear reactor suspected of producing weapons-grade plutonium in return for two light-water reactors and US oil supplies.
But the US and its allies decided to halt oil shipments last month after Washington's envoy, James Kelly, reported that Kim Jong-il's secretive regime had admitted to pursuing an alternative, enriched uranium programme.
US President George W Bush has maintained a much harder line towards North Korea than his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
The US has been slow to respond to North Korean overtures to improve relations. US officials have cited North Korea's nuclear ambitions and its exporting of long range missiles as reasons to keep the country in its "axis of evil".
North Korea's neighbours have reacted cautiously. South Korea's National Security Council convened in emergency session to express "strong regret and grave concern" over the development.
North Korean orphan
North Korea badly needs foreign aid A South Korean unification ministry spokesman said: "North Korea-US relations are heading toward the end of a cliff, but we have to see if the North is actually about to implement this or if it is using it as a negotiation tactic."
The BBC's Caroline Gluck, in Seoul, says the government will come under renewed pressure to rethink its "sunshine policy" of engagement and exchanges with the North.
Japan described the threat as "deplorable" - but Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi urged caution, noting the "consistent stance ... to seek a peaceful resolution".
Korea analyst Aidan Foster-Carter, recalling Pyongyang's frequent brinkmanship, told the BBC: "What they say is one thing, we have to see what they do".
Mr Foster-Carter, senior research fellow in modern Korea at Leeds University, said that proof of action would be the expulsion of two International Atomic Energy Agency monitors who are based at the defunct nuclear reactor at Yongbyon.
Yongbyon: Site includes a 5-MWe experimental nuclear power reactor and a partially completed plutonium extraction facility. The US believes the reactor and extraction plant have been used to produce plutonium - possibly enough for 1 or 2 nuclear weapons. Activities at site frozen under 1994 Agreed Framework
Taechon: 200-MWe nuclear power reactor - construction halted under Agreed Framework
Pyongyang: Laboratory-scale "hot cells" that may have been used to extract small quantities of plutonium
Kumho: Site of two 1,000-MWe light water reactors under construction by Kedo
----
For North Korea, missiles pay
Rumsfeld calls Pyongyang the world's leading proliferator
Thursday, December 12, 2002
International Herald Tribune
http://www.iht.com/articles/80002.html
SEOUL The export of North Korean missiles to the Middle East shows the North's reluctance to yield to American pressure, but unlike its nuclear development program, exporting missiles is legal - and highly profitable.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who was visiting U.S. troops in Djibouti on Wednesday, called North Korea the "single largest proliferator" of missile technology on earth.
"They are putting into the hands of many countries the technologies and capabilities which have the potential for killing hundreds of thousands of people," Rumsfeld added.
Rumsfeld spoke after it was made public that a North Korean ship with a cargo of Scud missiles had been intercepted in the Gulf of Aden while bound for Yemen. After a diplomatic tussle, the United States allowed the ship to proceed to its destination.
In Seoul, a foreign intelligence analyst estimated that North Korea has earned $50 to $100 million a year in the last five years from the export of missiles to countries including Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Iran and Iraq.
The trade in missiles "is a source of hard currency or barter," said the analyst. "It is one of their lucrative sources of business - one of the few exports from which they hope to make real money."
Analysts in South Korea noted that North Korea has repeatedly defended its right to sell missiles as commercial products to any country that wanted them. North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, has offered that argument to numerous visitors, including Prime Minister Goran Persson of Sweden when he visited Pyongyang in May.
Shim Yun Jo, director-general of the North American desk at the South Korean Foreign Ministry, said his government had "grave interest in this matter" but wanted to know more about it before responding.
"The information we have from the United States is not sufficient," he said. "It is not clear the ship came from North Korea or if North Korea is directly involved."
The episode, however, was expected to enter the dialogue of the candidates in next week's presidential election.
"It reconfirms the duplicity of North Korea in dealing not only with us but also with the United States," said Park Shin Il, foreign policy adviser to the conservative candidate, Lee Hoi Chang. Ben Limb, spokesman for Roh Moo Hyun, candidate of South Korea's governing party, said the episode underlined the need for dialogue with the North. "We are urging the United States to initiate dialogue as soon as practicable," he said.
The North Korean missile trade was the focal point of intense negotiations in the final weeks of the Clinton administration in which U.S. officials believed they were on the verge of a deal to get the North to stop the business.
North Korea, however, set what were viewed at the time as impossible conditions, demanding $1 billion a year from the United States in compensation for the business that it said it would sacrifice if it ceased exporting missiles.
"We weren't going to pay them that price," said an American analyst, "and we're certainly not going to pay them now."
Negotiations near the end of the Clinton administration also revolved around a proposal for the United States to launch a satellite that the North could use for communications.
Although the export of missiles does not violate any international agreement, analysts said that North Korea has done it secretly in the knowledge that ships carrying missiles might be boarded.
"They are continuing to export missiles, but we don't know for sure how many," said Choi Jin Wook, senior fellow at the Korea Institute of National Unification.
"The trade is not official. When you make a trade, you need a contract, a bank account, but they don't trade with official letters."
----
North Korea to Reopen Nuclear Plant Over Oil Cutoff by U.S.
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By DON KIRK
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/12CND_KORE.html
TOKYO, Dec. 12 - In a bold challenge to the United States, North Korea said today that it was immediately lifting a freeze on a nuclear reactor that has been mothballed since a 1994 crisis that nearly led to war between the two countries.
Pyongyang justified the surprise decision, which is the latest in a sharply downward spiral in relations with Washington, by invoking a recent American suspension of fuel oil deliveries to North Korea. The fuel cutoff, in turn, was announced as punishment for a secret nuclear weapons program, whose existence American diplomats say North Korea acknowledged in early October.
Using the acronym for the country's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the Foreign Ministry said in a statement: "The prevailing situation compelled the D.P.R.K government to lift its nuclear freeze adopted on the premise that 500,000 tons of heavy oil would be annually supplied to the D.P.R.K. under the D.P.R.K.-U.S. Agreed Framework and immediately resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity."
The statement, which was published by the official Korean Central News Agency, added, "Whether the D.P.R.K refreezes its nuclear facilities or not hinges upon the U.S."
In Washington, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said the United States said the North Korean decision was "regrettable," adding that it would work with its allies to resolve the matter peacefully.
He said the United States "will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the agreements North Korea has signed."
The North Korean announcement prompted an emergency meeting of the South Korean cabinet.
A statement read by the Foreign Ministry spokesman, Sok Dong Yon, urged its neighbor to "observe all the obligations stipulated in the 1994 Geneva Accord, Inter-Korean Denuclearization Declaration, Nonproliferation Treaty and International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards."
South Korea is one week away from presidential elections in which the two major candidates have offered sharply different visions of relations with their neighbor. Throughout the campaign, there have also been large anti-American demonstrations, with many protesters condemning the presence of 37,000 American troops in the country, and denouncing United States policy toward North Korea.
The North Korean statements have come like a last-minute wild card that could have a dramatic and unpredictable influence on the outcome.
One candidate, Roh Moo Hyun, offers continuing aid and other reconciliation efforts, while the other candidate, Lee Hoi Chang, is largely in line with the Bush administration, warning of sanctions if North Korea does not dramatically modify its behavior.
Mr. Roh, who according to the latest opinion polls is the narrow front runner, has the most to lose from a sudden heightening of tensions and issued a carefully hedged statement saying "the world is alarmed by North Korea's announced plan to resume the operation of nuclear facilities and its threat to develop nuclear weapons.' But he urged dialogue and called on the United States "to cooperate, so that this problem can be resolved peacefully without further building tension on the Korean peninsula."
Plutonium from the reactor in question, at Yongbyon, 60 miles north of Pyongyang, is currently being kept in a cooling pond under surveillance by inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Expulsion of the inspectors, or removal of the fuel, which is ideal for use in nuclear weapons construction, would represent a sharp escalation of the confrontation with Washington, but analysts said tonight that the wording of the North Korean statements suggested that those are steps that it has not yet resolved to take.
Instead, adhering to a pattern of statements from the country that has held throughout the current crisis, North Korea leavened its defiance with an apparent call for a negotiated solution. "It is the invariable stand of the D.P.R.K. government to find a peaceful solution to the nuclear issue on the Korean peninsula," the Foreign Ministry statement said.
In other statements, North Korea has said that it would be willing to discuss all of its weapons of mass destruction with the United States if it were to be offered the normalization of relations and a guarantee that the country will not be attacked.
Pyongyang has been seriously rattled by its inclusion by Mr. Bush in a supposed "axis of evil," and seems to believe that it will be next on a hit list. "The U.S. has already listed the D.P.R.K. as part of an `axis of evil' and a target of pre-emptive nuclear attack," today's statement from North Korea said.
In recent weeks, the Bush Administration has said that it does not seek to attack North Korea but has insisted that it cannot negotiate with the country until it takes "clear and verifiable" measures to dismantle the uranium enrichment program. By conducting that program in secret, in violation of many agreements, North Korea has strengthened the hand of critics in Washington who have long said that negotiations with the country are worthless.
"North Korea's traditional negotiating behavior, of pushing up to the brink of a crisis and then climbing down from it can be seen in this statement," said Victor D. Cha, a professor of government at Georgetown University. "It is a combination of threats and olive branch, but when you take the olive branch, the cooperation becomes a sinkhole. If you make another agreement with them, not only is it difficult to trust them, it is difficult to verify."
While expressing strong dismay over the announcement, Japanese officials tonight played down the immediate threat posed by the North Korean statement and said that it appeared to be aimed at bringing the United States to the negotiating table.
"If you read the North Korean announcement carefully, their consistent stance is to seek a peaceful resolution," Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi told reporters. "We need to respond calmly, based on close cooperation with the United States and South Korea."
The United States had been providing 500,00 tons of fuel oil a year to the impoverished communist country since 1994 as part of a complex multilateral arrangement known as the "Agreed Framework," which was intended to end North Korea's nuclear weapons program by freezing operations of a five-megawatt Soviet-designed research reactor at Yongbyon.
The mothballed reactor is thought to have been the source of plutonium, fissile material for a nuclear weapons development program that according to American and Chinese intelligence estimates may have produced between two and five nuclear devices before the launching of a separate, clandestine uranium enrichment program.
The discovery of that program, and North Korea's reported defiant acknowledgment of it, has been at the root of the sharply increased tensions between Washington and Pyongyang. On Wednesday the United States engineered the interception by the Spanish Navy of a clandestine North Korean shipment of Scud missiles to Yemen aboard an unflagged vessel. The Bush Administration later decided to release the vessel and allow it to deliver its cargo to Yemen, an ally in the war on terror.
Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and other senior American officials strongly condemned North Korea, however, as the world's largest proliferator of missile technology.
Tonight a South Korean Foreign Ministry official suggested that the timing of North Korea's lifting of its nuclear reactor freeze, after weeks of hesitation since the heavy fuel oil suspension, may have been driven in part by pique at the missile seizure.
"You cannot really disassociate one from the other," the Foreign Ministry official said. "They take these things all together. North Korea has a tradition of acting unexpectedly, so it fits the pattern, but there was still a lot of surprise here. We were certainly not expecting this."
--------
N. Korea Believed to Have Nuclear Bombs
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-NKorea-Nuclear-Programs.html
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium it extracted from a Soviet-designed reactor it froze in 1994, and now plans to reactivate, according to security experts.
Less is known about the secretive country's second, recently revealed nuclear program, which is based on uranium enrichment and much harder to detect. However, the consensus among intelligence analysts is that the second program is in its early stages.
North Korea's defiant declaration Thursday that it will restart a reactor at Yongbyon as well as build other unfinished facilities intensifies old fears its nuclear ambitions could undermine global stability.
The North has said the plutonium-based nuclear program it froze in a 1994 deal with Washington was designed to alleviate its energy shortages. But it is widely believed North Korea's main goal was to manufacture nuclear weapons.
One immediate concern is the fate of plutonium fuel rods that were separated from a frozen 5-megawatt reactor and stored under supervision of inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA.
North Korea could reprocess the plutonium into a form useful for the making of nuclear weapons in ``a matter of months'' if it removes the rods from IAEA supervision, Secretary of State Colin Powell said last month.
``North Korea might have dozens of nuclear bombs today instead of possibly one or two'' if not for the 1994 agreement that froze the nuclear program, Steve LaMontagne, senior analyst at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in Washington D.C., wrote in an analysis.
Under that deal, known as the Agreed Framework, North Korea suspended its plutonium-based program in exchange for the construction by a U.S.-led consortium of two light-water reactors for civilian purposes, as well as the provision of fuel oil until the reactors are completed.
But the deal unraveled after U.S. officials reported that North Korean counterparts acknowledged in October they had a uranium-based nuclear program, which violated the Agreed Framework. To punish the North, the United States and its allies, including South Korea, Japan and the European Union, suspended the oil shipments last month.
North Korea said it was reviving the plutonium-based reactor program to make up for the loss of energy caused by the suspension.
Security analysts believe Pakistan, a nuclear power, provided assistance to North Korea in its efforts to acquire gas centrifuges to enrich uranium. In return, they believe, Pakistan received North Korean missile technology. Pakistan has denied the allegation.
U.S. officials have not said whether they think North Korea has built such centrifuges, or used them to produce enriched uranium. Such centrifuges are small, and can easily be hidden.
South Korean intelligence officials have said they were aware of reports of North Korea's uranium enrichment program for a couple of years. Uranium is abundant in mines in the mountainous North.
North Korea also has a decades-old missile program and there are concerns it could mount a nuclear warhead on such weapons. This week, a ship carrying North Korean Scud missiles bound for Yemen was seized and released in the Arabian Sea.
North Korea adapted Soviet technology, allegedly importing Scud missiles from Egypt in the 1970s or early 1980s. Similarly, its nuclear research efforts date back to the 1960s, when North Korean students studied the topic in the Soviet Union, then a communist ally.
North Korea also has suspected chemical and biological weapons programs, as well as huge numbers of troops, although they lack modern equipment, spare parts and fuel. South Koreans, many of whom live within artillery range of the Demilitarized Zone on the border, are more concerned about the North's conventional, rather than nuclear, threat.
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Report: N.Korea Tells IAEA to Unseal Nuke Plant
December 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-nuclear.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea has told the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) it wants the nuclear monitoring body to unseal and remove surveillance cameras from a nuclear plant at the center of a suspected 1990s weapons program, Kyodo news agency reported on Friday.
The report, from Vienna, quoted IAEA director Mohamed ElBaradei as saying the agency had received a letter from the communist state making the demand.
Pyongyang said on Thursday that it would reactivate the nuclear facility, raising the stakes in a standoff at the world's last Cold War flashpoint.
The decision to restart the reactor, mothballed in 1994 after an international crisis over alleged production of weapons-grade plutonium there, escalates a showdown with the United States over a second nuclear program being pursued by the isolated and poor communist state.
Analysts have said Pyongyang's latest move -- which it said it had been forced to take after a U.S.-led decision to suspend oil aid to the country -- appeared to be a desperate attempt to force Washington to the negotiating table.
In a statement from Vienna, Elbaradei called on Pyongyang to act with restraint and refrain from any unilateral action that might make it hard for the monitoring agency to keep tabs on those nuclear materials subject to international safeguards.
``It is essential that the containment and surveillance measures which are currently in place continue to be maintained,'' ElBaradei said in the statement.
-------- missile defense
U.S. Missile Defense Test Is Failure
Reuters
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A35
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42672-2002Dec11?language=printer
A device designed to destroy an incoming warhead failed to separate from its booster rocket in a test over the Pacific yesterday, setting back the Bush administration's push to build an anti-missile shield.
First reports showed no sign that the device itself, the "exoatmospheric kill vehicle" built by Raytheon Co., had anything to do with the failure, said Lt. Col. Rick Lehner of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
A similar separation failure in a July 8, 2000, test was traced to botched commands from the booster's upper-stage assembly built by Lockheed Martin Corp.
Five of the previous flight tests, including the last four in a row, have succeeded in shooting down the target launched from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base. Yesterday's flight marked the third failure.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Defense strategy includes nukes
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021212-13664457.htm
In a new defense strategy submitted to Congress yesterday, President Bush warned Iraq and other hostile countries that the United States is prepared to use "overwhelming force" - including nuclear weapons - in response to any chemical or biological attack.
The threat was contained in a White House document called the "National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction."
Presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer called it a declaration "of how seriously the United States would take it in the event that weapons of mass destruction were used."
"It's a reiteration of a statement that has been made previously, but this time, it ties it all together to make clear that the United States will indeed respond," Mr. Fleischer said.
The six-page strategy outline underscores long-standing policy that the United States "reserves the right to respond with overwhelming force - including through resort to all of our options - to the use of [weapons of mass destruction] against the United States, our forces abroad and friends and allies."
That passage intends to threaten U.S. nuclear retaliation as a deterrent to hostile governments, said senior administration officials who briefed journalists about the document Tuesday.
Administration officials emphasized that the strategy, developed jointly by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and homeland security adviser Tom Ridge, is an overall statement of the Bush administration's overarching principles. Its timing, however, coincides with other muscle-flexing by President Bush designed to show Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein that the United States is serious about seeing him disarmed.
The White House document gathers into one comprehensive whole several doctrines for prevention, deterrence and defense that Mr. Bush has enunciated since taking office, including a commitment to boost programs aimed at containing the damage of any chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear attack.
The strategy said some unspecified states that support terrorists already have weapons of mass destruction and seek even more "as tools of coercion and intimidation."
"For them, these are not weapons of last resort, but militarily useful weapons of choice intended to overcome our nation's advantages in conventional forces and to deter us from responding to aggression against our friends," the document said.
"We must accord the highest priority to the protection of the United States, our forces and our friends and allies" from weapons of mass destruction, it continued.
The broadly worded strategy does not speak with any specificity to the priorities it asserts, nor does it assign them any budget numbers. Instead, those details were contained in classified directives, described as "substantial taskings," issued to relevant federal departments a couple of months ago, officials said.
The strategy's priorities will be reflected in the new budget Mr. Bush submits to Congress in February.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear Panel Chairman to Leave in March
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-NRC-Chairman.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Richard Meserve, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission chairman, said Thursday he will resign from the agency at the end of March, more than a year before his term expires.
President Bush will nominate his replacement on the five-member commission and name a new chairman. The nomination requires Senate confirmation.
Meserve, selected for the post and made chairman by President Clinton in 1999, said he will become president of the Carnegie Institution, a prominent research center in Washington.
Meserve, a Democrat, leaves at a time when the agency is facing a range of new challenges. They include protecting nuclear power plants from terrorists and approving a proposed nuclear waste site at Yucca Mountain in Nevada.
In remarks Thursday to agency staff, Meserve said he felt ``we have responded effectively to the terrorists' challenge to our national security.''
Meserve is one of three Democrats on the commission. Commissioner Greta Joy Dicus, a Democrat, is expected to depart in June when her term expires.
The other members of the commission are Republicans Jeffrey S. Merrifield and Nils J. Diaz, and Democrat Edward McGaffigan Jr. By law, only three commission members may be of the same party, so one of Bush's nominees will have to be a Democrat.
-------- new york
Danger at Indian Point
December 12, 2002
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/opinion/L12INDI.html
To the Editor:
The report about serious, continuing security lapses at the Indian Point nuclear power plant (news article, Dec. 8) is alarming because it refutes past assurances from the New York State Office of Public Security and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Last December, James K. Kallstrom, head of the state office, even taunted terrorists to try an attack on the plant, saying, "Let 'em try." He added, "That may be one way of flushing them out."
Mr. Kallstrom made this statement just before a security consultant for the plant owner documented that 81 percent of the guard force believed that they could not successfully defend the plant after 9/11.
Worse yet is the attitude of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It has still not upgraded its regulations for defending nuclear plants. One commissioner, Edward McGaffigan Jr., said he was happy to stand shoulder to shoulder by Mr. Kallstrom's perspective.
PAUL LEVENTHAL
Chevy Chase, Md., Dec. 8, 2002
The writer is president emeritus, Nuclear Control Institute.
-------- us politics
U.S. scorned for foreign arms stand
Letting North Korea ship Scuds called hypocritical Democrat accuses Bush of being inconsistent
LINDA DIEBEL TORONTO STAR STAFF REPORTER
Dec. 12, 2002. 01:00 AM
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&c=Article&cid=1035775473597&call_pageid=968332188854&col=968350060724
What's a definition of irony?
It's the United States - the world's largest weapons seller and heartiest participant in the international arms bazaar - complaining about North Korea shipping 15 Scud missiles to Yemen, according to peace activists.
For Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to call North Korea the "single largest proliferator'' of missile technology is, as they say, the pot calling the kettle black.
"I guess you've got to remember that irony is essentially dead in the United States,'' said Scott Lynch, from Washington-based Peace Action.
"But even so, this one has got to be seen as highly ironic. One could even move up to hypocritical.''
Rumsfeld's reaction, buttressed by Bush administration officials throughout the day yesterday, came after Spanish authorities discovered the Scud missiles, infamous for their attempted use against Israel by Iraq's Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War, in a cargo ship in the Arabian Sea. Ultimately, the ship was allowed to sail on its way after U.S. officials said there was no legal basis under international law to detain them.
"The audacity of the administration never fails to shock me. The U.S. needs Yemen as a partner in the region,'' added Lynch. With President George W. Bush pushing for a second war against Iraq, "they can't afford to piss off Yemen, and that is cynical ...
"At the end of the day, the administration deigns unto itself the right to make the rules for everybody.''
On Capitol Hill yesterday, several lawmakers also saw a certain irony in U.S. criticism of North Korea, followed by an abrupt and red-faced announcement that the shipment would not be stopped.
Massachusetts Democratic Representative Edward Markey accused Bush of being "dangerously inconsistent'' for allowing the Scuds, along with 15 conventional warheads and assorted drums of chemicals, to proceed to Yemen.
"(He is) tough on Iraq, diffident on North Korea, ineffective in Iran, and hypocritical at home in initiating the development of `mini-nuke' weapons, plutonium pits and other signs of our insincerity towards curtailing our own (weapons of mass destruction) technology,'' he told Reuters.
"Let's not compound this further.''
Bruce Campbell, from the Centre for Policy Alternatives, an Ottawa-based think tank, said that the Scud controversy was an example of "do as I say, not as I do.''
According to U.N. statistics for 1996-2001, the U.S. dominated the global arms bazaar, delivering 45 per cent of conventional weapons sales.
In 2000, the U.S. netted $14 billion (U.S.) in arms sales, double its closest competitors, Britain and Russia.
"It just seems as if they want to protect their territory from up-comers like North Korea,'' said Campbell. "It's a double standard. It's about proprietary rights rather than outrage about what's actually being sold.''
The view of the U.S. administration appears to be that "it's our God-given right to police the world, and never mind the contradictions,'' said Campbell.
U.S. policy is certainly awash in contradictions, agrees Steven Staples, arms and security expert for the policy group, Polaris, based in Ottawa.
"They are preparing to go to war with Iraq even though no substantive link has been found between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Meanwhile, North Korea admits it does have a weapons-of-mass-destruction program, and the U.S. isn't doing anything,'' he said.
"Furthermore, the U.S. has been arming the Middle East for decades. In fact, the United States helped arm Saddam himself,'' he said, referring to the 1980s when Saddam was a U.S. ally in the region and the Iran was considered the biggest threat. Many of Saddam's war crimes, now cited by Bush as reasons to go to war, were carried out during the days of friendly ties with Washington.
"The U.S. is in no position politically or ethically to bring peace to the region,'' said Staples. "My strongest hope is that the United Nations will hold out against the war. We are literally dangling by a thread between peace and war now, with the U.N. in the balance.''
Staples believes it will be a particularly difficult situation for Canada if the U.S. goes to war without U.N. support. That's because Canadian warships are already in the region as part of an international coalition under American leadership to enforce sanctions against Iraq.
"It's much trickier politically to actually pull your forces out, than to join a campaign,'' he said. "It will be very interesting to see what Ottawa will do (in those circumstances).''
At Washington's Center for Arms Control, analyst Eric Floden agreed that Washington has no business criticizing other countries for doing what it does.
"It's simple,'' he said. "The bottom line is that the U.S. doesn't want any country to buy weapons from anybody else, and it wants to dictate who can buy weapons and who can't.''
For example, Bush administration officials said Monday the U.S. will sell equipment to the military-backed government of Algeria to help combat Islamic militants. That makes Algeria just the most recent nation in a long list of countries who buy arms from the U.S., despite criticism from human rights groups.
Richard Sanders, co-ordinator of the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, says it's unfortunate that the irony of the U.S. position doesn't jump out at people.
"To us, it's mind-boggling,'' he said from Ottawa. "The U.S. sells the world's largest volume of weapons to more countries than anybody else, they have 1.5 million troops stationed around the world, they spend more than $500 billion (U.S.) a year on the military budget ... they just fought a war against Afghanistan and they are ready to bomb Iraq,'' he said. "I guess it's not the kind of irony you laugh at.''
Final comment must go to Toronto's Matthew Behrens.
"We find the situation very ironic, given that we went to jail,'' he said last night.
On Tuesday, Behrens, along with 25 anti-war protesters from Raging Grannies to a 7-year-old, showed up at the gates of Burlington's Wescam Inc. The company makes communications equipment with military applications, and is being purchased by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., a major supplier to the U.S. defence department.
The aim, according to Behrens, was to "conduct a citizens' weapons inspection of the facility,'' just as U.N. inspectors are inspecting installations in Iraq. It wasn't even a surprise visit, according to Behrens, whose organization, Homes Not Bombs, sent a letter to the company last week.
But when they showed up, police cruisers were on the site and Behrens and two colleagues were taken to the Halton Regional Police Station and charged with trespassing.
"While U.N, inspectors have enjoyed unfettered (and often unannounced) access to a host of suspected Iraqi weapons productions sites,'' the Canadian protestors ended their attempted inspection with a "free ride in handcuffs down to the local police station,'' said the group said yesterday in a statement.
"It was a clear indication of the hypocrisy that underscores the demands of nations which are armed (and arming) to the teeth that only one nation be disarmed.''
Behrens said the three accused plan to fight the charges in court.
----
9/11 Panel Criticizes Secrecy on Saudi Links
Two Leaders Urge Public Information
By Dana Priest and Susan Schmidt
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A20
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42670-2002Dec11?language=printer
Leaders of the congressional panel ending an investigation of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorism attacks yesterday accused the administration of refusing to declassify information about possible Saudi Arabian financial links to U.S.-based terrorists because the material would be embarrassing and would heighten political tensions with the desert kingdom.
In releasing the panel's final report on the intelligence agencies' performance before the attacks, Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, and Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the vice chairman, said the information on Saudi Arabia should be made public to inform the public about a continued source of support for anti-American terrorism groups. Doing so also would put more pressure on the U.S. government to force the Saudis to sever their financial links to charities and individuals who support terrorism, they said.
Citing "their people and a lot of their leaders and probably even the royal family," Shelby said: "I believe [the Saudis] cannot support so-called charities that support terrorism on a big scale, and then pretend that they're our friends or our allies.
"As we get into the money trail, it might be embarrassing, but the American people need to know; the victims and their families need to know," he added. Shelby and Graham said avoiding embarrassment and maintaining good relations with Saudi Arabia are not legitimate reasons to withhold information from the public.
"The question is," Graham said after the news conference, "will we get [the information declassified] in 30 years when the archives are open, or will we get it in time, before the next attack?"
U.S. officials have been trying to cut off funds for terrorist groups, some of which, they say, flow from wealthy Saudis through a network of Muslim charities. Senior administration officials, including President Bush, have publicly praised Saudi cooperation, although a number of authorities have privately criticized the Saudi effort as less than energetic. Last month, an interagency group working on the financing issue decided to recommend that the White House put more pressure on Riyadh, although the recommendation has not yet reached Bush's desk.
A CIA spokesman said the information Shelby and Graham cited is classified either because it involves an ongoing investigation or sources and methods that, if revealed, would harm future intelligence-gathering.
A spokesman for the Saudi Embassy said he did not know what information Graham and Shelby were referring to, but said Saudi officials have been aiding U.S. efforts to track terrorist financing. "We are going to cooperate fully with investigative authorities in this country," he said.
The panel convened in February to investigate how U.S. intelligence agencies handled information about the hijackers and their plot. It released 19 recommendations for improving the spy system -- most of which have been made public in recent days -- and 19 findings, most of which emerged during public hearings this fall. Many of the joint committee's findings remain classified; the panel is asking the CIA to declassify most of the rest.
The key recommendations include a proposal to create a Cabinet-level intelligence czar with budget control over all 13 U.S. intelligence agencies. CIA Director George J. Tenet, who is also director of central intelligence, is supposed to have that authority now. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, not Tenet, has control over about 80 percent of the intelligence budget, and the intelligence agencies have devolved into separate, often competing, fiefdoms.
The panel also strongly criticized the FBI for not adapting rapidly after the terrorism attacks into a domestic intelligence bureau and said the government should study the creation of a domestic spying agency.
The panel said the CIA lacked an effective system for holding its officials accountable for their actions, and recommended that inspectors general at each agency further investigate allegations of improper judgment and unsatisfactory performance by a number of individuals responsible for monitoring and disrupting terrorism worldwide.
In a separate statement, Shelby, the panel's most outspoken member, named six top officials he said had "failed in significant ways to ensure that this country was as prepared as it could have been. He singled out Tenet; Tenet's predecessor, John M. Deutch; former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh; National Security Agency Director Michael Hayden; Hayden's predecessor, Lt. Gen. Kenneth Minihan; and former Deputy Director Barbara McNamara.
On the issue of Saudi Arabia, the panel recommended that the FBI and CIA "aggressively address the possibility that foreign governments are providing support to or are involved in terrorist activity targeting the United States and U.S. interests."
The furor over Saudi funding for terrorism peaked last month with reports that Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and his wife made charitable contributions to San Diego associates of two of the Sept. 11 terrorists. The two men helped hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi with introductions to the Muslim community when they arrived in San Diego in 2000.
Saudi Embassy officials have said that neither Bandar nor his wife knew the men, and that they make many charitable contributions to needy Saudis living in this country. There is no evidence any of the money made it into the hands of the hijackers, the officials said.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Ivory Coast Army Admits Role in a Mass Killing
December 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/africa/12IVOR.html
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Dec. 11 - The army acknowledged today that scores of people in a mass grave in the west of the country were killed by government troops, but said they were rebels who died in fighting rather than civilians.
"These are rebels who were killed during mopping-up operations," said Jules Yao Yao, an army spokesman. "Normally we would clear the area and collect bodies. But in that particular case we did not have time. We were dealing with several fronts."
The rebel Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast has said the grave which was discovered last week in Monoko-Zohi, 45 miles northwest of the loyalist-held cocoa town Daloa, contained the bodies of 120 civilians - mostly foreign immigrants - killed by Ivoirian troops after a raid in the rebel-held area.
Foreign news media have quoted residents of the village as supporting the rebels' version.
But Mr. Yao Yao said the rebels had set up the mass grave to tarnish the government's image.
The Ivoirian government has previously denied any responsibility for the killings and said it was ready for an international inquiry.
Government officials initially said loyalist troops had not been to Monoko-Zohi, near an area where a helicopter bombarded rebel positions on Nov. 27 after President Laurent Gbagbo's forces accused them of breaking a cease-fire.
The patriotic movement, the main rebel faction, which started the war with a failed coup on Sept. 19, has threatened to pull out of peace talks if West African mediators do not condemn the killings in strong enough terms.
The rebel group said in a statement today that it had information about another mass grave in a cemetery in the capital, Yamoussoukro. It did not give any more details.
The government has accused the rebels of summary executions and says there is a mass grave in the rebel-held stronghold of Bouaké, Ivory Coast's second biggest city, containing Ivoirian gendarmes killed by the dissidents.
-------- arms sales
U.N. team to shield Iraq's arms suppliers
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021212-45090058.htm
U.N. arms inspectors will not disclose the identities of foreign suppliers to Iraq's weapons programs, but past arms transfers have been sent from a range of companies in Russia and in China, as well as in Europe and the United States.
U.S. officials familiar with the report said that it consists mainly of declarations made to the United Nations in the years leading up to 1998, when inspectors were blocked from returning after a U.S. bombing raid.
According to the private Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, Iraq's suppliers of goods related to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and missiles include European, Asian and South American companies, as well as U.S. firms.
The project has documented hundreds of public sales of equipment and material in the years before the 1991 Persian Gulf war as well as during the 1991 to 1998 period when dual-use and military equipment was banned.
Among the main suppliers in the past were German companies that provided Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's military with nuclear and missile technology.
Swiss firms also have sent Iraq missile-fuel production equipment and nuclear-related equipment, and one Italian company provided a plutonium-extraction laboratory.
France assisted Iraq with its Osirak nuclear reactor, which was bombed by Israeli warplanes, and Brazil helped with equipment related to missiles and nuclear arms.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which is working with Hans Blix's U.N. weapons inspectors, also documented nuclear-arms equipment it found in Iraq after the 1991 war.
The goods included 60 machines that shape metal into centrifuge parts that were produced by the German companies Dorries, H&H Metalform, Kieserling & Albrecht, Leifeld and Magdeburg, Britain's Matrix Churchill and the Swiss company Schaublin.
U.S. and German companies were found to have provided mass spectrometers, which monitor bomb-fuel production, and Sweden's Metallextraktion AB had sold plutonium-extraction equipment.
A Japanese NEC mainframe computer was found in Iraq that was to be used in processing nuclear-bomb codes, and French company Sciaky had supplied a special welder used to make centrifuges.
The Wisconsin Project also has documented sales to Iraq of equipment used by the Iraqi Atomic Energy Commission, which was in charge of Iraq's nuclear-arms program.
The commission was found to have used Hewlett-Packard computers for electronic testing and calibration. Other computer makers that were found to have helped Iraq's missile program included the Data General Corp. and Honeywell.
Mr. Blix said on Monday that the names of foreign companies will be edited out of the Iraqi arms declaration before it is sent to the Security Council on Monday.
Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, which Mr. Blix heads, said the policy of not disclosing companies "is designed to protect our sources."
Mr. Buchanan said that in the past some company names have been left in U.N. reports by accident, but most are taken out.
The U.N. oil-for-food program also has been a major source of financing for Iraqi weapons-related goods. The program is supposed to permit Iraq to buy humanitarian goods but among the thousands of purchases have been militarily useful goods, including special powder that can be used to make chemical weapons more difficult to counter.
The United States also assisted Iraq with its biological-arms program. In 1986, the Commerce Department permitted the sale from a U.S. company of fungal cultures that were used by Iraq to make aflatoxin.
Also, in 1985, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a shipment of West Nile fever virus to an Iraqi researcher.
Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project, said he believes it is a mistake for the United Nations to withhold the names of Iraq's foreign suppliers.
"If they want to make exceptions for some companies that would be useful in investigations, that's fine," he said. "But to say you're not going to release any company names is not responsible, because the best way to deter these companies is reveal who they are."
According to Mr. Milhollin, U.N. weapons inspectors had compiled a series of confidential reports on the foreign-supply network used by Iraq.
"What they recount is an ongoing effort to build weapons of mass destruction," said Mr. Milhollin, who has seen the reports.
Some 20 different countries had helped Iraq evade sanctions in rearming since 1991, he said.
----
Reluctant U.S. Gives Assent for Missiles to Go to Yemen
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER and THOM SHANKER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/middleeast/12SCUD.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - President Bush reluctantly ordered the Navy today to release a North Korean ship bound for Yemen with 15 Scud missiles, after Yemen's president told Vice President Dick Cheney in a tense telephone call that the United States had no right to seize weapons he had legally bought, officials said.
Administration officials conceded that the release of the unmarked ship and the missiles brought an embarrassing diplomatic end to an otherwise successful military interdiction of North Korean missiles. By coincidence, it came on the day the administration sent Congress a new strategy for countering weapons of mass destruction that advocates American interdiction of weapons thought to be a threat.
The ship was stopped by two Spanish warships on Monday, and the missiles, discovered hidden beneath sacks of cement, were catalogued and secured by American explosives experts. The freighter was turned over to the United States Navy.
But early this afternoon, the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer, told reporters that "we have looked at this matter thoroughly, and there is no provision under international law prohibiting Yemen from accepting delivery of missiles from North Korea."
That decision was particularly painful to the White House, officials acknowledged privately, because American intelligence agencies believe that North Korea uses the hard currency from sales of its Scud and Nodong missiles to pay for both its missile program and its effort to develop nuclear weapons.
The decision came after Mr. Cheney tried to persuade President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen to give up delivery of the battlefield-range missiles, the same kind Yemen has bought from North Korea before.
Mr. Cheney then consulted with Mr. Bush, and afterward the Yemeni leader - who also spoke today with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell - was told that he could have the ship's contents. Administration officials said Mr. Saleh had agreed to keep control of the missiles and not pass them on to either Iraq or terrorist groups. The State Department spokesman, Richard A. Boucher, also said Secretary Powell had received assurances from Mr. Saleh that no more Scuds would be bought from North Korea.
Mr. Cheney's involvement underscored the sensitivity of the diplomatic task. He and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have been outspoken about the need to cut off North Korea's sources of income and highly critical of its sale of weapons to other countries. But administration officials acknowledged that it was impossible not to yield to Yemen's request for the missiles because of its strategic location and its cooperation in the American fight against Al Qaeda.
To that end, Yemen has gone so far as to let the Central Intelligence Agency operate pilotless Predator drone aircraft over its territory. A Predator fired a Hellfire antitank missile in Yemen last month, killing six suspected Qaeda operatives. Officials said a senior leader of Al Qaeda, Qaed Salim Sinan al-Harethi, was among the dead.
"I suppose we could have seized the ship for a while and delayed the delivery," one senior administration official said tonight. "But what purpose would it have served? Why anger the Yemenis if we ultimately were going to have to turn it over?"
There was little doubt that maritime law allowed the initial, temporary seizure of the freighter. American and Spanish officials said it was sailing without a flag and had its identification markings obscured by paint, rendering it a lawless, stateless vessel comparable to a pirate ship.
Neither North Korea nor Yemen has signed the Missile Technology Control Regime, which seeks to limit the spread of missiles capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction. The sale of Scuds, therefore, was not illegal. But the ship's anonymity and hidden missile cargo indicated that at the least, North Korea sought to avoid discovery.
"I think most people would see this as a clear indication that there was no interest on the part of North Korea in being upfront about what it was doing," said one Pentagon official. "Why else would they have hid the cargo, filed an improper manifest, and told the captain to give false stories about where he was going? North Korea was not trying to do this in an overt way."
As of tonight, North Korea had no official comment on the incident.
In August, the North was penalized by the United States for a similar sale to Yemen; that time it was Scud missile components. The penalties, which singled out the North's work on missile technology, were largely symbolic, because the United States had already severed any economic ties.
Today's situation mirrored one last month, involving Pakistan's purchase of missile parts from North Korea. In that case, too, American intelligence tracked the transaction but was unable to stop it or dissuade Pakistan, which has been a critical ally in the American military campaign in Afghanistan.
Asked today whether the United States had thought Iraq - which has no history of buying from North Korea - was the intended recipient of the missiles, American officials said it had been considered a possibility.
If Iraq had been the buyer, not only would confiscating the shipment have been legal under United Nations resolutions, but Iraq would also have been in material breach of those resolutions. The missiles would have given the United States grounds for war.
Today, Mr. Fleischer called the effort against the freighter "a very successful coalition interdiction."
But that was apparently cold comfort to Mr. Bush, whom a senior official described as "a very, very unhappy man" after deciding to send the ship on its way to Yemen.
Veterans of the Clinton administration, described by Mr. Bush and his aides during the presidential campaign as being too soft on North Korea, said they were stunned by the decision to release the cargo.
"The administration's actions in this case were confused and contradictory," said Robert Einhorn, who led the nonproliferation efforts in the State Department under Mr. Clinton.
"They must have known the nature of the cargo and the destination from the beginning," he said. "They should have determined at the outset whether they were ready to see it through. Now, having reversed themselves, how can they go to other countries and try to discourage them from purchasing North Korean missiles?"
Mr. Bush's decision also brought sharp criticism late today from Rep. Edward J. Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is co-chairman of the Bipartisan Congressional Task Force on Non-Proliferation.
"The Bush administration, in its focus on disarming Iraq, appears to be ignoring other potential threats to our security," he said. "Before it let the North Korean vessel go, it should have demanded a full and complete investigation of the circumstances surrounding this entire incident."
Mr. Rumsfeld, touring the Horn of Africa this week, expressed his irritation today at North Korean officials.
"They continue to be the single largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology on the face of the Earth, and they are putting into the hands of many countries the technologies and capabilities which have the potential for killing hundreds of thousands of people," Mr. Rumsfeld told reporters in Djibouti.
In Madrid today, the Spanish defense minister, Federico Trillo, gave new details of how two of its warships hailed, halted and boarded the cargo ship.
Mr. Trillo said the Spanish frigate Navarra fired three bursts of warning shots at the cargo vessel, which was believed to have been registered previously in Cambodia and named So San, after it tried to evade the warship. "There was no option but to board the vessel," he said.
Spanish snipers shot out metal cables crisscrossing the deck to allow a helicopter to hover overhead while seven armed marines were lowered down to the freighter. The freighter's crew offered no resistance. A second Spanish team then came aboard.
A search of the ship, which had last docked in China, turned up "15 complete Scud missiles, with 15 conventional, high-explosive warheads and 23 tanks of nitric acid," Mr. Trillo said. Eighty-five barrels of chemicals were also on board; they are still being identified.
-------- biological weapons
U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis
Analysts: Chemical May Be VX, And Was Smuggled Via Turkey
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42876-2002Dec11?language=printer
The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. They said government analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey.
If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq. If advanced publicly by the White House, the report could be used to rebut Iraq's assertion in a 12,000-page declaration Saturday that it had destroyed its entire stock of chemical weapons.
On the central question whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein knew about or authorized such a transaction, U.S. analysts are said to have no evidence. Because Hussein's handpicked Special Security Organization, run by his son Qusay, has long exerted tight control over concealed weapons programs, officials said they presume it would be difficult to transfer a chemical agent without the president's knowledge.
Knowledgeable officials, speaking without White House permission, said information about the transfer came from a sensitive and credible source whom they declined to discuss. Among the hundreds of leads in the Threat Matrix, a daily compilation by the CIA, this one has drawn the kind of attention reserved for a much smaller number.
"The way we gleaned the information makes us feel confident it is accurate," said one official whose responsibilities are directly involved with the report. "I throw about 99 percent of the spot reports away when I look at them. I didn't throw this one away."
Like most intelligence, the reported chemical weapon transfer is not backed by definitive evidence. The intended target is unknown, with U.S. speculation focusing on Europe and the United States.
At a time when President Bush is eager to make a public case linking Iraq to the United States's principal terrorist enemy, authorized national security spokesmen declined to discuss the substance of their information about the transfer of lethal chemicals. Those who disclosed it have no policymaking responsibilities on Iraq and expressed no strong views on whether the United States should go to war there.
Even authorized spokesmen, with one exception, addressed the report on the condition of anonymity. They said the principal source on the chemical transfer was uncorroborated, and that indications it involved a nerve agent were open to interpretation.
"We are concerned because of al Qaeda's interest in obtaining and using weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, and we continue to seek evidence and intelligence information with regards to their planning activity," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. Johndroe was the only official authorized by the White House to discuss the matter on the record.
"Have they obtained chemical weapons?" Johndroe said. "I do not have any hard, concrete evidence that they have." Pressed on whether the information referred to a nerve agent, Johndroe said "there is no specific intelligence that limits al Qaeda's interest to one particular chemical or biological weapon over the other."
One official who spoke without permission said a sign of the government's concern is its "ramping up opportunities to collect more, to figure out what would be the routes, where would they be taking the material, how would they deploy it, how are they transporting it, what are the personnel?" The official added: "We're not just sitting back and waiting for something to happen."
A Defense Department official, who said he had seen only the one-line summary version of the chemical weapon report, speculated that it might be connected to a message distributed last week to U.S. armed forces overseas. An official elsewhere said the message resulted only from an analyst's hypothetical concern.
Prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, last week's "Turkey Defense Terrorism Threat Awareness Message" warned of a possible chemical weapons attack by al Qaeda on the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey. Incirlik is an important NATO facility from which a U.S.-led coalition in 1991 launched thousands of bombing runs to force Iraq to withdraw its army from Kuwait. Turkey has given conditional agreement to its use in the event of a new war with Iraq.
According to two officials, a second related threat report was distributed in Washington this week. The CIA message, transmitted before the daily 3 a.m. compilation of the Threat Matrix, described a European ally's warning that the United States might face a chemical attack in a big-city subway if war breaks out with Iraq. A U.S. government spokesman said the European ally offered little evidence and "the credibility of the report has not been determined."
Among the uncertainties about the suspected weapon transfer in Iraq is the precise relationship of the Islamic operatives to the al Qaeda network. One official said the transaction involved Asbat al-Ansar, a Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group that recently established an enclave in northern Iraq. Asbat al-Ansar is affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and receives funding from it, but officials said they did not know whether its pursuit of chemical weapons was specifically on al Qaeda's behalf.
The government is also uncertain whether the transaction involved a chemical agent alone or an agent in what is known as a weaponized form -- incorporated into a delivery system such as a rocket or a bomb. The latter would be a more efficient killer, but chemical weapons are deadly in either form. Among the reasons for suspecting VX was involved is that it is the most portable of Iraq's chemical weapons, capable of inflicting mass casualties in a quantity that a single courier could transport.
After initial denials, Iraq admitted in the 1990s that it had manufactured tons of VX and two less sophisticated nerve agents, Sarin and Tabun. Its remaining chemical arsenal was limited to blister agents, such as mustard gas, that date back to World War I.
First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and respiratory failure. The United States, a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in November 2000.
U.S. military forces, hazardous materials teams and some ambulance systems carry emergency antidotes. They usually come in autoinjectors containing atropine and an oxime -- drugs that reverse the neuromuscular blockade of a nerve agent. Atropine-like drugs have other uses, such as in anesthesia and in treating cardiac arrest, and are often stocked in hospitals.
During inspections by the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, in the 1990s, Iraq denied producing any chemical weapon other than mustard gas. Faced with contrary evidence, it eventually acknowledged the manufacture of 3.9 tons of VX and 3,859 tons in all of lethal chemicals. The Baghdad government also admitted filling more than 10,000 bombs, rockets and missile warheads with Sarin. It denied having done so with its most potent agent, VX, but an international commission of experts assembled by UNSCOM said the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.
UNSCOM said in its final report, in January 1999, that it could not account for 1.5 tons of the VX known to have been produced in Iraq, and that it could not establish whether additional quantities had been made.
The U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq in April 1991 to relinquish all capabilities to make biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as well as long-range missiles. The declared basis for the present threat of war is the U.S. view, shared by the Clinton and Bush administrations, that the Baghdad government never came close to complying.
In 1998, the Clinton administration asserted that Iraq provided technical assistance in the construction of a VX production facility in Sudan, undertaken jointly with al Qaeda. In retaliation for al Qaeda's August 1998 truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, President Bill Clinton ordered the destruction of the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.
Clinton's advisers released scant public evidence about al Shifa, and the Tomahawk missile attack was widely regarded as a blunder. Top Clinton administration officials, and career analysts still in government, maintain there was strong evidence behind the strike but that it remains too valuable to disclose. During last year's New York trial of the embassy bombers, prosecution witness Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a onetime operative who broke with al Qaeda, offered limited corroboration. He named al Qaeda and Sudanese operatives who had told him they were working together to build a chemical weapons plant in Khartoum. He said nothing about Iraqi support for the project and named a site near, but not in, the al Shifa plant.
Only once has a chemical weapon been used successfully in a terrorist attack. During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains pulled in.
In all, the Sarin contaminated 15 stations of the world's busiest subway system, putting 1,000 riders in the hospital and killing 12 of them. Though the attack spread great terror in Japan, it took fewer lives than its authors expected because the Sarin reached many victims in a form that was not sufficiently concentrated.
"Psychologically, use of nerve agent in the United States would send people over the deep end, but it probably wouldn't kill very many people," said an official whose responsibilities have included the assessment and disruption of the threat.
Others said the panic induced could have serious economic consequences, rendering many Americans unwilling to enter a facility of the sort that had suffered a chemical attack.
In general, al Qaeda's pursuit of chemical and biological weapons is well known to U.S. intelligence. A central player in the effort has been Midhat al Mursi, an Egyptian who is among the most-wanted al Qaeda operatives but who remains at large. He ran a development and testing facility for lethal chemicals in a camp -- in Derunta, Afghanistan -- that was eventually renamed "Abu Kebab" after Mursi's nom de guerre.
The Derunta operation is not thought to have progressed beyond unsophisticated poisons, including the cyanide used in videotaped experiments on dogs. Unconsummated plots by al Qaeda and its allies in Jordan just before the turn of the millennium, and in Britain last month, also involved cyanide.
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500,000 GIs must get smallpox shot
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021212-14754043.htm
President Bush will mandate smallpox vaccinations for up to a half-million military personnel and make the vaccine available to all Americans on a voluntary basis to guard against a bioterrorist attack, senior administration officials said yesterday.
The first step will be the military vaccinations and a plan to offer the vaccine to emergency medical workers and response teams within weeks, the officials said.
The public will be offered the vaccine as soon as large stockpiles are licensed, probably in early 2004. Mr. Bush will announce his plan tomorrow.
Smallpox was declared eradicated from nature in 1980, but intelligence analysts believe at least four nations, including Iraq, have unauthorized stocks of the virus. Analysts fear that it could be used by hostile nations or terrorist groups in an attack.
Mr. Bush, who struggled with the decision for months, had to weigh the dangers of the disease against the risks associated with the vaccination, which uses a weakened version of the deadly virus.
He talked about the broad outlines of his plan yesterday on ABC's "World News Tonight."
"I think it ought to be voluntary," Mr. Bush said of the civilian part of the plan. "It's going to be very important for us to make sure there's ample information for people to make a wise decision."
First lady Laura Bush, asked whether she would want her 21-year-old twin daughters inoculated against smallpox, replied: "If the vaccine were available, which I think it will be, I would feel like that was certainly safe for them to do. I know there's a slight risk."
Mr. Bush is expected to recommend smallpox vaccinations for about 500,000 emergency workers and smallpox-response teams that would investigate suspected cases. The White House officials said a similar number of military personnel would be ordered to get the shots.
The vaccine will be made available to all Americans, though the government probably will not encourage them to get it, senior officials said.
Based on studies from the 1960s, medical officials estimate that 15 of every 1 million people vaccinated for the first time will face life-threatening complications, and one or two will die. Reactions are less common for those being revaccinated.
Using these data, vaccinating the nation could lead to nearly 3,000 life-threatening complications and at least 170 deaths. But the administration concluded that the government could not make it available only to some people.
Federal health officials are preparing a massive education effort to help people decide whether to be vaccinated. Polls, including one released yesterday, show most people would get the vaccine if given the chance. But health officials fear that many people do not adequately understand the risks.
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Smallpox Shots Will Start Soon Under Bush Plan
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON with LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/politics/12VACC.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - President Bush intends to announce a plan on Friday to start vaccinating military personnel, health care and emergency workers against smallpox within weeks, and to offer immunization to the public on a voluntary basis starting in 2004, administration officials said tonight.
The announcement comes after months of debate within the administration over how to respond to the threat that terrorists or hostile governments might use the smallpox virus on the battlefield or against civilians in the United States.
Mr. Bush had to weigh the relative risks of vaccination, which can cause serious side effects and even death in rare cases, against the possibility that the disease, once one of the world's great scourges, could be deliberately spread through large populations.
Administration officials described the plan after ABC News broadcast excerpts from an interview with Mr. Bush in which he said he would eventually offer all Americans a chance to be vaccinated.
"I think it ought to be a voluntary plan," Mr. Bush told Barbara Walters in the interview, which will be broadcast on the program "20/20." "In other words, I don't think people ought to be compelled to make the decision which they think is best for their family. And what's going to be very important is for us to make sure that there's ample information for people to make a wise decision."
Government officials have estimated that about 500,000 military personnel and 500,000 civilians - mostly health care and emergency workers who would be most likely to be exposed to someone who had contracted smallpox - would be covered by the plan's initial phases.
Eventually as many as 10 million people involved in law enforcement, health care and emergency response could be offered the vaccine, administration officials said.
Administration officials said they expected the Pentagon to order the military to vaccinate within weeks. They said that the vaccinations of health care and emergency workers would be carried out under plans submitted by each state to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and that they were likely to start around the first of the year.
The officials said it would be 2004 before there would be enough of a newly manufactured vaccine to offer it to the public.
A critical decision remaining to be made is whether the vaccine could be offered to the public sooner, before licensing, on an experimental basis. Polls show a majority of the public is willing to be vaccinated.
"The question is what do you do about John Q. Public between now and when licensed vaccine is widely available?" a person familiar with the deliberations said tonight. "That's what the president hasn't decided."
The vaccine could simply be kept from the public until it is licensed. Another option would be to let people apply for the vaccine under the "investigational new drug" rules of the Food and Drug Administration. Under those rules, people who make a compelling case that they need experimental medicines can be given permission to take them by the F.D.A. But the process is cumbersome.
Existing stockpiles of the vaccine, which are decades old and much of which is not currently licensed by the government, will be used for the first phases of vaccination. In case of an attack, there is enough old vaccine to inoculate all Americans, administration officials said.
Smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, and there have been no routine vaccinations in the United States since 1972. In recent years, however, the United States has come to fear that smallpox could be a potent biological weapon, and officials have identified several nations, including Russia, Iraq and North Korea, as possibly having hidden stocks.
The administration began debating whether to offer vaccines again after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks last year. But the vaccine is made from a live virus, and in some cases can cause fatal complications, especially among people with immune deficiencies.
In the interview with ABC, Laura Bush, the first lady, was asked whether she would want her twin 21-year-old daughters vaccinated.
"If the vaccine were available, which I think it will be, I would feel like that was certainly safe for them to do," Mrs. Bush said. "All of us were. I know there's a slight risk. That's what people will weigh when they make the decision whether or not to have their children vaccinated."
Throughout the debate over whether to vaccinate, decisions have been closely held by the White House. Top federal health officials said in October that they favored a plan like the one the president will announce on Friday and for months they have said his decision was imminent. But Mr. Bush's remarks to Ms. Walters appeared to catch top government health officials by surprise.
Tonight, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the director of the disease control centers, said, "We have no confirmation of the policy decision yet."
The C.D.C. is the federal agency responsible for monitoring diseases like smallpox and overseeing the states' plans to vaccinate health care workers.
"At this time, C.D.C. is not anticipating that any immunizations of health care workers will be given until January," Dr. Gerberding said in a telephone interview.
Meanwhile, she said, the agency is evaluating the plans for immunizing health care workers that the states and large cities were supposed to file by Dec. 9.
"We have almost all the states' plans and we are very pleased with the preliminary evaluation of them," Dr. Gerberding said.
The plans call for vaccinating "from 400,000 to 500,000 health care workers," which is in keeping with earlier federal estimates, she said.
The vaccine that will be given first to military personnel and then to the health care workers is the same one that has been stored since 1972. It is also the same one used to eradicate smallpox in a worldwide campaign that ended in 1980.
Since then, the vaccine has been given only to a few thousand qualified scientists who work with the smallpox virus and the vaccine, which is made from a closely related live virus, under top security precautions in approved laboratories.
After eradication, the former Soviet Union and the United States were allowed to keep stores of the smallpox virus for research, one in Russia and one at the disease control agency in Atlanta. Original plans called for destroying the stores of the virus, but they have been deferred, largely because of disclosures that the former Soviet Union secretly weaponized smallpox virus.
Another aim of eradicating smallpox was to end permanently the need for smallpox vaccinations.
Smallpox vaccine is the most dangerous human immunization. Before the United States stopped routine smallpox vaccinations, life-threatening complications occurred at a rate of 15 per million among those who received their first smallpox vaccination, and the number included about one to two deaths.
Those at risk for such complications include people whose immune system has been weakened by cancer, AIDS or other diseases. The risk also includes two common skin conditions, eczema and atopic dermatitis. These conditions could disqualify as many as 50 million Americans.
Smallpox vaccine contains a live virus that can be transmitted to other people, in effect involuntarily vaccinating them and putting some at risk of complications.
Immunizing 500,000 health care workers will present huge logistical challenges.
Most doctors now in practice have had no experience with making the 15 scratches used in administering the vaccine to the skin, and relatively few have treated, or seen, the complications that can occur.
Sore arms, fever and swollen lymph nodes are common after a vaccination. Doctors must take care in examining vaccine recipients to ensure that their reactions are the expected ones that require no treatment, not secondary infections that may require antibiotics.
Many health workers who are vaccinated may take sick time and stay out of work because of the reactions. So policy makers have urged hospitals to schedule their vaccinations in stages to avoid sudden widespread absenteeism in emergency rooms, particularly if an outbreak of influenza occurred.
Screening potential recipients for medical conditions that could disqualify them will be another logistical problem. For example, more than 300,000 Americans are believed to be infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, but do not know it. H.I.V. tests are voluntary and findings are confidential.
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Iraq Denies Giving al - Qaida Nerve Agent
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Nerve-Gas.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- A senior Iraqi general dismissed as ``ridiculous'' a published report Thursday that Iraq may have provided nerve gas to Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaida.
``This is really a ridiculous assumption from the American administration,'' Lt. Gen. Hossam Mohammed Amin told a news conference. ``They know very well we have no prohibited substances.''
Amin, the chief Iraqi liaison officer who deals with U.N. inspectors, was commenting on a report in The Washington Post that members of the al-Qaida-affiliated Asbat al-Ansar may have obtained VX nerve agents in Iraq and smuggled them out through Turkey.
``We're used to hearing such reports from the enemies of Iraq, from the intelligence services of the CIA, Britain and Mossad,'' he said, referring to the Israeli intelligence service.
A senior Bush administration official, commenting on the Post report, told The Associated Press that U.S. intelligence had uncorroborated information that Islamic extremists with ties to al-Qaida may have received a poisonous substance.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the United States does not know whether the material was nerve gas or whether the extremists are linked to Saddam's government.
In Qatar, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the possibility that Iraq may have provided such materials to Islamic extremists ``should come as no surprise to anybody.''
Rumsfeld told ABC's ``Good Morning America'' he had not seen the article, but ``I have seen other information over a period of time that suggests that could be happening.'' He said it has been know for many months, ``probably years that the terrorist states have chemical weapons and have relationships with al-Qaida and that al-Qaida is trying to get such weapons.''
Amin said Iraq was pleased with the course of U.N. inspections that began last month after a four-year break. The inspections are to verify Iraqi claims that it no longer holds weapons of mass destruction, despite U.S. and British claims to the contrary.
``We are satisfied,'' Amin said. ``The teams have proved to be professional. ... We also appreciate the professionalism and nature of the inspections. We have not witnessed any trivial questions as in the past.''
He was referring to friction between Iraq and the previous U.N. teams that led to the collapse of the U.N. inspection program in 1998.
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Explosion in the Homeland Security Field
By Judy Sarasohn
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Washington Post; Page A43
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43110-2002Dec11?language=printer
PoliticalMoneyLine, the Web site of FECInfo and tray.com, noted a couple of weeks ago that "as the new Department of Homeland Security gets set up, there are already Washington lobbyists vying for security and a home." More than 444 lobby registrations, it said, describe their interest with the term "terror" or "security."
"It's growing fast," PoliticalMoneyLine's Kent Cooper said yesterday.
A number of law firms and lobby shops have already organized homeland security practices to focus their efforts and attract clients. Some associations and companies have also hired or named personnel with homeland security briefs.
What follows is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are a few of the organizations with practices focusing on homeland security or have hired new folks with the specialty:
Powell Goldstein Frazer & Murphy has pulled together a homeland security practice of about 50 lawyers. "This is a huge practical problem for the country. We're Washington lawyers; we ought to be able to figure it out," said Bruce Shirk, co-chairman of the practice. "Our clients want to know what we know about it."
McKenna Long & Aldridge, which has the oldest and largest government contracts practice around, has organized a homeland security practice of about 40. The leaders are Raymond B. Biagini, Frank M. Rapoport and Frederic Levy.
Venable's homeland security practice includes Michael Ferrell and John Pavlick, the co-chairmen; James Burnley IV, former secretary of the Department of Transportation; Daniel Lungren, former Republican member of the House from California; and Bill Cook, former general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Rhoads/Weber Shandwick has brought on John H. Lugar as a senior consultant, focusing on homeland security and international client development. Lugar co-founded WestSphere Equity Investors and was a senior associate at Robinson, Lake/Sawyer Miller Group.
Tom Worrall, head of the homeland security practice at the government relations boutique, said Lugar is not expected to lobby. "The concept of having professional help in navigating the government is not a new concept," Worrall said. "It was important before 9/11."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently hired Kim Dougherty, a retired Air Force colonel, to be its new vice president of national security. Dougherty, who most recently served as a principal deputy assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says she won't be lobbying but instead will act as liaison for the chamber and business with the Homeland Security Department and other agencies.
Microsoft Corp. snagged Thomas Richey, a former commander in the Coast Guard and more recently a senior policy adviser to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), to be its director of homeland security. He, too, does not plan to be lobbying for Microsoft but will be helping to develop the company's role in the government's homeland security efforts.
Fleishman-Hillard says it has "launched" its new homeland security practice under retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, former director of the White House Office of Drug Control Policy in the Clinton administration and former commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces Southern Command.
-------- colombia
Colombia Defuses 5 Bombs
World In Brief
Reuters
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Washington Post; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43031-2002Dec11?language=printer
BOGOTA -- Colombian authorities said they had narrowly thwarted a devastating rebel attack on the nation's capital yesterday, defusing five powerful, remote-controlled car bombs capable of punching holes in city blocks.
"We have averted an unprecedented terror attack against Bogota," Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez said. "These five car bombs could have done unimaginable damage."
The announcement, accompanied by pleas for citizens to keep alert, came as President Alvaro Uribe was briefly moved to an army barracks because of an unconfirmed plan by Marxist rebels to assassinate him during a trip to the city of Medellin.
The cars were each packed with at least 550 pounds of explosives and rigged with remote controls allowing the bombers to guide the vehicles to their designated targets, which police said included their barracks and a bus station.
Police also arrested six people in raids throughout Bogota over the past two days, some of whom offered details on the planned bombing campaign during interrogation.
Authorities said the car bombs were part of an urban offensive by the 17,000-member Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC. The rebels were blamed for a smaller car bomb that ripped through supermarket parking lots in Bogota on Monday, injuring more than 60 people.
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Explosion of European Rocket Threatens Program
Reuters
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A42
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42576-2002Dec11?language=printer
KOUROU, French Guiana, Dec. 11 -- The delayed launch of the first upgraded European Ariane 5 rocket ended in disaster today when it exploded soon after liftoff from French Guiana, sending two satellites plunging into the Atlantic Ocean.
The explosion was the fourth failure of an Ariane 5 rocket in its 14-mission history. The failure could halt Ariane 5 flights indefinitely.
Arianespace's chief executive, Jean-Yves Le Gall, said the rocket stopped functioning three minutes after launch.
"At this stage it is too early to give precise reasons for this failure," he said.
The rocket was carrying a Hot Bird 7 satellite owned by the Paris-based operator Eutelsat. It had an estimated value of $250 million.
The second satellite, Stentor, was an experimental project worth $385 million. It was developed by the French space agency CNES, France Telecom and the French defense procurement agency.
Europe suffered another space disaster last month when a Russian Proton rocket failed to put a European communications satellite into its proper orbit.
The French-made Astra 1K, the world's biggest communications satellite, was boosted out of its incorrect orbit and plunged into the southern Pacific Ocean this week.
-------- iraq
U.S. Approved Sale of Atropine
Iraq Imported Millions of Doses Of Antidote for Nerve Agents
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42783-2002Dec11?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 11 -- With U.S. approval, Iraq imported more than 3.5 million vials of the drug atropine over the past five years, despite concerns that it could be used to inoculate Iraqi soldiers participating in chemical warfare, according to U.N. sources and confidential U.N. documents.
Between late 1997 and November 2001, French, Russian and Italian companies signed at least five contracts through the U.N. oil-for-food program to sell Iraq more than 3.5 million ampuls of the nerve agent antidote, which is also used to treat heart attacks. More than 2 million units of the drug have already been delivered to Baghdad, U.N. sources said. The rest is awaiting delivery.
The disclosure comes as the United States is struggling to convince the U.N. Security Council to place new restrictions on the sale of the drug because of Pentagon concerns that the Iraqi army may use the drug to protect its soldiers if it mounts a chemical attack against U.S. troops.
On Tuesday, John R. Bolton, undersecretary of State for arms control and international security, listed atropine and the antibiotic ciprofloxacin (also known as Cipro), among 36 categories of items that should be subject to U.N. Security Council scrutiny before they can be shipped to Iraq. In 1999, a Jordanian firm, Arab Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Co. Ltd., sold Iraq an unknown quantity of Cipro, a broad spectrum antibiotic that is used to treat exposure to anthrax and a host of other infections, according to U.N. documents.
Until May, the United States had the right to prohibit or monitor sales of atropine to Iraq but rarely exercised it. The United States relinquished its authority as part of a council agreement to ease restrictions on the import of civilian goods into Iraq.
The Pentagon became alarmed about the potential military uses of atropine after discovering that Turkey had been approached by Iraq to supply it with massive quantities of atropine and auto-injectors, which are designed to treat victims of pesticide or nerve agent poisoning. A senior Turkish official said that Ankara is investigating the report, which was first disclosed in the New York Times. Until now, however, it was not known that Iraq had succeeded in buying supplies of atropine or that they were obtained through the U.N.-sanctioned oil-for-food program.
U.N. officials said the quantities of atropine purchased by Iraq were consistent with dosages used for medical purposes. More than 3.4 million vials, the vast majority, contained 0.6-milligram doses of atropine sulfate, an amount typically used to speed up the heart rate of heart attack victims.
Chemical warfare experts said a dose of 2 milligrams is typically administered to victims of nerve agents or pesticide poisoning. On the battlefield, they said, the drug would probably be administered with auto-injectors. U.N. officials said Iraq has never imported auto-injectors through the oil-for-food program, which permits Iraq to sell oil in exchange for food, medicine and humanitarian goods.
"The advantage of an auto-injector is that somebody can give one to himself, he can give it to his buddy right there. It doesn't require medical care," said Frederick R. Sidell, a retired U.S. Army expert on chemical warfare. But Sidell said that the lower doses used for heart treatment could be easily converted to military uses if administered with a common needle and syringe. "You just give three times as much. For any casualty who is mildly exposed it might be enough."
The United States has cited the Turkey case to underscore the importance of preventing Iraq from obtaining a host of items that could be used to develop long-range missiles and chemical, biological and conventional weapons. Those items, which are listed in the document Bolton presented council members, include global positioning systems, radio intercept devices, night vision technology and communications jamming equipment.
Asked why the United States had not previously added atropine or auto-injectors to the list of items requiring Security Council review, John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said, "I honestly don't know the answer." But he said that the United States has received a commitment from the other council members to consider placing new restrictions on them before the end of the month.
Russia and France have signaled that they are willing to add atropine and some other items to the United Nations' 302-page list of dual-use products that require Security Council scrutiny. But they have made it clear that they want other items taken off the list. Russia, for instance, has proposed easing restrictions on trucks that it sells to Iraq.
A spokeswoman at the U.N. Office of the Iraq Program, which overseas all sales to Iraq through the oil-for-food program, declined to name the companies that sold the medicines to Iraq. But confidential U.N. documents and U.N. sources revealed that the Italian company Alfa Intes Industria Terapeutica Splendore signed a contract to sell about 3,000 ampuls of atropine sulfate to Iraq in late 1997.
The French pharmaceutical company Laboratoires Renaudin sold nearly one million ampuls of atropine to Iraq in July 2000. A more recent shipment of 1.5 million ampuls of atropine from French and Russian sources was placed on hold by the United States, but it was then approved under the recent procedures without any plans for monitoring its use. It was approved in October and is awaiting delivery to Iraq.
"If a particular item is not on the goods review list, the contract gets approved," said Ewen Buchanan, a spokesman for the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission, which is responsible for reviewing contracts.
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White House Orders Plans to Debrief Iraqi Scientists
Aggressive Effort Aimed at Accelerating Weapons Hunt
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A38
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42884-2002Dec11?language=printer
The White House has told the CIA and the Defense and State departments to develop a comprehensive plan to quickly move large numbers of Iraqi scientists outside the country -- lured by the possibility of asylum or compelled by what would amount to United Nations-issued subpoenas -- for United Nations interviews about Baghdad's weapons programs, administration officials said.
The orders, emanating from national security adviser Condoleezza Rice over the last two weeks, are strongly backed by top civilians in the Defense Department who are anxious to speed up an inspections process they see extending inconclusively for months and possibly years. The defense officials believe that it is only through such an aggressive approach that they will be able to quickly and definitively confront President Saddam Hussein of Iraq over his banned weapons programs.
A senior Bush administration official who favors the approach said yesterday that a preliminary U.S. assessment of Iraq's latest weapons declaration, handed over to the United Nations on Saturday, has proven that the interviews are "essential." The 12,000-page document, the official said, is "almost the opposite of full disclosure. It's full nondisclosure."
Iraq has denied possessing any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, or long-range missiles.
The U.N. Security Council resolution on Iraq adopted unanimously last month requires the Baghdad government to provide the names of all former and current personnel associated with its weapons programs, and to give inspectors immediate, unimpeded access to them, including the right to interview them outside the country. Iraqi failure to ensure that they and their families, if they choose, comply with U.N. demands could constitute a material breach of the resolution that many U.S. officials believe is inevitable.
Although Iraq has so far not impeded inspections on the ground, including allowing entrance into one of Hussein's previously restricted palaces, the inspectors' newly enhanced interview power is "the most significant authority contained in the resolution" and "the one thing that is most likely to produce overt Iraqi opposition," the senior official said. For that reason, "it can't be a voluntary program," the official said, comparing the interview summonses to grand jury subpoenas.
Under this formulation, refusal by the interviewees to provide information under questioning would also constitute an Iraqi breach, as would previously unrevealed weapons discoveries made on the basis of their disclosures.
But the haste with which the plan to compel interrogations of large numbers of Iraqis outside the country is being put together, and the pressure on U.S. intelligence officials and U.N. inspectors to make it their top priority, has raised concerns in both the CIA and the State Department, administration officials said. While they agree on the importance of the interviews, those agencies, along with some allied foreign governments and U.N. officials, have suggested that attempts to short-circuit the inspection process with a quickly conceived operation that could involve hundreds of Iraqis and their families could endanger lives while undermining both the inspections themselves and ongoing U.S. intelligence operations in Iraq.
National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack said no decision has been made on how, or whether, to push for U.N. implementation of a U.S.-written program for accelerated interviews. "We have said we want the inspectors to use all the tools at their disposal. . . . Each step along the way will prove [Iraqi] willingness to comply" with the disarmament resolution, McCormack said.
Internal administration disagreements over how to deal with the Iraqi threat have arisen at virtually every decision point since President Bush's acceded to a new round of U.N. inspections to achieve Iraqi disarmament, even as the United States has simultaneously continued to prepare for war in the event Iraq does not cooperate. The disagreements have become more urgent as preparations for an attack -- that, from a military point of view, would optimally be fought by spring -- threaten to outpace inspections that are only beginning to get underway.
Part of those war preparations included the transmission Tuesday of an official U.S. request to Hungary for use of an air base in the southern part of that country to train Iraqi opposition members for participation in a possible U.S. invasion of Iraq. The administration has asked opposition organizations to produce the names of as many as 10,000 Iraqis to serve with U.S. military forces as interpreters, guides, spotters and guards for prisoners of war. Most of these Iraqis identified so far are from the Iraqi diaspora or are living in the northern part of Iraq that is not controlled by Hussein. But the administration has been reluctant to admit them into the United States, even after extensive vetting, for fear some might be Iraqi agents or army deserters guilty of earlier human rights abuses.
Hungary's ambassador to Washington, Andras Simonyi, said that the request was for use of Taszar air base in southwestern Hungary. A former Soviet facility, it was used as a logistical and training base for U.S. forces in Bosnia in the mid-1990s. Simonyi said the administration had asked Hungary for use of Taszar as its "contribution" to a possible war against Iraq. Hungary's government could approve the request on its own, he said, but has chosen to seek a consensus with Hungarian opposition parties and would soon begin internal discussion of the request.
Rice traveled to New York early this month to impress on Hans Blix, the director of the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), the need to move quickly on the interviews with Iraqi scientists. Blix, sources said, told her they were moving expeditiously to begin that process, but the Americans were free to propose any idea they thought was better.
The possibility of mass interrogations has "lifted the spirits" of those inside the administration by possibly providing "a way out" for those who have always regarded the U.N. resolution as "a trap" to put off a U.S. invasion, said one informed source. "It's the same internal battle being fought on new terrain."
The importance many inside the administration attribute to the interviews, and a proposal to interrogate large numbers of Iraqi scientists outside the country within a short period of time was first reported yesterday by the Los Angeles Times.
"I know they want to move quickly," the source said of those favoring the new proposal. "But there is a tradeoff here between moving quickly . . . and not putting so much pressure on Blix that you have an open rift between him and one or more members of the Security Council. . . . You don't want an open rebellion from UNMOVIC on this."
Blix has yet to ask the Iraqis officially for a list of scientists although, as he told reporters Tuesday, "I have put them on notice that we will ask them for names of people who were active in the different programs."
CIA officials, who want to work hand in glove with U.N. inspectors conducting the interviews, and arrange for entry into the United States for those Iraqis who feared returning to Iraq, have cautioned that those inside the administration favoring quick movement may not have considered all the complications.
"It's more difficult than people believe," said another official with knowledge of the plan. "Getting the list of names is easy, but getting folks together" in families inside Iraq, "and deciding who knows what is the real problem. The mechanics of pulling this off is still being looked at."
The senior administration official countered that these problems, and others, have been taken into consideration. "There will be lies," he said. "One reason to get started is you may find you want to do this with quite a few people. You may find you may want to go back and ask for something based on something somebody else told you." Any Iraqi taken outside the country would be free to return, he said, while acknowledging that "it puts a burden" on them of possible retaliation from Hussein. "We didn't create the situation where it's a death sentence to give information to inspectors," he said.
"I don't think it's complicated," the official said. "It's a little brutal. It's a little rough." But "it has always been a dangerous thing [for Iraqis] to be inside that [weapons of mass destruction] program."
-------- israel / palestine
PA seeks to unmask al-Qaida 'conspiracy'
By KHALED ABU TOAMEH
Dec. 12, 2002
Jerusalem Post
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/A/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1039666296480
Representatives of the Palestinian Authority have asked to meet US security officials to brief them on an alleged Israeli conspiracy to establish al-Qaida terrorist cells in the Gaza Strip, a senior Palestinian security source said Wednesday.
The source said the Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip passed on information to US officials four months ago about details of the ostensible al-Qaida cells. According to the source, the details of the Israeli "conspiracy" were also relayed to French, British, and Arab security officials.
Minister of Planning and International Cooperation Nabil Shaath said Saturday PA security forces had uncovered the plot. He said the Mossad and Shin Bet were involved in attempts to establish fake al-Qaida terrorist cells in the Gaza Strip in order to defame the PA.
----
5 Unarmed Palestinians Killed by Israelis in Gaza
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By MICHAEL WINES with TERENCE NEILAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/12CND_MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 12 - Five unarmed Palestinians were shot and killed as they tried to climb over the barbed-wire fence marking the boundary between the Gaza Strip and Israel, the Israeli Army said today.
The five were seen by soldiers on Wednesday in an area where Palestinians are barred from entering. Soldiers fired at the five, and their bodies were found this morning, the army said. Ladders were found near the bodies, but no weapons.
Palestinians looking for work in Israel often try to climb the fence or cut their way through. Unemployment is high in Gaza, particularly since security measures blocked Israel to Gaza residents.
In other action in Gaza, Israeli soldiers killed an armed Palestinian trying attack a Jewish settlement today. A radical faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, claimed responsibility for the failed infiltration.
Two Palestinians approached the Gush Katif settlement bloc before dawn, armed with automatic rifles, an Israeli Army commander, Lt. Col. Avi Oved, told The Associated Press.
One of the attackers was cutting the perimeter fence, Colonel Oved said. "The forces fired on him and killed him," he said. "The other one was apparently behind and managed to flee. Their goal was definitely to get into one of the settlements."
Also Thursday, the Tel Aviv District Court ruled that it had the right to try Marwan Barghouti, a leader of the current Palestinian uprising and the highest-ranking Palestinian official in custody.
The defense argued that Mr. Barghouti, a leader of Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement in the West Bank, had immunity as a Palestinian legislator and that Israeli forces took him illegally from a West Bank home eight months ago.
Mr. Barghouti had said he should be treated as a prisoner of war, not a criminal suspect. Israel has accused him of involvement in attacks that killed 26 Israelis.
On the political front, a week of internal balloting appeared to edge Israel's Labor Party to the right as two peace activists in the party said on Wednesday that they would quit to join the left-wing Meretz Party in national elections next month.
The two, Yossi Beilin and Yael Dayan, finished low in the Labor Party's internal elections this week, in which party members rank their candidates for seats in Israel's Parliament.
In the elections on Jan. 28, Labor is expected to win only about 21 seats, 4 fewer than it currently holds. Other Labor candidates gained enough votes in this week's elections to claim all those seats.
In Israeli parliamentary elections, citizens vote only for parties, which then apportion their seats among the top finishers in internal ballots like those held this week.
Meretz, which advocates moves toward an immediate peace with Palestinian representatives, agreed to rank Mr. Beilin and Ms. Dayan higher on their candidates' list in exchange for their departure from Labor.
Mr. Beilin's decision to leave Labor stands as a measure of the party's shift to the right since the Palestinian uprising began 26 months ago. He was one of the primary movers behind the interim peace accord that Israel and the Palestinian Authority signed in Oslo in 1993.
The latest opinion polls showed the hard-line Likud Party, led by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, holding a wide lead over the opposition Labor Party.
According to the Dialogue research company poll published in the daily Haaretz today, Likud will get 41 seats in the 120-member Parliament, more than double the 19 seats it currently holds.
-------- mideast
Tiny desert nation bids to host troops
By Tom Carter
December 12, 2002
WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021212-93364279.htm
In a region packed with squeamish U.S. allies, the newest nation is working overtime to be part of Washington's plans for war against Iraq.
Eritrea, a tiny desert nation across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia, has even hired a Washington lobbying firm to press its invitation to American troops.
"Eritrea provides the United States with a strategic advantage and hospitable atmosphere that cannot be matched in the region," says the Washington lobbying firm Greenberg Traurig LLP, which was hired by Eritrea in May for an estimated $50,000 a month.
In a press release titled "Why Not Eritrea?" that reads somewhat like a tourist brochure, the firm goes on to say:
"Based on current sentiment of the Arab community and the geography of the region, it is increasingly clear that failure to form an alliance with Eritrea is unconscionable."
On Tuesday, during a visit by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the Eritrean capital, Asmara, President Isaias Afworki, offered the United States the use of Eritrean military bases if a Washington-led international coalition decides to use force to disarm Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"We have very limited resources, but we are willing and prepared to use these resources in any way that is useful to combat terrorism," said Mr. Isaias.
Asked if that included the use of Eritrean military facilities, Mr. Isaias replied: "That's the least you can imagine."
Mr. Rumsfeld did not say if the United States, which has 1,000 elite troops stationed on a warship off the coast, would take up Eritrea's offer.
But he did say that the relationship between the United States and Eritrea, a strip of coastal desert not quite the size of Florida, was one that he hoped would evolve and "grow in the weeks and months and years ahead."
The United States is prepositioning troops and equipment in the region, and Army Gen. Tommy Franks has made at least four trips to Eritrea since the September 11 terrorist attacks, suggesting that the Pentagon is interested in what Eritrea has to offer.
"It is not a bad idea to include Eritrea in the war on terrorism," said Jack Spencer, defense analyst at the Heritage Foundation. "The Horn of Africa is incredibly important ... . If we don't include Eritrea, it is a part of the world that will breed terrorism."
The United States, France and Germany currently have troops in Djibouti, a Muslim country on Eritrea's southeast border. But like other Muslim nations in the region, Djibouti has expressed reservations about being used as a base in a war on Iraq.
Eritrea, which is about 50 percent Muslim and 50 percent Christian, is pro-American and has turned down numerous invitations to join the Arab League and the Organization of Islamic States.
But not all is well with U.S.-Eritrean relations. On Oct. 11, 2001, two Eritrean nationals who worked for the U.S. Embassy in Asmara, Alli Alamin and Kiflom Ghebrenichael, were arrested and have been held since then at an undetermined location on unspecified charges.
The State Department has made repeated requests that the Eritrean government give the men a fair and open trial, so far to no avail.
And in October, the Eritrean government accused the CIA of trying to overthrow its government. The accusation apparently involves a Clinton administration effort to recruit some Eritrean "spies."
Eritrean Ambassador Girma Asmeron said yesterday his country's lobbying efforts were geared toward attracting foreign investment.
"Our target is the private sector. We have gold. We have potash. We have fish, and this is how the system works in America: You need lobbyists and consultants," he said in a telephone interview.
----
A Pass on Preemption
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Washington Post; Page A44
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42995-2002Dec11?language=printer
THE INTERCEPTION of a North Korean ship carrying 15 Scud missiles was starting to look like a practical example of the Bush administration's muscular new policy of preemptive action -- until the ship and its cargo were handed over to Yemen. Now the episode stands as an illustration of why that much-discussed doctrine is looking more formidable on paper -- and in the scary accounts of critics -- than in the real world. A paper issued by the White House this week described "effective interdiction" as "a critical part of the U.S. strategy to combat weapons of mass destruction and their delivery means." That certainly would seem to apply to an unflagged North Korean vessel carrying missiles capable of delivering chemical and biological warheads to a nation that is one of al Qaeda's principal bases. As the Yemeni government recently promised the Bush administration that it would no longer import such weapons -- and as North Korea's export of them is one of the most important challenges of proliferation -- the logic of preemption would mandate the confiscation and destruction of the missiles. Instead, faced with protests from the nominally friendly Yemeni government, which said the Scuds had been legally purchased, the administration backed off. "There is no clear authority to seize the ship," was the unmuscular explanation of White House spokesman Ari Fleischer.
Behind this response is a difficult balance of interests. On the one hand, it is dangerous to allow the import of Scud missiles anywhere in the Middle East at this moment. Though the Yemeni government has declared itself an ally of the United States in the war on terrorism -- and has allowed U.S. forces to operate against al Qaeda on its territory -- it controls neither its own lawless countryside nor, in the past, its own weapons. According to a report in this week's issue of Newsweek, the SA-7 missiles fired at an Israeli airliner in Kenya last month probably were stolen from a Yemeni government arsenal. Yemen's claim that it needs the North Korean missiles for defense is absurd; the Scud is an offensive weapon whose most common use has been to murder civilians in cities.
For the administration, these considerations, and its own preemption principle, seem to have been outweighed by the perceived advantages of continuing a partnership, however attenuated, with the Yemeni regime. If so, that would be the second time in months the White House has ignored its doctrine to satisfy real-world demands: Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, another dodgy ally in the fight with al Qaeda, has paid no penalty for his swap of nuclear bomb technology for North Korean Scuds.
There is also the problem of international law: As construed by many of its advocates, particularly in Europe, this would bar the United States from ever boarding ships or crossing borders, even if to stop a rogue regime from supplying weapons to al Qaeda. Some of the more breathless critiques of the Bush administration's security doctrine have claimed that it will lead to unilateral U.S. military action against enemies and perceived enemies around the world; the Yemen episode demonstrates that that is most unlikely. In practice, the Bush team's reaction to such challenges has been measured and prudent. Yet the administration is right to be rethinking questions of international sovereignty and security. To defend itself and its allies in this era, the United States will need to stop rogue states from producing and distributing weapons that could be used to murder its citizens en masse without warning. It's not enough to issue papers about this principle; sooner or later, it will be necessary to act on it.
-------- nato
NATO Quietly Slips Into Afghan Mission
First Step Beyond Traditional Bounds
By Keith B. Richburg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A36
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42575-2002Dec11?language=printer
BRUSSELS -- NATO has quietly begun supporting the multinational peacekeeping force in Afghanistan, in the alliance's first mission outside Europe and North America and a possible precursor to engagements in other trouble spots far from its home turf, NATO officials and diplomats said.
NATO so far has provided help in military planning to German and Dutch contingents that are part of the International Security Assistance Force. The two units are scheduled to take over command of the peacekeeping force patrolling Kabul in February. After that, NATO intends to expand its aid to communications, logistics and intelligence gathering and assessment, officials and diplomats said.
The German-Dutch command is scheduled to last six months. Some NATO members are pushing for the alliance to take over command of the force at that point. "If it happens, it will be very significant," a NATO official said.
Diplomats and NATO officials stressed that there is no consensus among the 19 NATO countries for such a step. At least one country, France, is said to oppose any direct NATO role in Afghanistan.
NATO's military consists largely of the national armed forces of the member countries. But some military assets, such as surveillance planes, command centers, planning staffs and communications networks, are maintained jointly. While many NATO members have independently sent military units to Afghanistan, the aid to the peacekeeping forces marks the first role there by the alliance as an organization.
"The Rubicon has been crossed, because NATO has been doing critical bits of the planning with Germany and the Netherlands," NATO Secretary General George Robertson said in an interview on his plane this week while returning from a one-day visit to Moscow. "The biggest obstacle has been overcome, which was the decision to go at all."
The move comes less than a month after NATO heads of government meeting in Prague endorsed a new mission for the alliance, stating that it could no longer limit itself to its traditional area of operations and must meet new challenges and threats wherever they emerge.
The involvement in Afghanistan is a sharp reversal from a year ago, just after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, when NATO for the first time invoked its Article 5 mutual defense clause and offered to assist the United States -- only to see that offer largely rebuffed by Washington, which drew support from just a few key allies.
Since then, in an attempt to keep the alliance relevant to the United States, Robertson has led an effort to retool the organization, which was created to counter Soviet forces in Europe during the Cold War.
Robertson said that NATO is examining taking command of the peacekeepers in Afghanistan chiefly to avoid the disruption of the current system, in which command turns over every six months.
For this initial phase, NATO involvement will be largely behind the scenes, with the Germans and Dutch in control. "There won't be any NATO flag or anything," said an alliance official, adding that "some countries are a bit nervous about it."
"This will be the first NATO operation out of area, but there will be no NATO footprint in Afghanistan," said a spokesman for the German mission to NATO. "It will be done very discreetly from Brussels."
A Dutch Defense Ministry spokesman in The Hague said NATO's involvement came about when the two countries preparing to take over the Kabul force requested military planning help. Also, he said, the Dutch army corps being dispatched to Kabul from a base in Germany is already integrated into the NATO structure.
In Moscow this week, Robertson briefed the Russian defense minister, Sergei Ivanov, on NATO's plans, alliance officials said. The Russians voiced no objections, said a NATO official who spoke to reporters after the meeting. Ivanov, however, told Robertson he thought the best option was to turn the mission over to Afghan police and soldiers, the official said. Robertson responded that the international force was, at the moment, the best guarantor of stability in the country, the official said.
-------- russia / chechnya
Russian president orders referendum on Chechnya
December 13, 2002,
Jang (Pakistan)
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/dec2002-daily/13-12-2002/world/w3.htm
MOSCOW: Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday signed a decree ordering that a referendum be staged in the breakaway republic of Chechnya to pave the way for presidential elections in the war-torn territory.
Putin gave Chechnya's pro-Russian administration one month to prepare proposals for organisation of the referendum, which will be submitted to the Russian government for approval, a Kremlin statement said.
The announcement, made as the Russian leader held a reception in the Kremlin to mark Russian Constitution Day, came a day after a congress of pro-Moscow Chechens gathered to discuss a draft constitution for Chechnya.
The draft constitution, due to be submitted to a referendum next March, was made public for the first time at the Chechen People's Congress, as were bills on presidential and parliamentary elections that are to follow the referendum.
Reaffirming his hard line ruling out any peace talks with Chechen separatists, Putin said that the "anti-terrorist" crackdown in Chechnya would not be compromised by any political moves. "Terrorists and their sponsors is one thing and the political process is quite another," he was quoted as saying by news agencies. The congress in Chechnya took place as Russia stepped up its efforts to secure the extradition from Britain of Akhmed Zakayev, a top aide of Chechen rebel president Aslan Maskhadov.
Zakayev, whom Russia branded a terrorist after October's Moscow theatre hostage crisis, appeared briefly in a London court which released him on bail pending a further appearance on January 9. He later dismissed the conference, whose venue was switched at the last moment from the regional capital Grozny to Gudermes, 30 kilometres (20 miles) to the east, for fear of rebel attacks.
"You can organise all the congresses and conferences you want, but as long as no decision is taken to start negotiations, the war will continue," the 43-year-old envoy said in comments broadcast on Moscow Echo radio.
Despite regular Russian assertions that life is getting back to normal in the southern republic, federal forces which moved into Chechnya in October 1999 come under daily rebel attack and suffer frequent losses.
-------- spy agencies
THE INVESTIGATION
Inquiry Is Critical of Intelligence Agencies for Failing to Prevent Attacks
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES RISEN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/politics/12INTE.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 11 - The joint Congressional committee investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes issued a final report today sharply criticizing intelligence agencies for their failure to prevent the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
But the panel did not go far enough for a leading member who issued a separate report identifying current and former senior officials who he said should be held accountable for the intelligence failures.
In a report that included findings about the government performance before Sept. 11 and recommendations for changes, the joint inquiry said stronger leadership was needed to improve coordination of the work of more than 12 military and civilian agencies that failed to share information before the attacks.
The report said that the agencies "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."
Although he said he supported the broad recommendations of the joint inquiry, the member who issued his own report, Senator Richard C. Shelby, Republican of Alabama, said he was disappointed that the panel did not assign personal responsibility for the failures to any individual senior officials.
He singled out the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet; the director of the National Security Agency, Michael V. Hayden; the F.B.I. director who vacated his post in 2001, Louis J. Freeh; and other senior officials for failing to do more before Sept. 11.
"The U.S. intelligence community," Mr. Shelby wrote, "would have been far better prepared for Sept. 11 but for the failure of successive agency leaders to work wholeheartedly to overcome the institutional and cultural obstacles to interagency cooperation and coordination that bedeviled counterterrorism efforts before the attacks."
He added that the leaders whom he named were "not responsible for the disaster of Sept. 11, of course, for that infamy belongs to Al Qaeda's 19 suicide hijackers and the terrorist infrastructure that supported them."
"As the leaders of the United States intelligence community, however," he added, "these officials failed in significant ways to ensure that this country was as prepared as it could have been."
Mr. Tenet came in for some of the most pointed criticism. Mr. Shelby suggested that after Mr. Tenet issued a memo in 1998 saying the United States was "at war" with Al Qaeda, the C.I.A. director did not follow up by aggressively seeking additional money and resources for the fight against the terrorist organization.
"One of the great unanswered questions of our Sept. 11 inquiry, therefore, is how the D.C.I. could have considered himself to be `at war' against this country's most important foreign threat without bothering to use the full range of authorities at his disposal in this fight," Mr. Shelby wrote.
A spokesman for the agency said it would review the findings and recommendations. Officials at the F.B.I. said they welcomed the input and had taken steps to put into effect some of the recommendations.
Broadly, the panel found that the government had failed to grapple with the growing terrorist threat to the United States in a coherent and coordinated way before Sept. 11.
"Neither the U.S. government as a whole nor the intelligence community had a comprehensive counterterrorist strategy for combating the threat posed by Osama bin Laden," the report said. "The intelligence community was neither well organized nor equipped, and did not adequately adapt, to meet the challenge posed by global terrorists focused on targets within the domestic United States."
The panel urged the creation of a cabinet-level director of national intelligence to oversee the entire intelligence community, in part to end decades-old budget and turf battles that have prevented smooth information sharing and greater coordination in counterterrorism operations.
Senator Bob Graham, the Florida Democrat who was co-chairman of the inquiry, said although many similar proposals for changing intelligence operations had failed, the Sept. 11 attacks made it clear that Congress could not afford to keep the status quo.
"I come back to one number - 3,025 - the number of persons who were killed on September the 11th," Mr. Graham said. "And I do not believe that the members of Congress are going to want to take the position, let us just stand by, let us allow the gaps and holes and weaknesses in our current system to continue, to cross our fingers and hope that we are not in the next few months again picking up the pieces and, sadly, the bodies of yet another successful attack inside the United States."
Mr. Graham said at a news conference today that the joint inquiry had approached the issue of personal accountability cautiously because it believed that assigning blame might make officials at the intelligence agencies afraid to take the risks needed to achieve success in counterterrorism operations. He noted that the panel had decided to turn over its findings to the inspectors general of each agency so that the inspectors could recommend action against individuals.
In the report were new findings concerning potential clues that intelligence agencies did not adequately pursue before Sept. 11.
In June 2001, American intelligence obtained information that indicated that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti extremist, had an active role in sending terrorists to the United States and suggested that he was helping them here, the report said.
American intelligence officials have identified Mr. Mohammed as a central planner of 9/11 and is considered one of the most important leaders of Al Qaeda. The report says that before Sept. 11 American intelligence had information that linked Mr. Mohammed to Al Qaeda and to anti-American terrorist plans to use aircraft as weapons.
He was indicted in 1996 in connection with an unsuccessful plot to bomb American airliners over the Pacific. The United States had been searching for him for years before Sept. 11.
But the report found that American intelligence "did not recognize the significance of reporting" last June about what was apparently Mr. Mohammed's role in sending terrorists here and that his role in the attacks "was a surprise to the intelligence community."
The joint inquiry's main recommendation, creating a cabinet-level post of director of national intelligence, would effectively reduce the power of the director of central intelligence while setting the stage for a major turf battle between the Pentagon and the new intelligence czar.
Under the proposed structure, the director of central intelligence, who now has nominal authority over the entire intelligence community, would have control only over the Central Intelligence Agency. The panel found that the C.I.A. needed a director focused solely on the agency, and one not distracted by responsibilities for other agencies.
-------- un
Unseen when the U.N. calls
Max Boot
December 12, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021212-20185163.htm
There is no mystery about why President Saddam Hussein chose to inundate the United Nations with 12,000 pages listing every food-processing facility, tannery and dairy in Iraq.
The Butcher of Baghdad gave away the game in his first interview in 12 years, granted to the Egyptian newspaper Al-Usbu'a last month. "No doubt, time is working for us," he said. "We have to buy some more time, and the American-British coalition will disintegrate because of internal reasons and the pressure of public opinion in American and British streets."
Saddam knows it will take a long time to wade through those 12,000 pages.
And even when the "full and complete declaration" - actually, fully incomplete - is finally analyzed, there will be endless debates about whether there is conclusive evidence of a "material breach." Even if weapons inspectors stumbled on a cache of nuclear weapons, this would not satisfy Saddam's defenders in Paris, who would no doubt claim these bombs were meant for heating cups of cocoa. The universal call now is for the Bush administration to find evidence of "smoking missiles" that it can present in giant photos to the U.N. Security Council, just as the Kennedy administration presented evidence of Soviet missiles in Cuba 40 years ago.
But this is unlikely, to put it mildly. Much of Saddam's arsenal will be buried, or loaded in mobile laboratories that can scoot away at the first sign of inspectors.
Our best bet of catching Saddam red-handed will come if a timely defector pops up, but so far Hans Blix has shown little interest in using the powers granted him by the United Nations to interview Iraqi weapons scientists outside the country. Thus, many have pinned hope on finding an Iraqi "material breach" in those 12,000 pages. Even before intelligence analysts scrutinize this voluminous document, one probable violation stands out as clearly as a pile of anthrax at an aspirin factory.
The British government report issued this year on Saddam's violations of U.N. resolutions noted that, after inspectors were last kicked out of Iraq in 1998, they were unable to account for vast stores of chemical and biological weapons. To be exact: 360 tons of chemical warfare agents, including 1.5 tons of VX nerve agent; 3,000 tons of precursor chemicals; growth media for biological agent production, sufficient for more than 3 times the 8,500 liters of anthrax Iraq admits to having made; and more than 30,000 special munitions to deliver chemical and biological weapons.
Amir Saadi, the general who prepared the latest report, claims that all these weapons were destroyed - but, oops, so was the documentation relating to their destruction. So we'll just have to take it on faith that Saddam has decided to divest himself of an arsenal he spent years and millions of dollars acquiring.
This is about as credible as believing he has been making secret donations to the Hendon Reform Synagogue. But, again, the other members of the U.N. Security Council, especially Russia and France, seem unwilling, for their own cynical reasons, to believe anything bad about their buddy in Baghdad.
If George Bush and Tony Blair feel compelled to get the U.N.'s written approval before attacking Saddam, they may well have to wait a long time - precisely what he intends. It's worth waiting a little longer; the U.S. military won't be ready for war for at least a month. But rather than lose the window of opportunity that may close once summer settles over Iraq, America and her closest allies would be better advised to strike anyway, whether or not they have U.N. support.
Even if we don't have conclusive evidence today about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, it's a safe bet we'll find plenty once we've occupied Iraq. After all, the last time we fought Iraq we found out Saddam's nuclear weapons program was much more advanced than previously assumed.
Whatever Anglo-American troops uncover this time will be sure to silence the critics. Maybe even those in Paris.
Max Boot is Olin senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
-------- us
Study urges wider authority for covert troops vs. terror
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 12, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021212-98893924.htm
An internal study ordered by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld calls for giving more power to U.S. special-operations forces to capture or kill al Qaeda operatives and other terrorists, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
The officials say the study, by the government-funded Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), endorses a bigger budget and more troops for U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla.
It also recommends making the command a lead player in the war on terrorists by letting it conceive and conduct its own covert hunt-and-destroy missions in some circumstances.
This endorses the thinking of Mr. Rumsfeld, who has advocated making U.S. Socom, as it is known, the global combatant command in a war that could last a decade or more.
Gen. Charles Holland, who heads Socom, endorses bigger spending, but has expressed reservations about making his domain the lead command. Officials say he has worried about trespassing on the authority of other combatant commanders, such as U.S. Central Command, who run operations in their geographic area.
"This IDA study is a further push for Socom to go in the direction Rumsfeld wants it to go," said one administration official. "That's why he ordered the study."
Mr. Rumsfeld last month had IDA conduct a quick, but extensive study of special operations from a "blank sheet," according to an internal Pentagon memo obtained by The Washington Times.
Gen. Holland has requested a big budget increase and more troops to meet Mr. Rumsfeld's desire to kill or capture terrorists around the world more quickly. Special Operations Command Green Berets, Delta Force and SEALs are playing a leading role in disrupting Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Officials said Mr. Rumsfeld conducted a meeting Saturday in his Pentagon office attended by Gen. Holland and other officials to receive the IDA report.
Two sources said the classified study essentially supported Gen. Holland's proposal for expansion. It also endorses continuing the command's special authority to buy the specialized equipment needed by covert warriors.
"It supports a significant increase in the budget over the next five years," said one military source. "It was a strong voice of support for what Socom has been advocating."
Officials refer to the study as the "Welch Commission," named after IDA President Larry Welch, a retired general and former Air Force chief of staff. The study was principally conducted by former chiefs of U.S. Special Operations Command, such as retired Gen. Peter Schoomaker and retired Gen. Carl Stiner.
Mr. Rumsfeld is in the final stages of approving a new five-year defense budget, starting with the fiscal 2004 plan that goes to the White House later this month.
Gen. Holland, officials say, wants to nearly double Socom's budget of $5 billion annually over five years and add thousands of warriors and support personnel.
One Pentagon official said that at this stage of budget deliberations, Socom may receive an increase of $2 billion in fiscal 2004, which begins Oct. 1.
Socom oversees 47,000 warriors and support troops stationed at Hurlbert Field, Fla., Fort Bragg, N.C., and other bases.
Reshaping Socom comes amid two major issues. For one, Mr. Rumsfeld has ordered Gen. Holland to devise a new war plan against terrorists. He wants units positioned to deploy on the spur of the moment once intelligence pinpoints terrorists at a specific location.
"He wants their focus on the war on terrorism," said an administration official. "They weren't responding fast enough."
Secondly, Mr. Rumsfeld, in a sign of how important commandos are in the war, has explored the possibility of making Special Operations the lead operational command in the war on terrorism.
If Socom became the global command, it would plan and execute specific missions. Right now, Socom is a "supporting command," in Pentagon parlance, which means it provides troops to "supported commands" who plan and carry out missions.
Historically, there has been a reluctance at times by conventional commanders to tap special-operations forces for what can be high-risk operations.
The Washington Times this week quoted Army Special Forces soldiers as saying many of their proposed missions against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan were turned down by the in-country command at Bagram air base. The Green Berets said the command, Task Force 180, deemed the missions too risky versus their potential benefits.
In November, Marshall Billingslea, the top Pentagon policy-maker on special-operations issues, sent a memo to Mr. Rumsfeld telling him the IDA study was under way.
"I explained to [Gen. Welch] that the purpose of the effort was to start with a 'blank sheet' and re-design U.S. SoCom to fight the war on terrorism," Mr. Billingslea said in his memo. "Welch's panel will then take that assessment and compare it with USSoCom's restructuring effort, and with the FY 04-09 budget request."
--------
U.S. Military Helicopter Crashes in Honduras
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Honduras-US-Crash.html
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras (AP) -- A U.S. military helicopter crashed in central Honduras, the U.S. military said, and radio quoted local police as saying that all five U.S. soldiers aboard were killed.
The American Black Hawk helicopter from Soto Cano Air Force Base in Palmerola crashed at about 8:55 p.m. Wednesday while on routine training, said Lt. Col. Bill Costello, a spokesman for U.S. Southern Command in Florida.
``Right now we are classifying it as a training accident,'' Costello said. ``It is being investigated.''
Five crew members were aboard and have not been found, he said.
But Arnold Espinal Gutierrez, a Honduran police spokesman near the site of the crash, told Radio HRN on Thursday the ``the bodies of all the helicopter's occupants were recovered earlier this morning. All of them are U.S. military personnel.''
Espinal said the helicopter departed at 8:14 p.m. from San Pedro Sula, the second-largest city and 110 miles north of Tegucigalpa, the capital.
He said it crashed on a mountain near the town of Santa Cruz de Yojoa some 85 miles north of Tegucigalpa. It was headed to the U.S. base in Palmerola in central Honduras, he said.
Espinal said the cause of the crash was not known, but that there had been heavy rains in the area over the past three days.
Honduran and U.S. soldiers participated in the rescue operations, which lasted 10 hours, he said, adding that the helicopter was destroyed.
The control tower at the La Mesa international airport in San Pedro Sula reported that the helicopter had arrived there from the Palmerola base at 7.30 p.m. to participate in a night landing exercise.
After reloading fuel, it departed again and was headed back to the base when it crashed into the mountain.
Palmerola is a $30 million base built in 1983. It lodges 400 U.S. soldiers, who rotate every three months.
During the turmoil of the 80's in Central America, Palmerola was the main U.S. military operations center in the area.
-------- propaganda wars / press
U.N. Court Grants Special Legal Protection to War Reporters
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By MARLISE SIMONS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/europe/12HAGU.html
THE HAGUE, Dec. 11 - The United Nations war crimes tribunal granted special legal protection today to reporters working in areas of conflict, saying they would be required to testify before the court only under exceptional circumstances.
In handing down their ruling, the judges also annulled an earlier court order for an American reporter to appear as a witness against his will.
Lawyers for The Washington Post and the reporter - a former Post correspondent, Jonathan Randal - immediately hailed the decision.
"This will go down in the line of other important decisions dealing with press freedom," said Geoffrey Robertson, The Post's lead counsel.
It was the first time that limited legal protection for reporters was defined and upheld in a modern war crimes court, lawyers at the tribunal said. They said the ruling would almost certainly set the standard in other ad hoc tribunals, and, most important, it was likely to define relations between war correspondents and the new International Criminal Court.
Numerous news organizations have argued that requiring testimony from reporters who work in conflict zones could hamper their work and endanger their lives.
Today, the five judges, from France, Guyana, Turkey, Sri Lanka and the United States, agreed. In a unanimous decision they said that to subpoena a war correspondent the evidence sought must be "of direct and important value in determining a core issue in the case" and "cannot reasonably obtained elsewhere."
The decision came after Mr. Randal's refusal to testify about a 1993 interview with a former Bosnian Serb political leader, Radoslav Brdjanin, now being tried on genocide charges. Mr. Randal had given a statement to the prosecutor about his interview, but he said the article should speak for itself, and he did not want to be questioned about its accuracy in court.
When Mr. Randal was ordered to testify earlier this year, he and The Post challenged the subpoena, but it was upheld. They appealed and were supported by 34 news organizations and professional groups, including The New York Times, as "friends of the court."
Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer from New York who represented the news organizations at a hearing in October, said journalists could not "have access to people if those people believe the journalists will testify against them."
In their decision today, the judges invoked some of the arguments made by Mr. Abrams as well as decisions by the European Court of Human Rights recognizing that journalists play "a vital public watchdog role" essential to democratic societies, which must not be hampered. But the judges did not adopt all the recommendations made during the appeal. While the appellants had asked for limited protection for "journalists in general," the judges said their decision only concerned "a smaller group, namely war correspondents," whom they defined as "individuals who, for any period of time, report (or investigate for the purposes of reporting" from a conflict zone on issues relation to the conflict."
Mr. Randal, who has retired and now writes books, was not in court. Reached by telephone at his home in Paris, he said: "I'm relieved for myself and delighted for my fellow war correspondents, present and future. This was a question of principle, and I'm glad we won it."
---
Tribunal in landmark ruling on war correspondents
Ciar Byrne
Wednesday December 11, 2002
UK Guardian
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,7495,858186,00.html
War correspondents should be given a limited exemption from being compelled to testify, the UN war crimes tribunal in the Hague has said in a landmark ruling.
A panel of five judges at the tribunal made their comments at the same time as they ruled that former Washington Post reporter Jonathan Randal did not have to testify to the court.
The judges said that before calling a journalist to appear the court must be convinced that the "evidence has a direct and important value in determining a core issue in the case" and that there is no reasonable alternative for obtaining the evidence.
Randal was appealing against a decision by the international criminal tribunal that he should give evidence in the trial of former Serbian minister Radoslav Brdjanin, who is on trial for the persecution and expulsion of more than 100,000 Croats and Muslims during the 1992-1995 Bosnian conflict.
He had been asked to give evidence on an interview he conducted with the Serb nationalist for the Washington Post in 1993.
In Randal's case, the judges doubted whether his evidence fit either criterion, and cancelled his subpoena. But they said if the prosecutors wished to try again, they could apply for a new subpoena to the lower court.
The decision will be seen as setting a precedent in other international courts dealing with war situations.
Randal was supported in his appeal by 34 international news organisations, which asked the court to grant limited privilege for journalists against testifying to give them a greater degree of safety while they are gathering information in war zones.
It is in everybody's interest for reporters to work freely in war zones and to bring attention to the "horrors and reality of warfare", the court said.
The judges noted that "images of suffering of detainees" at a detention camp in Bosnia "played a vital role in awakening the international community to the seriousness of the situation".
Randal's lawyer, Geoffrey Robertson QC, described the decision as "a great boon for reporters".
Mr Robertson said the judges understood that "for war correspondents to be routinely compelled would threaten their neutrality."
The tribunal's decision is the latest contribution to an ongoing debate about whether war correspondents should act as witnesses in criminal trials based on information gathered in the course of their reporting.
BBC correspondent Jacky Rowland recently appeared as a witness at Slobodan Milosevic's war crimes tribunal in the Hague.
When a group of former BBC correspondents hit out at the corporation for allowing journalists to become "informants" in a letter to the Times, a spokeswoman for Rowland said it had been her "strong wish" to testify.
Rowland said in a statement that she did not believe war correspondents were exempt from "moral obligations or international justice"
Award-winning war correspondent Janine Di Giovanni has also declared that journalists had "an obligation" to testify, although she said she could understand Randal's reservations about giving evidence.
The prosecution in the Brdjanin case argued that journalists should have no special privileges, and said they were no different from other international workers, such as UN and Red Cross personnel.
In an article published in February 1993 Randal quoted Brdjanin, whom he described as a Serbian housing official, as advocating the expulsion of non-Serbs from the Bosnian city of Banja Luka.
The article said Brdjanin "personally argued that those unwilling to defend Serb territory must be moved out but that the Serb political leadership so far had not agreed".
"He said he believed the exodus of non-Serbs should be carried out peacefully to create an ethnically clean space through voluntary movement. Muslims and Croats, he says, should not be killed, but should be allowed to leave - and good riddance," said Randal in his article.
Randal was summoned after he told tribunal investigators that a local journalist was with him and had translated Brdjanin's words.
The prosecutors said they wanted him to testify because those quotes did not appear in an article written three days later by the second journalist, whose name was being kept secret for his own protection.
----
Missile Seizure Backfires on U.S. - European Press
December 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-ship-reaction.html
PARIS (Reuters) - The egg on Washington's face over its seizure of a North Korean arms shipment to Yemen spread across the pages of the European press on Thursday as allies questioned U.S. tactics in its war against terror.
``Intercept of North Korean missiles misfires'' was how Britain's Financial Times headlined its story on the dramatic seizure by Spanish warships in the Arabian Sea on Wednesday and the reluctant U.S. decision to release the ship hours later.
``The whole affair was a flop,'' the French daily Le Figaro wrote. ``It looks like the Americans screwed up,'' Liberation, another Paris paper, remarked.
Richard Murphy, former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, told Italy's La Stampa that the freighter incident was ``really very embarrassing to the United States.''
Acting on U.S. information, Spanish warships stopped the unflagged cargo ship So San on Monday and found 15 Scud missiles and conventional warheads as well as 85 drums of unidentified chemicals hidden under cement bags on the ship.
It handed control over to the United States.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld denounced North Korea on Wednesday as ``the single largest proliferator of ballistic missile technology on the face of the earth'' and said the arms would not reach their destination.
But later in the day, Washington reluctantly handed the shipload of missiles over to Yemen, which insisted it had bought them legally and would not hand them over to anyone else.
On Thursday the United States apologized ``for what could seem an absurd situation,'' a Spanish Defense Ministry spokesman said.
FIGURING OUT A FLIP-FLOP
Washington's flip-flop raised suspicion in Madrid that Spanish forces had been made fools of by their American ally.
``Spain has had to carry out a thankless task which undoubtedly carried risk for our troops,'' the conservative daily El Mundo wrote in an editorial demanding an explanation.
It suggested Spain should withdraw its ships if Washington could not explain why it risked Spanish sailors' lives.
``In such a sensitive area, you can't have the feeling of ridicule felt by policemen when they arrest a criminal and see the judge let him out by the back door,'' it wrote.
The seizure also turned the spotlight on impoverished Yemen, which has joined Washington's war on terror but has yet to shake off its image as a haven for Muslim militants.
``The fact that an ally of ours, right in the middle of the Iraqi crisis, buys 15 Scud missiles from North Korea shows that this alliance is very different from those we had during the Cold War, which were much more reliable,'' Murphy told La Stampa.
Washington's leniency with Yemen, apparently due to a concern not to alienate even a shaky ally, exposed ``new contradictions in U.S. foreign policy,'' Germany's Stuttgarter Zeitung observed.
``It puts pressure on North Korea but just looked on as Pakistan, a U.S. ally in the war against terror, secretly delivered nuclear technology to North Korea,'' it wrote.
``This climb-down (over the missiles) will certainly give another argument to those who oppose a war against (Iraqi President) Saddam Hussein and denounce Washington's double standards,'' Le Figaro wrote.
SILLY STUNT OR SERIOUS SPLIT?
Not everybody was as critical as Britain's left-leaning Guardian, which headlined its editorial on the seizure: ``Silly stunts are not serious policy.''
Several commentators saw the seizure as Washington's way of proving North Korea was exporting missiles.
``The goal of this episode...was obviously to expose North Korea as an arms supplier,'' wrote the Austrian daily Die Presse. ``The U.S. wanted to catch the North Koreans in the act.''
France's Le Monde saw Washington infighting behind the flip-flop. ``There is every reason to think that the seizure was authorized, probably at the suggestion of Vice President Richard Cheney, without the State Department being consulted,'' it wrote.
``The So San affair seems to be a new display of activism by the hard-liners in the Bush administration.''
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
In Era of Cameras, Keep an Eye on Civil Liberties
By Marc Fisher
Thursday, December 12, 2002
Washington Post; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43085-2002Dec11?language=printer
Step into almost any office building and the guard at the front desk can watch you on his security cam. Enter a store -- pretty much any store these days -- and you know you're being recorded, ostensibly to protect against the Winona Ryders of the world.
I don't especially like being watched, but that doesn't stop me and most rational people from going about our daily rounds.
When I flip on the radio in the car and tune in to traffic and weather together, I know that most of the information I'm hearing comes straight off the cameras that monitor almost every major road in the area. Those would be the good surveillance cams.
Now explain this: Why is it that the same people who love traffic cameras and click onto online voyeur cams when the boss isn't looking start fulminating when police mount cameras on buildings in an effort to curb crime?
The D.C. Council is scheduled to hold a hearing today on how to use the city's 16 street surveillance cameras -- tiny devices attached to roofs and lampposts so police can survey sidewalks for bad guys. The way some folks are talking, it sounds as if we're in a civil liberties crisis.
At first glance, the outrage seems misdirected. Our expectation of privacy in public spaces is already limited -- walk outside and you're fair game for news cameras, marketing intrusions, police comparing you to wanted posters.
It's in privately owned spaces -- offices, shops, places of entertainment -- that we still harbor some (totally unrealistic) expectation of privacy. Fact is, business is far beyond the police in spying on us. From gas stations to restaurants, lobbies to cubicles, cameras monitor our behavior -- with almost no check on how those images might be abused. Hardly anyone squawks about that.
Yet the moment government gets into that game, we're creeped out. I know I was when a proud D.C. public schools security official showed me the snazzy system that lets him peek into the hallways of city schools.
Cedric Laurant -- a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a District advocacy group seeking to restrict police use of street cams -- was so disturbed that he created observingsurveillance.org, where he's posted chilling photographs of the demure little cameras that masquerade as street lamps downtown.
Laurant worries that images captured by "Tiny Brother" cameras might be stolen by hackers, or that the state might use cameras to quash dissent -- just as Soviet bloc countries used street cameras not so long ago.
But Laurant knows that in a free society, anyone can put a camera almost anywhere. In a society that slobbers over "Girls Gone Wild" on TV, it sounds a tad precious to worry about police using street cams against bad guys.
There is a difference, however: In our society, people are free to do anything that's not illegal, but the government may do nothing but what it is specifically charged to do.
It all comes down to how street cams are used. "We oppose general surveillance, but we can see supporting good regulations that protect privacy while allowing law enforcement to fulfill its mission," Laurant says.
Reasonable enough. For 30 years, police have swooned over the notion that putting cameras on the street might deter crime. But in Britain, where more than a million cameras have been installed in public spaces, studies show that while open-air drug markets, prostitution and the like can be discouraged, they're not erased -- just relocated.
Knowing that cameras are watching everywhere puts a damper on public life: Would you join a demonstration, make out with your lover, act like a fool if you knew you were on somebody's screen?
Maybe you would. Those Hollywood producers who make voyeur TV shows believe we'll do anything in public. But there is a difference when the state is watching, because the state can hold our behavior against us.
Cameras aren't good or bad. They're put to smart or dumb uses: Casting a wide eye over our streets is a police state tactic -- ineffective in nabbing crooks but chilling to ordinary pedestrians. The council should narrow the net and use cameras to catch specific targets -- red-light runners, ATM robbers, drug dealers. Even if the whole world is watching, freedom is being alone in a crowd.
Join me at noon today for "Potomac Confidential" at www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
------- courts
Reporter Wins Tribunal Appeal
Judges Back Journalist's Refusal to Testify in War Crimes Trial
By Glenn Frankel
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A40
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42649-2002Dec11?language=printer
LONDON, Dec. 11 -- A former Washington Post reporter cannot be compelled to testify at a U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, an appeals panel at the tribunal ruled today, in a decision that press freedom advocates said would protect reporters' ability to work in the danger of combat zones.
The five-judge panel upheld Jonathan C. Randal's argument that the personal safety and independence of journalists could be jeopardized if they were required to give evidence in such trials. Journalists have been divided over this issue, with some saying immunity is needed but others saying they have a moral obligation to testify.
Overturning a ruling by a lower court at the tribunal, the judges stated that testimony from war correspondents had to be "direct and important" to the core issues in a case and had to convey information that could not reasonably be obtained from other sources.
The panel said prosecutors could attempt to reissue their subpoena seeking Randal's testimony in the trial of a former Bosnian Serb leader whom he interviewed for an article that appeared in The Post in 1993. But the judges also said they found it "difficult to imagine how the appellant's testimony" could meet the dual criteria they had established.
The ruling at the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia drew praise from many press freedom advocates.
"It's a true breakthrough," said Floyd Abrams, a First Amendment lawyer from New York who filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Randal and The Post on behalf of 34 news organizations worldwide, including Dow Jones, the New York Times, three major U.S. television networks, the BBC, the Associated Press and organizations from Britain, France, Australia, South Africa, Greece and Serbia.
"This ruling from an international court assures that war correspondents can do their job without the concern they will be routinely placed in the impossible position of testifying against their sources," Abrams said.
Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, called the ruling "stunning and wonderful." She said that "for the very first time, this influential court has recognized a reporter's privilege outside the borders of the United States."
Legal experts who argue that journalists deserve no special rights said the decision did not undermine their position. "We feel very strongly, as do many journalists, that they have a moral responsibility to come forward and bear witness in cases where their testimony is important, and we don't believe this decision in any way rejects that concept," said Judith Armatta, a lawyer who is The Hague's representative for the Coalition for International Justice, a nonprofit group in Washington that supports international war crimes tribunals.
Randal was issued a subpoena last February to appear at the three-year-old trial of Radoslav Brdjanin, a former deputy prime minister of the Bosnian Serb government who is accused of killing, torturing or expelling from their homes more than 100,000 non-Serbs during the 1992-95 war in Bosnia.
In a Washington Post article published Feb. 11, 1993, Randal quoted Brdjanin as advocating the expulsion of Croats and Muslims. When Brdjanin's defense counsel challenged the accuracy of parts of the article, the prosecution sought Randal's testimony to defend it.
Randal's attorneys have maintained that journalists should have qualified immunity from testifying for reasons of personal safety and freedom of the press. They also argued that Randal's testimony was of no practical value because he had used a translator and did not speak Serbo-Croatian. But the lower court ruled in June that Randal's testimony was "pertinent" and that he should take the stand.
Randal's attorneys appealed that decision. In overturning the decision today, the panel cited "society's interest in protecting the integrity of the news-gathering process," and said that news sources in war zones would be less inclined to talk freely to reporters or might target reporters for reprisals if they believed the journalists might testify against them.
Although Randal's attorneys did not argue that journalists should have absolute immunity against testifying, they said the testimony had to be of "crucial importance" and pose no danger to the journalist or the journalist's colleagues. The appeals court, in invoking a less stringent "direct and important" standard, did not go as far, but Randal nonetheless said he was gratified by the ruling.
"My feeling is that wars are becoming more dangerous for correspondents and forcing them to testify would only increase the dangers," said Randal, who in 45 years as a correspondent frequently covered armed conflicts. "It's hard to gain the confidence of combatants. Either they won't talk to us at all or they'll kill us. I wanted the court to think long and hard about that."
The question of whether reporters should appear in court has divided the international journalistic community. Analysts said the dilemma is growing more acute because international prosecutions are likely to become more common, following the recent establishment of the International Criminal Court, which is meant to have general jurisdiction the world over.
Jacky Rowland, a BBC television correspondent formerly based in Yugoslavia, testified at the tribunal against the country's former president, Slobodan Milosevic, in August. In an interview, she said she did not believe such testimony would endanger her safety or that of other war correspondents. "We are human beings and ordinary people, we're not a priesthood," said Rowland, who is now based in Moscow. Emphasizing that journalists should follow their consciences in deciding whether to give evidence, she added, "I think perhaps our own readers and viewers might get suspicious if we started claiming special privileges and exemptions."
Florence Hartman, prosecution spokesman in the Brdjanin case, said prosecutors would decide sometime in the new year whether to pursue another subpoena for Randal. "We're pleased that the court did not grant a systematic privilege for all journalists," she said. "We welcome and understand the fact that the court is trying to prevent war correspondents from being subpoenaed unnecessarily."
Staff writer Howard Kurtz in Washington contributed to this report.
-------- drug war
Canada Committee Urges Laxer Pot Laws, U.S. Upset
December 12, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-canada-marijuana.html
OTTAWA (Reuters) - A parliamentary committee urged the Canadian government on Thursday to relax its laws on possession of marijuana, an idea that Washington's drug czar immediately branded as outdated and dangerous.
The special committee on the non-medical use of drugs said in a report that marijuana should be decriminalized, but not legalized. This means people possessing and cultivating pot in amounts less than 30 grams (1.1 ounces) would be fined if caught, rather than getting a criminal record as at present.
About 20,000 Canadians a year are convicted for possession or cultivation of marijuana, which committee chairwoman Paddy Torsney said was a waste of police resources because current laws seemed to be having no effect.
``We concluded that the possession of marijuana should remain illegal and trafficking in any amount of cannabis should remain a crime,'' she told a news conference.
``Smoking any amount of marijuana is unhealthy but the consequences of conviction of a small amount of marijuana for personal use are disproportionate to the potential harm,'' she said, pointing out that 30 percent of Canadians admitted to having smoked pot.
The report provides more ammunition for Justice Minister Martin Cauchon, who said this week he planned to introduce legislation early next year to decriminalize marijuana.
But in the United States, officials, already worried about the increasing amounts of potent Canadian marijuana flowing across the border, flatly condemned the idea that pot was not particularly dangerous.
John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, said the committee's recommendations reflected ``archaic views'' about marijuana.
``The line that has been presented to Americans as well as Canadians is that marijuana is not a serious drug of abuse. That is not true,'' he said.
``High-potency marijuana in particular is being used by teenagers of younger and younger ages,'' he told a news conference in Buffalo, New York.
Walters said the recommendations would lead to greater use of marijuana and other drugs, and if Canadian laws were relaxed the United States might have to increase security at the two nations' shared border to clamp down on trafficking.
This could deal a major blow to Canada's economy, since more than 85 percent of its exports go to the United States.
``No family, no community and no nation is better off with more drug use...for people who have tried to tell Americans marijuana is not something you have to pay attention to -- it's a lie,'' said Walters.
Police say Canada, with an estimated illegal drug market of $9 billion a year, has surpassed Mexico as a source of illegal drugs for the United States.
Cauchon said decriminalizing marijuana would help police focus on striking at organized crime gangs -- especially in the western province of British Columbia -- who have turned pot growing into a multibillion-dollar industry.
``We want to ensure we'll be even tougher on those involved in organized crime and smuggling drugs...we want to make sure we focus our resources where it really counts for our society,'' he told reporters, stressing what he said was excellent cooperation between Canadian and U.S. police forces.
Torsney's committee -- comprising legislators from the House of Commons -- recommended against the full legalization of marijuana, an idea that Cauchon has already rejected.
In September a Senate committee said marijuana should be legalized and regulated, as is the case with alcohol.
Kevin Sorenson of the official opposition Canadian Alliance, a right-wing law-and-order party, backed the overall thrust of the report but said the limit for non-criminal marijuana possession should be set at 5 grams (0.2 ounces).
--------
U.S. Frets Canada May Ease Marijuana Law
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Canada-Going-to-Pot.html
TORONTO (AP) -- Getting caught with an ounce or less of marijuana in Canada should bring fines, not prison time and a criminal record, a parliamentary committee said Thursday.
The committee was the second in Parliament that has called for Canada to ease its marijuana laws -- despite protests from the United States.
Canada's Supreme Court is also preparing to hear a constitutional challenge to laws that make it illegal to possess pot, and Justice Minister Martin Cauchon said this week that legislation to decriminalize marijuana could be introduced early in 2003.
The report by a House of Commons committee on drugs said too many young Canadians get a criminal record for the relatively minor offense of smoking pot.
Rather than legalizing marijuana, as recommended by a Senate committee earlier this year, the House panel proposed a fine or other sanction instead of the maximum six-month jail term for possession.
The report also differed from the Senate committee by not calling for an amnesty for the estimated 600,000 Canadians with a criminal record for possession of cannabis.
It proposes government education and prevention programs for young people, naming a drug commissioner to report on national drug strategy, and more money each year for the Canadian Center on Substance Abuse.
American officials oppose the push toward greater leniency.
Liberalizing laws will boost drug use and bring more pot into the United States, said John Walters, director of the U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy.
Canada is already a major source of marijuana for the United States, with an estimated $2.5 billion worth smuggled in each year, Walters said Thursday.
While he didn't think the new laws would ``destroy'' relations between the historically friendly neighbors, Walters said the United States would be forced to combat the increased flow of drugs.
``My theory is it's going to cause unnecessary harm to our citizens and our children on both sides of our borders,'' he said.
The Canadian Supreme Court will hear a constitutional challenge to marijuana laws on Friday. The basic argument is that people should not be imprisoned for something that isn't harmful.
Walters said it's a myth that marijuana isn't harmful, saying 60 percent of drug-dependent Americans are hooked on it.
``For people who try to tell Americans marijuana is not something we have to pay attention to -- it's a lie,'' he said.
The issue joins a growing list of differences between the North American neighbors that share the world's largest trade partnership, worth more than $1 billion a day.
Despite their military ties and common democratic values, Canada has traditionally adopted more liberal social policies, in part to distinguish itself from its neighbor. Examples include diplomatic ties with Cuba, a ban on capital punishment and more lenient immigration policies.
Last year, Canada implemented a medical marijuana program that allows some patients to possess and grow pot.
Eight U.S. states have taken some kind of step toward permitting the medicinal use of marijuana. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, has ruled there is no exception in federal law for people to use marijuana, so even those with tolerant state laws could face arrest if they do.
On the Net:
Canadian site advocating marijuana culture:
http://www.cannabisculture.com
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration at http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/
--------
U.S. Officials Reject Drug War Claims
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Colombian-Heroin.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- U.S. anti-drug officials Thursday rejected lawmakers' claims that they are doing little to eradicate Colombia's opium, the raw material for most of the heroin sold in the United States.
Members of the House Government Reform Committee said a $1.8 billion anti-drug program in Colombia is so focused on eradicating coca, little is being done about opium. Fewer opium crops are being fumigated this year than before U.S. helicopters and other anti-drug aid began arriving two years ago.
The result has been a surge in heroin in the United States, lawmakers said.
``Plain and simple, the heroin that is flooding the United States and is killing our citizens comes from Colombia,'' said Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga. ``It is a weapon of mass destruction and we must help the Colombian government eradicate it, before it gets to the United States.''
A top State Department antidrug official, Paul E. Simons, told lawmakers that the United States is fighting opium as well as coca in Colombia.
``We know the enemy and what we need to do,'' he said. ``We have assets in country deployed to do the job, and we have effective and strong leadership in Colombia prepared to do its part.''
In 2000, pilots sprayed about 22,700 acres of opium. That figure fell to about 3,950 acres last year. U.S. officials hope to spray about 12,350 acres this year.
Simons said opium spraying was hindered last year by a lack of spray planes and pilots, interruptions in the flow of money and bad weather. With coca eradication requiring fewer resources than opium eradication, it was a higher priority.
In a visit Thursday to Washington, Colombia's foreign minister, Carolina Barco, noted the difficulty of fumigating opium.
Opium poppies ``are cultivated at much higher altitudes than coca and we need to find ways to eradicate them and find economic alternatives'' for opium farmers, she said.
Colombia accounts for most of the world's cocaine, but only a tiny fraction of its heroin. But almost all Colombian heroin is sold in the United States, mostly in the East. Cocaine is much more popular than heroin in the United States, but heroin accounts for more fatal overdoses.
Colombian heroin tends to be purer than the Mexican heroin that dominates the western United States. Because of its purity, it is often inhaled, making it more appealing to people who don't want to use needles.
Police and anti-drug officials say Colombian heroin is tied to what they see as increased use of the drug.
In Westmoreland County, Pa., near Pittsburgh, 12 people have died of overdoses this year, compared with five fatal overdoses over the five previous years, Detective Tony Marcocci, of the county's district attorney's office, said in his testimony.
Detective Sgt. Scott Pelletier of the Portland, Maine, Police Department, said heroin seizures and arrests have surged in his state.
``There has historically been a heroin problem in Maine, but over the last five years it has become nothing short of an epidemic,'' he said.
Associated Press writer Nestor Ikeda contributed to this story.
-------- spying
Canada Plan to Gather Travel Data Criticized
December 12, 2002
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/americas/12CANA.html
TORONTO, Dec. 11 - Canada's new system for collecting detailed information about airline passengers is gathering increased criticism from privacy advocates, who say the system violates Canadian law.
The system, first announced two years ago and made operational in October, uses information collected from the airlines to screen all passengers on incoming flights as potential security threats.
A similar system that integrates with Canada's is scheduled to be operational in the United States by next spring.
But some Canadian officials, privacy advocates and legal experts say the system's scope is too broad and violates the country's Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That criticism intensified in late October after the government confirmed news reports that it planned to expand the system next year to include all forms of mass transportation, including buses, trains, ferries and cruise ships.
"What this creates is a huge expansion, in terms of data collection from citizens or individuals coming into the country, that didn't exist before," Ann Cavoukian, Ontario's information and privacy commissioner, said.
The Advance Passenger Information/Passenger Name Record, or API/PNR, system collects detailed information about air travelers, including travel itinerary, seat location, ticket price and method of payment, the identity of travel companions and even what meals were ordered.
After passengers check in for flights to Canada, the information is submitted to the system at the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency and is screened while the plane is in flight. If a passenger is deemed a security threat, he or she will be refused entry to Canada and sent back to the point of origin.
Passengers on domestic flights are not screened.
"Free and democratic societies do not generally tolerate the creation of databases of personal information on vast numbers of innocent citizens for general law enforcement purposes," Gérard La Forest, a retired Supreme Court justice, wrote in a legal argument sent to Canada's privacy commissioner, George Radwanski. "The fact that the C.C.R.A.'s proposed database relates to international air travel does not justify departing from this principle."
Colette Gentes-Hawn, a spokeswoman for the customs agency acknowledged that the system collects more information than it needs.
"Some of the information it collects doesn't matter," she said. "We don't use it for anything, but we store it anyway. It's just easier for the airlines to send us everything."
-------- terrorism
SEABORNE TRADE
Warnings From Al Qaeda Stir Fear That Terrorists May Attack Oil Tankers
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By KEITH BRADSHER
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/asia/12TANK.html
ABOARD PETRO RANGER, in the Strait of Malacca, Dec. 6 - As the distant jungle shore of Malaysia faded from green to gray to black at sunset, Noer Rahman put a bright red fire ax on the back deck of this aging tanker, then tied two high-pressure fire hoses to the stern handrail and turned them on.
Mr. Rahman, an experienced Indonesian sailor, was getting ready to fight pirates and terrorists, dangers especially great in this important waterway, the fastest route around the southernmost tip of continental Asia.
A recent audiotape believed to have been made by Osama bin Laden praised and seemed to take responsibility for a suicide attack two months ago in which a speedboat packed with explosives rammed and crippled a French tanker, the Limburg, off Yemen. Other leaders of Al Qaeda have vowed to cut the "economic lifelines" of the world's industrialized societies.
The threats have focused the attention of intelligence agencies and marine police worldwide on the vulnerability of tankers. Representatives of most of the world's seagoing nations are meeting in London to discuss how to keep ships safe from the long-term problem of piracy and the new risks of terrorism.
"With the attack on the Limburg, commercial vessels, especially vulnerable vessels like tankers, are terrorist targets," said Pootengal Mukundan, the director of the International Maritime Bureau, a United Nations affiliate that works with Interpol to combat seaborne crime.
Nowhere has the concern been more acute than here in the Strait of Malacca, between Malaysia and Indonesia. A quarter of the world's trade passes through the strait. That includes half of all sea shipments of oil, bound for East Asia or sometimes the United States, and two-thirds of the world's shipments of liquefied natural gas.
More pirate attacks occur in Indonesian waters than anywhere else in the world. The pirates have spies in ports to identify valuable targets, and sometimes confederates aboard as well.
Since Indonesia has many radical Muslim groups with a history of violence, which have been linked to the bombing in Bali in October, law enforcement and intelligence officials worry that terrorists may tap the pirates' expertise to mount attacks on ships in the region.
Smaller tankers like this 420-foot-long vessel, making slow trips through the strait while fully laden with valuable cargos, run the greatest danger, Mr. Mukundan said.
The big fear is that Al Qaeda might seize a ship and crash it into another vessel or into a refinery or port.
Singapore, where the Petro Ranger started its current journey, has the world's second-busiest port, after Hong Kong's, so its government has taken the threat of terrorism very seriously.
As the ship began inching away from the jetties of Singapore's immense refinery, where it took on three million gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel, a brown Singaporean F-4 Skyhawk fighter flew overhead on combat air patrol, a precaution started after the attacks on Sept. 11 of last year.
A Singaporean Hawkeye airborne surveillance plane circled twice over the refinery in the next hour, while a half-dozen fast patrol boats with deck guns and a small gray warship cruised the anchorage. One of the patrol boats escorted the Petro Ranger.
But once vessels enter the Strait of Malacca they are essentially on their own. An hour from Singapore, the Petro Ranger peacefully steamed past Iyu Kecil, a jungle-covered Indonesian island that Mr. Mukundan described as a base for an organized crime gang that has been hijacking small tankers to sell the cargos.
Three hours later, the Petro Ranger sailed past Laboh Point, Malaysia, where the tanker's crew had a close call just two months ago. A watchman on the deck of the Petro Ranger spotted a fast, low boat with no lights within 100 yards of the stern.
The tanker's bells sounded to wake the unarmed crew, a radio call went out to the Malaysian coast guard and Istaque Hossain, the second officer, aimed a spotlight at the craft to signal to the occupants that they would not take the Petro Ranger unawares.
The spotlight revealed the boat to be packed with crouching men. "All of them were squatting, coming very close in masks and full black body suits," recalled Fong Chung-chen, the Petro Ranger's Malaysian chief officer. After it was caught in the light, the boat sheered off and vanished.
Armed with machetes, swords, even assault rifles and hand grenades, pirates often climb up the stern of a vessel, using grappling hooks and rope or sometimes shinnying up thick bamboo poles with hooks at the top. Pirates frequently choose the stern because it is low and because they are unlikely to be seen by officers on the bridge watching the sea ahead.
Once aboard they try to disable a ship's radio systems before the crew can send a distress signal to local coast guard units.
Experienced sailors say pirates consider fire axes and hoses to be fair defensive weapons, unlike guns, for which they often punish ship crews. The axes are used to sever the pirates' grappling hooks, and the hoses spraying water off the stern are supposed to make the pirate boats wet and slippery platforms from which to mount an attack.
The pirate boats are typically equipped with several outboard motors on the back, allowing them to go up to three times as fast as the tankers, which lumber along at 11 knots, the equivalent of 13 land miles an hour. The pirates also use a low-tech version of stealth technology: they choose boats made of wood, which are hard to spot on radar.
Laws in many ports bar the equipping of tankers with deck guns. Many companies, including Petroships Pte. Ltd., which operates the single-hull Petro Ranger and seven newer tankers, also ban the crews from carrying guns.
"Let's say we shoot at them," Mr. Fong said. "When they board they would kill us all. Once they board we are finished - if we lock the doors, they break the glass" of the windows.
Four and a half years ago, a dozen pirates swarmed aboard this tanker off the eastern coast of Malaysia and took the crew prisoner. The pirates sailed to China to try to sell the gasoline and diesel fuel, then worth about $2 million at wholesale prices. But a Chinese marine police vessel discovered the tanker and freed the crew.
The International Maritime Bureau's records show a decline in reported attacks against vessels in the Strait of Malacca in the last two years.
Bureau officials say that partly reflects the fact that fewer captains are reporting incidents, but also some progress in combating piracy.
China has begun keeping pirates out of its waters, notably by executing members of one gang that murdered the entire crew of a vessel. Malaysia has purchased more fast patrol boats and has identified some of the ringleaders of pirate gangs based in nearby countries, said Muhamad Muda, the commander of Malaysia's marine police.
"We gave them the warning that if they ever came into Malaysian waters we will apprehend them and eliminate them," he said.
Indonesia, struggling with a crippled economy, has proven unable to mount such an ambitious effort. Intelligence officials say most pirates are based on the Indonesian side of the strait and buy the collusion of villagers by sharing their loot.
A few shipowners, notably Petroships' chairman, Alan H. J. Chan, say efforts to date have been completely inadequate, and have begun calling for the formation of a small military force, operating under a license from the United Nations, to patrol the strait.
"A big project may cost millions but save billions, and save lives, too," Mr. Chan said.
But Malaysia and Indonesia oppose the idea, arguing that intelligence gathering and law enforcement ashore are just as important.
Additional patrols might discourage pirates but will not stop terrorists willing to die for their cause, Mr. Mukundan said. The International Maritime Bureau has begun calling for the creation of special shipping lanes reserved for commercial vessels in waterways like this one, with military force used to exclude fishing boats and pleasure craft.
"The only way to stop it is to blow it out of the water before it hits the tanker," Mr. Mukundan said. The United States and other countries have been leery of such a drastic response.
By 9 p.m. on the second day of its voyage, the Petro Ranger was chugging across calm seas in moonless, utter darkness. The nearest land was Tuan Point, Malaysia, where the captain of a fishing trawler was kidnapped by pirates in broad daylight. He was later released unhurt.
Aboard the Petro Ranger, Mr. Fong fretted over the radar. A long, thin fishing boat was barely visible by its navigation lights, yet the radar showed no trace of it.
When Mr. Fong turned up the radar, it showed a mass of reflections from every ripple on the sea, and still no boat was discernible. The boat quietly passed around the stern of the Petro Ranger, where it unexpectedly turned up on the radar, and then sailed off into the distance.
Two hours later the Petro Ranger's 31-year-old engines began spewing clouds of sparks because of a fuel mixture problem. The bridge officers were alarmed that sparks might blow onto the cargo tanks, or that pirates might see the sparks as a sign of engine distress and pounce. It took an hour for the ship's engineers to fix the problem.
After traversing the narrowest and most dangerous 130 miles of the strait, the Petro Ranger safely sailed up an estuary and docked at 6 a.m. at Port Klang, the main port for the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur. Mohda Hadapi, the Malaysian helmsman, was relieved after a nerve-racking night of scanning a pitch-black sea.
His wife cries each time he leaves, he said. "Pirates and now terrorists - after January, I'm going to sign off, maybe find a job ashore," he added.
--------
Al - Qaida Suicide Teams Train in Pakistan
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Pakistan-Suicide-Squads.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan (AP) -- Suicide squads are being trained in Pakistan by al-Qaida operatives to hit targets in Afghanistan and the bombers' families are being promised $50,000, say Afghan and Pakistani sources.
The Pakistani government denies the presence of camps here. ``Nobody will ever be able to either hide here or establish training camps in Pakistan,'' said Interior Ministry spokesman Iftikar Ahmed.
But privately, some officials in Pakistan's intelligence community and Interior Ministry say they believe there is such bomb training and that it is protected by Pakistani militants and Taliban sympathizers in the Pakistan military.
The nephew of Maulvi Abdul Kabir, the Taliban's No. 3 man, says the training camps are in Bajour and Mansehra, towns in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province where support for the former Afghan regime runs strong.
The nephew asked that his name not be used, saying he feared retaliation from both the Taliban and Pakistanis. He said he agreed to an exclusive interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday because he believes suicide bombing is wrong. He also seemed interested in getting U.S. attention and possibly a reward.
There is a $10 million reward for Mullah Mohammed Omar, the deposed Taliban leader, but not for most other Taliban officials. The nephew said he has not talked to any U.S. official, and would not approach the Pakistanis because he suspects they are in league with the Taliban.
Kabir's nephew had a video taken at a graduation ceremony in the southwestern Pakistan city of Quetta where Kabir and several top Taliban leaders, including former intelligence officials and governors, were present and some spoke. He also had an audio cassette from speeches given at a mosque in Quetta in which Kabir spoke on behalf of Mullah Omar, condemning the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and calling on the faithful to wage a holy war against the Americans.
During two weeks of training, would-be bombers are told by Arab instructors that they are waging war on the Jews and ``will be martyrs and go straight to heaven and their family will get $50,000,'' Kabir's nephew said.
They are trained in small groups and not all are told they must die, he said. Some are taught to detonate bombs by remote control, and to drive explosives-laden trucks into Afghanistan, he said.
So far two Afghans and one suspected al-Qaida operative trained at these camps have infiltrated Afghanistan but have been arrested, the nephew said. He did not know whether these were the same people whose arrest was announced by Afghan authorities two months ago after they came from Pakistan in a car packed with explosives.
The nephew said one of the men arrested was an Iraqi. Last month, an Iraqi man was arrested in Kabul, the Afghan capital, but the nephew couldn't say whether he was among those trained in Bajour, a tribal region bordering Afghanistan's northeastern province of Kunar.
U.S. forces are scouring the mountains that crisscross Afghanistan's Kunar province searching for Taliban and al-Qaida operatives, and for Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an Iranian-backed rebel commander.
A Western intelligence source in Pakistan also said training was going on in Bajour and in Mansehra area. He said there had been reports that Hekmatyar loyalists had purchased several vehicles for the purpose of carrying explosives. Afghan, Pakistani and Western sources say Kabir has forged an alliance with Hekmatyar, who is also being sought by the United States.
The AP also acquired books written in both Pashtu and Persian extolling the virtue of carrying out suicide attacks. It cited verses from the Islamic holy book, the Quran, to support suicide attacks. Most Muslim scholars, however, say suicide is against Islamic teachings.
Reports of trained suicide squads surfaced last September when one of Hekmatyar's military commanders, Salauddin Safi, told AP that some Taliban had formed an alliance with Hekmatyar's followers, a view shared by Western intelligence sources, who believe Kabir is working with Hekmatyar.
With money from al-Qaida and Iran, the two groups formed a new alliance called Lashkar Fedayan-e-Islami, or the Islamic Martyrs Brigade, which Safi said would target U.S. military installations.
In a separate interview, a man who served in the Cabinet of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said Pakistan's army protects the Taliban.
``They have even given them their jeeps to get around safely. Why do you think none of the top Taliban who came to Pakistan have been arrested?'' he said.
The nephew said Kabir is protected by Pakistan's intelligence and its military. He travels freely throughout Pakistan, from its deeply Islamic tribal regions to the southwestern city of Quetta and to Haripur, a city 35 miles north of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
His entourage includes former Taliban governors, intelligence chiefs and, in recent weeks, Maulvi Ghazi, special adviser to Mullah Omar, the nephew said. Omar is high on the U.S. wanted list.
With the October election that gave religious hard-liners control of the strategic provinces that border Afghanistan, fugitive Taliban have become increasingly brazen, even launching fund-raising campaigns.
During the three-day Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr that ended last weekend, $50,000 was raised by former Taliban Maulvi Baram, the nephew said.
The Taliban even issue receipts, which say the money is for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban called the country.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Smart Windows, Ethanol Technique Among Grantees
December 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-12-09.asp#anchor7
GOLDEN, Colorado, The Department of Energy has awarded grants totaling $4.4 million to advance energy efficient, environmentally clean production and building technologies.
"Twenty-five percent of the energy used to heat and cool buildings goes right out the window," said Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham. "The innovative technologies receiving funding today will improve U.S. industrial competitiveness while reducing energy use, helping to make our nation more secure."
The Energy Department selected 19 organizations out of 202 proposals to receive funding as part of two DOE programs: Inventions and Innovation (I&I), and the National Industrial Competitiveness through Energy, Environment and Economics (NICE3) initiative.
Among the projects selected for funding are:
- Advanced Processing Technology of Electrochromic Windows: A process to develop new film patterning techniques for energy saving smart windows. The process improves visible light transmission and reduces glare, while retaining a clear view and increasing thermal comfort.
- An Indirect Route for Ethanol Production: A process to develop fuel ethanol from renewable resources to achieve savings of 80 percent in energy consumption. The process helps U.S. farmers create a market for corn supplies and increases national energy security.
- Manufacturing Ceramic Products from Fiberglass Waste: A low cost energy method of transforming fiberglass waste into a dense ceramic product. The process could eliminate the need for disposal of 260,000 tons of fiberglass waste each year.
- Near-Infrared (NIR) Veneer Strength Sensor for Forest Industry: Use of NIR sensors instead of ultrasonic technology allows testing for veneer wood strength before drying. The NIR technology will improve process efficiency and reduce product waste, and is expected to save about $23,000 a year in energy costs.
- The Force Modulator: A durable sheet metal technology for the steel industry that allows better control of press forces during part forming.
Over the past 20 years, DOE's I&I program has funded more than 500 energy efficient inventions with almost 25 percent of them reaching the marketplace. Cumulative sales for those products total almost $710 million.
DOE's NICE3 program provides funding to state and industry partnerships for projects that demonstrate advances in energy efficiency and clean production technologies. State and industry partnerships are eligible to receive a one time grant of up to $525,000.
The industrial partner may receive a maximum of $500,000 in federal funding. The non-federal cost share must be at least 50 percent of the total cost of the project.
-------- environment
Governents Craft Hazardous Waste Strategic Plan
December 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-12-04.asp
GENEVA, Switzerland, Hazardous wastes require "permanent vigilance" to ensure that they do not cause harm to human health or contaminate the environment, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today in a message to a meeting in Geneva crafting an action plan to help countries safely dispose of hazardous wastes.
"Since wastes tend to follow the path of least resistance, efforts are also needed to ensure that they are disposed of, as far as is practicable and sound, as close as possible to where they were generated," Annan said in remarks to the Sixth Conference of the Parties (COP6) to the Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal.
Annan
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (Photo courtesy UN)
"The overall challenge we face concerns more than disposal," Annan told the conference in his message. "We must also minimize the quantity and hazardousness of wastes, including by improving the design of products and processes," he said.
The conference, which is scheduled to conclude tomorrow, is considering a strategic plan through 2010 aimed at accelerating action to protect human health and the environment from hazardous wastes.
The meeting is expected to adopt technical guidelines on the disposal and recycling of lead-acid batteries, plastic wastes, biomedical and healthcare wastes, and obsolete ships.
Today major mobile phone manufacturers signed a declaration expressing their interest in cooperating with the Basel Convention and with other stakeholders in the mobile-phone sector on the environmentally sound management of obsolete mobile phones.
signing
Mobile phone manufacturers sign declaration of interest in dealing with their e-waste. (Photo courtesy ) The Initiative for a Sustainable Partnership on Environmentally Sound Management of End-of-life Mobile Phones will address the recovery of this consumer product using a life-cycle approach.
It is seen as the first of many such agreements to be developed between various industry sectors and the Basel Convention in the future.
The manufacturers supporting the mobile phone initiative are LG, Matsushita (Panasonic), Mitsubishi, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Philips, Samsung, Siemens and Sony Ericsson.
Senior officials from the participating companies signed the declaration during the high level segment of the conference before some 40 ministers and several hundred government representatives from most of the Convention's 151 member governments.
Philippe Roch, Swiss State Secretary and Director of the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape, who presided over the previous Conference of the Parties (COP5) in Basel in 1999, was pleased with the mobile phone manufacturers' position.
Roch
Swiss State Secretary Philippe Roch(Photo courtesy IISD-ENB) "Tackling the environmental implications of mobile phones through this initiative will provide a good example of cooperation between economic sectors and multilateral environmental agreements," he said.
An amendment that bans the export of hazardous wastes for final disposal and recycling from developed to developing countries is under consideration by COP6.
Other issues up for decision include - monitoring the implementation of and compliance with the Basel Convention, preventing and monitoring illegal traffic, an emergency fund or mechanism, a dispute settlement mechanism, and the legal implications of the dismantling of ships.
Since the last Conference of Parties, the Basel Convention Technical Working Group has been working on draft technical guidelines covering the environmentally sound management of lead-acid battery wastes, plastic wastes, biomedical and healthcare wastes, recycling and reclamation of metals and metal compounds, the full and partial dismantling of ships, and persistent organic pollutants (POPs) as wastes.
The technical group has also discussed cooperation with the World Customs Organization and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), adjustments to the lists of wastes considered hazardous or non-hazardous, and proposals made by Germany on asphalt wastes and edible oil wastes, such as frying oils.
The sound management of chemicals and hazardous waste was addressed at the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD), in Johannesburg this summer. Delegates agreed to text in the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation supporting entry into force of the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent by 2003 and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants by 2004.
The Johannesburg Plan of Implementation commits governments to promote efforts to prevent international illegal trafficking of hazardous chemicals and hazardous waste, as well as damage resulting from the transboundary movement and disposal of hazardous waste.
On November 19 to 22 in Tianjin, China, officials from eight Asian governments met under the auspices of the Basel Convention to seek solutions to the growing deluge of electrical and electronic wastes.
The Asia-Pacific Regional Scoping Workshop on the Environmentally Sound Management of Electronic Wastes is the first intergovernmental meeting to be held on the e-wastes problem in Asia. The environmentally sound management of e-wastes is an important element of the strategic plan now being developed by the member governments of the Basel Convention.
component
Computer parts (Photo courtesy Freefoto)
Asian countries are the main importers of e-wastes generated around the world. They can earn income from refurbishing used PCs and disassembling obsolete PCs, monitors, and circuit boards and then recovering the gold, copper and other precious metals.
But e-waste often contains hazardous substances such as lead, cadmium and mercury. Workers in e-waste operations may face dangerous working conditions where health, safety and environmental standards may be compromised.
The Tianjin meeting said dismantling can be made easier and safer by incorporating these concerns at the design stage. Manufacturers can be given responsibility for managing the wastes resulting from the equipment they sell.
National capacities and legislative frameworks for monitoring and controlling transboundary movements of the e-waste stream can be strengthened.
The Basel Convention was adopted in March 1989 and regulates the movement of hazardous wastes. It obliges member countries to ensure that such wastes are managed in an environmentally sound manner. Governments are expected to minimize the quantities that are transported, to treat and dispose of wastes as close as possible to where they were generated, and to minimize the generation of hazardous waste at source.
----
Bush Sets Rules to Speed Logging in U.S. Forests
By Mike Allen and Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42732-2002Dec11?language=printer
President Bush announced plans yesterday to speed up the cutting of trees and brush in national forests by curtailing environmental reviews and judicial oversight, with the aim of reducing wildfires fueled by overgrowth.
Bush acted after both houses of Congress rejected the proposed changes when he asked for them last summer. The new rules will decrease, from 200 pages to perhaps only one page, the amount of environmental impact information needed to approve clear-cutting projects in some areas.
The president said the plan, which will increase the number of controlled burns, will help prevent another epidemic of forest fires like the one this year that burned 7 million acres in the West and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings. Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman, briefing reporters after meeting with Bush, said the changes were designed "to streamline unnecessary, burdensome red tape."
"We continue to be hampered by outdated, inefficient and time-consuming processes that often delay projects to improve forest and rangeland health until it's too late," Veneman said.
But conservationists said the plan will do relatively little to address the problems of tinder-like underbrush and fire-prone trees near heavily populated areas, even as it gives loggers greater leeway to cut larger, more commercially valuable trees in remote regions.
"This plan is nothing more than a payback to the timber industry, allowing it to remove trees far from where people live," said Amy Mall, a forest specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The administration proposals will be issued in a final version after a 30-day public comment period, and then will take effect. Bush was able to make the changes without congressional approval by acting under an exemption in administrative regulations for projects that do not have a significant impact on the human environment.
The plan applies to 10 national forests, most of them in mountain and western states, and the administration wants to have it in effect before the next fire season. The new rules will fundamentally change the way federal agencies manage millions of acres of forest, dramatically speeding up thinning and restoration projects by eliminating the need for full environmental impact assessments. The rules will sharply reduce the ability of opponents to delay new projects until a court has ruled, and reviews mandated by the Endangered Species Act will be quicker.
The announcement was the latest example of Bush using executive powers to accomplish aims he could not win in Congress. Last month the administration announced plans to streamline the process of conducting environmental reviews before allowing drilling, logging and other activities in national forests. Yesterday's announcement offers new fodder to critics who say his changes in environmental policy consistently benefit executives and industries that are major Republican donors.
Many Democrats and Republicans agree that the policies of recent decades have allowed too much national forest growth near populated areas. They differ on what should be done in remote areas. Bush's plan would allow more cutting of trees and brush in or near lightly populated areas.
Congressional Republicans and forest industry leaders hailed the announcement as an important breakthrough in the effort to control forest fires. But some Democrats and environmentalists sharply criticized it for limiting public input in key decisions.
Rep. Scott McInnis (R-Colo.), chairman of the forest subcommittee of the House Resources Committee and a champion of the president's proposal, said the plan "represents real progress in addressing the growing wildfire epidemic. With the next fire season a few short months away, western communities want forward movement and they want it now."
Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton said many clearing projects, which the govenrment calls "fuels reduction," are blocked by concerns about endangered species, which then lose their habitats in forest fires. "Dense overgrown forests and rangelands have grown like a cancer," Norton said. "They need to be treated."
But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.), outgoing chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said the administration was ramming through proposals that had been rejected this fall by congressional Democrats and Republicans.
"I think most of us in Congress wanted to facilitate the thinning of these high-risk areas," Bingaman said. "But we felt the administration was pursuing too much exemption from existing law in order to accomplish that, and we were trying to get agreement to do something that seemed more reasonable."
In August, Bush unveiled his Healthy Forests Initiative, which suggested congressional action to accomplish many of the changes he now is making administratively, during a tour of wildfire devastation in southern Oregon. Senate Democrats blocked efforts by Sens. Larry E. Craig (R-Idaho) and Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.) to attach a version of the president's proposal to the fiscal 2003 Interior Department spending bill. Republican and Democratic members of the House Resources Committee could not agree on a compromise.
The administration's proposal is aimed at reducing legal and administrative barriers to thinning underbrush and small trees, as well as commercially attractive old-growth trees. The plan would restructure rules that govern appeals of federal decision-making on logging in highly fire-prone areas -- particularly making "less cumbersome" the National Environmental Policy Act, which environmentalists see as a bedrock law.
"We have a situation now which our chief of the Forest Service likes to call 'analysis paralysis,' where you make a decision, and it continues to get appealed into the courts," Veneman said. "We then never get anything done."
-------- genetics
New Stanford Institute Is to Study Controversial Stem Cell Manipulation
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By NICHOLAS WADE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/science/12CLON.html
A new stem cell institute being set up at Stanford University will study a wide variety of human diseases through two advanced but controversial techniques of cell manipulation. One is nuclear transfer, also used in cloning animals, and the other will involve generating new lines of human embryonic stem cells.
The institute will be headed by Dr. Irving Weissman, a Stanford expert on the stem cells in the bone marrow that daily renew the red and white blood cells. An anonymous donor has provided $12 million to start the institute.
Dr. Weissman said he intended to explore two promising new lines of inquiry made possible by embryonic stem cells. The first is to find out if stem cells and cancer cells may use the same genetic machinery to replicate themselves. Stem cells multiply freely to generate all the mature cells of the body, and though mature cells lose this ability cancer cells somehow regain it.
A later goal will be to use stem cells to develop models of human disease, meaning cultures of cells that can be studied in the laboratory. Dr. Weissman gave as an example the creation of a model for Lou Gehrig's disease, which is caused by the mysterious death of the motor neurons that control the muscles. From a patient's body cell, the nucleus - which contains all the DNA including the faulty genes that cause the disease - would be extracted and inserted into an unfertilized human egg whose own nucleus had been removed. Still in a laboratory dish, the egg would develop after a few days into the early, pre-implantation embryo known as a blastocyst.
The blastocyst's inner cell mass, from which all the different cell types of the body are formed, would then be removed and the cells, now known as embryonic stem cells, would be exposed to signals that make them develop first into nerve cells and then into the specialized motor neurons. If these start to die, just as they do in patients with Lou Gehrig's disease, researchers should have an excellent opportunity to pinpoint the errant genes that are responsible and to devise drugs to counter their subversive action.
The same technique, Dr. Weissman said, could be used to create models of any other human disease, with the embryonic stem cells being converted into whatever type of tissue the disease affects, whether the pancreas in the case of diabetes or basal cell ganglia in the case of Parkinson's disease.
"This is so important that we finally have the chance to get a handle on every one of these human multigenic diseases - it would be wrong not to try it," Dr. Weissman said. Multigenic diseases, which are caused by several errant genes acting in concert, are particularly hard to analyze because they follow no obvious pattern of inheritance.
A flurry of news reports yesterday portrayed the Stanford institute as planning to do a form of human cloning, and Dr. Weissman said he was distressed to see his research plan presented in that light. The nuclear transfer technique is used by animal cloners to make blastocysts that are then inserted into an animal's womb. In Dr. Weissman's proposal the blastocysts would stay in the Petri dish and be destroyed to make human embryonic stem cells.
The creation of human embryonic stem cells has been controversial because some critics, including the Roman Catholic Church, object to destroying human blastocysts, even the surplus ones created in fertility clinics. Under the compromise announced by President Bush on Aug. 9, 2001, researchers using federal money may work with stem cell lines established before that date but not generate new ones of their own. This restriction does not apply to biologists who do not use federal money for this part of their research.
Dr. Weissman noted that Gov. Gray Davis of California recently signed legislation outlawing the cloning of a person but encouraging nuclear transfer technology and other methods to make human embryonic stem cells.
He emphasized that the new institute's initial focus would be on cancer cells and exploring whether they proliferate because they have learned to switch back on the genes that were used by their stem cell predecessors. "That opens up some wonderful possibilities because we would have a whole new set of genes to look at," Dr. Weissman said.
-------- health
Class of Estrogens Labeled Carcinogens
U.S. Upgrades Danger Posed by Element in Replacement Therapies, Contraceptives
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42653-2002Dec11?language=printer
All estrogens used in replacement therapies and contraceptives were listed yesterday by the federal government as "known human carcinogens," a significant upgrading of the dangers they pose.
However, government scientists said it is not known whether estrogens retain their cancer-causing potential when used in combination with other hormones, as they commonly are in hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives.
Some estrogen compounds were previously listed by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences as likely to cause cancer in humans, but yesterday's listing of the entire class of steroidal estrogens was a broad expansion.
"Based on our review of the literature, we have now put the entire class of steroidal estrogens in the category of greatest hazard," said Christopher Portier, director of the Environmental Toxicology Program for NIEHS. "For us, this is a big step."
This summer, a large clinical trial of hormone replacement therapy in post-menopausal women by the Women's Health Initiative was halted early when it showed an increased incidence of breast cancer and heart disease. Many women stopped taking the medications -- which had been widely prescribed to prevent hot flashes and other symptoms of menopause, and to protect women against heart disease and osteoporosis. Another part of the study that followed women on estrogen therapy alone -- generally women who have had mastectomies -- was allowed to continue because the risk of cancer was not higher than expected.
Portier said the new federal listing of estrogens was not based on that study, but rather on a review of the medical literature over the past two years. The official list of carcinogens is mandated by Congress and produced every two years.
Portier said that the listing does not make any recommendations about whether and when estrogen products should be used. He said patients should consult their doctors if they are concerned by the cancer-causing potential of estrogen products they are using.
In all, 15 substances were added yesterday to the list of "known" or "reasonably anticipated" to pose a cancer risk, bringing the total to 228.
Among them was methyleugenol, which occurs naturally in spices such as ginger, nutmeg and basil, and is widespread in the food supply. Portier said the compound caused cancer in animals, and further study is needed to determine whether it poses any risk to humans.
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Carcinogens: Estrogens, Ultraviolet, Wood Dust
December 12, 2002
ENS
http://ens-news.com/ens/dec2002/2002-12-12-09.asp#anchor2
WASHINGTON, DC, Estrogens used in hormone replacement therapy and oral contraceptives have been added to a federal list of known human carcinogens.
This and 15 other new listings bring the total of substances that are known or "reasonably anticipated" to pose a cancer risk to 228.
The tenth edition of the report from the National Toxicology Program was forwarded to Congress and released to the public on Wednesday by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The reports are published every two years after lengthy study and scientific reviews by three successive expert panels of government and non-government scientists.
In a statement releasing the report, HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson thanked "the hundreds of scientists who have contributed to this report through their original research or their careful reviews of these important studies. The public is well served by this dispassionate report that helps all of us ensure that the American public is made aware of potential cancer hazards."
The tenth report lists the group of hormones known as steroidal estrogens as "known human carcinogens." A number of the individual steroidal estrogens were already listed as "reasonably anticipated carcinogens" in past editions, but this is the first report to list all these hormones as a group.
Also listed as new known causes of cancer in humans are broad spectrum ultraviolet radiation, whether generated by the sun or by artificial sources; wood dust created in cutting and shaping wood; nickel compounds and beryllium and its compounds commonly used in industry. Beryllium and beryllium compounds are not new to the list but were previously listed as "reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen."
The report is mandated by Congress as a way for the government to help keep the public informed about substances or exposure circumstances that are "known" or are "reasonably anticipated" to cause human cancers. The report also identifies current regulations concerning these listings in an attempt to address how exposures have been reduced.
The report makes a distinction between "known" human carcinogens, where there is sufficient evidence from human studies and "reasonably anticipated" human carcinogens, where there is either limited evidence from human studies that the substances cause cancer, or sufficient evidence of carcinogenicity from experimental animal studies.
The report does not assess the magnitude of the carcinogenic risk, nor does it address any potential benefits of listed substances such as certain pharmaceuticals. Listing in the report does not establish that such substance presents a risk to persons in their daily lives.
The full report is accessible at: http://ntp-server.niehs.nih.gov
-------- ACTIVISTS
Opera's Atomic Energy Commission
By Ronald Blum
Associated Press
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page C09
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A43068-2002Dec11?language=printer
John Adams has been commissioned by the San Francisco Opera to compose "Doctor Atomic," a work about the development of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos, N.M., in the 1940s.
Alice Goodman, who collaborated on Adams's two previous operas, will write the libretto, which centers on J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project during World War II.
Peter Sellars will direct, as he did the premiere productions of Adams's "Nixon in China" in 1987 at the Houston Grand Opera and "The Death of Klinghoffer" in 1992 at the Theatre Royale de Monnaie in Brussels.
Donald Runnicles, the San Francisco Orchestra's music director since 1992, will conduct.
The premiere is scheduled for September 2005 at San Francisco's War Memorial Opera House. The production will be shared with the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
"It involves what I call American mythology," said Adams, 55. "That was what drew me to the 'Nixon in China' story as well. I grew up in the late 1950s and '60s, the worst part of the Cold War, and these images are planted in my consciousness."
The chief characters have not yet been cast. Oppenheimer will be sung by a baritone, and other characters include Edward Teller (bass-baritone), Kitty Oppenheimer (mezzo-soprano), Mici Teller (high mezzo-soprano), Elsie McMillan (high soprano) and a triple tenor role: Sen. Bourke Hickenlooper, King Juda of the Bikini Islands and scientist Edwin McMillan.
Orchestra General Director Pamela Rosenberg first suggested the idea to Adams in November 1999, 18 months before she formally took over the company.
"I wanted to have a new music drama by him after 'Klinghoffer' and 'Nixon in China.' I've got this incredible composer sitting right across the bay in Berkeley," she said.
Adams plans to start composing next summer, after finishing commissions for the San Francisco Symphony and the opening of Disney Hall in Los Angeles.
"I'm interested in using in part the structure of the 1950s science-fiction movie," Adams said. "These events were played out during a time when all those movies about bombs and monsters and strange genetic mutations were very popular, and they invaded the consciousness, the unconsciousness, of the country. That's why I chose the title, because it had a certain '50s, sci-fi resonance."
Adams has composed many works, including "El Nino" and "On the Transmigration of Souls," commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in remembrance of the victims of last year's terrorist attacks.
--------
Iran Students Say Ministry Has Arrested 12 Protesters
December 12, 2002
New York Times
By NAZILA FATHI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/12/international/middleeast/12IRAN.html
TEHRAN, Dec. 11 - With the possibility of a crackdown hanging over them, leaders of the student movement here appealed today to the domestic and international news media for help.
At a news conference, students said that more than 12 of their colleagues had been arrested in the past three days, after weeks of protest over a death sentence against a reformist university professor.
The students, who are demanding a referendum on the conservative government, said they feared that rogue elements of the Ministry of Information were behind the arrests. Some students have been snatched off the streets, they said, and many others are being watched and followed.
A few of the kidnapped students managed to contact their families, and said they were being held in solitary confinement and being subjected to long hours of interrogation.
"We believe that hard-liners are implementing a project of cleansing universities of pro-reform students," said Reza Delbari, a member of the Islamic Association of Amir Kabir University. He said that the crackdown resembled one in 1998, in which four intellectuals were killed, and that the purpose seemed to be to intimidate the students.
Students also complained that President Mohammed Khatami, the leader of Iran's reformers, had done nothing to protect them, even though he has direct authority over the Ministry of Information, which is making the arrests.
Only one member of Parliament, they said, Aliakbar Moussavi Khoini, has publicly supported the students and made any effort to intervene. Mr. Khoini, a former student leader, reported to Parliament on the arrest of the students, but he was powerless either to stop the crackdown or find the arrested students.
Mr. Delbari said the students were making the same point that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made in the 1979 revolution, when he said, "Our fathers had no right to decide for us 50 years ago."
Stressing the need for a referendum on the hard-liners' rule, Mr. Delbari said: "Our parents voted for the Islamic Republic 24 years ago. Just as Mr. Khomeini said, we want to choose our own future."
----
Tens of thousands protest against government handling of tanker disaster
Thursday, December 12, 2002
By Mar Roman,
Associated Press
http://enn.com/news/wire-stories/2002/12/12122002/ap_49168.asp
MADRID, Spain - Tens of thousands of people braved heavy rains in towns across northwestern Spain to protest the government's handling of the Prestige oil tanker disaster.
Some 150,000 people took part Wednesday in the biggest demonstration in the fishing port of Vigo - which has a population of 300,000 - calling for resignations in the regional and central governments and demanding that laws be passed to ensure such a disaster never happens again.
Earlier Wednesday the government acknowledged serious problems in cleaning up the oil 28 days after the Prestige ran into trouble off the northwest coast.
Explaining that anti-pollution boats weren't able to suck up many of the smaller slicks spewed by the vessel, Deputy Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy appealed to fishers to repeat a frantic, rudimentary cleanup campaign they carried out last week.
Rajoy said a shift in wind direction has made it inevitable that another wave of slicks will hit the northwestern Galician coastline shortly, further threatening the Rias Baixas (Lower Estuaries), one of the world's richest shellfish zones.
He said big slicks have broken into smaller ones, making it very difficult for an international flotilla of anti-pollution boats to vacuum them up.
The 26-year-old, single-hulled Prestige broke in two and sank on Nov. 19, six days after it ruptured in a storm and started leaking. The ship spilled an estimated 20,000 tons (5.3 million gallons or 20 million liters) of fuel oil out of a cargo of 77,000 tons (20.5 million gallons or 77.6 million liters).
A cleanup that began last week - fishermen sought desperately to protect their livelihood in the estuaries using nets, cranes and even their hands to scoop up oil - will have to be repeated soon, the minister said.
"It's not possible for the big boats to pick up all this oil. We need all the available fishing boats as soon as possible to fight the spill," Rajoy said.
He also confirmed that the French research submarine Nautile, studying the wreck, would dive again on Wednesday with specific tasks for the next four days: gauge the temperature of leaking oil, the rate of leakage, obtain a sample, and study the viability of sealing cracks through which the oil is escaping.
A Spanish scientific commission said on Tuesday that the Prestige is spewing 125 tons (33,000 gallons) a day and could continue to do so until March of 2006. The tanker is leaking oil from 14 cracks, nine in the bow and five in the stern.
After minimizing the impact of the spill in the first few weeks, a stance that brought wide criticism, Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar is now calling it the country's worst ever ecological catastrophe.
Spain had previously insisted that the oil still in the tanker would solidify because of the near-freezing temperatures on the sea floor, some 3.5 kilometers (2.2 miles) from the surface.
On land, some 7,400 volunteers and soldiers were trying to clean up nearly 200 beaches and hundreds of rocky inlets already tarred by the toxic oil.
----
Protesters in Mexico Storm Congress
December 12, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Mexico-Congress-Attacked.html
MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Protesters stormed Congress on Thursday for the second time in three days, breaking down a door before being pushed back by police and security guards.
The protesters, mostly teachers and farmers, caused less damage than Tuesday when many of the same demonstrators rode horses into the lobby of the building, hurled fire extinguishers at fleeing security guards and disrupted the legislative session for more than an hour.
Hundreds of federal police officers have since stood guard outside the legislature and the Attorney General's office has launched an investigation into the violence.
The second protest involved about 500 teachers who are demanding higher wages and say lawmakers have ignored their demands for salary increases. They have been camped out in front of the legislative building near downtown Mexico City for several days, living in tents and under tarps.
The teachers have been joined by farmers and ranchers angered by a provision of North American Free Trade Agreement will lift tariffs on several U.S. farm products in January. Some protesters have brought horses, cows and other farm animals with them to the encampment.
Lawmakers organized special commissions to hold discussions with the protesters Wednesday, but the talks failed to produce any major agreements.
``The truth is they don't want to talk. What they want to is throw Congress into chaos and impede end-of-the-year meetings,'' said one lawmaker, Guadalupe Castillo.
-------
December 2002 Statement of Leonard Peltier
Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002
From: Max Obuszewski <MObuszewski@afsc.org>
Greetings Friends & Supporters:
Well here we are once again, at the end of my 26th year behind these prison walls. As I reflect back on this past year I am amazed to see all the legal motion that is now happening in my case. After Clinton walked out on us in 2001, I almost felt that I didn't have any avenues of redress left and I wasn't sure if the campaign for my freedom could continue. I wasn't really sure that there would be any more options to pursue. There was the office transition and a lull in activity this past summer. But now, thanks to my great legal team I see that there are still more battles to be fought and if fought hard enough, won. And I hope you are all ready to continue this work because I sure am ready for the next go round.
I know that the political climate, the impending war and the state of the economy is going to make this work a lot more difficult for all of us. However, we must remember that the people have always had to struggle for every little gain that has been won and it isn't going to be any different this time. We must continue our work to expose the FBI's illegal conduct not only in my case, but also for all the people who are unjustly incarcerated for their political beliefs.
This past summer I put out a call for Native youth to come out and take on some responsibility for the movement to free me and to make sure Indigenous issues are kept alive. I am happy to report that a number of students from Haskell Indian Nations University took up the challenge. They have formed the Peltier Indigenous Justice Alliance (PIJA). This endeavor by these students makes me feel proud. I hope that others will join them to carry on the work of those who have already worked so tirelessly all their lives for justice. Remember it was a hand-full of students from the Bay Area who helped organize the takeover of Alcatraz, which gave spark to the movement, which led to many of the demonstrations that would bring our issues before the public.
I also want to tell you how proud and happy to have my daughter Marquetta working in the office coordinating my campaign and being on the speakers' bureau. She has taken on a tremendous responsibility, is doing a fine job. Thanks to her this Christmas I will be able to have more of my grandchildren with me. It hasn't been easy watching my children and now my grandchildren grow up through photos. Now I can actually have them with me and be able to spend some time talking and playing with them for a few hours a week. Believe me this is a welcome break from this daily oppressive life I live in here.
Now that the holidays are once again upon us I would once again ask you to support the Christmas Drive for the children of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. So many children would have gone without a gift, had it not been for your generosity these past years.
And last but far from least I want to thank each and every one of you for hanging in there with me through the good and the hard times. I am counting on all of you to be with me for this next campaign. No effort can move forward without your continued support. Together we can and will succeed. And in closing I want to wish you and yours safe and happy holidays and a prosperous New Year.
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Leonard Peltier
The New Leonard Peltier Justice Campaign
Leonard Peltier Defense Committee
PO Box 583
Lawrence, KS 66044
785-842-5774
http://www.freepeltier.org
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