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NUCLEAR
WHO fact-sheet on DU - your comments are appreciated
U.S. Should Rejoin Revised Fusion Energy Project, Experts Say
India Says Completes Troop Pull Back from Border
American spies yield to Blix over weapons
Iraq Says Nothing to Hide, U.S. Talks of Last Phase
U.S. Giving Better Data to U.N. Iraq Team
Political Asylum Sought for Iraqi Scientists
N. Korea Removing Nuclear Surveillance
North Korea Confirms it Dismantled U.N. Surveillance Equipment
U.N.'s Surveillance Equipment Is Shut Down at Nuclear Plant
U.S. Warns North Korea Over Dismantling of U.N. Devices
Questions Remain Whether U.S. Missile Defense Works
Russia, Iran discuss nuclear fuel
Nuclear Industry Sponsors Reactor Tests
MILITARY
French Troops Turn Back Ivoirian Rebels
UK sells chemical weapons to the world
West tries to shield companies that made a monster of Baghdad
So Much for the Plan to Scrap Old Weapons
Study Finds Soldiers Exposed to Sarin in Persian Gulf
Yugoslav Scientist Says Trips To Iraq Were Simply Academic
Casualties of an 'Undeclared War'
U.S. Said to Ready Kurd Areas in Iraq for Possible War
U.S. Seeks to Raise Anti - Saddam Force
US missiles, troops on way to Israel
Palestinians Postpone Vote
Israel Troops Train For Chemical Attack
Anti-American Feeling Rises in Pakistan as U.S. Confronts Iraq
Pentagon chief: We're ready to attack
ENERGY AND OTHER
Legacy of Power Cost Manipulation
ACTIVISTS
Time Names Whistleblowers Persons of Year
About 3,000 Turks protest possible war in Iraq
Bishops defy Blair with tough anti-war message
The Crucible
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
WHO fact-sheet on DU - your comments are appreciated
From: Norman Cohen <ncohen12@comcast.net>
Date: Sun, 22 Dec 2002 14:39:28 -0500
http://www.who.int/inf-fs/en/fact257.html
World Health Organization Fact Sheet
N° 257 Revised April 2001
DEPLETED URANIUM
Uranium
Uranium is a silver-white, lustrous, dense, natural, weakly radioactive element. It is ubiquitous throughout the natural environment, and is found in varying but small amounts in rocks, soils, water, air, plants, animals and in all human beings.
On average, approximately 90 µg (micrograms) of uranium exist in the human body from normal intakes of water, food and air. About 66% is found in the skeleton, 16% in the liver, 8% in the kidneys and 10% in other tissues.
Natural uranium consists of a mixture of three radioactive isotopes which are identified by the mass numbers 238U(99.27% by mass), 235U(0.72%) and 234U(0.0054%).
Uranium is used primarily in nuclear power plants. However, most reactors require uranium in which the 235U content is enriched from 0.72% to about 3%.
Depleted uranium
The uranium remaining after removal of the enriched fraction contains about 99.8% 238U, 0.25% of 235U and 0.001% 234U by mass; this is referred to as depleted uranium or DU.
DU is weakly radioactive and a radiation dose from it would be about 60% of that from purified natural uranium with the same mass.
The behaviour of uranium and DU in the body is identical radiologically and chemically.
Spent uranium fuel from nuclear reactors is sometimes reprocessed in plants used for natural uranium enrichment. Some reactor-created radio-isotopes can consequently contaminate the reprocessing equipment and the DU. Under these conditions another uranium isotope, 236U, may be present in the DU together with very small amounts of the transuranic elements plutonium, americium and neptunium and the fission product technetium-99. However, on the basis of the concentrations of these radio-isotopes found in DU, the increase in radiation dose from uptake by the human body would be less than 1%.
Applications of depleted uranium
The main civilian uses of DU include counterweights in aircraft, radiation shields in medical radiation therapy machines and containers for the transport of radioactive materials.
Due to its high density, about twice that of lead, and other properties, DU is used in munitions designed to penetrate armour plate and for protection of military vehicles such as tanks.
Exposure to uranium and depleted uranium
The average annual intakes of uranium by adults are estimated to be 460 m g from ingestion and 0.59 m g from inhalation.
Under most circumstances, use of DU will make a negligible contribution to the overall natural background levels of uranium in the environment. The greatest potential for DU exposure will follow a conflict where DU munitions are used.
A recent United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report giving field measurements taken around selected impact sites in Kosovo (Federal Republic of Yugoslavia) indicates that contamination by DU in the environment was localized to a few tens of metres around impact sites. Contamination by DU dusts to local vegetation and water supplies was found to be extremely low. Thus, the possibility of significant exposure to the local populations was found to be very low.
However, levels of DU may be significantly raised over background levels in close proximity to DU contaminating events. Over the days and years following such an event, the contamination will become dispersed into the wider natural environment. People living or working in affected areas can inhale dusts and can consume contaminated food and drinking water.
There is a possibility that people near an aircraft crash may be exposed to DU dusts if counterweights were to combust on impact. Significant exposure to people from this situation would be rare. Exposures to clean-up and emergency workers following aircraft accidents are possible, but normal occupational protection measures would prevent any significant exposure occurring.
DU exposure pathways
Individuals can be exposed to DU in the same way they are routinely exposed to natural uranium, i.e. through inhalation, ingestion, dermal contact or injury (e.g. embedded fragments).
Each of these exposure situations needs to be assessed to determine any potential health consequence.
The relative contribution from each of these pathways to the total DU uptake into the body depends on the physical and chemical nature of the DU, as well as the level and duration of exposure.
Intake of depleted uranium
Intake by ingestion can occur if drinking water or food is contaminated by DU. In addition, the ingestion of soil by children via geophagia (the practice of eating earth, clay, chalk, etc.) or hand-to-mouth activities is also an important pathway.
Intake by inhalation can occur following the use of DU munitions during or when DU deposits in the environment are re-suspended in the atmosphere by wind or other forms of disturbance. Accidental inhalation may also occur as a consequence of a fire in a DU storage facility, an aircraft crash, or the decontamination of vehicles from within or close to conflict areas.
Intake by contact exposure of DU through the skin is very low and relatively unimportant.
Intake from wound contamination or embedded fragments in skin tissues allows DU to enter the systemic circulation.
Absorption of depleted uranium
Most (>95%) uranium entering the body via inhalation or ingestion is not absorbed, but is eliminated via the faeces.
Of the uranium that is absorbed into the blood, approximately 67% will be filtered by the kidney and excreted in the urine within 24 hours; this amount increases to 90% within a few days.
Typical gut absorption rates for uranium in food and water are about 2% for soluble uranium compounds and down to 0.2% for insoluble uranium compounds.
Health effects of exposure to depleted uranium
DU has both chemical and radiological toxicity with the two important target organs being the kidneys and the lungs.
In the kidneys, the proximal tubules are considered to be the main site of potential damage. Long-term studies of workers chronically exposed to uranium have reported impairment of the kidneys that depended on the level of exposure. There is also some evidence that this impairment may return to normal once the source of excessive uranium exposure has been removed.
In a number of studies on uranium miners, an increased risk of lung cancer has been demonstrated, but this has been attributed to exposure from radon decay products. There is a possibility of lung tissue damage leading to a risk of lung cancer if a high enough radiation dose results from insoluble DU compounds remaining in the lungs over a prolonged period (many years).
Erythema (superficial inflammation of the skin) or other effects on the skin should not occur even if DU is held against the skin for prolonged periods (weeks). There is no established data to suggest that skin cancer results from skin contact with uranium dusts.
No consistent or confirmed adverse effects have been reported for the skeleton or liver. However, few studies have been conducted.
No reproductive or developmental effects have been reported in humans, but studies are limited.
Although uranium released from embedded fragments may accumulate in the central nervous system (CNS) tissue and some animal and human studies are suggestive of effects on CNS function, it is difficult to draw firm conclusions from the studies.
Maximum radiation exposure limits
The following doses, from the International Basic Safety Standards agreed by WHO in 1996, are in addition to those from normal background exposures.
The general public should not receive a dose of more than 1 millisievert (mSv) in a year. In special circumstances, an effective dose of up to 5 mSv in a single year is permitted provided that the average dose over five consecutive years does not exceed 1 mSv per year. An equivalent dose to the skin should not exceed 50 mSv in a year.
Occupational exposure should not exceed an effective dose of 20 mSv per year averaged over five consecutive years or an effective dose of 50 mSv in any single year. An equivalent dose to the extremities (hands and feet) or the skin should not surpass 500 mSv in a year.
Guidance on exposure based on chemical and radiological toxicity
The World Health Organization (WHO) has guidelines for determining the values of health-based exposure limits or tolerable intakes (TIs) for chemical substances. The TIs given below are applicable to long-term exposure in the general public (as opposed to workers). In single and short-term exposures, higher exposure levels may be tolerated without adverse effects.
The general public's intake via inhalation or ingestion of soluble DU compounds should be based on a tolerable intake value of 0.5 µg per kg of body weight per day. This leads to an air concentration of 1 µg/m3. For ingestion, this would be about 11 mg/y for an average adult.
It would be appropriate to reduce the TI for intake of insoluble DU compounds to 0.5 µg per kg of body weight per day so that compatibility is achieved with the public radiation dose limit. When the solubility characteristics of the uranium species are not known, which is often the case in exposure to depleted uranium, it would be prudent to apply the more stringent tolerable intakes, i.e., 0.5 µg per kg of body weight per day for oral exposure.
Uranium compounds with low absorption are markedly less nephrotoxic, and a tolerable intake via ingestion of 5 µg per kg of body weight per day is applicable.
Monitoring and treatment of exposed individuals
For the general population, neither civilian nor military use of DU is likely to produce exposures to DU much above normal background levels produced by uranium. Therefore, an exposure assessment for DU will normally not be required.
When an individual is suspected of being exposed to DU at a level significantly above the normal background level, an assessment of DU exposure may be required. This is best achieved by analysis of daily urine excretion. The amount of DU in the urine is determined from the 235U:238U ratio, obtained using sensitive mass spectrometric techniques. Faecal measurement can give useful information on intake if samples are collected soon after exposure (a few days).
External radiation measurements over the chest, using a whole-body radiation monitor for determining the amount of DU in the lungs, have limited application since they require specialist facilities and can only assess relatively large amounts of DU in the lungs.
There are no specific means to decrease the absorption of uranium from the gastrointestinal tract or lungs, or increase its excretion. Thus, general methods appropriate to heavy metal poisoning could be applied. Similarly, there is no specific treatment for uranium poisoning and the patient should be treated based on the symptoms observed. Dialysis may be helpful in extreme cases of kidney damage.
Recommendations
Levels of contamination in food and drinking water could rise in affected areas after some years and should be monitored where it is considered that there is a reasonable possibility of significant quantities of DU entering the ground water or food chain.
Where possible, clean-up operations in impact zones should be undertaken where there are substantial numbers of radioactive projectiles remaining and where qualified experts deem contamination levels to be unacceptable. If very high concentrations of DU dust or metal fragments are present, then areas may need to be cordoned off until removal can be accomplished. Disposal of DU should come under appropriate national or international recommendations for use of radioactive materials.
Young children could receive greater exposure to DU when playing in or near DU impact sites. Typical hand-to-mouth activity could lead to high DU ingestion from contaminated soil. Necessary preventative measures should be taken.
Individuals who believe they have had excessive intakes of DU should consult their medical practitioner for an examination and treatment of any symptoms. General screening or monitoring for possible DU related health effects in populations living in conflict areas where DU was used is not called for.
Research
In April 2001, WHO published a monograph entitled Depleted Uranium: Sources, Exposures and Health Effects. It is the product of a review of the best available scientific literature on uranium and depleted uranium. The monograph provides a framework for identifying the likely consequences of public and occupational exposure to DU.
It is available at:
http://www.who.int/environmental_information/radiation/depleted_uranium.htm.
The monograph identifies a number of future research needs.
-------- energy
U.S. Should Rejoin Revised Fusion Energy Project, Experts Say
December 22, 2002
New York Times
By KENNETH CHANG
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/national/22FUSI.html
An expert panel has recommended that the United States seek to rejoin a $5 billion international nuclear fusion project it abandoned four years ago as overly ambitious and expensive.
The panel, convened by the National Research Council, said on Friday that changes in the design of the proposed reactor and recent advances in fusion science now made the endeavor worthwhile. The project seeks to use nuclear fusion, the process that powers the sun, to generate electricity.
"We have confidence it will work," said Dr. Raymond J. Fonck, a professor of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin and a co-chairman of the panel.
The panel, which consists of 18 scientists, mostly physicists, is to present a final report reviewing the direction and scope of the United States' fusion research program by next summer.
The Department of Energy had requested the interim report to help decide whether the United States should begin negotiations to once again be a partner in the proposed International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, or ITER. If it were to join, the United States would be likely to contribute more than $1 billion, over a decade.
The other ITER participants - Canada, Japan and a European consortium that includes Russia - are discussing possible locations for the reactor and how to divide costs and responsibilities.
Dr. Raymond Orbach, director of the science office at the Energy Department, said the report would "help inform the administration's continuing review" of whether to participate.
Dr. Murray Stewart, president of ITER Canada, said he hoped the American officials would decide before the next round of discussions in St. Petersburg, Russia, in February.
"We would very much like them at that meeting," Dr. Stewart said.
ITER (in Latin, "iter" means "the way"; it is pronounced "eater") would be the next step in large experimental fusion reactors.
Fusion, which produces energy by fusing hydrogen atoms into helium, has been looked on for decades as a potentially attractive energy source. Hydrogen is readily available, and fusion reactors would not produce long-lived highly radioactive waste as do current nuclear fission reactors, which split uranium atoms to produce energy.
But progress has been slow, and even optimists believe commercial fusion power plants are still decades away.
In the mid-1990's, many American fusion scientists criticized the original $10 billion ITER design as too costly and too ambitious.
After the United States withdrew in 1998, the design was scaled back to $5 billion. The new smaller design also incorporated more modern technology and dropped the goal of self-sustaining fusion.
The smaller ITER would still produce much more power than its predecessors.
Dr. William D. Dorland, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who had been among the critics of the original design, said the new design addressed the major concerns that were raised. He said he supported the panel's recommendations.
"If ITER is going to go forward as an international project with this new design, it would be good for the U.S. to be a partner," Dr. Dorland said.
At a meeting this summer, more than 200 American fusion scientists reached a consensus that the United State should try to rejoin ITER, but that it should also continue design work for a smaller alternative project should ITER hit additional snags.
-------- india / pakistan
India Says Completes Troop Pull Back from Border
December 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-india-pakistan-troops.html
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India has completed the withdrawal of troops from its border with Pakistan, a Defense Ministry spokesman said on Sunday, ending a face-off that nearly triggered a war between the nuclear-armed rivals.
``Troop redeployment is complete,'' the spokesman said, adding that troops on the border had returned to peacetime locations.
``But some heavy equipment could still be there,'' he said.
New Delhi and Islamabad massed a million men on their frontier after India blamed Pakistan-based militants for a bloody attack on the Indian parliament last December.
The neighbors were on the verge of war in May and June after a bloody militant attack in Indian Kashmir but they stepped back from the brink after hectic diplomatic efforts.
Tension has eased since then and the two countries announced in October they would withdraw troops on their border except in the disputed Kashmir region, at the heart of their long-standing hostility.
The two countries have fought three wars since independence from Britain in 1947, two of them over Kashmir.
India accuses Pakistan of sending Muslim rebels into Indian Kashmir to support a bloody insurgency against Indian rule in which more than 35,000 people have been killed since 1989.
Muslim Pakistan says it only provides moral and political support to what it describes as a legitimate freedom struggle in the Muslim-majority Himalayan region.
-------- inspections
American spies yield to Blix over weapons
By David Usborne in New York
22 December 2002
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=363679&dir=75&host=3
Hans Blix, the United Nations' chief weapons inspector, was preparing this weekend to begin a new, more invasive phase in the hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, making use of intelligence from Washington and London, and new military hardware ranging from helicopters to flying drones.
The stepped-up effort, involving more than 100 inspectors in Iraq, will be in stark contrast to the inspections of the past few weeks, which have been short of manpower and equipment.
If the past weeks have been a dress rehearsal for Mr Blix, his work in the month ahead will be the real thing that may finally determine whether or not there is war in Iraq.
After weeks of hesitation, Washington has now indicated readiness to start feeding Mr Blix, and his opposite number at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei, its own intelligence on where Saddam Hussein may be storing prohibited armaments.
London is also expected to make its own intelligence available to the inspectors.
US officials hinted that some of the information, mostly gleaned from satellites, may be transmitted to the UN and IAEA in instalments. Mr Blix had made an appeal for access to American and British intelligence on Friday, arguing that it would facilitate findingany hidden stockpiles of banned chemical, biological and nuclear materials.
Reportedly, Washington had been concerned that Mr Blix's UN Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (Unmovic)would be unable to ensure information did not leak to the Iraqis.
But yesterday Ari Fleischer, a White House spokesman, said: "It is entirely in the interests of the United States ... to give the inspectors the tools they need to do their job, and we will do so."
Nuclear experts yesterday re-visited al-Nassr al-Atheem Company, an engineering plant at Daura refinery, south of Baghdad. Other inspectors searched al-Raya Company, owned by Iraq's military industrialisation commission.
Plans for reinforcing the inspections were partially spelled out by Mr Blix during a closed meeting of the UN Security Council on Thursday. He said that while most inspections had so far been done overland, with teams using Jeeps, they would soon be partially airborne. Seven more helicopters, besides the existing one, would be ready for use by the end of the week. Mr Blix is also procuring aeroplanes and unmanned drone aircraft to conduct low-level aerial surveillance across Iraq.
The number of inspectors is also being increased; about 100 are expected to be fully operational by 31 December, and training of more inspectors starts in January. The Unmovic HQ in Baghdad will be expanded in the next few weeks, and a regional base will open in Mosul. Mr Blix also expects to interview Iraqi scientists on the alleged weapons programmes.
It remains to be seen, however, whether Mr Blix will respond to Washington's urging to try to remove some scientists from Iraq to interview them beyond the gaze of Saddam's government.
----
Iraq Says Nothing to Hide, U.S. Talks of Last Phase
December 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq.html
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraq launched a public relations offensive against the United States and Britain, saying it had nothing to hide, as a U.S. official said efforts to force Baghdad to disarm were entering a final phase.
President Saddam Hussein and his officials said on Sunday that Iraq was doing all it could to cooperate with the United Nations and one senior adviser suggested that Washington send CIA agents to direct U.N. arms inspectors to any suspect sites.
But a White House spokesman, echoing statements by high-level Washington officials, said Iraq appeared ``not to have made the strategic choice'' to renounce weapons of mass destruction.
``While we have not given up on disarming Iraq through the United Nations, we are now entering a final phase in how we compel Saddam Hussein to disarm,'' the official told Reuters.
Amir al-Saadi, one of Saddam's top advisers, told a news conference in Baghdad that U.N. inspections over the past four weeks had shown U.S. and British charges that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction were ``lies and baseless.''
Saadi rejected U.S. and British suggestions that there were holes in the arms declaration that Iraq presented to the United Nations two weeks ago.
``We do not even have any objections if the CIA sent somebody with the inspectors to show them the suspected sites,'' he said, accusing a previous U.N. inspection team of falsifying evidence to suggest Iraq had carried on developing a deadly nerve agent.
Saddam himself accused the United States of trying to harass him. ``The world should tell America now there is no need for more aggression and sanctions on Iraq in order to let it cooperate freely (with the U.N.),'' he told a group of visitors.
The United States and Britain have made no secret of their preparations for war to back up demands that Saddam come clean.
Iraq watchers said Saadi's remarks seemed designed to appeal to countries less convinced of the merits of war.
``This is an Iraqi attempt to counter what is becoming quite a sophisticated campaign in the West...almost to create a war atmosphere,'' defense expert Paul Beaver told the BBC.
GERMAN MISGIVINGS
One opponent of war is Germany. ``It is quite clear that we will not contribute any financial support for a war against Iraq,'' German Finance Minister Hans Eichel told Bild newspaper's Monday edition, citing domestic budget and economic concerns.
Scores of U.N. arms inspectors are scouring Iraq for evidence of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
But the United States says it believes it has enough evidence of its own to justify military action if Iraq does not own up.
Washington said last week Iraq's arms declaration was in ``material breach'' of a November Security Council resolution. Defying the resolution carries an implicit threat of war.
Washington is forging ahead with a build-up that may see over 100,000 troops in the Gulf region in January or February. Experts say planners will need to wage a war before March or April if they want to avoid the searing desert heat of Iraq's summer.
U.N. inspectors hunted for banned arms on Sunday. Iraq said a Baghdad space research center was searched.
A January 27 briefing by U.N. arms inspectors to the Security Council is widely seen as the next key date.
Saadi said Iraq had dropped efforts to obtain uranium and develop the VX nerve agent.
He said the new U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix had asked Iraq for a list of certain scientists working in key fields and this would be provided by the end of the year.
Israel, a target for Iraqi missiles during the 1991 Gulf War over Kuwait, has scheduled joint exercises with U.S. forces and gas mask lessons for children, Israeli officials said on Sunday.
Israeli media said the nation would go on high alert from January 15 in anticipation of hostilities starting in the month after January 27. The Defense Ministry would not confirm that.
Some 1,000 U.S. troops were expected in Israel this week for an exercise involving U.S.-made Patriot missiles, which were largely ineffective against Iraqi Scud missiles in 1991.
The Patriot has since been upgraded and Israel has developed and deployed the more effective Arrow anti-missile system.
----
U.S. Giving Better Data to U.N. Iraq Team
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-Iraq.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States is increasing the quality of intelligence given U.N. weapons experts in Iraq as the United Nations bolsters its inspection team and can act more quickly on the information, American officials said.
Meanwhile, U.N. weapons Inspectors set out Sunday morning for searches at five sites, according to Iraqi officials. One was identified as a space research center. Another, al-Kindi Co., was identified in the final report of U.N . weapons inspectors who worked in Iraq in the 1990s as having had a role in Iraq's biological weapons programs.
U.N. officials had no immediate comment on Sunday's searches.
The arrival of 15 additional inspectors last week brought their total to 113. President Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, wants 250 to 300 on the ground in Iraq, though the United States has not specified a time frame, a senior administration official said Saturday.
In the next two weeks, as the inspectors grow in number, the United States will provide more detailed intelligence reports, said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Two administration officials said the United States has been continuously providing the United Nations with intelligence on Iraqi weapons sites.
The United Nations has pressed for more.
Chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix urged the United States and Britain to hand over any additional evidence they have about Iraq's secret weapons programs.
He said the inspectors need intelligence because Iraq's declaration on the state of its weapons programs leaves so many unanswered questions that it is impossible to say confidently that its claim to have no weapons of mass destruction is accurate.
The United States and Britain have given briefings to inspectors on what they think the Iraqis have, but what inspectors really want to know is where weapons-related material is stored, Blix told the BBC.
One U.S. official said the administration was reluctant to provide information as detailed as the United Nations seeks for fear that inspectors would not be able to act immediately on it.
U.S. intelligence officials are also concerned that information could leak, jeopardizing information-gathering sources and other methods. The Pentagon fears that handing over such intelligence could tip off Iraq on likely bombing targets.
Blix said he planned to give the United States and Britain assurances that intelligence material would be protected. He said his inspectors, who are searching for chemical, biological and long-range missile programs, have between 500 and 1,000 sites to visit.
The administration's current strategy is to increase pressure on inspectors to seek interviews with Iraqi weapons scientists outside of Iraq to gain new intelligence and provide evidence that could be used against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
----
Political Asylum Sought for Iraqi Scientists
Weapons Inspectors Seek U.S. Guarantees to Protect Interviewees, Their Families
By Colum Lynch
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A27
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23559-2002Dec21?language=printer
UNITED NATIONS, Dec. 21 -- The U.N.'s chief weapons inspectors are pressing the United States to guarantee that any Iraqi scientist or government official they interview outside of Iraq will be granted political asylum for themselves as well as their entire families if they want it, according to U.S. and U.N. officials.
The Bush administration, which has been urging the inspectors to conduct such interviews, has so far declined to offer blanket assurances of asylum to all Iraqis questioned by the inspectors, the officials said.
Senior U.S. officials have been engaged in intensive discussions with U.N. inspectors this month to try to reach a compromise that would ensure a select number of key Iraqi scientists and their families would receive safe haven if they cooperate. John S. Wolf, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation, and John D. Negroponte, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, have met several times with Hans Blix, Mohammed ElBaradei and other U.N. officials over the past two weeks to work out procedures for the interviews.
The talks were followed by a U.S. campaign to persuade the inspectors to quicken the pace of interviews to try to elicit fresh evidence of hidden Iraqi weapons and test Baghdad's cooperation. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Thursday that the U.N. inspectors "should give high priority to conducting interviews with scientists and other witnesses outside of Iraq, where they can speak freely."
Blix, the executive chairman of the U.N. Monitoring Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), and ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), have expressed an increased willingness this week to consider taking Iraqi officials abroad if their safety can be assured. They have also ordered Iraq to provide them before the end of the month with a list of Iraqi scientists and other officials associated with its current and past weapons programs.
Blix, who has resisted U.S. pressure to spirit Iraqi officials out of the country, saying he did not want to run a "defection" agency, told the Security Council on Thursday that such interviews with willing Iraqi specialists are "an option." ElBaradei went further, confirming that "we will do it" if there are arrangements in place to guarantee the protection of the Iraqis and their families. "We need to ensure their safety, both in terms of making sure that they either have asylum abroad or if they decide to come back to Iraq they [will be] safe," he said in an interview.
ElBaradei said he would conduct the first round of private interviews with Iraqi specialists inside Iraq before selecting a smaller group to be interviewed outside the country. "We need to identify the people who have the key information . . . to make sure that they are willing to come out of Iraq voluntarily. We are not going to force them."
U.N. officials say they are concerned that the United States or other governments may refuse asylum requests from Iraqis who have been taken out of the country but failed to supply valuable information on Iraq's secret weapons program. "What if this guy says 'I want asylum in the United States,' and the United States say 'no' because he just repeated the official line," said one U.N. inspection official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Then we are stuck in the middle. Are we going to have to send him and his family back to Iraq knowing they most probably are going to be killed or harmed?"
The United States is finalizing arrangements to deliver a list of the names of knowledgeable Iraqi scientists that it wants the inspectors to question. An administration official said Washington is also "working meticulously" with the United Nations to resolve the asylum issue. "We haven't taken a decision yet on whether we would take in these people," the official said. "There are discussions going on with the United Nations as well as with other countries, but nothing has been decided."
U.N. and European officials said that they expect the United States to shoulder the burden of taking in Iraqi asylum-seekers. "There is one country pushing this, so that one country will have to think about what it's willing to do," said a European diplomat. "It shouldn't be a big deal for the United States on its own to absorb them. It's not a major burden in terms of immigration."
The asylum issue is just one of several practical concerns that are complicating Washington's efforts to hasten the pace of interviews with Iraqi officials. Blix and ElBaradei are trying to establish security arrangements for interviews with Iraqi experts inside Iraq. U.N. officials said they expect to secure interview sites with U.N. guards and sweep the premises with anti-bugging devices.
Officials familiar with the planning said that Blix and ElBaradei also have been consulting the United States about the prospects of persuading a country near Iraq to provide a site for interviews, housing and security, as well as temporary visas for interview subjects and their families. The most likely sites are Cyprus, where U.N. inspectors already maintain a full-time office and operate a daily flight between Larnaca and Baghdad, Jordan or Turkey.
If they conduct an interview in Cyprus, they wonder whether Cyprus will allow them to have 42 visas to accommodate the interviewee's extended family and whether the United States will be prepared to give asylum to individual scientists and extended family members.
U.S. and U.N. officials said that none of these countries has received formal requests to provide a location for interviews. But Turkey's U.N. ambassador, Umit Pamir, said his government would probably be willing to help out if asked: "If we are approached by Blix . . . to carry out some interviews in Turkey, I don't think our position would be negative."
-------- korea
N. Korea Removing Nuclear Surveillance
By CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
Associated Press Writer
Dec 22, 2002 7:09 PM EST
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/K/KOREAS_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- In a defiant declaration that triggered alarm in foreign capitals, North Korea said Sunday that it had begun removing U.N. seals and surveillance cameras from nuclear facilities that U.S. officials say could yield weapons within months.
The U.N. nuclear watchdog, which has been monitoring the facilities, said Pyongyang had unsealed a spent fuel storage chamber that holds 8,000 irradiated fuel rods.
"As the spent fuel contains a significant amount of plutonium, (North Korea's) action is of great nonproliferation concern," Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a press release Sunday.
The United States and its allies urged the communist country to rescind its decision. "The 8000-odd spent fuel rods are of particular concern because they could be reprocessed to recover plutonium for nuclear weapons," State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said.
Pyongyang's announcement raised fears of a nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula similar to one involving the same facilities in 1994. At that time, many officials in Seoul and Washington believed there was a heightened possibility of war with North Korea.
Conflict was averted when North Korea agreed to freeze the facilities in a deal with the United States, but it said Dec. 12 that it planned to reactivate them to produce electricity. The removal of U.N. monitoring devices appeared to be the first step in that process.
North Korea said the Vienna-based IAEA failed to respond to its request to remove the equipment, compelling it "to immediately start the work of removing the seals and monitoring cameras from the frozen nuclear facilities for their normal operation to produce electricity."
The IAEA said in its Sunday statement that the seals and surveillance equipment had been removed from the spent fuel pond, which stores the fuel rods, at the 5-megawatt, Soviet-designed reactor in Yongbyon, 50 miles north of Pyongyang.
"Without our equipment, we cannot monitor their nuclear inventories and therefore cannot provide assurances that they are not producing material for nuclear weapons," Mark Gwozdecky, IAEA spokesman, told The Associated Press.
ElBaradei said in the statement that it was "deplorable" that Pyongyang had not responded to his requests for "an urgently needed discussion on safeguards issues."
Fintor, of the U.S. State Department, said the 8,000 spent fuel rods had "no relevance" for generating electricity. Their unsealing "belies North Korea's announced justification to produce electricity," he said.
Security experts believe North Korea made one or two nuclear weapons using plutonium it extracted from the Yongbyon reactor in the 1990s. Now there are fears it will reprocess plutonium fuel rods that were separated from the Yongbyon reactor, and later stored under supervision by IAEA inspectors.
"They're going to be able to build four to five additional nuclear weapons within months if they begin that reprocessing operation," Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., said on "Fox News Sunday."
Biden, the outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the North Korean nuclear issue was a greater threat to U.S. interests than Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
The United States, which is preparing for a possible war against Iraq, says it seeks a diplomatic solution to the North Korean nuclear issue.
North Korea must "allow the IAEA to replace or restore the seals and cameras that the North damaged," Fintor said.
Reactivating the nuclear facilities "would fly in the face of the international consensus," he said.
In a telephone conversation Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell and South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong called for close cooperation with Russia and China on pressuring North Korea, Choi's ministry said.
"It has been our consistent position that we will not tolerate North Korea's nuclear activities," said Shim Yoon-jo, director of North American affairs at the Foreign Ministry.
"For our country, this is worrisome," the Japanese Foreign Ministry said. The French Foreign Ministry said it "deplores the new initiative of North Korea."
The announcement by the North's state-run news agency, KCNA, was part of a dispute that has been escalating since October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted it had a secret nuclear weapons program based on uranium enrichment.
The program violated several nuclear arms control agreements, and Washington and its allies suspended shipments of heavy fuel oil to the energy-starved country that were required under the 1994 deal. Instead of giving up its nuclear program, Pyongyang said it had no choice but to revive old nuclear facilities that were frozen under the same agreement.
The North Korean news agency referred to its earlier appeal for a nonaggression treaty with the United States, saying the North "made it clear that the issue of refreezing its nuclear facilities entirely depends on the attitude of the U.S. side."
The United States, however, says North Korea must take steps to abandon nuclear development ahead of any talks. The U.S. position differs from that of South Korean President-elect Roh Moo-hyun, who advocates dialogue as a way to resolve the problem.
----
North Korea Confirms it Dismantled U.N. Surveillance Equipment
Move Tests Potential Schism Between U.S., South Korea
By Peter S. Goodman and Akiko Kashiwagi
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 22, 2002
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A25605-2002Dec22?language=printer
SHANGHAI, Dec. 22-North Korea confirmed today that it had dismantled U.N. surveillance equipment at a nuclear reactor it once mothballed and is now resurrecting, ratcheting up a confrontation with the Bush administration while testing a potential schism between the United States and South Korea.
North Korea's disclosure prompted fresh words of worry and rebuke from neighboring governments and the United States. As Japanese, U.S. and South Korean officials talked privately about how best to respond, some accused North Korea of employing a strategy of nuclear brinkmanship, intentionally seeking to trigger a crisis that would allow it to blackmail the world into resuming economic aid. "It has no other effective cards to play," said a Japanese government official quoted by Kyodo News.
"The tension is now mounting to the point we were in March 1993," when North Korea and the United States stared each another down in a similar nuclear confrontation, said Hideshi Takesada, a Korea expert at the National Institute for Defense Studies in Tokyo.
North Korea's decision to take apart surveillance cameras at the Nyongbyong reactor is the latest development stemming from disclosures in October that it has for years quietly sought to develop nuclear weapons in violation of a 1994 agreement with the United States. Under that accord, North Korea pledged to abandon its nuclear weapons program and shutter the reactor in exchange for critically needed fuel oil from the United States. Though North Korea maintained that the reactor was intended to generate electricity, the United States feared that its plutonium could easily be diverted to produce weapons.
When the Bush administration accused North Korea of violating the deal, the United States along with the European Union, South Korea and Japan promptly halted fuel shipments. Japan cut off dialogue that had been aimed at establishing relations with North Korea. The Bush administration has since sought to use a combination of diplomatic and economic pressure to force North Korea to keep its 1994 promises.
According to South Korean reports, the United States is pressing China-which played a key role in brokering the 1994 agreement-and Russia to urge North Korea to comply with its terms.
Today, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell spoke by telephone with South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung Hong. They called for close cooperation with Russia and China to help to persuade North Korea to comply, South Korean officials said.
Meanwhile, North Korea has sought to compel the United States to resume discussions by resurrecting its nuclear power plant, harnessing global fears of its nuclear designs as a bargaining tool. Taking down the monitoring cameras at is nuclear plant amounts to North Korea's latest move forward under this strategy, said analysts.
"Clearly, this is a fierce game of chicken," said Lee Jung-Hoon, a professor of International Relations at Yonsei University in Seoul. "We should be very worried about this. We are approaching the worst limits of this situation."
North Korea's decision to intensify confrontation with the United States also reflects its apparent calculation that its leverage has improved dramatically following last week's Presidential elections in South Korea. Voters there handed power to Roh M Hyun, a former labor lawyer who campaigned on a pledge to continue the "sunshine policy," which relies on engagement and aid to improve relations between the two halves of the Korean peninsula-even if doing so strains South Korea's with the United States. In electing Roh, South Korea's voters effectively rebuked President Bush, who has branded North Korea part of an "axis of evil" and has sought to isolate the country by encouraging South Korea and Japan to minimize contact.
"North Korea sees that South Korea is on its side and is trying to intensify anti-American sentiment to use as leverage in negotiations with the United States," said Tsutomu Nishioka, an analyst at the Modern Korea Institute in Tokyo.
Though hawkish members of the Bush administration have discussed a military response to North Korea's nuclear admissions, the United States remains preoccupied with the looming prospect of war with Iraq. Given the stakes in Iraq, the United States is particularly keen to avoid war on the Korean peninsula.
Moreover, South Korea-which would likely devastated within minutes of any outbreak of hostilities-is more eager than ever to avoid war. This constellation of circumstances has apparently convinced North Korea that the United States is powerless to respond militarily, say analysts, emboldening the isolated the Communist country to test the limits of threat in seeking a resumption of aid.
"This is a confident move by North Korea," said Takesada, the National Institute for Defense Studies expert. "They see that the United States cannot resort to military action."
Lee Jung-Hoon, the Yonsei University expert, said North Korea was likely to continue on its course of confrontation until it believes that the United States is really preparing to respond with force.
"Until the eve of a military confrontation," he said, "they will continue to play brinkmanship."
Kashiwagi reported from Tokyo. Special correspondent Joohee Cho in Seoul contributed to this report.
----
NORTH KOREA
U.N.'s Surveillance Equipment Is Shut Down at Nuclear Plant
December 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/international/asia/22NORT.html
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - The United States urged North Korea today not to restart a nuclear reactor suspected of being used to make weapons-grade plutonium after the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency reported that the North Koreans had disabled its monitoring equipment at the plant.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said in Vienna that North Korea had disabled surveillance devices the agency had placed at the 5-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon, which the United Nations believes was used to make plutonium before being closed under a 1994 agreement with the United States.
"We urge the D.P.R.K. not to restart its frozen nuclear facilities, including the 5-megawatt reactor," a State Department spokesman, Lou Fintor said today, referring to North Korea's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. He added that to do so would "fly in the face of international consensus."
To monitor North Korea's compliance with the 1994 agreement, the I.A.E.A. sealed five nuclear facilities and installed permanent surveillance cameras. But today, North Korea broke most of the seals and disabled the cameras.
"We call on the D.P.R.K. to respond to repeated requests by the I.A.E.A. to consult on arrangements for safeguarding the frozen nuclear facilities at Yongbyon and allow the I.A.E.A. to replace or restore the seals and cameras that the North damaged," Mr. Fintor said.
He said Washington was still establishing exactly what North Korea had done today, adding that it did not appear North Korea had disturbed seals or cameras at the reprocessing plant or at the spent-fuel pond where 8,000 spent-fuel rods were stored.
North Korea's actions and its pursuit of a covert nuclear program undermined the international community's efforts to help it deal with poverty and other serious problems, he said.
"The North has been in violation of its safeguard agreement for some time," Mr. Fintor said. North Korea's "refusal to come into compliance with its safeguard obligations is one of our primary concerns."
"We will await further information before reaching a decision on a further violation," he said.
North Korea, acting after the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union decided to halt heavy fuel oil deliveries to the country, announced plans earlier this month to immediately reactivate the Yongbyon reactor.
The United States and its allies decided to cut fuel deliveries after the North acknowledged that it had a program to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons, in violation of the 1994 agreement.
Under the 1994 accord, North Korea promised to freeze its nuclear programs in return for a $5 billion package that included two light-water nuclear reactors for power generation and 500,000 metric tons of heavy fuel oil per year.
American intelligence officials have estimated that the North has produced one or two nuclear bombs.
--------
U.S. Warns North Korea Over Dismantling of U.N. Devices
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-US-NKorea.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States on Sunday urged North Korea to replace surveillance gear it dismantled at one of its nuclear reactors and refrain from restarting the facility.
Secretary of State Colin Powell discussed the situation over the weekend with top officials of China, South Korea, Russia and Japan.
``The international community had been reaching out to North Korea to try to assist it in dealing with its severe poverty and other serious problems,'' State Department spokesman Lou Fintor said.
``That effort has been undermined by North Korea's pursuit of a covert nuclear program and its latest actions.''
A leading Democratic senator said the United States faced more of threat from North Korea's restarting of the plants than from Iraq's weapons programs.
``This is a greater danger immediately to U.S. interests at this very moment, in my view, than Saddam Hussein is,'' said Sen. Joe Biden, outgoing chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
``If they lift the seals on these canisters (at the plant), they're going to be able to build four to five additional nuclear weapons within months if they begin that reprocessing operation -- that's within a year,'' Biden, D-Del., told ``Fox News Sunday.''
North Korea on Saturday disabled the U.N. equipment installed at a reactor in Yongbyon, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Fintor urged North Korea to respond to repeated requests by the U.N. nuclear agency ``to consult on arrangements for safeguarding'' the facilities at Yongbyon and allow the agency to replace or restore the seals and cameras.
``A move to restart them would fly in the face of the international consensus that the North Korean regime must fulfill all its commitments and in particular dismantle its covert nuclear weapons program,'' Fintor said.
North Korea acknowledged on Oct. 4 that it had a uranium-enrichment program meant to develop a nuclear weapon.
President Bush later halted oil shipments the United States has provided the energy-poor country. In response, the North Koreans said they would restart nuclear energy facilities shut down as part of a 1994 disarmament pact.
North Korea's official news agency said Sunday the government began removing the equipment because the nuclear agency was ``whiling away time after proposing what it called working negotiations.''
Under the 1994 agreement, North Korea pledged to freeze and eventually dismantle its nuclear weapons program in exchange for international aid to build two power-producing nuclear reactors.
The United States ``will not enter into dialogue in response to threats or broken commitments, and we will not bargain or offer inducements for North Korea to live up to the treaties and agreements it has signed,'' Fintor said.
Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind. and incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the administration must be firm in dealing with North Korea.
``We cannot take an attitude, I believe, in which we just simply say they are wrong -- that is, the North Koreans -- we're not going to talk until they do some things right,'' he said. ``We're all going to have to talk, talk continuously to South Korea, to North Korea, to Japan, be heavily engaged.''
The United States has threatened war if Iraq does not disarm, but has taken a much more measured approach with North Korea, which Bush has said is part of an ``axis of evil'' with Iraq and Iran.
Powell called Chinese Foreign Minister Tang Jiaxuan, South Korean Foreign Minister Choi Sung-hong and Russian Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov on Saturday. On Sunday, he spoke with Japanese Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.
-------- missile defense
Questions Remain Whether U.S. Missile Defense Works
December 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-arms-usa-missiles.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The concept is elegantly simple: using one missile to shoot down another one.
It is the basis of the national missile defense system that President Bush has ordered to be operational starting in 2004 to protect the United States from threats such as a long-range missile attack by North Korea.
But, experts said, just because the concept is simple does not mean it will work. Even with multiple tests due between now and 2004, the system likely will be put in place before it is determined whether it can deal with even basic countermeasures such as decoys to draw attention away from a true nuclear warhead, they said.
``I support the research. But I think that the system needs to demonstrate that it can work first,'' said Philip Coyle, a former assistant secretary of defense who helped evaluate the program under President Bill Clinton.
``None of the tests will present an opportunity to learn whether or not the system can discriminate between real targets and decoys and countermeasures,'' added Coyle, now a senior adviser for the Center for Defense Information think tank.
Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were careful on Tuesday when they unveiled the deployment plan not to promise that the system would provide an impenetrable shield. ``Better than nothing'' is what Rumsfeld called it.
``It would be a very preliminary, modest capability, and you would be learning -- it would be in a testing and learning mode,'' Rumsfeld said. ``But also, in the event it were needed, it would be able to provide you some limited capability to deal with a limited number of ballistic missiles.''
Congress provided $16 billion for the program in the first two years of Bush's presidency. The Pentagon plans to seek $17.5 billion over the next two years. In the long run, the costs of the system could exceed $200 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
The central element of the system is the plan to shoot down long-range missiles in mid-flight, long before they can bring devastation to their intended target. To deal with these, land-based interceptor missiles are set to be placed at Fort Greely in Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
The interceptors are made up of a booster rocket that shoots the missile into space, and a so-called ``kill vehicle'' that zeros in on an enemy warhead. The kill vehicle is released from the booster after leaving the atmosphere, and carries an infrared camera to help guide it to its target, and small rocket engines for maneuvering.
'HITTING A BULLET WITH A BULLET'
``That's what people refer to as hitting a bullet with a bullet. That's a difficult thing to do, but tests have shown that you can do that,'' said David Wright, a physicist and co-director of the Global Security Program for the Union of Concerned Scientists, which opposes deployment. ``The problem is: that's not the hard part of developing one of these systems. The hard part is figuring out where the warhead is and what you should be shooting at.''
There have been eight major tests of the system in which interceptors launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands were intended to shoot down a dummy warhead aboard a modified Minuteman 2 intercontinental ballistic missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force base in California, about 4,800 miles away. Three failed and five succeeded.
The tests have not examined whether the system would be fooled by decoy warheads. Critics said any nation able to launch a long-range missile that could hit America would be capable of mounting countermeasures such as decoys to increase the chances that its warheads evade any defensive system.
One area of concern for the Pentagon is the interceptors' booster rockets. Two of the three test failures occurred because the kill vehicle did not separate from the booster.
``DOESN'T FLY RIGHT''
``I don't like where we are in terms of being developed with the boosters,'' said Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency. ``I mean, we can't use an interceptor that doesn't fly right.''
Kadish said his agency will concentrate in 2003 on coming up with a reliable booster rocket, noting that officials are looking at two possible alternatives.
Also missing is the high-resolution radar intended to be used to find incoming missiles, which has not yet been constructed. Defense Department officials plan to upgrade existing radars until the new radar system is ready.
``I think you have to acknowledge this thing has some capability against a simple threat. And the question becomes: Is that capability against a simple threat worth the money when you know that the threat may not be so simple,'' said Michael O'Hanlon, an expert at the Brookings Institution think tank.
``I would still tend to say under those circumstances that it's worth putting a small defense in place. But I think you have to keep your expectations in check.''
-------- russia
Russia, Iran discuss nuclear fuel
By Modher Amin
UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
December 22, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20021222-023857-2193r.htm
TEHRAN, Iran, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- Russia's Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyanstev arrived in Iran on Sunday for talks with Iranian officials on nuclear cooperation between the two countries.
He is expected to sign a contract for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel from Iran's Bushehr reactor.
During his four-day visit, the Russian minister is expected to meet several Iranian officials, including the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Gholamreza Aqazadeh, Speaker Mehdi Karroubi and Vice-President Mohammad-Reza Aref. Rumyanstev will also travel to the southern port city of Bushehr where Iran is building a nuclear plant with Russia's assistance.
The Russian Itar-Tass news agency reported that Rumyanstev will also discuss proposals for transferring nuclear fuel waste from Iran to Russia for reprocessing.
Russian officials have said that a new agreement between Iran and Russia - to be signed during this visit - would provide firm guarantees against nuclear proliferation, the Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
Washington has expressed serious concerns over the $1 billion, Russian-assisted Bushehr nuclear plant.
Both Iran and Russia have said they intend to complete the plant, with Moscow announcing in August it intended to build a second plant in Bushehr.
Moscow has tried to assuage U.S. fears by saying that the Bushehr plants will function under the full supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Despite America's objections, Russia has shown interest in expanding its nuclear cooperation with Iran and is willing to help Iran build more reactors.
Last week, a Washington-based nuclear watchdog issued satellite pictures of two nuclear sites near the central Iranian towns of Natanz and Arak, suggesting that they could be used for building nuclear weapons.
The Institute for Science and International Security confirmed through photo interpretation that the site near Arak appeared to be a heavy water plant under construction. Heavy water, which is ordinary water enriched with the hydrogen isotope deuterium, is used as a moderator in one type of nuclear reactor.
The site's existence increases suspicions that Iran may be building a heavy-water moderated reactor, but ISIS was unable to locate such a reactor.
Iran is a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has committed to renouncing the possession of nuclear weapons and permitting inspections by the IAEA of all its nuclear activities.
Under NPT safeguards agreement, Iran is not required to allow IAEA inspections of a new nuclear facility until 6 months before nuclear material is introduced into it.
IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei was scheduled to arrive last week in Iran to discuss safeguards issues, visit these sites. However, the Iranian government canceled his delegation's visit.
Iran stated at the IAEA General Conference in September in Vienna it was pursuing a "long term plan" to construct "nuclear power plants and the associated technologies such as fuel cycle" facilities.
ISIS said it was concerned this effort was aimed at developing the capability to make separated plutonium and highly enriched uranium, the two main nuclear explosive materials.
-------- terrorism
Nuclear Industry Sponsors Reactor Tests
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Plants-Planes.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Tests using engineering models support the nuclear industry's arguments that a reactor could withstand a direct hit by a jetliner, an industry-sponsored report says.
While the tests by engineers independent of the industry provide valuable data, federal regulators briefed on the findings say they are waiting for completion of their own tests before drawing conclusions.
The vulnerability of the 4-feet-thick concrete containment domes of reactors to an airborne attack has been of major concern since the Sept. 11 attacks.
Reactors are designed to withstand many natural disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes. They never were designed specifically to be protected against a direct hit by a large aircraft such as the planes flown into the Pentagon and World Trade Center.
Findings to be released this week conclude that if a Boeing 767-400 jetliner, fully loaded with 28,980 gallons of fuel, were flown directly into the center of a reactor at 350 miles an hour, the plane would not penetrate the structure.
``The analysis indicates that no part of the engine, the fuselage or the wings -- nor the jet fuel -- entered the containment building,'' says the report prepared by two consulting firms for the Electric Power Research Institute at the request of the nuclear industry.
The computer analysis evaluated both a direct impact on the containment structure of one of the plane's engines and ``the global impact'' of the entire aircraft mass on the structure.
The analysis concluded that damage would be limited to ``some spalling'' -- crushing of material -- of the concrete but with minimal penetration.
A summary of the report, provided to The Associated Press on Sunday from industry sources, produced no detailed test calculations but said conservative assumptions were used.
For example, the computer runs assumed a fuel-loaded aircraft, making a direct hit at the exact center of the containment building where impact forces would be greatest.
It assumes use of a Boeing 767-400 because that wide-bodied jet best represents the commercial aircraft fleets, and the report used a speed of 350 mph because that is believed to be the speed at which two jetliners hit their targets on Sept. 11.
Higher speeds would make an aircraft too hard to control at low altitude and make a hit on a reactor extremely difficult, especially by an inexperienced pilot, the study said.
The tests were conducted by ABS Consulting, which specializes in quantifying losses from natural and manmade hazards including fires, earthquakes and missile impacts; and ANATECH Corp., a San Diego engineering firm that specializes in evaluating structural failures.
The sponsoring Electric Power Research Institute, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is a nonprofit energy research consortium of the electric power industry. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Nuclear Energy Institute asked the consortium to develop the study.
Separate tests on reactor vulnerability to an aircraft crash, details of which are classified, are under way at the government's Sandia National Laboratory and elsewhere, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
William Beecher, however, said he could not comment on the industry tests without referring to classified information involving the government tests. The spokesman said commission officials have been briefed on the industry findings.
Nuclear industry critics have noted that reactor design and security requirements never have taken into account the possibility of a deliberate strike of a reactor by a hijacked jetliner, and past studies have provided conflicting data.
A computer analysis conducted in 1982 by the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory did not rule out penetration of a reactor containment by an aircraft hit. If penetration occurred, that report said, burning jet fuel ``would lead to a rather violent explosion'' within the dome.
Recently, 19 nuclear experts, many of them long associated with the nuclear industry, cited a 1988 test at the Sandia laboratory that they said made clear a containment shield would withstand a jetliner crash.
But reliance on the 1988 Sandia test, which involved a much lighter F-4 Phantom fighter, also has been the subject of dispute. Skeptics have noted it was not designed to measure the strength of the structure, which was set up so that it could move upon impact and did move several feet, which reduced the impact force.
On the Net:
Electric Power Research Institute: http://www.epri.com/
Sandia National Laboratories: http://www.sandia.gov/
Nuclear Regulatory Commission: http://www.nrc.gov/
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
French Troops Turn Back Ivoirian Rebels
December 22, 2002
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/international/africa/22IVOR.html
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Dec. 21 - French soldiers fired on Ivory Coast rebels today, repelling an attack as the rebels tried to seize a strategic western town.
The rebels had opened fire on French soldiers as they approached the town of Duékoué from the northeast, but a French Army spokesman said the attack had been halted.
Today's rebel attack came as the French chief of staff, Gen. Henri Bentegeat, arrived in Ivory Coast's inland administrative capital, Yamoussoukro, to review the situation on the ground.
The French Army has a mandate to enforce a truce between the government troops and the Ivory Coast Patriotic Movement rebel group, which has occupied the mainly Muslim northern half of the country since Sept. 19.
Two new rebel groups recently surfaced in western Ivory Coast and overran strategic towns on Nov. 28, the same day the main rebel group resumed hostilities in the west.
One of the new groups retook the town of Man on Wednesday and then captured nearby Bangolo two days later, making further inroads into the country's cocoa-growing belt.
-------- arms sales
UK sells chemical weapons to the world
Breaking international law, Britain exports lethal TCPs to Iran, Sudan, Libya and Israel
Exclusive by Neil Mackay,
12/22/02
UK Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/25366
BRITAIN is supplying chemical warfare technology to 26 countries including Libya, Syria, Israel and Iran -- which was labelled part of the 'axis of evil' by the United States.
A Sunday Herald investigation has revealed that the UK is allowing the export of the lethal chemicals, which are illegal under international law and controlled under the chemical weapons convention because they can be used in weapons of mass destruction.
The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI), which authorised the sales, has admitted that it does not know whether the exports will be used to create chemical weapons once they are exported, or not.
Among the countries to which Britain is exporting 'toxic chemical precursors' (TCPs) is Sudan. The US bombed a factory in the Sudanese capital Khartoum in 1998 with the full support of the Blair government for allegedly producing the deadly VX nerve agent.
The UK is also exporting chemical weapons technology to countries that are not signatories to the chemical weapons convention and therefore do not recognise the international ban on chemical warfare.
Sudan and Jordan, which the UK also exports to, have signed the convention but not ratified it, making the treaty virtually meaningless there. The other nations Britain exports TCPs to are: Cyprus, India, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda and Yemen.
TCPs are known as 'dual-use chemicals' as they can be used for harmless activities like farming or adapted or turned into chemical weapons. The DTI admitted the sales were on-going, but said the weapons were sold 'in the belief' that they would be used 'benignly' in agriculture or as detergents.
The DTI said it relied on assurances from foreign governments in the form of 'end user undertakings' that they would not use British TCPs to make chemical weapons. A spokesman agreed that this was in effect nothing more than a promise that could be broken.
'We aim to minimise risk,' the spokesman said, 'but obviously it is very difficult to say what happens to these things once they get to their final destinations. It is impossible to clamp down 100%. It is impossible to know what happens to them in the stages that come after they leave Britain.
Labour MP Ann Clwyd, who sits on international development, human rights and arms export committees, is to raise the Sunday Herald investigation with the Prime Minister in the Commons.
She wants the Arms Export Bill, which is currently going through parliament, to be amended to give MPs the right to scrutinise and approve all weapons exports before they leave the UK. The government has so far refused to give MPs these powers.
She said claims by the DTI that it monitored chemical sales were 'a myth' and 'did not stand up to scrutiny'. Clwyd added: 'We have no idea what happens with these chemicals when they get to their final destination. If we are going to sell these things we have to be 100% sure what happens to them when they are sold. If we can't be sure, we shouldn't sell them.'
Clwyd accused the government of having a 'skewed morality', adding that the suspicion now hung over the Blair government that it was 'aiding and abetting dodgy regimes in the development of weapons of mass destruction'.
Professor Julian Perry Robinson, a chemist at the Science and Technology Research Unit at Sussex University, said TCPs were the main constituent of chemical weapons. Robinson, who worked on the drafting of the chemical weapons con vention and is a member of its UK National Authority Advisory Committee said reve lations about trade in TCPs were of great public concern. He explained how one TCP, dimethyl methylphosphonate, could easily be turned into lethal sarin nerve gas -- the same agent used by the Aum Shinrikyo cult to kill 12 people on the Tokyo subway system in 1995.
Robinson said it was easy for countries buying chemicals from the UK to lie about their end use, and backed calls for parliamentary scrutiny of export licences, saying: 'It is impossible to say whether the current safeguards work.'
Richard Bingley, of the group Campaign Against the Arms Trade, warned that Britain was selling chemical weapons technology to regimes that could one day turn the capabilities Britain is giving to them back against it and its allies.
l The revelations of Britain's trade in chemical warfare follow an anti-arms trade demo nstration outside 10 Downing Street yesterday. Prot esters were calling for a ban on weapons sales from the UK to India and Pakistan as the two nations teeter on the brink of war.
Britain's Chemical Bazaar - http://www.sundayherald.com/25290
----
West tries to shield companies that made a monster of Baghdad
IAN MATHER,
December 22, 2002
Scotsman
http://www.news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1422882002
IT IS a monster that has been fed by Western firms. Some 150 companies, mostly in Europe, the United States and Japan, have provided components and know-how needed by Saddam Hussein to build atomic bombs and chemical and biological weapons.
The Iraqi dossier delivered to the UN and chief weapons inspector Hans Blix adds up to the most comprehensive list so far of companies involved.
Iraq's report says that equipment was sent by more than 80 German companies, 24 American, and 17 British, as well as by a number of Swiss, Japanese, Italian, French, Swedish and Brazilian firms. It says that more than 30 countries supplied equipment for its nuclear programme alone.
The activities of the British companies all took place before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, according to the dossier. But it says that some German companies have co-operated with Iraq more recently. Russian and Chinese companies have also moved in as more Western companies have accepted the ban and steered clear of Iraq.
Some of the names of the foreign companies that helped Iraq have been known for some time. Others are new.
Since the Gulf war of 1991 dozens of companies have either admitted to sales or have been prosecuted in Europe for helping arm Iraq.
Other sales listed in the Iraqi dossier have been legal and often made with the knowledge of governments before sales to Iraq were banned. Between 1985 and 1990 the US Commerce Department, for instance, licensed $1.5bn (£960m) of sales of technology which had military potential for Iraq.
A central difficulty with the Iraqi document concerns dual use technology. Iraq is allowed to import medical equipment, and in 1998 it ordered six 'lithotripter' machines, which are used to treat kidney stones. Each machine requires an electronic switch. The same switch can also be used to trigger atomic bombs.
Iraq could also convert its plants for building short-range missiles constructed with foreign help and permitted under UN resolutions, into plants for producing longer-range ones, which are forbidden.
Then there are questions over what Iraq has tried to buy. According to a recent British government dossier, Iraq has continued its nuclear shopping efforts. Since 1998, the dossier says, Iraq has tried to buy "significant quantities of uranium" in Africa, although it has no peaceful use for it.
Both the US and the UN are trying to keep the names of Iraq's foreign suppliers secret, and large parts of the document have been excised in advance of copies being handed to the non-permanent members of the Security Council.
The US and the UN both argue that they need the co-operation of companies in providing details of Iraq's non-military purchases, which could have dual use. If companies were named and shamed all cooperation would cease. But already the secrets are leaking out. Much information was published last week in the left-wing German newspaper, Die Tageszeitung. More is sure to follow.
-------- business
So Much for the Plan to Scrap Old Weapons
December 22, 2002
New York Times
By LESLIE WAYNE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/business/yourmoney/22MILI.html
OVER the past year, even as he hunted down terrorists, oversaw lingering operations in Afghanistan and made plans for a possible invasion of Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld was also waging a battle much closer to home. On that front, pitted against American military contractors, he has more than met his match.
This week, Mr. Rumsfeld will deliver to President Bush a $378 billion military budget that had been trumpeted as a new strategic vision - one that was to have shaken the relics of cold-war weapons systems from the national arsenal and replaced them with new, lighter and more lethal fighting forces.
Yet it now appears that the military contractors, united with allies in the Pentagon and Congress in a group known around Washington as the Iron Triangle, stood up to Mr. Rumsfeld - and won. Weapons systems that had been on the chopping block have been saved, and others that many critics say should be consigned to the dustbin of history are about to receive millions, and in some cases billions, of taxpayers' dollars.
"As far as the sweeping, let's-turn-the-place-inside-out changes that were being proposed, that's just not going to happen," said Byron K. Callan, a military industry analyst at Merrill Lynch. "The most interesting thing about this administration and Pentagon is that there has been a lot of talk, but action only at the margin."
For two years now, the administration has wanted to make good on Mr. Bush's campaign promise to modernize the military, even if it meant skipping a generation of weapons in the works. Despite the attention the military receives for its high-technology weaponry, billions of dollars still flow into weapons systems designed to fight the battles of yesterday - fighter jets built for aerial battles with the Soviets, warships designed for battles in the open seas.
For companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics and dozens of others, hundreds of millions of dollars were on the line every time Mr. Bush talked about modernization. He gave two major speeches on the subject at the Citadel, one as a candidate and one last year. His pronouncements were repeated even more forcefully by Mr. Rumsfeld, who, known for tough decisions, looked as if he could turn the tough talk into action.
But it hasn't turned out that way. After canceling one weapons system last year and saying that six other major ones were on the block, Mr. Rumsfeld is expected to put forward a budget that is said, by those who have seen it, to keep the funds flowing to nearly every weapons system that was up for review.
The Pentagon will not comment on the budget until its official release. But barring a last-minute change of heart in the White House, the scope of military spending appears to be set for the next several years.
After intense behind-the-scenes lobbying, Lockheed will find that its F/A-22 fighter jets, each with a $200 million price tag, are protected - the budget will recommend that 203 be made in the next decade and perhaps an additional 100 in the decade after that. That is also a victory for the Air Force, which had made the F/A-22 its No. 1 priority, even though its Soviet counterpart was never built. Boeing's troubled V-22 Osprey, which crashed in several test flights, causing the deaths of 23 Marines, is not only spared but is getting $100 million more so the Army's Special Forces can get a few, too. Boeing's partner on the V-22 is Textron.
Northrop Grumman will get the contract for a new aircraft carrier - and in a version even more technologically advanced than the one the Navy had sought. As recently as September, Mr. Rumsfeld was weighing whether to cancel or delay the carrier.
The only major weapons system taking a noticeable hit is the Army's Comanche helicopter, built by Boeing and the Sikorsky Aircraft unit of United Technologies. Mr. Rumsfeld is suggesting that only 650 be made - versus the 1,200 now in the program, which was started in 1983 to counter the Soviets but has yet to produce a single craft.
There's a simple explanation for the about-face.
"You had the resistance of the military services to rapid change," said Loren B. Thompson, a military expert at the Lexington Institute, a conservative policy group in Arlington, Va. "You had the relative superficiality of the Bush administration's transformation vision. Trying to make a major change in defense spending is extremely difficult and there is no political support for it."
In Congress, Mr. Thompson said, members often see the Pentagon budget as a jobs program. "You have 120 members of the depot maintenance caucus and there is no military transformation caucus," he said. "That pretty much says it all."
OR the last year, operating behind blast-proof windows at the Pentagon, Mr. Rumsfeld and a trusted aide, Stephen A. Cambone, have been working on the budget, scrutinizing one weapons system after another. This Pentagon budget, for the 2004 fiscal year, was to have been the administration's first crack at modernization; its first military budget was inherited from the Clinton administration, and the second was overtaken by Sept. 11. All told, the budget is $100 billion more than when Mr. Bush took office.
Given Mr. Rumsfeld's forceful personality, as well as his popularity in the wake of the war in Afghanistan, expectations ran high that he was the right man for the job.
"You cannot underestimate Rumsfeld's persuasive skills," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, a liberal-leaning policy group. "I'm disappointed he could not have curtailed or canceled more programs. That would have been a major contribution. But if he is not doing it in this budget, he will never do it."
Yet it was never a fair fight. Mr. Rumsfeld ran directly into the Iron Triangle, the modern-day version of the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about.
Military contractors have spent $90 million in the last year and a half lobbying Congress - and they have an enviable roster of former members of Congress on their payrolls spending it. Congress, meanwhile, excels at turning the Pentagon budget into a pork-barrel program, encouraged by the fact that the military industry spreads weapons production into as many Congressional districts as possible. Some weapons are produced in as many as 40 states.
Mr. Rumsfeld is also up against the combined forces of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines - each with pet weapons programs on which many careers have been built. Members of the services annually take their wish lists directly to Congress, bypassing civilian Pentagon authorities.
Last year, those direct requests came to $25 billion above the Pentagon's budget, with $3.8 billion approved. Congress added even more - $7.5 billion for its favored projects, according to a study by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and a member of the Armed Services Committee, who reports annually on military pork. About 80 percent of these projects were in home districts of members of Congressional appropriations committees.
"There are entrenched constituencies in the Pentagon that did not share the vision," said Christopher Hellman, a senior analyst at the Center for Defense Information, a military research group. "These guys did not want to give up what they had, and they were not going to help with transformation."
Military contractors are also aided by former executives who have won appointments to some of the highest positions in the Pentagon.
For instance, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche is a former president of Northrop Grumman's electronic sensors and systems sector; Peter B. Teets, an Air Force under secretary, was Lockheed's chief operating officer, and Nelson F. Gibbs, an Air Force assistant secretary, is a former Northrop Grumman controller.
Gordon R. England, the departing Secretary of the Navy, was a General Dynamics vice president, and Michael W. Wynne, a former senior vice president at General Dynamics, is a Defense Department under secretary.
"It's hard to battle all these vested interests," said Ivan Eland, the director of defense policy studies at the Cato Institute, a free-market research group. "But I think Rumsfeld had given up before he even started. He caved in on the aircraft carrier. He caved in on the F/A-22. He was defeated even within the Pentagon."
For the Air Force, the big victory was over the flashy and expensive F/A-22 Raptor fighter jet, the subject of a huge "Save the Raptor" campaign. This contract, valued at up to $64 billion, will go to Lockheed Martin, along with Boeing and the Pratt & Whitney unit of United Technologies, as well as to 1,000 subcontractors in more than 40 states.
Designed for aerial combat against futuristic Soviet fighters that were never made, the F/A-22 cruises at Mach 1.5. It has, however, been 10 years in the making and is $690 million over budget in development costs alone - and still no plane has been produced. While critics say the plane is no longer needed, the only battle was over how many F/A-22's would be made. In the end, the Air Force got close to what it had requested, after an all-out campaign by it and Lockheed in and out of the Pentagon.
The Raptor's slogan - "First look. First shot. First kill" - became its selling point. Not only did Lockheed have the usual platoon of lobbyists, it also used its three F/A-22 flight simulators around the country to treat influential decision makers to lifelike fighter-jet rides.
One simulator was stationed just outside Washington, where it provided rides to members of Congress and their staffs. Another traveled the country, drumming up grass-roots support by offering rides to veterans groups, local news media, subcontractors and hometown politicians. The third is based at Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Ga., giving joy rides to visitors.
In fact, the interests of Lockheed and the Air Force are so aligned on the F/A-22 that their Web sites are linked and carry nearly identical photographs of the fighter jet in action, along with reams of information to download.
Lockheed also provided information to the many F/A-22 fan clubs that have sprung up around the country, as well as to students writing papers and Boy Scout troops working on badges. F/A-22 test pilots often spoke about the plane's wonders to local civic groups.
Inside the Pentagon, the strategy of Lockheed and the Air Force was to portray the plane as "transformational" rather than as a cold-war relic, and to redesign it, adding capacity to drop more bombs instead of simply engaging in aerial dogfights. The Air Force then changed the name from F-22, which signifies a fighter jet, to F/A-22, reflecting its air-to-ground attack capabilities.
Vance D. Coffman, the chief executive of Lockheed Martin, said Lockheed representatives met with Pentagon officials weekly. "There is no lack of communication," he said. "The Pentagon expressed a high degree of interest in what we think about. The path is open."
OTHERS are more cynical.
"The Air Force wants it so badly," said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., the executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington group studying the military. "I'm surprised they are not trying to sell it as a car."
For the Marines, the biggest pleasant surprise was the funding of the $46 billion V-22 Osprey, a Boeing craft that can hover like a helicopter and fly like a jet. Despite the deaths of Marines in test flights, 360 Ospreys were sought to replace Vietnam-era helicopters that cannot fly as far or as fast.
The V-22 Osprey has had a troubled history. It is already 10 years behind schedule. Even as far back as 1992, Dick Cheney, then the secretary of defense, called it "a program that I don't need." Subsequent attempts to kill it failed, as Congress continued to finance the program, which also has subcontractors in about 40 states. But because the Marines rarely ask for major weapons systems, Osprey backers argued that the Marines were "owed" one.
Still, it was the Army's Special Operations Command that came to the Marines' rescue, according to a civilian official at the Pentagon. With their star rising since the invasion of Afghanistan, the Army Special Operations forces said they, too, wanted an Osprey - and they got it. If the Osprey's problems continue, the Pentagon may revisit this decision.
For the Navy, the big victory was the aircraft carrier, but, according to that official, the Navy is getting more than it bargained for. Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cambone are demanding that the Navy accelerate the introduction of new technologies to reduce the carrier's crew.
The new carrier would be built in Virginia, the home state of Senator John W. Warner, the Republican who will head the Senate Armed Services Committee, making it all but certain that it will breeze through Congress.
Only the Army lost out in the proposed budget, largely because it has the greatest inventory of heavy armaments from earlier eras. The Army's Comanche helicopter program - at a cost of $40 million an aircraft - was approved for only half the request, around 650 choppers. Since 1999, costs have swelled by $4.8 billion, to $48.1 billion.
While the helicopter now has many new high-technology redesigns to make it stealthier, many critics say existing Army helicopters are more than up to the task. Those within the Pentagon say Mr. Rumsfeld cut the buy for the Comanche out of a belief that contractors should focus more on pilotless aerial craft.
TILL undecided is the fate of the Army's Stryker family of combat vehicles - the next generation of tanklike vehicles to be made by General Dynamics and General Motors. (General Dynamics said last week that it plans to buy the G.M. unit that is its partner in the venture.)
Initially, Mr. Rumsfeld wanted to finance only three brigades of Strykers, rather than the six sought by the Army. That would have reduced the number of Stryker vehicles to 1,100 from 2,100 and cut potential orders by $2 billion.
But he is now calling for four brigades and has left open the door to an additional two, after an all-out effort by the Army to drum up support for the six-brigade option. In uncharacteristically strong public language, the Army's chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, took to speaking to pro-military groups in Washington. "It's time, and the right number is six," he said in an October speech. Army Secretary Thomas E. White has given interviews backing the six-brigade option.
The Army and General Dynamics, meanwhile, sponsored a media day at Andrews Air Force Base on Oct. 16 at which 200 reporters were wisked past security and watched as Strykers taxied on and off a C-130 aircraft. The event was intended to debunk criticism that Strykers are too heavy to be transported easily.
Among the special guests at the Andrews event was Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker and now a commentator on the Fox News Channel, who had questioned the Stryker. A photograph of a smiling Mr. Gingrich being taught how to drive one is now posted on the Army's official Web site.
In the end, only one modernization effort may provide a lasting legacy. It came earlier this year when Mr. Rumsfeld went toe to toe with the Army over the $11 billion Crusader artillery system, and won. It was the first high-profile weapons system to be canceled in a decade and fulfilled a Bush campaign promise.
In that fight, Mr. Rumsfeld took on the combined forces of the Army brass that had gone to Congress at the 11th hour to save the system, which, at 40 tons, was too heavy to be moved swiftly. He also squared off against United Defense Industries, controlled by the Carlyle Group, a Washington investment firm whose executives and advisers include Frank C. Carlucci, the former secretary of defense; James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state; and former President George Bush.
Mr. Rumsfeld also had to face Representative J. C. Watts Jr., the lone black Republican member of Congress, now completing his final term, and a key to getting African-American votes. The Crusader was to have been built in his district.
Mr. Rumsfeld prevailed, fortified by a call from President Bush, but so did the Iron Triangle. Even though the project was killed, United Defense got a $475 million contract to continue development of the Crusader's cannon.
-------- chemical weapons
Study Finds Soldiers Exposed to Sarin in Persian Gulf
U.S. Newswire
22 Dec 2002 19:44
http://www.usnewswire.com/topnews/qtr1_2003/1222-103.html
Study Finds Soldiers Exposed to Sarin in Persian Gulf To: National Desk Contact: Steve Robinson of the National Gulf War Resource Center, 301-996-8450 E-mail: srobinson@ngwrc.org
WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Exposure to sarin nerve gas in concentrations too low to produce immediate symptoms causes irreversible brain damage in laboratory rats, according to a new study by researchers at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense, Aberdeen, Md.
The new findings, published in three scientific articles in the peer-reviewed journal Toxicology and Applied Pharmacology, supplies the final missing piece of the puzzle that connects nerve gas exposure in the 1991 Gulf War to the collection of disabling symptoms known as Gulf War illness.
In its September 2000 report, Gulf War and Health, Volume 1: Depleted Uranium, Sarin, Pyridostigmine Bromide, and Vaccines, an expert committee of the Institute of Medicine found that exposure to low-level sarin in concentrations sufficient to cause immediate symptoms can produce long-term brain injury with symptoms identical to those of Gulf War illness.
The committee stopped short of attributing the veterans' illness to low-level sarin, however, because they found insufficient evidence proving that exposure to low-level sarin in concentrations below the level that would cause immediate symptoms can produce long-term brain injury.
The committee recommended that further laboratory research in animals be undertaken to address this final link.
In the new study researchers administered very low doses of sarin to laboratory rats for one hour per day for 1, 5 or 10 days, while observing the rats for signs of immediate effects on breathing, body temperature, activity level and body weight. The experiment was repeated in additional rats living in a high temperature environment. Half the rats in each experiment were sacrificed and tested for evidence of brain cell damage one day after the exposures ended, looking for immediate brain effects, and the other half were sacrificed and tested 30 days later for delayed, long-term effects.
The study found that none of the sarin-exposed rats had immediate symptoms of nerve gas effects or brain changes at one day after the exposures were ended. However, at 30 days after the end of the exposures, the brains of the rats in all the sarin-exposed groups had marked signs of brain cell damage. The degree of brain cell damage was proportional to the dose of sarin given and was increased by living in the hot environment.
The measure of brain cell damage used in the study was the loss of so-called muscarinic-1 (M1) cholinergic receptors. These are active sites on the surface of brain cells that normally allow the brain neurotransmitter acetylcholine to bind in transmitting brain signals. Loss of M1 cholinergic receptors would cause the brain cells not to respond normally to signals, resulting in symptoms.
"Our results indicate that rats exposed to low levels of sarin, particularly under heat-stress conditions, sustain alterations in muscarinic receptor sites in critical areas of the brain and that most of these alterations appeared long after the exposure occurred," the study's authors concluded. "Repeated exposures to levels of sarin that would not be noticed clinically resulted in delayed development of brain alterations that could be associated with memory loss and cognitive dysfunction."
The brain cell damage in the rats was found only in certain regions of the brain, most notably in the basal ganglia (also called the "striatum" by researchers), as well as in the frontal cortex, the olfactory tubercle and the anterior nucleus. The basal ganglia are vital deep brain structures that were found to be damaged in ill Gulf War veterans in a 2000 brain imaging study by researchers at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas. Subsequently, that finding was replicated by brain imaging scientists at the University of California at San Francisco and the San Francisco VA Medical Center.
"The bottom line is, now we have the evidence the IOM committee needed to draw a connection between low-level sarin and Gulf War illness," concluded Steve Robinson, director of the National Gulf War Resource Center. "It is urgent that the IOM committee evaluate the new evidence and revise their conclusions. This will allow the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to assure current troops that if they get wounded by nerve gas in Iraq next year, the VA system with take care of them."
At the Society of Neuroscience meeting in Washington in late November, other researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Chemical Defense presented additional evidence of long-term brain damage in laboratory animals from low-level sarin and possible potentiation of the damage by pyridostigmine bromide, the active ingredient in anti-nerve gas tablets given to U.S. troops in the 1991 Gulf War. All of these new studies appear to corroborate the findings of studies reported in the early 1990s by researchers at the Indian Defense Research and Development agency, who first studied long-term effects of repeated low-level sarin exposure in laboratory animals.
Additional evidence of the link in humans includes epidemiological surveys from the University of Texas Southwestern and the VA Central Office linking self-reported nerve gas exposure to Gulf War illness; the development of similar symptoms by survivors of the 1995 sarin attacks in the Tokyo and Matsumoto subways; and evidence of an increased susceptibility to nerve gas damage from a genetically determined deficiency of the paraoxonase enzyme in ill Gulf War veterans, reported by several research groups.
Prior research over the past 20 years has shown that brain cells in the basal ganglia and other deep brain structures are particularly susceptible to damage by chemical warfare nerve agents.
The U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command funded the new study.
-------- iraq
Yugoslav Scientist Says Trips To Iraq Were Simply Academic
U.S. Assailed Courses Relevant to Missile Technology
By Nicholas Wood
The Washington Post
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23610-2002Dec21?language=printer
BELGRADE -- Sitting in a Belgrade University cafeteria sipping an espresso, Zlatko Petrovic hardly seems a threat to U.S. security. Slightly portly, dressed in jeans and baggy T-shirt and sporting a bushy mustache, the 50-year-old professor of aerodynamics seems friendly and mild-mannered.
But the expertise of men like him, U.S. officials contend, has been helping Iraq update old weapons and develop new ones.
Over the past three years Petrovic and several other members of the mechanical engineering faculty at Belgrade University have made repeated trips to Baghdad, paid for by the Iraqi government. There they have taught post-graduate students and researchers a range of subjects, including, in Petrovic's case, fluid dynamics, a field essential in the development of ballistic missiles.
The teaching is part of a range of ways in which Yugoslavia has been cooperating with Iraq's defense industry, earning the country a tough warning in October from U.S. diplomats to cease such contacts or face sanctions. The Yugoslav government, which has been approached repeatedly by the United States during the past year about the situation, has acknowledged the problem and put an end to the trade.
In an interview, Petrovic said that he and several colleagues first traveled to Iraq in May 2000. He and two other Serbian teachers were housed in one of Baghdad's top hotels and driven daily to a building where they taught groups of up to 16 people. He visited Iraq three times, most recently in May, he said, staying for a month each time. Petrovic and his colleagues have not been informed of the legality of their contact with Iraq by government officials, but they presumed that they are no longer allowed to travel there.
He acknowledged that his lessons could have had military value but said that he was merely being hired as a teacher, and had no direct role in any weapons program.
"I am sure that education is not under the Security Council resolution" that regulates arm sales to Iraq, he said. "I don't think I have anything to hide." He played down the significance of his lectures, saying, "You can find these lectures on the Internet."
The role of scientists in possible Iraqi programs to develop banned weapons has come under increasing scrutiny as U.N. weapons inspectors tour Iraq, looking for signs that the country has or is trying to develop prohibited weapons. U.S. officials maintain that visits such as Petrovic's highlight the ease with which Iraq has been able to obtain foreign military expertise.
U.S. diplomats have already cited the involvement of the mechanical engineering faculty in the proliferation of missile technology. A protest sent to the Yugoslav government by the U.S. Embassy in Belgrade on Oct. 17 listed that relationship and also said that two Yugoslav companies, Brunner and Infinity, both run by colleagues of Petrovic's, had helped Libya and possibly Iraq in the development of a medium-range cruise missile. Djordje Blagojevic, an Infinity associate, declined to comment. His colleagues said he is cooperating with the inquiry.
Petrovic said he worked with Brunner in Serbia in 1996-1997 to help develop an unmanned aerial vehicle, or drone.
Yugoslavia and Iraq have a long economic and military relationship. In the 1990s, it was a natural fit -- both countries were at odds with the United States and were under U.N. arms embargoes.
Petrovic said he was first approached in early 2000 about work in Iraq by a fellow member of his faculty, whom he declined to name. He was offered $3,000 for a one-month teaching assignment, he said, an amount that would have taken him six years to earn in Yugoslavia, which at the time was suffering from inflation and Western sanctions.
It was the money, he said, that persuaded him to say yes, not any sympathy for the Iraqi government. "What we get for teaching is less than half [of what] you need to live a normal life. The money [we were paid] could not solve all your problems; it lets you live normally."
In May 2000, he flew from Belgrade to Amman, Jordan, and was taken by taxi to Baghdad. He said that this was a public transit point for entering Iraq, monitored by foreign intelligence agencies, and the fact that he went by this route indicated that he was not trying to hide anything.
Each day, he and two colleagues were picked up at their hotel and driven to a school.
He was asked to teach advanced theories in a short period of time, he said, but the facilities and computers were inadequate. Some of the students were very capable and could keep up, he said, but after three or four days, most had fallen behind because of the difficulty of the theory.
Two of them, he said, seemed entirely clueless about the subject matter. That led him to conclude they were members of the secret police, sent to monitor the class.
Contact with his students was restricted outside the classroom. "I could not speak with them freely," he said. "It was simpler for me not to know too much."
He said it is now general knowledge in his field that Iraq is developing two missiles with a range of about 60 miles, one type using a solid propellant and the other a liquid propellant. By his understanding, this work was allowed under the U.N. weapons sanctions because of the missiles' short range.
He said the project was never mentioned to him during his visits to Baghdad.
Petrovic said he doubts Iraq can carry out a sophisticated weapons program by itself. "They don't have the basics to keep things functioning," he said, referring to facilities in Baghdad. "Even what they have does not work. They would need years and years of outside help to do anything."
----
Casualties of an 'Undeclared War'
Civilians Killed and Injured as U.S. Airstrikes Escalate in Southern Iraq
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23834-2002Dec21?language=printer
BASRA, Iraq -- She flinches just a bit when the air raid siren comes on. Not because it is unusual, but because it is not. And because it reminds her of that day just a few weeks ago.
The sirens sound most every day, once, twice, sometimes more. They are followed by the sound of jet planes soaring overhead. Then the soft puffs of antiaircraft fire off in the distance.
What Nahla Mohammed remembers from that day, however, is not the sirens or the jet planes, but running into her son on the street just after she finished shopping for supper. He asked what she would fix, she recalled. Meat, vegetables and soup, she answered. He headed off, anticipating the family meal.
Ten minutes later, according to a cousin who was there, a powerful blast slammed him to the ground as metal shards sliced through his body. Mohammed Sharif Reda, a 23-year-old mechanic married just two months and planning to build a house for his family, was among four people who Iraqi officials said were killed Dec. 1 in what they call an "undeclared war" being waged here in southern Iraq.
While U.S. troops flow into the Persian Gulf region in preparation for a possible invasion of Iraq, U.S. and British warplanes fire regularly on what the Pentagon describes as military targets. U.S. officials say the bombings and missile attacks are responses to Iraqi challenges to enforcement of the southern "no-fly" zone in place since 1991 -- painting aircraft with air defense radars or shooting at them. But the pace of the attacks has quickened demonstrably in recent months and the Pentagon has broadened its targets to a wide array of command and communications facilities in what analysts see as an effort to weaken Iraq's defenses.
The attack on Dec. 1 destroyed a pair of large vehicles parked in an oil company courtyard in the center of Basra, the country's second-largest city, located near the Kuwaiti border. U.S. military spokesmen said they hit an air defense facility, not an oil company, and in any case never deliberately attack civilian targets. But something obliterated the vehicles here and everyone questioned believes it was the Americans.
"Every day, every day, all the time. Why?" cried Reda's widow, Najila, 25, at the family home around the corner from the Museum of the Martyrs of Hostile Persian Shooting. "I ask you: Why is America bombing?"
Through the first four months of the year, U.S. and British forces struck Iraqi sites in the northern and southern no-fly zones just six times, while in the past four months they have launched about four dozen air raids. So far in December, the U.S. military has reported nine strikes around southern cities such as Kut, Nasiriyah, Amarah and Basra, including one here on Friday.
Iraqi officials complain that U.S. and British aircraft violated their airspace for patrols 1,141 times between Nov. 9 and Dec. 6. In response, Iraqi antiaircraft batteries have fired at U.S. and British planes more than 470 times this year, according to a Pentagon count, although the Iraqis have never succeeded in shooting one down.
The no-fly zones were imposed to protect a Kurdish enclave in the north and rebellious Shiite Muslims in the south from possible attack by President Saddam Hussein's aircraft. While Iraq and several major powers do not recognize the legitimacy of the zones, they have become an inescapable fact of life here.
"Not many people realize that a war has been going on for the last several years in the no-fly zone," said Gen. Amir Saadi, a top Hussein adviser. "The very people that Britain and the United States claim to be protecting, they're killing them, maiming them, depriving them of their normal livelihood and also destroying the infrastructure which is there to serve them."
The Pentagon disputes that and includes a statement at the end of each announcement of another raid: "Coalition aircraft never target civilian populations or infrastructure and go to painstaking lengths to avoid injury to civilians and damage to civilian facilities."
Until recently, U.S. and British warplanes responding to threats from Iraqi forces limited their strikes to gun emplacements, radar facilities and other sites involved in trying to hit them. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in August ordered his commanders to widen the target list to include more communications centers, command buildings and fiber-optic links.
The more strategic targeting led U.S. forces to strike the Tallil air base, the air defense sector headquarters about 160 miles southeast of Baghdad, a dozen times this fall. With hardened revetments for aircraft, surface-to-air missiles and two major runways, Tallil protects the southern approach to the capital and was a major target during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
In September, U.S. planes also hit radars at a remote military airfield 240 miles west of Baghdad, far from most antiaircraft fire, in a move that analysts speculated could be intended to open a corridor for Special Forces helicopters to enter the western desert undetected.
The campaign in the south was recently expanded to include propaganda warfare as well. Aircraft dropped 480,000 leaflets at six locations in southern Iraq last week, the seventh time they have conducted such drops in the past three months, according to military officials. The leaflets, distributed in areas where coalition planes recently struck, warned Iraqis against repairing fiber-optic cables and said rebuilding defensive facilities would put their lives in danger.
The leaflets also directed Iraqis to a radio frequency where they could listen to U.S. broadcasts now beamed into the country for several hours a day by military aircraft as they patrol the no-fly zone.
While the zones were established to shield Iraqis from their leader, they have served to embitter at least some of the people, and government officials assert that they even solidify support for Hussein. "When it gets worse and worse, the people will be closer to the leadership," said Lt. Gen. Hadi Abdul Reda, head of civil defense in Basra. "They make me more eager to face the Americans."
"We hate them," said Mesa Ali, 25, a mother of two young boys who lives across the street from the site of the Dec. 1 bombing. The blast shattered her front window, covering her 18-month-old son with broken glass. "They want to get the oil and make us slaves."
"It's a crime," said Ali Abid Hamid, 31, who works at a nearby cement company and helped his cousin get to a hospital to treat a slashed throat after the explosion. "There is no reason to bomb civilians. They want to make problems."
It remains unclear how many civilians have actually been hurt or killed by the recent U.S. and British bombing. Even by Iraqi reports, most targets seem to be military facilities and government officials decline to take journalists there.
The Dec. 1 episode, however, clearly left noncombatants dead and injured, according to interviews with survivors, relatives, witnesses and doctors. The U.S. military reported dropping 23 precision weapons from 13 aircraft in southern Iraq that day in retaliation for antiaircraft fire at warplanes patrolling the northern no-fly zone two days earlier, the first time they had struck in the south for an incident in the north.
The U.S. military said it hit unspecified air defense targets near Basra and Kut, but not an oil installation. Witnesses and survivors, though, said two explosions erupted in the yard of the state-run Southern Oil Co. in the center of Basra between 10 and 11 a.m., about the time U.S. warplanes were reported to be striking. Iraqi officials said four people were killed and 27 injured.
U.S. officials in the past have accused Hussein of positioning mobile air defense units in civilian locations in an effort to prevent them from being destroyed or to draw enemy fire that would kill innocents, thus creating a propaganda victory for Iraq. From the street, about 50 yards away, it appeared clear that at least two large vehicles were demolished by the explosions at Southern Oil. But it was impossible to determine whether they were civilian trucks or mobile missile launchers or radars.
Iraqi officials would not allow an American reporter inside the compound to examine the site.
What was clear was that people such as Watheka Raheem Feyad were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Feyad, 25, a clerk at Southern Oil, had just returned from vacation and was walking between buildings when she was suddenly blown off her feet.
"I felt like I was being sucked up into the air, two to three meters up," she said. "I didn't know if it was a rocket or a missile or a bomb. I didn't know what was the matter. I was afraid and shocked. The noise was very, very loud and I lost feeling in my legs. I closed my eyes because I was so scared."
Two colleagues dragged her away, she said, and she later woke up in the hospital. Her brother, Ali Raheem Feyad, 38, raced to the hospital at 100 mph when he heard the news and was initially told that she was dead. She was not, but she suffered a head injury and multiple fractures of her leg, which is now in a metal splint, and still has shrapnel in her body. She takes six types of drugs, faces several more operations and will need at least a year before she can walk again, according to her doctor.
Mohammed Sharif Reda was not so lucky. Walking outside the gate, he and his cousin were caught in the blast, family members said. His relatives were already angry at Americans, blaming his uncle's death from cancer in March on depleted uranium used in some U.S. weapons in the area.
"They are killing people," Nahla Mohammed, 49, who has lost her son and brother, said, occasionally succumbing to tears as she talked. "Why do they commit such crimes? Why was my son just walking along the streets and died? Why?"
Reda's cousin, Sabah Hassan Mohammed, 23, who was walking alongside him that day, survived but suffered deep gashes in his left leg and deep resentment in his heart. At the hospital last week, he winced in pain and clutched his brother's hand.
"I will get better and I will take revenge, for me and for others," he said. "We are strong. Even if they keep bombing us, we will bear it and we will show them the results."
----
U.S. Said to Ready Kurd Areas in Iraq for Possible War
December 22, 2002
New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/international/middleeast/22IRAQ.html
DOHUK, Iraq, Dec. 21 - As the United States and Iraq publicly spar over the degree of Iraqi compliance with United Nations weapons inspections, an array of American war preparations are under way here in the independent north.
American intelligence officials have been working alongside Kurdish officials in recent weeks, and recruiters for an American-sponsored opposition group have been selecting candidates for a program to train scouts and translators that one day may help American forces inside Iraq, according to Kurdish and Western officials.
American military planners have visited secluded corners of the country to examine potential basing sites for use in a war, according to a Western expert familiar with the activity.
No American military forces are based here yet, Kurdish officials say, and recent Turkish and Arabic news reports of sizable military deployments appear unfounded. But teams from the Central Intelligence Agency have been working with the principal political parties in the Kurdish region - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan in the east, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party in the west - for upward of two months. The C.I.A. teams have become a familiar sight for Kurds, who see them traveling in convoys with armed local guards.
One team appeared Thursday at the local supermarket here, arriving as a New York Times photographer stepped outside with his purchases. The Americans were accompanied by Kurdish gunmen who wore the distinctive red-and-white headdress of the Barzanis, the ruling clan in the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
Kurdish officials say the Americans have interviewed members of a Muslim militant group who have been captured by Kurdish security forces, looking for links to Al Qaeda. The group, Ansar al Islam, has been waging holy war against the secular Kurdish government, with some tactical success.
Other duties of the Americans are less clear. But local officials say that after a long absence, the American teams have been analyzing the political and military situation in the autonomous zone and meeting important figures, deepening Washington's understanding of the region. They are also building relationships that would be valuable if the United States leads a war against President Saddam Hussein's government and later occupies this historically unstable land.
The independent northern zone is a tenuous entity, existing with scant economic and military resources in territory once controlled by Mr. Hussein. His forces have ruthlessly killed civilians here in the past.
It is also ringed by neighbors - Iran, Turkey and Syria - that express deep misgivings over the intensifying Western involvement with the Kurds, and with the possible spread of Kurdish democracy to their own independence-minded Kurdish minorities.
It is no surprise then that the American presence, welcomed by many Kurds, has caused palpable discomfort elsewhere.
In one testy exchange this month, the head of the Iranian intelligence office in the eastern city of Sulaimaniya visited a deputy of Jamal Talabani, the leader of the Patriotic Union, to register a complaint. The Iranian official protested Kurdish cooperation with the C.I.A., according to a Kurdish official familiar with the exchange. "He said, `Why have you invited them here? We should not have these Americans in the region,' " the official said.
"He was told, `This is a free society. We need them here, and we like them here. We are free to invite anyone's assistance as we choose.' "
Local officials say that apart from the C.I.A presence, there has been the American-sponsored effort to recruit guides, civil affairs specialists and translators to work with Western forces should they enter Iraq.
Yura Mossa, chief of the minority Assyrian Democratic Party in the northwestern city of Zakho, said senior party officials had met with an unspecified group of Americans and then had asked local party offices to select applicants. The program, underwritten by the United States Congress as part of Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, would provide training, perhaps in Hungary, for the recruits.
"We have registered some names, and we have told them we are ready to register some other names, and to send young people to help America," Mr. Mossa said. "In the case of ousting Saddam Hussein, all the people of Iraq - Kurds, Assyrian, Arabs - will be ready to help."
Mr. Mossa said that none of the men his office had signed up had departed for training and that they were awaiting further instructions.
A similar effort has occurred in Sulaimaniya, where a former head of the Iraqi Communist Party has been registering names and circulating a questionnaire as a sort of job application. His activities have been reported in the local media and in The Christian Science Monitor, and have angered Kurdish political parties.
"He is a clown," one Kurdish official said. "He had no local reputation and no money, and all of a sudden he has a new office and an Internet connection, and he's handing out these letters. The Americans should not work with him."
A Western expert familiar with the region said the recruiting was coordinated by the Iraq National Congress, an opposition group based in London, and was unrelated to the C.I.A. teams here.
That led a Kurdish official to say that American government agencies often seem split in their agendas, and that sometimes it was not possible to determine the direction and shape of American policy.
Kurdish leaders are generally supportive of the American presence, and are grateful for protection provided by American and British warplanes since the United Nations northern no-flight zone was established in 1991. But Kurds also remember engagements with the United States that ended in what they consider betrayal.
The United States encouraged Kurdish uprisings in 1975 and 1991, then withheld support while local guerrillas were routed.
An American-encouraged coup attempt against Mr. Hussein in 1996 also ended badly. Iraqi security services discovered the plan and sent security agents into Kurdish neighborhoods to kill opposition members.
As planning goes forward, Kurdish officials worry that Mr. Hussein might use the American presence as grounds for a pre-emptive strike. Several Kurdish cities are within artillery range of the Iraqi Army.
"We have to be very careful," a senior official said. "If there are people who want to overthrow Saddam Hussein, we do not want to be too far from them. But we do not want to provoke Saddam Hussein in any way. We know him, and we are responsible for our people, and must be very careful about what we say and do."
The sense of uncertainty briefly deepened this week, when Turkish and Arab media reported that 50 military trucks entered Iraq at the border crossing near Zakho, ferrying American troops and equipment into village bases. Some reports said American soldiers were improving airfields in anticipation of war.
Turkish military officials and Western diplomats said the reports were false, and Kurdish officials investigated and then dismissed them as baseless. "Until now I have not seen these military trucks," said Akher Shekh Jamal, Zakho's mayor. "If American troops came to Kurdistan, we would see them. We would have witnesses."
A Western expert said military activity had been limited to surveys of airfields some weeks ago by American planners near the villages of Bamarni and Harir in northern Iraq. Tours of northern villages appeared to confirm a low level of activity.
The Turkish Army has operated inside northern Iraq since the late 1990's, under an agreement with the Kurdistan Democratic Party. The deployments are part of the army's counterinsurgency against the Kurdish Workers Party, or P.K.K., which has engaged in a long campaign for Kurdish rights in Turkey.
With their armored vehicles, including American-made M60 tanks, Turkish soldiers were visible on Thursday near the airfield in Bamarni and at the mountaintop village of Amadiya, both roughly 15 miles south of the Turkish border.
But villagers said the Turks were part of deployments that began in 1997 and that have not recently changed in size or composition. The troops seemed lazily deployed, with few guards. Most of their tanks were idled and under tarps. Fighting positions had clearly been dug long ago.
Moreover, the dirt-and-gravel airstrip at Bamarni showed no signs of improvement. It had drainage problems, was littered in places with melon-sized stones, and in sections had shin-high shrubs.
"We haven't seen American forces come here," said Nori Fatah Abdullah, of Bamarni, looking down from a hilltop at the Turkish tanks. "We would like it if they came, because they are good people, but they are not here yet."
--------
U.S. Seeks to Raise Anti - Saddam Force
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Meyers.html
ABOARD THE USS CONSTELLATION (AP) -- The Pentagon wants to recruit Iraqi exiles and train them to be part of a future Iraqi national army, the U.S. military's top general said Sunday.
Air Force Gen. Richard B. Meyers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confirmed that planning is under way for training Iraqi volunteer soldiers in Europe. Advertisement Click Here Following this week's Iraqi opposition conference in London on forming a post-Saddam Hussein government, reports emerged that several thousand Iraqis exiles would be recruited to guide coalition troops for a possible war against Baghdad. The exiles would form the core of the Arab country's new armed forces if Saddam Hussein is ousted.
Hungary this week gave the United States permission to use a former Soviet air base to train the Iraqis for possible deployment in their homeland.
Hungarian government spokesman Zoltan J. Gal said the first trainees could arrive as early as January at the Taszar air base, southeast of Budapest. The United States has permission to train up to 3,000 personnel of Iraqi or other Arab origin now living in Europe or the United States and attached to the U.S. military, Gal said.
Meyers visited the aircraft carrier Sunday as part of a tour of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and the Gulf. The Constellation, which replaced the USS Abraham Lincoln in the northern Arabian Sea, this week started mounting combat air patrols in the southern no-fly zone over Iraq.
The general cautioned that recruiting and vetting Iraqi volunteers for the new force ``is not a particularly easy process (and) it will take some time.''
He also denied reports of rifts among top U.S. military commanders regarding operational plans for a high-speed thrust by ground forces deep into Iraq.
Meyers said the steady buildup of U.S. forces in the region -- currently numbering about 50,000 troops -- would continue ``in order to help diplomacy'' and encourage Baghdad ``to do the right thing'' regarding weapons of mass destruction.
U.N. weapons inspectors are in Iraq searching for weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad denies having biological, chemical or nuclear weapons or programs to develop them.
Meyers, who was accompanied by comedian Drew Carey and New York Yankees baseball pitcher Roger Clemens, was greeted by thunderous chants of ``USA, USA'' from hundreds of sailors and airmen assembled in the carrier's vast hangar.
The Constellation left San Diego on Nov. 2 on a six-month deployment to the Gulf area.
-------- israel / palestine
US missiles, troops on way to Israel
Dec 22, 2002
Sify News (India)
http://news.sify.com/cgi-bin/sifynews/news/content/news_fullstory_v2.jsp?article_oid=12357256&page_no=1
Jerusalem - As Israel gears up to the possibility of a US attack on Iraq, US patriot missiles and troops are on the way to protect it from scud missiles.
As per reports in the Haaretz, some 1000 US troops are expected to arrive in Israel to participate in a joint exercise with the Israel Defence Forces anti-aircraft division.
Israeli Defence Minister and former Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz had told state Radio on Friday that the US has decided that the country won't participate in the campaign against Iraq but would extend all possible assistance to it in case of an Iraqi attack and that Israel is better prepared for a possible Iraqi threat than it was ever before.
Israel has asked for four billion dollars in special aid for expenses related to protecting the home front to which US has promised to consider positively.
Israel had so far maintained that it would defend itself in case of an attack by Iraq unlike the Gulf war.
However, US pressures on it to steer clear from the war to pacify its allies in the Gulf and the Muslim world in general seems to have prevailed.
Israel launched a missile detection system on Wednesday. The system working from various key locations would enable to locate a missile coming towards its territory in advance providing almost six minutes to organise emergency measures.
An Israel Defence Forces spokeswoman confirming about the launch had said the system consists of a lot of cameras positioned at high altitudes and connected to a central monitoring station in Tel Aviv.
The home front has been conducting large exercises, which have been rated successful, according to the official.
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz are likely to visit the Home Front headquarters this week to monitor preparations to possible escalation in the Persian Gulf.
The Home Front is also working on a pamphlet that will be published in the coming weeks, containing information to the public on how to respond in the event of an attack by the US on Iraq, Israel Radio reported on Sunday.
Home Front officers expect that pressures will mount at gas mask distribution centres around the country. They expect that inquiry about, and requests for, kits will rise sharply in response to accelerated US preparation for an attack against Iraq.
The Israeli request for an advance warning before the attack on Iraq from the United States has been rebuffed for the time being on grounds of a possible leak.
Iraq fired 39 scud missiles on Israel during the Gulf war, killing two and injuring scores of others.
The United States has warned that if threatened, Iraq might use chemical and biological weapons against Israel.
----
Palestinians Postpone Vote
December 22, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) - Palestinians decided on Sunday to postpone indefinitely a general election scheduled for January, saying it was difficult to hold a vote while Israeli forces continued to occupy West Bank cities.
``Due to the Israeli reoccupation, obstruction and closures, it is impossible to convene the election on January 20,'' cabinet minister Saeb Erekat told Reuters after a Palestinian government meeting on the vote.
The United States -- keen for calm in the Middle East as it prepares for possible war on Iraq -- has been pressing for Palestinians to choose a new leader ``not compromised by terrorism.''
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat has denied fomenting anti-Israeli violence in a more than two-year-old uprising against Israeli occupation and has repeatedly condemned attacks on both Israeli and Palestinian civilians.
He called presidential and parliamentary elections in September under pressure at home and abroad to reform his Palestinian Authority as a step toward statehood.
Earlier this month, Arafat told Reuters the January ballot would have to be postponed because Palestinians would need at least one month and possibly up to three months free of Israeli military occupation to allow for campaigning.
A Palestinian cabinet statement on Sunday said elections ``would be held immediately after occupation forces pull back'' to positions held before the uprising began in September 2000.
NO ILLUSIONS
Israel has said there can be no such withdrawal until the revolt and attacks against Israelis end. It sent troops into West Bank cities this year after Palestinian suicide bombings against Israelis.
A senior Israeli official said Israel had harboured no illusions that an election -- which Arafat had been expected to win -- would have led to real reform in a Palestinian leadership it accuses of complicity in violence.
``An election with Arafat and terrorism would have been a mockery of the democratic process,'' the official said. Israel has deemed Arafat irrelevant and said he could never again be a peace partner.
Ordinary Palestinians welcomed the postponement of the vote.
``This is the right decision because how can people move while tanks are in towns? How can candidates move freely,'' asked Nael Arar, a teacher from the West Bank city of Ramallah.
Britain has invited leading Palestinians to a conference in London in January on Palestinian reform with members of the Quartet of Middle East mediators and other regional countries.
The Palestinian decision followed a joint call on Friday by the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia for an immediate Israeli-Palestinian truce to be followed by Israeli withdrawal from areas occupied since the start of the uprising.
The so-called ``Quartet'' of mediators are putting together a new peace plan designed to end two years of Middle East bloodshed that includes creation of a Palestinian state.
They said the peace plan was nearly complete, but was unlikely to be presented until after Israeli general elections on January 28, expected to cement the power of the ruling right-wing Likud party under current Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
--------
Israel Troops Train For Chemical Attack
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Israel-Army.html
JERUSALEM (AP) -- Israeli soldiers are training with chemical agents, learning how to detect them to warn the public in case of an attack. Israel TV reported Sunday.
The report said officers, including the chief of the Home Front Command, Maj. Gen. Yusef Mishlab, volunteered to enter a room in protective gear, and chemical agents, some of them dangerous, were sprayed into the room. All of the officers emerged unharmed, according to the TV report.
The military would not comment on the report or on the implication that Israel possesses chemical warfare agents. Israel is widely believed to have a chemical warfare capability but has never acknowledged it.
Military sources said the training has been going on for years. Soldiers in units sent to the site of a missile attack to determine what agent was carried in a warhead undergo training to familiarize themselves with the agents and gain confidence in dealing with them, the sources said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Israel is preparing for a possible Iraqi attack in retaliation for a U.S.-led offensive against Iraq. In the 1991 Gulf war, Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles at Israel. All had conventional warheads.
-------- pakistan
Anti-American Feeling Rises in Pakistan as U.S. Confronts Iraq
December 22, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/international/asia/22STAN.html
PESHAWAR, Pakistan - With the possibility of an American attack on Iraq looming, people like Tanweer Ahmed, an amiable man in a cardigan sweater, has Western diplomats and Pakistani moderates worried.
Mr. Ahmed, a middle-class 37-year-old Pakistani shopkeeper, says Presidents Bush and Saddam Hussein are "equally aggressive." He cannot understand why the United States feels threatened by a small country like Iraq. He says it "goes without saying" that the United States is biased toward "the Jews" and discriminates against Muslims.
"There are so many doubts and suspicions among the people," he said, referring to Pakistanis' views of the United States these days. "The gulf of hatred between the Pakistani and American people is widening."
More than a year after President Pervez Musharraf cast his country's lot with the United States in the campaign against terrorism and Osama bin Laden's network, Al Qaeda, suspicion of and disenchantment with the United States is spreading through all parts of Pakistani society, Pakistani and Western observers say. There is also fear that Pakistan could be Washington's next target after Iraq.
"Over the last eight or nine months it's gotten a lot worse and that's what Osama and the people on his side want to foster," one Western diplomat said. "This is a real danger. This can get out of hand on a lot of levels."
An American war against Iraq is likely to harden opinion even more, according to a range of observers from Pakistani officials and academics to Western diplomats.
It could set off large protests, they say, and present a new set of challenges to President Musharraf and his military, custodians of the Islamic world's only known nuclear arsenal. There are already signs that the changing mood here has reduced Pakistani enthusiasm for pursuing Qaeda members believed to be hiding in Pakistan.
In a recent worldwide opinion poll by the Pew Research Center, 69 percent of Pakistanis held an unfavorable view of the United States and only 10 percent expressed a favorable one. Of the 44 countries surveyed, Pakistan tied with Egypt for the most negative perception of the United States.
A recent State Department poll showed rising support for Iraq, not the United States. Fifty-two percent of Pakistanis polled said they had a "good" opinion of Mr. Hussein, an increase of 9 percentage points increase from six months ago. And 67 percent of Pakistanis polled said they would oppose an American military attack on Iraq, even if it blocked United Nations weapons inspections.
A conversation with Mr. Ahmed, who has a dozen relatives in the United States and watches CNN and HBO on cable television here, suggests why. Mr. Ahmed said that a year ago he condemned the Sept. 11 attacks in New York and Washington. Now he voices some views that would please an Islamic hard-liner.
"Because of the mistakes of some people, Muslims all over the world are being targeted," he said.
The change appears to be driven by anger over American policy in places like Iraq and Israel, the observers said. New American immigration policies, anti-Muslim statements by conservative American religious leaders, and misleading accounts in some Pakistani newspapers have also contributed.
The deepest source of resentment, Pakistanis say, is that they are not being rewarded for their cooperation in the war on terrorism and, more important, are not trusted because their country is Muslim.
Instead, Pakistanis say, they are objects of American suspicion in a world they increasingly see divided between "us" and "them" - us meaning Muslims and them being Christians and Jews.
New security screenings for males from Pakistan and 19 other Muslim nations have made it far more difficult to get American visas. Businessmen and college students bitterly complain of ethnic profiling.
At the same time, planeloads of Pakistanis deported from the United States under a post-Sept. 11 immigration crackdown are arriving. While American officials say that Muslims are not being singled out, that is not the perception here.
"Especially, they are cracking down on Muslims," said Wasim Abbas, a 33-year-old gas station owner recently deported from York, Pa. "Basically, we are being punished while we are helping America fight against Al Qaeda."
The recent disclosure by American intelligence officials that Pakistan shared nuclear technology with North Korea is viewed as a first step toward declaring Pakistan the next rogue state. Also, the Bush administration's diplomatic approach to North Korea and military approach to Iraq is seen as proof of an American double standard: one for Muslim countries, and one for others.
Rasul Bakhsh Rais, a political scientist at Lahore University of Management Sciences, said hard-liners were successfully blaming the United States for Pakistan's stagnant economy and other problems.
"Whenever anything bad happens to Muslims," he said, "they see an Israeli, Indian or American hand."
Misleading reports in Pakistan's Urdu-language press aid their cause. Recent stories have asserted that rebellious Afghans have killed 1,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan, that American Marines raped a secretary to Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and that Israeli soldiers will be guarding Mr. Karzai.
Not one of these reports is true. But diplomats and others say they are shaping Pakistani public opinion in dangerous ways. Pakistanis generally express a far more negative view that Afghans of the American presence in Afghanistan, which is often described here as an American "occupation."
There are other sources of resentment as well. Pakistanis said they felt betrayed that the United States, so eager to hold Iraq to account for defying United Nations resolutions, had never forced India to respect a resolution calling for a plebiscite in the disputed territory of Kashmir. Coverage on a new 24-hour news station and in the country's newspapers highlights Palestinian suffering and unconditional American support for Israel.
Meanwhile, the rewards that the United States has bestowed on Pakistan since last September go little remarked and little noticed.
The United States has rescheduled $3 billion in Pakistan's debt, launched a five-year $100 million aid program and provided $73 million in equipment and aid to secure Pakistan's border with Afghanistan.
The effect on Pakistani opinion has been negligible, as is that of a series of State Department advertisements saying that the United States is not biased against Muslims, according to observers here.
They said they feared that officials in Washington did not understand how America was currently perceived in Pakistan, or the potential complications for the United States-led campaign against terrorism.
"There is a gut level sense that the U.S. is anti-Muslim," the diplomat said. "I think a lot of key decision-makers still don't necessarily realize that's how the Muslim world sees it."
-------- us
Pentagon chief: We're ready to attack
By David Usborne
22 December 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=363677&dir=75&host=3
The United States' most senior military official, General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declared yesterday that his troops are ready to attack Iraq the moment they get the green light from President George Bush. "US forces are ready if called upon," he said.
In the same breath, however, he signalled that he would be relying on support from the armed forces of other coalition countries in any offensive.
The US is counting in particular on Tony Blair, who on Friday issued a warning to British troops to be ready to engage Saddam Hussein's forces.
General Myers, who was paying a Christmas visit to US soldiers in Afghanistan, said he had no view on whether conflict with Iraq had become inevitable. "The job of the US military and our coalition partners is to be ready to do what our presidents ask us to do, and my president asks me to do," he said. "We will be ready to do that no matter what month it is."
But there is every sign that the US military is not ready. General Myers has about 50,000 troops in the Persian Gulf region but plans are now drawn up to double that number in the next month. Those plans have been approved by the White House, but the Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has yet to sign the necessary deployment orders.
Meanwhile, Washington has alerted 30,000 reservist soldiers in the US to prepare to report for duty and tens of thousands more reservists and National Guard soldiers are likely to receive word to activate in several weeks.
A galaxy of hardware, most importantly in the air power arena, is also being readied for deployment to the region. It will include aerial bombers and fighter jets. America already has two aircraft carriers in the area, which are preparing for war.
The movement of weaponry would include the dispatching of B-52 and B-2 bombers to Diego Garcia in the central Indian Ocean; B-1 bombers possibly to Oman, F-15 and other fighter jets to Kuwait, and refueling and other support aircraft to Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Also expected to join are F-117 stealth fighter-bombers.
General Myers is on a tour of US bases in Kuwait, Qatar and also Afghanistan, where about 8,000 US soldiers remain. They are part of the international force responsible for stabilising the country after the ousting of the Taliban and for seeking out remaining hostile and al-Qa'ida elements.
He denied that the US would be over-stretched trying to remain in Afghanistan and fighting Iraq at the same time. "The US is absolutely capable of fighting a war on two fronts," he said. "There should be no question in anybody's mind about that."
General Myers has repeatedly insisted in recent days that the American build-up in the region does not signify that war is now inevitable with Iraq.
Instead, he has argued, it is a tool to maintain the pressure on Saddam Hussein to reveal his weapons of mass destruction and thus avert hostilities.
"One of the reasons is to keep helping the diplomatic angle, to reinforce diplomacy and to ensure the Iraqi regime understands the options it has," he said.
A French television reporter was hit by a tank yesterday while covering military exercises in the Kuwaiti desert. Patrick Bourrat, who works for TF1, suffered four broken ribs.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Legacy of Power Cost Manipulation
December 22, 2002
New York Times
By TIMOTHY EGAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/business/22POWE.html
EVERETT, Wash., Dec. 19 - Two years ago this month, a record was set at the height of the West Coast energy crunch: an hour of electric power was sold for $3,250 - more than a hundred times what the same small block had cost a year earlier.
Now, power supplies are abundant and wholesale prices have plummeted. But the fallout from what state officials say was the largest manipulation of the energy market in modern times has continued to hit West Coast communities hard.
Here in Snohomish County, which has the highest energy rates in the state, more than 14,000 customers have had their electricity shut off for lack of payment this year - a 44 percent increase over 2001. They have seen electric rate increases of 50 percent, as the Snohomish County Public Utility District struggles to pay for long-term power contracts it signed with companies like Enron at the height of the price run-up.
Aided by charities, most customers have had their power returned within a day of being shut off, but others are forced to make choices about which necessities they can live without.
"It's a pretty tough thing trying to explain to your 5-year-old kid why the lights won't come on anymore," said Crystal Faye of Everett. "I didn't pay much attention to all that stuff about California and Enron, but it's certainly come home to hurt us now."
Ms. Faye and her husband, Rick, who are unemployed, have had their power shut off twice this year.
Brianne Dorsey, a single mother, said she removed the baseboard heater in her home here and has had to rely on a small wood stove for heat, because she is $1,000 behind in paying her electric bills.
Faced with such tales tied to rate increases along the West Coast, states are trying to get back some of what they lost during 18 months when energy prices seemed to have no ceiling.
The decision this month by a federal regulatory judge that California utilities had been overcharged by $1.8 billion bolstered the case of Northwest utilities seeking refunds, officials of those utilities said. It also angered California officials, who say they will continue to press for a total of nearly $9 billion in refunds. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is expected to decide on Northwest refunds in the spring.
No matter what the federal government decides, officials say their best hope for compensation is from a number of criminal investigations being pursued by Nevada and the three West Coast states - Washington, Oregon and California. They liken their cause to state lawsuits against tobacco companies, which started as long shots but resulted in enormous settlements.
Aided by a guilty plea in October from a former trader for Enron, and by newly discovered internal documents describing how companies manipulated the energy market in 2000 and 2001, the West Coast states are hoping to get settlement money from more than a dozen energy trading companies.
The companies say they acted legally in taking advantage of a unique market condition, but state officials say the companies created a fake energy crisis.
At the height of the rise in energy costs in early 2001, the Bush administration said the West Coast's troubles were a precursor of what would happen if the nation did not build 1,900 power plants over the next 20 years.
But state officials in the hardest-hit areas say the crisis was never about energy shortages so much as it was about an epic transfer of wealth. They want payback - in some cases for immediate relief to consumers who cannot pay their bills this winter.
Last month, the Williams Company, in Tulsa, Okla., agreed to a $417 million settlement with Washington, Oregon and California. While admitting no wrongdoing, Williams agreed to pay refunds and other restitution to the three states; in return, the states dropped an antitrust investigation.
Among large energy companies, the states are seeking refunds from the Mirant Corporation, Reliant Resources Inc., Dynegy Inc., Duke Energy and Enron.
"All of us on the West Coast have been hard hit by these rate increases, but the poor in this county have just been hammered," said Bill Beuscher, who runs the energy assistance program in Snohomish County. Mr. Beuscher said that in the first two weeks the winter energy assistance program was open this year, requests for financial aid were up 55 percent from same period last year.
The power trading companies named in criminal investigations and refund cases did not want to comment publicly while the cases were pending. But several of the companies that are fighting refunds have said in their public filings that the utilities, particularly in the Northwest, are trying to renege on legitimate long-term contracts. They said they did not act in collusion and explained that the highest prices were a result of severe market shifts brought in part by the Northwest drought.
In some cases, the power trading companies said, the utilities resisted buying shorter contracts, which would have cost them less. They also said that some Northwest utilities took advantage of the price spikes and sold power into the market themselves, only to come up short later. The companies said they expected to be vindicated when the government finishes its refund cases next spring.
Mr. Beuscher said he would like to see money from the Williams settlement be used to help people who cannot afford the rate increases. Consumers in Oregon and California have made similar pleas. But officials in all three states say that until there are larger settlements with the energy companies, consumers are unlikely to see relief.
"We hope that the Williams case serves as a template," said Tom Dresslar, a spokesman for the California attorney general's office, "because California was monumentally ripped off by these energy traders."
About seven million consumers in California, who were initially shielded from having to pay for runaway energy costs during the worst part of the state's deregulation debacle, are paying rate increases averaging 30 percent more than the pre-deregulation prices of 1996. The state has the highest energy rates in the nation, consumer advocates say, although the structure of the rate increase allows poor people and low energy users to escape the recent increases.
"I don't hold out a lot of hope that we will ever get significant refunds," said Doug Heller of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, a nonprofit group based in Los Angeles. The group calculates that California power customers overpaid a total of $70 billion.
At the height of the energy troubles, the trading companies boasted of record profits in their quarterly reports. But many of those companies are now near bankruptcy as they cope with a downturn that has caused the energy trading sector to lose 80 percent of its value, according to Wall Street analysts.
"It's like the highwayman robbed us and then spent all the money on booze," Mr. Heller said.
The companies themselves blame the states. In one case that was heard this month, William A. Wise, chief executive of the El Paso Corporation, which is based in Houston, denied manipulating the market and blamed the officials who set up California's deregulated energy market for causing the price run-ups with "one bad policy after another."
Under a New Deal-era law, power companies can be forced to pay refunds if they have charged an "unreasonable and unjust" amount for electricity. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which West Coast governors say did very little to restrain power traders during the height of the run-ups, will determine the exact refund amount, if any.
In the meantime, electric rates throughout the Pacific Northwest, once among the cheapest in the nation, have climbed as much as 50 percent.
California's problems stem from its chaotic attempt at energy deregulation, approved in 1996 and put in effect in 1998. The Northwest, with its tradition of publicly owned utilities, was drawn into the California crisis by a convergence of dry weather and freewheeling trading of its own.
Usually, the Northwest avoids price fluctuations by providing a steady stream of hydroelectric power, aided by abundant winter rainfall. But in late 2000, a drought in the Northwest forced utilities to buy power on the open market. Some utilities had also tried to sell power into the California market but were pinched by the drought.
At the same time, major energy traders were withholding blocks of power to create the appearance of further shortages, according to Enron memorandums discovered this year.
Refunds were once thought to be unlikely. But then came the memorandums - many of them detailing schemes to manipulate the market under names like Death Star - and the agreement in October by Timothy N. Belden, a former senior trader for Enron, to plead guilty to conspiring with others to manipulate the West Coast energy market.
Prosecutors say Mr. Belden is cooperating with investigations of the power trading companies.
"What really started the ball rolling were the smoking-gun memos, and then the guilty plea has helped as well," said Kevin Neely, a spokesman for the Oregon Department of Justice.
There is also continued bitterness among West Coast officials toward the Bush administration for waiting until June 2001 before putting price controls on the market, which immediately ended the large price spikes and rolling blackouts and brought stability.
Since then, power use has fallen and prices on the short-term market are about where they were before the energy run-up of 2000 and 2001.
"It was a fallacy to blame this crisis on a lack of new power plants," said Steven Klein, superintendent of Tacoma, Wash.'s public utility, Tacoma Power. "But it's a shame what came of this. It put a dent in a lot of family budgets, and forced some businesses to close."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Time Names Whistleblowers Persons of Year
December 22, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Time-Persons-of-Year.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- Three women ``whistleblowers'' -- an FBI agent who wrote a memo blasting intelligence failures after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and two executives who exposed corporate corruption -- are Time magazine's Persons of the Year for 2002.
In its issue reaching newsstands Monday, Time said Coleen Rowley, Cynthia Cooper and Sherron Watkins were selected ``for believing -- really believing -- that the truth is one thing that must not be moved off the books, and for stepping in to make sure that it wasn't.''
Time's 2002 picks are unusual in that most people cited by the magazine in the past have been well-known public figures. Last year's selection was New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, for his conduct in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
``They were people who did right just by doing their jobs rightly -- which means ferociously, with eyes open and with the bravery the rest of us always hope we have and may never know if we do,'' Time said of its 2002 choices.
Rowley, 48, was the FBI agent based in Minneapolis whose scathing memorandum to FBI Director Robert Mueller last May said agency headquarters ignored her pleas in the weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks to aggressively investigate Zacarias Moussaoui, now charged as an accomplice. In later Senate testimony, Rowley charged that the FBI was plagued by ``careerism'' and bureaucracy.
``Ordinary people do find themselves in those types of situations, and certainly government employees do,'' Rowley said Sunday on ABC's ``This Week,'' where the three honorees appeared in a group interview. ``And it's going to be beneficial to everyone to bring out the concerns earlier rather than later.''
Cooper, 38, was an internal auditor at WorldCom who alerted the telecommunications firm's board of directors to $3.8 billion in accounting irregularities. A month later, WorldCom declared the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S. history. Investigators have since uncovered more than $9 billion in accounting fraud at WorldCom.
Watkins, 43, was a vice president of Enron, who warned company chairman Kenneth Lay in 2001 that the firm could collapse as a result of extensive false accounting. Enron also filed for bankruptcy, and Watkins resigned last month.
``It's an amazing recognition. ... It's still sinking in,'' Watkins said Sunday. ``It is mindboggling and amazing because we are just ordinary average Americans.''
Watkins and Cooper acknowledged that a great deal was at stake in making their decisions to speak out on corporate wrongdoing.
The exposure of fraud at WorldCom has been ``a tragedy ... very difficult at times for many employees,'' and ``many people have lost their entire retirement,'' Cooper said in the TV interview.
However, she said, ``I feel very confident that we made the right decision, and there was really only one right path.''
Watkins said it was now ``up to the regulators and the court system to define exactly how this act plays out in corporate America. But I hope we're on the road to more truth-telling for investors.''
In an earlier interview with Time editors, Rowley, Cooper and Watkins said some colleagues now hate them for exposing the mistakes of their bosses.
``There is a price to be paid. There have been times that I could not stop crying,'' Cooper said.
The women symbolized a critical struggle in the country to restore trust in disgraced institutions, from business firms to the Catholic Church, Time managing editor Jim Kelly told The Associated Press.
``All three are just resolute in standing up for what is right,'' Kelly told The Associated Press. ``All three of them are made of very strong character.''
On the Net:
Time: http://www.time.com
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About 3,000 Turks protest possible war in Iraq
Sun Dec 22, 2002
AP
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20021222/ap_wo_en_po/eu_gen_turkey_iraq_protest_1
ANKARA, Turkey - With some waving red Communist flags, about 3,000 leftists and unionists demonstrated Sunday against the United States for planning a possible war in neighboring Iraq.
NATO (news - web sites)-member Turkey is a close U.S. ally, but anti-war sentiment is running high. Turkey is holding talks with U.S. military officials but it has not committed to allowing the use of Turkish territory or air bases - crucial to any U.S. war effort.
"We will not be America's soldiers!" the demonstrators chanted. Others held up banners that said "We won't die, we won't kill for the U.S." and "No to war in Iraq."
Turkish officials say the 1991 Gulf War (news - web sites) has cost Turkey's troubled economy more than US$40 billion from a loss of trade with Iraq, once a main trading partner. It fears a new war in the region would further ravage its economy. The country is also preparing for an influx of refugees if war breaks out.
"A war is going to hurt Turkey," said Aynur Mert, a 33-year-old demonstrator. "America does not have the right to come to any country and start a war. It happened in Afghanistan (news - web sites), it is happening here now."
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Bishops defy Blair with tough anti-war message
By Sophie Goodchild, Home Affairs Correspondent
22 December 2002
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=363619
Leading bishops are to preach this Christmas against a war with Iraq in messages that openly defy Tony Blair and his government.
The sermons and Christmas messages will be seen as the church giving a prominent voice to widespread concerns about the seemingly inevitable push towards war.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells, the Right Reverend Peter Price, will tell worshippers on Christmas Eve: "The sanctity of life precludes all war and violence. We must be guided by a vision of the world in which nations stop seeking to resolve their problems through violence."
And in his Christmas message, the Bishop of Saint Edmundsbury and Ipswich, the Right Reverend Richard Lewis, will warn against the desire for revenge in the wake of 11 September. "The question for all of us is whether we give in to that knee-jerk need for revenge and respond in that sort of way, or whether we address the essential questions of justice and peace that underlie that need. We must not let a desire for revenge affect our relations."
These tough lines emerged from a survey carried out by The Independent on Sunday of all 44 senior bishops in the Church of England. Of the 34 who responded, seven said they were unconditionally opposed to war. These include the acting Bishop of Manchester, the Right Reverent Stephen Lowe, and the Bishop of Saint Edmundsbury and Ipswich, who sits in the Lords.
A further 25 were against war unless military action was sanctioned by the United Nations and even then only as a last resort.
In taking this line, they are following the lead of Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury. Last week, Dr Williams used his Richard Dimbleby lecture on BBC1 to urge the church to take a stand on moral issues.
Outright opposition to the war goes further than the statement made by the House of Bishops in October. This questioned the morality and legality of war against Iraq and stated that force must be considered only as a last resort. This declaration was signed by all 44 diocesan bishops.
The survey also found there was not a single bishop that dissented from this line. In October, the Bishop of Rochester was the only senior member of the Church of England who said that the Government was justified in taking a militarily tougher stand on Iraq. However, his office declined to renew this statement when he was contacted by this paper last week.
The Archbishop of York, Dr David Hope, said that war should be a last resort and that he was still signed up to the October agreement. "The criteria for the definition of last resort are of great concern to him," a spokesman said. "We have to be absolutely sure of any facts and not propaganda."
Several bishops will also use their Christmas sermons to warn that hostility against Iraq will fuel racial tensions in multicultural communities. "To attack Iraq lowers the threshold of what constitutes a legitimate war totally unjustifiably," said the Bishop of Coventry, the Right Reverend Colin Bennetts. "Here in Coventry we have very close ties with Iraq. The people of Iraq have been severely disadvantaged and so to have an all-out war is not a position that we have any sympathy with whatsoever."
--------
The Crucible
'Silence on the Mountain' by Daniel Wilkinson and
'The Blindfold's Eyes' by Sister Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis
Reviewed by Joanne Omang
Sunday, December 22, 2002
Washington Post; Page BW05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A12071-2002Dec19?language=printer
SILENCE ON THE MOUNTAIN Stories of Terror, Betrayal and Forgetting in Guatemala By Daniel Wilkinson Houghton Mifflin. 373 pp. $24
THE BLINDFOLD'S EYES My Journey from Torture to Truth By Sister Dianna Ortiz with Patricia Davis Orbis. 484 pp. $25
Now that the United States has declared war on terrorism, it is useful to inventory our weapons and ask just what it is we are fighting. We want to stop people who steer jets into skyscrapers, of course, and people who wear bombs into crowded places, and those who spread anthrax, or nerve gas, or radioactivity. And the governments that support them, clearly. And the governments that terrorize their own people, like Saddam Hussein's.
Does the list stop there? What about stopping the governments that support the governments that terrorize their own people? Governments like ours, for instance? Oh, but that was in a good cause -- fighting communism. Before El Salvador, before Chile, even before Vietnam, there was Guatemala -- yes, a bit extreme, but that's all over. Times are different now. No point in dredging it all up again. Nothing we can do about it anyway. We should just move on. Let's roll.
Daniel Wilkinson's Silence on the Mountain and Sister Dianna Ortiz's The Blindfold's Eyes bear comparison to Holocaust literature, essential works that document unthinkable horror, insisting as we try to turn away that attention must be paid, that what happened there must never happen again, that the past isn't past at all. And if compassion fatigue has set in before you start reading, that's only because you think you already know all about it and don't need to hear any more. You're wrong. Responsible U.S. pundits are now floating the idea of authorizing torture in certain situations as part of our war on terrorism. These books demonstrate that we have been there, done that, albeit through proxies. They show us that in Guatemala, torture did work. But what did it cost? What does winning look like?
Of the two books, Wilkinson's is by far the easier read, for his reporting on Guatemala's half-century of U.S.-sponsored agony is broad and analytical. The account of the American nun, meanwhile, is a narrow and writhing personal testimony that illustrates almost too vividly Wilkinson's subtitle: the terror, betrayal and forgetting that torture inflicts not only upon its victims but also upon those who survive. Wilkinson was a young Harvard scholar doing ethnographic research in Guatemala in 1993 who became curious almost by accident about one small event, the burning 10 years earlier of a mountain coffee plantation house called La Patria. He went for a visit and asked around. Why had that particular place been torched? Had the fighting come there? "Who knows?" the locals said, smiling cheerfully. "Nothing happened here."
Intrigued -- wasn't it all ancient history? why were people still reticent? -- Wilkinson pieced together the story over seven years and several trips, one halting conversation at a time. The book is an account of his search for witnesses, and the stories they told him, and what happened then, and in that seamless, absorbing way it becomes an account of Guatemala's past and present.
Wilkinson lets us listen to Sara Endler, the landowner whose family came from Germany in the 1890s to carve a new life out of the rainforest, growing coffee for the world. He has found for us the old men and women, close to death now, whose parents worked in near-slavery for those landowners, and who believed that when they elected the populist reformer Jacobo Arbenz in 1952, their lives would change for the better. Wilkinson shows us the documents that labeled Arbenz a communist and justified his U.S.-sponsored overthrow; he finds the labor organizers and the agrarian reformers who were targeted for death, both in those days and more recently. He tells of the death threats he received as he was doing his research, and how he reacted just as the locals had first reacted to him: "smiling a dopey smile and saying dopey things," trying to be insignificant. He goes on, however, and gives us the widows and the orphans, the former guerrillas and the former soldiers, and even the general who ran the pacification program, and he lets them all tell their own stories.
The book's most wrenching scene is in the mountaintop hamlet of Sacuchum, where villagers gather to describe, one by one, the January day in 1982 when soldiers massacred 44 people, cutting out their tongues and genitals and burning their houses down around them. "And the newspapers and radio said that the dead were all guerrillas who had died in combat," one tells him. "Were you ever able to tell the true story?" Wilkinson asks. "This is the first time."
That is the real horror of torture and terrorism, Wilkinson notes -- the fear it brings to the survivors, and the silence that follows, and the forgetting that follows the silence, which lets it happen again. Sister Dianna Ortiz gives a detailed anatomy of the process. She opens with a riveting, novelistic account of her abduction from a Guatemalan garden on a sunny morning in November 1989. This can't be happening -- I'm an American, she thinks. Her fear grows as she staggers around the dark cell where she is taken: "I begin to lose control of my knees." One of her torturers tells her about murdering villagers, killing babies, and asks her to forgive him. When she is speechless in horror, he leaves. "I could have saved you," he says.
Then we flash forward to the days after, when Ortiz cannot remember her family, her former home, her own life, and she cannot bear to think, much less talk, about what happened and what she herself did during her 24-hour ordeal -- and afterward. A fragile, naive and waifish young woman before these events, she has terrifying flashbacks in which the rapes and torture seem to recur. She is wracked by survivor's guilt and a sick belief that the torturers are inside her, able to hurt others through her -- classic symptoms of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. She cannot eat, for that would feed the evil inside.
Ortiz slowly comes to terms with events over the course of the very long book, but it is clear she is not healed even yet. Her lawsuits continue -- against the U.S. government and the military officers and leaders of Guatemala at the time -- and her book is a bitter, difficult cry of fury and frustration. If it often feels self-indulgent and self-obsessed, as well as exaggerated and neurotic, that is evidence of what torture can do to a person. And she suffered for only a single day.
The real cost of terrorism is its afterlife. Wilkinson points out that after Sept. 11 Americans "were able to denounce the killing, honor the dead, support the bereaved, mobilize to rebuild, and, in the process, overcome our fear. If we didn't do these things, we told ourselves, terrorism would have won." In Guatemala, none of those things were possible, because the terrorism continued for more than 50 years, with U.S. support and official silence. The result? "Guatemala was a place where terrorism did, in fact, win."
Read these books as a lesson on ends and means as we take up arms in our newest wars. What kind of weapons shall we use? What kind of victory do we want? •
Joanne Omang, a former Washington Post correspondent in Latin America, is the author of "Incident at Akabal," a novel of Guatemala in the 1980s.
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