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NUCLEAR
Niger: Iraq Asked for Uranium in 1980s
Niger denies selling uranium to Iraq
Japan Fears North Korea;
Reactor moves scourged
N Korea nuclear moves alarm UN
UN atomic agency says N.Korea nukes "very serious"
North Korea readies nuclear reactor
S. Korea Protests North's Nuclear Moves
Pyongyang's nuclear party
Many Koreans Fear Bush, Not A Nuclear North
Russia to Proceed With Reactor
Nuclear Plants Are Secure, Study Says
Nixon's 'Madman' Plan to Scare Soviets During Vietnam May Have Backfired
Eyes on 2004 Vote, Democrats Fault U.S. Terror Defense
President's Compassionate Agenda Lags
MILITARY
Ivory Coast's Raging Conflict Draws France In
Colombia's Second Rebel Force Breaks Off Talks
Call Saddam's bluff
Israel Will Expand Its Smallpox Vaccinations, but Not to Everyone
New Mobile Radar System Looking Out for Iraqi Missile Launchings
'No unilateral US war on Iraq'
An Anti-U.S. Haven for Al Qaeda
Saudi Arabia reiterates will not join any war on Iraq
Intelligence Predicts Hussein's Reaction to Attack
U.S. ready to unleash weapons
Report: China Closes 3,300 Cybercafes
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
CIA interrogations said verging on inhumane
U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations
Rights Groups Criticize U.S. Over Detainee in Bosnia
Michigan to Drop Minimum Sentence Rules for Drug Crimes
Peru Court to Scrap Fujimori Anti - Terror Laws
ENERGY AND OTHER
Defence redefined means securing cheap energy
Persistent Drop in Fertility Reshapes Europe's Future
ACTIVISTS
Pope cautions against taking up arms
Homeless people give Christmas check to cop
No Turning Back for China, Says Dissident
Opposition Resumes Protests in Venezuela
French Protest U.S. Battle Group
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- africa
Niger: Iraq Asked for Uranium in 1980s
December 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Niger-Iraq-Uranium.html
NIAMEY, Niger (AP) -- Iraq sought to buy uranium from Niger in the 1980s, but the desert West African nation rebuffed the request, Niger authorities said in response to U.S. allegations.
Niger's announcement follows U.S. charges last week that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.
British intelligence has also leveled accusations that Saddam's weapons programs had sought ``significant'' amounts of uranium from Africa, but the U.S. State Department on Dec. 20 became the first to specify an African country.
Speaking on state TV and radio this week, Niger Prime Minister Hama Hamadou confirmed ``In the 1980s, Iraq had wanted to buy uranium from Niger.''
However, then-President Seyni Kountche ``did not give a favorable reply to this request,'' Hamadou said.
Niger, a landlocked largely Muslim nation, is the world's third-largest producer of mined uranium. Uranium is the country's leading export.
Asked if Niger couldn't sell the ore to whom it pleased, Hamadou said his country was a signatory to international arms conventions, and, ``Niger can't defy the international conventions.''
The United States gave no details of its allegation, beyond saying that Iraq had failed to mention the sought-after transaction in its arms declaration to the United Nations.
The uranium-industry World Nuclear Association lists Namibia and South Africa as the other leading uranium producers in Africa.
Other countries, particularly Congo and Central African Republic, have rich uranium reserves.
South Africa, which had a nuclear program during apartheid, is believed the only African nation capable of producing weapons-grade uranium. South Africa in September categorically denied uranium transactions with Saddam.
----
Niger denies selling uranium to Iraq
Thursday, 26 December, 2002,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/2607081.stm
The prime minister of Niger, Hama Hamadou, has admitted that Iraq tried to buy uranium from it in the 1980s, but he said the offer had been rejected.
The US State Department last week accused Baghdad of seeking to procure uranium from Niger for the creation of nuclear weapons, and omitting this from its arms declaration to the United Nations.
The BBC's Souleymane Habouba in Niamey says that Mr Hamadou's denial surprised many in Niger who believe their impoverished country would not have missed the chance to improve its finances through uranium sales.
Niger, one of the world's poorest nations, is the third largest producer of uranium, along with Russia.
'Bilateral cooperation'
Mr Hamadou issued the denial during a live debate on national radio and television.
"In the 1980s, when Iraq was not a country banished by the great powers, it tried to buy uranium in the framework of bilateral cooperation," he said.
Mr Hamadou said that the then President Seyni Kountche turned down Iraq's request.
He said that his government, which has been in place since January 2000, had never been approached by Iraq for uranium.
"Iraq has never bought uranium from Niger, and the Niger Government has never discussed selling uranium to Iraq," he said.
Niger President Mamadou Tandja Niger says it cannot produce enriched uranium
He said that Niger had always respected international conventions on the proliferation of nuclear material.
"Niger cannot sell its uranium to whoever it likes: it has neither the technological means, nor the military capability, nor the ability to do so," he said.
Three countries in Africa are officially listed by the World Nuclear Association as uranium producing countries.
They are Niger, Namibia and South Africa.
Niger produces 2,900 tons of uranium per year, which it sells mainly to France, Japan and Spain.
Three months ago, the South African Government said categorically it had not been approached to sell uranium to Iraq.
Britain's dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, which was released in September, says that Saddam Hussein tried to get "significant quantities of uranium from Africa".
-------- japan
Japan Fears North Korea;
U.S. Promises Defense Shield
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By JAMES BROOKE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/asia/26KORE.html
TOKYO, Dec. 25 - With Japan increasingly worried about North Korea's missile arsenal and nuclear bomb programs, the United States has offered assurances that its Aegis destroyers are capable of shooting down medium-range missiles, the Japanese Jiji Press news agency reported today.
Japan's defense minister, Shigeru Ishiba, won the assurances from Pentagon officials when he was in Washington earlier this month, the agency said. North Korea is believed to have about 100 missiles with a range of 800 miles, enough to cover most of the Japanese archipelago.
In 1998, North Korea alarmed Japan by sending a missile over its main island, Honshu. Although half a century has passed since the Korean War, Japan and North Korea do not have diplomatic relations. In public opinion polls, North Korea consistently tops the list of countries seen as threatening by the Japanese people.
This week, news that North Korea is breaking international controls on its plutonium-producing reactors has dominated Japan's newspapers.
"It is extremely regrettable, and our country is concerned," a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Hatsuhisa Takashima, told reporters today of North Korea's moves to break seals and disable surveillance equipment at three nuclear-related sites in Yongbyon, North Korea.
North Korean nuclear technicians there today moved in and out of a reactor that had been closed since 1994, apparently moving in fresh fuel, according to Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The United States fears the plant could be used to make nuclear weapons. The atomic energy agency, which had been administering the controls, estimates that the North Koreans will have the five-megawatt reactor operational by the end of February.
In a telephone interview today, a senior South Korean official concurred with that estimate. "We believe it will take one or two months to restart the reactor," said the official, Chun Young Woo, director general for international institutions at the Foreign Ministry.
Mr. Chun scoffed at North Korea's claims that it decided to restart the reactor in order to generate electrical power. "The reprocessing facility doesn't produce electricity," he said. "Their objective has nothing to do with generating electricity."
On Tuesday, North Korea removed United Nations seals and surveillance cameras from a fourth nuclear site, including a reprocessing plant that produces weapons-grade plutonium. In the past few days, North Korea has cut seals and cloaked cameras at the Yongbyon reactor and its spent-fuel pond, as well as a fuel-rod fabrication plant and a reprocessing plant, according to Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the atomic energy agency.
"This rapidly deteriorating situation in the D.P.R.K. raises grave nonproliferation concerns," Dr. ElBaradei said in a statement, referring to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, North Korea's official name.
In the interview today, Mr. Chun said the atomic energy agency's inspectors had been "walking around freely," unimpeded by the North Koreans, to try to see what was going on since the monitoring cameras were disabled.
A two-person team from the agency has been rotating in and out of Yongbyon since the reactor was shut down in the 1990's, but the agency now has three people at the site in hopes of offsetting the loss of the surveillance cameras, Mr. Chun said.
Britain's foreign minister, Bill Rammell, said today that North Korea's recent actions were "very worrying."
"I think it is probably a fairly ham-fisted attempt to gain international leverage," he told BBC radio, "but our best analysis at the moment is that this is not a regime that is hell-bent on confrontation."
President Kim Dae Jung of South Korea is reportedly planning an emergency security meeting with his cabinet on Thursday.
United Nations officials said today that the atomic agency's governing board was planning to meet on Jan. 6 to discuss North Korea.
The board could decide to give the North Korean government a chance to begin cooperating through high-level talks with agency officials. But it might decide to bring the matter before the Security Council.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld warned North Korea on Monday not to take advantage of the Iraq crisis to further its nuclear ambitions. He asserted that American forces were capable of fighting two wars at once.
North Korea's defense minister, Kim Il Chol, was quoted on Tuesday by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency as attacking "U.S. hawks who are pushing the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war."
-------- korea
Reactor moves scourged
`Zero tolerance' for weapons programme
Bangkok Post,
December 26, 2002
http://www.bangkokpost.com/News/27Dec2002_news31.html
South Korea's outgoing president said his nation would never tolerate North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, as the communist nation began moving fresh fuel rods into a mothballed nuclear reactor.
President Kim Dae-jung said the standoff should be resolved through dialogue, however, despite deepening concerns that North Korea would restart facilities that experts said could produce nuclear weapons within months.
``We can never go along with North Korea's nuclear weapons development,'' Mr Kim said.
``We must closely cooperate with the United States, Japan and other friendly countries to prevent the situation from further deteriorating into a crisis.''
Mr Kim, whose five-year term ends in February, was the architect of a policy of engagement with North Korea that resulted in an agreement to pursue national reconciliation in 2000.
Since his election to the nation's top job last week, Mr Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, has also advocated dialogue to ease nuclear tensions.
North Korea earlier this month said it would restart its nuclear facilities to generate electricity, although United States officials have said the power obtained would be negligible.
State media in Pyongyang has defended the decision.
``The US is trying to stir public opinion internationally, as though this is a sign of developing nuclear weapons,'' said state-run Radio Pyongyang.
``Our measure has got nothing to do with plans to develop nuclear weapons. Our republic constantly maintains an anti-nuclear, peace-loving position,'' the station said.
In the past week, North Korea has removed United Nations monitoring seals and cameras from its nuclear facilities, ignoring warnings by the US and the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
North Korea again defied international opinion on Wednesday by moving fresh fuel rods from storage into a power plant that houses a 5-megawatt nuclear reactor at its main nuclear complex in Yongbyon, 80km north of Pyongyang, said the Vienna-based IAEA.
IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said agency inspectors in North Korea had reported some 400 fuel rods were moved into the reactor building but have not yet been loaded into the reactor for operation.
Mr Gwozdecky estimated ``at least a month and maybe several months'' would be required before the reactor could resume operation.
The Soviet-designed reactor produces plutonium, the material used to make atomic bombs, as a residue.
By bringing the rods into the reactor building, North Korea was demonstrating its announcement to reactivate the facilities was not an ``empty word'', said South Korea's Foreign Ministry nuclear disarmament official Chun Young-woo.
Mr Chun could not provide details on how the rods were being transported, but said they are too heavy to be moved by hand. They were about a metre long and three centimetres in diameter.
In a deal with the US in 1994, North Korea froze its suspected plutonium-based nuclear weapons programme.
Earlier this month, Pyongyang decided to restart it after Washington and its allies halted fuel oil supplies as punishment for revelations in October that it had moved forward with a second nuclear weapons programme that used enriched uranium.
Mr Gwozdecky said there were no signs of activities by North Korean officials at two other key facilities that were of more serious concern _ a storage area holding 8,000 spent fuel rods and a laboratory used to reprocess spent fuel rods to get plutonium.
US and IAEA officials said the 8,000 spent fuel rods held enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several nuclear bombs. North Korea is suspected of already having at least one atomic bomb.
``We are concerned about the reprocessing facility which is where they would extract plutonium from the spent fuel rods and where they would make plutonium,'' Mr Gwozdecky said.
----
N Korea nuclear moves alarm UN
Thursday, 26 December, 2002,
BBC
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/2607375.stm
The UN nuclear watchdog says North Korea has moved 1,000 nuclear fuel rods to a reactor that could produce weapons-grade plutonium - a situation it describes as "very worrying".
There is mounting international concern that North Korea could restart the Yongbyon reactor, which had been sealed up for eight years under a deal with the United States.
We cannot assure the world that the materials produced without our safeguards are not used for nuclear weapons
Mark Gwozdecky IAEA spokesman
The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Mohamed El Baradei, said the plant "can be directly used to manufacture nuclear weapons - and there again we have no way to verify the nature of the activity".
"The situation is very worrying," he told CNN television.
The IAEA says the unsealed plant could be up and running again within two months.
South Korea anxious
South Korea has said more diplomatic efforts are needed to avert a crisis over North Korea's nuclear programme.
Click here for map of key nuclear sites
President Kim Dae-jung told his National Security Council that Seoul must work with the US and Japan to stop the situation deteriorating.
CRISIS CHRONOLOGY
16 Oct: N Korea acknowledges secret nuclear programme, US announces
14 Nov: Fuel shipments to N Korea halted
27 November: N Korea accuses US of fabricating claim about nuclear programme
12 Dec: N Korea threatens to reactivate Yongbyon N-plant
22 Dec: N Korea removes monitoring devices at Yongbyon reactor
26 Dec: UN says 1,000 fuel rods had been moved to the plant Detailed timeline of growing tensions
Correspondents say his remarks could signal increased efforts to broker a dialogue between Washington and Pyongyang.
Earlier this month Pyongyang said it was re-activating its nuclear programme and dismantled the IAEA's monitoring equipment at Yongbyon.
The Yongbyon reactor was closed down as part of an American-led fuel aid deal which broke down this year when the US suspended shipments in protest at moves by the North to revive its nuclear programme.
The IAEA spokesman, Mark Gwozdecky, said the agency was particularly concerned about the reprocessing plant at the site, which North Korea could use to obtain weapons-grade plutonium from spent fuel.
"We're concerned about the reactor but ultimately it is the reprocessing facility that is of the highest concern to us," he said.
He added that there was no sign of the North Koreans trying to re-start the reprocessing plant.
Mr Gwozdecky said that although the North Koreans had disabled surveillance equipment there, two IAEA inspectors on the ground were still monitoring the situation.
US restraint
An unnamed US official who spoke to Reuters said that the Communist North appeared to be playing a game to try to draw Washington into resuming talks on normalising relations.
"It's like a strip-tease," he said, but warned that America was unwilling to play the North's game.
Defence Secretary Rumsfeld warned this week that the North should not think Washington was distracted by the possibility of war on Iraq over its suspected weapons of mass destruction.
He pointedly remarked that the US could, if need be, fight a war on two fronts.
North Korea says the Yongbyon reactor will help meet its electricity needs.
Russia has renewed its calls on North Korea to co-operate with IAEA inspectors who were brought in to ensure it did not conceal weapons-grade plutonium when the reactors were mothballed.
NORTH KOREA NUCLEAR PROGRAMME
Map showing North Korea's nuclear sites http://news.bbc.co.uk/media/images/38182000/gif/_38182147_nuclear_capabilities2_300.gif
Yongbyon: Five-megawatt experimental nuclear power reactor and a partially completed plutonium extraction facility. Activities at site frozen under 1994 Agreed Framework Taechon: 200-MWt nuclear power reactor - construction halted under Agreed Framework
Pyongyang: Laboratory-scale "hot cells" that may have been used to extract small quantities of plutonium
Kumho: Two 1,000-MWt light water reactors being built under Agreed Framework
---
UN atomic agency says N.Korea nukes "very serious"
Friday December 27,
Agence France Presse
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/021226/1/361gu.html
The UN atomic agency said that developments in North Korea were "very serious" and that it could not guarantee Pyongyang would not use a reactor site to try to produce nuclear weapons.
The announcement Thursday came just a week after North Korea began disabling the agency's monitoring equipment and unsealing its Yongbyon nuclear facility, which experts say could produce weapons-grade plutonium in several months.
"We cannot assure the world that the materials produced without our safeguards are not used for nuclear weapons," said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
"The situation is very serious," he said. The highly secretive and virtually bankrupt Stalinist state said it was re-activating operations at Yongbyon, roughly 100 kilometers (60 miles) north of Pyongyang, following the collapse of a 1994 deal with the United States.
President Kim Dae-Jung of neighbouring South Korea accused the North of "aggravating" a nuclear crisis while Japan's Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi called the step "provocative."
Under the accord shutting down Yongbyon, the United States offered annual supplies of heavy fuel oil and two new light water nuclear reactors in return for Pyongyang's agreement to freeze nuclear operations.
But the deal fell apart following US revelations in October that Pyongyang had admitted to a separate nuclear programme based on enriched uranium technology. Washington suspended oil shipments to the North as punishment.
North Korea in turn said it was in desperate need of power generation after the oil supplies were cut, and last week began unsealing around 8,000 spent fuel rods at the facility and dismantling IAEA monitoring equipment.
"That's obviously worrying because we don't have any means to check the nature of the activities once that reactor is started," IAEA chief Mohammed ElBaradei told CNN.
"But the big worry... (is) if they start to operate the reprocessing plant because that would produce plutonium which can be directly used to manufacture nuclear weapons," he said.
Gwozdecky, the IAEA spokesman, said: "We have indications that they want to re-start the reactor within one or two months."
He said the North Koreans had moved 1,000 fresh fuel rods into the reactor building and that the country "has no use for plutonium in its civilian (nuclear) programme. That suggests that they are maybe planning something.
The South Korean president said: "Despite the international community's efforts for a peaceful resolution of the nuclear issue, North Korea moved to restart frozen nuclear facilities, further aggravating the situation."
He has also been critical of the US handling of the stand-off eight years ago when Washington and Pyongyang drew back from the brink of war over Pyongyang's plutonium programme.
North Korea is on the point of economic collapse and has been pushing for negotiations with Washington. It needs aid and security guarantees from Washington to ensure its survival, experts say.
Throughout the nuclear dispute Pyongyang has said it is ready to sit down and talk with Washington, and even to refreeze its Yongbyon programme.
Experts dismissed the idea that North Korea was relaunching the reactor for energy purposes.
"At its peak it would produce enough for one large office building -- a negligible amount," said Chun Young-Woo, director general for International Institutions at the foreign ministry in Seoul.
But it will produce plutonium one to two years after it opens -- a significant proliferation concern for Washington.
Of more immediate concern are the unsealed 8,000 spent fuel rods in a cooling pond at Yongbyon and from which plutonium for making nuclear warheads can be extracted within months.
----
North Korea readies nuclear reactor
From combined dispatches
December 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021226-71336036.htm
VIENNA, Austria - The U.N. nuclear watchdog agency said yesterday North Korea had moved fresh fuel to a reactor that the United States says must stay mothballed because it can be used to produce plutonium for nuclear weapons.
The announcement by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) heightens a tense international confrontation that has followed the breakdown of an 8-year-old agreement restricting North Korea's nuclear program.
On Tuesday, North Korea's defense minister accused Washington of pushing the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war.
"We had noticed yesterday that they were carrying out work at the 5-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon," IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky told Reuters news agency. "And we noticed that they were moving fresh fuel to the reactor."
He added that North Korean technicians had broken most of the seals and disabled U.N. surveillance devices at all four nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. The cameras had been monitoring the secretive Stalinist state's compliance with a 1994 shutdown of the plants.
"North Korea estimates that [the 5-megawatt reactor] could be up and running in one to two months," he said, adding that the U.N. agency believes it would take longer.
The IAEA is also worried about the plutonium storage and reprocessing facilities at the Yongbyon complex. A storage pond there holds some 8,000 spent irradiated fuel rods that contain large amounts of plutonium.
"The reprocessing plant could have absolutely no civilian use for North Korea," Mr. Gwozdecky said.
But he said no work was being done at the plant, capable of separating plutonium from other substances in the spent fuel. However, the South Korean news agency Yonhap quoted an unidentified South Korean government official as saying: "North Koreans are freely moving in and out of the unsealed nuclear reactor" at Yongbyon.
The facilities at Yongbyon were frozen under a 1994 agreement with the United States under which North Korea halted its nuclear arms program in exchange for oil shipments and the construction of two atomic reactors that are difficult to use for military purposes.
But the United States, South Korea and other states suspended oil shipments to North Korea this month after revelations in October that the North was operating a separate nuclear-weapons program using highly enriched uranium.
U.S. intelligence officials say enough weapons-grade plutonium had already been produced at Yongbyon to build two nuclear weapons by the time the plant was closed down in 1994.
On Saturday, North Koreans began removing the seals and disabling U.N. monitoring cameras at the 5-megawatt Yongbyon reactor after the IAEA failed to meet Pyongyang's demand that it take away the gear so it could revive the reactor.
Mr. Gwozdecky said the IAEA was keeping two inspectors in North Korea to keep an eye on the situation.
It has carried out limited inspections of North Korea's nuclear facilities since the early 1990s.
The Associated Press, quoting South Korean officials, said the North has allowed the IAEA to increase the number of inspectors at the facility to three, but the claim could not be verified.
"The organization took the step to strengthen eye checks of nuclear facilities," Chon Young-woo, a Foreign Ministry official, was quoted as saying by the Korea Times newspaper.
Mr. Chon said that the inspectors were conducting daily checks without interference from North Korean authorities.
U.N. sources meanwhile told Reuters yesterday that the IAEA governing board was tentatively planning to meet on Jan. 6 to discuss North Korea.
The board would either decide to give Pyongyang a chance to begin cooperating and hold high-level talks with the IAEA or it might decide to put the matter to the United Nations Security Council.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld on Monday warned North Korea not to take advantage of the Iraq crisis to further its nuclear ambitions, and he said U.S. forces were capable of fighting two wars at once.
North Korean Defense Minister Kim Il-chol was quoted on Tuesday by the North's official KCNA news agency as attacking "U.S. hawks who are pushing the situation on the Korean Peninsula to the brink of nuclear war."
North Korea maintains it has a right to possess nuclear weapons and insists that Washington sign a nonaggression pact as a basis for talks on their differences.
President Bush and South Korea's president-elect, Roh Moo-hyun, will exchange special envoys next month to discuss North Korea, Mr. Roh's chief spokesman, Lee Nak-yon, said yesterday.
Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly is likely to visit South Korea, and Mr. Roh's envoy will return the visit, he said.
In Russia, which has maintained friendly ties with North Korea, Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Losyukov expressed concern over the North's nuclear program, saying it "negatively affects the situation on the Korean Peninsula."
"In these conditions, Pyongyang's cooperation with the IAEA takes on special significance. We call on North Korea to cooperate with the agency," he said, according to the Itar-Tass news agency.
----
S. Korea Protests North's Nuclear Moves
North Korea Begins Moving Fuel Rods to Nuclear Reactor, but Denies Planning Atomic Weapons
The Associated Press
Dec. 26, 2002
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/World/ap20021226_786.html
SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea's president said Thursday that his nation would never tolerate North Korea's efforts to develop nuclear weapons, as U.N. monitors accused the North of engaging in "nuclear brinkmanship."
Pyongyang has moved 1,000 fresh fuel rods to a storage facility at its main nuclear reactor in Yongbyon, 50 miles north of the capital its latest step toward reactivating the facility in defiance of the U.N. nuclear watchdog and the United States.
The North insisted Thursday that it was a "peace-loving" nation and is restarting the plant only to generate electricity, a claim rejected by the United States. Experts say that with plutonium from the facility, the North could produce nuclear weapons within months.
The new fuel rods have not yet been loaded into the reactor core at Yongbyon, said Mark Gwozdecky, spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency. He estimated that it would take "at least a month and maybe several months" to restart the 5-megawatt reactor, which has been mothballed since 1994.
In the past week, North Korea removed U.N. monitoring seals and cameras from its nuclear facilities, ignoring IAEA warnings. Among the facilities stripped of surveillance equipment was a plant for reprocessing spent fuel rods a process that produces plutonium and a storage room with 8,000 such rods.
U.S. and IAEA officials say the 8,000 spent rods hold enough weapons-grade plutonium to make several nuclear bombs.
The director of the Vienna-based IAEA, Mohamed ElBaradei, said Thursday that the North was moving to restart the reprocessing facility, which he said was "irrelevant" to generating electricity. In a statement, ElBaradei said that North Korea has no "legitimate peaceful use for plutonium."
"Moving toward restarting its nuclear facilities without appropriate safeguards, and toward producing plutonium raises serious nonproliferation concerns and is tantamount to nuclear brinkmanship," ElBaradei said.
The IAEA has reported no activity at the reprocessing plant. But "we're concerned that it might operate without our safeguards in place," Gwozdecky said.
South Korean President Kim Dae-jung told a special Cabinet meeting that the South "can never go along with North Korea's nuclear weapons development."
But he said the standoff should be resolved through dialogue. "We must closely cooperate with the United States, Japan and other friendly countries to prevent the situation from further deteriorating into a crisis," Kim said, in remarks released to the press by his spokeswoman, Park Sun-sook.
Kim, whose five-year term ends in February, was the architect of a policy of engagement with North Korea that resulted in a historic summit in 2000.
His successor, Roh Moo-hyun, has also advocated dialogue to ease nuclear tensions since he was elected to the nation's top job last week. Roh plans to exchange special envoys with the Bush administration in January to discuss the nuclear standoff.
U.S. officials have said that the power obtained from the Yongbyon reactor would be negligible.
State media in the North on Thursday defended Pyongyang's move to restart the facilities.
"The United States is going around trying to stir public opinion internationally, as though this is a sign of developing nuclear weapons," state-run Radio Pyongyang said in a commentary.
"Our measure has got nothing to do with plans to develop nuclear weapons. Our republic constantly maintains an anti-nuclear, peace-loving position," the commentary said. It was carried by South Korea's Yonhap news agency.
In a deal with the United States in 1994, North Korea froze its plutonium-based nuclear program in exchange for foreign energy supplies. Earlier this month, it decided to restart it after Washington and its allies halted oil shipments as punishment for revelations in October that North Korea had moved forward with a second nuclear weapons program that used enriched uranium.
North Korea says the dispute can be settled only if Washington agrees to sign a nonaggression treaty. Recent weeks have seen a sharp increase in anti-U.S. rhetoric warning that the situation on the Korean Peninsula was "on the brink of war."
The United States, which is preparing for a possible war against Iraq, is seeking a peaceful settlement to the issue but has ruled out any talks before the communist state gives up its nuclear ambitions.
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Pyongyang's nuclear party
Washington Times
EDITORIAL •
December 26, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20021226-4492990.htm
In a Dec. 12 letter to the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Pyongyang announced its intention to restart the country's nuclear program. "Accordingly, the IAEA is requested to take necessary measures to remove the seals and monitoring cameras on all of our nuclear facilities," Pyongyang wrote.
North Korea has a flare for the dramatic, and on Saturday it took decisive steps to make good on this threat. IAEA monitors were summoned to the five-megawatt nuclear reactor in Yongbyon to find a dismantling party underway. As monitoring cameras were disabled, taped over or turned away from their subjects, and doors that sealed the reactor were opened, Bush administration officials say the North Koreans celebrated by singing, dancing and even drinking. On Sunday, the party continued. The North began unsealing the sensitive site that contains 8,000 spent-plutonium rods and later, the nuclear processing center itself.
It doesn't take a nuclear scientist to see that all this is a recipe for disaster. If North Korea takes the next step to reprocess the spent-plutonium rods, Pyongyang will have enough fissile material for as many as five nuclear warheads. But, if there is a bright side, it is that last weekend's actions are consistent with the usual snafu that constitutes North Korean foreign policy. Tantrums are periodically thrown to rattle the international community just enough to remind it that Pyongyang wants new goodies.
In the last administration, this kind of behavior would have resulted in near-instantaneous appeasement: simpering diplomats with renewed pleas for restraint, and gifts of food, oil and money. But this week, the State Department responded soberly. The Bush administration "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," a State Department spokesman said.
The Bush administration has been careful not to describe the North's actions as a "crisis," although Pyongyang's actions are clearly intended to create a crisis, and that's not sitting well among some lawmakers. But some prominent lawmakers have chosen to leap to a crisis mentality. "This is a greater danger immediately to U.S. interests at this very moment, in my view, than Saddam Hussein is," said Sen. Joseph Biden, Delaware Democrat, on Sunday.
For a ranking member on the Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Biden's remark is surprisingly careless. Other than in its deplorability, in no respect are the North Korean and Iraqi situations similar. We suspect that Mr. Biden knows this, and that, like other liberal Democrats, his urgency with respect to North Korea is, at least in part, an excuse to go soft on Iraq. As James Lilley, a former ambassador to China, said, "This is American domestic politics. The situations are difficult; they're different. They each have to be handled in a different way."
For starters, given the lack of clear regional powers, the United States can assert itself in the Mideast in a way it cannot in the Far East. Then, too, Iraq has a stronger history of real aggression. Despite constant saber rattling from Pyongyang and a 1998 missile test that sent a Taiepodong screaming over Japan's main island, the North hasn't waged a military campaign since the war that cleaved the islands in two 50 years ago. And should it come to that point, the North has the immediate capability to rain down tens of thousands of warheads on neighboring Japan and South Korea - a capability Iraq does not have. Lastly, by dint of its wholly dilapidated economy, North Korea is more susceptible to diplomatic leverage than the relatively independent Iraq.
So what is the U.S. strategy for dealing with North Korea? To stall. The IAEA plans to hold an emergency session in early January to assess whether Pyongyang has broken its international commitments, and, if it is found in violation, the matter would likely be referred to the U.N. Security Council. Still, for that body to act, it would require a permanent council member to champion the cause.
The United States expects further escalatory steps by North Korea and would rather push the issue when the case against Pyongyang is beyond refutation. "Every step North Korea takes that is consistently a bad step only bolsters the case [for international action] later on," a Bush official said. China and Russia, meanwhile, have been slow to react to Pyongyang's shenanigans in the past, and it's doubtful they will push the issue. But there are fears within the administration that this approach might be sandbagged by France, another permanent security council member. Paris has long tired of Pyongyang's antics and frequently chides Washington for giving in to Pyongyang's blackmail. The worry among U.S. officials is that the Chirac administration will force the United Nations to act. And, as with Mr. Biden and his fellow liberal lawmakers, there's an element of politics involved: Getting tough on North Korea will relieve some of the heat France has taken for its reluctance to take on Iraq.
In truth, there's little substantively that the United Nations can do to change North Korea. Full-out war is not a likely scenario - even with Pyongyang's latest actions - and embargoes and sanctions will have no effect on the decrepit North Korean economy. As Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute said, the most effective method for putting the squeeze on North Korea is through bilateral agreements to stanch the flow of international aid.
That prospect is promising. Japanese sentiment is with the United States. Despite some incautious remarks by Russia's deputy foreign minister, working relations between Washington and Moscow also bode well. China is a reluctant aid donor generally, and even if it cannot be relied on to halt its subsidies to Pyongyang, Beijing is unlikely to backfill the loss of aid elsewhere. Even in South Korea, where last week saw the election of Pyongyang soft-liner Roh Moo-hyun as president, the question of continued subsidies is not a straightforward one. The hawkish Grand National Party still controls the South Korean legislature, and the North's recent actions will only bolster their opposition to continued aid.
Faced with the choice of behaving or further economic disintegration, Pyongyang may choose - if we are lucky - the former. But the next few months are critical. If the North continues with its plans to build nuclear weapons, it won't just be the United States that will have something to say. A nuclear North would likely result in a nuclear Japan and South Korea, and that's something the regional powers of Russia and China would prefer not to have. Indeed, it would likely prompt a party Pyongyang would rather not host.
----
Many Koreans Fear Bush, Not A Nuclear North
News Agency Reports Movement Of Fuel Rods Into Controversial Reactor
December 26, 2002
By BARBARA DEMICK,
Los Angeles Times
http://www.ctnow.com/news/nationworld/hc-korea1226.artdec26,0,3523050.story?coll=hc-headlines-nationworld
SEOUL, South Korea -- When Lee Jin Ju pauses to think about the nuclear crisis brewing over the Korean peninsula, she knows exactly whom she fears.
"George Bush," replies the 22-year-old accounting student without missing a beat. "He's a war maniac."
Lee doesn't like North Korea's Kim Jong Il much, either. "But we're not afraid of him. He's a Korean like us. Even if he does get the bomb, he's not going to use it against us."
This is a sentiment echoed by many Koreans - even some conservatives - and it is complicating U.S. efforts to forge a consensus on North Korea among its allies.
There is a tendency, particularly among the young, to shrug off the current nuclear showdown as the creation of a hysterical White House. Many South Koreans see their estranged countrymen to the north more as subjects of pity than fear, and the Americans less as saviors who defended them against communism than potential troublemakers.
The news that North Korea was removing surveillance cameras from its nuclear facilities got smaller headlines in Monday's newspapers in South Korea than in the United States. Several major papers played the story below the news of a political party reshuffle.
The stock market actually went up in mid-October when it was revealed that North Korea was violating its international agreements on its nuclear program. Only in the last two days have the markets here shown any jitters, and those mostly attributed to Iraq.
In one more step, the South Korean news agency Yonhap reported today that the North Koreans were moving fresh fuel rods into a small, 5-megawatt reactor at its Yongbyon nuclear facility, which had been closed under a 1994 agreement with the United States. The agency also said that workers were moving freely in and out of the facility, apparently in preparation to restart it.
Despite North Korea's actions since October to restart its nuclear program, there is no sense of impending crisis in Seoul.
The streets of the South Korean capital throb with neon advertising, the jangle of ringing cellphones, Christmas carols and throngs of people bent on spending money. Stop almost anyone to ask about the North Korean nuclear program, and they will respond with a quizzical stare.
"We don't seriously fear there will be a war, and if there will be the Americans will start it," said Hyun Ho Sang, a 19-year-old college freshman who was drinking a macciato at Starbucks in downtown Seoul.
Han Sung Joo, a former South Korean foreign minister, complains that the South Korean government has deliberately kept people ignorant about the danger posed by the North Koreans.
"We have a government that is interested in playing down the threat," said Han. "There is not much interest in explaining how serious it is that North Korean is developing nuclear weapons and as a result there is a certain insensitivity among the public."
Kim Kyong Won, a former Korean ambassador to the United States and a leading intellectual voice in the South Korean establishment, says South Koreans do not believe that the North's development of nuclear weapons has anything to do with them.
"The Koreans think there is no need to worry about North Korea developing nuclear weapons," said Kim. "They figure that Kim Jong Il loves life too much to start a war that he will surely lose. ... But Bush, on the other hand, is an ascetic and a warrior."
The reaction may be baffling to outsiders with an image of Korea frozen from the 1950-1953 war, when more than 1 million people were killed. The perception is that U.S. intervention paved the way for South Korea's current prosperity, sparing its people from the hunger and cold that now grip the North.
But the official version of history is challenged by many South Koreans, who increasingly question the U.S. role, past and present, in keeping the peace.
The victory in last week's presidential election of left-of-center labor lawyer Roh Moo Hyun has emboldened those who favor more independence from the United States in foreign policy and has given rise to a mood of giddy nationalism.
A fatal traffic accident in June involving GIs has triggered months of protests against the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea - the most recent being on Christmas Eve when 1,000 people marched with candles in front of the U.S. Embassy in Seoul.
Many South Koreans say they do not believe Bush's repeated assertions that the United States does not intend to attack North Korea. They were rattled by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's comments this week suggesting that the United States could wage simultaneous military campaigns against Iraq and North Korea.
-------- russia
Russia to Proceed With Reactor
World In Brief
Reuters
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A34
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38384-2002Dec25?language=printer
TEHRAN -- Russia yesterday brushed aside strong U.S. criticism and said it had agreed with Iran to speed up the building of an $800 million nuclear reactor and to consider constructing another.
The United States, which has branded Iran part of an "axis of evil" for allegedly developing weapons of mass destruction, fiercely opposes Tehran's nuclear program. But Russia's atomic energy minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, said Washington had failed to show that Iran had broken any international regulations.
"We always tell our American colleagues that all Iran-Russia cooperation is in accordance with international regulations and the resolutions of the International Atomic Energy Agency," Rumyantsev said at a news conference.
Moscow's participation in the project to build a nuclear reactor near the southwestern port of Bushehr had depended on Iranian assurances that all spent fuel would be returned to Russia, a demand advanced by U.S. experts.
Iran insists the Bushehr reactor is for purely civilian power production.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
Nuclear Plants Are Secure, Study Says
Industry Critics Dismiss the Report as Flawed
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38042-2002Dec25?language=printer
U.S. nuclear power plants would survive a direct hit by a fully fueled passenger airliner piloted by suicide hijackers bent on repeating the catastrophic attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to a new scientific study by a utility industry research group.
Critics of the nuclear industry said the study released earlier this week by the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) was skewed to draw a preordained conclusion proclaiming the safety of the nation's 103 nuclear power plants. The danger exists that a direct strike could cause the meltdown of a plant's nuclear core that would spread wind-borne radiation to thousands of people, skeptics of the report said.
"They knew the answers they wanted and worked backwards," said Edwin Lyman, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, an organization critical of the industry's safety claims. "We can't take anything the industry says at face value."
Nuclear industry officials insist the study was scientifically sound, and was conducted by highly reputable engineering consultants using real-life scenarios involving a terrorist strike on a nuclear plant. Only a 10-page summary of the lengthier study was released publicly, with the rest withheld for security reasons.
"The results of this study validate the industry's confidence that nuclear power plants are robust and protect the [nuclear] fuel from impacts of a large commercial aircraft," said Joe F. Colvin, president of the Nuclear Energy Institute, a trade association of utilities and nuclear energy firms that asked the research institute to conduct the report. "Public health and safety would be protected" in such an attack, he said.
"Confidence is predicated on the fact that nuclear plant structures have thick concrete walls with heavy reinforcing steel, and are designed to withstand large earthquakes, extreme overpressures and hurricane force winds," the EPRI report said.
The study considered what would happen if the relatively large Boeing 767 squarely crashed into a power plant's nuclear containment building -- the structure where nuclear reactors are located, with a tank full of fuel. The assumption was the plane was traveling at 350 miles an hour, the approximate speed of the jet that hit the Pentagon and the velocity that the consultants believe a pilot would maintain to maneuver a plane into a site built low to the ground.
Yet nuclear industry critic Lyman said it would be feasible for a highly trained al Qaeda pilot to fly at as much as 600 miles an hour, the approximate speed of the first plane to strike the World Trade Center -- a scenario that would worsen the damage at a crash site. Furthermore, the study apparently did not consider the effect of two or more aircraft strikes on the same plant, he said.
The study, mostly employing computer modeling, was performed for EPRI by ABS Consulting and ANATECH engineering specialists, and was peer reviewed by other experts with decades of experience in structural analysis, the Nuclear Energy Institute said.
Nuclear plants were not designed to withstand direct hits by passenger airliners, although some that were built beneath jetliner flight paths and that were approved in the 1970s had to show they could survive glancing blows from the relatively small 727, said Lyman, who has a doctorate in physics.
Lyman said the gravest danger if an aircraft slammed into a nuclear containment site is that the extremely hard steel shafts in the jet's engines would penetrate all the way through the four feet of reinforced concrete that makes up the side walls, and well beyond the three feet of concrete that he said makes up the structure's dome.
Safety specialists fear that a massive "insult" or breaching of a containment building's walls could cause the nuclear fuel to melt, setting off a cascade of events ending in the release of dangerous radioactivity that could be carried by winds for hundreds of miles. Among the plants that nuclear industry critics say pose the greatest risk in such a scenario is Indian Point nuclear power plant in Peekskill, N.Y. Twenty million people live within 50 miles, and 300,000 within 10 miles.
A study by a Washington think tank in October suggested the nuclear industry does a better job of protecting itself than many others.
In a mock exercise simulating the response to a vague report of a terrorist threat to East Coast energy installations, nuclear industry executives showed their plants are "the best defended targets" of any in the energy business, in part because they are in such close contact with local and federal officials, said John J. Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which helped run the exercise.
The center said that while commercial airlines have massively tightened their security since Sept. 11, 2001, the general aviation sector, including operators of large corporate jets, and companies flying cargo aircraft still need to improve security measures.
-------- us politics
Nixon's 'Madman' Plan to Scare Soviets During Vietnam May Have Backfired
Associated Press
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A30
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A38053-2002Dec25?language=printer
President Richard M. Nixon ordered a worldwide secret nuclear alert in October 1969, calling his wartime tactic a "madman" strategy aimed at scaring the Soviets into forcing concessions from North Vietnam, declassified documents show.
It didn't work, as Moscow displayed no concern. The reason is unclear. The Soviets may not have cared, may not have been as influential as Nixon believed -- or, like the rest of the world, might not have noticed the alert.
The aim of the alert was kept secret from even the generals who put it into place.
The bluff was part of what Nixon described as a "madman" strategy to his new administration at the outset of 1969: ratcheting up military pressure on the North Vietnamese at unpredictable intervals to pressure them into concessions at peace talks in Paris.
Nixon believed this would force them into an agreement that would leave South Vietnam, a U.S. ally, in place.
Among declassified documents published this week by the independent National Security Archive is a memo to national security adviser Henry A. Kissinger from his assistant, Gen. Alexander M. Haig. It described plans to signal "U.S. intent to escalate military operations in Vietnam in the face of continued enemy intransigence in Paris."
Among the "signals" in Haig's March 2 outline: bombing enemy positions in Cambodia. On March 17, Nixon began a widespread secret bombing campaign against communist bases there.
Despite such pressures, the Paris talks remained deadlocked, and Nixon began to contemplate the nuclear alert in the summer of 1969.
A memo telegraphed in early October from Gen. Earle Wheeler, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, to all his commanders in chief ordered a "series of actions during the period 13 October - 25 October to test our military readiness in selected areas worldwide to respond to possible confrontation by the Soviet Union. These actions should be discernible to the Soviets, but not threatening in themselves."
He recommended grounding combat aircraft in selected areas for readiness checks, periods of radio silence and increased surveillance of Soviet ships -- all actions that suggested posturing for a nuclear conflict, and that the Americans believed the Soviets were sure to notice. A later "talking points" document showed Wheeler also ordered heightened combat readiness for ground troops.
But Nixon's plan may have backfired.
According to a report on the nuclear alert in the January 2003 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin betrayed no knowledge -- or concern -- of the nuclear alert in a meeting with a U.S. official a few days after the alert.
The Soviets resented attempts to use means unrelated to the Vietnam conflict to pressure them to rein in the North Vietnamese. Nixon brought Vietnam into arms reduction and Mideast talks as well. Although the Soviets were a major arms supplier to North Vietnam, Hanoi adeptly played the USSR against China, threatening a move to the other sphere of influence at the first sign of pressure.
----
Eyes on 2004 Vote, Democrats Fault U.S. Terror Defense
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/politics/26DEMS.html
Democratic contenders for president are beginning to challenge President Bush's record on terrorism, arguing that Mr. Bush has failed to do enough to prevent another fatal attack on American soil and that the nation is barely safer than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.
The expressions of concern about the nation's safety by Mr. Bush's prospective challengers, voiced in interviews, speeches and television appearances over the last three weeks, suggest that the focus of the Democratic White House candidates in 2004 will go well beyond the traditional Democratic fare of education, the economy, jobs and health care.
While so far the criticisms lack many specifics beyond asking for more money for police agencies or the creation of an additional intelligence force, campaign aides said these early challenges on terrorism signaled what they expected to be a central theme in 2004. They argued that Mr. Bush was potentially vulnerable on the issue that Republicans view as a pillar of the president's political strength.
"It's time for us, without regard to party, to say what every American knows: Washington is not doing enough to make America safe," Senator John Edwards of North Carolina said in a speech on domestic security in Washington last week.
Mr. Edwards added, "If the administration continues to do too little, it will be too late again."
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut said the "American people are only slightly safer today here at home than we were on Sept. 11, 2001."
Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts said in an interview that the administration had squandered a year since the attacks, by failing to make "the preparations necessary to properly deal with an obvious problem of growing terror and the threat at home."
Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont said Democrats "have a real opportunity here," noting in particular what he described as the administration's bungling response to the rash of anthrax attacks.
Mr. Lieberman said: "With the possible exception of the aviation systems, we have not raised our guard sufficiently. This administration has been slow and inadequate in the response to the terrorist threat here at home."
White House officials described this line of attack as risky and unorthodox, with some suggesting that it would make the candidates appear willing to exploit American fears for political gain.
"Any candidate who suggests that when the enemy attacks, the blame lies with the United States and not with the enemy does so at great peril to their own political future," said the White House spokesman, Ari Fleischer.
Still, it is becoming increasingly clear that the dialogue of the coming presidential race will be unlike any other White House campaign in years, as a direct result of the attacks of Sept. 11.
Several Democrats predicted a fundamental shift in the way presidential candidates would have to present themselves in the 2004 campaign. They said polls showed that the voters would now consider a presidential candidate's ability to protect them from terrorism at home in much the same way voters in a big city might now consider a mayoral candidate's ability to stop crime in their neighborhoods.
"This is clearly going to be one of the cornerstones of the 2004 election - I don't think there is any question about it," said Steve Jarding, a senior adviser to Mr. Edwards. "Every campaign cycle, you see candidates talk about education, talk about health care. And I guess for better or worse, terrorism is going to be a part of that dialogue from now on."
The contenders have offered a few, though not many, details on what they would do differently. Mr. Edwards, for example, urged creation of a domestic intelligence agency with the specific directive to work against terrorism at home, making up for what he asserted were the now-demonstrated weaknesses of the F.B.I. and C.I.A.
Mr. Kerry and Mr. Lieberman assailed the administration for holding up $1.5 billion in antiterrorism aid to local police departments and emergency agencies allocated by Congress this year, and Mr. Lieberman said the White House should move aggressively to improve protection of borders, ports and transportation systems, which he described as vulnerable to attack.
None of the Democrats have suggested, for example, further incursions on civil liberties or immigration, in some cases arguing that the administration has gone too far.
In a reflection of these difficult times, aides to the contenders said they were planning their campaigns with the assumption that another terrorist attack could happen at any moment and discreetly trying to assess what that might mean for a continuing contest.
"If something else horrible happens, does the nation instinctively rally around the president?" asked a senior adviser to one contender, who did not want to be identified because of the delicacy of the subject. "Or do they say: `It's this guy's job keep my family safe. He's had two years to prepare for it.' "
Along those lines, aides suggested that some statements by the White House and the Democratic candidates were intended in part to position the campaigns in the event of a terrorist attack over the next 24 months.
Mr. Kerry, for example, declared three weeks ago on the NBC News program "Meet the Press" that there were "enormous gaps and deficits in the preparedness level of our country," while Mr. Bush and his aides have repeatedly warned that another attack is possible.
Former President Bill Clinton pointed the way to this new Democratic line of criticism in a speech in New York a month ago, in which he said the Democrats needed to directly challenge the Bush administration on terrorism. Mr. Clinton is in regular touch with some of the presidential contenders, particularly Mr. Edwards, though aides to Mr. Edwards said he had decided on his own to make this a central part of his campaign. Republicans said they were startled by the brazenness of the Democratic attacks, and suggested they would have little effect.
"It's a very tricky play because you're going to try to assign blame," said Russ Schriefer, a Republican consultant. "It's almost like you're trying to make political hay out of a disaster." Even Democrats said they had to be careful not to be perceived as in effect hoping for a terrorist attack, in much the same way that the administration painted the party as rooting for an economic downturn this past fall.
Dr. Dean warned that his party had to be careful about a backlash in confronting this issue, and said that some of his fellow Democrats had already crossed a line, though he declined to name names. "It depends on how shrill we are," Dr. Dean said. "Some of the candidates have sounded shrill."
Some Democrats said antiterrorism preparations at home had stalled because Mr. Bush had been distracted by the preparations for a war in Iraq, and took note of concerns cited by intelligence agencies that an attack against Iraq would result in terrorism reprisal attacks in the United States.
"The combined intelligence community says that there is a 75 percent or better chance that there will be terrorist attacks against United States interests, including inside the United States, when a war against Iraq is about to achieve success," said Senator Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who said he was considering a presidential race.
"When there has been such a lethargic effort made to protect the America people by dismantling those international groups, both here in the homeland and in their headquarters, I think the administration has assumed a very serious potential risk."
While, for the most part, this is a fight between President Bush and the Democrats, there are some differences among the Democratic presidential contenders as well. In offering his criticism of the administration, Mr. Lieberman noted that he had been a sponsor of the act creating the Homeland Security Department in Congress.
But Mr. Edwards belittled the new cabinet department, describing it as "more of a political achievement for the administration than a substantive achievement for America's security."
----
President's Compassionate Agenda Lags
Bush's Legislative Record For Disadvantaged Wanting
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37908-2002Dec25?language=printer
Two years after winning the White House on a platform of "compassionate conservatism," President Bush so far has achieved few of the items on his legislative agenda to help the disadvantaged, even as he has notched a string of victories on foreign, security and fiscal policy.
Earlier this month, as Bush announced that the AmeriCorps volunteer program was "expanding mightily," the program disclosed that it had halted enrollment; his proposed expansion of national service has not cleared Congress. That same week, the White House acknowledged that it was unlikely to free from congressional gridlock Bush's "faith-based initiative" to help charities, instead enforcing a limited version of it through executive orders.
Meanwhile, action on major welfare, prescription drug and disabilities legislation was postponed. Proposals to liberalize immigration were dropped, a plan for health-care tax credits was not pursued, and efforts to expand low-income housing are yet to see the funding Bush sought.
The one major success on the compassion list -- education legislation -- has become the subject of a budget fight, with Bush proposing only $22 billion of the $28 billion the new law authorized for the current year.
Many reasons for the delays are outside the administration's control. Last year's terrorist attacks put on hold much of the domestic agenda, and Senate Democrats have blocked pieces of Bush's compassion agenda. But several lawmakers and current and former advisers say the Bush White House has not pushed its compassion agenda with the energy and determination that it put behind tax cuts, defense spending and other priorities.
"He has always been rhetorically on the right side of the issue," said Harvard University's Robert Putnam, who has been consulted often by Bush aides. "They have not yet done nearly enough in practical terms to match the rhetoric." Putnam said right-wing conservatives trumped compassion-minded aides. "The compassionates win a lot of rhetorical battles," he said, "but when you look where the budget is, it shows hardly a hint of the compassionate."
Marvin Olasky, a conservative academic whose writings helped Bush form his views, said the president has expertly used his appearances to stir public compassion, but without victory in Congress. "I give them an 'A' in terms of President Bush's personal effort in setting the message, and an 'F' in terms of legislation at this point," he said, adding that he gives Bush top marks for regulatory changes.
White House officials say such criticism misses the point. Though many of the legislative items on Bush's compassion agenda stalled in the last Congress, Bush aides point out that he has done much with the bully pulpit -- his stirring denunciation of Sen. Trent Lott's racially tinged remarks was a powerful example of Bush's inclusive rhetoric -- and by making administrative changes. "If you look at what's been enacted, what's been achieved administratively, I think we're 80-plus percent there," said John Bridgeland, a Bush domestic policy adviser.
Aides say Bush will redouble efforts to enact his compassion agenda, and now he will have the leadership of one of his closest allies on these issues, incoming Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). Aides expect Congress will enact Bush policies next year on national service, welfare and disabilities. In his State of the Union address, aides said, he plans to propose a major mentoring initiative for low-income children and hundreds of millions of dollars for a new drug treatment program.
"The president went out and made education one of the top priorities, and he pushed and he pushed, and we were able to get a bill," said Jay Lefkowitz, head of Bush's Domestic Policy Council. "I think we're going to see some of that same kind of effort in some of the key and critical domestic policy areas in the coming year."
Undoubtedly, congressional gridlock has made Bush's job more difficult. Still, the president demonstrated -- on everything from tax cuts to homeland security -- that Congress would bend to his will. And Bush, busy with economic and anti-terrorism policy, did not put much of his compassion agenda at the top of the legislative list.
"I've seen no push for legislation from the White House," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who sought Bush's help with national service legislation. After an early expression of support, "we never heard from them again," he said, adding that he would use parliamentary tactics to pass the bill.
Steve Goldsmith, who coordinated the Bush campaign's domestic policy agenda, listed six policy areas of compassionate conservatism in an April 2000 speech to the Hoover Institution. Of the six -- retirement accounts, home ownership, education, refundable health-care tax credits, prescription drug benefits for the elderly and support for religious charities -- only one has seen a true legislative victory.
But that ignores progress on several items, Bush aides say. "We're on the 10-yard line," said Margaret Spellings, Bush's top domestic policy adviser.
The core of Bush's compassionate conservatism is his "Armies of Compassion" proposal to boost religious and community service organizations. Bush, as he promised, has established a "faith-based" office in the White House and a "Compassion Capital Fund" to help religious groups access government funds.
But the centerpiece of Bush's effort plan, a 10-year, $90 billion plan to increase charitable donations by giving deductions to those who do not itemize tax returns, was cut to $6 billion by the House in agreement with the White House, and never passed the Senate. And charities complain that repeal of the estate tax will deprive them of billions of dollars.
"They talked a really good game, but in the end the compassionate part of compassionate conservatism got omitted from the final calculation," said Harvard's Putnam.
The "charitable choice" component of Bush's proposal, which would ease restrictions on religious charities receiving government money, became embroiled in controversy when the White House and House Republicans included provisions that would allow religious charities to avoid laws against hiring discrimination. The bill "bore few marks of 'compassionate conservatism,' " John J. DiIulio Jr., the former head of Bush's "faith-based" office, said in the current issue of Esquire magazine.
Bush's recent executive orders eased restrictions on religious groups but did not attempt to extend "charitable choice" through the government.
In contrast to the "faith-based" bill, Bush's experience on education was a triumph. The White House reached broad consensus on legislation to increase education funding and standards, while freeing schools from many rules and requirements.
Now, however, Democrats say the White House has "gutted education funding," as David Sirota, House Appropriations Committee Democratic spokesman, put it. When GOP moderates complained last month about the lack of funds, Bush budget Director Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. criticized the "explosively larger education bill."
"There is a flat-out contradiction between the promise the president has made and the position of his OMB director," said William A. Galston, a University of Maryland professor who was an adviser to Bill Clinton.
As with the "faith-based" initiative, action on Bush's national service initiative has been limited to executive action. He created the USA Freedom Corps to oversee the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps volunteer programs. The new entity, in turn, created a clearinghouse of volunteer service opportunities and a survey to monitor volunteerism.
But the White House has for now dropped earlier notions to enhance the Freedom Corps by using tax credits or a major scholarship program to boost volunteerism. Larger proposals -- expanding AmeriCorps and the Peace Corps -- still await action. Bush this year opted not to challenge House Republicans who oppose the AmeriCorps. A number of experts say Bush missed a chance to channel the outpouring of patriotism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks into a broad volunteer effort for homeland security. "What was new and cutting edge disappeared," said Amitai Etzioni of George Washington University.
Bridgeland, who runs Bush's USA Freedom Corps, predicted victory for the legislation in the new Congress. "We're poised to move this," he said, noting that it typically takes 18 months to get legislation passed.
In a variety of related areas, Bush has made generous requests for funding to fulfill the components of his compassionate conservative agenda. But relatively few of the requests for funding and legislation have been accepted. Failure to complete fiscal 2003 spending bills has delayed Bush's requests for housing programs, drug treatment, child nutrition, help for prisoners' children and foreign aid.
Some smaller items on the compassion agenda have become law. Though Bush has not yet won action encouraging charitable contributions from corporations and IRAs, and he has not pushed his plan to seek state tax credits for anti-poverty donations, he won a permanent extension and increase in the adoption tax credit.
In some areas where legislation has foundered, Bush has taken unilateral action, proceeding with an administrative restructuring of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and implementation of a Supreme Court decision broadening rights of the disabled.
In other areas, the White House backed away from some bold ideas. After sending signals that it would expand guest-worker programs that would allow more immigrants to earn legal status, for example, the administration quietly dropped the idea after the terrorist attacks.
Also, some legislation has not yet turned out as advertised. When Congress passed a measure pledging more funds for nursing training, Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao said, "the Bush administration has issued what I call a 'call to care.' " But the funds are not in the spending bills. The National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, which lobbied for the legislation, said that for now, "it's all just rhetoric."
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
Ivory Coast's Raging Conflict Draws France In
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/africa/26IVOR.html
PARIS, Dec. 24 - As the United States rushes to complete its war preparations against Iraq, France is becoming more deeply enmeshed in a conflict on a much different battlefield: Ivory Coast.
The complicated dispute in France's former colony - once the most stable and prosperous country in West Africa - is France's largest and most precarious military commitment in Africa in almost two decades.
Although it has received scant attention in the United States, it has dominated conversation in the corridors of power and news reports in France since rebels tried to overthrow the government three months ago.
France has more than 2,500 troops, including members of the Foreign Legion, in Ivory Coast. The most recent deployment of 300 troops, accompanied by helicopters and light armored vehicles, will be operational by next week.
Their stated mission is twofold: to serve as a buffer between government and rebel forces along a cease-fire line until a multinational West African force takes over and to protect French and other foreign residents living in the country.
But little by little, the French troops have been drawn into what may become a long war that could spiral into anarchy.
The situation deteriorated on Monday after Ivory Coast's three rebel factions warned French troops that any military attack on rebel positions would be considered a "cause for war." The rebels also began discussing forming a coalition, a move that could significantly increase their power.
Those developments followed a clash last Saturday in which French Foreign Legion troops equipped with light tanks fired on a rebel group. The rebels had opened fire on French soldiers as they approached the strategic town of Duékoué from the northeast after bypassing government troops, according to a French army spokesman.
The French troops initially fired in the air but then responded to the attack. Three four-wheel drive vehicles belonging to the rebels were destroyed, and rebels said the assault had killed six people.
The Ivory Coast conflict has it origins in bitter ethnic and religious divisions that have built steadily since the death nine years ago of Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the country's longtime autocratic ruler.
A succession of presidents from the Christian south have worked assiduously and often unscrupulously in the intervening years to deny power to Alassane D. Ouattara, a popular leader from the more heavily populated and predominantly Muslim northern region. He was barred from the election in September 2000 that brought Laurent Gbagbo, Ivory Coast's current president, to power.
Disaffected northern soldiers rose up against President Gbagbo in a coup last September.
About 400 people were killed in the uprising, which has shattered the reputation the Ivory Coast as a country with a stable government, a vibrant economy and an infrastructure that works. Since then, two other rebel groups have emerged and tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee their homes.
The conflict has been complicated by rumors of the involvement of foreign powers and mercenaries, the discovery of two mass graves believed to hold up to 200 bodies and human rights abuses reported to have been committed by both government forces and rebels.
French troops intervened initially to protect foreign civilians caught in the fighting. But as rebels from different factions began to advance toward the country's largest city, Abidjan, French troops have increasingly been put in the position of keeping them away from the government-controlled part of the country.
The rebels, and even some French newspapers, have accused France of trying to prop up the increasingly unpopular government, and they warn against a deeper involvement.
"The French are not invincible," Guillaume Soro, a leader of the main rebel group, said on Sunday. "They lost in Indochina. We can at least make sure there are families mourning in France as well as in Ivory Coast."
"France has found itself in a trap," said Bernard Conte, a political economist who is an expert on Ivory Coast. "France's intervention started out as humanitarian, and now it is preventing the rebels from advancing. So it is gives the impression that it has taken sides."
A recent editorial in Le Figaro said, "By choosing what side it is on, Paris is taking a huge risk." An editorial in Le Monde said, "In terms of realpolitik, Ivory Coast, where only bad things can happen, holds no interest for anyone, not for France, not moreover for the United States."
The rebels have called the foreign troops an army of "conquest and occupation," a charge that France has denied.
"There is no question of our setting off to reconquer Ivory Coast or engaging in offensive operations," the chief of staff of the French Army, Gen. Henri Bentegeat, said on Sunday during a visit to Abidjan.
Ivory Coast, the world's top cocoa grower, was once the jewel in the French colonial crown, and Abidjan was called the Paris of West Africa. Even now, 20,000 French citizens live in the country, and French corporations are involved in public works and utility projects.
President Jacques Chirac is determined that France play the lead in bringing restoring order.
But President Abdoulaye Wade of Senegal, the current chairman of the Economic Community of West African States, said recently that regional troops could not be sent until the rebels and the government reached a political settlement.
That means that French troops may have to stay. France "can leave 2,500 men in Ivory Coast for some years if need be," General Bentegeat said on Sunday, if that is required to negotiate a political solution.
-------- colombia
Colombia's Second Rebel Force Breaks Off Talks
December 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-colombia-rebels.html
BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia's second-largest Marxist rebel force, the Cuban-inspired National Liberation Army, said on Thursday it had broken off preliminary peace talks in Cuba with the Colombian government, accusing officials of preparing for war.
``The government is preparing to fight and finance a war, expand it throughout the country and legitimize foreign intervention,'' the guerrilla army known by the Spanish initials ELN said in its Web site (www.eln-voces.com).
The government of President Alvaro Uribe, who took office in August, has acknowledged that it has met representatives of the ELN, believed to be 5,000 strong, in Cuba, in the hope of paving the way for formal peace talks.
Uribe, a firm U.S. ally who plays host to American soldiers training Colombian troops, insists that peace talks with any illegal armed force can only begin with a cease-fire.
The ELN said that Uribe, who has started a military build-up and wants to establish a million-strong network of civilian informants, was refusing to negotiate about the social problems which it said lay beneath the country's conflict.
Marxist rebels began fighting for land redistribution and socialist reform 38 years ago in a war which now claims thousands of lives a year.
The country's main far-right paramilitary groups, including the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, have declared a truce and the government has said that it will study the possibility of negotiations.
There has been no sign of progress toward contacts with the country's largest Marxist insurgent band, the 17,000-strong Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Former President Andres Pastrana tried for three years to negotiate peace with the group known as FARC, but negotiations collapsed in February.
Colombia's outlaw forces raise funds through kidnapping or ``taxing'' the country's massive cocaine trade.
-------- iraq
Call Saddam's bluff
Jack Kemp
December 26, 2002
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/commentary/20021226-27557992.htm
Secretary of State Colin L Powell said last week that Iraq's declaration on weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations contains "material omissions that, in our view, constitute another material breach." The secretary also said that the United States is "doing everything we can to avoid war," and he reassured U.N. inspectors that the United States is prepared to begin sharing intelligence about secret sites and activities that Baghdad has not disclosed.
Then on Sunday, Saddam Hussein invited the United States to send CIA agents into Iraq to designate sites where they believe Iraq continues to hide WMD, saying he would allow our intelligence agents to accompany the inspectors and give them immediate and unrestricted access to any site in the country. We should call Saddam's bluff.
I agree with Sen. Chuck Hagel, Nebraska Republican, who said on "Face the Nation" on Sunday that a persuasive case has not yet been made to go to war with Iraq. As the senator observed, "This is not just about Iraq. It is about the entire world."
Invading Iraq will have reverberations around the globe, and we should not go to war based upon the reports of Iraqi defectors or other indirect evidence. I believe by sending our intelligence agents into Iraq, we have an opportunity to call Saddam's bluff and see firsthand whether or not our suspicions are true.
Meanwhile, North Korea has reactivated its weapons-grade-plutonium-producing nuclear reactor, which it promised former President Clinton it would deactivate in exchange for the United States' giving it two "plutonium-free" nuclear power plants. Moreover, North Korea has abrogated its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty by throwing out the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and has announced that it is withdrawing from the NPT altogether.
In Pakistan, Islamic radicalism is coming to power democratically one province at a time through local elections, while officials of the national government and elected members of the national parliament openly incite violence against the United States and give aid and sanctuary to international terrorists. According to Washington Times journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave, "All the extremists detained following Gen. [Pervez] Musharraf's pledge to the United States last January to quench terrorism are now free men in a country where a Kalashnikov (AK-47) can be rented for $2.50 a day and any kind of a weapon obtained at one hour's notice."
Money from Saudi Arabia continues to finance a worldwide network of madrassas - fundamentalist Islamic schools (11,000 in Pakistan alone) - where boys are indoctrinated from the age of 4 into a brand of religious intolerance and violence that infects not only Muslim countries but also the United States and the rest of the Free World. These madrassas serve as a kind of terrorist petri dish, incubating a jihadist virus that threatens our democracy with attack from within long before Saddam could ever hope to reach the United States with any kind of WMD.
Although Americans trust their government more today than they have in many, many years, there is, nevertheless, a growing awareness that the potential future threat posed by an isolated Iraq has been exaggerated while the real, immediate threat emanating from the North Korean-Pakistani-Iranian-Saudi axis has been downplayed and underestimated.
As President Bush has kept our guns loaded and pointed at Baghdad, we are perfectly situated to implement a containment strategy that can work. If we call Saddam's bluff and send in our intelligence agents to thoroughly search Iraq for WMD, Saddam won't be able to make any more progress on a clandestine weapons program, even if Iraq had begun to reconstitute its weapons of mass destruction after the inspectors were withdrawn in 1998.
Now is the time to retrace our steps back to June 24, when Mr. Bush laid down a new framework for peace between Israel and the Arab world. Peace in the Middle East and democratic reforms in the Palestinian Authority, coupled with the promise of a 21st-century Marshall plan for the region, could be a toehold for helping to defuse the radical Islamic threat to world peace.
It is becoming more apparent every day that any search for peace on Earth, good will toward men in the 21st century must begin in the same land where the Prince of Peace was born 2000 years ago - that narrow strip of land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Jack Kemp is co-director of Empower America.
-------- israel / palestine
GERM WARS
Israel Will Expand Its Smallpox Vaccinations, but Not to Everyone
December 26, 2002
By DEXTER FILKINS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/middleeast/26ISRA.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 25 - Israeli officials said today that they had decided against vaccinating the entire population against the smallpox virus. But they said they were expanding the number of soldiers and health care workers who would be vaccinated to 40,000 or more.
The officials said they made the decision after concluding that the likelihood of a smallpox attack, by terrorists or another country, was slim. A more realistic goal, they said, was to ensure that the country's doctors and nurses could carry out a crash program to inoculate the entire population quickly if a single case of smallpox were discovered. The officials said they hoped they could vaccinate the entire population of six million Israelis in about four days if the need arose.
"Intelligence reports are saying there is no immediate threat, and we don't see the possibility of Iraq attacking us with smallpox," said Dr. Yehuda Danon, professor of immunology and pediatrics at Tel Aviv University. "But everything could change once we have the first case."
The decision was announced amid a flurry of press reports here speculating on the dangers of a biological or chemical weapons attack in the event of a war with Iraq. The Israeli smallpox program has been closely watched in the United States, where the Bush administration recently started a campaign to vaccinate as many as 10 million health care and emergency workers and 500,000 soldiers. The American program has prompted concerns that the vaccines will kill or harm a number of people, but Israel uses a less virulent strain and officials say they have kept the vaccine's side effects to a minimum. The Israeli government has already vaccinated about 17,000 people, and so far only two people have suffered ill effects from the vaccines. Both of them recovered, the officials said.
Israeli officials said they decided to expand the pool of those receiving vaccinations to include more health workers, police and soldiers. The larger group of people receiving the vaccine, the officials said, would provide a larger supply of plasma with which to treat those who suffer complications.
"The first single case of smallpox would change the daily life of the whole country and probably the whole world," Dr. Danon said. "Air and sea transportation would stop. We have to make sure that we have a population who can treat the sick people and immunize healthy people."
Smallpox was declared eradicated by the World Health Organization in 1980. Until then, it killed about a third of those it infected.
-------- mideast
AIR DEFENSES
New Mobile Radar System Looking Out for Iraqi Missile Launchings in the Gulf
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By ERIC SCHMITT with PHILIP SHENON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/middleeast/26RADA.html
CAMP AS SAYLIYAH, Qatar, Dec. 21 - The United States military has deployed a sophisticated ground-radar system here to help protect allied and American forces in the Persian Gulf region from Iraqi missile attacks, military officials say.
The radar - called the Joint Tactical Ground Station - is a mobile Army system that alerts commanders to hostile missile launchings, using data from space-based satellites. The information is also relayed instantaneously to missile defense systems, like the Patriot, that are deployed in the region, to help intercept incoming missiles.
These new radars are deployed overseas in only two other places - Germany and South Korea - and are a significant advance from the early-warning systems used during the 1991 Persian Gulf war. The single greatest loss of American lives in that conflict came when an Iraqi Scud missile hit a barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 service members and wounding 98 others.
Iraq's military is smaller and less caable than it was a decade ago, American officials say, but its arsenal of Scuds, which could be tipped with chemical or biological weapons, still poses a major threat to American forces and allies in the region, like Israel.
Commanders here and at other American bases in the region said the ground-radar system, combined with other air defenses, gives them more time to warn troops of an enemy missile strike and to fire off a quicker and more accurate counterattack.
"It gives us early warning and it has huge coverage," said Lt. Col. Frank Molinari, commander of Army forces at this base, which is also home to a new command center that would serve as the military's headquarters for a war against Iraq.
The new radar, which was deployed here several months ago but only recently described in detail by officials here and in the United States, is one of several improvements the Pentagon has made since 1991 to detect and destroy Scud launchers and missiles, even after they have been fired.
The Patriot system fielded a decade ago was an antiaircraft defense that was modified to counter Iraqi Scud missiles, but experienced only mixed success. Unlike the older Patriot, which explodes near its target, the new Pac-3 model is designed to hit its target head-on. It is also more maneuverable and has better tracking and guidance systems.
Israel has also deployed an operational missile defense, called Arrow, and is ready to use it to protect Tel Aviv and other major cities if they come under fire from Iraq's Scud missiles.
In the gulf war, Iraqi forces used mobile launchers to fire Scuds and then fled into caves or culverts before allied warplanes could bomb them. The United States assigned nearly 2,500 missions to Scud-hunting but failed to score a confirmed kill against a mobile missile or launcher.
American commanders now plan to deploy Predator and Global Hawk surveillance aircraft, which can patrol continuously for 24 hours, as well as E-8C Joint Stars ground-surveillance planes, to detect mobile launcher movements and guide bombers to their targets faster with improved communications equipment.
American warplanes now carry more accurate laser-guided and satellite-guided bombs and missiles. Special Operations Forces will probably deploy to western Iraq in the opening hours of any war to destroy missile launchers that threaten Israel.
In an effort to learn more about how the Scuds operate, the Air Force last month launched a pair of the missiles - secretly bought from a former Warsaw Pact country - into the Pacific Ocean from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Sensors on the missile, as well as on nearby ships and planes, measured the missiles' trajectories.
In the gulf war, Iraq lobbed about 90 Scuds at Israel and allied troops in Saudi Arabia and other gulf countries. American intelligence officials believe that Iraq still has "several dozen" Scuds, including the Hussein version with a range of about 390 miles, and the Abbas version with a range of about 540 miles.
Iraq has also deployed short-range rockets, the Samoud and Ababil 100. American analysts say both of them exceed the 150-kilometer range limit - about 93 miles - that the United Nations imposed on Iraq's missiles after the gulf war.
American intelligence officials said they expect Iraqi commanders to deploy these short-range missiles to within range of American forces in Kuwait and possibly Turkey. "We are concerned about their being used in both the south and the north," one intelligence official said.
The United States Central Command has long sought to deploy the ground radar into the gulf region. The European Command, whose area of responsibility includes most of Europe, and parts of Africa and the Middle East, including Israel, has units stationed in Stuttgart, Germany, that can be sent anywhere in its region. The Pacific Command has units at Osan, South Korea.
When the Central Command failed to reach agreement to station the ground radar in Saudi Arabia, officials turned to Qatar, where some 3,000 American forces are stationed.
The radar system, made by Northrop Grumman, is a series of radars that pack into a large storage container and can be towed around by truck. It is small enough to fit on a C-141 transport plane, requires a small crew, and is relatively easy to set up and take down, officials said.
In the gulf war, space-based sensors that detected Iraqi missile launchings alerted officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado. Officials there telephoned commanders in the gulf to alert them to the threat, a former senior officer said.
"What Jtags does is allow a small portable piece of equipment to directly downlink data from satellites rather than having to rely on the cumbersome set of relays that we had to use in the gulf war," said the officer, Joseph G. Garrett 3rd, a retired Army major general who commanded all Patriot antimissile units in Saudi Arabia during the gulf war.
The ground radar's high-resolution displays give commanders the estimated launching point and time of a missile, its projected impact point and time, and its trajectory.
With the ground radar linked up with Patriot antimissile batteries, front-line commanders say the overall air defenses give them a greater sense of security against hostile strike.
"We have a good array of systems," said Col. Patrick Shaw, commander of the 386th Air Expeditionary Wing at Ali al Salem Air Base in Kuwait, just 39 miles south of the Iraqi border.
-------- nato
'No unilateral US war on Iraq'
Agence France Presse,
Dec. 26, 2002
http://www.thestatesman.net/page.news.php?clid=8&theme=&usrsess=1&id=8503
LONDON - The USA will not launch a war on Iraq without UN backing, Mr George Robertson, Nato secretary-general, said today.
He said the 19-member alliance could support military action against Iraq, and has been asked to consider such an option, but no decisions have yet been taken. "Up till now, the USA has kept very rigidly to the UN route. They still do, the inspectors are still there," he told the BBC.
He said: "There is a certain amount of rhetoric, but in reality President George Bush has strongly placed his country in Nato's fold and also within international, multilateral institutions."
Washington asked Nato earlier this month for help in any possible military action. "What the Americans have done in NATO is to suggest a number of options where NATO could help in a military action and countries have been invited to consider that," he said. "But no decisions have yet been taken on it." The US request came after Nato leaders agreed at a November summit to take "effective action" to secure Iraq's "full and immediate compliance" with UN disarmament demands.
Saddam refuses to lift ban: Saddam Hussein has turned down a suggestion to lift a ban on foreign satellite television, saying it was illogical to relay enemy or immoral material, state television said today, adds a report from Baghdad. The Iraqi President told a Cabinet meeting that only an elite in Baghdad was interested in receiving such broadcasts while the man in the street was busy with more mundane pursuits. "Airing the views of others ... who are in enemy ranks would be tantamount to sabotage," he said.
"Banning immoral behaviour while simultaneously helping spread it (by airing footage that would encourage such behaviour) would bring God's wrath down upon us," he said Saddam, whose speeches increasingly have religious overtones.
Only foreign media, embassies and senior state officials are allowed access to foreign satellite television in Iraq. There are four television channels in the country: state television, which is run by the information ministry; a state satellite channel; Youth Television, which is run by Saddam's elder son Uday, and a sports channel.
Iraqi missile batteries and ground defences opened up on US and British warplanes overflying the south of the country, driving them back to Kuwait, a military spokesman has said, adds another report from Baghdad.
-------- pakistan
PAKISTAN TRIBAL REGION
An Anti-U.S. Haven for Al Qaeda
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By DAVID ROHDE
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/asia/26TRIB.html
MIRAM SHAH, Pakistan - Each day, fierce-looking young students set up makeshift roadblocks in this desolate corner of Pakistan, ignoring the dust that coats their faces and stings their eyes and dries their throats. Their only desire, it seems, is to please their teachers and, by extension, their God.
They string ropes across the road and demand that drivers stop and make contributions to their religious schools. Filled with the certitude of youth, they berate the drivers who refuse to stop and acknowledge the righteousness of their cause.
The boys are students of the hard-line madrasas, or Islamic religious schools, that fill Pakistan's tribal areas, a 350-by-25-mile strip of impossibly rugged mountain terrain that snakes along the border with Afghanistan.
In the last several months, the tribal areas have emerged as a growing source of frustration for American forces in Afghanistan and F.B.I. agents in Pakistan. Raids by bureau agents have failed to capture the small number of Arab members of Al Qaeda - possibly even Osama bin Laden himself - who are believed to be hiding in the tribal areas.
American forces in Afghanistan are increasingly frustrated by their inability to pursue gunmen who fire at them and then flee over the porous border into the tribal areas.
At the same time, religious hard-liners have gained ground here. Islamic candidates vowing to expel American agents from Pakistan swept the tribal areas in recent legislative elections, and local leaders are demanding that all American activity in the area stop. As a result, a year after the Taliban's fall, the tribal areas are emerging as a newly emboldened stronghold of Islamic militancy.
A recent visit to the area confirmed that opposition to the United States is vehement and growing. In an interview, six tribal leaders gathered here by Pakistani officials demanded that the Pakistani Army be solely responsible for security and that American raids end.
They were adamantly opposed to allowing American forces in Afghanistan to enter Pakistan and warned that F.B.I. agents could face violence if they returned. "We will take steps," said Ghulbat Khan, one of the tribal leaders. "Sometimes a trifling incident can lead to a great quarrel."
The reason for the opposition is simple, according to Pakistani experts. The tribal areas remain isolated and underdeveloped, a place of widespread support for the Taliban and Al Qaeda, fueled in part by false information, and Americans are seen as anti-Muslim invaders.
Asked why Americans were not welcome, Sangin Khan, an unemployed man, said, "America is killing Muslims all over the world."
Some experts question whether the raids are worth continuing, considering the resentment they stir up. Pakistani officials said that even though at least 10 joint American-Pakistani raids had been conducted in the tribal areas in the last year, not a single high-level Qaeda or Taliban member had been caught. After initial sweeps last winter netted several hundred fleeing Taliban and Qaeda, only a handful of low-level Afghans and Uzbeks have been arrested or killed in the last six months.
"They haven't caught anyone, and they have caused a lot of anger," said Rahimullah Yusufzai, a leading Pakistani journalist. "I don't think they should be doing it anymore until they have proper intelligence."
Pakistanis said American agents hampered by weak human intelligence sources were offering potential informers cash, in amounts like $400 a month. But, they said, the informers are providing bad information that leads the agents to raid the same religious schools and mosques repeatedly.
"The Americans 15 to 20 times have disgraced our soil and our sacred mosques," Ghulbat Khan complained. "Despite their hectic efforts, they have not produced a single man, not a single one."
Mr. Yusufzai, the journalist, said that if there were Qaeda members hiding in the tribal lands, it was only thanks to the inhabitants. "Without local support," he said, "you cannot hide in the tribal areas."
-------- saudi arabia
Saudi Arabia reiterates will not join any war on Iraq
26 December, 2002
Reuters
http://asia.reuters.com/news_article.jhtml;jsessionid=GDWWXTGUW5UIACRBAEZSFFA?type=worldnews&StoryID=1959921
RIYADH - Saudi Arabia has reiterated that it will not take part in military action against Iraq and will not necessarily allow strikes to be launched from its territory, Saudi newspapers said on Wednesday.
The papers were quoting Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal telling a news conference late on Tuesday that even if the United Nations sanctions war on Iraq, the conservative kingdom would not send troops to fight alongside the U.S. army.
The kingdom, a key U.S. ally, sent soldiers to the 1991 U.S.-led Gulf War against Baghdad and was a main launch pad for the strikes.
Last month, Prince Saud told CNN that his country would not allow the United States to use its facilities for any attack against neighbouring Iraq, apparently contradicting earlier remarks in which he indicated Washington could use Saudi bases if the war was approved by the United Nations.
Saudi Arabia hosts more than 5,000 U.S. soldiers and other Western troops.
Asked if these soldiers would be used in an attack, Saud said the troops were in Prince Sultan airbase to enforce no-fly zones in southern Iraq, adding: "This does not mean the kingdom will attack Iraq or will allow strikes from its territory."
"If the U.N. Security Council sanctions war against Iraq, that will require cooperation, but this does not mean that all countries must take part in military action," he added.
"Obviously, we will not take part in military action."
A U.S. air campaign against Iraq would be more difficult, but not impossible, without access to Saudi bases. The United States has turned to Qatar, another regional ally, pouring $1.4 billion into expanding bases there. The move may be partly responsible for a row between Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
Although concerned about U.S. ties, Saudi Arabia is wary of an attack on Iraq mainly due to internal opposition and sympathy for Iraq among many ordinary Muslims.
Saud said the kingdom was trying its best to prevent any war on Iraq, as it would destabilise the whole region. He also denied there was any crisis in the kingdom's relations with the United States.
U.S.-Saudi ties have come under pressure since the September 11, 2001 suicide attacks. Several of the suspected hijackers were Saudis. Saudi Arabia has angrily denounced what it calls "negative propaganda" against it by U.S. media.
-------- spy agencies
Intelligence Predicts Hussein's Reaction to Attack
U.S. and British Analyses Are Highly Speculative, and Miscalculations Could Be Costly in Event of War
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37825-2002Dec25?language=printer
U.S. and British intelligence analysts are closely monitoring Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, watching as he appears publicly to embrace U.N. inspections while wooing Europeans and seeking to rally fellow Arabs in the face of the American military buildup.
As U.S. forces continue to strengthen in anticipation of possible war, the Western intelligence community is producing estimates for policymakers of the Iraqi leader's potential actions, attitudes and intentions in the event of an attack. Because Hussein lives in a secluded and closely guarded environment, these analyses are highly speculative, senior administration officials said.
U.S. intelligence officials said they believe that although Hussein maintains a tight grip on his government, he could be overthrown by a military coup if U.S.-led ground troops were about to invade his country. "The expectation has been that the closer [Iraqi military leaders] perceive the end is near, the more people inside will be willing to raise their hands," one senior intelligence analyst said this week. He cautioned, however, that "it is unlikely to happen until after they hear guns start firing."
Past miscalculations on anti-Hussein coups have brought brutal retaliation, including death and torture, to hundreds and perhaps more than a thousand Iraqi officers -- even many never involved in any plotting, a former CIA case officer said. "Attacks on Baghdad from cruise missiles and dropping of bombs alone won't do the trick," the former officer said. "There have to be troops coming on the ground."
The intelligence community is also following Hussein's rare public appearances. Last Sunday, he received a delegation from Belarus headed by Nikolai Ivanchenko, the deputy head of President Alexander Lukashenko's administration. Belarus is one of the few countries accused by the United States of selling prohibited weapons to Baghdad, and Michael Kozak, the U.S. ambassador to Belarus, made the charge openly last month at a conference in Washington sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute. He described Lukashenko as someone who has sold illegal arms to Iraq and, thus, chosen the wrong side in the war on terrorism.
Last spring, the State Department accused Belarus of training Iraqi forces to use antiaircraft systems, but at last month's meeting, Kozak said U.S. details on Lukashenko's arms transfers to Baghdad must remain secret to protect sources and methods of collection.
Previous U.N. inspections found that in the mid-1990s Belarus sold Baghdad machine tools capable of turning out components for missiles and high-speed centrifuges that Iraq could use to process highly enriched uranium used in bombs. In 1998, U.N. inspectors saw similar machines in Iraq, although they were said to have been used to make lenses for artillery shells.
At last Sunday's meeting, according to Belarus radio, Hussein told the Belarus delegation that he was getting little help from other countries in his efforts to lift the embargo on this type of machinery because of accusations that he was still making weapons of mass destruction. "We already told the world that we don't produce these kinds of ammunition, but the world doesn't seem to care," Hussein was quoted as saying.
Iraq's news service reported that Hussein then promised Ivanchenko "huge reciprocal cooperation" with Belarus in the future.
Last October, Baghdad moved to build up relations with Saudi Arabia, among other countries, playing host to Saudi businessmen for the first time since the 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Two weeks ago, telephone links between the two countries were reestablished, and this week Baghdad announced the awarding of $44 million in contracts for vehicles, milk powder and air conditioners.
Iraq's trade minister, Mohammed Mahdi Saleh, appeared on Qatar-based al-Jazeera television earlier this week to call on all Arab nations to help his country. Echoing an approach that Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz took a week earlier, he said Washington, aided by London, wanted to divide and conquer the Arab world. "Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Iran and Turkey will be the next targets of the Anglo-American plan to split up the Arab and Islamic world," Saleh said.
At home, however, preparations of the public as well as the military continue to be made for a possible war. Radio Free Iraq, which broadcasts into Iraq from Europe, reported that the Iraq Ministry of Commerce is planning to distribute six-month food allocations in one swoop, something not done during the eight-year Iran-Iraq war. Some analysts said Baghdad was trying to reassure the public so that should war come they would be willing to fight rather than just turn to the invaders for food.
Iraq has even agreed last week, through the Red Cross, to open a new border crossing with Iran that would allow humanitarian relief financed by the U.N.'s oil-for-food program. The agreement came just weeks after Iraq exile groups met in Tehran with Iranian government officials.
Hussein's recent moves to neutralize Kuwait and other Gulf states, however, have appeared to backfire.
An attempt earlier this month to "apologize" to Kuwait for his 1990 invasion caused a firestorm when he linked it to an appeal to Kuwaitis to oppose their leaders' cooperation with Washington. Kuwait has since accused the Iraqi regime of attempting to divide the oil-rich emirate and incite additional terror attacks against U.S. troops stationed there since the Persian Gulf War.
Kuwaiti lawmakers blasted Hussein's message as a "declaration of war" and vowed unequivocal support for the emirate's rulers and the presence of U.S. troops there.
Khaled al-Razni, director of the Kuwait embassy's information office, told reporters, "The apology reflects the desperation of Saddam Hussein to save his government and present his aggressive designs on Kuwait." The Arab League subsequently criticized the apology, as did the Gulf Cooperation Council, a group made up of leaders of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, most of which play host to U.S. military facilities. The council accused Hussein of "inciting violence and supporting and encouraging terrorism" and called on him to prove to U.N. inspectors that he has no weapons of mass destruction.
Since Hussein's "apology," Iraq has moved on several fronts to ease the Kuwaiti anger. On Sunday, it was announced that Iraq told the United Nations that it is prepared to meet in Jordan next month to discuss the whereabouts of 605 Kuwaitis still missing from the 1990 war and at the same time return works of art stolen 12 years ago from the Gulf country. This came after Iraq returned in October other stolen Kuwaiti archives.
"The Kuwaitis are still not satisfied," a senior U.S. official said this week.
-------- us
U.S. ready to unleash weapons
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 26, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20021226-48299625.htm
The Army plans to quickly deploy its new Shadow 200 spy plane if the United States goes to war against Iraq.
In the Persian Gulf, the Navy has America's newest attack jet - the F-18 Super Hornet - ready for its first extended wartime action.
The Air Force is planning a swarming air campaign against Saddam Hussein that would utilize new ways to use precision-guided munitions.
In all, the military would bring a new array of weapons, infrared sensors and communications gear to any conflict to change the regime in Baghdad. The new gadgets promise to make the war quicker and less bloody than Desert Storm a decade ago, military analysts say.
"A major factor will be precision weapons, and they are far superior today to the ones in Desert Storm. It's unbelievable," said retired Rear Adm. Phillip Smith, a former P-3 Orion pilot. "I think militarily we will be successful in not too much time. I'm not one of those who thinks we can do it in three days, like I recently read."
Added Claude Bolton Jr., the Army's assistant secretary for acquisition and logistics, "We have more firepower."
In an interview, Mr. Bolton listed battlefield improvements made during the last decade. He spoke of the emerging Shadow surveillance drone, better night vision gear, a new communication network called "Force 21 Battle Command, Brigade and Below," and an improved model of the Apache tank-killing helicopter.
"We had good capability in situational awareness in the Gulf," said Mr. Bolton, a retired Air Force major general and former jet fighter test pilot. "I would say it's much improved now."
Perhaps there is no greater battlefield advancement since 1991 than the deployment of a satellite-guided bomb, the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).
Using the revolutionary Global Positioning System (GPS), pilots can independently program each 500- or 2,000-pound bomb to hit different targets. Accuracy is measured in feet.
But more importantly, JDAMs is impervious to the elements, or as the military puts it, the system is "all-weather." In the 1991 Gulf war, poor weather caused some laser-guided bombs to go off target, or forced pilots to abort missions.
"In the '91 war, weather created huge problems for us because of cloud cover," said retired Air Force Col. John Warden, who helped plan the air attack.
Today, he said, "Air operations have become significantly less concerned with weather because with GPS and JDAM bombs you can drop through clouds. If you know where the target is, you can drop it."
The military first used the weapon extensively in the 1998 air war against Serbia, primarily from the B-2 Stealth bomber.
Today, JDAM has spread to tactical aircraft, too. Air Force F-15s and F-16s, as well as Navy F-18s and F-14s, can drop the bomb. In 1991, the only Navy plane equipped with laser-guided weapons was the since-retired A-6 Intruder. F-18 pilots had to rely on less-accurate radar guidance, and too often missed battlefield targets, pilots said.
Whether JDAM is a deciding factor in a war with Iraq could be known in the opening days. War plans call for an unprecedented use of the B-2 (perhaps 16 of the 21 bombers) to drop independently targeted JDAMs on critical targets. If the B-2s successfully strike command centers, air defenses and Saddam's security forces, the strikes could shorten the war.
In Desert Storm, only one manned plane could penetrate downtown Baghdad in the first days - the F-117 stealth bomber with its limited arsenal of two laser-guided bombs. The B-2 can carry 16 2,000-pound bombs.
In all, more than 80 percent of all air-to-ground munitions can be precision-guided, compared with 10 percent in Desert Storm. The ability to hit more targets, using fewer missions, is one reason the number of American troops being sent to the region is half the 550,000 deployed in 1991.
"When you roll it all together, I say we're 10 times more powerful," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney. "And [Saddam] is about 30 percent what he was before. So you can see how we can achieve rapid dominance using 'effects-based' operations."
"Effects based" is an Air Force approach to bombing campaigns. Critical parts of the target are destroyed, not the entire complex or network. For example, planners target electrical nodes instead of the much larger generation plant to get the same effect - no military electrical power.
Another big advancement is the development of unmanned spy planes, such as the Air Force Predator and Global Hawk, and the Army's Shadow. The remote-controlled drones can loiter aloft for long periods of time, sending back video images. Commanders can use the "real-time" intelligence to direct air strikes or reposition ground forces.
"We did not have that kind of 'real-time' reconnaissance capability in the Gulf war," Col. Warden said. "If we had a handful of Predators in the Gulf war, we probably would have found and killed Saddam Hussein He was always moving enough that we stayed one step behind."
Col. Warden based his assessment on the fact that in the early hours of the war in Afghanistan, an armed Predator saw Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar escaping Kandahar. Permission to fire the Predator's Hellfire missile was delayed at U.S. Central Command. The reclusive Mullah Omar escaped.
Since then, the Predator's deadly missiles, triggered and guided by CIA operators at Central Command in Tampa, Fla., have killed Taliban and al Qaeda members in Afghanistan and Yemen.
The Predator's performance is one reason top Army officials are so optimistic about the Shadow 200 RQ-7A. The 300-pound spy plane is slated to be assigned to the Army's Stryker Brigade Combat Teams - the mobile ground units of the future - and the 4th Infantry Division at Fort Hood, Texas.
The Army's Mr. Bolton said the future is now for the Shadow if there is a war against Iraq. "They are your eyes and ears," he said. "They can loiter for a long time."
Mr. Bolton listed the Shadow among a number of technological improvements for warfighters.
The M-1A2 Abrams battle tank, now assigned to the 4th Infantry and 1st Calvary divisions, has improved armor and a better fire-control system.
The infrared system allows gunners to watch the round all the way to the target. The older system goes blank for a few seconds after the gun barrel flashes.
"It allows you to make sure you can see the target at all times," he said. "What you like to do is watch that round go downrange."
-------- propaganda wars
Report: China Closes 3,300 Cybercafes
December 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-China-Cybercafe-Crackdown.html
BEIJING (AP) -- China has closed more than 3,300 Internet cafes in a safety crackdown launched after a fire in June at a Beijing cafe killed 25 people, the official Xinhua News Agency says.
Nearly 12,000 other Internet cafes have been closed temporarily while they make improvements, Xinhua said Thursday.
The fatal fire June 16 in Beijing's university district came amid complaints by some officials that such businesses were endangering the safety and morals of young people.
Many Internet cafes were unlicensed and had no fire exits or other required safety features. Officials complained that they also gave young people access to pornography and other harmful material online.
The crackdown adds to efforts by the communist government to control how Chinese use the Internet, even as it encourages the spread of online activity for business and education.
Special filters block Web surfers from seeing sites abroad run by Chinese dissidents, human rights groups and news organizations.
Under new rules that took effect Nov. 15, minors are banned from Internet cafes. Managers are required to keep records of customers' identities and to close by midnight.
Two teenage boys accused of setting the June fire in Beijing were sentenced to life in prison. Authorities said they had argued with cafe employees. China has tens of millions of Internet users, many of whom until recently relied on cybercafes for access. With the falling price of home computers, however, more small businesses and families can afford their own, and many customers now use cybercafes to play computer games rather than getting online.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
CIA interrogations said verging on inhumane
Reuters
Thursday December 26, 2:38 PM
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/reuters/asia-138627.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA interrogators have been using "stress and duress" techniques on captured enemies in Afghanistan that blur the line between legal and inhumane, the Washington Post reported on Thursday.... [see next story]
---
U.S. Decries Abuse but Defends Interrogations
'Stress and Duress' Tactics Used on Terrorism Suspects Held in Secret Overseas Facilities
By Dana Priest and Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, December 26, 2002; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A37943-2002Dec25?language=printer
Deep inside the forbidden zone at the U.S.-occupied Bagram air base in Afghanistan, around the corner from the detention center and beyond the segregated clandestine military units, sits a cluster of metal shipping containers protected by a triple layer of concertina wire. The containers hold the most valuable prizes in the war on terrorism -- captured al Qaeda operatives and Taliban commanders.
Those who refuse to cooperate inside this secret CIA interrogation center are sometimes kept standing or kneeling for hours, in black hoods or spray-painted goggles, according to intelligence specialists familiar with CIA interrogation methods. At times they are held in awkward, painful positions and deprived of sleep with a 24-hour bombardment of lights -- subject to what are known as "stress and duress" techniques.
Those who cooperate are rewarded with creature comforts, interrogators whose methods include feigned friendship, respect, cultural sensitivity and, in some cases, money. Some who do not cooperate are turned over -- "rendered," in official parlance -- to foreign intelligence services whose practice of torture has been documented by the U.S. government and human rights organizations.
In the multifaceted global war on terrorism waged by the Bush administration, one of the most opaque -- yet vital -- fronts is the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects. U.S. officials have said little publicly about the captives' names, numbers or whereabouts, and virtually nothing about interrogation methods. But interviews with several former intelligence officials and 10 current U.S. national security officials -- including several people who witnessed the handling of prisoners -- provide insight into how the U.S. government is prosecuting this part of the war.
The picture that emerges is of a brass-knuckled quest for information, often in concert with allies of dubious human rights reputation, in which the traditional lines between right and wrong, legal and inhumane, are evolving and blurred.
While the U.S. government publicly denounces the use of torture, each of the current national security officials interviewed for this article defended the use of violence against captives as just and necessary. They expressed confidence that the American public would back their view. The CIA, which has primary responsibility for interrogations, declined to comment.
"If you don't violate someone's human rights some of the time, you probably aren't doing your job," said one official who has supervised the capture and transfer of accused terrorists. "I don't think we want to be promoting a view of zero tolerance on this. That was the whole problem for a long time with the CIA."
The off-limits patch of ground at Bagram is one of a number of secret detention centers overseas where U.S. due process does not apply, according to several U.S. and European national security officials, where the CIA undertakes or manages the interrogation of suspected terrorists. Another is Diego Garcia, a somewhat horseshoe-shaped island in the Indian Ocean that the United States leases from Britain.
U.S. officials oversee most of the interrogations, especially those of the most senior captives. In some cases, highly trained CIA officers question captives through interpreters. In others, the intelligence agency undertakes a "false flag" operation using fake decor and disguises meant to deceive a captive into thinking he is imprisoned in a country with a reputation for brutality, when, in reality, he is still in CIA hands. Sometimes, female officers conduct interrogations, a psychologically jarring experience for men reared in a conservative Muslim culture where women are never in control.
In other cases, usually involving lower-level captives, the CIA hands them to foreign intelligence services -- notably those of Jordan, Egypt and Morocco -- with a list of questions the agency wants answered. These "extraordinary renditions" are done without resort to legal process and usually involve countries with security services known for using brutal means.
According to U.S. officials, nearly 3,000 suspected al Qaeda members and their supporters have been detained worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001. About 625 are at the U.S. military's confinement facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Some officials estimated that fewer than 100 captives have been rendered to third countries. Thousands have been arrested and held with U.S. assistance in countries known for brutal treatment of prisoners, the officials said.
At a Sept. 26 joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees, Cofer Black, then head of the CIA Counterterrorist Center, spoke cryptically about the agency's new forms of "operational flexibility" in dealing with suspected terrorists. "This is a very highly classified area, but I have to say that all you need to know: There was a before 9/11, and there was an after 9/11," Black said. "After 9/11 the gloves come off."
According to one official who has been directly involved in rendering captives into foreign hands, the understanding is, "We don't kick the [expletive] out of them. We send them to other countries so they can kick the [expletive] out of them." Some countries are known to use mind-altering drugs such as sodium pentathol, said other officials involved in the process.
Abu Zubaida, who is believed to be the most important al Qaeda member in detention, was shot in the groin during his apprehension in Pakistan in March. National security officials suggested that Zubaida's painkillers were used selectively in the beginning of his captivity. He is now said to be cooperating, and his information has led to the apprehension of other al Qaeda members.
U.S. National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack declined to comment earlier this week on CIA or intelligence-related matters. But, he said: "The United States is treating enemy combatants in U.S. government control, wherever held, humanely and in a manner consistent with the principles of the Third Geneva Convention of 1949."
The convention outlined the standards for treatment of prisoners of war. Suspected terrorists in CIA hands have not been accorded POW status.
Other U.S. government officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, acknowledged that interrogators deprive some captives of sleep, a practice with ambiguous status in international law.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, the authoritative interpreter of the international Convention Against Torture, has ruled that lengthy interrogation may incidentally and legitimately cost a prisoner sleep. But when employed for the purpose of breaking a prisoner's will, sleep deprivation "may in some cases constitute torture."
The State Department's annual human rights report routinely denounces sleep deprivation as an interrogation method. In its 2001 report on Turkey, Israel and Jordan, all U.S. allies, the department listed sleep deprivation among often-used alleged torture techniques.
U.S. officials who defend the renditions say the prisoners are sent to these third countries not because of their coercive questioning techniques, but because of their cultural affinity with the captives. Besides being illegal, they said, torture produces unreliable information from people who are desperate to stop the pain. They look to foreign allies more because their intelligence services can develop a culture of intimacy that Americans cannot. They may use interrogators who speak the captive's Arabic dialect and often use the prospects of shame and the reputation of the captive's family to goad the captive into talking. 'Very Clever Guys'
In a speech on Dec. 11, CIA director George J. Tenet said that interrogations overseas have yielded significant returns recently. He calculated that worldwide efforts to capture or kill terrorists had eliminated about one-third of the al Qaeda leadership. "Almost half of our successes against senior al Qaeda members has come in recent months," he said.
Many of these successes have come as a result of information gained during interrogations. The capture of al Qaeda leaders Ramzi Binalshibh in Pakistan, Omar al-Faruq in Indonesia, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri in Kuwait and Muhammad al Darbi in Yemen were all partly the result of information gained during interrogations, according to U.S. intelligence and national security officials. All four remain under CIA control.
Time, rather than technique, has produced the most helpful information, several national security and intelligence officials said. Using its global computer database, the CIA is able to quickly check leads from captives in one country with information divulged by captives in another.
"We know so much more about them now than we did a year ago -- the personalities, how the networks are established, what they think are important targets, how they think we will react," said retired Army general Wayne Downing, the Bush administration's deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism until he resigned in June.
"The interrogations of Abu Zubaida drove me nuts at times," Downing said. "He and some of the others are very clever guys. At times I felt we were in a classic counter-interrogation class: They were telling us what they think we already knew. Then, what they thought we wanted to know. As they did that, they fabricated and weaved in threads that went nowhere. But, even with these ploys, we still get valuable information and they are off the street, unable to plot and coordinate future attacks."
In contrast to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, where military lawyers, news reporters and the Red Cross received occasional access to monitor prisoner conditions and treatment, the CIA's overseas interrogation facilities are off-limits to outsiders, and often even to other government agencies. In addition to Bagram and Diego Garcia, the CIA has other secret detention centers overseas, and often uses the facilities of foreign intelligence services.
Free from the scrutiny of military lawyers steeped in the international laws of war, the CIA and its intelligence service allies have the leeway to exert physically and psychologically aggressive techniques, said national security officials and U.S. and European intelligence officers.
Although no direct evidence of mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody has come to light, the prisoners are denied access to lawyers or organizations, such as the Red Cross, that could independently assess their treatment. Even their names are secret.
This month, the U.S. military announced that it had begun a criminal investigation into the handling of two prisoners who died in U.S. custody at the Bagram base. A base spokesman said autopsies found one of the detainees died of a pulmonary embolism, the other of a heart attack.
Al Qaeda suspects are seldom taken without force, and some suspects have been wounded during their capture. After apprehending suspects, U.S. take-down teams -- a mix of military special forces, FBI agents, CIA case officers and local allies -- aim to disorient and intimidate them on the way to detention facilities.
According to Americans with direct knowledge and others who have witnessed the treatment, captives are often "softened up" by MPs and U.S. Army Special Forces troops who beat them up and confine them in tiny rooms. The alleged terrorists are commonly blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions, subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep. The tone of intimidation and fear is the beginning, they said, of a process of piercing a prisoner's resistance.
The take-down teams often "package" prisoners for transport, fitting them with hoods and gags, and binding them to stretchers with duct tape.
Bush administration appointees and career national security officials acknowledged that, as one of them put it, "our guys may kick them around a little bit in the adrenaline of the immediate aftermath." Another said U.S. personnel are scrupulous in providing medical care to captives, adding in a deadpan voice, that "pain control [in wounded patients] is a very subjective thing." 'We're Not Aware'
The CIA's participation in the interrogation of rendered terrorist suspects varies from country to country.
"In some cases [involving interrogations in Saudi Arabia], we're able to observe through one-way mirrors the live investigations," said a senior U.S. official involved in Middle East security issues. "In others, we usually get summaries. We will feed questions to their investigators. They're still very much in control."
The official added: "We're not aware of any torture or even physical abuse."
Tenet acknowledged the Saudis' role in his Dec. 11 speech. "The Saudis are proving increasingly important support to our counterterrorism efforts -- from making arrests to sharing debriefing results," he said.
But Saudi Arabia is also said to withhold information that might lead the U.S. government to conclusions or policies that the Saudi royal family fears. U.S. teams, for that reason, have sometimes sent Saudi nationals to Egypt instead.
Jordan is a favored country for renditions, several U.S. officials said. The Jordanians are considered "highly professional" interrogators, which some officials said meant that they do not use torture. But the State Department's 2001 human rights report criticized Jordan and its General Intelligence Directorate for arbitrary and unlawful detentions and abuse.
"The most frequently alleged methods of torture include sleep deprivation, beatings on the soles of the feet, prolonged suspension with ropes in contorted positions and extended solitary confinement," the 2001 report noted. Jordan also is known to use prisoners' family members to induce suspects to talk.
Another significant destination for rendered suspects is Morocco, whose general intelligence service has sharply stepped up cooperation with the United States. Morocco has a documented history of torture, as well as longstanding ties to the CIA..
The State Department's human rights report says Moroccan law "prohibits torture, and the government claims that the use of torture has been discontinued; however, some members of the security forces still tortured or otherwise abused detainees."
In at least one case, U.S. operatives led the capture and transfer of an al Qaeda suspect to Syria, which for years has been near the top of U.S. lists of human rights violators and sponsors of terrorism. The German government strongly protested the move. The suspect, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, holds joint German and Syrian citizenship. It could not be learned how much of Zammar's interrogation record Syria has provided the CIA.
The Bush administration maintains a legal distance from any mistreatment that occurs overseas, officials said, by denying that torture is the intended result of its rendition policy. American teams, officials said, do no more than assist in the transfer of suspects who are wanted on criminal charges by friendly countries. But five officials acknowledged, as one of them put it, "that sometimes a friendly country can be invited to 'want' someone we grab." Then, other officials said, the foreign government will charge him with a crime of some sort.
One official who has had direct involvement in renditions said he knew they were likely to be tortured. "I . . . do it with my eyes open," he said.
According to present and former officials with firsthand knowledge, the CIA's authoritative Directorate of Operations instructions, drafted in cooperation with the general counsel, tells case officers in the field that they may not engage in, provide advice about or encourage the use of torture by cooperating intelligence services from other countries.
"Based largely on the Central American human rights experience," said Fred Hitz, former CIA inspector general, "we don't do torture, and we can't countenance torture in terms of we can't know of it." But if a country offers information gleaned from interrogations, "we can use the fruits of it."
Bush administration officials said the CIA, in practice, is using a narrow definition of what counts as "knowing" that a suspect has been tortured. "If we're not there in the room, who is to say?" said one official conversant with recent reports of renditions.
The Clinton administration pioneered the use of extraordinary rendition after the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But it also pressed allied intelligence services to respect lawful boundaries in interrogations.
After years of fruitless talks in Egypt, President Bill Clinton cut off funding and cooperation with the directorate of Egypt's general intelligence service, whose torture of suspects has been a perennial theme in State Department human rights reports.
"You can be sure," one Bush administration official said, "that we are not spending a lot of time on that now."
Staff writers Bob Woodward, Susan Schmidt and Douglas Farah, and correspondent Peter Finn in Berlin, contributed to this report.
----
THE BALKANS
Rights Groups Criticize U.S. Over Detainee in Bosnia
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By DANIEL SIMPSON
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/europe/26BOSN.html
SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Human rights groups have accused American-led NATO peacekeepers in Bosnia of undermining international law through their detention of a Muslim man the Americans say is suspected of spying and having links to Al Qaeda.
The suspect, Sabahudin Fiuljanin, was arrested on Oct. 26 by American soldiers who followed him home after observing him outside a United States military base in northern Bosnia on several occasions.
But he was only allowed access to a lawyer a month later after Amnesty International and other human rights organizations protested to Lt. Gen. William E. Ward, the American commander of the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia, or SFOR.
According to the peacekeeping force, Mr. Fiuljanin, who was found in possession of a shoulder-held rocket launcher and several different passports, is being held at an undisclosed location and has not been charged with a specific crime under any recognized legal jurisdiction.
The peacekeeping force argues that its mandate allows it to detain anyone it suspects of criminal activity, or of posing a threat to Bosnia's general stability, without the obligation to present evidence to the public. Human rights advocates dispute whether the peacekeepers' mandate, established under the 1995 Dayton accords, which ended three and a half years of brutal fighting in Bosnia, is as sweeping as NATO maintains.
"There's nothing on paper that says SFOR has the right to do this," said Helen Habraken of Amnesty International, citing the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, which is directly applicable as law in Bosnia.
Since Amnesty first complained last month, Mr. Fiuljanin's lawyer, Osman Mulahalilovic, has seen his client twice on an American military base. But Mr. Mulahalilovic has not been able to establish whether charges will be brought, nor, he said, has he been shown evidence of a connection to Al Qaeda.
International officials in Sarajevo have publicly defended the force's right to detain people whom it deems a threat. But many are uncomfortable about the way in which the detentions of supposed terrorists are being handled.
The application of law by foreigners is complicated in Bosnia because of the question of arresting people indicted by the war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
The tribunal's two most-wanted men, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his top general, Ratko Mladic, are still fugitives. Although the peacekeepers have the power to detain suspected war criminals, they argue that it is a job for the local police.
-------- drug war
Michigan to Drop Minimum Sentence Rules for Drug Crimes
December 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/national/26MICH.html
LANSING, Mich., Dec. 25 (AP) - Karen Shook was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1993 for arranging a drug deal for a man who turned out to be an undercover police officer. But Ms. Shook, a former bank teller, could be paroled 10 years early under legislation expected to be signed by the governor in the next week to eliminate mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes.
Michigan is one of several states revising mandatory minimum sentences. Connecticut, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, New Jersey and North Carolina are also considering eliminating such rules, said Laura Sager, executive director of Families Against Mandatory Minimums, a Washington group.
Michigan Department of Corrections officials do not know how many of the state's 49,296 inmates could be eligible for parole under the legislation, which would take effect March 1. But supporters of the legislation said the state's skyrocketing prison population made the law necessary.
Critics of Michigan's mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines have pushed for changes for years, but economic difficulties may ultimately have led to their elimination.
The state, facing a $1.5 billion general fund deficit in the coming fiscal year, spends about $1.4 billion a year on its prison population, or an average of $28,000 for each inmate, said Russ Marlan, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections.
This month, as the Legislature struggled with the state budget, it approved eliminating mandatory sentences. The departing governor, John Engler, a Republican, supports the move.
Laurie Quick, Ms. Shook's sister, said her family did not know about the state's strict sentencing guidelines until Ms. Shook, now 49, was arrested.
"It's been a nightmare," Ms. Quick said. "She has seen murderers and other convicted felons come and leave since she's been there. It's cruel."
Although the Michigan legislation would make some offenders eligible for early parole, a decision about their release is ultimately up to the parole board. Drug offenders have the highest rate of parole, at 72 percent, Mr. Marlan said.
Nearly 62 percent of other nonviolent offenders receive parole when they are first eligible, followed by violent offenders at 40 percent and sex offenders at 15 percent, he said.
The legislation requires judges to follow state guidelines when sentencing criminals to prison. But eliminating mandatory minimums will give them much more discretion.
"The time had come to make the change," said David Morse, the Livingston County prosecutor. "The idea of stiff severe penalties for drug kingpins was a problem because we weren't getting those kingpins. We were getting people who were carrying on behalf of kingpins."
Under current law, Michigan judges are allowed to deviate from the mandatory minimum guidelines only in extraordinary circumstances.
Now, the law requires a sentence of at least 10 years and up to 20 years in prison for a person convicted of possessing 50 to 224 grams of narcotics or cocaine. The legislation would allow the judge to impose any sentence up to 20 years.
-------- terrorism
Peru Court to Scrap Fujimori Anti - Terror Laws
December 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-peru-justice.html
LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - In a highly complex ruling, Peru's top court has found tough anti-terror laws decreed by ex-President Alberto Fujimori unconstitutional -- meaning hundreds jailed in the 1990s, including top rebel leaders, will now face retrials, court sources and jurists said on Thursday.
The Constitutional Court is expected to formally issue the 80-page ruling on Friday, striking down four legislative decrees signed by Fujimori in 1992 that allowed rebel suspects to be tried by hooded military judges with no due process.
``They've reached the conclusion that the laws are unconstitutional,'' one court source told Reuters, requesting anonymity. The ruling is designed to bring Peru's legislation in line with international human rights requirements.
The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, a watchdog arm of the Organization of American States, has already found that Fujimori's anti-terror laws ``per se violated human rights'' and some rebel convictions -- notably that of 33-year-old New Yorker Lori Berenson -- have already been challenged.
Court President Javier Alva Orlandini has described the ruling -- drafted after a petition by 5,000 people, mostly relatives of those jailed, calling for the laws to be revised -- as ``the longest and most voluminous'' in court history.
Human rights groups welcomed the prospect, but jurists said there was no chance avowed rebel leaders like Abimael Guzman, head of the Shining Path guerrilla group that was one of Latin America's bloodiest insurgencies at its height and remains on an official U.S. list of terror organizations, would go free.
The court source said final details were being worked out on Thursday in a bid to ensure there was no legal vacuum until new anti-terror legislation can be approved by Congress. Some 2,500 people are currently in jail in Peru on terror charges.
Peru has already pardoned and freed several hundred people wrongly imprisoned on terrorist charges.
Francisco Soberon, head of Peru's human rights coordinator, told Reuters he expected some 700 or 800 retrials. That could prove costly for a justice system already under strain, but he said: ``The state has an obligation to rectify this situation.''
DRACONIAN LAWS LONG IN SPOTLIGHT
Peru's rebel wars in the 1980s and 1990s -- in which some 30,000 people died and 7,000 disappeared at the hands of guerrillas or state security forces -- have left deep scars and polls show the public still has no sympathy for ``terrorists.''
Although widely reviled for the corruption scandal that engulfed his government in 2000 and sparked his flight to Japan where he remains on the run from human rights abuse charges, Fujimori still earns praise for succeeding where his two predecessors failed -- quelling rampant violence by Shining Path and the Tupac Amaru Revolutionary Movement, or MRTA.
Fujimori passed the draconian anti-terror laws -- which helped give Peru one of Latin America's worst human rights records -- after his so-called ``self-coup'' in April 1992, in which he temporarily closed Congress and ruled by decree.
Jorge Santistevan, Peru's former human rights ombudsman and a respected lawyer, told Reuters he expected less than 1,000 people to have retrials and said lower sentences could be set.
Peru has so far revised only one military court conviction, that of Berenson, who was jailed for life in 1996 as an MRTA leader by a military judge. Her conviction was overturned in 2000 and a civil retrial last year sentenced her to 20 years for the lesser crime of collaboration. She says she is innocent and is appealing.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Defence redefined means securing cheap energy
December 26 2002
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2002/12/25/1040511092926.html
Behind George Bush's high-minded rhetoric on why America may go to war with Iraq is a long history of weighing the price of securing its oil supplies. Ritt Goldstein writes.
As troops and equipment pour into the Gulf for a looming war with Iraq, United States military thinkers admit that "defence" means protecting the circumstances of "daily life" - and in the US daily life runs on cheap oil.
As far back as 1975, Henry Kissinger, then secretary of state, said America was prepared to wage war over oil. Separate plans advocating US conquest of Saudi oilfields were published in the '70s. So it should come as little surprise that in May last year - four months before the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York - a battle plan for Afghanistan was already being reviewed by the US Command that would carry it out after September 11. Military strategists were highlighting the energy wealth of the Caspian Sea and Central Asia and its importance to America's "security".
The Indian media and Jane's Intelligence Review reported that the US was fighting covert battles against the Taliban, months before the "war on terrorism" was declared.
General William Kernan, commander-in-chief of the US Joint Forces Command, let the revelation about the battle plan review casually drop in July while extolling the success of America's Millennium Challenge war games to Agence France-Presse.
Earlier, during the northern spring last year, Michael Klare, an international security expert and author of Resource Wars, said the military had increasingly come to "define resource security as their primary mission".
Over several months beginning in April last year a series of military and governmental policy documents was released that sought to legitimise the use of US military force in the pursuit of oil and gas.
Simultaneously, the energy task force of the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, was working to tackle a looming US oil crisis. Reflecting a shifting strategic policy, the influential Council on Foreign Relations urged that the Defence Department be included in Cheney's energy group.
During that spring of 2001, as the US military examined the all-out battle scenario that would soon become the operational plan for the war in Afghanistan, events fatefully spun towards September 11's trigger. But these events did not occur in a vacuum.
Providing a summary of the US military's coming role, over the summer of 2000 the Army War College (a foundry for the US military's strategic thinking) published a declaration that security "is more than protecting the country from external threats; security includes economic security".
The policy statement appeared in an article by Lieutenant-Colonel P. H. Liotta, professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College, one of a handful of present US national security gurus.
His article went on to advocate the use of military force "for more than simply protecting a nation and its people from traditional threat-based challenges". Colonel Liotta argued that defence meant protecting the US lifestyle, the circumstances of "daily life".
Reflecting the relationship between pronouncements by such policy gurus and Washington's actual policies, in the Journal of Homeland Security of August this year, Colonel Liotta said America "will practise pre-emption against those who seek to harm our vital interests and our way of life".
At the end of September President Bush unveiled a national security strategy of pre-emption.
And so the months preceding September 11 saw a shifting of the US military's focus. Publications of the US Army War College and the army General and Command Staff College argued that, when it came to oil and gas, "where US business goes, US national interests follow". They highlighted the energy wealth of Central Asia and its importance to America's "security". Oil and gas were on the military's agenda.
Cutting to the crux of present-day issues, a spring 2001 article by Jeffrey Record in the War College's journal, Parameters, argued the legitimacy of "shooting in the Persian Gulf on behalf of lower gas prices".
Mr Record, a former staff member of the Senate armed services committee (and an apparent favourite of the Council on Foreign Relations), also advocated the acceptability of presidential subterfuge in the promotion of a conflict. Mr Record explicitly urged painting over the US's actual reasons for warfare with a nobly high-minded veneer, seeing such as a necessity for mobilising public support for a conflict.
Amplifying the impact of the military papers, in a document commissioned early in the Bush presidency, two key US policy groups, the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, explicitly advocated a convergence of military and energy issues.
Their joint report - Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century - aproved of "military intervention" to secure energy supplies. It also urged Pentagon participation in Mr Cheney's energy task force. And the report warned that the US was running out of oil, with a painful end to cheap fuel already in sight.
Virtually concurrent with the report's release on April 10 last year, Tommy Franks, commander of US forces responsible for the Persian Gulf/South Asia area, added his voice.
An April 13 report on his congressional testimony defined General Franks's command's key mission as "access to [the region's] energy resources". That May it was his command that reviewed the soon-to-be-used details for the coming war in Afghanistan.
Also early last year, the security expert Michael Klare warned that US military action to secure oil "could emerge as the favoured response to future [oil] crises". In the months preceding September 11, US governmental and military policymakers increasingly built military frameworks around energy questions.
Iraq has 10 per cent of the world's proven oil reserves, with The New York Times reporting in October that the Bush White House is planning for the installation of a US military government there in the event of a war leading to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In a parallel with Afghanistan, US covert action has reportedly already begun.
-------- health
Persistent Drop in Fertility Reshapes Europe's Future
December 26, 2002
New York Times
By FRANK BRUNI
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/26/international/europe/26FERT.html
FERRARA, Italy - On a recent night at the Blue Elephant recreation center here, a clutch of parents watched adoringly as dozens of 3- and 4-year-olds sprinted through a colorful playroom, bounced on the cushioned floor or doodled on drawing pads, aglow with creative pride.
It was Italy as outsiders still imagine it: child-worshiping and family-loving.
But there was something wrong with the picture. Most of the parents were gazing at one, and only one, child.
That was true of Gianluca Valenti, who said that giving his son any siblings would be too exhausting and expensive, and of Barbara Lenzi, who said that more than one child "doesn't seem to make sense."
It was also true of Rosa Andolfi, who responded to a question about having an additional child as if a vampire were near.
"Basta!" Ms. Andolfi more or less yelped, then made a cross with her index fingers and thrust it forward.
That gesture was not just funny but telling; it touched on an increasingly worrisome reality for Italy and other European countries whose fertility rates have plummeted over the last decades, shifting one-child families close to the statistical norm.
In Spain and Sweden, Germany and Greece, the total fertility rate - or the average number of children that a woman, based on current indicators, is expected to give birth to - was 1.4 or lower last year, according to the World Health Organization.
In no West European country did the rate reach 2.1 - the marker that, demographers say, means an exact replenishment of the population. By contrast, the United States had a 2.0 rate, which demographers attribute to greater immigration.
While that trend has been evident for many years, its slow-building consequences are now coming into starker relief, as more West European countries acknowledge and take new steps to address the specter of sharply winnowed and less competitive work forces, surfeits of retirees and pension systems that will need to be cut back deeply.
In Italy, where the fertility rate last year was 1.2, according to the health organization, Labor Minister Roberto Maroni has announced that the cost of the state pension system will need to be reduced. Mr. Maroni said the government would offer incentives, which he did not specify, to keep people at work past the minimum retirement age of 57.
The United Nations recently published data suggesting that the population of Spain could decline to about 31.3 million in 2050 from about 39.9 million now. According to the World Health Organization, Spain's fertility rate last year was 1.1, the lowest in Western Europe.
Many provinces in Italy's wealthy, well-educated north have rates well below that.
The rate in the province of Ferrara, which includes the city of Ferrara, has been under 0.9 for each of the years since 1986 that Italy's National Institute of Statistics kept track.
Ferrara officials talk about the dearth of young children in the streets, the closing of elementary schools over the last decade and a pervasive sense that something is missing.
"There's a lack of energy," Deputy Mayor Tiziano Tagliani said in a recent interview here. "The society is colder without children."
Nationwide, Italy's fertility rate has been so low for so long - under 1.5 since 1984 - that the country offers an especially good glimpse into the dimensions and dynamics of the trend.
For example, Italy now has the world's oldest population. The percentage of people 60 or older is 25, compared with 16 percent in the United States, according to the population division of the United Nations.
The division's experts project that by 2050, if current trends hold, 42 percent of Italy's population will be 60 or older.
Antonio Golini, a professor of demographics at the University of Rome, Sapienza, said that would be "unsustainable, from a cultural and even psychological point of view."
That sense of alarm was reflected in Pope John Paul II's first-ever address to the Italian Parliament in November. The pope said "the crisis of the birthrate" in Italy was a "grave threat that bears upon the future of this country."
In Italy, as in other West European countries, the low fertility rate is interwoven with an array of other issues - immigration, for one. While many people and many politicians in Europe would like to clamp down on the rising tide of new arrivals over the last decade, they may be forced to accept it, simply to fill jobs and maintain levels of productivity.
Europe stands out as the continent with the lowest fertility rates. The numbers are now starkest in East European countries like Bulgaria, Latvia and Ukraine, each of which had a rate of 1.1 in 2001, according to the World Health Organization. (Its figures sometimes differ slightly from those of individual countries, but provide a yardstick.)
But the trend hit Western Europe earlier, and has had more time to produce hand-wringing and soul-searching. Apart from welcoming more immigrants, no one knows precisely what to do.
Many governments have expanded tax breaks for parents, child care alternatives or maternity and paternity benefits, acknowledging that a high cost of living and more women in the work force can be obstacles to large families. In some of those countries, like France, the fertility rate has nudged slightly upward.
Spain is considering a variety of ways to address those obstacles: cheaper utility bills for large families; assistance for young couples who are trying to afford homes; the creation of hundreds of thousands of new preschools and nursery schools; and longer hours for existing schools, an accommodation for working parents.
Although the Italian government provides mothers with nearly full salary compensation for about a half-year of maternity leave, the city of Ferrara, like several other north Italian cities, added benefits that kick in after that period. They include cash supplements of about $350 a month for mothers who want to stay at home an additional nine months. Ferrara also has pumped millions of dollars into nursery schools and child care centers like the Blue Elephant.
But Italy's low fertility rate persists, suggesting that the reasons go well beyond the arithmetic of salaries and schedules.
"People are studying longer, and thus are finding work later, when there is work, and then are marrying later, which doesn't necessarily mean having a baby anymore," said Valerio Terra Abrami, head of the department of social statistics for Italy's National Institute of Statistics.
Contraception and abortion are more readily available. Divorce is more common.
Moreover, decades of prosperity have altered people's assumptions and expectations. Older people once poised to look after grandchildren now pursue other activities and travel more. As for would-be parents, their attachments to leisure time, conveniences and indulgences do not easily accommodate multiple children - or sometimes, for that matter, any children at all.
"It's never been at the top of my list," said Teresa Ginori, 41, a fashion magazine consultant who lives outside Milan. "It's never been in the top 200 things."
Ms. Ginori and many women she knows have never married, in part, she said, because of a facet of Italian life that she cited as one possible explanation for the especially low fertility rate here.
Many Italian men, she said, live with their mothers into their 30's. When they marry, they are not prepared to help out at home in ways that take pressure off women, especially if those women want to have children.
"Even the most open-minded guy - if you scratch with the nail a little bit, there's the mother who did everything for him," she said. "I hate the mothers of these men. These mothers are a disaster."
Parents also seem to feel that they owe more opportunities to the children they do have, a conviction that discourages large families.
That partly explained the prevalence of only children in Ferrara, where one-child parents at the Blue Elephant center mentioned siblings who had also stopped at one child. The center's coordinator, Monica Viaro, 37, has only one child, an 8-year-old son.
Ms. Andolfi, 32, who has a 3-year-old son, said a second child would limit her son and limit the baby.
She conceded that her family's definition of what it needed was expansive.
"The cellphones aren't enough and the televisions aren't enough," she said. "It's a little selfish."
Ms. Lenzi, 32, who is also part of a two-career couple, said she liked to read to her 3-year-old son, adding, "It doesn't make sense to have three just to tuck them in at night and say, `Ciao, stella,' and that's it."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Pope cautions against taking up arms
By Frances D´Emilio
ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 26, 2002
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021226-70353128.htm
VATICAN CITY - War must and can be avoided even in a world made fearful by terrorism, Pope John Paul II insisted in a Christmas message that stepped up the Vatican's campaign against a war in Iraq.
"May humanity accept the Christmas message of peace," he declared yesterday.
Thousands of tourists and pilgrims stood in a light drizzle at St. Peter's Square to hear the ailing pontiff deliver his annual Christmas Day message, "Urbi et Orbi" - Latin for "to the city and to the world."
They screamed and clapped in delight when John Paul, wearing gold-colored robes, was driven in a white, open-topped vehicle through the square, past a life-size Nativity creche and a towering Christmas tree.
The 82-year-old pontiff's voice sometimes trembled and his words often slurred as he read his speech from the central steps of St. Peter's Basilica.
"From the cave of Bethlehem there rises today an urgent appeal to the world not to yield to mistrust, suspicion and discouragement, even though the tragic reality of terrorism feeds uncertainties and fears," the pope said.
John Paul deplored the "senseless spiral of blind violence" in the Middle East and called on the world to "extinguish the ominous smoldering of a conflict which, with the joint efforts of all, can be avoided."
Although he did not mention Iraq by name, the pope's comments reflected the Vatican's widely known opposition to U.S. plans for a likely attack on Iraq.
When a U.S.-led coalition prepared to invade Afghanistan last year in response to the September 11 attacks, Vatican officials said there was a moral right to defend the common good against terrorism.
But in recent weeks, the Vatican has said repeatedly that Catholic teaching does not consider "preventive" strikes a justification for taking up arms.
The Bush administration insists Iraq is harboring weapons of mass destruction, and has been lobbying for international support for an attack.
----
Homeless people give Christmas check to cop
Around the Nation
December 26, 2002
Washington Times •
Combined dispatches and staff reports
NEW YORK - A police officer got a Christmas gift of $3,000 from homeless people who wanted to thank him for standing up for them.
Officer Eduardo Delacruz was suspended for 30 days without pay last month after he refused a sergeant's order to arrest a homeless man found sleeping in a parking garage.
In gratitude, organizations for the homeless put together the fund for the 37-year-old officer, his wife and their five children. Homeless people also contributed change scrounged from passers-by, money earned from recycling cans and bottles, and even portions of their welfare checks.
"We just wanted to thank him by contributing however we could," said Joe Bostic, one of 30 former and current homeless men and women who announced the gift. "And a lot of us gave quarters, nickels and dimes."
According to police, Officer Delacruz told his superiors in the department's Homeless Outreach Unit that he would not arrest a homeless man for trespassing on Nov. 22 because the man had nowhere else to go.
The man was arrested by another officer and pleaded guilty to trespassing.
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No Turning Back for China, Says Dissident
December 26, 2002
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-china-dissident.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - A prominent Chinese dissident freed this week vowed Thursday to keep fighting for reform while in exile and said there was no turning back for China as its people learned about democracy.
Xu Wenli, who arrived in New York Tuesday, said milestones such as China's 2001 entry into the World Trade Organization and its successful bid to host the 2008 Olympics showed China's transformation was inevitable.
``There is no turning back for Chinese society,'' Xu, 59, told Reuters in a telephone interview. ``There is a strong awakening of consciousness within Chinese society toward democracy, freedom and human rights.''
Xu, who has spent 16 years in jail since 1981, was released Tuesday on medical grounds and is expected to be treated in the United States for hepatitis B, contracted in prison three years ago. The release came less than a week after a visit to Beijing by a U.S. envoy who had pressed for his freedom.
Xu was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1998 for subversion after setting up the outlawed China Democracy Party. He was jailed from 1981 to 1993 for ``counterrevolution'' for his part in the 1979 Democracy Wall movement in which people posted calls for reform on a wall near Beijing's Forbidden City.
``China still has a long way to go before becoming a society ruled by law, but I'm optimistic about the future,'' said Xu, who had access to Chinese state media while in prison and was aware of economic changes sweeping the country.
``I will never give up, but relying on us alone is not enough,'' said Xu, referring to China's tiny band of dissidents.
His release was seen by analysts as a sign Beijing was eager to mend fences with Washington. But the release of Xu and two labor leaders in northeastern China on the same day came after a string of fresh dissident arrests in China in recent weeks.
CHECKS AND BALANCES
China needed checks and balances between the executive, legislative and judiciary branches of government, Xu said, adding that without such a system the cost of policy mistakes could be worse than corruption. ``Taxpayers are gradually awakening to their rights,'' he said.
The Communist Party has ruled China since winning a civil war in 1949. China has a separate legislature, judiciary and cabinet but government leaders are without exception members of the Communist Party. Critics say China's parliament is a rubber stamp and are skeptical of the judiciary's independence.
The 2.5 million-strong People's Liberation Army pledges unswerving loyalty to the party.
Xu's release came after U.S. human rights envoy Lorne Craner visited Beijing to press for his release and that of more than 200 prisoners believed to be held for political reasons.
Xu said he now hopes to spend time with his 55-year-old wife, He Xintong, and their 30-year-old daughter, Xu Jin. He met his daughter, a U.S. school teacher, for the first time in four years in Chicago, where he arrived from Beijing en route to New York.
``She lost her father's love when she was nine. I owe her a lot.''
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Opposition Resumes Protests in Venezuela
December 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Venezuela-Strike.html
CARACAS, Venezuela (AP) -- After a brief Christmas break, thousands of people renewed protests across Venezuela Thursday, the 25th day of a strike to force Hugo Chavez to call elections.
In Caracas, workers, journalists, business leaders, artists and politicians staged rallies under a new rallying cry: ``Freedom!''
Thousands of protesters demonstrated in the streets and at the headquarters of the state-owned oil monopoly Petroleos de Venezuela S.A, or PDVSA. Oil executives staged a rally shouting ``Not one step back!'' and ``We are not afraid!'' as speakers denounced government firings of striking oil workers and arrests of tanker crews.
The strike, which began Dec. 2, has shut most gasoline stations, factories and many stores, causing fuel and food shortages in this food-importing nation of 24 million.
The opposition wants Chavez to quit or call a nonbinding referendum in early 2003 -- demands the president has rejected. But late Thursday, government negotiator Nicolas Maduro said Chavez wouldn't stand in the way of the referendum if it's upheld by the courts.
In a first sign of unrest sparked by shortages, about 300 people from poor districts blocked a highway for two hours to demand propane cooking gas. ``We are desperate. We've been using charcoal and kerosene to cook for two weeks now. We can't stand it any more,'' said Faustino Gonzalez, a 59-year-old taxi driver.
Chavez's government is seeking food and fuel overseas.
Brazil's state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro shipped 520,000 barrels of gasoline to Venezuela. The tanker should arrive by the weekend, Brazilian officials said.
Members of the opposition Democratic Coordinator movement met with Brazil's ambassador Thursday to urge Brazil not to interfere in Venezuela's crisis by helping Chavez break the oil strike.
Venezuela will pay oil for food from the Dominican Republic, Agriculture Minister Efren Andrade said. The deal includes a rice shipment delivered Thursday by a Venezuelan navy vessel. Talks for milk and meat from Colombia are continuing.
One strike leader said that the opposition should consider ending the strike and focus instead on elections.
``The fundamental outcome we wanted, the president's resignation'' or his agreement to a referendum hasn't occurred, said Enrique Ochoa Antich, a leader of the Democratic Coordinator.
The strike has all but stopped exports from the world's fifth-biggest oil supplier, which usually provides 14 percent of U.S. oil imports. A tanker carrying 300,000 gallons of gasoline departed for Chile, a shipping company source said Thursday. Officials couldn't immediately be reached to explain why Venezuela shipped the gas when it needs it at home.
Fears that the strike will continue well into 2003 and possible war in Iraq sent oil prices above $32 a barrel, the highest they've been in two years. Some companies have asked the Bush administration to tap into the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
``This is a fight of a people who are demanding liberty!'' Timoteo Zambrano, an opposition negotiator at talks sponsored by the Organization of American States, proclaimed to deafening cheers by employees of Venezuela's oil monopoly.
``The international community cannot ask for the impossible'' -- call off the strike and resume oil exports, Zambrano said.
Opposition negotiator Americo Martin said government firings of oil workers would be brought up at the OAS talks, which resumed Thursday. But government negotiator Nicolas Maduro said the government wouldn't discuss the workers' status at the OAS talks.
PDVSA president Ali Rodriguez has acknowledged total exports for December were 2 million barrels -- compared to a pre-strike average of about 3 million barrels a day.
Rodriguez also said Venezuela will re-establish domestic gas supplies in January -- a goal dismissed as impossible by PDVSA executives who argue that 35,000 skilled and striking workers cannot simply be replaced or that a giant oil company can simply restart operations.
Oil workers are ignoring a Supreme Court injunction ordering them to work until the court decides if the strike is legal.
Venezuela's opposition delivered 2 million signatures demanding the nonbinding vote. The national elections council scheduled the vote for Feb. 2 and is updating voter lists.
Pro-Chavez legislators have challenged the vote's constitutionality in the Supreme Court. But during OAS talks Thursday, the government agreed not stand in the way of the referendum -- including not withholding funds -- if the court upholds it, said Maduro.
Chavez, whose six-year term runs to January 2007, says early elections require changing Venezuela's constitution, a process that must be done in the Chavez-dominated National Assembly. The assembly also would deal with another proposal: reducing presidential terms to four years.
The president has welcomed the possibility of a binding referendum on his presidency in August 2003, or halfway into his term, as permitted by the constitution. Opponents cite a constitutional clause allowing Venezuelans not to recognize a government they consider undemocratic.
--------
French Protest U.S. Battle Group
December 26, 2002
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-France-US-Protest.html
MARSEILLE, France (AP) -- With chants of ``no blood for oil,'' about 1,000 people marched through this southern French port city on Thursday, protesting the passage of a U.S. Navy battle group and the prospect of an American-led war against Iraq.
Dozens of police kept order during the rally, which was peaceful even though demonstrators briefly shouted at a small group of U.S. sailors.
The battle group, led by aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman, has nearly a dozen ships with 8,000 sailors and Marines, is expected to end a five-day stop in Marseille on Friday. The flotilla is making a scheduled move to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf.
Police and rally organizers estimated that about 1,000 marchers took part.
Bernard Genet, a spokesman for anti-war group Understand and Act, one of the rally's organizers, criticized France's policy of serving as a stop-off point for the U.S. flotilla.
The French government has vowed to honor its international obligations if Iraq is found to be flouting U.N. resolutions forcing it to disarm. But France has repeatedly said everything must be done to avoid war.
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