Archive By Date | Today's Links to Search By
Activists' News | Nuclear | Depleted Uranium | Military | Police
Alternative Energy Etc. | From Subscribers
NUCLEAR
Review: "The Fire This Time" CD Set Extinguishes Media Myths
Nuclear Waste Dump Partly Secured
Group Says Iran Has 2 Undisclosed Nuclear Laboratories
Tehran defies US with nuclear program
Russia vows to complete Iran nuclear power plant despite US pressure
Bush may take first step to Tehran regime change
Rebels say Iran has two nuke plants
Iraq May Have Destroyed Weapons Before War - U.S.
False Leads Stall Weapons Search in Iraq
U.S. Rebuffs North Korean Call for Bilateral Talks
New Breed of Missile Silos Put in Alaska
GAO Faults Agency on Space - Based Missile Sensor
U.S. to Build Power Plants in Russia
"Do as I say, not as I do" Nuclear Policy
US nukes can be adapted for use against enemy
The Dark Shadow of Indian Point (5 Letters)
Back in Political Forefront
IRAQ: Unease Grows in Washington Over Fruitless Weapons Search
Bush quietly signs bill to allow federal borrowing to grow
MILITARY
RWANDA - Genocide survivors vote on constitution
Congo War Toll Soars as U.N. Pleads for Aid
Ft. Detrick Unearths Hazardous Surprises
'Gulf war syndrome' soldiers threaten legal action
British Soldiers Allege Second 'Gulf War Syndrome'
Defense Firms Consolidate As War Goes High-Tech
Iran Warns U.S. Not to Interfere in Its Affairs
Iran Says It Made Al Qaeda Arrests
Iraqi top cop fired for Ba'ath ties
Iraq Attack Shows Postwar Danger for U.S.
2 American Soldiers Killed in New Violence in Iraq
Sharon vows to end Israeli 'occupation'
The Mideast Thicket Continues to Test Bush's Leadership
At the DMZ, troops fight a 'ghost war'
Sunni Muslim authority decries suicide bombings
Military increases efforts against separatists
PENTAGON: SPACE IS FOR AMERICANS ONLY
Europe to launch Galileo space program
Securing Europe's access to space, now and for the future
Bombing by Numbers
U.S. troops' role in Iraq likened to occupation of postwar Japan
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Polygraphs: Worse Than Worthless
ACTIVISTS
Anti-nuclear protest at air base
Democracy activists sentenced to prison
A Time for Healing
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Review: "The Fire This Time" CD Set Extinguishes Media Myths
Maureen Clare Murphy,
Electronic Iraq
27 May 2003
http://electroniciraq.net/news/839.shtml
Cover of the CD set -
http://electronicIraq.net/uploads/thefirethistime.jpg.
My guess is that when Grant Wakefield, peace activist and creator of the two CD project The Fire This Time, began his multimedia quest to document the sanctions of Iraq, he didn't anticipate or desire that the devastating sanctions would instead be swapped for a potentially equally disastrous long-term U.S. military occupation of Iraq. Unfortunately, this is the situation that exists today, after the anti-climactic U.N. announcement that the sanctions would be dropped and that the U.S. occupation is "legal."
Wakefield's four-year long endeavor, which culminated in the two CD set and website www.firethistime.org, aims to the dispel myths and misconceptions regarding the Gulf War and sanctions put forth by the U.S. and British governments and enforced by the popular news media. Wakefield and co-writer Miriam Ryle, who made the documentary film Voices from Iraq, traveled to Iraq "intending to update her documentary," as Wakefield writes on his website.
In addition to capturing "life in and around Baghdad," the pair conducted several interviews, including one with Hans Von Sponeck, U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Iraq. Von Sponeck "went on record for the first time to say that he too had come to believe that the sanctions 'experiment' was over and, furthermore ... accuse[d] Britain and America of manipulating the sanctions to their own agenda and at the cost of Iraq's civilian population."
However, when Wakefield and Ryle submitted their unedited footage to the BBC and Channel 4 they were rejected without an apology. They were told by BBC World that "'We do not accept any rant pieces'" and asked by Channel 4, "'Did you film any executions?'"
With no media outlets willing to air their work, Wakefield and Ryle decided to make an audio CD. Happily, a CD might better accomplish the duo's goals, considering that the CD format, allowing for easy reproduction and distribution, may get into more hands than a film or video documentary, which are generally more expensive and difficult to copy. Immensely benefitting from meticulous research, the first CD in the set consists of spoken word, which narrates the politics and history that led to the sanctions on Iraq, coupled with ambient music, and countless sampled statements by politicians, media pundits, and journalists.
The music, which on the first CD responds to and complements the narration and samples, is strong enough to merit a CD of its own, featuring both highly addictive electronica melodies and some more contemplative ambient recordings. The instrumental CD is a wise marketing choice as well; the instrumental tracks by popular groups such as Orbital, Aphex Twin, and Higher Intelligence Agency will probably attract those without the attention span, or interest, to listen to a 77-minute long dissection of politics and the popular media in regard to the sanctions on Iraq.
My copy of the second disc I'm sure will soon gain many scratches and fingerprints, the symptoms (at least in my CD collection), of a successful and frequently played album. The first CD is equally as successful, although its function is entirely different. However, I'm not exactly sure whom Wakefield's audience will be. Considering American culture, and how what is visually visceral is king, it is hard to imagine having a spoken word CD having a very broad audience. Wakefield probably realizes this, and so the narration gives way to well-edited samples of disturbing, ironic, and dumbfounding statements from politicians. These include Madeline Albright's infamous response to the question of whether the deaths of thousands of children is worth continuing the sanctions, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price...we think the price is worth it," and George H. W. Bush declaring, "This will not be...another Vietnam. ... We will not permit our troops to have their hands tied behind their backs. And I pledge to you there will not be any murky ending."
Wakefield goes way back in history to counter the pre-Gulf War American impression that Iraq is just a barren desert, and that this makes it okay to bomb. He states, "In the prelude to the Gulf War it was easy to think that Iraq had only just been invented. That there was nothing much to say about it as a country; that there was nothing much there to bomb." Wakefield reminds us what every art history student and scholar is told from the beginning of their studies, that Mesopotamia, now modern Iraq, was the "land where all written history began" and that "whilst Europe was populated with Stone Age tribes, the people of Mesopotamia were living in towns, and those towns had libraries."
Quickly fast forwarding to the 20th century, in between George H. W. Bush lamenting that he's frustrated about the propaganda campaign coming out of Baghdad that accuses the U.S. of striking civilian targets during the Gulf War and a U.S. official assuring, "We're doing out best to abide by the Geneva Convention," are reports by European broadcasters informing that "Iraq's infrastructure has been bombed again and again." Indeed, on another track, a U.S. talking head asks us to "Imagine Iraq like a human body ... what happens if you sever their spinal cord? They can't function...right?"
On track nine, entitled "Say Hello to Allah," a British official says, "we'll bomb them 'til they're not there anymore." The fast beats and distorted guitar feedback of Aphex Twin's music further pushes the tension between the deceptively optimistic, testosterone-fueled statements of U.S. and British military personnel and those of shell shocked journalists who report that:
"The Iraqis were sitting ducks...it was apocalyptic...in this inferno vehicles exploded and were ripped up by small arms fire...in the panic of the attack tanks and cars were crashing into each other...thousands and thousands of Iraqi vehicles all the way up the road...vehicles lie scattered and destroyed with bodies along the road-side...many too badly charred ever to be identified...we found a scene of carnage"
Not only is the CD very educational, but Wakefield's website archives a wealth of information as well. Numerous documents exist on the site, such as a list products banned from import into Iraq (including baby food and toy balls), a list of corporations that armed Iraq, and several transcriptions of speeches made by and interviews of U.N. and U.S. officials regarding the Gulf War.
The most troubling and disturbing of all of the sections on the website is the one called "The Human Cost." Photographs of children and fetuses with extreme birth defects, and conjectured diagnoses, are shown. Wakefield believes that the depleted uranium utilized by the U.S. military during the Gulf War are to blame for the sharp spike in birth deformations and cancer cases in Iraqi children. Of course, the sanctions prevented Iraqi hospitals to providing appropriate medial treatment, contributing to hundreds of thousands of child deaths. In addition to providing pictures of Iraqi children who are born without eyes, noses, and mouths, and with their internal organs outside of their bodies, Wakefield includes a few pictures of children of U.S. soldiers who have tragic deformities as well.
Sections devoted to providing information regarding depleted uranium, the targeting of Iraqi civilians, infrastructure, and agriculture are also present. Additionally, the entire script of the CD is included; quotations drawing from a multitude of sources are useful for anyone interested in learning more about the situation in Iraq. This website should be bookmarked by journalists, historians, and concerned citizens alike because, as Wakefield knows, mass education is the first step in counteracting the U.S. government's campaign of mass deception.
Related Links # The Fire This Time website www.firethistime.org
-------- europe
Nuclear Waste Dump Partly Secured
The Baltic Times,
May 8, 2003
By Aleksei Gunter (RRF 27 may-03)
"Michael Kerjman" <mkwrk2@yahoo.com>
The first phase of cleanup at the radioactive waste pond near the town of Sillamae has been completed, allowing residents to breathe a bit more easily until experts manage to complete the containment effort. Shortly after gaining independence, Estonian officials discovered previously classified information on the pond, bringing to the public's attention the waste storage facility of the uranium processing plant in the northeastern town of Sillamae for the first time. According to Soviet-era documents, the sludge-filled lake was built with little precaution and has become a serious environmental threat.
Sillamae, set about 190 kilometers from Tallinn in the problem-stricken northeastern region of Estonia, has about 19,000 residents. From 1945 to the end of the Soviet period the military uranium processing plant, the largest enterprise in town, produced uranium for the U.S.S.R.'s nuclear program. The plant's waste pond which served as the storage area for unnecessary by-products such as uranium tailings - the mildly radioactive bits of ore left after processing - became known in 1992 as the Sillamae uranium pond. When Soviet troops left the country in 1994, experts received access to the waste area and learned that some 12 million tons of uranium tailings mixed with oil-shale ashes were being kept in the shallow lake.
Jan Vrijen, an expert from Karuweeg BV waste management consultancy, said the Sillamae case was a difficult one. "The amount of waste here was quite significant, and the way the Soviet military built the tailings pond was completely terrible," he said. "It looks like they decided to do it as cheaply as possible. As a result we have a waste storage built without the necessary security layer beneath it." Accumulated from 1948 to 1990, the waste has taken on a clayish consistency and originally took up an area of nearly 50 hectares set about 50 meters from the seashore and only a few hundred meters from Sillamae itself.
The work on remediation of the poisonous tailings pond that used to emanate radon, a deadly radioactive gas, started only in November 2000. Tonis Kaasik, director of Okosil, a branch of Silmet, the company created after the 1997 privatization of the plant, said the current work consists of covering the area with permanent cover and soil. "The tailings pond contains many metals, yet it is impossible to recycle or re-use them." The amounts, however, are staggering. "There are some 800 tons of pure uranium and 40,000 tons of aluminum in there," Kaasik said.
The engineering solution for the tailing pond is unique because the Cambrian clay platform beneath it had to be taken into account. A double row of reinforced concrete piles reaching deep into the ground will keep the hill from slowly slipping into the sea. In addition, a special drainage system will take away most of the water so that it will not mix with the waste. According to Kaasik, the isolated tailings pond construction will last for at least 1,000 years.
While the total project will cost about 20 million euros, and the Estonian government has allocated only eight million euros for the cleanup, with the rest of the funding coming from the EU's PHARE program, the Nordic Environment Finance Corporation, and Scandinavian countries.
John Kjaer, head of the European Commission delegation to Estonia, said the Sillamae tailings pond is a good example of how human activity can be environmentally dangerous. "However, this was not a challenge Estonia had to face alone, and today it is one of the most important and the largest PHARE projects in the environmental sector," he said. "EU taxpayers' money have been spent well." Kjaer added that Estonia can rely on the EU for help both before and after Estonia joins the EU.
"ISPA funds are available before the EU accession, and cohesion funds will become available after that," he explained. Allan Gromov, vice chancellor of the ministry of environment, said in 2006 the old waste area will look like a big green hill covered with trees. "We used the most suitable way to tackle the problem. It is better not to touch any nuclear waste storage but to secure it from the outer world," he said. According to Gromov, the EU has given about 950 million kroons (60 million euro) to various environmental project in Estonia since 1991.
-------- iran
Group Says Iran Has 2 Undisclosed Nuclear Laboratories
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
May 27, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/international/middleeast/27IRAN.html
WASHINGTON, May 26 - An Iranian opposition group said today that it had evidence of two previously undisclosed uranium enrichment facilities west of Tehran - information that, if proven, might add to the Bush administration's argument that Iran is violating its commitment not to produce nuclear weapons.
The group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran, an umbrella for Iranian opposition organizations, said the facilities were two small laboratories that operate as satellite plants to a larger nuclear facility in Natanz, in central Iran. The group said the facilities were discovered by the People's Mujahedeen, a resistance group that brought the Natanz plant to the attention of international weapons inspectors.
"The Iranian regime is working on other outlets to circumvent international supervision and international monitoring," a council official, Ali Safavi, said in an interview. He said one site had already installed several centrifuges for processing uranium, and called on international inspectors to scrutinize the facilities.
"This organization has been extremely on the mark in the past," said a senior United Nations official who is familiar with the situation in Iran, adding, "They are a group that seems to be privy to very solid and insider information."
However, People's Mujahedeen has stirred some controversy within the Bush administration. In a gesture toward Iran, the administration has classified the organization as a terrorist group. However, American military officials have also signed a cease-fire with People's Mujahedeen fighters based in Iraq.
Iran has insisted that its intention is to make fuel for a civilian nuclear power program. But in recent months American officials have grown increasingly concerned that Iran is developing a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which it has signed.
Administration officials are now trying to build international support for an official finding from the International Atomic Energy Agency, the branch of the United Nations that monitors peaceful nuclear programs.
Mr. Safavi said his organization, which plans to make its information public on Tuesday, had already provided details to the atomic energy agency, whose board is meeting in June at agency headquarters in Vienna to review Iran's compliance with the treaty.
A spokeswoman for the agency, Melissa Fleming, declined to comment on the People's Mujahedeen's allegations. "We are not commenting at all on the situation in Iran because we are in the midst of a very sensitive inspection," she said. "We are going there. We are taking samples and we are doing analysis."
The State Department also declined comment. An independent expert, Gary Milhollin, director of The Wisconsin Project, an arms control research group, said, "I think the Bush administration ought to take it seriously."
"They ought to ask the I.A.E.A. to ask Iran for either a denial or a confirmation," he said, "and if the Iranians confirm it, then the I.A.E.A. ought to ask to be allowed to see both sites."
In the interview today, Mr. Safavi said the two laboratories were intended to function as a backup to the Natanz site in case that facility were to come under military attack. "These sites will allow the mullahs to continue their uranium weapons production," he said, describing them as "smaller, dispersed sites used for uranium enrichment."
The two laboratories, Mr. Safavi said, are both in the Hasthgerd region, near Karaj, about 25 miles west of Tehran. He said construction at the sites began in 2000 under strict security.
Mr. Safavi also provided a list of eight businesses that he described as "front companies" set up by the Atomic Energy Organization, the branch of the Iranian government that oversees nuclear activities, to conduct secret weapons work.
Mr. Milhollin, the arms control expert, said it would make sense for Iran to build satellite nuclear facilities, "because of the risk that Israel or somebody else could bomb the sites that are known."
But he said it might be difficult for the Bush administration to prove that the Iranian program violates the nuclear nonproliferation pact. The pact requires that countries make their nuclear sites available to international inspectors, but disclosure is not required until the sites contain the fissile material that explodes in nuclear weapons. Countries that are in the early stages of building nuclear facilities can legally keep those sites secret.
----
Tehran defies US with nuclear program
By Mark Forbes in Tehran and agencies
May 27 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/05/26/1053801342455.html
Iran has vowed to continue its nuclear program and is demanding that sanctions against it should be lifted before it will agree to international inspections of its nuclear facilities.
After talks with the Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, President Mohammad Khatami said Iran had the right to develop a nuclear energy program.
President Khatami said there were no plans to develop nuclear weapons, and he rejected Mr Downer's call to allow in inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
But he agreed to firm action against al-Qaeda.
He also supported the introduction of a democratic, stable government in Iraq, easing fears that Iran would help to set up a neighbouring Islamic state.
Mr Downer said he told Mr Khatami that the Riyadh bombings could have been prevented if senior al-Qaeda figures in Iran had been arrested. He also said Iran could not underestimate the determination of the West to stop terrorism.
"I said the same thing in relation to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," Mr Downer said.
"These issues of terrorism and WMD are the major issues for most of the world today and we want them resolved. It would be unacceptable if Iran moved to develop a nuclear weapons capability."
Mr Downer said he urged Iran to sign the international nuclear inspections protocol to "reassure the international community of its peaceful intentions".
He issued a veiled warning that "what happened in Iraq is an illustration the world has changed, and changed big time".
Mr Khatami wanted assurances that "we can be assisted in being given the rights for peaceful use of nuclear energy".
Iran's Foreign Minister, Kamal Kharrazi, said sanctions should be lifted because Iran has "a natural right to make use of modern technology".
The United States has expressed fears that Iran's development of a uranium enrichment plant could be the first step in developing nuclear weapons.
In February Iran said it had discovered and extracted uranium to produce nuclear energy, but it insisted its nuclear power program was strictly for civilian use.
It said it had invited IAEA inspectors to verify the facilities.
Iran, which is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, rejected claims that it was trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
"We are ready to accept inspectors to check our [nuclear] activities in order to reveal the lies told by others," Mr Khatami said on February 2.
In his meeting with Mr Downer, Mr Khatami attacked terrorism and US unilateralism. "We stand in need of peace and security in the world and this cannot be established by resorting to force," he said.
Iran has arrested many al-Qaeda figures, he said.
The US is pressing Iran to co-operate with the investigation into the recent bombings of foreign compounds in Saudi Arabia and to hand over operatives of al-Qaeda believed by US intelligence officials to have been working in Iranian territory.
----
Russia vows to complete Iran nuclear power plant despite US pressure
Tuesday, 27-May-2003
Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)
http://www.prolog.net/webnews/wed/cg/Qrussia-iran.RfHu_DyR.html
MOSCOW, May 27 (AFP) - Russia said Tuesday it intended to complete the construction of Iran's first nuclear power plant despite expressing concern about Tehran's potential nuclear ambitions.
Russia "is satisfied with the pace of construction of the Bushehr plant, and is confident that the launch of its first bloc will be completed on time," the Prime Tass news agency quoted Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev as saying.
His comments came less than a week before a key summit in Saint Petersburg between Russian President Vladimir Putin and his US counterpart George W. Bush.
US officials earlier said that Russia's controversial cooperation with Iran -- to which Washington strongly objects -- will be high on the agenda of the June 1 talks.
In February, the United States renewed accusations that Iran was using its Bushehr light-water reactor to secretly advance a nuclear weapons program and called once again on Russia to stop cooperating on the project.
And even while pressing ahead with the Bushehr project, a senior Russian official said Tuesday that he had expressed his concerns about Iran's military program during talks with the country's ambassador to Moscow.
"There was special attention paid to the present problem of the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction," the Russian foreign ministry said in a statement following Deputy Foreign Minister Georgy Mamedov's meeting with Iran's Gholamreza Shafei.
The statement said Mamedov "expressed concern about the existence of some serious questions that have not been cleared up by Iran concerning its nuclear program."
He added that Moscow was keenly awaiting a report on Iran's nuclear activities that is due to be published by the UN's nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in mid-June.
Russia still insists that its nuclear aid to Iran is for purely civilian purposes, but admitted last month that it was concerned that Tehran may be enriching uranium with a view to developing nuclear weapons.
Iran in February revealed that it was building an array of facilities to exploit uranium deposits which would make it self-sufficient in nuclear fuel.
However the construction of Bushehr has faced several delays.
In August, Rumyantsev announced that Bushehr would begin operating in June 2004 -- nearly six months later than originally scheduled.
Rumyantsev conceded on Tuesday that "there has been a correction in the construction schedule," but did not specify when he though the first Bushehr bloc may go on line.
He stressed during a meeting with Iran's deputy atomic energy minister Asadollah Saburi: "We will continue to fulfill our obligations despite the fact that our views on this do not correspond with those of Washington."
A high-placed US official in Moscow said earlier this month that Rumyantsev had given his assurances that Russia would not construct any more blocs at Bushehr after completing construction of the first one.
Rumyantsev added Tuesday that Iran's atomic energy minister Gholam-Reza Aqazadeh would visit Moscow in June.
----
Bush may take first step to Tehran regime change
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Tuesday May 27, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,12858,964026,00.html
Bush administration officials today look set to turn up the heat on Iran at a meeting to consider whether to break off diplomatic contacts as a possible first step to regime change in Tehran.
The gathering was expected to give a wider airing to calls from the Pentagon for destabilising Iran - a course of action so far opposed by the state department, Britain and other governments.
But a steady drip of allegations from Pentagon officials, including the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, about possible links between Iran and al-Qaida, and reports that Iran has intensified its nuclear programme, mean it can no longer be ignored.
In the past few weeks a widening debate on policy towards Tehran, conducted within the administration and in public, has freshened memories of President George Bush's speech in which he listed Iraq, Iran and North Korea as the "axis of evil".
In comments reminiscent of the public discourse on Iraq before the war, US officials have begun to speak of a link between Iran and al-Qaida. They accuse Iran of harbouring the cell that carried out the synchronised bombings in Saudi Arabia this month.
Some of the rhetoric appears aimed at pressing for an Iran more compliant with US interests. The US has called for Iran to work closely with intelligence agencies investigating the Saudi bombings, and to turn over suspects in Iranian custody. But the Iranian ambassador to Washington, Javad Zarif, told ABC television at the weekend that that was unlikely to happen.
-----
Rebels say Iran has two nuke plants
By Anwar Iqbal,
May 27, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20030527-062343-4286r.htm
WASHINGTON -- An Iranian opposition group said Tuesday that Iran is secretly building two new nuclear plants and urged the Bush administration to overthrow the regime in Tehran if it wants peace in the Middle East.
Soona Samsani, the U.S. representative for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, said that despite international pressure Tehran has continued its drive to acquire nuclear weapons and is constructing two new uranium enrichment plants.
Both the plants are located in the northern Iranian villages of Lashkar-Abad and Ramandeh, about 40 kilometers (24 miles) west of the capital, Tehran. They are about 5 kilometers (3 miles) from each other.
"Both have been under the direct supervision of Reza Aghazadeh, the director-general of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization," Samsani told a news briefing in Washington.
Last August, the council made headlines when it revealed the existence of two secret Iranian nuclear facilities in Natanz and Arak. The claim was initially dismissed as unauthentic but later U.S. and other governments also acknowledged the existence of these plants.
The U.S. government, however, refuses to deal with the council because it is controlled by an Iraq-based group, the People's Mujahedin, which the State Department regards as a terrorist organization.
The council also presented a written report about the two new plants, along with a map detailing their location and other information.
The Lashkar-Abad plant was being built inside a sprawling grove known to local residents as a "presidential orchard." It contains several buildings housing uranium enrichment centrifuges and has a surface area of 80 hectares (31 square miles).
So far some 4,000 to 5,000 square meters (10 to 12 acres) are under construction. A wall has been built around the complex to hide it from the passersby.
In a hall, which measures 50 meters by 30 meters (55 yards by 33 yards), several centrifuge machines have been installed for testing.
The hall is similar to the laboratory Iran has built at another location called Natanz that has 1,000 centrifuge machines. The new plant, however, is smaller and has fewer machines.
The nearby Ramandeh enrichment site is hidden inside several local warehouses.
Both the sites, the council said, work as substations for the main site in Natanz in nuclear enrichment process.
They can also be used as substitutes for Natanz in case of military strikes or any interruption in its operations.
The group produced several maps of the area and provided the address of the Noor-Afza-Gostar Company allegedly running the plants. But it offered no photographs or other visual evidence to prove its claim.
The council also issued a list of front companies that work for the Iranian Atomic Energy Organization. They included Hasteh, Kavoshyar, Energy Novin, Novin Puneh, Mesbah Energy, Kala Electric, Tavan Gostaar and Noor-Afza-Gostar.
Another council representative, Alireza Jafarzadeh, said Iran had purchased the centrifuge technology from other countries while also had built some of it at home. He did not name the countries Iran had acquired this technology from but said it was a known fact that Iran was getting external support for its nuclear program.
The group also urged the Bush administration to over throw the regime in Tehran if it wants peace in the Middle East, and offered to help bring about such a regime change.
The offer came hours after the White House said it would continue to bring pressure on Tehran to stop supporting al-Qaida.
"Iran has the most sophisticated terrorist regime in the region," Jafarzadeh told the briefing. "It is time for the U.S. policy to be decisive and firm against the Iranian regime, if it wants peace in the region."
The council officials did not call for a direct U.S. military action against Iran but said the new U.S. policy should recognize the right of the Iranian people to resist and overthrow the repressive regime.
Jaferzadeh said the "appeasement" policy of the Clinton administration could not prevent the regime from making weapons of mass destruction. The Iranian regime, he said, already has chemical and biological weapons and is close to acquiring nuclear weapons as well.
"The appeasement policy did not work because there are no moderates in the regime to be appeased," he said.
Iranian government officials strongly deny the allegation that they are making nuclear weapons, saying that their program is strictly for peaceful purposes.
They also deny sheltering members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terror network.
President Bush has dubbed Iran part of an "axis of evil" and accused the regime in Tehran of sponsoring terrorism and developing nuclear arms.
-------- iraq / inspections
Iraq May Have Destroyed Weapons Before War - U.S.
Tue May 27,
(Reuters)
By Grant McCool
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20030527/ts_nm/iraq_rumsfeld_weapons_dc
NEW YORK - Iraq may have destroyed its purported chemical and biological weapons before the U.S.-led invasion in March, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said on Tuesday in an effort to explain why none had been found.
President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair cited their belief that Iraq had banned weapons of mass destruction as the main reason for the March 20 invasion that ousted President Saddam Hussein's government.
Rumsfeld told the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations think-tank he did not know why Iraq had not used chemical weapons against the invaders as Washington had predicted it would.
He said the speed of U.S. advance may have caught Iraq by surprise, but added: "It is also possible that they decided that they would destroy them prior to a conflict."
Rumsfeld told his audience of foreign policy analysts, diplomats and business leaders that he suspected "we'll find out a lot more information as we go along and keep interrogating people."
Rumsfeld said Iraq was as large as California and search teams had only been working there seven weeks. He said there were hundreds of suspected sites to investigate.
"It will take time," said Rumsfeld.
On May 13, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, also raised the possibility that Iraq had destroyed its weapons stocks.
"I just don't know whether it was all destroyed years ago -- I mean, there's no question that there were chemical weapons years ago -- whether they were destroyed right before the war, (or) whether they're still hidden," Petraeus said.
MOBILE LABORATORIES
Rumsfeld said U.S. intelligence agents had confirmed that two trailers found in northern Iraq were mobile biological weapons laboratories. No actual biological weapons were found on either trailer, U.S. officials have said.
The Pentagon was working with the Central Intelligence Agency and other U.S. intelligence-gathering agencies to assess U.S. information obtained before the war and compare it with what has been found since, Rumsfeld said.
But he insisted there were no disagreements between agencies.
"We are looking at, before the conflict started, the kinds of things that we can benchmark," Rumsfeld said.
The defense secretary, who wrote in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday that Washington would prevent a "remake of Iraq in Iran's image," said Iran was "being unhelpful today with respect to Iraq."
"My personal view is that I'm still amazed at how fast it went from the Shah of Iran to the clerics, to the ayatollah," Rumsfeld said.
"Maybe we'll be favorably surprised some day that it will go back to something ... where the people of that country will have a broader voice and an opportunity to affect their lives, which clearly they're restricted from doing."
----
False Leads Stall Weapons Search in Iraq
May 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Bad-Tips.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- The quarry was intriguing: secret bunkers filled with chemical weapons near a Baghdad runway -- a sure bet, according to an airport worker. So an enthusiastic team of U.S. and British arms experts, lugging a shovel and ground-penetrating radar, went to work.
But after two hours in 105-degree heat, it became clear that despite a few pieces of broken concrete and scattered scrap metal, there was nothing suspicious hidden beneath the earth.
The Bush administration, searching for the unconventional weapons it is convinced that Saddam Hussein recently had, believes a successful search depends on information from locals who may know where the arms are hidden.
But as weapons searchers are forced to rely more and more on ``human intelligence,'' they are falling prey to false leads and snipe hunts from locals eager to help -- or to reap the reward money the United States is offering to anyone with information on weapons of mass destruction.
``The human intelligence has been massively problematic,'' said Lance Corp. David Reed, part of a two-man British team that operates a high-tech radar system which can see images 16 feet below the surface.
The shift toward human intelligence -- as opposed to using data gathered electronically -- comes as 10 weeks of searches, based mostly on U.S. leads, have failed to turn up any chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in Iraq.
The CIA and other intelligence agencies are reviewing the accuracy of information they supplied to the administration before the mid-March invasion of Iraq, said a senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Col. Tim Madere, the top officer for unconventional weapons with the Army's V Corps, said the tip had ``a lot of potential.'' But, preparing his troops, he reminded them of a similar episode a week earlier at a girls' school.
``We went there on supposedly good intelligence,'' he said, ``but it turned out to be nothing.''
The latest mission, Madere explained to his 10 chemical experts, ``was based on a walk-in who said he knew where chemical weapons were buried. He gave us a general grid coordinate and description, and when we went out there the other day it looked suspicious.''
The suspicious site -- a wide heap of dirt piled 8 feet high -- stood out among the flat fields and runways around the airport. Several pieces of concrete, some plastic and scrap metal were nearby.
Finding nothing, he suggested the Iraqis may have purposely engaged in deception. Offers of up to $25,000 in reward money also could prompt some Iraqis to stretch their stories.
In any case, Madere said U.S. officials would go back to the airport worker for more information before digging further.
Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Monday that it was a matter of time before weapons of mass destruction were found. He said chances for success were improving as U.S. forces capture more members of Saddam's ousted regime.
``Given time, given the number of prisoners now that we're interrogating, I'm confident that we're going to find weapons of mass destruction,'' Myers said.
But commanders on the ground say top regime members now in custody are continuing to insist that Iraq had no such weapons before the war. Officers and soldiers involved in the search have also complained about the quality of U.S. intelligence leads they have been given.
Myers told NBC``s ``Today'' show he has ``high confidence in the intelligence data that we had before we went into Iraq.''
The stories of false leads provided by Iraqis seem to be endless as search teams are sent around the country to follow up information from sources they don't know and can't verify. The teams are also conducting their own interviews with Iraqis believed to know about the country's former weapons programs.
After visiting more than 20 sites based on human intelligence tips, Reed said he had found no evidence of any of the underground bunkers or tunnels Iraq had been suspected of having.
At the girls' school last week, Reed's equipment also turned up no signs of the underground facilities that school administrators believed were hidden there.
But the teams decided to dig up the area anyway because the story was so compelling: Iraqi soldiers had come at night, poured concrete into a basement room and left.
``We felt bad about the mess, so we're going to help them,'' Madere said. Two days ago, troops filled the hole they'd dug with a new septic tank.
-------- korea
U.S. Rebuffs North Korean Call for Bilateral Talks
Tue May 27, 2003
(Reuters)
http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2827401
WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell on Tuesday rebuffed a North Korean call for bilateral talks on its suspected nuclear arms program and said Washington wants to address the matter in multilateral talks.
Over the weekend North Korea said it would be willing to hold multilateral talks apparently including South Korea and Japan but only after one-on-one talks with the United States, something Washington has strenuously opposed.
"I've been reading those statements and we always examine closely whatever they say, but we are still committed to multilateral talks, expanded multilateral talks, if there are going to be future talks the way we want to do it," Powell told reporters.
The United States, North Korea and China held three-way talks on the issue in Beijing last month during which U.S. officials say Pyongyang told them it possesses nuclear weapons, an admission that raised tensions on the Korean Peninsula.
The United States has insisted on multilateral talks in part because it believes it has little chance of persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions unless Beijing uses its economic influence to pressure Pyongyang.
-------- missile defense
New Breed of Missile Silos Put in Alaska
$500 Million Construction Project Readies First Installation for Ballistic Interceptors
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41901-2003May26?language=printer
FORT GREELY, Alaska -- On a barren Alaskan field shorn of the spruces and poplars that once crowded it, construction crews now churn up tons of dirt, carving 80-foot-deep holes for missile silos and erecting about a dozen state-of-the-art military command and support facilities.
It is here that the Bush administration plans to install a vanguard force of rocket-propelled interceptors for defending the United States against ballistic missile attack. Racing against a deadline 16 months away, the $500 million construction effort has many moving parts that must mesh tightly for the schedule to hold.
During a recent site visit, giant cranes could be seen starting to lower long steel cylinders into silo holes to contain the missile interceptors that are still in development. Workers climbed in and out of deep trenches that cut across the missile field, laying three miles of concrete tunnels to insulate water pipes against the cold.
Other crews poured concrete panels for encasing buildings. The buildings are further lined with plates of steel -- all part of a reinforced architecture intended to protect against enemy attack, earthquakes and electromagnetic waves from high-altitude nuclear blasts.
All in all, construction site managers have identified about 13,000 activities that need to be completed for the antimissile system to be up and running by Sept. 30, 2004, the date set by President Bush. In the nearby town of Delta Junction, population 840, residents regard the construction project with a mixture of awe and trepidation. The missile field itself is shielded from public view, located well off the two-lane road that runs to town about five miles away. But with several hundred construction workers camped in the area and trucks rambling past the farms, ranches and forests of the Alaskan interior, the project is difficult to ignore.
Property values around Delta Junction have soared, and the Pentagon has invested $18 million in several town projects, including a new landfill, school, recreation center and library addition. Local authorities expect more federal money in the coming year.
The economic boost has raised hopes in an area whose fortunes have long been tied to the U.S. military. The missile complex is rising on the grounds of an old military base, established during World War II as part of the Alaska Highway project. Fort Greely eventually became a cold-weather test site for the Army, but in 1995 it was deemed dispensable and ordered shut as part of a series of Pentagon base closings.
The decision triggered an economic slump in Delta Junction and set off a bitter town debate over whether to turn the base into a prison. Now, that's history.
"Many people have rallied behind the idea of missile defense," said Pete Hallgren, a former state Republican Party chairman who moved here from Sitka in southern Alaska several years ago anticipating the arrival of missile defense and became the town's administrator. "This community grew up around the military, so the people are used to it."
Not everyone is enamored of the antimissile project, though. Some worry that the recent surge of construction will lead to another boom-bust cycle. Also unnerving for some is the idea of having powerful rockets stationed so close.
"It was different having the old base here than having an antimissile site," said Wanda Stewart, owner of Granite View sports and gifts shop. "The old base didn't kill."
The only open opposition has come in the form of a couple of small demonstrations organized by an antinuclear group called No Nukes North, headquartered in Fairbanks about 90 miles to the north.
For Bush, who has made development of missile defenses a top priority, establishment of a working antimissile system here would mark a major milestone. Only once before has the United States built such a defense. But that system, set up in North Dakota in 1975, lasted only several months before Congress terminated it amid concerns about cost and effectiveness.
In the early 1980s, President Ronald Reagan rekindled the argument about constructing a national antimissile system. The idea has received added impetus under Bush as a necessary weapon for thwarting terrorist groups and such nations as North Korea and Iran, both of which have been trying to develop long-range missiles.
Longtime critics of national missile defense see politics as the driving force behind Bush's determination to make Fort Greely operational several weeks before the next presidential election. But administration officials insist the motivation is military, not political. They point to intelligence reports predicting that within the next few years, North Korea could have a missile able to reach the western United States.
Alaska's northern location has made it the Pentagon's first choice for a missile defense site. But when ground was broken here in June 2002, the idea was simply to build a test bed with several missile silos for gauging how interceptors and associated communications and command networks could withstand the Alaskan cold.
In an emergency, officials said at the time, the site could be made operational. But only a few flight tests had been run on the proposed system -- and those involved some significant artificial elements -- so a presidential decision to actually deploy it seemed some time away.
But the thinking changed over the summer and fall as proponents of missile defense within the administration, conservative think tanks and the defense industry pressed the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency to begin defining a specific system and get something built.
"Questions came from a number of directions about what we could do with the test bed," said a senior defense official involved in the process. "We looked at what it would take to convert the site into an operational base and concluded it was doable."
In December, Bush announced the deployment plan.
"Before, we had planned to build a test bed with an inherent operational capability," said Tom Devanney, deputy director of the program. "Now, we're building an operational site that can be used for testing."
The timetable calls for putting six interceptors at Fort Greely and four at California's Vandenberg Air Force Base by next year. Ten more are due at Fort Greely in 2005.
To help track enemy missiles, the Pentagon also is upgrading a radar station on the remote Aleutian island of Shemya and constructing a high-resolution X-band radar that will float at sea on a giant platform. Additionally, U.S. officials have requested use of early warning radars in Britain and Greenland for targeting any missiles that might be launched from the Middle East.
As much as Bush is gambling that Fort Greely will be ready on time, it is not his biggest schedule risk. That lies with the interceptors -- or, more specifically, the booster rockets that are supposed to lift "kill vehicles" into space, releasing them to home in on enemy warheads.
The boosters are months behind schedule. An initial effort, overseen by the Boeing Co., to design a single type of booster gave way last year to plans for two separate models, one now being managed by Lockheed Martin Corp., the other by Orbital Sciences Corp.
Both models may ultimately be used. But the delay has prompted the Pentagon to cancel three planned intercept attempts this year rather than run the tests with surrogate boosters.
By autumn, defense officials hope to have at least one of the two new boosters ready. Even so, that will leave time for only two or three intercept tests before Bush's deployment date. A failure of any of those tests, or further booster delays, could bust the deadline.
In interviews, several senior program officials acknowledged the hurried nature of the project. But they expressed confidence that the deadline will be met. They also noted that one of the purposes of building the interceptor field is to provide for more realistic testing and future improvements in the system.
The construction project -- a joint effort involving Boeing and Bechtel Group Inc., which are responsible for the silos, and Fluor Corp. and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which have charge of everything else -- has managed to stay on schedule. One big advantage was a relatively mild winter that dropped less snow here than in Washington.
The site has even received an early test of its ability to withstand the seismic tremors that frequent the region. An earthquake registering 7.9 on the Richter scale struck in November. Although the epicenter was only about 30 miles from here, it caused little damage to facilities under construction or to the trenches, which were filled with workers at the time.
"People refer to that as our first developmental test," said Army Col. Kevin Norgaard, director of the Site Activation Command.
----
GAO Faults Agency on Space - Based Missile Sensor
May 27, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-arms-missile.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Pentagon's decision to cut competition on a satellite sensor system could drive up the price of a key element of the Bush administration's planned ballistic missile shield, a report said Tuesday.
The General Accounting Office faulted the Missile Defense Agency for deciding to eliminate funding to build an alternative to the Space Tracking and Surveillance System (STSS), for which Northrop Grumman Corp . is the prime contractor.
If successful, the sensors will eventually be part of a constellation of satellites that work together to track and detect ballistic missiles aimed at the United States and its allies.
Expressing concern about limiting production to a single contractor, the GAO report said: ``If it chooses to pursue STSS as part of the missile defense system, STSS may end up being more expensive in the future because MDA could be locked into a single contract for the design and production of the large constellation of satellites.''
The Missile Defense Agency has awarded Los Angeles-based Northrop more than $1 billion in contracts to begin developing STSS, formerly known as Space-Based Infrared System Low (SBIRS Low).
Raytheon Co, based in Lexington, Massachusetts, has won a contract to provide the main sensor payload for the STSS system.
The agency's decision to launch STSS in 2007 lacked important knowledge, GAO said, noting that the Missile Defense Agency had not completed an assessment of the working condition of the equipment it needed to complete the launch.
No comment was immediately available from the Missile Defense Agency.
The Bush administration has set an aggressive schedule for deploying its proposed missile defense shield, with the initial sea-based leg of the system to be launched as early as 2004.
-------- russia
U.S. to Build Power Plants in Russia
May 27, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russian-Plutonium.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Energy Department announced a $466 million deal Tuesday to build two coal-burning power plants for Russia in return for a Russian promise to close three plutonium-producing reactors considered among the most dangerous in the world.
Two American companies -- Washington Group International and Raytheon Technical Services -- will oversee construction of the two fossil fuel plants. Most of the actual work is expected to be done by Russian companies and workers. Advertisement
Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham called it a major step in the U.S.-Russia nuclear nonproliferation effort, although it will be five to eight years before the Russian reactors will shut down and stop making plutonium.
While the Russians have agreed to halt plutonium production and dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium that is already stockpiled, they have refused to shut down the three reactors until a way is found to replace the electricity and industrial heat the reactors produce for nearby communities.
In addition to making enough plutonium for three warheads each week, the reactors in the Russian cities of Seversk and Zheleznogorsk also are viewed as among the most dangerous because of their design, which is similar to the Chernobyl reactor involved in the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine. Unlike U.S. reactors, for example, they do not have concrete containment domes to hold in radiation in case of an accident or major leak.
``They're the most dangerous reactors they've got,'' said Kenneth Baker, the top Energy Department official involved in nuclear nonproliferation issues. And, he adds, ``when you have three reactors producing enough plutonium for three bombs a week you want to (deal with them) as fast as you can.''
Abraham and Russia's nuclear minister, Alexander Rumyantsev, agreed in March to replace the reactors with fossil fuel plants. As part of the agreement, the U.S. government would arrange for the replacement power.
``Replacing these reactors with fossil fuel energy is critical to eliminate the production of weapons-grade plutonium in Russia and closing these facilities,'' said Abraham, who announced the contracts at a news conference with Russian Ambassador Yuri Ushakov.
Abraham said the Russians would handle -- and pay for -- the shutdown of the reactors, while the U.S. companies, working with the Russian contracting firm of Rosatomstroi, will build the new fossil fuel plants.
Washington Group International -- an engineering, construction and management company headquartered in Boise, Idaho -- will oversee work at the Seversk site, where an old coal-fired plant will be refurbished and expanded by 2008.
Raytheon, headquartered in Vienna, Va., will oversee construction of a new plant at the Zheleznogorsk site with a completion date of 2011.
Abraham said that final contracts are expected to be completed with the two companies by the end of June. Until then, he said, he could not provide specifics such as how $466 million will be divided. The companies were selected from a list of a half dozen companies provided by the Defense Department, said Abraham.
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
"Do as I say, not as I do" Nuclear Policy
By Michelle Ciarrocca
May 27, 2003
Editor: John Gershman, Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC)
http://www.fpif.org/commentary/2003/0305nuke.html
The Bush administration has its foreign policy hands full with each nation in its "Axis of Evil." From the ongoing search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, to the appearance of negotiations with North Korea, and the push to declare Iran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, President Bush is following through with his promise to make certain these "dangerous regimes and terrorists" can not threaten the U.S. with the world's most destructive weapons.
But he's going about it in a way that will actually increase the nuclear threat to the U.S. and the world.
Buried in the President's 2004 defense budget are two particularly troubling requests. The first seeks to repeal a 10-year-old ban on the development of smaller, lower-yield nuclear weapons, also known as mini-nukes. The second is a $15.5 million request to conduct research on a new bunker buster bomb called the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator.
The Senate voted 51 to 43 to lift the ban on research and development of low-yield nuclear weapons. Actual production of the weapons would require the President to obtain congressional authorization. The House is expected to vote on the measure this week.
Administration officials contend they are not seeking to build new nuclear weapons, but only studying and researching the options. Speaking at a press conference, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld added, "Many of the things you study, you never pursue." Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), a supporter of the ban, replied, "Does anyone really believe that?"
The Bush administration's desire to develop a low-yield nuclear weapon stems from the theory that a cold war nuclear weapon is so massive and destructive the U.S. would never actually use one. The thinking goes, a smaller, 5-kiloton nuclear weapon--about a third the size of the nuclear bomb used in Hiroshima--would be more useful in deterring nations such as North Korea. But as Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) rightly noted, "We're moving away from more than five decades of efforts to delegitimize the use of nuclear weapons."
As for research into a new bunker-buster nuclear weapon, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a fact sheet outlining the "troubling science" behind the proposed weapons. The scientists note that even a small, low-yield earth-penetrating weapon will create radioactive debris, there is no guarantee that the nuclear blast would successfully destroy chemical or biological weapons, and there are current conventional weapons that could be used as alternatives.
The Bush administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released in January 2002, was a foreshadowing of a new nuclear era in which the once-termed "weapon of last resort" has turned into a usable, necessary tool in the anti-terror arsenal.
As part of the Nuclear Posture Review, the Pentagon expanded the nuclear hit list to include a wide range of potential adversaries, such as North Korea, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, whether or not those nations possess nuclear weapons. The circumstances under which the use of nuclear weapons might be considered has also expanded beyond situations threatening the national survival of the United States to include retaliation for a North Korean attack on South Korea, or simply as a response to "surprising military developments." The review also sanctions the first use of nuclear weapons to "dissuade adversaries from undertaking military programs or operations that could threaten U.S. interests or those of allies and friends."
The Bush administration's nuclear doctrine represents an abrupt departure from the policies of prior administrations, Democratic and Republican alike. How likely are countries like Iran, North Korea, Syria, Libya, Russia, and China--all of which have been targeted in Bush's new nuclear plan--to heed the administration's calls to reduce or renounce their own nuclear arsenals in the face of this new threat from the United States?
"I can't believe that I have witnessed in my time on Capitol Hill a more historic debate than what we are undertaking at this moment," said Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL). "We are literally talking about whether or not the United States will initiate a nuclear arms race again. Nothing that I can think of meets this in terms of gravity and its impact on the future of the world."
If President Bush were serious about reducing the threat posed by nuclear weapons he would focus on preventive measures, such as increasing funds for nonproliferation and threat reduction programs, while also reducing our own massive arsenal. Nonproliferation programs receive about $1.8 billion annually. Compare that to the $41 billion budget for homeland defense, or the $79 billion supplemental for the war in Iraq. Representative John Spratt (D-SC) pointed out the disparity between funding saying the almost $10 billion "ballistic missile defense is a prime example of how the emphasis on counter-proliferation comes at the expense of nonproliferation."
The Russian parliament recently ratified the nuclear arms reduction treaty signed by Russian President Putin and President Bush last year. The U.S. Senate approved the treaty in March. The treaty reduces each nation's arsenals of strategic nuclear weapons by two-thirds, to fewer than 2,200 each over the next decade. While the treaty is a worthy and symbolic signal of a new relationship with Russia, much more can and should be done.
By taking ten years to make the proposed reductions, allowing both sides to keep thousands of their withdrawn warheads in "reserve" rather than destroying them, and giving either party the right to withdraw from the agreement on just 90 days notice, the Pentagon has preserved its ability to rapidly reverse the Bush administration's proposed reductions in the U.S. arsenal whenever it wants to, even as it continues to seek new types of nuclear weapons.
Deeper, verifiable cuts on both sides--to as low as 200 to 500 strategic warheads each rather than the 1,700 to 2,200 allowed in the current proposal--would give Washington and Moscow leverage to begin pressing nuclear-armed states like Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and Israel to eliminate their own arsenals. This move toward multilateral reductions would also make it much easier to get states with nuclear capabilities to agree not to aid nations like Iraq, Iran, or North Korea to develop their own weapons of mass destruction.
Whereas Ronald Reagan left office saying that a nuclear war can never be won and must never be fought, two decades later, the word coming from the Bush administration is that nuclear weapons are here to stay. The recommendations contained in the Nuclear Posture Review and 2004 budget requests are steps backwards, and arguably violations of U.S. commitments to "pursue negotiations in good faith" for the reduction and eventual abolition of nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The only way to protect the American people, and the people of the world, from the threat of nuclear weapons--big and small--is to take determined steps to get rid of them, once and for all.
(Michelle Ciarrocca <ciarrm01@newschool.edu> is a research associate at the World Policy Institute and writes regularly for Foreign Policy in Focus (online at www.fpif.org).)
--------
US nukes can be adapted for use against enemy: Bush
Monday May 27, 2003
http://www.paktribune.com/news/index.php?id=26465&PHPSESSID=b03686ff957c6fbc855841f113c461a9
WASHINGTON, May 27 (Online): The US strategic air command maintains a 'target list' for nuclear strikes in contingency planning against several countries, including Russia, China and North Korea, a defence expert has claimed .
Iran, Syria, Sudan, Libya and Algeria also figure among the countries, Bruce G Blair, President of Centre for Defence Information, a Washington-based nongovernmental think tank, said .
He links contingency planning against deeply buried targets, especially those in Russia, with recent interest in developing "mini-nukes," with explosive power of below five kilotons.
Congress has authorised research in these weapons but development and production would need their approval.
President George W Bush has "notion that US nuclear weapons can, and should, be adapted for use against a growing list of enemy weapons in a widening array of circumstances," Blair said adding the "top two candidates" for inclusion in the nuclear target list are located inside the Yamantau and Kosvinsky mountains in the central and southern Urals .
Blair said the Yamantau command centre is a wartime relocation facility for the top Russian leadership while Kosvinsky is a wartime nuclear command system that can communicate through the granite mountain to far-flung Russian strategic forces using very-low-frequency radio signals which can burn through a nuclear war environment .
Kosvinsky came on line recently, "which could be one explanation for the US interest in a new nuclear bunker buster," he said adding, though logical in the Cold War-era nuclear planning, building a new weapon to threaten these mountain redoubts would not increase US security.
The new missions that will make Americans secure to the nuclear enterprise almost certainly will revolve around the challenge of preventing nuclear terrorism, Blair said.
President Bush's nuclear guidance doubtless instructs the Pentagon to plan the destruction of Yamantau and Kosvinsky, along with 2,000 other targets in Russia and hundreds more in China, claimed Blair.
He said the real driving force behind the US administration's chase for bunker busters and mini-nukes "is the US nuclear security establishment's desire to preserve indefinitely a nuclear weapon design capability at the national laboratories, particularly Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore."
"The labs fear that atrophying intellectual capital in this area would leave the United States crippled if it ever wished to restart a nuclear design effort in a national emergency," Blair said .
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new york
The Dark Shadow of Indian Point (5 Letters)
May 27, 2003
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/opinion/L27NUKE.html
To the Editor:
Herschel Specter ("Nuclear Risk and Reality," Op-Ed, May 20) suggests that after a successful attack at the Indian Point nuclear plant, Westchester and New York City residents can calmly wait to see if the radioactive plume comes their way. That would be funny, except that the nuclear bureaucracy and industry really believe it.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, established as an independent regulator, now acts like a subsidiary of the nuclear utilities.
Its regulations exempt utilities from responsibility for protecting reactors against "an enemy of the United States," including terrorists, but it has not asked the United States government to provide security that the industry cannot.
The result is inadequately protected plants, far more vulnerable to catastrophic consequences than the industry and the N.R.C. concede.
PAUL LEVENTHAL
Washington, May 20, 2003
The writer, president of the Nuclear Control Institute, helped prepare the law that established the N.R.C. in 1974.
• To the Editor:
"Nuclear Risk and Reality," by Herschel Specter (Op-Ed, May 20), is insensitive, at best, about the perils terrorists pose to the Indian Point nuclear power plant.
He opines about a nuclear plume being created by an explosion at the plant: "Typically, in less than two miles, the plume is too weak to cause early fatalities. A few miles further, and the plume is too weak to cause early injuries."
As the congressman who represents some of the 20 million people who live around the plant, I am appalled by Mr. Specter's callousness. Life is more precious than electricity. Families who live around Indian Point should not have to worry about "early" or "late" fatalities because people like Mr. Specter wrongly figured their lives into a cost-benefit analysis.
ELIOT L. ENGEL
Washington, May 20, 2003
The writer, Democrat of New York, is a member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
To the Editor:
Herschel Specter (Op-Ed, May 20) makes a convincing argument for some perspective on the terrorist threat to Indian Point. More to the point, is evacuation really an option? We can't even get out of town on a normal Friday night.
So the question is whether the risk of operating Indian Point outweighs its benefits.
As a near-lifelong resident of Westchester, I find that the most vocal opponents of Indian Point fall into two categories: outsiders with an antinuclear agenda of their own and Johnny-come-latelies to the county, who discovered that Indian Point existed only after they settled here.
In all my years in Westchester, the only injuries I ever suffered came from some person in my vicinity and never from Indian Point.
ROBERT F. CICERO
Yonkers, May 20, 2003
•To the Editor:
The optimism expressed by Herschel Specter (Op-Ed, May 20) about the possible consequences of a terrorist attack on a nuclear power plant in the United States is belied by the experience of Chernobyl.
Among other things, his contention that any plume would be "too weak to cause early injuries" beyond a radius of a few miles overlooks the devastating effects of the Chernobyl plant failure on lands and people hundreds of miles away.
PETER S. ALLEN
Providence, R.I., May 21, 2003
•To the Editor:
Herschel Specter (Op-Ed, May 20) discounts the weaknesses of the Indian Point emergency plan as "minor shortcomings." By contrast, James Lee Witt, Gov. George E. Pataki's independent reviewer of the plan, has indicated that any serious attempt to fix the plan would require an immense financial investment.
But then, one would expect Mr. Specter, a consultant to Entergy, the owner of the plant, to discount any news that might cause the public to question whether Indian Point should remain open.
ANN HARBESON
Croton-on-Hudson, N.Y.
May 21, 2003
-------- us politics
Back in Political Forefront
Iran-Contra Figure Plays Key Role on Mideast
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A41843-2003May26?language=printer
A cycle of disgrace and redemption has brought one of Washington's most accomplished -- and controversial -- bureaucratic infighters back to the center of U.S. foreign policy decision-making.
When Elliott Abrams stood in front of a federal judge in October 1991 and pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress, few imagined he would ever return to government. At age 43, he had become one of the casualties of the Iran-contra scandal, detested by Democrats for his combative political style and mistrusted by human rights activists for playing down the crimes of right-wing dictatorships in Central America.
Twelve years later, Abrams is helping to shape White House policies toward many of the world's trouble spots. Appointed in December as President Bush's senior adviser on the Middle East, his responsibilities extend from Algeria to Iran. But nowhere is his influence more evident than on the Arab-Israeli peace process.
A self-described "neo-conservative and neo-Reaganite" with strong ties to Jews and evangelical Christians, Abrams has become a flash point for the debate on how much pressure the Bush administration is prepared to apply to Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to reach an agreement with the Palestinians. Last week, the White House sought to address Israeli concerns about a U.S.-endorsed "road map" on Israeli-Palestinian peace by saying they would be considered during the implementation phase.
The question for many critics, both inside and outside government, is whether the White House will risk a public fight with Sharon on freezing and eventually reversing Jewish settlement activity that could antagonize some of its core political supporters in the run-up to a presidential election. Before joining the Bush administration, Abrams expressed skepticism about past U.S. peacemaking efforts in the region and praised Sharon for his "strength" and "firmness" toward the Palestinians in contrast to the "weakness" displayed by his predecessor, Ehud Barak.
Abrams's supporters emphasize his formidable bureaucratic skills, and say his pro-Sharon views will provide political cover for the administration in extracting concessions from a reluctant Israeli government. His enemies depict him as a partisan, ideological figure who pays a lot of attention to the pro-Israel lobby, but has yet to reach out to Arab Americans.
Abrams's appointment raised a "red flag for me and my community," said Khalil Jahshan, director of government affairs for the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee. "If the president is serious about a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he picked the wrong person to manage the policy for him."
"Much of the criticism of Elliott misses the fact that he is an extremely intelligent, competent guy," countered William Kristol, a conservative commentator who served alongside Abrams in the Reagan administration. "Bush is more committed to seeing whether he can push ahead with the Middle East peace process than most people believe, and that is true of Elliott as well."
Unlike his previous incarnation in government, when he was a high-profile figure on Capitol Hill and in the media, Abrams this time around is working far from the glare of publicity and congressional oversight. According to people who have dealt with him, however, his operating style has changed little in the intervening decade, and is characterized by the same combination of ideological zeal and bureaucratic toughness that made him a formidable advocate for the Reagan administration.
"He is relentless in pursuit of his agenda," said someone who has clashed with him in internal administration debates. "If that means pushing people out of the way who disagree with him, then that is what he will do."
The White House declined requests for an interview with Abrams. A senior administration official said he was hired for the Middle East post because he had shown himself to be "an extremely good manager." He said that Abrams's personal views on the Palestinian-Israeli dispute were irrelevant as he was implementing "the vision of the president" on Middle East peace.
"It's the president who makes these decisions," the official said. "Our job is to take the president's policies and try to make them happen."
At the time of Abrams's appointment, Middle East policymaking at the White House was in a state of some turmoil, insiders said. Responsibility for shaping policy toward a vast, troubled area of the world was divided among three officials, each with the title of "senior director." The original National Security Council department chief, Zalmay Khalilzad, focused mainly on dealings with the Iraqi opposition and had the reputation of being a poor administrator. A third official, Flynt Leverett, had responsibility for the Middle East peace process.
Administration insiders said Abrams clashed with Leverett and Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns, the State Department's top Middle East expert, over the shape of the final Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement. Burns and Leverett believed that any agreement probably would resemble a deal offered to the Palestinians by Barak in early 2001, with the Israelis giving up nearly all the occupied territories in return for Palestinians surrendering their right of return to Israel. Abrams envisaged more limited Israeli concessions.
According to the Abrams camp, his differences with Leverett were more bureaucratic than substantive: Abrams was frustrated by the lack of a clear chain of command on Middle East issues. Leverett left the NSC staff in mid-March after refusing an offer by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice to work on the road map under Abrams. Two other officials left the NSC staff as part of a shake-up in the Near East office related to Abrams's arrival.
Administration rivals say Abrams worked behind the scenes to rewrite the road map on the basis of critiques drawn up by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a leading Jewish American lobby group. He fired off frequent e-mails to Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, trying to reduce the role of international mediators in the peace process.
"Elliott was suspicious of anything that involved the United Nations and the European Union," a participant in the administration debates said. "It's an open question whether he is going to be the guy who becomes the one to push for a document he has expressed such ambivalence about."
Administration officials said Abrams is now fully on board with the peace plan, which envisages a freezing and eventual dismantlement of Jewish settlements in occupied Arab territories in return for an "unconditional cessation of violence" by the Palestinians.
Much of Abrams's adult life, beginning with his days as a Harvard Law School student during the tumultuous 1960s, has been preparation for an important role in government. In conventional political terms, he was a liberal, criticizing the Vietnam War and the Cambridge police for using force to end a 1969 student strike. By campus standards, however, he was a conservative, opposing the militant tactics employed by Students for a Democratic Society.
"He was culturally straight and had short hair," recalls a former roommate, Steven Kelman, now a professor of public policy at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "Elliott was the only person I knew who threw his blue jeans out when they started to fade."
Kelman believes that Abrams, as a bright young kid from the Hollis Hills neighborhood of Queens who was reared in the progressive Jewish tradition, was "traumatized" by his experiences of campus politics at Harvard. "There is a part of him that is still fighting the student radicals of the '60s," he said. "He doesn't like people whom he sees as anti-American, or down on the United States."
After Harvard, Abrams followed a classic neo-conservative trajectory, taking a job with Sen. Henry M. "Scoop" Jackson, a hawkish Washington Democrat. "They hit it off more or less immediately," said Richard N. Perle, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration who introduced Abrams to Jackson. "He was comfortable with Scoop's combination of a tough foreign policy and a liberal domestic policy."
Abrams joined the neo-conservative aristocracy in March 1980 through his marriage to Rachel Decter, daughter of conservative pundits Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter. By the time Ronald Reagan was elected president later that year, Abrams had become a Republican. As an assistant secretary of state, he found himself implementing the Reagan doctrine of "rolling back communism" in Central America.
For Abrams, fighting communism and promoting human rights were one and the same. Although he criticized the right-wing Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile, he played down or ignored human rights violations by pro-American governments in Central America, where the struggle for geopolitical influence with the Soviet Union was most intense. In an exchange with the human rights activist Aryeh Neier on ABC's "Nightline" in 1984, Abrams insisted that widely reported massacres by right-wing death squads in El Salvador "never happened."
"Elliott was willing to distort and misrepresent the truth in order to promote the policy adopted by the administration," Neier said. "His approach was that the ends justified the means." Abrams has replied to past criticism by Neier by describing his human rights work as "garbage" and "completely politicized."
Abrams also had problems with Congress over the Iran-contra scandal. In 1991, he was forced to admit in court that he had not disclosed his knowledge of a secret contra supply network and his solicitation of a $10 million contribution for the contras from the sultan of Brunei. He received a pardon from President George H.W. Bush in December 1992.
An administration official brushed aside questions about the plea bargain, noting that Abrams had received a full pardon. In a 1993 book, "Undue Process," Abrams forcefully defended his actions, describing the legal proceedings against him as "Kafkaesque" and his prosecutors as "filthy bastards."
As president of the Center for Ethics and Public Policy, a Washington-based religious think tank, Abrams called for reconciliation between Jews and conservative Christians. He also wrote about the threats to the Jewish identity in the United States because of assimilation and intermarriage, arguing that it is important for Jews to understand that "tomorrow's lobby for Israel has got to be conservative Christians because there aren't going to be enough Jews to do it."
Under the Bush administration, evangelical Christians have emerged as an important source of political support for Israel. In some cases, they have been even more insistent than Jews in their backing for a Greater Israel, which they see as sanctified by the Bible.
Abrams's years in the political wilderness ended in June 2001 when Rice chose him to head the NSC's office for democracy, human rights and international operations. In addition to his regular responsibilities, he took part in brainstorming sessions with Rice and other NSC officials to consider new approaches to Middle East peace.
"Elliott could always be relied upon to give clear expression of the Israeli line, and whether or not it would fly with the Jewish community," another participant in the sessions recalled.
Abrams received first-hand insight into Sharon's besieged worldview earlier this month when he made a secret visit to Israel with Hadley, the deputy national security adviser. According to Israeli sources, the prime minister took his guests up in a helicopter for a bird's-eye view of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank that Israel could be required to abandon under a peace deal with the Palestinians.
The helicopter tour has become a standard feature on the itinerary of U.S. officials visiting Sharon, said Martin Indyk, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel. "You look down at all these settlements in the hills below you, and you get the distinct impression that they will not be moving anywhere in the lifetime of your administration," he said.
"If anyone in the Bush administration is going to push Israel on the settlements, it would be Abrams, because he has credibility with the Israeli government," said Aluf Benn, diplomatic reporter for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who broke the story about the secret helicopter tour. "But so far we have not seen the political will on the part of the White House to seriously press the issue."
----
IRAQ: Unease Grows in Washington Over Fruitless Weapons Search
Jim Lobe,
May 27 2003
(IPS)
http://www.ipsnews.net/interna.asp?idnews=18432
WASHINGTON - The failure of the U.S. military to find any strong evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD), let alone links between former President Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, is creating growing unease within both Congress and the administration of President George W. Bush.
The administration sold the war it launched in March with allies the United Kingdom and Australia based on its contention that Baghdad had massive quantities of WMD, some of which could have been transferred to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda or similar groups to carry out an attack against the United States or its allies.
But after seven weeks of uncontested control of Iraq's territory, it has yet to find even one gram of biological, chemical or nuclear material designed for weapons use, despite an intensive search by specially trained teams that have investigated all of the sites identified by the intelligence community before the war as most likely to hold WMD.
''The Bush team's extensive hype of WMD in Iraq as justification for a pre-emptive invasion has become more than embarrassing,'' said Democratic Senator Robert Byrd, the longest-serving lawmaker in Congress, who has emerged as its most scathing critic of the war.
''It has raised serious questions about prevarication and the reckless use of power. Were our troops needlessly put at risk? Were countless Iraq civilians killed and maimed when war was not really necessary? Was the American public deliberately misled? Was the world?'' he asked in a blistering address on the Senate floor last week.
It is not only Democrats who are raising such questions. ''Obviously, it concerns us that we have what I think are credible reports that weapons exist that cannot be accounted for,'' said the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, Representative Porter Goss of Florida.
Goss and his Senate counterpart, Pat Roberts, are already planning hearings to assess information acquired by the intelligence community and used by the administration to rally public opinion behind the war.
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has also launched a review, reportedly at the behest of Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, whose own pressure on the intelligence community to unearth evidence of WMD and links between Baghdad and al-Qaeda ironically has been blamed by retired intelligence officers for distorting the process that led to the U.S.-led attack.
Rumsfeld last year created an Office of Special Plans (OSP) under the direction of Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Undersecretary William Luti precisely because they were unhappy that the evidence compiled by the CIA and other intelligence agencies, particularly about alleged ties between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, was extremely weak.
As explained by W. Patrick Lang, former director of Middle East analysis at the Defense Intelligence Agency, to the 'New York Times', the OSP ''started picking out things that supported their thesis and stringing them into arguments that they could use with the president''.
''It's not intel,'' he said, using an insider's word for intelligence, ''it's political propaganda''.
The Pentagon naturally strongly denies this, and even the CIA, some of whose analysts were reportedly furious about what they saw as manipulation of intelligence by the Pentagon, insists that, while the al-Qaeda evidence was always considered shaky, its own evidence that Baghdad did retain significant quantities of WMD in violation of United Nations resolutions was strong.
Both agencies have offered explanations for why no WMD have been uncovered. Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith recently told Congress that only about 20 percent of roughly 600 suspected sites have been investigated, although he conceded that most of those considered most likely to hold WMD have been examined.
''I am confident that we will eventually be able to piece together a fairly complete account of Iraq's WMD programmes, but the process will take months and perhaps years,'' he testified 12 days ago. ''We're learning about new sites every day.''
Other Pentagon officials have suggested that perhaps Saddam Hussein did destroy all his WMD just before the war, or that he had a ''just-in-time'' weapons system that kept key chemicals separated in civilian neighbourhoods or other unlikely areas until the moment they would be combined and used, or that the weapons remain hidden in remote mountain areas deep in the ground where they are unlikely ever to be discovered, or that all the suspect sites were looted before U.S. troops could secure them, as happened with a major nuclear site.
Some have even suggested that Baghdad may have destroyed all the weapons in the early 1990s, but then acted as if it still had them in order to deter an attack. Kenneth Adelman, a member of Rumsfeld's Defense Policy Board and a major war booster, said he thought that Hussein might have launched a ''massive disinformation campaign'' to that end.
The strongest evidence collected to date, aside from special chemical warfare gear that could have been left over from the Iran-Iraq war, is the discovery two weeks ago of two mobile trailers of the kind that Secretary of State Colin Powell described to the U.N. Security Council before the war as mobile units used to create biological weapons on site.
While Pentagon officials have insisted that no other purpose for the vans could be explained, they have still failed to find any specific biological or chemical evidence, such as residues in the equipment, which proves they were used for that purpose. The trailers remain under investigation.
Even before their discovery, however, the chief task force created by the Pentagon to find the weapons--consisting of biologists, chemists, arms-treaty experts, nuclear operators, translators and computer experts--was told to wind down its operations and prepare to return home.
Meanwhile, the administration, in addition to reducing expectations over WMD, has tried to focus public attention instead on the discovery and exhumation of mass graves of alleged victims of Hussein's rule, in part to provide an alternative justification for going to war.
Some analysts have argued that the administration relied far too heavily on defectors, particularly those supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led by Ahmed Chalabi who has made little secret of his ambitions since 1992--when he created the group--to replace Hussein in Baghdad.
Indeed, the highest-ranking Iraqi official ever to defect from Iraq and Hussein's own son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, told U.S., British and U.N. interrogators in 1995 that Iraq had destroyed all its WMD after the first Gulf War, and also warned them against Kidhir Hamza, a nuclear scientist who defected in 1994, as ''a professional liar''.
Like other defectors used by the INC, Hamza played a key role in persuading Washington that Hussein was revving up his nuclear programme, for which no evidence has been found. Hamza is now in Baghdad working with the U.S. occupation.
''This could conceivably be the greatest intelligence hoax of all time,'' noted Representative Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee last week. ''I doubt it, but we have to ask.'' (END/2003)
----
Bush quietly signs bill to allow federal borrowing to grow by nearly $1 trillion
By Associated Press,
5/27/2003
http://boston.com/dailynews/147/economy/Bush_quietly_signs_bill_to_all%3A.shtml
WASHINGTON (AP) Without comment or ceremony, President Bush on Tuesday signed a bill allowing a record $984 billion increase in the amount the federal government can borrow, to a record $7.4 trillion.
The increased federal borrowing will enable the government to pay for the $350 billion economic stimulus package that the GOP-led Congress passed last week at Bush's behest.
Bush will hold a signing ceremony at the White House on Wednesday to celebrate passage of that legislation, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer announced. The package includes $330 billion in tax cuts and $20 billion in aid for states.
Passage of the bill raising the nation's debt ceiling came last Friday, only hours after the tax-cut bill was approved. Congressional Democrats had sought to spotlight the federal IOUs that have resumed piling up under President Bush.
But Republican leaders maneuvered to get the debt-ceiling measure passed quickly, and with little fanfare.
The Senate gave the bill final congressional approval by 53-44 on Friday.
Republican leaders did not bring the measure to the Senate floor until the House had left town for a weeklong Memorial Day recess.
The House had avoided a direct vote on the debt limit by reviving a rule that made its approval of a borrowing increase automatic when Congress finished its annual budget last month.
After running annual surpluses during the last four years of the Clinton administration, federal deficits have returned. This year's is expected to well exceed $300 billion, a record, and huge future shortfalls are expected with no end in sight.
Bush's signing of the bill announced in a statement with a single sentence will enable the government to borrow money until sometime next year.
The current $6.4 trillion limit was breached earlier this year.
Failure to extend the borrowing limit could have led to a first-ever federal default something neither party wants to explain.
The bill is H.J. Res. 51.
-------- MILITARY
-------- africa
RWANDA - Genocide survivors vote on constitution
May 27, 2003,
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
KIGALI - Rwandans voted yesterday on a new constitution hailed by some as a step toward reconciliation after the genocide in 1994, but criticized by others who say it is aimed at keeping President Paul Kagame's ruling party in power.
Diplomats expect the 3.8 million registered voters to back the constitution, which permits an executive president to serve two seven-year terms, while imposing tight control over political parties.
----
Congo War Toll Soars as U.N. Pleads for Aid
May 27, 2003
The New York Times
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/international/africa/27CONG.html
BUNIA, Congo, May 26 - They call the machete a weapon of mass destruction here.
Its ghastly wreckage can be found inside what passes for this town's only functioning hospital. On a thin foam mattress lies a wide-eyed old man who has survived an attempted decapitation. Nearby, a mother with black moons around her eyes nurses two wounded children back to health and mourns for another two, freshly killed.
It is estimated that more than three million people have died in Congo's four-year war as a dizzying array of rival rebel armies and their patrons from nine neighboring countries have fought over Congo's enormous spoils. Gold, diamonds and coltan - a mineral used in cellphones - are among the precious loot in this northeastern province called Ituri, and peace deals so far have done nothing to stanch the bloodletting. The latest massacre took place over several days this month, as militias belonging to rival Hema and Lendu tribes battled for control here in Ituri's largest town.
Today, the death toll stands at 350. Most have been buried in unmarked graves since their remains offered few details about who they were, let alone which of the warring ethnic groups they belonged to. As many as 17,000 people are huddled inside the tent cities that have sprung up in a United Nations compound, at the airport and in the heart of town.
An eerie calm hangs over Bunia. There is no telling when the next round of carnage will unfold, or whether the United Nations Security Council will send troops to bring order. The secretary general, Kofi Annan, has appealed to member countries to send soldiers for a multinational force here.
By the standards and logic of war in Congo, the Bunia massacre was neither unexpected nor extraordinary. The only thing that distinguished this one was that it happened before the eyes of United Nations peacekeepers who had warned of its risks.
The grim facts that led to the carnage here were no mystery to anyone, certainly not to the members of the Security Council who sent in the peacekeepers. Troops from Uganda were pulling out of Ituri under a multinational peace deal. Rival warlords were at one another's throats. Indeed, there was no peace to keep in Congo's northeast, certainly not by a paltry force of some 300 blue-helmeted Uruguayan soldiers who were deployed with orders to guard United Nations property and to escort aid workers.
Bunia turned out to be a peacekeeping mission from hell.
When the fighting broke out between rival Hema and Lendu forces, child soldiers taunted the blue helmets, first with insults, then mortars, then by tossing a body over the fence into the United Nations compound. Townspeople grew so terrified that they tried to climb over a barbed wire fence to get to the safety of the compound. A stray bullet landed in the tent city that emerged spontaneously on the grounds, and a woman napping on a foam mattress was killed instantly.
"I ask for a lot of troops, but troops haven't arrived," said an embattled Col. Daniel Vollot, the sector commander of the United Nations forces in Bunia. "Ituri is a military operation. We have not the means to carry on that mission. People say you are not able to provide security. We don't have the strength for that."
Then came the worst. A little over a week ago, the bodies of two unarmed United Nations military observers were found about 40 miles north of here. The two men, natives of Jordan and Malawi, had been assigned to gather information on armed groups operating in Ituri. Their bodies left no doubt that they had been mercilessly murdered; one had been disemboweled.
Since then, all military observers in Ituri have been pulled back to Bunia. They now gingerly patrol its streets, facing the scowls of armed children, some of whom look to be no more than 10 years old, who parade around Bunia in oversize double-breasted suits and combat fatigues, twirling bright green hand grenades in their tiny palms, as though they were shiny new toys.
If nothing else, the Bunia massacre has revealed, with graphic and embarrassing detail, the impotence of the international reaction to the horrors that have befallen Congo, United Nations officials, aid workers and rights advocates say.
Most of the war's three million-plus fatalities have been attributed to starvation and disease among people in small villages who have been routed or have fled in terror from their homes and are forced to fight for survival in the forests. The Security Council has authorized 8,700 soldiers for the United Nations mission in Congo to monitor peace in the country, which is about a fourth the size of the United States.
"It's an abysmal response by the United Nations," said Anneke Van Woudenberg, a senior researcher with Human Rights Watch in London. "If the United Nations is serious about peacekeeping, the protection of civilians, if they are going to prevent mass killings, this is a critical test."
Last week, prompted by Mr. Annan's appeal, military teams were sent to assess the prospect of deploying a combat-ready multinational force in Bunia. Britons, Canadians and South Africans have expressed interest in pitching in, while the United States, though unlikely to send troops, has indicated its support for such a multinational force.
The only long-lasting solution for peace in Congo, American officials here say, is to persuade outsiders, namely Uganda and Rwanda in the east, to stop arming proxy fighters and to support a peace deal recently negotiated between warring factions. That peace deal is currently bogged down over differences in how to construct a national military.
It is unlikely, however, that any permanent peace can be forged without restoring a measure of order here in Ituri. The blood bath in Bunia has made that plain, said the United Nations undersecretary general for peacekeeping operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, during a visit to this town on Sunday. "There is an immediate challenge: to convince the international community to deploy troops," he said in an interview here. "It is a sort of wild violence that can still be contained."
Persuading United Nations member countries to send their men and women to Central Africa is only part of the challenge. The logistics of any such operation are daunting. It is impossible to drive to Bunia. Its airport is decrepit and potholed, making it extremely difficult to actually bring a thousand troops here.
The tangle of colonial history and ethnic rivalries in the Congo conflict means, moreover, that any such force must be seen as impartial. The Rwandans, for instance, still smarting from what they see as French complicity in the 1994 Rwandan genocide, are unlikely to accept a French-led initiative.
Also, as aid workers here point out, sending a force to secure Bunia, effectively a Hema-controlled town, would be to ignore the ethnic Lendu, who have been forced to flee. By some estimates, 50,000 of them are now encamped south of here; no aid groups can reach them because it is unsafe.
-------- biological weapons
Ft. Detrick Unearths Hazardous Surprises
Cleanup Finds Debris Of Biological Warfare
By Elizabeth Williamson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2003; Page B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42036-2003May26?language=printer
Two years of digging at the U.S. Army's Fort Detrick in Frederick has unearthed more than 2,000 tons of hazardous waste -- including vials of live bacteria and nonvirulent anthrax that the military did not know was buried there, Detrick officials said.
Discovery of the pathogens at the former biological weapons research center turned what the Army thought would be industrial waste removal into the biggest cleanup in its history. So far, cleanup crews have discovered more than 100 glass vials, many containing live bacteria, and in a few, a nonvirulent strain of anthrax. The $25 million excavation is due to end this year.
While the Army searches for evidence of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq, Fort Detrick's cleanup saga shows how, nearly 40 years after the United States ended such programs at home, it still struggles with their lingering dangers. As in the Middle East, poor documentation, the passage of time and the programs' secrecy have slowed the effort.
"You find it, contain it and try to figure out what it is," said Col. John Ball, Fort Detrick garrison commander. "We're learning, but it's expensive."
In the tall grass off Kemp Lane in Frederick, deer leap, white tails flashing, and cows graze nearby. When the animals die, they are autopsied as a precaution. This is Area B, a 400-acre site that hosted Fort Detrick's target range, cropland and, in its southwest corner, a network of waste pits. Inside a specially pressurized and filtered vinyl tent, workers in biohazard suits empty the dump of its Cold War trash and secrets.
"There's a certain time capsule effect," Ball said.
Inside the tent, bulldozers operate under blast shields, as pit contents periodically ignite. The crew breathes through air hoses. The site is quarantined for two hours at the end of each working day, while the tent's air is tested for pathogens.
When digging began in April 2001, the Army expected to find mostly lab chemicals, debris and incinerator ash. But little more than one foot down, the bulldozers hit upon corroded drums of herbicides and unidentified chemicals, syringes, lab instruments and strange substances mixed with the dirt. They plucked out 50 pressurized cylinders of gases and liquids that still await analysis. Four dissected laboratory rats appeared, still floating in jars of formaldehyde at least 30 years old.
But what the Army least expected to find were tiny vials of live bacteria like Brucella melitensis, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Bacillus anthracis -- a nonvirulent form of the anthrax bacterium, the potent form of which was brewed by the gallon at Fort Detrick until 1969.
"The documentation for where this came from doesn't exist," said Lt. Col. Donald Archibald, Fort Detrick's director of safety, environment and integrated planning. After larger objects are removed, the soil and waste are pulverized, and throughout the process, they are doused with bleach to kill all bacteria. After testing for pathogens, it is sent in sealed containers to a disposal facility in Texas.
The few documents that exist say Fort Detrick used the dump from 1955 through the 1960s, while the post served on the front lines of the U.S. biological and chemical warfare program. During those years, technicians brewed a pastelike anthrax "slurry." Scientists sprayed germs into a giant sphere called "the Eightball," testing them on livestock and, occasionally, people. The Crops Division tested a key ingredient in the dangerous Vietnam War-era defoliant known as Agent Orange: Traces of it have shown up in the dump.
Hubert Kaempf, 83, supervised Detrick's waste haulers during those years. "We had one of the finest safety departments in the world," he said. "But what was in keeping with safety and sanitary laws then would now be very much forbidden."
Some waste -- laboratory materials, animal carcasses -- was supposed to be sanitized, incinerated or both, and the ashes buried. Chemicals were dumped directly into the pits. From time to time, other government institutions sent trash to Detrick's landfill. They included, Kaempf said, the Central Intelligence Agency, which, a declassified government report shows, tested biological agents at Fort Detrick.
The pits had no linings, as Fort Detrick's landfill does now. There was no inventory done. Such precautions weren't required.
Then, in 1969, President Richard M. Nixon halted the weapons programs. Fort Detrick underwent a massive decontamination and became a conventional medical research center. Today, it houses the National Cancer Institute and the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases.
"When Nixon shut us down," Kaempf said, "There was a lot of lab apparatus that was just dumped. Whatever records . . . I have no way of knowing where they went."
In 1991, toxins turned up in Army monitoring wells near the dump. Tests showed trichloroethylene, or TCE, a metal-cleaning solvent linked to liver and kidney damage, and tetrachloroethylene, or PCE, a degreasing compound believed to cause liver cancer.
The Maryland Department of the Environment and the Frederick County Health Department tested 33 wells at homes near Area B. Half were contaminated with the two agents, six so badly that the water was unfit to drink. In a few wells, concentrations of the two chemicals exceeded Environmental Protection Agency limits many times over. In an Army monitoring well nearest the dump, the chemicals were so concentrated, "you could smell it," said Joseph Gortva, an engineer who is managing the cleanup.
The post paid to put homes with tainted wells on the city water system. It briefed politicians and posted detailed information on its Web site. It convened an advisory board of neighbors, former workers and businesspeople for public meetings every two months.
"They've been very open and honest," said Michael Kurtianyk, a real estate agent on the advisory board. "I was looking for something really secretive, but no."
Others aren't so sure. Said Helen Alexander, another member from Frederick: "We probably don't know all the ins and outs of what they actually found."
At one meeting in November 2000, the advisory board asked a representative from the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene whether the department could study cancer rates in the population living downhill from the dump from the 1960s through the 1980s. He replied, according to the minutes, "that it would be difficult because data from the Maryland Cancer Registry only goes back to 1992."
To secure Pentagon money for a cleanup, Detrick needed to estimate the size and scope of the project. Archivists located an old map of Area B, noting a series of four waste pits in a corner known as B-11. A soil test boring released a gas that sent several workers to the hospital for observation.
By the late 1990s, the restoration team had compiled thick binders with everything it knew.
"We couldn't rule out that we might find biological material, though we didn't expect to," Archibald said. The Pentagon authorized a $5 million project. Digging began on the largest of the four main waste pits.
Frederick Mayor Jennifer Dougherty, who had previously taken Fort Detrick to task about sharing information on the cleanup, remembered a phone call from Ball a year ago, the day the anthrax turned up. "He said, 'We found a vial . . .' " she recalled. "At that point, your mind just races."
Ball remembered thinking, "This could be bad, but let's wait for the testing." It showed that the vial contained "a vaccine strain of anthrax," which could not cause the disease. The Fort Detrick team found identifying biological materials a costly, uncertain process.
In a Restoration Advisory Board meeting Oct. 9, Ball "expressed his surprise at learning that the United States, being one of the most advanced technological nations in the world . . . does not have the ability to rapidly and accurately identify biological culture samples," meeting minutes noted.
Whether in Iraq or Frederick, "there's a body of science we rely on, but there's a lot of gray area," said Archibald, the safety director. "The more money you put into testing, the better the results."
As retrieving, identifying and destroying biological agents tripled the cleanup budget, the Pentagon balked, pressing to delay the digging. Ball and Maryland officials pushed for the funds needed to finish. Digging in the final three pits started this month and is expected to end by December.
"I think today's Fort Detrick is a good neighbor," Dougherty said.
Though a spokesman for the EPA said the groundwater contamination has reached acceptable levels, the Army estimates it will take four more years, and more money, to clean it completely.
Meanwhile, Fort Detrick is searching for other uncharted dumps.
"You never know what's there until you start digging," Ball said. "We've generally ruled out finding a nuclear weapon."
Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.
-------- britain
'Gulf war syndrome' soldiers threaten legal action
Agencies
Tuesday May 27, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4677571,00.html
Four soldiers have threatened to sue the Ministry of Defence after suffering symptoms similar to "Gulf war syndrome", their lawyer said today.
The men believe the vaccinations they received before the war caused their symptoms, which include depression, eczema, breathing difficulties and stomach problems.
Solicitor Mark McGhee, representing the unidentified four, told the BBC: "I personally have dealt with well in excess of 400 Gulf war one veterans. The symptoms which these individuals are experiencing are identical to those of the individuals I represent in relation to the first Gulf war conflict."
The Ministry of Defence said it does not know of the four soldiers' cases, but there is a screening programme to identify any symptoms early. Run independently from the MoD, King's College in London is screening soldiers on their return from the Gulf.
"Gulf war syndrome" is still a controversial subject without an agreed cause. It has been linked to stress, smoke from oil-burning wells, the depleted uranium used in some weapons and other causes.
It has also been blamed on vaccinations given to troops before they headed to the Gulf for the campaign against Iraq in 1991. The 45,000 British forces serving in Iraq this time around were also given a range of vaccinations to protect against chemical and biological attack.
The Ministry of Defence denies the syndrome exists, but a former British soldier won a landmark case only three weeks ago in which a tribunal ruled that a cocktail of drugs given to him in 1991 should be blamed for his illness.
Charles Plumridge, senior coordinator of the National Gulf Veterans and Families Association, said the symptoms reported by the four soldiers were almost identical to those experienced by veterans of the first Gulf war.
Mr Plumridge, who served in the first Gulf war, said: "They are more or less similar to the ones from 1991. The only exception is they have come on rather early."
He said symptoms such as mood swings and depression were only reported about three or four months after soldiers returned from the Gulf in 1991.
Of the four soldiers who may take legal action against the MoD, two did not even go to Iraq because they suffered such bad reactions to the multiple vaccinations, Mr Plumridge said.
One of the other two who were deployed to the Gulf had to be flown back to the UK after just 10 days because he fell ill and did not seem to get better, he added. He said the soldiers had five injections in one day, followed by one anthrax vaccination five days later and a second one a week later.
"We have got to question the government's policy on the mixture of vaccinations," he added. "I know from my own personal experience that when we got five injections in one day, we were all ill."
The case had yet to be put to the Ministry of Defence, Mr McGhee said.
"We are clearly gathering the evidence. I am aware through the organisations that there may be other individuals. We will assess it and if we think there is a case we will go forward," he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.
----
British Soldiers Allege Second 'Gulf War Syndrome'
Mike Wendling London Bureau Chief
(CNSNews.com)
May 30, 2003
Crosswalk.com
http://www.crosswalk.com/news/1202167.html
London - Four British soldiers are considering legal action against the Ministry of Defense, alleging that vaccinations meant to prepare them for duty in Iraq and the Persian Gulf have caused symptoms similar to so-called "Gulf War Syndrome."
A lawyer who has been consulted by the four, Mark McGhee, said Tuesday that initial medical tests were about to be conducted on the soldiers, who have suffered from aches and pains, breathing difficulties, stomach problems, chronic fatigue and memory problems.
"I've had communications with various veterans' organizations who have had individuals come to them with similar problems," he said by phone from the offices of the Linder Myers law firm in Manchester. "I would not be surprised if more individuals come forward."
McGhee has represented soldiers who allegedly came down with Gulf War Syndrome as a result of the 1991 conflict in Kuwait and Iraq and said the symptoms displayed by soldiers serving this time around are "identical."
"These symptoms arrived soon after vaccinations and these people were healthy before," he said. "Right now they need proper diagnosis and assessment."
The four soldiers are members of the National Gulf Vets and Families Association, according to the group's chairman, Shaun Rusling.
Rusling said that two of the unnamed soldiers were on active duty in the Gulf, while the other two received the same vaccines as other personnel but became ill before their deployment.
Three of the soldiers have been or are about to be medically discharged, Rusling said, while one is still on active duty as a military policeman.
A Ministry of Defense spokesman said he could not comment on the threatened action and that the legal team representing the soldiers has not contacted the ministry.
"We do recognize from the first Gulf War that some soldiers have been suffering from illnesses," the spokesman said. "Both sides have approached independent scientific experts and none have as of yet been able to prove that the symptoms have been caused by a unique Gulf War Syndrome."
The Ministry has consistently denied claims related to Gulf War Syndrome but other official bodies have recognized the disease in individual cases.
Earlier this month, a war pensions tribunal ruled in favor of a British vet who claimed that a cocktail of drugs and vaccines administered at the time of the first Gulf War caused his later illnesses.
Rusling said that he expected more suspicious illnesses to be uncovered in veterans of the most recent conflict in the coming months and years.
"When we came back in 1991, there were no organizations and nobody looking into this, so it took three to four years before anyone realized there was a problem," he said. "Because the syndrome is now well-known, we can expect to hear about more cases soon."
Researchers and veterans' groups have proposed several possible causes of the illnesses, including the vaccines, depleted uranium weapons, and fumes from destroyed chemical weapons plants. Rusling said the vaccines were the "first assault on the bodies of soldiers."
The U.S. government has not acknowledged a distinct Gulf War Syndrome; however, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs has identified a link between service in the Gulf and Lou Gehrig's disease.
An estimated 20,000 Americans and 5,000 Britons became ill after the first Gulf War, according to veterans groups.
-------- business
Defense Firms Consolidate As War Goes High-Tech
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42090-2003May26?language=printer
The nation's leading defense contractors are gobbling up small technology firms in a consolidation binge driven by the Pentagon's demand that future military conflicts be dominated by high-tech warfare.
The buying spree is contributing to a fundamental change in the structure of the defense industry as the top players move away from their roles as mere weapons makers and increasingly cast themselves as "systems integrators" that produce high-tech networks for the battlefield. In the past three years, contractors have swept up about 180 small tech firms, mostly in Northern Virginia, a 25 percent increase from the previous three-year span.
In one recent high-profile case, General Dynamics Corp., which makes M1 tanks, bought Herndon-based Creative Technology Inc., which designs computer networks that transmit classified information.
The Pentagon has pushed in recent years for a more intensive role for war technology, but the pace has accelerated with the proven high-tech successes in Afghanistan and Iraq and the demands of fighting terrorism. The rush to grab the premier small companies is sparking bidding wars and redesigning the landscape of the local tech industry -- a cornerstone of the region's business community that blossomed in the shadow of the dot-com revolution.
Underlying the consolidation is the sharp competition among the big defense companies to secure a lucrative role in the transformation of the military envisioned by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and backed by a growing Pentagon budget. Some industry observers worry, however, that the absorption of the small tech firms into the giant contractors could crimp innovation in a field that thrives on swift advances.
The companies attracting attention often work quietly behind the scenes, producing the technology essential to the new ways of war. Among the firms recently acquired are Alexandria-based Adroit Systems Inc., which writes software that instructs hovering drones to transmit surveillance photos to fighter jets, ships and ground stations; Chantilly-based Integrated Data Systems Corp., which develops software that allows the Pentagon to share classified information with other agencies on a secure network; Premier Technology Group Inc., a Fairfax firm that analyzes and disseminates intelligence for the Army; and Conquest Inc. of Annapolis Junction, Md., which specializes in managing information networks for the intelligence community.
"Just 20 or 30 years ago, the airplane was the thing or the ship was the thing," said Stuart McCutchan, publisher of Defense Mergers & Acquisitions, an industry newsletter. "Now those things are just nodes in the network, and the network is the thing."
The deals are more numerous but smaller in value than those of the last great merger wave, after the end of the Cold War. Contractors signed 65 deals last year valued at about $4 billion, according to the investment bank Houlihan Lokey Howard & Zukin. The industry is on track to beat that figure, with 31 deals signed in only the first four months of this year. Twenty-one were signed in the same period of 2002.
In the early 1990s, defense contractors joined forces in several mega-deals that reduced the number of the industry's aircraft makers to three from eight; tactical-missile manufacturers declined to four from 13. In a typical year a decade ago, the total value of the deals was more than $10 billion.
The most attractive companies today -- those in the secretive intelligence field or staffed by employees with top-secret security clearances -- are drawing bids far in excess of their earning power. But they might still sell for less than $100 million each.
"Two years ago you could not get any of the big top 10 companies to look at anything under $1 billion. You couldn't get any of the big investment banks to look at anything under $1 billion. Now everybody is going after" these tech companies, no matter how small, said an executive at a leading defense firm.
General Dynamics started its push into the information technology business in the late 1990s. At the urging of the Pentagon, the Falls Church-based company had begun outfitting its tanks, submarines and warships with the latest technology. The Army stopped ordering new tanks but spent millions upgrading its existing arsenal with digital capabilities, said Kenneth C. Dahlberg, executive vice president of the information systems and technology unit. "The new focus was on digitalizing the battle space," he said.
As a result, General Dynamics decreased its reliance on technology subcontractors and started to buy small tech firms. In 1997 it paid $200 million for a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp. that specialized in defense technology. The same year it made two other deals. In 1998, General Dynamics set up an IT unit -- a novel concept in the industry at the time. The unit, established almost solely through acquisitions, is now a nearly $4 billion business and one of the company's fastest-growing sectors.
Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin expanded its presence in the defense IT field in 2001 with the acquisition of OAO Corp., a Greenbelt-based firm. This month it acquired Orincon Corporation International. Lockheed, the maker of the F-16 fighter jet, also established an IT business council that includes the presidents of four of its business units to help it pursue contracts in the growing market.
"This is an evolving market because the technology is very dynamic," said Jeffrey Maclauchlan, Lockheed Martin's vice president of financial strategies. "It is definitely a focus area for us as we execute our growth strategy."
Raytheon Co., maker of the Patriot missile, is working on ways to further expand its IT business, a spokesman said. Last Monday, a spokesman said, the company grouped all of its information technology businesses into a single unit with more than $650 million in annual revenue.
The competition for the small tech firms is so ferocious that the average price paid for a defense industry IT company in 2000 was six to seven times its earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or EBITDA, according to Houlihan Lokey. In recent deals, companies have demanded nine times EBITDA or more.
It is not just the top-tier defense firms that are pursuing consolidation. The trend is playing out among the mid-level players that have less than $1 billion in revenue. ManTech International Corp., a Fairfax company with annual revenue of $500 million, bought Integrated Data Systems in February. Integrated, a high-end IT company that works almost exclusively on classified programs, sold for about $67 million, 13 times its EBITDA, according to the investment bank Aronson Capital Partners LLC.
"Current valuations are generally up" 10 percent to 30 percent from levels in the late 1990s, said Robert Kipps, director of Houlihan Lokey's McLean-based aerospace and defense group. They are up "nearly 100 percent" from the post-Cold War period of the early 1990s, he said. "Military successes in Afghanistan and Iraq . . . have validated the criticality of technology to our military strategy and has buoyed the attractiveness of high-end defense IT providers."
Some industry experts have begun to worry that if lumbering giants absorb too many small niche players, innovation could suffer. They are concerned that consolidation will wring out competition -- and without competition the fire for technological advance may be doused.
"Will IT, like the rest of the defense industry, become solely the domain of the [giant firms] because all of the small contractors have been absorbed?" said Christopher Hellman, a senior research analyst with the Center for Defense Information.
But many within the industry discount such concerns. Despite the accelerated rate of consolidation, there is little danger that all of the thousands of firms that make up the defense-related IT sector will be consumed, industry officials said. Many companies still refuse to sell, hoping that their future growth will bring a higher price later, they said. Others are headed by young entrepreneurs who are not ready to give up the helm.
"There are frankly too many $50 million companies still out there," said Jon B. Kutler, chairman and chief executive of the investment bank Quarterdeck Investment Partners LLC. "They are large enough for their heads to pop up, but not large enough to have the efficiencies, balance sheets to be successful in capturing larger and more complex contracts."
Consolidation could spur innovation if the deals create a capital-infusion used to fund new ventures, said Suzanne D. Patrick, deputy undersecretary of defense for industrial policy. "I am hopeful that the companies that can sell their ideas to the larger companies at a considerable premium will use that capital as start-up for the next company that they will found or the next idea that they will develop," she said.
The Pentagon has another reason to support consolidation: It saves the government money. A recent Defense Department report found that 10 acquisitions completed since 1994 saved the agency $4.7 billion. Every contract includes the cost of a company's overhead, which can be squeezed if providers join forces, agency officials said.
Still, the Pentagon recognizes the dangers of too much consolidation, Patrick said. "We also as a government have become very conscious of the fact that some of the most valuable pieces of innovation we have in the industrial base are embedded in these emerging defense suppliers," she said.
When Raytheon bought Solipsys Corp. for $170 million this year, the Pentagon stepped in. Solipsys had developed technology coveted by the Navy that linked ship radar systems. In an effort to breed innovation, the Defense Department urged Raytheon to share the technology with its competitors for three years, and Raytheon agreed.
Government intervention on mergers is typical in multibillion-dollar combinations but not for small deals, industry officials said. "It's unusual, but I think agreements like that might be more commonplace going forward as these companies attract the interest of large companies," Patrick said. "We know innovation typically comes not from the primes but from the second- and third-tier suppliers."
-------- iran
Iran Warns U.S. Not to Interfere in Its Affairs
Tue May 27, 2003
(Reuters)
By Parisa Hafezi
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=topNews&storyID=2824851
TEHRAN - Tehran Tuesday told Washington to stay out of its internal affairs as U.S. policymakers prepared to discuss whether to take a tougher stance on Iran aimed at destabilizing its clerical establishment.
Washington has stepped up its criticism of Iran in recent days, accusing the Islamic Republic of harboring senior al Qaeda members and developing a secret nuclear weapons program. Iran denies the charges.
"We hope that wisdom and logic dominates the Americans' debates and they refrain from carrying out any interference in our affairs," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
"Iran has always defended its interests with full power and will continue to do so. It won't hesitate even for a fraction of a moment to defend itself," he told Reuters without elaborating.
Washington's increasingly-hostile rhetoric has alarmed Iran's clerical leaders, already unnerved by the presence of U.S. troops across its borders with Afghanistan and Iraq.
Washington broke ties with Tehran shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution and President Bush last year placed Iran in an "axis of evil" alongside Iraq and North Korea.
"The message Iran is hearing from Washington is: 'We're out to get you'," said a local analyst, who declined to be named.
The Washington Post Sunday reported that the White House was due to consider Tuesday a Pentagon-backed proposal to destabilize Iran's clerical rulers through popular uprisings.
IRAN NOT A HOUSE OF CARDS
It was not known what actions the Pentagon was proposing although some U.S. official have suggested Washington could provide backing for exiled opposition groups such as the Iraq-based People's Mujahideen militia and Reza Pahlavi, eldest son of Iran's late shah.
But diplomats in Tehran caution that the exiles enjoy little support among Iranians and that while discontent with clerical rule is strong, public protests are kept firmly in check.
"The assumption that Iran is a house of cards waiting to collapse is off base," said one Asian diplomat.
The heightened pressure on Iran follows U.S. intelligence reports suggesting senior al Qaeda members in Iran may have played a role in the May 12 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia.
Iran says it has arrested and deported around 500 al Qaeda suspects over the past year and is interrogating several others.
Diplomatic pressure on Iran is likely to intensify on June 16 if, as Washington hopes, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) declares Iran in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Iran insists its network of nuclear facilities, which includes a uranium enrichment plant, are solely geared to electricity generation. But U.S. officials and independent analysts say Iran's atomic program could allow it to "break out" of the NPT when it is ready to build nuclear weapons.
"Iran is sending the signal that it is close to being able to make nuclear weapons while denying it has any such intention," David Albright, head of the Institute for Science and International Security, wrote in a recent research article.
Despite mounting concerns that Iran may be less than two years away from making weapons-grade nuclear material, Russia said Tuesday it would not give in to U.S. pressure to drop its assistance in building Iran's first nuclear reactor.
"We will continue to fulfil our duties despite the fact that our position on this question is different from Washington's official view," Russian Atomic Energy Minister Alexander Rumyantsev told the Prime Tass news agency.
----
Iran Says It Made Al Qaeda Arrests
Rank of Suspects Is Still Unknown
Reuters
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42425-2003May26?language=printer
TEHRAN, May 26 -- Iran, under pressure from Washington to join the U.S.-led war on terrorism, said today it has arrested several suspected members of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network but is unsure of their rank in the network.
U.S. officials say they have intelligence suggesting that senior al Qaeda members hiding in Iran had prior knowledge of the May 12 suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia in which 34 people, including eight Americans, were killed.
Leading U.S. lawmakers predicted on Sunday there would shortly be positive developments regarding al Qaeda in Iran.
Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Iran has several al Qaeda suspects in custody "but we don't know who these people are to be able to say whether they are senior or not.
"They need to be identified and interrogated," the official IRNA news agency quoted Asefi as saying, without giving details on the arrests.
State radio reported earlier that Asefi had said the al Qaeda suspects under arrest in Iran are not senior members of the network, accused by the United States of masterminding the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Iran, branded by Washington as being part of an "axis of evil" along with Iraq and North Korea, said it has deported about 500 al Qaeda members in the past year after they slipped over its borders from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.
Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said in a French newspaper interview today that Iran had done its best to expel al Qaeda operatives and had no interest in supporting the network.
"There is no reason for us to help this organization," Kharrazi told Le Figaro. "Our borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan are so long that some al Qaeda members have sought refuge in Iran. We have arrested many of them and extradited them to their country of origin."
Javad Zarif, Iran's ambassador to the United Nations, said on Sunday that Iran was trying to identify a group of al Qaeda suspects in custody and was willing to hand them over to "friendly governments," such as Saudi Arabia.
The United States, which broke diplomatic ties with Tehran shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution, has grown more critical of Iran since the end of the Iraq war last month.
U.S. officials have accused Iran of pursuing a secret nuclear weapons program, meddling in postwar Iraq and harboring al Qaeda members. Iran has denied those charges and said it is ideologically opposed to al Qaeda.
-------- iraq
Iraqi top cop fired for Ba'ath ties
May 27, 2003
By Jim Krane
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030526-103958-5073r.htm
BAGHDAD - The top U.S. official in Iraq has fired a Baghdad police chief because of his Ba'ath Party membership, despite the help he provided American forces in rebuilding the capital's ravaged police force.
West Baghdad Police Chief Abdul Razak al-Abbassi was dismissed Sunday, said Lt. Col. Richard Vanderlinden, commander of the U.S. Army's 709th Military Police Battalion.
Mr. al-Abbassi was found to have had full membership in Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, disqualifying him from any of the three top positions in an Iraqi government bureau, Col. Vanderlinden said.
A 33-year veteran of the force, Mr. al-Abbassi helped coax Baghdad police to return to work and rebuild their looted station houses, and he restarted patrols in a city under siege from Kalashnikov-wielding carjackers and looters.
"He was very cooperative, very competent at his job," Col. Vanderlinden said.
L. Paul Bremer, who heads the U.S. Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, issued a decree earlier this month that bars up to 30,000 upper-level Ba'athists from retaining any job in the Iraqi government. The order is strictly enforced for leaders of security departments.
Mr. Bremer fired Mr. al-Abbassi after Baghdad officers complained that a top Ba'athist still controlled the force.
But because Mr. Bremer gave himself wide latitude to grant exceptions to the de-Ba'athification rules, U.S. military police officers asked Mr. Bremer's office to permit Mr. al-Abbassi a hearing on the matter.
Mr. al-Abbassi presented his case Saturday, but the decision to fire him was not changed, Col. Vanderlinden said.
Mr. al-Abbassi may still qualify for a lower-level government job, Col. Vanderlinden said.
The news comes as the U.S. occupation force works to reform the Baghdad police department.
The west Baghdad force, with some 2,000 officers who patrol jointly with the 709th MP Brigade, was to begin receiving new uniforms yesterday.
Across the Tigris River, some 2,000 east Baghdad police - who patrol in concert with the U.S. Army's 519th MP Battalion - were also to receive new uniforms.
U.S. forces have disbanded all Iraqi security organizations, from the military to the secret police.
The Baghdad police force is far too small for a city of 5 million people, said Lt. Clint Mundinger, intelligence officer of the 709th.
To address the shortage, Mr. Bremer's office is devising a police-recruitment drive, Col. Vanderlinden said.
----
Iraq Attack Shows Postwar Danger for U.S.
By BASSEM MROUE
Associated Press Writer
May 27, 2003 v9:08 PM EDT
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAQ_VULNERABLE_AMERICANS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
FALLUJAH, Iraq (AP) -- Two Iraqis stepped from their car and opened fire early Tuesday, killing two Americans and wounding nine in a city whose people have made clear that U.S. troops are not welcome.
The violence in Fallujah, a hotbed of support for Saddam Hussein, was the latest in three deadly days for the U.S. military in postwar Iraq - further evidence the country remains a perilous place for its American occupiers.
Eight American soldiers have died in Iraq since Sunday - in direct attacks, accidents and explosions. Nearly two dozen have been injured. Hours after the attack in Fallujah, two American military police officers were wounded in rocket-propelled grenade assaults on a Baghdad police station.
"You've always got to be worried," said Sgt. Ariel Saez, 28, a soldier with the 1st Armored Division manning a Baghdad checkpoint. "You hear the gunshots constantly at night. It makes you wonder if it's one of us being put down. We always worry about it."
Whether recent incidents are connected is unclear. The American general commanding troops in Baghdad said the attacks, which he blamed on extremists loyal to Saddam, appeared to be uncoordinated.
"It's very small groups - one or two people - in isolated attacks against our soldiers," said Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III, commander of the 3rd Infantry Division, which fought its way to Baghdad and is now trying to keep the peace.
On Tuesday afternoon, six Iraqis were being interrogated about the shooting in Fallujah, a city where Saddam had many strong supporters - and a place where bitterness at the Americans has been particularly aggressive. Two Iraqi attackers were killed in the firefight.
"Who knows what they were thinking when they engaged U.S. soldiers?" said Maj. Randy Martin, a spokesman for the Army's V Corps. "I know we suffered casualties, and the enemy paid a price for those casualties."
Details of the incident, which happened around midnight at a Fallujah traffic checkpoint, some 30 miles west of Baghdad, were hazy.
Initial reports said the Americans were fired upon from many directions, including from a mosque, U.S. military officials said. But townspeople said only two men opened fire, and both were quickly cut down by American forces.
Martin said two vehicles had pulled up to the checkpoint together, and when a search of the first turned up weapons, men in the second vehicle opened fire and threw a grenade. The intensity of the assault "would suggest the possibility" that it had been coordinated by occupants of the two vehicles, said Capt. Tom Bryant, another V Corps spokesman.
U.S. troops captured six of the attackers, U.S. Central Command said in a statement.
Fallujah's 200,000 residents benefited greatly from Saddam's regime, with its young men awarded positions in the Republican Guard or jobs in government-built factories.
Today, while much of Iraq appears to be outwardly accepting the U.S. presence, people in Fallujah is openly angry.
"Every Iraqi is ready to sacrifice his life for resistance," said Safa al-Jubair, a 27-year-old street vendor in Fallujah. "We are 26 million Iraqis and we are all resisting and, God willing, occupation will end."
Protests against the U.S. Army's presence in Fallujah turned violent twice in April when soldiers fired at crowds, killing 18 Iraqis and wounding at least 78. The United States said people in the crowds fired first, but Iraqis insisted no one shot at the Americans.
On Sunday alone, there were three ambushes against Americans in Baghdad, all along a highway between the city center and the airport, said Lt. Clint Mundinger, a U.S. Army intelligence officer.
In one, an explosive was placed onto the highway in the path of a Humvee carrying four U.S. soldiers and detonated as the vehicle drove past. All four soldiers were injured, though two managed to fire on the suspect as he fled and left a trail of blood. The other two soldiers were trapped in the burning Humvee as ammunition it was carrying began to explode. Both were badly injured, and one later died.
Hours later, someone dropped a grenade from an overpass apparently trying to hit a moving Humvee. No one was injured. Also that night, a Humvee driven by three military police officers hit a trip wire, triggering an explosion. There were no injuries.
In the other incidents this week:
-On Monday, one American soldier was killed and another was wounded when their convoy was ambushed in northern Iraq.
-Also Monday, one soldier died and three were wounded when their vehicle hit a land mine or a piece of unexploded ordnance in Baghdad.
-On Sunday, a U.S. soldier was killed and another injured when a munitions dump they were guarding exploded in southern Iraq. The blast was not thought to be a result of hostile action, Central Command said.
-A U.S. soldier died Tuesday and two were injured in a road collision near the town of Tallil.
-Also Tuesday, a soldier drowned in an aqueduct in northern Iraq.
In yet another incident, five children swimming in a Baghdad canal were injured Tuesday when a grenade - apparently thrown at American soldiers - flew past them and into the canal, according to a witness. Two of the children were badly injured.
----
2 American Soldiers Killed in New Violence in Iraq
May 27, 2003
The New York Times
By PATRICK E. TYLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/international/worldspecial/27CND-IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 27 - Two United States soldiers died and nine others were wounded in a firefight west of Baghdad today, bringing to at least four the number of Americans killed in hostile exchanges with Iraqis in the past 24 hours.
Six Iraqis were captured and were being interrogated after today's incident, said Maj. Randy Martin, a spokesman for the United States Army's V Corps. Two unidentified attackers were reported killed when the Americans returned fire at a traffic control point in Falluja, 30 west of Baghdad.
The attackers used rocket-propelled grenades and small arms in the attack, the United States Central Command said, but Major Martin said the grenade was thrown by hand, The Associated Press reported.
All the American soldiers hit today were from the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, based in Fort Carson, Colo., Major Martin said.
"Who knows what they were thinking when they engaged U.S. soldiers?" he added. "We suffered casualties, and the enemy paid a price for those casualties."
An Army helicopter landed during the firefight to evacuate the wounded and was damaged when a Bradley Fighting Vehicle struck it while maneuvering into a firing position.
Falluja's 200,000 people benefited greatly from Saddam Hussein's Baath regime. Mr. Hussein built chemical and other factories in the city that employed Falluja's young men and gave others places in his elite Republican Guard.
A protest against the presence of American soldiers in Falluja turned violent in April, leading to the deaths of 18 Iraqis. American soldiers said they were defending themselves. No Americans were wounded by gunfire.
On Monday two soldiers were killed and five others were wounded in attacks on convoys.
The first occurred 110 miles northwest of Baghdad just after dawn when an eight-vehicle convoy of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment was on its way to resupply American forces near the city of Al Qaim close to the Syrian border. The convoy came under attack from gunmen who opened fire with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns.
One American soldier was killed and another wounded in the firefight as attack helicopters and ground forces reinforced the besieged convoy, a military statement said.
On Monday afternoon in Baghdad, four American soldiers were wounded when an explosive device believed to be a land mine was hurled by an unidentified assailant at a convoy on the road to the international airport on the western side of the capital. The United States Central Command later issued a statement saying one soldier had died and three others had been wounded in the incident, The A.P. reported.
"A man came running straight out at the road, and I engaged," Pfc. Dustin Meeks said. "He just sprung out of the bushes, and I perceived him as a threat, and I shot at him."
Despite the gunfire, the assailant managed to throw the explosive device into the path of an Army Humvee, destroying it and wounding all three of the passengers, according to the Army sergeant riding in the second vehicle.
"The gunner of the truck was slung about 15, 20 feet," said Private Meeks, who was interviewed at the scene of the attack. He was the gunner of a Humvee driving in convoy with the destroyed vehicle. The two Humvees, part of a scout platoon of the Third Infantry Division, were driving north about three miles from the airport when they were attacked.
A fourth soldier, from the Third Battalion of the 69th Armored Regiment, was wounded by shrapnel from exploding munitions when he stopped to assist in pulling the soldiers from the smoldering wreckage.
Meanwhile, an American soldier died today and two others were injured near the town of Talil when their tractor-trailer collided with another vehicle. Another Army soldier drowned after diving into an aqueduct in northern Iraq, the Central Command said.
Against the background of continuing violence, the head of the occupation authority in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, said on Monday that the Central Bank of Iraq and a group of private banks would begin providing "substantial" trade credits for exports to Iraq within weeks.
Now that the United Nations has lifted sanctions on Iraq, and as the country resumes selling its crude oil in coming weeks, Mr. Bremer said the trade credit system would "lubricate international trade with Iraq" and would also serve to demonstrate symbolically "to the world that Iraq is open for business again."
In announcing the opening of bank credit lines to finance the sale of goods to Iraqi ministries, government-owned factories and private companies, Mr. Bremer said that the total amount was still under discussion but that American and British companies were expected to be among the first to benefit.
Contracts are pending to sell everything from oil field technology to transportation services and telecommunications to Iraqi ministries coming back into operation under the occupying powers.
One good economic omen for Iraq, Mr. Bremer announced, was the discovery of $250 million in salvageable American currency in the flooded basement vault of the Iraqi Central Bank. In the last few days, American crews drained river water from the damaged building and opened the vault to find the currency.
American military forces earlier recovered hundreds of millions of dollars believed to have been looted from the Central Bank just before the war by Baath Party officials and relatives of Saddam Hussein.
The International Atomic Energy Agency confirmed on Monday that its inspectors were headed back to Iraq, but only to check the country's inventory of nuclear materials, which the agency is charged with safeguarding under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. The A.P. reported that the team was expected to leave for Iraq by week's end.
Also on Monday, United States military officials said they had arrested a brother-in-law of Saddam Hussein after giving chase to a vehicle speeding through Mr. Hussein's hometown, Tikrit, according to Maj. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, commander of the Fourth Infantry Division.
The vehicle was spotted by an American patrol aircraft. The police followed the car to a hospital in Tirkit. Hospital employees led authorities to the man, Mulhana Hamood Abdul Jabar, whose name appears on a list of 245 wanted Iraqis, although not on the list of the 55 most wanted. The passengers in the car were two unidentified men suffering from gunshot wounds.
The car also contained $300,000 in cash and an equivalent amount of Iraqi dinars.
In his news conference on Monday, Mr. Bremer said shortages of electrical power were still hampering economic recovery in the Iraqi capital.
Though power has returned to much of the city, industries, homes and business are plagued by rotating blackouts. Mr. Bremer also said that in a "matter of days" Iraqi oil refineries would begin producing gasoline to alleviate the long waits for fuel that have added to frustration and occasional violence in the capital.
On the political front, Mr. Bremer said he would provide no details of his plans to form an "interim administration" of Iraqi political figures, and he said he had asked Iraqi political figures to keep confidential their discussions with him about the country's political evolution.
The "leadership council" of the Iraqi political groups that worked with the United States and its allies to topple Mr. Hussein has expressed deep frustration with the shift in policy that has pushed them to the sidelines as the occupation authority was established.
Mr. Bremer said the United Nations Security Council resolution that last week lifted penalties that had been imposed on Iraq and recognized the United States and Britain as occupation powers "did not change the reality."
"The reality under the rules of war is that the coalition is the occupying power in Iraq," he said.
One Iraqi political figure said today that Mr. Bremer had discussed with Iraqi political leaders a plan to appoint a number of Iraqis to important ministry posts in coming weeks. This collective could become the interim administration, though it would have no political power.
In addition, the Iraqi said, Mr. Bremer has suggested that a national conference might be assembled this summer to select a commission to work on drafting a constitution.
Iraqi political groups say they are planning to send a delegation to Washington and London to protest the failure of the occupying powers to move more quickly to establish an interim government of Iraqis and pave the way for elections.
-------- israel / palestine
Sharon vows to end Israeli 'occupation'
May 27, 2003
By Ravi Nessman
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030527-124704-5818r.htm
JERUSALEM - Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told his stunned country yesterday that he was determined to reach a peace deal and to end 36 years of "occupation" - a word he used publicly for the first time - of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The word is anathema to the Israeli right, which believes Israel has a legitimate claim to the West Bank and Gaza for religious and security reasons.
"To keep 3.5 million people under occupation is bad for us and them," Mr. Sharon told angry hard-liners in his Likud Party in remarks broadcast on Israeli radio.
Palestinians claim all of the West Bank and Gaza for a state.
On Sunday, Mr. Sharon's Cabinet approved conditionally the U.S.-backed "road map." The three-phase plan begins with a halt to violence and envisages a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 2005.
Mr. Sharon's remarks indicated that his surprising turnaround could be genuine, analysts said.
The ex-general was nicknamed "the Bulldozer" for ramming West Bank settlement programs through successive Cabinets and once argued that giving up even 13 percent of the West Bank and Gaza would endanger Israel's security.
"This can't continue endlessly. Do you want to remain forever in Ramallah, Jenin, Nablus?" he asked his party's lawmakers, listing towns in the West Bank.
The Cabinet's approval of the road map plan, coupled with a list of conditions, was worded carefully to allow Israel to dodge measures that were toughest for Mr. Sharon's government to accept. Palestinians, who already accepted the plan, insist that it must be implemented unchanged.
In his remarks yesterday, Mr. Sharon left himself a way out.
"What will happen if Palestinian terror continues? Nothing. Nothing will happen. The Palestinians will get nothing," he told the lawmakers.
Critics have said Mr. Sharon's long-held condition that all violence must stop before peace moves forward is unrealistic and guarantees that the stalemate will continue.
Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom also told Arab neighbors yesterday that it never would accept the return of Palestinian refugees or their descendants to its territory under any peace settlement.
"There will be no way refugees will be settled in the state of Israel," Mr. Shalom told reporters at a European Union meeting with Mediterranean states in Greece.
He urged Arab states to accept the refugees and their families, estimated at some 4 million, permanently. The road map says the two sides must negotiate over the refugee issue toward the end of the peace process.
Still, Israel's conditional acceptance of the road map left some Arab leaders cautiously hopeful.
"We are on the verge of peace," said Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher. "We believe the road map is very clear. Jordan is ready to do its part in a good-faith manner."
Officials began preparing for a meeting in the coming days between Mr. Sharon and Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, their second in 10 days. Palestinian officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the meeting would take place tomorrow evening in Mr. Sharon's office.
That could clear the way for a summit with President Bush as early as next week, possibly in Jordan.
Mr. Sharon faced withering criticism from members of Likud who said the road map favored the Palestinians and endangered Israel.
Yuval Steinitz, a leading Likud member, said Mr. Sharon ignored the negative parts of the plan. "I think that Arik is very uncomfortable with the road map," said Mr. Steinitz, using a nickname for Ariel. He said Mr. Sharon was unable to withstand international pressure to endorse the plan.
In violence yesterday, a Palestinian teenager was killed by Israeli troops and another surrendered after infiltrating from Gaza, the military said. They were unarmed and apparently looking for work. In a village near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, an 11-year-old Palestinian boy was killed during an exchange of gunfire with Israeli troops, Israeli radio reported.
Some believe Mr. Sharon's startling reversal is genuine. "Often he says to me, 'Ten years ago, I wouldn't do this or say this,' " political analyst Shimon Shiffer told Israeli TV. "He reached the realization that at the age of 75, he's the man that finds himself at this intersection, that he and only he can do this."
Others said Mr. Sharon had never been a true ideologue of the right.
"Sharon is a pragmatist," said Efraim Inbar, director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv's Bar Ilan University. "He is capable of change when circumstances require."
Liberal lawmaker Yossi Sarid argued that Mr. Sharon was trying to keep his intentions murky so that the U.S. government could assume that he was committed to the plan, while his hawkish allies could assume that he was just making a tactical move to end U.S. pressure.
"Ariel Sharon likes to walk in the fog, because then no one knows where he is headed," Mr. Sarid wrote in the Yediot Ahronot daily.
----
NEWS ANALYSIS
The Mideast Thicket Continues to Test Bush's Leadership
May 27, 2003
The New York Times
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/27/international/worldspecial/27DIPL.html
WASHINGTON, May 26 - The phrase "arc of crisis" was coined by President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, after a revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. It described the religious fervor, instability and strategic and economic importance of the world from South Asia to the Mediterranean.
Today, the region is once again testing American leadership in ways that would tax any administration. But with the Iraq war over and many of President Bush's aides hoping for a peaceful period leading up to an easy re-election next year, the problems seem especially unwelcome.
The bombings in Saudi Arabia this month did more than destroy parts of three foreign compounds in Riyadh. They shook American complacency that the campaign against terrorism had been won along with the war on Iraq. The Saudi attacks also exposed deep new anxieties in Washington over the Saudi government's ability, and perhaps willingness, to help crush terrorist cells in its midst.
Then there is the sharpened quandary over Iran, which some Bush administration analysts say is harboring cells of Al Qaeda that were involved in the Saudi bombings. American officials have said that Iran is already trying American patience by supporting militant Shiite groups in Iraq and, the officials believe, accelerating its nuclear arms programs.
The administration is to hold a high-level interagency meeting on Tuesday to decide whether to suspend diplomatic contacts with Iran or take even firmer actions, perhaps beginning to support opposition groups, to get the Tehran government to cooperate.
Some in the administration favor confronting Iran, pressing for sanctions on its nuclear program at the United Nations or becoming friendly with groups that want to overthrow the current government. Others argue that Iran should be given more time to identify Qaeda operatives and perhaps hand them over.
"They are not going to want to take a step that looks like they are catering to American pressure," said an administration official, referring to the government in Iran. "Ratcheting things down for a while might make it easier for them to cooperate."
Beyond Iran and Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda is believed to be functioning in Afghanistan and further east in Pakistan, where it enjoys considerable popular support. American military officials complain that they are barred from going after Qaeda units in Pakistan. The fear is that an obvious American military presence in Pakistan would destabilize the government of Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
All these crises are unfolding against a backdrop of rising bitterness and confusion in Iraq, where the American failure to deliver basic services has set back national reconstruction and forced a deferral of American plans to install an interim Iraqi governing authority.
American credibility in the region has also been sapped, Arab diplomats say, by the failure to find Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden or any unconventional weapons in Iraq - the rationale the administration presented for war.
The one bright spot, for now, at least, is that the Bush administration finally seems to have altered the grim status quo in the Middle East. Peace is far from secured, but at least the peace effort seems more alive than it has been in two and a half years. Over the weekend, the administration won reluctant approval from Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for its peace plan for the Middle East, known as the "road map."
But the plan - with its series of reciprocal concessions on both sides that are supposed to lead within three years to a Palestinian state and an Israel at peace with its Arab neighbors and inhabitants - has raised a new set of problems for the administration. It has plunged Mr. Bush into what his aides agree is a risky new phase of direct involvement in negotiating a settlement on that most intractable of problems - a morass that has dragged down many a negotiator before, including President Bill Clinton at the end of his term.
"Are there a lot of ways this could go off the rails?" asked a senior administration official involved in trying to persuade Israel to accept the approach. "Of course."
Among the tough choices lying ahead for the administration are how much to pressure Israel to compromise for the sake of peace and how much to continue working with European, Arab and other allies to bring about a solution in an arena where the United States has always played the dominant role.
Another fallout of the Iraq war is that the Arabs and Europeans who supported the United States are calling in their chits. In return for supporting the war in Iraq, they are demanding that Mr. Bush make a bigger push to help establish a Palestinian state.
Many people close to Mr. Bush say that a Palestinian state has never been the president's top priority. Conservatives in Mr. Bush's political base - including evangelical Christians and many Jews - oppose any steps to pressure Israel to make concessions to bring such a state about.
Prime Minister Sharon has been sounding conciliatory on a Palestinian state. Though he is considered the godfather of the Jewish settlement movement in the West Bank and Gaza, lately he has suggested that a Palestinian state "is good for us, and good for the Palestinians," as he said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post.
"I don't think we can continue to control another people," he added. "I think it is bad for us, and bad for the Palestinians. How long is it possible to sit in all those cities?"
The trap in the peace plan, as seen in Washington and Jerusalem, is the size and shape of such a state. By mentioning "those cities," Mr. Sharon may have been signaling that he only intends to withdraw from population centers in the West Bank, maintaining control in most of the rest of its territory.
Hard-liners in the Bush administration are sympathetic to Mr. Sharon's concerns. But some say that hard-liners have themselves become more supportive of the "road map" approach, if only to give the administration more latitude in dealing with other crises in the region - diplomatically or maybe even militarily.
Mr. Bush will have to decide just how far to involve himself in the Middle East. European diplomats, who have lured the administration into the process so far, now want further commitments from the United States.
Specifically, they want Mr. Bush to commit to American forces in the field to monitor progress on the peace plan and to appoint a special presidential envoy to broker a solution.
Among those mentioned by the Europeans as ideal for that job are a former Senate majority leader, George Mitchell, who helped broker agreements on Northern Ireland and led a task force to study the Middle East in early 2001; and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III.
Top administration officials say only that a special envoy is under consideration, and that it is something that may be adopted. First, they say, they want to see evidence of progress on the ground, including Israeli actions to ease conditions of Palestinians and Palestinian actions to disarm Hamas and other militant groups.
"The president has made clear that he thinks there's an opportunity to make progress on the Middle East, and that he's prepared to be engaged," said a senior official. "We are going to try and seize the opportunity that we think is here."
-------- korea
At the DMZ, troops fight a 'ghost war'
May 27, 2003
By Willis Witter
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030527-124710-6791r.htm
OBSERVATION POST OUELLETTE, South Korea - The American soldiers turn their heads slowly, examining ridges, trees and even tiny twigs that explode in detail amid green hues in the night-vision scopes suspended from the rims of their Kevlar helmets. The M-16 rifles in their camouflaged hands follow in a sweep across a mist-covered North Korean landscape that begins only yards away with shadows cast by the full moon.
For the next 10 days, the squad of a dozen men will sleep in barracks covered by camouflage nets on the protected south side of Ouellette's wind-swept ridge. They might encounter North Korean soldiers while on patrol. From time to time, the enemy slips south across a border marked only by rusted yellow signs spaced several hundred yards apart.
Should that happen, the Americans will make their presence known and the North Koreans will probably flee to their side of the Military Demarcation Line, the official North-South border that bisects a 2.5-mile-wide buffer zone established nearly 50 years ago by a truce that ended fighting in the Korean War.
American soldiers struggle to describe their existence here - whether at Ouellette, Camp Bonifas less than a half-mile to the south, or at nearby Panmunjom, a Cold War display of guard booths and scowling North Korean soldiers that is visited by 150,000 tourists each year. Of that place, one often hears words such as "surreal" or "mind-game."
One American officer compares life here to a Dr. Seuss book he read as a child, in which hostilities between two creatures flare to absurd levels from a disagreement over the proper side on which to butter a slice of bread.
"It's like a ghost war," says U.S. Army 1st Lt. Keith Hager while escorting two visitors on a rare nighttime visit to Ouellette.
The silence is broken only by a howling north wind that sets hoist ropes banging against aluminum flagpoles, from which Old Glory, the United Nations and South Korean flags were retired hours earlier at sunset.
Against that backdrop, the soldiers hear reports on the latest nuclear crisis on the Korean Peninsula, from Seoul, Pyongyang, Beijing, Tokyo and Washington.
Impoverished North Korea is once again making a bid for both attention and aid by threatening to envelop its enemies in a nuclear "sea of fire," a strategy it successfully used a decade ago to win billions of aid dollars from the United States, South Korea and Japan.
This time it looks as if the fanatical Stalinist state has made a bad play, with the Bush administration recoiling more with disgust than fear, Japan beginning to shed decades of postwar pacifism to arm itself against an attack, and South Korea starting to abandon a policy of providing aid and investment to North Korea regardless of how it behaves.
But life for the 200 or so American soldiers here in the Demilitarized Zone - a tiny but elite fraction of the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea - moves to a rhythm of its own, seemingly disconnected from political events outside.
"From here, it's hard to tell what the North Koreans are doing or not doing," says Lt. Col. Matthew Margotta, commander of the U.N. Security Battalion at Panmunjom, a combined unit of about 550 soldiers, 60 percent from the South Korean Army and 40 percent from the U.S. Army.
Col. Margotta's command includes Ouellette, Panmunjom, Bonifas, the farming village of Taesongdong, and the farmers' vast expanse of softly terraced rice paddies that step up all the way to the border.
The area has had its share of incidents over the years including an ax murder, several defections and shootouts, all documented in great detail as July's 50th anniversary of the armistice approaches.
There are tourists, too. They come by the busload. American and South Korean soldiers escort them to the border at Panmunjom, where they snap pictures of North Korean soldiers in crisply pressed olive uniforms. Moments later, they load up on souvenirs at nearby Bonifas while waiting for the camp's one-hour photo shop to develop their film.
"We do our best to make transparent to the tourists just how dangerous this place can be," says Col. Margotta, of San Antonio. "What they don't see is the security behind all this, a quick-reaction force and extensive surveillance capability."
In his office, its walls lined with black-and-white photos from the Korean War, he speaks in the context of recent tensions that began with an October disclosure by North Korea of a secret program to make atom bombs. "Looking at history, incidents here have tended to occur when tensions were high," Col. Margotta says. But as tourists stroll through his military base, he adds with emphasis:
"We've seen nothing here now that we can pinpoint as being related to outside events."
Soldiers speak of cycles here in which tensions ebb and flow in their own rhythms, not those of global politics.
"When the alert is high, things can get pretty tense," says Lt. Hager, 25, of Adams, N.Y.
"How often does that happen?" one of his guests asks. "We can't discuss operational details," he politely replies.
Late in the afternoon, as shadows of trees and guard towers grow long, Lt. Hager takes his guests to barracks housing a unit of South Korean soldiers at the Panmunjom crossing.
Green mosquito nets cover the South Koreans' neatly made bunks. Because North Korea has yet to wipe out malaria, hordes of mosquitoes bred in nearby rice paddies become a menace in the hot summer.
A South Korean officer, Capt. Yang, explains that his soldiers sleep with their boots on so they can respond to any incident within seconds.
In an adjacent room, a group of soldiers monitors a bank of TV cameras covering every square inch of the border-crossing area. All is quiet and the pictures are more like photographs, but the soldiers gaze as intensely as if watching a television thriller instead of an empty road, swamp or quiet North Korean guard post.
As the sun moves toward the horizon outside, the tourists are gone and only the calls of rare birds such as the stately white Manchurian crane break the silence.
Inside a central one-story building that straddles the Military Demarcation Line, a muscle-bound South Korean guard who maintains a fierce Taekwondo stance during tourist hours is nowhere to be found.
The building is empty except for Lt. Hager, Capt. Yang and two guests, a reporter and photographer from The Washington Times.
"I was hoping the North Korean guards would come down and stare through the window, but I guess they saw your blue [journalist] armbands and weren't interested," Lt. Hager says.
The building smells of fresh paint, a coat of U.N. light blue applied to spruce things up for the upcoming armistice anniversary.
Negotiations take place here, sometimes over inane details such as the size of miniature flags that the North and South Koreans place on a conference table that literally straddles the border.
The Americans and South Koreans sit on one side, the North Koreans on the other. Once, the North Koreans slipped in at night and sawed a few inches from the legs of their adversaries' chairs, so they would look smaller during talks the next day.
The psych-games are not one-sided.
North Korean negotiators face the flags of the 10 nations, led by the United States, that fought under the U.N. flag to rescue South Korea from the 1950 North Korean invasion. The miniature flags are enclosed in a glass picture-frame at the building's South Korean entrance. "It really irritates the North Koreans because they only want to deal with the United States," Lt. Hager says.
The glass-covered display is designed to stop the North Koreans from repeating one incident in which they entered the building and used an American flag to wipe their boots.
Later, Lt. Hager takes his guests on a stroll to the nearby Bridge of No Return, a low and crumbling cement structure where prisoners of war were exchanged at the end of the Korean War.
In 1968, the 82 surviving crewmen from the seized U.S. surveillance ship Pueblo crossed here to freedom just in time to spend Christmas Eve with their families.
The North has since built a wall blocking its end of the bridge, now overgrown with weeds. As Lt. Hager and his guests approach a dividing line at the bridge's center, a North Korean soldier steps from a guard booth and stares at the intruders with World War II-vintage binoculars.
Near the bridge lies a simple monument to victims of a 1976 ax murder in which North Korean soldiers picked up axes being used by a party of six South Koreans and four Americans to trim a tree. They hacked two American officers to death.
The encounter, documented in a series of black-and-white photos, shows Americans defending themselves with their bare hands. At the time, the "rules of engagement" prohibited firing even in self-defense.
Because the DMZ is designated a combat zone, American soldiers come for one-year tours, officially as members of the U.N. Command Security Battalion, while their families typically remain home. That can make it a tough assignment.
"I was worried when I came here because some men who come forget about their families," says Sgt. Francisco Gonzalez, 24, of San Juan, Puerto Rico. Pictures of his wife, Yaidza, and two young children cover his locker door. Every day he calls home, prays with his wife and chats with his daughter, Yadiel, 3, and son, Anis, 1.
"Everything I do in Korea is not for me. It's for them. With the Army I can give them everything they want," says Sgt. Gonzalez, who is to rejoin his family in October for his next posting.
It was also tough for soldiers here during the war in Iraq, albeit for different reasons. The all say they turned to television at every opportunity and wished they could have been there.
"It felt bad not being with so many of the guys I knew," says Lt. Bryan Ash, 36, of Huntington, W.Va., whose former unit processed prisoners at the airport in Kandahar, Afghanistan, before being sent to Iraq.
But he adds, "Most of us enjoyed watching the embedded reporters. The world could see what we do."
Television reports also gave military families a morale boost, says Staff Sgt. Rick Bryan, 35, of Castle Hayne, N.C. "They could watch and feel good about what we were doing."
The high point of the war, he says, came when U.S. troops helped Iraqis pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad, and the low point was when TV reporter Geraldo Rivera drew his map in the sand telling the world where his unit was headed next.
Sgt. Bryan's assessment of the reporter draws chuckles from a group of soldiers taking a short break in the garage where they repair and maintain the battalion's fleet of Humvees and other vehicles.
The 10-day assignment for the squad at Ouellette begins on a sunny afternoon with a tactical rehearsal.
First they review the rules of engagement. Then they practice hand signals for basic commands and notices such as "pick up; move out" and "obstacle."
The soldiers move silently across a practice field in the hot sun, form a tight circle with rifles pointing outward, and later move on in an extended single file, without uttering a word.
"Stop, look, listen, smell, attune yourself to the battlefield, the animal chatter; sniff for cigarette smoke; look for broken sticks, matted grass and other signs of the enemy," explains Lt. Hager.
As the 12-soldier squad practices, a pair of South Korean soldiers stand guard as flooded rice paddies ripple in the wind.
The Ouellette assignment begins for real about an hour later. The soldiers drop their gear in the barracks and begin blending shades of green and brown camouflage paint on their faces and hands.
Slowly they move out, down the mountain slope, into a wooded ravine and out of sight. Later, they pass several tombstones engraved with Chinese characters.
The Americans stay on their side of the border.
But North Korean soldiers are known to slip into the South, with paper and pencil, to stencil the Chinese characters from the tombstones in an act considered a right of passage. It produces a souvenir proving they set foot on South Korean soil.
The patrols continue at irregular intervals, day and night, in dense forests and atop denuded ridges. The timing, routines and formations are deliberately varied to keep the enemy off balance.
When this patrol finishes its 10-day stint it will head back to Bonifas to train. The Army expends more ammunition here per soldier in training than anywhere else on Earth. Soldiers get just four days off each month.
Newly arriving troops are called "turtles," Lt. Hager explains. "They're pretty nervous at first but after a few months they begin to relax."
-------- mideast
EGYPT
Sunni Muslim authority decries suicide bombings
May 27, 2003,
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
CAIRO - Al-Azhar, the highest authority in Sunni Islam, warned yesterday that Muslim rage does not justify suicide bombings, such as recent deadly ones in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and Casablanca, Morocco.
"These savage and blind attacks have terrified the whole Muslim world ... and are in clear violation of many Islamic principles," Al-Azhar's theological research committee, chaired by the institution's top cleric, Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, said in a statement.
The committee said people have the right to defend their country "from occupation and invasion, but such attacks against innocent civilians under the cover of religious, political or other slogans is completely different."
-------- pacific
Military increases efforts against separatists
May 27, 2003
By Chris Brummitt
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20030526-103955-2182r.htm
BANDA ACEH, Indonesia - Indonesia moved heavy artillery into rebel areas of Aceh yesterday, stepping up its offensive against the region's poorly armed separatists.
The Free Aceh Movement said it wasn't intimidated and vowed to keep up its fight for independence in the tiny province. Rebels promised to increase hit-and-run attacks on vehicles plying the main roadways.
"We will resist Indonesia until we are free," said Tengku Jamacia, a rebel spokesman in northern Aceh. "Our soldiers are not afraid. The more Indonesian troops they see, the higher their morale."
Burned-out trucks and minivans littered the roadside between the main cities of Banda Aceh and Lhokseumawe, casualties of the guerrilla-style fighting that has characterized eight days of renewed clashes in Asia's longest-running separatist war.
The recent fighting, between more than 30,000 government troops and about 5,000 poorly armed rebels, marks the most intense crackdown yet in the oil- and gas-rich province, located on the northern tip of Sumatra, Indonesia's largest island.
It also marks Indonesia's largest military operation since it invaded East Timor in 1975.
Military spokesman Maj. Gen. Syafrie Syamsuddin said the government had learned lessons in the first week of fighting and would begin larger operations against rebels. He refused to elaborate or set a timetable.
"Such a large operation will, of course, get reactions" from rebels, he said. "If the reaction is aimed at the [military] or the police, that is to be expected. We are worried, though, that it will be aimed at civilians and the media."
More than 21,000 Acehnese have fled their homes in recent days. The military accuses the rebels of burning hundreds of schools and attacking trucks transporting food into the province.
The Indonesian military said it killed at least six guerrillas in battles yesterday, bringing the rebel death toll to 75. It said five soldiers and police officers have been killed and 20 wounded.
The guerrillas said they have killed dozens of soldiers and accused the military of targeting civilians, a charge the army denies.
Indonesian President Megawati Sukarnoputri ordered the offensive May 19, after cease-fire negotiations in Tokyo collapsed.
Meanwhile, Indonesian police said they had asked Interpol for help in arresting four exiled rebel leaders living in Europe.
The wanted men include Hasan di Tiro, who leads an Acehnese government-in-exile in Stockholm.
Baktiar Abdullah, spokesman for the group, told the Associated Press that he and his colleagues are Swedish citizens and have no fear of arrest.
-------- space
PENTAGON: SPACE IS FOR AMERICANS ONLY
May 27, 2003
DEFENSE TECH
Edited by Noah Shachtman mailto:defense@defensetech.org
http://64.207.156.228/
The National Reconaissance Office -- the government agency in charge of all U.S. spy satellites -- "is talking openly... about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time -- not just adversaries, but even longtime allies," EE Times reports.
At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, (NRO director Peter) Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide 'persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters.' If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have 'no veto power.' While empire-cheerleaders, like the fine folks at Winds of Change, are applauding the move, such a denial seems sure to piss off America's dwindling handful of pals -- again. And when fighting a global, decentralized enemy like Al Qaeda, don't you need all the friends you can get?
THERE'S MORE: As if on cue, the European Space Agency has announced plans to move ahead with the 30-satellite Galileo system, which is widely seen as a rival to the U.S. military's Global Positioning System (GPS) array. The plans call for Galileo to be operational by 2008.
As Slashdot notes, the U.S. opened up access to GPS three years ago "partly to make GPS more useful for all mankind, but also to dissuade other countries from developing their own navigational satellite system, and thus be dependant on the U.S. for both peaceful and military purposes.
"Since the demise of the Russian GLONASS system, GPS is the only game in town. Evidently recent events make Europe feel less comfortable about such things, and so they're building their own." (emphasis mine)
----
Europe to launch Galileo space program
Tuesday, 27 May 2003,
Australian Broadcasting
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/scitech/SciTechRepublish_865038.htm
European governments have agreed to launch the long-delayed Galileo space program.
Galileo is seen as a potential rival to the United States military's GPS global satellite positioning system.
The European Space Agency (ESA) said in a statement that an agreement had been reached among its member states which finalised the conditions for their participation in the project.
The ESA's members are Norway, Switzerland and the 15 European Union countries excluding Greece and Luxembourg.
The Galileo system, which would be built around 30 satellites occupying three circular earth orbits and generate an estimated 140,000 jobs, has been criticised as redundant by officials in the US.
ESA says Galileo, which is scheduled to be operational by 2008, will be a "civil" system and complement existing US GPS.
"The European Space Agency is now able to finalise the conditions for participation in the Galileo navigation program and to approve the Galileo joint undertaking foundation act to be soon signed by ESA and the European Union," ESA's statement said.
The EU's executive arm has said the Galileo program is essential to securing Europe's presence in the space industry.
It says it is also expected to offer profitable services in global positioning for transport, leisure and security applications.
But the project has run into repeated delays, initially due to scepticism on the part of Britain, Germany and the Netherlands about the need for Galileo, and later because of squabbles between states within ESA, the non-EU body which coordinates European space ventures.
For much of the past year the project was held up as Italy and Germany vied for influence.
More recently, Spain had opposed a deal between Germany and Italy that would have diminished the Spanish stake in the program.
"Conscious of the economic, industrial and strategic importance of satellite navigation, our member states have reached agreement in the common interest," ESA director-general Antonio Rodota said in the statement.
The so-called Galileo joint undertaking, to be headquartered in Brussels, will now assume responsibility for the development and validation phases of the project and also for preparations for system deployment and operations.
Galileo is the first instance of a project carried out jointly by ESA and the European Union.
----
Securing Europe's access to space, now and for the future
27 May 2003
European Space Agency
http://www.esa.int/export/esaCP/SEMEGDS1VED_index_0.html
ESA PR 35-2003. Ministers in charge of space affairs in Europe, meeting in Paris today, agreed on steps to put Ariane 5 back on track and set up development of future launchers within a reorganised launcher sector, free funds for the International Space Station and strengthen relations between ESA and the European Union, while Galileo has become a reality for Europe.
The Ministers responsible for space matters in ESA's fifteen Member States and Canada have today held a one-day meeting at the Agency's Paris headquarters. This was a follow-on from the ministerial gathering that took place in November 2001 in Edinburgh, where they had taken a number of important decisions on current programmes and new initiatives, with the overarching ambition to place space at the service of European citizens. Whereas the Edinburgh decisions had been implemented, new decisions were required now to help ensure that Europe remains at the forefront of space, especially in the field of launch systems, and that space is fully recognised as a key to efficient implementation of major European policies in such areas as transport, the environment, science, and security in the broadest sense.
The decisions taken today are critical to safeguarding Europe's guaranteed access to space. The Ministers have helped ESA restore the competitiveness of Europe's launcher system, restructure its launcher sector and prepare the future generation of launchers. In addition, they decided to unblock funds for exploitation of the International Space Station and reaffirmed their commitment to closer cooperation with the European Union.
In particular, the Ministers decided to support Europe's commercial launch operator, Arianespace, in the resumption of production of the "generic" version of Ariane 5 in order to guarantee continuity in launcher operations. At the same time they decided to support the qualification of the new and more powerful version (ECA, for a 10t lift-off capacity) by means of two flights in 2004 and to reduce production costs further. In order to sustain Europe's guaranteed access to space, the Ministers also agreed on a specific programme over the period 2005-2009 aimed at intensifying the institutional use of Ariane 5.
In addition to this first set of measures to overcome present difficulties in the launcher sector, which is undergoing a severe worldwide crisis, structural measures have been taken to secure the robustness of the overall European launcher sector, demonstrating political will to strengthen the sector.
First, the Ministers supported the need to reorganise the launcher sector so as to establish a strong link between production and development. They also decided to prepare for development of the next generation of launchers, thereby improving Europe's competitiveness in the field, and to build up international cooperation. This cooperation, initially with Russia, includes operation of the Russian Soyuz launcher by Arianespace from the Guiana Space Centre, Europe's spaceport at Kourou, French Guiana, as from 2006.
Through the decisions taken today by the Ministers and the related exceptional and structural measures, Europe's guaranteed access to space will be restored and its future will be secured.
Another subject dealt with by the Ministers was Europe's exploitation of the International Space Station. At the previous Ministerial meeting, in Edinburgh, part of the funds necessary for European exploitation of the Space Station had been blocked pending confirmation that the American partner would honour commitments it had given previously, showing that Europe was indeed willing to cooperate, but not at any price. The Ministers now agreed to unblock a first part of the ISS Exploitation Programme funds, to cover time-critical activities mainly related to the availability of ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV) and to the European ISS ground segment. Timely availability of the ATV will help to make up for a reduced Shuttle fleet after the Columbia accident.
The Ministers also addressed the relationship between ESA and the European Union, which has become a regular feature of the meetings at ministerial level. The first Resolution adopted at the Edinburgh meeting in November 2001 had reflected a very positive outcome with respect to this relationship, calling in particular for a framework agreement to formalise cooperation between the two organisations. Since then, this subject has received attention at the highest political level, as seen in the cooperation between the European Commission and ESA on drafting the Green Paper on European Space Policy and also in the possible inclusion of space matters in the revised mandate of the European Union, currently under consideration by the European Convention.
New steps have therefore been taken towards a closer relationship between ESA and the Union. The Ministers expressed their wish to see it deepened and developed further, and urged the Agency to complete, before the end of 2003, the framework agreement to form the basis on which ESA and the EU will work together permanently.
Galileo
Galileo: Europe's navigation system
In addition, the Ministers noted that Europe is now in a position to finalise the conditions for participation in the Galileo navigation programme. The agreement reached among ESA Member States clears the way for the official launch of the Joint Undertaking between ESA and the European Union, the legal entity that will have the task of coordinating their cooperation on Galileo, the European initiative to develop a global satellite navigation system.
On the space science programme, the Ministers welcomed ESA's Science Programme Committee's decision on Rosetta's new mission baseline: the spacecraft will be launched in February 2004 from Kourou, French Guiana, using an Ariane 5 launcher. The rendezvous with the new target comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is expected in November 2014.
The cost of the Rosetta launch delay has created a cash-flow problem for the science programme, which is currently operating under tight budgetary restrictions, but this problem will now be resolved by the ESA Council, through approval of financial flexibility at Agency level.
Ministers meet at ESA Headquarters
The decisions reached are among the most important in years "This is a great day for Europe in general and its space community in particular. Conscious of the economic, industrial and strategic importance of guaranteed access to space and applications such as satellite navigation, our Member States have given fresh momentum to European space activities, demonstrating Europe's continued resolve to remain at the forefront", said Antonio Rodotà, ESA Director General.
Describing the outcome of today's ministerial meeting of the ESA Council, Mrs Edelgard Bulmahn, who chaired the conference, said "the decisions reached are among the most important in years. The ESA Member States have provided the Ariane launcher system with the structures it needs to deal effectively with competition in a keenly disputed market. Thanks to the agreement on restructuring, policy-makers and industrialists alike can rely on planning stability over the years ahead. Responsibilities have been clearly established and price stability has been secured".
For further information, please contact:
ESA Media Relations Service
Tel: +33(0)1.53.69.7155
Fax: +33(0)1.53.69.7690
-------- us
Bombing by Numbers
The Iraqi air war wasn't as modern as it looked.
By Fred Kaplan,
MSN Slate
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
http://slate.msn.com/id/2083605/
With no fanfare, the U.S. Air Force recently released the official statistics on what it did during Gulf War II-how many planes of what sort flew how many sorties and dropped how many bombs of which types on what kinds of targets. The numbers confirm much and dispel much else of what we've assumed or been told about this "high-tech war."
The unclassified report-titled Operation Iraqi Freedom by the Numbers, signed by Lt. Gen. Michael Moseley, commander of CENTAF (Central Command Air Forces), and available on John Pike's wondrously useful Web site globalsecurity.org-confirms that the part of the war concerned with intelligence-gathering, target-acquisition, and real-time battlefield command-and-control was very high-tech indeed.
However, many of the weapons used were quite old-some of them nearly antique-and most of their missions were not in the least bit exotic.
These numbers have significance not just for war-wonks. Read closely, they contain lessons about the true nature of warfare and about what kinds of weapons we should-and should not-be buying.
The myth of shock and awe. The original Air Force war plan, at least as suggested by Air Force doctrine, called for massive airstrikes on key "nodes" of the Iraqi "leadership," which would disrupt Saddam Hussein's ability to command his military, thereby toppling his regime. Shortly before the war started, U.S. officials seemed to confirm this notion, saying 3,000 smart bombs and cruise missiles would fall on Baghdad the first night.
It turns out, however, that of the 18,898 targets hit from the air in this war, just 1,799-fewer than 10 percent-were related to the regime's leadership or the military's command structure.
War means killing the enemy's soldiers. The vast majority of targets struck-15,592 of them, or 82 percent of the total-were Iraqi troops, tanks, and other weapons concentrated on the battlefield. In other words, the U.S. Air Force spent most of its resources doing what its officers least like-not bombing "high-value assets" in the capital, or achieving "air supremacy" by shooting down enemy warplanes (there apparently were none, or at least none that took off), but rather supporting the U.S. Army troops and Marines as they slugged it out on the ground. This mission is called "close-air support," and the Air Force, which is run mainly by fighter pilots, has never been wild about it; it's an implicit acknowledgement that the real contest is going on way down there with the grunts, not above the clouds with the flyboys.
The Warthog rules. Just as close-air support dominated the Air Force task orders, so the A-10 Warthog-the only Air Force plane ever built for the dedicated mission of close-air support-dominated the skies. The A-10 is a relatively large, slow beast of an airplane, with a titanium-shielded cockpit, so it can fly in low and fire its armor-piercing 30mm shells from twin-barrel gun mounts. [Correction, May 28, 2003: The A-10 gun has seven barrels.]
Of the 1,801 airplanes sent to the region (not including helicopters), 60 were A-10s, more than any other single type of combat plane (except for the Navy's F/A-18). While the report does not say how many "tank kills" can be credited to those A-10s, it does say that they fired 311,597 rounds of 30mm ammunition.
Just as the Air Force brass has never liked close-air support, it has always loathed the A-10 and tried to kill it from the moment it was born. The last one was built in 1986. And although they performed superbly in both gulf wars, the brass is now trying to retire the Warthogs that remain.
Is stealth necessary? The Air Force would rather spend tens of billions of dollars on a new generation of stealth aircraft, made of radar-absorbing material that can fly virtually invisible to enemy anti-air defenses. But the report indicates that, while a little Stealth can go a long way, we probably don't need any more than a little.
The Iraqis fired their anti-aircraft artillery 1,224 times and launched 1,660 surface-to-air missiles. As a result, they put out of action six helicopters and a single A-10 (the only attack plane that flies at altitudes measured in hundreds or even dozens of feet, not tens of thousands).
The Air Force planners knew this from the beginning. Of the current stealth planes in the arsenal, they sent just 12 F/A-117s and only four B-2s.
By comparison, they sent 28 B-52s-bombers originally designed to carry nuclear weapons, all converted in the past decade to hold conventional bombs-most of them older than the pilots flying them.
The fact is, in this era of precision-guided munitions or "smart bombs," the airplane matters much less than the weapons and electronics inside. You could take a 747, snap on a bomb bay, fly it at 10,000 feet-and it would do just fine.
How smart were the smart bombs? During the war, most analysts assumed the majority of bombs were smart bombs and the majority of smart bombs were the new, cheap Joint Defense Attack Munitions or JDAMs. The old smart bombs, the ones used in Desert Storm, were laser-guided. In other words, a crew member would shine a laser on the target; the bomb would follow the beam. However, the beam could be deflected by dust, smoke, rain, even humidity. And the laser-guided bombs were expensive-around $100,000 apiece. JDAMs are guided by Global Positioning Satellites. The pilot punches the target's coordinates into the bomb's GPS receiver andthe bomb homes in on the spot; environmental conditions aren't a factor. And they're cheap-a JDAM kit can be strapped onto an old-fashioned "dumb bomb" for $18,000.
However, it turns out that of the 19,948 smart munitions fired during Gulf War II, 8,716-two-fifths-were the '90s-era laser-guided bombs. Substantially fewer, 6,642, were JDAMs. The other 4,590 smart weapons were GPS-guided but much more expensive models than the JDAM.
More surprising, another 9,251 bombs-or one-third of all the bombs dropped during this war-were unguided, unmodified dumb bombs. It would be good to know where these dumb bombs-and the less-reliable laser-guided bombs-were dropped: on the battlefield, in cities? In other words, was "collateral damage" a greater problem than our vision of a JDAM-dominating war suggested?
In this regard, Operation Iraqi Freedom was still far different from Operation Desert Storm, when just 9 percent of the bombs were smart and none of those were guided by GPS. Still, the picture has not advanced quite as far as we had been led to assume.
Smart video. The war's smartest technology, which didn't even exist in the preceding war, was the surveillance technology-the drones that hovered over the battlefield, taking pictures of targets below and streaming the imagery back to headquarters in real time. According to the report, ISR ("intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance") aircraft flew 1,000 sorties, taking 42,000 battlefield images, 3,200 hours of "full-motion video," and 1,700 hours of images that indicate moving targets. (There were also electronic-intelligence aircraft intercepting 2,400 hours of Iraqi signals intelligence.)
The report notes that this war marked the first time that four Predator drones flew simultaneously in support of combat missions-and the first time that six U-2 spy planes (which, apparently, were also busy picking out targets) orbited all at once on the same "air tasking order."
These devices let the commanders know the precise locations of Iraqi tanks and troops, so the A-10s, B-52s, F/A-18s, and so forth could go attack them with smart bombs, dumb bombs, and 30mm shells. They're worth spending a lot of money on. So is the idea of buying more JDAMs. As for much of the other high-tech air dreams, especially the new generation of multibillion-dollar stealth planes, it's not clear how much we need them in the real world of war.
Correction, May 28, 2003: The A-10 airplane's gun has seven barrels.
----
U.S. troops' role in Iraq likened to occupation of postwar Japan
May 27, 2003
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030527-121550-3688r.htm
American ground forces increasingly are shedding combat roles and taking on the job of running Iraq in an occupation of a kind not seen since the United States democratized Japan and Germany.
In recent weeks, commanders have redirected a larger share of the U.S. troops in Iraq to the chores that accompany controlling and operating any large city such as Baghdad: patrolling the streets, staffing prisons, guarding valuable real estate, imposing gun control, restoring electricity and water distribution, and supervising trash collection.
"For the U.S. military to be occupying a country, trying to take charge of basic services, trying to keep order, really trying to make the country work from scratch, this is something we haven't seen since the 1940s," said Thomas Carothers, a foreign-policy expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former legal adviser to the State Department.
In some ways, Mr. Carothers said, the task for the U.S. military in Iraq, a country of more than 20 million, is more daunting than that faced by Gen. Douglas MacArthur in Japan 58 years ago. Unlike Iraq, Japan was a more unified society and had a fairly vibrant economy, with people who knew how to run it.
"I think we are just going to see a long, slow road to reconstruction," Mr. Carothers said. "Nothing will happen fast. There will be gradual improvements."
The U.S. initially stationed 450,000 troops in occupied Japan, then a country of 72 million. It steadily reduced the troop number during the seven-year occupation that, unlike Iraq, saw virtually no Japanese opposition.
The major shift in U.S. military operations comes about a month after coalition troops captured Saddam Hussein's last stronghold, Tikrit, a place where Army soldiers still are rooting out the last bastions of his Ba'ath Party operatives.
In Baghdad, a city of more than 5 million, the Army's 3rd Infantry Division is sending home some heavy weapons, such as artillery pieces, as its aim now is winning the peace, neighborhood by neighborhood.
"We are a police force now," Maj. Gen. Buford Blount III, the 3rd Infantry commander, told reporters recently. His division of 20,000 soldiers "has transitioned from combat to a security force to help the people of Baghdad," he said.
There are now 150,000 U.S. ground troops in Iraq, up by several thousand since the war ended. A military police force of 2,000 will double by month's end.
Pentagon sources say the force number eventually will begin declining, as more of the country is stabilized and elements of the 3rd Division, some of which have been in theater since September, are sent home. The 1st Armored Division in Germany will take on some of the 3rd's missions.
Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, told reporters yesterday that all 60,000 Marines sent to the Persian Gulf area for Operation Iraqi Freedom will leave soon. "We have plans to come out this summer," said Gen. Hagee, according to Reuters news agency.
Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall U.S. commander in the Gulf, and L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. administrator in Iraq, are studying troops levels. The two are counting on allied nations to provide troops to replace Marines in southern Iraq.
"We've had many nations stand up, not just in Europe, but essentially around the world that want to contribute to the stability operations in Iraq," Gen. Richard B. Myers, Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, said this week. "So I don't think the number of troops is going to be the issue."
In recent weeks, Gen. Blount has put more soldiers on the street, as threats diminish from regular Iraqi military or from paramilitary, such as the Fedayeen Saddam. The military has set up a unit called Task Force Neighborhood that attempts to clean up Baghdad, block by block. The teams include police, civil engineers and doctors, who pick up garbage, collect ordnance, and deliver medical assistance.
Other teams are guarding crucial infrastructure, such as refineries, gas stations and fuel trucks. Still others participate in about 1,000 street patrols daily, accompanied by the burgeoning Baghdad police force.
Mr. Carothers said the focus on municipal duties reflects Mr. Bremer's immediate goals.
"It's clearly proven much more difficult than expected," he said. "When Paul Bremer came in, he's been trying to get back to basics. Let's get the security situation under control. Let's put off the political process a bit. No need to rush, his view, to Iraqi authority. Let's treat this more like what it is - a U.S. occupation of a broken country."
An Army officer said in an interview that despite negative articles in the U.S. press about Baghdad's reaction to the occupation, the vast majority of Iraqis gladly accept the American presence.
"Only those that accompany troops on patrol see a different reaction of the population from those reporters that write their stories from the Palestine Hotel," said the officer, who asked not to be named. "In the hotel, they cook up stories of chaos and animosity toward our troops. The truth is that 99 percent of the locals are glad we're there."
Still, pockets of resistance remain. Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan, the most senior U.S. officer in Iraq, announced last week that his forces will soon institute a gun-control policy that is expected to force many citizens to turn over AK-47s and other weapons.
"We are in the final stages of formulating a weapons policy to put rules on who can and cannot possess a weapon," Gen. McKiernan said. "We want to get explosives and AKs out of the wrong hands."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS
Polygraphs: Worse Than Worthless
By Alan P. Zelicoff
Tuesday, May 27, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42267-2003May26?language=printer
In 1999, in the midst of alleged leaks of nuclear weapons information from his department's national laboratories, the secretary of energy, Bill Richardson, set out to show that he could be "tough" on national security matters. He sought congressional funding for a wide-ranging polygraph program to cover all employees with high-level clearances -- about 15,000 people in all.
Congress agreed -- despite the absence of any evidence that polygraphs have ever detected a spy operating anywhere in the U.S. government. But Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) managed to get the Senate to stipulate two important conditions -- first, that the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) review the medical and scientific literature to determine whether use of polygraph tests for screening was in any way worthwhile and, second, that the secretary report back to Congress after the NAS report was completed.
Late last year the NAS published its findings. It determined that the polygraph was not a worthless tool -- indeed, that it was much worse than worthless. The report said that "available evidence indicates that polygraph testing as currently used has extremely serious limitations . . . if the intent is both to identify security risks and protect valued employees." The NAS panel, made up of internationally respected psychologists and statisticians, further determined that the test was so nonspecific that even if the polygraphers managed to finally uncover their first spy, at least 100 innocent laboratory employees would have their clearances yanked because of the "false positives" inherent in the test. The NAS concluded: "Polygraph testing yields an unacceptable choice . . . between too many loyal employees falsely judged deceptive and too many major security threats left undetected. Its accuracy . . . is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies." It doesn't get much clearer than that.
Spencer Abraham, the current energy secretary, was faced with a dilemma: If he did the right thing by openly recommending that Congress trash his predecessor's polygraph program, he would embarrass his counterparts in the CIA and the Defense Department, where faith in the polygraph long ago reached cult status. If he kept the polygraphs, he would do so in the face of the academy's clear rejection and more than 60 years of evidence that they waste taxpayers' money while destroying the careers and lives of countless loyal Americans.
Abraham opted instead for a third course. In a memo to the national laboratory directors in late March, the secretary said he had decided to "defer" his decision on polygraphs until "after hostilities in Iraq had ended." That wasn't quite true. Just two weeks later, an official Energy Department "proposed rule" appeared in the Federal Register, in which the secretary gave it as his opinion that "DOE [the Energy Department] does not believe that the issues that the NAS has raised about the polygraph's accuracy are sufficient to warrant a decision by DOE to abandon it as a screening tool. Doing so would mean that DOE would be giving up a tool that, while far from perfect, will help identify some individuals who should not be given access to classified data, materials, or information."
There is supposedly an opportunity for the public to comment on the Energy Department's proposal to do nothing. But there is little reason to believe the department has any intention of listening, given its willingness to dismiss all credible science on the issue without any explanation.
The aftermath of this episode of bureaucratic bungling is even worse. Since the secretary displayed his studied ignorance, the department has been faced with yet another polygraph embarrassment: William Cleveland Jr., head of counterintelligence at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (and a retired FBI agent), stands accused of a reckless tryst with Katrina Leung, recently indicted as a Chinese double agent. During that time, the FBI paid her $1.7 million to spy on Beijing.
Cleveland asserts that he warned another FBI counterintelligence agent and Leung's handler, James J. Smith, about her. Smith, it turns out, was having an affair with Leung at the same time. Cleveland passed his DOE polygraph, even though during his examinations he was asked if he had "unauthorized contact with representatives of a foreign government." Smith has been arrested, but the damage is done: Leung copied their secret documents, probably sending them on to her friends in the Ministry of State Security in China. So much for "identifying some individuals who should not be given access to classified data, materials, or information."
Unfortunately, there is nothing new here. Two years ago I wrote a piece in the science magazine Skeptical Inquirer recounting the multiple failures and ignoble history of the polygraph, and the mindless faith invested in it by presidents, CIA and FBI directors, police departments and other people who ought to know better. Shortly thereafter a letter to the editor arrived, stating: "In my experience with the polygraph, as user and subject, its junk science does provide an important but discreditable service for lazy and timid national security managers (also known as a species of bureaucrat). There's a lot at stake for the bureaucrat. Faced with the prospect of excruciating hard work, considerable expense and agonizingly difficult choices, the [polygraph] offers an attractive refuge from responsibility. Like handing fate to the stars . . . bureaucrats can abandon their duties and responsibilities to junk scientists and interrogators masquerading as technicians."
The correspondent, writing from prison, was Aldrich Ames, perhaps the most damaging spy in all of U.S. history. Over Ames's 30-year career -- the last decade of which was spent as a mole within the CIA ratting on his own agents -- more than a dozen U.S. intelligence operatives in Moscow and elsewhere perished, while Mr. Ames netted a cool $3 million, courtesy of the KGB.
Meanwhile, he passed his CIA polygraph every five years.
The writer is a senior scientist with the Center for National Security and Arms Control at Sandia National Laboratories. The views here are his own.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Anti-nuclear protest at air base
ISABEL COCKAYNE
May 27, 2003
EDP24 News (Norfolk, UK)
http://www.edp24.co.uk/content/News/story.asp?datetime=27+May+2003+18%3A37&tbrand=EDPOnline&tCategory=NEWS&category=News&brand=EDPOnline&itemid=NOED27+May+2003+18%3A25%3A43%3A090
Anti-nuclear campaigners demonstrated outside Europe's largest F15 fighter base today.
About 30 people gathered outside the US Air Force's base at Lakenheath to protest against the "continuing presence of nuclear bombs at the base".
An USAF spokesman said it was the US Department of Defense's policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons in any location.
The protests's organiser, Lakenheath Action Group (LAG), said the bombs could be used against attacks by conventional, biological or chemical weapons and on non-nuclear weapons countries.
They said future generations of children in Iraq would be lost because of the depleted uranium used in the war.
And they pledged to continue their protests at RAF Lakenheath indefinitely.
Mel Harrison of LAG said: "The children of Iraq will suffer and die for decades to come because of the depleted uranium used during the war on Iraq.
"Nuclear weapons do not just kill in the present; they deform and kill future generations of children as well. It is completely unacceptable that we allow our governments to threaten people like this."
Davida Higgin of LAG and Norwich CND said there were vital issues involving nuclear weapons and the aftermath of the illegal war on Iraq.
"It is incredibly hypocritical of the US and UK governments to claim they went to war with Iraq because of weapons of mass destruction, when not only are the nuclear weapons at USAF Lakenheath illegal under international law but they are also used to threaten non-nuclear states."
----
BURMA
Democracy activists sentenced to prison
May 27, 2003,
Washington Times
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
RANGOON - A court in Burma sentenced 10 democracy activists to prison terms ranging from two years to life, and a pro-junta group threatened supporters of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi and hurled a brick at her car, her party said yesterday.
As the Nobel Peace laureate drove through central Burma, returning home from a political tour, a group backed by the military regime forced her waiting supporters to flee after threatening to run them over with cars, said a spokesman for the opposition National League for Democracy.
----
A Time for Healing
For Torture Survivors, a Community of Victims Provides a Rare Psychic Refuge
By Teresa Wiltz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, May 27, 2003; Page C01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A42089-2003May26?language=printer
Making blindfolds bearing the names of countries that engage in torture is one of the activities of the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International. (Photos Susan Biddle -- The Washington Post)
Second of two parts
They sit in a circle, 13 or so of them, brown and black, beige and white, refugees from horrors most of us only read about. A baby girl, a new arrival from the Congo, naps at her mother's feet, a girly girl in ruffled pink. Next to her mother, a sad woman in cornrows, sits a blond American, translating the proceedings in halting French. In the center of the circle here in Northeast Washington, a candle cast in the shape of the Earth flickers.
A young man from Angola, Concei da Silva, grabs the globe. His face is sweetly expectant; a tear-shaped scar sits perilously close to his left eye. Da Silva, who at age 9 watched government troops hang his father in the family's living room, murmurs a few words in his native tongue. "It feels good to speak in my language," he says, then passes the candle to the next member of Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC).
"I am a victim of torture in my country," a small man in his sixties announces, and then, at da Silva's prodding, adds something in Vietnamese. The candle is passed to the next man, who speaks in Spanish, and then to a man who speaks in Kurdish, and then to the next two, who speak in Amharic, and to the Congolese woman, who whispers in French, and to a big-bellied man who blurts something in English, and finally to the ex-priest, who speaks in Filipino. They all speak of loved ones lost, of hopes for peace, and fear for the future.
"All of us have experienced horrible torture at the hands of all kinds of regimes," says Alex, a ponytailed Guatemalan in a baseball cap who sits quietly next to his U.S.-born wife.
"Sometimes these days I am distraught, completely. There are pundits on TV who say torture is okay. It's easy to say it's okay to torture someone else if you don't experience the torture yourself. But if you experience it, you speak out against it. Maybe we can't undo the things that were done to us.
"But we can help somebody."
It is this urge to "help somebody" that keeps the members of TASSC together, reliving what they'd rather not relive. With some 150 members from around the globe, TASSC believes it is the only organization created by and for survivors of state-sanctioned violence.
Here, in these cinder block rooms, the wounded heal the wounded.
Da Silva remembers how they came for his family. He is from the same ethnic group, the Ovimbundu, as rebel leader Jonas Savimbi, and that made his family a target. Soldiers from the Angolan government came barreling into his home. Killed his father, snatched up his mother. It was 1984.
Da Silva never saw his mother again.
He spent the next four years in an orphanage, scrambling for food and clothing. He found family in his best friend, Inoque. Together they learned how to defend themselves, how to depend only on each other. Nearly four years later, the soldiers came again. This time they came for da Silva and Inoque. The choice: Join the army or be killed. In camp, Da Silva learned how to shoot a rifle, how to plant land mines, how to torture prisoners.
He was 12.
"Sometimes you wish you were never born, that you never saw certain things," da Silva tells the support group. But the feeling "goes away. You realize there is work to be done."
These days, their work has intensified. There is war. And with war, they say, there is torture.
TASSC has a strong political focus. Its stance is firm: "Zero tolerance for torture." Three out of five of its staff are torture survivors, including da Silva and U.S.-born nun Dianna Ortiz, the organization's founder and executive director. Its members hail from 50 countries, from Angola to Bosnia, from the Philippines to Pakistan, and from right here in the United States. (TASSC has five offices around the country, eight in other nations.)
TASSC members are a determined lot. They opposed the war in Iraq, participating in peace rallies, lobbying members of Congress and holding prayer vigils. When Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, was arrested, TASSC publicly questioned whether the man had been tortured by the U.S. government.
For TASSC members, activism is the best form of therapy. It is a counterweight to living in the aftermath of torture, oftentimes far more brutal, survivors say, than the torture itself.
Long after the release, or the escape, or the rescue, long after the peace accords have been signed and the last soldiers have been brought home, war still wages within.
"Sometimes," says Leny Ilongo, a 49-year-old torture survivor from the Democratic Republic of Congo, "it's hard to believe what people went through. The ego is destroyed. . . . You've got to try to build a new life. How is a person changed? That is the key question. Because sometimes a person doesn't know when there was the break, the passing from one side to another."
Da Silva wants to erase that time, to delete the images replaying in his mind. But that time was like living in another dimension, days without sleep, a child soldier hyped up on drugs the soldiers had injected him with to "remove fear."
"You feel the excitement to shoot the gun," da Silva says of the drugs he and others were forced to take.
He considers himself lucky: He was assigned to plant land mines. The boys who were sent to fight never came back.
Then he and Inoque ran away. But out in the bush, Inoque stepped on a mine. He was dying, crying, begging for help. Da Silva could only watch and fret. He couldn't carry him. And if he stayed, they'd both be found and they'd both be killed.
"It is," he says, "very hard to leave someone."
Tucked beneath a hill on the premises of the Capuchin Friar monastery are the TASSC offices, where statues of the Virgin Mary and Saint Francis of Assisi stand amid the tulips. Inside, everything is soft: Smiles, voices, lighting, music.
Handmade quilts and posters proclaiming "Stop Torture" and "Fight for Peace" dot the walls. Pictures of TASSC members create a smiling, multi-culti collage while flowers, candles and little statues of Buddha and Christ form altars in the offices.
Visitors wander in and out: A friend from Guatemala cracking jokes about foul-mouthed parrots, a young family of refugees from Colombia. Preschoolers dash about, giggling and slamming doors, and yelling in Spanish, "He hit me!!!" Assistant director Orlando Tizon, a former priest in his sixties from the Philippines, doles out milk and cookies, looking flummoxed by the whir of toddler energy.
Sometimes playing babysitter is part of the job description.
Two of the TASSC staff are paid full-time wages (Ortiz's salary is paid by the Ashoka Fellowship, a global nonprofit that invests in "social entrepreneurs"); the others, including da Silva, work as volunteers. Other TASSC members and interns volunteer from time to time, receiving carfare and lunch. It's about all that an organization funded by individual contributions and small grants can afford.
The staff lives simply and works long hours, seeing two to three new cases each week. For a while clients were coming in from Ethiopia; now the staff is seeing survivors from Colombia, Ivory Coast and a small island in Indonesia.
Survivors find out about TASSC through its Web site, through treatment centers and churches. TASSC welcomes them all.
"We try to share who TASSC is, that all of our members are survivors," says Ortiz. "Sometimes we get these strange looks like, 'You're a survivor, too? But you're an American.' I say yes. That's when I share some of my experiences."
In 1989, Ortiz was a young nun teaching school kids in Guatemala, when, she says, she was kidnapped and tortured by Guatemalan security forces. She says she was raped, burned and forced to kill another prisoner.
Rats and mice were used in her torture; now, she is deathly afraid of them. It's a phobia that she has to confront regularly: Rodents romp through TASSC offices. It is da Silva who traps them for her. And then sets them free outside.
He wandered in the bush for six weeks, lost, sleeping in trees, only a gun for companionship. Eventually, da Silva made it back to Minongue, and then to the capital of Luanda. Sometimes he stole so that he could eat. It wasn't something he was proud of, the child of wealthy landowners. So he got work on a farm -- and started night school.
There, he met his wife, Maria de Souza. Bit by bit, he became an activist, advocating for the rights of child soldiers, protesting the war, organizing groups to resist the regime. He became a leader. And prey.
On Dec. 2, 1999, soldiers raided his house while he hid in a hole in under the floor. For hours, he listened to Maria's screams, too paralyzed to move. Eventually, her screams stopped. He crawled out, took her in his arms. She'd been raped many times. As he stepped outside to carry her to the hospital, he heard the click of a gun.
The soldiers were waiting for him.
"I tried telling Maria everything would be okay," he says. "But it happened too fast."
He was carted off to prison, where "they did many, many things" to him. His torturer pulled out a toolbox and went to work. Da Silva was hung upside down with his veins slashed; left naked on blocks of ice; chunks of flesh were carved out of his chest with a machete; electricity was applied to his genitals; four teeth were pulled out with pliers. The torturer sidled up beside him, sliding a knife in the socket of da Silva's left eye. And then he promised to make da Silva eat his own eyeballs.
Some of the things they did da Silva refuses to discuss. And yes, after a while, he named names. Many names. Collaborators, villages, anything. Made up stuff. Because when you are faced with that kind of pain, you will do anything to make it stop.
"Everyone underestimates their breaking point," says TASSC member Philip Farah, an economist who says he was tortured by Israeli officials in the 1970s when he was active in a Palestinian theater group. "I thought I was such a coward and it turned out that I was a little bit better than I expected. Still, I did beg shamelessly for the beatings to stop. . . . Like a poor beggar."
It has been said that torture is the spiritual cousin of pornography. There is something unique about the forced subjugation of the will, something fascinating about the creative cruelty torturers use. We are mesmerized by the misfortune of others.
Witness the rescue of the American POWs from a private home in Numiniyah, Iraq, with TV anchors breathlessly questioning military officials: What kind of injuries do they have? Torture is the word that hovers, sometimes spoken, sometimes not. It is an intrusiveness that survivors often feel.
Still, TASSC members willingly tell their stories, racing through from start to finish, usually ending in tears. In the telling, they reason, is the potential to stop torture -- forever.
Theirs is an ambitious undertaking. Amnesty International reports that more than 150 governments practice torture, defined by the United Nations as "acts deliberately perpetrated by or with the approval of government officials, which are designed to inflict extreme physical and/or psychological suffering."
According to a congressional resolution, an estimated 500,000 torture survivors reside in the United States.
Da Silva escaped in January 2000 when they took him out to a field to kill him.
"They start to shoot, pop pop pop pop."
He was shot in the leg and chest as he ran. He was rescued by men in a charcoal truck and spent three months in the hospital. When he was released he went looking for Maria. But Maria had died of her injuries.
That was the first time da Silva tried to kill himself. Swallowed 25 quinine tablets. Tried to hang himself. Then he tried to drown himself.
But his will to live was stronger than his grief. He left the country, stowing away on a ship.
The community of survivors who are "out" and outspoken is intimate. Everyone knows everyone. They meet at conferences, rallies, prayer vigils and peace marches. For some, this means succor, a comfort in knowing that you are known. For others, like a Central American psychiatrist who asked that her name and story not be used, the idea of being known is enough to send one spiraling into panic and paranoia. Survivors tell their stories willingly, and then call back to withdraw their tales.
What happened to them happened under cover, without witnesses. Because of that, it is difficult to verify survivors' accounts. Groups like the Human Rights Watch can confirm that a survivor's story fits a general pattern of reported violence and abuse in their country.
"You can't be 100 percent certain that all of the information you've been given is correct," says David Hinkley, executive director of the San Francisco-based group Survivors International. "But there is a growing network of clinicians who've developed increasing amounts of expertise, recognizing patterns and symptoms."
There are the physical scars, evidence of beatings and burnings. And there are the internal ones, clinical depression, agoraphobia, post-traumatic stress.
Scars crisscross da Silva's body. The left side of his face is still numb, the machete hole in his chest aches still. The thick wound peeks out from his shirt, thick and welted. He drinks too much coffee, smokes too many cigarettes. False teeth line his mouth.
He remembers Maria, and he is hounded by guilt. Maybe he could have saved her. He tries to get his work permit here, and he is pricked with fear. Having to jump through bureaucratic hoops feels menacing. Perhaps he shouldn't have his picture in the paper. Just in case.
Some survivors struggle alone, in silence and anonymity. Some who are afraid to be public reach out to TASSC privately. Ortiz keeps their identity secret, even from her staff members. Currently she's working with two women who live out of town, and are so fearful that they rarely leave their homes. Lately, they told her, they've found the courage to go to the park, to stop and have a cup of tea.
There are others who are seeking political asylum, which means they must demonstrate that returning to their country will put them at mortal risk. For some survivors, such as Kani Xulum, pursuing asylum is tricky: He is a Kurd from Turkey, and Turkey is considered a U.S. ally.
Compounding their distress is the fact that many of the survivors are struggling to meet the most basic of needs: Finding work and a place to live. Some are homeless. There are shelters, but for many, shelters feel threatening. TASSC helps them find families that are willing to take them in temporarily.
Says an Ethiopian physical therapist who was living on the streets for a while with a fellow torture survivor: "We were pushing a very hard life. All those torture pains were coming back. All of the shelters reminded us of the torture chambers. . . . I wouldn't go. I preferred to live on the street. But with TASSC, things started changing."
The group helped him and his friend find a home, helped his family in Ethiopia find an apartment where they could hide until he is able to send for them. Recently he was granted asylum and found a job working in his profession.
"I was thinking of making suicide. But they brought back me. I started having hope."
Da Silva ended up in Puerto Rico, working at a shipyard, sleeping in bus stops, eating in churches that served the poor. He tried to be cheerful, to not show fear. The illusion gave him courage. He hitched a ride on a boat headed for Long Island, then took a train to New York City. There, he was told, he would find "everything." "Everything" was hard. He lived on the streets for weeks, too afraid even to seek asylum. He had no papers, no identification.
He taught himself English and then Spanish in the public library. Finally, at the prodding of a worker in a homeless shelter, he sought asylum. Last year he came to the District for a TASSC conference on torture and stayed. He felt at home with other survivors. Now he works at TASSC, living on donated room and board, trying to help himself by helping others.
"It's a positive cause. I don't have to grab a gun and shoot someone. Or myself."
He's started a group, Africans United for Africa, to lobby for democracy and freedom in Angola and other African countries. Politics is a part of him.
He'd like to go to college. He'd like to marry. He'd love to have a family.
He hopes for that.
For survivors, the hope, when there is hope, mingles with the fear, with feelings of cowardice and outrage, the "if onlys" and the "why me's."
Relationships are hard. Trust is a casualty of torture. Some never marry. Some, tortured at an early age, have never had a romantic relationship. And yet they long for closeness.
The Sept. 11 attacks ratcheted up the fear. The war in Iraq brought with it a certain degree of paranoia. A man tortured 20 years ago doesn't want his name published. He is a U.S. citizen now, but he hails from a Muslim province back home.
Still, TASSC members dive into the political pool. Sometimes this means meeting with politicians to solicit help in obtaining U.S. visas for other survivors -- like those planning to attend a TASSC conference next month.
The group recently called on President Bush to issue a public statement upholding U.S. and international covenants against torture, and to appoint an independent commission investigating allegations of current U.S. involvement in torture.
But more often than not, their work involves old-fashioned grass-roots organizing.
When Egyptian activists were being detained and reportedly tortured in Cairo for protesting the war in Iraq, TASSC members sent letters of protest to the Egyptian Embassy and demonstrated outside its doors. Several activists have been released, Ortiz says.
But by far the most ambitious undertaking is the group's plans for a global database of known torturers -- on hold until it can find funding. There are an estimated 1,000 suspected torturers currently residing in the United States, according to Amnesty International. TASSC wants to make their presence known.
"They're enjoying total freedom," Ortiz says.
Although Congress adopted legislation in 1994 criminalizing acts of torture committed outside the United States, the federal government has not prosecuted anyone under the law's provisions, according to Amnesty International. But human rights groups including the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Center for Justice and Accountability have sued individuals in this country for committing acts of torture abroad, and victims themselves have sued their torturers.
He sits in the safety of the TASSC offices, remembering. Here, he says, there is sanctuary.
"When you have suffered and find someone who has suffered as you've suffered, you feel relief. And when you find someone who has suffered more than you, you feel better. It gives me courage."
He's recovered himself.
And yet there are the dreams.
Before his head touches his pillow, he knows what he will be dreaming. Soldiers chase him with bombs and guns. Sometimes he runs across a collapsing bridge, falling, falling, falling. He can't swim.
But other times, he says, "I fly."
He flaps his arms like wings.
-------
------- OneList (submissions from subscribers)
------- Depleted Uranium Keeps On Killing!
-----------
Posted
without profit or payment for research and educational
purposes only,
in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107.