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NUCLEAR
Two strontium powered lighthouses vandalised on the Kola Peninsula
China denies CIA accusations over Pakistan weapons program
Bulgaria wants compensation for closing nuclear plant
Fortum presses ahead with controversial stake in Finnish nuclear plant
Austria protests Czech plans to expand controversial nuclear plant
Germany's Retreat from Nuclear Energy Begins
IRAN - EU official calls Tehran honest
Wider Split Between U.S. and Europe Over Iran
US Slams Iran Draft; Exiles Say Tehran Fooling UN
Japan's U.S. strategy
U.S. talks Korea strategy shift
U.S. commander fears N. Korea would sell nukes
Nukes option by U.S. in Korea
Kelly in Beijing to Work Out N.Korea Nuclear Talks
U.S., Japan Agree on N. Korea Nuke Crisis
Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue
Study: West Too Slow to Counter WMD Terror Threat
Congress Approves Bush Nuclear Weapons Funds
Energy Department is tearing down Hanford plutonium facility
EPA to propose easing rules for radioactive waste
EPA Proposes New Radioactive Waste Disposal Rule
Radioactive Waste Plan Attacked
Powell Praises Iran on Nuclear Decisions
Bush Insists That U.S. Troops Will Stay in Iraq
MILITARY
Taiwan protests at criticism over submarine deal
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
U.S. Sets Time Frame For 24 Iraq Contracts
BAE Systems' Dirty Dealings
Colombian drug war stalls
U.S. Jets Pound Suspected Guerrilla Positions in Iraq
A U.S. General Speeds the Shift in an Iraqi City
American, Israeli Hawks Worried Over Peace Moves
Israeli Army Engaged in Fight Over Its Soul
Palestinian Kills Two Soldiers; Israel Raids Gaza Strip
NATO on trial as Afghanistan spins out of control
U.S. Intelligence Is Softening Some Judgments on Illicit Arms
CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak
Sweden spied on Russian military until 2001: report
U.N. group seeks control of Internet
Powell and European Leaders Discuss U.N. Role in Iraq
U.N. Refugee Agency Pulls Staff From Afghanistan
Military Alters Plans For Possible Conflicts
Low-Tech Grenades A Danger to Helicopters
U.S.'s 'Iron Hammer' Code Name 1st Used by Nazis
Media caught in Iraq's war of perceptions
Plea Deals Being Used to Clear Balkan War Tribunal's Docket
Blair's Wife Faults Bush's Opposition to International Court
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Judges Question Detention of American
Appeals Court Weighs Case of Enemy Combatant
Court to Rule on 'Enemy Combatant' Label
Show Us Your Money
FBI Curbed In Tracking Gun Buyers Brady Law Policy Foils Watch List
Two Yemenis Held Abroad Are to Face Trial in a U.S. Court
ENERGY AND OTHER
DaimlerChrysler to Test 100 'Green' Cars
China Set to Act on Fuel Economy
Conference panel OKs energy bill
Congress Weighs Extended Deadlines on Smog Reduction
EPA Seeks Middle Ground in Toxic-Release Reporting
Flu Vaccine Faces Unexpected Strain
Flu Season May Be Severe, Officials Say
Congress Adds to Global Spending for AIDS Fight
ACTIVISTS
Environmentalists protest route
Miami Girds for Protests at Trade Talks
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- accidents and safety
Two strontium powered lighthouses vandalised on the Kola Peninsula
November 18, 2003
Bellona Fdn Russia
http://www.bellona.no/en/international/russia/navy/northern_fleet/incidents/31767.html
MURMANSK - Two Radioisotope Thermal Generators, or RTGs, were vandalised on the Kola Peninsula. The Northern Fleet discovered the damage during regular checks in mid November. The administration of the Murmansk region referred to the event as "radiation accident."
Two Strontium containing Radioisotope Thermal Generators, or RTGs, used to power navigation beacons and lighthouses were found literally ripped to pieces by unknown vandals during regular checks by the Russian Navy's Northern Fleet in the area of the Kola Peninsula last week.
The damage was so severe that Murmansk Regional officials designated the incident as a "radioactive accident."
It is assumed by local authorities that the vandals were scavenging for valuable metals, including stainless steel, lead and aluminium, all of which could easily be dumped on the scrap metal market in Murmansk. But the vandals also took with them the depleted uranium casing, which is used to protect the RTG's strontium cores.
The strontium cores were left at the sites of the navigation devices. They are highly radioactive-emitting some 1000 roentgens per hour-and local police officials and officials from the Murmansk Regional Federal Security Service, or FSB, said in interviews with Bellona Web that the suspects could well be dead or seriously ill. They have therefore expanded a search for the suspects to include not only the areas from where the RTG's were stolen, but to Murmansk area hospitals as well. They are also combing local metal scrap yards, a Murmansk FSB official said in a telephone interview.
That the generators, known as RTGs, could so easily be reached and torn down literally to their radioactive cores is disturbing news for both the environmental and nuclear security communities.
Both groups have warned Russian officials about potential disasters that could occur should terrorists get their hands on any of Russia's aged 1000 RTGs-many of which have not been checked in years, and many of whose locations, by admission of Russian Ministry of Defence, are unknown. In Northwest Russia alone, there are some 150 of these strontium generators. All 1000 of these generators have exceeded their engineering life span-and according to a source in the Defence Ministry-decade.
In the wake of the discovery the Murmansk Region Administration today issued a statement indicating that on November 12th, the Hydrographic Department of the Northern Fleet-while conducting a regular inspection of the lighthouses-discovered a completely dismantled Beta-M type No255 RTG, which was used to power the navigation lighthouse No414.1 in Olenya bay in the Kola harbour.
The statement indicated that the RTG had been completely dismantled, down to the depleted uranium protection vessel. One radioisotope heat source was found near shore in water 1.5 to 3 meters depth.
The next day, according to the Murmansk Administration statement release Monday, yet another Beta-M type No256 type RTG, which powered lighthouse No437 on Yuzhny Goryachinksy island in the Kola harbour was found in precisely the same condition-all of it's valuable metals had been stripped, including the depleted uranium, and a radioisotope heat source was found on shore on the northern part of the island.
No overview or control of RTGs
The destroyed RTGs are the responsibility of the Russian Ministry of Defence, which carried out periodic checks on the units-that are still locatable-once or twice a year. Many RTGs in the Arctic north of Siberia and the coast of the rough Russian Far East have, according to sources in Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy, or Minatom, literally been lost, or "orphaned."
In a similar accident in the Leningrad Region in March 2003, an RTG of Beta-M type was vandalised. The Navy carried out control of this RTG in June 2002-almost a whole year before the accident was discovered. And in 2002, three hunters in the former Soviet republic of Georgia were severely irradiated after stumbling across an RTG that had been in the wood for years. Huddling around the strontium battery as a heat source, all three spent months in the hospital battling radiation sickness.
It is Bellona's position that the Russian Federation must provide stricter controls over its RTGs and carry out an immediate inventory on all currently operating RTGs. In addition to the health risks these radiation sources-found in isolated areas with little to no warning about their presence-pose, RTGs represent an obvious non-proliferation threat. Their strontium components can easily be fashioned by terrorists into a so-called "dirty bomb," which is a conventional bomb stuffed full of radioactive materials. Fear of such radiological dispersal devices has grown the world over after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Bellona's working paper on RTGs
The newly released Bellona's working paper on RTGs discovers the environmental and non-proliferation dangers associated with them, concludes that Russian authorities have no overview over the problem. The working paper is so far available only in Russian.
RTGs
There are approximately 1000 RTGs in Russia. Most of them are used as a power source for lighthouses. RTGs are operated by the Defence Ministry, the Ministry of Transport and Russian Hydro-Meteorological Service. The Ministry of transport runs more than 380 RTGs, whereas the Ministry of Defence operates 535, including more than 100 located on the Kola Peninsula. Most of the RTGs, which fall under the auspices of the Defence Ministry, are located along the Arctic coast, or the so-called Northern Sea Route.
Since 1960, nine different models of RTGs have been developed. The Beta-M type RTG is most commonly use and there are around 700 of them in operation across the Russian Federation.
Beta-M puts out 230 Watts of power. The weight of an RTG is 560 kilograms altogether, and the weight of the radioactive portion is around 5 kilograms. This active portion contains 35,000 to 40,000 Ci of activity. The radioactivity of an RTG at the distance of 0.02 to 0.5 meters is 800 to 1000 roentgens per hour. The radioactive source can heat up to 500 degrees Celsius.
-------- china
China denies CIA accusations over Pakistan weapons program
BEIJING (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118093706.d2x3p0mw.html
China insisted Tuesday its nuclear energy cooperation with Pakistan was for peaceful purposes and adamantly denied that exchanges with Islamabad violated commitments on the proliferation of nuclear weapons.
"Cooperation between China and Pakistan regarding nuclear energy generation is purely for peaceful purposes and does not violate any non-proliferation obligations or China's export controls," foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said.
He was responding to questions about a US Central Intelligence Agencyreport issued last week which alleged that Chinese firms may be aiding Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
"China is a party state to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) treaty and is absolutely opposed to the proliferation of weapons of any kind," said Liu.
He further maintained that the nuclear energy cooperation with Pakistan was being carried out under safeguards put in place by the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The CIA report said Chinese entities continued to work with Pakistan and Iran on ballistic missile-related projects during the first six months of this year.
Despite a warming of relations in recent years, the United States and China frequently find themselves at odds over the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
Washington has slapped sanctions on a long list of Chinese firms accused of links to nations including Pakistan, North Korea and Iran.
The unclassified report to Congress notes that Beijing promised Washington in May 1996 not to provide assistance to unsafeguarded nuclear facilities.
"We cannot rule out, however, some continued contacts subsequent to the pledge between Chinese entities and entities associated with Pakistan's nuclear weapons program," the report said.
It noted Beijing has taken some steps to educate individuals and firms on new missile-related export control regulations, but "Chinese entities continued to work with Pakistan and Iran on ballistic missile-related projects during the first half of 2003."
-------- europe
Bulgaria wants compensation for closing nuclear plant
SOFIA (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118130545.hxm1hzuq.html
Bulgaria said Tuesday it would honor its pledge to the European Union to close two reactors at the Kozloduy nuclear power plant but wanted to be compensated for the losses.
"Bulgaria has pledged to close units 3 and 4 in 2006 and we do not shrink from this. There will be losses, however, which must be compensated," Energy Minister Milko Kovatchev said in an interview with bTV television.
"Bulgaria should be compensated for economic and social losses," he said.
Public opinion opposes shutting the reactors down in a country which gets nearly half its electricity needs from the country's only nuclear plant.
Eleven EU experts arrived in Bulgaria on Sunday to inspect Kozloduy, 200 kilometres (125 miles) north of Sofia.
Bulgaria closed the two oldest reactors at Kozloduy at the end of 2002 at the urging of the EU, which argued that they posed a security risk.
Two Soviet-era 440-megawatt reactors are due to be shut down in 2006 under an agreement with the EU made during the course of Bulgaria's accession negotiations with the bloc, which it hopes to join in 2007.
Authorities have since modernised those two reactors and installed a cooling system designed to prevent any radioactive leakage in case of an accident, to allay EU concerns.
The United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), has found that the safety mechanisms at the two reactors meet all their requirements.
If the EU team reaches the same conclusion as the IAEA in their report due out early in 2004, Bulgaria will seek a delay on the date set for the closure of the reactors before it concludes its accession negotiations with the EU towards the middle of 2004.
The reactors were installed between 1981 and 1982, with a projected life span of 30 years.
The director of the plant, Yordan Kostadinov, says their capacity depends on the continued use of the two reactors it must shut down.
----
Fortum presses ahead with controversial stake in Finnish nuclear plant
HELSINKI (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118150216.6owkrzas.html
Fortum, Finland's state-controlled energy group, on Tuesday went ahead with a controversial decision to take a 25-percent stake in a new nuclear reactor, set to become operational by the end of the decade.
The Fortum decision has provoked resistance from anti-nuclear groups, and Greenpeace last week called a demonstration in an effort to stop the move.
"It wasn't an easy decision, but the problem is that there is no other single large scale solution to increase the energy production capacity, that we all agree is needed," Carola Teir-Lehtinen, Fortum's spokeswoman, told AFP.
The Finnish national energy group is a member of TVO, a non-profit consortium that won parliamentary approval last year to build a new nuclear reactor, supplementing four aging power stations from the 1970s.
TVO said on Monday that interest in the project's 1,600 Mw power-generating capacity had been strong, with Finnish firms wanting to reserve over 2,000 Mw for their future use, but gave no further details.
Believed to be among them are Finnish forestry and paper giants UPM-Kymmene and Stora-Enso, which both hold indirect stakes in TVO, while the City of Helsinki has already said that it will participate in the construction.
Fortum, controlled by the Finnish state with a 61-percent stake, has a stated ambition to become the Nordic region's largest supplier of electricity. Currently it ranks second, supplying some 13 percent of total deliveries.
Following the decision Greenpeace said it would start a campaign targeting Fortum's customers in Scandinavia, where resistance against nuclear power remains strong and the firm has marketed its energy as a "green alternative".
"We will make Fortum's customers in the Nordic countries aware of this, I'm sure that their customers and potential customers in Denmark, Sweden and Norway would like to know about this," Kaisa Kosonen, a campaigner for Greenpeace, said.
Fortum was, however, not worried by any possible boycott threat, Teri-Lehtinen said.
----
Austria protests Czech plans to expand controversial nuclear plant
VIENNA (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118154939.pce724ks.html
The Austrian government said Tuesday it was to protest plans by the Czech Republic to expand a controversial nuclear plant that lies just 60 kilometres (36 miles) across the border from Austria.
The Temelin plant has soured Prague's relations with nuclear-free neighbour Austria, which has demanded safety and environmental guarantees.
Environment Minister Josef Proell said: "We have asked the Austrian ambassador in Prague to give a letter of protest to the Czech foreign ministry."
The Czech government is hoping to build two new reactors at Temelin, the industry vice minister Martin Pecina said in Prague in an interview published Monday in the Czech magazine Tyden.
Pecina said the project would be finalized next year and construction would begin in 2009 if all went as planned.
Temelin's first reactor went onstream in October 2000 despite repeated technical problems, and the second reactor is at full power, but in a trial phase.
Prague says that Temelin's two Soviet-designed reactors have been upgraded to Western safety standards.
----
Germany's Retreat from Nuclear Energy Begins
Story by Christian Charisius
REUTERS GERMANY:
November 18, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22869/story.htm
STADE, Germany - Germany switched off the first of its 19 nuclear power stations on Friday, launching what it calls the world's fastest withdrawal from atomic energy but a policy that may still be reversed if the opposition takes power.
Germany's center-left government struck a deal with industry in 2000 to close all nuclear power plants by about 2025, the Greens making a phase-out a condition for forming a coalition with Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats in 1998.
However, it is still unclear if Germany can meet the deadline and how it will replace atomic power, which provides a third of its electricity, while also meeting commitments to cap its emissions of greenhouse gases produced by fossil fuels.
With little fanfare inside the control room, the Stade plant, Germany's second oldest, ceased operations on Friday morning with the simple pressing of two buttons.
"All rods are engaged. We are now out," said shift leader Bernd Schroeder as the reactor near Hamburg shut off.
Greens Environment Minister Juergen Trittin said Friday's closure showed nuclear power had no future in Germany.
"No country is pulling out as quickly as Germany. Up until 2020 one nuclear power plant will be closed on average every year in Germany," he said in a speech
The Greens held a party in Berlin to celebrate, but operator E.ON said its 32-year-old reactor would have closed anyway on purely economic grounds without government pressure.
Opposition parties have threatened to reverse the withdrawal. Within government, Trittin is at odds with SPD Economy Minister Wolfgang Clement over how much to promote renewable energy as coal subsidies are phased out as Germany seeks alternatives to make up the nuclear power shortfall.
EUROPEAN LEADER
Like Germany, Belgium and Sweden have also announced nuclear phase-out plans. Sweden closed one reactor but postponed further closures after protests from energy-intensive industry.
France, which relies on nuclear power for 80 percent of its electricity, and Britain are keeping their options open to build new nuclear plants to replace aging ones. Finland, the only country in western Europe expanding its atomic energy production, is soon to start building its fifth nuclear reactor.
"There's little sign of Europe following Germany. If anything it's going more in the opposite direction," said Berthold Hannes, analyst at consultancy A.T. Kearney.
"Germany's conservatives could also reverse the decision if they came to power. I don't think there will be any new nuclear plants, but the present ones could have their lives extended from 32 years to, say 50 years, or even 60 years as in the United States," he added.
Germany's VDEW electricity association urged the government to extend the lives of nuclear power plants, saying it would help the country keep to greenhouse gas limits. It called Stade's shutdown a routine closure, not an ecological triumph.
German Friends of the Earth was also not celebrating, saying some of Stade's output had been shifted to other nuclear plants.
Despite winning the pledge of an end to atomic power, anti-nuclear protesters are still a force to be reckoned with in Germany, with thousands earlier this week disrupting a shipment of nuclear waste returning to a German storage site.
The reprocessed fuel did complete its journey from France with the help of 13,000 police, but protesters secured extensive media coverage and ensured the nuclear industry remains a costly burden - at least for the state which footed the policing bill.
Work on dismantling the 672-megawatt Stade nuclear reactor is due to begin in 2005, once its fuel has been removed.
(Additional reporting by Philip Blenkinsop, Margaret Orgill in London)
-------- iran
IRAN - EU official calls Tehran honest
November 18, 2003
Washington Times
World Scene
http://www.washtimes.com/world/worldscene.htm
BRUSSELS - European Union foreign-policy chief Javier Solana said yesterday Iran had been honest so far about its nuclear program and said he hoped it would not be reported to the U.N. Security Council for any sanctions.
His comments came as France, Britain and Germany circulated a draft resolution at the U.N. nuclear watchdog, which diplomats said was certain to disappoint Washington, because it did not say Iran had violated a global pact against atomic weapons.
Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, due to meet EU foreign ministers today, disputed Mr. Solana's comments, saying he "wouldn't have gone quite so far" when crediting Tehran for its honesty.
----
Wider Split Between U.S. and Europe Over Iran
November 18, 2003
By THOMAS FULLER,
International Herald Tribune
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/europe/18EURO.html
BRUSSELS, Nov. 17 - The split between Europe and the United States over Iran's nuclear program widened on Monday with the foreign policy chief of the European Union saying that the Iranian government had been honest about its nuclear work and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell saying that such a conclusion went too far.
The two are to meet here on Tuesday, and on Thursday the International Atomic Energy Agency is to decide if Iran has violated the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, a finding that would send the issue to the United Nations Security Council for possible sanctions.
The Bush administration has said that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program, while many officials in Europe have been more conciliatory about Iran's efforts to comply with international inspections.
"They have been honest," Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, said here on the sidelines of a meeting of European Union foreign ministers and defense ministers. "Let's see if they continue all the way to the end."
In Washington, Mr. Powell said he disagreed with Mr. Solana's assessment. "I wouldn't have gone quite as far," he told reporters, according to Agence France-Presse.
Mr. Powell said the United States believed that Iran's nuclear development program "had an intent to produce a nuclear weapon."
But he also said that diplomatic efforts by the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany had been "very, very helpful."
The three foreign ministers visited Tehran last month and obtained a promise that the Iranian government would stop enriching uranium.
Mr. Solana said it was his hope that the International Atomic Energy Agency would not recommend that Iran appear before the Security Council.
The European Union has pursued a policy of engagement with Iran and is negotiating new trade and investment agreements contingent on political factors like Iran's human rights record and its policies toward its neighbors.
--------
US Slams Iran Draft; Exiles Say Tehran Fooling UN
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-nuclear-iran.html
LONDON/VIENNA, Austria (Reuters) - The United States said Tuesday a draft resolution on Iran's breach of U.N. nuclear obligations was ``deficient,'' while an Iranian opposition group accused Tehran of hiding an ``atomic weapons program'' from the United Nations.
France, Britain and Germany have circulated a draft resolution criticizing Iran's long history of concealing its atomic program to be discussed by the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors Thursday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell expressed his disappointment with the work of the European Union's three biggest states.
``The resolution that I was aware (of) being presented by the EU three was not adequate,'' Powell told reporters on a flight from Brussels to London where he was to join President Bush who is on a three-day state visit to Britain.
``It did not have the trigger mechanisms in the case of further Iranian intransigence or difficulty,'' he said.
Powell said the draft was a matter of intense discussion and he said Washington was considering whether to abandon the quest for one entirely, saying, ``If a resolution (is) totally inadequate, then maybe don't have a resolution right now.''
In Brussels earlier, Powell accused Iran of violating the global pact against atomic weapons and indicated that he felt any resolution on Iran must formally acknowledge this.
``The fact of the matter is that Iran has been in noncompliance'' with its obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Powell said after what he called a ``very candid discussion'' with his EU counterparts.
``We'll be in discussion with our EU colleagues and other members of the IAEA as to whether or not the resolution is strong enough to convey to the world the difficulties we've had with Iran over the years,'' he said.
COOPERATION
However, Powell said Iran appeared to be moving in the right direction recently by cooperating with the IAEA.
The United States says Iran has a secret weapons program and wants the 35-nation IAEA board to declare the Islamic republic in ``noncompliance'' and report its NPT breaches to the U.N. Security Council, which has the power to impose sanctions.
The draft resolution, which will undergo revisions over the next few days, merely criticizes Iran for ``failures to meet safeguards obligations,'' diplomats familiar with the text told Reuters. This is too weak for Washington, they said.
Iran denies wanting an atomic bomb and urged the IAEA board not to give in to pressure from Washington.
``America should abandon such useless pressures and stop imposing its ideas on the agency,'' Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told Reuters in Tehran.
Last month, Iran submitted a declaration of its entire nuclear program to the IAEA that Tehran said was accurate and complete in order to comply with an Oct. 31 IAEA deadline to come clean about the full extent of its atomic program.
In this declaration, Iran admitted to reprocessing a small amount of plutonium and concealing a uranium enrichment program for 18 years. But it denies having weapons ambitions.
However, Shahin Gobadi, a spokesman for the National Council of Resistance of Iran, told Reuters his group had specific information about further ``recent violations'' of Iran's obligation to report all its nuclear activities to the IAEA.
Tehran is also hiding its ``secret atomic weapons program,'' Gobadi said, echoing an often-made U.S. accusation. Iran says it wants nuclear power for the peaceful generation of electricity.
Gobadi said officials working within Iran's nuclear industry had informed some workers that Iran's current policy of openness with the IAEA was ``all temporary.''
He said his group, which has accurately informed about undeclared nuclear sites in Iran in the past but is considered by Washington as a terrorist group, would give details Wednesday.
The IAEA said last week it had ``no evidence'' yet that Iran had a clandestine nuclear weapons program but the jury was still out on whether such a program existed.
-------- japan
Japan's U.S. strategy
November 17, 2003
Washington Times
Embassy Row
http://www.washtimes.com/world/embassy.htm
Japan strengthened its alliance with the United States in the face of threats from North Korea, economic difficulties, competition from China and Russia, and growing nationalism, according to a former U.S. ambassador to Japan.
"Under these circumstances, Japan's latitude for pursuing alternative strategic options is limited," Michael H. Armacost wrote in the annual "Strategic Asia" assessment of the National Bureau of Asian Research, a private think tank.
"Past hopes for carving out a unique role as a global civilian power, advancing the cause of human security, while relying essentially on soft power, confronted the harsh realities of real threats, a sluggish economy and a tight budget."
•Call Embassy Row at 202/636-3297, fax 202/832-7278 or e-mail jmorrison@washingtontimes.com.
-------- korea
U.S. talks Korea strategy shift
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
CNN http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/17/skorea.rumsfeld/index.html
Photo: Protesters hurl eggs at a picture of Rumsfeld during a protest in Seoul.
http://i.cnn.net/cnn/2003/WORLD/asiapcf/east/11/17/skorea.rumsfeld/story.skorea.protest.ap.jpg
SEOUL, South Korea -- The United States is to move its forces back from the highly-fortified Demilitarized Zone dividing South and North Korea, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said.
Although no timetable had been set, the process would begin "as soon as possible," Rumsfeld said after holding high-level joint security talks on realignment of U.S. forces on the Korean peninsula.
The relocation would form part of a sweeping reorganization of U.S. troops across Asia.
"Any changes to U.S. military posture in Northeast Asia will be the product of consultation with our key allies. Most importantly, they will result in an increased U.S. capability in the region," Rumsfeld told a press conference Monday in Seoul.
"(The troop movements) will reflect our new technologies and abilities to deter and defeat any aggressions against allies such as South Korea," he said.
The security talks, described by Rumsfeld as "possibly the most substantive" between the two countries, focused on issues relating to North Korea and Iraq.
"They shared a grave concern that North Korea's self-acknowledged nuclear weapons program threatens regional and global security and violates North Korea's commitments to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," Rumsfeld and South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil said in a joint statement.
Rumsfeld also expressed appreciation for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun's decision to send additional troops to Iraq, as well as US$260 million in reconstruction funds by 2007.
Outside the defense ministry a group of about 30 protesters chanted slogans against Rumsfeld's visit .
The demonstrators claimed Rumsfeld was trying to pressure Seoul into sending more troops to Iraq. They also demanded the withdrawal of the 37,000 U.S. troops in stationed in South Korea since the end of the Korean War. Iraq commitments
Rumsfeld arrived in the South Korean capital Sunday amid protests over plans to send more South Korean troops to Iraq.
Nearly 700 South Korean soldiers, mostly medics and engineers are already in Iraq, and Washington was seeking several thousand more, including combat troops.
Professor Koh Byung-chul, of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies told CNN Monday the U.S. had asked for 5,000 troops, including combat forces, but South Korea wanted to limit the numbers to 3,000 in mainly non-combat roles.
He said polls showed opinion in South Korea to be evenly divided on the troops issue, adding that it would be politically difficult for South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun to agree to the U.S. request. Rumsfeld (right) is greeted upon arrival in Seoul by U.S. Ambassador Thomas C. Hubbard.
Riot police were deployed on the streets of the capital Sunday night when Rumsfeld arrived by helicopter at Yongsan Garrison, the 8th U.S. Army's 320-hectare (800-acre) headquarters in the center of the city, the Associated Press reports.
While some South Koreans oppose sending any troops to Iraq, others believe the nation must be realistic and shoulder some international responsibility.
The issue is complicated by the presence of 37,000 U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to defend against possible aggression by North Korea.
Also South Korea and the United States are currently involved in a global effort to stop North Korea's nuclear weapons ambitions. (N. Korea: 'Stop threats')
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-South Korean security treaty following the end of the Korean War.
On Tuesday, Rumsfeld was scheduled to visit U.S. troops, including soldiers of the 2nd Infantry Division, the main Army unit based in South Korea. Asian strategy shift
South Korea is the third leg of Rumsfeld's six-day Asian trip. He has already visited Guam and Japan.
While in Tokyo, Rumsfeld downplayed Japan's decision to delay sending non-combat troops to Iraq which was prompted by the bomb attack on Italian troops that left 26, including 18 Italians, dead.
Japan has said it would like to send troops "as soon as possible" and dispatched a 10-member fact-finding team to Iraq Saturday to further assess the security situation.
During talks Friday and Saturday, Rumsfeld presented Japanese leaders with plans for altering the U.S. military "footprint" as part of a sweeping realignment of U.S. forces around the world.
"But we don't have any specifics because it will take a great deal of discussion," he said at a press conference on Saturday.
The long-term U.S. presence on Okinawa has sparked strong opposition from a section of the Japanese public.
-- Seoul CNN Bureau Chief Sohn Jie-ae contributed to this report
----
U.S. commander fears N. Korea would sell nukes
November 18, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031117-104259-1344r.htm
SEOUL - North Korea poses a regional danger because the communist regime is likely to sell its nuclear arms and expertise to rogue states or terrorists, the commander of U.S. forces in South Korea said yesterday.
"North Korea is a known proliferator of military technology," said Army Gen. Leon LaPorte in an interview with reporters. "We believe that nothing would prevent them from selling weapons-grade nuclear material to other countries, rogue nations or terrorist organizations."
That could lead to terrorist groups obtaining and using nuclear bombs.
"That's the concern that we have relative to North Korea's nuclear program," Gen. LaPorte said.
North Korea's large military has outdated conventional equipment, but is backed by an estimated 800 missiles and nuclear weapons.
The North Korean military ranks No. 1 in the world in terms of submarine forces, special operations commandos and artillery, he said.
While the North Korean navy and air force are not well-armed, the ground forces are very powerful, Gen. LaPorte said.
North Korea's "asymmetric threat" lies in its 120,000 special forces commandos and its chemical weapons.
"Their doctrine is to use chemical weapons as a standard munition," he said.
A key worry is North Korea's weapons of mass destruction and missiles, the four-star general said.
"And our concern is that they have nearly 800 missiles," he said. "The missiles themselves are a very significant asymmetrical threat. But if that was combined with a nuclear capability, now you have a capability that not only threatens the Korean Peninsula, but the entire region."
Gen. LaPorte and other senior U.S. military leaders took part in military committee talks with South Korean military leaders, coinciding with civilian defense talks.
The key issue discussed at the talks was the relocation of the 7,000 U.S. troops at more than 10 facilities in Seoul.
South Korean officials want to keep some of the troops in the city, while Pentagon officials plan to leave a small number and move the rest farther south, a senior defense official said.
"It will be way less than a thousand," said the official referring to the remaining troops.
Gen. LaPorte said the South Koreans would take over security at the truce village of Panmunjom sometime in the fall of 2005, while they would probably assume responsibility for countering North Korean artillery by October 2004.
As for enhancing U.S. capabilities, the Pentagon is spending $11 billion over the next several years on new weapons and equipment, including Apache attack helicopters, Stryker combat vehicles and high-speed ships that can move troops quickly.
South Korea, for its part, is buying U.S. surface-to-surface short-range missiles known as the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS.
South Koreans also are planning to purchase advanced Patriot PAC-3 antimissile systems.
Gen. LaPorte said the decrease in the 37,000 U.S. troops based in South Korea may be "one of the payoffs" of the multiyear program to realign bases and add new forces.
----
Nukes option by U.S. in Korea
November 18, 2003
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031117-115816-2478r.htm
SEOUL - The United States is committed to defending South Korea from an attack by the North and would use nuclear forces if needed, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told the government here yesterday.
Mr. Rumsfeld, who finishes his first official visit to Asia today, said the U.S. commitment to South Korea includes "the continued provision of a nuclear umbrella" for South Korea, according to a statement issued after joint security talks.
"We understand that weakness can be provocative, that weakness can invite people into doing things that they otherwise might not even consider," Mr. Rumsfeld told a joint news conference with South Korean Defense Minister Cho Young-kil.
The two defense chiefs also discussed transferring some of the 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea to two areas south of the demilitarized zone.
The tasks carried out by the U.S. forces will be handed over to South Korean troops, including security for the truce area of Panmunjom at the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas and the development of South Korean antiartillery capabilities.
Mr. Rumsfeld met with South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and told him that the United States would like Seoul to send "self-sufficient" troops to Iraq that do not need the protection of U.S. combat forces or help with supplies, said a senior defense official at the meeting.
South Korea has said it will send additional troops in the coming months but did not say whether they will be combat troops or humanitarian forces. The dispatch of humanitarian forces would require protection from terrorist attacks and Iraqi insurgents by U.S. or allied troops.
At the annual defense talks, the two sides agreed that North Korea poses a "global threat," the joint statement said.
Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Cho share the "grave concern that North Korea's self-acknowledged nuclear-weapons program threatens regional and global security and violates North Korea's commitment to a nuclear-free peninsula."
North Korea has not tested a nuclear device, but the CIA stated in a recent report to Congress that Pyongyang has "validated" atomic weapons design to the point of posing a credible nuclear threat.
North Korea is continuing to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and long-range missiles, and poses a danger of exporting the weapons and technologies, the statement said.
The United States pulled out all of its tactical nuclear weapons, including nuclear land mines, in the early 1990s. It was then that Washington promised to use its nuclear forces, primarily missile-equipped submarines, to counter any atomic threats to South Korea.
However, the explicit restatement of that promise was unusual, and appeared intended to pressure North Korea in upcoming nuclear arms talks and to persuade South Korea not to develop its own atomic weapons.
North Korea's deployment of nuclear arms in the late 1990s shifted the strategic balance on the peninsula in Pyongyang's favor.
The United States' willingness to use nuclear arms to defend South Korea is expected to anger the communist North, which has accused the Bush administration of planning a nuclear attack.
Asked later about the nuclear assurances, Army Gen. Leon LaPorte, commander of U.S. forces in South Korea, said he could not comment on operational plans.
"Our concern is to maintain a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula," Gen. LaPorte said in an interview with reporters.
The United States is developing nuclear weapons capable of penetrating deep, rock-hardened bunkers like those housing North Korean weapons, U.S. officials have said.
Both leaders called on North Korea to "completely, verifiably and irreversibly dismantle its nuclear-weapons programs" and halt the testing, development, deployment and export of weapons of mass destruction, missiles and related technologies, the statement said.
North Korea should take the opportunity of the six-party talks to denuclearize, the statement said.
Assistant Secretary of State James A. Kelly is in Tokyo and will visit Seoul later this week. He told reporters that a resumption of six-party talks is expected as early as mid-December.
Mr. Rumsfeld said at the press conference that the 13-year plan to move forces away from the demilitarized zone and consolidate bases over the next several years will strengthen the 50-year-old alliance with South Korea.
The alliance is successful because "we have had the ability to deter and defend and, if necessary, prevail," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "And that has been well understood. I can assure you it will be well understood in the years ahead, and, needless to say, neither of our governments would do anything that would in any way weaken the deterrent and the capability to defend."
Mr. Rumsfeld and South Korean leaders did not discuss cutbacks in the numbers of troops, but a U.S. official quoted Mr. Roh as saying that weapons upgrades and organizational reform make the number of troops less important than in the past.
"It is not numbers of things, it is capability to impose lethal power, where needed, when needed, with the greatest flexibility and with the greatest agility," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
Defense officials have said they do not want U.S. military forces to be used as a vulnerable "tripwire" in any initial attack by North Korea's 1.2-million-troop army.
Thousands of U.S. Army forces are deployed in camps spread close to the demilitarized zone and would be quickly overrun by invading North Korean forces or forced to make a difficult withdrawal through the urbanized Seoul area during a conflict.
The two sides were unable to reach an agreement on the relocation of some 700 to 1,000 U.S. troops from the military's Yongsan garrison in Seoul. South Korea does not want the troops in the Seoul area to be moved. The U.S. wants them pulled back to areas around Osan air base, located south of the capital.
-------
Kelly in Beijing to Work Out N.Korea Nuclear Talks
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-korea-north-kelly.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said Tuesday his visit to Tokyo set a ``good basis'' for talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis with China and South Korea before flying to Beijing.
Kelly shed no light on the timing of a next round of six-party discussions with North Korea.
Asked when a second round of six-way talks on ending Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program would be held, Kelly told reporters in Japan: ``I don't know. I still don't know. I am going to go to Beijing and do some more work.''
Kelly, who visited Tokyo for three days, arrived in Beijing Tuesday for talks with Chinese officials on an overnight stopover before flying to Seoul for a three-day stay.
A spokesman for China's foreign ministry declined to comment Tuesday on who Kelly would meet, what specifics would be discussed or when the next round of talks would happen.
South Korean National Security Adviser Ra Jong-yil said on Monday that although nothing had yet been decided, the next round of six-country talks was likely to be held on December 17-18.
The United States, the two Koreas, China, Japan and Russia held an inconclusive first round of talks in Beijing in August in an effort to end the crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear program.
Earlier Tuesday, Kelly met Japanese Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Foreign Minister Yoriko Kawaguchi.
Japanese officials said Kelly and Kawaguchi discussed a written security guarantee for North Korea in exchange for a ``verifiable and irreversible'' end to its nuclear weapons program. The officials declined to elaborate.
The officials quoted Kelly as telling Kawaguchi that his talks with Japanese officials laid a ``good basis for talking to China and ROK (South Korea).''
DIALOGUE AND PRESSURE
Ishiba told Kelly that both dialogue and pressure should be used in dealing with North Korea, they said.
``A diplomatic and peaceful solution does not mean accepting everything North Korea says,'' Ishiba told reporters after meeting Kelly. ``If (North Korea) is trying to have its way by blackmail, with nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction or missiles, we cannot accept that and such methods should not be tolerated.''
Pyongyang, reiterating recent remarks, said Sunday it was ``ready to abandon in practice its nuclear program which the U.S. is concerned about at the phase where its hostile policy is fundamentally dropped and its threat to us removed in practice.''
A spokesman for North Korea's Foreign Ministry, whose comments were reported by the official KCNA news agency, said North Korea was willing to consider ``written assurances of non-aggression'' rather than a formal non-aggression treaty with the United States. The U.S. has ruled out such a treaty.
China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said China, the North's only friend and biggest benefactor, welcomed the comments and said they would help the process.
``We think this is yet another positive and important piece of news North Korea has issued to the international community and goes ahead in showing North Korea's sincerity,'' he told a news conference.
``It benefits the goal of restoring the process of dialogue and I think this news will be welcomed and taken seriously by the relevant parties and international community.''
The crisis began in October 2002 when U.S. officials said Pyongyang had privately admitted pursuing a clandestine nuclear weapons program that violated its international agreements.
--------
U.S., Japan Agree on N. Korea Nuke Crisis
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-US-Koreas.html
TOKYO (AP) -- A senior U.S. envoy and Japan's defense chief agreed Tuesday to use ``dialogue and pressure'' to persuade North Korea to abandon its suspected nuclear weapons development.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly met with defense chief Shigeru Ishiba as he wrapped up the Tokyo leg of a three-nation Asia tour to coordinate policy ahead of six-way talks expected next month on the North Korean nuclear dispute.
Kelly told reporters that the date for a new round of multilateral negotiations with North Korea was still not set. Kelly then went to Beijing, where he said he would do ``more work on that problem.''
A six-nation conference including China, the United States, the two Koreas, Japan and Russia in August in Beijing ended with the participants only reiterating their desire to resolve the crisis diplomatically.
South Korean officials have indicated that a second round could take place Dec. 17-18 in Beijing.
Kelly and Ishiba agreed to continue using ``dialogue and pressure'' to resolve the nuclear crisis, Ishiba told reporters afterward.
``Resolving the matter diplomatically and peacefully does not mean accepting everything (North Korea) says,'' Ishiba added. ``If it tries to benefit from nuclear weapons, weapons of mass destruction, missiles or threats ... that is not acceptable.''
Kelly's earlier talks with Japanese officials focused on the question of how to defuse the crisis over North Korea's suspected development of nuclear weapons without compromising Japan's defense.
In Seoul, a senior South Korean official said that he was not ``confident'' that six-nation talks could alone persuade the communist North to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Kim Hee-sang, national defense adviser for President Roh Moo-hyun, said the North would be reluctant to relinquish its nuclear programs because it was the last playing card that the impoverished and isolated state has.
Meanwhile, North Korea criticized South Korea for planning to deploy U.S.-made missiles near the border and slammed the United States for repeatedly raising the North's human rights record.
South Korea has said it would start deploying the Army Tactical Missile System Block 1A missiles next month near the border with the North. The missile has a 186-mile range and can reach most of North Korea.
``This is an provocative act that throws cold water on the six-nation talks' atmosphere,'' the North's state-run Rodong Sinmun newspaper said Tuesday, according to KCNA, the North's official news agency. KCNA was monitored by Yonhap.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said Kelly, who was scheduled to arrive Tuesday evening from Japan, will meet with ``relevant officials'' during his 24-hour visit. He offered no additional details.
-------- russia
Activists Make Nuclear Waste a Russian Election Issue
MOSCOW, Russia, (ENS)
November 18, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-18-19.asp#anchor3
Environmental activists across Russia plan to stage protests on November 25 against the import of nuclear waste that are intended to influence public opinion in advance of national elections.
Two weeks ahead of the December 7 elections to the State Duma (Parliament), Russian environmental groups will organize protests and information pickets, actions and performances aimed at informing voters across country on the positions of candidates on nuclear waste issue.
Ecodefense, Russia's national anti-nuclear group since 1998, says actions will take place 20 large cities on November 25, conducted by some 50 environmental groups.
The campaign is aimed at building a strong civil society by forcing parliamentarians to be more responsible.
"The new elections are coming, and we have to remind voters which Duma members voted in favor of the import of nuclear waste," Ecodefense said. "Through effective public pressure we need to force the new parliament to disapprove the nuclear waste legislation as amoral and anti-democratic."
In 2001, the Duma approved legislation allowing the Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) and the nuclear industry to import high-level radioactive waste such as spent nuclear fuel.
At the same time, nearly 90 percent of citizens demonstrated their opposition to the new legislation, holding hundreds of actions all across the country. The parliament ignored mass public opinion.
The Russian nuclear industry has announced it will import over 20,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from across the world for long term storage. The industry expects to earn nearly $20 billion for new reactor construction and spent nuclear fuel reprocessing.
But Ecodefense says that for the past several years the nuclear industry has been under strong public pressure, and cannot find new customers for its spent fuel services.
At the same time, Russia is having problems dealing with its own spent nuclear fuel. In Murmansk today, Victor Akhunov, head of the Russian Ministry of Atomic Energy's Department of Ecology and Nuclear Installation Decommissioning, told a meeting of an International Atomic Energy Agency expert group that Russia has 200 metric tons of spent nuclear naval fuel that it has little chance of reprocessing. He called the backlog Minatom's "most difficult current challenge."
-------- terrorism
Study: West Too Slow to Counter WMD Terror Threat
November 18, 2003
REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-security-wmd.html
LONDON (Reuters) - Western governments and Russia are moving far too slowly to stop terrorists acquiring deadly ingredients to build weapons of mass destruction, a major international report concluded Tuesday.
Of a total $20 billion pledged by the Group of Eight last year to secure stockpiles of nuclear, chemical and biological materials, ``only a tiny fraction'' has been spent or even allocated to specific projects, it said.
``The threat is outpacing the response,'' former U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn told Reuters in an interview in London. He heads the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an anti-proliferation watchdog which largely funded the study by 21 security think tanks.
Nunn said war in Iraq had distracted the United States and diverted resources away from the need to secure WMD materials in regions such as the former Soviet Union.
``We've spent more now (on the war) than it would take to lock up all the nuclear materials around the globe,'' he said.
According to the study, there are some 100 poorly protected research reactors, spread across 40 countries, containing weapons-usable uranium.
``The global community remains alarmingly vulnerable to catastrophic terrorism. Around the world, and particularly in the former Soviet Union, materials and weapons of mass destruction are insecure, often protected only by a padlock or an unpaid guard,'' it said.
``To construct a nuclear bomb, terrorists would need to steal only a small amount of nuclear material, about enough to fit in a suitcase.''
While praising a European diplomatic initiative to dissuade Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapons program, Nunn said terror groups were less likely to acquire WMD from a state than to source the materials from ill-secured research sites.
``The most likely source of terrorist weapons probably does not come from a state that has spent 10, 15, 20 years trying to get their own weapons -- they're not likely to turn around and give it to al Qaeda,'' he said.
``Theft or sale of nuclear material from these stockpiles is the more likely source of supply.''
Apart from money, the report said, ``Russian bureaucratic foot-dragging'' and the reluctance of Russian security forces to grant access to some sensitive sites were also hampering progress.
Nunn said the rate of success in securing such sites was too slow. ``At the pace we're going, you're talking about 20 years. I don't think we've got that long.''
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Congress Approves Bush Nuclear Weapons Funds
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/politics/politics-congress-spending.html
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Congress on Tuesday granted President Bush much of the money he had sought to study new types of nuclear weapons as Republican leaders worked toward a deal that would let them wrap up the rest of Congress' unfinished budget work this week.
The House of Representatives voted 387-36 to pass the funds as part of a $27.3 billion spending bill for energy and water programs in 2004. The Senate later unanimously followed suit, sending the bill to Bush to be signed into law.
Meanwhile, Republicans were negotiating with the White House to try to craft a catch-all measure grouping most of the remaining spending bills -- which could then be cleared all at once before Congress is set to adjourn at the end of the week.
The energy spending bill would give Bush half of the $15 million he had sought to develop an earth-penetrating nuclear warhead for use against deeply buried bunkers.
It also has the full $6 million he wanted to research small, low-yield nuclear weapons -- although $4 million of that would be contingent on a report to Congress detailing the administration's future plans for the U.S. nuclear stockpile.
Critics argue small nuclear weapons are dangerous because policy-makers may see them as a usable adjunct to conventional arms, heightening risks of nuclear escalation. And they say U.S. moves to develop them may force others to follow suit.
Congress is supposed to pass 13 spending bills to fund the federal government each fiscal year. So far only six have been sent to Bush and at least five more may now have to be wrapped up into a huge end-of-session ``omnibus'' package.
But the process is being dogged by disagreements over the controversial provisions that the must-pass spending measures always attract. This year, lawmakers defied veto threats to bar a relaxation of curbs on media ownership and block an administration effort to change overtime pay rules.
While no final decision has been made, Republican lawmakers and aides have said they expect the White House to eventually accept Congress' effort to force the Federal Communications Commission to reinstate a stricter limit on how many local stations U.S. television networks can own.
``The White House is just sticking up for their agency. They don't really care about it,'' said one aide.
But the overtime issue, which pits business groups against organized labor in a fight with heavy political implications, remains ``a showstopper,'' said House Appropriations Committee Chairman Bill Young, a Florida Republican.
The energy and water spending bill also contains $580 million for the controversial Yucca Mountain nuclear waste disposal project, $11 million less than Bush requested but far above a limit previously backed by the Senate.
The plan aims to site the first permanent U.S. nuclear waste repository in the desert northwest of Las Vegas and is bitterly opposed by the state of Nevada, whose senators have generally succeeded in capping its funding in past years.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- washington
Energy Department is tearing down Hanford plutonium facility
November 18, 2003
Associated Press
http://www.katu.com/outdoor/story.asp?ID=62563
http://www.kxly.com/common/getStory.asp?id=32637
RICHLAND - For four decades, the Hanford nuclear reservation made plutonium for weapons, including the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki.
Now, more than half a century later, workers are tearing down a plutonium facility for the first time at the south-central Washington site.
Hanford is demolishing hundreds of industrial buildings as part of the effort to clean up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site.
Among those buildings is the Plutonium Concentration Facility.
The three-story building played a critical role in the production of plutonium at Hanford during the first decades of the Cold War.
The building's foot-thick concrete walls will be sheared or sawed away in sections in the coming weeks.
Most of the debris will be transported to an on-site landfill. The work should be completed in March.
-------- us nuc waste
EPA to propose easing rules for radioactive waste
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
By Nancy Zuckerbrod,
Associated Press
http://www.enn.com/news/2003-11-18/s_10499.asp
President George W. Bush's administration is considering allowing low-level radioactive waste to be dumped at toxic waste sites and other facilities that currently aren't permitted to receive it.
The Environmental Protection Agency was expected to issue a notice Tuesday seeking public comments on the proposal. The notice asks the public to weigh in on whether certain levels of radioactive waste can be stored in landfills or hazardous material disposal sites.
Nuclear power companies can dispose of low-level radioactive waste at a handful of sites around the country, and about 20 sites can dispose of hazardous material.
The EPA notice says a rule change could simplify the process for getting rid of hazardous and radioactive waste for nuclear power companies and others that generate it. "The need to comply with two separate regulatory systems, each of which is targeted to a different component of the waste, creates a certain regulatory and economic burden on mixed waste generators," the EPA states in its notice.
Companies have stored a lot of waste instead of disposing of it because of the burden of getting rid of it properly, the notice says.
Environmentalists criticized the new proposal.
"They can save a lot of money if their waste doesn't have to go to a facility designed to safely contain it," said Daniel Hirsch, president of the Committee to Bridge the Gap, a Los Angeles-based nuclear watchdog group.
Environmentalists urged new EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, the former governor of Utah, not to make the changes.
----
EPA Proposes New Radioactive Waste Disposal Rule
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
November 18, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-18-09.asp#anchor3
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today proposed to allow the storage of low level radioactive waste in landfills designed and permitted only for chemical wastes, industrial wastes, and possibly municipal garbage. Current regulations require such waste to be sent to facilities specifically licensed for radioactive materials and regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the EPA.
The proposal would facilitate this by allowing mixed radioactive and hazardous wastes to be considered only hazardous.
EPA officials say today's proposal is only the first step towards revising the rule and that the decision is far from final. The public can comment on the Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking through March 17, 2004.
In the proposal published in the Federal Register, the agency said that it is focused on finding a "simpler but protective approach to the present dual regulatory system applicable to low-activity mixed waste."
The EPA says it is seeking comment on approaches to "reduce the burden of the dual regulatory framework" for the waste.
But a coalition of environmental groups is already convinced the proposal should be scrapped.
"The EPA's proposal is to deregulate radioactive waste pure and simple," said Diane D'Arrigo, Nuclear Waste Project director at the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS).
The coalition, which includes NIRS, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Sierra Club, and Public Citizen sent a letter Monday to EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt voicing their opposition to the proposal.
The groups wrote in the letter that the proposed new rule "could significantly harm the environment and public health if you do not act promptly to block it."
"The nuclear industry knows that in order to prolong its existence it must deal with nuclear waste and it must do so at minimal cost," said David Ritter, policy analyst with Public Citizen's Critical Mass Energy & Environment Program. "The EPA is now helping to prop up the industry, at the expense of public health, by paving the way for tons of nuclear waste to be dumped in facilities that were not designed for, nor capable of containing, these dangerous radionuclides."
"That they are attempting to paint this effort as a benign shift in management style is just shameful, and contradictory to the stated mission of the EPA," Ritter added.
----
Radioactive Waste Plan Attacked
EPA Suggests Storing Low-Level Material in Landfills
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A23
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54507-2003Nov17.html
The Environmental Protection Agency is considering an important rule change that for the first time would allow the nuclear industry to store low-level radioactive material in ordinary landfills and hazardous waste sites.
The agency today will formally invite public comment on its plan to "promote a more consistent framework" for the disposal of the waste, including such low-yielding radioactive materials as cesium, strontium, cobalt and plutonium. Currently, those materials must be stored in nuclear waste sites closely regulated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the EPA and state governments.
EPA officials stressed that the waste under review contains only small amounts of radioactive material and that any loosening of rules would not affect the carefully monitored handling of lethal spent nuclear fuel, high-level radioactive waste, or tailings from the processing of uranium or thorium ore.
"The important principle is that any facility that might accept 'low-activity' [nuclear] waste must provide protection of public health and the environment that is comparable to the protection provided by EPA and NRC standards for other radioactive wastes," according to an EPA statement.
After a meeting late yesterday between EPA officials and environmentalists, EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman said, "No decisions have been made, and at the end of this [review], we may decide no change is necessary."
Despite those assurances, a coalition of environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, the Nuclear Policy Research Institute, Public Citizen, and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, is strongly opposing the potential rule change. In a letter to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, the coalition warned that the proposed rule "could significantly harm the environment and public health . . . if you do not act promptly to block it."
Environmentalists said the EPA proposal would permit radioactive waste -- including refuse and soil from decommissioned nuclear power plants and weapons manufacturing plants -- to be disposed of in landfills designed and permitted only for chemical waste, industrial waste and municipal garbage. Some say the Bush administration is considering the change as a means of reducing the industry's storage and disposal costs.
"The EPA's proposal is to deregulate radioactive waste, pure and simple," said Diane D'Arrigo of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, a watchdog organization.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) said recently that a rule change "would allow radioactive wastes to be sent to landfills that were neither designed nor licensed to handle such waste."
The EPA's efforts to devise a new "safe" category of nuclear waste that could be disposed of at unlicensed dumps or incinerators coincides with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's consideration of several options for nuclear waste deregulation.
The NRC has provided technical support and comments to the EPA over the past 18 months, and the two agencies have coordinated their regulatory review activities, according to NRC spokesman David McIntyre.
-------- us politics
Powell Praises Iran on Nuclear Decisions
Tuesday November 18, 2003
By PAUL GEITNER
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3402369,00.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) - Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday that Iran ``seems to be moving in the right direction'' in disclosing details of its nuclear program but he was still not satisfied Tehran had abandoned all efforts to produce a weapon.
Powell made the comments after talks with EU foreign ministers over whether to declare Iran in violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty - a step that could lead to U.N. sanctions against Tehran.
European leaders favor a less drastic step when the member nations of the board of the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency meet this month in Vienna, Austria.
Powell said he and the EU ministers had ``a very candid discussion'' about a draft IAEA resolution that stops short of declaring Iran in noncompliance.
``We had some reservations ... about whether the resolution is strong enough to convey to the world the difficulties that we have had with Iran over the years,'' Powell said.
``The fact of the matter is Iran has been in noncompliance. It's a position the United States has taken for some time and finally the facts became clear to all.''
Powell said it ``remains to be seen'' if a resolution can be adopted unanimously. ``That will be the subject of intense discussions in Vienna over the next couple of days.''
In an attempt to avoid U.N. Security Council sanctions, Iran has agreed to unfettered IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities and suspended enrichment of uranium, two key steps demanded by the nuclear watchdog.
``I am pleased that Iran seems to be moving in the right direction now,'' Powell said. ``But we can't be satisfied until Iran has demonstrated that all of the programs it had been pursuing have now been made known ... and they are now being brought to a halt.''
In a report last week, the IAEA said Iran produced small amounts of plutonium as part of covert nuclear activities. While finding ``no evidence'' Iran tried to make atomic arms, the report said such efforts cannot be ruled out.
The report did not link it to weapons activity but it criticized Iran for not reporting its processing activities, listing it among dozens of cases where Tehran had covert programs in place.
The report credited Iran for a change of heart since September, when the agency demanded it explain contradictions and ambiguities in its nuclear activities.
--------
THE WHITE HOUSE
Bush Insists That U.S. Troops Will Stay in Iraq
November 18, 2003
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/politics/18PREX.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - President Bush said emphatically on Monday that the United States would not leave Iraq even though the White House had decided to speed the transfer of American civilian authority to a new government in Baghdad.
"I assured these five women that America wasn't leaving," Mr. Bush told reporters at the end of a meeting with a group of leading Iraqi women in the Oval Office. "When they hear me say, `We're staying,' that means we're staying."
Mr. Bush's comments were his most explicit commitment to date to keep American troops in Iraq, but he did not say how long they would stay, or how many would remain. For now, the Pentagon has plans to reduce total American forces in Iraq to about 105,000 troops next year from the 130,000 that are there now. The White House has decided to try to hold elections in Iraq in the first half of next year, which would lead to a provisional Iraqi government.
"The political process is moving on," Mr. Bush said. "The Iraqi people are plenty capable of governing themselves." Even so, he said, "we will continue to work with the Iraqi people to secure" the country. "We fully recognize that Iraq has become a new front on the war on terror, and that there are disgruntled Baathists, as well as fedayeen fighters and mujahedeen types and Al Qaeda types that want to test the will of the civilized world there," he added.
Mr. Bush made his comments on the same day that the C.I.A. said it had been unable to determine the authenticity of a new audiotape purporting to carry a message from Saddam Hussein.
"The quality of the recording was poor, and after an extensive technical analysis it is inconclusive as to whether or not it is the voice of Saddam Hussein," a C.I.A. spokesman said of the tape, which was broadcast on the Arabic-language television network Al Arabiya.
In the 14-minute tape, the speaker said the United States military forces now occupying Iraq would "only reap disappointment with more and more American lives lost." Iraqis who heard the message said the voice sounded like Mr. Hussein's and used a similar oratorical style.
An earlier tape, broadcast in September, was determined by the C.I.A. to "probably" contain the voice of Mr. Hussein. But government officials familiar with the latest review said the poor quality of the latest recording had made it impossible for intelligence analysts to reach any kind of solid verdict.
President Bush has said he regards the latest recording as "propaganda" whether or not it is authentic. In a television interview broadcast in the United States on Monday, L. Paul Bremer III, the top American official in Iraq, dismissed Mr. Hussein as nothing more than a "voice in the wilderness."
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Taiwan protests at criticism over submarine deal
TAIPEI (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118090612.43v7te32.html
Taiwan said Tuesday it had lodged a protest against the top US envoy to Taipei for allegedly calling the island's decision to buy eight conventional submarines "silly".
Defense minister Tang Yao-ming said military officers had met with American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) officials Monday over the alleged comments made in Maryland by its managing director, Therese Shaheen.
"The cabinet had demanded the defense ministry and foreign ministry to protest to the US government ... and we have also met AIT officials," Tang told parliament.
Defense ministry spokesman Huang Suey-sheng declined to disclose details of the meeting, but said the ministry's position had been "clearly explained" to AIT, Washington's quasi-embassy in Taipei.
"The AIT officials said they would pass our message to Washington," Huang told AFP.
According to Taiwan's China Times, Shaheen commented on the submarine deal to reporters after giving a speech at an annual Thanksgiving dinner hosted by the Taiwanese Association of America in Maryland Saturday.
Shaheen reportedly said it was "silly" for Taiwan to still be disputing who was to build the submarines.
The US had reportedly quoted Taiwan 11 billion US dollars for the eight conventional submarines and 20 percent more if the island insisted on building some of the submarines on its own.
Despite concerns that the submarines could be overpriced, Tang last week reiterated the need for Taiwan to acquire the weaponry as a "deterrent" against China's military threat. He said Taiwan would not pay "exorbitant prices".
US President George W. Bush approved the submarine sale in April 2001 as part of the most comprehensive arms sales to the island since 1992.
The deal, however, has progressed slowly as the US has not built conventional submarines for more than 40 years.
The US remains the leading arms supplier to Taiwan despite its shift of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
Beijing has repeatedly protested against Washington's arms sales to Taiwan, which it considers part of the Chinese territory to be reunified by force if necessary.
-------- business
BAE System's Dirty Dealings
Sasha Lilley,
November 18, 2003
Guerilla News / Corpwatch.org
http://www.guerrillanews.com/corporate_crime/doc3419.html
It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction: The UK's largest armaments producer running a Ł20 million ($33.4 million) slush fund to finance prostitutes, gambling trips, yachts, sports cars, and more for its most important clients the Saudi royal family and their intermediaries, greasing the wheels of the largest business deal in UK history. These are the accusations made last month by a former employee of weapons giant BAE Systems. And evidence has surfaced that members of the British government were aware of the bribe arrangement, but looked the other way.
BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace, is one of the world's top arms producers. It manufactures warplanes, avionics, submarines, surface ships, radar, electronics, and guided weapons systems, generating annual sales of Ł12 billion ($20 billion) in 130 countries. The arms giant was formed as a nationalized British defense corporation in 1977, which was subsequently privatized in the early 1980s, and changed its name to BAE when British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems in 1999.
BAE Systems' North American branch has an unusual special relationship with the Pentagon where it is treated as a domestic arms company. According to Ian Prichard of the British Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), "BAES North America appears to be virtually a separate company - even top UK executives are not privy to the more sensitive work carried out by 'their' company in the U.S."
For years the company has been accused of selling arms to impoverished and dictatorial regimes, polluting the environment, and has been dogged for years by allegations of corrupt dealings.
Now those allegations have exploded into the open. Revelations point to BAE's provision of enticements to the Saudis over a fifteen year period, starting in the late 1980s, using a front company Robert Lee International (RLI), to divert funds to the arms clients and their middlemen. Among other allegations, RLI procured prostitutes for visiting Saudi officials and bought houses for mistresses, while an internal BAE statement reportedly refers to "sex and bondage with Saudi princes". According to documents published by The Guardian, the British government's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) alerted the Ministry of Defense of the possible involvement of BAE's chairman Sir Richard Evans in the bribe scheme, but the Ministry of Defense did nothing.
BAE Systems' chief executive Mike Turner didn't deny the slush fund charges. At a press conference following the revelations, he stated, "They are old allegations and they are old hat. They are history." Turner added, "Everything we do is legal and that is all I am prepared to say. Whatever the law is, we are legal."
Al-Yamamah
The slush fund allegations are tied to the biggest export agreement in British history - the Al-Yamamah (The Dove) arms deals that the British government signed with the Saudi royal family. BAE, then known as British Aerospace, was to sell the Saudis 72 Tornado and 30 Hawk advanced fighter-bombers along with other tranches of military hardware.
In an unusual barter arrangement between the two governments, the Saudis were to purchase the armaments in payments of oil, over an unspecified period of time. Over the last two and a half decades, the deals have amounted to the sale of 96 Tornado Fighters and more than 100 Hawk jets and other training aircraft totaling at least Ł20 billion ($33.4 billion), with BAE taking in an estimated Ł1.5 billion a year. BAE is currently in negotiations with the Saudis for a further extension of the Al-Yamamah deal.
The first Al-Yamamah deal was signed in 1986, when the Saudis' main armaments supplier, the United States, was blocked from selling arms to their longtime ally by an historic Congressional vote. The House of Saud turned to British weapons manufacturers instead. The Saudis were happy to reduce their dependence on the U.S., while the UK saw the petrodollar-rich Saudis as a long term bonanza. A second deal between the two governments was signed in 1988. Some analysts believe that Al-Yamamah kept BAE afloat through the 1990s when the company was facing financial difficulties.
Rotten from the Beginning
While armaments transactions are known to be fraught with bribery, British journalist and arms trade opponent Gideon Burrows states that Al-Yamamah "may be the world's most corrupt deal". And while the scandal around allegations of the BAE slush fund are particularly lurid, accusations of corruption date back to the creation of Al-Yamamah I and II, as they've come to be known.
According to former CIA operative Robert Baer much of the money that BAE registered as earnings from Al-Yamamah was earmarked from its inception for kickbacks to members of the Saudi royal family and other intermediaries. "[Al-Yamamah] was a huge commission-generating machine. British Aerospace overcharged for its hardware and spare parts, with the difference going to commissions."
The Saudis are not the only ones who may have profited from Al-Yamamah kickbacks. In 1994 MP Tam Dalyell accused the son of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of receiving a Ł12 million commission from the Al-Yamamah deal, but the government declined to investigate the charges against Mark Thatcher. Less fortunate was British Defense Procurement Minister Jonathan Aiken who played a key role in setting up Al-Yamamah II. He was imprisoned in 1993 for letting the Saudis pick up his tab at the Paris Ritz.
The British government and BAE have been criticized from the start by arms watchdog groups for selling weapons to a despotic, theocratic regime. Amnesty International characterizes Saudi Arabia, the world's top arms buyer, as a major violator of human rights: "Summary, unfair and secret trials are the norm in Saudi Arabia and torture is a common practice to extract confessions from suspects. Defendants facing capital charge are invariably convicted after trials which lack the most basic standards of fairness." A 1995 Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary revealed that BAE tried to sell electric shock batons to Saudi Arabia two years earlier, which could be used for the torture of prisoners.
Hawk Jets
If the current allegations of the Saudi slush fund weren't bad enough, BAE is in the center of another storm of controversy. This summer, BAE finally clinched a highly contentious deal to sell 66 Hawk jets to India - for which the poverty-stricken nation paid Ł1billion ($1.7 billion).
The agreement, which threatened to fall through a number of times, was helped along by the intervention of the British government. In 2002, in the midst of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir that threatened to turn into a nuclear war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the two countries ostensibly on a peace-making mission. However, as the Indian media revealed, he used the visit as an opportunity to promote the sale of BAE Systems Hawk jets, as did his Foreign Secretary Geoff Hoon later in the year.
"The same time that the prime minister and the foreign secretary have been over in India trying to play a role as a peace broker in the Kashmir crisis, we've also in effect been acting as an arms broker," says Andy McLean of the London-based think tank Saferworld. "And the government has been directly pushing the sale of jets which we will know could be used both directly in Kashmir and also will be used to train Indian pilots to fly much more deadly fighter jets which could also be used in Kashmir and potentially which could be used to carry nuclear weapons."
McLean says that BAE Systems' dealings in India are not an anomaly. "The Hawk jet [has] almost become synonymous in the UK with scandal in the arms trade," he says. "It was Hawk jets that were licensed for export to Indonesia and were then found after years of protestation from human rights groups to have been used to intimidate the civilian population in East Timor. This was denied by the government for years but was then actually admitted by the Indonesian armed forces."
The British government also allowed export licenses for the sale of BAE's Hawk jets to Zimbabwe, which is was later forced to revoke Zimbabwe became involved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. BAE has targeted other poor African countries for arms sales. "It was also British Aerospace which manufactured the military radar system that has cost the Tanzania people Ł28 million ($46.8 million) that could have been used on providing fresh water and vaccinations for the population there," says McLean.
Government Role
Business between BAE and the governments of impoverished countries like Indonesia, Zaire and Tanzania would not be possible without the sanctioning of the British state, which must issue export licenses for such sales to go through. Fortunately for BAE, the UK government - the world's second largest arms exporter - is a most faithful ally, promoting BAE's interests through the Ministry of Defense's Defense Export Sales Organisation (DESO), whose role is to encourage the sale of British weapons abroad.
BAE and other arms companies get further assistance from the British government's Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) which underwrites the transactions between the weapons companies and potentially unreliable buyers, loaning out UK tax payers' money for the foreign purchase of British-made arms. BAE has received more Export Credit Guarantees than any other UK company in recent times.
The Blair Labour government has proved itself as steadfast a supporter of the arms industry in general, and BAE in particular, like the governments of its Conservative predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major - The Observer refers to BAE chairman Sir Richard Evans as "one of the few businessmen who can see Blair on request". Before its ascendancy to power, the Labour government promised to publish the conclusions of a 1992 investigation into charges of corruption by BAE in the Al-Yamamah deals by the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the audit has never been published.
The Blair government has defended its backing of the arms industry by claiming that companies like BAE Systems play a central role in the economy. Arms critic Richard Bingley and former member of CAAT disagrees. "On the face of it, the arms export business is reckoned to be quite lucrative, its worth about Ł5 billion to the UK Exchequer every year. However, when you take away overheads and then also look at the fact that the arms trade is subsidized by about Ł1 billion per year by the UK Exchequer, actually you begin to see there's no profit line by exporting arms. So literally, it is at best an industry that pays for itself."
Under Fire
Despite the British government's ongoing support for BAE, pressure is mounting on the armaments giant. Adding to the embarrassment of the slush fund scandal, activist groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Friends of the Earth UK are putting the spotlight on BAE's role in perpetuating armed conflicts around the world.
Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth UK launched a campaign against BAE's production of depleted uranium shells which have been used by British soldiers in Iraq. Hannah Griffiths, corporate campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK, said: "We want the directors of companies like BAE to take their duties to communities and the environment as seriously as they do their duties to the company's bottom line".
The Campaign Against Arms Trade has also been targeting BAE with protests at 40 sites all across England, Wales and Scotland that belong to BAE or its subsidiaries, accusing BAE of fanning the flames of war.
Meanwhile BAE has also targeted CAAT. The Sunday Times (London) revealed in September that BAE paid a private intelligence firm Ł120,000 a year to infiltrate and spy on CAAT over a four year period in the 1990s. The head of the firm told BAE that she had a database containing more than 148,000 names and addresses of arms trade and peace activists, environmentalists and union members. CAAT issued a statement denouncing BAE's actions. "The alleged theft of the supporter database, by copying it, is illegal and entirely unacceptable. CAAT is considering how to pursue the allegation," it said.
A New Al-Yamamah
In spite of the recent bribery revelations, BAE is intent on pressing ahead with a new Al-Yamamah deal with the Saudis, according to a statement by the Swiss investment bank UBS.
In the last decade and a half the Saudis have had difficulties holding up their end of the arms-for-oil bargain, as the price of petroleum has fluctuated and the Saudi domestic debt has continued to mushroom, while arms purchases gobble up a third of the national budget. However, recently Saudi Arabia's fortunes have been buoyed by higher oil prices, while their relationship with their other main weapons supplier has gotten chillier. "Now that the U.S. is on the outs with the Saudis and pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are looking more to Europe for their defense needs," says analyst Frida Berrigan of the Arms Trade Resource Center in New York.
The new agreement would be to upgrade 85 Tornado fighter planes that were purchased in an earlier Al-Yamamah deal. If it goes through it would be a boost to the beleaguered weapons giant, which has been having difficulties arranging a merger with a U.S. defense company. But it would be anything but a boon for British taxpayers, who would continue to subsidize BAE, or the Saudi populace, who would see none of the kickbacks flowing to the House of Saud -- just the further perpetuation of the royal family's corrupt rule.
Sasha Lilley is Research Coordinator/ Editor at CorpWatch and a Producer for Pacifica Radio's KPFA.
This article is reprinted with permission from Corpwatch.org.
----
U.S. Sets Time Frame For 24 Iraq Contracts
Pentagon Plans Open Process for Awards
By Jackie Spinner
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page E03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54384-2003Nov17.html
The U.S. government plans to award 24 new Iraq reconstruction contracts by Feb. 1 using full and open competition, a process rejected in the first round of awards because it would take too long.
Retired Rear Adm. David J. Nash, who is heading up the new Pentagon-led Project Management Office in Baghdad to oversee reconstruction spending, said in an interview yesterday that contracts for $18.7 billion in recently appropriated rebuilding funds would be awarded using an "accelerated" process to meet a deadline he acknowledged was aggressive.
The government has been criticized for limiting competition in awarding the initial contracts. Such restrictions are allowed under federal procurement laws for emergencies, an exemption that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) relied on in picking companies to bid on some of the 11 contracts it awarded. Full competition can take six months, federal procurement experts said.
"It's very fast for our system, but we're going to do it all appropriately and make sure we comply with all the regulations and law," Nash said of the 10-week time frame. "To me, it's not impossible. It does make people wonder. But I think we're okay."
Representatives of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-led interim government in Baghdad; USAID; the Defense Department; and other agencies have been meeting in recent days to set priorities for how to spend the new reconstruction money.
Nash said USAID, which took the lead in awarding $2 billion in contracts earlier this year, would share the workload this time with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the State and Treasury departments, and the Department of Health and Human Services.
Of the 24 new contracts, 17 will be for construction projects, including five worth about $5 billion for continued work repairing the country's electrical grid, five more worth about $4 billion for public works and water projects, and two worth about $1 billion to build police stations and prisons. One contract worth about $1 billion will target construction of health facilities, two others worth about $1 billion total will go to transportation and communications systems, and two more worth about $1 billion are for fuel distribution and repairs to the oil industry infrastructure.
Six separate contracts will be awarded for project management, and one will be awarded to support the office Nash will head to oversee how the congressional funds are spent.
Nash, who spent 33 years in the Navy before retiring in 1998, is on leave from his job as president of PB Buildings Inc., a subsidiary of the New York-based construction firm Parsons Brinckerhoff Inc. In the Navy, Nash was the "King Bee," the nickname for the commander of the Navy's Seabee construction battalion. He also served as commander and chief of the Navy's civil engineers.
The Defense Contract Audit Agency will monitor the work his office does, Nash said, and the office will employ 130 U.S. government employees from various agencies. "We will mainly do what I call contract management in Iraq because we have to do the day-to-day task to make this thing move forward," he said.
--------
BAE Systems' Dirty Dealings
Sasha Lilley,
November 18, 2003
http://www.khilafah.com/home/category.php?DocumentID=8769&TagID=2
It sounds like the stuff of pulp fiction: The UK's largest armaments producer running a Ł 20million ($33. 4million) slush fund to finance prostitutes, gambling trips, yachts, sports cars, and more for its most important clients the Saudi royal family and their intermediaries, greasing the wheels of the largest business deal in UK history. These are the accusations made last month by a former employee of weapons giant BAE Systems. And evidence has surfaced that members of the British government were aware of the bribe arrangement, but looked the other way.
BAE Systems, formerly known as British Aerospace, is one of the world's top arms producers. It manufactures warplanes, avionics, submarines, surface ships, radar, electronics, and guided weapons systems, generating annual sales of Ł 12billion ($ 20billion) in 130 countries. The arms giant was formed as a nationalized British defense corporation in1977 , which was subsequently privatized in the early1980 s, and changed its name to BAE when British Aerospace merged with Marconi Electronic Systems in1999 .
BAE Systems' North American branch has an unusual special relationship with the Pentagon where it is treated as a domestic arms company. According to Ian Prichard of the British Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), "BAES North America appears to be virtually a separate company - even top UK executives are not privy to the more sensitive work carried out by 'their' company in the U.S."
For years the company has been accused of selling arms to impoverished and dictatorial regimes, polluting the environment, and has been dogged for years by allegations of corrupt dealings.
Now those allegations have exploded into the open. Revelations point to BAE's provision of enticements to the Saudis over a fifteen year period, starting in the late1980's, using a front company Robert Lee International (RLI), to divert funds to the arms clients and their middlemen. Among other allegations, RLI procured prostitutes for visiting Saudi officials and bought houses for mistresses, while an internal BAE statement reportedly refers to "sex and bondage with Saudi princes". According to documents published by The Guardian, the British government's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) alerted the Ministry of Defense of the possible involvement of BAE's chairman Sir Richard Evans in the bribe scheme, but the Ministry of Defense did nothing.
BAE Systems' chief executive Mike Turner didn't deny the slush fund charges. At a press conference following the revelations, he stated, "They are old allegations and they are old hat. They are history." Turner added, "Everything we do is legal and that is all I am prepared to say. Whatever the law is, we are legal."
Al-Yamamah
The slush fund allegations are tied to the biggest export agreement in British history - the Al-Yamamah (The Dove) arms deals that the British government signed with the Saudi royal family. BAE, then known as British Aerospace, was to sell the Saudis 72 Tornado and 30 Hawk advanced fighter-bombers along with other tranches of military hardware.
In an unusual barter arrangement between the two governments, the Saudis were to purchase the armaments in payments of oil, over an unspecified period of time. Over the last two and a half decades, the deals have amounted to the sale of 96 Tornado Fighters and more than 100Hawk jets and other training aircraft totaling at least Ł 20billion ($33. 4billion), with BAE taking in an estimated Ł1. 5billion a year. BAE is currently in negotiations with the Saudis for a further extension of the Al-Yamamah deal.
The first Al-Yamamah deal was signed in1986 , when the Saudis' main armaments supplier, the United States, was blocked from selling arms to their longtime ally by an historic Congressional vote. The House of Saud turned to British weapons manufacturers instead. The Saudis were happy to reduce their dependence on the U.S., while the UK saw the petrodollar-rich Saudis as a long term bonanza. A second deal between the two governments was signed in1988 . Some analysts believe that Al-Yamamah kept BAE afloat through the1990 s when the company was facing financial difficulties.
Rotten from the Beginning
While armaments transactions are known to be fraught with bribery, British journalist and arms trade opponent Gideon Burrows states that Al-Yamamah "may be the world's most corrupt deal". And while the scandal around allegations of the BAE slush fund are particularly lurid, accusations of corruption date back to the creation of Al-Yamamah I and II, as they've come to be known.
According to former CIA operative Robert Baer much of the money that BAE registered as earnings from Al-Yamamah was earmarked from its inception for kickbacks to members of the Saudi royal family and other intermediaries. "[Al-Yamamah] was a huge commission-generating machine. British Aerospace overcharged for its hardware and spare parts, with the difference going to commissions."
The Saudis are not the only ones who may have profited from Al-Yamamah kickbacks. In 1994 MP Tam Dalyell accused the son of then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of receiving a Ł 12million commission from the Al-Yamamah deal, but the government declined to investigate the charges against Mark Thatcher. Less fortunate was British Defense Procurement Minister Jonathan Aiken who played a key role in setting up Al-Yamamah II. He was imprisoned in 1993 for letting the Saudis pick up his tab at the Paris Ritz.
The British government and BAE have been criticized from the start by arms watchdog groups for selling weapons to a despotic, theocratic regime. Amnesty International characterizes Saudi Arabia, the world's top arms buyer, as a major violator of human rights: "Summary, unfair and secret trials are the norm in Saudi Arabia and torture is a common practice to extract confessions from suspects. Defendants facing capital charge are invariably convicted after trials which lack the most basic standards of fairness." A 1995 Channel 4 "Dispatches" documentary revealed that BAE tried to sell electric shock batons to Saudi Arabia two years earlier, which could be used for the torture of prisoners.
Hawk Jets
If the current allegations of the Saudi slush fund weren't bad enough, BAE is in the center of another storm of controversy. This summer, BAE finally clinched a highly contentious deal to sell 66 Hawk jets to India - for which the poverty-stricken nation paid Ł1billion ($1.7 billion).
The agreement, which threatened to fall through a number of times, was helped along by the intervention of the British government. In2002 , in the midst of heightened tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir that threatened to turn into a nuclear war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited the two countries ostensibly on a peace-making mission. However, as the Indian media revealed, he used the visit as an opportunity to promote the sale of BAE Systems Hawk jets, as did his Foreign Secretary Geoff Hoon later in the year.
"The same time that the prime minister and the foreign secretary have been over in India trying to play a role as a peace broker in the Kashmir crisis, we've also in effect been acting as an arms broker," says Andy McLean of the London-based think tank Saferworld. "And the government has been directly pushing the sale of jets which we will know could be used both directly in Kashmir and also will be used to train Indian pilots to fly much more deadly fighter jets which could also be used in Kashmir and potentially which could be used to carry nuclear weapons."
McLean says that BAE Systems' dealings in India are not an anomaly. "The Hawk jet [has] almost become synonymous in the UK with scandal in the arms trade," he says. "It was Hawk jets that were licensed for export to Indonesia and were then found after years of protestation from human rights groups to have been used to intimidate the civilian population in East Timor. This was denied by the government for years but was then actually admitted by the Indonesian armed forces."
The British government also allowed export licenses for the sale of BAE's Hawk jets to Zimbabwe, which is was later forced to revoke Zimbabwe became involved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. BAE has targeted other poor African countries for arms sales. "It was also British Aerospace which manufactured the military radar system that has cost the Tanzania people Ł 28million ($46.8 million) that could have been used on providing fresh water and vaccinations for the population there," says McLean.
Government Role
Business between BAE and the governments of impoverished countries like Indonesia, Zaire and Tanzania would not be possible without the sanctioning of the British state, which must issue export licenses for such sales to go through. Fortunately for BAE, the UK government - the world's second largest arms exporter - is a most faithful ally, promoting BAE's interests through the Ministry of Defense's Defense Export Sales Organisation (DESO), whose role is to encourage the sale of British weapons abroad.
BAE and other arms companies get further assistance from the British government's Export Credit Guarantee Department (ECGD) which underwrites the transactions between the weapons companies and potentially unreliable buyers, loaning out UK tax payers' money for the foreign purchase of British-made arms. BAE has received more Export Credit Guarantees than any other UK company in recent times.
The Blair Labour government has proved itself as steadfast a supporter of the arms industry in general, and BAE in particular, like the governments of its Conservative predecessors Margaret Thatcher and John Major - The Observer refers to BAE chairman Sir Richard Evans as "one of the few businessmen who can see Blair on request". Before its ascendancy to power, the Labour government promised to publish the conclusions of a 1992 investigation into charges of corruption by BAE in the Al-Yamamah deals by the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the audit has never been published.
The Blair government has defended its backing of the arms industry by claiming that companies like BAE Systems play a central role in the economy. Arms critic Richard Bingley and former member of CAAT disagrees. "On the face of it, the arms export business is reckoned to be quite lucrative, its worth about Ł 5billion to the UK Exchequer every year. However, when you take away overheads and then also look at the fact that the arms trade is subsidized by about Ł 1billion per year by the UK Exchequer, actually you begin to see there's no profit line by exporting arms. So literally, it is at best an industry that pays for itself."
Under Fire
Despite the British government's ongoing support for BAE, pressure is mounting on the armaments giant. Adding to the embarrassment of the slush fund scandal, activist groups like the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), Oxfam, Amnesty International, and Friends of the Earth UK are putting the spotlight on BAE's role in perpetuating armed conflicts around the world.
Earlier this year, Friends of the Earth UK launched a campaign against BAE's production of depleted uranium shells which have been used by British soldiers in Iraq. Hannah Griffiths, corporate campaigner at Friends of the Earth UK, said: "We want the directors of companies like BAE to take their duties to communities and the environment as seriously as they do their duties to the company's bottom line".
The Campaign Against Arms Trade has also been targeting BAE with protests at 40 sites all across England, Wales and Scotland that belong to BAE or its subsidiaries, accusing BAE of fanning the flames of war.
Meanwhile BAE has also targeted CAAT. The Sunday Times (London) revealed in September that BAE paid a private intelligence firm Ł120, 000a year to infiltrate and spy on CAAT over a four year period in the1990 s. The head of the firm told BAE that she had a database containing more than148 , 000names and addresses of arms trade and peace activists, environmentalists and union members. CAAT issued a statement denouncing BAE's actions. "The alleged theft of the supporter database, by copying it, is illegal and entirely unacceptable. CAAT is considering how to pursue the allegation," it said.
A New Al-Yamamah
In spite of the recent bribery revelations, BAE is intent on pressing ahead with a new Al-Yamamah deal with the Saudis, according to a statement by the Swiss investment bank UBS.
In the last decade and a half the Saudis have had difficulties holding up their end of the arms-for-oil bargain, as the price of petroleum has fluctuated and the Saudi domestic debt has continued to mushroom, while arms purchases gobble up a third of the national budget. However, recently Saudi Arabia's fortunes have been buoyed by higher oil prices, while their relationship with their other main weapons supplier has gotten chillier. "Now that the U.S. is on the outs with the Saudis and pulling U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia, the Saudis are looking more to Europe for their defense needs," says analyst Frida Berrigan of the Arms Trade Resource Center in New York.
The new agreement would be to upgrade 85 Tornado fighter planes that were purchased in an earlier Al-Yamamah deal. If it goes through it would be a boost to the beleaguered weapons giant, which has been having difficulties arranging a merger with a U.S. defense company. But it would be anything but a boon for British taxpayers, who would continue to subsidize BAE, or the Saudi populace, who would see none of the kickbacks flowing to the House of Saud -- just the further perpetuation of the royal family's corrupt rule.
Sasha Lilley is Research Coordinator/ Editor at CorpWatch and a Producer for Pacifica Radio's KPFA.
-------- colombia
Colombian drug war stalls
November 18, 2003
By Steve Salisbury
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031117-092206-3888r.htm
BOGOTA, Colombia - The ouster of a Colombian army general - sacked in June partly because of secretly recorded conversations obtained by American agents - has apparently caused distrust between U.S. and Colombian officials and hindered cooperation in the war on drugs.
It has also prompted an investigation by the Defense Department Inspector General's Office in Washington. The Pentagon has a major role in a joint $2.3 billion effort over the past three years to halt the production and export of cocaine and other drugs from Colombia to the United States.
The story centers on ousted Brig. Gen. Gabriel Diaz Ortiz, who was forced out by then-Defense Minister Marta Lucia Ramirez. Miss Ramirez resigned from the government last week.
Gen. Diaz's ouster came days before the publication of an account in Cambio magazine here linking him to the disappearance of cocaine intercepted by authorities in the northern city of Barranquilla last year.
Subsequent news accounts and a report by the Colombian attorney general's office accused the police - not Gen. Diaz - of having seized at least one truck carrying 2 tons of cocaine. The accounts said it appeared Colombian police accepted a payment of $769,000 from the drug traffickers and returned the cocaine shipment to them.
That was in August 2002. Gen. Diaz, at the time commander of the Colombian army's 2nd Brigade, based in Barranquilla, says he had introduced three informants to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration days before the cocaine was intercepted by police.
"That meeting with the DEA was the last time I had anything to do with the case," he said in a recent interview.
According to Gen. Diaz, the three informants - two of whom were slain separately the following month - had information that would have enabled the DEA and police to intercept the cocaine shipment.
In Colombia, the DEA and police often work together.
"I collaborated [with the DEA] totally, providing them very important antinarcotics information, and look what happened," Gen. Diaz said. "The fact is that of the three informants I handed over to the DEA, two are dead. And the cocaine passed through."
Suspicious pattern
U.S. officials tell a different story. Speaking to reporters on the condition of anonymity, they say the U.S. suspicions of Gen. Diaz are based not only on the case of the missing cocaine, but also on three different cases. They involve:
•Human rights reports since 2000 about Gen. Diaz's purported links to outlawed paramilitaries.
•A cocaine seizure by Gen. Diaz's soldiers in June 2002.
• Operation Conquista - an October 2002 joint DEA-Colombian police sweep along Colombia's northern coast, in Medellin, and on San Andres Island that led to the extradition in June of at least a dozen Colombians to the United States to face charges of money laundering.
Colombia's largest magazine, Semana, says DEA evidence against Gen. Diaz includes tapes of 12 conversations between the general and a suspect in Operation Conquista, businessman Omar Ghassan Fakih.
Gen. Diaz and Mr. Ghassan say their conversations were innocent.
Regardless of which version of events one believes, some view Gen. Diaz's ouster as evidence of confusion in the government of President Alvaro Uribe.
This month, Mr. Uribe's government had a spate of high-level resignations or dismissals, including that of Justice Minister Fernando Londono on Nov. 6, Defense Minister Ramirez on Nov. 9, National Police commander Gen. Teodoro Campo on Nov. 11, armed forces commander Gen. Jorge Enrique Mora last Wednesday, and other senior officials.
The Associated Press ascribed some of the departures to an Oct. 25 referendum in which Colombians rejected cuts in government spending that were sought to free money for fighting Marxist rebels and strengthening Mr. Uribe's battle against corruption.
Even before the resignations, the Pentagon's inspector general had opened a probe into complaints of tension between U.S. and Colombian military and law enforcement personnel.
The United States has a cap of 400 military and 400 civilian contractors in Colombia to provide logistical, communications and technical intelligence support. They also train thousands of Colombian soldiers and police in counternarcotics, counterterrorism, antikidnapping and oil-pipeline protection.
The DEA's mission is to assist Colombian law enforcement in counternarcotics efforts.
The Pentagon began its investigation in June at the urging of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Gordon Sumner, who had just completed a weeklong fact-finding trip to Colombia.
Gen. Sumner, who was President Reagan's ambassador-at-large to Latin America, said he has shared his observations with high-ranking officials in Washington.
Gen. Sumner noted that the Colombian military has recently scored high-profile battlefield successes in a 39-year-old war against Marxist guerrillas. But he added: "There seem to be some frictions on the ground between Colombians and U.S. Embassy personnel, and they appear to be hindering the ability to fight terrorism and drug trafficking in Colombia."
The ouster of Gen. Diaz is one event cited by Gen. Sumner.
'Scapegoat'
Supporters of Gen. Diaz are particularly upset at Col. William Graves, the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy, over Gen. Diaz's ouster.
"Graves allowed me to be lynched," Gen. Diaz said.
Mrs. Ramirez, the former defense minister, reportedly acknowledged that U.S. concerns and the U.S. surveillance tapes were factors in her dismissal of Gen. Diaz.
The U.S. State Department's director for Andean affairs, Phil Chicola, has also told Colombian TV that Gen. Diaz was ousted over suspicions he had ties to outlawed paramilitaries and drug traffickers.
"This is outrageous. I am an innocent scapegoat," said Gen. Diaz.
About three years ago, human rights activists began charging that Gen. Diaz had ties to paramilitary militias and that the general had turned a blind eye to abuses by these groups.
Like Marxist guerrilla forces, some paramilitary groups are funded by drug growers and traffickers who operate in regions they control.
U.S. officials reportedly say the surveillance tapes were part of Operation Conquista, an investigation of merchants and businessmen suspected of laundering drug money in Barranquilla and Maicao, a town near the Venezuelan border.
One of those extradited to the United States was Mr. Ghassan, described as a porcelain and appliance merchant of Lebanese descent, in his late 30s.
In one videotape, Gen. Diaz is reportedly seen entering and leaving Mr. Ghassan's popular Sanyo Center store in Barranquilla.
According to Semana magazine, an anonymous agent who participated in Operation Conquista said:
"There are [recordings of] more than 12 conversations between the general and [Mr. Ghassan], in which they talk about personal favors, the purchase of firearms and permits to carry them, of permits to tint the windows of their friends' cars, and of invitations to meetings and parties."
Mr. Ghassan responded, according to the magazine: "The recordings that the DEA may have of my conversations with the general don't have any relation with illicit business, for I have never had them with him, nor with anyone. The conversations make reference to a china set that the general bought in my store."
Gen. Diaz said he never knew of any links to drug trafficking that involved Mr. Ghassan.
Gen. Diaz has taken his case to the press and the Colombian congress. He says anonymous news leaks against him were aimed at shifting attention away from corrupt police who used the Barranquilla bust to extort money.
On June 16, the Colombian attorney general's antinarcotics and maritime interdiction unit (UNAIM) opened an investigation into the events.
UNAIM reviewed a statement from the surviving informant, secret police-counterintelligence reports, and testimony from police and a former paramilitary member.
They said that the cocaine had been seized by members of the police's Judicial Investigation Section (SIJIN) and a separate antikidnapping unit and later returned to the drug traffickers for $769,000.
UNAIM identified the drug traffickers as belonging to the Northern Valle drug cartel, which is believed to work closely with paramilitaries.
Last September, prosecutors issued arrest warrants for some 16 policemen and 10 civilians in the Barranquilla area on drug-related charges.
UNAIM said in a statement that Gen. Diaz has not been, nor is he now under criminal investigation for drug trafficking, although a separate UNAIM report criticized him for not informing prosecutors promptly about the failed Barranquilla drug bust and of the informant's account when they first came to him.
'Falsely accused'
Gen. Diaz says he informed his army superiors and the provincial police chief, Col. Luis Enrique Estupinan, who was eventually transferred and ousted after the scandal broke.
At least seven police officers have since been arrested and jailed - two on charges related to killing the informants.
Gen. Diaz sees the UNAIM findings as vindication of his innocence. "But what about my reputation and the job I lost? Who is going to repair the damage I suffered after I was falsely accused?" he asked.
Gen. Diaz said he feels betrayed by the DEA and Col. Graves, the defense attache at the U.S. Embassy. He said he, Col. Graves and DEA agents met several times between March 2002 and April 2003.
But U.S. officials discount the value of that cooperation.
Colombian prosecutors say two of the three informants - brothers Angel Guillermo Leon Sanchez and Luis Alfonso Sanchez, the surviving informant - were "big fish" drug dealers a decade ago who had served jail time. The prosecutors say the informants had proven their credibility by supplying information leading to earlier cocaine seizures.
A Colombian judicial official in Barranquilla, who requested anonymity, said police who have admitted taking bribes to let the cocaine go have also accused DEA personnel of taking bribes. A policeman at the Atlantico province police headquarters in Barranquilla said separately, "Yes, some of the DEA received money."
A U.S. Embassy spokesman denied the accusations, attributing it to unfounded rumors from dubious sources.
But a spokesman for the Colombian attorney general's office said the investigation into the Barranquilla police scandal and into any DEA actions or omissions continues.
"Every officer I have talked to supports Gen. Diaz," said Miguel Posada, director of the Center for Sociopolitical Analysis. "They see him as being scapegoated, and they are worried they could be next."
-------- iraq
U.S. Jets Pound Suspected Guerrilla Positions in Iraq
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html?hp
TIKRIT, Iraq (AP) -- U.S. fighter jets pounded suspected insurgent positions Tuesday in the largest bombardment of guerrillas in central Iraq since President Bush declared the end of major combat in May, the U.S. military said.
In Baghdad, dozens of loud explosions were heard after sundown Tuesday in what appeared to be a U.S. operation against Iraqi insurgents. A U.S. military spokesman had no comment on the blasts.
In northern Iraq, guerrillas detonated a roadside bomb, wounding two soldiers, the military said. On Monday, a U.S. civilian contractor was killed in an insurgent attack near Baghdad, the military said without elaborating.
The U.S. military has reacted forcefully to an upsurge in guerrilla activity in central and northern Iraq. On Monday, six insurgents were killed in gunbattles and 99 suspects were reportedly detained in a series of sweeps.
Near Baqouba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, U.S. jets and Apache helicopter gunships Tuesday blasted abandoned buildings, walls and trees along a road where attacks have been so common that troops nicknamed it ``RPG Alley'' after the rocket-propelled grenades used by insurgents. Fighter-bombers dropped 500-pound bombs and tanks fired their 120mm guns at suspected ambush sites, the military said.
F-16 fighter aircraft dropped two bombs Tuesday on insurgent targets near the town of Samara, about 60 miles north of Baghdad, the military said.
On Monday, 4th Infantry Division soldiers also killed six alleged insurgents in the Tikrit area as they pressed their search for a former Saddam deputy, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who is believed to be orchestrating attacks.
The attacks went on sporadically through the night, with sporadic explosions reverberating across Tikrit.
In fighting in central Iraq, U.S. soldiers destroyed 12 safe houses, 14 mortar firing positions and four ambush sites, said Lt. Col. William MacDonald, a military spokesman. No casualties were reported.
Elsewhere, an Iraqi militant group called Muhammad's Army claimed responsibility Monday for the Nov. 2 downing of a U.S. helicopter that killed 16 soldiers near Fallujah, west of Baghdad. The group warned that U.S. forces would face more attacks if they did not leave Iraq in 15 days. There was no way to independently verify the claims.
In a videotape broadcast by the Lebanese Al Hayat-LBC satellite station, Muhammad's Army also claimed responsibility for the September assassination of Aquila al-Hashimi, a member of the U.S.-backed Iraq Governing Council, who was gunned down near her Baghdad home.
The group is seeking to return Saddam to power and consists of several hundred former Iraqi intelligence and security services. A group with this name is one of several that claimed responsibility for the Aug. 19 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad.
Despite the administration's efforts to repair infrastructure, Iraqis frequently complain about the slow pace of reconstruction seven months after the war that deposed Saddam's regime.
Coalition authorities have frequently pointed to the gradual restoration of electrical power as a benchmark of their success in rebuilding Iraq.
But those efforts suffered a major setback when the grid supplying the capital from power plants in the north collapsed Saturday.
As a result, much of Baghdad has been left with only brief, 10-15 minute periods of electricity in the last three days.
U.S. administrators said the outages were a result of maintenance work on the national grid. But Iraqi government officials said they were caused by the collapse of steel pylons carrying high-tension lines after heavy rains and high winds.
Kareem Waheed, an undersecretary in the Electricity Ministry, said he was hopeful that power could be resupplied to Baghdad on Wednesday.
``We cannot cook, there is no water, and it is very cold without heating at night,'' said Leyla Najim, a librarian in central Baghdad. ``The children cannot do their homework in the dark.''
On Monday, the Italian Foreign Ministry confirmed the resignation of an Italian official of the U.S.-led coalition, who accused the occupation authorities of incompetence
``The provisional authority simply doesn't work,'' the Italian daily Corriere della Sera quoted Marco Calamai, a special counselor of the Coalition Provisional Authority, as saying. ``Reconstruction projects that were promised and financed have had practically no results.''
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher, asked about the resignation, said the coalition authority has made ``excellent progress'' in several areas, including ``the physical reconstruction of Iraq, the restoration of services to Iraqi people, the beginnings of political authority among the Iraqi ministers and now an accelerated path to political authority.''
In Baghdad, shots were fired outside the Japanese Embassy about 3 a.m. Tuesday but no staffers were injured, the Japanese Foreign Ministry said in Tokyo.
More than one gunman was apparently involved, and they fled in a car after an Iraqi security guard at the embassy fired back, it said.
Japan was among the first countries to support the U.S.-led war against Iraq and is considering sending troops to help with reconstruction.
Meanwhile, a United Nations official was quoted Tuesday as saying the world body will continue to operate in Iraq through its local staff and quick visits by senior officials based in neighboring countries.
Ghassan Salameh, an adviser to Kofi Annan, told the Lebanese newspaper An-Nahar that a U.N. meeting in Cyprus last week came up with ``temporary, work-around solutions'' to cope with the absence of international staff after most of its employees were evacuated following the bombing of the U.N. office.
Some 4,000 local U.N. staff are still performing humanitarian work in Iraq, although the number is expected to drop to about 1,500 with the termination of the U.N.-run oil-for-food program at the end of November.
--------
TROOPS
A U.S. General Speeds the Shift in an Iraqi City
November 18, 2003
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/middleeast/18IRAQ.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 17 - An American commander is preparing to pull troops back from Ramadi, a city at the center of guerrilla activity, and turn it over to Iraqi officers, an experiment that could change the course of the occupation of Iraq.
The commander, Maj. Gen. Charles H. Swannack Jr., of the 82nd Airborne Division, said in an interview last week that troops stationed in Ramadi might be ready to withdraw as early as January. About 18,000 Americans are stationed in Anbar Province, with several thousand of those in Ramadi, military officials said.
The plan, if it works, would represent a significant shift in American efforts to pacify areas dominated by Sunni Arabs, who benefited the most from the reign of Saddam Hussein. The plan seems to dovetail with Washington's recent push to accelerate the transfer of political responsibilities to the Iraqis.
General Swannack said his troops would "stand back" outside the town, ready to help the Iraqi police when needed, but otherwise leaving policing duties to them. To help prepare the Iraqis, he said, the G.I.'s have begun joint patrols with them.
Ramadi, the provincial capital, with about 250,000 residents, has been a center of armed resistance against the American occupation. About 80 miles west of Baghdad, it is in the heart of the area north and west of the capital known as the Sunni Triangle, which is generating most of the attacks against Americans.
"By January or February, we will start backing away and letting them do it," General Swannack said of the Iraqi police. "We will become the backup and the checkers if they aren't doing something right," he added in the interview, at his headquarters in Ramadi.
Many Iraqi leaders have been urging American commanders to take a lower profile, saying their presence alone is prompting resentment and violence against the Americans.
The question in Ramadi is how well the Iraqi security forces, assembled and trained by the Americans, sometimes with great haste, will perform on their own. Some security forces in Anbar are not fully equipped with guns and radios. Many of the province's 4,000 Iraqi police officers have not gone through the training courses taught by the Americans, officials said.
American and British commanders have executed similar pull-backs, but in cities dominated by Kurds, Shiite Muslims and Christians, groups that have been largely receptive to the occupation.
The plan outlined by General Swannack appears to be the broadest effort so far to pull American troops back from a city dominated by Sunni Arabs. A more limited transfer was tried in Falluja in July.
The 18,000 soldiers under General Swannack's command are spread across a wide desert expanse. Anbar Province, particularly the areas around Ramadi and Falluja, has been the center of resistance against the occupation since 15 Iraqis were killed by American soldiers during a riot in Falluja in April.
The violence has risen sharply. In September, American soldiers were attacked 340 times in Anbar; in October, there were 450 attacks.
But General Swannack said he had made steady progress in Ramadi, not just in training security forces but also in winning over allegiance from residents. Ramadi currently has about 1,600 Iraqi police officers.
"The perception that Iraqis are unwilling to take charge of their destiny is totally wrong," General Swannack said. "The Sunnis in this area want to take charge of their destiny. We just have to provide the tools."
In Ramadi on Monday, military officials announced what they described as a significant success by apprehending Kazim Muhammad Faris, whom American officials described as an organizer of anti-American attacks.
In separate attacks on Monday near Balad, about 50 miles north of Baghdad, an American soldier died and two others were wounded when guerrillas ambushed their patrol, and another soldier died when the convoy he was in hit a homemade bomb.
Four Iraqis and a suspected foreign fighter were killed in three incidents on Sunday night and Monday, American officers said.
Three Iraqis died in a firefight in Tikrit that the officers said began when an American patrol found a group of Iraqis who appeared to be planting a homemade bomb. The suspected foreign fighter was killed when he attacked an American soldier after he was captured Sunday night trying to cross from Syria, the officers said.
In the interview, General Swannack drew a distinction between Ramadi, where, he said, the residents were largely cooperative, and Falluja, where, he said, they are not.
General Swannack said Falluja was nowhere near ready to be handed over to the Iraqi police. In discussing the guerrillas in Falluja, he said: "They can make it easy on themselves and tell us who the bums are, and we'll go search them out, or they will be subjected to some pain.
"But we are not going to tolerate attacks on coalition forces and people jumping for joy in the streets."
French Urge Faster Transfer
PARIS, Nov. 17 - In a new sign of French resistance, Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said Monday that the American plan to speed the transfer of power in Iraq was too slow.
In an interview in the daily La Croix, Mr. Villepin proposed instead to supplement the present Iraqi Governing Council of 24 leaders with "additional forces" to form a representative assembly that could elect a cabinet of 15 ministers before the end of the year. "This provisional government would embody Iraqi sovereignty and would see itself progressively endowed with the reality of executive power," he said.
Mr. Villepin's remarks appeared at odds with the approval of the American plan by the German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer. Speaking with reporters on Monday after a meeting with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Mr. Fischer said the American timetable was "a very important step forward," news agencies reported.
-------- israel / palestine
American, Israeli Hawks Worried Over Peace Moves
by Jim Lobe
November 18, 2003
(Inter Press Service)
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe111803a.html
Middle East peace activists are seeing rays of hope for the first time since pro-Likud neo-conservatives grabbed control of US policy toward the region after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
The specific focus of those hopes lies with two "unofficial" peace plans put together by leading Israelis and Palestinians that have begun transforming the debate over US Mideast policy from demands that the Palestinian Authority (PA) "dismantle the terrorist infrastructure" in the occupied territories before further steps toward peace, to what should be the shape of a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians.
The two most prominent promoters of the former approach, US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, have both seen their popularity plummet in recent months, according to polls.
And two key US officials, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, have already offered encouraging words for the new peace efforts, as has key Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, who has long taken an interest in the conflict.
Both initiatives are circulating as the Palestinian intifada enters its fourth year, and the right-wing Likud government headed by Sharon races to build a controversial security fence in and around the West Bank to wall off Israel and many Israeli settlements there from the surrounding Palestinian population.
Palestinians and many Israelis are concerned that the fence, which cuts deeply into Palestinian territory, is an effort to impose a final border between the two peoples, one that would effectively prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, as called for by both the Oslo accords and the US-backed "road map."
Even Bush has called the barrier a "problem," although, like other concerns he has raised about Sharon's policies over the past two years, he has failed to follow up with sanctions. Washington even vetoed a recent United Nations Security Council resolution that demanded a halt to construction.
The two peace plans are based on the premise that the PA will be able to effectively combat terrorism only when the Palestinian population can be assured of a final settlement that will meet their demands for an independent and viable state. Unlike Oslo or even the road map, both offer a vision of such a final settlement to which both parties are asked to agree.
One plan, worked out by the president of Al-Quds University, Sari Nusseibeh, and former Israeli intelligence chief, Ami Ayalon, has been signed by over 100,000 Israelis and more than 60,000 Palestinians.
It calls for Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders and to share Jerusalem as the two people's capital, in exchange for a demilitarized Palestinian state and the surrender by Palestinian refugees of any right of return to Israel.
The initiative has been signed by four former heads of Israel's main security agency, Shin Bet - including Ayalon - as well as many other prominent Israelis and Palestinians.
In statements that caused consternation among neo-conservatives and other right-wing Zionists here, Wolfowitz described it not only as consistent with the Bush administration's policy goals, but also as a way to bolster moderates in the Islamic world.
The second plan, called the Geneva Accords and worked out over two and a half years by unofficial delegations headed by former Israeli justice minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian information minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, runs 50 pages and is based largely on peace talks in Egypt in January 2001, just before Sharon took power.
Far more detailed, it would require Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders subject to adjustments that would permit it to retain most of the larger Israeli settlements in the West Bank in exchange for a comparable amount of Israeli territory being transferred to the Palestinians.
It would also require that the Palestinians demilitarize, grant Israel control of Palestinian air space, and give up the right of return. Jerusalem would be divided between the two states with each having sovereignty over their respective holy sites.
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan has publicly supported the Geneva Accord, which has also been endorsed by a number of European leaders, including Bush's closest international partner British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who is expected to urge Bush to line up behind it during their summit in London this week.
Powell wrote a congratulatory letter to the heads of both delegations, describing the Accord as "important in helping to sustain an atmosphere of hope."
But what is increasingly compelling about both initiatives - beyond their backers - is the fact that the public-approval ratings of both Sharon and Bush have plummeted in recent weeks, apparently because of popular discontent with their hawkish policies..
Bush has seen has popularity plunge in the last couple of months due to the growing sense that the US military is sinking into a quagmire in Iraq - despite assurances by his neo-conservative advisers that the US occupation would be easy - and that his prewar claims about the threat posed by Baghdad were untrue.
Sharon has seen his approval ratings drop to only around 30 percent due apparently to the seriousness of the economic recession in Israel and the sense that his hard-line policies against Arafat and the Palestinians have reached a dead-end.
In that respect, last week's harsh and unprecedented denunciation of Sharon's policies by Ayalon and three other former chiefs of Shin Bet have clearly encouraged peace activists, as did a similarly harsh assessment of hard-line policies several weeks ago by Israeli's armed forces chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon.
All of these developments have created a sense of growing concern among pro-Likud hawks both here and in Israel. Sharon and right-wing members of his cabinet denounced Beilin and other sponsors of the Geneva Accord virtually as traitors but that criticism has since grown quieter, particularly after the declarations of Yaalon and the former Shin Beth directors.
The US Anti-Defamation League and the far-right Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), to which many neo-conservatives in the Bush administration have ties, also strongly denounced both plans and Powell's endorsement of the Geneva Accord.
The ZOA also criticize Wolfowitz's remarks and called on Bush to disavow them.
Although Wolfowitz is widely seen as the highest-ranking neo-conservative in the Bush administration, unlike most neo-conservatives, he has never been closely identified with Likud or US groups that are particularly close to Israel's right-wing party or the settlement movement.
Mainstream Jewish organizations here, such as the American Jewish Committee, have not taken a position on any of the plans or on the statements of Powell and Wolfowitz.
- Americans for Peace Now
http://www.peacenow.org/
--------
Israeli Army Engaged in Fight Over Its Soul
Doubts, Criticism of Tactics Increasingly Coming From Within
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54448-2003Nov17?language=printer
JERUSALEM -- The hunt for suspected militants sent Sgt. Lirom Hakkak bashing his way through a wall into a Palestinian family's threadbare living room, his slender frame sweating under nearly 35 pounds of body armor and combat gear, his M-16 rifle ready.
He noticed the grandmother first, her creased face so blanched with terror that she appeared on the verge of collapse. A middle-aged couple huddled close by, trembling.
"They could be my parents," Hakkak, the 22-year-old son of an Israeli poet, recalled thinking. In that split second of recognition, he said, "you really feel disgusting. You see these people and you know the majority of them are innocent and you're taking away their rights. You also know you must do it."
With the Israel Defense Forces in the fourth year of battle with the Palestinians, the most dominant institution in Israeli society is also embroiled in a struggle over its own character, according to dozens of interviews with soldiers, officers, reservists and some of the nation's preeminent military analysts.
Officers and soldiers have begun publicly criticizing specific tactics that they consider dehumanizing to both their own troops and Palestinians. And while they do not question the need to prevent terrorist acts against Israelis, military officials and soldiers are speaking out with increasing frequency against a strategy that they say has forsaken negotiation and relied almost exclusively on military force to address the conflict.
Nearly 600 members of the armed forces have signed statements refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. Active-duty and reserve personnel are criticizing the military in public. Parents of soldiers are speaking out as well, complaining that the protection of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not worth the loss of their sons and daughters.
Such issues are being debated at the highest levels of Israel's political and military leadership. At the end of last month, the military chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, told columnists from Israel's three leading newspapers that the road closures, curfews and roadblocks imposed on the Palestinian civilians were creating explosive levels of "hatred and terrorism" among the populace. Last week four former heads of the Shin Bet domestic security service said the government's actions and policies during the Palestinian uprising had gravely damaged Israel and its people.
While such public comments have infuriated Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a former general who favors stringent measures against the Palestinians, they reflect the anxieties of many active-duty soldiers and reservists over whether the military is provoking more terrorist attacks than it is preventing. In addition, members of the armed forces said they feared that some of the harsher tactics -- especially assassinations of suspected Palestinian militants, which often also cause civilian deaths -- are corrupting Israeli soldiers, and by extension, Israeli society.
"What's happening is terrible," said retired Brig. Gen. Nehemia Dagan, former chief of education for the armed services. "The ethics and morals of Israeli society are more important than killing the heads of Hamas or Islamic Jihad."
"It's a difficult type of war. It's harder to uphold ethics," said Asa Kasher, a professor of military studies at Tel Aviv University who is rewriting the armed forces' code of ethics, which he first wrote nine years ago. "There are no books on moral regulations for fighting terror."
While Kasher said he does not believe the core values of the Israeli military have changed, this conflict has "put people into utterly new situations -- whether it's a private at a checkpoint or the chief of staff."
"Even my friends who are Jewish think what the army is doing is wrong," said a 20-year-old first sergeant, Noam, who is a sniper in the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion. Israeli military officials requested that the full names of active-duty soldiers not be printed for fear that they could be subject to prosecution for war crimes in countries that oppose Israel's actions in the Palestinian territories. Noam said he has told his friends: "I'm not killing anyone for no reason. I'm doing this because I have to do it."
At the same time, many other soldiers assert they are proud of what they have done. For much of this year, Dor, a shy 19-year-old medical officer, was based with the paratroops near the West Bank city of Nablus. He was only 27 miles from his home in Netanya, an Israeli seaside city that has been the target of six suicide bombings since the Palestinian uprising began in September 2000.
"You think of your girlfriend sitting in a cafe, and it makes things here more personal, more relevant," Dor said. "When you stop a bomber, you feel good about yourself."
Dissent against military action is not new to Israel: Military historians note that public discontent with Israel's two-decade occupation of southern Lebanon and its slowly mounting casualty toll helped pressure the government to withdraw its forces in May 2000 -- over the objection of the military leadership.
Opinion polls continue to rate the Israel Defense Forces as the country's most respected institution, though public confidence levels have eroded slightly since the military's incursion into West Bank cities in the spring of 2002. The Israeli news media, including the military's official weekly newspaper, have become more willing to scrutinize an institution once considered sacrosanct.
Many analysts say they see a growing willingness among today's soldiers and officers to not only speak out against the tactics employed in the Palestinian territories, but also to refuse to serve. That, the analysts say, signals an unprecedented challenge to the armed forces and the government.
Israel maintains mandatory military conscription and reserve duty in which eligible men, and some unmarried women, serve about one month each year, usually until age 41, though requirements vary substantially depending on the individual's military specialty. The military is what Michael Oren, a military historian, calls a "neighborhood army," which most Israeli boys and girls grew up knowing they would join. Active-duty and reserve soldiers maintain a fierce dedication to the military, and believe they have an obligation to protect their homeland, as well as the lives of families and friends.
But in dusty camps, at blistering desert roadblocks and, perhaps most frequently, when soldiers go home and take off their uniforms, introspection often blurs the clear outlines of duty.
"You're in a situation where you need to be blind," said Hakkak, the Israeli sergeant, tugging nervously at unruly strands of his brown hair as he discussed his role in the conflict. "You do things as a machine, it doesn't matter if it's right or wrong. The things you've done affect you in a very serious way."
Nearly 900 Israelis have been killed during the conflict -- more than 250 of them soldiers. Almost 2,500 Palestinians have been killed. It is difficult to determine how many of those casualties were civilians, with estimates by Palestinian human rights groups and Israeli research groups ranging as high as 85 percent and as low as 48 percent. No verifiable independent count exists, and the Israeli military provides no statistics on Palestinian civilian deaths.
Nearly a year after leaving active duty, Hakkak, who like many soldiers later found work as a security guard, said he was still haunted by his West Bank tour.
"In my dreams I see myself killing people I didn't kill," he said.
An Army's Mystique
Cpl. Mati Milstein was sweaty and bored -- extremely bored, as he recalled. He was halfway through an eight-hour shift at a Gaza Strip checkpoint near a Jewish settlement when he spotted a car approaching. A Palestinian man and his young son were inside.
Milstein, his coffee-colored eyes set in a face that seemed all sharp angles, trained his M-16 rifle on the father and ordered him out of the car. He remembered that the "young son watched in horror."
The soldier peered inside the trunk. The father and his boy were probably returning from the beach and were no security threat, Milstein told himself.
"But I wasn't finished," Milstein later wrote in a Jewish newsletter. "At gunpoint, I ordered the father to open the hood and show me the engine, open the glove compartment, lift up the front seats, crawl into the back and show me whatever was stuck between the rear seats, open his shopping bags, empty his pockets."
Then, with the man's identity card in his pocket, Milstein ambled over to his shaded and fortified checkpost and gossiped with a colleague, keeping his M-16 trained on the father and son, who remained standing under the wilting sun.
"I held them for 20 minutes -- because I could," he recalled. "Then I let them go because I got bored with the game."
Milstein, an American who moved to Israel and joined the army four years ago, said he discussed the incident with no one -- not with fellow soldiers, nor with his parents back in Santa Fe, N.M. "We tend to keep those experiences within us," he explained, echoing the feelings of almost every soldier interviewed. "It's very personal. We might prefer to forget what happened.
"I didn't think about the implications until afterward," said Milstein, whose father is a psychiatrist and mother is a psychologist. "I didn't feel good about what I did -- that I couldn't keep myself from sinking to this."
Last year Milstein decided to tell his story in the newsletter of the Jewish Federation of Greater Albuquerque. Sitting in a Tel Aviv coffee bar with an army buddy on a recent afternoon, he tried to dissect his reasons for taking his personal feelings public.
"There's a mystique about the army -- that we are the most moral army in the world, we only do good things," Milstein said. "But this is what's happening. I think it's important for people to know." He thought it particularly important to tell other Jews because, he said, "they don't really know what's going on."
Today, as a 28-year-old reservist who works for an Israeli Web site, Milstein continues to serve -- reluctantly -- in the Palestinian territories when he receives call-ups.
"There are terrorists stopped and terrorist attacks prevented," he said. "In that respect, there is a very clear purpose and reason for being there. But I don't think we should be there. All the incidents that happen at checkpoints make the Palestinian population hate us more. It counteracts the useful work of tracking suicide bombers. It strengthens the hand of the armed Palestinian groups. It makes it easier for Hamas to justify its attacks on Israelis."
Disobeying Orders
Brig. Gen. Yiftah Spector is one of the most decorated pilots in Israeli history, a triple ace credited with downing 15 enemy planes in wars spanning three decades. In recent years, Spector became a revered flight instructor for the air force. This year alone he spent 47 days on reserve duty and flew 110 times, mostly training cadets and their instructors.
Last month scores of Palestinians were killed or wounded when pilots attempting to kill militant leaders dropped bombs or fired missiles into crowded urban neighborhoods in the Gaza Strip. Spector and 26 other current and former Israeli air force pilots signed a letter stating their opposition to executing "illegal and immoral orders to attack." They refused "to take part in air force strikes in civilian population centers" and "to continue to hurt innocent civilians."
The letter angered many of their commanders, rattled the political establishment and astounded a society that has long considered military pilots to be among the elite. The air force commander, Maj. Gen. Dan Halutz, grounded all the pilots and fired the nine instructors, including Spector, his longtime friend and colleague.
Spector, 63, was undeterred. In an interview a few days after personally surrendering his wings to Halutz, he said: "I am the public. I can speak my heart."
"If we continue, there are going to be greater and great dilemmas and there will be more and more mistakes," said Spector, a sculptor and painter who invented a computerized aircraft flight control system. The government, he said, is "deaf, blind and stupid" for relying exclusively on military force to resolve the conflict.
In addition to the pilots, 567 reserve army officers and soldiers have declared publicly that they will no longer serve in the Palestinian territories, and hundreds of others have quietly asked their commanders for reassignment, according to military lawyers and Israeli military experts.
Many government officials have dismissed the numbers as inconsequential in a military of about 186,000 active-duty and 445,000 reserve troops. Some military analysts disagree.
"This is very significant," said Yagil Levy, author of a recently published book on changing trends in the Israeli military. "For the first time in Israeli history, you're talking about hundreds of officers. They are very prominent officers who served in the IDF in very prominent jobs."
Fear of the Unknown
"My biggest fear is that we get numb," Nadav, a 26-year-old captain, said recently at a shabby Israeli base just outside of Nablus, about 28 miles north of Jerusalem. He sat at a dusty, plastic-covered table in his office, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights and contemplating the impact of this war on his army. Like all officers in the Israeli military, he began service as an enlisted soldier.
Nadav, a compactly built man who took a break to travel the world after his mandatory service and returned to active duty last year, described a trip to Ethiopia. On the first day, he was overwhelmed by the poverty. After a few days, he said, "I didn't see it as much," adding, "I'm afraid that will happen to us. We will start doing things, like taking over a house, and blowing up a door will look natural -- that we'll do stuff and not think about the person, even if he's killed."
Nadav commands a company of about 105 soldiers in the 202nd Paratrooper Battalion. His troops are native Israelis as well as immigrants from across the globe -- 20 from Russia and other former Soviet republics, 10 from Ethiopia, others from Argentina, Britain and, until recently, two from the United States. The unit's members call themselves "the Rattlesnakes."
He refers to them as "my children." He worries about the strain the conflict has put on the unit and his men. Before last year's West Bank incursions, troops usually spent four months in the field and four months training at a rear base. This year, Nadav's men were allotted one month of training and reorganization after 11 months of combat operations.
One night this year at the beginning of a shift, the Rattlesnakes collected in front of an elaborately detailed, computer-projected aerial photograph of Nablus, an ancient city known to most of the men in the room by its Hebrew name of Shechem and revered by Jews as the spot where Abraham received the promise of a land of Israel.
The night's mission was a raid intended to nab a suspected Palestinian militant.
"We know very little," cautioned the deputy commander who gave the briefing. "Name, what he looks like. . . . We don't know where he is. These are the suspected places" -- three houses where intelligence reports indicated the suspect could be spending the night.
Each squad was to leave its armored jeeps or truck at a specific location; each man had a precise rooftop, tree line or alley at which to position himself; each was responsible for knowing the location of his colleagues to reduce the chances of casualties caused by friendly fire.
Soldiers say few operations prey on their psyches more than searches for suspected militants. Sometimes the troops blast through doors with explosives, fearful of the potential danger of armed fighters on the other side. All too frequently, they find Palestinian families cowering in their own houses.
"One time we went into a house . . . really, really aggressively," said a 22-year-old first sergeant, Gabriel, whose copper-colored hair sprouted from beneath a maroon skullcap emblazoned with the emblem of the paratroops. "The people were really scared. The people were shaking. Not just the women -- the father, all of them were shaking." It was the wrong house.
"I really, really, really felt bad," said Gabriel, who said he watched Walt Disney movies to relax on his weekends at home. "If it's a terrorist, you don't feel as bad. I really felt bad. I couldn't stop apologizing. There was nothing I could do. I'm a simple soldier."
Noam, the 20-year-old first sergeant, spent his youth in Israel, moved to England with his family and returned nearly three years ago to serve in the armed forces. In those three years, he said, he has lost count of how many Palestinian homes he has raided.
"You feel sorry for the family," said the lanky soldier with short black hair. "They have done nothing wrong. . . . You think of what it would be like if someone came to your family."
"A person not in the army might think you should get out of the occupied territories," said Noam, watching two Rattlesnakes play a heated game of table tennis as they waited for the night's mission to begin. "But by being here, you know you stopped a potential murderer. That's the only satisfaction."
His soft voice drifted off: "Even that's not too much satisfaction. It's a war. No one likes this."
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Palestinian Kills Two Soldiers; Israel Raids Gaza Strip
November 18, 2003
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/middleeast/18CND-MIDE.html?hp
Palestinian gunman who hid an assault rifle in a rolled-up carpet walked up to an Israeli checkpoint in the West Bank today and opened fire, killing two soldiers, an Israeli Army spokesman said. In the Gaza Strip, at least eight people were wounded when Israeli forces raided Palestinian areas, sparking a battle with Palestinian gunmen.
At the checkpoint near the Palestinian-controlled town of Al Khader in the West Bank, the gunman approached the soldiers, stopped about 55 yards away and opened fire before escaping, said the Israeli spokesman, who insisted on anonymity.
The army raided the town in search of the gunman, who is believed to have been helped by a getaway driver. "We have forces inside Al Khader now," the spokesman said. The Palestinian news agency reported that a large force of Israeli soldiers imposed a curfew on Bethlehem and neighboring villages.
Full security control of the area was handed over to the Palestinians in July, but there have been three attacks since then, the spokesman said.
In the Gaza Strip, eight Palestinians were wounded, four seriously, when Israeli forces invaded Rafah, the Palestinian news agency reported. Israeli forces also raided Khan Younis refugee camps, it said.
An Israeli army spokesman said Israeli forces raided Rafah to look for tunnels Israel says are used to smuggle weapons across the border with Egypt.
The incidents could become a setback to renewed peace efforts.
But in Brussels today the Israeli foreign minister, Silvan Shalom, said he had told Secretary of State Colin L. Powell at a meeting that the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, would meet.
"I gave him the date we think we are going to have this meeting," Mr. Shalom said in remarks carried by Reuters. "It wasn't set up exactly, but in the next coming week," he said, when asked for the date of the meeting.
Recent violence has lingered in the backdrop of efforts to bring Israelis and Palestinians back to talks intended to curb more than three years of conflict. Numerous cease-fires throughout the Palestinian uprising for statehood have come and gone, smothered by outbursts of fighting for which the two sides blame each other.
In the past two months, the Palestinians have struggled with a political crisis brought on by the resignation of the prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas, who complained that his efforts toward peace had been hampered by both sides. His successor, Ahmed Qurei, was sworn in on Nov. 4 as the head of a new government with Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat's loyalists in central positions.
But Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, who had offered to hold talks with Mr. Qurei once the new cabinet was formed, said on Monday that he might meet with Mr. Qurei in the next few days. The two sides are intending to discuss how to restart the "road map" peace plan backed by the United States.
When the Palestinian cabinet took office earlier this month, Mr. Qurei called for a cease-fire. But Muslim militants responsible for bombings that have killed scores of Israelis must be on board for any truce to hold.
The military wing of Hamas said today in a statement that it was responding to Israel's raid in the Gaza Strip when it set off roadside bombs against its forces. Hamas added that it was committed to "resistance of the Zionists until their presence on Muslim lands ceases".
Nabil Aburdeinah, the top aide to Mr. Arafat, said on Monday that Mr. Arafat had approved plans by an Egyptian mediator, Omar Suleiman, to send a delegation to Gaza within 48 hours to begin talks among militants to try to get them to agree to halt attacks on Israelis.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian minister in charge of negotiations with Israel, said today that the shooting of the soldiers and the Gaza Strip raid underlined the urgency for an agreement between Israelis and Palestinians to stop the conflict.
"The violence and counterviolence reflects the genuine, dire need for both sides to reach a comprehensive agreement," he said in a telephone interview.
"Now we will have a Palestinian dialogue in Cairo, I think in the next 10 days, and I hope if we can reach a comprehensive agreement to stop violence then Israel should reciprocate," Mr. Erekat said. "This is what is needed to resume the road map."
Dore Gold, an adviser to Mr. Sharon, said in a telephone interview that the road map states that any cease-fire must be unconditional. "That means it is not contingent on Israel undertaking something in exchange," Mr. Gold said.
He said the plan includes such security steps as dismantlement of the Palestinian "terrorist infrastructure."
"If you just get the Palestinians to put the safety of the Kalashnikov rifles on, that is not a cease-fire of the road map," Mr. Gold said.
Israel has said that previous truces have served only as breathing time for militants to rearm, and that there will be no real cease-fire unless the Palestinians dismantle the factions.
An Arafat loyalist, Hakam Bilawi, was installed as interior minister in charge of security and police forces when the Palestinian cabinet was sworn in but Mr. Arafat retained overall control as head of a National Security Council.
"The Palestinian security services remain dependent on Yasir Arafat, and that raises questions about the willingness to fight against terrorism," said the Israeli defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, in remarks conveyed by the ministry.
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NATO on trial as Afghanistan spins out of control
By John Chalmers
(Reuters)
November 18, 2003
http://www.swissinfo.org/sen/Swissinfo.html?siteSect=143&sid=4460520
KABUL - Here's an astonishing fact: the 5,700-strong multinational force keeping the peace in Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, has just three helicopters.
Belgium offered more choppers and then got cold feet once it realised the cost, Greece declined to send any because it was too stretched by preparations for the 2004 Athens Olympics and Turkey is now sitting on a last-ditch request to fill the gap.
So much for NATO's plans to expand its International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) into lawless hinterlands of the country, where Taliban militia are back on the offensive and warlords are thriving on a resurgent opium drug trade.
"If the alliance does not step up to the plate, in five years we will be back here fighting again because this place will go to hell," says Lieutenant-Colonel John Tibbetts, chief planner at the 24-nation force's headquarters in Kabul.
NATO's takeover of the Afghan operation in August was a morale-booster for an organisation which had been sidelined by Washington after the September 11 attacks on America, plunged into self-doubt and torn by a row over the U.S.-led war in Iraq.
Its first deployment of troops outside Europe or North America, the ISAF mission vindicated two years of painstaking effort by NATO Secretary-General George Robertson to transform the Cold War alliance to face new and global security threats.
And that is why he is now frantically signalling that NATO's new-found credibility will stand or fall in Afghanistan.
"If we fail, we will find Afghanistan on all of our doorsteps. Worse still, NATO's credibility will be shattered, along with that of every NATO government," he told lawmakers from alliance nations in Orlando last week.
"I therefore urge you to challenge your governments on the excuses they make for not doing more."
KABUL REASONABLY SECURE
Two years ago this month, the Islamic Taliban regime fled Kabul under cover of darkness after weeks of U.S. aerial strikes for their harbouring of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network, which Washington holds responsible for the September 11 attacks.
Today, the city is still a wreck of rubble, rubbish and grinding poverty, but -- says ISAF Commander Lieutenant-General Goetz Gliemeroth -- it is at least "reasonably secure".
"Ninety-nine percent of people in Kabul are delighted to see ISAF on the streets," says Major Fraser Rea, who leads a company of Nepali Gurkha soldiers and British reservists patrolling the streets in one neighbourhood.
This correspondent went in a jeep with one patrol to a dusty outskirts village where some suspicious strangers had been reported recently. All the way men and children waved, smiled and stuck their thumbs up as the convoy rumbled past.
But Kabul is unique. The south and east of the country have been rocked in recent months by a wave of militant violence, the worst in fact since the Taliban was toppled.
Prodded by the United Nations and Afghan interim president Hamid Karzai, whose power base barely reaches beyond Kabul, NATO's 19 nations agreed last month to extend the ISAF mission.
The ultimate goal is for NATO to support several Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs), groups of aid workers under military protection. Four of these teams have already been set up in urban centres by Britain, Germany, New Zealand and the United States, and five more are planned by year's end.
The existing PRTs are protected by Operation Enduring Freedom, a U.S.-led force of 11,600 troops hunting down diehard elements of the Taliban and al Qaeda.
HIGH STAKES
The problem for NATO, military planners say, is that if it takes even two of these teams under its wing it will need an additional protection force of 2,000-3,000 troops, combat and transport helicopters, communications equipment and a forward operating base perhaps in neighbouring Tajikistan or Kyrgyzstan.
Given that the alliance cannot even find the 12 helicopters and the intelligence officers it needs to do its basic job in Kabul -- or muster forces necessary to take command of security at the capital's airport -- such a goal seems a long way off.
"Political will is fine," NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General James Jones, told reporters as he flew to Afghanistan recently. "But we haven't fully resourced the first mission, so let's temper the enthusiasm a bit."
Indeed, NATO has done just that.
It has agreed only to back a new German PRT in the relatively calm northern city of Kunduz, which will in any case enjoy protection from German helicopters stationed on the Uzbek border, and to make temporary deployments of ISAF troops outside Kabul to oversee elections and a disarmament programme.
Talk of a more ambitious ISAF expansion has gone quiet.
"It's pathetic that they've only got three ageing helicopters in Kabul," said one diplomat at NATO's Brussels headquarters. "It has a lot to do with money. And every country is waiting for everyone else to do the volunteering."
Robertson never tires of telling audiences that the 18 non-U.S. allies have 1.4 million men and women under arms, and yet with only 55,000 soldiers deployed on multinational missions most plead they are overstretched and can do no more.
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U.S. Intelligence Is Softening Some Judgments on Illicit Arms
November 18, 2003
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/politics/18INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - A broad United States government reappraisal of intelligence about illicit weapons programs around the world is prompting a softening of some earlier judgments about foreign arsenals, according to several American officials.
The reassessment - in two parallel, highly classified reviews by the National Intelligence Council - is based on a review of judgments made on the basis of old intelligence and on new information, when that is available. The reviews, which are still in draft form, are the first since the late 1990's by the council, which reports to George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence.
In one key new judgment, the officials said, the chemical weapons assessment expresses less certainty than the last one about the status of China's chemical weapons program. While China is still believed to possess chemical weapons, the officials said, the new review concludes that current intelligence is not sufficient to support an earlier firm judgment that those weapons have been deployed with military units.
Other than the reappraisal on China, the officials declined to specify which judgments were being revised. But they said that in the cases of a number of countries, the judgments being reached would reflect less certainty than in the previous review. Virtually all of the changes they had seen in the current draft, they added, reflected a softening of previous judgments.
"The analysts are insisting that the judgments be backed up by hard evidence, not supposition," a government official familiar with the process said.
As an example of the danger of supposition, a second official cited Iraq, saying the absence of evidence that Iraq had destroyed its chemical and biological weapons appeared to have been interpreted by intelligence agencies as evidence that it still possessed them.
In an interview last month at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., a senior intelligence official acknowledged that the government was reassessing its judgments about chemical and biological weapons programs around the world, but said the exercise was unrelated to the experience in Iraq.
"We've asked them to re-examine what we've said, and make sure they're signing up for what we say, make sure that the information is good," the official said.
Even though officials said changes were not being made as a direct result of the Iraq experience, the emerging conclusions seem to reflect fresh caution by intelligence analysts, whose prewar certainty that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons has been cast in doubt by the failure of American investigators to find any evidence of Iraqi stockpiles.
How intelligence agencies do business in the aftermath of Iraq is being watched closely, with some members of Congress and intelligence officials expressing concern that a new wariness about overreaching might leave agencies too timid in their judgments.
At the same time, some Congressional and intelligence officials say that the experience of Iraq has demonstrated the danger of drawing hard conclusions on the basis of limited evidence, and that a new prudence on the part of intelligence agencies would be welcome.
"People have talked about the pendulum theory of intelligence, when you go from one extreme to another, and we don't want that," Representative Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said in an interview on Thursday. Ms. Harman, from California, declined to discuss the classified reviews on biological and chemical weapons programs now under way, but she said, "There were major problems with the prewar intelligence on Iraq that have to be fixed."
Based on the most recent previous intelligence reviews, government officials said, the countries believed by the United States to possess both chemical and biological weapons include China, Iran, Iraq, Israel and Egypt.
Previous reviews have concluded that Syria, too, has chemical weapons and is seeking to develop biological weapons, and that Russia has biological weapons. India, Pakistan, Sudan and Libya have all been listed as nations with suspected biological and chemical weapons research programs or abilities.
The officials said they did not expect changes in some key judgments, including those having to do with the supposed chemical and biological weapons abilities of North Korea and Iran, the other two nations along with Iraq that the Bush administration has listed as members of an "axis of evil."
In a private letter last month to the Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Mr. Tenet said that what was at stake for intelligence agencies included "our willingness to make hard calls on difficult subjects that affect national-security decision making."
Similarly, Representative Porter J. Goss, the Florida Republican who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, expressed concern in an interview last month that the Iraq experience was causing intelligence analysts "to become more cautious instead of more creative, more thoughtful."
The government officials who agreed to discuss the reassessment would do so only in general terms and on condition of anonymity. Those who spoke to a reporter said they had been briefed on the status of the review and believed that the public should know that intelligence agencies were holding themselves to strict standards as professional analysts whose judgments were independent of political pressure.
The reviews, expected to be completed this month, are to become formal National Intelligence Estimates, the classified documents that reflect the consensus of intelligence agencies and which then serve as the basis for the administration's public remarks, in this case about chemical and biological weapons abilities of countries around the world.
The review on biological weapons is being headed by Lawrence K. Gershwin, the national intelligence officer for science and technology, officials said. They said the review on chemical weapons was being headed by John R. Landry, a retired major general who is the national intelligence officer for conventional military issues.
The Central Intelligence Agency and its supporters have strongly defended the intelligence judgments about Iraq and its illicit weapons program, even as they have come under strong criticism from members of Congress. In the interview last month at C.I.A. headquarters, four senior intelligence officers said that based on the evidence available at the time, it would have been irresponsible for intelligence analysts to come to any conclusions other than those spelled out in a National Intelligence Estimate in October 2002. That document stated flatly that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons and was seeking to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.
Those judgments have not yet been upheld by a team of American investigators in Iraq led by David Kay, a special adviser to Mr. Tenet. In the interview last month, all of the senior intelligence official expressed confidence that Mr. Kay would one day find the evidence of such weapons, but they also warned of what they called low morale among intelligence analysts as a result of the widespread criticism about their judgments about Iraq.
"I worry about how much longer they're going to make the tough calls if this is the reception they get," a senior intelligence official said.
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CIA Seeks Probe of Iraq-Al Qaeda Memo Leak
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54452-2003Nov17.html
The CIA will ask the Justice Department to investigate the leak of a 16-page classified Pentagon memo that listed and briefly described raw agency intelligence on any relationship between Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network, according to congressional and administration sources.
In addition, the leaders of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) and Vice Chairman John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), are considering making their own request for a Justice investigation. The top-secret memo was attached to an Oct. 27 letter to them from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith. Feith was answering a request that he support his assertion during a closed-door hearing in July that there was intelligence to support a longtime relationship between the Iraqi leader and the terrorist group.
Excerpts from the memo were first published Saturday in the issue of the Weekly Standard dated Nov. 24. Under the headline "Case Closed," the article described the memo as documenting "an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003" between bin Laden and Hussein. It describes the memo as containing "50 numbered points" that are "best viewed as sort of a 'Cliff's Notes' version of the relationship. It contains the highlights, but it is far from exhaustive."
In making their case for invading Iraq, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and other senior administration officials stressed both Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction and his connection to bin Laden. To date, the administration has been unable to come up with unconventional weapons in Iraq or evidence that there was a close connection between the Iraqis and al Qaeda.
A Washington Post poll in August found that 69 percent of the American public believed Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
A CIA request to Justice is automatic when classified information purported to come from the CIA is involved in an unauthorized disclosure, according to a senior intelligence official, who declined to comment specifically on the Feith memo. Under the normal referral system, a request would be made to Feith to determine who had access to the memo and what other distribution it may have had beyond the Senate committee, the official said.
In a news release, the Defense Department late Saturday described the Feith memo as containing "either raw reports or products of the CIA, the NSA [the National Security Agency, which performs electronic intelligence intercepts] or in one case, the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]." The release said that leaking such a document "is deplorable and may be illegal."
One item reported in the Weekly Standard began, "According to CIA reporting, bin Laden and [top bin Laden deputy Ayman] Zawahiri met with two Iraqi intelligence officers in Afghanistan in Dec. 1998." Another item refers to "sensitive CIA reporting" about the Saudi National Guard going on alert in December 2000 "after learning Saddam agreed to assist al Qaeda in attacking U.S./U.K. interests in Saudi Arabia."
In its Saturday release, the Pentagon took the unusual step of saying, "News reports that the Defense Department recently confirmed new information with respect to contacts between al Qaeda and Iraq . . . are inaccurate." The release also said the memo "was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and drew no conclusions."
A senior intelligence official said yesterday that the NSA and the DIA may make their own referrals to Justice, based on their analysis of the information disclosed from the Feith memo.
While Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article, concluded that "there can no longer be any serious argument about whether Saddam Hussein's Iraq worked with Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda to plot against Americans," some critics of the administration policy came to a different conclusion.
W. Patrick Lang, former head of the Middle East section of the DIA, said yesterday that the Standard article "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?"
Another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather "data points . . . among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true."
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Sweden spied on Russian military until 2001: report
STOCKHOLM (AFP)
Nov 18, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031118164850.a6rv2x4a.html
Sweden spied on Russia's military industry as late as 2001, mainly acquiring information on radar equipment aboard Russia's modern fighter jets in order to better equip Sweden's own fighter planes, Swedish radio reported on Tuesday.
Sweden's Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), which in addition to providing materiel for the military also gathers intelligence, smuggled the top secret equipment out of Russia with the help of small Swedish companies active in the country, the public radio said.
"Swedish authorities provided official documents that were used to get past Russian authorities and make the deals look official," the radio said in a report on its website.
Among the Russian materiel acquired, via contacts cultivated by the small Swedish export company Exico, was nose radar equipment in 1995 for jet fighters that was specifically not for export -- in other words, military secrets.
According to documents obtained by Swedish radio, the acquisition was approved by FMV and senior defence staff.
Officially, the Swedish government has claimed that the deal concerned only "measuring equipment for microwave signals".
An FMV spokesman remained tight-lipped about the affair on Tuesday.
"This was a technical purchase, but this was a technical purchase that we on the Swedish side are not interested in talking about," spokesman Ulf Lindstroem said.
-------- un
U.N. group seeks control of Internet
November 18, 2003
By John Zarocostas
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031117-113002-7678r.htm
GENEVA - Governments spearheaded by China, Brazil, India, Russia and Saudi Arabia are trying to place the Internet under the control of the United Nations or its member governments, a move that the United States and other developed countries are determined to resist.
The issue has cropped up in preparatory talks for a world summit on the information society to be held from Dec. 10 to 12 in Geneva, with the stated goal of advancing the management and worldwide use of the Internet, especially in poorer nations.
Delegates from rich and developing nations remained divided on the matter at the end of the latest round of talks on Friday, senior diplomats said.
"We will continue to fight hard to ensure that Internet governance remains a balanced enterprise among all stakeholders and continues to be private-sector-led," said the chief of the U.S. delegation, Ambassador David A. Gross.
Pierre Gagne, executive director of the world summit, earlier identified control of the Internet as one of two key issues in the talks, adding that control and financial issues "will probably be the last issues to be resolved" at the summit.
Many developing countries argue that governments need to play a greater role in managing and setting policy for the Internet, while the United States, the European Union and Japan, among others, say government interference could stifle the development of the dynamic medium.
The Internet, at present, is loosely managed by a private organization in California named the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which coordinates such matters as Internet servers and domain names.
Countries with developing and emerging economies would like to hand over that authority to a U.N. agency, such as the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).
The Internet medium is too important to be left in the hands of one major power, some argue, and others say problems such as cybercrime and protection of intellectual property rights require greater government involvement.
Yoshio Utsumi, secretary-general of the ITU, which will host the December summit, said in an interview that Brazil is "a very strong advocate" of his agency taking over the Internet.
China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Senegal and many other African countries were also "keen" for the United Nations to have a role, he said.
But, he said, the differences of opinion were "too big" to be settled before the delegates meet in Geneva next month. Other diplomats said there might be no decision even then.
The summit also will deal with questions such as how to block the spread of viruses, prevent unwanted "spam" and prevent the use of the medium for criminal purposes such as identity theft, Western officials said.
Russia has proposed that the final declaration address Internet security in both "civil and security fields," but many countries fear that any reference to military security could limit freedom of expression, Mr. Utsumi said.
There also is pressure for a strong statement in support of free expression on the Internet but sources said that is being resisted by China and other countries that want to maintain strong oversight of the medium.
Nitin Desai, special adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said the core purpose of the summit is to establish a common vision for the information society, to utilize new technologies to overcome poverty and to find ways to make Internet access affordable to all.
The president of Senegal has proposed the creation of a "global digital solidarity fund" to help poor countries establish Internet access. The ITU estimates that fewer than 1 percent of low-income country residents are Internet subscribers.
The United States and other industrialized countries say the existing mechanisms are sufficient and argue that funding a new international bureaucracy would not be an effective way to spread information technology.
Poor countries would be better served by establishing an environment in which the private sector would develop the needed infrastructure, the industrialized countries say.
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Powell and European Leaders Discuss U.N. Role in Iraq
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Powell-Europe.html
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- Secretary of State Colin Powell said Tuesday the security situation in Iraq will be brought ``under control'' by June, the deadline for forming an interim Iraqi government.
He also said that as U.S.-led coalition forces make Iraq safer, he hoped U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan would send a new special envoy to Baghdad to replace Sergio Vieira de Mello, who died Aug. 19 in a bomb attack on the U.N. compound in the Iraqi capital.
Speaking to reporters after he discussed Iraq and other issues with his European Union counterparts, Powell said all parties were aware of the ``security challenges'' in Iraq when they developed the new timeline for transferring power.
``The security challenge is a challenge that was given to us by the remnants of the old regime,'' he said. ``They not only wish to see the Americans gone, they want to see democracy gone. They want to return to the old days of dictatorial leadership. Those days will not be coming back.''
In recent days, Powell said, coalition forces have started to act more aggressively to halt the insurgency.
``I am confident in the ability of coalition military forces as well as the Iraqi forces now being built up. ... We are confident we will be able to get the security situation under control'' by the time an interim Iraqi government is formed in June.
That deadline, Powell said, will be met.
With U.S. casualties mounting, the United States is seeking more international help in stabilizing Iraq, but France, Germany and other countries have resisted appeals for peacekeeping troops and extra reconstruction aid, demanding a transfer of power to an Iraqi administration or the United Nations.
Powell and his EU colleagues also debated Iran and agreed that Tehran must come clean on its nuclear program.
``We are expecting specific results; commitments and promises are not enough,'' said Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, who chaired the meeting.
But they disagreed on how to get Iran to do so.
Powell said Iran ``seems to be moving in the right direction'' in disclosing details of its nuclear program but added ``we can't be satisfied until Iran has demonstrated that all of the programs it had been pursuing have now been made known ... and they are now being brought to a halt.''
But European diplomats said Powell would probably not win support for a declaration Thursday by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency at to declare Tehran in violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- a move that could lead to U.N. sanctions.
The Europeans, who recently pressed Iran into agreeing to open up to IAEA inspectors, are taking a softer line.
In a report last week, the IAEA said Iran produced small amounts of plutonium as part of covert nuclear activities. While finding ``no evidence'' Iran tried to make atomic arms, the report said such efforts cannot be ruled out.
The report did not link it to weapons activity but it criticized Iran for not reporting its processing activities, listing it among dozens of cases where Tehran had covert programs in place.
The report credited Iran for a change of heart since September, when the agency demanded it explain contradictions and ambiguities in its nuclear activities.
EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, said both sides share the objective ``to prevent Iran to go nuclear,'' but he said he favored ``constructive dialogue.''
Powell said it ``remains to be seen'' if a resolution can be adopted unanimously. ``That will be the subject of intense discussions in Vienna over the next couple of days.''
Frattini also said the EU would seek to add a nonproliferation clause to all of its future treaties with third countries. EU officials said Iran and Syria would be first on the list.
Ahead of his meeting with foreign ministers of the 25 current and soon-to-be EU nations, Powell met in Brussels with Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom in an effort to break the deadlock over the U.S.-backed ``road map'' peace plan.
Shalom said the first meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his Palestinian counterpart, Ahmed Qureia, will take place next week. However, Qureia aide Hassan Abu Libdeh denied a meeting had been scheduled, saying more time was needed to prepare.
In a sharply worded statement, the EU said Israel had a ``right to protect its citizens,'' but warned that Israel's military actions and restrictive policies in the West Bank and Gaza were ``fueling extremism'' by making life ``increasingly intolerable'' for Palestinians.
Powell was to travel to London after his talks to join President Bush on his state visit to Britain.
Associated Press writer Barry Schweid contributed to this report from Washington.
--------
U.N. Refugee Agency Pulls Staff From Afghanistan
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Afghan-UN-Withdrawal.html
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) -- Unable to protect its staff from Afghanistan's cascade of violence, the U.N. refugee agency on Tuesday pulled international workers out of the volatile south and east and suspended all aid to refugees returning from Pakistan.
The decision, taken after the weekend slaying of a 29-year-old French refugee worker, could affect tens of thousands of Afghans. A group of international aid organizations also said Tuesday it was considering a pullout from the south, raising fears the desperately poor region could become even more isolated.
``We are taking today a painful decision to temporarily reduce staff in the eastern and southern provinces,'' said Filippo Grandi, the chief of mission in Afghanistan at the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. ``We will review the situation after two weeks.''
Some 30 foreign staff members were being withdrawn, and refugee centers in the provinces of Nangarhar, Paktia, Khost and Kandahar were being closed, he said.
The agency said Monday that it had withdrawn its surviving international staffer out of Ghazni, where Bettina Goislard was gunned down as she traveled Sunday through a bazaar in a clearly marked U.N. vehicle.
That same day, a remote-controlled bomb went off beside a U.N. vehicle in Paktia province. And on Nov. 11, a car bomb exploded outside U.N. offices in Kandahar, wounding two people.
Maki Shinohara, the UNHCR spokeswoman, said that to minimize the effects of the pullout, a limited number of Afghans will keep the agency's offices open, and it will work with other aid organizations to try to keep support flowing.
``Operations will be scaled down, inevitably. The biggest impact will be on refugees returning from Pakistan because we can't operate the reception centers,'' Shinohara said. She said about 5,000 refugees returned from Pakistan each week in October, but with winter approaching, only about 1,300 a week in November.
Some 2.5 million Afghan refugees have returned to the country, in addition to 500,000 internally displaced people, since the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, mostly from Pakistan and Iran. UNHCR said the few remaining Afghan staff would help keep aid flowing to more than 220,000 Afghan returnees affected by the decision.
As violence has escalated, there have been increasingly strident calls for the 5,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping contingent, the International Security Assistance Force, to be expanded beyond the Afghan capital, Kabul.
NATO has approved that move, but details have yet to be worked out. The government of President Hamid Karzai has little power outside the capital, where warlords hold sway and Taliban and al-Qaida militants launch frequent attacks.
``If reconstruction of the country is to continue, governments must consider more seriously helping Afghanistan achieve security and stability,'' Grandi said. ``We cannot do this alone. This murder tragically proved it.''
Squadron Leader Paul Rice, a spokesman for the peacekeepers, said he understood the growing impatience and noted that NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson himself has chided member-states for their reluctance to commit troops.
He warned, however, that expansion of the peacekeepers' mission alone must not be viewed as a solution to Afghanistan's security problems.
``The nature of terrorism is that you attack and melt away, and its hard to stop that,'' Rice said.
Meanwhile, several international aid organizations met in Kandahar to discuss possibly withdrawing from the south, according to ACBAR, an umbrella group of 86 aid agencies working in Afghanistan.
Officials said the two motorcycle-driving assailants who allegedly killed Goislard have been taken into custody and admitted to being Taliban supporters. Ghazni Gov. Haji Asadullah Khalid also said more suspects had been detained, but refused to say how many.
Mullah Akim Latifi, who was a culture and information official under the Taliban and claims to still speak for the group, told The Associated Press the Taliban were not involved in Goislard's killing.
``We are not interested in killing aid workers. We only want to kidnap them to bargain for the release of our jailed comrades,'' he said. He acknowledged that the Taliban are holding a Turkish engineer, Hasan Onal, who was kidnapped Oct. 30 in Ghazni.
Associated Press writer Noor Khan in Kandahar contributed to this report.
-------- us
Military Alters Plans For Possible Conflicts
Focus Is on Ending Wars More Quickly
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A18
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54368-2003Nov17?language=printer
U.S. military commanders, working with the Pentagon's Joint Staff, have revised plans for potential wars on the Korean peninsula, in the Middle East and elsewhere based on assumptions that conflicts could be fought more quickly and with fewer American troops than previously thought, senior officers said.
The changes reflect advances in precision munitions, greater use of Special Operations forces, and improved coordination between air, ground and sea forces tested in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. By incorporating these and other new elements in all U.S. war plans, Pentagon authorities hope to make them permanent features and gain greater combat efficiency, the officers said.
Although many specifics remain classified, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has alluded to the revised plans in recent statements, saying they show the Pentagon would be able to deal with other conflicts while U.S. forces stay heavily committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has rejected calls from lawmakers and others to increase the overall size of the armed forces.
In the case of a North Korean attack on South Korea, one senior Joint Staff officer said, the new plans would allow the United States to respond without waiting for as many ground forces to arrive, by substituting air power for artillery and getting such critical equipment as counter-battery radars -- for pinpointing enemy mortar and artillery fire -- on scene ahead of the rest of their divisions. The resulting force might not be as "elegant" as planners would like, but "it will certainly be capable," the officer said.
Still, the new planning does not appear to have addressed issues of postwar stabilization and peacekeeping, which in the case of Iraq have imposed huge burdens on the Pentagon that were not foreseen by Rumsfeld and many of his top aides. Instead, it has focused on how to win wars fast.
"It has shown so far that overwhelming force can be provided faster and with fewer individuals," said Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He noted that initial plans for invading Iraq called for about 500,000 troops but that ultimately only 160,000 were used.
War plans for other parts of the Middle East as well as for Korea, Southeast Asia, Europe, Africa and Latin America are being refined with the help of an ongoing study headed by Pace. The study, called Operational Availability, is analyzing how changes not only in technology but also in foreign basing of troops, pre-positioning of combat equipment abroad and routine rotations of U.S. forces overseas can increase the U.S. military's speed in achieving victory.
The study has presented Rumsfeld over the past year with more than 60 ideas for improving combat efficiency, Pace said. Among them is a recommendation to change the command structure under which specific Army divisions, Navy ships and other forces are assigned to four-star commanders in various regions for war planning. Instead, a new central authority, based in the United States, would be given responsibility for apportioning and monitoring forces.
Pace said Rumsfeld initiated the review soon after taking office in 2001.
"When he came in, he looked at the war plans on the shelf and thought they were dated and did not take into account all the improvements that had been made in U.S. war-fighting capabilities," the general said in an interview last week. "So he directed his combatant commanders to go out and revise them."
They were told to emphasize speed in defeating aggression.
A series of war-gaming exercises last year, starting with the old plans for Iraq and Korea and incorporating "about 84" scenarios, found that timelines for U.S. victories could be shortened significantly, Pace said. The speedier wars meant that many of the forces called for in the plans -- up to two-thirds in some instances -- would never have fought.
"This was pretty revealing for us," said the other Joint Staff officer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "We had too much, and a lot of what we had never reached the battle anyway, because it was either placed in the wrong area or couldn't be flown or shipped there in time."
Another new factor that war planners had to take into account was a broadening of the Pentagon's mission. In place of the Cold War focus on the Soviet threat or the 1990s focus on potential wars in the Middle East and the Korean peninsula, the U.S. military has been directed by the Bush administration to be ready to confront terrorism around the world and to deal with a greater number of possible trouble spots.
"We're moving worldwide from a static defense to a different footprint," Rumsfeld told reporters Thursday en route to Asia, "a footprint that recognizes that it's not possible today to predict with precision where a threat may come from or exactly what kind of a threat it might be." This will require more agile forces, Rumsfeld added, and more access to a larger number of locations abroad.
To achieve those goals, Pace said, the Operational Availability group has recommended looking at, among other things, building faster Navy cargo ships, providing more Air Force cargo planes and creating modular, interchangeable Army units that would blur the distinction between "heavy" armored divisions and "light" infantry divisions.
The Pentagon is designing a dramatically changed basing strategy, with a network of smaller outposts in Eastern Europe, Africa and elsewhere as an alternative to the large, permanent bases in Germany and South Korea set up during the Cold War.
Additionally, the military services have been directed to look at ways of reducing the number of troops constantly deployed, with the Navy taking the lead. Instead of keeping three of its 12 aircraft carriers on overseas duty in heel-to-toe rotations, the Navy is developing a plan that would allow ships to remain closer to their home port but ensure a majority of the fleet could be put to sea quickly if needed.
The proposal to set up a new central authority for monitoring the status and availability of forces strikes at the long-standing organization of U.S. troops around the world. Under the old system, every military unit was assigned to a theater -- whether Europe, the Pacific or the United States -- and every force was apportioned to a potential war in either Korea or the Middle East.
"The idea that you're only trained for one fight just doesn't work in the construct of a global war on terrorism and multiple things going on," the senior officer said.
Another complication of the old approach was that it appeared to vest four-star regional commanders with ownership of the forces assigned to them. So if, for instance, the general in charge of forces in the Middle East needed an additional carrier in the Persian Gulf, he would feel compelled to seek permission to borrow it from either the European or Pacific theater commanders.
Under the proposed change, "the idea of ownership would no longer be there," the senior officer said. Instead, responsibility for overseeing the assignment of forces would rest in one of several places still to be decided: the Joint Staff, the service chiefs, or a combination of Joint Forces Command, Special Operations Command and Strategic Command. Such a change, the officer said, would afford Rumsfeld and his successors a better means of assessing the risks involved in moving forces from one part of the world to another.
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Low-Tech Grenades A Danger to Helicopters
By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A17
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54495-2003Nov17.html
For the hundreds of U.S. helicopters ferrying troops and supplies around Iraq, one of the most persistent dangers is also an old one: rocket-propelled grenades.
The low-tech weapons have been mentioned as possible culprits in three helicopter crashes this month, including Saturday's collision of two Black Hawks -- the deadliest single incident for U.S. forces so far. On Nov. 2, a CH-47 Chinook was brought down by a surface-to-air missile, killing 16 soldiers headed for a short-term break, followed a few days later by the loss of a UH-60 Black Hawk. The Pentagon said the causes of all three crashes are still unclear. The second incident involving a Black Hawk may not have been enemy fire, but mechanical fire, a spokesman said.
But in the wake of the first incident, acting secretary of the Army R.L. Brownlee ordered all helicopters in Iraq and Afghanistan to be equipped with the "most effective defensive systems we have in development or procurement," according to a memo released by Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). "Affordability is not the constraint for such a plan -- only what is doable considering technology production, acquisition and application." Handwritten at the bottom of the memo is Brownlee's reminder that "Like other force protection measures, this is URGENT!"
Army helicopters already have anti-missile systems, which warn pilots of incoming heat-seeking missiles. On some helicopters such a warning automatically triggers the launching of flares meant to confuse the incoming missile and send it off course. Others are equipped with laser-based technology that jams or interrupts the missiles' electrical system. The Army is developing a plan to upgrade those defenses, a spokesman said.
"I can't say that these helicopters are safe in the air, but they are going to be safer," Durbin said.
It's unclear, however, how much such measures will help, military experts said. Helicopters, used to ferry troops, attack targets and provide surveillance, are inherently at risk, said Christopher Hellman, director of a military-spending oversight project at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. "The things that we like about helicopters, that they can go slow and hover, are what makes them vulnerable," said Hellman.
In addition, the high-tech equipment aboard helicopters is not effective against shoulder-fired grenades, which don't rely on electronic tracking or a heating seeking system, military experts said. "To the extent that they work, our jammers work better against more sophisticated equipment than what the Iraqis have," said Hellman.
Rocket-propelled grenades are not very accurate, have a short range and can be pushed off course by a stiff wind, military experts said, but they are also cheap and readily available, making them a persistent threat. Given enough opportunities, an attacker could beat the odds and hit a helicopter, they said.
"I am not sure we have a real defense mechanism" against rocket-propelled grenades, Durbin said. "That's just a reality that has to be faced."
The Army faced similar problems during Vietnam, when 10 percent of the 1,236 helicopters lost to ground fire were taken down by rocket-propelled grenades, said Steven J. Zaloga, a weapons expert at Teal Group Corp., a defense research firm. "This just highlights the fact that a problem that plagued helicopters during Vietnam is still around," he said.
During the height of the war in Iraq in March, about 30 Apache helicopters were forced to cut short their first large-scale strike after facing intense antiaircraft fire, including the launching rocket propelled-grenades. One of the Apaches went down.
The only protection against rocket-propelled grenades is tactical, said John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org. When on assault missions the helicopters must maintain the advantage of surprise to ensure that they can avoid an ambush, he said. "You have to make sure that a helicopter does not get within a few hundred feet of where a [rocket-propelled grenade] can come from," said Pike.
----
U.S.'s 'Iron Hammer' Code Name 1st Used by Nazis
Tue Nov 18, 2003
Reuters
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20031118/us_nm/iraq_hammer_dc&cid=1896&ncid=148076yuuuuuuuuuuu43
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. military's code name for a crackdown on resistance in Iraq was also used by the Nazis for an aborted operation to damage the Soviet power grid during World War II.
"Operation Iron Hammer" this week launched the 1st Armored Division's 3rd Brigade into the roughest parts of Baghdad to ferret out the attackers who have killed scores of U.S. troops since Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was ousted in April.
A Pentagon official said the name was chosen because of the "Old Ironsides" nickname of the 1st Armored Division. He was unaware of any connection to any Nazi operation.
"Eisenhammer," the German for "iron hammer," was a Luftwaffe code name for a plan to destroy Soviet generating plants in the Moscow and Gorky areas in 1943, according to Universal Lexikon on the www.infobitte.de Web site.
A researcher at Britain's Imperial War Museum confirmed the existence of Eisenhammer.
The Nazi's long-range bombing operation was repeatedly postponed and was finally scrapped after an allied air assault destroyed many of the German planes on the ground in 1945, shortly before the defeat of Germany.
After it declared war on terrorism, U.S. officials changed the code name for its impending attack on Afghanistan to Operation Enduring Freedom.
The original name, Operation Infinite Justice, was jettisoned amid fears that the Muslim world, already leery of U.S. intentions, would object on the basis of Koranic teachings that only God can provide infinite justice.
-------- propaganda wars
Media caught in Iraq's war of perceptions
Many Americans have seen news coverage as overly negative, but mounting troop deaths test support for war
By Ann Scott Tyson
The Christian Science Monitor
November 18, 2003
http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/1118/p02s01-woiq.html
Just as news footage of Vietnam casualties slowly eroded public backing for that conflict, today's bold headlines on US military deaths in Iraq are revealing a ground truth that is, more swiftly, undercutting domestic support for the Iraq war.
Some polls show that most Americans no longer believe removing Saddam Hussein was worth the loss of US lives; significant majorities now consider the 400-plus US casualties in Iraq "unacceptable."
"We've reached that magic number, and now Americans are asking whether it's worth it or not," says John Zogby of Zogby International, which conducted prewar polls showing that war support would drop below 50 percent if US casualties went into the hundreds.
The stream of bad news is heightening tensions between an American media that feels duty-bound to report US losses in the headlines, and a Bush administration and Pentagon prone to castigating the negative coverage as one-sided.
Newly enforced restrictions on media coverage reflect Washington's sensitivity to public attitudes. At home, reporters are kept at a distance from Iraq servicemens' funerals at Arlington National Cemetery; they are not allowed to photograph caskets returning to Delaware's Dover Air Base. In Iraq, the military has mistakenly fired on journalists, detained them, or confiscated their equipment, leading media organizations to raise protests with the Pentagon.
Strategically, the war of perceptions has real-world import: In a classic guerrilla campaign, targets are as much political as military, US commanders stress. "It's a serious issue.... Our opponents are attacking the political and moral will of the American people - that's their strategic objective," the Army vice chief of staff Gen. John Keane, told a recent congressional hearing before he stepped down. Americans need a full picture of Iraq to see "what the gain is for that loss of life," he said.
Pentagon leaders have accused the media of "largely ignoring" progress while dwelling on problems. "It isn't all terrible. There's some darn good stuff happening," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Many Americans agree. A Christian Science Monitor/TIPP poll taken early this month, for example, found that 41 percent of Americans believe the media's Iraq coverage is too negative, 15 percent say it is too positive, 36 percent say it is balanced.
Yet US editors and media analysts counter that the spreading guerrilla attacks on the US-led coalition are rightfully major news in Iraq today, and take precedence over coverage of repairing schools or restoring water. Iraq is not a PR problem, but a policy problem, they say.
"No matter how many reporters are there, you are always going to have more coverage of Americans dying than [of] an electricity grid coming up," says George Condon, Washington bureau chief of Copley Newspapers. "That's how it should be, because that's what Americans care about."
At the heart of the debate is what constitutes "news." News is, by definition, something unusual, different, revealing, or dramatic - whether it be the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue or the car bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
But the news is not comprehensive.
"It's an inherent limitation of news. It can't give you all of reality. It necessarily focuses on a tiny piece of reality that is making the most noise at the moment," says John Watson, assistant professor of communications at American University here. In hotspots, "most news organizations are unable to devote the time and manpower" to covering breaking news while also providing thorough overviews for perspective.
Another factor influencing coverage of Iraq is the media's practice of holding the government accountable for its stated policies. In this way, the Bush administration's success in Iraq is being gauged by expectations set in Washington, experts say.
"If the administration had said, there may or may not be weapons... but we will oust a brutal dictator and there will be thousands of casualties, the press coverage would be different," says Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center in Philadelphia.
"The administration has managed expectations poorly, and then blamed the press for not meeting those expectations," says Ms. Jamieson, author of "The Press Effect," a book on media and politics.
Similarly, the administration's assertion that US troops would be widely welcomed as liberators has fallen short of reality. "We had this archetypal vision of the American troops rolling in as in France and handing out Hershey bars and nylons, and that's not happening," says Mr. Watson.
"The administration ... gave no indication there would be this nasty war of attrition with Americans blown up in continuing acts of terrorism for which the US has no defense," Watson continues.
Scrutiny and 'selective screening'
Meanwhile, the administration's continued efforts to cast the occupation in the best possible light have drawn intensified scrutiny from reporters who encounter a more mixed picture on the ground.
In September, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on television, cited a poll that he said showed 60 percent of Iraqis wanting US forces to stay in Iraq "at least" another year. He failed to state that the same poll showed 64 percent of Iraqis want the US to leave within a year, says Zogby, whose firm conducted the poll.
Republicans in Congress highlighted the poll's finding that 68 percent of Iraqis think Iraq will be a better country in five years. None pointed out, however that most respondents did not attribute that progress to American intervention: Half of Iraqis said the United States would hurt their country over the next five years.
"It was very disturbing to me," says Mr. Zogby. "I haven't accused anyone of lying, but this is what psychologists call 'selective screening,' " he says. "There was very little good news in this poll."
Troop morale is another area where administration statements on Iraq have clashed with what reporters are hearing first hand.
An informal poll of 1,900 service members in Iraq in August by the Pentagon-funded Stars and Stripes newspaper revealed that 49 percent think morale in their units is low - the same percentage who say they are unlikely to reenlist. Nearly a third said the war in Iraq was of "little value" or "not worthwhile at all."
Although media outlets, including this one, are regularly pummeled with hostile e-mails over reports perceived as antiwar and unpatriotic, experts disagree. "The press is almost congenitally patriotic and nationalistic," says Jamieson.
As in Vietnam, initial US media coverage of Iraq was fairly supportive of the administration's line, says Watson. Skepticism set in more quickly than in Vietnam, however, beginning with the occupation phase and coinciding with reporters leaving the embedded media program.
-------- war crimes
Plea Deals Being Used to Clear Balkan War Tribunal's Docket
November 18, 2003
By MARLISE SIMONS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/europe/18TRIB.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
THE HAGUE, Nov. 17 - The United Nations tribunal for the war crimes in the Balkans in the 1990's is suddenly rushing through its backlog of cases, adopting a disputed strategy to promote plea bargains with much reduced sentences in exchange for cooperation and guilty pleas.
The abrupt shift after seven years of methodical if plodding trials came in response to intense pressure from the United Nations Security Council and particularly the Bush administration, which pays almost a quarter of the tribunal's current $120 million annual budget and has little sympathy for such international courts. The Council has demanded that the court end all investigations next year and complete its trials by 2008.
"It's been a very strange six months," said one high court official. "The whole attitude has changed, with procedures speeding up, a lot of guilty pleas and trials halted as a result."
Since May this year, eight defendants, a record number, have accepted deals with the prosecution and pleaded guilty to various crimes related to the wars that broke up Yugoslavia.
Some have already received sentences far lighter than those handed down in the past for similar crimes, prompting a torrent of criticism from victims groups. Proponents of the plea bargaining, by contrast, point to the benefits of the new strategy, like the recent testimony that disclosed the detailed Bosnian Serb planning that went into the cold-blooded execution of some 7,000 Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995, the greatest massacre of the Yugoslav wars.
Lawyers also said the plea-bargaining option was now a topic of keen interest and debate at the United Nations jail here, where the former Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic is among the 51 inmates.
The plea bargaining, along with a series of changes in the rules, is part of the tribunal's exit strategy, which is being actively promoted by Pierre-Richard Prosper, the Bush administration's ambassador for war crimes issues.
The strategy calls for focusing on the most senior of those suspected of being war criminals, sending lower-level cases back to courts in the Balkans and speeding up proceedings by such steps as limiting the scope of prosecution evidence and allowing written testimony.
The Security Council even removed the chief prosecutor, Carla Del Ponte, as head of a similar war crimes tribunal for Rwanda, ostensibly because that would allow her to devote her full attention to the Balkans court.
Some legal experts and judges are troubled, saying that serious charges are being dropped and deals are becoming too favorable. Some of the court's most experienced officers have even warned that in the rush to clear the docket, rules are being adjusted in ways that could undermine the tribunal's credibility.
Judge David Hunt, who previously served as a supreme court justice in Australia and is now an appeals judge here, recently vented his frustrations in an uncommonly strong dissent. He argued that the tribunal would not be judged by the number of its convictions or the speed at which it completed its mandate, "but by the fairness of its trials."
The judge objected strongly to several recent appeals decisions because, he said, they favored the prosecution rather than the rights of the accused. Those decisions, he warned, "will leave a spreading stain on this tribunal's reputation."
Such language is unusual in the polite quarters of the court's 16 permanent judges, where in-house squabbles rarely leak out. But Judge Hunt, who is retiring in November, told colleagues he felt obliged to warn against an unfortunate "new trend" in which some judges seemed eager to assist the prosecution in order to speed up cases.
One recent case that raised eyebrows came on Oct. 28 when Predrag Banovic, a Bosnian Serb who was a guard at the notorious Keraterm prison camp, pleaded guilty to taking part in the killing of five inmates and in beating 27 others. He was sentenced to eight years, which may eventually be reduced to six for good behavior. Relatives of camp victims were infuriated. In similar cases earlier, low-level guards who had not pleaded guilty were given 20-year sentences.
One of the three judges on the panel, Patrick Robinson, also found the sentence too light, saying in a dissent that the crimes to which Mr. Banovic had confessed warranted "a longer term of imprisonment." But the verdict stood. As part of the agreement, no side will appeal.
Prosecutors, however, say the new policy is a success, saving the court costly trials that have taken a year or more on average. They say that as part of most deals, defendants have agreed to cooperate and some are already providing vital new evidence, as in the case of the two Bosnian Serb officers who pleaded guilty to playing a role in the Srebrenica massacre and provided the first high-level insiders' account of how and by whom it was planned.
Those proponents also argue that the confessions make the continuing denials and revisionism about the war more difficult and the tribunal more acceptable in Serbia and Croatia, where many people regard the court as biased.
The plea-bargaining strategy was proposed by American lawyers on the prosecution staff. "Facilitating guilty pleas certainly makes sense from a management standpoint," said a senior prosecution official, asking not to be identified. "It's a reasonable solution to a difficult problem, how to get all our accused tried in the time available."
Plea bargaining is familiar in the American, British, Canadian and other justice systems, but those from other legal traditions took some persuading of the value of the new strategy, the official said. Tribunal judges are not bound by the sentence that the prosecution and defense propose as part of a deal, but no chamber has yet gone outside the suggested range. Since 1996, there have been 16 guilty pleas at the tribunal, 8 of them since May. Defense lawyers say they expect quite a few more. One defense counsel said he knew of several cases coming up for trial in which the lawyers now preferred to seek a deal.
"We're seeing a snowball effect," he said.
Judge Theodor Meron, the tribunal president, who is from the United States, insisted in an interview that the court's proceedings met every standard of fairness. He said the recent changes in the rules and strategy were "part of the court's coming of age." The court is now running at full steam, he said, but must also prepare to end its work in a "fair and orderly fashion."
An international tribunal cannot try all the defendants, Judge Meron continued. "We must now focus on the gravest crimes and on the leaders," he said.
"We could not do this in the beginning," he added, referring to the years when only a few, low-level defendants were delivered to the court.
Now, more than 40 people have been tried, and 27 others are preparing for trial. Four people are on trial at the moment, including Mr. Milosevic, whose proceedings move in fits and starts because of his poor health or complaints of fatigue. An additional 17 people who have been indicted remain fugitives, chief among them the Bosnian Serb wartime leaders Radovan Karadzic and Gen. Ratko Mladic.
Mrs. Del Ponte recently told the Security Council that given the demand to focus on the most senior perpetrators, she had suspended the investigations of 62 people. But she said she planned to issue new indictments against up to 30 new, senior suspects before the end of 2004, when investigations must close.
One lawyer at the court raised the question of whether the workload and the rush to complete it would override the interest of justice. "It never should," he said. "It's a dilemma for any court, but people are wondering if it is happening here."
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Blair's Wife Faults Bush's Opposition to International Court
By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A26
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54133-2003Nov17.html
On the eve of President Bush's state visit to Britain, the wife of Prime Minister Tony Blair strongly criticized the administration's campaign against the International Criminal Court, saying its concerns are "not well founded."
Cherie Booth, a leading human rights lawyer, levied the criticism yesterday during a panel discussion on human rights and international law at Georgetown University. Most of her remarks were an academic and historical overview of the development of international law, but she devoted a substantial portion to countering Bush's arguments for rejecting the court.
The administration, which removed the United States from the treaty establishing the court signed by President Bill Clinton, has argued that with peacekeeping missions around the world, U.S. military personnel would be subject to whims of an "unaccountable prosecutor and its unchecked judicial power." The administration has not only rejected the court, designed to deal with war crimes and genocide, but pressured countries to sign bilateral agreements that would exempt the United States from the court's jurisdiction. Seventy countries have signed such agreements, though few are in Europe.
One hundred thirty-two countries have signed the treaty creating the court, and 92 have ratified it. Judges and a prosecutor have been selected, and Booth said its first case is likely to concern Congo.
Booth noted that Britain is a strong supporter of the court and has concluded that its citizens are not threatened by its existence. "With time we can but hope the U.S. will come to share that perspective with regard to its own people, and recognize that the concerns it has expressed -- legitimate as they may now seem -- are not well founded," Booth said. "The absence of the United States means we all stand to lose."
Booth said the treaty establishing the court "has it flaws" but she was "convinced the international criminal court with independent prosecutors putting tyrants and torturers in the dock before independent judges reflects the postwar [post-World War II] human rights aspiration come true. It is a shining example of how human rights might be realized under international law."
Booth said that while the administration says the court will expose its citizens to politically motivated prosecutions, "the U.S. appears unwilling to see there are various safeguards built into the stature, which ensure that all states have nothing to fear from the court."
The court, she said, would only take on a case if a country has no functioning judicial system or if it refused to investigate a case without adequate explanation. The court "buttresses but does not override national judicial systems," she said.
"It seems inconceivable that a state committed to the rule of law, such as the U.S., would refuse to investigate and prosecute its nationals should there be reliable evidence that they had been involved in international crimes," she said.
But in the speech earlier this month, Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton rejected this argument. He said this theory is untested, and "whether and under what circumstances the ICC's prosecutor will accept assertions of national jurisdiction remains essentially unknown."
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
Judges Question Detention of American
November 18, 2003
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/national/18BOMB.html
Two federal appeals court judges were hostile to the Bush administration's position yesterday as the government argued that the requirements of the antiterror effort meant that the president could indefinitely detain an American who was arrested in this country as an "enemy combatant" and deny him contact with his lawyer.
"As terrible as 9/11 was, it didn't repeal the Constitution" one judge, Rosemary S. Pooler, said.
The judges made their comments as a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, began considering the case of Jose Padilla, an American arrested last year at O'Hare International Airport near Chicago. The case drew worldwide attention when Attorney General John Ashcroft announced in June 2002 that the government believed that Mr. Padilla was planning to explode a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States.
Another judge on the panel, Barrington D. Parker Jr., said that if the courts accepted the government argument "we would be effecting a sea change in the constitutional life of this country."
A lawyer for the government, Paul D. Clement, said the nature of the conflict meant that military principles, not the usual rules of the American criminal courts, had to be applied to protect the country properly.
"Al Qaeda made the battlefield the United States," Mr. Clement told the panel in a crowded courtroom. "And there's every indication they want to make the battlefield the United States again."
The third judge on the panel, Richard C. Wesley, at times sparred with the other judges, suggesting that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were different from other conflicts.
"This happened on our soil," Judge Wesley said.
Mr. Clement, the deputy solicitor general, expanded arguments that government lawyers made when a federal district judge began considering the case last year. He said the president's power as commander in chief had always included the power to detain military enemies.
Lawyers arguing on behalf of Mr. Padilla told the judges that the government was distorting principles of American liberty by expanding battlefield concepts to civilian life.
One lawyer, Jenny S. Martinez, said, "The president seeks an unchecked power to substitute military power for the rule of law."
Both sides appealed parts of rulings by Michael B. Mukasey, chief judge of the Federal District Court in Manhattan. Judge Mukasey said President Bush had the authority to detain Mr. Padilla if there was "some evidence" he was involved in terrorism, but also said Mr. Padilla had a right to meet with his lawyers.
Mr. Padilla, a former gang member in Chicago and a convert to Islam with a long criminal record, was arrested after traveling from Pakistan. On May 8, 2002, he was taken to New York on a material witness warrant. In June, Mr. Bush declared him an enemy combatant, and he was moved from a federal jail in Lower Manhattan to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C. He has been held incommunicado since then.
Yesterday, all three judges on the panel indicated that they viewed the case as a crucial test of government powers. The appeal on Mr. Padilla's behalf has attracted wide attention because he is the only American taken into custody in this country and declared an "enemy combatant."
The appeal drew added interest after the Supreme Court decided last week to consider whether the detainees at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, could challenge their status in civilian courts. That decision was seen by some experts as an expression of a new willingness by the courts to challenge the administration's contention that the nature of the antiterror effort made the administration the final arbiter on many questions over treating detainees.
Judge Pooler and Judge Parker were appointed to the federal bench by President Bill Clinton. Judge Parker, who was elevated to the appeals court from the Federal District Court in Manhattan by Mr. Bush, at times suggested that he was also alarmed by the government's arguments.
Judge Parker made several of those comments after Mr. Clement argued that the court would be mistaken to test Mr. Padilla's detention against usual civilian rules. Mr. Clement is the principal deputy to Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson. The government has said Mr. Padilla was "associated with Al Qaeda," met officials of the group in Afghanistan and received training in explosives in Pakistan.
"The normal system does not apply," Mr. Clement said.
Judge Parker then said that "what troubles me" was what he described as "the ease with which" Mr. Clement transposed military rules into the civilian sphere. Judge Parker said he believed that only Congress could make what he described as an unprecedented decision that would permit the indefinite detention without charges of an American arrested in this country.
Mr. Clement answered that the government was proposing no change at all, because the detention without charges of people captured in war had been recognized "over and over again in military engagement after military engagement."
At times in the more than two hours of legal arguments, it appeared that Judges Parker and Pooler were debating as much with Judge Wesley as they were with the lawyers.
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Appeals Court Weighs Case of Enemy Combatant
Judges Question Executive Branch Powers in Patriot Act
By Michelle Garcia
The Washington Post
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54449-2003Nov17.html
NEW YORK, Nov. 17 -- Two federal appeals judges sharply questioned whether the president alone had the power to designate a U.S. citizen as an enemy combatant, and one of them noted that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks "didn't repeal the Constitution."
A three-member appeals court panel peppered a government lawyer with questions as it considered the case of Jose Padilla, who is suspected of conspiring with al Qaeda to explode a radiological "dirty bomb." The government never formally charged Padilla, 33, who has been locked for 18 months in a naval brig in South Carolina, without access to family, friends or a lawyer.
Judge Rosemary S. Pooler questioned whether Congress intended to grant such extraordinary powers to the executive branch. "If, in fact, the battlefield is the United States, I think Congress has to say that, and I don't think they have yet," she said, adding later that "as terrible as 9/11 was, it didn't repeal the Constitution."
Another panel member, Judge Barrington D. Parker, said: "Were we to construe the Constitution as permitting this kind of power in the executive with only modest judicial review, we would be effecting a sea change in the constitutional life of this country and making changes that would be unprecedented in civilized society."
A lower court ruled that Padilla has a right to meet with a lawyer. The Bush administration appealed this decision to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. Many legal observers expect the case to end up in the Supreme Court.
Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who traveled from Washington to argue Monday's case, answered the judges' questions by evoking the image of a nation at war. To allow suspects such as Padilla to talk with lawyers, Clement said, would jeopardize the government's ongoing interrogation. "Al Qaeda made the battlefield the United States, and they've given every indication they're trying to make the United States the battlefield again," he said. Clement, however, suggested for the first time that Padilla eventually might gain access to a lawyer, once his value as an intelligence source ends. "Trust the executive to make [a] judgment about intelligence value," Clement said. "The authority to hold enemy combatants has always been held part and parcel of war power."
Defense attorneys rejoined that the government has no right to deny an American citizen access to a lawyer. "The government's position has no limits. Under this theory, the government could do this to anyone at any time," said Jenny S. Martinez, a law professor at Stanford University and member of Padilla's legal team. "This new power of the government is really unprecedented."
For all of their sharp questioning of government lawyers, the judges also evinced concern about tying the president's hands. Judge Richard C. Wesley asked a series of questions during which defense attorneys conceded that a president had the right to hold and interrogate a suspect who posed an imminent threat.
The federal government has never charged Padilla with a crime. FBI officials took him into custody in May 2002, when he arrived at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago. The agents served Padilla with a material witness warrant and transported him to a federal detention center in New York City, where a judge appointed Donna Newman as his legal representation.
But the defense attorneys never talked with their client. On June 9, 2002, two days before a judge was to hear a court challenge to Padilla's detention, President Bush designated him an "enemy combatant," and Padilla was taken to a naval brig in South Carolina. Government officials have said they relied on two sources, who told them that Padilla had met with al Qaeda members to hatch a plan to detonate a dirty bomb.
Padilla's attorneys have challenged his designation as an enemy combatant, saying that one has recanted his accusations and the other has a history of providing false information. Wesley noted that the Patriot Act, passed by Congress in 2001, places strict limits on how long a government may detain a noncitizen without bringing charges. He contrasted that with the Padilla case.
"Isn't it curious," Wesley asked Clement, "that an alien is treated better than a citizen?"
Padilla is one of three detainees the administration has designated enemy combatants. The others are Ali S. Marri, a citizen of Qatar who was apprehended while living in Illinois, and Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in November 2001. He also is being held at the naval base in South Carolina.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit ruled that the government could hold Hamdi without accusing him of a crime or allowing him meet with attorneys. Hamdi's case is now before the Supreme Court.
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Court to Rule on 'Enemy Combatant' Label
November 18, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Terror-Suspect.html
NEW YORK (AP) -- A panel of federal judges waded into the question of whether the president has the power alone to declare a U.S. citizen an enemy combatant, an issue the Bush administration considers vital in its war on terror.
Three judges from the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals suggested Monday that President Bush needs Congressional authorization to indefinitely hold 33-year-old Jose Padilla, accused in a dirty bomb plot and designated an enemy combatant.
Giving such power exclusively to the executive branch with only limited review by the courts, said Judge Barrington D. Parker Jr., would be ``a sea change in the constitutional life of this country and ... unprecedented in civilized society.''
The three-judge panel was hearing an appeal of a lower-court ruling establishing that Padilla is entitled to see his lawyers and to challenge his designation as an enemy combatant. He has not seen a lawyer in 17 months.
Padilla is accused of plotting to detonate a ``dirty bomb,'' which uses conventional explosives to disperse radioactive materials. The former Chicago gang member was arrested in May 2002 and within days was moved to a naval brig in Charleston, S.C.
In a two-hour hearing blocks from the World Trade Center site, Judge Rosemary S. Pooler said the president must go to Congress because it has the power to let the president make a U.S. citizen captured on American soil an enemy combatant.
Deputy Solicitor General Paul D. Clement suggested that the urgency of the war against terrorism necessitated such moves.
``Al-Qaida made the battlefields the United States and they've given every indication they're trying to make the United States the battlefield again,'' he said.
Pooler recalled witnessing the 110-story towers burning on Sept. 11, 2001.
``If, in fact, the battlefield is the United States, I think Congress has to say that, and I don't think they have yet,'' she said.
The hearing marked the first time a U.S. government official has said someone such as Padilla could eventually have access to an attorney once the intelligence gathering process was complete.
Jenny Martinez, a Stanford Law School professor who argued on Padilla's behalf, said the government believed its powers were almost limitless.
``Under their theory, they can do this to any American. They can pick up any person off the street and, so long as the president turns in a piece of paper that says that that person is associated with al-Qaida, that person has no rights and the courts are powerless to intervene,'' she said. ``Your honors, that has never been the law in this country and it cannot be the law.''
Andrew Patel, another lawyer for Padilla, said the right to court proceedings ``must be respected in periods of calm and in times of trouble.''
``Your honor, this is the land of the free and the home of the brave. That means something. Those words mean something,'' he said.
Pooler responded, ``As terrible as 9-11 was, it didn't repeal the Constitution, you mean.''
The third judge on the panel, Richard C. Wesley, suggested the case shouldn't have been brought in Manhattan. ``This should be litigated in South Carolina,'' Wesley snapped.
The judges weren't expected to issue their ruling for weeks, if not longer. While two of three judges expressed doubts about the government's arguments, they could still opt to refer the case to another court, as Wesley suggested.
Only two other people have been designated enemy combatants since the 2001 terrorist attacks: Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, a citizen of Qatar who has been accused of being an al-Qaida sleeper agent, and Esam Hamdi, a Louisiana native captured during the fighting in Afghanistan.
On the Net:
http://www.ca2.uscourts.gov
-------- justice
Show Us Your Money
The USA PATRIOT Act lets the feds spy on your finances. But does it help catch terrorists?
John Berlau
November 2003
Reason
http://www.reason.com/0311/fe.jb.show.shtml
"This is really a bill which, if enacted into law, will be [a longer] step in the direction of stopping terrorism than any other we have had before this Congress in a long time," one of the bill's sponsors declared. The legislation authorized broad surveillance of financial transactions, bypassing the Fourth Amendment's normal protections against "unreasonable searches and seizures" by requiring businesses to collect and share information with the government. After the measure passed and was signed into law, the debate was far from over. The American Civil Liberties Union and other critics continued to rail against the law as an unnecessary breach of privacy.
"Under the act and regulations the reports go forward to the investigative or prosecuting agency...without notice to the customer," one civil libertarian wrote. "Delivery of the records without the requisite hearing of probable cause breaches the Fourth Amendment....I am not yet ready to agree that America is so possessed with evil that we must level all constitutional barriers to give our civil authorities the tools to catch terrorists."
But times have changed, one of the law's defenders countered. "While an act conferring such broad authority over transactions such as these might well surprise or even shock those who lived in an earlier era," he wrote, "the latter did not...live to see the heavy utilization of our domestic banking system by the minions of organized terrorism as well as by millions of legitimate businessmen." The author did not "think it was strange or irrational that Congress, having its attention called to what appeared to be serious and organized efforts to avoid detection of terrorist activity, should have legislated to rectify the situation."
These may sound like the arguments for and against the USA PATRIOT Act, passed immediately after the attacks of September 11, 2001. But they concern another piece of legislation, the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) of 1970. The only change I made to these decades-old quotes was to substitute the word terrorist for criminal and terrorism for crime.
The congressman was Wright Patman, the populist Texas Democrat who pushed through the bill on the premise that it would help fight drug trafficking, tax evasion, and other crimes, including the then-prohibited ownership of gold as a commodity. The civil libertarian was Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. In the 1974 case California Bankers Association v. Shultz, Douglas wrote a dissent, joined by Justices William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, concluding that the Bank Secrecy Act violated the Fourth Amendment. The final quote is from William Rehnquist, now the Court's chief justice, who wrote the majority opinion upholding the law.
Needle in a Haystack
The reason the arguments sound familiar is that the BSA set the precedent for much of the PATRIOT Act, not to mention government fishing expeditions such as the Pentagon's aborted Total Information Awareness program. The law authorized the government to require bank reports of all transactions over a dollar value set by the Treasury Department, even if there is no reason to suspect a criminal connection. For the first time, in the words of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, "the government claim[ed] the legal right to maintain routine surveillance, without summons, subpoena, or warrant, over the details of citizens' financial transactions."
The district court struck down the BSA's reporting requirement, but its decision was reversed by the Supreme Court. In a complicated majority opinion, Rehnquist said that banks, as businesses, don't have the same Fourth Amendment rights as individuals. The opinion relied on the many post-New Deal cases that minimized economic liberties, including one that said "corporations can claim no equality with individuals in the enjoyment of a right to privacy." In this and in a subsequent BSA case, U.S. v. Miller (1976), the Court ruled that a bank's customers generally lack standing to challenge the law.
Law enforcement agencies thus found a convenient end run around the Fourth Amendment. They can access the details of a bank customer's transactions from the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) without showing probable cause -- or any evidence at all. That is why the PATRIOT Act's defenders argue that the law is not a radical departure from what the government already had the power to do. Writing in the Summer 2003 issue of City Journal, the Manhattan Institute's Heather Mac Donald accuses the PATRIOT Act's opponents of trying to "invent new rights," because it has long been the case that "there is no Fourth Amendment privacy right in records or other items disclosed to third parties."
While Mac Donald may be partly right about the case law, she overlooks two important questions. One is whether surveillance programs like FinCEN are consistent with the principles of a free society. The other is how effective they've been: Have we gotten more security during the last 30 years in exchange for the privacy we've sacrificed? Looking specifically at the BSA and other bank surveillance measures, prominent experts in law enforcement, national security, and technology say the answer is no. The record of FinCEN, the agency that was charged with tracking terrorist financing prior to 9/11, seems to vindicate their arguments. The lack of success with the financial information that the government has long been collecting does not bode well for more-ambitious data dredging plans. Indeed, experience suggests that piling up more data could make it harder to zero in on terrorists.
"I consider all these measures to be highly counterproductive," says John Yoder, director of the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Office in the Reagan administration. "It costs more to enforce and regulate them than the benefits that are received. You're getting so much data on people who are absolutely legitimate and who are doing nothing wrong. There's just so much paperwork out there that it's really not a targeted effort. You have investigators running around chasing innocent people, trying to find something that they're doing wrong, rather than targeting real criminals."
The paperwork is indeed massive. Even before the PATRIOT Act, banks sent more than 12 million transaction reports to the government in 2000 alone. In a 2000 report for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, economist Lawrence Lindsey, who later became head of the Bush administration's National Economic Council, calculated that banks file more than 100,000 reports on innocent customers for every money laundering conviction. Oliver "Buck" Revell, a highly decorated 30-year veteran of the FBI who supervised the bureau's counterterrorism division in the 1980s and '90s, agrees that the sheer volume of data generated by these measures can overwhelm law enforcement efforts. "You can be buried in an avalanche of information," Revell says. "The total volume of activity makes it very difficult to track and trace any type of specific information....It's virtually impossible to look at millions and millions of CTRs [currency transaction reports] and make any sense out of them if you don't have some prior intelligence as to what might be occurring."
Yoder argues that the information overload from bank surveillance contributed to the intelligence failure before the September 11 attacks. "We already had so much information that we weren't really focusing on the right stuff," he says. "What good does it do to gather more paperwork when you're already so awash in paperwork that you're not paying attention to your own currently existing intelligence gathering system?"
While it did not cite the BSA directly, the recently published Joint Congressional Inquiry report on intelligence lapses before 9/11 did find that law enforcement and intelligence agencies faced a "huge volume of intelligence reporting," within which were "various threads and pieces of information that, at least in retrospect, are relevant and significant." The report concluded that "although relevant information...was available to the Intelligence Community prior to September 11, 2001, the Community too often failed to focus on that information and consider and appreciate its collective significance in terms of a probable terrorist attack." This was partly because analysts were trying to find a needle in a very large haystack of data created by laws like the BSA.
Banker or Spy?
Fears that the BSA would swamp law enforcement with data were expressed from the beginning. The federal court decision striking down the law's reporting requirement (issued, coincidentally, on September 11, 1972) called the BSA a "far-fetched" way to catch criminals and warned that it could be counterproductive. The court quoted an IRS commissioner as saying that "the creation of a mass of paper beyond our capacity to utilize could have the effect of submerging and making unobtainable information of special interest to us."
Despite such concerns, financial surveillance has been massively expanded during the last 30 years, while other intelligence-gathering techniques, such as the use of informants, have been sharply restricted. The Treasury Department's BSA regulations required banks, subject to some exemptions, to file a currency transaction report on every cash transfer of $10,000 or more. In the 1990s, the department established FinCEN, which expanded the regulations to require that banks file "suspicious activity reports" on all transactions of $5,000 or more if they have "no apparent lawful purpose or are not the sort in which the particular customer would normally be expected to engage." Banks are forbidden to notify customers about the reports. "In effect, bankers have been drafted as spies and snitches," wrote banking industry consultant Bert Ely in a 2002 paper for the conservative Free Congress Foundation.
"Know Your Customer" rules, proposed by FinCEN and the Federal Reserve in 1998, would have required banks to profile every customer's "normal and expected transactions" and report the slightest deviation to the feds. The rules were withdrawn after the Libertarian Party, the ACLU, and other groups helped generate 300,000 public comments in opposition.
But according to Wired magazine, as of 1999 more than 88 percent of U.S. banks already had "Know Your Customer" policies in place to satisfy regulators who looked at their suspicious activity reports. And after the September 11 attacks, regulators began openly using the phrase again. At an American Bankers Association conference in October 2001, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta Vice President Suzanna Costello told the audience her agency was "looking for...effective Know Your Customer" programs at the banks it regulates. "A year ago, I wouldn't have even said 'Know Your Customer,'" she said. "But I see that it's back."
The Citizen-Soldier Burden
Customer surveillance is not just at banks anymore. In his dissent in the California Bankers Association case, Justice Douglas made a sarcastic suggestion that turned out to be prophetic:
"It would be highly useful to government espionage to have reports from all our bookstores, all our hardware and retail stores, all our drugstores....What one buys at the hardware and retail stores may furnish clues to potential uses of wires, soap powders, and the like used by criminals."
Even before 9/11, FinCEN had put out a rule applying the "suspicious activity" reporting requirement to any establishment that processed money orders or sold smart cards, including convenience stores. The PATRIOT Act extended the requirement to many more businesses. FinCEN, pursuant to the act, recently put the "suspicious activity" reporting rules into effect for brokerage houses, and real estate transactions are next on the list. The law also specifically covers casinos, credit card agencies, and life insurers. In the next few months, the Broward Daily Business Review reports, "the Treasury Department will decide whether the act covers travel agents, automobile dealers, mutual funds and dealers in precious metals and stones." And under the law, virtually all businesses, including the "hardware and retail stores" mentioned by Douglas, now have to report to the government any cash purchases over $10,000.
Treasury Department General Counsel David Aufhauser explained the new reporting requirements this way in a 2002 interview with The Washington Post: "The Patriot Act is imposing a citizen-soldier burden on the gatekeepers of financial institutions." He justified this burden by arguing that "they are in the best position to police attempts by people who would do ill to us in the U.S. to penetrate the financial system."
Few politicians, even among those who have criticized other parts of the PATRIOT Act, are willing to challenge the proposition that businesses should be deputized to spy on their customers. The late Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall might be shocked that liberal Democrats in Congress such as Sens. Carl Levin of Michigan and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland have been the biggest proponents of expanding the Bank Secrecy Act. They see it as a way of targeting wealthy people who pay less than their "fair share" in taxes by moving some of their investments overseas. The only member of Congress who has gone on record in support of repealing the BSA entirely is Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).
Yet given the BSA's track record, experts say there's no reason to believe the new financial surveillance measures will stop the next attack. They could simply swamp law enforcement with even more useless data. The critics say reporting mandates have flooded the government with massive volumes of irrelevant information, such as reports on the "suspicious activities" of law-abiding customers withdrawing large amounts of money for medical treatment or depositing thousands of dollars in casino winnings, and have not been effective in either attacking the drug trade or preventing terrorist attacks.
J. Michael Waller, vice president of the Center for Security Policy, a hawkish D.C. think tank, is usually not in sync with the ACLU. He fully supports Attorney General John Ashcroft's detention of Arab visitors and advocates targeted ethnic profiling. But he calls the BSA's routine mass surveillance measures "really, really dumb."
"To me, it's just a well-intentioned thing with no cojones behind it," says Waller, who is also a professor of international communications at the Institute of World Politics in Washington. "It's a huge burden on the banks. It could mean that every time somebody trades in some stock and just buys other stock with the same money, it's got to be reported to FinCEN. [FinCEN bureaucrats] are giving themselves millions of times more information than they can possibly handle or analyze....What if you get a $25,000 or $50,000 book advance? 'Oh, that's an anomaly; let's look at this guy.' Think of the probably millions of anomalies occurring every day. It's really stupid."
Hawala Bungle
Although it was not one of the agencies covered in the 9/11 report, FinCEN had its own intelligence failures, and they cast light on how effective the expanded financial reporting mandates might be. In the months prior to 9/11, FinCEN appeared to be choking on the flood of bank reports it received. In the March 25, 2002, issue of Insight, Jamie Dettmer reported that "Treasury sources say there is a two-year backlog of SARs [suspicious activity reports] still waiting to be entered into the agency's computers." In addition, several banking compliance officers told him "they were unaware of any SARs they'd filed being followed up by federal investigators."
FinCEN apparently was so busy processing paperwork that it ignored the valuable advice of one of its experts -- advice that many say could have led to the Al Qaeda money trail. Patrick Jost, who came to FinCEN in the '90s with an atypical background as a jazz musician, linguistics instructor, and video game programmer, was an expert on hawala, the shadowy, informal system of money trading in South Asian and Middle Eastern countries that leaves a very faint paper trail. In a hawala transaction, someone from Pakistan living in America could send money back home by paying a U.S. vendor, who in turn would contact a trusted partner in Pakistan, who would give the money in local currency to its intended recipient. The money technically never leaves the U.S. It is a money transfer without money movement. Although hawala is often used for innocent purposes such as sending money to relatives, in the late '90s there was already evidence that it was being used by terrorists. As Jost documented in a 1998 paper he co-wrote for Interpol, terrorists used hawala to finance a series of bomb blasts in Bombay, India, in 1993.
William Wechsler, head of a White House working group on terrorist financing, met with Jost in 1999. Wechsler recalls that after hearing Jost's explanation of hawala, he spread the word to counterterrorism experts in the government, many of whom contacted Jost for help. Jost was also doing research on other aspects of terrorist financing, such as the countries terrorist money flows through. But FinCEN, even though it was charged with helping law enforcement track criminal money laundering, instructed him to decline Jost's offer of assistance and discouraged him from pursuing further research on terrorism financing. Jost told The Washington Post in 2001 that FinCEN Director James Sloan and Chief of Operations Connie Fenchel "didn't want FinCEN to pursue this line of work." According to the Post, after being "made to feel unwelcome, Jost left government in June 2000." (Jost and FinCEN officials declined to comment for this article.)
Wechsler recalls that the issue of terrorism did not seem to be a high priority for FinCEN, which appeared much more interested in processing data for the drug war. "FinCEN, along with the rest of the federal law enforcement community, for too long assigned far too low a priority to understanding the nature of and the threat from underground remittance systems, like the hawala network," he says.
Now that supposedly has changed. FinCEN has set up a toll-free number for banks to report transactions they truly think are suspicious, and the Treasury Department has a targeted "watch list" of suspected terrorists for banks to report on. But FinCEN and other agencies will still be inundated with an even bigger flood of reports about mostly legal financial transactions, thanks to the mandates of the BSA and the PATRIOT Act.
Wechsler, along with other Clinton administration officials such as Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Eizenstat, supported the expansion of "suspicious activity" reporting. (He proudly claims that "there are a lot of provisions of the PATRIOT Act that the Clinton administration had asked for.") He argues that new technology will be able to sift through the data. "We should spend the money that it takes to make sure we are able to use the information as effectively as possible, and that we are able to give back to the banking community the after-action reports, how it was used," he says. "But all of those are marginal questions compared to the overall statement that this is way too burdensome and useless. It's nonsense; it's very useful."
Yet for 30 years agencies have said technology eventually would be able to pinpoint the needle in this enormous haystack, and the elusive technology has yet to appear. The Pentagon's Total Information Awareness (TIA) project was aimed at developing methods to sift through huge volumes of data from public and private sources, looking for patterns that could indicate terrorist activity. After a loud public outcry about the privacy implications, Congress voted earlier this year to deny the project funding. Now the Pentagon is trying to revive it under a new name, Terrorism Information Awareness.
Missing Human Intelligence
Professional criminals often know the banking laws and how to get around them. And terrorist money, without prior intelligence, appears to be even harder to track than drug money. While large cash transfers can occasionally tip off authorities to drug activity, terrorists leave few telltale financial signs. As Jost pointed out in Senate testimony in late 2001, money used for terrorism often comes from legal businesses and charities. "With a certain amount of simplification, money laundering and terrorist financing are opposites," he said. "In money laundering, dirty money becomes clean; in terrorist financing, clean money become dirty."
Take the September 11 hijackers. The only way we know of that any of them broke the law prior to the attacks was by overstaying their visas. They gave no signs to the financial institutions they dealt with that they were plotting something sinister. "The terrorists didn't spend a whole lot," observes Richard Rahn, a senior fellow at the Seattle-based Discovery Institute and the author of The End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy. "They stayed in cheap hotels, ate in cheap restaurants and rode in cheap rental cars....And so these measures that are promulgated to try to just collect financial information willy-nilly are not really very useful." Bert Ely, the banking consultant, noted in his Free Congress Foundation paper that "the FBI has estimated that the Sept. 11th hijackers spent just $500,000 over more than a year carrying out their diabolical acts. Payments moving through the U.S. financial system average $1.7 trillion per business day."
A SunTrust bank in Florida did file an internal report, as required for wire transfers of $3,000 or more, on money received by 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta, which came from the United Arab Emirates in 2000 and totaled more than $100,000. But "there was nothing unusual in the way those accounts and transactions were opened or maintained," says SunTrust spokesman Barry Koling. The only possible tipoff was that the money came from the UAE, which Jost had identified in his 1998 Interpol report as a hotbed of hawala and terrorism financing. But FinCEN apparently had not issued any warnings about the UAE, as it had about Colombia and other hot drug spots.
That oversight illustrates the importance of what's called "human intelligence." Both privacy and national security advocates say that since the advent of massive data- bases and laws like the BSA, the government too often has relied on technology as a savior and disregarded the importance of human sources, both experts in the field and snitches among the bad guys. FBI veteran Revell says that in his major cases, it was the informant who led to the financial data, not the other way around. "When we were investigating the skimming of the casinos by the mob in Las Vegas [in the late 1970s and early '80s], we had to have intelligence on how it was being done before we could really determine evidence of how it was being done," he recalls. "The development of informants within the mob's control structure of Las Vegas led us to be able to discover the money laundering and to bring charges and wipe the mafia out in Las Vegas."
Even data mining experts say the most advanced technology is useless without human intelligence. "The data won't do anything unless you ask the right questions," says Marc Epstein, CEO of Data Mining International, a Los Gatos, California, firm that makes software for the U.S. Customs Service and other law enforcement agencies. Epstein says that before the government starts collecting massive data for a TIA-style program, it should make better use of the data it has. He says there is much that can be gleaned simply from the customs data of goods going into and out of the country. "From a pure law enforcement point of view, putting aside privacy concerns, more information is better," Epstein says. "But we're not using the information that we have well."
30 Years of Failure
There are plenty in the tech world who would take issue with Epstein's assertion that more information is always better. Software engineer Bruce Schneier, for example, has written about the inevitable problem of "false positives" in a large database. Passengers at airports are already seeing the effect of false positives that mistakenly put them on "no fly" lists, presumably because their names are similar to those of terrorists or criminals. Recent press reports have chronicled the travails of several men named David Nelson, including the actor who played himself on the popular '50s TV show The Adventure of Ozzie and Harriet, who have been delayed or prevented from catching their flights because the name mysteriously set off an alarm in an airport computer.
"When you are scanning a population that is composed of hundreds of millions of people, and the class of criminal you're looking for is a couple hundred or a couple thousand, there are no tools available, and there are almost certainly never going to be tools available, with the sophistication to focus almost exclusively on the bad guys," says Bob Gellman, who in the '90s acted as chief counsel of a House subcommittee on privacy and technology. Gellman says data mining's success in the private sector will never translate to law enforcement because a different level of precision is required. "If direct marketing companies, with all the research they do, get a 3 percent response rate, they're ecstatic," Gellman says. "And these are smart people with lots of data and lots of motivation because they're making money, and they can't do much better than that."
In the debate over the PATRIOT Act and other broad surveillance measures, the Bank Secrecy Act should be thought of as a 30-year experiment in subverting the Fourth Amendment. The experiment has imposed tremendous costs on individual privacy and the economy (even before 9/11, the banking industry was estimating compliance costs of $10 billion a year), with few tangible results in stopping crime and even fewer in preventing terrorism. Getting back to the standards of the Fourth Amendment is a good idea, not just for securing privacy but for making law enforcement and intelligence agencies more focused and effective at stopping criminals and catching terrorists.
"Most police officers, I find, have very high regard for and deference to the Fourth Amendment," says Bob Barr, the former CIA agent and U.S. attorney who served as a Republican congressman from Georgia for eight years and is now a consultant on privacy issues for the ACLU and the American Conservative Union. "I think they understand, perhaps better than a lot of bigwigs, that it is there to protect them and to help keep them focused as well as to protect the individuals."
John Berlau, a writer for Insight magazine, received the National Press Club's 2002 Sandy Hume Memorial Award for Excellence in Political Journalism.
-------- police
FBI Curbed In Tracking Gun Buyers Brady Law Policy Foils Watch List
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54498-2003Nov17?language=printer
The FBI has launched a new background-check system that notifies counterterrorism agents when suspects on its terrorist watch list attempt to buy guns, but regulations prohibit those officials from obtaining details if the transaction occurs, according to federal officials familiar with the system.
If the purchase is blocked, however, the FBI is permitted to investigate the person who attempted to buy the weapon.
The result, according to the officials, is an awkward situation in which terrorism suspects who do not complete gun purchases may be located but those toting lawfully purchased weapons may not be sought.
More than a dozen suspects on the FBI's terrorist watch list have attempted to buy guns since the system was implemented this spring, officials said. Authorities have declined to say how many succeeded.
The rules are the result of Attorney General John D. Ashcroft's interpretation of the Brady gun-control law, according to Justice Department officials, who said they are simply abiding by the federal firearms background-check system the statute established. The law bars authorities from sharing information with investigators about legal gun buyers and does not prohibit terrorism suspects from buying firearms, officials said.
"Being a suspected member of a terrorist organization doesn't disqualify a person from owning a gun any more than being under investigation for a non-terrorism felony would," a Justice Department official said in a written statement
Gun-control advocates said the rules endanger Americans by giving suspected terrorists an opportunity to evade scrutiny while obtaining weapons. The situation also has frustrated many law enforcement officials eager to monitor the whereabouts and activities of suspected terrorist operatives and their associates.
"This policy is mind-boggling," said Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who has frequently clashed with Ashcroft on gun issues. "We could have a nationwide lookout for a known terrorist within our borders, but if he obtained a weapon, the Justice Department's policy is to refuse to reveal his location to law enforcement officials."
Officials have declined to reveal how many terrorism suspects were able to buy weapons. It is also difficult to determine precisely how the system works because Justice and FBI officials have refused to provide details about it.
Congressional staff members who were briefed on the situation last month were told that at least 13, and as many as 21, suspects on the watch list tried to buy firearms since the system was established. Two law enforcement sources said subsequently that the correct number is 13 and that all had been suspected of links to terrorist groups, not domestic gangs.
When someone on the watch list attempts to buy a weapon, the FBI is allowed to search for additional reasons -- such as a previous conviction or mental illness -- to deny a purchase and investigate further, the Justice Department official said. But it can do no more unless such an indicator is found, the official said.
Ashcroft, who has presided over an expansion of law enforcement powers in the effort to prevent terrorism, has enforced a relatively narrow interpretation of the Brady law. The law is named for James Brady, the press secretary wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
Ashcroft, a longtime National Rifle Association member, has also altered the government's legal view of the Second Amendment by asserting that an individual's right to possess a firearm is not tied to the maintenance of state militias.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Ashcroft's advisers stopped the FBI from comparing a list of Sept. 11-related detainees against a list of approved gun purchasers. They said that under the Brady law, the Justice Department is prohibited from using such records for law enforcement purposes. Before it was interrupted, the search had resulted in two matches, sources said at the time.
A Congressional Research Service report released earlier this year found that U.S. gun laws could be exploited easily by terrorists, who can obtain firearms and explosives by taking advantage of delays and loopholes in the system. An al Qaeda training manual recovered by U.S. forces in Afghanistan included a chapter noting the ease with which firearms can be obtained in the United States and urged followers to "obtain an assault rifle legally, preferably an AK-47 or variations, learn how to use it properly and go and practice in the areas allowed for such training."
AK-47 rifles are prohibited under the current ban on assault weapons, but numerous copycat models are available legally.
At the heart of the Brady law is the National Instant Criminal Background Checks System (NICS), a section of the FBI with offices in West Virginia that reviews gun purchases made through federally licensed firearms dealers. The dealer transmits a form to NICS, which runs a computerized check to make sure the applicant is not a member of several categories prohibited from buying guns. These include felons, illegal immigrants, convicted domestic abusers and those found by a court to be mentally ill.
Many of the files accessed during these checks are contained in the FBI's overall criminal database, the National Crime Information Center, which also contains lists that are not used in the gun purchase process. The Violent Gang and Terrorist Organization File contains more than 10,000 names, most of them belonging to suspected terrorists or their alleged sympathizers and associates, officials said.
When NICS runs a search on an attempted gun purchaser whose name is on the gang and terror list, the FBI or another federal agency responsible for entering that name is notified and is able to contact an anti-terrorism team at NICS, sources said. If the person was denied the ability to purchase a firearm, the agency is free to seek records of the transaction, these sources said.
If the person was allowed to buy a firearm, NICS is generally prohibited under Justice rules from providing the FBI or any other agency with information about the transaction, including where it occurred and what personal information was provided on the purchase application, officials said.
The most the FBI can do in such cases is to confirm whether the purchaser is the same person listed on the terrorist watch list and attempt to determine if any incidents have been overlooked that should have prohibited the person from buying a firearm.
The FBI frequently does not know the whereabouts of terror associates listed in the gang and terror watch list, which means that learning where a firearm was bought and what address the purchaser provided could be extremely helpful to counterterrorism investigators, several law enforcement officials said.
"It's obviously frustrating for law enforcement in that kind of situation," one official said. "But we're just following the rules set by DOJ. . . . We can't get in the middle of it."
NRA spokesman Andrew Arulanandam said he could not comment on the details of the NICS process. But he said it was doubtful that most terrorist groups would bother to buy legal firearms for use in an attack.
"We support any effort that would prevent firearms from getting into the hands of terrorists," Arulanandam said. "But it is also misguided for anyone to think that gang members or terrorists are somehow en masse going through legal means to purchase their firearms. Most of these firearms are obtained through the black market."
Gun-control advocates disagree about the risks, pointing to the instructions found in the al Qaeda manual and to other incidents that have indicated terrorists have an interest in U.S. guns. After the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI arrested a Michigan felon who bought weapons at a gun show for the Hezbollah militant group and, in another case, charged a Seattle man for allegedly attempting to set up an al Qaeda firearms training camp in rural Oregon.
Eric Howard, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Ashcroft's interpretation of the Brady law is overly narrow and inhibits the ability of the FBI and other law enforcement agencies to monitor and prevent terrorism. Investigators should be allowed to have access to basic information about gun purchases by terror suspects, he said.
-------- prisons / prisoners
Two Yemenis Held Abroad Are to Face Trial in a U.S. Court
November 18, 2003
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/international/middleeast/18QAED.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - A well-known Yemeni cleric and his assistant, accused of funneling money to Al Qaeda from Muslim supporters in Brooklyn and elsewhere, will face conspiracy charges in the United States, officials said Monday.
German authorities, who arrested the men earlier this year in a sting operation, agreed to turn them over after they were assured that they would not face a military tribunal or the death penalty, officials said.
The men, Muhammad Ali Hassan al-Mouyad and Muhammad Mohsen Yahya Zayed, were flown to the United States on Sunday, the first time that Germany has extradited terrorism suspects to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001, officials said.
Mr. Mouyad and Mr. Zayed appeared in Federal District Court on Monday afternoon in Brooklyn, where they said through Arabic-speaking interpreters that they understood the charges against them. A federal magistrate ordered them held without bail.
Mr. Mouyad, a cleric at a prominent mosque in Yemen's capital, Sana, is regarded as an important financier for Al Qaeda. American officials said he once boasted that he personally delivered $20 million to Osama bin Laden to support holy wars.
Officials said a confidential informant reported that Mr. Mouyad had told him in early 2002 that he regularly provided money to support mujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kashmir.
Mr. Mouyad faces 60 years in prison if convicted of conspiring to provide material support to Al Qaeda and Hamas, and Mr. Zayed, who American officials believe was his assistant, faces 30 years in prison if convicted on similar charges.
Officials said they believed that some of the money raised by Mr. Mouyad and Mr. Zayed came from the Al Farouq mosque in Brooklyn.
The mosque has come under suspicion before because of accusations of terrorist links - the blind Egyptian sheik eventually convicted in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 was its imam for two months in 1990 - but leaders of the mosque have denied knowledge of any scheme to funnel money to terrorists.
A German court last week cleared the way for the extradition of Mr. Mouyad and Mr. Zayed to the United States, 10 months after they were arrested by German authorities in Frankfurt after a yearlong undercover operation. The two had fought their extradition, as had the government of Yemen, but Germany's highest court said they were confident the men could expect a fair trial in the United States.
A German diplomat said Monday that the Germans agreed to the United States' extradition request after they were assured in discussions with the United States that neither man would face the prospect of being put in a military tribunal or being charged with a capital crime.
The Yemenis "will appear not before a military tribunal but rather before a civil court, giving the public the chance to observe the case," the diplomat said. "We're quite happy with the outcome in that respect."
Attorney General John Ashcroft said the extraditions demonstrated that "our terrorist enemies are wrong if they believe they can hide from justice behind international borders."
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
----- alternative energy
DaimlerChrysler to Test 100 'Green' Cars
REUTERS USA:
November 18, 2003
http://www.planetark.org/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22873/story.htm
NEW YORK - DaimlerChrysler AG, the world's No. 5 carmaker, said on Sunday it plans "real-world experience" with more than 100 environmentally friendly, fuel cell vehicles by the end of 2004.
"We consider fuel cell technology to be the solution for the future," Dr. Andreas Truckenbrodt, head of fuel cell and advanced powertrain development for DaimlerChrysler, said in a statement.
"The next step is what we call, 'Fit for Daily Use.' We need to get field experience on the road in daily use to determine how our customers use the vehicles and what their needs are," Dr. Truckenbrodt said.
FCVs are being touted as the ultimate "green car," since they emit only water as a by-product, creating electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen. Mass production is believed to be at least a decade away due to high costs and the lack of infrastructure to supply and store hydrogen.
"The first commercially available fuel cell vehicles will be offered around the beginning of the next decade, but will not be produced in large numbers," Dr. Truckenbrodt said.
DaimlerChrysler said it will have "on-road real-world experience" with more than 100 fuel cell vehicles, including passenger cars, vans and transit buses, by the end of 2004. The vehicles will be placed with customers in Europe, Asia and the United States, the company said.
--------
China Set to Act on Fuel Economy
November 18, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/business/worldbusiness/18AUTO.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
UANGZHOU, China, Nov. 17 - The Chinese government is preparing to impose minimum fuel economy standards on new cars for the first time, and the rules will be significantly more stringent than those in the United States, according to Chinese experts involved in drafting them.
The new standards are intended both to save energy and to force automakers to introduce the latest hybrid engines and other technology in China, in hopes of easing the nation's swiftly rising dependence on oil imports from volatile countries in the Middle East.
They are the latest and most ambitious in a series of steps to regulate China's rapidly growing auto industry, after moves earlier this year to require that air bags be provided for both front-seat occupants in most new vehicles and that new family vehicles sold in major cities meet air pollution standards nearly as strict as those in Western Europe and the United States.
Some popular vehicles now built in China by Western automakers, including the Chevrolet Blazer, do not measure up to the standards the government has drafted, and may have to be modified to get better gas mileage before the first phase of the new rules becomes effective in July 2005.
The Chinese initiative comes at a time when Congress is close to completing work on a major energy bill that would make no significant changes in America's fuel economy rules for vehicles. The Chinese standards, in general, call for new cars, vans and sport utility vehicles to get as much as two miles a gallon of fuel more in 2005 than the average required in the United States, and about five miles more in 2008.
This country's economy is booming, and a growing upper class in big cities like this one is rapidly buying all the accouterments of a prosperous Western life, including cars. As China burns more fossil fuels, both in factories and in a rapidly growing fleet of motor vehicles, its contribution to global warming is also rising faster than any other country's.
But Zhang Jianwei, the vice president and top technical official of the Chinese agency that writes vehicle standards, said in a telephone interview on Monday that energy security was the paramount concern in drafting the new automotive fuel economy rules, and that global warming had received little attention.
"China has become an important importer of oil so it has to have regulations to save energy," said Mr. Zhang, who is also deputy secretary of the 39-member interagency committee that approved the rules at a meeting this month.
China was a net oil exporter until a decade ago, but its output has not kept up with soaring demand. It now depends on imports of oil for one-third of its needs, mainly from Saudi Arabia and Angola. Before the war, Iraq was also an important supplier. By comparison, the United States now imports about 55 percent of the oil it uses.
The International Energy Agency predicts that by 2030, the volume of China's oil imports will equal American imports now. Chinese strategists have expressed growing worry about depending on a lifeline of oil tankers stretching across the Indian Ocean, through the Strait of Malacca, a waterway plagued by piracy, and across the South China Sea, protected mainly by the United States Navy.
Various Chinese government agencies still have three months to review the legal language in the fuel economy rules, giving automakers some time to lobby against them; as yet, there has been no mention of the approval of the new rules in the government-controlled Chinese media.
But Mr. Zhang said that the rules in draft form were the product of a very strong consensus among government agencies and that "the technical content won't be changed."
Two executives at Volkswagen, the largest foreign automaker in China, said that representatives of their company and of domestic Chinese automakers attended what they described as the final interagency meeting to approve the rules. Under pressure from the government, these auto industry representatives agreed to the new rules despite misgivings, the executives said. "They had no choice but to agree," one of the Volkswagen executives added.
The executive said that Volkswagen's vehicles would meet the first phase of the standards in 2005, while declining to comment on compliance with the second, more rigorous phase, which is to take effect in July 2008.
The new standards are based on a vehicle's weight - lighter vehicles must go the farthest on a gallon - and on the type of transmission, with manual-shift cars required to go farther than those with less efficient automatic transmissions.
In a major departure from American practice, all new sport utility vehicles and minivans in China would be required to meet the same standards as automatic-shift cars of the same weight. In the United States, standards for sport utilities and minivans are much lower than for cars.
The Chinese rules do not cover pickups or commercial trucks. According to General Motors market research, there is little demand for pickup trucks in China except from businesses, because the affluent urban consumer who can afford a new vehicle regards pickup trucks as unsophisticated and too reminiscent of the horse-drawn carts still used in some rural areas.
Typically, heavy vehicles are much harder on fuel than light ones, but the new Chinese standards permit the heavy vehicles to get only slightly worse gas mileage. As a result, they provide an incentive for manufacturers to offer smaller, lighter vehicles, which will be easier to design.
The new standards would require all small cars sold in China to achieve slightly better gas mileage than the average new small car sold in the United States now gets, according to calculations by An Feng, a transportation consultant who advised the government on the rules. But officials in Beijing would require much better minimum gas mileage for minivans and, especially, S.U.V.'s than the average vehicle of either type now gets in the United States.
American regulations call for each automaker to produce a fleet of passenger cars with an average fuel economy of 27.5 miles a gallon under a combination of city and highway driving with no traffic; window-sticker values for gas mileage, which include the effects of traffic, are about 15 percent lower. Light trucks, including vans, S.U.V.'s and pickups, are allowed an average of 20.7 miles a gallon without traffic.
But the Bush administration has raised the comparable American standard to 22.2 miles a gallon for the 2007 model year and is now completing a review of whether to raise limits further for 2008. The administration is also considering adopting different standards for different weight classes of light trucks.
Over all, average fuel economy in the United States has been eroding since the late 1980's as automakers shifted production from cars to light trucks. It fell in the 2002 model year to the lowest level since 1980. Automakers in Europe have accepted European Union demands to increase fuel economy under different rules that could prove at least as stringent as China's minimums.
The Chinese standards would require the greatest increases for full-size S.U.V.'s like the Ford Expedition, which would have to go as much as 29 percent farther on a gallon of fuel in 2008 than they do now in the United States, Mr. An calculated. Sport utility sales in China have more than doubled so far this year, but are still a much smaller part of the overall market than they are in the United States.
Because the American standards are fleet averages while the Chinese standards are minimums for each vehicle, the effect of the Chinese rules could be considerably more stringent. A manufacturer can sell vehicles in the United States that are far below average in fuel efficiency if it has others in its product line that offset it by being above average. But under the Chinese rules, the fuel-inefficient models - especially new ones introduced after the standards take effect - would be subject to fines no matter how well their siblings do, Mr. Zhang said, and the maker would not be allowed to expand production of the gas-guzzling models. In Garrison Keillor's phrase, China plans to require that every vehicle be above average.
Mr. An said that at the final meetings on the new rules, the only outspoken objections had come from a representative of the Beijing Automotive Industry Holding Company, which makes Jeeps in a joint venture with DaimlerChrysler.
According to people who have seen the new standards, many Jeep models sold in China do not now comply with them; neither do the Chevrolet Blazer sport utilities built by a General Motors joint venture in Shenyang. Some of Volkswagen's car models also fall slightly short, these people said. By contrast, Honda's cars, built at a sprawling factory complex here in Guangzhou, the commercial hub of southern China, would comply easily because they use advanced engine technology, these people said.
Trevor Hale, a DaimlerChrysler spokesman, declined to comment in detail. "DaimlerChrysler complies with local regulations where it does business," Mr. Hale said in an e-mail response to an inquiry. "It continues working to improve fuel economy in the vehicles it develops, builds and sells around the world."
Bernd Leissner, the president of Volkswagen Asia Pacific, said that his company's cars would comply because "it's just a question of how to adapt the engine - it's something that could be done quickly."
The fastest way to improve fuel efficiency is to switch from gasoline to diesel engines, as Volkswagen is starting to do in China. The latest diesel engines are much cleaner than those of a decade ago, but are still more polluting than gasoline engines of similar power.
A spokeswoman for General Motors, which is beginning to introduce Cadillac luxury cars in China, said she did not have enough information about the newly drafted rules to comment on them, but that her company's vehicles were comparable in fuel economy to those of rival manufacturers in the same market segments. Executives of G.M. were preparing for an event in Beijing on Tuesday and Wednesday when the company plans to showcase examples of its work on gasoline-saving fuel-cell and hybrid engines for cars.
In the United States, G.M. has argued that tighter fuel economy rules are unnecessary because technological improvements will someday improve efficiency anyway. G.M. and other automakers have also contended in the United States that higher gasoline taxes would represent a better policy than higher gas mileage standards, because it would give drivers an economic incentive to choose more efficient vehicles and to drive fewer miles.
China is still considering its policy on fuel taxes, but has not acted so far, because higher fuel taxes would impose higher costs on many sections of society, Mr. Zhang said.
Another company that could run into trouble over the Chinese mileage standards is Toyota, which on Nov. 6 began selling a locally produced version of its full-size Land Cruiser sport utility vehicle in China. A spokesman said on Monday that Toyota had not yet heard about the new Chinese fuel economy regulations, which have been prepared with a level of secrecy typical of many Chinese regulatory actions.
Japan is also phasing in new fuel efficiency standards based on vehicle weight that allow heavier vehicles only slightly worse gas mileage than lighter ones. American automakers have complained that the Japanese rules discriminate against them because Japanese automakers tend to produce slightly lighter cars anyway.
China has more than 100 automakers, as Detroit did a century ago, but the bulk of its output comes from a small number of joint ventures with multinational companies. Total production has more than doubled in the last three years, to about 3.8 million cars and light trucks in 2002, nearly as many as Germany. The United States builds about 12 million a year, Japan about 10 million.
The cars that Chinese automakers produce on their own tend to be very small and lightweight, but the engines are built on older technology, and may not have an easy time complying with the new fuel economy standards.
The government has been encouraging the industry to consolidate, and the new rules may hasten that process by forcing investment in engine designs that small companies may not be able to afford on their own.
-------- energy
Conference panel OKs energy bill
November 18, 2003
By Brian DeBose
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031118-123340-5637r.htm
A House-Senate conference last night approved a Republican-backed energy bill, clearing the way for the legislation to go to the two chambers for final approval, probably this week.
The panel spent much of the day sweeping aside Democrat bids to change the bill. Democrats were able to get several amendments approved by the Senate half of the conference team yesterday, but the conference's House members rejected all of them.
House negotiators passed the bill by voice vote, followed by approval from the Senate side by a vote of 8-5. The seven Republican senators were joined by Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, North Dakota Democrat, in support of the bill.
"This is a solid agreement," Sen. Pete V. Domenici, New Mexico Republican, said as he opened the bipartisan conference designed to merge bills passed this year by the House and Senate. "I don't think we can take a risk of undoing this."
House negotiators said any changes would upset the political compromises reached in 71 days of closed-door talks between conservatives in both houses and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Among the amendments killed by the House team after being offered by Senate negotiators was a provision to require electric utilities to produce 10 percent of their power from renewable fuels. Another was a proposal that would repeal the excise tax on ethanol.
"The Democratic conference vigorously objected to this process, and our concerns were well-founded. This bill does not go far enough to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, waives important environmental legislation and has too many pork-barrel programs," said Sen. Jeff Bingaman, New Mexico Democrat.
Congressional estimates released yesterday put the cost of the total package at a higher-than-expected $32 billion over 10 years - $23 billion in tax breaks and about $9 billion in spending measures and lost revenue. Republican conference leaders said they would finish last night so the House could take up the bill as early as today.
Republican lawmakers said Democrats should have no reason to balk at the legislation, given its emphasis on renewable-energy options and conservation mandates.
"We provide billions of dollars in dozens of ways to reduce our dependence on foreign oil," said Rep. Billy Tauzin, Louisiana Republican and the chief House negotiator.
More than $5.2 billion in tax credits and other tax benefits over 10 years for developing renewable-energy sources are in the bill, including tax breaks for corn-based ethanol and the addition of 5 billion gallons of ethanol to the nation's fuel sources.
"It makes sense to use the tax code to develop alternative energy," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, Iowa Republican. "Cutting taxes is an effective way to encourage positive, environmentally conscious ways to produce electricity and fuel. This is a good, green energy tax package."
The bill includes $550 million in grants for biomass programs and $100 million in spending for increased hydropower. There also is $300 million for solar programs, with a directive for the federal government to use 7.5 percent more renewable energy by 2011.
The bill's major provisions also include tax incentives worth $14.5 billion for the oil, natural gas and coal industries, and a $1.8 billion research project to develop clean coal technology and tax benefits for a new generation of nuclear power plants.
Democrats were pleased to see left out a proposal to allow oil drilling in part of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) - an option the Bush administration initially insisted be in the package.
Republicans knuckled under and left out ANWR drilling, knowing it would be a deal breaker among Senate Democrats, three of whom are running for president.
The legislation also did not, contrary to the wishes of some Democrats, tighten automobile fuel-efficiency standards or put limits on carbon dioxide emissions.
•This article was based in part on wire service reports.
-------- environment
Congress Weighs Extended Deadlines on Smog Reduction
By Eric Pianin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54500-2003Nov17.html
At least eight metropolitan areas, including Washington and its suburbs, would be able to postpone compliance with federal smog-reduction rules under a provision in the massive energy bill awaiting final approval in Congress this week.
Proponents say the measure would grant the Environmental Protection Agency flexibility to extend deadlines for pollution reduction in areas whose air quality has been shown to be adversely affected by ozone traveling downwind from more heavily polluted areas.
But environmental groups say the rule change would result in extended delays in clean air protection for millions of Americans that would lead to more asthma attacks and other health problems. They say that virtually every community with poor air quality could qualify for a postponement.
"The net result is that no community will have to clean up until another community goes first," said Zach Corrigan, clean air advocate for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.
The provision was not in the original versions of the House or Senate energy bills, but it was added during subsequent negotiations at the behest of Rep. Joe Barton (R-Tex.). Barton said the amendment would codify an EPA policy proposed during the Clinton administration but blocked by the courts. The Bush administration has endorsed Barton's measure, and Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M), the chief Senate negotiator, accepted it as part of the energy legislation the House and Senate will consider this week.
"We do believe it's the right thing to do," said EPA spokeswoman Cynthia Bergman. "The courts have said we need statutory authority to do this, and what this amendment would do is codify what the Clinton administration proposed."
More than 130 million Americans live in communities that violate federal smog standards, according to EPA estimates.
Clean Air Act amendments enacted in 1990 require jurisdictions to meet a series of staggered deadlines for reducing smog, the pollution that is a mix of ozone and toxic particles emitted by power plants and vehicles. Areas with "severe" problems were given until 2005 to meet the standards, while areas with "extreme" problems have until 2010. Communities that miss their deadlines are "bumped up" to even tougher standards.
Barton's amendment would allow the EPA to let communities delay compliance if their smog levels were being affected by particles drifting in from distant sources of pollution, such as power plants. The provision would negate a series of decisions last year in which courts ruled that the EPA had no authority to grant such extensions.
Among the affected areas are Atlanta; metropolitan Washington, D.C.; St. Louis; Baton Rouge, La.; the Hartford, Conn., area; the Springfield, Mass., area; Beaumont-Port Arthur, Tex.; and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, which includes Barton's district.
John Stanton, vice president of the National Environmental Trust, called Barton's move "a de facto repeal of the ozone-smog protections in the Clean Air Act."
But opponents of Barton's move suffered a serious setback on the House floor recently when a nonbinding motion urging the energy negotiators to throw out the provision lost handily, 232 to 182, after intense lobbying by business organizations and coal-burning electric utilities.
Staff writer Dan Morgan contributed to this report.
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EPA Seeks Middle Ground in Toxic-Release Reporting
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54405-2003Nov17?language=printer
The Environmental Protection Agency has convened a new phase of an electronic dialogue designed to encourage "thoughtful comment" on how to improve its Toxics Release Inventory Program, which measures how much of 650 toxic chemicals are released into the environment every year.
The question at hand is how to make it easier for industry to file -- or reduce -- the voluminous annual reports, while not compromising the value of an important public database.
Industry and environmentalists alike say the TRI, as it is called, is one of the federal government's most successful "right-to-know" information databases. It was established in 1986 and has become a primary source for community activists and public-interest groups that want to track sources of pollution in their regions, such as chemical runoff into Chesapeake Bay.
Over the years, in fact, it has spurred some industries to figure out successful ways to reduce toxic releases. Total releases in 2001 were 1.4 billion pounds; in 1988 they were 3.1 billion pounds.
But industry has long been irritated by the paperwork involved, especially since the reporting program has been expanded by EPA over the years, sometimes without formal rulemaking that allows companies a chance to comment. So when the EPA opened an electronic meeting a year ago, after years of directives from the Office of Management and Budget to cut the paperwork burden, the "discussion" focused on the collection and release of the data.
The EPA received about 200 comments, and the second phase of the online meeting presented a variety of "burden reduction options": the possibility of exempting more small businesses from reporting (those with more than 10 full-time employees have to file the reports now), raising the reporting thresholds for certain industrial sectors or classes of facilities; allowing more companies to fill out a "short form," rather than a more detailed questionnaire; permitting companies to skip reporting if they have no significant changes to report, and allowing companies to report ranges of pounds of chemicals rather than actual amounts.
For the companies that filled out more than 91,000 forms in 2000, the new round of discussion is welcome. "If anything is going to happen, it's going to happen this year," said Glen Barrett, senior health scientist with the American Petroleum Institute, who is heading a new industry coalition on the issue. He said refineries spend hundreds of hours filling out the reports.
Most industries say they support the community-right-to-know program on which the TRI was founded. But they also complain about how complicated and time-consuming it is.
"The Toxics Release Inventory comes at significant cost and burden. We estimate the TRI costs the U.S. $600 million a year," said Michael Walls, senior counsel for the American Chemistry Council, which represents 90 percent of chemical producers. "The burden is in collecting the data -- monitoring it, checking it, and all that. You don't just scratch down a few numbers and send them to EPA."
"We, and many others, are for biennial reporting. That would cut the burden in half," said API's Barrett. The electric utility industry also would like to see the EPA adopt biennial reporting "and put the numbers in context so they don't frighten the public," said Michael Rossler, manager of the Edison Electric Institute's environmental program.
The mining industry brought two lawsuits against the EPA in recent years, one challenging the agency's authority to include it in the inventory at all, and one making it collect data on mining byproducts called waste rock. Carol Raulston, spokeswoman for the National Mining Association, said a recent court decision was favorable, so some companies stopped reporting the data on waste rock, reducing total amount of toxic releases they had to report to EPA.
Environmental groups, on the other hand, aren't pleased with most of the ideas that EPA is floating. They asked the agency during the first round of comment to concentrate more on ease of access to the data and expanded reporting.
They fear the electronic discussion might be the first step toward reducing the number of reports on toxic releases, especially since some of the options would allow companies not to report materials they recycle.
The agency cautioned in materials it posted to set up the "discussion" that talking about options does not mean they are "technically, practically and legally feasible." Still, some public-interest groups fear the EPA will be receptive to what industry is pushing.
Lexi Shultz, legislative director for the Mineral Policy Center, which monitors the mining industry, said some of the suggestions are "relatively benign." But she worries that Michael O. Leavitt, the new EPA administrator and former governor of Utah, will be sympathetic to the mining industry, especially since he and other Western governors signed a "policy resolution" in 2002 stating that "some materials in the mining and utility sectors are not appropriately included in the EPA reporting requirements."
"This is EPA proposing an industry wish list of options to change the nation's preeminent right-to-know law," said Paul Orum, director of the Working Group on Community Right-to-Know, a nonprofit organization that monitors the TRI program. "Depending on what goes forward, this could be a significant weakening of the program."
Tom Natan, research director for the National Environmental Trust, a nonprofit educational organization, said potential changes could compromise the "integrity of the data."
The EPA is using the electronic "dialogue" through Jan. 5, to "put lots of options out there and examine the pros and cons of them" and has made no decisions on a formal regulatory proposal, said Kimberly Nelson, assistant administrator for the office of environmental information. "Rulemaking is very costly and it locks you into a position."
As for those who fear a weakening of the TRI: "If they have concerns . . . I hope they will engage in this dialogue," Nelson said
-------- health
Flu Vaccine Faces Unexpected Strain
November 18, 2003
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/science/18FLU.html
The influenza vaccine now being given was not developed to protect against a strain of the virus that has surfaced in this country this fall, but the government is optimistic that this year's vaccine will stave off outbreaks, a top federal health official said yesterday.
The reason is that animal studies suggest that the strains of virus included in the vaccine are close enough to the new one that the vaccine will still protect, said the official, Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
Still, she warned, the United States could face a severe epidemic this year, given that the flu season began unusually early and has hit Texas and Colorado particularly hard.
"It's a little too early to say whether or not this portends the worst flu season we have had in a long time," Dr. Gerberding said in a telephone news conference. Her agency is responsible for tracking and controlling influenza and other infectious diseases.
She said she was "sounding the alarm" to urge more people to get flu shots to "nip this problem in the bud." The center does not know how many people have received flu shots this season. "People have the impression we are doing better this year than last year, but we do not have the data to back that up at this point in time," she said.
The flu vaccine includes three strains of influenza virus, but was not designed to protect against a new one that has appeared in a number of countries over the last year. It is known as the Fujian strain, a variant of the Panama strain that is included in the current vaccine. Both are categorized as H3N2 strains that have been linked to higher rates of serious illness requiring admission to a hospital and to death, Dr. Gerberding said.
Each year, influenza causes 114,000 hospital admissions and 36,000 deaths.
The influenza virus mutates frequently. Health officials change the strains of virus put in the flu vaccine each year as they try to keep up with mutations. But matching strains in the vaccine with those circulating among humans during a flu season is a notoriously unpredictable exercise.
The World Health Organization committee that makes the recommendations for the flu vaccine knew about the Fujian strain in February, said Dr. Klaus Stöhr, an influenza expert at the organization. But Dr. Stöhr said in a recent interview that the committee decided not to include the Fujian strain because scientists could not make it pure enough in time for a human vaccine.
The flu vaccine is prepared in eggs. Decisions about the components of the vaccine have to be made months in advance in part because manufacturers and farmers need to know how many eggs to prepare in anticipation of demand.
Influenza typically occurs during the winter in each hemisphere, and the vaccines are prepared at different times. The vaccine being prepared for use in the Southern Hemisphere will include the Fujian strain, Dr. Stöhr said.
"There may be less than optimal protection against H3N2" in the Northern Hemisphere, "but no vaccine failure has been reported" there, he said. "So there is no reason to discourage people from getting vaccinated."
Dr. Gerberding said it was common for the circulating influenza to gradually change genetically - known as "drift" - as it spread to infect more people.
Tests at the center found that 84 percent of the 55 strains of influenza virus isolated this fall are the Fujian strain, Dr. Gerberding said. But she emphasized that protection could still occur even without a perfect match.
Dr. Gerberding said that an earlier than usual onset of the flu had occurred in some European countries but that "this is not a pandemic."
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Flu Season May Be Severe, Officials Say
By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, November 18, 2003; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A54059-2003Nov17.html
The flu season has started much more quickly than usual and features what could be an especially nasty strain of the virus, signs that the nation could be facing a severe influenza outbreak this year, federal health officials said yesterday.
Although it remains too early to know how bad the winter will be, Texas is reporting flu cases statewide, Colorado is experiencing a regional outbreak and cases have been reported in 30 other states, including Virginia, officials said.
Moreover, the proportion of suspected cases that lab tests confirmed to be the flu rose above 19 percent last week, the earliest such a high number of tests have come back positive since 1976, officials said.
"We're very concerned that the flu season has had an earlier onset than we've seen in many years, and we are seeing some parts of the country that are having very high levels of widespread flu infection," Julie L. Gerberding, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a media briefing.
Based on the ominous early indications, federal health officials again urged Americans to get a flu shot as soon as possible.
"That's why we're here today -- to sound the alarm," Gerberding said. "The point is that people need to get their flu shot. This is the time for Americans to really step up to the plate and get vaccinated against influenza, especially because this could be a worse-than-usual flu season."
Officials are particularly concerned because they have detected a strain of the flu virus -- called H3N2 Fujian -- that was not specifically included in developing the vaccine. H3N2 flu strains have been especially virulent.
"Because in past years, H3N2 influenza A has typically been associated with higher rates of hospitalization and higher mortality than some of the other flu strains, that is part of the reason why we're worried about this being a more severe year," Gerberding said.
This year's vaccine includes another variant of the H3N2 virus, and officials are hopeful that the immunity it produces will protect people against the unexpected variant, Gerberding said.
"We're optimistic . . . but we'll be watching that very carefully, and we'll know more as the flu season evolves," Gerberding said.
Anyone who wants a flu shot should get one, but officials particularly recommend vaccination for anyone age 50 or older, people with health problems that make them especially vulnerable and children ages 6 months to 23 months.
Gerberding, who singled out health care workers as among those who should get vaccinated, stressed that the vaccine is safe and, contrary to popular misconceptions, does not cause the flu.
"It takes about two weeks to develop maximum protection after a flu shot, so we urge people not to delay," she said.
In a typical year, about 10 percent to 20 percent of Americans get the flu, sending about 114,000 to the hospital and killing about 36,000. The elderly and people with other health problems are most vulnerable.
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Congress Adds to Global Spending for AIDS Fight
November 18, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/politics/18AIDS.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - Congressional negotiators agreed Monday to a final foreign aid bill of $17.2 billion with $400 million more to fight global AIDS than President Bush sought. It also contained $650 million for his program to reward countries that institute political and economic reforms.
The bill to finance foreign aid programs, tentatively cleared by negotiators for both the Senate and the House of Representatives, provides $2.4 billion for the first year of the five-year, $15 billion program Mr. Bush sought to fight AIDS as well as tuberculosis, malaria and other diseases that prey on people who have AIDS.
The bill, which is about $1 billion above current levels, must go for final votes in both the House and the Senate as lawmakers scramble to wrap up the tardy federal budget and other legislation so Congress can adjourn for the year.
Mr. Bush had asked for $2 billion for the AIDS initiative's first year, prompting an outcry from many lawmakers and AIDS activists that he was shortchanging the effort to stem the spread of a disease that is ravaging much of the globe.
A number of lawmakers had pushed to get a total of $3 billion in AIDS financing this year, but called the final deal a good compromise.
The bill also cuts in half the president's request for his new Millennium Challenge Account program, which encourages countries to institute reforms in government, the economy and human rights to be eligible for the program's assistance.
Mr. Bush had sought $1.2 billion, but some lawmakers said that would come at the expense of desperately poor countries that would not qualify for the program.
The bill also gives Mr. Bush the $731 million he wanted for the effort to fight drug trafficking in the Andean region of South America and to help Colombia stem its long-running war against insurgents.
It also has $2.2 billion in military aid and $480 million in economic aid to Israel; $1.3 billion in military aid and $575 million in economic aid to Egypt; and $206 million in military aid and $250 million in economic aid to Jordan.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Environmentalists protest route
November 18, 2003
By Derrill Holly
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20031117-095821-2455r.htm
Environmentalists visited a downtown commuter rail station yesterday to warn of the potential dangers presented by hazardous chemicals moved by truck and rail through the District each day.
They gathered at a Virginia Railway Express station in Southwest to warn that chlorine and other toxic materials could be turned into weapons of mass destruction as a result of terrorist sabotage. The train station - through which freight traffic also passes - is just outside the L'Enfant Plaza headquarters of several federal agencies.
"What sense does it make to let these tank cars come through the city day and night on tracks that are four blocks from the U.S. Capitol?" asked Frank Millar, a member of the D.C. Emergency Planning Committee. Mr. Millar said alternative routes exist that would take such cargo through communities that lack the symbolic attraction of Washington.
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club are calling on the D.C. Council to pass legislation prohibiting cargo not destined for industrial use within the District from being transported through the city, if there are practical alternative routes available.
Proponents of the measure contend that making trucks use the Capital Beltway, and routing trains along tracks in suburban Maryland or Northern Virginia would not present major inconveniences to shippers.
"The Southeast-Southwest Freeway has been labeled by the D.C. government as an approved hazardous cargo truck route," said Jim Dougherty, chairman of the legal committee of the local Sierra Club.
"It is nuts in a time of terrorism to be suggesting that hazardous trucks can take a shortcut through the city instead of staying farther away."
Truck traffic near locations such as the Capitol and the White House is banned or heavily restricted, with scheduled deliveries often requiring inspection and a police escort. The environmentalists contend that chemicals deliberately released from tank trucks or rail cars moving just outside the restricted areas could threaten hundreds of thousands of workers and visitors including tourists.
"If you get these cargos away from this spot, the National Mall and the Capitol may no longer become a target for terrorism," said Casey Harello, a local member of Greenpeace.
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Miami Girds for Protests at Trade Talks
November 18, 2003
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/18/national/18PROT.html
MIAMI, Nov. 17 - This city's downtown was nearly deserted on Monday as police and government officials prepared for an international trade meeting that is likely to draw thousands of protesters, some threatening the same violent tactics that crippled a World Trade Association meeting in Seattle in 1999.
As cruise ships and federal court proceedings were diverted to Fort Lauderdale for the week, some shops and restaurants boarded their windows and office workers navigated closed-off streets and police barricades, trade officials from 34 nations began arriving for the first high-level trade talks held in the United States since the Seattle meeting.
The topic is whether, and how, to create a free trade zone stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. The idea is embraced by many corporate leaders but reviled by labor unions and low-wage workers, who say ending tariffs would eliminate countless American jobs.
While trade negotiations will not begin in earnest until Thursday, business leaders and civic groups began meeting here on Monday to come up with recommendations for the trade ministers. Law enforcement officers took to the streets on horses, bikes and foot, making final preparations for an event they have been training for all year.
As of late Monday afternoon, the police had arrested five protesters, for blocking a downtown sidewalk. All of the department's roughly 1,000 officers are on 12-hour shifts, a police spokeswoman said, and many more officers, on loan from departments throughout Florida, will join them. City officials say most of the $12 million cost of playing host to the event involves security.
The stakes are high for Miami because it is hoping to be chosen as the headquarters for the Free Trade Association of the Americas, a distinction that would help its economy and give it more international clout. Miami is marketing itself as perfect for the headquarters because of its large Latin American population, the hundreds of daily flights between here and Latin American cities, and Florida's status as one of the top trade partners for most of the 34 nations in the trade pact.
But Miami is competing with eight other cities, including Atlanta; Panama City; Port-of-Spain, Trinidad; and Cancún, Mexico. And Florida's powerful sugar and citrus industries are vehemently opposed to ending trade tariffs, because doing so would threaten their existence by sharply increasing competition from Brazil and other Latin American countries.
At the moment, though, officials fear that the biggest threat to Miami's bid for the headquarters is the potential for violent protests now. Critics of the intense police presence, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say it is an overzealous effort to prove that Miami can keep protesters under control.
Most protest groups, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O., have promised to use only nonviolent tactics.
"The anarchists, do they concern us?" said Fred Frost, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. of South Florida, referring to small, secretive groups that have used violence at other trade meetings. "Yes. But the A.F.L.-C.I.O. will have peacekeepers in the area to try to maintain order. We love this community, and we're here to help protect it."
Civil rights groups are incensed about an ordinance the Miami City Commission passed last week barring a range of potential weapons from public gatherings that some civil liberty experts say violates free-speech rights.
The ordinance prohibits protest groups of more than six people from carrying glass bottles, water guns, pieces of wood more than a quarter-inch thick, guns and "any length of metal, plastic or other similar hard or stiff material."
Lida Rodriguez-Taseff, president of the Miami branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, said the large police presence was a dangerous tool in Miami's quest to win the trade headquarters. "When you use your police force to carry out your political whim," she said, "that is when you have a recipe for disaster."
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