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NUCLEAR
Iran: First Uranium Then Plutonium: What's Next?
Signs N.Korea May Abandon Nuclear Ambition - S.Korea
Pushing Technology And Fighting Skeptics
Energy Department to OK new building at LANL
Bush Returns From Secretive Trip to Visit Troops in Iraq
MILITARY
Senator Clinton, in Afghanistan, Calls for More Foreign Troops
Annan Backs UN Probe of Congo Arms Ban Compliance
S.Korea Says May Consider Special Forces for Iraq
S. Korea Explains Iraq Troop Deployment
Raids in Britain Catch 2 Terrorism Suspects
China Again Warns Taiwan About Seeking Independence
Taiwan Steps Back From Confronting China
Taiwan Acts to Ease Tensions With China
Debate on EU army warms up
Italy and Germany Arrest Suspected Militant Recruiters
U.S. Soldier Killed Day After Bush Visit
U.S. Weighs Elections for Iraq's Provisional Government
Meeting of Iraqi Leaders Gives Lift to U.S. Plan on Power Shift
Annan: Israel Violating U.N. Resolution
Israel army warned by UN for shooting at aid workers
U.S. prods Israel on peace
Sharon Warns Palestinians: Make Peace or Risk Losing Land
Armed forces on alert after terror warning
UN Probes Possible Iran-Pakistan Nuclear Link
Man still prisoner of Korean War
Powell: no quick deal on Guantanamo
US Freeing Guantanamo Inmates to Torture?
Chechnya Duty Hardens Russian Police
Analyst Defends Prewar Spy Data on Iraq
Scholar Says U.S. Unharmed
UN adopts protocol on unexploded weapons -- the "sleeping killers"
Blix Says Hopes U.S. Learned a Lesson in Iraq
Brain injuries high among Iraq casualties
U.S. considers turning scooters into war robots
Inside the Ring
Army Commanders Felt Iraq Ammo Was Short
When Foreign Policy Aims and Campaign Needs Clash
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Senate Opens Inquiry Into Leaked Memos
3 California men get leniency in medical-pot case
New Light on Old F.B.I. Fight
N. Virginia envisions prisoners who buck the system
ENERGY AND OTHER
Blair Energy Bill Promotes Renewables
Informed Consent Treaty for Hazardous Chemicals to Become Law
Health Official Says Stem Cell Rules Do Not Hamper Research
ACTIVISTS
Hundreds protest against violence in Baghdad
Troop Families Going on Iraq Peace Mission
The IRS Claims New Patriot Act Type Powers
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- iran
Iran: First Uranium Then Plutonium: What's Next?
Gary Fitleberg,
11/28/03
American Daily
http://www.americandaily.com/item/3673
Is Iran developing a nuclear weapons program? Or is its nuclear program for peaceful purposes?
One thing is perfectly clear. Iran has not come clean time and time again regarding complete disclosure of the facts surrounding its nuclear program.
Iran did not first disclose possession of enriched uranium (obtained illegally on the black market). Now it has come to light that Iran has also produced plutonium. Both ingredients for nuclear weapons. Can Iran be taken on its word and trusted? Will further investigation be necessary by the U.N. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)?
Iran managed to produce some plutonium, says a new report that will be delivered by Mohammed El Baradie to the IAEA. The report, disseminated two nights ago among member states in the IAEA, won't be published officially until a board of governors meeting on November 20.
It says that in a letter delivered by Iran on October 21 to El Baradie, and signed by the head of the Iranian atomic energy commission, Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, "Iran admits that between 1968 and 2002, it conducted a series of experiments in the process of enriching uranium with centrifuges at the Kleia Electronics Corp., using uranium it had imported in 1991, as well as enrichment procedures with the use of lasers, and between 1991 and 2000, it managed to produce seven kilograms of uranium from which it processed small amounts of plutonium."
The report says Iran did not declare that it has any plutonium in all the various contacts it had with the IAEA, until that letter of three weeks ago.
According to the report, Iran has a broad nuclear capability, including uranium mines, converting uranium, enriching it, manufacturing uranium fuel, manufacturing heavy water, a cold water reactor, a research reactor based on heavy water, and sites where extensive nuclear activity is underway.
The report says that Iran systematically hid its nuclear program, and did not fulfill its international commitments, including cooperation with the IAEA - at least up until September of this year, when the IAEA delivered an ultimatum to start cooperating.
But despite all the new revelations in the report, it goes on to say that there is no proof that the nuclear activity that has so far been undeclared "is connected to a nuclear weapons program." Yet, in light of the pattern of concealment, says the report, it will take time before the IAEA can reach the conclusion that Iran's nuclear program was for peaceful purposes only.
Furthermore, the report praises Iran for its decision in September to sign the additional protocol, which enables IAEA inspectors to make surprise, intrusive visits to Iranian facilities.
Is Iran developing a nuclear weapons program? Or is its nuclear program for peaceful purposes? You be the judge!!!
-------- korea
Signs N.Korea May Abandon Nuclear Ambition - S.Korea
November 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north-signs.html
TOKYO (Reuters) - North Korea, locked in a dispute with the United States over its nuclear weapons program, is showing signs of abandoning its nuclear ambitions, a South Korean government spokesman said on Friday.
``It is very fortunate for the future of the Korean peninsula that North Korea shows signs of giving up its nuclear program and that the United States has indicated its intention to provide North Korea with security assurances,'' visiting South Korean government spokesman Cho Young-dong told reporters in Tokyo.
He made the remarks amid a flurry of diplomatic activity among officials from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea and Russia to try to kick-start a fresh round of six-way talks on ending North Korea's nuclear weapons program.
``We place great hopes on a next round of six-party talks expected to be held in Beijing next month,'' he said. ``The (South) Korean government pursues the principle that the nuclear issue must be resolved through dialogue and compromise.''
He declined to comment on media reports that the second round of six-way talks would be held in Beijing on December 17-19.
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.
In an attempt to defuse the crisis, Washington said last month it was willing to give Pyongyang unspecified security assurances in exchange for the North putting a verifiable and irreversible end to its nuclear ambitions.
Senior diplomats from the United States, Japan and South Korea will meet in Washington next week to prepare for the next round of six-nation talks, Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun reported on Friday. Japanese and South Korean officials were unable to confirm the report.
In a move that could put a dampener on efforts to jump-start the nuclear talks, a Japanese ruling party politician said Tokyo would have no option but to raise the thorny issue of Japanese nationals abducted by North Korea in the 1970s and 1980s.
``There is no way Japan is going to avoid the topic of the abductions at the six-way talks. Failing to raise the topic is not an option,'' said Shinzo Abe, secretary-general of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.
Five abductees were flown to Japan in mid-October last year, supposedly to ``temporarily'' visit their homeland for the first time in a quarter of a century, and Japan decided later that month not to send them back. The move angered Pyongyang.
Japan insists that seven children of the abductees -- now in their teens and twenties -- be allowed to join their parents in Japan and that better information be provided about seven other abductees Pyongyang says died of illness, accidents or suicide.
Japanese officials have said China, which played a key role in persuading Pyongyang to agree to the first round of the six-way talks, would not want Tokyo to raise the abduction issue at the next round of the six-party talks.
Cho said the South Korean economy would be affected by North Korea's nuclear and economic policies.
If North Korea scrapped its nuclear weapons program and implemented economic reforms, chances of war in the region would recede, he said. ``I expect that the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula and simultaneous reform of North Korea toward an open economy would help eliminate the possibility of war in Northeast Asia,'' he said. ``The painful scars of the Korean War have not been fully healed.''
The nuclear crisis began in October 2002 when Washington said Pyongyang had admitted to having a covert weapons program despite having agreed earlier to freeze its atomic activities.
-------- missile defense
Pushing Technology And Fighting Skeptics
Missile Defense to Be Deployed in Election Year
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A39
On his desk in a spacious corner office looking down on the Pentagon from a nearby hill, Air Force Lt. Gen. Ronald T. Kadish keeps a model of the plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
It reminds him of the skepticism the brothers confronted, a parallel that he sees with his own circumstance as director of the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency.
"The Wright brothers faced the same problem that we face with missile defense," he said in a recent interview. "They had eminent scientists of the day saying that man would never fly, and they were proving them wrong."
Kadish has been overseeing the controversial program since June 1999, having survived the change in administration from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush. He is on track to becoming, after April, the longest-serving head of the missile defense program since President Ronald Reagan set up a separate Pentagon organization to manage the effort nearly 20 years ago.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has extended Kadish's tenure twice, keeping the general in place to prepare for the planned deployment in September 2004 of antimissile interceptors in Alaska and California.
"The secretary is interested in longevity in key positions," Kadish said. "And I think this is one area that he pays particular attention to."
Low-key and genial, with a round face and stocky build, Kadish came into the job with a reputation as a kind of Mr. Fix-It. He had turned around the Air Force's troubled C-17 cargo jet program, impressing Rumsfeld's predecessor, former senator William S. Cohen (R-Maine), who picked Kadish for missile defense.
The assignment has presented Kadish with what he describes as his most difficult career challenge.
"We know how to operate tanks and airplanes, but handing a long-range missile defense system to the services to operate requires a whole new set of thinking," he said.
The system that the Pentagon plans to deploy next year will rely on interceptor missiles launched from silos to chase down enemy warheads in space, a concept known as "hit to kill." Technical glitches and quality control problems in designing new boosters for the interceptors have slowed development and resulted in more than a year's delay in flight intercept tests.
Nonetheless, Kadish remains confident that President Bush's deployment deadline can be met. The timetable has the system starting as the 2004 presidential campaign enters its final weeks, although Kadish and other defense officials insist politics was not a factor in determining the schedule.
Critics in Congress, scientific circles and the arms control community continue to warn that the administration is rushing ahead with an approach that has yet to be adequately tested and is likely to prove unworkable or quickly become obsolete.
They complain that the administration has lowered the threshold for what is technologically acceptable, justifying its plan on grounds, as Rumsfeld has said, that something is better than nothing. They also accuse Kadish of pulling a veil over the program since last year.
"The program is not at all transparent," said Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), a member of the Armed Services Committee. "I think General Kadish has instructions to be as minimally cooperative as he can be."
Kadish said the program must be cloaked in greater secrecy as it moves toward deployment to avoid revealing too much to potential enemies. But he insisted that members of Congress continue to receive ample information. "When it comes to the Hill, we bend over backwards," he said.
Kadish is widely credited, by opponents as well as proponents of the program, with showing care in public statements not to overstate what the planned system will be able to do. He has stressed that the initial setup will have very limited ability -- enough to shoot down only a handful of relatively simple warheads.
But while acknowledging technical limitations, Kadish has declared that the basic hit-to-kill approach is sound and ready for deployment. His detractors accuse him of adjusting his views to suit the administration's political aim of erecting some kind of system after decades of research and billions of dollars. The fiscal 2004 defense budget sets aside $9.1 billion for missile defense.
Daryl G. Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association, likens Kadish's willingness to endorse the administration's missile defense goal to CIA Director George J. Tenet's readiness, before the Iraq war, to support the view that Iraq's weapons programs posed an imminent threat to U.S. interests.
"Kadish has an obligation to be technically and scientifically honest about what the program can do, just as Tenet had an obligation to present honest assessments before the war," Kimball said.
Kadish said he has come under no pressure from the administration to shade judgments about system capabilities.
A source familiar with internal Pentagon deliberations on missile defense said some on Kadish's staff had shown "cultural resistance" to moving toward an operational system next year, preferring to stay focused on research. But Kadish favored turning a planned new test site in Alaska into an operational facility while continuing to use the site to test and improve the system.
Since the early months of the Bush administration, Kadish has worked closely with Rumsfeld to widen the range of technological options being explored, from ground- and sea-launched interceptors to airborne lasers and space-based weapons. At Kadish's urging, Rumsfeld last year freed the missile defense program from the detailed requirements that usually govern the development of major weapons.
The current plan calls essentially for Kadish and his team to build the best system they can in the near term, then improve on it in phases, or developmental "blocks," spaced in two-year intervals. No ultimate system architecture is specified. Instead, Kadish and other defense officials speak in broad terms of erecting a multilayered network of land-, sea- and air-based weapons that would target enemy missiles in all phases of flight.
Kadish said he reads as much history as he can -- biographies, military stories, accounts of past scientific and technological programs -- looking for ideas. But one of his biggest frustrations remains finding a way to avoid production quality problems.
The last attempted intercept test, for instance, failed because of a broken metal pin connecting a computer chip in the interceptor built by Raytheon Corp. More recently, the mixing of rocket propellants at a Pratt & Whitney facility triggered two accidental explosions, one killing an employee in September. This interrupted development of a new booster by Lockheed Martin Corp., leaving the Pentagon to proceed with an alternative rocket designed by Orbital Sciences Corp.
"What's been frustrating to me is that we've been failing on the quality side of technologies we've used before," Kadish said. "That I find totally unacceptable. . . . We'll just have to keep after it."
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Energy Department to OK new building at LANL
11/28/2003
Associated Press
http://kobtv.com/index.cfm?viewer=storyviewer&id=6575&cat=HOME
(Los Alamos-AP) -- The Energy Department is one step closer to building a new research facility to test and process plutonium and other radioactive materials.
The new building would be at Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico.
The final environmental impact statement supporting the new building was announced this month in the Federal Register. Copies of the document are still being sent out.
DOE officials say the Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project is needed to replace one of the lab's oldest and largest buildings that no longer meets safety requirements.
Watchdog groups have contested the need for the new building. They argue it violates the UN nuclear nonproliferation treaty because it would supports construction of nuclear weapons.
-------- us politics
Bush Returns From Secretive Trip to Visit Troops in Iraq
November 28, 2003
By ELISABETH BUMILLER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/28CND-PREX.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 28 - President Bush returned to the United States early this morning from Iraq, after spending Thanksgiving dinner with hundreds of soldiers in a military mess hall in Baghdad.
Ending one of the most secretive presidential trips in American history, Mr. Bush arrived back in Waco, Tex., at 4 a.m. local time, then flew on Marine One to his ranch.
Mr. Bush, the first American president to visit Iraq, was the surprise guest at a Thanksgiving dinner Thursday at Baghdad International Airport, where he told about 600 stunned, whooping soldiers from the First Armored Division and the 82nd Airborne that he was happy to be with them - "I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere" - and that he was grateful for their service.
Mr. Bush flew to Baghdad under intense security on Wednesday to thank them for standing up against the "band of thugs and assassins" they are fighting in Iraq.
"Thank you. I was just looking for a warm meal somewhere," the president told the troops when he appeared as the surprise guest. "Thank you for inviting me to dinner."
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, who accompanied him on the trip, said today in remarks to CNN that the trip was the result of a long planning effort and there were obvious security concerns, especially after a cargo plane recently came under missile attack at the airport.
But she said the president wanted to personally thank the troops fighting the war on terrorism on the front line.
The trip came at a time when the president is under sharp criticism about the attacks on American troops in Iraq and for his absence from the funerals of American soldiers killed in the conflict. To that end, it showcased Mr. Bush's personal connection to the struggle.
Asked if soldiers had asked her when they would be coming home, Ms. Rice said that she was only told they were thinking about their families and missions, and that they understood the difficulties. "Nothing of lasting value is ever born without sacrifice," she said.
The administration did not announce the trip until Mr. Bush had left Baghdad, about midday Thursday, Eastern time. Only a few reporters were allowed to accompany Mr. Bush.
Mr. Bush told reporters aboard Air Force One as it returned from Baghdad on Thursday night that his parents did not know about his trip beforehand. But he said that he told his daughters, Barbara and Jenna, on Wednesday before he left and that his wife, Laura, had been aware of the trip all along.
"I had to tell my family, that would be wife and daughters, that I would not be there for Thanksgiving today," Mr. Bush said. "My mother and dad came over from College Station, thinking they would see me. They did not know that I was not going to be there."
The trip highlighted the continuing dangers of Iraq. Mr. Bush's trip was conducted under extraordinary security, even for a president who routinely travels under some of the tightest security in the world. Air traffic controllers in Baghdad did not know the plane heading for the runway was Air Force One, and it then landed without its lights in darkness, but for a sliver of moon.
On the flight over, Air Force One had come within sight of a British Airways plane, Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, told reporters on the trip, according to the transcript.
The British Airways pilot radioed over and asked, Mr. Bartlett said, "Did I just see Air Force One?" There was silence from the Air Force One pilot, who then replied, "Gulfstream 5."
There was a longer silence from the British Airways pilot, Mr. Bartlett said, who, seeming to get that he was in on a secret, then said, "Oh."
Mr. Bush, who spent only two and a half hours in Baghdad, all in the secure area around the airport, also met with members of the Iraqi Governing Council, including Ahmad Chalabi, the exile leader who is close to senior officials at the Pentagon.
The trip, which was a tightly held secret until the very end among only a few aides, began about 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday in Crawford. Mr. Bush left his ranch in an unmarked car, not the usual presidential limousine, for the private airport he uses near Waco, Tex. Aides said they did not want to attract attention, so there was no motorcade and no blocked streets. Mr. Bush said he even tried to disguise his appearance, as did Ms. Rice. ,
"They pulled up a plain-looking vehicle with tinted windows," Mr. Bush told reporters. "I slipped on a baseball cap, pulled 'er down - as did Condi. We looked like a normal couple."
Mr. Bush also noted that without his usual motorcade, he experienced pre-Thanksgiving Texas traffic.
"The president encountered and witnessed traffic for the first time in three years," Mr. Bartlett told the small group of reporters, photographers and television technicians who accompanied Mr. Bush. "That was a little amusing to those who were riding with him."
Air Force One then left Texas for Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, where Mr. Bush switched to another Air Force One, a refueled 747. The group picked up a few more reporters, bringing the total number of journalists on the trip, including camera crews, to 13. Reporters on the trip were instructed not to tell their families or their employers where they were going.
The president left Washington on Wednesday night, and arrived in Baghdad about 10 and a half hours later, around 5:30 p.m. on Thursday. On the way, Mr. Bartlett told reporters that if news of the trip leaked out before Air Force One landed in Iraq, the plane would turn around.
Mr. Bush said the idea for the trip first came up in mid-October, when his chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., suggested it to him.
"Andy said, 'Would you be interested in going to Baghdad?' " Mr. Bush told reporters. "I said I don't want to go if it puts anybody in harm's way. I said it's very essential that I fully understand all aspects of the trip, starting with whether or not we could get in and out safely, whether or not my presence there would in any way cause an enemy to react and therefore jeopardize somebody else's life."
Mr. Bush said he signed off on the nearly complete plans on Tuesday, and gave the final approval for his trip on Wednesday morning from Crawford in a conference call with Vice President Dick Cheney, Ms. Rice and Mr. Card.
Those on the trip to Baghdad included Ms. Rice, Mr. Card, Mr. Bartlett, the White House doctor, Dr. Richard A. Tubb, and Joe Hagin, the White House deputy chief of staff. Those who knew of the trip included Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Gen. John P. Abizaid, head of the United States Central Command.
Mr. Bush was asked by reporters if there was any point during the trip's planning when he thought it was too risky and that he should not go. He had a ready reply.
"Yeah, all along," he said. "I mean, I was the biggest skeptic of all."
Richard W. Stevenson and David E. Sanger in Washington and Richard A. Oppel Jr. in Crawford, Tex., contributed reporting for this article.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Senator Clinton, in Afghanistan, Calls for More Foreign Troops
November 28, 2003
By DAVID ROHDE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/asia/28AFGH.html
BAGRAM AIR BASE, Afghanistan, Nov. 27 - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton called for the deployment of additional foreign soldiers in Afghanistan Thursday during a Thanksgiving visit to American troops here. Senator Clinton, citing recent attacks on aid workers, said reinforcements from the United States or NATO were needed to increase security.
"I believe we need more troops," she said. "I don't think we have an adequate number of troops to do what needs to be done."
Her comments came during a whirlwind one-day visit to Afghanistan by Senator Clinton, a Democrat of New York, and Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, also a Democrat. Both serve on the Senate Armed Services Committee and will visit Iraq after Afghanistan.
The senators began the visit here with a meeting with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, in Kabul's stately presidential palace. They ended it in a linoleum-floored Army mess hall, eating turkey, mashed potatoes and yams off cardboard trays with soldiers from Fort Drum, the New York base of the 10th Mountain Division.
Twenty officers and soldiers from Queens, Ithaca, Geneva, Brooklyn, Homer, New Rochelle and other places across New York dined with the senators.
Senator Clinton received a generally warm reception from members of the military, who are often perceived as conservative and Republican.
After the meal, more than a dozen soldiers formed a line to have their photographs taken with the former first lady. A half dozen asked for her autograph, often inscribed to their daughters. One soldier had Mrs. Clinton autograph an American flag.
"It's great that she came here," said Capt. Jim Mullin, a 29-year-old from Mahopac who pointed out that Senator Clinton could have spent the holiday with her famous family. "It's selfless, something I respect."
Both senators criticized the Bush administration's policies in Afghanistan. Senator Reed said the United States had wasted "precious months" in the country and lost momentum in the struggle against Islamic militants.
"We let our attention wander from Afghanistan," he said. "We lost the initiative. We gave these groups a second chance."
The senators called on NATO countries to contribute additional troops for a long-delayed expansion of peacekeeping operations outside Kabul, the capital.
There are currently 11,600 combat troops, the vast majority of them American, carrying out operations against Taliban and other militants in the country.
Another 5,500 international soldiers patrol Kabul in a NATO-led peacekeeping mission.
This year, suspected Taliban fighters have killed two foreign aid workers and at least 13 Afghan aid workers in a successful campaign to slow the distribution of aid in southern and eastern Afghanistan.
Earlier this month, a gunman shot dead a 29-year-old French woman working for the United Nations refugee agency in broad daylight in a city just south of Kabul.
Soldiers said they hoped the visit would heighten both American public interest in Afghanistan and the profile of the 10,000 American soldiers deployed here.
"Them being here raises awareness," said Capt. Micaela McMurrough, a 27-year-old intelligence analyst from Ithaca. "Sometimes we do feel this is a bit of a forgotten war."
-------- africa
Annan Backs UN Probe of Congo Arms Ban Compliance
November 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-congo-democratic-arms.html
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on Friday recommended the creation of an expert panel to investigate whether the Democratic Republic of Congo and its neighbors were complying with an arms embargo on eastern Congo.
Annan also called for creation of a new U.N. Security Council committee to monitor the expert panel's work, seek ways to tighten the embargo and pursue its ideas with U.N. member-states.
His views were set out in a report to the 15-nation Security Council meant to follow up on the work of an earlier U.N. independent panel which has been studying how to stem the systematic plunder of Congo's rich natural resources.
That panel, whose mandate expired last month, concluded that the resources -- which include gold, diamonds, medicinal barks, cobalt, copper and coltan, a mineral used in cell phones and nuclear reactor parts -- were being drained away at least in part to help finance Congo's long civil war.
It recommended that a ``monitoring mechanism'' be set up to track who was buying and selling weapons to fuel the Central African country's five year-old civil war.
While the war has tapered off in most of the country, sporadic fighting continues in the volatile eastern area of the country, which is particularly rich in natural resources.
The Security Council imposed an arms embargo on eastern Congo earlier this year.
``Without arms, the ability to continue the conflict, and hence creating the conditions for illegal exploitation of resources, cannot be sustained,'' the independent panel said in its final report, issued in October.
-------- asia
S.Korea Says May Consider Special Forces for Iraq
November 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-usa-troops.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea might send special forces to Iraq as part of efforts to help the United States restore order there, a Defense Ministry spokesman said on Friday.
One of South Korea's main newspapers, Chosun Ilbo, quoted an unidentified military source as saying the government was considering sending 1,500 special forces soldiers to Iraq.
Prime Minister Goh Kun said on Wednesday South Korea might send 3,000 troops to secure a specific part of Iraq and had ruled out sending non-combat troops alone.
``The government may consider sending special forces to Iraq but we can't confirm the report because no decision has been made yet,'' a Defense Ministry spokesman said by telephone.
South Korea has had 675 medical and engineering troops in Iraq since May.
President Roh Moo-hyun has already committed Seoul to sending more forces but, in the face of widespread public opposition, has yet to decide on the mix of combat and non-combat troops.
Roh said on SBS television on Friday history may judge it was wrong to send troops to Iraq.
``The most important factor is whether strengthening ties with the United States will help resolve the North Korea issue, not economic benefits,'' he said, referring to a crisis over Pyongyang's nuclear weapons ambitions.
An official at the Special Warfare Command Center told Reuters a military survey in October for volunteers willing to go to Iraq found many special forces soldiers had applied.
South Korea's elite forces are rigorously trained because of the perceived threat from North Korea, which has the world's largest special forces.
Many South Koreans are less enthusiastic about the Iraq deployment and there have been regular street protests.
Military police arrested one conscript, Private Kang Chol-min, on Friday during a protest march on the presidential Blue House. Kang failed to return to his unit last Friday from leave and instead staged a sit-in protest.
--------
S. Korea Explains Iraq Troop Deployment
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-SKorea-US-Iraq.html
SEOUL, South Korea -- President Roh Moo-hyun said Friday that he decided to send troops to Iraq hoping it would encourage the United States to continue to work to resolve the North Korean nuclear crisis.
Roh said history may judge him harshly for making the decision earlier this month to send up to 3,000 troops to Iraq to help U.S. forces restore order in Iraq. South Korea already has hundreds of non-combat troops, mostly medics and engineers in the country, a move that set off violent protests earlier this year.
South Korea has yet to decide whether the new troops deployment will include combat forces or when they will be deployed.
``History's judgment in the future may be negative on the troops' dispatch, but what is more important than a historical judgment is how our country can overcome the reality today,'' Roh said during a nationally broadcast interview on SBS-TV.
``We have the North Korean nuclear problem and this problem cannot be resolved unless the United States makes its move,'' he said. ``That is the reality facing us.''
Roh did not say exactly what that move should be, saying only: ``The government is handling the troops deployment on the premise of how we will develop our relations with the United States.''
The United States and its allies are trying to persuade communist North Korea to abandon its development of nuclear weapons in return for security guarantees and economic benefits.
South Korea insists that the crisis be resolved peacefully. It believes that any forceful steps by the United States, such as economic sanctions, would escalate tensions and hurt its economy.
North Korea says it's building nuclear bombs as a deterrent against a U.S. invasion of the country that President Bush dubbed a part of the ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and Iraq.
-------- britain
Raids in Britain Catch 2 Terrorism Suspects
November 28, 2003
By ALAN COWELL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/europe/28BRIT.html
LONDON, Nov. 27 - The British authorities arrested two suspected terrorists in separate raids on Thursday and said one of them was believed to be connected to "the network of Al Qaeda groups."
Sky Television said one of the detainees, a 24-year-old British man of Asian heritage who was seized in Gloucester, west of London, had links to Richard C. Reid; he is the British "shoe bomber" who was sentenced to life imprisonment in January in the United States for trying to blow up an American Airlines flight. There was no immediate official confirmation of the Sky report.
Three streets around the suspect's home in Gloucester were sealed off, and over 100 people were evacuated from the area because the police feared that the man might have hidden explosives in the neighborhood, the police said.
The police in Blackburn, in northwestern England, searched two buildings including an Islamic college where the Gloucester suspect had once been a student, according to reports by the police and Islamic leaders. Officials at the college denied any link with terrorism and said the police had found nothing linking the college to the suspect.
Separately, a 39-year-old man was arrested in Manchester, in northwestern England, the police said.
The arrests followed warnings by the police that a terror attack might be planned for Britain and an increase in the authorities' assessment of the level of the threat of an attack from "significant" to "severe general," the second-highest level.
Both men, whose names were not released, were arrested under antiterrorism laws covering people suspected of "involvement in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism."
David Blunkett, Britain's home secretary, who is in charge of internal security, said of the Gloucester suspect, "It is the belief of the security and Special Branch services that this man has connections with the network of Al Qaeda groups."
"We would not have taken these steps if we did not believe that this individual posed a very real threat to the life and liberty of our country," Mr. Blunkett said.
Britain has sought previously to uncover Qaeda activities in several parts of the country ranging from a mosque in London to provincial cities, particularly in the Midlands.
-------- china
China Again Warns Taiwan About Seeking Independence
November 28, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/asia/28CND-TAIW.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 28 - Beijing shifted its response today to new Taiwanese legislation on national referendums, expressing concern about the law and repeating warnings to this island against seeking formal independence, but stopping short of any threats.
The official New China News Agency had initially posted a commentary on its Internet site noting that the referendum legislation removed "the imminent danger of Taiwanese independence."
But the initial commentary was joined this evening on the site by a brief statement quoting an unidentified spokesman for the Chinese government's Taiwan Affairs Office. "We are deeply concerned about relevant things concerning 'referendum legislation' in Taiwan and are paying close attention to the development of the issue," the New China News Agency quoted the spokesman as saying, without elaborating.
The statement closed with a warning that, "any attempt to separate Taiwan from China will not be tolerated absolutely." But in contrast with three warnings earlier this week of the possible use of force against the island if a broad referendum law passed, the statement made no explicit threats.
Beijing has regarded Taiwan as a renegade province ever since the Nationalists lost China's Civil War to the Communists in 1949 and retreated here.
Beijing's return to vague statements, albeit critical, showed that tensions across the Taiwan Straits were easing, experts here said today. By contrast, a Chinese statement earlier this week had referred to Taiwan as a "shen sheng," or sacred, part of China, a term seldom used in recent years and viewed here as a signal of great anger and intransigence in Beijing.
"I had goosebumps coming up when I saw it," said Su Chi, an influential Nationalist Party adviser on Taiwan Straits issues and former minister for relations with China.
President Chen Shui-bian and his Democratic Progressive Party backed away on Thursday afternoon from previous demands by the party's pro-independence wing for broad legislation authorizing the use of referendums to pursue changes in the constitution and sovereignty.
The party ended up offering a more narrowly written version, which in turn lost out in the voting on the floor of the legislature to an even narrower version supported by the Nationalist Party and People First Party, which favor eventual political reunification with the mainland.
Politicians said in interviews that a new consensus seemed to be emerging among political parties that the presidential campaign now getting started here should be fought more on economic issues than on sovereignty issues that might inflame relations with China. Even President Chen's government and his party are taking a more moderate tone, partly after American officials made several strong statements to Taiwanese reporters in Washington in the last week that the Bush Administration did not want a crisis in the Taiwan Strait.
A senior Taiwanese government official described today an acute wariness here of angering the United States by allowing any crisis to develop with China at a time when the Bush Administration is already preoccupied with Iraq and North Korea.
"People here in the political parties know this is not a time to offend our friends, especially when our friends need a more peaceful time" in the Taiwan Straits, said the official, who insisted on anonymity. "We are aware of the reality, we are pretty realistic."
The referendum law passed by the legislature may be unconstitutional in allowing the legislature to call referendums but making it extremely difficult for the president to do so, the official said in an interview. For this reason, President Chen may veto the law or ask the legislature to amend it or ask Taiwan's supreme court, the Council of Grand Justice, to issue an interpretation of the law's technical provisions, the official said.
"These attempts, if there are any, would not reopen the sovereignty issue; it's pretty much a settled issue in my view," the official said. "All of the political parties have an understanding."
---------
Taiwan Steps Back From Confronting China
November 28, 2003
By KEITH BRADSHER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/asia/28TAIW.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Friday, Nov. 28 - Taiwan's legislature took a half-step back on Thursday night from an immediate confrontation with China, passing a bill that would allow national referendums on constitutional and sovereignty issues only under very narrow circumstances.
Chinese officials had tried to dissuade Taiwanese politicians from endorsing any bill to provide for referendums, but had devoted most of their criticisms to a rival measure, supported by President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan, that would have made it easy for him to call referendums. Most provisions of that bill were defeated in the legislature on Thursday night.
Chinese and American officials had feared that legislation permitting a referendum on Taiwanese independence from the mainland would lead to a showdown in the Taiwan Strait that neither China nor the United States wants now.
China is trying to pay more attention to economic growth, especially in its interior provinces, while the United States has been preoccupied with Iraq and with seeking China's cooperation in trying to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.
The Bush administration has reaffirmed repeatedly the principle that there is one China encompassing Taiwan and the mainland, but Chinese officials have called for the United States to do more. China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to use military force to prevent it from becoming a fully independent nation.
Mr. Chen and his Democratic Progressive Party have tried to move Taiwan gingerly toward somewhat greater independence status and had sought a referendum bill for that purpose. But most of the provisions in the final bill came from amendments by the opposition, which opposes full independence and has more seats in the legislature than Mr. Chen's party.
Even a narrowly written bill could still irk Beijing's leaders, by establishing a precedent for holding any referendums at all on what Beijing regards as Chinese soil.
As specifically demanded by Beijing on Wednesday, the final bill bars referendums on changing the flag of Taiwan or Taiwan's official name, the Republic of China. The legislation also makes it extremely hard to hold a referendum to amend the Constitution and bars referendums to draft a new or completely rewritten constitution.
The official New China News Agency said on its Internet site on Friday morning that a prominent Chinese expert on Taiwan had interpreted the legislation as eliminating "the imminent danger of Taiwan independence."
But the expert, Liu Guoshen, director of the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University, was also described as warning that the law could yet foster future problems in relations across the Taiwan Straits, by creating a legal basis for future moves toward independence.
Following approval of the bill, lawmakers from Mr. Chen's party were so upset that they tried to schedule additional votes to undo it. They contended the law involved an unconstitutional transfer of power from the executive branch to the legislature, by allowing the legislature to call referendums but making it hard for the president to do so.
"There are certain items we find unacceptable," Hsiao Bi-khim, a member of the legislature who is the director of the party's international policy division, said in a telephone interview. She said Mr. Chen might veto the bill if it survives.
A government spokesman said the executive branch would not comment on the legislation immediately.
A provision that could still cause some dismay in Beijing is one allowing Taiwan's president to call a referendum on "national security" if the island is faced with a clear foreign threat that could erode Taiwan's territorial integrity. Even this provision did not explicitly allow a referendum on independence.
Dozens of other provisions were adopted at the suggestion of the Nationalist Party and its smaller ally, the People First Party, which favor an eventual reunification with the mainland.
Justin Chou, a Nationalist Party spokesman, said the party was "very happy with the result" of Thursday's voting. The party was not acting because of the threats from China but because of what it saw as the best course for Taiwan, he added.
Zhang Mingqing, a spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council, had warned in a televised news conference on Wednesday in Beijing that if a broad bill was passed allowing a referendum on independence with no limits, "we will make a strong reaction."
The Nationalist Party and People First Party have long resisted the passage of any referendum bill, describing such a step as unnecessary and possibly dangerous given Mr. Chen's separatist leanings. They changed their position earlier this month, favoring a limited referendum bill.
The parties changed tack after the lead in the polls for the presidential candidate from the Nationalist Party, Lien Chan, and his vice-presidential running mate from the People First Party, James Soong, started to evaporate as Mr. Chen appealed to anti-Beijing sentiment. Polls this month have suggested that the race is too close to call.
The most important provision of Thursday's bill would make it hard for President Chen to hold a referendum to amend the Constitution, unless the amendments had already been approved by three-quarters of the legislature and the legislature scheduled the referendum.
Assembling even a simple majority of the legislature, much less three-quarters, is very hard in Taiwan's faction-ridden politics.
--------
Taiwan Acts to Ease Tensions With China
Legislature Makes Independence Vote Difficult
By Tim Culpan and Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A43
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17476-2003Nov27.html
TAIPEI, Taiwan, Nov. 27 -- Taiwan's legislature stepped back from a confrontation with China on Thursday, approving a carefully worded referendum bill that would make it difficult, but not impossible, to call a vote on the island's independence.
The legislature's action appeared likely to ease tension in the Taiwan Strait and appease the Chinese government after more than a week of escalating verbal attacks describing Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian's push for referendum legislation as a step toward formal independence.
Beijing considers Taiwan as part of China and says it will go to war if the self-governing island of 23 million declares independence. On Wednesday, it also threatened a "strong reaction" if Taiwan passed a referendum law that set no limits on what issues the public could decide and created what China called "the legal basis for Taiwan independence."
The bill adopted by Taiwanese lawmakers does not appear to do that. The Chinese government did not immediately comment, but an official Internet site quoted a Taiwan expert with ties to the government, Xu Bodong, as saying the legislature's action would "temporarily ease the recent tense atmosphere." Another report quoted a mainland scholar, Liu Guoshen, as saying that the "imminent danger of Taiwan independence" had been eliminated but that "potential troubles" remained because of the law.
Both the ruling Democratic Progressive Party and Taiwan's two main opposition parties had condemned China's threats and vowed to enact a referendum bill. But when the issue came to the floor of the legislature Thursday, opposition lawmakers balked at Chen's proposal and succeeded in adding language making it more difficult to call a referendum and limiting the kind of questions that could be put to a vote.
The most important provision inserted by the opposition prohibits any referendum on changing Taiwan's official name -- the Republic of China -- its national flag or the definition of its territory. Beijing had warned that a referendum law that did not specifically block such changes would trigger a strong response.
But Chen's party managed to preserve one controversial provision that allows the president to call a "defensive," or emergency, referendum on national security issues -- perhaps including independence -- if the island's sovereignty is threatened by outside forces. It was unclear how China would respond to the provision. But Chen's supporters, who favor a broad referendum law to ensure the public has the final say over any reunification deal with the mainland, expressed disappointment with the final legislation.
"They have passed what we call a bird-cage version, which limits referendums rather than authorizes the public to have their say," said Joseph Wu, deputy secretary general to the president.
[On Friday, Taiwan's premier said Chen's party might call another vote.]
A Nationalist Party spokesman, Justin Chao, denied the opposition had bowed to threats from China. Instead, he said, it had struck a balance between the public's right to a hold a referendum and the risk of damaging cross-strait relations.
"This isn't because of China," he said. "This is because we think Taiwan needs to maintain stability. . . . We hope the people can understand that what we did was very hard."
Because the opposition controls a slim majority in the legislature, it succeeded in rewriting key elements of Chen's referendum proposal during a day of debate and political maneuvering.
Chen's bill would have allowed the president or his cabinet to call a referendum. The law that passed, however, stipulates that proposals must come from the public or the legislature. Proponents of a referendum also must gather signatures from 5 percent of Taiwan's electorate and win the approval of a legislative committee to put an issue on the ballot.
The opposition's decision to accommodate Beijing could complicate the political situation in Taiwan. Chen is running for reelection in March and is behind in most polls. He had been gaining on his rivals by pushing the referendum proposal and portraying his opponents as too easily cowed by Beijing.
The opposition parties then broke with long-standing policy and decided to support a referendum law in an effort to take the issue away from Chen. But they may have provided Chen ammunition.
Pan reported from Beijing.
-------- europe
Debate on EU army warms up
November 27, 2003
By David R. Sands
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031126-094546-3937r.htm
BRUSSELS - A largely philosophical debate over the wisdom of a separate EU army is rapidly coming to a head in this city, headquarters to the European Union and the trans-Atlantic alliance NATO.
Pushed primarily by France, the EU force is seen by supporters as a boost to Europe's lagging defense capabilities and by skeptics as a direct challenge to Washington's dominance in the security field.
Addressing the European Union's aggressive drive to create the institutions behind the defense force by summer, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell employed some bland language to deliver a blunt message on a visit here last week.
"Our security is bound together in NATO, even as the European Union expands its capabilities," Mr. Powell said after a working lunch with the foreign ministers of the European Union's 25 current and prospective members.
"And we support all the initiatives that are under way to expand the capabilities of the European Union in the security field."
A U.S. diplomat attached to the EU mission here said the unspoken message was: "We can live with where we are on this, but we're not sure we like where it's headed."
The debate is shifting from paper to concrete - literally - in the Brussels suburb of Tervuren, where backers of the EU defense force hope to build a permanent headquarters and planning center for the new body, a multinational "rapid-reaction" army with 60,000 troops on call.
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Nicholas Burns has attacked the center proposal as wasteful and redundant, given NATO's own resources. Outgoing NATO Secretary-General George Robertson has said that Europe needs "more usable soldiers and fewer paper armies," not its own military bureaucratic showcase.
But French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie has argued that Europe is only doing what the Americans have long been demanding.
"Successive American administrations, and even [Defense Secretary] Donald Rumsfeld on a number of occasions have incited Europeans to build their own defense," she said in an interview with Agence France-Presse last week.
"So it would be misplaced to come and reproach us for doing that which they have for years encouraged us to do," she added.
Advocates also say the defense force could address the growing "capacity gap" with the better-funded U.S. military.
The European Union has engaged in military operations independent of NATO, overseeing missions in Bosnia-Herzegovina as well as Macedonia, both using NATO assets.
In a little-noticed move, an EU force in June carried out a U.N.-backed peacekeeping mission in Congo, without NATO aid and with France supplying the planning and command structure.
Mr. Powell said a planned EU defense cooperation agency, to be led by EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, "doesn't cause us any concern," and President Bush, during a recent state visit to Britain, said only that he "trusted" Prime Minister Tony Blair on the issue.
But analysts say the U.S. government has been more pointed in private talks, especially with Mr. Blair, America's closest ally in the European Union.
"No matter what the president chooses to say in public in praise of his ally ... in private he will tell Blair that his decision to sign on to new common defense arrangements with France and its allies may threaten the special relationship that has enabled America and Britain to win and preserve the peace for over 50 years," wrote London Times columnist Irwin Seltzer.
Britain's Conservatives, deeply skeptical of French and German intentions for the European Union, also have hammered Mr. Blair over the defense force plans.
"The French have for a generation made it a matter of priority that Europe should provide for its own defense outside NATO," according to Conservative Party foreign policy spokesman Michael Ancram.
Britain is anxious to mend fences with France and Germany after the bitter divisions over the Iraq war, but Defense Minister Geoff Hoon has dismissed the proposed Tervuren complex as "expensive and unnecessary."
Mr. Blair's delicate straddle on the issue was on display in a summit in London earlier this week with French President Jacques Chirac, in which the two leaders admitted to a continuing disagreement over the ultimate shape of the EU military force.
"It makes to me complete sense in circumstances where NATO is not engaged for Europe to have the capability and the power to act in the interests of Europe and the wider world," Mr. Blair said.
But he acknowledged there were "practical issues" to be dealt with and said the defense force must not be incompatible with NATO.
Mr. Chirac made clear that he would push for a strong planning capability for the new force.
"There are operations which need to be carried out by us, and they have to be properly prepared, properly led and properly operated," he told reporters.
--------
Italy and Germany Arrest Suspected Militant Recruiters
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Italy-Terror-Suspects.html
ROME (AP) -- Police in Italy and Germany have arrested three North African men suspected of recruiting militants to carry out suicide attacks against coalition forces in Iraq, officials said Friday.
The arrests stemmed from a wider probe into an alleged terror cell in Italy, and two people -- an Iraqi man and a Tunisian woman -- remained at large, the Interior Ministry in Rome said.
The main suspect, identified as Abderrazak Mahdjoub, 29, of Algeria, was arrested in Germany on Friday morning on a warrant issued in Milan, said a police spokesman in Hamburg, Ralf Kunz.
Mahdjoub was arrested in Hamburg in July on suspicion of plotting a bomb attack in Spain, but he was released a few months later for lack of evidence.
The two other suspects were arrested in Milan, the Interior Ministry said. They were identified as Housni Jamal, 20, of Morocco and Bouyahia Maher Ben Abdelaziz, 33, of Tunisia.
The Iraqi suspect is believed to have fled to Syria while the Tunisian woman sought by authorities has most likely gone back to her home country, the ministry said.
All five suspects are charged in warrants with association with the aim of international terrorism -- a charge that was introduced here after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The ministry also confirmed earlier reports that a sixth suspect, a man from Tunisia, was arrested Saturday for allegedly providing logistical support to the alleged cell.
Abderrazak had contacts with men arrested in March and April on suspicion of helping militants reach northern Iraq or other European countries, investigators said.
Italy has put dozens of suspected terrorist behind bars over the past two years, following a series of probes mainly in the northern part of the country.
-------- iraq
U.S. Soldier Killed Day After Bush Visit
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) -- An American soldier died when guerrillas shelled a military base in the northern city of Mosul on Friday, a day after President Bush's surprise visit to U.S. troops at a heavily fortified military compound at Baghdad's main airport.
Iraqis expressed differing opinions about the significance of the brief visit, which was organized in such secrecy that even members of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council invited to attend Thanksgiving celebrations at the airport were not told about it.
``We cannot consider Bush's arrival at Baghdad International Airport yesterday as a visit to Iraq,'' said Mahmoud Othman, a member of the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council. ``He did not meet with ordinary Iraqis. Bush was only trying to boost the morale of his troops.''
Bush's 2 1/2-hour visit came just ahead of Friday's arrival in Baghdad of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island.
The former first lady and Reed, both Democrats, have been critical of the Bush administration's handling of postwar operations in both countries. The senators toured Baghdad on Friday, meeting with troops, top officials of the occupation administration and aid groups.
Clinton said it's not too late to bring the United Nations back to Iraq and transfer some of the expense and pressure of administering Iraq to a wider group of nations.
``I'm a big believer that we ought to internationalize this, but it will take a big change in our administration's thinking,'' she said. ``I don't see that it's forthcoming.''
``We're in a very difficult political situation, trying to expedite a process for self-governance that will be very challenging,'' Clinton said. ``We have a lot of adversaries that wish us and the Iraqi people nothing but bad news.''
In Baghdad, an explosion slightly damaged a highway overpass, and the military said that two U.S. soldiers died in separate incidents in central and northern Iraq.
One soldier died on Thanksgiving from a gunshot wound inside the heavily fortified base in Ramadi, 60 miles west of Baghdad. It was not immediately clear how the shooting occurred, a military statement said.
Another soldier died Friday when four mortar shells slammed a 101st Airborne Division base in Mosul. Attacks by Iraqi insurgents on U.S. troops in Mosul have increased in recent weeks.
The military said a soldier was seriously wounded when a roadside bomb struck a convoy traveling near the town of Samarra, north of Baghdad.
The military said it had captured one of Saddam Hussein's bodyguards, identified as Brig. Gen. Khalid Arak Hatimy. The statement claimed Hatimy had been inciting the uprising west of Baghdad and providing money and weapons to the guerrillas.
More than 60 U.S. troops were killed in hostile action in November, more than any other month since the end of major combat in Iraq on May 1.
Since operations began, nearly 300 U.S. service members have died from hostile action, and another 136 from accidents and other causes. Several civilians working for the U.S. military and 75 soldiers from allied nations also have been killed, bringing total coalition deaths to more than 500.
In Poland, which suffered its combat death since World War II when an army major was ambushed earlier this month, Defense Minister Jerzy Szmajdzinski defended the decision to send 2,400 Polish troops to Iraq.
``When we got involved in the stabilization mission, we took on responsibility for the Iraqis,'' he told Parliament on Friday. ``We have a strategic goal -- to make Iraq a country for Iraqis.''
Lawmakers in the Netherlands and Macedonia, meanwhile, voted Friday to keep their troops in Iraq for another six months.
In Baghdad, hundreds of Iraqis demonstrated against terrorism and condemned Saddam Hussein at a rally on a downtown square. The protest occurred in Firdos Square, where a large bronze statue of Saddam was toppled by Iraqis and U.S. Marines on April 9 after the fall of Baghdad in the U.S.-led invasion.
The demonstration was organized by a handful of Iraqi political parties, none of which are members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council.
Bush, who flew into Baghdad on Thursday evening to spend the Thanksgiving holiday with U.S. troops, also reserved a word for Iraqis.
``You have an opportunity to seize the moment and rebuild your great country, based on human dignity and freedom,'' Bush said. ``We will stay until the job is done.''
Bush also met with four members of the 25-seat Governing Council.
Mouwafik al-Rubei'e, one of those attending, said they were simply invited to Thanksgiving dinner with Iraq's American administrator, L. Paul Bremer, and had no forewarning that they would meet Bush.
``It was a fruitful meeting,'' al-Rubei'e said. ``The U.S. president reaffirmed his country's commitment to build a new, democratic and prosperous Iraq.''
Ordinary Iraqis said it was difficult to judge the importance of the event.
``It meant little to the Iraqi people. Some are welcoming it, but most are dismissing its importance,'' said Kamal Mehdi, a cashier in Baghdad.
--------
U.S. Weighs Elections for Iraq's Provisional Government
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17507-2003Nov27?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Nov. 27 -- Less than two weeks after overhauling its plans for Iraq's political transition, the Bush administration is considering more major revisions that could include elections for a provisional government in an attempt to appease the country's most powerful Shiite Muslim cleric, senior U.S. officials said.
Holding elections would be a major reversal for the administration, which has long argued that the absence of an electoral law and accurate voter rolls would make a nationwide ballot time-consuming, disruptive and open to manipulation by religious extremists and loyalists of former president Saddam Hussein.
But the senior officials said the administration may be forced to organize elections to satisfy Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. A senior cleric who has strong support among Iraq's Shiite majority, Sistani appears to have rejected a plan devised earlier this month to select a provisional government through 18 regional caucuses. Two Shiite politicians said Sistani told them on Wednesday that he does not support the caucuses and instead wants the provisional government chosen through a general election.
"Elections are now a possibility," said a senior U.S. official close to Iraq's political transition. "We're scrambling to find a solution."
The revisions under consideration illustrate the challenge the administration faces as it attempts to craft a political blueprint for Iraq that satisfies the country's diverse religious and ethnic groups while attempting to ensure U.S. influence over the new government and an end to the civil occupation before the presidential election next year.
Although the White House and the U.S.-led occupation authority in Baghdad are waiting for a clear statement from Sistani about what he wants, administration officials have concluded that their latest plan -- crafted in part to answer his earlier objections -- does not satisfy the grand ayatollah. Some officials said they are still hopeful he can be appeased with changes to a caucus system. If not, they said, the administration may have no choice but to hold elections to retain the support of Iraq's Shiite majority.
"We were surprised that Sistani did not bless the plan," another senior administration official said. "We're waiting to see what he says. If he says no to the caucuses, then we have to figure out a way to get elections done."
During his brief visit to Baghdad on Thursday, President Bush met with four members of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council. Bush said he reminded them that "it's up to them to seize the moment, to have a government that recognizes all rights, the rights of the majority and the rights of the minority, to speak to the aspirations and hopes of the Iraqi people."
According to three of the council members at the meeting, Bush indicated that he would be willing to accept revisions to the administration's transition plan, although he did not endorse the idea of elections.
One of the council members, Mowaffak Rubaie, said Bush told the group: "I will support any decision you make. I won't make decisions for you. I will help you in implementing your decisions." Two other members at the meeting, Ahmed Chalabi and Rajaa Habib Khuzai, concurred with Rubaie's account but added that Bush expressed a desire for the provisional government to be chosen through caucuses.
"He talked to us about getting the job done, about moving toward sovereignty," Chalabi said.
U.S. officials said Bush did not delve into specifics of the transition plan and merely indicated to the council members that the United States wanted to be helpful and supportive of the council. "He said, 'We're here to support you,' " an administration official said.
A senior Shiite politician who met Sistani on Wednesday evening said the grand ayatollah made clear that he wanted members of a provisional government to be chosen through direct elections, not caucuses. The politician said Sistani would issue a religious edict in the coming days that would articulate his views.
Another Shiite political leader, Abdul Aziz Hakim, said Wednesday that Sistani was concerned that the administration's transition plan did not give ordinary Iraqis enough of a say in shaping the provisional government. Hakim said Sistani also was worried that the plan lacked safeguards for what he called the country's "Islamic identity."
In an effort to defuse the crisis, the Governing Council's current president, Jalal Talabani, met with Sistani on Thursday in the holy city of Najaf. Talabani said that he agreed with several of Sistani's objections and that the council would seek to modify the plan to take the cleric's views into account.
"I see the views of his grace as logical and reasonable, and I agree with them," Talabani said after meeting with Sistani.
But Talabani stopped short of endorsing Sistani's reported demand that members of the provisional government be directly elected. Instead, Talabani suggested that the council would attempt to modify the caucus arrangement and add language that addressed Sistani's concerns about the role of Islam in the provisional government.
Sistani did not issue any public comments after the meeting. It is not known whether Talabani's concessions will satisfy him. Some council leaders said they believe that Sistani will accede to a revised caucus system, while Shiite political figures contend he will not agree to anything but elections.
Sistani's earlier demand that drafters of Iraq's constitution be elected effectively forced the administration to rework a political transition plan that called for drafters to be selected by other means -- on the grounds that early elections would be too problematic.
Under the revised plan, the handover of sovereignty would no longer wait for Iraqis to write a constitution. Instead, caucuses would be held in the country's 18 provinces to choose representatives to serve on a transitional assembly, which would form a provisional government that would assume sovereignty by next summer. After power is transferred, Iraqis would be free to elect delegates to write a constitution.
As soon as the new plan was announced Nov. 15 by leaders of the Governing Council, council members began pushing for changes. Contending that the plan was forced on them by U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer, they have sought to revise several key elements, including the planned dissolution of the council after the provisional government was formed.
Several Shiite members also have objected to the method of choosing participants in the caucuses. Under Bremer's plan, they must be approved by 11 of 15 people on an organizing committee, which would be selected by the Governing Council and U.S.-appointed councils at the city and province level. Shiite leaders worry that religious figures may be excluded by the organizing committees.
But even Shiite leaders acknowledge that holding elections for the assembly will be a difficult endeavor. Iraq has no voter rolls, electoral districts or other basic infrastructure to facilitate a popular ballot.
Several Shiite leaders contend that the easiest way to get around that problem would be to rely on a database used to distribute food rations that lists the name and address of almost every person in the country. "It would be a quick and dirty election, but Sistani doesn't mind that," said Rubaie, a Shiite close to the grand ayatollah. "He thinks it can be done."
Bremer and other administration officials have long opposed elections because they are concerned that the voting could open the way for former members of Hussein's Baath Party or followers of anti-American Islamic extremists to slide into the new government.
U.S. officials also contend that security problems, particularly in Sunni-dominated areas north and west of Baghdad, could doom elections.
One option administration officials are considering would be to hold elections in Shiite and Kurdish areas and caucuses in Sunni areas, where resistance to the occupation has been fierce. But Shiite leaders contend that approach could exacerbate Sunni anger. They maintain that the prospect of elections could, in fact, help to quell Sunni violence.
"Will it work?" a senior administration official said. "Something's got to work. June 30 is turnover day, which is when Iraqis will have full authority and power, and nothing's going to change that."
Wright reported from Washington.
--------
POLITICS
Meeting of Iraqi Leaders Gives Lift to U.S. Plan on Power Shift
November 28, 2003
By JOEL BRINKLEY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/middleeast/28IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 27 - The American plan to transfer power to Iraq regained some momentum on Thursday, after a meeting between two leading Iraqi political figures.
Jalal Talabani, the president of the Iraqi Governing Council, traveled to Najaf to confer with Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the senior Iraqi cleric who had raised objections to the American plan for indirect elections for a new provisional government. Afterward, both sides appeared to be moving toward a possible compromise.
Ayatollah Sistani exercises strong influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, and on Wednesday his spokesmen said he was insisting that the election planned for next June must be a direct, popular ballot and not the indirect caucus election called for in the American plan.
That threw the future of the plan for speeding up self-rule into doubt. The American authorities have maintained that popular elections are impossible in the absence of a census, which cannot be completed by next summer. But at a news conference on Thursday night, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, a Shiite cleric and member of the Governing Council who is close to Ayatollah Sistani, said there was room for negotiation.
"There are different proposals for getting the opinion of the Iraqi people," he said. "The best way would be to have a census and election law, and elections. But in these circumstances, there are other ways you can reach the views of the Iraqi people."
"The most important thing," he added, "is to end the occupation."
That is exactly what the Americans have been saying. American officials declined to comment on the discussions on Thursday. But on Wednesday, Bush administration officials in Washington said they hoped that a system of provincial and local elections, town meetings and caucuses of civic leaders throughout Iraq might be acceptable to Ayatollah Sistani.
Mr. Hakim declined to comment directly on that idea. Throughout his news conference, however, he spoke respectfully of the occupation authorities. But at one point he did issue what appeared to be a threat. If Ayatollah Sistani's views are not heeded, he warned, "there will be a real problem in this country."
After his meeting with the ayatollah, Mr. Talabani, the Kurdish leader who heads the Governing Council until the end of this month, called his objections "logical and reasonable."
He went even further, seemingly embracing the views of Ayatollah Sistani without reservation.
"I will take his views to the council, and we, God willing, hope to ratify them," Mr. Talabani said after the meeting at the ayatollah's headquarters in Najaf, 100 miles south of Baghdad.
He added that while the self-government proposal remains, "we may add an attachment that has additional clauses" to address Ayatollah Sistani's concerns. "The agreement can evolve," he said.
Aides said the ayatollah had also insisted that the proposal must declare more forthrightly that Iraq is an Islamic state and ensure that no Iraqi law will be permitted to conflict with Islamic law.
Mr. Talabani said one appendix "says Islam is the religion of the majority, and it must be respected and considered a main source for the constitution" that is to be written in the coming years.
Mr. Talabani's position as president of the Governing Council is largely symbolic and holds no particular authority. Many others on the council are likely to take issue with his statement that Ayatollah Sistani's views should be accepted and enacted. When Mr. Talabani's term ends, the next council president, for December, will be Mr. Hakim.
American officials said they were insisting on indirect elections of some form because no voter rolls existed for full national elections, and a voter registration list could not be compiled in the coming year.
But Mr. Talabani said Ayatollah Sistani suggested this morning that the United Nations food rations registry could be used as the basis of a voter registration. No census has been taken in Iraq since 1998, so that list stands as the most complete count of Iraq's roughly 25 million citizens.
Mr. Hakim reiterated that using the rations registry was one idea. But he made a point of saying "other ways" of holding elections might be considered as well.
Mahdi al-Hafidh, Iraq's minister of planning, said it normally took two years to conduct a census. But if the census was stripped of all questions except those that are needed for an election, he added in a recent interview, it is possible that it could be competed by next summer.
Mr. Talabani said he would discuss Ayatollah Sistani's view with the Governing Council and the American authorities. Mr. Hakim warned that reaching agreement might not be quick or easy.
-------- israel / palestine
Annan: Israel Violating U.N. Resolution
By PRISCILLA CHEUNG
Associated Press Writer
Nov 28, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/UN_ISRAEL_WALL?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Friday that Israel is violating a General Assembly resolution to halt construction of barrier that juts into the West Bank and to dismantle the 90-mile section already built.
In a report to the assembly, Annan said the barrier - a network of fences, walls, razor wire and trenches - violates international law and "could damage the longer-term prospects for peace," including those offered by the U.S.-backed "road map" plan.
"In the midst of the road map process, when each party should be making good-faith confidence-building gestures, the barrier's construction in the West Bank cannot, in this regard, be seen as anything but a deeply counterproductive act," Annan said.
Israel says the intended 320-mile barrier is essential to prevent suicide attacks against civilians.
Palestinians say the barrier is a land grab ahead of any possible talks about the borders of a Palestinian state. Arye Mekel, Israel's deputy U.N. ambassador, said Friday that Israel would not dismantle the barrier until the Palestinian leadership makes a "substantial and concentrated" effort to halt terrorist attacks.
"Israel fundamentally rejects the abhorrent propaganda campaign which seeks to stop and misrepresent the true purpose of the fence," Mekel said. "The fence is an efficient and nonviolent mean of self-defense, which has proven itself effective in stemming the wave of Palestinian terrorism against Israeli civilians."
Officials at the Palestinians' U.N. observer mission did not immediately return a phone call seeking comment.
Robert Wood, a spokesman for U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte, had no immediate comment on the report.
The resolution passed overwhelmingly last month by the 191-nation General Assembly - but opposed by Israel and the United States - is not legally binding, but it is considered a reflection of international opinion. The resolution also does not rule out further U.N. action against Israel.
The assembly could ask the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, for an advisory opinion - a possibility Israel has strongly protested.
The United States previously vetoed a Security Council resolution that would have declared the barrier illegal.
But earlier this week, Washington said it plans to penalize Israel for West Bank construction of settlements and the barrier by deducting $289.5 million from a $9 billion loan guarantee package.
The penalty will only cost Israel a few million dollars a year, a punishment Palestinians dismissed as a cosmetic step.
In his report, Annan acknowledged Israel's right and duty to protect its people against terrorist attacks.
"However, that duty should not be carried out in a way that is in contradiction to international law, that could damage the longer-term prospects for peace by making the creation of an independent, viable and contiguous Palestinian state more difficult, or that increases the suffering among the Palestinian people," he said.
----
Israel army warned by UN for shooting at aid workers
By Eric Silver in Jerusalem
28 November 2003
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/story.jsp?story=467924
The United Nations and other international relief agencies have warned that they may have to cease operating in the occupied territories unless Israel eases the closures that severely restrict their movement through the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The aid agencies have complained bitterly to Israel about soldiers firing on their relief workers, even when traffic has been co-ordinated in advance. "Several organisations are now seriously considering whether they should continue to work at all under these circumstances," they said.
They complain that despite numerous meetings with the military authorities, the relief agencies are subjected to unpredictable and sudden changes on the ground, whose purpose is often obscure and rarely explained.
Despite the growing anger among aid organisations, diplomatic sources said there was "no prospect" of the UN itself ending its programme of feeding poor Palestinian families in the occupied territories, something it has been doing for five decades.
Earlier this year, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Swiss-based charity, decided it could no longer maintain food-distribution efforts in the West Bank. "This program was not designed to substitute for the responsibility of the occupying power, which is Israel," said Vincent Bernard, a Red Cross spokesman in Jerusalem. Aid organisations , including the UN, are increasingly looking at the costs of subsidising the occupation, expected to be £700m next year.
Under increasing domestic and international criticism for doing nothing to end the cycle of violence, Ariel Sharon, Israel's Prime Minister, yesterday urged Ahmad Qureia, his Palestinian counterpart, to meet him and resume negotiations.
Mr Sharon told an annual gathering of Israeli editors that he wanted a summit "because I am interested in promoting peace", but said there was a limit to Israel's patience.
The two Prime Ministers' bureau chiefs, Dov Weisglass and Hassan Abu Libda, are expected to meet early next week to prepare the ground. Mr Qureia is seeking a ceasefire between Israel and all the Palestinian militias, though Mr Sharon is refusing to accept that as a condition for talks.
Jibril Rajoub, the Palestinian security chief, demanded in an interview with Israeli radio yesterday that Israel stop building its controversial security fence before a summit, but Mr Sharon insisted that work would continue.
Mr Rajoub was speaking from England, where he is attending a two-day private gathering outside London of senior Israeli and Palestinian political and security officials, who are attempting to find a way out of the impasse. The Israeli delegation includes Omri Sharon, the Prime Minister's son, a Likud MP who has served in the past as a back channel for talking to Yasser Arafat.
----
U.S. prods Israel on peace
November 27, 2003
By Barry Schweid
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031126-110958-1895r.htm
The Bush administration is using some of Israel's strongest American allies both inside and outside the U.S. government as leverage to prod Prime Minister Ariel Sharon toward peacemaking.
The efforts, which come after a lull in violence and the emergence of a new Palestinian prime minister, are aimed at encouraging Israel to alleviate hardships for the Palestinians with a pullback of Israeli troops on the West Bank and an easing of roadblocks to Palestinian travel.
However, Palestinian officials took little comfort yesterday from a U.S. decision to deduct $289.5 million from loan guarantees to Israel, saying the move would do little to force Israel to end settlement construction or stop building a security barrier.
The deduction, taken from $9 billion in guarantees promised over three years, reflected the amount Israel is spending on parts of the barrier that cut into the West Bank, as well as other Israeli construction there.
"We want steps from the Americans that will definitely stop the settlements and the wall to give peace a chance," Palestinian Cabinet Minister Saeb Erekat said. "I'm afraid that this step, as a message, will not deter Israel."
Zalman Shoval, a senior adviser to Mr. Sharon, confirmed Israel's intention to continue building the barrier. No deduction should be made for the barrier "because this is a security matter," he said. "Israel is prepared to give up money when the subject is defending the lives of its people."
Nevertheless, the Bush administration will continue its peacemaking efforts by sending Assistant Secretary of State William Burns to the region tomorrow to talk with Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian officials.
The administration also is pursuing more unusual lines of diplomacy, among them sending Elliott Abrams, who heads the Near East desk at the White House's National Security Council, to meet with Mr. Sharon last week while the prime minister was visiting Rome.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, another of Israel's staunchest friends in the Bush administration, recently met with Israeli Adm. Ami Ayalon and Palestinian professor Sari Nusseibeh and praised a private peace petition campaign they are spearheading.
U.S. officials yesterday invited the two men to meet with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell on Dec. 12 in Washington, said Dimitri Diliani, Mr. Nusseibeh's spokesman.
The grass-roots peace plan calls for the creation of a Palestinian state in nearly all the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians then would give up their demand to return to homes they lost during the 1948 Mideast war.
Mr. Powell also has gone out of his way to encourage former Israeli Justice Minister Yossi Beilin and former Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo, who have drawn up a similar plan under Swiss sponsorship in Geneva. That plan, which has angered the Sharon administration, is to be signed formally next week.
Mr. Powell's spokesman, Richard Boucher, said the Bush administration is not engaged in "some kind of end run around leaders in the region."
----
Sharon Warns Palestinians: Make Peace or Risk Losing Land
November 28, 2003
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/international/middleeast/28MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Nov. 27 - Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel warned Palestinians on Thursday to become more conciliatory or risk losing permanently some of the land they want for a state.
As he has in the past, Mr. Sharon hinted at possible but unnamed territorial concessions in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, saying, "Obviously, ultimately we will not be in all the places that we are in today."
But speaking at a news conference in Tel Aviv, he said he might make the decisions about territory unilaterally if he decides the Palestinian leadership is not serious about peace.
"They do not have unlimited time at their disposal," Mr. Sharon said. "While I am against setting artificial timetables, ultimately there is also a limit to our patience."
He added, "The Palestinians should have understood already that what they didn't get today, they may be unable to receive tomorrow."
Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian foreign minister, reacted angrily to Mr. Sharon's remarks, calling them "rude and arrogant."
"Sharon wants to declare an extreme position, and then to declare some measures that have no value that he will describe later as painful concessions," Mr. Shaath said. "But in fact they're painful concessions for us, not for him."
Talks prompted by an American-backed peace initiative, known as the road map, broke down in August, during a surge in violence. But recently there has been a flurry of unofficial contacts between the sides, and Mr. Sharon has come under domestic criticism as doing too little to advance a negotiated end to the three-year-old conflict.
Mr. Sharon is now preparing for a meeting with the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei. Both men have been issuing stern demands in what appears to be an effort to establish their bargaining positions.
Mr. Sharon sounded a defiant note on Thursday on two points that have brought him criticism from the Bush administration. He said Israel was "accelerating" its construction of a barrier in the West Bank. The barrier, a combination of fencing, concrete, ditches and guardposts that is supposed to stretch some 360 miles, has consumed some stretches of West Bank land.
He also said Israel would retain some of the so-called settlement outposts, the rough clusters of trailers placed on isolated West Bank hilltops. Mr. Sharon said there were some outposts that were "of security importance of the first order."
The road map requires Israel to "immediately" dismantle "settlement outposts erected since March 2001." There are dozens of them.
Zeev Boim, Israel's deputy defense minister, said Thursday that Israel was in the final stages of a process to legalize some of these outposts. Israel says it does not have to remove those outposts it considers to be legal.
-------- latin america
Armed forces on alert after terror warning
Buenos Aires
November 28, 2003
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/11/27/1069825916879.html
Argentina said on Wednesday that it had been warned by foreign intelligence services of a possible attack on American, British or Spanish interests there.
Defence Minister Jose Pampuro said the armed forces had been put on alert.
Security experts say Argentina has a high risk of being attacked because of its recent history of bombings, a large Jewish community and the porous border region with Paraguay and Brazil, a region suspected by Washington of bankrolling Islamic militants.
Extra police and security officers were posted at the British, US, Italian, Spanish and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.
On Tuesday, Britain closed its embassy in Bulgaria, a week after suicide bombers killed more than 30 people in attacks on British interests in neighbouring Turkey.
-------- pakistan / india
UN Probes Possible Iran-Pakistan Nuclear Link
Story by Louis Charbonneau
REUTERS AUSTRIA:
November 28, 2003
http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/22963/story.htm
VIENNA - The U.N. nuclear agency is probing a possible link between Iran and Pakistan after Tehran acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear identical to ones used in Pakistan's quest for an atom bomb, diplomats say.
Diplomats said the agency was trying to determine whether the drawings had come from someone in Pakistan or elsewhere.
Tehran, accused by Washington of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, told the U.N. nuclear agency it got the blueprints from a "middleman" whose identity the agency had not determined, a Western diplomat told Reuters on condition of anonymity.
It was unclear where the "middleman" got the drawings. The U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has said in a report Iran told the IAEA it got centrifuge drawings "from a foreign intermediary around 1987."
Centrifuges are used to purify uranium for use as fuel or in weapons. Experts say the ability to produce such material is crucial for an arms program and the biggest hurdle any country with ambitions to build a bomb must overcome.
Several diplomats familiar with the IAEA said the blueprints were of a machine by the Dutch enrichment unit of the British-Dutch-German consortium Urenco - a leader in the field of centrifuges.
Iran's ambassador to the IAEA, Ali Akbar Salehi, told Reuters he had no knowledge a Urenco design had been used by Iran. "This is new information to me," he said.
In a statement to Reuters, Urenco said it had not supplied any centrifuge know-how or machinery to Iran.
"Urenco would like to strongly affirm that they have never supplied any technology or components to Iran at any time," it said.
PAKISTAN, IRAN DENY NUCLEAR COOPERATION
Pakistan, which non-proliferation experts and diplomats say used the Urenco blueprint, and Iran have repeatedly denied any cooperation in the nuclear field.
Iran has long insisted its centrifuge program is purely indigenous and that it has received no outside help whatsoever - not from Pakistan or anywhere else. The father of Pakistan's atom bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, worked at the Urenco uranium enrichment facility in the Dutch city of Almelo in the 1970s.
After his return to Pakistan he was convicted in absentia of nuclear espionage by an Amsterdam court, but the verdict was overturned on appeal. He has acknowledged he did take advantage of his experience of many years of working on similar projects in Europe and his contacts with various manufacturing firms.
But David Albright, a former U.N. weapons inspector and head of the Institute for Science and International Security think-tank, said: "Khan is widely believed to have taken these drawings and developed them."
Khan is known to have visited Iran, but the diplomats said there was no proof of a link involving him and his laboratories in Pakistan.
The United States accuses Iran of using its nuclear power program, parts of which it kept hidden from the IAEA for 18 years, as a front to build an atom bomb. Tehran denies this.
This week, the IAEA Board of Governors unanimously approved a resolution that "strongly deplores" Iran's two-decade concealment of its centrifuge enrichment program, while praising its promises to be transparent from now on.
The IAEA is still investigating Iran's enrichment program in order to identify the origin of traces of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) inspectors found at the Natanz enrichment plant and the Kalaye Electric Co.
But when IAEA experts visited Iran's pilot enrichment plant at Natanz earlier this year, they saw it bore the marks of the centrifuges outlined in the Urenco designs, diplomats said.
They said Tehran later acknowledged it had used the Urenco designs and recently showed them to the IAEA. Iran also admitted to a massive procurement effort to get centrifuge components.
Iran says some of these components, purchased through "middlemen" in the middle of 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, were contaminated with HEU. This, the Iranians say, is why the IAEA found HEU traces at Natanz and Kalaye, where centrifuge parts were tested and manufactured.
Diplomats and non-proliferation experts say Iran's centrifuge program based on the Urenco design appears to have been more successful than Pakistan's. They say Pakistan eventually abandoned the Urenco model and chose another one.
-------- prisoners of war
Man still prisoner of Korean War
November 28, 2003
By Sang-Hun Choe
ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.washtimes.com/world/20031127-092616-1237r.htm
SEOUL - In September last year, the South Korean army's Tiger Division held an honor-guard ceremony for Sgt. Kim, officially discharging him after having listed him as killed in action for a half-century.
"I couldn't tell whether it was a dream or not," said Mr. Kim, 75, a slight, wrinkled man with a shy smile.
For Mr. Kim, it was a long journey home. When he escaped North Korea in 2001 after five decades of captivity, he was one of the last Korean War prisoners to return home from the communist North.
Seoul thinks at least 400 prisoners of war from the South might still be alive in the North. Their fate, like the war that ended in an armistice signed 50 years ago this July, is unresolved.
As for American servicemen who may still be in North Korea, the U.S. government has never asserted publicly that there are any, although a Pentagon analyst wrote in an internal report in 1996 that 10 to 15 "possible POWs" probably were in communist captivity.
Mr. Kim's unit was guarding South Korea's westernmost front line June 25, 1950, when communist invaders poured over the 38th parallel. Mr. Kim found himself "on my own, tumbling down the hills."
By mid-October, he was among 700 POWs in an old colonial Japanese military camp at Hoeryong, a coal-mining town on North Korea's northeastern tip.
"We only had one sheet of cloth we had on when we were caught. We fought over the few rice-straw mats thrown in," Mr. Kim said. "We starved and were so weak we had to crawl or take one step at a time leaning against the wall to go to the restroom."
Four months later, the POWs were moved to another camp. Mr. Kim was so frail that guards left him for dead with a heap of bodies. Farmers nursed him back to life.
After the 1953 cease-fire, 8,341 South Korean POWs and 3,748 U.S. soldiers were traded for 83,000 North Koreans and Chinese.
But North Korea refused to return thousands of other South Korean prisoners, calling them "liberated soldiers" who wanted to stay in the North. Mr. Kim thought that to ask to go home could invite punishment.
And so, he said, "I spent my next 50 years toiling at a brick kiln."
Mr. Kim and his North Korean wife talked to a reporter on the condition that only their last names be published and the name of their town not be mentioned, fearing for the seven children they had left in the North.
When famine struck in the mid-1990s, thousands fled, including 40 POWs.
In 1995-96, 20 to 30 people died of hunger daily in Mr. Kim's neighborhood of 20,000, and society appeared to be breaking down. Several people were publicly executed for slaughtering orphaned children for their flesh.
"A man found human carcasses hanging from the ceiling of a neighbor's second-floor apartment," Mr. Kim said.
Things improved around 1997 when authorities allowed farmers to cultivate their own small patches instead of relying on the collective-farm system.
In March 2001, a man came to Mr. Kim and said: "You are from the South, and I know a way to get you there."
So-called brokers smuggle people out of North Korea, bribing border guards and getting help from human rights activists and sometimes from South Korean government intelligence agents, according to defectors. Seoul doesn't acknowledge a role.
Mr. Kim's brother in Seoul financed his escape. Mr. Kim received nearly $300,000 from the South Korean government in back pay and pension, and spent about $42,000 to bring his wife out of North Korea in December.
Mr. Kim and his wife want to bring an unmarried daughter to South Korea. They wish their other children could join them, but realize they have families of their own.
"My heart pounds when I think about my children and grandchildren in the North," Mrs. Kim said.
"I can't sleep very well," her husband said.
After a half-century, he is still, in a sense, a prisoner of the Korean War.
----
Powell: no quick deal on Guantanamo
US needs more time to decide if Britons held in Cuba are dangerous, secretary of state says
Julian Borger in Washington
Friday November 28, 2003
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,13743,1094996,00.html
The US military authorities at Guantanamo Bay have not finished interrogating seven of the nine British detainees and have yet to decide whether "they have done something wrong", Colin Powell, the US secretary of state, said yesterday, nearly two years after the prison camp was set up in Cuba.
Mr Powell's remarks, in an interview with the Guardian and three other European papers in his state department office, appear to dash hopes of a swift resolution to the fate of the British inmates. The US struck a deal with the Australian government this week, under which two Australian suspects would have lawyers from their own country if they faced military tribunals and might be able to serve their sentences in Australia.
Mr Powell said there were still some legal obstacles to overcome before a deal could be reached on the two Britons, Feroz Abbasi and Moazzam Begg, who have been named among the first group of prisoners to face a military commission.
"The specific cases of two detainees that are before our military tribunal, the British detainees, is a difficult one," Mr Powell said. "There are some very complex legal issues that our lawyers are still working out. But the president is anxious to do what he can to resolve that one. And we're trying to be very sensitive to the needs of Tony Blair's government."
He did not specify what the outstanding legal issues were, but his remarks about the other seven inmates - Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed, Richard Belmar, Tarek Dergoul, Martin Mubanga, and Jamal Udeen - offered even less hope that they would be freed or at least learn their fate any time soon.
"The other seven are in a different track and they have not yet gone through the entire intelligence and interrogation process that exists in Guantanamo to determine whether or not they have done something wrong and therefore should be subject to some judicial process, or whether they should be released, and what danger they present," he said.
The comments were greeted with outrage from human rights groups and the prisoners' lawyers. Relatives of all nine Britons, who were captured in Afghanistan, have denied they had links with terrorist groups.
Stephen Jakobi, the director of the pressure group Fair Trials Abroad and an adviser to the European parliament on the issue of Guantanamo Bay, said: "It is necessary under international law to bring people before a court promptly. I have yet to see a definition of 'promptly' that means two years. The idea that intelligence can't process people over two years in risible. What Powell has said makes no sense."
Rights
The US supreme court agreed earlier this month to hear arguments from lawyers for a group of prisoners, including Mr Iqbal and Mr Rasul, demanding access to civilian lawyers and other rights enjoyed by defendants in civilian trials. That hearing is due in spring, but the British government will have to decide by Christmas whether to file an amicus brief, a written argument, laying out its position.
There was little in what Mr Powell said to give much comfort to the government, which had been hoping to win concessions from the Bush administration during this month's presidential state visit.
The secretary of state, who is due in Maastricht on Monday for a meeting of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said Mr Bush had not yet decided whether to lift US tariffs on European steel. "The president is waiting for some more information and reports," he told the Guardian, Libération, Die Zeit and NRC Handelsblad.
As for the new international criminal court, the permanent war crimes tribunal supported by Britain and Europe but fiercely opposed by Washington, he said the US had not changed its policy of threatening signatories with economic reprisals if they did not pass laws excluding Americans from the court's jurisdiction. "We're not going to yield on our ICC policy," Mr Powell said. "We made it clear that we would not be any longer bound by any of the terms of the ICC, even though President [Bill] Clinton signed it just before he left office, knowing at the time he signed it it would never go to our Senate for ratification."
In an unapologetic and at times heated performance, Mr Powell also defended his presentation to the UN on February 5, in which he laid out the evidence that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. None has been found.
Asked if there were any claims in his speech that he now regretted, he mused for a few seconds before replying: "None." However, he put the responsibility for the speech squarely on the CIA.
"What I presented on the 5th of February was not something that I made up here in the state department," he said. "And it was not something that was given to me by people who are not competent to provide such information. It represented the best work of our intelligence community, and I spent several days - I think from Thursday through Monday - with the director of central intelligence, with the deputy director of central intelligence, well into the night - almost midnight every night - and all of the analysts who have responsibility, the senior analysts, and we went over every single item."
----
US Freeing Guantanamo Inmates to Torture?
by Jim Lobe
November 28, 2003
Inter Press Service
http://www.antiwar.com/ips/lobe112803.html
Uighur separatists from China are likely to be mistreated if they are returned to Beijing's custody from the Guantanamo Bay naval base as the US administration is reportedly considering, says the group Human Rights Watch (HRW).
More than a dozen members of the Muslim ethnic group are being held at the base in Cuba with other detainees suspected of belonging to the al-Qaeda terrorist group and the Taliban, former rulers of Afghanistan.
New York-based HRW says the Uighurs, who were captured by US forces in Afghanistan two years ago, could face torture and execution if repatriated to Beijing, which has gone to great lengths to repress Uighur nationalism in the far-western province of Xinjiang, where most of the Turkic group have lived for centuries.
"The United States should not even contemplate returning Uighurs to China," said Brad Adams, director of HRW's Asia division, in a statement. "Any assurances from China that it will not mistreat returnees would not be worth the paper they are written on."
"It would be virtually impossible for the US to prevent mistreatment of these detainees once they fall into China's abysmal prison system," he added.
Some 660 al-Qaeda and Taliban suspects from more than two dozen countries are being held as "illegal combatants" at Guantanamo. Most were seized during the brief, US-led military campaign in Afghanistan two years ago.
Instead of giving them "prisoner of war" status, the administration considers them "illegal combatants," meaning they lack some of the basic rights and protections that are accorded POWs under the Geneva Conventions and virtually all of the rights guaranteed by the US Constitution.
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld has declared that, like POWs, the detainees can be held so long as the war against terrorism continues.
Their status and treatment have generated much controversy, both in the United States and overseas, where a number of governments, human rights groups and prominent jurists have criticized Washington for not giving them POW status or ensuring basic due process rights.
In a very rare public criticism, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) last month strongly denounced the detentions, calling them "unacceptable" under current conditions.
This week one of Britain's most prominent jurists, High Court Judge Steyn, called the circumstances of their detention "monstrous," and declared that Washington's refusal to permit the prisoners to challenge their detention in a court amounted to a "breach of the minimum standards of customary international law."
The US Supreme Court decided earlier this month to hear a case that challenges the Pentagon's claim that the detainees are not entitled to basic constitutional rights because the base where they are being held cannot be considered US territory. But the case will not be argued before early next year, and a decision is not expected until the spring.
Some 88 detainees, mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, have been quietly returned to their home countries. While Washington agreed that 84 of them could be freed as harmless, four others were repatriated to Saudi Arabia, where they remain in detention, reported the Associated Press this week.
The AP quoted officials as saying that dozens more could be repatriated but only on condition that their governments subject them to interrogation and continued detention. Among that group are the Uighurs, who were apparently training in Afghanistan with the intention of returning to Xinjiang to fight for independence from China when they were captured.
Beijing has relentlessly repressed the cause of Uighur separatism, which has flared in occasional violence and bombings several times over the past decade.
Suspected separatists have been systematically tortured and otherwise mistreated, while some have been executed after trials that also do not meet minimum international due-process standards, according to HRW and Amnesty International, as well as US State Department human rights reports.
Under the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which Washington ratified in 1994, governments are forbidden to return individuals to countries if there are substantial grounds to believe they might be subject to such treatment.
The Bush administration has acknowledged this obligation, but its practice during the war on terrorism raises serious questions about whether it would abide by it, say rights activists.
A number of US and foreign newspapers have reported over the past year that suspected terrorists seized by or transferred to US custody have in some cases been "rendered" to home governments for interrogation.
In most cases, the intelligence or security services of those governments are known to use torture or other forms of mistreatment against detainees.
The most notorious case came to light earlier this month when a Syrian-born Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, disclosed that he had been detained at a New York airport in September 2002 while in transit from the Middle East to Canada.
After a brief interrogation he was flown to Washington, from there to Jordan and thence to Syria, where he was beaten and confined to a small cell for 10 months.
Last week, US officials admitted Arar had been detained and deported, but insisted that they had received assurances in advance from Damascus that he would not be mistreated. Arar has already filed suit against the governments of Jordan and Syria, and his lawyers said they have plans to sue the United States as well.
"As with Arar and Syria, it is a fallacy to believe that a state that systematically practices torture will magically transform itself simply because it has offered diplomatic assurances," said Adams.
"It would be extremely reckless to accept written assurances from China in these cases. If these men are returned and anything happens to them, it will be the responsibility of the United States."
HRW called for the administration to immediately institute a moratorium on returning detainees to countries that routinely practice torture until it has completed a broader review of what has happened to such individuals in the past.
-------- russia / chechnya
Chechnya Duty Hardens Russian Police
Officers Often Return Disillusioned, Angry and Violent, 'Like Zombies'
By Susan B. Glasser
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A43
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17494-2003Nov27?language=printer
SARANSK, Russia -- Coming home from Chechnya to the placid streets of this provincial capital, Sergei Myasnikov and the other men in his elite Russian police unit thought only of losing themselves in alcohol. They were quick to anger, bitter over money they believed they were entitled to and never received, and resentful about having to fight a war that few of them supported.
"We were gorging ourselves on vodka like pigs when we came home," Myasnikov recalled. He observes law enforcement from the sidelines now, because his skull was blown apart in a Chechen ambush and patched back together with a plastic plate. And what he notices is a police force far different from the one he joined a decade ago. "I see how they change in Chechnya," he said. "When they come back, they're like zombies."
Myasnikov was a cop, not a warrior, but in Russia today, after nearly a decade of on-again, off-again combat in Chechnya, there is less and less difference between the two. Police units from every region of Russia have been dragged into the conflict, lured and often coerced into what the officers call "business trips" with the promise of extra money. Using police as well as army troops is part of a Russian government strategy to depict the war, to its public and the world, as a limited anti-terrorist operation.
Assigned to maintain law and order in Russia's fragile emerging democracy, the country's traffic cops and riot squads and foot patrolmen have instead spent years being schooled in the lawlessness and disorder of one of the world's most brutal civil wars. Like Myasnikov, they come back to civilian Russia changed, a new breed of angry, disillusioned police officers who moonlight as mercenaries.
To human rights activists, this constitutes a menace that may become one of the lasting legacies of the Chechen war throughout the rest of Russia. They fear the consequence for creation of democratic institutions when the guarantors of the law have themselves been accused of serious war-zone abuses by human rights groups and, very occasionally, prosecutors.
"For eight years, almost the entire militia of Russia have been to Chechnya. They are used to killing and to illegal violations, and they bring that back with them," said Lev Ponomaryov, leader of the group For Human Rights.
In a gritty suburb of Moscow, Chechen drama students were attacked in their dorm, in 2001 and again in 2002, by a squad of organized-crime police who said they had returned a week earlier from Chechnya and "wanted revenge for their friend who died there," recounted Rustam Milkeyev, one of the students.
In the Russian industrial city of Perm, 1,000 miles northeast of the war, ordinary traffic cops ask for bribes in halting Chechen when they stop someone from Chechnya, said Chechen businessman Aslanbek Dinayev. "The only way out is just to pay," he said.
In Nizhny Novgorod, an officer, just back from Chechnya, recently opened fire on a crowd of civilians in the Volga River city; his bosses said he did it because he thought he heard a Muslim man speaking.
"We come back harsher. Definitely. People who went there pull out their guns far more often than necessary," said Alexei, a police detective from Chechnya with a fearsome scar who spoke on condition his full name not be used. These days, he cruises the potholed streets of Perm, hunting down gangsters. "You see the world through different eyes. You just become totally fearless."
"We just got orders, and were forced to go," said Myasnikov, a thin wraith whose days now are a succession of legal hearings, painkillers and money troubles. At 37, he will never work again. "And for what? What kind of motherland were we suffering for? Nobody was attacking my Saransk."
In recent interviews, more than a dozen current and former police officers in three Russian cities all said they fought the war for money and because they believed they would lose their jobs if they did not go. They brought home toxic rage and casual violence that can break up their families -- and they were back on the streets within a few weeks of returning, with minimal or no help adjusting to civilian life.
"We don't go for free, that's for sure," said one current Perm police officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity and, like other officers, increasingly resists pressure from superiors to go. "Now, they don't pay any more, and we won't go anymore," he added as he quietly drained a carafe of homemade vodka.
Many tell stories of corruption, in Chechnya and at home. "You can't feed your family for $100 a month," said Nikolai, a St. Petersburg street officer, who also spoke on condition that his full name not be used. He has gone back and forth between chasing pickpockets in the shadow of the city's historic monuments and fighting in Chechnya so intense that he once took part in an 18-hour gun battle. Last year, shrapnel from a grenade explosion left a gash in his left calf.
He and his friend Yura both work on the side for cash in St. Petersburg. "We do it," said Yura, who runs a series of family businesses with his father, "but it is not legal." In Chechnya, they had to pay their own money for food, "if you want to eat like a human being," Yura said. They were issued only a limited number of bullets, and had to buy extras from the regular army troops -- for 1 ruble a round.
"When you come home, you think everything is okay and then you look at your watch and you think, 'When am I supposed to go to the checkpoint?' or you look under your bed for your gun or you hear a car backfiring and dive for cover," Yura said. "These are the leftovers of Chechnya."
Several groups that monitor the police say that at least half and as much as 80 percent of Russia's estimated 1.8 million-strong force has passed through Chechnya. The Interior Ministry, which oversees the national police even when they are in the war zone, will not provide numbers. Since the current round of conflict began in 1999, an estimated 1,100 Russian police officers from all over the country have died, according to a recent investigation by the newspaper Novaya Gazeta.
Human rights groups say police units visiting from elsewhere in Russia have carried out many of the most serious abuses they have documented in Chechnya. Many have occurred during zachistki, or cleansing operations -- sweeps of the civilian population that have been linked to incidents of killing, rape, theft, extortion and the disappearance of more than 2,500 Chechens.
Only seven cases of crimes by police against Chechens have made it to court, according to a May report by the human rights group Memorial, and just four police officers have been sent to prison. No one knows how many crimes outside Chechnya have been committed by policemen who served there; the Interior Ministry will not say. "There is no relation," a spokesman said.
In every region of Russia, local police departments receive regular orders for how many officers they must send. At first, the rewards were considerable -- doubled salaries for officers who earn as little as $100 a month, extra combat pay and a tripling of time served counted toward their pensions. But last year, tours of duty were extended from three months to six and combat pay was essentially canceled.
'Just Once More'
Myasnikov never meant to go to war.
A repairman at Saransk's Lisma Lighting factory, he signed up for an elite new rapid-reaction police unit known as SOBR in the early 1990s, when the Russian economy was collapsing and it seemed like a secure job. He had done a mandatory tour in the Soviet army in the 1980s, during the war in Afghanistan, but landed in the communications troops attached to the KGB in Odessa. His main weapon there, he recalled with an ironic laugh, was a pen.
He had met his wife, Nellya, when they were teenagers, and she was sent to his grandmother's collective farm to help with the potato harvest. In 1987, they married and moved in with her parents. Soon, they had two daughters, and the six members of the family lived in a cramped three-room apartment.
He was "not military," at all, said Nellya, a petite, athletic woman who teaches at a kindergarten. "When this military action started in Chechnya, I didn't even suppose in the beginning" that he would have to go.
In Saransk, a city of 350,000 that is the capital of the Russian republic of Mordovia, 750 miles from the fighting in Chechnya, Myasnikov and his buddies in SOBR were trained to deal with organized crime, hostage situations and armed attacks. But there wasn't much of that kind of work. In Saransk, Myasnikov said, the only kind of hostage calls were due to "drunk people taking each other hostage." In his years on the force, no one ever shot at him.
By the spring of 2000, Myasnikov had become a hardened veteran of Chechnya. He had gone three times, because the money was good and because, as his wife's mother, Anna, said, "if he didn't go, he would be fired."
But when his bosses tried to sign him up for a fourth tour, Myasnikov resisted, as an increasing number of police around Russia have been doing.
"Sergei didn't want to go, I persuaded him," said his friend Alexei Talalayev, who studied to be an accountant but ended up in SOBR.
"I just didn't want to go," Myasnikov said. "Alexei made me change my mind. He said, 'Just once more and that's it.' "
A month into the trip, around 6 a.m. on Monday, June 24, 2000, Myasnikov shook Talalayev awake in their meat factory-turned-barracks in the Chechen capital, Grozny, and told him to get dressed. They were on their way to a zachistka. They weren't told where.
The two climbed into the back of a Ural truck with about 30 other police officers from all around central Russia's Volga region. Theirs was the second in a three-vehicle convoy, and as it rumbled through the city's Staropromyslovsky district, a remote-controlled mine went off underneath it. Two men died immediately, a third later. Dozens were wounded.
Myasnikov's skull was blown open; Talalayev's body was shattered with so much shrapnel that doctors later decided to leave it in because otherwise he would be full of holes.
A Typical Roundup
Talalayev described a typical zachistka like the one they were meant to carry out that morning, how he would point his gun at the Chechens and round up "every suspicious male" in a village and send them off to a notorious interrogation center in Khankala.
"Both they and we violated rights," he said, adding, "If they didn't provoke us, we never would have done anything wrong."
They are far more open about the price of such actions for the policemen who carried them out. "In Chechnya, you feel yourself a military man, not a civilian person. And here you're supposed to be civilian. It's much harder here," Talalayev said. "When you go to Chechnya, a part of you stays there. It's a physical and moral toll."
Since they came home disabled, the two SOBR friends have been plunged into what they consider a new set of humiliations -- trying to force the government in court to compensate them for their lost ability to work. "We shouldn't have to beg," Talalayev said.
At first, Myasnikov received only a $370 insurance payment. Then, he won a court decision granting him a one-time $1,700 bonus for fighting "against terrorism." A court also awarded Myasnikov an extra $95 a month, but it hasn't been paid since spring. So for now, the family of four lives on his $135 monthly pension and his wife's $45 salary.
In August, a judge granted Myasnikov 1.6 million rubles ($53,500) in compensation. Russian press accounts said it was the largest sum ever awarded to a police officer injured in Chechnya. The decision is being challenged by local officials, who say they don't begrudge Myasnikov but that it isn't fair because none of Saransk's other Chechen casualties got comparable sums.
Myasnikov received three medals for his service in Chechnya, the highest of which praises his "heroic actions in providing for public order." He can hardly stand to look when his wife brings them out. The police, he said, is "a crazy house," and elite units like the one he joined are "even worse. Then you have a war on top of it all."
His daughters, now 11 and 15, have little idea what their father did in Chechnya. He has never told them about the zachistka. They know only what he told them about what we was doing the day his head got blown up. "They said they were going to buy apples," said the younger, Ksenia.
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Analyst Defends Prewar Spy Data on Iraq
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Weapons-Intelligence.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- A top U.S. intelligence analyst who supervised the production of the U.S. government's key prewar findings on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs says he believes those conclusions were sound, even though many have not been validated.
Stuart A. Cohen, the vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council, a body of senior intelligence analysts which advises CIA Director George J. Tenet, argued in an article Friday that with all the evidence the U.S. government possessed, ``no reasonable person could have ... reached any conclusions or alternative views that were profoundly different from those that we reached.''
Cohen was the acting chairman of the council when he oversaw the production of a National Intelligence Estimate summarizing U.S. evidence on Iraq's alleged weapons programs.
Distributed in October 2002, it judged that Iraq had prohibited biological and chemical weapons and missiles and was producing more. It also concluded that Iraq had a nuclear weapons program but did not have a finished weapon, while noting the State Department's intelligence branch dissented from that view.
``We have re-examined every phrase, line, sentence, judgment and alternative view in this 90-page document and have traced their genesis completely,'' Cohen wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post. ``I believed at the time the estimate was approved for publication, and still believe now, that we were on solid ground in how we reached the judgments we made,'' he said.
A longer version of Cohen's defense was posted on the CIA's web site Friday afternoon.
Only a small portion of the classified National Intelligence Estimate was made public, in July. Last year, as the estimate was circulated within the government, the CIA released an unclassified paper that summarized its key points.
The estimate's findings served as a foundation for the Bush administration's case for war.
In his article, Cohen stayed away from discussing any divide between the U.S. intelligence community's judgments on Iraq and the way President Bush and his administration characterized these conclusions to the public. Some Democrats have said the administration exaggerated what intelligence community knew, ignoring uncertainties as it tried to persuade the world to support the war.
Cohen did acknowledge some uncertainties, but did not speak to the politics of the issue.
``There is a reason that the October 2002 review of Iraq's WMD programs is called a National Intelligence ESTIMATE and not a National Intelligence FACTBOOK,'' he said. ``On almost any issue of the day that we face, hard evidence will only take intelligence professionals so far. Our job is to fill in the gaps with informed analysis.''
Cohen also set out to correct what he describes as myths that have emerged about the intelligence estimate on Iraq. The estimate made no recommendation on whether to go to war, he says. It relied on intelligence reports not from a single source, but many.
The article also argued that there is little substantive difference between the capability to quickly produce weapons and possessing actual weapons. So far, weapons hunters in Iraq have found no finished chemical or biological weapons, but what they interpret as possible signs of a program to ramp up production of biological weapons on short notice. They also describe an Iraqi intention to acquire prohibited long-range missiles.
Cohen said solid evidence of Iraq's weapons programs may yet be found.
``Finding physically small but extraordinarily lethal weapons in a country that is larger than the state of California would be a daunting task even under far more hospitable circumstances,'' he says.
Cohen, a 30-year veteran of the CIA, also worries that in the face of all the criticism, intelligence analysts will become averse to reaching -- and pronouncing -- conclusions on a given issue unless they have ``ironclad evidence,'' something in short supply in the murky intelligence world.
``Fundamentally, the intelligence community increasingly will be in danger of not connecting the dots until the dots have become a straight line,'' he wrote.
Still, Cohen acknowledged the possibility the prewar judgments on Iraq were inaccurate.
``If we eventually are proven wrong -- that is, that there were no weapons of mass destruction and the WMD programs were dormant or abandoned -- the American people will be told the truth; we would have it no other way,'' he said.
http://www.cia.gov/cia/public--affairs/press--release/2003/pr11282003.html
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Scholar Says U.S. Unharmed
Gao Defends Human Rights Efforts, Appeals for Sympathy
By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17475-2003Nov27?language=printer
Gao Zhan, the former American University researcher who pleaded guilty to selling sensitive technology to China, said yesterday that her actions did not harm U.S. national security and that she never intended to help the Chinese government that once imprisoned her.
Gao, freed from a Chinese prison two years ago after U.S. diplomatic protests, defended her human rights work and sought to contain the public backlash from her guilty plea Wednesday in Alexandria federal court to one count of unlawful export of computer microprocessors with potential military uses.
"I am not an agent, nor a double agent, for any government," she said in an interview. "I'm just purely a scholar, a sociologist trying to bring my dreams to reality. It's that simple."
Gao, in the interview and an earlier statement, said that she conducted business with Chinese business entities and research institutes, "not the Chinese government per se." She said she wanted to raise funds to finance a women's research institute and radio talk show in China.
The 43-year-old U.S. permanent resident, who now lives in Herndon and does freelance work for Voice of America's Radio Free Asia, faces up to 13 years in prison for selling 80 military-formatted microprocessors to a Chinese government-authorized defense firm for more than $539,000. The court released Gao on $50,000 personal recognizance bond pending sentencing March 5.
Gao said she has opposed the Chinese Communist regime "from Day One" and "never intended to betray the United States, especially the Bush administration, who rescued me and saved my family." She pleaded guilty, she said, to accept responsibility for her actions "as a God-fearing Christian" and to spare her husband and three sons, ages 8, 1 and 2 months, the strain and cost of a long trial
As human rights groups and China researchers distanced themselves from Gao's troubles, U.S. defense experts said the technology she sold was unlikely to yield significant advances to Chinese researchers.
Speaking from her home, where she spent the Thanksgiving holiday, Gao made a plea for public sympathy, calling her family's plight a "tragedy." She thanked President Bush, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the American people "for caring about me and my family . . . I beg them, don't rush to any judgment."
Gao said that the "lack of discretion in my past deeds doesn't mean that I have lost the moral high ground in my advocacy for democracy in China."
Gao's statements marked the latest twist in a murky, three-year tale of intrigue and espionage charges surrounding the sociologist, whose academic record consists largely of studies of women's and families issues in China and Taiwan. Gao was arrested on Feb. 11, 2001, by Beijing authorities as she, her husband and her son were about to return to the United States after a visit.
Her husband and son were each held separately for 26 days before being released. She was imprisoned for 166 days, prompting intercession by Bush and Powell. She was released to return to the United States one day after a Chinese court convicted her of spying for Taiwan and sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
At the time, her human rights attorneys said Chinese authorities objected to her having officially restricted materials that were collected and used by scholars and sold openly in bookstores.
Yesterday, Gao said she was also interrogated by security ministry officials about her business activities. She declined to elaborate, citing threats to her and relatives. She said speculation that her detention was part of a Chinese government ruse was "total nonsense."
Her felony plea leaves her subject to deportation, Gao said. Her attorney said prosecutors have told the court that they will recommend no immigration action be taken against her if she "provides substantial cooperation." Gao sold additional electronic equipment to China, and federal officials said they had prepared charges that she had sold items with no civilian uses.
Chinese scholars and human rights workers said Gao's violation of U.S. export licensing requirements for shipments of sensitive technology appear unconnected either to her research or her subsequent human rights appeals against Chinese detention policies.
Gao's offense "was related to her business activities, not to her academic activities," said Sam S. Zhao, professor at the University of Denver's graduate school for international studies.
Saman Zia-Zarifi, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Asia division, said that regardless of Gao's activities, China's detention policies fall beneath international standards and that its practice of seizing and releasing political prisoners as diplomatic bargaining chips should not be tolerated. "We call it hostage-politik," he said.
Gao admitted shipping 80 military Intel 486 DX2 microprocessors to the Nanjing Research Institute of Electronics Technology, also known as the Nanjing SunSea Industry Corp., which court documents say is a premier Chinese radar designer.
Federal law restricts the export without a license of such computer technology, which is specially "hardened" for use at super-low and high temperatures or shielded from radiation. Such "dual-use" components could be used in civilian and military applications, such as aircraft or guided missiles and bombs.
U.S. businesses argue, however, that since the end of the Cold War, such export limits are curbing U.S. marketing opportunities because similar technologies are available from foreign competitors. A 2002 congressional report said China's domestic semiconductor research has advanced such that it is closing in on U.S. technology.
"Why would China want obsolete chips . . . and so few of them, when the Chinese already have access to the very latest chip technology?" said John Frankenstein, a Columbia University China defense analyst. China wants more sophisticated guided munitions, he said, but "there would be no need for China to import these chips."
Staff writers Jerry Markon and Philip P. Pan and news researcher Karl Evanzz contributed to this report.
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UN adopts protocol on unexploded weapons -- the "sleeping killers"
GENEVA (AFP)
Nov 28, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031128195349.7kxtxda5.html
Representatives of 92 countries on Friday adopted an accord aimed at forcing governments to clear up millions of unexploded weapons left behind after conflicts around the world, diplomats said.
These "sleeping killers" -- a label used by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in reference to arms such as bombs, shells, missiles and cluster bombs -- kill thousands of people, mainly civilians, long after wars have ended.
Aid agencies welcomed the adoption of the text, but expressed dismay at its "weak" content, noting that the accord would largely apply to future conflicts.
Chris Sanders, the Dutch ambassador for disarmament and the main architect of protocol number five, said it would likely come into force around the start of 2005 once it has has been ratified by 20 countries.
The text, which extends the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons, marks the first time a legally-binding treaty on disarmament has been adopted at the United Nations since curbs on anti-personnel landmines were approved in 1996.
It obliges a country taking part to "mark and clear, remove or destroy explosive remnants of war in affected territories under its control."
This would encourage attacking nations to "think twice before using certain weapons," said one western diplomat.
It would also pressure countries to ensure their weapons explode on impact.
Experts estimate that up to a third of cluster bombs, which the US unleashed in great numbers in Iraq and Afghanistan, failed to go off when dropped.
At present, there is no enforceable principle of paying for the mess you make. A nation is simply invited to take part in any clean-up operation, while help from the UN and other international organisations can also be requested.
The US-led coalition was doing a good, voluntary job of tidying away war debris in Iraq, which mainly came from the former Iraqi regime, noted Sanders.
"The important step they have made today is that they have accepted a legally-binding commitment to do so in the future," he told reporters in Geneva.
The protocol is a compromise between the European Union, which wanted a restricting text, and the United States, which was reluctant to sign a new legally-binding instrument.
The fact that Washington finally agreed to this solution was described as "a divine surprise" by one European diplomat.
It is the first disarmament treaty signed by the Bush administration, which still refuses to ratify the nuclear Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, adopted in
To appease fears from Japan, which dropped shells and mines across Asia during World War II, article seven of the protocol says a signatory country "in a position to do so" must help to clean up unexploded weapons left behind.
But such get-out clauses drew a scathing response from Human Rights Watch, the advocacy group.
"Because the text is so weak, the success of the protocol will depend on good will and good intentions," the group's arms director, Stephen Goose, said in a statement.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, which was the initiator of the discussions on unexploded munitions in 2000, welcomed the adoption but said the protocol applies primarily to wars that occur after it has been ratified.
The agency pledged to urge governments to give equal priority to eliminating existing unexploded weapons.
Aid agencies estimate that tens of millions of unexploded munitions are scattered across about 90 countries.
In France and Belgium explosives from World War I are still being discovered and the problem is particularly severe in southeast Asian countries like Laos and Cambodia which were attacked by the United States in the 1970s.
French aid group Handicap International meanwhile voiced regrets that the protocol "does not better guarantee the protection of civilians against new proliferations", such as cluster bombs.
Such weapons should be banned "until the humanitarian impact of their use has been resolved", it said.
Handicap International is one the six founding organisations of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, which was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1997.
The new protocol complements the 1997 Ottawa Convention, which bans the production and use of anti-personnel landmines.
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Blix Says Hopes U.S. Learned a Lesson in Iraq
November 28, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-iraq-blix.html
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector, was quoted on Friday as saying he hoped Washington had learned its lesson in Iraq about the need for multinational cooperation.
Blix also told the Belgian daily De Morgen the United States could not simply choose to leave Iraq after toppling Saddam Hussein.
``The United States is on the ground, they can't leave now. But...they don't have much experience in reconstructing a country,'' said Blix, the former Swedish foreign minister who for 16 years headed the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
``They will need the United Nations a great deal. I hope the Americans have learned their lesson and recognize the need for cooperation.
``I don't really see them doing quite the same thing in Iran or North Korea very quickly. And you better believe that when they show up with evidence again, we will scrutinize them very closely,'' he said.
Blix is putting together and heading a new commission against weapons of mass destruction, paid for by Sweden and supported by international think-thanks.
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Brain injuries high among Iraq casualties
By Spc. Chuck Wagner
Army News Service,
28 November 2003
http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/read.php?story_id_key=5445
WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Nov. 24, 2003) -- U.S. casualties in Iraq may be suffering a greater share of brain injuries than in previous wars, causing concern among military doctors.
Doctors with the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center at Walter Reed Army Medical Center say early casualty assessments suggest service members are returning with a wide range of brain injuries - from mild concussions to coma or death - in larger percentages than the military's rule of thumb.
This suspected rise in an injury notoriously debilitating to victims and hard for doctors to diagnose may result from the terrorists' explosive arsenal and vulnerabilities in current U.S. combat gear, according to experts.
"It's always been well known there are going to be brain injuries in combat," said Dr. Louis French, a neuropsychologist and assistant director for clinical services at the brain center. "About 20 percent is usually what's talked about. So far, what we've seen suggests a higher percentage."
Among 105 casualties assessed between June and October, doctors discovered about two-thirds, or 67 percent, to have brain injuries, according to Dr. Laurie Ryan, another neuropsychologist and the assistant director for research.
The center is pursuing several studies to statistically verify the trend.
The cause for the dramatic increase seems to be the changed nature of warfare in Iraq. The terrorists' weapons of choice are high explosives. Land mines, rocket propelled grenades and improvised bombs allow terrorists to skirt direct engagement with better trained and equipped soldiers, and can still inflict damage to soldiers whose torso, or in military jargon their "center mass", is protected against small arms ballistics.
"There's not as many gunshot wounds," French bluntly noted.
Ironically, a well-protected body has forced the enemy to attack the brain, the only organ still vulnerable to deadly attack.
Another leading cause of head injuries is vehicle accidents, said Ryan, followed by falls.
Although soldiers are wearing head protection, the Kevlar helmet may not be serving soldiers as a solid defense against modern warfare's growing threat - concussive impact.
"It's like a pan on your head, held on by shoestring webbing," said Sgt. Tyler Hall of the 14th Combat Engineers, Fort Lewis Washington. "The Kevlar is a crude system. When you take a hit, it rings your head like a bell."
"It's not designed to absorb impact," French concurred.
Hall has been treated in the center since August, when a convoy traveling near Tikrit came under attack. Terrorists rigged a 155 mm howitzer shell to detonate in the sand as the convoy drove past. The explosion blew through the vehicle's bed and tossed Hall. He landed face down. From the moment he was put on a Blackhawk helicopter until he awoke at Walter Reed a month later, Hall was in a coma caused by the blunt force against his head, despite wearing a Kevlar. He's undergone several surgeries to reconstruct the bones in his face and drain fluid from his brain.
Doctors are treating Hall for several injuries, but it's the head injury that repeatedly threatened to rob Hall of his life, and later the ability to appreciate that he still had a life.
"Day to day I'm getting better. A fog is finally off my eyes. It's frustrating, very frustrating. It's like fighting something you don't see, no one sees, but you can feel it," said Hall, who's improved under intense care at the center but still suffers headaches, nausea, and memory loss. "I still misplace things. I just want to be able to ride in a car again without getting sick."
French and Ryan said brain injuries add a new element of difficulty to casualty assessment, because the injuries are challenging to diagnose and difficult to differentiate from symptoms of other injuries, for instance the symptoms of psychological stress.
"A blow to the head is known to cause depression. Anyone who is returning from a situation in which they are being shot at is likely to experience emotional trauma that can cause depression. It's hard to draw a line between them," said French. "They share symptoms."
He admits brain injuries may be neglected, or even pushed aside as merely psychological.
"They are suffering just as much, but may not get the same support as someone who has an observable injury like a bullet wound or a broken leg," said French.
Brain injuries can exert themselves in physical, cognitive or emotional symptoms, and left untreated they can pose significant hurdles to recovery.
The center is seeking out possible brain injury casualties instead of waiting for referred patients. Doctors screen each new casualty list in search of those likely to have experienced concussive impact, like those in explosions, vehicle accidents or falls. Doctors arrange for personal interviews with high-risk service members. They've screened over 100 patients so far, and continue the effort with Walter Reed's approximately 10 daily arrivals, said Ryan.
The brain center on Walter Reed is the headquarters for eight different centers, including four veterans' affairs, three military and a civilian site. The center is congressionally funded. It works hand in hand, but independently with other medical facilities on Walter Reed.
The center's doctors also are involved in analyzing the newly developed Modular Integrated Communication Helmet (MICH) for its protection against impact-related injuries, said Ryan.
The MICH is currently fielded with Rangers, Special Forces, Navy SEALS, Air Force Special Operations, the Marine reconnaissance community, the FBI's Hostage Response Team, and a brigade at the 82nd Airborne Division, according to a MICH project officer.
The padded MICH is the only ballistic helmet used by Special Operations Command also authorized for use with motorcycles or other all-terrain vehicles, which the project says attests to improved impact protection. Lab testing showed a 40 percent improvement in impact protection over the Kevlar.
The jury is still out on whether the MICH can protect against the causes of brain injuries faced in Iraq, but there's at least one soldier voting in favor of dampening the blows landing on our troops' heads.
"The Kevlar physically moves and bounces on your head. It's heavy and you hear soldiers complaining about headaches a lot," said Hall, running his hand along the back of his head, still laced with metal sutures. "I'd like to see the Army find something better."
(Editor's note: Spc. Chuck Wagner writes for the Pentagram newspaper at Fort Myer, Va.)
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U.S. considers turning scooters into war robots
Fri. Nov. 28 2003
Associated Press
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1070032823376_233/?hub=SciTech
NEW YORK - It's called the Segway Human Transporter, but the Pentagon is drafting the two-wheeled scooter as part of a plan to develop battlefield robots that think on their own and communicate with troops.
The program is still in the research phase, so the self-balancing scooters aren't expected to report to boot camp anytime soon.
So far, university researchers armed with Pentagon funding have programmed Segway robots that can open doors, avoid obstacles, and chase soccer balls -- all without human control.
Researchers say potential applications for the robots include performing search missions on the battlefield, transporting injured soldiers to safety, or following humans around while hauling their gear.
Dean Kamen, the Segway's inventor, says he had no qualms about enlisting his brainchild into the military.
"You build a car and it can either be used as an ambulance, or it can drive your troops around," he said. "My personal reason for liking (this program) is we would love to get more Segways at universities. The more we have our technology among the tech world, particularly the young geeks, it could only help us."
Any useful applications developed by universities could help kickstart badly needed sales for the fledgling scooter company.
When the scooters were unveiled with great fanfare in 2001, Kamen's supporters predicted millions would be sold, transforming urban transportation. But in September, when company issued a voluntary recall to fix a problem that caused riders to fall off when the batteries run low, it was disclosed that only 6,000 Segways had been sold.
Since the Segways retail for $3,995 and $4,495 US, depending on the model, new sales to the government or any other big customer could "help lower the price and let more people afford it," said John Morrell, chief development engineer for privately held Segway LLC.
So far, the military program involves 15 Segways, which were delivered to university and government research labs over the last few months. The project is funded as part of a program in which the Pentagon is spending $26 million this year to develop software for autonomous systems.
Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon's defence advanced research projects agency, said the idea is to let researchers concentrate on what the agency calls Mobile Autonomous Robot Software, rather than the mode of transportation. The Segway, which uses gyroscopes to balance itself, provides a common platform on which researchers can swap open-source programs.
"One of the focuses of this program is to develop software that would allow the robotic system to learn, so it can better perceive its outside environment," Walker said.
The Segway can make much tighter turns than four-wheeled robotic vehicles currently used in the military and by researchers, and its high centre of gravity means cameras and sensors can be placed a metre or more above the ground _ a height more suitable for interacting with humans.
The scooters were modified by software engineers at Segway so they could be controlled by laptop computers. The researchers then loaded them up with cameras, sensors, communications gear and other gadgets.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology built a Segway robot that can navigate hallways and open doors.
At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Segways are being used as part of a lab's ongoing efforts to build robots that can play soccer with humans. So far, the robot can chase an orange soccer ball and kick it. The next goal is to teach the robot the rules of the game and get it to communicate with human players.
"They will come together not as a master-slave relationship, with the human telling the robot what to do," , said computer science professor Manuela Veloso. "The human and robot will be part of the same task."
University of Southern California researchers are working on ways to get the Segway to act as a "mule" that follows humans around, carrying their gear. The robotic Segway hauls as much as 45 kilograms.
Another USC project involves controlling the way the Segway pitches and bounces over rough terrain so it can carry sensitive cargo, perhaps an injured human, according to lead researcher Gaurav Sukhatme.
A University of Pennsylvania lab is getting a robot-controlled Segway to communicate with an autonomous robotic blimp and small, truck-like vehicles so they can work as a team to find a designated object in a certain geographic area. The robots would navigate and communicate with each other autonomously, but a human would oversee the whole network.
"The human operator can basically interrogate the robots," said Jim Keller, a project manager. "If a robot has seen something it thinks is interesting, it will send an alert back. The human operator will get more images by bringing in other robots to look at the same location from whatever their perspective is."
The researchers tried the robots out at Fort Benning in Georgia a few months ago. But mostly they've been testing them out at the university's football stadium.
The athletes who congregate there "roll their eyes when they see us coming," Keller said.
----
Inside the Ring
November 28, 2003
By Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm
Counterleak
A Pentagon counterintelligence unit has begun an investigation of the leak of a highly classified government letter that details years of reported contacts between al Qaeda operatives and senior members of Saddam Hussein's regime.
The Pentagon letter said contacts began in the early 1990s, when Osama bin Laden moved from being simply a terror financier to the builder of the global terror network al Qaeda.
Top Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) officials met with bin Laden at his farm in Sudan in the mid-1990s and relayed technical advise on how to make car bombs, a favorite al Qaeda tactic, the letter states.
The Weekly Standard broke the story by obtaining a copy of the top-secret letter signed by Douglas Feith, undersecretary of defense for policy, and sent to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence late last month. The letter was a response to questions from the committee. The letter lists 50 intelligence reports of contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad.
The leak angered the Bush administration. But supporters of the president's decision to invade Iraq and remove Saddam are relishing the disclosure. They say the intelligence is proof that Baghdad aided bin Laden, whose al Qaeda group was behind the September 11 attacks.
The Pentagon's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) opened a probe that will look at the process by which the letter was sent from the Pentagon to Capitol Hill. It will also try to determine who had leaked it, a senior defense official told Inside the Ring.
It was reported previously that the CIA and Senate intelligence committee had asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak.
The counterintelligence unit normally focuses on shoring up security at places such as the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba. Getting the Feith letter case shows how egregious the Pentagon considers the breach, the official said.
"It was entirely unprofessional," the official said.
The source said the agency will try to determine whether the procedures in sending classified material to the Hill are "sound and should anything be tightened up." The source said the agency will identify everyone who handled the letter.
Strategic Guam
The strategic Pacific island of Guam is being looked at by the Pentagon as a place where U.S. military force numbers could be sharply increased.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited the island, located in the northern Pacific Ocean about three-quarters of the way from Hawaii to the Philippines, on Nov. 14.
A U.S. military officer in Guam said the U.S. territory's strategic value is that basing forces there puts them "14 hours closer to Asia than any U.S. base."
"With the fall of Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party, North Korea is the next major strategic threat," the officer said.
The officer did not mention the Taiwan Strait, where tensions have increased in recent days. China renewed threats to act against Taiwan over its plan to hold a referendum on a new constitution.
Other officials have said the recent basing of two Los Angeles class attack submarines, including the USS Corpus Christi, which was seen in port earlier this month, were intended to bolster any likely defense of Taiwan. A third submarine also is slated for basing on the island. An aircraft carrier battle group also could be "forward deployed" there.
The Air Force also has a major weapons supply depot on Guam that includes stockpiles of Conventional Air-Launched Cruise missiles and the newer satellite-guided Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM, that was used in the Iraq war.
Rumsfeld on intelligence
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld does not favor a consolidation of U.S. intelligence agencies into one entity.
The secretary was asked his views on civilian and military intelligence consolidation by an airman at Osan Air Base, South Korea, on Nov. 18.
"There are people who talk about the idea of bringing all intelligence under a single entity. It's got some appeal," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld said "national intelligence," the gathering and analysis of strategic information for policy-makers, could logically be consolidated into one agency to save money and improve efficiency.
"The problem with that is, it seems to me, is that national intelligence isn't what it's all about," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "National intelligence is important, but so is military intelligence. So is tactical intelligence. So is preparation of the battlefield. That can be quite different."
Mr. Rumsfeld said, however, that he does not believe all intelligence agencies should be brought under one roof.
"I think the truth is that we're probably arranged pretty well," he said.
Mr. Rumsfeld added that there are two things "you don't want to centralize excessively." One is research and development, which can be harmed by a lack of innovation by centralization.
"The second-worst thing you can do, I think, is to centralize intelligence," he said. "What we need is multiple sources of information. We need competing ideas and a variety of ways of gathering intelligence, it seems to me. We need people who think unconventionally about intelligence."
The remarks were viewed as a veiled criticism of the CIA, which is supposed to be the paramount U.S. intelligence agency.
Mr. Rumsfeld said intelligence officials need to think about their business, especially the "unknown unknowns," in ways that are "fresh and different."
"So I could criticize it, I could play it round or square, centralize it one place, centralize it another place, or leave it like it is," he said. "My best judgment tells me that we're probably better arranged today than we would be if we took either of the other courses."
Col. West update
Neal Puckett, the attorney for Army Lt. Col. Allen B. West, provided us with a two-page report on his client's Article 32 hearing on Nov. 19 in Tikrit. The Army has charged Col. West with aggravated assault and threatening to kill an Iraqi detainee. Col. West said he fired his pistol twice near the Iraqi to scare him into providing details about a plot to assassinate the officer.
"There [was] testimony that the Iraqis know that we cannot actually force or psychologically coerce them to give any information they don't want to give and regularly so state to interrogators," Mr. Puckett wrote.
"In this case, Lt. Col. West believed that the best course of action, in the limited time he had, was to take measures to ensure that any potential attacks on his soldiers were averted. He decided that the information must be obtained from the Iraqi policeman. He psychologically intimidated the detainee, who then provided names and places and methods of attack. Thereafter, Lt. Col. West's men took active security precautions, and no further attacks or ambushes occurred. One of the most important measures of effectiveness in combat is the absence of American casualties."
The hearing officer may recommend that Col. West face a court-martial or administrative punishment, or that the charges be dismissed.
Col. West spent his Thanksgiving running a 10K, serving turkey to soldiers and answering a barrage of e-mails.
Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough are Pentagon reporters. Mr. Gertz can be reached at 202/636-3274 or by e-mail at bgertz@washingtontimes.com. Mr. Scarborough can be reached at 202/636-3208 or by e-mail at rscarborough@washingtontimes.com.
--------
Army Commanders Felt Iraq Ammo Was Short
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Armys-Appraisal.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Soldiers with the Army's 3rd Infantry Division charged into Iraq in April short of the ammunition their commanders had said was necessary to invade, according to the division's postwar evaluation of the fighting.
It was one of a number of supply problems encountered by the 3rd Infantry before and during its 21-day dash to Baghdad from Kuwait, according to the internal review, a 293-page after-action report created by the division's senior officers and troops.
During the run-up to the war, division commanders requested additional ammunition be delivered to front-line units. The request was approved, but the troops could not obtain all the ordnance despite months of war preparations.
``Every attempt to gain the ammunition assets resulted in some agency or another denying requests, short-loading trucks or turning away soldiers,'' the report said. ``The entire situation became utter chaos. ... The division crossed (into Iraq) short the ammunition it had declared necessary to commit to combat.''
The report, whose authors were not identified by name, catalogued serious problems with supply, security and the handling of prisoners of war. It blamed many problems on higher headquarters or other parts of the military, although it did point out some places where the division could train its own soldiers better.
A spokesman for the division, Maj. Darryl Wright, characterized the report as a candid effort to pinpoint problems and refine tactics so the division fights better next time. He said the report, obtained by The Associated Press and other outlets, had not yet been finalized.
During the Iraq invasion, more than 12,000 troops of the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized) joined thousands of Marines and other soldiers in the northward thrust to Baghdad. The first U.S. infantry and armored units entered Iraq on March 20 and took Baghdad within three weeks.
The 3rd Infantry, based at Fort Stewart, Ga., suffered 44 killed during combat in Iraq. Much of its report focused on problems encountered during the rapid thrust into Iraq, which has since given way to an increasingly dangerous occupation.
The report praised the division's troops, leaders and front-line fighting gear, particularly the M-1 Abrams tank and the M-2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
``The Third Infantry Division (Mechanized) moved farther and faster than any other ground offensive operation in history,'' the report claimed.
``U.S. armored combat systems enabled the division to close with and destroy heavily armored and fanatically determined enemy forces with impunity, often within urban terrain,'' it said.
Yet the division had serious problems receiving supplies while on the move, including vehicle parts, ammunition, fuel and medical supplies. Had the division been required to move beyond Baghdad, or had it required more time to reach the city, its advance would have stalled, the report suggested.
``Most units literally spent 21 days in continuous combat operations without receiving a single repair part,'' the report said. ``Shortages of predictably high-demand repair parts and vehicular fluids had the most lasting effect on fleet readiness.''
In a section describing the problems combat engineers faced in receiving needed construction equipment, the report said, ``The Army's current supply system failed before and during the operation.''
Despite well-publicized fears that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein would use chemical or biological weapons on advancing U.S. troops, not all soldiers had complete protective gear, the report said.
A battalion of air defense troops was among those. ``More than half of the battalion deployed with some type of nuclear, biological and chemical equipment shortage,'' the report said.
Units ran into shortages of gloves, suits and mask filters. Some protective suits weren't fitted properly, and decontamination kits had expired. Some troops simply left their equipment at home.
The division also had problems handling enemy prisoners of war, the report said.
``Soldiers failed to properly record the circumstances of many captures,'' it said. ``Later, we were unable to identify enemy soldiers who violated the law of war, and, therefore, cannot achieve a major goal set forth by President Bush: To punish those who violate the law of war.''
Some units that operated away from the front lines had inadequate weapons to defend themselves as they faced guerrilla attacks, the report said. ``Security was lacking for critical command and control nodes ... as well as for critical staff personnel.''
Communications were another persistent problem. The division, along with other advancing units, stretched out across southern Iraq, with support units reaching back to Kuwait. But some transmitters didn't have the range to reach more distant units. Iridium satellite phones only functioned about half of the time, the report said.
The division also had difficulty delivering mail to the troops, the report said. Mail, in particular, is considered a critical morale booster for fighting soldiers.
-------- propaganda wars
WHITE HOUSE MEMO
When Foreign Policy Aims and Campaign Needs Clash
November 28, 2003
By DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/national/28MEMO.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 - After spending months trying to recast President Bush as a man devoted to building international coalitions rather than the gun-slinging cowboy of European political cartoons, Mr. Bush's foreign policy team was stunned by the Republican National Committee's new advertising campaign. The spot hailed the president as a man who pre-empts first and asks questions later.
The advertisement, which ran in Iowa this week and is to be broadcast in New Hampshire in December, portrays Mr. Bush in precisely the terms many White House aides have been trying to live down. For months, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, have been orchestrating speeches in which Mr. Bush affirms his faith in a strong United Nations and emphasizes how he is working with Asian and European nations to put diplomatic pressure on North Korea and Iran to disarm.
Ms. Rice was the primary author of the National Security Strategy last year, which enshrined as policy the concept of pre-emptive action against growing military threats. But she has asserted since that too little attention was paid to the rest of the strategy, and she has repeatedly said that for Mr. Bush, a pre-emptive military action, like the one he chose in Iraq, "is only the very last option this president reaches for, not the first."
It was a rude awakening, then, when the foreign policy team returned to Washington last weekend and saw the political advertisement from the Republican National Committee, with its suggestion that voters call their Congressional representatives and "tell them to support the president's policy of pre-emptive self-defense."
"What was that all about?" one of Mr. Bush's senior aides asked after returning from Britain, where the president took his appeal for collaborative action against common enemies to new heights. Saying the advertisement ignored Mr. Bush's recent series of speeches, the official complained, "Don't these guys read the papers?"
In fact, what both the White House and the Republican National Committee wandered into was the gulf between George Bush the president and George Bush the candidate for re-election. Just shy of 12 months from Election Day, Mr. Bush's political team and his foreign policy team are emphasizing opposite messages, leading one senior State Department official to say this week, in exasperation, "Karl Rove ought to learn that any ad he broadcasts in Iowa gets rebroadcast in Italy."
None of the foreign policy advisers interviewed for this article agreed to be quoted by name, largely out of fear of appearing at odds with Mr. Rove, the White House political adviser.
But the issue is not simply Mr. Rove, who did not return telephone calls seeking comment on the advertisement. Mr. Bush is singing very different tunes, depending on the audience.
Raising money around the country, he emphasizes his go-it-alone decisions, never mentioning the United Nations, an institution many in his conservative base say they would like to see disappear.
"In Afghanistan and Iraq, we gave ultimatums to terror regimes," he told an audience in Phoenix on Tuesday, using a line he has repeated dozens of times at dozens of dinners. "Those regimes chose defiance, and those regimes are no more."
It is a line that usually brings the audience to its feet, cheering. "It's the red-meat part of the speech," said one of the officials responsible for shaping such campaign messages.
Yet when the audience is primarily an international one, Mr. Bush is the picture of an alliance-building president. In Britain, he invoked the name of Woodrow Wilson, a Democratic predecessor no one on the Bush foreign policy team could recall him citing before. He also talked of turning the United Nations into a far more effective institution.
"Like 11 presidents before me, I believe in the international institutions and alliances that America helped to form and helps to lead," he said. "The United States and Great Britain have labored hard to help make the United Nations what it is supposed to be: an effective instrument of our collective security."
Mr. Bush was hardly unqualified in his praise of Wilson. He warned his British audience that "we learned that idealism, if it is to do any good in this world, requires common purpose and national strength, moral courage and patience in difficult tasks."
But Wilson is not likely to be mentioned on the $2,000-a-plate trail that Mr. Bush resumes on Monday in Detroit and Newark.
"The problem here is that all campaigns have a tendency to try to simplify foreign policy issues," said James B. Steinberg, the deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton and now vice president and director of foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. "In this case, Condi and others have all said that pre-emption is a last resort, but the campaign advertisements whiz past that distinction. And that's a particularly difficult problem if you are a sitting president, because every campaign utterance is seen as an expression of policy."
Mr. Bush's aides are quick to say under the cover of anonymity that the problem of dual messages is not likely to get better anytime soon. They say that though Mr. Bush is often accused of bending policy decisions to fit the needs of his campaign, in this case the Republican National Committee put together its advertisement without checking with those developing the policy.
But the queasiness of Mr. Bush's foreign policy advisers does not seem likely to change the Republican campaign strategy, especially when pre-emption is an issue that separates Mr. Bush from Democratic candidates. Those contenders have made Mr. Bush's ability to alienate allies a key element of their argument that it is time for the president to be replaced.
"When it comes to winning the war against terror, the president's critics are adopting a policy that will make us more vulnerable in a dangerous world," Ed Gillespie, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote in an Oct. 28 memorandum to "R.N.C. members and Republican leaders."
Underlining the next sentence in the memorandum, Mr. Gillespie wrote: "Specifically, they now reject the policy of pre-emptive self-defense and would return us to a policy of reacting to terrorism in its aftermath. The bombings of the World Trade Center in 1993, Khobar Towers, our embassies in East Africa and the U.S.S. Cole were treated as criminal matters instead of the terrorist acts they were."
Mr. Gillespie made no reference to President Clinton's missile attack on one of Osama bin Laden's camps, an attack that missed the leader of Al Qaeda.
Mr. Gillespie concluded: "If we do not fight the war against terror in places like Baghdad and Kabul, we are more likely to have it fought in places like Boston and Kansas."
It is a line very similar to one Mr. Bush uses on the campaign trail.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Senate Opens Inquiry Into Leaked Memos
Computer Files Discussed Democrats' Strategy on Bush Judicial Nominations
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 28, 2003; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17502-2003Nov27.html
The Senate sergeant-at-arms has opened an investigation into Republicans obtaining and publicizing internal memos from the computer and network resources of two Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Late Tuesday, Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) confirmed that his inquiry had found that a member of his staff "had improperly accessed some of the documents" and a second former staff member "may also have been involved."
Hatch said the current staff member, who was not named publicly and has been put on administrative leave, denied releasing to the media the strategy memos written for Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). Excerpts of the memos were first published Nov. 14 by the Wall Street Journal and the next day in the Washington Times.
The 15 memos written from 2001 to 2003 promote strategies for opposing judicial nominees of President Bush and occasionally report the views of outside organizations that have made suggestions on how to respond. Since the first disclosure, House and Senate Republicans, along with conservative groups, have continued to publicize the memos, using them to criticize the Democrats for their tactics.
On Nov. 17, the Independent Women's Forum, a conservative advocacy group, issued a press release in which it said the memos show the "immense power they [special interest groups] exert over Democratic legislators." The press release goes on to identify Manuel Miranda, a senior aide to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), as circulating the memos .
"Manuel Miranda, counsel in Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist's office, recently sent around an e-mail composed of strategy memos that had been obtained from the 2001-2002 period when Democrats ran the Judiciary Committee," the Women's Forum release said. "The 'real bosses' of Democratic legislators, Miranda concluded, are the liberal interest groups that more or less tell the senators when to sit, speak and roll over -- and which Bush judges to confirm or not."
Miranda, who worked for the Judiciary panel's Republican staff until joining Frist in February, said in an interview Wednesday that he had sent the Women's Forum and other groups an e-mail copy of the Wall Street Journal article but nothing more. Asked about the Democratic strategy memos, he said they "have never touched my office. . . . I have never distributed any memos to anyone."
Rieva Holycross, the Women's Forum official who said she was responsible for the Nov. 17 press release, described it as "a terrible mistake." The group never received the memos, she said, and only had the Wall Street Journal article that Miranda had sent. Holycross said the quote attributed to Miranda in the press release was a rewrite of a sentence in the Journal article, something that Miranda had also suggested.
Miranda refused to say whether he had been questioned by the sergeant-at-arms investigators. "I can't comment on an ongoing investigation," he said. When asked whether any of Hatch's investigators had talked to him, he said he had "not met with them at all."
Frist spokeswoman Amy Call said the office was cooperating with the investigation but would have no further comment.
Five committee Republicans have objected to Sergeant-at-Arms William H. Pickle allowing anyone to read their backup tapes without their consent. They also want the inquiry to be limited to examining the "memoranda in question and no other files."
Three days after the Wall Street Journal article appeared, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.), ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee along with Kennedy and Durbin, requested that Pickle hire security experts to determine who retrieved the documents.
They also asked for an audit of logs to determine who may have been trying to access the files or directories from which the memos had been copied. Two days later, the senators complained to Hatch that he had not yet given consent for the committee hard drives to be turned over to Pickle.
On Wednesday, Leahy issued a statement saying he believed Pickle's investigation "is being handled in good faith" and "with the intent of identifying and solving this problem."
That same day, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), a Judiciary Committee member who asked Pickle to get his permission before accessing his computer files, took the Senate floor to discuss the memos.
After saying he awaited the outcome of the investigation to see how the memos were obtained, he said that now they have "entered into the public domain, and I think it is important that we address these memos and what, in fact, they confirm about the obstruction and destructive politics that have taken hold of the judicial confirmation process and which have left me concerned that there is no foreseeable end to the current gridlock."
-------- drug war
3 California men get leniency in medical-pot case
November 27, 2003
(AP)
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20031126-110956-1925r.htm
LOS ANGELES - Three men who pleaded guilty to distributing medical marijuana to seriously ill patients received probation instead of a federal prison term after a judge expressed admiration for their work and called the prosecution "badly misguided."
Scott Imler, Jeff Yablan and Jeffrey Farrington each received one year of probation and up to 250 hours of community service. They faced up to 30 months in prison after striking a plea bargain with prosecutors.
"Though it was hard to keep faith in the system throughout this process, I know mine was restored today," Mr. Imler said Monday as he thanked U.S. District Judge A. Howard Matz for his leniency and prosecutors for treating him with respect.
Judge Matz said he was navigating "somewhat uncharted shoals" in making the downward departure from sentencing guidelines, but said the three men did not distribute the marijuana for money or political leverage.
He also said they scrupulously adhered to rules established under Proposition 215, the nation's first medical-marijuana law, which allowed Californians with cancer, HIV and certain other chronic medical conditions to grow and use marijuana to ease nausea and other health problems if a physician recommends it.
The 1996 state law conflicted with federal law banning the cultivation, possession and use of marijuana, even for medical purposes. The conflicting laws have led to numerous raids of medical-marijuana centers and lawsuits.
The men ran the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center for five years until 2001, when federal agents raided it and shut it down. The center was providing marijuana to about 960 patients suffering from AIDS, epilepsy, glaucoma, cancer and other serious illnesses, said Mr. Imler's attorney, Ronald Kaye.
Judge Matz said the prosecution was "badly misguided." He said he was baffled and disturbed that the Drug Enforcement Administration and prosecutors wasted so much time and money in prosecuting the case.
"We don't contest the sincerity and good faith of these defendants," lead prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told the judge. "But we do have a legal regime in which a law was passed by Congress, and I think ... all of us, whether we agree with those rules or not, need to abide by them."
-------- police
New Light on Old F.B.I. Fight
November 28, 2003
By MIREYA NAVARRO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/nyregion/28PUER.html?pagewanted=all&position=
In 1965, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wanted to tap the home telephone of a dying Pedro Albizu Campos, then the titular head of Puerto Rico's Nationalist Party. But there was a problem: he did not have a phone.
So while federal agents leaned on the telephone company to speed up Mr. Albizu Campos's installation order, they found out that his family and friends sometimes used a neighbor's phone, and they tapped that one. The agents were eavesdropping to prepare for a possible violent reaction to Mr. Albizu Campos's death. What were they after? "Current, precise information as to condition of subject," the agents in San Juan wrote to J. Edgar Hoover, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. "Plans to foment assassination attempts and other violence at the time of subject's death."
This radiogram is part of secret files on Puerto Rico's independence movement that the F.B.I. kept for decades. For the last three years, the declassified files have been trickling into a tiny office at Hunter College in New York, a few hundred pages at a time. There, amid boxes neatly stacked on wall metal racks, a researcher and a group of students working for Hunter's Center for Puerto Rican Studies are painstakingly producing a detailed inventory of the files.
Of the 1.5 million to 1.8 million pages in the files, about 120,000 have arrived. There are many blacked-out portions. But at a time civil libertarians worry that the F.B.I. may be turning to past controversial methods to fight terrorism, the boxes at Hunter give a sense of the lengths to which the government kept tabs on an old enemy: those fighting for Puerto Rican independence.
Puerto Rico, a commonwealth of the United States, has strong pro-statehood and pro-commonwealth movements, the latter made up of those who want to keep the status quo or some modified version of it. But in the 1930's, 1940's and early 1950's, the independence movement was much more widespread than it is today, and ranged from legal political parties to violent militant groups.
Many Americans became aware of the independence struggle when, on Nov. 1, 1950, two Puerto Rican nationalists tried to shoot their way into Blair House, where President Truman was living while the White House was being remodeled. Mr. Truman was not injured, but one of the Puerto Ricans and a White House guard were killed in the gunfire.
The F.B.I. papers arriving at Hunter so far span six decades, from 1936 to 1995. They track everything from the Puerto Rican Independence Party (still active and known as PIP) to student demonstrations and workers' strikes to bomb explosions and assassination attempts as part of an armed struggle.
They include a 1961 directive from Mr. Hoover to seek information on 12 independence movement leaders, six of them operating in New York, "concerning their weaknesses, morals, criminal records, spouses, children, family life, educational qualifications and personal activities other than independence activities." The instructions were given under the domestic surveillance program known as Cointelpro, which aimed at aggressively monitoring antiwar, leftist and other groups in the United States and disrupting them.
In the case of Puerto Rican independence groups, Mr. Hoover's 1961 memo refers to "our efforts to disrupt their activities and compromise their effectiveness." Scholars say the papers provide invaluable additions to the recorded history of Puerto Rico. "I expect that this will alter somewhat the analysis of why independence hasn't made it," said Félix V. Matos Rodríguez, director of the center at Hunter. "In the 1940's, independence was the second-largest political movement in the island, (after support for commonwealth status), and a real alternative. But it was criminalized."
The existence of the F.B.I. papers came to light during a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in 2000, when Representative José E. Serrano of New York questioned Louis J. Freeh, then F.B.I. director, on the issue. Mr. Freeh gave the first public acknowledgment of the federal government's Puerto Rican surveillance and offered a mea culpa.
"Your question goes back to a period, particularly in the 1960's, when the F.B.I. did operate a program that did tremendous destruction to many people, to the country and certainly to the F.B.I.," Mr. Freeh said, according to transcripts of the hearing. Mr. Freeh said that he would make the files available "and see if we can redress some of the egregious illegal action, maybe criminal action, that occurred in the past."
The F.B.I. did not work alone. It often used information provided by the Police Department of Puerto Rico.
Discovery of the police files caused a public outcry in the 1980's in Puerto Rico and prompted hundreds of civil rights lawsuits. An official apology came in 1999 from Gov. Pedro J. Rossello, who set up a fund to compensate those who were denied jobs, harassed or discredited as a result of blacklisting.
Both the F.B.I. and the police department in Puerto Rico have made their files available to investigation subjects who claim them. One of those subjects is Ramón Bosque-Pérez, a sociologist and the researcher now leading the effort at the Hunter center to preserve the F.B.I. historical trove.
Mr. Bosque-Pérez was one of the authors of a 1997 book on the Puerto Rican police dossiers, known as "carpetas." He said the first inkling that he was under investigation came in the late 1960's, when he was still in high school and politically active. Two plainclothes police officers visited his mother, he said, and advised her to keep him out of trouble.
When Mr. Bosque-Pérez, who later became president of the main pro-independence group at the University of Puerto Rico, claimed his surveillance files, he learned that he had been tracked through the early 1980's. His files recorded his arrest for refusing to register for the draft and his participation in public events beginning in high school, he said.
But his much bulkier police dossier, running more than 2,000 pages, he said, included such minutiae as the license plates of the cars he drove and a partial guest list of a wedding he attended. "The extent of the invasion of privacy and of the threat to the basic right of citizens to express themselves politically was surprising," said Mr. Bosque-Pérez, who said it took him 10 years to obtain his bachelor's degree because his political activities led to frequent suspensions by college administrators.
The F.B.I.files on Mr. Albizu Campos, who headed the Nationalist Party from 1930 until his death in 1965, fill two boxes with 4,700 pages, including meticulous medical records from a long hospital stay at Columbus Hospital in Manhattan (later part of Cabrini Medical Center).
"Writing most of the night," a nurse reported in her overnight notes for April, 11, 1945. "Unable to sleep."
Regarded as the father of Puerto Rico's independence movement by his followers, Mr. Albizu Campos launched a militant crusade in Puerto Rico in the 1930's to sever ties with the United States. He served prison sentences for subversion, attempted murder and conspiring to overthrow the government. It was his followers who tried to assassinate President Truman in 1950, and on March 1, 1954, shot and wounded five congressmen from the visitors' gallery of the House of Representatives.
But members of radical groups were not the only ones being watched. Individuals and groups who worked legally for the cause of independence are also in the files. One 1972 memo listed the number of meetings eight major pro-independence parties and groups had held over a period of five months.
Some of the most interesting papers track the political development of Luis Muñoz Marín, Puerto Rico's first elected governor and founder of the Popular Democratic Party, both architects of the island's current American commonwealth status. Mr. Muñoz Marín, who served four terms, started out as a young socialist and was deemed to be "anti-American" by informants who in the early 1940's reported about his mistress, his political associates and his drinking.
In 1941, when Mr. Muñoz Marín was already president of the Puerto Rican Senate, an F.B.I. agent described him as "a political opportunist supported by radical politicians who desire Puerto Rico's independence from the United States."
"He has no moral character, he is absolutely irresponsible financially, but he is probably the most brilliant politician on the political horizon of Puerto Rico," the agent wrote.
In an interview, Representative Serrano said that most of the surveillance was improper and that some of the violence attributed to "independentistas" was, in fact, the work of infiltrators trying to destroy the movement. Since his Washington office began receiving the F.B.I. files in 2000, he has forwarded copies of the material to both Hunter College and the Judiciary Committee of the Puerto Rican Senate.
Kevin Wilkinson, the F.B.I. Congressional liaison who is overseeing the transfer of the documents to Mr. Serrano's office, said the files must be viewed in the context of their times - the cold war, anti-Vietnam War protests, radical groups. "There were incidents of violence and destruction in Puerto Rico by groups that were considered terrorists, like the Macheteros," he said of one of the violent groups.
But he said that "the whole playing field" has changed since then, and that current federal guidelines and oversight would prevent the F.B.I. from taking action against people peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights.
Kenneth D. McClintock, the Senate minority leader in Puerto Rico and an advocate of statehood, noted that government persecution was not the only factor contributing to the decline of independence fervor. There were also economic and political considerations, he said. But he said of the surveillance, "Undoubtedly, it had a chilling effect on the political opposition in Puerto Rico."
Mr. Matos Rodríguez, the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, one of the largest Latino archives in the United States and the only one focusing on the history of the Puerto Rican diaspora, wants to see the first batch of F.B.I. files posted on the Center's Web site, www.centropr.org, by spring. While he expects the collection to be the subject of academic study, he said it may also spark new - and uncomfortable - public dialogues.
"The other side of the story is the extensive network of Puerto Ricans telling on each other," he said. "This could not have happened without the collaboration of many people in Puerto Rico."
-------- prisons / prisoners
N. Virginia envisions prisoners who buck the system
November 28, 2003
By Arlo Wagner
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20031127-102245-6556r.htm
Jail officials in Northern Virginia are considering charging inmates for each day they are behind bars, to help pay for upkeep.
Officials in Alexandria and Fairfax County said they are working to enact a program that would require state and local inmates to pay a daily $1 fee, which in some cases would help cover meal expenses.
"We're looking at doing a fee program. That could be a big boost to us," said Maj. James Whitley of the Fairfax County Sheriff's Office, which runs the county's Adult Detention Center in Fairfax City.
The Fairfax County jail houses about 1,200 inmates. Capt. David Rocco of the Alexandria Sheriff's Office said the city is "still working" on the possibility of imposing a daily fee on inmates at the city jail.
"We haven't made a final decision yet," Capt. Rocco said.
In July, the Virginia General Assembly authorized local governments to charge each inmate a daily fee of up to $1. The fees have been implemented in jails in Portsmouth, Norfolk and Virginia Beach.
The program is about to get started in Harrisonburg, Va.
Rockingham County Sheriff Don Farley said he expects to start charging jail fees as early as January. He said the $1 fee his office plans to charge will help defray the cost of the county jail in Harrisonburg, near the West Virginia state line.
The Rockingham jail now holds 15 federal and 245 state and local prisoners.
"I first got the idea in Colorado when I learned they have [automated teller machines] in their prisons," Sheriff Farley said.
Federal rules prohibit the $1 daily charges, so federal inmates won't have to pay the fee, Sheriff Farley said. Indigent prisoners also will be exempt, but they won't be allowed to use the canteen, where prisoners can buy snacks, magazines and other leisure treats.
"The canteen is just a luxury," Sheriff Farley said.
Still, the jail could earn as much as $245 a day from state and local inmates, he said.
Arlington County charges receiving fees, but not the $1 daily fee as the new law allows, Deputy Sheriff Maj. Karen Albert said.
Maryland does not specify daily fees for prisoners in local jurisdictions, but Montgomery and Prince George's counties charge prisoners for specific services and provisions.
Montgomery County's detention services collect more than $5 million annually from prisoners who earn wages for jobs outside jail, said Arthur M. Wallenstein, director of corrections and rehabilitation.
"We charge our prisoners on work release. They pay much more than [$1 daily]," he said.
Such prisoners must pay a minimum of $6 a day from jobs that vary from landscaping to working for lawyers and accountants, Mr. Wallenstein said. Those legal provisions have been in effect for about 30 years.
Prisoners awaiting trial are not charged, Mr. Wallenstein said, because they are considered innocent until convicted. Montgomery County jails confine an average of 1,100 prisoners.
Prince George's County jails housed 1,277 prisoners as of Monday. Home-detention prisoners raise the total to 2,009. Prince George's prisoners are not charged a daily fee, but must pay for home detention and medical services.
"We are now charging medical fees of $4," Corrections Director Barry L. Stanton said.
Medical fees amounted to $4,250 for fiscal year 2003, which ended in June, he said.
The medical fees were imposed because some inmates "were pretending to be sick," corrections spokeswoman Vicki Duncan said. "It was a waste of doctors' and nurses' time."
Inmates who go to jobs or are on home detention while continuing to work must give a day's pay each week to the corrections system, Miss Duncan said.
Inmates in the District currently do not have to pay any daily fees.
"We don't have anything like that," said Darryl Madden, public information officer for D.C. jails, which hold 3,284 prisoners.
D.C. inmates can earn stipends working in laundry, kitchens, and similar chores and put the stipends into an account to buy goods.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- alternative energy
Blair Energy Bill Promotes Renewables
LONDON, UK, (ENS)
November 28, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-28-05.asp
Measures to enable the generation of more environmentally friendly power and to deal with the UK's nuclear legacy are contained in a a new Energy Bill heralded by the Queen's speech on Wednesday and introduced in the House of Commons today.
The bill is intended to help create a low carbon economy and ensure that 10 percent of the UK's electricity comes from renewable sources by the year 2010. Core themes of the bill are sustainable energy, dealing with the nuclear legacy, and competitive energy markets.
Energy Minister Stephen Timms said, "The policies we are putting in place today are not merely for the here and now. Future generations will reap the rewards of cleaner, greener power.
The proposals will encourage sustainable energy by enabling projects such as wave and tidal power developments to be built beyond British territorial waters.
Energy Minister Stephen Timms (Photo courtesy Office of the Minister) "The Bill will help support our renewables goals, by enabling us, for the first time, to explore building projects beyond our territorial waters," Timms said. "This will mean that developments can be on a larger scale, and that we can exploit the potential not only of future offshore wind farms, but also of wave and tidal power schemes."
For the first time, the legislation creates a single body - the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority - that will have complete responsibility for the decommissioning and cleanup of the UK's civil nuclear sites, and effective management of nuclear waste. Currently, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Nuclear Safety Directorate and others have responsibility for various functions in this field.
The bill introduces the new British Electricity Trading and Transmission Arrangements (BETTA). These will establish a single wholesale electricity market for Britain, making energy markets more competitive.
Timms explained that BETTA will also help the growth of renewables, by spreading the cost of grid reinforcement - which is needed to accommodate renewable energy - across all users throughout the country.
A number of technical provisions aimed at ensuring competitive and reliable energy supplies are also included in the new bill
The measure will implement several commitments made in the government's Energy White Paper published in February. Timms said, "The White Paper stated our aspiration for renewables to meet 20 percent of our electricity needs by 2020, and by 2050, we are working to cut our CO2 [carbon dioxide] emissions by 60 percent."
The UK is making quick progress in opening more renewable energy generating facilities. The country's first offshore wind electricity flowed ashore from the North Hoyle wind farm on November 21, generated by the winds off the North Wales coast. The facility will produce enough clean electricity for up to 50,000 homes each year.
Six of North Hoyle's 30 wind turbines located about five miles off the North Wales coast between Rhyl and Prestatyn (Photo courtesy National Windpower) Built in just eight months, the 30 turbine wind farm will prevent the release of about 160,000 metric tons of harmful carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year - the equivalent of removing some 80,000 cars from the road each year.
Backed by Prime Minister Tony Blair and environmental group Greenpeace, the wind farm was developed by National Wind Power, sister company to npower, which supplies renewable energy to more UK households than any other company.
Stephen Tindale, executive director of Greenpeace UK, said North Hoyle's construction marks an important first step towards a cleaner future for the UK. "This is the beginning of mainstream offshore wind power development and the dawn of a new era. Global warming is the greatest threat facing the planet, but the power flowing ashore today demonstrates we have the solutions to tackle it. It's great news for all our futures."
Coal has not been forgotten in the interest of renewable and nuclear energy. The government intends to secure more than 4,000 coal mining jobs in the UK and create a further 300 jobs as part of a £52m investment package announced today.
Under the new Coal Investment Aid scheme, 12 projects at mines in Northumberland, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Yorkshire and South Wales have been awarded up to 30 percent of their total costs for development projects.
The funding package aims to unlock the potential of coal reserves that may otherwise remain untouched by providing a large chunk of the investment costs. If the funding is accepted, a total of £175m will be invested into the UK coal industry.
"Today's announcement demonstrates that, despite some difficult times in the past, there are encouraging signs for the future of the coal mining industry in the UK," Timms said.
The funding will help secure the future of coal mining to 2008 and beyond, he said. Two 12 successful applicants have until the end of February 2004 to accept these offers.
-------- environment
Informed Consent Treaty for Hazardous Chemicals to Become Law
GENEVA, Switzerland, (ENS)
November 28, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/nov2003/2003-11-28-03.asp
Exporters of certain specified hazardous chemicals and pesticides will be legally bound to notify importing countries as of February 24, 2004 when an international agreement on trade in these substances takes effect.
On Thursday, Armenia became the 50th country to ratify the Rotterdam Convention on the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) Procedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides in International Trade, triggering the 90 day countdown to the treaty's entry into force.
"Inappropriate pesticides and their misuse still threaten health and environment in developing countries," said Jacques Diouf, director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
"We recognize that, in meeting the increased demand for food production, pesticides will continue to be used. The Rotterdam Convention provides countries with a major tool to reduce the risks associated with pesticide use," Diouf said.
The convention enables importing countries to decide which potentially hazardous chemicals they want to receive and to exclude those they cannot manage safely. Most of the Parties to the Rotterdam Convention, so far, are developing countries.
Nicaraguan farmer sprays his maize crop with insecticide. (Photo by L. Dematteis courtesy FAO) When trade is permitted, requirements for labeling and providing information on the potential health and environmental effects is expected to promote safer use of chemicals.
There are a total of 31 chemicals currently subject to the interim PIC procedure. Among these chemicals are 21 pesticides, five industrial chemicals and five severely hazardous pesticide formulations. Many more substances are likely to be added in the future.
When the convention becomes legally binding 27 chemicals will be governed by its provisions. Five additional chemicals - dimefox, endosulfan, endrin, mevinphos and vinclozolin - have been proposed for inclusion on the PIC list.
Some pesticides covered by the convention, such as methyl parathion, are extremely hazardous and can present a severe threat to the health of farmers everywhere.
Methyl parathion is acutely toxic by all routes of exposure, and the pesticide is a known carcinogen. Human fatalities have been caused by ingestion, dermal adsorption, and inhalation of parathion. As with all organophosphates, parathion is readily absorbed through the skin.
In the United States, methyl parathion is approved only for use in uninhabited open fields where it breaks down due to sunlight. It is not approved for roach control in homes. When applied in homes it can retain its toxicity to the nervous system for years, and can cause headaches, nausea, vomiting, cramps, weakness, blurred vision, difficulty breathing, muscle spasms, convulsions, coma and death in humans and domestic animals.
Under the convention, importing countries now will be supplied with scientific information about any of the listed chemicals proposed for import so they can make informed decisions about their use.
"Thanks to the Rotterdam Convention, we now have an effective system in place for avoiding many of the deadly mistakes made in past decades when people were less aware of the dangers of toxic chemicals," said Klaus Toepfer, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
"The convention, whose early entry into force was urged by the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg last year, will contribute to the WSSD's aim of ensuring that, by the year 2020, chemicals are used and produced in ways that minimize significant adverse effects on human health and the environment," he said.
Some 70,000 different chemicals are available on the market today, and around 1,500 new ones are introduced every year. Many pesticides that have been banned or restricted in industrialized countries are still marketed and used in developing countries.
Dr. Jacques Diouf is director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. (Photo courtesy FAO) Diouf said today, "This new regime offers its member governments, particularly in developing countries, the tools they need to protect their citizens, clean up obsolete stockpiles of pesticides and strengthen their chemicals management. Governments need to become members as quickly as possible so that they can reap these benefits and participate in shaping key decisions that must be taken next year."
The Rotterdam Convention covers the following 22 hazardous pesticides - 2,4,5-T, aldrin, captafol, chlordane, chlordimeform, chlorobenzilate, DDT, 1,2-dibromoethane (EDB), dieldrin, dinoseb, fluoroacetamide, HCH, heptachlor, hexachlorobenzene, lindane, mercury compounds, and pentachlorophenol, plus certain formulations of methamidophos, methyl-parathion, monocrotophos, parathion, and phosphamidon. Since September 1998 five additional pesticides (binapacryl, toxaphene, ethylene oxide, ethylene dichloride and monocrotophos) have been added to the interim PIC procedure.
It also covers five industrial chemicals - crocidolite, polybrominated biphenyls (PBB), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), polychlorinated terphenyls (PCT) and tris (2,3 dibromopropyl) phosphate.
The first meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention will take place in Geneva in late 2004. At its first meeting the Parties will decide on including chemicals in the PIC list that have been added during the past several years to the interim PIC procedure,
The will establish a Chemical Review Committee that will evaluate future chemicals for the convention's list, adopt the rules of procedure and address issues such as dispute settlement, compliance, financial rules, and arrangements for the permanent Secretariat.
"Implementation of the convention will help countries to control the availability of pesticides that are recognized to be harmful to human health and the environment and of highly toxic pesticides that cannot be handled safely by small farmers in developing countries," said Diouf.
The treaty promotes sustainable agriculture in a safer environment," he said, "thereby contributing to an increase in agricultural production and supporting the battle against hunger, disease and poverty."
-------- genetics
Health Official Says Stem Cell Rules Do Not Hamper Research
November 28, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/28/science/28STEM.html
WASHINGTON, Nov. 27 (AP) - The director of the National Institutes of Health says that if White House restrictions slow federally supported studies of embryonic stem cells he will ask President Bush to revisit the issue.
The director, Elias Zerhouni, said in an interview that research into the medical uses of embryonic stem cells was still at an early stage and that the 78 cell lines approved for use by the White House were enough to meet scientific needs.
If studies show a need for more cell lines and if the White House policy is stunting research, Dr. Zerhouni said on Wednesday, "I'll be the first to go the president and say we have reached a point where we need a debate here."
But he maintained that the current policy "is appropriate" for the current stage of the science.
Embryonic stem cells form in the early days after conception. Researchers, principally through mouse studies, have found that the cells can be prompted to grow into virtually any kind of cell in the body. Some scientists believe it is possible the cells could be transformed into new tissue that could be used to treat diabetes, spinal cord injuries and perhaps Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.
Some religious groups oppose such research because it involves the destruction of human embryos. Mr. Bush ordered the institutes of health not to pay for any research on stem cells harvested from embryos destroyed after Aug. 9, 2001. The institutes identified 78 cell lines that met all the restrictions, and 12 of those lines are now available for study.
But many stem cell scientists say the policy severely restricts research that could benefit millions of patients.
Dr. Zerhouni said that although scientists believed stem cell research could provide new treatments for disease there had been no research proving them medically useful. He said there were fundamental safety questions that must be answered before stem cells could be considered for therapeutic use. Those questions, he said, can be adequately answered using the existing approved cell lines.
The limiting factor in embryonic stem cell research is not the number of cell lines available for study, Dr. Zerhouni said, but the number of researchers trained to do the work.
Critics have said that by restricting federal support for stem cell studies, the White House policy may cause the United States to lose its lead in medical research because some other countries like Britain do not have such restrictions.
Dr. Zerhouni, however, said there were no homegrown embryonic stem cell lines now available in Britain without restrictions. He said the British system required research proposals to go through elaborate checks.
Only the United States government, he said, is openly and easily providing stem cells to researchers. Hundreds of specimens have been sent to laboratories in the United States and other nations, he said.
A report by a team of scientists at Johns Hopkins University said it would be unethical and risky to treat patients with any of the 12 available cell lines because they were all cultured using mouse cells as nutrients. The report said this could possibly expose patients to an animal virus that could not be controlled by the human immune system.
Dr. Zerhouni noted that the Food and Drug Administration has concluded that there are safety practices in place to evaluate the risks if a researcher ever proposes to use one of the approved cell lines to treat patients.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Hundreds protest against violence in Baghdad
Saturday, November 29, 2003
AFP
http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s999861.htm
A US soldier has been killed in a mortar attack on a base in northern Iraq as hundreds of Iraqis marched through the centre of Baghdad to protest against the violence plaguing the country's reconstruction.
After US President George W Bush told his troops during a lightning Thanksgiving visit to Baghdad that the coalition would prevail over insurgents, former US first lady Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spent the day in the city.
In Europe, police also moved against the Iraqi insurgency, arresting three alleged militants suspected of recruiting insurgents for suicide attacks in the country.
Iraqi police and US forces closed off Baghdad's main commercial thoroughfare as hundreds marched through the city centre to demonstrate against terror amid persistent fears of attack by anti-US insurgents or Islamic militants.
Security services were taking no chances with a rally bound to be seen as pro-American by the insurgents and a heavy Iraqi police presence accompanied the marchers while two US military helicopters hovered ahead.
"This is the picture of the martyr Adnan - he is a martyr of terror," Hassan Rehemi said, holding aloft a photograph of his 20-year-old son, who died in a blast north of Baghdad last week.
In a speech, Aziz al-Yasser, the coordinator of the rally organisers, the Alliance of Iraqi Democratic Forces, called on ordinary people to help the US-led coalition in the fight against insurgents.
"We have to help the coalition - the call issued by some for the withdrawal of occupation forces is suspect, Iraq will drown in a lake of blood if they withdraw," he said, adding that the attacks were delaying the end of the US-led occupation.
The latest coalition casualty came when a US soldier from the 101st Airborne Division was killed when four mortar shells were fired at the division's base in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, a US army spokesman said.
Meanwhile, Italian and German police arrested three North Africans as part of a massive anti-terror dragnet reportedly connected with terrorist attacks in Iraq.
The arrests followed a confirmation by prosecutors in Milan that they had issued arrest warrants for five suspected Al Qaeda activists, including an Algerian arrested in Germany and a woman nabbed at dawn in Padua.
They were wanted, among other things, on suspicion of having recruited suicide attackers for strikes in Iraq, police sources said.
The five included the Algerian whom German police said had been arrested in Hamburg at the request of the Italian prosecutors.
A police spokeswoman identified him as Mahjub Abderrazak, known as "the sheikh".
Italian prosecutors say the Milan-based cell, which had contacts throughout northern Italy, was trying to recruit suicide bombers for attacks in Iraq.
But two of the five for whom warrants were issued were still at large, including an Iraqi and a Tunisian, both 33.
----
Troop Families Going on Iraq Peace Mission
Thursday November 27, 2003
By MICHELLE MORGANTE
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/worldlatest/story/0,1280,-3438081,00.html
SAN DIEGO (AP) - Michael Lopercio is going to Iraq to hear how ordinary Iraqis feel about the war. Anabelle Valencia hopes to see her son and daughter, who are in the Army. Fernando Suarez del Solar wants to touch the earth where his son was killed.
Each will leave their hometowns on Saturday, forming a small delegation with other relatives of servicemen to bring a message of friendship for the people of Baghdad. They also bring with them doubts about the United States' involvement in Iraq and the Bush administration's handling of the war.
``A mission of peace, that is what we are trying to do,'' said Suarez del Solar, whose son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jesus Suarez del Solar, was killed in Iraq eight months ago. ``The idea is that the people of Iraq understand that we are not their enemies, that we are also suffering in this war.''
The group of 10 includes two wives of soldiers based at Fort Bragg, N.C., and four veterans of the Vietnam and Gulf wars, two of whom have children deployed in Iraq. They have raised donations to pay for the trip, and though no special government permission was needed, 25 members of Congress wrote letters of support.
``I have been very confused about what is going on,'' said Lopercio, whose son, Anthony, is an Army fueling specialist. ``You hear lots of conflicting, crossed messages from the administration and the news reports.''
Lopercio, 51, said he wants to talk to ``average, everyday Iraqis. ... How they feel will ultimately dictate our success or failure there.'' The journey - which will have the group meet in Amsterdam, fly to Jordan, and then drive into Iraq - was inspired by 48-year-old Suarez del Solar.
He became an anti-war activist after his 20-year-old son died on March 27 when he stepped on an unexploded U.S. cluster bomblet south of Baghdad.
Suarez del Solar's efforts caught the attention of Medea Benjamin, director of the San Francisco group Global Exchange. Over the past two months, they've linked other parents and family members willing to travel to Iraq.
``What we have in common is that we think that the Bush administration has got us into quite a mess in Iraq and we want to help find a solution that will both be positive for the U.S. troops and the Iraqis,'' Benjamin said.
Suarez del Solar plans to take dirt from the site where his son died and use it to plant a tree near the Marine's grave in Escondido.
Lopercio said his oldest son, 23, joined the Army shortly before the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
``He's got two years left in the service and I'm visualizing that he may spend two years in the most dangerous place on Earth,'' Lopercio said. ``It just doesn't match up with the recruiting poster, does it?''
The greatest challenge in organizing the trip, Benjamin said, was a sense that U.S. soldiers were being punished by commanders if their family members wanted to join them but expressed opposition to the war.
In Baghdad, coalition spokesman Sgt. Danny Martin said he had not heard of such repercussions.
While Martin expressed concern about the safety of the delegation, and for all people in Iraq, he said their effort would be appreciated.
``Any assistance in keeping the entire nation stable and peaceful and secure is more than welcome,'' he said.
The group is to return Dec. 9, and members hope late to meet with U.N. officials in New York.
----
The IRS Claims New Patriot Act Type Powers to Punish Political Dissenters
by Robert R. Raymond
November 28,2003
Sianews/Friends of Liberty
http://www.sianews.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1414
In a precendent-setting case, the IRS wielded new power to punish the political speech of those who "espouse views" the government considers "inconsistent" with government-held beliefs. In a hearing originally closed to the public in a secret tribunal on a military island, but moved to a public location after protests from the press and the public, the IRS wants to wield this power against a former IRS whistleblower, who was forced to resign upon his discovery of fraud in the agency.
After monitoring and taping the whisteblower's appearances on Sixty Minutes, talk radio shows, and political publications where he rebroadcast his findings of IRS fraud, the IRS initiated this inquisition against their former whistelblower. This new power may find new political targets soon enough.
The IRS, through the small office of "Director of Practice," claims the authority to wield carte blanche authority over all the other powers of government -- the authority to monitor, surveil, and eavesdrop on political dissenters, the authority to pry into the private financial records of banks, businesses, and taxpayers, the authority to conduct secret investigations under a criminal grand jury, and the authority to censure political dissenters by branding on them a badge of infamy and stripping them of governmentally- protected licenses. In short, under the guise of a "practice" investigation, the IRS claims the right to wield all intrusive and invasive powers of government available...
A "license" to practice before the IRS -- even for people who have never requested such a license or actually practiced before the IRS, but are given one as a matter of law if they are accountants -- "licenses" the IRS to conduct private audits without notice to the taxpayer, confer with criminal prosecutors without disclosure, and bring special "disbarment" proceedings against disfavored dissenters, even if the alleged "disreputable" conduct has nothing to do with any "practice" before the IRS.
The IRS now claims it can use these so-called "practice" investigations of anyone who Congress licenses to practice before the IRS -- regardless of whether they actually practice before the IRS -- to surveil the public appearances of dissenters, eavesdrop on the political conversations of dissenters, benefit from secret grand jury investigations, hold secret conferences with the criminal investigators, surreptiously tap the private database of taxpayer information, including taxpayers who merely have some financial "connection" to the accused, audit the political dissenter's personal financial records, and use all this information against the dissenter in the "practice" proceeding.
Under the guise of a "practice" investigation, the IRS can ignore all the normal procedural protections against an illicit audit while it conducts such an audit. Simultaneously, the IRS can ignore all the legal protections afforded a person accused of a crime while conferencing with the people conducting a criminal investigation. Indeed, the IRS can even ignore the sunshine laws, as the records of such "practice investigation" are exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, as are grand jury proceedings.
The IRS claims it can exercise this authority in a secret proceeding without allowing a person the opportunity to cure any alleged mistakes, the opportunity to prepare a defense by knowing the exact facts they are accused of, without any opportunity for discovery, without any opportunity to call witnesses necessary for their defense, without any opportunity to cross examine their accusers, without any opportunity to testify at their own hearing about the merits of their position, without being forced to testify against themselves without such an assertion being held against them, and without even an opportunity for a hearing on the evidence.
This power of this little office with a Napoleonic vision goes even beyond the Patriot Act type authority and stories of FBI monitoring of war protestors.
Too Hoover-ish to be true in modern America? Just read the case of the IRS against Joe Banister scheduled for a "hearing" -- a hearing where the IRs prohibited Banister from introducing any witnesses or presenting any evidence as to his defenses, and even discussing the sincerity, the truth or the "reasonableness" of his positions -- on December 1 in the city by the bay, in the Tax Court chambers of the federal courthouse in San Francisco. History is being made.
For more information contact:
Law Offices of Robert G. Bernhoft S. C 207 East Buffalo Street Suite 600 Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53202 ph. 414-276-3333 fx. 414-276-2822 rgbernhoft@bernhoftlaw.com rebarnes@bernhoftlaw.com
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