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NUCLEAR
Warheads Roasting on an Open Fire
US believes Pakistan's vow not to shop nuclear secrets
Israel not informed by U.S. of Libya talks
Inspections of Libyan Nuclear Programs to Start Next Week
U.N. Atomic Agency to Make Visit to Libya
Analysts: Libya Could Provide Intelligence Bonanza
Pakistan Questions Nuke Program Founder
Inquiry Suggests Pakistanis Sold Nuclear Secrets
Father of Pakistani Bomb Questioned Over Iran Link
Russia Deploys Fresh Batch of Missiles
Good Nukes, Bad Nukes
Quake Shuts Power Plant, Triggers Outages
Governor expresses concern over pit proposal
Paul Wolfowitz - The godfather of the Iraq war
Cheney's tough talking derails negotiations with North Korea
MILITARY
U.S. Expanding G.I. Presence in Afghanistan to Permit Aid Work
China Thanks Bush for Taiwan Stance
Taiwan debating missile early-warning system: Jane's
US Saddam claims being challenged
Bomb Kills 2 G.I.'s and Translator in Baghdad
In New Iraq, Sunnis Fear a Grim Future
Elite Israeli Troops Refuse To Serve in the Territories
'Lost Tribe' Finds Itself on Front Lines of Mideast Conflict
Palestinians Attack Egyptian Foreign Minister
Libya Opens Nuke Programs to Inspections
Judge Halts Forced Military Anthrax Shots
Keeping Secrets
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Amid Terror Concerns, Ridge Urges Mix of Calm and Caution
U.S. Threat Level Rises to Orange
Rights Group Criticizes Immunity Deal for Combatants in Burundi
Calif. Immigrant Initiative Revived
ENERGY AND OTHER
Seeking to Lift Secrecy Curtain Over Energy Industry Lobby
ACTIVISTS
Thousands protest French scarf ban
-------- NUCLEAR
Warheads Roasting on an Open Fire
By Al Kamen
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A23
Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20045-2003Dec21?language=printer
This is the time of year when agencies come up with their own versions of Christmas carols, substituting in-house themes for traditional lyrics. Usually, these are fairly lame, not even rising to the level of a Loop contest.
But some lyrics sent over this year by the State Department's Bureau of Arms Control and International Security are most worthy of note. The T-Tones, a 10-year-old singing group named for the bureau's internal designation, "T," had several fine songs, written by lyricist Elizabeth Rood.
Our favorite is "Coping With a Nuclear Iran," sung to the tune of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." (Note to non-Foggy Bottom folks: Natanz is the site Iran is building to process highly enriched uranium (HEU) for bombs or low-enriched uranium for nuclear energy. DPRK is the lunatic Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea). Mohamed ElBaradei is head of the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency.)
And with that, the song:
In Natanz, they're enriching,
As their story keeps switching,
Each day something new,
Like lost HEU,
Coping with a nuclear Iran.
Do they need centrifuges?
Do they think we're just stooges?
They're going the way
Of DPRK,
Coping with a nuclear Iran.
Let's go to the IAEA chairman,
If it seems the board might let us down,
Are they in compliance? He'll say, "No, Man!
But no one wants to say that in this town!"
We convinced some friendly nations
To report the violations,
But that didn't fly
With ElBaradei,
Coping with a nuclear Iran.
-------- india / pakistan
US believes Pakistan's vow not to shop nuclear secrets
WASHINGTON (AFP)
Dec 22, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031222191405.hyqclbzh.html
The United States said Monday it believed Pakistan's denials that it does not shop nuclear secrets, despite new reports implicating it in clandestine past sales to Iran.
Pakistan's status as a key US anti-terror ally faced new scrutiny after weekend reports here that Islamabad had been involved in selling nuclear secrets to the Islamic Republic, following reports last year of previous such links to North Korea.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher referred reporters to remarks made by Secretary of State Colin Powell in October 2002, after he addressed the matter with Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
"He assured us that Pakistan was not participating in any kind of activity of that nature, and I checked this morning and I would say that we continue to accept that assurance," said Boucher.
Powell, at that time, and aides ever since, have pointedly not ruled out previous nuclear transgressions by Pakistan.
Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan said Musharraf's government had never authorized or initiated any transfers of sensitive nuclear technology," adding however that several nuclear scientists were under investigation.
"Pakistan takes its responsibility as a nuclear weapons state very seriously. Since a strict command and control system was established nothing of the sort has happened," he said.
Khan denied reports in the Washington Post that US investigators were involved in questioning Pakistani scientists.
"These are purely in-house investigations. No foreigners or foreign agencies are associated with the debriefing sessions in sensitive organisations."
The New York Times reported Monday that information Iran turned over to the International Atomic Energy Agency two months ago has strengthened suspicions that Pakistan sold key nuclear secrets to Iran.
Pakistan's suspected role in providing centrifuge designs to Iran was first reported Sunday in the Post, which said the blueprints provided a "tremendous boost" to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.
-------- israel
Israel not informed by U.S. of Libya talks
By Aluf Benn,
Haaretz Correspondent
22/12/2003
http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/spages/374405.html
The United States did not let Israel in on its secret talks with Libya over the past few months that led to Libya's declaration last weekend of its intention to stop the development of weapons of mass destruction, according to senior political sources in Jerusalem.
The sources say that about 10 days ago, Israel received intelligence information regarding "certain occurrences in Libya," but that it was not briefed by the Americans on their talks with Libyan ruler Muammar Gadhafi. When Israeli defense officials raised the issue of the Libyan threat with their U.S. counterparts, they were told, "We are handling it, keep a low profile." Israeli officials believe that secrecy was tight within the U.S. administration as well, and that senior officials in regular communication with Israel on issues of weapons monitoring were kept out of the loop.
The U.S. and Israel have been discussing Libya's nuclear program since May 2002. On a number of occasions, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon warned that Libya might become a nuclear power even ahead of Iran. In his speech at the Herzliya Conference last week, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said that "an eye must be kept on Libya."
Israel views the information that Libya volunteered to the U.S. and Great Britain about its nuclear progress as another sign of the weakness of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Libya is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty )NPT( and its nuclear facilities are open to international inspection, but it has deceived the agency over the years and like Iran, has violated its obligations.
The Libyan declaration, and Iran's signing of the Additional Protocol allowing inspection of its nuclear facilities, are expected to increase pressure on Israel to open its nuclear facilities to monitoring. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, on a visit to Jerusalem Sunday, was quick to connect the Libyan announcements to Israel.
The Israeli position supports a nuclear-free zone in the region, but only as part of a gradual and long-term process, after peace has been achieved between Israel and all the nations in the region and a mutual monitoring system has been instituted.
While the U.S. has assured Israel that it has no need to worry, Israel is closely watching discussions in the American administration on a possible re-evaluation of the proposed international treaty to freeze the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons (high level plutonium and enriched uranium).
The proposed Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty (FMCT) is directed mainly at reining in the nuclear programs of Israel, India, and Pakistan, which are not subject to international monitoring.
Israel told the U.S. a few years ago, under the Netanyahu government, that the FMCT was a danger to its security and that it would not sign it. Discussions on the treaty in the UN also ran into difficulties a few years ago because of a dispute between the U.S. and China, but when the dispute was resolved, the U.S. decided to reevaluate its position on the treaty.
Minister without portfolio Uzi Landau, heading an Israeli delegation to the U.S. for strategic talks, met Sunday with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in preparation for a renewal of the American-Israeli strategic dialogue, which has been dormant for over a year.
-------- libya
Inspections of Libyan Nuclear Programs to Start Next Week
December 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Libya-Nuclear.html
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- The head of the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Monday he will lead the first inspection of Libya's nuclear facilities as soon as next week, aiming to kick-start the elimination of the country's programs for weapons of mass destruction.
In the wake of Libya's surprise admission, Pakistan acknowledged Monday the possibility that some of its scientists may have provided nuclear technology to foreign nations.
Pakistan's government has strongly denied allegations it gave such information to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya -- but said Monday it has questioned the founder of its nuclear program as part of its inquiry into whether any of its scientists acted without authorization.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press in Islamabad on Monday that ``some individuals may have been doing something on their own.''
Both Libya and Iran have imported centrifuges for uranium enrichment, although Libya -- which publicly admitted Friday it was seeking to develop weapons of mass destruction -- says it stopped short of an enrichment program. Diplomats have identified Pakistan as one source of Iran's equipment procurement.
The founder of Pakistan's nuclear program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, was been questioned as part of the debriefing of a ``very small number of scientists,'' but is not in custody, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan.
``No restrictions have been imposed on him,'' he added.
At least two scientists from Khan Research Laboratories, the country's top nuclear laboratory named after its founder, have been held for questioning this month.
The Bush administration on Monday registered its confidence in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf assured Secretary of State Colin Powell in 2002 that Pakistan was not leaking any technology, ``and we continue to accept that assurance,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said Monday.
At the same time, Boucher said, ``we'd certainly welcome Pakistan's investigation and its debriefing of individuals who may have valuable information'' bearing on Musharraf's assurances.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, said he would lead the first inspection there perhaps as early as next week.
In Washington, White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the United States expects Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi ``to act on the commitments he's made. And the initial signs are positive.''
Gadhafi said he had nothing to hide. ``Come and and see what it is, we don't want to hide anything,'' he told CNN.
ElBaradei said much of Libya's technology came from abroad, but declined to say whether there was a common source for Libya, Iran or prewar Iraq -- or whether the three nations exchanged equipment and expertise.
``There has been, of course, a good deal of importation from abroad of equipment and material,'' he told reporters. ``We do not know yet whether there was any linkage with other nations.''
Diplomats familiar with the agency said ElBaradei could fly to Tripoli on Friday. They also said he and the IAEA were scrambling to play catch-up after being caught off guard by Libya's admission, the result of nine months of secret negotiations with Britain and the United States.
ElBaradei praised the Libyan move ``to rid itself of all programs or activities that are relevant or could lead to the production of weapons of mass destruction.''
Libya agreed to tell the IAEA about current nuclear programs, adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and sign an additional protocol to allow wide-ranging inspections on short notice.
ElBaradei said Libya's weapons research effort started with a program to enrich uranium through spinning in centrifuges ``sometime in the 80s (and) picked up steam in the 90s.''
The United States had also learned that Libya had tens of tons of mustard agent, a World War I-era chemical weapon, produced about 10 years ago. It also had aircraft bombs capable of dispersing the mustard agent in combat. In addition, it had a supply of Scud-C ballistic missiles made in North Korea. The weapons can hit targets 500 miles away.
Also Monday, the world's chemical weapons watchdog said Libya's promise will help rid the globe of ``these heinous means of terror, death and destruction.''
``Libya's imminent accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention brings us much closer to our shared goal of a world free of these means of terror, death and destruction,'' the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement from its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Libya is one of just 14 countries that has neither signed nor ratified the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention prohibiting the production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
Gadhafi's decision to come clean is the latest in a series of moves to end his country's international isolation and shed its reputation as a rogue nation.
The United States imposed sanctions in 1986, accusing Libya of supporting terrorist groups. Ten years later, America passed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which threatened to penalize the U.S. partners of European companies that did significant business in Libya and Iran.
While U.S. sanctions remain in force, the U.N. Security Council voted to abolish its sanctions on Libya in September, after it agreed to pay compensation to families of the Lockerbie bombing.
Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground. A former Libyan intelligence agent was found guilty of the bombing in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison.
--------
U.N. Atomic Agency to Make Visit to Libya
December 22, 2003
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/africa/22CND-LIBY.html
The International Atomic Energy Agency is sending a team to Libya to start verifying nuclear activities in the North African country, which has also agreed to sign an additional protocol to give inspectors broader access rights, agency officials said today.
"The purpose of my visit will be to initiate an in-depth process of verification of all of Libya's past and present nuclear activities," the director general of the agency, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, told reporters in Vienna. Mark Gwozdecky, the agency's chief spokesman, conveyed Dr. ElBaradei's remarks in a telephone interview.
"We will define the corrective actions that need to be taken and consult on the necessary steps to eliminate any weapons-related activities," Dr. ElBaradei said. "We are ready to go as early as the weekend but we need the concurrence of the Libyan authorities, which we are working on right now."
President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said on Friday that Libya's leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, had admitted that his country had been trying to develop a broad arsenal of unconventional weapons, and he promised to dismantle them and submit to international inspections.
Government and independent experts said it was the first time Colonel Qaddafi had admitted to having such unconventional weapons or programs to produce them. Mr. Bush said that if Colonel Qaddafi followed through, Libya could "regain a secure and respected place" among nations. The action by Libya was the result of nine months of secret diplomacy; Colonel Qaddafi initiated the talks by reaching out to London and Washington just as the invasion of Iraq was beginning.
Dr. ElBaradei said he hoped to visit Libya with a team of senior agency experts. His remarks followed a weekend meeting with a senior Libyan government delegation.
"In that meeting," Mr. Gwozdecky, the nuclear agency spokesman, said, "they informed him that Libya had for more than a decade been engaged in the development of a uranium enrichment capability, including the importation of natural uranium, and centrifuge and conversion equipment, and the construction of a now dismantled pilot scale centrifuge facility." .
"They also told us that this nuclear enrichment program was at an early stage of development, that no industrial scale facility had been built, nor any enriched uranium produced," the spokesman said.
The Libyans also told the agency that they "would be taking the necessary steps" to conclude an additional protocol of the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would give inspectors broader, more intrusive inspection rights.
"Libya's decision to reverse course is a positive development and a step in the right direction," Dr. ElBaradei said. "I hope that through verification, dialogue and engagement, all questions related to Libya's nuclear program can be resolved and the required corrective actions taken."
The roots of Libya's surprise declaration lay in the final phase of five years of talks over the United Nations sanctions against Libya imposed after the bombing in 1988 of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, British and American officials said.
The United Nations lifted its sanctions after Libya acknowledged responsibility for the bombing and offered about $10 million in compensation for each of the 270 victims. Libya said full payment would come only after all international sanctions were lifted, but Congress and the Bush administration said sanctions would be maintained until Libya gave up its illicit weapons programs and links to terrorist organizations.
"We agree to the commitment that we are taking from the International Atomic Energy Agency and we are willing to abide by its rules and honor our commitments." Libya's prime minister, Shukri Ghanem, told the BBC in remarks carried on its Web site today. He described the decision to sign the protocol as "courageous" and "timely."
A British official who briefed reporters in London said on Saturday that teams of American and British experts had spent weeks inspecting dozens of Libyan laboratories and military factories in October and early December. They found that Libyan scientists were "developing a nuclear fuel cycle intended to support nuclear weapons development," adding, "Libya had not acquired a nuclear weapons capability, though it was close to developing one."
--------
Analysts: Libya Could Provide Intelligence Bonanza
December 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-libya-intelligence.html
LONDON (Reuters) - After decades of fueling underground militancy around the globe and buying up banned weapons technology, a newly cooperative Libya could potentially provide the West with a bonanza of valuable intelligence.
Dictators, spies, arms dealers and militants throughout the Middle East and beyond will be bracing themselves for any revelations by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
``He's the first one to squeal. He's turned state's evidence and everyone else is going to hang in the wind,'' said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Digest.
``I think there will be a number of people within the Arab world or the Islamic world who will be watching carefully and listening to what the colonel is prepared to disclose.''
Libya has already allowed U.S. and British experts access to its nuclear and chemical weapons programs and missiles and has agreed to allow snap U.N. arms inspections.
Inspections could expose parts of the international web of weapons proliferation, potentially embarrassing Western companies as well as far-flung states, said William Hopkinson, terrorism expert at Britain's St Andrews University.
``If X has been selling kit to him, they may be prepared to sell it to someone else,'' he said.
Washington says Libya has already acknowledged cooperating with North Korea to develop Scud missiles.
And if Libya's cooperation with the West goes beyond arms, there are a host of other secrets it could potentially reveal.
For decades Libya operated one of the Middle East's most well-funded and powerful intelligence agencies, fueling and funding an alphabet soup of underground militant organizations, from the Palestine Liberation Organization to the Irish Republican Army and Germany's Red Army Faction.
For now, it remains to be seen just how far Gaddafi will go in satisfying the West's thirst for knowledge.
There is no sign that Tripoli's deal with Washington and London includes a promise to help other countries, such as France and Germany, which still have claims against Libya.
``Do we expect Libya to now communicate freely on what it did in the 1980s?'' said analyst Barthelemy Courmont at France's Institute of International and Strategic Relations.
``Will Libya now go for complete transparency, or will it decide that now it is supported by the United States, giving it a certain legitimacy among the international community, it does not need to bother to do anything else, like satisfying France?''
Much information Tripoli does supply may well be out of date: Western experts say Gaddafi has not had a hand in major anti-Western attacks in years, since he began pursuing rehabilitation with the West.
He is therefore unlikely to have much up-to-the-minute information on Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, which formed only in the last decade.
``The heyday of Gaddafi as the 'mad dog of the Middle East' has already been confined to the history books,'' Standish said.
But even if the information relates to old attacks, details that implicate another state could provide Washington with ammunition against other adversaries, such as Syria and Iran.
``Gaddafi's intelligence service may know where other bodies are buried, that they themselves were not responsible for,'' Standish said.
Ultimately, Washington's and London's goal in handling Gaddafi now is to show that even the most disreputable ``rogue state'' can be rehabilitated if it renounces banned weapons and links to militants.
``If he's treated properly now, one can say: 'Do you want to follow Saddam Hussein? Or do you want to follow Colonel Gaddafi, that well-known, wise elder statesman of the Arab world?''' Hopkinson said.
-------- pakistan
Pakistan Questions Nuke Program Founder
By SADAQAT JAN
Associated Press Writer
Dec 22, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/P/PAKISTAN_NUCLEAR_SCIENTISTS?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistan has questioned the founder of its nuclear program as part of investigations into whether any of its scientists leaked sensitive technology to other countries, the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
Scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan is not in custody but was questioned in connection with "the ongoing debriefing sessions" of a "very small number of scientists," ministry spokesman Masood Khan said.
"No restrictions have been imposed on him," he added.
Pakistan's government strongly denies allegations it spread nuclear technology to countries such as Iran, North Korea and Libya but acknowledged Monday the possibility that individual scientists may have acted without authorization. At least two scientists from Khan Research Laboratories, the country's top nuclear laboratory named after its founder, were held for questioning this month - including Mohammad Farooq, its former director general and aide to Khan.
Farooq is still in custody. "Dr. Farooq is still undergoing a dependability and debriefing session," said the ministry spokesman said.
Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed said Pakistan's government had not authorized the spread of sensitive technology to any country, but acknowledged it was looking into whether individuals involved in its nuclear program had.
"Some individuals may have been doing something on their own. We are investigating that," Ahmed told The Associated Press.
Officials have declined to give details about the "in-house" investigations and what allegations the scientists faced.
Pakistan, which carried out nuclear weapons tests in 1998, "takes its responsibilities as a nuclear weapons state very seriously," he said.
"The government of Pakistan has not authorized any transfers of sensitive nuclear technology to other countries. We have a strong command and control system. Only individuals are being investigated," he said.
Pakistan's admission came just days after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's surprise announcement Friday that his country was abandoning its weapons of mass destruction. On Monday, Libya agreed to open its nuclear activities to pervasive inspection by the U.N. atomic agency as early as next week.
According to diplomats, the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency has identified Russia, China and Pakistan as probable sources for equipment used by Iran for possible nuclear weapons development.
Ahmed said the investigations followed "IAEA reservations and recent news reports in the Western world."
This month, Iran signed a key accord Thursday that gives U.N. experts full access to its nuclear facilities. That followed international pressure on Iran to prove it had not tried to build atomic weapons.
Recent newspaper reports have suggested that some of Iran's technology, such as designs for centrifuges used for enriching uranium, may have been come from Pakistan. Pakistan has also been accused of exchanging nuclear know-how with North Korea in return for missiles.
Pakistan's President Gen. Pervez Musharraf said last month that his country obtained short-range missiles and technology from North Korea, but denied giving any nuclear weapons secrets in return.
Khan Research Laboratories is Pakistan's main nuclear weapons laboratory where uranium is enriched, according to the Federation of American Scientists.
Last year, Pakistan detained a former nuclear scientist Sultan Bashiruddin Mehmood on suspicion of his links with Osama bin Laden.
Mehmood, who worked for Pakistan's Atomic Energy Commission until his retirement in 1999, was later freed.
--------
Inquiry Suggests Pakistanis Sold Nuclear Secrets
December 22, 2003
By WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID ROHDE and DAVID E. SANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/asia/22STAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 - A lengthy investigation of the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, by American and European intelligence agencies and international nuclear inspectors has forced Pakistani officials to question his aides and openly confront evidence that the country was the source of crucial technology to enrich uranium for Iran, North Korea and possibly other nations.
Until the past few weeks, Pakistani officials had denied evidence that the A. Q. Khan Research Laboratories, named for the man considered a national hero, had ever been a source of weapons technology to countries aspiring to acquire fissile material. Now they are backing away from those denials, while insisting that there has been no transfer of nuclear technology since President Pervez Musharraf took power four years ago.
Dr. Khan, a metallurgist who was charged with stealing European designs for enriching uranium a quarter century ago, has not yet been questioned. American and European officials say he is the centerpiece of their investigation, but that General Musharraf's government has been reluctant to take him on because of his status and deep ties to the country's military and intelligence services. A senior Pakistani official said in an interview that "any individual who is found associated with anything suspicious would be under investigation," and promised a sweeping inquiry.
Pakistan's role in providing centrifuge designs to Iran, and the possible involvement of Dr. Khan in such a transfer, was reported Sunday by The Washington Post. Other suspected nuclear links between Pakistan and Iran have been reported in previous weeks by other news organizations.
An investigation conducted by The New York Times during the past two months, in Washington, Europe and Pakistan, showed that American and European investigators are interested in what they describe as Iran's purchase of nuclear centrifuge designs from Pakistan 16 years ago, largely to force the Pakistani government to face up to a pattern of clandestine sales by its nuclear engineers and to investigate much more recent transfers.
Those include shipments in the late 1990's to facilities in North Korea that American intelligence agencies are still trying to locate, in hopes of gaining access to them.
New questions about Pakistan's role have also been raised by Libya's decision on Friday to reveal and dismantle its unconventional weapons, including centrifuges and thousands of centrifuge parts. A senior American official said this weekend that Libya had shown visiting American and British intelligence officials "a relatively sophisticated model of centrifuge," which can be used to enrich uranium for bomb fuel.
A senior European diplomat with access to detailed intelligence said Sunday that the Libyan program had "certain common elements" with the Iranian program and with the pattern of technology leakage from Pakistan to Iran. The C.I.A. declined to say over the weekend what country appeared to be Libya's primary source. "It looks like an indirect transfer," said one official. "It will take a while to trace it back."
There are also investigations under way to determine if Pakistani technology has spread elsewhere in the Middle East and Asia, but so far the evidence involves largely the exchange of scientists with countries including Myanmar. There have been no confirmed reports of additional technology transfers, intelligence officials say.
The Pakistani action to question Dr. Khan's associates was prompted by information Iran turned over two months ago to the International Atomic Energy Agency, under pressure to reveal the details of a long-hidden nuclear program. But even before Iran listed its suppliers to the I.A.E.A. - five individuals and a number of companies from around the world - a British expert who accompanied agency inspectors into Iran earlier this year identified Iranian centrifuges as being identical to the early models that the Khan laboratories had modified from European designs. "They were Pak-1's," said one senior official who later joined the investigation, saying that they were transferred to Iran in 1987.
Pakistani officials said the sales to Iran might have occurred in the 1980's during the rule of the last American-backed military ruler, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq. They acknowledge questioning three scientists: Mohammed Farooq, Yasin Chohan and a man believed to be named Sayeed Ahmad, all close aides to Dr. Khan.
A senior Pakistani intelligence official said Mr. Farooq was in charge of dealing with foreign suppliers at the Khan laboratory, run by Dr. Khan until he was forced into retirement - partly at American insistence - in the spring of 2001. At the laboratory, where much of the work was done that led to Pakistan's successful nuclear tests in 1998 and its deployment of dozens of nuclear weapons, Mr. Chohan was in charge of metallurgical research, according to senior Pakistani officials.
Contacted by telephone last week, relatives of Mr. Farooq said he was still being questioned. Mr. Chohan's family said Sunday that Mr. Chohan had been released and was at home.
Pakistani officials have insisted in that if their scientists and engineers had done anything wrong, it was without government approval. They said their bank accounts and real estate holdings were also being investigated. A senior Bush administration official, while declining to comment on what was learned when Pakistani officials questioned the men, said that all three had been "well known to our intelligence folks." Another official said the United States had steered Pakistani officials to the three, in hopes it would further pressure Dr. Khan.
Dr. Khan declined several requests in November for an interview, routed through his secretary and his official biographer, Zahid Malik. However, Mr. Malik relayed a statement from Dr. Khan that he had never traveled to Iran. "He said, `I have never been there in my life.' " A European confidante of Dr. Khan's, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the Pakistani scientist put the blame for transfers on a Middle Eastern businessman who he said was supplying Pakistan with centrifuge parts and, on his own, double-ordered the same components to sell to Iran. "There is evidence he is innocent," the confidante said of Dr. Khan in an interview. "I don't think he is lying, but not perhaps telling the whole truth."
Iran has insisted that all of its centrifuges were built purely for peaceful purposes, and last week it signed an agreement to allow deeper inspections.
But for 18 years Iran hid the centrifuge operations from the agency's inspectors.
In Pakistan, the disclosure of the investigation is already complicating the political position of General Musharraf, who narrowly escaped an assassination attempt a week ago. An alliance of hard-line Islamic political parties has already assailed him for questioning the scientists, saying the inquiry shows he is a puppet of the United States.
Any attack on Dr. Khan, hailed as the creator of the first "Islamic bomb," is likely to be seized by the Islamist parties as a major political issue. Many Pakistanis opposed the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as what is seen as the United States' one-sided support of Israel. Many also perceive the United States as trying to dominate the Muslim world - and through pressure on the nuclear scientists, to contain its power.
While General Musharraf was responsible for sidelining Dr. Khan nearly three years ago, he has also praised him. When the nuclear and military establishments of Pakistan gathered for a formal dinner early in 2001 to honor Dr. Khan's retirement, General Musharraf described him this way, according to a transcript of his speech in a Pakistani archive: "Dr. Khan and his team toiled and sweated, day and night, against all odds and obstacles, against international sanctions and sting operations, to create, literally out of nothing, with their bare hands, the pride of Pakistan's nuclear capability."
European and American officials have a different view of Dr. Khan, from his work from 1972 to 1975 in the Netherlands at a centrifuge plant, Urenco.
At the plant, Dr. Khan gained access to centrifuge designs that were extremely sensitive, records from a later investigation show. Suddenly, around 1976, Dr. Khan quit and returned to Pakistan. Not long after, Western investigators say, Pakistan started an atom bomb program that eventually began to enrich uranium with centrifuges based on a stolen Dutch design.
Investigators in the Netherlands found a letter he wrote in the summer of 1976, after having returned to Pakistan, to Frits Veerman, a technician friend at the plant. "I ask you in great confidence to help us," Dr. Khan wrote, according to an article by David Albright, a nuclear expert, in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. "This is absolutely urgent."
Dr. Khan asked for help on how to etch special grooves on a Dutch centrifuge's bottom bearing, a critical part. The grooves were to aid the flow of lubricants. He also asked if Mr. Veerman might like to vacation in Pakistan "and earn some money at the same time?"
Suspicious, Mr. Veerman gave the letter to officials at Urenco. It was eventually used against Dr. Khan when he was put on trial in absentia in the Netherlands. In 1983, he was sentenced to four years in prison for stealing nuclear secrets. The conviction was later overturned, however, on a legal technicality.
By 1986, American intelligence had concluded that Pakistan was making weapons-grade uranium. And Dr. Khan was making no secret of his expertise: he published two articles that advertised his knowledge. He did so, he wrote, "because most of the work is shrouded in the clouds of the so-called secrecy" controlled by Western nuclear powers.
At around the same time, Iran made its secret deal and obtained basic centrifuge designs, the ones that now bear Pakistan's technological signature.
But it was in the mid- to late 1990's, as American sanctions tightened, that Pakistan made its biggest deal - with North Korea, American intelligence officials have said. Though Pakistan continues to deny any role, the laboratories are believed to have been the centerpiece of a barter arrangement of nuclear technology for missiles. South Korean intelligence agents discovered the transactions in 2002 and passed the information to the C.I.A. In the summer of that year, American spy satellites recorded a Pakistani C-130 loading North Korean missile parts in North Korea.
Earlier this year the State Department barred American transactions with the Khan laboratory because of the missile deal.
Pakistani officials say that since Dr. Khan's retirement, he has no longer been officially affiliated with the laboratory that bears his name. Still, one former Pakistani military official described him as a proud nationalist who saw himself as a Robin Hood-like character outwitting rich nations and aiding poor ones. Dr. Khan, he said, "was not that sort that would think it was a bad thing" to share nuclear weapons technology. "In fact, he would think it was a good thing."
David Rohde reported from Pakistan and Boston. William J. Broad and David E. Sanger reported from Vienna, New York and Washington.
--------
Father of Pakistani Bomb Questioned Over Iran Link
December 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-pakistan-nuclear.html
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) - Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's atom bomb, is being questioned about reports of possible links between the Pakistani and Iranian nuclear programs, the Pakistani government said Monday.
The move follows investigations by the U.N.'s nuclear agency. Tehran has acknowledged using centrifuge designs that appear identical to ones used in Islamabad's nuclear weapons program.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Masood Khan told Reuters Khan was being questioned in connection with the ``debriefings'' taking place of several scientists working at his Khan Research Laboratories, a uranium enrichment plant near Islamabad.
``He is too eminent a scientist to undergo a normal debriefing session,'' Masood Khan said. ``However, some questions have been raised with him in relation to the ongoing debriefing sessions.''
The spokesman denied reports that Khan was ``under restriction'' and gave no other details.
Several intelligence sources told Reuters however the scientist, who is a national hero for developing a nuclear bomb tested in 1998 to rival India's, had not been allowed to receive visitors at his home in Islamabad nor to leave it since last week.
One intelligence official said the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation had taken part in the questioning.
``It is a routine matter,'' said one of the sources, who did not want to be identified. ``We are debriefing every nuclear scientist, so Dr Qadeer is facing the same formality.''
Diplomats in Vienna told Reuters last month the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) was investigating whether blueprints for Iran's centrifuge had come from someone in Pakistan or elsewhere.
Tehran, accused by Washington of trying to develop nuclear weapons, told the IAEA it had got them from a ``middleman'' whose identity the agency had not determined, a Western diplomat told Reuters at the time.
KEY U.S. ALLY
Pakistan, a key U.S. ally in the ``war on terror,'' denies exporting nuclear technology and specifically denies any link to Iran's nuclear program.
Sunday, authorities said Yasin Chohan, one of three Khan Laboratories scientists detained earlier in the month, had been allowed home after a ``personnel dependability and debriefing session.'' It said two others, Mohammad Farooq, and another identified only as Saeed, were ``still undergoing debriefing.''
Opposition politicians have condemned the investigations as a ``national insult'' and a capitulation to American pressure.
It was inevitable the spotlight of the Iran probe would turn to Khan, who worked in the 1970s at a uranium enrichment plant run by British-Dutch-German consortium Urenco.
According to diplomats close to the Vienna-based IAEA, the centrifuge designs used by Iran were of a machine made by the plant in the Netherlands.
In 1983, after his return to Pakistan, Khan was sentenced in absentia to four years' jail by an Amsterdam court for attempted espionage, a decision later overturned on appeal.
Earlier this year, Washington announced commercial sanctions on Khan Research Laboratories for allegedly arranging the transfer of nuclear-capable missiles from North Korea to Pakistan, a decision Islamabad protested.
-------- russia
Russia Deploys Fresh Batch of Missiles
December 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Russia-New-Missiles.html
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=518&ncid=732&e=6&u=/ap/20031222/ap_on_re_eu/russia_new_missiles
MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia has deployed a fresh batch of its top-of-the-line strategic nuclear missiles after a break caused by a funding shortage, and military officials presented ambitious plans Monday for building weapons even more potent.
Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov inaugurated the new set of Topol-M missiles at the Tatishchevo missile base in the central Saratov region Sunday, describing them as a ``21st-century weapon'' unrivaled in the world.
``This is the most advanced state-of-the-art missile in the world,'' Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said in remarks broadcast by Russian television stations Monday. ``Only such weapons can ensure and guarantee our sovereignty and security and make any attempts to put military pressure on Russia absolutely senseless.''
U.S. military analysts equate the missile, known as the SS-27 in the West, with the American Minuteman III, the older of the two land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles in the U.S. inventory.
Ivanov on Monday reported the deployment to President Vladimir Putin, saying the military will continue modernizing all components of the nation's nuclear forces.
The Interfax-Military News Agency said six Topol-Ms were deployed Sunday.
The first 10 such missiles entered duty in December 1998 and two more sets followed in the next two years. The military had planned to continue the deployment in regular annual installments, but got the fourth batch of Topol-Ms out only Sunday.
The Topol-M missiles, capable of hitting targets more than 6,000 miles away, have so far been deployed in silos. Its mobile version, mounted on a heavy off-road vehicle, is set to become operational next year, the Strategic Missile Forces chief, Col.-Gen. Nikolai Solovtsov, said in televised remarks.
The daily Izvestia said that the Topol-M lifts off faster than its predecessors and maneuvers in a way that makes it more difficult to spot and intercept. It is also capable of blasting off even after a nuclear explosion close to its silo, the newspaper reported.
The deployed Topol-Ms have been fitted with single nuclear warheads, but there are plans to equip each missile with three individually targeted warheads, Izvestia said. The missile's mobile version will carry from four to six warheads, the Interfax-Military News Agency quoted an unidentified General Staff officer as saying.
However, the Topol-M's chief designer, Yuri Solomonov, told Izvestia that a severe money crunch had put the program in jeopardy.
Budget allocations for making Topol-Ms next year were halved without consulting its makers, he said. If the government doesn't revise its course, ``the year 2004, or the year 2005 at the latest, will be the last year when we will be able to carry out serial production of high-tech products for the military,'' Solomonov added.
As the Topol-M program faced difficulties, the military has sought to maintain nuclear parity with the United States by extending the lifetime of its Soviet-era missiles.
In Washington, a State Department official said the latest Topol-M deployment is regarded a continuation of the Russian program that started in 1998 and doesn't violate strategic weapons treaties.
The new deployment is consistent with what the Russian government had told the U.S. government to expect, the official said.
Putin said in October that Russia had several dozen Soviet-built SS-19 missiles that remained factory-fresh because they were stockpiled without fuel. The General Staff officer who spoke to Interfax said these missiles would enter service beginning in 2010 and remain on duty through 2030.
Next year, design work will start on a next-generation heavy nuclear missile, which will enter service after 2009, the officer said. The new missile will be capable of carrying 10 nuclear warheads with a total weight of up to 4.4 tons, compared to Topol-M's combat payload of 1.32 tons, he added.
Russia's strategic aviation chief, Lt.-Gen. Igor Khvorov, said Monday that the air force was drawing up requirements for a new strategic bomber that could become operational in 2014-2016, the Interfax-Military News Agency said.
-------- treaties
Good Nukes, Bad Nukes
December 22, 2003
New York Times
By ASHTON B. CARTER, ARNOLD KANTER, WILLIAM J. PERRY and BRENT SCOWCROFT, OP-ED CONTRIBUTORS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/opinion/22SCOW.html?pagewanted=all&position=
http://www.iht.com/articles/122457.htm
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is arguably the most popular treaty in history: except for five states, every nation in the world is part of it. For more than three decades, it has helped curb the spread of nuclear weapons.
Since 9/11, however, and especially in the last several months, the viability of the treaty has been called into question. Some say it is obsolete. Others say it is merely ineffective. In support of its argument each side cites the situation in Iran, which has been able to advance a nuclear weapons program despite being a member of the treaty.
The Iranian nuclear program - and, to a lesser extent, the activities of Libya, which has also signed the treaty but announced last week it would give up all illegal weapons programs - highlight both the utility and the limitations of the treaty. It is not obsolete; if the treaty did not exist, we almost certainly would want to invent it. At the same time, it would be a mistake to rely on it exclusively to address the problem of nuclear proliferation.
Those who say the treaty is useless argue that the bad guys either don't sign the treaty, or they do and then cheat. The good guys sign and obey, but the treaty is irrelevant for these countries because they have no intention of becoming nuclear proliferators in the first place.
This all-or-nothing argument is wrong. First, it fails to acknowledge that there is an important category in between good guys and bad guys. For these in-betweens - countries like Ukraine, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Argentina or South Korea - the weight of international opinion against proliferation expressed in the treaty has contributed to tipping the balance of decision-making against having nuclear weapons.
Second, the treaty does have an impact even on "bad guys" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. When the United States moves against such regimes, it does so with the support of the global opprobrium for nuclear weapons that the treaty enshrines.
This consensus undergirds the multilateral approach that is under way to resolve the North Korean nuclear issue, and was at the heart of the international pressure that persuaded Tehran to increase the transparency of its nuclear program. Even in the divisive case of Iraq, no one argued that Saddam Hussein should be left alone with weapons of mass destruction.
Yet the treaty is not perfect. It allows, for example, nations that forswear nuclear weapons to develop nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Signatories may build and operate nuclear power reactors, and they are permitted to produce enriched uranium that fuels the reactors, to store the radioactive spent fuel from those reactors, and to reprocess that spent fuel. The only specific obligations are that signatories declare these plants to the International Atomic Energy Agency and permit the agency to inspect them.
The problem is that this "closed fuel cycle" gives these countries the inherent capacity to produce the fissile material required for a nuclear weapon. Facilities used to produce enriched uranium for power reactors can also be used to produce enriched uranium for weapons. Reprocessing spent fuel yields plutonium that can be fashioned into nuclear weapons.
As North Korea and Iran demonstrate, regimes that intend to violate the treaty's ban on nuclear weapons can exploit this right to operate a nuclear power plant. While seeming to remain within the terms of the treaty, they can gather all the resources necessary to make nuclear weapons. Then they can abrogate the treaty and proceed to build a nuclear arsenal.
The world should renew its determination to curb the spread of nuclear weapons by supplementing the current treaty with additional inducements and penalties. The key is to draw a distinction between the right to a peaceful civilian nuclear power program and the right to operate a closed fuel cycle. The first should be preserved - and perhaps enhanced - but the second should be seriously discouraged, if not prohibited.
How might such a system work? In addition to their treaty obligations, those countries seeking to develop nuclear power to generate electricity would agree not to manufacture, store or reprocess nuclear fuel. They also would agree to submit to inspections (probably under the atomic energy agency) to verify their compliance.
Those countries that now sell peaceful nuclear technology in accordance with the treaty, meanwhile, would agree not to provide technology, equipment or fuel for nuclear reactors and related facilities to any country that will not renounce its right to enrich and reprocess nuclear fuel, and agree not to sell or transfer any equipment or technology designed for the enrichment or reprocessing of nuclear fuel. At the same time, these countries would agree to guarantee the reliable supply of nuclear fuel, and retrieval of spent fuel at competitive prices, to those countries that do agree to this new arrangement.
We might also consider sanctions on those countries that nevertheless choose to pursue a closed fuel cycle. Whatever the precise content and form of these undertakings, it would probably be better to treat them as a companion to that treaty, rather than embark on the complicated and controversial process of amending it.
Why would any countries that want to develop a peaceful nuclear power program agree to such a bargain? One blunt answer is that if these restrictions were put in place, these countries would have virtually no choice, because developing the necessary technology from scratch is a daunting task. Refusing the arrangement would open them up to international scrutiny and pressure. On the other hand, any country that was truly interested in developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes would undoubtedly welcome a guaranteed supply of nuclear fuel. And why would countries that now supply nuclear technology be interested? First, no nation in this category has any interest in adding any country to the roster of the world's nuclear states. Second, over time, there probably is more money to be made in nuclear fuel services than in nuclear reactors.
Iran provides an excellent opportunity to test this approach. Building on the progress recently announced in Tehran, the United States should propose that Russian plans to help Iran build a network of civilian nuclear power reactors be permitted to proceed - provided that Iran enters into a verifiable ban on its enrichment and reprocessing abilities, and into an agreement to depend instead on a Russian-led suppliers' consortium for nuclear fuel services.
The Russians would be likely to embrace such a proposal for commercial and political reasons, and the Iranians would be confronted with a clear test of whether they harbor nuclear weapons ambitions. Britain, France and Germany, whose foreign ministers recently proposed a similar scheme to Iran, would need only to avoid the temptation to undercut the Russians on behalf of their own nuclear industry. And the United States could reap the benefits of offering a constructive initiative to address the Iranian nuclear problem.
Of course, this new arrangement would hardly be a cure-all. And making it work would be difficult. But at a time when its effectiveness and relevance are being questioned, such an approach would strengthen the treaty by furthering its goals: preventing the spread of nuclear weapons while promoting the development of peaceful nuclear energy.
William J. Perry and Ashton B. Carter were secretary of defense and assistant secretary of defense, respectively, in the Clinton administration. Brent Scowcroft and Arnold Kanter were national security adviser and under secretary of state, respectively, in the administration of George H. W. Bush.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- california
Quake Shuts Power Plant, Triggers Outages
December 22, 2003
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/business/business-quake-california-power.html
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Utilities scrambled on Monday to get the lights back on in towns in Central California after a magnitude 6.5 earthquake delivered a deadly jolt to the region.
The temblor, centered half way between San Francisco and Los Angeles near the tiny coastal town of San Simeon, also knocked out a major power plant and raised alarms at Diablo Canyon, a big nuclear power plant.
``It took us about 45 minutes to an hour to get a good handle on the total number. When we did, we had about 75,000 customers without power,'' Pacific Gas & Electric Co. spokesman Bill Roake said, speaking from the utility's service office in San Luis Obispo.
The company, a subsidiary of San Francisco-based PG&E Corp. (PCG.N), is the biggest power supplier in Central and Northern California.
``Currently, that number is down to about 22,000. We're cautiously optimistic that we'll have the majority of these customers back on line by 9 p.m. tonight,'' he added.
About 2,750 Southern California Edison customers, mostly in Santa Barbara County, also lost power, but a company spokesman said service had been fully restored within about 2-1/2 hours.
SCE is Edison International's (EIX.N) utility unit.
Utility officials said most of the outages were caused by downed lines or small, pole-mounted transformers that had been violently shaken.
But Roake said about a dozen power poles had been toppled in the Paso Robles area, where emergency officials reported two deaths, so far the earthquake's only known fatalities.
KNOCKED OFF LINE
Farther east, National Energy and Gas Transmission said the temblor shut the company's 1,000 megawatt La Paloma power plant in McKittrick, about 80 miles east of San Simeon.
The plant's four natural gas-fired generators were feeding about 700 megawatts onto the grid when the earthquake struck at 11:15 a.m. Pacific time (2:15 p.m. EST), triggering an automatic shutdown.
Engineers inspected the plant through the afternoon for signs of damage. Power company equipment is designed to shut itself off during earthquakes to prevent short-circuiting and can be switched back on quickly if undamaged.
``They'll bring the units back on line when they've determined it's safe,'' said Megan Doern, a spokeswoman at National Energy and Gas Transmission's Portland office.
Meanwhile, the giant Diablo Canyon nuclear power station, about 40 miles southeast of San Simeon, was spared any damage, as were high-voltage power lines serving the region.
``The earthquake was felt at Diablo Canyon. However, there was no impact to the plant and both units are operating normally,'' PG&E spokesman John Nelson said.
The plant, whose twin reactors are perched on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is one of the state's biggest power stations, generating 2,200 megawatts, enough to power roughly two million homes.
PG&E said the earthquake prompted Diablo Canyon's control room staff to declare an ``unusual event'' at the plant, the lowest level in the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission's alert program indicating no perceived threat to public safety.
-------- new mexico
Governor expresses concern over pit proposal
By David Giuliani
Current-Argus
Dec 23, 2003
http://www.currentargus.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=192&num=3768
SANTA FE - Gov. Bill Richardson said Tuesday he has "serious reservations" about a proposal for a factory making nuclear weapons components near Carlsbad.
Meanwhile, a local official said the community's leadership stands behind the project.
Richardson said he hasn't made a final decision on the plant in Carlsbad, saying he wants to focus on Louisiana Energy Services' plan for disposal of waste at its planned nuclear fuel factory in neighboring Lea County.
"I have serious reservations about the project (in Carlsbad)," Richardson said at a news conference on Tuesday. "I want to stabilize the LES situation. By that I mean that I am very insistent that there will be legislative language in the Congress that prohibits the disposal of waste in New Mexico. I'm supportive of the project only if those restrictions are accomplished.
"I have reservations about the plutonium pit facility. I'm not even sure we're being seriously considered," he added.
When LES announced a few months ago that it planned the Lea County plant, Richardson was on hand to give a supportive speech. Now, a controversy over what will happen to the plant's waste has created a rift between the governor and LES.
Meanwhile, Carlsbad leaders have been lobbying the Department of Energy to place a facility that manufactures pits - the triggers for nuclear weapons - at the Waste Isolation Plant. WIPP is one of five sites under consideration, and the Energy Department is expected to make a decision next spring.
Carlsbad City Councilman Bob Murray said local leaders believe Carlsbad is one of the top two finalists for the pit facility.
"This would be great for economic development. We want a continuation of industry that is nuclear-related, only if it's 100 percent safe," Murray said. "I think our work in getting our name out in Washington and keeping our name out there has helped."
The state's entire congressional delegation has come out in favor of placing the facility at WIPP, if the Energy Department decides to go ahead with it.
During a stop in Carlsbad in August, Richardson said he would make a decision soon on whether he supports a pit facility in Carlsbad.
"I know how important it is to the community," the governor said at the time.
-------- us politics
Paul Wolfowitz - The godfather of the Iraq war
By Mark Thompson,
Time Magazine,
Decembetr 22, 2003
http://www.time.com/time/personoftheyear/2003/poywolf.html
As tag teams go, Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, could not be more unlikely. Rumsfeld is a Cook County, Ill., politician, while Wolfowitz would be more at home at the University of Chicago, where he earned his doctorate. That makes them the most interesting one-two combination this side of Bush-Cheney. If Rumsfeld is the face, mouth and strong right arm of the war in Iraq, Wolfowitz-the intellectual godfather of the war-is its heart and soul. Whereas Rumsfeld talks about Iraq like a technician, Wolfowitz sounds more like a prophet. Says a close associate of the deputy's: "Paul asks himself every day how he can limit suffering by toppling another dictator or by helping people to govern themselves."
Rumsfeld offered Wolfowitz his current post with an invitation to serve as his intellectual alter ego, a senior aide says. Their offices are a short walk apart along the Pentagon's E-Ring. Wolfowitz frequently slips down a back hallway, peers through a peephole into his boss's suite and, if Rumsfeld is alone, walks right in. "He's got great power of concentration," says Wolfowitz, "so you can open the door-it doesn't disturb him-until he pauses, and I ask, ÔCan you take a minute?'" They talk half a dozen times a day, on matters small and large. Rumsfeld likes to chaff his deputy. "If there's a grammatical error in something I've written," Wolfowitz says, "he loves to correct it and say, ÔAnd he has a Ph.D.!'"
Most Pentagons feature a top guy who's a big thinker and a No. 2 who's the day-to-day manager. Rummy and Wolfie (as the President calls them) have it reversed: Wolfowitz is more ideological than Rumsfeld, which has suited both men for different reasons. Wolfowitz often ventured way ahead of the rest of the Administration on foreign policy matters over the past two years, and Rumsfeld frequently let him go. That allowed Wolfowitz to push the whole Bush team to the right, which also let Rumsfeld align himself with that crowd when it served his purpose to do so. "Rumsfeld's a big-enough maestro to understand that Wolfowitz was the leading edge and that someone had to do it," a Pentagon associate says.
"Are there times when it made him uncomfortable? Absolutely. Are there times when he had to crank it back? Yes. But did it work for him? Clearly." Wolfowitz has spent much of his career as a fierce defender of democracy. In Ronald Reagan's State Department, he pushed autocrats in Indonesia, the Philippines and South Korea toward reform. In George H.W. Bush's Administration, he was the Pentagon's No. 3 civilian and the first to argue that letting Saddam Hussein remain in power was a mistake. In the current Administration, he was the first to push Bush to topple Saddam in the wake of 9/11-and he did so just four days after the tragedy. Over coffee at Camp David, Wolfowitz privately broached the idea with Bush, who pulled him aside during a break and urged him to bring it up at a later meeting.
The onetime diplomat seems to lack the diplomatic gene. Wolfowitz was seen as clumsy and heavy-handed after the release on a U.S. government website of his memo barring nations that didn't participate in the invasion from winning U.S. contracts to rebuild Iraq-at the same time the U.S. was trying to persuade those nations to forgive Iraq's debt. Says a Pentagon official: "We ended up looking petty and petulant."
The Rummy and Wolfie show may soon go off the air. It is widely believed in national-security circles that Wolfowitz may leave the Administration sometime in 2004. He has become too controversial for Bush to promote to Defense Secretary; Wolfowitz believed that U.S. troops in Iraq would be greeted with rose petals. He remains unbowed about the postwar effort. "I'd like to know, among those people who say we should have had better plans, just which plan they had in mind that would have prevented the murderers and torturers that raped and abused that country for 35 years from continuing to fight this destructive war until they're defeated. The bottom line is," he says, "these are tough, ugly bastards."
----
Cheney's tough talking derails negotiations with North Korea
By Hamish McDonald,
Sydney Morning Herald Correspondent in Beijing
December 22, 2003
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/12/21/1071941611806.html
The US and Chinese Presidents, George Bush and Hu Jintao, talked at the weekend after revelations that hardliners in Mr Bush's Administration had derailed diplomatic preparations for a new round of talks with North Korea over its nuclear weapons.
The Saturday-night phone talk came after US newspapers reported that the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, a neo-conservative wielding unusual powers in foreign policy, opposed the latest draft of a Chinese-initiated plan for North Korea to freeze and dismantle its nuclear programs in return for security guarantees and economic aid.
US State Department negotiators had submitted a reworked version of the Chinese plan to a high-level meeting in Washington on December 12, but Mr Cheney had insisted that the document require North Korea to agree to "irreversible" dismantling of its nuclear weapons programs and international verification.
The Knight-Ridder newspaper chain said a senior official had quoted Mr Cheney as telling the meeting: "I have been charged by the President with making sure that none of the tyrannies in the world are negotiated with. We don't negotiate with evil; we defeat it."
The re-emergence of the word "evil" and talk of defeat - recalling Mr Bush's January 2002 speech linking North Korea with Iraq and Iran in an axis of evil - is likely to make the North Koreans even more distrustful of promising anything ahead of firm guarantees from the US and its allies.
Mr Cheney's veto of the Chinese plan ended hopes of bringing US and North Korean negotiators together again in Beijing this month, with teams from China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Diplomatic momentum is unlikely to rebuild for some weeks, unless Mr Bush's phone talk indicates a decision has been taken over Mr Cheney's head.
The official Chinese news agency Xinhua said North Korea had been discussed along with Iraq, Taiwan and bilateral relations. "The Chinese side will continue maintaining close contact with the relevant parties to facilitate the holding of the second Beijing six-party talks at an early date and enable the talks to yield positive results," it quoted Mr Hu as saying.
Even without Mr Cheney's words, the US stance was proving hard for the North Koreans to swallow, insisting the Pyongyang government move to dismantle its nuclear weapons without the formal security treaty it had demanded, and well before any economic aid was even discussed. After its draft was rejected, China called on Washington to be more "flexible" and "realistic".
On Saturday, Pyongyang's official Rodong Sinmun newspaper said North Korea would never give up its "nuclear deterrent" unless its security was guaranteed and aid recommenced. It said it would disarm only in return for a "simultaneous package solution".
Meanwhile, the World Food Program said it will probably have to cut off food aid to 3 million North Koreans next month due to a lack of foreign donations. The UN agency's chief, James Morris, said member governments had donated only 60 per cent of the food the agency needed for its plan to feed 6.5 million of North Korea's 23 million people.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
U.S. Expanding G.I. Presence in Afghanistan to Permit Aid Work
December 22, 2003
By CARLOTTA GALL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/asia/22AFGH.html
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 21 - American forces will expand deployment in the southern and eastern parts of Afghanistan to increase security so that reconstruction work can begin unmolested by Taliban and Qaeda attackers, the top military commander here said Sunday.
The announcement by the commander, Lt. Gen. David Barno, amounted to an admission by the Americans that the 11,500 troops in Afghanistan have been unable to stop a constant stream of insurgent attacks that have undermined or slowed international aid efforts.
The announcement also signaled a major shift in emphasis for the so-called provincial reconstruction teams run by the military, which have been helping mainly to provide emergency relief to Afghans and win the trust of the population. Now those teams will focus primarily on providing security in the southern and eastern areas of Afghanistan that have been most vulnerable to insurgent attacks this year.
"Expanding the P.R.T.'s, and rapidly expanding in that part of the country will have a dramatic effect, I think, not only on security in the area, but in accelerating development," General Barno said at a press briefing in downtown Kabul. "It is important to recognize that P.R.T.'s have an important security role as well as a reconstruction role."
A military spokesman, Lt. Col. Matthew Beevers, said, the new strategy was meant to "ensure security so we can accelerate and enable the international community and the central government to get some programs going."
The military has five provincial reconstruction teams, consisting of 50 to 70 soldiers each, and is putting six more in place. Twelve teams in all will be working by March, the spokesman said. They will concentrate on a range of security initiatives, including patrolling, and building up local police and Afghan security forces.
NATO, which commands the peacekeeping force in Kabul and is taking over control of a German-run reconstruction team in northern Afghanistan at the end of the month, will also set up more such teams in coming months, General Barno said.
The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and international and Afghan aid agencies have for months called for a stronger international effort to improve security. Some prominent agencies have criticized the reconstruction teams as an inadequate response to the serious security threats facing the Afghan people and those providing assistance.
"There is still not a clear mandate about how they are going to operate," said Sally Austin, deputy country director of CARE International in Kabul. She added that a year after the first reconstruction team started in the town of Gardez, southeast of Kabul, it remained unclear what achievements there had been there. Security has improved recently in the Gardez area, she said, but she attributed the improvement more to the change in governor than any impact by the team.
Two foreign aid workers, an Italian tourist and 13 Afghan aid workers have been killed in Taliban-orchestrated attacks this year. At least 100 Afghan policemen and 8 American troops have also died. Five Afghan border guards were killed and two wounded in the latest attack, on Saturday night at their post close to the border with Pakistan near the southern town of Spinbaldak.
After a 29-year-old woman from the United Nations refugee agency was shot dead last month in the town of Ghazni, south of Kabul, the United Nations special representative to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said the organization might have to pull staff members out of the country if security does not improve.
The security problems may jeopardize the entire political process and national elections scheduled for June next year. Elections may have to move to September, and can go ahead at all only if there is a major improvement in security, Mr. Brahimi said in an interview on Friday.
The change in the military approach comes amid a major shifting of gears in the American mission in Kabul with the arrival 10 days ago of the new ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, and the recent approval of $1.2 billion in extra assistance for Afghanistan, bringing the total appropriated for 2004 to $2 billion. Mr. Khalilzad, who retains his position as special presidential envoy to Afghanistan, has brought a new intensity to the American aid program and the political process under the United Nations-sponsored Bonn accords.
General Barno is now based in the Embassy in Kabul, rather than at Bagram Air Base, 70 miles north of Kabul. His move to the capital reflects the new combined military and political strategic approach to bringing stability to Afghanistan, as one military official described it.
Mr. Khalilzad is bringing with him a new team, which will make up a special operational unit called the Afghan Reconstruction Group, working under his chief of staff in the embassy, to concentrate on reconstruction projects around the country. A building to house the team is to be built within four months across the road from the heavily fortified embassy, aides said. Meanwhile, a new embassy building in the main compound is going up at great speed, with construction teams working 24 hours a day to make enough space for the expanding embassy staff.
The United States Agency for International Development will triple its staff in Afghanistan in the next two to three months, Andrew S. Natsios, the administrator of A.I.D., said during a visit to Kabul last week. At the moment, the agency has only 40 staff members in the country and needs more living space to house the increase. Most embassy staff members now live in temporary shelters occupying virtually all the space on the embassy grounds.
Security remains a major restraint on the agency's activity. Twenty percent of the country is off limits for staff members for security reasons, Mr. Natsios said.
The new money and impetus reflect a more important ideological change toward assistance in the United States government over the last year, Mr. Brahimi, the United Nations representative, said in an interview on Friday.
"The ideological opposition to any participation in what is called nation building has disappeared," he said. "The dismissive attitude that the most powerful member of the U.N. had to peace building has gone. If Afghanistan has done that, that is a very big plus."
-------- china
China Thanks Bush for Taiwan Stance
Beijing Issues New Warning Against Move Toward Independence
By Philip P. Pan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A22
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20120-2003Dec21.html
BEIJING, Dec. 21 -- China's president, Hu Jintao, thanked President Bush in a telephone call Saturday night for opposing any "words and actions" by Taiwan to alter its status, and again warned that China would not tolerate the island's independence, state media reported Sunday.
The telephone conversation came as President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan continued to ignore warnings by the United States and China against holding a referendum in March to demand that China redeploy hundreds of missiles it has aimed at the island.
Chen has pledged to go ahead with the referendum, which China considers a provocative move toward a vote on independence and the Bush administration has argued is a campaign ploy that needlessly raises tensions. Chen is fighting for reelection in a close race. The presidential election and the referendum are scheduled to take place on the same day, and analysts say Chen will lose if he gives in on the issue of the referendum.
"On the Taiwan question, the Chinese government is willing to achieve the reunification peacefully with its utmost sincerity and greatest efforts, but Taiwan independence definitely cannot be tolerated," Hu was quoted as telling Bush, according to the official New China News Agency.
The statement could be interpreted as an attempt to press Bush to follow through on promises made to Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao during his visit to Washington this month. Bush rebuked Chen at a news conference, and a senior U.S. official said Bush also told Wen he was worried about "things going on on Taiwan in the context of a hotly contested election" and would "speak out if that is necessary."
In addition to the referendum, China may be concerned about recent remarks by Chen's rival for the presidency, Lien Chan, who has backed away from his Nationalist Party's longstanding position supporting eventual unification with China. On Saturday, Lien also appeared to reverse course and endorse Chen's position that there are independent countries on each side of the Taiwan Strait.
Lien and his party had condemned Chen after that policy was announced in August 2002, describing it as a reckless move that would make it impossible to resume talks with China. China insists that Taiwan is part of its territory and has threatened to go to war if the self-governing island of 23 million people formally declares independence.
The Nationalists, who ruled China before relocating to Taiwan after the Communist Revolution in 1949, have always maintained that the mainland and Taiwan are part of "one China" and supported eventual unification. But at a news conference last week, Lien repeatedly refused to endorse the "one China" policy, saying that he did not want to be portrayed as pro-China by Chen.
Another senior Nationalist official, Wang Jin-pyng, the legislative speaker and Lien's campaign manager, also said the party did not rule out independence. Other party officials said neither statement represented a change in the party's official "one China" position.
At a campaign rally in Taipei on Saturday, the Associated Press reported, Lien referred to Chen's position that there are independent countries on each side of the Taiwan Strait and said, "If you put it simply as each side has one country, there should be no problem."
China has favored Lien's presidential bid, but recently expressed anger about his party's decision to reverse longstanding policy and join Chen in supporting a referendum law. If the Nationalists and the People First Party, which has endorsed Lien, also decide to join Chen in abandoning the "one China" policy, no major party on the island would openly support unification.
----
Taiwan debating missile early-warning system: Jane's
TAIPEI (AFP)
Dec 22, 2003
http://www.spacewar.com/2003/031222061923.4e763s57.html
Taiwan's defense officials are locked in debate over selecting an early-warning system to guard against a possible missile attack by China, according to a report to be published this week.
US defense suppliers Lockheed Martin and Raytheon are slugging it out for the multi-million dollar contract, the authoritative Jane's Missiles and Rockets weekly will say in its Thursday edition.
"Both companies are making claims that are not realistic -- squabbling over which radar could see a butterfly flying along in Fujian Province," a US Pentagon official said.
"Both companies are saying things like, 'Our radar can do 90 percent of the job for just 10 percent of the costs of the other guy.' It's just ridiculous."
The report said Raytheon has put forward its AN/FPS-115 Pave PAWS long-range early-warning radar for the contract, while Lockheed Martin has offered its AN/TPS-59(V)3 theatre missile defence radar.
However, some Taiwan officials are pointing out that Taiwan already has a variety of tactical long-range radars and is currently developing a new system which has a range of 1,000 kilometers (600 miles).
Taiwan's parliament last week passed a resolution urging China to remove its hundreds of ballistic missiles aiming at the island to pave way for reconciliation between the two, which split in 1949 following a civil war.
-------- iraq
US Saddam claims being challenged
By Paul McGeough Baghdad
December 22, 2003
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/21/1071941609659.html
Claims that US troops captured Saddam Hussein have been challenged by reports that he was discovered only after Kurdish forces had taken him prisoner.
The deposed president was drugged and abandoned ready for the American soldiers to recover him, a British tabloid newspaper reported yesterday.
Saddam came into the hands of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) after being betrayed by a member of the al-Jabour tribe, whose daughter had been raped by Saddam's son Uday, leading to a blood feud, reported the Sunday Express, quoting an unnamed senior British military intelligence officer.
Washington's claims that brilliant US intelligence work led to the capture of Saddam are also being challenged by reports sourced in Iraq's Kurdish language media that say its militia set up the circumstances in which the US merely had to go to a farm identified by the Kurds to bag the fugitive former president.
American forces took Saddam into custody about 8.30pm local time on the Saturday, but sat on the dramatic news until 3pm the next day. But early on Sunday, a Kurdish language wire service reported explicitly: "Saddam Hussein was captured by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. A special intelligence unit led by Qusrat Rasul Ali, a high-ranking member of the PUK, found Saddam Hussein in the city of Tikrit, his birthplace. Qusrat's team was accompanied by a group of US soldiers. Details of the capture will emerge but the global Kurdish party is about to begin."
The Western media in Baghdad were electrified by the revelation, but as reports of the arrest built, they relied almost exclusively on accounts from within US military and intelligence organisations, starting with the words of the US-appointed administrator of Iraq, Paul Bremer: "Ladies and gentlemen, we got 'im."
A report from the PUK's northern stronghold, Suliymaniah, last week claimed a vital intelligence breakthrough after a telephone conversation between Qusrat Rasul Ali and Saddam's second wife, Samira, which had prompted the Kurds to move units of their Peshmerga fighters to where Saddam was hiding.
The report, from the MENA agency, as monitored by the BBC, said the Americans had insisted that it be an American arrest because they worried that such a coup for the Kurds might provoke an Arab-Kurd civil war.
A Kurdish member of the Iraq Governing Council, Mahmud Othman, also suggested a critical role for Kurds in the arrest when he said on the Sunday: "Before 4am (more than 12 hours ahead of the US announcement) today, Qusrat Rasul Ali called me to inform me that his men, with the Americans, had managed to capture Saddam Hussein."
US intelligence officers have concluded that Saddam was directing the postwar insurgency inside Iraq, playing a far more active role than thought.
Despite his bewildered appearance when he was hauled from his hiding hole last weekend, he is believed to have been issuing regular instructions on targets and tactics through five trusted lieutenants.
Documents found in Saddam's briefcase indicated that he had been kept informed of the progress of the insurgency, but did not suggest he had overall control of operations by former Baath Party loyalists. But since the arrest and interrogation of guerilla leaders named in the paperwork, US investigators now believe Saddam headed an elaborate network of rebel cells.
The investigators have put together a picture of Saddam's support structure, enabling him to issue commands without using satellite phones, which monitoring devices can hear.
- with agencies
----
Bomb Kills 2 G.I.'s and Translator in Baghdad
December 22, 2003
New York Times
By EDWARD WONG
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/middleeast/22CND-IRAQ.html?hp
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Dec. 22 - Two American soldiers and their Iraqi interpreter were killed here this morning when an improvised bomb exploded by their convoy, military officials said. Two other soldiers from the First Armored Division were wounded.
The deaths brought to 202 the number of soldiers killed in combat since President Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, and to 317 since the war began on March 20.
The explosion occurred at 11:45 a.m., the military said, and the two wounded soldiers were quickly taken to a combat hospital. Neither their conditions nor the identities of the dead and wounded were made public.
The deaths came even as the number of daily attacks on American soldiers has declined, from a high of 50 a day at one point in November.
Guerrilla fighters seem increasingly to be concentrating on strikes at what the military calls soft targets, like Iraqi police stations, which have little in the way of protection against car bombs. But military officials have also warned that intelligence reports suggest that there could be a rise in attacks against coalition forces this week, as insurgents try to disrupt Christmas celebrations and avenge the capture of Saddam Hussein on Dec. 13.
Military officials said that on Sunday night American soldiers captured a high-ranking former intelligence officer in Mr. Hussein's government. The officer, Maj. Gen. Mumtaz al-Taji, is believed to have been coordinating attacks against coalition forces north of Baghdad, the military said. Mr. Taji was detained during night raids in the town of Baquba, in the so-called Sunni Triangle, where disaffection with the American occupation runs high.
Now that Mr. Hussein has been caught, the most wanted man on the American government's list of fugitive Iraqis is Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, who is thought to be in hiding north of Baghdad.
The north, with its various ethnic groups and tribes, is one of the most difficult areas for the American occupiers to placate. Thousands of Kurds took to the streets of the oil-rich city of Kirkuk today, demanding that the city be turned over to Kurdish control. The two dominant Kurdish parties in the north intend to ask the Iraqi government to give them broad governing authority over the Kurdish regions.
As part of the effort to restore services in Iraq, the Iraqi minister of telecommunication signed contracts with three cellular phone companies to provide service in the country. The contracts were some of the most anticipated and hotly contested ones given out since Mr. Hussein's government was ousted. Rival companies have accused the Iraqi government and the winners of favoritism and corruption, charges that the parties have denied.
Orascom Telecom Holding, an Egyptian company, will provide service in central Iraq, including in Baghdad, where service is expected to start on Jan. 1. AsiaCell will operate in the north, and AtheerTel, a Kuwaiti company, will cover the south. The three contracts, worth a total of $5 million, are good for two years.
Orascom said it was starting a weeklong experimental transmission today before building up to full service that will cost 8 to 10 cents a minute.
The minister of telecommunication, Heidar al-Abadi, said at the signing of the contracts that telecommunications exchange buildings in the country had been turned into "concrete armed barracks" to prevent attacks from guerilla fighters.
Iraq has a population of 25 million people, and it has been considered one of the greatest untapped markets in the Middle East for cellphone companies. MCI currently runs service here for about 10,000 people, mostly employees or close associates of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Otherwise, people use mobile satellite phones called Thurayas, whose handsets cost $600 here.
The Governing Council said today that 30,000 Iraqis this year would be allowed to make the Haj, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, in Saudia Arabia. That is double the number who went last year. A third of those will be able to fly from Baghdad International Airport, where insurgents have repeatedly tried to shoot down planes. One group hit a DHL cargo plane in late November with a surface-to-air missile.
The other pilgrims will go by land through various borders, with the Iraqi military providing protection. Families of people killed by Mr. Hussein's government will be given priority in the Haj application process.
--------
In New Iraq, Sunnis Fear a Grim Future
Once Dominant, Minority Feels Besieged
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20116-2003Dec21?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Dec. 21 -- The Bridge of the Imams draws together two Baghdads and divides two Iraqs.
Arching over the Tigris River, the overpass ends in Kadhimiya, a Shiite Muslim neighborhood built around the gold-domed shrine of a descendant of the prophet Muhammad. On Friday, the neighborhood pulses with promise. Pilgrims crowd its intersections, sidewalks overflow with money-changers, jewelers and kiosks brimming with hummus, cardamom and olives. Slogans written on the walls declare deposed president Saddam Hussein an infidel, and newspapers celebrate the capture of the man they call the tyrant.
At the other end of the bridge is Adhamiya, a grim Sunni Muslim neighborhood where the venerated Abu Hanifa Mosque is shielded behind eight steel barricades. Its twin minarets, clock tower and brick walls bear the scars of war. The slogans along the neighborhood's streets, where many of the shops are shuttered, convey nostalgia and anger. "Long live Saddam," reads one, scrawled in black. "Jihad is our way," declares another. A dozen or so men carrying AK-47 rifles sit atop the mosque's roof and patrol the street below, casting wary glances toward the bridge and the celebrations beyond.
"The future? What's the future?" asked one of the guards, Ammar Abu Nour Quds. "We don't have any future."
Of the emotions unleashed by Hussein's arrest, the darkest were those that gripped the country's Sunni minority, of which Hussein was a member. As a new Iraq unfolds, with Hussein's arrest the latest milestone, they are on the inside looking out -- a community besieged, leaderless and relentless in its refusal to accept the eight-month U.S. occupation. The Sunnis' reversal of fortune marks a spectacular shift for a group that for most of the country's modern history, and for centuries before that, guided Iraq through colonialism and coups, dictatorship and war.
In interviews across the Sunni Triangle, which gave Hussein much of his support and suffered the most with his fall, many insist they are no longer fighting for the privilege they enjoyed in previous decades, but rather for their community's survival in a country with a Shiite Muslim majority. Once divided and discredited clergy have stepped forward to try to end a crisis of identity, bringing a message of political Islam to a community that once embraced secular Arab nationalism and tribal traditions.
No longer kingmakers, the community's leaders vow that they still hold the key to stability. But casting a shadow over conversations with men such as Quds is a sense of dispossession, of a minority searching for a voice in the contest to create a new state.
"The people are waiting for something, to hear something, to see something," said Khaled Ahmed, a 23-year-old Sunni whose photo store is across the street from the Abu Hanifa Mosque. He listened for a moment to the sermon, a homily urging restraint and unity that was broadcast from loudspeakers. "They're waiting for some kind of hope," he said.
'A People Without'
Col. Abdullah Jassem and his brother, Gen. Abed Jassem -- two retired military officers from the northern town of Thuluya -- still espouse hope for what they admit is unlikely, that Hussein was somehow not captured.
It is the talk that swirls through towns in the Sunni Triangle and neighborhoods of Baghdad. In Tikrit, near Hussein's ancestral home town, young men insisted, without a hint of doubt, that the former Iraqi president visited Wednesday and doled out "10 papers" -- Iraqi slang for $1,000 -- to the sheik of the Bayt Habous mosque. His message: distribute it to the poor. They recounted another story, spread at a wedding last week, that Hussein was seen in the streets of Tikrit on the day of his capture, Dec. 13, greeting the people.
"I have some suspicions," Abdullah Jassem said while sitting in his home with a riverfront view of the meandering Tigris.
For the Jassem brothers, men of rural origins who rose to influence and prestige under the 35-year rule of Hussein's Baath Party, the suspicions derive as much from their fear of the future as from their loyalty to the past.
The Sunni Triangle stretches from the Iranian border in the east to Syria in the west, an arid region of central Iraq made livable by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. But until Hussein took power, it was the Sunni elite in the capital -- not their poor, rural cousins -- who controlled the country. Blessed with wealth, education and the favor of overlords, they were the administrators and officers under the Ottoman Empire, then in large part through inertia, the favorites of the British who arrived after World War I.
To build the Baath Party, Hussein broke their hold on the country. Ever suspicious, he relied on the ranks of his fellow disenfranchised Sunnis, the neglected from cities such as Tikrit, Samarra and Thuluya. At first, he recruited from tribes, imbued with the fierce, often unforgiving traditions of the countryside. While, in time, he narrowed the ranks of his faithful to his family, men such as the Jassems profited, and today, the ranks of Thuluya's newly unemployed are filled with former military officers, intelligence agents and bureaucrats.
Hussein guaranteed their interests and provided their patronage. In a region given to prejudices against Shiites, he ensured that power would remain out of Shiite hands. Until Hussein's capture last week, when he crawled out of a dirt hole without resistance, the Jassems thought they shared with Hussein the ideals of dignity, pride and honor. After his arrest, they felt only shame, another reflection of their growing humiliation.
In Thuluya and elsewhere, the word that punctuated their conversations was ihana, insult.
"He's supposed to fight with honor, he's supposed to defend his honor," Abed lamented. His brother shook his head in dismay. He stretched out a leg crippled by shrapnel during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war. "We believed in him, that he would always resist," he said. "We can't believe that he would be reduced to his level, as a coward."
"Believe me, the day of his capture was the same as the collapse of Baghdad, maybe worse," Abdullah added.
Qahtan Jabbouri, a friend sharing small cups of bitter coffee, interrupted. "We are now a shaab biduun," he said. "A people without."
Feeling Disenfranchised
For generations, sect and ethnicity have cast a long shadow over Iraq, and under Hussein's clan-based rule, Shiites and Kurds were the most frequent victims of his government's brutal repression. But now, in the freewheeling, postwar era, sect and ethnicity have come to define politics almost exclusively, with explicit quotas determining the allotment of power and patronage under the U.S.-led occupation. In that contest, the Kurds are represented by the community's two traditional parties. The Shiites, comprising perhaps 60 percent of the population, have a voice through formerly exiled groups or clergy, both radical and mainstream, who emerged forcefully in the wake of Hussein's fall.
The Sunnis, about one-fifth of Iraq's people, find themselves largely disenfranchised, posing a formidable challenge to the U.S.-led administration that is trying to craft an inclusive political process to transfer power by June.
The Baath Party, its leadership traditionally dominated by Sunnis, was outlawed in May. The Sunni-led Iraqi Islamic Party, whose leader serves in the U.S.-appointed Governing Council, struggles for support among a constituency that, in overwhelming numbers, refuses to accept the status quo. In the words of one leading Sunni cleric, Abdel-Salaam Kubeisi, the party does little more than "market the occupation." The sheiks of Sunni Arab tribes, aggressively courted by the U.S. administration, are seen by many Sunnis as compromised.
"In the past they took money from Saddam," Jabbouri said. "Now they're taking money from the Americans."
The sense of disenfranchisement is powerfully felt among Sunnis. Even today, many are reluctant to identity themselves by sect. They insist they are Muslims and that sectarian differences are only a ploy to divide Iraqis. Others say they are Arabs, even as the Arab nationalism that gave them voice has receded. Often, they identify themselves in opposition -- against the occupation or, more commonly, as a besieged community, facing an escalating campaign of shadowy killings of Baathists and Sunni clergy.
"We were the heads of the Arabs, and the people were happy," said Mohammed Abed, 24, owner of a CD store in Tikrit, recalling an Arab proverb. "But by God, time has turned its face on us, and we've now been placed at the mercy of the villains."
The play list at Abed's store is a window on such sentiments. It points to a society that he and others believe is growing more radical and ceding ground to once-divided clergy that can claim independence and moral stature.
From a room decorated with posters of Arab and international pop stars -- Kadhim Saher, Assala and Britney Spears -- he points to the video that he has trouble keeping on the shelf. It is by Sabah Abu Hashim Jannabi, an Iraqi singer from the northern city of Mosul. It is titled "Wrath," and at about 50 cents a piece, he said he sells 40 or so a week -- by far his best seller.
The video is a wild mishmash of images -- scenes from "The Lion of the Desert," a movie starring Anthony Quinn as the famed Libyan guerrilla leader Omar Mukhtar, promotional video from U.S. armed forces and relentlessly violent footage taken from Arab satellite networks and Fox News of U.S. attacks and raids in Iraq.
To a heavy drumbeat, Jannabi sings: "America is losing in the thousands. Our paths are paved with bullets."
The Clergy's Role
Sheik Nadhim Khalil represents a new generation of leader. He has achieved influence by religious appeals and anti-occupation rhetoric. Only 25, he has led the Caliphs Mosque, Thuluya's oldest and most prominent, for seven years. Since the government's fall, he said, worshipers have tripled in number. Plans are underway, he said, to build a new floor to house them.
His followers, many of them young, point to his credentials. The Americans raided his house last month, they said -- a sure sign of his independence. Under Hussein, they recalled, he was questioned often for his sometimes explicit criticism of the government -- that it should build schools rather than palaces, that its administration lacked the justice of Islam's forebears.
"Now there's space. Now there's an opening," said Khalil, sitting atop red Persian carpets and leaning on pillows stacked against the wall, which was adorned with framed verses of the Koran. "Only the mosques represent the Sunnis."
While fearing their influence, many Sunnis express envy at the authority commanded by the most senior Shiite clergy. To religious Shiites, the pronouncements of the grand ayatollahs carry the force of law, and the clerics' ascent through a rigid hierarchy of scholarship is measured by their prestige among their followers. In times of change, the institution provides a voice of the community.
Through history, the Sunni clergy have lacked that status, tainted by what many view as subservience to the state and bereft of stature in a sect that, at its most orthodox, sees no intermediary between man and God.
Now, the Sunni clergy are trying to raise their standing. Just days after the government's collapse, several clerics established the Commission of the Muslim Clergy. Today, it claims 3,000 members, with offices in most provinces. Its advisory council of 41 scholars and clerics and secretariat of 11 meet weekly, and its statements speak explicitly on behalf of the sect. The most recent warned of consequences of more killings of Baathists and clergy.
"We have moral authority with the majority of the Sunni people," said the group's spokesman, Abdel-Salaam Kubeisi. "But there is no doubt now that things are boiling. The question is how long we can control the feelings of the people."
In his own way, Khalil has repeated the commission's experiment. Inside Thuluya, perched on a bend in the Tigris, he has convened weekly gatherings of the town's 17 clerics, the setting for the two-hour meeting rotating among the mosques. They have dealt with U.S. raids in Thuluya, sectarian strife in nearby Balad, with its mixed Shiite-Sunni population, and efforts to refurbish the mosques.
His message is harsh -- opposing the American occupation, defending Sunnis against Shiites.
Some worshipers recall a sermon Khalil delivered last month in which he spoke of three men competing to be the most vile. The first saw a woman carrying wood atop her head. He beat her. The second tore off her clothes and raped her. The third stood back. When the other two asked what he would do to prove his wickedness, he laughed. That was my mother, he said.
As the mosque fell silent, Khalil said the mother represented Iraq, and the men were those who betrayed the country.
"The occupation is like a cancer, and it has to be removed," he said. The clerics, he said, "are fighting with our tongues."
On this day, Khalil expounded on the need to form a Sunni militia to offset the armed presence of Shiites and Kurds. He said former military officers had started recruiting in Thuluya -- in his view, a welcome development.
"If you lose and cannot get a place in the government, you have something to fight with," said Nadhim, wearing a white skullcap. . "It's something to create a balance of power."
The future, he predicted, was grim. He saw no end to the occupation. He saw sectarian strife only mounting.
"The seeds for civil war have been planted," he said, his tone matter of fact. "I really think so."
-------- israel / palestine
Elite Israeli Troops Refuse To Serve in the Territories
By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20118-2003Dec21.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 21 -- Thirteen reservists from Israel's elite military commando unit stated Sunday in a letter to the prime minister that they would no longer serve in the occupied territories, joining other influential security officials who have recently criticized Israeli military tactics and treatment of the Palestinians.
"We have long ago crossed the line between fighters fighting a just cause and oppressing another people," three officers and 10 soldiers of the army's most secretive unit, the Sayeret Matkal, said in the letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The letter was made public by the soldiers, who signed with their ranks, first names and the first letter of their last names.
The reservists said they were taking the dramatic step of publicly criticizing their government's policies "out of deep fear for the future of the state of Israel as a democratic, Zionist and Jewish country and out of concern for its moral and ethical image."
"It is very grave and unfortunate that reservists use the unit in which they served as a platform for publicizing their political views," said an Israeli military spokesman, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The condemnation of government policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by the commandos echoes similar recent remarks by a group of 27 reserve pilots, four former chiefs of Israel's powerful domestic security service, the military's current chief of staff, and a separate list of 574 army reservists. The statements by reservists are being organized by a group calling itself Courage to Refuse.
The criticism from within the Israeli military and security forces has unsettled the Sharon administration and has contributed to discontent expressed in the last few months by many segments of Israeli society over the government's handling of the Palestinian uprising, now in its fourth year.
Political analysts said the comments from soldiers and military officers on operations in the occupied territories was one of the reasons Sharon announced last week that his government would unilaterally establish what he called a security line between the West Bank and Israel if the Palestinian Authority did not act quickly to stem terrorism.
An open protest letter from members of a military unit that has been involved in dozens of the Israeli military's most sensitive operations is highly unusual, analysts said.
"This is the number-one military unit in Israel," said Yagil Levy, author of a recent book on the Israeli military. "Until 10 years ago nobody could even mention its name publicly because it was covered by censorship regulations. It is a very mysterious unit responsible for the most heroic missions the Israeli Defense Forces have ever made."
Members of the commando unit specialize in counterterrorism, assassinations and rescue missions. One of their most famous operations was the 1976 rescue of hostages from a hijacked French airplane in Entebbe, Uganda. Israeli documents declassified after last week's capture of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein confirmed accounts that the unit planned an assassination attempt against Hussein in 1992, but it was aborted when five commandos were killed during a rehearsal for the mission.
Some of Israel's most prominent current and former leaders have been members of the commando unit, including former prime minister Ehud Barak; Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu; Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, chief of staff of the armed forces; and the director of the Shin Bet security agency, Avi Dichter.
Although the unit does not participate in routine activities in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it has reportedly been involved in some of the most critical missions, involving intelligence gathering and assassinations of Palestinians.
The 13 reserve officers and soldiers accused the Israeli government of "depriving the rights of millions of Palestinians" and using soldiers as "human shields for the settlements."
The letter said, "We will no longer butcher our humanity by taking part in an occupying army's missions."
At least two reservists from the unit were jailed last year by the military for refusing to serve in the Palestinian territories. It was unclear whether those two were among the signatories of the letter because the names of the jailed men has not been divulged publicly.
Effi Eitam, a reserve general and the head of the National Religious Party, which strongly supports Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, said, "Those who signed are not worthy of being called soldiers," the Associated Press reported.
Separately on Sunday, Israeli military activities continued in the West Bank, where a six-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammad Naim Isryda, was shot in the chest and killed while playing near his house in the Balata refugee camp on the edge of Nablus, Palestinian medical officials reported. Israeli military officials said soldiers opened fire on the area after a homemade explosive was thrown at them. Another youngster from the camp, Nur Emran, 13, died from injuries he suffered on Tuesday, when an Israeli soldier shot him in the head with a rubber-coated steel bullet. The soldiers opened fire on youths who were throwing stones, bricks and bottles, a military spokesman said. The spokesman said the military had not received any formal complaint that a youth had been hit.
--------
'Lost Tribe' Finds Itself on Front Lines of Mideast Conflict
December 22, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/middleeast/22SETT.html?pagewanted=all&position=
HAVEI SHOMRON, West Bank, Dec. 16 - Sharon Palian and his fellow immigrants from India are still struggling with the Hebrew language and remain partial to homemade kosher curry rather than Israeli cuisine.
But the 71 immigrants, who arrived in June with the firm conviction that they were descended from one of the biblical lost tribes of Israel, feel they have completed a spiritual homecoming.
"This is my land," said Mr. Palian, a 45-year-old widower who left a lush rice farm and brought his three children with him from the Bnei Menashe community in northeastern India. "I am coming home."
Yet by making their home here, over the hill from the Palestinian city of Nablus, they have thrust themselves onto the front lines of the Middle East conflict.
"Israel can bring lost tribes from India, Alaska or Mars, as long as they put them inside Israel," said Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator. "But to bring a lost person from India and have him find his land in Nablus is just outrageous."
The Indians arrived as work began on a Middle East peace plan that would require Israel to freeze settlement activity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Even Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has indicated that Israel may have to abandon some settlements, if not through a peace deal with the Palestinians, then as part of an imposed decision. That could affect communities like the Bnei Menashe, who are among 6,000 people who consider themselves Jews in two states in northeast India, Mizoram and Manipur, which are near the border with Myanmar, formerly Burma.
Already, Israel's interior minister, Avraham Poraz, has frozen the program that has permitted about 100 members of the Bnei Menashe community to immigrate annually. He is concerned that people from poor countries are coming to Israel to upgrade their standard of living, rather than because of historical and religious Jewish ties.
Those already here have their own concerns. Palestinian assailants have carried out frequent ambushes on the isolated roads outside Shavei Shomron and on occasion have even slipped inside the community, through a fence around the perimeter and despite an army encampment attached to the settlement.
While Israel has been building what it describes as a security barrier in the West Bank, the planned route will not quite reach Shavei Shomron. That would make the community, with its 600 residents, a prime candidate for dismantling if Israel does begin that process.
The immigrants, many of them farmers at home, wear Western clothes, and the men wear skullcaps. The married women cover their hair with knitted caps and wear long skirts, as they did in India.
They live a spartan existence in mobile homes, with much of their day devoted to language lessons. Some stay in the nearby settlement of Enav and commute to their classes in an armored bus.
They receive a monthly stipend from Amishav, an Israeli group that seeks out "lost Jews" and has been bringing in immigrants from Bnei Menashe for more than a decade.
But the immigrants do not yet have jobs, and with no sizable Israeli towns close by, they meet few Israelis and leave the small settlements infrequently.
On a sunny day here, they received their Hebrew lesson in a classroom that also serves as a community shelter in case of an attack.
"What do you want to study?" the teacher asked. One young woman replied, "I want to become a doctor." But most of the Bnei Menashe never graduated from high school in India.
Most of the immigrants have recently completed a religion course and are now recognized as Jewish by the state, permitting them to become citizens. In the coming months, most are expected to leave Shavei Shomron, but they are likely to land in other settlements where they have relatives or friends.
The local Bnei Menashe now number about 800, with most of them clustered in three West Bank settlements and one in Gaza.
Michael Menashe, who was among the early arrivals from India in 1994, now works with the new Indian immigrants and is a shining example of successful assimilation.
His Hebrew is fluent. He has served in the military, worked as a computer technician and married an American immigrant to Israel. He is one of 11 siblings, 10 of whom have now immigrated.
"We begin at zero when we arrive," said Mr. Menashe, 31. "It is difficult to go out and live a normal life. But we don't have a choice. This is where we want to be."
Amishav, the group that champions the Bnei Menashe, wants to bring all 6,000 of them to Israel.
"They work hard, serve in the army and raise good families," said Michael Freund, director of Amishav, which means "my people return" in Hebrew. "They are a blessing to this country."
Mr. Freund said he would gladly settle the immigrants wherever they could be accommodated. They gravitate to settlements because housing is cheaper, and the tightly knit settlement communities are prepared to absorb the newcomers.
But Peace Now, an Israeli group that monitors settlements, says the recruitment of far-flung groups with questionable Jewish ancestry is part of an effort to raise the number of settlers and to increase the Jewish population relative to the Arabs.
"This definitely contradicts the spirit, if not the letter" of the peace plan, "because these people will live in the settlements," said Dror Etkes, a Peace Now spokesman.
Mr. Freund acknowledges that his group wants immigrants for demographic reasons. But he also insists that the commitment of the Bnei Menashe to Judaism is deep-rooted and predated plans to immigrate to Israel.
There is no proof, though, of historical links to the Manasseh, one of the 10 lost tribes of Israel driven into exile by the Assyrians in the eighth century B.C.
But the group has long had traditions that resemble ancient Jewish practices, said Mr. Freund, a former prime ministerial aide.
The Bnei Menashe did not practice Judaism before British missionaries converted them to Christianity about a century ago. They followed an animist religion typical of Southeast Asian hill tribes. But that religion did seem to include some practices that were similar to Bible stories, said Hillel Halkin, an Israeli journalist who has written a book about them, "Across the Sabbath River: In Search of a Lost Tribe of Israel."
It is not clear what prompted the Bnei Menashe to begin practicing Judaism. In the 1950's they were still Christians, but they began adopting Old Testament laws, like observing the Sabbath and Jewish dietary laws. By the 1970's, they were practicing Judaism, Mr. Halkin said. There was no sign of any outside influence. The Bnei Menashe wrote letters to Israeli officials in the late 1970's seeking more information on Judaism. Then Amishav contacted them, and the group began bringing the Beni Menashe to Israel in the early 1990's.
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Palestinians Attack Egyptian Foreign Minister
December 22, 2003
By GREG MYRE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/middleeast/22CND-MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Dec. 22 - After a day of meeting with Israel's leaders, Egypt's foreign minister, Ahmed Maher, was attacked and heckled this evening by Muslim radicals inside the Aksa Mosque here, one of the holiest sites in Islam.
While Mr. Maher suffered no serious injuries, the episode reflected the combustible nature of Mideast diplomacy. As it tries to mediate the Mideast conflict, Egypt has recently been increasing its contacts with Israel, and Mr. Maher apparently became a target because of his talks with Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
The attack on Mr. Maher came during a day of scattered violence. In the one episode, an Israeli security official said that two Israelis and a Palestinian gunman had been killed in an exchange of gunfire on a road used by Israeli soldiers and settlers in the southern Gaza Strip.
The shooting, outside the Gush Katif settlement bloc, resulted in the first Israeli killings since two security guards were fatally shot outside Jerusalem a month ago, on Nov. 22.
As Mr. Maher entered the expansive Aksa mosque to pray, young men immediately began yelling at him, calling him a traitor, and threw shoes at him, a particularly potent insult in Arab culture. The entourage surrounding him was jostled.
"You are not welcome here," they shouted at Mr. Maher, who had just wrapped up talks with several senior Israeli leaders. "Go back to Sharon!"
The Egyptian minister appeared short of breath and near collapse amid the clamor. Israeli police officers, who did not enter the mosque initially, went inside to assist Mr. Maher's bodyguards in removing the minister, a spokesman for the Israeli police, Gil Kleiman, said.
Mr. Maher, 68, was taken to an Israeli hospital for an examination but suffered no serious injuries and was released several hours later, officials said.
It is highly unusual for a Muslim to be attacked by other Muslims at the compound, known as the Noble Sanctuary, which is the third-holiest site in Islam, after Mecca and Medina, and also contains the Dome of the Rock mosque.
According to witnesses, the assault was carried out by about 20 members of the Islamic Liberation Party, a small, Muslim fundamentalist group that has not previously played any significant role in the Mideast conflict.
The Palestinian Authority, led by Yasir Arafat, denounced the attack. "We condemn in the strongest possible terms the assault on Mr. Maher," the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said.
The compound is the most bitterly contested religious site in Jerusalem. The Noble Sanctuary was built atop the ancient ruins of the two biblical Jewish temples, and is known to Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism.
Israel claims sovereignty over the site, but the Waqf, an Islamic religious trust, has day-to-day control. "We are sorry for this incident, it is shameful," the director of the Waqf, Adnan Husseini, said of the attack. "Anyone who has a message to convey can do it in a civilized way."
Israeli security forces do not enter the compound, except in special circumstances.
On Sept. 28, 2000, Mr. Sharon led a controversial Israeli visit to the compound while he was the opposition leader in Parliament. Palestinian leaders denounced the visit as a provocation - a charge that Mr. Sharon rejected - and the next day, Palestinians rioted as they emerged from midday prayers at the Aksa Mosque. The Mideast bloodletting has continued since.
Mr. Maher is the highest-ranking Egyptian official to visit Israel in the past two years, and his efforts are part of stepped up Egyptian diplomacy in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Egypt, which was the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, withdrew its ambassador from Israel shortly after the Israeli-Palestinian fighting began in September 2000.
But Egypt helped broker a deal this summer under which Palestinian factions pledged to halt attacks against Israel. However, that agreement collapsed amid renewed fighting, and Egypt is trying to mediate another cease-fire among the Palestinian groups.
Israel has welcomed the Egyptian moves and is seeking to rebuild ties strained by the past three years of violence.
"I am sure that this visit will contribute to the strengthening of relations between Egypt and Israel," Mr. Sharon said.
At a news conference before the assault, Mr. Maher said: "I come out from here encouraged, but the encouragement needs to be followed up by actions. We hope to see actions from both sides as soon as possible."
Mr. Maher met only Israeli officials during his one-day visit. Israel has insisted that if visiting diplomats want to meet with top Israeli officials, they must not see Mr. Arafat, although it has no objection to diplomats meeting with other Palestinian officials, like the prime minister, Ahmed Qurei.
Mr. Maher said at the news conference that he planned to meet with Palestinian officials in the future, though no talks were scheduled at present.
Separately, the Israeli Army's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, said 13 reserve soldiers in an elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, would be dismissed from the military if they did not retract a letter saying they would no longer serve in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip.
The reserve soldiers submitted the letter on Sunday to Mr. Sharon's office, writing, "We will no longer be party to an oppressive rule in the territories and the disregard for the human rights of millions of Palestinians."
In September, 27 Israeli reserve pilots objected to Israeli airstrikes aimed at Palestinian militants in built-up civilian areas. They were dismissed from the Air Force.
Over the past two years, more than 500 reserve soldiers have signed a petition saying they will refuse to serve in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip, where the military carries out almost daily operations in Palestinian cities and towns.
The military says such action is necessary to track down Palestinians responsible for the violence against Israel.
Reserve soldiers typically perform several weeks of active duty a year, and some of the soldiers refusing to serve have been sentenced to prison for an equivalent amount of time.
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Libya Opens Nuke Programs to Inspections
By GEORGE JAHN
Associated Press Writer
Dec 22, 2003
http://customwire.ap.org/dynamic/stories/L/LIBYA_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
VIENNA, Austria (AP) -- Libya has agreed to open its nuclear activities to pervasive inspection by the U.N. atomic agency as early as next week, a key step toward honoring a promise to scrap its nuclear weapons program, the agency's chief said Monday.
Also Monday, Pakistan acknowledged that some scientists participating in its nuclear program may have been involved in the proliferation of sensitive technology to other countries. The government was responding to suspicions that Pakistan has aided Libya, Iran or North Korea.
Libya's decision followed a meeting its delegation had Saturday with Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The session came after Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi's surprise announcement Friday that his country would give up nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction.
ElBaradei said he would lead the first inspection mission, which he described as a positive step on the part of Libya "to rid itself of all programs or activities that are relevant or could lead to the production of weapons of mass destruction."
"We will start as early as ... next week," ElBaradei said. He said he and senior experts would meet with Libyan government officials in the capital, Tripoli, to agree on how to carry out pervasive inspections, with actual inspection teams following shortly afterward.
Libya has admitted to nuclear fuel projects, including the possession of centrifuges and centrifuge parts used in uranium enrichment - a nuclear effort more advanced than previously thought. It also agreed to tell the IAEA about current nuclear programs and to adhere to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
During Saturday's meeting, the Libyan delegation also agreed that it was in breach of its safeguard obligations and that it would sign an additional protocol to the Nonproliferation Treaty. That move gives IAEA a strong mandate for wide-ranging inspections on short notice.
ElBaradei confirmed Monday that the Libyans were ready to sign that protocol. He described that concession as a "welcome step (that) gives us the authority to detect nuclear activity at a nascent stage - the kind of activity that has been going on in Libya."
Revealing some details of Libya's activities, ElBaradei said the weapons research effort started with a program to enrich uranium through spinning in centrifuges "sometime in the 80s (and) picked up steam in the 90s."
"It involved the importation of centrifuges, (other) equipment, natural uranium," he told reporters at IAEA headquarters in Vienna.
ElBaradei said Libyan officials in Vienna told him the experiments did not progress to uranium enrichment - a key step in creating nuclear weapons.
He said it was too early to establish whether some of the technology and expertise used in the program was linked to suspected nuclear weapons programs in Iraq or in Iran, which - under international pressure - agreed to sign the additional protocol last week.
Pakistan's government has strongly denied allegations it spread nuclear technology, but said it was investigating whether individual scientists acted without authorization.
"Some individuals may have been doing something on their own. We are investigating that," Pakistani Information Minister Sheikh Rashid Ahmed told The Associated Press in Islamabad.
ElBaradei expressed confidence that - with continued cooperation by Tripoli - his agency would be able to "resolve all issues relevant to Libya's effort to develop weapons of mass destruction" over the next few months.
Also Monday, the world's chemical weapons watchdog said Libya's promise to dispose of its prohibited weapons will help rid the globe of "these heinous means of terror, death and destruction."
"Libya's imminent accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention brings us much closer to our shared goal of a world free of these means of terror, death and destruction," the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said in a statement from its headquarters in The Hague, Netherlands.
Libya is one of just 14 countries that has neither signed nor ratified the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention prohibiting the production, storage and use of chemical weapons.
Gadhafi's decision to come clean is the latest in a series of moves to end his country's international isolation and shed its reputation as a rogue nation.
The United States imposed sanctions in 1986, accusing Libya of supporting terrorist groups. Ten years later, America passed the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act, which threatened to penalize the U.S. partners of European companies that did significant business in Libya and Iran.
While U.S. sanctions remain in force, the U.N. Security Council voted to abolish its sanctions on Libya in September, after it agreed to pay compensation to families of the Lockerbie bombing.
Pan Am Flight 103 from London to New York exploded over the Scottish town of Lockerbie on Dec. 21, 1988, killing 259 people on the plane and 11 on the ground. A former Libyan intelligence agent was found guilty of the bombing in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison.
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Judge Halts Forced Military Anthrax Shots
Dec 22, 2003
By PAULINE JELINEK
(AP)
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20031222/D7VJJDK01.html
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon must stop forcing servicemen and women to take the anthrax vaccination against their will, unless President Bush signs a special order, a judge ruled Monday.
Millions of shots have been given and hundreds of service members have been punished for refusing them since the mandatory vaccinations started in 1998.
The judge ruled that the anthrax vaccinations fell under a 1998 law prohibiting the use of certain experimental drugs unless people being given the drug consent or the president waives the consent requirement.
Congress passed the law following fears that the use of such drugs may have led to unexplained illnesses among veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf War that have come to be known as Gulf War Syndrome.
"The women and men of our armed forces put their lives on the line every day to preserve and safeguard the freedoms that all Americans cherish and enjoy," said Judge Emmet G. Sullivan of the United States District Court in Washington.
"Absent an informed consent or presidential waiver, the United States cannot demand that members of the armed forces also serve as guinea pigs for experimental drugs," Sullivan said.
The Pentagon had no immediate comment.
Sullivan rejected the government concern that military discipline would be harmed if courts intervene between soldiers and their military superiors.
Believing Iraq and other nations had produced anthrax weapons, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen in 1997 ordered the armed forces immunized.
Shots started in 1998 for soldiers in areas believed to present the highest risk of infection - the Persian Gulf, then Korea.
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Keeping Secrets
The Bush administration is doing the public's business out of the public eye. Here's how -- and why
Investigative Reports
12/22/03
U.S. News & World Report
By Christopher H. Schmitt and Edward T. Pound
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/031222/usnews/22secrecy_9.htm
"Democracies die behind closed doors." --U.S. APPEALS COURT JUDGE DAMON J. KEITH
At 12:01 p.m. on Jan. 20, 2001, as a bone-chilling rain fell on Washington, George W. Bush took the oath of office as the nation's 43rd president. Later that afternoon, the business of governance officially began. Like other chief executives before him, Bush moved to unravel the efforts of his predecessor. Bush's chief of staff, Andrew Card, directed federal agencies to freeze more than 300 pending regulations issued by the administration of President Bill Clinton. The regulations affected areas ranging from health and safety to the environment and industry. The delay, Card said, would "ensure that the president's appointees have the opportunity to review any new or pending regulations." The process, as it turned out, expressly precluded input from average citizens. Inviting such comments, agency officials concluded, would be "contrary to the public interest."
Ten months later, a former U.S. Army Ranger named Joseph McCormick found out just how hard it was to get information from the new administration. A resident of Floyd County, Va., in the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, McCormick discovered that two big energy companies planned to run a high-volume natural gas pipeline through the center of his community. He wanted to help organize citizens by identifying residents through whose property the 30-inch pipeline would run. McCormick turned to Washington, seeking a project map from federal regulators. The answer? A pointed "no." Although such information was "previously public," officials of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission told McCormick, disclosing the route of the new pipeline could provide a road map for terrorists. McCormick was nonplused. Once construction began, he says, the pipeline's location would be obvious to anyone. "I understand about security," the rangy, soft-spoken former business executive says. "But there certainly is a balance--it's about people's right to use the information of an open society to protect their rights."
For the past three years, the Bush administration has quietly but efficiently dropped a shroud of secrecy across many critical operations of the federal government--cloaking its own affairs from scrutiny and removing from the public domain important information on health, safety, and environmental matters. The result has been a reversal of a decades-long trend of openness in government while making increasing amounts of information unavailable to the taxpayers who pay for its collection and analysis. Bush administration officials often cite the September 11 attacks as the reason for the enhanced secrecy. But as the Inauguration Day directive from Card indicates, the initiative to wall off records and information previously in the public domain began from Day 1. Steven Garfinkel, a retired government lawyer and expert on classified information, puts it this way: "I think they have an overreliance on the utility of secrecy. They don't seem to realize secrecy is a two-edge sword that cuts you as well as protects you." Even supporters of the administration, many of whom agree that security needed to be bolstered after the attacks, say Bush and his inner circle have been unusually assertive in their commitment to increased government secrecy. "Tightly controlling information, from the White House on down, has been the hallmark of this administration," says Roger Pilon, vice president of legal affairs for the Cato Institute.
Air and water. Some of the Bush administration's initiatives have been well chronicled. Its secret deportation of immigrants suspected as terrorists, its refusal to name detainees at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and the new surveillance powers granted under the post-9/11 U.S.A. Patriot Act have all been debated at length by the administration and its critics. The clandestine workings of an energy task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney have also been the subject of litigation, now before the Supreme Court.
But the administration's efforts to shield the actions of, and the information obtained by, the executive branch are far more extensive than has been previously documented. A five-month investigation by U.S. News detailed a series of initiatives by administration officials to effectively place large amounts of information out of the reach of ordinary citizens. The magazine's inquiry is based on a detailed review of government reports and regulations, federal agency Web sites, and legislation pressed by the White House. U.S. News also analyzed information from public interest groups and others that monitor the administration's activities, and interviewed more than 100 people, including many familiar with the new secrecy initiatives. That information was supplemented by a review of materials provided in response to more than 200 Freedom of Information Act requests filed by the magazine seeking details of federal agencies' practices in providing public access to government information.
The principal findings:
Important business and consumer information is increasingly being withheld from the public. The Bush administration is denying access to auto and tire safety information, for instance, that manufacturers are required to provide under a new "early-warning" system created following the Ford-Firestone tire scandal four years ago. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, meanwhile, is more frequently withholding information that would allow the public to scrutinize its product safety findings and product recall actions.
New administration initiatives have effectively placed off limits critical health and safety information potentially affecting millions of Americans. The information includes data on quality and vulnerability of drinking-water supplies, potential chemical hazards in communities, and safety of airline travel and other forms of transportation. In Aberdeen, Md., families who live near an Army weapons base are suing the Army for details of toxic pollution fouling the town's drinking-water supplies. Citing security, the Army has refused to provide information that could help residents locate and track the pollution.
Beyond the well-publicized cases involving terrorism suspects, the administration is aggressively pursuing secrecy claims in the federal courts in ways little understood--even by some in the legal system. The administration is increasingly invoking a "state secrets" privilege (box, Page 24) that allows government lawyers to request that civil and criminal cases be effectively closed by asserting that national security would be compromised if they proceed. It is impossible to say how often government lawyers have invoked the privilege. But William Weaver, a professor at the University of Texas-El Paso, who recently completed a study of the historical use of the privilege, says the Bush administration is asserting it "with offhanded abandon." In one case, Weaver says, the government invoked the privilege 245 times. In another, involving allegations of racial discrimination, the Central Intelligence Agency demanded, and won, return of information it had provided to a former employee's attorneys--only to later disclose the very information that it claimed would jeopardize national security.
New administration policies have thwarted the ability of Congress to exercise its constitutional authority to monitor the executive branch and, in some cases, even to obtain basic information about its actions. One Republican lawmaker, Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, became so frustrated with the White House's refusal to cooperate in an investigation that he exclaimed, during a hearing: "This is not a monarchy!" Some see a fundamental transformation in the past three years. "What has stunned us so much," says Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, a public interest group in Washington that monitors government activities, "is how rapidly we've moved from a principle of `right to know' to one edging up to `need to know.' "
The White House declined repeated requests by U.S. News to discuss the new secrecy initiatives with the administration's top policy and legal officials. Two Bush officials who did comment defended the administration and rejected criticism of what many call its "penchant for secrecy." Dan Bartlett, the White House communications director, says that besides the extraordinary steps the president has taken to protect the nation, Bush and other senior officials must keep private advice given in areas such as intelligence and policymaking, if that advice is to remain candid. Overall, Bartlett says, "the administration is open, and the process in which this administration conducts its business is as transparent as possible." There is, he says, "great respect for the law, and great respect for the American people knowing how their government is operating."
Bartlett says that some administration critics "such as environmentalists . . . want to use [secrecy] as a bogeyman." He adds: "For every series of examples you could find where you could make the claim of a `penchant for secrecy,' I could probably come up with several that demonstrate the transparency of our process." Asked for examples, the communications director offered none.
There are no precise statistics on how much government information is rendered secret. One measure, though, can be seen in a tally of how many times officials classify records. In the first two years of Bush's term, his administration classified records some 44.5 million times, or about the same number as in President Clinton's last four years, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, an arm of the National Archives and Records Administration. But the picture is more complicated than that. In an executive order issued last March, Bush made it easier to reclassify information that had previously been declassified--allowing executive-branch agencies to drop a cloak of secrecy over reams of information, some of which had been made available to the public.
Bait and switch. In addition, under three other little-noticed executive orders, Bush increased the number of officials who can classify records to include the secretary of agriculture, the secretary of health and human services, and the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, all three can label information at the "secret" level, rendering it unavailable for public review. Traditionally, classification authority has resided in federal agencies engaged in national security work. "We don't know yet how frequently the authority is being exercised," says Steven Aftergood, who publishes an authoritative newsletter in Washington on government secrecy. "But it is a sign of the times that these purely domestic agencies have been given national security classification authority. It is another indication of how our government is being transformed under pressure of the perceived terrorist threat." J. William Leonard, director of the information oversight office, estimates that up to half of what the government now classifies needn't be. "You can't have an effective secrecy process," he cautions, "unless you're discerning in how you use it."
From the start, the Bush White House has resisted efforts to disclose information about executive-branch activities and decision making. The energy task force headed by Cheney is just one example. In May 2001, the task force produced a report calling for increased oil and gas drilling, including on public land. The Sierra Club and another activist group, Judicial Watch, sued to get access to task-force records, saying that energy lobbyists unduly influenced the group. Citing the Constitution's separation of powers clause, the administration is arguing that the courts can't compel Cheney to disclose information about his advice to the president. A federal judge ordered the administration to produce the records, prompting an appeal to the Supreme Court.
Energy interests aren't alone in winning a friendly hearing from the Bush administration. Auto and tire manufacturers prevailed in persuading the administration to limit disclosure requirements stemming from one of the highest-profile corporate scandals of recent years. Four years ago, after news broke that failing Firestone tires on Ford SUVs had caused hundreds of deaths and many more accidents, Congress enacted a new auto and tire safety law. A cornerstone was a requirement that manufacturers submit safety data to a government early-warning system, which would provide clues to help prevent another scandal. Lawmakers backing the system wanted the data made available to the public. After the legislation passed, officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said they didn't expect to create any new categories of secrecy for the information; they indicated that key data would automatically be made public. That sparked protests from automakers, tire manufacturers, and others. After months of pressure, transportation officials decided to make vital information such as warranty claims, field reports from dealers, and consumer complaints--all potentially valuable sources of safety information--secret. "It was more or less a bait and switch," says Laura MacCleery, auto-safety counsel for Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer group. "You're talking about information that will empower consumers. The manufacturers are not going to give that up easily."
Get out of jail free. Government officials, unsurprisingly, don't see it that way. Lloyd Guerci, a Transportation Department attorney involved in writing the new regulations, declined to comment. But Ray Tyson, a spokesman for the traffic safety administration, denies the agency caved to industry pressure: "We've listened to all who have opinions and reached a compromise that probably isn't satisfactory to anybody."
Some of the strongest opposition to making the warning-system data public came from the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. The organization, whose membership comprises U.S. and international carmakers, argued that releasing the information would harm them competitively. The Bush administration has close ties to the carmakers. Bush Chief of Staff Card has been General Motors' top lobbyist and head of a trade group of major domestic automakers. Jacqueline Glassman, NHTSA's chief counsel, is a former top lawyer for DaimlerChrysler Corp. In the months before the new regulations were released, industry officials met several times with officials from the White House's Office of Management and Budget.
The administration's commitment to increased secrecy measures extends to the area of "critical infrastructure information," or CII. In layman's terms, this refers to transportation, communications, energy, and other systems that make modern society run. The Homeland Security Act allows companies to make voluntary submissions of information about critical infrastructure to the Department of Homeland Security. The idea is to encourage firms to share information crucial to running and protecting those facilities. But under the terms of the law, when a company does this, the information is exempted from public disclosure and cannot be used without the submitting party's permission in any civil proceeding, even a government enforcement action. Some critics see this as a get-out-of-jail-free card, allowing companies worried about potential litigation or regulatory actions to place troublesome information in a convenient "homeland security" vault. "The sweep of it is amazing," says Beryl Howell, former general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Savvy businesses will be able to mark every document handed over [to] government officials as `CII' to ensure their confidentiality." Companies "wanted liability exemption long before 9/11," adds Patrice McDermott, a lobbyist for the American Library Association, which has a tradition of advocacy on right-to-know issues. "Now, they've got it."
Under the administration's plan to implement the Homeland Security Act, some businesses may get even more protection. When Congress passed the law, it said the antidisclosure provision would apply only to information submitted to the Department of Homeland Security. The department recently proposed extending the provision to cover information submitted to any federal agency. A department spokesman did not respond to requests for comment. Business objections were also pivotal when the Environmental Protection Agency recently backed off a plan that would have required some companies to disclose more about chemical stockpiles in communities.
If the administration's secrecy policies have helped business, they have done little for individuals worried about health and safety issues. The residents of the small town of Aberdeen, Md., can attest to that. On a chilly fall evening, some 100 people gathered at the Aberdeen firehouse to hear the latest about a toxic substance called perchlorate. An ingredient in rocket fuel, perchlorate has entered the aquifer that feeds the town's drinking-water wells. The culprit is the nearby U.S. Army's Aberdeen Proving Ground, where since World War I, all manner of weapons have been tested.
Trigger finger. After word of the perchlorate contamination broke, a coalition of citizens began working with the Army to try to attack the unseen plume of pollution moving through the ground. But earlier this year, the Army delivered Aberdeen residents a sharp blow. It began censoring maps to eliminate features like street names and building locations--information critical to understanding and tracking where contamination might have occurred or where environmental testing was being done.
The reason? The information, the Army says, could provide clues helpful to terrorists. Arlen Crabb, the head of a citizens' group, doesn't buy it. "It's an abuse of power," says Crabb, a 20-year Army veteran, whose well lies just a mile and a half from the base. His coalition is suing the Army, citing health and safety concerns. "We're not a bunch of radicals. We've got to have the proof. The government has to be transparent."
Aberdeen is but one example of the way enhanced security measures increasingly conflict with the health and safety concerns of ordinary Americans. Two basics--drinking water and airline travel--help illustrate the trend. A public health and bioterrorism law enacted last year requires, among other things, that operators of local water systems study vulnerabilities to attack or other disruptions and draw up plans to address any weaknesses. Republicans and Democrats praised the measure, pushed by the Bush administration, as a prudent response to potential terrorist attacks. But there's a catch. Residents are precluded from obtaining most information about any vulnerabilities.
This wasn't always the case. In 1996, Congress passed several amendments to the Clean Water Act calling for "source water assessments" to be made of water supply systems. The idea was that the assessments, covering such things as sources of contamination, would arm the public with information necessary to push for improvements. Today, the water assessments are still being done, but some citizens' groups say that because of Bush administration policy, the release of information has been so restricted that there is too little specific information to act upon. They blame the Environmental Protection Agency for urging states to limit information provided to the public from the assessments. As a result, the program has been fundamentally reshaped from one that has made information widely available to one that now forces citizens to essentially operate on a need-to-know basis, says Stephen Gasteyer, a Washington specialist on water-quality issues. "People [are] being overly zealous in their enforcement of safety and security, and perhaps a little paranoid," he says. "So you're getting releases of information so ambiguous that it's not terribly useful." Cynthia Dougherty, director of EPA's groundwater and drinking-water office, described her agency's policy as laying out "minimal standards," so that states that had been intending to more fully disclose information "had the opportunity to decide to make a change."
The Federal Aviation Administration has its own security concerns, and supporters say it has addressed them vigorously. In doing so, however, the agency has also made it harder for Americans to obtain the kind of safety information once considered routine. The FAA has eliminated online access to records on enforcement actions taken against airlines, pilots, mechanics, and others. That came shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when it was discovered that information was available on things like breaches of airport security, says Rebecca Trexler, an FAA spokeswoman. Balancing such concerns isn't easy. But rather than cut off access to just that information, the agency pulled back all enforcement records. The FAA has also backed away from providing access to safety information voluntarily submitted by airlines.
As worrisome as the specter of terrorism is for many Americans, many still grumble about being kept in the dark unnecessarily. Under rules the Transportation Security Administration adopted last year--with no public notice or comment--the traveling public no longer has access to key government information on the safety and security of all modes of transportation. The sweeping restrictions go beyond protecting details about security or screening systems to include information on enforcement actions or effectiveness of security measures. The new TSA rules also establish a new, looser standard for denying access to information: Material can be withheld from the public, the rules say, simply if it's "impractical" to release it. The agency did not respond to requests for comment.
This same pattern can be seen in one federal agency after another. As Joseph McCormick, the former Army Ranger trying to learn more about the pipeline planned for Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, learned, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission now restricts even the most basic information about such projects. The agency says its approach is "balanced," adding that security concerns amply justify the changes.
The Bush administration is pressing the courts to impose more secrecy, too. Jeffrey Sterling, 36, a former CIA operations officer, can testify to that. Sterling, who is black, is suing the CIA for discrimination. In September, with his attorneys in the midst of preparing important filings, a CIA security officer paid them a visit, demanding return of documents the agency had previously provided. A mistake had been made, the officer explained, and the records contained information that if disclosed would gravely damage national security. The officer warned that failure to comply could lead to prison or loss of a security clearance, according to the lawyers. Although vital to Sterling's case, the lawyers reluctantly gave up the records.
What was so important? In a federal courtroom in Alexandria, Va., a Justice Department attorney recently explained that the records included a pseudonym given to Sterling for an internal CIA proceeding on his discrimination complaint. In fact, the pseudonym, which Sterling never used in an operation, had already been disclosed through a clerical error. Mark Zaid, one of Sterling's attorneys, says the pseudonym is just a misdirection play by the CIA. The real reason the agency demanded the files back, he says, is that they included information supporting Sterling's discrimination complaint. Zaid says he has never encountered such heavy-handed treatment from the CIA. "When they have an administration that is willing to cater [to secrecy], they go for it," he says, "because they know they can get away with it." A CIA spokesman declined comment.
In this case, which is still pending, the administration is invoking the "state secrets" privilege, in which it asserts that a case can't proceed normally without disclosing information harmful to national security. The Justice Department says it can't provide statistics on how often it invokes the privilege. But Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor active in national security matters, says: "In the past, it was an unusual thing. The Bush administration is faster on the trigger."
Surveillance. At the same time, the government is opening up a related front. Last spring, the TSA effectively shut down the case of Mohammed Ali Ahmed, an Indian Muslim and naturalized citizen. In September 2001, Ahmed and three of his children were removed from an American Airlines flight. Last year, Ahmed filed a civil rights suit against the airline. But TSA head James Loy intervened, saying that giving Ahmed information about his family's removal would compromise airline security. The government, in other words, was asserting a claim to withhold the very information Ahmed needed to pursue his case, says his attorney, Wayne Krause, of the Texas Civil Rights Project. "You're looking at an almost unprecedented vehicle to suppress information that is vital to the public and the people who want to vindicate their rights," Krause says.
Secret evidence of a different kind comes into play through a little-noticed effect of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. A key provision allows information from surveillance approved for intelligence gathering to be used to convict a defendant in criminal court. But the government's application--which states the case for the snooping--isn't available for defendants to see, as in traditional law enforcement surveillance cases. With government agencies now hoarding all manner of secret information, the growing stockpile represents an opportunity for abusive leaks, critics say. The new law takes note of that, by allowing suits against the federal government. But there's an important catch--in order to seek redress, one must forfeit the right to a jury trial. Instead, the action must be held before a judge; judges, typically, are much more conservative in awarding damages than are juries.
Most Americans appreciate the need for increased security. But with conflicts between safety and civil rights increasing, the need for an arbiter is acute--which is perhaps the key reason why the vast new security powers of many executive-branch agencies are so alarming to citizens' groups and others. A diminished role of congressional oversight is just one area of fallout, but there are others. Some examples:
It took the threat of a subpoena from the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks to force the White House to turn over intelligence reports. Even at that, family members of victims complain, there were too many restrictions on release of the information. In Congress, the administration has rebuffed members on a range of issues often unrelated to security concerns.
In a huge military spending bill last year, Congress directed President Bush to give it 30 days' notice before initiating certain sensitive defense programs. Bush signed the bill into law but rejected the restraint and said he would ignore the provision if he deemed it necessary.
Initial contracts to rebuild Iraq, worth billions of dollars, were awarded in secret. Bids were limited to companies invited to participate, and many had close ties to the White House. Members of Congress later pressed for an open bidding process.
Many public interest groups report that government agencies are more readily denying Freedom of Information Act requests--while also increasing fees, something small-budget groups say they can ill afford. The Sierra Club, for example, has been thwarted in getting information on problems at huge "factory farms" that pollute rivers and groundwater. Says David Bookbinder, senior attorney for the group: "What's different about this administration is their willingness to say, `We're going to keep everything secret until we're forced to disclose it--no matter what it is.' "
The administration is undeterred by such complaints. "I think what you've seen is a White House that has valued openness," says Daniel Bryant, assistant attorney general for legal policy, and "that knows that openness with the public facilitates confidence in government."
That's not the way Jim Kerrigan sees it. He operates a small market-research firm in Sterling, Va., outside Washington. For more than a decade, he has forecast federal spending on information technology. Three months after Bush took office, the Office of Management and Budget issued a memo telling government officials to no longer make available such information so as to "preserve the confidentiality of the deliberations that led to the president's budget decisions."
As a result, Kerrigan says, information began to dry up. Requests were ignored. And the data he did get came with so much information censored out that they were barely usable. The fees Kerrigan paid for a request, which once topped out at $300, jumped to as much as $6,500. "I can't afford that," he says. "This administration's policy is to withhold information as much as possible."
Key Dates:
Secrecy and the Bush Administration
Inauguration Day (1/20/01)
Administration freezes Clinton-era regulations, without allowing for public comment.
10/12/01
Attorney General John Ashcroft, reversing Clinton policy, encourages agencies to deny Freedom of Information Act requests if a "sound legal basis" exists.
10/26/01
President Bush signs U.S.A. Patriot Act, expanding law enforcement powers and government surveillance.
2/22/02
Congress's General Accounting Office sues Vice President Dick Cheney for refusing to disclose records of his energy task force; the GAO eventually loses its case. A separate private case is pending.
3/19/02
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card directs federal agencies to protect sensitive security information.
11/25/02
Bush signs Homeland Security Act. Its provisions restrict public access to information filed by companies about "critical infrastructure," among other matters.
01/3/03
Administration asks, in papers filed before the Supreme Court, for significant narrowing of the Freedom of Information Act.
3/25/03
Bush issues standards on classified material, favoring secrecy and reversing provisions on openness.
------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security
Amid Terror Concerns, Ridge Urges Mix of Calm and Caution
December 22, 2003
By JOHN H. CUSHMAN Jr. and DAVID STOUT
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/national/22CND-ALER.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 - President Bush met with the Homeland Security Council today as the White House tried to strike a balance between calm and caution amid signs of increased threats of terrorist attacks during the holiday season.
"Clearly, for national security reasons, we're not going to broadcast everything that we're doing," Tom Ridge, the homeland security secretary, said after the meeting. But he made clear that military and law enforcement agencies from Washington to local communities were taking extra steps.
Mr. Ridge's comments, one day after the administration raised the antiterrorism alert level one notch for most of the country, to the second-highest level, indicated yet again the difficulty of trying to raise the public's collective level of alertness without stirring panic.
In New York City, which has been widely mentioned in news reports as a possible target, the alert level has been at the second-highest notch since the system was developed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Nonetheless, city officials said that they, too, were taking extra precautions for the holiday week.
In emphasizing today that tighter security measures, many unnoticed and unannounced, are in place at every level, he tried to convey what he called "a strong message, hopefully of reassurance and confidence, to the American public."
At the same time, there was no mistaking the concern felt within the White House. When he was asked whether the danger signs are even clearer now than they were the last time the alert level was raised earlier this year, he replied: "We've never quite seen it at this level before," adding, "The strategic indicators suggest that it is the most significant threat reporting since 9/11."
The White House spokesman, Scott McClellan, delivered the same message at a news briefing this afternoon, citing intelligence reports indicating that "terrorists abroad are anticipating attacks that they believe will rival or exceed the scope and impact of those we experienced on Sept. 11," and that Al Qaeda may try to use aircraft in suicide attacks once again.
Asked to address the paradox that Al Qaeda, despite its supposedly weakened state, is able to pose the biggest threat since Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. McClellan said: "We cannot rest. We must continue carrying out the war on terrorism and taking the fight to the enemy."
Mr. McClellan's briefing took place a few hours after the meeting of the Homeland Security Council, which consists of some of the president's top advisers, including the secretaries of defense, transportation and health and human services as well as the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Coming at the peak of the holiday season, the change in alert level will subject millions of travelers to tighter security measures at airports and elsewhere and will set off more intense surveillance by federal, state and local law enforcement agencies at borders and around vulnerable targets.
Today, Mr. Ridge said aviation security had been increased "from the curbside to the cockpit" since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Security officials said the decision to increase the level of alert to "high" from "elevated" - to orange from yellow on the department's five-color scale - came after intense consultations over the weekend among intelligence agencies, which had picked up recent talk among extremists about some unspecified but spectacular attack.
The alert level has been at yellow, the midpoint on the scale, since May, when it was set at orange for 10 days after a number of deadly bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. This is the fourth time that the government has set an orange alert. The highest level of alert, red, is reserved for an emergency in which a possible attack is considered imminent.
Although New York City has remained on orange alert even while the rest of the nation was on yellow, city officials said at a rare Sunday evening news briefing at City Hall that the higher federal threat level had led them to step up counterterrorism efforts.
City officials said they were putting more police officers on patrol at landmarks and important sites, establishing checkpoints at bridges and tunnels, and calling in teams of National Guard members who are trained to detect chemical, biological and radiological substances.
"Even though we are not aware of any specific plots targeting New York City, we have to always act as if there are, because it's the best way to deter a terrorist attack," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said. Mr. Bloomberg urged New Yorkers to go about their business and made a point of saying that he still intended to ring in the new year in Times Square.
In September, federal officials said they were tightening the criteria for heightened alerts, avoiding changes unless there was credible and detailed intelligence to justify a public warning. In the past, the system has been criticized by security experts, local officials and others who said it unnecessarily confused and alarmed the public.
Mr. Ridge said on Sunday that he acted after consulting other agencies about new intelligence that suggested a higher level of risk "around the holiday season and beyond." In particular, he cited concerns that attackers might again try to use commercial aircraft as a weapon.
Law enforcement officials said they were especially guarding against an attack using passenger planes departing from abroad and heading toward the United States.
Mr. Ridge said the deterrent effect of the heightened security, for example at border points, was a consideration in his decision.
"We know from experience that the increased security that is implemented when we raise the threat level, along with increased vigilance, can help disrupt or deter terrorist attacks," he said.
He suggested that the latest intelligence was firm enough to meet the new standards for an elevated alert.
"The U.S. intelligence community has received a substantial increase in the volume of threat-related intelligence reports," Mr. Ridge said. "These credible sources suggest the possibility of attacks against the homeland around the holiday season and beyond."
Last week, federal law enforcement agencies issued renewed warnings to New York and other large American cities about the possibility of terrorist attacks over the holidays. But as recently as Friday, officials at the security department said there were no plans to change the national alert status.
Gov. George E. Pataki, responding to the federal alert, on Sunday ordered New York State agencies to activate contingency plans, including the use of National Guard troops and state police officers to protect airports, bridges, tunnels, train and bus terminals, utilities and other "critical infrastructure." Starting on Monday, the state planned to tighten security aboard trains entering and leaving New York City.
In Connecticut, Gov. John G. Rowland ordered state troopers to ride aboard all Metro-North commuter trains to and from New York City. Mr. Rowland also said the state would step up patrols of New Haven Harbor and the Bridgeport ferry to Long Island.
In the past, the national threat level has been adjusted based on what seemed to be inconclusive and nonspecific intelligence, often referred to as chatter by security officials. Officials have also considered factors like global developments, significant religious or national holidays, anniversaries and statements issued by figures in Al Qaeda.
This time, Mr. Ridge said, the action was taken based on "the quantity, the quality, and the credibility and the scope" of intelligence from various sources. In addition, he said, intelligence analysts were concerned to hear that there was a widespread expectation among people they were monitoring that an attack might come in the near term.
"Extremists abroad are anticipating attacks that they believe will either rival or exceed" the attacks of 9/11, he said.
But there is some evidence to suggest that the move also reflected a caution based on generalized warnings as well as on specific intelligence tips.
On Friday, the Arabic television network Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape of a statement attributed to Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the chief deputy to Osama bin Laden.
"We are still chasing the Americans and their allies everywhere, even in their homeland," the voice on the tape said.
The State Department on Sunday cautioned Americans living abroad to "maintain a high level of vigilance" and to be aware of possible terrorist attacks overseas, especially at public places like restaurants, hotels and centers of worship.
American and allied troops in Iraq have been on higher alert against attacks since the capture of Saddam Hussein a week ago.
--------
U.S. Threat Level Rises to Orange
Attack Risk May Be Highest Since 9/11
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 22, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A19938-2003Dec21?language=printer
Federal officials said yesterday that because fresh intelligence suggests al Qaeda is planning multiple catastrophic terrorist attacks in the United States, they were raising the national threat alert status to "high risk," or code orange, a step administration officials previously had said they were reluctant to take except in the most unusual circumstances.
Some of the worrisome new intelligence indicates al Qaeda operatives are exploring security vulnerabilities on commercial or cargo flights originating overseas and flying into U.S. airports, officials said. It suggests the terrorist network is preoccupied with repeating its Sept. 11, 2001, tactic of hijacking aircraft for use as missiles against U.S. targets, they added.
"The strategic [intelligence] indicators, including al Qaeda's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland, are perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th," Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said at an impromptu news conference yesterday. "Information indicates that extremists abroad are anticipating near-term attacks that they believe will rival, or exceed, the attacks in New York [and] at the Pentagon."
Officials said they have no specific information on where or when an attack might be planned.
Raising the alert level to orange from yellow, or "elevated risk," results in stepped-up security procedures across the country to protect government buildings, critical infrastructure such as nuclear plants and railroads, harbors, shopping malls and other locations where people congregate.
At U.S. airports yesterday, security screeners and police mobilized in response to the alarm. Some airports, such as Baltimore-Washington International, prepared to bring out more bomb-sniffing dogs to patrol the terminals. At others, parking was restricted at some garages closest to airport terminals, and screeners were advised by supervisors to be extra vigilant.
Area agencies stepped up security in response to the higher threat level. Security is increased at the downtown monuments, said Lt. Patrick O'Brien of the U.S. Park Police. "We're right in the phase of moving up all our manpower," he said.
In Virginia and Maryland, officials said state police were increasing patrols, particularly of potential targets.
Ridge made the announcement about the change in the alert status at his agency's headquarters in Washington yesterday 90 minutes after President Bush approved the recommendation by top officials of Ridge's department, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the White House.
Homeland Security and other officials had been working round-the-clock, and all night Saturday, sifting through the intelligence, coordinating with state and local officials and refining yesterday's announcement.
New information analyzed Friday about al Qaeda efforts to penetrate foreign airports and airlines was soon deemed "credible," officials said. That information came from "a reliable source that has been corroborated by other things we know," one official said, declining to elaborate.
But the officials decided to take action upon combining this new information with evidence that al Qaeda terrorists around the globe were saying in telephone calls and e-mails that they expected a series of synchronized attacks in the United States around the holidays, officials said.
"The extremists were expecting a very near-term attack in the United States," one Homeland Security official said. The government picked up "so many credible threats" that officials concluded they had to take action, the official added.
Captured terrorists have said in interrogations that increased security discourages attacks, officials said.
In recent months, Homeland Security officials had stated that they would avoid frequent raising and lowering of the threat alert so that Americans would not become nonchalant about their warnings. Earlier this year, the government sounded three orange alerts in four months, and many citizens as well as public officials -- especially those living far from the perceived top targets of Washington and New York -- simply ignored them.
Government officials said they overrode their skepticism of invoking another orange alert because they are deeply alarmed about the possibility of attacks during or just after the holidays.
"There was a consensus in the intelligence community that we go up" to orange alert, Ridge said yesterday in his news conference.
But there has not always been unanimity among top U.S. officials on these matters.
Last May -- after deadly al Qaeda suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco, and coming on the heels of several orange alerts within a few months -- Ridge and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld opposed stepping up to code orange, officials said. In internal discussions, Ridge said then that Americans were growing jaded about the alarms, and Rumsfeld said an orange alert could divert military assets from the battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, officials said.
But Attorney General John D. Ashcroft disagreed, so Ridge went to Bush with a "consensus" view in favor of an orange alert, officials said -- and Bush agreed.
In making yesterday's announcement, Ridge was facing a complex public relations quandary -- how to warn Americans they could be targets in this economically key and heavily traveled holiday season but urging people to continue to enjoy the seasonal festivities.
"I encourage you to continue with your holiday plans," he said. "Gather with your family and friends. . . . We will show the terrorists this holiday season both our goodwill toward our fellow men, and our readiness and resolve to protect our families."
Staff writers Sara Kehaulani Goo, Rosalind S. Helderman, Susan Levine and Alice Reid contributed to this report.
-------- human rights
Rights Group Criticizes Immunity Deal for Combatants in Burundi
December 22, 2003
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/international/africa/22BURU.html
NAIROBI, Kenya, Monday, Dec. 22 (AP) - Human Rights Watch, an international human rights group based in New York, on Monday criticized a peace agreement giving soldiers and rebels temporary immunity from prosecution for atrocities committed against civilians in Burundi's 10-year civil war.
More than 200,000 people have been killed, mostly civilians who often are the targets of rebels from the Hutu majority and soldiers from the Tutsi-dominated army.
The group said soldiers and rebels had been responsible for deliberate attacks on civilians - including rapes, killings and looting.
Last month, the main rebel group, the Forces for the Defense of Democracy, and the transitional government reached a peace accord in which they agreed to give temporary immunity to members of the armed forces and the rebel fighters.
But fighting continues between the army and another rebel group, the National Liberation Forces, and between the rebel groups.
"With the recent agreements, government soldiers and F.D.D. combatants have no need to fear being held accountable for their conduct," said Alison Des Forges, senior adviser to the Africa division of Human Rights Watch. "Civilians pay and will continue to pay the price."
The Burundi Army spokesman, Col. Augustin Nzabampema, said he could not comment until he read the report.
It was not immediately possible to contact the National Liberation Forces rebels, but a spokesman for the Forces for Defense of Democracy, Gelase Daniel Ndabirabe, said that many atrocities happened during the war.
"Both sides will take time to discuss them," he said. "For the time being, we are not fighting. We are working for peace and are trying to cure the wounds."
Human Rights Watch has documented a series of attacks in which it says civilians were killed by rebels and government soldiers from April to November.
-------- immigration / refugees
Calif. Immigrant Initiative Revived
Ballot Proposal Would Bar State Services to Undocumented
By Robert Jablon
Associated Press
Monday, December 22, 2003; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20103-2003Dec21.html
LOS ANGELES -- Backers of a contentious 1994 initiative denying some social services to illegal immigrants have resurrected their effort and are gathering signatures to qualify a new measure for the November ballot.
The "Save Our State Initiative" would bar undocumented immigrants from obtaining driver's licenses and most public services, including non-emergency health care.
Police, teachers and other public employees would have to notify federal authorities in writing of immigration violations or face potential misdemeanor criminal charges.
"We don't think it's right to give welfare to illegal aliens," campaign organizer Ron Prince said Saturday. "If you don't do something about illegal immigration, you will never cure your deficit."
The campaign has collected hundreds of signatures and several thousand dollars since it began less than two weeks ago, Prince said. Backers need 500,900 valid signatures by April to put the measure on the November ballot.
The measure is similar to 1994's Proposition 187, which was approved by 60 percent of voters but never took effect because of court challenges.
This time supporters have designed the measure so it can survive legal challenges, Prince said. One difference is that the new proposal would allow illegal immigrants to attend public school.
The Proposition 187 campaign angered many Hispanic groups, who accused its supporters of racism.
Nativo V. Lopez, president of the Mexican American Political Association and national director of the immigrant rights group Hermandad Mexicana Latinoamericana, called the new effort "symptomatic of the worst of what we saw of the 1990s anti-immigrant movement."
Prince said Proposition 187 supporters were encouraged by the Oct. 7 recall of Gov. Gray Davis (D), fueled in part by anger over a bill he signed that would have permitted some illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R) repealed the law after taking office. He voted for Proposition 187 but has not taken a position on the proposed new initiative.
The state Republican Party also endorsed Proposition 187, but no major GOP organization has endorsed the new campaign.
Backers say the new initiative is necessary because providing services to undocumented immigrants is costing California millions of dollars. A summary of the measure prepared by the attorney general's office says it could cost the government tens of millions of dollars to verify citizenship but could save more than $100 million a year through reduced costs of providing public services.
Prince disputes some studies that indicate illegal immigrants pay more in taxes than they use in government services. "If that were true, California would be awash in extra cash instead of having the worst deficit in the nation and in our history," he said.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Seeking to Lift Secrecy Curtain Over Energy Industry Lobby
WASHINGTON, DC, (ENS)
December 22, 2003
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2003/2003-12-22-09.asp
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request last week that seeks records relating to efforts by Bush administration officials with the Energy Department to coordinate a grassroots lobbying strategy with energy companies to secure passage of the energy bill.
The FOIA request targets records from Deputy Energy Secretary Kyle McSlarrow and other agency officials.
NRDC has asked the Energy Department to provide any handwritten, typed, or electronic notes in the agency's possession, including but not limited to correspondence, minutes of meetings, memoranda, notes, e-mails, calendar or daily entries, agendas, notices, and faxes.
"Secrecy is job one in the Bush administration, especially concerning energy policy," said NRDC senior attorney Sharon Buccino. "We are trying to pull back the curtain on the latest secret and potentially unlawful dealings between high level Bush officials and energy lobbyists."
Buccino says the request follows a report by the weekly Washington based publication "National Journal" of meetings with McSlarrow and members of the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth - a coalition of trade groups including the American Gas Association, the American Petroleum Institute, and the Nuclear Energy Institute.
The report said lobbyists from these groups met with McSlarrow to coordinate efforts to gain support for the energy bill, including a grassroots lobbying campaign to pressure lawmakers into passing the controversial legislation. The energy bill contains billions of dollars in tax breaks and subsidies for the nuclear, oil and gas industries.
McSlarrow formerly served as an Energy Department participant on Vice President Dick Cheney's National Energy Policy Development Group. Last week, the Supreme Court decided to hear an appeal by Cheney to a lower court ruling that ordered him to release documents related to the task force, which critics say consisted of energy lobbyists.
The task force's recommendations formed the basis for the $75 billion energy bill, which stalled in the Senate last month. The bill will be reconsidered in January.
"If not illegal, it is certainly unseemly for the Bush administration to secretly scheme with corporate lobbyists to pass a bill that is little more than a huge payback to energy producers and polluters," added Buccino. "The energy industry has kicked in millions to President Bush's campaign coffers. Perhaps that is why $23 billion of the energy bill's more than $25 billion dollars in tax breaks go to coal, oil, gas and nuclear power companies."
-------- ACTIVISTS
Thousands protest French scarf ban
December 22, 2003
(UPI)
http://www.washtimes.com/upi-breaking/20031221-100521-8788r.htm
PARIS, Dec. 21 -- Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Paris Sunday to protest France's proposed ban on head scarves in public schools.
Several hundred Muslim women and girls were among the protesters waving French flags and chanting "my veil, my choice," CBC News reported.
French President Jacques Chirac on Wednesday proposed banning religious symbols, including Jewish skullcaps, Muslim hajibs or scarves and large Christian crosses from state-funded schools starting next year.
The bans are necessary to keep church and state separate, the president maintained.
Many Muslim women wear head scarves as a show of faith and modesty. They claim the law would discriminate against France's five million Muslims.
Chirac has asked parliament to pass a law implementing the ban.
Polls indicate two-thirds of French people support the ban, as do many schoolteachers, the BBC reported.
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