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NUCLEAR
Nuclear threat on meeting agenda
Enough plutonium for five bombs 'missing' at Sellafield
German Minister Says Siemens Should Scrap Nuclear Export
Brazil Resists Plan to Allow Spot Inspection of Nuclear Site
U.N. Team Arrives in Libya to Open Talks
Weapons Inspectors Begin Visiting Sites in Libya
Halting the Spread of Nuclear Arms (4 Letters)
MILITARY
Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories
U.S. Has New Concerns About Anthrax Readiness
Attacks Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq
Israeli Army Shooting of Israeli Stirs Hot Debate
School for spies
C.I.A. Reveals Some Old Tricks of the Spy Trade at Museum
Psychic spies knew of raid
Revealed: how MI6 sold the Iraq war
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
U.S. Asks Judge to Lift His Ban on Pentagon's Anthrax Vaccination Program
The fish that threatened national security
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- asia
Nuclear threat on meeting agenda
December 28, 2003
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/28/1072308734945.html
Talks today between senior officials from South Korea, China and Japan are expected to focus on North Korea's nuclear weapons development.
The meeting in Seoul comes amid reports that North Korea has agreed to work with China toward resuming the six-nation talks aimed at resolving the nuclear crisis early next year.
Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao agreed in October to coordinate efforts to end the Stalinist state's nuclear ambitions, South Korea's foreign ministry said yesterday.
The agreement, made on the Indonesian island of Bali at the annual summit of the 10-nation Association of South-East Asian Nations, also reiterated that the dispute should be resolved peacefully.
Today's talks will involve senior foreign ministry officials from the three nations, the ministry said in a statement.
China's official Xinhua news agency reported that a joint statement from Beijing and Pyongyang said the two governments "considered a second round of six-party talks extremely important," and would try to hold them in early 2004.
The pledge was made during a visit by China's top diplomat on the North Korean nuclear issue, Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, to Pyongyang on Thursday and yesterday, Xinhua said.
The United States, China, Japan, Russia and the two Koreas held a first round of six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear development in Beijing in August, but the meeting ended without much progress or an agreement on a date for new talks.
North Korea says it will dismantle its nuclear programs in exchange for a US security guarantee and aid. But Washington wants North Korea to give up its nuclear ambitions before it makes any concessions.
The Xinhua report did not say if the North had changed its conditions for talks.
South Korean foreign ministry official Chung Sang-ki will hold separate talks with counterparts Fu Ying of China and Mitoji Yabunaka of Japan on Monday after the trilateral meeting.
-------- britain
Enough plutonium for five bombs 'missing' at Sellafield
By Liam McDougall
28 December 2003
UK Sunday Herald
http://www.sundayherald.com/38953
ENOUGH plutonium to make five nuclear bombs has gone missing from Sellafield in Cumbria in the past 12 months, it has been revealed. The official report which lists "materials unaccounted for" at the UK's nuclear sites found that 19.1kg of the highly toxic substance was apparently missing from the reprocessing plant.
At the Dounreay plant in Caithness, meanwhile, the annual audit recorded a surplus 1.16kg of highly enriched uranium, which can also be used to make nuclear weapons.
Spokesmen for each plant were quick to play down the figures, saying they were estimates and "gave rise to no concern over either the safety or security" of the sites. But independent nuclear experts have expressed concern.
A look back at Sellafield's records reveals that auditors have found large quantities of plutonium regularly unaccounted for. Although the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority does not have a complete record of its annual nuclear materials balance on its website, Sellafield was found to have 5.6kg of plutonium unaccounted for in 2001 and as much as 24.9kg in 1999.
After the latest figures were revealed, Dr Frank Barnaby, a nuclear consultant who used to work at the Aldermaston atomic weapons factory in Berkshire, said: "In reprocessing, a small amount of material is bound to be lost in the process, but 19kg is a very sig nificant amount of plutonium. The company might say this is not a cause for concern, but if they cannot be sure where the plutonium is, how can they say it has not been stolen?
"If a terrorist group were to claim it had stolen 5kg of plutonium from Sellafield, the authorities could not say with any certainty that they had not taken it. It's a very unsatisfactory situation indeed. This amount of material could be made into five or six nuclear weapons."
John Large, a nuclear engineer who advised the Soviet Union following the Kursk submarine disaster, described Sellafield's figure as "a very serious shortfall".
" If it's an accounting lapse, then maybe it never existed in the first place, but it's worrying. The inventory controls for plutonium are extremely tight.
"British Nuclear Fuels [the company that runs Sellafield] needs to be more accountable. It cannot simply record that it has a 19kg deficit and simply say there is no cause for concern. "
Dr Dan Barlow, head of research at Friends of the Earth Scotland, also said he believed the situation was unsatisfactory.
"The fact that material such as this is unaccounted for, whether lost or in surplus, is of deep concern. No other industry would be allowed to get away with such poor industrial practices. For bomb-grade material to go missing in such large quantities has to be a cause for concern. The question of where this material has gone is one that demands an answer."
The latest criticisms of the nuclear industry come after scientists found the teeth of children in Northern Ireland were con taminated with plutonium from the Sellafield nuclear plant. The research, published earlier this month, found traces of the radio active material in every single milk tooth of 3000 children studied.
Scientists believe leaks and discharges into the sea have put the material into the food chain over recent decades. The day after the research was published, British Nuclear Fuels admitted that "lightly radioactively contaminated" pipes from Sellafield had been washing up on beaches in Northern Ireland.
Spokesman Alan Hughes said the figures for "unaccounted for" plutonium were normal.
"It is impossible to measure absolutely exactly that amount of material going into the plant and the amount coming out because of the changes material undergoes in the process.
"There is also a degree of uncertainty in the measuring process and some material may remain in the internal pipe system. We would expect to see a slightly larger figure at Sellafield than for other reprocessing plants because of the huge amount of material that is put through it each year."
When asked how he could be sure no substances had been taken away from the plant, Hughes said the strict security measures employed at Sellafield would make it "virtually impossible" for radioactive material to be stolen.
-------- business
German Minister Says Siemens Should Scrap Nuclear Export
At the heart of the controversy -- the plutonium plant in Hanau, western Germany
27.12.2003
Deutsche-Welle
http://www.dw-world.de/english/0,3367,1432_A_1069766_1_A,00.html
German Environment Minister Trittin has weighed in on the debate over Berlin's mired sale of a plutonium factory to China and warned plant owner Siemens it risks damaging its image if it goes ahead with the export. Germany's controversial €50 million ($62 million) sale of a nuclear fuel-rod plant to China took a further twist on Saturday when German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin warned plant-maker and electronics giant Siemens that it risked ruining its reputation if it pushed ahead with the export.
"The heads of the company must decide whether the ensuing image-loss is greater than the financial advantages of the deal," Trittin told German daily Die Welt. The environment minister stressed that anti-nuclear demonstrators and citizens' initiatives would "not pass up the chance to once again brand Siemens as a nuclear company" if the plant, designed to produce fuel elements from plutonium, was exported to China.
Trittin (photo) reminded Siemens of its separation from nuclear subsidiary KWU years ago and said the motive for the pull-out at the time had been the realization that "the nuclear business only amounted for five percent of the company's profits, whereas it made up 50 percent of the criticism that Siemens had to face."
Trittin also pointed out that two thirds of Germans weren't in favor of the export and added, "For a company that has a strong consumer orientation in mobile phones and computers, that is a definitive factor."
There was no official response from Siemens to the minister's allegations.
Nuclear deal threatens to split ruling coalition
Trittin's criticism of the nuclear deal is just the latest in a snowballing dispute that has threatened to cause a rift in the ruling coalition between Chancellor Schröder's Social Democrats and their junior partners, the anti-nuclear Greens. Schröder agreed to sell the plutonium processing plant to Beijing during a visit to China in early December(photo).
Though Schröder says Beijing has assured him the plant will not produce material for military purposes, the Greens fear China could still use the plant to produce weapons-grade plutonium for military use.
They say the export also smacks of hypocrisy, since Berlin is committed to phasing out nuclear power on German soil. Before the Greens agreed to share power with Schröder's Social Democrats in 1998, they insisted that Germany abandon nuclear energy. Last month, the government moved to decommission the first of 18 nuclear power stations as part of the agreement.
The plutonium plant is based at Hanau, western Germany and was constructed in 1991 by Siemens. It was mothballed in 1995 without ever going into operation and still lies idle. Siemens had previously offered to export the complete facility to Russia in mid-2001, but the plan sparked political concern and was eventually dropped.
Export subsidies for nuclear technology questioned
The planned export to Beijing has also attracted the attention of Brussels, which is probing whether the deal violates European Union export rules.
On Saturday Green member of the European Parliament Heidi Rühle touched upon a new aspect of the issue and demanded the German government do away with export subsidies for nuclear technology. Rühle announced she would take up the matter with EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti in January. "We want to be clear about how far such subsidies hinder free competition," she told AP.
Rühle added that there was an impression that Germany was phasing out nuclear energy at home, but German firms could still participate in constructing nuclear plants abroad.
-------- latin america
Brazil Resists Plan to Allow Spot Inspection of Nuclear Site
By LARRY ROHTER
December 28, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/international/americas/28BRAZ.html?pagewanted=print&position=
RASÍLIA, Dec. 27 - Brazil has announced that by mid-2004 it expects to join the select group of nations producing enriched uranium and that within a decade it intends to begin exporting the product. But it is balking at giving international inspectors unimpeded access to the plant that will produce the nuclear fuel.
Officials here describe the uranium enrichment effort as entirely peaceful in purpose, aimed at providing fuel far short of weapons grade for the country's nuclear power plants. But they also maintain that as a peaceful nation, Brazil, which has the world's sixth-largest known deposits of uranium, should not be subject to the same regimen of unannounced spot inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran and Libya have recently accepted.
"All we've got are a couple of itty-bitty reactors," Roberto Amaral, the minister of science and technology in the left-wing government that took office in January, said in an interview this month. "It is necessary to be worried about what goes on out there, not here."
The issue has come to a boil now because work has concluded on a uranium enrichment plant that officials say will be ready to begin production as early as next May.
Mark Gwozdecky, a spokesman for the International Atomic Energy Agency, said in a telephone interview from the organization's headquarters in Vienna, "We are working and have been working for some time with the government and authorities in Brazil to develop an appropriate verification regime for this new facility," but the agency otherwise declined comment.
After years of resistance, Brazil adhered to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in 1997 and has since permitted limited, controlled visits to its nuclear facilities. But it has refused to approve the so-called additional protocol that authorizes spot inspections. Diplomats here say the international agency earlier this month sent a letter asking for a clear, prompt and definitive response.
During Brazil's military dictatorship, from 1964 to 1985, the government clandestinely pursued a nuclear weapons program. In 1981, Brazil and Iraq signed a nuclear cooperation agreement that, according to an I.A.E.A. report issued last year, led the government to ship 26.7 tons of uranium dioxide to Baghdad. In 1989, the former head of Brazil's nuclear weapons program worked in Iraq as a consultant until American pressure forced his recall.
With the return of democratic civilian rule, Brazil and its historic rival Argentina jointly renounced the manufacture of nuclear weapons and set up a mutual inspection system. But the Brazilian program continued secretly, and when a new government came to power in 1990, it found and destroyed a 1,050-foot-deep shaft built by the Air Force in the heart of the Amazon that scientists said had all the characteristics of a nuclear test site.
In addition, the Brazilian Navy has long been working on a program to build nuclear-powered submarines, which would require a degree of enrichment higher than that needed for a power plant.
During the presidential campaign he won last year, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva criticized the Nonproliferation Treaty as unjust, saying it favored countries that already have nuclear weapons.
Then, during the new government's first week in office in January, Mr. Amaral caused a furor when he argued that Brazil should acquire the capacity to produce a nuclear weapon. He backed away from that position after he was severely criticized here and in Argentina.
This month Mr. Amaral publicly criticized the I.A.E.A.'s position on spot inspections as "idiotic" and "foolish." But he also said, "We're not interested in a bomb and we've never made a bomb or ordered it used in a war against Argentina, so we have the moral and ethical authority to talk about this subject."
-------- libya
U.N. Team Arrives in Libya to Open Talks
Nuclear Program Called 'Low Level'
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35280-2003Dec27.html
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec. 27 -- The chief U.N. nuclear weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, arrived here Saturday to test Libya's willingness to fully disclose its atomic arms program, which he said had not yet produced a bomb.
ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, told reporters that Libya's program was "at a low level, a nascent stage." The Libyans did not enrich uranium, a step necessary to build a nuclear bomb, he added.
His comments appeared to run counter to recent suggestions by U.S. officials in Washington that Libya had made substantial progress toward acquiring sophisticated equipment needed to produce weapons-grade uranium. The officials had described the Libyan program as nascent but active; they added that it did not approach the scope of nuclear weapons efforts in Iran and North Korea.
Libya's foreign minister, Abdel-Rahman Shalqam, declared, "We didn't arrive at the step of weaponization." He repeated his government's commitment to "complete transparency" and to permitting short-notice inspections of its nuclear facilities by signing a separate protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Libyans have acknowledged in effect breaching the treaty through a research and development program.
The decision to abandon nuclear ambitions is a major turnaround for the government of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi. His 34-year rule has been marked by involvement in regional turmoil, support of international terrorist groups and intermittent conflict with the United States.
Libyan officials said that Gaddafi was now turning away from militarism to promote development. He has campaigned to end Libya's international isolation with a series of conciliatory steps. Key among them was the extradition of two suspects in the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jetliner over Lockerbie, Scotland, and payment of $270 million to families of the victims.
U.N. economic sanctions have been lifted, but not American bans on trade with Libya, which has been listed as a supporter of terrorism by successive U.S. governments. Libya is hungry for investment in its oil industry, which supplies almost all of the country's export earnings.
Gaddafi government officials deny that the toppling of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein frightened Libya into cooperating with the IAEA. Shalqam said that conversations with the United States over the issue went back several years. Libya has had an arms program for 10 to 15 years, he said, adding that "the Libyan step is a strategic one," designed to free resources for social programs. "National security can not be maintained with such weapons," he said.
ElBaradei's visit, scheduled to conclude on Monday, commences a painstaking process. He and a team of experts will meet with the head of Libya's nuclear development program Sunday, discuss an agenda for inspections and visit a reactor and other sites. ElBaradei expects Libya to sign the added protocol by March, when he will make an initial report on his findings.
After that, a round of inspections will be held, followed by the dismantling of equipment and ongoing monitoring. ElBaradei has brought experts with experience in both Iraq and Iran to aid his work.
A question of trust hangs over the process. The IAEA has been inspecting Libyan facilities for 20 years under terms of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and knew nothing of Gaddafi's weapons program.
ElBaradei, who headed atomic weapons inspection teams in Iraq during the 1990s, said the extra protocol would "help us a lot" to ensure the project has ended. He also noted that the danger from a Libyan bomb was remote. The program would have had to move to an "industrial stage" of production to create a weapon, which the IAEA would have been able to detect, he said.
Shalqam called on all states in the region to abandon nuclear weapons, "especially the Israelis." Israel refuses to discuss its nuclear arsenal. The United States also asserts that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons and has pressed other countries to provide neither technology nor equipment.
ElBaradei is expected to seek information on whether Libya received aid from foreign sources. Such intelligence is extremely sensitive, as it might implicate countries in spreading nuclear technology against international rules. Pakistan and Iran were among the suspects, a Western diplomat here said. Over the past decade, Iran has sold short- and medium-range missiles to Libya.
Without naming names, ElBaradei said he was looking into the issue. He said finding origins was complicated by a "black market" in nuclear technology and the possibility that suppliers were not aware of its final use. Shalqam refused to answer a reporter's question on whether countries that provided technology or equipment knew of Libya's arms program.
"The most important point is we did not weaponize," he repeated.
--------
Weapons Inspectors Begin Visiting Sites in Libya
By Daniel Williams
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A36302-2003Dec28.html
TRIPOLI, Libya, Dec. 28 -- United Nations nuclear weapons inspectors began visiting nuclear facilities in Libya Sunday, the first concrete result of a recent Libyan promise to give up its nuclear arms program.
Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, and a team of inspectors visited four facilities in the Tripoli area, including the small experimental Tajura reactor, identified by Western diplomats as the heart of the Libyan program. The inspections kicked off a process that IAEA officials said would be long and laborious and would include an accounting of Libya's efforts to build an atom bomb, the dismantling of equipment deemed usable for weapons production and monitoring.
"They promised us access and delivered," Mark Gwozdecky, an IAEA spokesman, said of the initial outing.
ElBaradei also met with the head of Libya's nuclear program, Matouk Mohammed Matouk. In the evening, the IAEA team worked on a long-term plan with the Libyans. ElBaradei is scheduled to leave Libya on Monday, but three members of his entourage will remain behind, and three more IAEA inspectors will join them soon, Gwozdecky said.
The inspections followed months of secret talks among Libyan, U.S. and British officials in which the Libyans decided to expose their program voluntarily. The United States had long accused Libya of trying to produce nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Commentary in Arab newspapers outside Libya suggested that Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi buckled under fear that the United States would apply its policy of preemptive warfare to bring Gaddafi down, following the ouster of the Taliban government in Afghanistan and the government of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
Libyan officials said their government had concluded that weapons development would not protect it and that it needed to promote relations with the West and the United States to procure foreign investment and trade. Last fall, Libyan Prime Minister Shukri Ghanem predicted that trade relations with the United States would open within the first months of 2004.
Washington has maintained an economic embargo on Libya for almost two decades. United Nations sanctions were lifted this year after Libya agreed to pay compensation to families of the 270 victims of the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Libya began to ease its international isolation in 1999, when it extradited two Libyan suspects in the Lockerbie bombing.
ElBaradei said on arriving in Libya Saturday that Tripoli's weapons program was embryonic and that its scientists were far from producing a nuclear weapon. Nonetheless, with its development program, Libya was in breach of the non-proliferation treaty it had signed. Libyan officials say they will endorse a treaty protocol that will permit short-notice inspections.
-------- treaties
Halting the Spread of Nuclear Arms (4 Letters)
December 28, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/opinion/L28NUKE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
To the Editor:
The measures to strengthen the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty laid out in "Good Nukes, Bad Nukes," by Ashton B. Carter, Arnold Kanter, William J. Perry and Brent Scowcroft (Op-Ed, Dec. 22), are missing some key pieces.
First, a worldwide ban on the production of plutonium is needed to deal with the twin threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. Second, to make full use of the political leverage afforded by the treaty, the five nuclear-weapon-state signers must live up to their obligations to pursue nuclear disarmament.
The United States' refusal to ratify the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, its plan to develop new "more usable" nuclear weapons and its reversal of a 25-year-old policy not to use plutonium in nuclear power programs make a mockery of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and undermine the nonproliferation regime.
LISBETH GRONLUND
EDWIN LYMAN
Cambridge, Mass., Dec. 22, 2003
The writers are senior scientists in the Union of Concerned Scientists' Global Security Program, of which Dr. Gronlund is co-director.
•
To the Editor:
The proposal to curb proliferation by halting the export of fuel cycle facilities (Op-Ed, Dec. 22) sidesteps the problems we now confront with North Korea and Iran: Both have crossed or are crossing the fuel cycle threshold.
What the authors ought to be asking is this: If parties to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty cheat, what do we do?
One option: Once the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors declares that a treaty party is in noncompliance, the United Nations Security Council will have in place a template of sanctions that it will initiate within two weeks unless the violator reverses policy. Illustration: Suspension of international commerce (week 3); suspension of all commercial air travel (week 5), naval blockade (week 7); and military action (week 9).
Parties to the Proliferation Security Initiative would be responsible for blockades and NATO's rapid reaction force for additional military action. If the Council fails to act, NATO could do so in its stead. This would give the treaty the teeth it requires to deter violations.
BENNETT RAMBERG
Los Angeles, Dec. 22, 2003
The writer served in the State Department during the first Bush administration and is the author of "Nuclear Power Plants as Weapons for the Enemy."
•
To the Editor:
The pragmatic proposal to discourage countries from reprocessing weapons-grade nuclear fuel in exchange for supplying them such fuel for civilian nuclear plants (Op-Ed, Dec. 22) can be extended to the area of nuclear missiles. Since rockets that launch satellites can be used as missiles to deliver nuclear weapons, states should be discouraged from building such rockets.
An international space service consortium can launch civilian satellites and provide satellite data (useful in weather forecasting, natural resource management and telecommunications) for states that renounce rocket development. This would reduce the proliferation of nuclear missile technology and strengthen the nonproliferation regime.
DINSHAW MISTRY
Cincinnati, Dec. 22, 2003
The writer, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Cincinnati, is the author of "Containing Missile Proliferation."
•
To the Editor:
"Good Nukes, Bad Nukes" (Op-Ed, Dec. 22) ignores the most obvious driver of nuclear proliferation.
Under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, countries with nuclear capabilities are allowed to maintain their nuclear arsenals, while all other nations may not obtain nuclear weapons. This doctrine establishes an unfortunate example, encouraging lateral proliferation. Nonnuclear nations rightly view these weapons as cudgels appropriated by nuclear nations to exert their will globally with impunity - the iron fist in the velvet glove.
How can the spread of nuclear weapons be halted?
Russia and the United States, the only nations capable of inducing nuclear winter, must establish a moral precedent by agreeing to eliminate their vast nuclear arsenals in a bilateral and rapid fashion. Only then will other nations be encouraged to follow and disarm. Our survival depends on it.
HELEN CALDICOTT, M.D.
Bermagui, Australia, Dec. 23, 2003
The writer is founder and president, Nuclear Policy Research Institute.
-------- MILITARY
-------- asia
Report on Brutal Vietnam Campaign Stirs Memories
By JOHN KIFNER
December 28, 2003
New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/national/28TIGE.html?pagewanted=print&position=
Quang Ngai and Quang Nam are provinces in central Vietnam, between the mountains and the sea. Ken Kerney, William Doyle and Rion Causey tell horrific stories about what they saw and did there as soldiers in 1967.
That spring and fall, American troops conducted operations there to engage the enemy and drive peasants out of villages and into heavily guarded "strategic hamlets." The goal was to deny the Viet Cong support, shelter and food.
The fighting was intense and the results, the former soldiers say, were especially brutal. Villages were bombed, burned and destroyed. As the ground troops swept through, in many cases they gunned down men, women and children, sometimes mutilating bodies - cutting off ears to wear on necklaces.
They threw hand grenades into dugout shelters, often killing entire families.
"Can you imagine Dodge City without a sheriff?" Mr. Kerney asked. "It's just nuts. You never had a safe zone. It's shoot too quick or get shot. You're scared all the time, you're humping all the time. You're scared. These things happen."
Mr. Doyle said he lost count of the people he killed: "You had to have a strong will to survive. I wanted to live at all costs. That was my primary thing, and I developed it to an instinct."
The two are among a handful of soldiers at the heart of a series of investigative articles by The Toledo Blade that has once again raised questions about the conduct of American troops in Vietnam.
The report, published in October and titled "Rogue G.I.'s Unleashed Wave of Terror in Central Highlands," said that in 1967, an elite unit, a reconnaissance platoon in the 101st Airborne Division, went on a rampage that the newspaper described as "the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War."
"For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public," the newspaper said, at other points describing the killing of hundreds of unarmed civilians.
"Women and children were intentionally blown up in underground bunkers," The Blade said. "Elderly farmers were shot as they toiled in the fields. Prisoners were tortured and executed - their ears and scalps severed for souvenirs. One soldier kicked out the teeth of executed civilians for their gold fillings."
In 1971, the newspaper said, the Army began a criminal investigation that lasted four and a half years. Ultimately, the investigators forwarded conclusions that 18 men might face charges, but no courts-martial were brought.
In recent telephone interviews with The New York Times, three of the former soldiers quoted by The Blade confirmed that the articles had accurately described their unit's actions.
But they wanted to make another point: that Tiger Force had not been a "rogue" unit. Its members had done only what they were told, and their superiors knew what they were doing.
"The story that I'm not sure is getting out," said Mr. Causey, then a medic with the unit, "is that while they're saying this was a ruthless band ravaging the countryside, we were under orders to do it."
Burning huts and villages, shooting civilians and throwing grenades into protective shelters were common tactics for American ground forces throughout Vietnam, they said. That contention is backed up by accounts of journalists, historians and disillusioned troops.
The tactics - particularly in "free-fire zones," where anyone was regarded as fair game - arose from the frustrating nature of the guerrilla war and, above all, from the military's reliance on the body count as a measure of success and a reason officers were promoted, according to many accounts.
Nicholas Turse, a doctoral candidate at Columbia University, has been studying government archives and said they were filled with accounts of similar atrocities.
"I stumbled across the incidents The Blade reported," Mr. Turse said by telephone. "I read through that case a year, year and a half ago, and it really didn't stand out. There was nothing that made it stand out from anything else. That's the scary thing. It was just one of hundreds."
Yet there were few prosecutions.
Besides the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968, only 36 cases involving possible war crimes from Vietnam went to Army court-martial proceedings, with 20 convictions, according to the Army judge advocate general's office.
Guenter Lewy, who cited the Army figures in his 1978 book, "America in Vietnam," wrote that if a soldier killed a civilian, the incident was unlikely to be reported as a war crime: "It was far more likely that the platoon leader, under pressure for body count and not anxious to demonstrate the absence of good fire discipline in his unit, would report the incident as `1 VC suspect shot while evading.' "
Mr. Causey, now a nuclear engineer in California, said: "It wasn't like it was hidden. This was open and public behavior. A lot of guys in the 101st were cutting ears. It was a unique time period."
Mr. Kerney, now a firefighter in California, agreed that the responsibility went higher.
"I'm talking about the guys with the eagles," he said, referring to the rank insignia of a full colonel. "It was always about the body count. They were saying, `You guys have the green light to do what's right.' "
While Mr. Causey and Mr. Kerney became deeply troubled after they returned from Vietnam, Mr. Doyle, a sergeant who was a section leader in the unit, seemed unrepentant in a long, profanity-laced telephone conversation.
"I've seen atrocities in Vietnam that make Tiger Force look like Sunday school," said Mr. Doyle, who joined the Army at 17 when a judge gave him, a young street gang leader, a chance to escape punishment.
"If you're walking down a jungle trail, those that hesitate die," said Mr. Doyle, who lives in Missouri. "Everybody I killed, I killed to survive. They make Tiger Force out to be an atrocity. Well, that's almost a compliment. Because nobody will understand the evil I've seen."
The American public was shocked in November 1969 when the reporter Seymour M. Hersh broke the news of the My Lai massacre. Years later, it was revealed that a Navy Seal team led by Bob Kerrey, who would go on to become a United States senator and is now president of New School University in New York, had killed 21 women, children and old men during a raid on the village Thanh Phong in 1969.
"My Lai was a shock to everyone except people in Vietnam," recalled Kevin Buckley, who covered the war for Newsweek from 1968 to 1972 and reported on an operation called Speedy Express, in which nearly 11,000 were killed but only 748 weapons were recovered.
At his court-martial in the My Lai massacre, Lt. William L. Calley Jr., the only person convicted in the case, said: "I felt then - and I still do - that I acted as directed, I carried out my orders, and I did not feel wrong in doing so." He was paroled in 1975 after serving three and a half years under house arrest.
In spring 1971, embittered veterans demonstrated against the war in Washington, many throwing away their medals.
One of their leaders, John Kerry, then a recently discharged Navy officer, now a senator and presidential candidate, delivered an impassioned speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971.
American troops in Vietnam, he said, had "raped, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."
Mr. Kerry's account came from his own experience, as well as from a three-day conference of the fledgling Vietnam Veterans Against the War. At the conference, he said, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
A transcript of that meeting makes for hair-raising reading. The returned troops told of the slaughter of civilians; "reconnaissance by fire," or soldiers shooting blindly; "harassment and interdiction fire," with artillery being used to shell villages; captives thrown from helicopters; severed ears drying in the sun or being swapped for beers; and "Zippo inspections" of cigarette lighters in preparation for burning villages.
There is no shortage of literature on atrocities in Vietnam. Books include Jonathan Schell's "The Military Half," which recounts the campaign in 1967 in which Tiger Force took part; Philip Caputo's "A Rumor of War," a bitter memoir of his experience as a young Marine officer that is now required reading in a military history course at West Point; and Michael Herr's "Dispatches," which captured the madness from a "grunt's" point of view.
David H. Hackworth, a retired colonel and much-decorated veteran of the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam who later became a journalist and author, said that he created the Tiger Force unit in 1965 to fight guerrillas using guerrilla tactics. Mr. Hackworth was not in command of the unit during the period covered by the Blade articles because he had rotated out of Vietnam.
"Vietnam was an atrocity from the get-go," Mr. Hackworth said in a recent telephone interview. "It was that kind of war, a frontless war of great frustration. There were hundreds of My Lais. You got your card punched by the numbers of bodies you counted."
Lt. Col. Kevin Curry, an Army spokesman, said the Army had compared the Blade articles with the written record of the earlier investigation and did not intend to reopen the case.
"Absent any new or compelling evidence, there are no plans to reopen the case," Colonel Curry said. "The case is more than 30 years old. Criminal Investigation Command has conducted a lengthy investigation when the allegations surfaced four years after they reportedly occurred."
-------- biological weapons
U.S. Has New Concerns About Anthrax Readiness
By JUDITH MILLER
December 28, 2003
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/national/28ANTH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
wo years after the anthrax letter attacks, senior administration officials say they have fresh concerns about the nation's vulnerability to terrorist attacks with the deadly germ.
The officials said their fears had intensified in part because they now recognized that anthrax spores could be more widely dispersed than previously believed. In addition, they said, terror suspects with ties to Al Qaeda have told questioners that the group has been trying to obtain anthrax for use in attacks.
One indication of concern was a secret cabinet-level "tabletop" exercise conducted last month that simulated the simultaneous release of anthrax in different types of aerosols in several American cities.
The drill, code named Scarlet Cloud, found that the country was better able to detect an anthrax attack than it was two years ago, said officials knowledgeable about the exercise. But they said the exercise also showed that antibiotics in some cities could not be distributed and administered quickly enough and that a widespread attack could kill thousands. "The exercise was designed to be very stressful to the system, and it was," a senior government official said.
Veterans of America's biological warfare program of the 1950's and 1960's said the recent recognition of the ability of anthrax to spread widely appeared to be in line with research conducted decades ago and remains secret.
"The new generation of biological and chemical experts is simply unfamiliar with the earlier studies," said William C. Patrick III, a former head of product development at Fort Detrick, Md., then the military's center for developing germ weapons.
Another factor fueling concern about anthrax is the questioning of senior Qaeda agents now in United States custody, administration officials said.
One official said that after his arrest in March, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants, confirmed to American officials earlier reports that Al Qaeda, and particularly its second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, a physician, had long been eager to acquire biological agents, particularly anthrax. The official noted that Qaeda agents had inquired about renting crop-dusters to spread pathogens, especially anthrax.
According to an article by Milton Leitenberg, a biological warfare expert at the Center for International and Security Affairs at the University of Maryland, computer hard drives and handwritten notes seized at the home where Mr. Mohammed was arrested included an order to buy anthrax, along with other evidence of an interest in acquiring anthrax and other dangerous germs.
"Nothing so far translated implies access to the most dangerous microbial strains or to any advanced processing or delivery methods," Mr. Leitenberg concluded in a survey of recent developments in bioterrorism published in the journal Politics and Life Sciences.
American officials also said in interviews that Mr. Mohammed had told questioners that until the American invasion after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Al Qaeda's anthrax program was based in Kandahar, Afghanistan, and was led by two men: Riduan Isamuddin, known as Hambali, and Yazid Sufaat, a Malaysian member of Jemaah Islamiyah, a Qaeda-affiliated group.
Mr. Sufaat, who received a degree in biological sciences in 1987 from California State University, was a technician in the Malaysian military. In 1993, he set up a company to "test the blood and urine of foreign workers and state employees for drug use," Mr. Leitenberg wrote. Government officials say his company appears to have been involved in transferring money and buying ammonium nitrate for explosives for Qaeda groups in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Although Mr. Sufaat tried to acquire anthrax, there is no evidence that he was able to procure the appropriate strain used for attacks, officials said. Mr. Sufaat was arrested in 2001 as he tried to enter Malaysia and is being held at an undisclosed place, officials said. He has reportedly confirmed numerous details about Al Qaeda's effort to develop anthrax and other biological agents.
So, too, has Hambali, who like Mr. Sufaat fled to neighboring Pakistan after the United States invaded Afghanistan. He was arrested last August in Thailand and has been cooperating with American officials, several officials said.
CBS News reported in early October that Hambali had been trying to open a new biological weapons program for Al Qaeda in the Far East when he was arrested.
Officials said recent notices from the Department of Homeland Security also reflected the concern about a bioterror attack. A Nov. 21 warning from the department to law enforcement agencies states that while Al Qaeda is not known to have executed an attack using chemical or biological agents, "the acquisition, production or theft of these materials and subsequent dissemination is a top Al Qaeda objective."
Jerome Hauer, a former acting assistant secretary of health and human services for biodefense who now heads a biodefense center at George Washington University, said it was "no secret that Al Qaeda wants to use anthrax." He said, "If they get to the point where they have the technical sophistication to execute an attack, I think they would do so."
Lisa Bronson, a deputy under secretary of defense, said an anthrax attack was viewed as a threat to military personnel. Speaking to a group of security and arms control experts, she said anthrax was considered a unique weapon because of its stability and potential use in missiles and other delivery systems.
Last month's anthrax drill was notable for the top-level attention it drew and the gaps it showed in the effort to protect against bioterrorism. About three dozen senior officials involved in domestic defense, including two cabinet officers - Tom Ridge, the secretary of homeland security, and Norman Y. Minetta, the secretary of transportation - as well as John Gordon, the head of the White House's Homeland Security Council, participated in the exercise at the Pentagon's National Defense University, officials said.
The drill was an effort to follow up on weaknesses in federal emergency response plans identified in a simulated bioterrorism attack. That exercise, called Top Off 2, was organized by the Department of Homeland Security and involved 8,000 local, state, and federal officials. It simulated a radiological attack on Seattle and a pneumonic plague attack on Chicago.
The weeklong exercise showed that the government needed to improve plans for delivering vaccines and antibiotics to those exposed to a deadly agent, administration officials said. It also demonstrated that the government needed better plans for controlling and monitoring the movement of potentially contaminated produce and people in such an emergency, officials said.
Last month's test "showed that we are a lot better off today than we were two years ago before 9/11," a senior administration official said in an interview. "It also showed that there has definitely been a fast learning curve on bioterrorism."
But it also pointed up the problems in rapid distribution of medicine that could counteract anthrax exposure and showed that the government had enormous difficulties stopping the spread of contamination through the country and into Canada.
In an interview, a senior official said the exercise underlined the need for a program that President Bush first outlined in this year's State of the Union speech for providing $5.6 billion over 10 years to encourage the development of drugs, vaccines and other defenses against biological, nuclear, radiological and chemical attacks. The program, Project Bioshield, would also encourage private companies to work with federal agencies to develop measures to combat smallpox, Ebola virus, plague, anthrax and other pathogens. The government would then buy and stockpile the drugs or vaccines.
Although the measure passed overwhelmingly in the House and Senate, legislation authorizing its implementation has not been approved.
-------- iraq
Attacks Force Retreat From Wide-Ranging Plans for Iraq
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, December 28, 2003; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35053-2003Dec27?language=printer
BAGHDAD, Dec. 27 -- The United States has backed away from several of its more ambitious initiatives to transform Iraq's economy, political system and security forces as attacks on U.S. troops have escalated and the timetable for ending the civil occupation has accelerated.
Plans to privatize state-owned businesses -- a key part of a larger Bush administration goal to replace the socialist economy of deposed president Saddam Hussein with a free-market system -- have been dropped over the past few months. So too has a demand that Iraqis write a constitution before a transfer of sovereignty.
With the administration's plans tempered by time and threat, the U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, and his deputies are now focused on forging compromises with Iraqi leaders and combating a persistent insurgency in order to meet a July 1 deadline to transfer sovereignty to a provisional government.
"There's no question that many of the big-picture items have been pushed down the list or erased completely," said a senior U.S. official involved in Iraq's reconstruction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Right now, everyone's attention is focused [on] doing what we need to do to hand over sovereignty by next summer."
The new approach, U.S. diplomats said, calls into question the prospects for initiatives touted by conservative strategists to fashion Iraq into a secular, pluralistic, market-driven nation. While the diplomats maintain those goals are still attainable, the senior official said, "ideology has become subordinate to the schedule."
"The Americans are coming to understand that they cannot change everything they want to change in Iraq," said Adel Abdel-Mehdi, a senior leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a Shiite Muslim political party that is cooperating with the U.S. occupation authority. "They need to let the Iraqi people decide the big issues."
Bremer's plan for Iraqis to write a constitution before he departed had been intended to prevent extremists from dominating the drafting process. U.S. officials acknowledge that risk exists, but said it had been outweighed by the need to end the civil occupation by the summer. The presence of U.S. troops in Iraq will go on longer, military officials have said.
With goodwill toward Americans ebbing fast, Bremer and his lieutenants have also concluded that it does not make sense to cause new social disruptions or antagonize Iraqis allied with the United States. Selling off state-owned factories would lead to thousands of layoffs, which could prompt labor unrest in a country where 60 percent of the population is already unemployed. Food Rationing System
An unwillingness to assume other risks has also scuttled, at least temporarily, plans to overhaul a national food rationing program that was a cornerstone of Hussein's welfare state. Several senior officials want to replace monthly handouts of flour, cooking oil, beans and other staples -- received by more than 90 percent of Iraqis -- with a cash payment of about $15. Although the proposal has the enthusiastic support of economic conservatives in the occupation authority, concerns about the logistics have put the effort on hold.
"It's a great idea that the academics thought up, but it wasn't in tune with the political realities," said a U.S. official familiar with discussions of the issue. "We have to look at what we gain versus what we risk. Right now, we don't need to be adding any more challenges to those we already have."
A similar philosophy extends to the disarmament of various militias backed by political groups. Although the occupation authority wanted to quickly disband the Kurdish pesh merga militias by moving members into the new army and police force, U.S. officials have not pressed the issue with Kurdish leaders, who remain strong supporters of the American occupation. U.S. officials are also taking a measured approach toward a Shiite militia whose sponsoring party is the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.
At the same time, the occupation authority has substantially decreased the number of new recruits it intends to put through a three-month boot camp designed to build an improved, professionally trained army. Instead, the occupation authority is increasing the ranks of police officers and civil defense troops, who can be deployed faster but receive far less training and screening than the soldiers.
Bremer also recently allowed the creation of a new force, comprising former members of five political party militias, to pursue insurgents with American training and support.
"The Americans promised to limit our security forces to a professional army and a professional police," said Ghazi Yawar, a member of Iraq's U.S.-appointed Governing Council. "They should not tolerate these militias. They should be dissolving them."
Yawar and his fellow Sunni Muslims, a minority that had long ruled Iraq, are concerned that Shiites, who make up about 60 percent of the population, and Kurds, who have lived autonomously for 12 years, will have little incentive to demobilize their militias after the occupation.
"The Americans have to deal with this issue," he said. "It would be irresponsible to leave it up to the Iraqis."
Across Iraq, efforts are underway to rebuild after years of war, economic sanctions and gross mismanagement by Hussein's government. Hundreds of schools have been refurbished with funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Extensive rehabilitation and expansion of the country's electrical, water and sewage systems are slated to begin next year, paid for by an $18 billion U.S. aid package. "We are going to see a massive reconstruction program that will further demonstrate the depth of American commitment to Iraq," Bremer said in a recent interview.
But there has also been a noticeable dampening of some early ambitions to remake Iraq. In June, as he returned to Baghdad aboard a U.S. military transport plane after speaking at an international economic conference, Bremer discussed the need to privatize government-run factories with such fervor that his voice cut through the din of the cargo hold. "We have to move forward quickly with this effort," he said. "Getting inefficient state enterprises into private hands is essential for Iraq's economic recovery."
Asked recently about privatization, he said it was an issue "for a sovereign Iraqi government to address."
The administration's decision to shift privatization and the drafting of a constitution to the provisional government has been generally well received by Iraqi political leaders, who want to deal with those subjects themselves. But a small, quiet minority of political figures, including a few members of the Governing Council, contend that aggressive market-oriented policies must be enacted by the occupation authority. The provisional government, they fear, will not be willing to assume the risk of revamping the ration system or shutting down a factory with thousands of workers.
"The Americans are the only ones who can implement these changes," one of the council's 25 members said. "If they leave it up to Iraqis, it will never get done."
Bremer and his aides voiced similar concerns until Nov. 15, when he agreed to abandon his insistence that a constitution be written before a transfer of sovereignty. A few weeks before the new arrangement was announced, a top American official here stated that requiring the drafting of a "constitution before sovereignty is the only way to guarantee we'll get a constitution."
By handing over sovereignty first, the administration has ceded veto power over the final document and is forcing Iraqis to confront a raft of contentious issues, from Kurdish demands for autonomy to Shiite demands for Islamic law, without a referee. In September, Bremer warned that electing a government without a constitution "invites confusion and eventual abuse."
Under the Nov. 15 agreement, Iraqi political leaders are to draft a "basic law" that will serve as an interim constitution until a permanent one is written. Bremer has said that the basic law will include a bill of rights, recognition of an independent judiciary and other "guarantees that were not in Saddam's constitution." His aides contend that discussions about federalism and the relationship between religion and government that will occur during the writing of the basic law will ease the process of drafting a permanent constitution, but other American officials are more skeptical. "We're requiring a country that lacks a democratic tradition and the institutions of civil society, but has plenty of ethnic and religious tension, to sort out a lot of very challenging things," the senior American official said. "It's not ideal, but what choice do we have? Nobody wants us to extend our stay here."
Privatization, the official said, illustrates the dilemma well: It is a step that needs to be taken -- and that Bremer wanted to take -- but it has been deemed too difficult and dangerous to accomplish now. Reversal on Oil Factory
With a bloated workforce, decrepit factories and goods that cannot compete with imports, the State Company for Vegetable Oils is the sort of government-run business that economists working for the occupation authority had wanted to shove into the private sector as soon as possible.
One of 48 companies owned by the Ministry of Industry, the enterprise was a flagship of Hussein's socialist economy. Its six factories produced consumer goods -- from partially hydrogenated cooking oil to shampoo and detergent -- that filled the domestic market and were cheaper than imported products.
Although the company posted impressive profits, they were illusory. The government subsidized imports of raw materials, charging the company only $1 for each $6,000 worth of materials brought in.
American experts who examined the company over the summer believed it would be foolish for Iraq's new government to continue the subsidies. What was needed, they concluded, was a private owner who would buy raw materials and sell finished products at market prices. In exchange for investing in new manufacturing equipment and modernizing the product line to better compete with imports, they decided the new owner should have the right to shut down older factories and reduce the number of employees to bring costs under control.
In late June, Bremer outlined his vision for a free-market Iraq before hundreds of business executives attending a meeting of the World Economic Forum in Jordan.
"Markets allocate resources much more efficiently than politicians," Bremer said. "So our strategic goal in the months ahead is to set in motion policies which will have the effect of reallocating people and resources from state enterprises to more productive private firms."
The vegetable oil company's director at the time, Faez Ghani Aziz, agreed with Bremer. "We need outside investors," he said shortly after the speech. "We cannot continue like this."
Bremer's chief economic adviser over the summer, Peter McPherson, advocated a speedy move toward privatization, citing studies of the economic transformations in Eastern Europe in the 1990s. "This needs to be done quickly," McPherson, president of Michigan State University, said in July. "Experience shows us that the faster you do it, the more beneficial it is for the economy."
But as resistance attacks grew more intense, security worries quickly trumped economic ambitions in Bremer's office. No one wanted to do anything that would increase the number of jobless Iraqis who might be recruited to fight the occupation. Practical concerns also surfaced: The closure of Baghdad's airport to commercial flights meant few investors could travel to Iraq.
Iraqi officials expressed further doubts about fast privatization. They argued that waiting for a year or two for Iraq to stabilize would increase the prices at which the government could sell factories. They also raised fears that former Baathists would use ill-gotten money to buy up state firms.
In late July, the debate took a grim turn. After refusing to rehire dozens of workers who had been dismissed before the war, Aziz, the director of the vegetable oil company, was gunned down on his way to work. His killing sent a wave of panic through the Ministry of Industry. All of a sudden, no one wanted to talk about privatization.
Faced with growing reluctance among officials at the ministry and on the Governing Council, Bremer and his advisers stopped advocating a fast sell-off of state firms. "It's just disappeared from the agenda," an official with the occupation authority said. "It was just too risky."
The Ministry of Industry recently decided to lease 35 factories to Iraqi and foreign investors on the condition that they not fire a single employee. "The Americans first thought with the easy change of regime in Iraq there should be parallel drastic decisions on the economic front," said Mehdi Hafedh, Iraq's interim minister of planning. "But now they realize they cannot be too aggressive."
-------- israel / palestine
Israeli Army Shooting of Israeli Stirs Hot Debate
By REUTERS
December 28, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-mideast.html
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israelis hotly debated on Sunday just who crossed a red line: a young Israeli who joined Palestinians and foreign sympathizers in a protest against a West Bank barrier, or soldiers who shot him.
Gil Naamati, a 21-year-old kibbutz member who recently completed his compulsory military service, was hit in his knee and hip with live ammunition on Friday as he tried to cut through the razor-wire topped fence. An American woman was also wounded.
Unlike hundreds of incidents in which soldiers have killed or wounded Palestinians since an uprising began in September 2000, the army's first use of live gunfire against an Israeli was a shot heard across the Jewish state.
``Today they shot my son, tomorrow they'll shoot yours,'' Naamati's father, Uri, told Israel Radio.
The army said it had begun an investigation. Its chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Moshe Yaalon, visited the wounded Israeli protester -- a member of a fringe Israeli group called ``Anarchists Against the Fence'' -- in a hospital.
``I explained to him that it wasn't right that they shot me and he said it also wasn't right that I cut the fence,'' Naamati, speaking from his hospital bed, said on Army Radio.
Israel says the barrier it is building of fences, concrete walls and trenches, cutting deep into land Palestinians want for a state, is aimed at stopping infiltration by suicide bombers. Palestinians call it a land grab.
Meanwhile, left-wing opposition politicians demanded to know why troops had used lethal means to disperse dozens of unarmed protesters gathered behind a locked gate 20 yards away.
``In a law-abiding country, you don't shoot civilians,'' said Avshalom Vilan, a legislator from Meretz, a dovish party whose land-for-peace message has been drowned out by more than three years of Israeli-Palestinian bloodshed.
A news photographer at the scene said on Israel Radio that he and other journalists had told the soldiers they were shooting at fellow Israelis, but the troops ignored him.
Yaalon said the protesters had only themselves to blame. ``They masqueraded as Arabs, mingled with Palestinians and entered the ... Palestinian side of the fenceillegally,'' he told Israel radio.
Deputy Defense Minister Zeev Boim said soldiers followed orders by first shouting warnings and firing warning shots before aiming at the protesters' legs.
Israel's biggest newspaper, the mainstream Yedioth Ahronoth, said the soldiers' behavior was a symptom of the ``bestiality which the continuing occupation and war situation...has created within the army and the Israeli consciousness as a whole.
``Let's not kid ourselves...if a Palestinian (had been shot), it probably would not have got even one line in the newspaper,'' the editorial added.
-------- spies
School for spies
What the CIA learned (and mislearned) in the groves of academe.
By Jeet Heer,
12/28/2003
Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/12/28/school_for_spies/
COUNTLESS BOOKS AND MOVIES have displayed the seedier elements of the spy trade: the entrapments, the blackmail, the assassinations. Yet the analytical, brainy side of the profession has always been of equal importance: There is a reason why spies are said to belong to the "intelligence community." Just as James Bond needs his boss M for guidance, real-life spies rely on armchair accomplices to shape raw data into coherent and meaningful analysis.
But what kind of analysis? Attempting to distinguish "signal" from "noise," officials at the CIA and Defense Department debate competing methods of data-sifting and weigh the aggressive, "hypotheses-driven" style of interpretation favored by the Pentagon. Probability and risk are continually assessed, and sometimes the talk can sound nearly philosophical. Referring to the search for illegal weapons in Iraq, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld declared on Aug. 5 that "the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence."
If such matters arose at a university, they would attract the attention of philosophers of science or even theorists of literature, who study how to tease meaning out of texts. And indeed, the academy has profoundly shaped the rough-and-tumble espionage trade since the founding days of the CIA. In his classic 1987 study, "Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961," Yale historian Robin W. Winks showed how professors took a crucial role in creating and manning the agency and its forerunner, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). No university played a greater role than Winks's own. "From Yale's class of 1943 alone, at least 42 young men entered intelligence work, largely in the OSS, many to remain on after the war to form the core of the new CIA," Winks notes.
It wasn't just globe-trotting historians and social scientists who made the leap. As Winks emphasized, Yale's literature specialists played a key role in shaping the agency's thinking. Mole-hunter James Jesus Angleton, the most controversial figure in CIA history, began his career as an apprentice of the New Critics on Yale's English faculty, and his literary training in "close reading" may have shaped his hyper-skeptical (some would say paranoid) approach to counterintelligence.
With their emphasis on wide-ranging historical research and, later, the minutely detailed examination of language, Yale's literary scholars shaped the CIA's understanding of the world -- for better and for worse.
. . .
Among the first of the New Haven intelligence specialists was Wilmarth Lewis, a well-born dandy who guided Yale University Press's landmark 48-volume edition of the letters of 18th-century British art collector and novelist Horace Walpole. As many reviewers noted, the beauty of the Yale Walpole was not in the actual letters, which tended toward the trivial, but in the footnotes, which extensively detailed the overlapping networks of patronage and influence that characterized Walpole's time.
On the eve of 1941 the poet, Yalie, and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish recruited Lewis into the embryonic intelligence agency being created by future OSS chief "Wild" Bill Donovan. A Columbia alumnus, Donovan was busily hiring both sturdy Eastern establishment types and erudite refugees from Nazi Europe (including the Marxist social theorist Herbert Marcuse).
In late 1941, Lewis became chief of the Central Information Division (CID), a government agency charged with organizing vast bodies of knowledge so that any crucial military question could be answered quickly -- an effort reminiscent of retired Admiral John Poindexter's recent attempt to create a "Total Information Awareness" database. In the pre-Google world, CID collected postcards of German cities, popular European newspapers and magazines, and other items, and stored them on index cards and microfilm.
As University of Arizona professor William H. Epstein explained in a 1990 article for the journal English Literary History: "Lewis and his staff developed a system for the storage and retrieval of this huge flow of material, a cross- and counter-indexed catalogue which became the pre-computer model for other government information systems. This monumental attempt to index the contemporary world was based on the documentation techniques Lewis and his sub-editors had devised for the Yale Walpole edition."
But even as it gained currency in Washington, back in New Haven Lewis's style of extensive historical research was coming under fire from a new generation of literary scholars. Influenced by the British scholars I.A. Richards and William Empson, and by the towering presence of T.S. Eliot, the New Critics insisted that too much historical context could distract the reader from the really important question: the shape and intrinsic value of a work of literature itself. Like appraisers of jewelry, literary critics would examine poetry and prose in fine detail; only an intensive reading of the poem itself could show how a great work such as John Donne's "The Ecstasy" wove its conflicting meanings into a coherent whole.
In 1942, erstwhile Yale student Donald Downes recruited English professor Norman Holmes Pearson into the OSS. As Winks explains, Pearson knew how to read materials "as intently as possible for hidden messages" because the Yale Department of English taught him "how to read, really read, closely, without interruption, how to interrogate a manuscript. . .." (After the war, Pearson would resume his scholarly career, which included collaborating with his friend W.H. Auden in the editing of the five-volume anthology "Poets of the English Language.")
None of the New Haven alumni would be more significant or controversial than James Jesus Angleton. As a Yale undergraduate in the late 1930s and early `40s, he distinguished himself as an active supporter of both the New Criticism and its cultural ally, literary modernism. Furioso, the little journal Angleton cofounded with poet Reed Whittemore in 1939, published modernist writers like Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. Angleton also invited Empson to campus.
Following Pearl Harbor, Angleton joined the OSS, where he served with distinction. In Italy after the war, he organized the covert anticommunist campaign that secured victory for the Christian Democrats in the crucial election of 1948. He carried out this task with such flair that he quickly rose in the CIA, becoming Chief of the Office of Special Operations in `49. In that capacity, Angleton was responsible for all counterintelligence. But in his increasingly obsessive search for a "Big Mole" inside the agency, he alienated colleagues and eventually reached what many considered the outer limits of paranoia before he was fired in 1974.
The key to understanding Angleton's genius, or madness, may lie in his training as a literary theorist. Angleton once defined counterintelligence as "the practical criticism of ambiguity." (As William Epstein observes, this phrase is "derived from the titles of two of the most influential texts of formalist criticism, Richards's `Practical Criticism' and Empson's `Seven Types of Ambiguity."')
The New Critics famously attacked the "intentional fallacy," arguing that the meaning of a text could not be identified with its author's intentions. They also put a high value on paradox, indirection, and all the many ways in which a written artifact does not mean what it seems to mean.
In his rigorous questioning of Soviet defectors, Angleton was a New Critic par excellence. He almost never took them at their word, fearing as he did that they might be double agents sent to spread disinformation. "The more solid the information from a defector, the more you should not trust him, and the more you should suspect he has something to hide," he once observed.
For Angleton, history resembled a novel by Ford Madox Ford or Henry James, with a plausible surface story that hid a very different and more troubling tale if you read it closely enough. He speculated that Joe McCarthy might have been a KGB agent sent to make anticommunism look bad, and believed the Sino-Russian split was a ruse. Convinced that a KGB defector named Yuri Nosenko was a fraud, Angleton and his followers at the CIA went to elaborate if fruitless lengths to get him to admit the "truth" about his deception: They held him in isolation for at least two years, tortured him and injected him with truth serums. As a massive wave of suspicion engulfed the agency, many began suspecting that Angleton himself was the Big Mole.
Now that the Cold War is history, it's clear that Angleton's refusal to accept straightforward explanations led him seriously astray. The Soviet Union did penetrate the CIA, but Aldrich Ames was not the Big Mole of Angleton's theorizing. But even though he is generally dismissed as a crank, Angleton does continue to have his admirers. New York Times columnist William Safire likes to recall meeting Angleton and has fondly imagined him "cultivating the orchids in Spook Heaven." (Angleton died in 1987.) In National Review Online, Michael Ledeen, a conservative thinker involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, has written columns imagining what Angleton would say about the war on terrorism. (Karl Rove has cited Ledeen as one of the chief intellectual influences on the current Bush administration.)
Both Safire and Ledeen are proponents of a grand unified theory of the Middle East. Safire believes that Osama bin Laden had ties with Saddam Hussein whereas Ledeen has argued for connections between the Iranian theocrats and Al Qaeda. They are, in their way, heirs to the Angleton tradition.
Angleton once described the intelligence world as "a wilderness of mirrors", a quote taken from one of his favorite poets, T.S. Eliot. For all his reputed brilliance, Angleton got lost in that wilderness.
Perhaps the moral of Angleton's story can be found in another work of literature. Norman Rush's recent novel, "Mortals," tells the story of a CIA agent and John Milton scholar whose cover is his job teaching literature at a university in Botswana. At one point, Rush's scholar-spy reflects: "The past is a forest of signs. The problem was that you could only read them when you turned around and looked back, unfortunately."
Jeet Heer is a regular contributor to the National Post of Canada and the Globe.
----
C.I.A. Reveals Some Old Tricks of the Spy Trade at Museum
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
December 28, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/national/28CIA.html?pagewanted=print&position=
McLEAN, Va., Dec. 27 (AP) - When the Central Intelligence Agency's gadget makers invented a listening device for the Asian jungles, they disguised it so the enemy would not be tempted to pick it up and examine it: The device looked like tiger droppings.
The guise worked. The fist-size, brown transmitter detected troop movements along the trails during fighting in Vietnam, a quiet success for a little-known group of researchers inside the C.I.A.
The office, known as the Directorate of Science and Technology, is celebrating its 40th anniversary by revealing a few dozen of its secrets for a new museum inside its headquarters near Washington.
Keith Melton, a leading historian of intelligence, calls it "the finest spy museum you'll never see." It is accessible only to C.I.A. employees and guests to those closed quarters.
Besides the jungle transmitter, the exhibits include a robotic catfish, a remote-controlled dragonfly and a camera strapped to the chests of pigeons. Secret gadgets currently used by the C.I.A. are not included.
The pigeons' missions remain classified.
"People don't think of a pigeon as being anything more than a rodent on top of a building," said Pat Avery of Newalla, Okla., who runs the National Pigeon Association and loves to recount decades-old exploits by famous military pigeons.
But as surveillance technology improved, the need for C.I.A. pigeons diminished. "They're pretty passé now," Ms. Avery said.
Agency lore holds that a pistol on display was so quiet that William Donovan, the founder of the agency that became the C.I.A., pulled the trigger inside the White House to demonstrate for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who never heard a shot.
"The president was on the phone at the time, so Donovan proceeded to fire the entire magazine, 10 rounds, into the bag of sand in the Oval Office, then placed the smoking-hot weapon on the desk and told him what he had done," said Toni Hiley, the curator for the C.I.A. museum.
In 2000, the C.I.A. built a catfish called Charlie, a remarkably realistic swimming robot. The agency will not disclose much about the fish's mission, but experts speculated that it collects water samples near suspected chemical or nuclear plants.
The agency is not showing off just its successes. It invented a remote-controlled dragonfly for delivering tiny listening devices outside windows, but the so-called insectothopter could not fly straight in winds.
The agency's D-21 "Tagboard" unmanned jet was kept secret until the late 1970's. Designed to fly off the back of C.I.A.'s version of the super fast SR-71 "Blackbird" surveillance jet, Tagboard cruised more than 17 miles high, taking photographs over cold war lands.
But over four missions, the C.I.A. once failed to recover the drone's film canister before it dropped into the ocean. Another drone crashed in Siberia. A C.I.A. crewman died in one launch attempt. "It wasn't a hugely successful program," Ms. Hiley said.
The Science and Technology Directorate is among the agency's largest units. It was held in highest esteem for more than a dozen years until 1976, but experts say its internal influence with the central intelligence director has declined since.
"They've been very clever; they have not stuck to simply what would be the traditional and obvious means of intelligence collection," said Jeffrey T. Richelson, who wrote a book about the directorate in 2001.
-------- us
Psychic spies knew of raid
By Henry Cuningham Military editor
2003-12-28
Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer
http://www.fayettevillenc.com/story.php?Template=military&Story=6069306
As Delta Force was trying to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, a psychic spy monitoring the operation from the United States reported an explosion.
The National Security Council received the report 48 seconds before getting an electronic call about the fatal explosion at the site known as Desert One, said Joseph W. McMoneagle. He started working as a psychic spy in the 1970s.
McMoneagle and Lyn Buchanan, who also worked on the once-secret project, describe the incident in books as "remote viewers." The controversial $20 million CIA-military program was known as the Stargate Project. It ended in 1995.
In a study of the project, Ray Hyman, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Oregon, questioned the reliability of the program's results.
Charlie Rose is a former congressman from Fayetteville who lives in Marshall, Va. He talked to some of the people in the program when he was on the House Intelligence Committee. Rose said a former director of Central Intelligence told him he was not convinced that psychic spying was reliable enough to play a role in military intelligence.
"I don't think our military or intelligence community at this point is spending very much money on any psychic program," Rose said.
McMoneagle, who retired from the Army as a chief warrant officer, wrote about his role in his 2002 book "The Stargate Chronicles." He discussed his experiences during a lecture earlier this month at the Rhine Research Center in Durham.
Practical problems
A psychic trying to gather military intelligence faces some practical problems, he said.
"During the Iran hostage problem, we were revisiting targets for the 100th time," McMoneagle said. "As a psychic, when you are looking at the same problem over and over and over on a daily process, it gets extremely difficult to look at it with an open mind."
Either things don't change, or they change very little, he said.
"We were being asked some pretty critical questions, like, 'Are the guards getting tired? Are they changing their armament? What's different about the room?' The smallest changes could be critical to people engineering hostage retrieval."
The project tried to gather information about Grenada during the U.S. invasion in 1983. It also looked for information on the whereabouts of Manuel Noriega, the deposed leader of Panama, during the 1989 invasion, and the intentions of Saddam Hussein during the first Gulf War.
That's according to Buchanan in his 2003 book, "The Seventh Sense: The Secrets of Remote Viewing as Told by a 'Psychic Spy' for the U.S. Military."
Sensitive operations
McMoneagle said planning for the Iran hostage-rescue operation was so sensitive that only a few people knew about it; the psychic spies accidentally became aware of preparations through extrasensory perception, he said.
"It was one of the most sensitive secrets," McMoneagle said. "In our remote viewings, it started to pop up. We started seeing American soldiers stockpiling weapons inside Tehran, to include trucks and munitions and things. We started seeing some of the safe houses."
The psychics reported their findings, and the planners agreed to let them in on the secret, he said.
"They decided since we were already picking up on that they would allow us to continue because we were obviously seeing things ahead of time," McMoneagle said.
"They decided we might in fact see the issues that they did not have resolution for and thereby give them the answers that they lacked."
Psychic spies might get lots of information about a particular situation, but it's not always necessarily what is relevant, he said.
"In the military projects, they would want to know what the agents were doing on the second window over," McMoneagle said. "They would get everything but what the agents were doing. They would get a detailed, perfect picture of this tower. They'd say, 'That's a miss. You didn't tell us what the agents were doing.'"
Military editor Henry Cuningham can be reached at cuninghamh@fayettevillenc.com or 486-3585.
-------- propaganda wars
Revealed: how MI6 sold the Iraq war
Nicholas Rufford,
12/28/03:
(The UK Times)
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article5433.htm
THE Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organised Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.
The revelation will create embarrassing questions for Tony Blair in the run-up to the publication of the report by Lord Hutton into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr David Kelly, the government weapons expert.
A senior official admitted that MI6 had been at the heart of a campaign launched in the late 1990s to spread information about Saddam's development of nerve agents and other weapons, but denied that it had planted misinformation. "There were things about Saddam's regime and his weapons that the public needed to know," said the official.
The admission followed claims by Scott Ritter, who led 14 inspection missions in Iraq, that MI6 had recruited him in 1997 to help with the propaganda effort. He described meetings where the senior officer and at least two other MI6 staff had discussed ways to manipulate intelligence material.
"The aim was to convince the public that Iraq was a far greater threat than it actually was," Ritter said last week.
He said there was evidence that MI6 continued to use similar propaganda tactics up to the invasion of Iraq earlier this year. "Stories ran in the media about secret underground facilities in Iraq and ongoing programmes (to produce weapons of mass destruction)," said Ritter. "They were sourced to western intelligence and all of them were garbage."
Kelly, himself a former United Nations weapons inspector and colleague of Ritter, might also have been used by MI6 to pass information to the media. "Kelly was a known and government-approved conduit with the media," said Ritter.
Hutton's report is expected to deliver a verdict next month on whether intelligence was misused in order to promote the case for going to war. Hutton heard evidence that Kelly was authorised by the Foreign Office to speak to journalists on Iraq. Kelly was in close touch with the "Rockingham cell", a group of weapons experts that received MI6 intelligence.
Blair justified his backing for sanctions and for the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that intelligence reports showed Saddam was working to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The use of MI6 as a "back channel" for promoting the government's policies on Iraq was never discovered during the Hutton inquiry and is likely to cause considerable disquiet among MPs.
A key figure in Operation Mass Appeal was Sir Derek Plumbly, then director of the Middle East department at the Foreign Office and now Britain's ambassador to Egypt. Plumbly worked closely with MI6 to help to promote Britain's Middle East policy.
The campaign was judged to be having a successful effect on public opinion. MI6 passed on intelligence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction and rebuilding its arsenal.
Poland, India and South Africa were initially chosen as targets for the campaign because they were non-aligned UN countries not supporting the British and US position on sanctions. At the time, in 1997, Poland was also a member of the UN security council.
Ritter was a willing accomplice to the alleged propaganda effort when first approached by MI6's station chief in New York. He obtained approval to co-operate from Richard Butler, then executive chairman of the UN Special Commission on Iraq Disarmament.
Ritter met MI6 to discuss Operation Mass Appeal at a lunch in London in June 1998 at which two men and a woman from MI6 were present. The Sunday Times is prevented by the Official Secrets Act from publishing their names.
Ritter had previously met the MI6 officer at Vauxhall Cross, the service's London headquarters. He asked Ritter for information on Iraq that could be planted in newspapers in India, Poland and South Africa from where it would "feed back" to Britain and America.
Ritter opposed the Iraq war but this is the first time that he has named members of British intelligence as being involved in a propaganda campaign. He said he had decided to "name names" because he was frustrated at "an official cover-up" and the "misuse of intelligence".
"What MI6 was determined to do by the selective use of intelligence was to give the impression that Saddam still had WMDs or was making them and thereby legitimise sanctions and military action against Iraq," he said.
Recent reports suggest America has all but abandoned hopes of finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that David Kay, head of the Iraq Survey Group, has resigned earlier than expected, frustrated that his resources have been diverted to tracking down insurgents.
The Times UK http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,2-523-944831,00.html
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- courts
U.S. Asks Judge to Lift His Ban on Pentagon's Anthrax Vaccination Program
By THOM SHANKER
December 27, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/27/national/27ANTH.html?pagewanted=print&position=
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 - The Justice Department has asked a federal district judge here to withdraw his preliminary injunction halting the military's mandatory anthrax vaccination program, or at least limit his ruling to the six plaintiffs whose suit prompted it.
The department's motion is the Bush administration's first legal response to the injunction, issued on Monday and barring the Pentagon from "inoculating service members without their consent."
The motion, which promises to be just one step in a long court battle, seeks clarification of whether the injunction applies solely to the six plaintiffs, each identified only as John Doe. If not, it asks that the judge reconsider, arguing that the suit was not filed on behalf of all military personnel.
"Plaintiffs never pursued this case as a class action," says the motion, which states later, "An award of preliminary injunctive relief to anyone other than the six Doe plaintiffs before the court would be wholly without justification."
The document is dated Wednesday, and a copy of it was provided by Mark S. Zaid, one of the plaintiffs' lawyers.
Most federal offices in Washington were closed Friday, and the Justice Department spokesman on duty said he had no comment about the motion.
Mr. Zaid said the motion was "understandable from the legal standpoint" but was "completely absurd from a policy standpoint."
He acknowledged that the plaintiffs' case had not been filed as a class action but said it had been "styled on behalf of all similarly situated persons" in the armed forces and among Pentagon civilians required to take the vaccine.
One option now, he said, would be to try to have the suit certified as a class action. Or, he said, it may be refiled, "adding in every single person's name who doesn't want to take the shot."
"The vaccine as being used is experimental in nature and therefore unlawful unless informed consent is given," Mr. Zaid said. "So to argue that this decision should only apply to those six individuals does a real injustice."
The Pentagon announced Tuesday night that it was at least temporarily halting its program of administering the anthrax vaccine, until the legal situation was clarified. Even so, Pentagon officials continue to defend the vaccine as safe, effective and necessary for national security.
"This is an important force-protection program," Bryan Whitman, the deputy Pentagon spokesman, said Friday. "The safety and efficacy of this vaccine has been looked at by medical experts, both inside and outside the United States government. They have agreed that this is an effective vaccine against all forms of anthrax."
In issuing the injunction, the judge, Emmet G. Sullivan, said the vaccine used in the Pentagon's mandatory program had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration to protect against skin exposure to anthrax but not against anthrax that is inhaled, a far greater threat on the modern battlefield. Defense Department officials countered by saying the F.D.A. had provided guidance that allowed the Pentagon to conclude that the vaccine was effective against inhaled anthrax.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say nearly 500 active-duty members of the armed services have refused the vaccine, with close to 200 court-martialed as a result. From 500 to 1,000 pilots and flight personnel have left the Air National Guard or Reserves rather than take the vaccine, the lawyers say.
Pentagon officials say that although several hundred military or civilian personnel declined the vaccine in the initial years after the program was begun in 1998, only 10 have refused it since June 2002, when the program was accelerated after supply problems had been resolved.
Since then, 600,000 to 700,000 military or Pentagon civilian personnel have received the vaccine, Defense Department officials say.
-------- homeland security
The fish that threatened national security
College student Lara Hayhurst was not prepared to let officials treat her little pet like Osama 'fin' Laden
Sunday, December 28, 2003
Pittsburgh Post Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/03362/255283.stm
Like many college students who flew home for the holidays, I had to endure the latest airport safeguards in the name of homeland security. A lot of us have stories to tell, but only mine is a fish tale, a contemporary melodrama of the absurd to prepare you for future travels.
My boyfriend Trey and I arrived by taxi at the US Airways terminal of La Guardia airport. We had four bags apiece, and one more precious piece of cargo -- MJ, my pet fish. MJ is a gorgeous fighting Betta fish, his palate a perfect pastel rainbow. He had become quite a solace to me in New York, a city that can make you feel so small and alone.
I missed my cats at college, and it really helped to have this tiny, exuberant creature to look after. Betta fish, research has shown, are the only aquatic animals that can recognize their owner. MJ was no exception. I'd walk into my cold dorm room after a long day and his body would just light up, and he would swim excited circles around his little bowl. Unfortunately, residence hall rules required that I take him home with me for winter break. That was just as well, since there would be no one there to care for him.
At La Guardia we proceeded to security and the X-ray inspection point run by the Transportation Security Administration. I have learned by now that, post-9/11, a traveler is better off safe than sorry when proceeding through security.
I wasn't prepared, however, for the TSA to stop me right at the entrance, proclaiming that no small pets, including fish, were permitted through security. I had, however, just received the blessing of the ticket agents at US Airways and pre-assured MJ's travels with Pittsburgh International Airport security weeks before our travel date. I tried to explain this to the screener who stood between me and the gates, but she would have none of it.
I was led back to the US Airways ticket counter, stocking-footed and alone, where the agents reasserted that they did not see a problem for me to have a fish on board, properly packaged in plastic fish bag and secured with a rubber band as MJ was. But the TSA supervisor was called over, and he berated me profusely. He exclaimed that in no way, under no circumstances, was a small fish allowed to pass through security, regardless of what the ticket agents said.
Mr. Supervisor was causing a grand scene, marshaling the full authority of the TSA to refuse me. Now, I know my fish is a terrorist (Osama Fin Laden we used to call him back at school), but doesn't it strike you as funny that, with all the commotion my little security threat was causing, by now engaging the full attention of the TSA at LaGuardia, that someone who posed a real threat to passenger safety might be conveniently slipping by?
By this time, I was in tears. The supervisor furiously told me to dispose of the fish. Dispose of my fish?! What did he want me to do, throw him away? He told me to go outside and give him to whomever I came to the airport with. When I explained I was a college student, alone in New York City (save for boyfriend Trey), he brushed me off and said that was not his problem.
I cried some more. With no other option that we could see, Trey and I headed toward a rest room.
Inside the ladies' room, I looked at MJ, swimming happily in his bag, and then the looming porcelain toilet bowl in front of me. I broke down. I couldn't do it.
I went back outside and told Trey I couldn't flush MJ. It was then, in this hopeless predicament, that Trey, ever brilliant and supportive, had an idea. He explained his plan to me.
Trey disappeared into the men's room with the fish and my backpack. When he got into the stall, he let out a bit of the water in MJ's bag, and packed the fish into my backpack, which only contained pants. Wedged between some corduroys and khakis, we prayed he wouldn't suffocate or get squished, not to mention fried by the security X-rays that can be fatal to small creatures such as fish. Every Web site I visited, every vet that I contacted said that air travel was no problem for Bettas, as long as I did not, under any circumstances, allow it to go through the X-ray machine.
In my research, I had learned that running a fish through an X-ray would be like a human getting radiation without wearing the protective lead cloak. At this point, though, we had no choice. We proceeded to a different security checkpoint, on the other side of the terminal.
Before we went through, Trey grabbed my hand. "Lara," he said, "you know there are only a few outcomes.
"One, they will see his bag or skeleton in the X-ray and catch us, we'll get in huge trouble for crossing security and we'll have to flush the fish. Two, he may die instantly in a blaze of glory from the X-rays. Or, he'll miraculously survive and we'll smuggle him onto the plane and pray that he survives the exposure." I shuddered and nodded.
We took a deep breath and proceeded. We loaded our things onto the belt before the X-ray machine and walked through. Once past the scanner, Trey and I grabbed our things and ran for the gates, eager to find the first bathroom to see if MJ was intact. On the way, we passed by the original security checkpoint we had tried to go through.
The agents were huddled together, and recognized us. "What did you do with the fish?" they asked, "What did you do with the fish!?"
Sensing a chance for comeuppance, Trey put on his "stone-cold-supportive-protector" face and said with great dramatics, "You know what ... we flushed him. We flushed him because you made us [pause for effect]. You killed my girlfriend's fish. No, you made her kill her fish ... Happy holidays."
I started sobbing again. Trey gave the TSA agents one last cold, steely gaze.
We turned and walked away. I smelled an Oscar.
Now in the rest room, I faced impending doom once again. I picked through my bag and found the familiar plastic. I pulled it out, and miraculously MJ was still alive!
Maybe it was God, maybe it was the corduroy, but someone wanted my fish to live. I then bought a doughnut from a coffee kiosk, placing MJ on the bottom of the paper bag I was given, and the pastry on top. Trey and I walked to the gate and checked in. A few passengers had witnessed our role in the La Guardia Christmas Security Spectacular and asked us what happened to the fish. We stuck to our story and told them it was gone.
The flight was full. I sat between two fat men who seemed intrigued by the brown paper bag I gently cradled in my lap the whole flight.
An hour and a half later, we were in Pittsburgh. We departed the people-mover, and ran one final time to the bathroom to see if MJ was OK, and he was.
Absolutely amazing. Two terminals, baggage claim and a car ride later, I was at home.
As I write this I sit with a cat in my lap and my fish, which I have aptly renamed X-ray, swimming contentedly in his glass-beaded bowl. And even though my actions may send Tom Ridge reeling and upset the karma of the Department of Homeland Security, I really don't care.
Honestly, they have bigger fish to fry.
Lara Hayhurst, a graduate of North Allegheny Senior High School, is studying musical theater at Pace University in New York City (starlet300@aol.com).)
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