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NUCLEAR
Health snapshot of returning soldiers: 11,000 have sought treatment
GOVERNMENT DU-PLICITY
Depleted Uranium: The War Crime That Has No End
Uranium Traveled to Iran Via Russia, Inspectors Find
MELMAN: It's Vanunu's Kidnap Story That Worries Israel
Japan - US deal to boost military ties
Japan Faces Anniversary of U.S. Nuke Test
Korean peace requires US compromise, troop exit
North Korea's desire for 'peaceful nuclear power' may stall talks
No breakthrough in N Korea talks
N Korea says no uranium program; no uranium deals with Pakistan
Diplomats See Modest Progress in North Korea Nuclear Talks
N. Korea Arms Talks Bring No Agreement
N. Korea Talks End with Deep Divisions Laid Bare
Nuke Negotiators Try to Avoid '94 Repeat
Libya's Kadhafi speaks out on abandoning weapons programme
Uranium Traveled to Iran Via Russia, Inspectors Find
Report Criticizes Uranium Program
Kerry attacks Bush as weak on defense
Kucinich on Palestine
Budget Office Predicts Deficit Over 10 Years: $2.75 Trillion
CBO Disputes Bush Promise To Cut Deficit in Half in 5 Years
MILITARY
Tales of the Taliban: Part Tragedy, Part Farce
African Leaders Sign Common Security Plan
Blair's people hit back at ex-minister who blew whistle on British spies
V-22 Costs Soar
The 50-Year Communist Assault on 5000 Years of Chinese Culture
Taiwan's Chen Leads Huge Human Chain Against China
Gangs, Looters Roam Haiti's Capital City Tense as Rebels Approach
Aristide Urges Calm After Gangs Rampage in Haiti
U.S. Considers Options in Haiti
Iranian defense minister threatens Israel in case of attack
Iraqi Council Shiites Walk Out of Session On Constitution
Iraqi Women 1, Islamists 0
A Day of Israeli-Palestinian Violence;
Israeli Airstrike on Car Kills 3 in Gaza
Washington Drops Bomb on Landmine Ban
The espionage is unending
Australian spy circle tied to UN bugging
Why they bugged the Secretary-General
'Britain and US shared transcripts after bugging Blix's mobile phone'
British intelligence gave Blair 'snippets
On Bugging News, Annan Had Low-Key Reaction to Old Practice
2 Killed as Troops Fight Protesters in Venezuela
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Senator Rebuts Times Article on Panel Vote Over Subpoenas
Hastert, in Reversal, Backs Extension for 9/11 Panel
In Reversal, Hastert Endorses Extending 9/11 Panel's Deadline
Lawyer in Two Cases Hosted Scalia Visit
Jakarta accuses US over human rights report
Handling of Terror Case Probed
F.B.I. Orders an Internal Review of Oklahoma City Bombing Files
Review Ordered on McVeigh Ties
FBI's Discipline Practices Flawed, New Report Says
ENERGY
Iconoclast Gets Consultant Fees to Tell Big Oil It's Fading Fast
OTHER
Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council
Lead Fears Force D.C. To Expand Response
ACTIVISTS
Anti-war protest at conference
-------- NUCLEAR
-------- depleted uranium
Health snapshot of returning soldiers: 11,000 have sought treatment
By Hal Bernton
Seattle Times
Saturday, February 28, 2004
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001867435_vetills28m.html
A new federal report offers a statistical snapshot of the health of U.S. veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, indicating more than 11,000 have sought treatment for conditions that range from hypertension to deafness to mental disorders.
Overall among the veterans, 11 percent have had health concerns, with veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars reporting roughly the same types of health problems at close to the same rates.
The report is part of an early-warning-detection system created by the Department of Veterans Affairs to help identify any mysterious syndromes or spikes in illnesses such as post-traumatic stress syndrome. The report also is intended to help the VA prepare for the tens of thousands of veterans who will be using clinics and hospitals in the months and years ahead.
The biggest numbers of health problems have involved muscle, skeletal or digestive problems.
But 1.6 percent of those who have sought treatment - 1,598 veterans - have been treated for mental disorders that included substance abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome and psychoses.
A larger group of veterans, some 2,024, have health issues that fall into a category of "symptoms, signs and ill-defined conditions."
Most of these veterans are from Iraq, a first flush of early discharges that does not include the thousands of active-duty soldiers who have endured long, stressful months fighting insurgents. VA officials say that, so far, they have found nothing considered to be a mystery disease or unusually high rates of any health problems.
"This is just an initial snapshot and over time may change," said Dr. Craig Hymans, the VA's chief consultant on environmental and occupational health. "But we now have the health records computerized - and will be able to follow what happens. We didn't have this after the Gulf War."
Some veterans returning from the 1991 war reported joint pain, fatigue, memory and sleep symptoms that collectively came to be known as Gulf War syndrome.
Concerns about the fate of these veterans heightened after the Pentagon disclosed that 145,000 troops were inadvertently exposed to low levels of sarin nerve gas released by the detonation of an Iraq ammunition dump. And the U.S. government has spent more than $200 million studying the syndrome.
Upon their return, many of the Gulf War veterans went to private physicians rather than VA facilities, so early on it was hard to track what was happening. Today's veterans are entitled to two years of free health care at facilities such as the VA Puget Sound and other VA facilities around the country, according to VA officials. Veterans' visits to these facilities were used to compile the new report.
During the post-Sept. 11, 2001, Afghanistan and Iraq wars, there have been no documented releases of nerve gases. So there appears to be less risk from exposure to toxic chemicals, as well as the smoke clouds emitted by the 1991 fires in Kuwait's oil fields.
But during these new conflicts, physicians say there could be more incidents of post-traumatic stress syndrome. The first Gulf War ended after less than a week of major ground fighting, while the present Iraq occupation has involved long, stressful months of battling insurgents.
"This is a whole different situation. Really, almost everywhere is a combat zone, and there are so many improvised explosive devices," said Dr. Stephen Hunt, medical director for the VA's Deployment Health Clinic in Seattle and at American Lake in Pierce County. Hunt says rates of post-traumatic stress syndrome will likely be higher than in the Gulf War.
Moreover, the incidence of post-traumatic stress syndrome in Iraq may be underrepresented in the new report because many early discharged veterans who sought treatment were from the Air Force or Navy, which had a short combat role in the war. Many Army soldiers who have suffered the greatest combat stress have yet to be discharged or have moved through the VA system.
Steve Robinson, executive director of the National Gulf War Resource Center, said the soldiers now in Iraq also may face risks from depleted uranium shells from U.S. munitions, as well as vaccines they received to ward off disease and anthrax attacks. Another problem has been sand flies, which can spread disease.
Department of Defense officials, in recent days, have been reviewing the VA report. They say they have yet to do a similar survey of the health problems of active-duty troops. But the types of complaints appear similar to those of active-duty soldiers, said Dr. Michael Kilpatrick, deputy director of deployment health in the Department of Defense.
Overall, about 4 percent of the active-duty troops in Iraq report some type of medical concern each week, Kilpatrick said. That's the lowest of any war fought by the United States in recent decades, he said.
With sandstorms and dust inhalation, respiratory problems have been a concern. But most of the problems appear to be short-term. "We're not seeing a lot of acute stuff," Kilpatrick said.
Hal Bernton: 206-464-2581 or hbernton@seattletimes.com
Where vets can call
Afghanistan and Iraq war veterans with health concerns in the Puget Sound region may call the Department of Veterans Affairs at 206-764-2636.
----
GOVERNMENT DU-PLICITY
By Susan Riordon & Davey Garland
February 28, 2004
UN Observer
http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout4.php&id=1487&blz=1
Great liars are also great magicians" - Adolf Hitler.
IT IS appropriate to quote from someone so despicable, about those who have created a despicable act, and have lied and covered up their crimes for over 12 years. The wall of silence or dis-information over Depleted Uranium held by the US and UK government has been near impregnable. But cracks have now emerged, be it from veterans, or scientists, over a decade of collating, researching and painstaking "digging" by activists and academics which may rock or even ruin some government Ministers and officials. The last months have seen a number of incidents which has seen the tight DU ship of lies spring a number of leaks.
It hit choppy waters first at the World Uranium Weapons Conference held in Hamburg in October, 2003, at which the global DU movement came together pro-actively for the first time, with activists, veterans, scientists and lawyers agreeing on solid, cohesive means of action. The Conference called for the abolition of all uranium weapons and confirmed acceptance of the United Nations Sub-commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights finding, that Depleted Uranium weapons are illegal. Accordingly, the Hamburg officially called for the abolition of the use of and halt to the proliferation of these weapons.
The Hamburg Conference concluded: "The evidence from scientists, medical professionals and legal experts at this conference is clear: DU is causing significant health effects worldwide... is illegal under existing International Law and Conventions" The Conference also called for the cessation of the manufacture testing, or use of these weapons. This was the final and unanimous agreement of Conference.
"Rubbing in the Salt"
A recent DU milestone was that of Kenny Duncan, who brought the U.K. Ministry of Defence to an Edinburgh based Pension Appeal Tribunal in January, claiming DU contamination from active service during Gulf war 1. The Tribunal ruled for DU contamination from dust from burnt out tanks. However, showing its own confusion and duplicity in the affair, the MoD and Government managed to turn down an appeal by over 2000 Gulf veterans, over Gulf War Syndrome, while at the same time, agreeing to commission an independent investigation into the causes of GWS, based at the Cambridge Centre. Many involved with the DU question regard this as another empty gesture. This particular unit, is infamous for its research on ME, which it opined mainly a psychological problem and may well conclude the same regarding GWS, given the track record of previous government investigation into the debilitating health problems.
The Ministry of Defence, however has opened itself to attack should it deny DU is a threat, since soldiers in Iraq have been issued with Medical card "F Med 1018" in which the MoD states:
"You have been deployed to a theatre where Depleted Uranium (DU) Munitions have been used. DU is weakly radioactive heavy metal, which has the potential to cause ill health. You may have been exposed to dust containing DU during you deployment."
The card continues to advise soldiers to check with their medical officer on return to their home base. They even gave out a Website: http://www.mod.uk/issuesdepleted_uranium/index.htm
The British government and its military forces, however, largely continue to reinforce an international policy which has continued since the dawn of the nuclear age, in concert with pro-nuclear institutions such as the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) actively suppressing reports and documents which link DU/Uranium weapons and ill-health.
A recent example is a Report commissioned by the World Health Organisation (WHO) on the effects of DU amongst the civilian populations of Iraq. Professor Keith Braverstock who completed the study in 2001 believes that the WHO purposely suppressed the findings, and that if the Report had been published it would have seriously affected public support for any new war in Iraq. Braverstock and two other radiation experts Mike Thorne AND Carmel McMaster, reinforced the already accepted view by authorative opponents of DU, that the chemically toxic and radioactive dust emanating from such weapons can cause cancer and other severe ailments. This might also explain why the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) has been refused permission by the US authorities to enter Iraq and make environmental impact assessments and monitor DU related health effects since the latest US/UK attack. No doubt anyway, its mandate would be as woefully and duplicitously restricted as it was in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan!
We are dealing with a war on information, a determination there be a lack of it. "Information warfare" is term that has been increasingly used by the military to undermine its opponents. However, historically, it has been more often used against it own people, particularly in the United States and Britain, through the FBI's Cointelpro and the MI5 respectively, which on numerous occasions have targeted informed progressive movements. This murky world of censorship, hyped paranoia and attack on free speech has been recently updated in the US (and Britain also) with the introduction of the Patriot Act.
When they are not successful through smear campaigns and infiltration, then they resort to intimidation and even assassination. The anti-nuclear (including the anti-DU groups) movement being a prime witness to these tactics with threats, arrests, murders, offices broken into, records, computers and data removed. But determined opposition will not crumble and in recent years, many committed activists have brought about a global alert and awareness. Much of the general public now knows of the dangers of DU and other uranium weapons, but has realised that terrifyingly, five "radioactive" wars have been fought since 1991.
To highlight just a few of the now numerous campaigns:
US Gulf Veteran and radiation expert, former Pentagon advisor, Dr Doug Rokke - himself severely sick from DU - ex-Major, turned whistle-blower after being sent to Iraq following the first Gulf War, to estimate the dangers of DU for the US Department of Defence (DoD), He, and other gravely ill soldiers and civilian victims travel the world relentlessly alerting audiences to the justice and health care that sufferers so vitally need. Rokke's unique expertise and recommendations on the clean-up possibilities and unique dangers of DU have been scrupulously ignored, because of combat needs on the ground and the fact that this lethal weapon has another unique property - it is radioactive redundancy from the nuclear fuel cycle, so the military gets it free of charge, since no one wants it in their back yard, - and it costs a fortune to keep in a safe and stable environment. Thus, dropping it on a hospital, mosque, kindergarten, or government building is a cheap method of disposal and ensures maximum destruction. It also remains polluting, poisoning and radiating for four and a half billion years.
The tireless work of Dr. Asaf Durakovic and his independent team of scientists from the Uranium Medical Research Centre have tested and found positive many DU contaminated veterans. Im addition to this - at great health risk to themselves - the team has visited the world's radiological battle zones, testing the local population and environment. Their work has proven the direct link between uranium weapons and radioactive contamination of these countries. The UMRC'S findings contradict starkly the official governments' "scientific evaluation", both of the countries and the amount of uranium weapons used. They remain unwavering in their determination to expose the toxicity of uranium weapons and present and future damage to the populations of Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, despite all efforts to demean their expertise and threats to their very existence.
The Afghan DU Relief Fund is operated and privately financed by an Afghan exile, US based, Dr Mohammed Miraki. Like the country that has disappeared from our view, so has the continued suffering and hardship of the people. But Dr Miraki travels on his own finances to raise further funds and to not alone relate the suffering, but to attempt to ensure sufficient relief and health care to treat the terrible illnesses that the population is now encountering. "They have turned my sweet Afghanistan into a poisoned burial ground" comments Miraki.
It is not alone the veterans, but also their families or remaining partners who crave and fight for justice. Susan Riordon is the widow of Captain Terry Riordon, late of the Canadian army, who was the world's first veteran to be officially diagnosed as dieing with Gulf War Syndrome. Terry had served his country for 23 years and convinced that he was contaminated with DU, asked his wife to use his body to prove that DU was the cause. He donated his body to research for his fellow veterans. His death certificate records: "Cause of death: Gulf War Syndrome".
DU was the proven "Killer". It had invaded virtually every tissue and organ of his body. Dead five years, Terry speaks to Science. A dead man standing for the veterans, for DU's "Dead and Dying". His wife now relentlessly challenges the Canadian government to accept her husband's diagnosis and to support those other veterans who are going down with GWS.
Richard "Nibby" David, in the UK, illustrates how DU/uranium reaches not only military but civilian levels. David is taking one of the world's biggest multi-nationals to court, to prove his contamination from uranium metal while working in the aerospace industry - and to prove its proliferation into a whole variety of civilian products. This is a modern "David &Goliath" battle, with a DU victim prepared to sacrifice everything to prove both the cause of his own illness and to more widely expose how these metals are seeping into our environment, our workplaces and our homes.
Terry Riordon, Doug Rokke, Richard David, one dead, two dying, all victims of the emotional and financial rape of their families. They are the few. Countless others struggle financially and physically to raise their voices in the political wilderness. DU is banned; it kills - and one microscopic particle is enough. As in Iraq and other "testing" grounds, it leads to omnicide, poisoning humanity, the new born, the unborn, fauna, flora and water supply leaving nothing unscathed or unpolluted - for all time
Never has this dynamic movement's grass-roots expertise, commitment and resilience been more needed. With every small victory, such as Kenny Duncan's and the courage of Professor Braverstock to speak out over the WHO's partisanship, the movement will be that much closer to eliminating this uniquely shameful and lethal scourge on humanity and everything living thing.
But more of those with power and influence must also speak out. In the US, it is election year, and so far, in the Democratic Party primaries, only Dennis Kucinich has spoken for the need to abolish DU. Will Kerry, one wonder, have the guts to address DU as he did Agent Orange and the health of Vietnam veterans?
The Hamburg Conference demonstrated the empowerment of unity, with world experts and committed activists from all corners of the globe sharing knowledge, strategies and ideas. That unity is now needed in the wider public arena to reinforce the illegality of these weapons and to force their abolition on governments.
Karen Parker, the lawyer responsible for determining the UN rule on Depleted Uranium Weapons being illegal, asked if she sees DU as a nuclear weapon, responded: "I think so. The UN has condemned the use of them. They are illegal weapons, and they are illegal for more reasons than the depleted uranium. They're just indiscriminate weapons".
Susan Riordan is the widow of Captain Terry Riordon, and Atlantic Director, Canadian Peacekeeping Veterans Association and Davey Garland is organiser for the Pandora DU Research Project and a Tutor in Radical Media Studies. Both are part of the International grass-roots initiative to abolish DU and all radioactive weapons.
Canadian Peacekeeping Veterans Association: http://members.shaw.ca/cpva/
Pandora DU Research Project: http://www.pandoraproject.org
Suggested Sites to look at in regard some of the real shakers and movers in publicising the case over DU/uranium weapons/products
Beatrice Boctor and her environmental work for Iraq: http://www.desertconcerns.org
Dai Williams: http://www.eoslifework.co.uk/du2012.htm
Doug Rokke: http://traprockpeace.org/RokkePressConf23July03.html
Karen Parker: http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de/speakers/parker_illegality.pdf
Low Level Radiation Campaign: http://www.llrc.org/
Dr Miraki Afghan DU Recovery Fund: http://www.afghandufund.org/
Dr Leuren Moret: What does the US government know about DU: http://traprockpeace.org/moret_25nov03.pdf
"Nibby David" Campaign article: http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/westcountry/2003/11/282063.html
Uranium Medical Research Centre: http://www.umrc.net/
& for Spanish readers: Coalición Internacional para la Abolición de las Armas Radiactivas and the work of Alfredo Embid: http://www.amcmh.org/
All information from the Uranium Weapons Conference can be found at: http://www.uraniumweaponsconference.de
----
Depleted Uranium: The War Crime That Has No End
By Paul Rockwell,
Feb 28, 2004
Al-Jazeerah
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/Feb/28%20o/Depleted%20Uranium%20The%20War%20Crime%20That%20Has%20No%20End%20By%20Paul%20Rockwell.htm
2004-02- 20 UN Observer
http://www.unobserver.com/layout5.php?id=1462&blz=1
"Depleted uranium is a crime against God and humanity." - Dr. Doug Rokke, U.S. Army health physicist
The international dispatches about the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq - replete with graphic details about overcrowded hospitals, U.S. cluster bomb shrapnel buried in the flesh of children, babies deformed by U.S. depleted uranium, farms and markets destroyed by U.S. bombs - do not make pleasant reading. The mounting evidence from the invasion of Iraq establishes what many Americans may not want to face: that the highest leaders of our land violated many international agreements relating to the rules of war. Unless we address the war crimes of the Bush administration - and the prima facie evidence is overwhelming - we betray our conscience, our country, and our own faith in democracy.
The United States is bound by customary law and international laws of war: the Hague Conventions of 1889 and1907 , the Geneva Conventions of 1949, and the Nuremberg Conventions adopted by the United Nations, December11, 1945 - all of which set limits beyond which, by common consent, decent peoples will not go. Under the Constitution, all treaties are part of the supreme law of the land. Humanitarian law rests on a simple principle: that human rights are measured by one yardstick. Without that principle, all jurisprudence descends into mere piety and power. Nor do violations of the laws of war by one belligerent vindicate the war crimes of another.
Of all the violations of the laws of war by the highest officials of our country, none is more alarming or portentous than the widespread, premeditated use of depleted uranium in Iraq. Eleven miles north of the Kuwaiti border on the "Highway of Death," disabled tanks, armored personnel carriers, gutted public vehicles - the mangled metals of Desert Storm - are resting in the desert, radiating nuclear energy. American soldiers who lived for three months in the toxic wasteland now suffer from fatigue, joint and muscle pain, respiratory ailments - a host of maladies often known as the Gulf War Syndrome.
Ever since the end of Desert Storm, when the Pentagon unloaded 350 tons of depleted uranium, American officials have been well aware of the health hazards of the residue that is collected from the processing of nuclear fuel. When President Bush and the Pentagon authorized the use of depleted uranium for the shock-and-awe campaign against Iraq in March 1983, the Bush administration not only committed a war crime against the people of Iraq, it demonstrated reckless disregard for the health and safety of American troops.
Article 23 of the Geneva Convention IV is clear and unambiguous: "It is forbidden to employ poison or poisoned weapons, to kill treacherously individuals belonging to the hostile nation or army, to employ arms, projectiles or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering." The Geneva Protocol of 1925 explicitly prohibits "asphyxiating, poisonous or other gasses, and all analogous liquids, materials or devices."
The radiation produced by depleted uranium in battle is a poison, a carcinogenic material that causes birth defects, lung disease, kidney disease, leukemia, breast cancer, lymphoma, bone cancer, and neurological disabilities.
Depleted uranium is much denser than lead and enables U.S. weapons to penetrate steel, a great advantage in modern war. But under the Geneva Conventions, "the means of injuring the enemy are not unlimited." When DU munitions explode, the air is bathed in a fine radioactive dust, which carries on the wind, is easily inhaled, and eventually enters the soil, pollutes ground water, and enters the food chain. Unexploded casings gradually oxidize, releasing more uranium into the environment. Handlers of depleted uranium in the U.S. are required to wear masks and protective clothing - a requirement that Iraqi and American soldiers, not to mention civilians, are unable to fulfill.
After the Gulf War in1991 , Iraqi hospitals recorded a surge in cancer and birth defects. Hospital statistics from Basra show that in 1988 there were 11 cancer cases per100 , 000people. By2001 , after schools, homes, and entire neighborhoods were leveled from the air, the number increased to 116 per100 ,000. Breast and lung cancer and leukemia showed up in all areas contaminated by depleted uranium. Dr. Jawad al-Ali, cancer specialist at the Basra Training Hospital, noted that, "The only factor that has changed here since the 1991 war is radiation." Thirteen members of his staff, all present when the hospital area was bombed, are now cancer patients.
The Christian Science Monitor recently sent reporters to Iraq to investigate long-term effects of depleted uranium. Staff writer Scott Peterson saw children playing on top of a burnt-out tank near a vegetable stand on the outskirts of Baghdad, a tank that had been destroyed by armor-piercing shells coated with depleted uranium. Wearing his mask and protective clothing, he pointed his Geiger counter toward the tank. It registered1 , 000times the normal background radiation.
The families who survived the tragic decade of sanctions, even the children who recently survived the bombing of Baghdad, may not survive the radiated aftermath of military profligacy. Uranium remains radioactive for two billion years. That's a long time for reconstruction.
According to Dr. Doug Rokke, U.S. Army health physicist who led the first clean-up of depleted uranium after the Gulf War, "Depleted uranium is a crime against God and humanity." Rokke's own crew, a hundred employees, was devastated by exposure to the fine dust. "When we went to the Gulf, we were all really healthy," he said. After performing clean-up operations in the desert (mistakenly without protective gear), thirty members of his staff died, and most others - including Rokke himself-developed serious health problems. Rokke now has reactive airway disease, neurological damage, cataracts, and kidney problems. "We warned the Department of Defense in 1991 after the Gulf War. Their arrogance is beyond comprehension."
The growing outcry against the use of depleted uranium is not a matter of minor legal technicalities. The laws of war prohibit the use of weapons that have deadly and inhumane effects beyond the field of battle. Nor can weapons be legally deployed in war when they are known to remain active, or cause harm after the war concludes. The use of depleted uranium is a crime whose horrific consequences have yet to run their course.
Years ago in the midst of France's brutal war in Algeria, the philosopher Jean Paul Sartre admonished the French intelligentsia:
"It is not right, my fellow-countrymen, you who know very well all the crimes committed in our name. It's not at all right that you do not breathe a word about them to anyone, not even to your own soul, for fear of having to stand in judgment of yourself. I am willing to believe that at the beginning you did not realize what was happening; later, you doubted whether such things could be true; but now you know, and still you hold your tongues."
-------- iran
Uranium Traveled to Iran Via Russia, Inspectors Find
February 28, 2004
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/middleeast/28NUKE.html
Inspectors have found evidence that some of the highly enriched uranium found on nuclear machinery in Iran came from Russia, European diplomats and American experts said Friday. The nuclear fuel appears to have come through the global black market, the experts added, and not with the blessings of Moscow.
With the findings, Russia emerges as a new and unexpected foreign source of supply to Iran's nuclear efforts. Recent revelations had shown that the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had provided Iran with some sophisticated centrifuge technology that could be used to refine weapons-grade uranium through his hidden nuclear trading network, according to international nuclear officials and Dr. Khan's own testimony.
The Bush administration has long accused Iran of harboring a secret bomb project, which Tehran denies, saying its nuclear program is only for peacetime purposes.
In that light, last year's discovery in Iran of highly enriched uranium -a potential bomb fuel - set off an international crisis about the country's nuclear intentions and raised questions about where it had originated. Iran claimed it was contamination that came in on imported equipment, which Iranian officials said they acquired to concentrate uranium for reactors to generate electricity. The centrifuges spin rapidly to enrich uranium for both nuclear reactors and nuclear arms. High concentrations of uranium's rare 235 isotope can fuel warheads.
In a report on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that its inspections had found that centrifuge equipment made indigenously in Iran - but not imported gear - showed many traces of the concentrated fuel, leading experts to doubt the Iranian explanation and suggest that Iran had enriched the uranium itself. Its purity was 36 percent U-235 - short of the 90 percent needed for most nuclear bomb designs but greater than that needed for most nuclear reactors.
On Friday, however, European diplomats said the agency's laboratory at Seibersdorf, Austria, had discovered a likely match between the atomic signatures of Russian uranium and samples agency inspectors had gathered from Iranian centrifuges.
In its sleuthing, the lab studies such things as a sample's isotopes - atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. A distinctive mix of such isotopes can amount to a fingerprint that experts check against atomic databanks.
The agency, a diplomat cautioned, was being extremely careful in its interpretation of the Seibersdorf data and other evidence and was still actively looking at alternative explanations.
Michael A. Levi, a science fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington who has studied the recent I.A.E.A. report, said yesterday that he had independently deduced that the Iranian uranium originated in Russia. The strong clue, he said, was its 36 percent enrichment, a level that matches a kind of fuel used in certain Russian submarines and research reactors. Globally, he added, he knew of no other nuclear technology that used 36 percent enrichment.
"There's no reason for Iran to enrich to 36 percent," he said. `The only place that does that is Russia."
He added that it was highly unlikely that the Russian government sold Iran the uranium because its scientists could have easily concealed the telltale signature.
Rather, he argued, thieves probably stole the material either from Russia proper or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and sold it on the black market.
Nations that use Russian reactors fueled with 36 percent enriched uranium, Mr. Levi said, include not only Russia but also the Czech Republic, Germany (in the former East sector), Hungary, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. None of the similarly enriched Russian submarine fuel is exported through legal channels.
Poor security over such materials has been the rule rather than the exception since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Levi said. For instance, in 1993, two Russian naval servicemen stole nearly four pounds of 36 percent enriched uranium from a naval base at Andreyeva Guba, Russia. They were caught and the material recovered.
Mr. Levi said Iran might have wanted a supply of 36 percent uranium because it could ease the production of bomb-grade uranium, making the process much faster and easier.
He estimated, for instance, that enriching one bomb's worth of material would take one year of running 66 pounds of 36 percent enriched uranium through just 25 centrifuges. A set of such centrifuges, known as a cascade, incrementally concentrates the U-235 isotope.
In contrast, if Iran started with natural, unenriched uranium, Mr. Levi said, the same production run would require 13,200 pounds of raw material running through 750 centrifuges. Such a cascade, he noted, "would be far harder to hide than the 15 centrifuge arrangement."
-------- israel
MELMAN: It's Vanunu's Kidnap Story That Worries Israel
Feb 28, 2004
By Yossi Melman,
Haaretz
http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=95366&list=/home.php&
It has been seventeen and a half years since his fateful meeting in Sydney, Australia, but Peter Hounam remembers it as clearly as yesterday. Since that day, the British journalist has been asking himself if anything could have been done differently - if Mordechai Vanunu's story could have been handled in a way that did not expose him as the information source about Israel's nuclear weapons; if he could have been protected better; if his capture by Mossad could have been prevented.
Peter Hounam was in Israel last week. He has stopped counting the number of visits he has made since November 1986 when he heard the announcement by Elyakim Rubinstein, then the cabinet secretary, that Vanunu was under arrest in Israel.
Hounam, 59, no longer writes for the Sunday Times. From his country home in Scotland, he works on television productions. But the Vanunu story is still coursing through his veins. Perhaps it is feelings of guilt, or maybe just a journalist's curiosity that refuses to fade away. He considers himself to be directly responsible, for better or for worse, for what happened to Vanunu.
Hounam has continued a written correspondence over the years with Vanunu. He speaks with members of the family, and keeps abreast of events. He also makes an effort to remind the British weekly not to let down its guard on the story.
If not for him, it is doubtful if the Sunday Times would have shown the same commitment to the affair. Now too it is he who came to Israel as a correspondent of the Sunday Times to write an article about preparations being made in Israel for Vanunu's coming release from prison. "Just two weeks ago I received a letter from him in prison," Hounam told Haaretz in an exclusive interview. "He hopes we will meet soon and renew our friendship."
He does not doubt that defense establishment officials, who go through every piece of mail sent or received by Vanunu, read this letter as well. But this time, for a change, no pieces of paper were cut out of the letter, containing sentences that might not have been to the liking of the censors.
"Perhaps this is also something that reinforces my sense that the public in Israel is showing more tolerance about his case," he says.
"On the other hand, when I read and hear what the security authorities in Israel are planning for him after his release, then maybe it's just my wishful thinking."
No Rights
Vanunu is due to be released April 21, after serving 18 years in prison, after being convicted on counts of espionage and treason. He will still be subject to certain restrictions on his freedom of movement. In the first two-and-a-half years of his imprisonment , Vanunu was held in harsh solitary confinement conditions in a 2x3 meter cell.
He was deprived of the basic rights of every prisoner - access to newspapers, radio and television. He was permitted a short walk every day, alone, so that he would not come into contact with the other prisoners. The number of visitors he was allowed was reduced to a handful of family members and his lawyers (at first Amnon Zichroni and later on Avigdor Feldman).
Some of the restrictions imposed on him were subsequently removed, but he is still considered a prisoner who must be watched vigilantly. Throughout his imprisonment, and especially in the period leading to his impending release, Vanunu has been approached by emissaries of Yehiel Horev - the chief security officer for the Defense Establishment, known as Malmab, who is also responsible for securing the reactor in Dimona and preventing leaks of information about it.
These officials would like to reach an "understanding" with Vanunu. Horev had hoped to replicate the deal he made with Professor Marcus Klingberg, a former deputy director of the Biological Institute in Nes Tziona, another top-secret facility in his jurisdiction.
Despite Horev's years-long opposition to the early release of Klingberg, who in 1983 was sentenced to 20 years in prison for spying on behalf of the Soviet Union, the court decided in favor of an early release. But Klingberg was closely watched by guards from a private security firm, at his own expense.
A camera was installed in his apartment, which was hooked up to the Malmab offices in the Kirya, in Tel Aviv. His telephones were wiretapped, with his knowledge. Klingberg also signed a commitment not to speak about his work. His cooperation made it possible for him to move to Paris last year to be near his daughter Sylvia, having completed his 20-year sentence.
Vanunu, however, refuses to sign any such commitment. Moreover, there is little similarity between his case and that of Klingberg's. The latter spied for the Soviet Union, while Vanunu gave his information to the Sunday Times. Klingberg received an early release and was free to walk the streets of Tel Aviv for about six years - with certain restrictions - while Vanunu will be completing his entire sentence. In any event, in the letters sent to family and friends Vanunu does not conceal the fact that he considers himself a man of principles, who aims to continue placing Israel's nuclear policy on the international agenda.
Man Of Principle
"In terms of that," Hounam says, "Vanunu remains the same man of principle, the person who believes in the justice of his path, that I met in Sydney. Already then he emphasized that it was his objective to sound a warning against what he saw as Israel's mistaken nuclear policy. He was concerned by the lack of adequate supervision, not by the Knesset and not by the public, of what was going on in Dimona. He thought that Israel was producing more weapons than it needed for its self-defense, and felt that nuclear development was harming the chances to reach a settlement in the Middle East."
In October 1985, Vanunu was dismissed from his work at the reactor, where he was a technician and served as a shift supervisor in the control room who specialized in supervising plutonium-production processes. He was paid severance fees for the nine years that he was employed in Dimona.
Vanunu left Israel two months later. Two rolls of film that he secretly filmed with his own camera were among his belongings. He had taken these photographs while on duty at night, in his capacity as control-room technician.
Vanunu went to the Far East, vacillated over whether to convert to Buddhism or not, and in late May 1986 arrived in Sydney. There he met John McKnight, an Anglican priest who ran a small church. After intense conversations with McKnight and several of the members of the church, Vanunu decided to convert, and became Anglican.
In the church he met Oscar Guerrero, a Colombian who claimed to be a freelance journalist. When Guerrero heard about the films, he grew excited and made contact between Vanunu and the Sunday Times. Times editor Andrew Neil assigned the job of exploring the lead to "Insight," the newspaper's award-winning team of investigative journalists.
The task was assigned to Peter Hounam, then a member of the team. He flew to Sydney and began a series of meetings with Vanunu. The meetings were held over an 11-day period, at the end of which Vanunu and Hounam flew to London for continued questioning and interviews. These meetings were held at different hotels, and went on for another three weeks. The Insight team brought in nuclear experts, including Dr. Frank Barnaby. "We gathered from Vanunu every scrap of technical information about Dimona that he could remember," says Hounam.
Limited Expertise
"He spoke candidly about everything he knew. And he didn't know everything. You mustn't forget that his knowledge in the nuclear field is not that extensive. After all, he is not a physicist or a chemist by training, and he only underwent a few months of training before being accepted for work. The only thing he wasn't willing to speak about was security arrangements in Dimona or about names of the people who worked there.
"We tried to convince him that we needed the names in order to corroborate his version. But Mordechai was insistent: `I won't give you names. You don't need them to write the article, and it could endanger people if their names would be mentioned.' I got the impression that his objective was to reveal what was happening in the reactor in Dimona. He knew that he had to persuade us that he truly worked there, and therefore furnished us with as much technical information as he understood and was able to provide, but he was not willing to hurt the people working there."
Maybe since being in prison he has changed his mind, and he now intends to disclose new secrets, as Yehiel Horev claims?
"I've been corresponding with him since we went to prison. In his letters, he has always made it clear that when he is released, he does not intend to act in any illegal fashion against Israel. That is why this allegation that is being lodged against him is in my opinion untenable. He doesn't possess new secrets. He told us everything he knows, and we published in the article, which was several pages long.
"We sketched the structure of the reactor, we described the rooms where they produce fissionable materials, we showed the photos he took of models of nuclear bombs and hydrogen bombs that Israel produced, we calculated the amounts of plutonium that Israel had produced and the numbers of bombs - between 100 and 200 - that could be produced from it. Dr. Barnaby also wrote a book in which he detailed what he'd heard from Vanunu. I assume that immediately after our article's publication big changes were made at Dimona, and new security measures were adopted. So what other secrets can he reveal?"
Maybe he kept some written material somewhere?
"In his letters to me, he writes that he doesn't know any other secrets. And I know for certain that he doesn't have any written material that might be hidden someplace. He didn't come to me back then in Sydney with any written material, only with the know-how and the memory and the two rolls of film."
So why, in your opinion, is Horev trying to impose new restrictions on him when he is released?
"I think that some people are afraid that Israel might be mortified if Vanunu told how he was kidnapped. Even though here, too, the story of his kidnapping, even if not all the exact details, has already been published several times."
Vanunu was kidnapped in Rome, to which he had been lured from London by "Cindy," a Mossad agent. It was later revealed that "Cindy" was in fact a young American woman named Cheryl Hanin, who had immigrated to Israel and worked for the Mossad. A few years ago, it turned out that she is living in Orlando, Florida with her Israeli husband.
Editor's Note: The film, Israel's Secret Weapon's, a detailed account of the Vanunu story, is available at JUS, The Video Store. This riveting documentary includes details of his kidnapping as well as some of the pictures that he originally took, which are still the only pictures ever made public of Israel's nuclear facilities.
-------- japan
Japan - US deal to boost military ties
Saturday February 28, 2004
News International, Pakistan
http://jang.com.pk/thenews/feb2004-daily/28-02-2004/world/w14.htm
TOKYO: Japan and the United States signed an agreement on Friday to boost the sharing of military supplies and services if Japan is attacked, the foreign ministry said.
The deal, which amends the Acquisition and Cross-Servicing Agreement, was signed by foreign minister Yoriko Kawaguchi and US Ambassador Howard Baker, the ministry said in a statement.
The pact allows the country for the first time to supply US forces with ammunition in the case of a sudden or foreseen assault on Japan, a foreign ministry official said. The previous agreement allowed only the sharing of supplies such as food and petroleum in the run-up to a military contingency, where a regional incident could threaten Japan's security, the official added.
Japan's constitution bans the use of force in settling international disputes but it sent troops to Iraq earlier this month, the first deployment of the Self-Defence Forces to a combat zone since World War II.
The new deal also expands the sharing of supplies in cases of international cooperation and large-scale disasters, but does not allow for the provision of ammunition by Japanese troops in Iraq to US forces, the official said. It will allow Japanese troops to share supplies with US forces in Iraq during security operations, whereas the old agreement was limited to humanitarian work.
"The new agreement maintains the three principles regarding the export of weapons, which avoids the promotion of international disputes," Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuo Fukuda said in a statement.
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Japan Faces Anniversary of U.S. Nuke Test
February 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Remembering-Bikini.html
TOKYO (AP) -- On the night of March 1, 1954, the No. 5 Fukuryu-maru was trolling for tuna off the Bikini atoll in the Pacific.
Suddenly, fisherman Matashichi Oishi saw the midnight sky flash orange and a rumbling shook the trawler. As he and 22 other crew members rushed to the deck, tiny white flakes began to fall on them like snow.
An underwater volcano, they thought. But it was something far more destructive: an American hydrogen bomb.
The No. 5 Fukuryu-maru, or Lucky Dragon, was about 100 miles off Bikini island in the central Pacific when the United States tested its bomb there, engulfing the fishermen in heavy radiation.
The bombing 50 years ago Monday provoked huge protests in Japan and reinforced the image of the Japanese -- the target of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks -- as unique witnesses to the atomic age.
``We were the victims of the nuclear arms race,'' said Oishi, 70, who runs a laundry in Tokyo and recently published a book on the bombing. ``The Bikini incident is not a problem of the past. It's an issue of nuclear weapons that affects all of us today.''
For the fishermen exposed, the effects were devastating.
By the time the trawler returned home two weeks later, some crew members had lost hair, developed skin burns or had discolored faces. They suffered from diarrhea and jaundice, and their white blood counts dropped dangerously low. The boat's radio telegraph operator, Aikichi Kuboyama, died in September 1954, aged 40.
Survivors have suffered from liver and blood disorders, including Oishi, who was operated on for liver cancer. In addition to Kuboyama, 11 crew members have died in the half-century since the exposure, at least six of them from liver cancer.
Fears at the time were high that such exposure was much more widespread. Between 1946 and 1958, the United States conducted 66 nuclear tests at Bikini as part of ``Operation Crossroads.'' The atoll is part of the Marshall Islands, almost midway between Hawaii and Tokyo.
A Japanese government survey estimated about 850 other Japanese fishing boats were exposed to radiation, and some 160 fishermen eventually came forward to collect U.S.-paid compensation. Oishi's boat, however, was the only boat confirmed to have been there at the time of the explosion.
Most of the other boats are thought to have entered the affected area soon after the explosion. The survey did not measure any potential impact on foreign trawlers.
Officials knew of the testing program, but Oishi says fishermen were not well informed about where and when bombs would explode. No follow-up studies have been conducted on those other boats and nobody knows the total number of fishermen who might have been affected, says Kazuya Yasuda, curator of Tokyo's No. 5 Fukuryu-maru Exhibition Hall, where the boat is now on display.
The exhibit includes a crew diary and artifacts like a glass bottle of the ``ash of death'' -- radioactive flakes of coral vaporized in the blast -- that fell on Oishi and the rest of the crew. The exhibit was renovated ahead of the 50th anniversary of the Bikini bombing.
``We are here to let people think about the risk of nuclear weapons today and think about peace,'' said Yasuda as he walked past visiting elementary school children on a field trip.
The Japanese government sought $6 million in compensation and got $2 million in 1955. In 1983 the Marshall Islands, then U.S.-administrated, got $183.7 million.
The package for Japan included condolence money for Kuboyama, about $5,600 each plus medical costs for 160 surviving crew members and other exposed fishermen, and damages to Japan's fishing industry, according to Foreign Ministry documents.
The payments settled the issue between the governments, but the victims' suffering endured.
The crew faced a stigma common in Japan for victims and the physically ill. Oishi fled the prying eyes of his neighbors in his hometown of Yaizu, 100 miles southwest of Tokyo.
He returned to the capital but the effects of the bombing kept coming back. Oishi's first baby was born with birth defects in 1960 and died. His daughter suffered three broken marriage engagements after prospective husbands learned Oishi had been exposed to radiation.
``For years, I only wanted to hide my past. But after seeing my colleagues die like social outcasts, I felt it wasn't right. I thought it was so unfair,'' Oishi said. ``So I came out of the closet. I couldn't let our past forgotten like nothing happened.''
Since he broke his silence in the early 1980s, Oishi has spoken at schools, town halls and museums.
``As a survivor of the nuclear test, I have to let people know the threat of nuclear weapons,'' he said. ``I'll keep telling my story as long as I live.''
-------- korea
Korean peace requires US compromise, troop exit
By David Scofield,
Asia Times
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/FB28Dg06.html
SEOUL - As the North Korea talks lumber on and "deals" reminiscent of those that failed 10 years ago again gain currency, one issue is crucial: extrication of US Forces from Korea. In order to pull the United States from the wreckage of 50 years of quasi-peace on the Korean Peninsula, Washington should compromise, accept key proposals from Seoul and commit to removing its troops from South Korea. That's unlikely to happen, but it should.
Deals and agreements should be moved aside to make way for a treaty, a regionally defined and enforced legal framework that will bring an end to the 50-year-old Korean War ceasefire that characterizes the peninsula - a legal agreement predicated on a withdrawal of the US Forces in Korea (USFK).
The current impasse is not a product of badly constructed agreements, per se. It's not the deals that were flawed, the dysfunction lies with the people with whom the United States must negotiate. Earlier bilateral agreements with North Korea have included workable frameworks, but all have ended in failure, corrupted by North Korea's obfuscation and deception.
Leadership change in Pyongyang would improve the prospects for peace, but that isn't likely. Still it is to be hoped that some day there will be a weaker central government in the North, one more responsive to its starving masses, one far more replaceable than the present dynasty of despots.
But without regional consensus for change, which seems about as unlikely as ever, the US is left pushing the region down a path that it is not prepared to take.
US should consider Seoul's 'freeze' idea
The United States should consider what other actors, including South Korea, are proposing. Seoul has been talking of a proposal, a starting point, predicated on the slippery notion of a "freeze". Apparently this would only involve North Korea's declared plutonium weapons program, conceivably allowing the highly enriched uranium (HEU) program to continue - it is hard to "freeze" something that is not acknowledged.
And if the tough talk from South Korean Minister of Unification Jeong Se-hyun is any indication, the issue will probably be avoided for the foreseeable future. Jeong was quoted recently in the Washington Post encouraging greater flexibility from the United States, asserting that pushing North Korea to admit to the HEU program would cause Pyongyang to lose face, hurting its pride and setting back the prospects of genuine dialogue and eventual stability. Instead, Jeong argued, the HEU issue should be dealt with indirectly, at a later date.
So what is the US to do? China enjoys the status quo, comfortable and secure in its asymmetrical relationship with the Koreans, North and South. Russia has little interest in the region; the dilapidated state of the Russia's far eastern outposts, namely Vladivostok, speak volumes about Moscow's commitment to the region, or lack thereof to date. Japan shares the United States' logical distrust of the serial liars in the North Korean government, but Tokyo is focused more on its nationals - abducted long ago by North Korea - than on the nuclear threat from Pyongyang. And Japan is more than capable of defending itself from North Korea, and could itself become a nuclear power in mere weeks, some say, if it so chose.
The solution? Deal. Or more, specifically sign on to the South Korean initiative. As inadequate, and even distasteful, as the idea is, the United States really has no other choice now. North Korean compliance will likely always prove impossible to ensure. Verifiability? Challenge any senior official with experience with North Korea to utter the words "ensured verifiability" with a straight face - no one can verify food distribution, much less secret weapons facilities.
Clinton had been willing to deal
Former US president Bill Clinton was willing to deal. He paid North Korean leader Kim Jong-il US$300 million in aid to verify an empty warren of tunnels in 1999. That was $300 million to tour a hollowed-out mountain, something North Korea has no shortage of, given founder Kim Il-sung's propensity for securing strategically important assets deep underground. Indeed, the Koreans have been tunneling non-stop for 50 years, making Iraq look positively transparent in comparison. It also raises obvious questions about the Yongbyon nuclear facility, a strangely obvious, above-ground site.
A new deal today would be tough, but it could be the only way. It would involve more rewards for continued bad behavior - something the US says it will never grant - and aid for the North "re-freezing" what was supposed to have remained frozen through the last agreement. But with one crucial addition: the complete removal of US force presence on the peninsula - the United States maintains an estimated 37,000 troops in South Korea. That would be coupled with North Korea's acknowledgment of South Korea as a sovereign state - the North still does not recognize the national sovereignty of its brothers in the South. And there would be the signing of a peace treaty ending the 50-year-old ceasefire that has defined the peninsula since 1953.
North Korea has argued for 50 years that peace is impossible as long as US troops remain in South Korea. But the US raison d'etre for staying - the protection of South Korea from the bellicose North - has become strikingly out of sync with contemporary South Korean perceptions of the region. And so the time is right to allow the Koreans to work out their own issues and for the region itself to take the lead in drafting conflict-resolution formulas. After all, a majority of South Koreans now view US President George W Bush as a greater threat to peninsular security than Kim Jong-il.
It's time for the US to shift gears and focus on extricating itself from what has become its Korean quagmire.
The alternative is anachronistic and puts the US in an increasingly dangerous and untenable position. Times have changed; with strong support from President Roh Moo-hyun, South Korea has embarked on a new "independent" foreign policy. The South has declared its intention to chart its own course in its dealings with the North, negotiating compromises and agreements that may not be in the United States' best interests. And why shouldn't Seoul decide its own foreign policy according to its own needs, not Washington's? South Korea has developed tremendously over the past few decades, economically, politically and socially.
Toeing the US line no longer works for Seoul
The notion that the South should toe the US line is increasingly out of sync with South Korea's evolved self-perception and global position. While South Korea may feel comfortable, deliberately overlooking the nefarious nature of the North Korean regime, the US cannot and should not follow Seoul's path. But embedded within South Korea as the US is, militarily and politically, it has become unworkable and impractical for Washington to pursue peninsular policies divergent from South Korea's.
So as this second round of talks wraps up, it is time for the US to take the initiative. North Korea has been allowed to play offense throughout, setting the agenda and even the timing of discussions. It's time to turn the tables. Peace and reconciliation, "more for more", "steaks and sledgehammers" - whatever it takes.
As distasteful as it is to concede more to the dysfunctional figures who rule the North, the dynamics of the region have made any other option virtually impossible. A treaty predicated on the swift withdrawal of US troops puts the issue of North Korea and regional security where it belongs - with the region. The region's actors bear primary responsibility for success because it is they - not the US - who ultimately will reap the direct rewards of peace and stability, and it is they who shoulder the burden of possible failure and the costs of conflict and instability.
The United States maintains an estimated 37,000 troops in South Korea and a roughly equivalent number of dependants, contractors and others associated with the military. Washington plans to close bases in Seoul and bases to the north, along the Demilitarized Zone, and relocate them elsewhere by 2007; an unknown number of troops also may be withdrawn from the nation. The deal to relocate US forces initially was made in 1991, to be completed in 1996, but it was scrapped because of the threat posed by North Korea's nuclear program.
David Scofield is a lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, Seoul.
----
North Korea's desire for 'peaceful nuclear power' may stall talks: official
BEIJING (AFP)
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040228125353.3dss8n65.html
North Korea's desire to have a nuclear power program for "peaceful purposes" may remain a sticking point in future six-nation talks, a Japanese official said Saturday.
In summing up the second round of talks that ended here Saturday on the Stalinist state's nuclear ambitions, Chinese Vice-Foreign Minister Wang Yi said the six nations had expressed their commitment to a "nuclear-weapons-free" Korean peninsula.
In the first round of talks here last August, the participants had committed themselves to a "denuclearisation" of the Korean peninsula.
A Japanese delegation member said inclusion of the expression "nuclear-weapons-free" meant that "there remain differences in the positions of the participating countries in seeking and realising the nuclear dismantling on North Korea's part".
"We don't consider this expression as a retreat," he said. "It doesn't mean that the North is allowed to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes."
North Korea has persistently denied it has a nuclear program based on highly enriched uranium, as claimed by the United States. It has vowed in the talks to freeze "nuclear weapons" development, but wants to keep its nuclear power program for "peaceful purposes" such as to generate electricity.
The US and Japan are demanding "a complete, irreversible and verifiable dismantling" of North Korea's nuclear development, meaning Pyongyang's programs for both military and peaceful purposes.
When asked if freezing North Korea's nuclear program also included that for peaceful purposes, China's chief six-party delegate Wang said: "In this world there are many nuclear-free zones, but when we talk about this notion we are talking about nuclear weapons freedom."
But experts say enriched uranium is suitable as a fuel for nuclear reactors if its density is low and that highly enriched uranium can become a material for nuclear weapons.
"I have consulted nuclear experts and it is unthinkable to use uranium for peaceful purposes by enriching it," Hiroyuki Hosoda, Japan's deputy chief cabinet secretary, told a news conference in Tokyo on Friday.
"It is hard to understand what it means," he said.
Japan says North Korea's track record in deceiving the international community with its clandestine nuclear program had prevented many countries from accepting Pyongyang's claim that its nuclear development was for peaceful purposes.
The official admitted there were "various discussions" at the six-way roundtable on the nuclear question resulting in the seemingly modified phrase "nuclear-weapons-free".
But he added that the expression in the chairman's statement should not confine "detailed discussions on what framework is necessary to pursue the nuclear dismantling".
----
No breakthrough in N Korea talks
Talks are focused on programmes at the Yongbyon nuclear site
Saturday, 28 February, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3494790.stm
Six-nation talks on North Korea's nuclear programme have ended in Beijing without a major breakthrough.
The United States hailed the meeting as "very successful", but North Korea said there had been "no substantive and positive result".
China cited a "complete lack of trust" between the US and North Korea, and said serious differences remained.
The parties agreed to hold more talks before the middle of the year and set up working parties to examine issues.
'Expectations exceeded'
An unnamed US official told reporters the talks had placed America's demand for the complete dismantling of North Korea's nuclear programme "more on the table than ever".
"The event has exceeded my expectations in a very important respect," the official was quoted by Reuters as saying.
"It's been very successful in moving the agenda towards our goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling [CVID] of DPRK [North Korea] nuclear programmes."
North Korea has traditionally offered only to freeze its nuclear programme in return for economic and energy aid and security guarantees from Washington.
The BBC's Charles Scanlon in Beijing says analysts noted signs of flexibility in the American position - it acquiesced in a regional offer to provide energy aid to the North in return for a nuclear freeze and made it clear that security guarantees and diplomatic relations were on the table if an agreement could be reached.
'Serious differences'
North Korea was far more negative, blaming the US for a lack of significant progress.
"We were denied the joy of a corresponding attitude by the US side," North Korea's chief delegate Kim Kye Gwan said after the talks.
"The United States is not willing to resolve this issue fundamentally."
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing said some progress had been made but urged caution.
"Differences, even serious differences, still exist," he said.
China's chief delegate, Vice Foreign Minister Wang Yi, said more discussion was needed on the scope of North Korea's offer to freeze its nuclear activities and America's demand for an complete end to Pyongyang's nuclear programmes.
Russia's Interfax news agency quoted Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Lossyukov as saying "progress, modest but a step forward" had been achieved at the talks.
The talks, involving the US, Russia, China, Japan and North and South Korea, were the first since a round last August ended without substantial progress.
Uranium row
One of the main stumbling blocks has been America's insistence that North Korea scrap an alleged uranium-enrichment programme to build nuclear weapons.
The current crisis erupted in October, 2002, after a senior US envoy said North Korean officials admitted to having such a programme, but North Korea has denied the assertion.
"The DPRK denials are there, but seem only to result in a self-isolation," Reuters quoted the US official as saying.
North Korea says, however, it has reprocessed thousands of spent nuclear fuel rods at the Yongbyon nuclear facility, from which extracted plutonium can be used to manufacture nuclear bombs.
The reclusive Stalinist state claims to have nuclear weapons, which the US believes might number "one or two".
----
N Korea says no uranium program; no uranium deals with Pakistan
BEIJING (AFP)
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040228112323.nk2azegt.html
North Korea Saturday again denied it had an enriched uranium-based nuclear program and dismissed suspicions that it had dealings on enriched uranium with Pakistan.
"I stress that we don't have either related facilities, nor scientists, nor technicians," said Kim Kye-gwan, North Korea's chief delegate to the
just-completed six-party talks, at a press conference.
He dismissed suggestions that uranium had been traded between North Korea and Pakistan.
"We and Pakistan have had various political and economic relations and feelings. There was a missile trade. We earned hard currency by selling missiles to Pakistan but there were no dealings over enriched uranium we don't need."
Pakistan's top nuclear scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan in early February admitted leaking nuclear secrets and begged for forgiveness following a lengthy investigation into the alleged transfer of nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Washington claims North Korea has a covert uranium-based programme, as well as its well-documented plutonium-producing enterprise.
North Korea has repeatedly said the uranium program exists only in the imagination of the United States.
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Diplomats See Modest Progress in North Korea Nuclear Talks
February 28, 2004
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/asia/28KORE.html
BEIJING, Saturday, Feb. 28 - The United States, North Korea and four other nations were due to issue a statement Saturday pledging to work for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, but they left almost all major disputes about the North's nuclear program unresolved, officials and news reports said.
In a joint statement that China, the host of the six-nation talks, was scrambling to finalize Saturday afternoon, the participants also agreed to meet again by June and to establish working groups that would tackle some of the most contentious issues about nuclear disarmament before then, according to Bush administration officials.
But a closing ceremony was delayed by at least an hour following indications that North Korea objected to some of the wording in the final communiqué at the last minute, raising questions about whether the parties would have anything to show for their four days of talks.
The statement, if issued as drafted, would be the first written commitment by the United States and North Korea to resolve the crisis that broke out 16 months ago, shortly after the Bush administration accused the North of breaking an earlier accord. It represents the fruits of intensive diplomacy by China, which had been pushing the parties to declare a common goal despite some stark differences in their negotiating positions.
Still, after three such sessions of talks between the United States and North Korea - and two that also included China, Russia, South Korea and Japan - the parties have only begun to debate detailed terms for ending the North's nuclear program.
While diplomats are likely to hail Saturday's agreement as at least a modest advance, it merely delays negotiations on the most delicate issues and potentially gives North Korea time to continue to develop nuclear weapons, experts say.
A senior Bush administration official signaled that the United States intended to treat the latest talks as a step in the right direction, even though they ended without addressing the main American concerns. "We think we have the basis for the kind of talks we need," the official.
Although the joint statement did not use the words the United States had been insisting are its bottom line - the complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement of North Korea nuclear program - this official said it remained high on the agenda.
"It is understood by all that in the follow-up process we will take up complete, irreversible, verifiable denuclearization," the official said.
Although the talks began Wednesday with hints of a new flexibility on all sides, the United States and North Korea remained far apart on several crucial questions, participants said. They included whether North Korea is using enriched uranium as well as plutonium for bomb fuel, whether it must discontinue both military and civilian nuclear programs, and whether it must agree to dismantle completely its nuclear program before receiving aid.
Over all, the talks were described as more substantive than previous rounds. North Korea put forward a plan to freeze its weapons program in return for economic benefits. South Korea offered to provide energy aid to its northern neighbor after a nuclear freeze. provided that the freeze was a first step toward full elimination of the nuclear program.
Diplomats said all parties had greeted North Korea's offer to stop its nuclear program as a positive development. China and Russia offered to join South Korea in providing energy aid if North Korea froze its weapons program, though the United States and Japan said they would not offer aid at that stage.
But the discussions bogged down when North Korea made a new distinction between its civilian and military nuclear programs, and insisted that it would continue to develop nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, like generating electricity. Experts say the country does not now have a civilian nuclear program to produce electricity.
North Korea has also continued to deny that it has made efforts to produce fissile material for nuclear bombs by uranium enrichment in addition to its larger and better known facility for extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel rods.
The United States says it has solid intelligence that North Korea pursued this second channel for developing atomic weapons, a claim that was bolstered by the recent confession by a Pakistani nuclear scientist who said he had provided such technology to North Korea.
Bush administration officials took a tough stance in the talks, demanding that any statement of common goals include a reference to the "complete, verifiable, irreversible dismantlement" of all nuclear programs undertaken by the North.
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N. Korea Arms Talks Bring No Agreement
By Philip P. Pan and Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11897-2004Feb27.html
BEIJING, Feb. 28 -- Negotiators for six nations struggled on Saturday to reach an agreement on a joint statement to end four days of talks on North Korea's nuclear weapons program as diplomats reported little progress toward resolving what China called "differences, difficulties and contradictions," especially between the United States and North Korea.
The deadlock appeared to doom the second round of the talks in Beijing to the same inconclusive fate as the first round held six months ago. U.S. officials said the nations drafted a joint declaration calling for the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and pledging to hold another senior meeting by the end of June.
The countries also seemed ready to set up working-level groups to continue discussions in the interim, though the groups' mandate would be left vague and subject to negotiation.
But even that modest advance appeared in jeopardy Saturday afternoon as news agencies reported North Korea was making last-minute demands for revisions in the statement. A closing ceremony for the talks scheduled for Saturday morning was delayed until the afternoon.
The draft statement appeared designed to disguise the fact that the parties failed to agree even on joint negotiating goals, let alone close the gap on how to resolve the impasse. North Korean officials have little negotiating flexibility, so it isn't clear how much can be accomplished at the working-group level in coming months.
Before the talks ended, a senior State Department said a joint declaration would be "significant to us because denuclearization means complete dismantlement" and U.S. officials have made it clear they will continue to pursue that goal in the working groups. "We are satisfied with this outcome," he said. "We think we have the basis for going forward."
A joint commitment to denuclearization and further discussions would echo an agreement announced by China, the host of the talks, during the first round in August.
But the nations never put that agreement in writing, and one day later, North Korean officials rejected more talks and vowed to step up their production of nuclear arms.
There was no sign that either the United States or North Korea had given any ground on the key disputes that have separated them for 16 months, and the gap may have even widened.
"Precisely because there are some differences, difficulties and contradictions, it is necessary to continue with the talks process," said Wang Yi, the chief Chinese delegate and the chairman of the talks.
North Korea has denied U.S. allegations that it has a uranium enrichment program, acknowledging only a program to extract weapons-grade plutonium from its nuclear plant in Yongbyon.
It has offered only to freeze its nuclear weapons programs in exchange for "compensation" such as energy aid and security assurances, not its civilian programs as the United States, Japan and South Korea have demanded.
For its part, the United States did not back away from its refusal to begin discussions on security guarantees or energy aid until North Korea committed to a "complete, verifiable and irreversible" dismantling all of its nuclear programs and weapons. "That is the position that we started out with and, yes, that we have indeed maintained," State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said.
Russia and China have said North Korea should be allowed to conduct "scientific research into nuclear energy," according to Alexander Losyukov, Russia's deputy foreign minister.
"North Korea is not ready to drop all its nuclear programs. It's not realistic to ask them to do it," Losyukov said. "North Korea is ready to drop its nuclear defense program, but some countries are not satisfied with that."
During the discussions on a final statement, the United States and Japan rejected drafts that failed to include language calling for the "complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantlement" of all of North Korea's nuclear programs, diplomats said, while North Korea has resisted drafts including that language.
Kessler reported from Washington.
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N. Korea Talks End with Deep Divisions Laid Bare
February 28, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-korea-north.html
BEIJING (Reuters) - Six-party talks on the North Korean nuclear crisis ended on Saturday without a breakthrough but a senior U.S. official said the meetings had advanced Washington's agenda of disarming Pyongyang.
Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing closed the four-day session saying all sides had agreed to set up a working group and hold the next set of talks in Beijing before the end of June.
``Differences, even serious differences, still exist,'' Li said at the closing ceremony, without specifying what gaps remained.
China's chief negotiator, Wang Yi, cited an ``extreme lack of trust'' between the U.S. and North Koreans and said further discussions were needed on the scope of both the North's proposal to freeze its nuclear programs and the U.S. demand for dismantling all atomic arms schemes.
But a senior U.S. official declared the talks, which also involved South Korea, Japan and Russia ``very successful,'' saying all but Pyongyang had agreed to the goal of a nuclear-free North.
``The event has exceeded my expectations in a very important respect. It's been very successful in moving the agenda toward our goal of complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling (CVID) of DPRK nuclear programs,'' the U.S. official said. ``CVID is now more on the table than ever.''
In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher was also upbeat despite acknowledging that ``key differences remain.'' He said in a statement the United States welcomed the results of ``very serious discussions'' and cited as progress the agreements to make the talks more regular.
After the first inconclusive round in August, it took six months of intense shuttle diplomacy to organize new talks, something the United States wanted to avoid repeating. It had proposed a formal schedule for fresh negotiations and establishing groups that would meet in between the rounds.
Russia's chief delegate, Alexander Losyukov, said the talks achieved ``modest'' results. But he called the working groups ``a reasonable base for the continuation of discussions of those problems arising from the different positions.''
Analysts said, however, that Washington and Pyongyang could both dig in their heels in this U.S. presidential election year.
``North Korea does not have to strike any agreement now, ahead of the November election in the United States,'' said Yu Suk-ryul of Seoul's Institute of Foreign Affairs and National Security. ``The United States has a need to avoid collapse of the talks before the election.''
DEVIL IN DETAILS
China's Li said the second round featured substantial dialogue and made ``a big step forward.''
``The road is longer and more bumpy. But time is on our side. Time is on the side of peace,'' Li said.
There was little evidence the gulf between North Korea and the United States had narrowed. In the end they settled on a chairman's summary statement instead of a joint declaration.
``They (the Americans) haven't succeeded, but they haven't failed and they can always say that the process is under way,'' said Peter Hayes, director of the Nautilus Institute in Berkeley.
North Korea, whose 11th-hour rejection of language in a proposed agreement prolonged the talks for hours and prevented the parties from signing a joint declaration, repeated its denial that it had an enriched uranium weapons program.
``We believe the insistence of the raising of the HEU (highly enriched uranium) issue by the U.S. side is very much related to the position of the U.S. Bush administration, who based this assertion on false information,'' Kim Gye-gwan, head of the North Korean delegation, told reporters after the talks.
The crux of the dispute and the reason for the six-party talks is a U.S. accusation -- which Pyongyang denies -- that North Korea is pursuing a uranium enriching program for bombs.
The U.S. official in Beijing brushed off the denials but a Japanese diplomat said the United States had not shown any evidence the North had such a program.
The U.S. official said the American goal of completely dismantling all of the North's nuclear arms programs had ``essentially been accepted by all of the participants except the DPRK.'' DPRK stands for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
``The DPRK did say and has said that it will dismantle its nuclear programs. The devil, of course, is in the details,'' said the official.
Asked about the North's offer to give up its military nuclear program but not its peaceful one, the official said: ``The problem is, I am not aware of any peaceful programs in the DPRK.''
Japan chief negotiator Mitoji Yabunaka voiced support for the U.S. goal of a eliminating the North's nuclear programs, which he said were a ``grave threat to our country.''
FREEZE, INSPECTIONS
The North wants aid and a security guarantee in return for a nuclear freeze. ``When we freeze nuclear activities I believe it will be followed by inspections. When, who and how we do the inspections will be determined in future talks,'' said Kim.
Officials in Washington said U.S. negotiators outlined a series of coordinated steps that Washington could take if the North agreed to the complete dismantling of its nuclear programs.
Initially, aid would come in the form of energy assistance from other parties to the talks, but the United States would be at the table, the officials said.
A similar deal was forged between the United States and impoverished North Korea in 1994, but it fell apart in October 2002 after Washington said Pyongyang had privately admitted to the enriched uranium program.
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Nuke Negotiators Try to Avoid '94 Repeat
February 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Koreas-Nuclear-Power-Play.html
BEIJING (AP) -- A decade ago, fuel-starved North Korea won energy assistance from the United States in exchange for giving up its nuclear program. The North took the aid but kept the program.
In recent days, a chance for more energy aid was on the table as six governments tried to end the standoff over American demands that the North scrap its nuclear development for good.
The talks involving the Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia ended Saturday without any breakthroughs, although negotiators agreed to meet again by July and to have lower-level officials work on the complex details of the dispute.
A key issue will be how to make the North stick to any agreement after it was accused of reneging on its 1994 pledge, which brought it oil and help in building two civilian nuclear power plants -- aid that is now suspended.
Despite the North's uneven track record, analysts say that this time, a carefully structured deal could work. The famine-stricken North is more desperate than ever -- and an eventual agreement would be signed with all of its neighbors, including allies China and Russia, leaving the isolated regime with nowhere to turn if it reneges.
``This time, it's multilateral. It has a bit more binding power,'' says Koh Yu-hwan, a North Korea expert at Dongkuk University in Seoul.
The United States is demanding the complete, verifiable dismantling of the North's nuclear program. That would require intrusive inspections of its declared and suspected nuclear facilities -- something that Pyongyang has been reluctant to allow with in the past.
The 1994 deal with the United States collapsed two years ago after American officials said North Korea was working on a uranium-based nuclear program in violation of the agreement.
South Korea's delegate to the talks, Lee Soo-hyuck, said Russia and China offered to contribute to its energy offer, although Beijing says its aid isn't linked to the nuclear talks.
By some estimates, China also provides about three-quarters of the North's fuel and almost half its food.
Beijing reportedly offered the North aid worth $50 million to $100 million to take part in the latest talks.
That gives China and South Korea leverage, said Ralph Cossa, of the Pacific Forum CSIS, a think tank in Honolulu.
``South Korea and China can say, `Look, if you want the next payment, you have to deliver,''' Cossa said. But still, he noted, ``the leverage works only if you're willing to use it.''
Pyongyang says it was forced to restart work on its own nuclear power plant due to desperate energy shortages.
The North is trying to get South Korean electricity and gas from the Kovykta gas field in Russia's Far East -- a resource coveted also by China, Japan and South Korea.
The North's energy crisis began with the end of Soviet oil imports and subsidies. Drought in following years cut power output from hydroelectric plants.
North Korea imports all of its oil, but its struggling economy has little money to pay for it, while coal production has dropped due to lack of electricity to light mines.
U.S. officials point to Libya as a possible role model for the North.
The government of Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi is scrapping its programs for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In exchange, it won support from the U.N. atomic agency for peaceful nuclear programs in agriculture and industry -- and pledges from Washington to lift crippling economic sanctions.
The shift is likely to bring oil-rich Libya a flood of foreign investment.
While the North lacks Libya's commercial appeal, Pyongyang also wants to break out of its isolation, Cossa said.
``What Libya says is, 'Look, there's another option,''' he said.
-------- libya
Libya's Kadhafi speaks out on abandoning weapons programme
SIRTE, Libya (AFP)
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040228181212.wgjgni69.html
Libyan leader Colonel Moamer Kadhafi on Saturday suggested his decision late last year to abandon all weapons of mass destruction was motivated by self-preservation.
"Any national state that adopts this policy (of weapons of mass destruction) cannot protect itself, instead it would expose itself to danger," he said at the closing ceremony of a summit meeting of the African Union (AU).
It was the first time that Kadhafi had spoken of his December decision in such a public international gathering.
"The nuclear arms race is a crazy and destructive policy for the economy and for life. We would like to have a better economy and a better life," he told the meeting in Arabic, with an accompanying English translation.
"We have found out it is not the responsibility of any national state" to possess such weapons, but rather that of multinational bodies such as the AU, which groups 53 African states.
He added that any proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by any individual African state would jeopardize their relations with one another.
"We have decided in Africa that Africa must be free of weapons of mass destruction," he said, adding that Libya was the second country in the continent, after South Africa, to abandon them.
-------- russia
Uranium Traveled to Iran Via Russia, Inspectors Find
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
February 28, 2004
NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/middleeast/28NUKE.html?ex=1078941368&ei=1&en=69acbd2fb43606bb
nspectors have found evidence that some of the highly enriched uranium found on nuclear machinery in Iran came from Russia, European diplomats and American experts said Friday. The nuclear fuel appears to have come through the global black market, the experts added, and not with the blessings of Moscow.
With the findings, Russia emerges as a new and unexpected foreign source of supply to Iran's nuclear efforts. Recent revelations had shown that the Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan had provided Iran with some sophisticated centrifuge technology that could be used to refine weapons-grade uranium through his hidden nuclear trading network, according to international nuclear officials and Dr. Khan's own testimony.
The Bush administration has long accused Iran of harboring a secret bomb project, which Tehran denies, saying its nuclear program is only for peacetime purposes.
In that light, last year's discovery in Iran of highly enriched uranium -a potential bomb fuel - set off an international crisis about the country's nuclear intentions and raised questions about where it had originated. Iran claimed it was contamination that came in on imported equipment, which Iranian officials said they acquired to concentrate uranium for reactors to generate electricity. The centrifuges spin rapidly to enrich uranium for both nuclear reactors and nuclear arms. High concentrations of uranium's rare 235 isotope can fuel warheads.
In a report on Tuesday, the International Atomic Energy Agency said that its inspections had found that centrifuge equipment made indigenously in Iran - but not imported gear - showed many traces of the concentrated fuel, leading experts to doubt the Iranian explanation and suggest that Iran had enriched the uranium itself. Its purity was 36 percent U-235 - short of the 90 percent needed for most nuclear bomb designs but greater than that needed for most nuclear reactors.
On Friday, however, European diplomats said the agency's laboratory at Seibersdorf, Austria, had discovered a likely match between the atomic signatures of Russian uranium and samples agency inspectors had gathered from Iranian centrifuges.
In its sleuthing, the lab studies such things as a sample's isotopes - atoms of the same element that have different numbers of neutrons. A distinctive mix of such isotopes can amount to a fingerprint that experts check against atomic databanks.
The agency, a diplomat cautioned, was being extremely careful in its interpretation of the Seibersdorf data and other evidence and was still actively looking at alternative explanations.
Michael A. Levi, a science fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington who has studied the recent I.A.E.A. report, said yesterday that he had independently deduced that the Iranian uranium originated in Russia. The strong clue, he said, was its 36 percent enrichment, a level that matches a kind of fuel used in certain Russian submarines and research reactors. Globally, he added, he knew of no other nuclear technology that used 36 percent enrichment.
"There's no reason for Iran to enrich to 36 percent," he said. `The only place that does that is Russia." He added that it was highly unlikely that the Russian government sold Iran the uranium because its scientists could have easily concealed the telltale signature.
Rather, he argued, thieves probably stole the material either from Russia proper or elsewhere in the former Soviet Union and sold it on the black market.
Nations that use Russian reactors fueled with 36 percent enriched uranium, Mr. Levi said, include not only Russia but also the Czech Republic, Germany (in the former East sector), Hungary, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Poland, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. None of the similarly enriched Russian submarine fuel is exported through legal channels.
Poor security over such materials has been the rule rather than the exception since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mr. Levi said. For instance, in 1993, two Russian naval servicemen stole nearly four pounds of 36 percent enriched uranium from a naval base at Andreyeva Guba, Russia. They were caught and the material recovered.
Mr. Levi said Iran might have wanted a supply of 36 percent uranium because it could ease the production of bomb-grade uranium, making the process much faster and easier.
He estimated, for instance, that enriching one bomb's worth of material would take one year of running 66 pounds of 36 percent enriched uranium through just 25 centrifuges. A set of such centrifuges, known as a cascade, incrementally concentrates the U-235 isotope.
In contrast, if Iran started with natural, unenriched uranium, Mr. Levi said, the same production run would require 13,200 pounds of raw material running through 750 centrifuges. Such a cascade, he noted, "would be far harder to hide than the 15 centrifuge arrangement."
-------- u.s. nuc weapons
Report Criticizes Uranium Program
Plan to Purify Material From Arms Over Cost, 5 Years Behind
By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13540-2004Feb27.html
The Energy Department's program to produce highly enriched uranium for nuclear weapons by recovering and purifying materials from retired bombs and missiles will be more than five years behind schedule and cost more than three times its original price when it starts operating in July, according to a report by the Energy Department's inspector general released yesterday.
Poor planning and lack of a consistent funding plan were cited as leading to delays and ballooning costs for the project, which was to be completed by December 1998, the report said. The original cost estimate was $119 million, but the bill will be about $400 million by July, the report said.
Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman wrote that one result has been that "the enriched uranium operations necessary for national security are not available to meet future mission needs." But the program's manager, Michael C. Kane of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), took issue with that finding. Kane said the operations at the agency's Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge, Tenn., where uranium is processed, "has consistently achieved meeting 100 percent of current program requirements."
The inspector general's report comes as the Bush administration is trying to stop North Korea and Iran from undertaking uranium enrichment programs of their own.
In a speech this month, President Bush proposed an international understanding in which nuclear fuel would be provided only to countries that renounce the type of nuclear reprocessing the United States has reestablished. "This step will prevent new states from developing the means to produce fissile material for nuclear bombs," Bush said.
David Albright, president of the Institute for Science and International Security, a nonprofit research organization that specializes in nuclear matters, said the reprocessing program makes it more difficult for the Bush administration to sell the idea of new nuclear restrictions.
"Any perception the U.S. stockpile is increasing could make it more difficult for Bush to get support for his initiative," Albright said. "He [Bush] can't get nations to give up enrichment plants if Y-12 is seen as expanding quantity and quality of our stockpile."
Another recent report by the Energy Department's inspector general highlighted other problems in preventing nuclear proliferation, in this case the attempt by the United States to collect weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium that was distributed for research purposes years ago.
The report focused on the U.S. Atoms for Peace program in the 1950s and on other programs in the 1960s, in which nuclear technology and tons of highly enriched uranium were distributed to about 33 countries for use in research reactors. Since 1964, the United States has been trying with limited success to get that nuclear material returned.
The Energy Department's inspector general said 22 countries had returned materials, but 12 countries have not agreed to participate in the program. Among those are Iran, Israel, Pakistan and South Africa. Albright, who has studied the program, estimated that the amounts delivered to Iran were not enough for a bomb, but the amounts given Israel and Pakistan were, if those countries had the capability to purify the uranium.
------- us politics
Kerry attacks Bush as weak on defense
February 28, 2004
By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20040227-111224-7063r.htm
Sen. John Kerry went toe-to-toe with President Bush on national security yesterday, charging that the president has weakened the U.S. military and been too timid to commit troops at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, thus blowing the chance to capture Osama bin Laden.
National security and toughness in the war on terror have returned as a threshold issue in the presidential campaign, much as being tough on communism was a threshold during the Cold War. In a speech in California, billed as his comprehensive strategy for the war on terror, Mr. Kerry sought yesterday to dispel the notion hewould be reluctant to use military force.
Mr. Kerry said he will not be afraid to "order direct military action when needed to capture and destroy terrorist groups and their leaders."
He even faulted the president for not committing forces in one particular instance. He said Mr. Bush lost a chance to capture bin Laden, whom Mr. Kerry said the United States "had in our grasp" during the December 2001 battle in the mountainous Tora Bora region in Afghanistan.
"George Bush held U.S. forces back and instead called on Afghan warlords with no loyalty to our cause to finish the job," Mr. Kerry said.
Republicans have said this year's election will come down to who Americans trust to keep a strong course in the war on terror. Mr. Kerry, a Vietnam War veteran, has said he is the best candidate to go up against Mr. Bush on this issue.
Mr. Kerry voted in 2002 to authorize the president to use force in Iraq, but has since been one of the harshest critics of how Mr. Bush has followed through.
He has consistently said the administration should have worked to gain approval of more nations before beginning the war. This is consistent with his belief expressed after the Vietnam War, that the United States should not commit troops to war without the approval of the United Nations.
Yesterday, though, Mr. Kerry said he would not let allies "tie our hands and prevent us from doing what must be done."
"As president I would not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake," he said. "But I will not push away those who can and should share the burden."
He also said the problem isn't that Mr. Bush has gone too far in the war on terror, but that "he's done too little."
"We can prove to the American people that we know how to make them safer and more secure - with a stronger, more comprehensive and more effective strategy for winning the war on terror than the Bush administration has ever envisioned," Mr. Kerry said.
Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush re-election campaign, said the speech was "filled with defeatist rhetoric and factual inaccuracies."
"Today, John Kerry ignored the real progress being made on all fronts of the war on terror, and he ignored his own long voting record that would undermine America's ability to win the war on terror," Mr. Schmidt said.
Mr. Kerry said Mr. Bush has failed to properly fund the military, including sending troops to patrol Iraq in unarmored Humvees and without proper body armor.
"Families across America have had to collect funds from their neighbors to buy body armor for their loved ones in uniform because George Bush failed to provide it," Mr. Kerry said.
But Republican senators drafted by the Bush campaign to respond said those supplies have now been purchased. They also said that Mr. Kerry in fact voted against the exact legislation, the $87 billion emergency spending bill last fall, that funded those needs.
Republicans said this is a recurring pattern. Sen. Jon Kyl, Arizona Republican, said Mr. Kerry has shown "a pretty clear pattern of being wrong, of being in the minority, fortunately of not being very effective."
And Sen. Norm Coleman, Minnesota Republican, said, "History has shown Senator Kerry's vision to be wrong." "He was wrong when he voted against the first Gulf war. Had we followed his vision, Saddam Hussein would still be in Kuwait and probably have nuclear weapons capability," Mr. Coleman said.
On the domestic security front, Mr. Kerry faulted Mr. Bush for misdirected priorities, and called for increased military staffing and public safety spending, including:
• Increasing U.S. Army troop strength by 40,000 in what he called "a temporary increase likely to last the remainder of the decade."
•Paying to hire 100,000 new firefighters and trying to "restore the 100,000 police on our streets which I fought for and won in 1994, but which the Bush administration has cut in budget after budget."
• Increasing homeland security spending for items such as new screening technology at U.S. ports and new safeguards for chemical and nuclear facilities.
Mr. Kerry said the president "stonewalled" the commission investigating intelligence failures before the September 11 terrorist attacks, and pointed to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's refusal earlier this week to allow a vote on a bill to extend the commission's deadline by two months. Mr. Kerry demanded that the president call and tell Mr. Hastert, Illinois Republican, to allow the commission more time.
Yesterday, Mr. Hastert issued a letter that he will agree to an extension, though spokesman John Feehery said it was independent of Mr. Kerry's remarks.
"John who?" Mr. Feehery said. "I assure you that Senator Kerry's stirring comments had absolutely nothing to do with our decisions."
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Kucinich on Palestine
By George Karsa
Al-Jazeerah,
Feb 28 ,2004
http://www.aljazeerah.info/Opinion%20editorials/2004%20opinions/Feb/28%20o/Kucinich%20on%20Palestine%20By%20George%20Karsa.htm
TRANSCRIPT OF DENNIS KUCINICH'S RESPONSE TO AUDIENCE QUESTION CONCERNING PALESTINE
Question: Can you talk for a second about the plight of the Palestinians and our role, our support of Israel?
Dennis Kucinich: Let's start with where we are at this moment. The President of the United States needs to be able to construct a climate where both Israel and the Palestinians can survive. I mean, we have to agree that peaceful coexistence is not only a possibility, it is an imperative. So then, how can we proceed? As President of the United States here is how I would proceed: I would approach Ariel Sharon, assure him of my support for Israel, and ask him to take down the wall.
I would assure him of my support for Israel and ask him to stop building new settlements. (Applause) I would assure him of my support for Israel and ask him to agree that it's necessary to have an autonomous Palestinian state. (Applause) And it is not enough for the United States simply to advocate an autonomous Palestinian state, because political autonomy is not substantive unless you have economic autonomy. So, the United States must play a role with Israel and the world community in helping to rebuild the Palestinian areas and the new Palestinian state which would mean this: to build new housing, to build new schools, hospitals, roads, to create a new infrastructure so that people really have the basis to be able to survive, which they don't have right now.
The United States can play a very powerful role in helping to bring about peace between Israel and the Palestinians, and we can help to create a bargaining environment which is conducive to the parties agreeing to the following: the parties must come to an agreement - and we can help produce the climate - on the critical issues of the sharing of water rights so there's no wars over water rights in the future, and on providing mutual security, each for the other. There has to be an understanding that the security of one depends on the security of the other. That kind of mutuality will be confidence-building and will help to create the possibility of the parties agreeing on two of the most vexing issues, borders and right-of-return. But we cannot impose those decisions on the Israelis or the Palestinians. But we can create a climate of mutuality where they can get to that. Furthermore, the United States needs to do something else. We must understand that we cannot put our foot on the accelerator of war anywhere in the world and expect that it's not going to have a destructive, undermining effect on our ability to keep peace in the Middle East. (Applause) Wherever I go around the country these issues come up and there's always this tendency - because there's so much anger out there about conditions.- there's always this tendency to try to draw forth statements of condemnation But we can take guidance from Lincoln in his second inaugural (address) when he said "with malice towards none and charity for all."
We have to be careful about adding to the climate which makes irresolution the order of the day. And so as President, I intend to go into those conditions with the intention of helping our brothers who are killing each other, solve their differences so that most, so that all may survive, because when we have that kind of karma where brother is killing brother, I do not believe it is for us to take one side so that the brothers can keep killing brothers. We need to help both come together and survive and keep the prosperity, and I intend to do that.
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Budget Office Predicts Deficit Over 10 Years: $2.75 Trillion
February 28, 2004
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/politics/28BUDG.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 - President Bush's new tax and spending plan would produce deficits of $2.75 trillion over the next 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office reported Friday in the first detailed analysis of the White House budget.
If there were no changes in taxes and if spending increased only at the rate of inflation, the deficit would be about $2 trillion over the next 10 years, the budget office reported today. But the new estimate is $737 billion higher, primarily reflecting Mr. Bush's desire to make permanent the tax cuts due to expire by 2011.
Three years ago, the budget office forecast budget surpluses totaling $5.6 trillion for the 10-year period ending in 2011.
The budget office predicts that this year's deficit will be $478 billion, lower than Mr. Bush's estimate of $521 billion, and it estimates that the deficit will be cut almost in half in three years, to $242 billion.
The forecasts by the budget office, a nonpartisan arm of Congress, indicate, however, that deficits will begin rising again toward the end of the next 10-year period, after the Bush tax cuts take full effect. And like the administration's budget, the budget office excludes some large expenses like the cost of operations in Iraq.
The most revealing part of the office's projection is the outlook from 2010 to 2014.
Deficits would total almost $1.4 trillion over that period, and the annual deficit will be $289 billion, and growing larger, as the nation heads into a wave of soaring costs from Social Security and Medicare payouts as more baby boomers reach retirement age.
Republicans argue that 10-year projections are flawed and unreliable and that the tax cuts were needed to get the economy going in the short-term while encouraging job growth and new business investment in later years.
Democrats contend that the White House wants to use five-year numbers to hide the huge and continuing deficits in later years. They argue that the tax cuts will squander resources needed to address a multitude of problems facing the country, including domestic security and more Social Security claims.
"As bad as these numbers are, they are actually worse because they omit significant costs that the president has omitted from his budget," said Representative John M. Spratt Jr. of South Carolina, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee.
In addition to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which could cost $50 billion next year, the budget does not include a provision for fixing the alternative minimum tax, a change that will probably drain $600 billion from the budget over the next decade, Mr. Spratt said.
By making only five-year projections, he said, the Bush plan "left most people thinking we will cut the deficit in half and it will keep on declining. But in truth, we see in the C.B.O. projections that the deficit gets worse over the long term. We simply don't have a plan to eradicate it."
Chad Kolton, spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget at the White House, said that administration officials are pleased that the budget office endorsed White House forecasts of a halved deficit within five years. But Mr. Kolton dismissed concerns about the large deficits predicted for later years.
"Once you get beyond that five-year window, the numbers, even by the C.B.O.'s account, become notoriously inaccurate," Mr. Kolton said. "Even C.B.O. would admit we don't honestly know what these numbers will look like 10 years from now."
Brian Riedl, federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group in Washington, said the 10-year projections "should be taken with a grain of salt because a 1 percent change in economic growth this year could alter annual tax revenues by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade."
More important, Mr. Riedl said, were Congressional Budget Office forecasts indicating that total tax revenues will grow by almost 30 percent over the next three years because of the economic rebound and stock-market profits that will bolster capital-gains taxes. "I was pleasantly surprised that revenues were projected as high as they were," he said.
Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, said it was "fantasy" to say the deficit would fall by half in just a few years because those budgets included hundreds of billions of dollars in surpluses from Social Security that would have to be repaid at some point.
"Instead of cutting the deficit in half," Mr. Conrad said in a statement on Friday night, "the president's policies will lead to an explosion of debt, with gross federal debt reaching almost $13.9 trillion" by 2014.
--------
CBO Disputes Bush Promise To Cut Deficit in Half in 5 Years
Budget Analysis Challenges Administration's Forecasts
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13463-2004Feb27.html
President Bush's budget would not cut the budget deficit in half over five years, as the president has promised, and would run up $2.75 trillion in additional debt over the next decade, according to an analysis the Congressional Budget Office issued yesterday.
The report suggests that the administration has given an overly pessimistic view of the deficit this year but overly optimistic forecasts for later years to back up its assertion that the budget deficit could be cut in half within five years.
Under Bush's forecasts, the deficit is slated to drop from $521 billion this year to $239 billion in 2009, the last year of his projection. By contrast, the CBO says the deficit under Bush's budget policies would be $478 billion this year, and would then fall to $258 billion in 2009, before climbing to $289 billion by 2014.
The CBO projections indicate that, by 2014, the president's spending and tax cut policies would push the government into a hole $737 billion deeper than if Congress ignored Bush's policy prescriptions.
The new forecast comes at a sensitive time for the White House and congressional Republicans, who face mounting criticism that the tax cuts and rising spending have turned record budget surpluses into record deficits. House and Senate budget writers have pledged to tackle the deficit more vigorously than the president has, and plan to draft budgets next month that would cut spending deeper than Bush has recommended.
The credibility of Bush's economic and budget forecasts has been attacked by Democratic presidential candidates and independent economists alike. Bush earlier this month backed away from the forecasts of his own Council of Economic Advisers, which had projected that the number of payroll jobs this year would be an average of 2.6 million higher than last year's -- an improbable figure, given the sluggish job market.
The new figures are significant because lawmakers must use CBO estimates, and not those of the White House, in drafting their budgets.
By those estimates, the president's plan over the first five years would trim the deficit by holding spending below the levels it would reach if it were allowed to rise with inflation. But in the next five years, the government's fiscal picture would deteriorate badly, mainly because of the cost of extending Bush's tax cuts beyond their expiration dates, the CBO says. Under the president's policies, tax revenue through 2014 would fall $1.3 trillion below where they would be if the tax cuts were allowed to lapse.
The deficit would never dip below $252 billion in the next decade, the CBO says. An additional $2.75 trillion in publicly held federal debt would increase today's $4.1 trillion debt by 67 percent.
"This is devastating," said Thomas S. Kahn, Democratic staff director of the House Budget Committee. "This confirms our worst fears about the president's budget."
White House budget office spokesman Chad Kolton defended the administration's forecasts. He said that even under the CBO projections, the deficit, expressed as a percentage of the economy, would be cut in half, from 4.2 percent this year to 1.8 percent. Kolton added that the CBO's 2009 deficit forecast of $258 billion is still half of the White House's $521 billion projection for this year. "Five hundred twenty-one billion is as accurate an estimate as you can get," Kolton said.
Kahn said the deficit picture is actually worse than that. The CBO estimate does not take into account funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan beyond this year because Bush included no such funding in his budget request. White House officials have conceded that they will have to seek as much as $50 billion in war funding, probably after the November election.
The CBO estimate also includes no fix for the burgeoning problem of the alternative minimum tax, a parallel income-tax system designed to ensure that the rich pay taxes but that increasingly has ensnared the middle class.
House and Senate GOP budget writers say they will try next month to draft budgets that more realistically address spending and deficit issues. "We are going to do better than the president does. We just don't think he's doing what's required," said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.), the vice chairman of the House Budget Committee.
-------- MILITARY
-------- afghanistan
Tales of the Taliban: Part Tragedy, Part Farce
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13506-2004Feb27.html
KABUL, Afghanistan - To the outside world, the Taliban was a forbidding, mysterious clique of Islamic militiamen who shut women away, enforced puritanical rules with whips and crushed all military rivals until U.S. bombers drove them from power in 2001.
But as seen from the inside, the Taliban's five-year reign over most of Afghanistan was also one of bumbling comedy, fatal military mistakes, disabling preoccupation with minor religious matters, deep internal splits and awkward relations with the Arab fighters who flocked to the movement's aid.
Waheed Mojda, a former official in the Taliban Foreign Ministry, has written a 40,000-word account of the Taliban years that provides both hilarious and painful insights into a short-lived Islamic regime that left no written records, rarely explained its actions and shunned contact with outsiders.
According to Mojda's unpublished account, written in Dari, the Taliban's extreme notions of Islam led to many bizarre moments. When Mohammad Omar, the movement's religious leader, was offered a toy camel by visiting Chinese diplomats, he recoiled like "someone holding a piece of red-hot coal," because he believed all likenesses of living creatures to be un-Islamic.
In another passage of Mojda's account, a Kabul man desperately tries to secure a religious order from the Supreme Court to have his teeth pulled because he had his cavities filled by a dentist but was told by a Taliban cleric that having filled teeth "would make my prayers and ablutions invalid."
Mojda also wrote about how an internal split between the moderate and fundamentalist camps deepened in early 2001, when officials began destroying historic art objects they viewed as un-Islamic. A dispute over whether to destroy a valuable European painting of a hunting scene became a tug of war among officials in five separate ministries.
He described the crisis that erupted when Omar ordered the demolition of two majestic Buddhas carved into the cliffs of central Afghanistan.
According to Mojda, many officials were unhappy about the order. Some tried to warn foreign conservationists, while others ducked responsibility.
Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil was "depressed" over the demolition but had to defend it to the foreign media.
"A great tragedy occurred," Mojda wrote. Military explosives were transferred to Bamian, where the Buddhas had been carved 13 centuries before, and the statues were rendered faceless. Not even senior Taliban officials had dared defy Omar, whose spirit, Mojda wrote, "always hung over meetings like a shadow."
While much of the outside world recoiled, Mojda noted, the symbolic smashing of the Buddhas attracted secret donations from foreign Muslim sympathizers and a fresh flow of Arab fighters eager to join the struggle against the oppressive West.
Mojda, 48, a conservative, scholarly Muslim who is now a senior aide in the Supreme Court, never joined the Taliban, but he was an activist with other Afghan Islamic groups that fought Soviet forces in the 1980s.
In an interview this week, Mojda said he had no desire to make fun of the Taliban, but rather sought to point out the flaws and fanatical aberrations that gradually disillusioned him -- and ultimately alienated many other Afghans from the initially popular movement.
"In Afghanistan, history is never written soon enough, and no one is neutral," he said. "I felt I needed to write what I had seen of the Taliban, both bad and good." Friends told him he was taking too great of a risk, but Mojda said several former Taliban leaders who read his book privately acknowledged he had "said some true things."
Mojda's book contains observations previously made by several foreign experts, but his firsthand descriptions and anecdotes contribute new and colorful detail to the emerging history of the reclusive Taliban's rule.
The most serious Taliban mistake, Mojda writes, was the arbitrary power given to its religious police, mostly illiterate village gunmen who had neither the legal nor Islamic knowledge to carry out such work. In one incident, he recounted, a police squad forced a Sikh man to pray in a mosque, insisting that "whatever else he was, he was still a Muslim." Sikhs, have their own faith, known as Sikhism.
The Taliban's obsessions with religious litmus tests and personal loyalty repeatedly undermined its administrative competence, according to Mojda. The ability to "recite verses from the Koran beautifully" was enough to obtain senior administrative posts, while transferred officials took along large coteries of followers, known as "andivalis," forcing agencies to start from scratch.
The Taliban's permanent conflict with ethnic militias from northern Afghanistan also prevented it from evolving into a real government. Senior officials were ordered to the front lines, leaving their ministries drifting and leaderless. Military commanders wielded far more power and enjoyed greater perquisites than their civilian counterparts.
"The Taliban leadership had no plan but war," wrote Mojda, and yet its battle plans often went awry. Even seasoned commanders had to wait to make field decisions until they obtained permission from Omar, who was usually incommunicado in his southern headquarters. Planning was so haphazard that large numbers of troops were sent into battles in which massive casualties were inevitable.
Mojda told the story of a man who dined with several Taliban commanders near Kabul and was then invited on a joyride in a caravan of pickup trucks. As they gained speed, shots rang out, and the man realized they were racing through enemy lines. "There were many dead and captured, but the commanders didn't care," Mojda said. "Their only idea was to drive fast and break through the line.
By his account, the Taliban initially sought only to disarm and pacify the lawless, war-torn country and had no desire to take power. Their crackdown on crime and abuses by other militias, beginning with the punishment of a commander who raped a bus passenger, was greeted with public relief. "From the Iranian borders to the remote reaches of Badakhshan, all were ready to welcome them," he wrote.
The early days of Taliban rule in Kabul were marked by mishaps as well as cruelty. Village mullahs lost their way in the capital, and the Taliban radio station issued bulletins asking people to help locate them. Newly named ministers went barefoot as they sat in ornate office chairs.
So many Taliban officials were war cripples, missing eyes or limbs, that Mojda said he developed a theory about repressive rule as a form of physical revenge. Omar, who had one eye, enjoyed absolute power as the movement's chosen emir, yet he resorted to "dreams and auguries" and was often unreachable when major decisions had to be made.
But over time, Mojda wrote, the Taliban leaders grew more ambitious and defiant of their mentors in Pakistan, while moving closer to their wealthy backers from the Middle East. Mojda describes these Arabs as both shrewd and deadly. At first, they ingratiated themselves with Omar and his aides by giving them expensive vehicles. Later, they set up training camps where Afghan fighters were taught to make explosives from common objects "like hockey balls" and to extract poison from cucumbers.
And yet the rustic Afghan militiamen never meshed with the more fanatical fighters from Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iraq who flocked to assist their "holy war." The Arabs, Mojda said in an interview, looked down on Afghans as vulgar and impure, especially because they smoked cigarettes and hashish, and found even the stern Taliban cadres insufficiently pure.
Some more progressive Taliban officials did, in fact, oppose their leaders' most extreme policies, and over time a deep internal split developed between the moderate and fundamentalist camps. Inside the Foreign Ministry, one of the few departments with educated employees, Mojda observed this struggle firsthand.
His boss, Muttawakil, was known as a Taliban moderate despite his close relations with Omar. Mojda wrote that the minister owned a television and liked to watch Arab news channels, but kept it locked and under guard in the basement so it would not be smashed by the religious police.
Today, Omar is a fugitive, believed to be hiding along the Pakistan border. Muttawakil, who turned himself in to U.S. officials, was recently released from over a year in U.S. custody and is now living quietly in Afghanistan.
As for Mojda, who once wore a bulky turban and long beard to work, he now sports the same jacket-and-tie uniform as most former employees of the Taliban. At night, he writes in his home study on a computer that once even his boss would have had to hide in the basement.
-------- africa
African Leaders Sign Common Security Plan
February 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Libya-African-Summit.html
SIRTE, Libya (AP) -- African leaders signed a sweeping defense and security agreement Saturday that allows the fledgling African Union to send forces to intervene in civil wars, international conflicts and coup attempts across the continent.
Also, Libyan leader Moammar Gadhiafi said his country decided to dismantle its atomic program to avoid the dangers it might bring.
``The nuclear arms race is a crazy and destructive policy for economy and life,'' Gadhafi said at the closing session of the African Union summit. ``Any national state that will adopt these policies cannot protect herself, on the contrary it would expose itself to danger.''
This was the first time Gadhafi publicly addressed Libya's nuclear program since agreeing to eliminate its facilities in December.
The defense and security agreement aims to prevent tragedies like the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which more than 500,000 people were massacred while the African Union's predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, did nothing. The 39-year-old OAU was disbanded in 2002 because it was so ineffective.
But with funding short and the African Union already $40 million in debt, the joint force is not likely to form soon, delegates said. A Zimbabwe official said it would not be ready before 2010.
``The framework we have just signed includes the necessity to find collective answers to threats, whether internal or external,'' Mozambique President Joaquim Chissano said.
``But our efforts are not over. ... We have to show a real commitment to the implementation of our decisions.''
Chissano told The Associated Press the union would establish a ``standby force'' of African troops for deployment to conflict zones on short notice.
He declined to elaborate, but draft copies of the agreement called for creating five regional brigades to be deployed by two bodies modeled on the United Nations.
The first is the African Assembly, or parliament. The second is the Peace and Security Council, Africa's version of the U.N. Security Council. They will be created in a few months.
Libya proposed creating a single African army, but many countries viewed that idea as unrealistic. However, Ould Salek, a foreign minister for Western Sahara -- a territory in southern Morocco recognized by the African Union -- said the concept would be discussed at the next summit in July.
``There is a great need for African troops to intervene in cases of necessity. We must take on fully our duty to stop war in Africa,'' he said.
Funding will be a major obstacle for the force, and aid will be sought from donor countries including the United States, Japan and European states, he said.
African nations have had no formal policy on how to react to conflict on the continent.
Charles Muligande, who headed the Rwandan delegation, said nations could have intervened to stop the 1994 genocide but chose not to.
``It isn't about legal frameworks,'' Muligande said. ``It's about will. There has to be will.''
Saturday's agreement does not obligate African states to act but provides standards for them to uphold, including protecting democratically elected governments from coups. The standby force could be deployed to enforce disarmament programs and provide humanitarian aid.
Shortly after its creation in 2002, the African Union deployed several thousand peacekeepers from South Africa, Ethiopia and Mozambique to Burundi, but that country remains mired in a civil war that has killed more than 200,000 people.
African leaders also signed an agreement on a common policy to boost agricultural production and manage water resources.
-------- britain
Blair's people hit back at ex-minister who blew whistle on British spies
LONDON (AFP)
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.terradaily.com/2004/040228201749.9bmbbxbn.html
Supporters of British Prime Minister Tony Blair hit back Saturday at Clare Short, the former cabinet minister who alleged that London spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan during the tense weeks leading to the invasion of Iraq.
Blair himself set the tone by describing Short's revelation as "deeply irresponsible" and telling followers in his ruling Labour Party that her claims were providing ammunition for his political opponents.
Home Secretary David Blunkett, Britain's interior minister, and other senior party figures also jumped into the fray, accusing Short of personal vindictiveness against Blair.
Short, the former international development secretary, quit in May in protest over the Iraq invasion.
She made her claims about spying on Annan's office after British prosecutors dropped charges against an intelligence translator, Katharine Gun, who leaked a memo revealing apparent US plans to spy on members of the UN Security Council in the run-up to the war.
Short said transcripts of Annan's bugged telephone calls were circulated to senior British ministers.
While Blair aides attacked Short, opposition members demanded that the prime minister say whether she was telling the truth or not.
Blair also came under pressure to reveal the legal reasoning for joining the invasion of Iraq alongside the United States last March.
The government refused, other than to say that it had advice of the Attorney General, Lord Peter Goldsmith, the nation's top law official, that the war was legitimate under international law.
Political commentators said the government may have ordered the official secrets charges against Gun dropped because a trial might have revealed details of the pre-invasion planning.
Nevertheless, the environment organisation Greenpeace demanded publication of Goldsmith's advice in the defence of 14 of its activists who briefly seized armored vehicles being shipped to Iraq to dramatize their allegation the war was illegal. They were scheduled to go on trial March 9.
Michael Howard, leader of Britain's opposition Conservatives, also demanded the government publish the attorney general's advice in full.
So far only Goldsmith's conclusion that the war was legal has been published.
While the political row rumbled on, other prominent UN figures lent credence to Short's charges.
Former UN secretary general Boutros Boutros Ghali, and former UN chief weapons inspectors Richard Butler and Hans Blix all said they had reason to believe they were spied upon.
Blunkett denied Short's allegations that transcripts of bugged phone conversations circulated in British cabinet meetings.
"I wasn't shown any transcripts and I am one of the very few people -- and Clare Short is not one of them -- who have clearance for the full security material that comes through," Blunkett told reporters.
Former government minister Jack Cunningham said Short had a personal agenda "to attack, damage and undermine the prime minister at every opportunity and sadly, that's been the hallmark of her conduct and behavior since she left the government."
Amid calls for Short to be expelled from Labour, party chairman Ian McCartney condemned her behaviour as "outrageous and unforgivable", but said he was not "going to make her a martyr".
Short, meanwhile, was unrepentant.
She repeated her allegations in an op-ed article in The Independent newspaper, saying Blair had to deal with two key allegations: "one that the attorney general's legal advice authorising war in Iraq was manipulated in dubious ways, the other that Britain is intruding on the privacy of Mr Annan's phone calls."
Short said Blair was not a man for details and may have been unaware of spying at the UN.
She added: "The suggestion that there is any threat to our national security or intelligence services from the exposure of the fact that such transcripts are circulated is laughable."
The issue is potentially explosive for Blair, and illustrates the formidable pressure that Britain and the US placed on members of the UN Security Council to vote a resolution explicitly authorizing a resort to force.
No such resolution was passed, and Britain had to justify the invasion of Iraq on the advice of the attorney general, without which, Short said, military commanders would not have moved.
A coalition of groups opposed to the war said Saturday it intended to take legal action over "the mass murder of 20,000 or so Iraqis" against Blair and US President George W. Bush before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Some 600 supporters of the Stop the War coalition, which was formed in September 2001, met in London to prepare for a mass demonstration in the capital on March 20, the anniversary of the invasion of oil-rich Iraq.
-------- business
V-22 Costs Soar
February 28, 2004
Carlton Meyer editor@G2mil.com
http://www.g2mil.com/V-22costs.htm
The V-22 Osprey program has become the largest scandal in US military history. Stubborn Marine Corps Generals refuse to admit that dedication and political influence cannot overcome the laws of physics which have proven the complex tilt-rotor design flawed and ultra-expensive. Details can be found in the five previous G2mil articles about the V-22, which reveal blatant lies about the V-22's performance. This article will cover the V-22's soaring cost, $96.2 million for each MV-22 this year, while the FY2005 defense budget request boosts the price 19% to $114.8 million per aircraft. The US Air Force requests three similar CV-22s in FY2005 for $443.0 million; or a unit cost of $147.7 million each. If the $395.4 million requested in FY2005 for V-22 research, development, evaluation and testing is included in this buy of 11 V-22s, the total cost of each V-22 is $159.7 million.
The US Army has lost 41 helicopters over Iraq and Afghanistan this past year, with another 24 so badly damaged they are likely to be scrapped. This is proof that employing ultra-expensive V-22s over combat zones is unwise, especially since they are larger than any helicopter in the US inventory. The V-22 weighs twice as much and costs four times more than helicopters with comparable abilities. For example, the Navy's FY2005 budget requests 15 MH-60S helicopters for $400.8 million; or a unit cost of $26.7 million each. This helo weighs one-third as much as the V-22, but can pick up nearly the same payload. It has room for 13 combat equipped Marines, compared to 18 for the V-22. If Congress canceled the V-22 and diverted its $1756.5 million FY2005 request to buy MH-60Ss, this could provide 67 modern helicopters for the Corps, which can also carry machine guns, rockets, and Hellfire missiles, unlike the V-22.
Marine Generals have evaded questions as to how the Marines can afford 360 V-22s, especially since other critical Marine aviation programs have been delayed as the V-22 is given priority. After a fatal V-22 crash in 2000, the General Accounting Office released a report projecting a V-22 average unit production price of $83 million. However, the Marine Corps insisted they would only cost $40 million. During an April 2000 news conference, a reporter asked the head of Marine Aviation, LtGen Fred McCorkle, to explain:
Q: Can you clear up for us the price tag on this aircraft? I've seen it various reported between $40 (million) and $80 million apiece. How much do they cost?
Lt. Gen. McCorkle: I'll be more than happy to, and this is on the back of an envelope, not something that you can take to the bank on price tag. But the way that I talk about price is what all the DOD aircraft are priced at is '94 dollars. It's -- the last official price on the MV-22 in '94 dollars is $39.9 million. I understand now that that is going to increase to, like, 41.7 or something million dollars, but when I hear somebody say it's $80 million, I'll say, Okay, so what does your aircraft cost and -- when we look at it in the same way? So normally, when you hear prices of $80 million or $100 million, somebody is comparing apples and oranges.
At a V-22 news conference several months later, another reporter asked McCorkle to clarify costs:
Q: Yes, you said that you requested a delay in Milestone 3. I assume that's to go for full production. And could you just run us through a little bit, first of all, the cost per -- what is the current cost projection per MV-22? And also, you were about to make that decision to go to full production, weren't you? What's the --
McCorkle: That's correct. And I didn't come down -- if you'll forgive me -- to talk about cost of the aircraft. I've done that before. We can get you a spreadsheet, if you want the cost, if you want the garage that goes with it. For those of you that I've talked to that say when somebody says $83 million, I just read -- I would hope to sell you your car, your next one, where you buy a $23,000 Chevy and I build your garage and give you the tires and batteries for 20 years, that will be about $85,000. So when you put it that way -- but we can get you the cost.
McCorkle led a passionate defense of the V-22 during his tenure. Soon after retiring from the Marines in October 2001, McCorkle joined the board of directors and as a senior advisor for GKN Aerospace Services (V-22 fuel tanks). He also serves on the Rolls-Royce North America board of directors (V-22 engines), and is a member of the board of directors of Lord Corporation (V-22 components). In addition, he has served as a consultant for Boeing Aerospace (V-22 maker) and Optical Air Data Systems (V-22 low airspeed indicator).
Cost information about the V-22 and other military procurement programs is often deceptive. The program manager now insists that V-22s are costing just $76 million each, despite the facts in the FY2005 Defense budget. What the V-22 manager does not reveal is that they hope the average cost for V-22s will fall dramatically and end up with an average of $76 million a copy over the entire production run. Since the V-22 began production in 1999, these projections have been wildly optimistic. The history of V-22 production clearly shows steady unit cost growth, so the program manager should be quoting a unit price higher than today's $115 million a copy if he wishes to advertise the average unit production cost.
The program excused higher costs in early years by noting these were Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) V-22s. This designation is used to explain high costs during the first two years of production since costs associated with purchasing production tooling, and hiring and training production workers must be included. That excuse was valid until 2001 when the V-22 entered normal production with a dozen of V-22s funded each year, despite having failed testing in 2001. This is the oddest production line in US military history since it turns out incomplete V-22s which are placed in storage in hopes that further testing scheduled to continue through FY2008 can produce a safe and effective final design. Then the first 100 of so V-22s must be sent back though the production line for upgrades to the final "Block C" configuration. The Marines have not included these V-22 upgrade costs in their future aviation budget plans nor in the quoted unit price.
The current excuse is that V-22s are costing so much because of inefficient low rates of production. However, the Navy has been buying only around 15 MH-60S a year, and those cost four times less. The FY2005 budget also contains a $320.4 million request of four Marine Corps KC-130J tankers; or $80.1 million each. This aircraft is twice the size of the V-22 with twice as many engines (the same engines too), and is now produced at the same rate as the V-22. So why does a V-22 cost 44% more than a big C-130 and 425% more than an MH-60S?
Marine Aviation Plans to Quadruple Spending
There is a shocking chart at the bottom of this link to the 2003 Marine Almanac (pdf). Marine Aviation procurement dollars have been $1 to $2 billion a year for the past 15 years. To afford the V-22, the Corps expects funding to rise $1 billion a year starting in FY2006 and eventually quadruple to over $6 billion a year in FY2009. Congressmen have become big spenders, but with the record budget deficits, it is doubtful Congress will increase procurement funding four fold. In addition to this huge amount needed for the Osprey, the Corps needs funding for the CH-53E upgrade, and the Corps recently announced that it needed $250 million to outfit their ancient CH-46s with new engines due to delays in V-22 deliveries. Meanwhile, the H-1 upgrade program has just begun and will cost twice as much as planned, and the F/A-18s are getting old and the new F-35 is scheduled for several billion dollars in annual funding starting in FY2009. The Corps has not budgeted the billion dollars needed to rebuild the first 100 or so new V-22's sitting around in hangers, which a recent whisterblower lawsuit claims are filled with defective hydraulic parts.
When the V-22 began production in 1999, the procurement plan was to quickly ramp up to 36 a year and finish up in FY2009. However, two fatal crashes led to an 18-month standdown, followed by a new six year research, development, evaluation, and testing phase which is eating up funds intended for production. Here is the recently revised MV-22 procurement plan for 360 aircraft:
FY05 - 9
FY06 - 17
FY07 - 26
FY08 - 31
FY09 - 48
FY10 - 48
FY11 - 48
FY12 - 48
FY13 - 40
Note: The 50 CV-22s desired by the US Air Force special operations command will be produced in small batches mixed with MV-22 production.
If the V-22 is fixed by 2008 and produced in higher quantities, they may get the price down to $100 million a copy, but the Corps needs $4.8 billion a year starting in FY09 just for V-22 procurement, which is also the target date when F-35s are to begin production. This does not include the billion or so needed to upgrade the first 100 V-22s to "Block C" when testing and development is done in FY2008. Finally, the Corps will be forced to begin retiring its CH-53Es, which can carry three times more than the V-22, in 2010 because they will become too old and unsafe since no money will exist to upgrade and overhaul them. Moreover, this all assumes the complex and problem plagued V-22 will complete testing by FY2008. Delay seems likely as the V-22's flight control software problems continue.
The Secretary of Defense or Congress must demand that the Marines present a realistic aviation procurement plan, just as the US Army has recently done with the cancellation of the RAH-66 Comanche helicopter. The reasonable solution is to end V-22 production this year and hope the 80 or so already funded can be eventually upgraded for special long range missions. Meanwhile, V-22 production funding can be diverted to purchase dozens of Navy MH-60S helicopters, or perhaps the new larger S-92 or EH-101 helicopters, although they will require a couple years of proper military evaluation.
The most effective strategy is to buy the MH-60S since it can also be employed as an attack helicopter, or outfitted for special roles using Army developed packages: an MH-60Q air ambulance, an EH-60 for electronic warfare, and the MH-60K with larger fuel tanks with twice the range of a V-22. Spare parts and training will be economical since the Marines can use the existing Navy pipeline. Hopefully, enough funding will remain to upgrade more CH-53Es; the current unfunded plan is to only upgrade only 111 and retire the other 54. Another option is for the Corps to acquire and upgrade the 40 newer MH-53Es which the Navy plans to retire soon. A final option is to trade the 80 or so V-22s now in testing or storage to the Air Force Special Operations command in exchange for their 38 newer MH-53Js, which they plan to retire as CV-22s come into service. MH-53s can be sent through the CH-53X upgrade and overhaul program to insure commonality with Marine heavy lifters.
These are the options which must be discussed. The current plan of passing the buck cannot continue or Marine Aviation will soon derail. A mixture of H-60s and more H-53s can provide the Marines with a more effective helicopter force than the unaffordable plan for 360 V-22s. Today's MH-60S can carry three times the payload of the original CH-60As from the early 1980s, and has been so modernized that it has few common components. An upgraded CH-53E will prove far more capable than the original design of 20 years ago. Ironically, a mixed force of H-60s and H-53s is what former Marine and Secretary of the Navy James Webb proposed in the early 1980s when the V-22 design was deemed unsafe and cancelled. The V-22 is unsafe and unaffordable. It is time for leaders to step forth and address this issue.
-------- china
The 50-Year Communist Assault on 5000 Years of Chinese Culture
by Sascha Matuszak
February 28, 2004
http://antiwar.com/matuszak/?articleid=2059
It's ironic that the Mainland demands only patriots may rule in Hong Kong and Taiwan - patriots meaning real Chinese and not bastardized versions corrupted by Western interference; Chinese who support the Party.
5000 years of culture is a term used often here to describe the confusion that often arises when West meets East on the Mainland, but 50 years of destruction is a term not often heard.
The damage done to Han culture, the culture supposedly representing the vast majority of Mainland Chinese over the past few decades is immeasurable. Tourists coming to China have to seek out the villages of the Yi, Qiang, Bai, Naxi and Dong minorities to get a glimpse of what China was before the Party and its excesses did best to erase those 5000 years.
Or they can go to Hong Kong and Taiwan, where the old written language and Chinese Buddhist rites Wu Shu and Feng Shui are alive and prospering.
In these renegade tracts of the Motherland, the poets, monks and masters escaped the fates of their Mainland compatriots who, in the 60s and 70s, were crushed under the heels of Red Guard Zealots and now, in the modern era, are reduced to sagging shambles awaiting the wrecking ball.
Kill All the Hutongs
The demise of Beijing's hutongs has been slow and painful, with forced relocations laced with greed driving the process. The Seaboard cities have exported their lust for mega-plexes to the western cities, with huge real estate conglomerates WanDa and YiDa from Dalian leading the way. WanDa specializes in huge department store buildings and housing complexes - they just signed a huge contract with Warner Bros. to introduce massive cinemas to Chinese audiences.
YiDa is launching a campaign to gain the rights to promote 21st Century's real estate practices throughout China - they started last year in Chengdu http://www.c21chengdu.com.cn, and now they are looking to expand. YiDa's marketing manager, Owen Chen, says his company realizes the need for culture in a modern society - he outlined the Group's plans to build a complex of buildings fusing IT and Taoism in the Taoist QingCheng Mountains north of Chengdu.
"We must leave something for our children," he said. "These cement boxes just don't cut it."
But Old Chengdu is virtually dead. The last remnants of what once a cultural capital are locked in a battle for their lives with the local government, who is more interested in a candy-coated refurbishing of the area than in the 1000 years of culture and history the neighborhood represents. And while the old city is under siege and rampant construction and development turns the city's waterways into cesspools, the Chengdu Government wanders around in dreamland.
The old parts of any large city in China are going or gone. Hong Kong's super-modern skyline draws visitors away from the islands and New Territories were the modern and the ancient co-exist and Han culture is visible.
If one were to take photos of the skylines of Shenzhen, Taiyuan and Chengdu, there would be no discernible difference. And there would be no old city to offset the sterility.
Where Are All the Kung Fu Masters?
Wu Shu on the mainland is in a dismal state. All the great masters left for Hong Kong and abroad during the war on ancient China waged by the Communist Party. Now, if one wants to study classical styles, Australia and the US offer better schools for common students than China proper.
On the Mainland, Wu Shu has degenerated into crude fighting styles used by soldiers and cops to beat down migrant workers when they fail to produce legal documents. The few masters that do exist live off of the money their students make as security guards. Traditional Wu Shu was always a guarded secret in China, and now that secret is going to the grave with the old masters due to a lack of students.
In remote towns like Hanyuan, tourist towns like Dali in Yunnan and the glorified Shaolin Temples, masters are still to be found - and a revival is happening, but if it were not for those anti-government traitors who fled the Mainland in 1949, classical Chinese Wu Shu would have all but disappeared.
Business First, Culture Later
The lust for riches is strong in China. Every endeavor is met with a pragmatic, "does it pay the rent?"
Musicians in Chongqing, a city with migrant workers swarming all over the buildings and bridges, speak reverently of making a difference and bringing meaning to the music the Mainland produces now. They scoff at Wang Fei, Liu De Hua, Zhang Bo Zhi and other Chinese pop stars that are adored by the masses.
A huge market has popped up for burned CDs from anywhere but China - French trance, English disco, Dub, Indian break-beat - anything to feed the appetites of the musicians here. But every one of these artists engages in CD swapping in their free-time - most days are spent producing "Business Music" to stay alive.
Fu Qiang, a music aficionado who owns hundreds of CDs - just began a business selling CDs with accompanying videos to the discos and bars of Chongqing and Chengdu. But the CDs he sells through his business are remixed dance tracks from the discos of the 1980s in London.
"This music is all crap, but they love it in the discos and I need to eat."
Beijing's "patriots" would aim to crush the spirit of Hong Kong and Taiwan, just as the Red Bandits tried to crush 5000 years of culture on the Mainland.
--------
Taiwan's Chen Leads Huge Human Chain Against China
February 28, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-taiwan-china-rally.html
TAIPEI (Reuters) - Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian and up to 2 million of his supporters formed a human chain down the length of the island Saturday in its biggest ever protest against China.
The day-long demonstration to oppose China's deployment of nearly 500 missiles aimed at Taiwan is seen as Chen's best chance of rallying support for his re-election in a March 20 vote.
After saying prayers and releasing a flock of white doves in the morning, the protesters raised joined hands and shouted ``Yes Taiwan,'' ``Oppose Missiles'' and ``Love Peace'' down the 500-km (310 mile) west coast of Taiwan.
``We formed a great wall of democracy and a great wall of peace,'' Chen told thousands of cheering supporters waving flags and blowing horns in the northern county of Miaoli.
``We showed the world our determination to recognize Taiwan and protect Taiwan,'' Chen said, flanked by former president Lee Teng-hui, who backs his re-election.
The rally ended peacefully.
Chen's campaign is centered on a controversial referendum to be held during the election that will ask voters to back greater missile defenses against China.
Beijing, which says Taiwan is a renegade province that must be reunited, by force if necessary, views the referendum as a dry run for a vote on independence that it says could lead to war.
The ``Hand in Hand Taiwan'' rally was inspired by a human chain in the Baltic states of Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania in 1989, when more than two million people called for independence from the Soviet Union.
Organizers estimated close to two million people took part in the event, which also marked the anniversary of a massacre of thousands of people killed when the Nationalist troops crushed islandwide rioting which broke out on February 28, 1947.
Wednesday, Li Weiyi, spokesman for China's policymaking Taiwan Affairs Office, said it would be wrong to use the 1947 uprising to stir up confrontation between native Taiwanese and mainland immigrants or create tension across the Taiwan Strait.
IDEA OF INDEPENDENCE
``The DPP wants to reinforce the idea of Taiwan as an independent country against China,'' said Chao Chien-min, a political science professor at the National Chengchi University, referring to Chen's Democratic Progressive Party.
``The DPP aims to consolidate its core pro-independence supporters, who have been hit by the economic downturn and are less certain about voting for Chen this time,'' he said.
Taiwan split from China after a civil war ended in 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Nationalist government retreated to the island. The Nationalists ruled Taiwan for more than five decades, until they were ousted by Chen in 2000.
Opinion polls show Chen and Nationalist candidate Lien Chan locked in a close race. A survey of 1,161 voters by the mass circulation United Daily News found 40 percent would vote for Lien against 37 percent for Chen.
``We fought hard for our democracy. If we don't stand up and let our voice be heard, China will not take us seriously. Our democracy will amount to nothing,'' said businessman Chang Ping-chen, who joined the chain in Taipei with 20 family members, including his 65-year-old father and two-year-old daughter.
Lien and tens of thousands of his supporters held a blood drive to commemorate the day, also known as Taiwan's Peace Memorial Day. They hugged each other at 2:28 p.m, to mark the anniversary of the ``2-28 incident.''
-------- haiti
Gangs, Looters Roam Haiti's Capital City Tense as Rebels Approach
By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13184-2004Feb27.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb. 27 -- Armed pro-government gangs roamed the streets of this capital on Friday, and thugs looted businesses and hijacked cars, forcing residents to stay in their homes in anticipation of a threatened assault by rebels who have vowed to capture or kill President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
There was a marked deterioration of security throughout the city of about 1.3 million people, three weeks into an armed insurgency that reportedly was moving toward the capital. In Washington, the Pentagon was considering sending 2,200 U.S. Marines to stand by off the coast as a precaution, officials said. The U.S. government sent 50 Marines earlier this week to protect the U.S. Embassy and its staff.
In a sharp escalation of diplomatic language by the U.S. government, the U.S. Embassy here issued a statement Friday night saying that armed groups had "begun to burn, pillage and kill" and "are spreading terror and attacking civilians and the general population and are acting in the name of Jean-Bertrand Aristide." The statement called on him to "stop this blind violence."
"Mr. Aristide must understand that his honor, legacy and reputation are now at stake," said the statement, which also issued "an equally urgent appeal" to the rebels to stop their armed advance on the capital.
Both the rebels, who include former death-squad and military members, and their civilian opponents accuse Aristide of abandoning his promises to help the poor. They also charge that he has profited from international drug-trafficking and has enforced his will by arming gangs who terrorize and kill his opponents.
Aristide denies the allegations. Vowing to stay in office until his term ends in 2006, he has appealed for international forces to protect him against those he calls "terrorists" who are threatening his life and Haitian democracy. Hundreds of foreigners and Haitian Americans jammed into the Port-au-Prince airport, only to discover that all flights had been canceled. American Airlines, the main carrier between Haiti and the United States, has canceled all flights until at least Wednesday.
The U.S. Coast Guard repatriated 531 Haitian boat people on Friday, the Associated Press reported. It was the first return of refugees trying to flee the country since the rebellion against Aristide began on Feb. 5.
Every night this week, masked gangs loyal to Aristide have set up roadblocks of burning tires, cinder blocks and burned-out cars, stopping cars, searching them for weapons and looking for rebels. But the roadblocks were enforced around the clock on Friday, with thick black smoke rising from the flaming piles of tires on trash-strewn downtown streets.
"I'm ready to die for Aristide, to defend the National Palace and his five years," said Gary Jean Robert, one of hundreds of Aristide supporters who rallied downtown, close to the palace. "We never had anyone who cared for the poor people before. If he leaves, there will be a lot of bloodshed."
Witnesses said gangs supporting the president were throwing rocks and smashing car windows throughout the city, beating drivers they believed were opposed to Aristide. In Haiti's complicated political environment, people have reportedly been attacked simply for appearing well-to-do; the elite in the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, where 80 percent of the 8 million people live in poverty, are among Aristide's most vocal opponents.
It became increasingly difficult to distinguish the militia defending the president from criminals taking advantage of the chaotic conditions. Drivers reported that gangs at roadblocks were demanding bribes of $5 or more -- a week's salary for most Haitians -- to let cars pass.
At least two car dealerships, one in the suburb of Delmas and another on the airport road, reportedly were sacked and looted Friday and all their cars were stolen. Several warehouses at the port were also reportedly overrun by hundreds of people who carried away sacks of food and other merchandise. There were reports of some businesses being set ablaze.
Sporadic gunfire could be heard around the city. Local radio reports said that two bodies had been found near a cemetery in the well-to-do Petionville neighborhood, and two other people were also reported killed Thursday and Friday. At least 70 people have been killed since the insurrection began with the rebels seizing the northern city of Gonaives on Feb. 5.
In the past two days, rebels have taken control of cities and towns not just in the north, but south and west of the capital. The town of Mirebalais, about 30 miles northeast of Port-au-Prince, reportedly came under rebel control Thursday night, along with Les Cayes, Haiti's third-largest city, about 100 miles southwest of the capital. St. Marc, a city about 40 miles north of here, was reported to be the last major city outside the capital still nominally controlled by the government.
Rebel leader Guy Philippe, a former military officer and police chief, said this week that he would not stop until Aristide was detained or dead. He said on local radio Thursday night that his forces had surrounded the capital and were ready to attack; on Friday he said he hoped to spend his 36th birthday on Sunday in the National Palace. There were unconfirmed reports of rebel forces closing to within a few miles of Port-au-Prince, which was awash with rumors of rebel sightings and movements -- all adding to a sense of insecurity in an already tense city.
Aristide's office is being protected by national police manning .50-caliber machine guns. Hundreds of his supporters massed near the city's central Champs de Mars Park near the National Palace in a show of solidarity. Many waved open palms with fingers spread, shouting "Five years!" in reference to the length of Aristide's presidential term.
-------
Aristide Urges Calm After Gangs Rampage in Haiti
February 28, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/international/international-haiti.html
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (Reuters) - Embattled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide called on Saturday for an end to looting and violence after many of his armed loyalists terrorized residents of Haiti's capital as rebels advanced on the city.
``We condemn that (looting). When it's not good we have to say it's not good,'' the president said in a national TV address. He called on Haitians to stop carjacking and thefts but continue to barricade the city against any attack by rebels already in control of half the country.
Hours after his address, many streets were emptier of people and cars. Some barricades, flaming the night before, had been taken down. Others were unmanned. Most shops and gas stations were closed amid increasing food shortages.
The president's address came shortly after the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince issued a statement saying pro-government groups had begun to ``burn, pillage and kill'' and calling on Aristide to put a halt to it.
At least 65 people have been killed during the three-week-old revolt against Aristide, accused of corruption and political thuggery by his foes.
On Friday, bands of armed men, many wearing masks, roamed in trucks and cars through the chaotic capital. At least three people were killed -- one apparently hacked with machetes and two found near the airport, one with hands bound.
A ragtag band of former soldiers and gang members are trying to unseat Aristide. The president is a one-time populist hero of Haitian democracy who is backed by an ill-trained, 4,000-member police force and armed supporters from the slums.
In South Africa, Beeld newspaper said on Saturday South African police have arranged to send 150 R1 rifles, 5,000 rounds of ammunition, 200 smoke bombs and 200 bullet-proof jackets to Haiti for government forces next week. There was no immediate comment from South African officials.
With few police now on the streets, Aristide called on his supporters to set up barricades at night to stop any rebel attack.
CALL FOR BARRICADES
``If you think barricades are necessary, yes, you can do that ... but when the sun appears and the people have to go to work people should be able to work.'' Aristide said.
He urged the country's 46,000 civil servants to go to work on Monday, adding, ``I will also be in my office on Monday.''
In Washington, U.S. defense officials said they were considering sending a three-ship group carrying U.S. Marines to Haiti to help deal with the crisis in the Caribbean country of 8 million, the poorest country in the Americas.
Aristide, who has predicted a blood bath if the rebels enter the capital, told CNN by telephone from Port-au-Prince Washington should take a stand for democracy in Haiti.
``I think President Bush sent troops to Afghanistan ... Here we want to defend democracy. We have a common ground,'' Aristide said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan was ``increasingly concerned'' at the deteriorating situation in Haiti and called for a peaceful solution, his spokesman said in a statement.
He warned leaders would be held ``accountable for any breaches of international human rights and humanitarian law.''
Rebel leader Guy Philippe, a former police chief accused of plotting coups who returned from exile in the Dominican Republic to join the revolt, said his men planned to cut off Port-au-Prince from the ocean.
``All the boats should come and stay in Cap Haitien so starting next week Port-au-Prince will not receive any guns or anything,'' Philippe said on Friday. Philippe has said his men have surrounded Port-au-Prince and are awaiting orders to attack.
A negotiated end to the crisis, which erupted on Feb. 5 in the western city of Gonaives, seemed far away.
Aristide's political foes -- who have distanced themselves from the armed revolt but share its aim of seeing Aristide gone -- have rejected power-sharing and reiterated demands the president leave the palace.
--------
U.S. Considers Options in Haiti
Use of Marines Is Discussed, but Volatility Makes Planning Difficult
By Peter Slevin and Bradley Graham
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A14
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13558-2004Feb27.html
The Pentagon has stepped up contingency planning for an international security force that could be sent to beleaguered Haiti, including the possible dispatch of as many as 2,200 Marines to help contain a crisis or assist in a political settlement, Bush administration officials said yesterday.
U.S. officials stressed that conditions remain too volatile to predict whether troops would be sent or for what mission, as the standoff continued among President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, democratic opposition leaders and loosely organized rebels. The rebels claimed control of another city yesterday.
President Bush and his national security team held fast to their position that a security force must follow a negotiated political solution, lest foreign troops or police forces find themselves in the middle of a dangerous civil war. Other governments agreed, and several have urged Aristide to resign as they worked on contingency plans of their own.
"Buffers are always bad," said a senior U.S. official involved in Haiti policy. "You're drawn into a conflict and you don't have the ability to affect the outcome. You're just holding people apart."
A senior Pentagon official described increased urgency and seriousness in planning discussions that addressed a range of situations, from the relative calm possible with a political compromise to a complete breakdown of law and order. Five or six options were under discussion, the official said, ranging from small forces to large ones, involving various mixes of Army paratroopers, Navy ships and Marines.
The State Department warned last night that security in Haiti had "deteriorated significantly." With major airlines halting flights to Haiti, the department advised U.S. citizens to "seek a safe haven and remain there until the situation improves or safe transport out of the country becomes available."
Joanne Mariner, deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Americas division, warned yesterday that "a rebel attack on Port-au-Prince could lead to widespread bloodshed and indiscriminate destruction of civilian property."
The Pentagon official said the administration's most immediate concern is the safety of U.S. Embassy personnel and other foreign nationals in the capital, Port-au-Prince. Fifty Marines arrived this week to reinforce the embassy and other U.S. facilities.
The administration is contemplating positioning as many as 2,200 Marines in ships off the coast, most likely including elements of the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit based at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The Marines, officials said, could assist with emergency rescue and evacuation, along with an ability to react to the difficulties of foreign citizens and Haitian refugees.
The unit's Web site quoted Lt. Gen. H.P. Osman, commander of the 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force at Lejeune, as telling Marines of the 24th MEU a week ago they might be dispatched to Haiti. "Things are bubbling right now in a nation in our own hemisphere, and . . . you're the Marines I'm going to be looking at to possibly answer that contingency," Osman was quoted as saying.
In the event of a settlement, U.S. forces could participate in an international peacekeeping force, defense officials said. But the lead in such a force -- whether composed of police, soldiers or a combination -- might be taken by Canada or France.
The part U.S. personnel would play remains undetermined.
Opinions differ about the proper makeup of a force, an issue that depends partly on conditions in Haiti. Some analysts and advocates say a military force strong enough to deter armed rebels should be dispatched right away. Others suggest that a political settlement is essential to clear the way for a lighter police presence.
The Bush administration would prefer that any security contingent be limited to a policing role. But policymakers are examining the possibility of deploying substantial combat units to provide stable conditions in which the peacekeepers can function.
"The police thing is ultimately where you want to get to, but the police have to be sure they're entering a secure environment," the Pentagon official said. "It's really too early to predict anything with any certainty. We just don't know what direction things will go."
Canada became the latest government to withdraw its support from Aristide when Foreign Minister Bill Graham told an interviewer that Aristide should reconsider his insistence on finishing his term in February 2006. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell made the same suggestion on Thursday, as did French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin the day before.
De Villepin met for an hour yesterday in Paris with Haitian Foreign Minister Joseph Philippe Antonio, presidential cabinet director Jean-Claude Desgranges and two cabinet members. De Villepin reiterated France's call for Aristide to step down to end the violence.
"Each hour counts if we want to avoid an uncontrollable spiral of violence," de Villepin said in the meeting, according to an aide. He said Haitians must work to install a transitional unity government. Haitian opposition leaders are due in Paris next week.
Correspondent Keith Richburg in Paris contributed to this report.
-------- iran
Iranian defense minister threatens Israel in case of attack
BEIRUT (AFP)
Feb 28, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/040228192145.9o4pjmw3.html
Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani threatened Israel here Saturday with a blinding response if the Jewish state attacked Iran, despite ruling out the possibility of such a strike.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would "suffer a lot ... if he commits the stupidity of attacking Iranian targets," Shamkhani told reporters, calling Israel a "glass fortress."
He added, however, that he "totally excludes" an Israeli attack against his country.
On December 21, Israel's Haaretz newspaper quoted Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz as saying that the Jewish state could, if necessary, attack Iran's nuclear sites.
Asked about a report on Iran's state radio earlier Saturday that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had been captured in Pakistan, Shamkhani said he "was not sure about the information".
Instead, the minister said he had conducted "fruitful" meetings here with Lebanese leaders and Hassan Nasrallah, chief of the Shiite Hezbollah movement, which is supported by Iran.
-------- iraq
Iraqi Council Shiites Walk Out of Session On Constitution
Role of Islamic Law Causes Rift With Sunnis
By Rajiv Chandrasekaran
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A13
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13537-2004Feb27.html
BAGHDAD, Feb. 27 -- Shiite Muslim members of Iraq's Governing Council walked out of a session to draft an interim constitution on Friday after a dispute over women's rights, exposing deep divisions between the country's two principal religious groups as they seek to form a transitional government.
The walkout by eight of the council's 13 Shiite members, the first since the body was formed in July, casts doubt on the council's ability to meet a Saturday deadline set by the Bush administration for drafting an interim constitution. Several members and their aides said the protest provided the clearest indication yet of the political gulf between majority Shiites, who largely favor a greater role for Islamic law, and minority Sunnis, who prefer a more secular system.
The disagreement stemmed from a decision to vote on a resolution introduced by some Shiites that would have imposed sharia, or Islamic law, in adjudicating divorces, inheritances and other family matters. When the resolution was rejected by Sunni members and a few liberal Shiites, two dozen women who had been invited into the council chamber erupted into applause, prompting the eight Shiite members to leave.
"They didn't like it," said council member Mahmoud Othman, a Sunni Kurd. "The women were cheering, so they got upset and they walked out."
The departure deprived the 25-member council of a quorum and halted work on the drafting of the interim constitution, which was scheduled to begin after the vote. Although it was viewed by some in the chamber as political theater, the walkout was the latest in a series of tense disagreements between Shiites and Sunnis about the shape of Iraq's interim government.
Several Shiite members have renewed their insistence in recent days that Islamic law be the sole source of legislation, instead of one source among many, as Sunnis and the Bush administration favor. If Islam were to become the sole basis of legislation, some religious moderates fear it could mean the loss of long-standing women's rights and the introduction of such punishments as cutting off a thief's hand.
After years of subjugation under former president Saddam Hussein, Shiite members also want to ensure that they retain clear control of the transitional government, which would take over after the U.S. civilian occupation ends on June 30. They have insisted that the interim constitution include a provision stating that if the transitional assembly cannot agree on one president -- presumably a Shiite -- then there must be five presidents, three of whom must be Shiites. "The Shiites want to make sure they are in control," said Ghazi Yawar, a Sunni council member. "Because they consider themselves a majority, they want things their way."
Sunni politicians said they were surprised by the walkout. "It's absurd and unnecessary at this critical juncture," said a top aide to a Sunni council member, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "This is a period where we need to be showing unity and coming to decisions on critical matters. An act of petulance will not serve the people's interest."
The Shiite members who staged the walkout could not be reached for comment on Friday. They held meetings late into the night at the residence of council member Ahmed Chalabi, a moderate Shiite who has allied himself with Shiite conservatives in recent weeks in an apparent attempt to build political support.
Sunni members said a meeting between both sides had been scheduled for Saturday morning. They said they would attempt to resume negotiations over the interim constitution but expressed doubt that the document would be completed by the end of the day.
Arab and Kurdish Sunni leaders said they were unwilling to bend on the issue of Islamic law. The U.S. administrator of Iraq, L. Paul Bremer, has also indicated that he will veto any interim constitution that makes Islam the sole source of legislation.
"It is very difficult to imagine that we will finish it in a day," Othman said. "There are many things left for us to resolve."
Othman said U.S. officials had urged council members to try to reach agreement on most, if not all, issues on Saturday, so they can announce that they have met the Bush administration's Feb. 28 deadline for completing the document. "They're pushing us to declare something," he said. "They told us we can resolve other issues later on."
Sticking to the Saturday deadline has been a priority for Bremer. The date, along with the planned June 30 handover of sovereignty, is among the few milestones the Bush administration hopes to preserve from an earlier plan for the political transition that has been largely abandoned. Daniel Senor, a spokesman for Bremer, said the U.S. occupation authority remained optimistic that Shiites and Sunnis would reach agreement on the interim constitution, also known as the transitional administrative law. "There were ups and downs," he said. "This is to be expected in any negotiations. But based on the discussions the Governing Council has had with us, we believe that they are making progress on finalizing the transitional administrative law."
After the Shiites walked out, the Sunnis continued to meet unofficially.
One issue that will not be spelled out in the interim constitution is what sort of transitional government Iraq will have when the U.S. civil occupation ends. With the Bush administration scrapping its plan for regional caucuses, U.S. officials and Iraqi leaders must decide what sort of administration will rule the country until elections can be held in several months. That system will be described in an addendum to the interim constitution, council members said.
For now, Kurdish leaders appear to be allied with Sunni Arabs, a group with whom they have had intense disagreements about the future of Kurdish pesh merga militia, the division of Iraq's oil revenue and the status of former Kurdish territory that had been annexed to Arab-dominated provinces by Hussein.
Kurdish leaders want the pesh merga to become an official national guard force in a Kurdish autonomous region, but Bremer and Sunni leaders want the central government to have greater control over the militia. Arab and Kurd politicians said that issue and others relating to Kurdish autonomy are scheduled to be discussed on Saturday, which could result in a split between the Sunni Arabs and Kurds, leaving three separate groups fighting for the drafting pen.
--------
THE CONSTITUTION
Iraqi Women 1, Islamists 0
February 28, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/middleeast/28FIGH.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Feb. 27 - Some Iraqi leaders said Friday that the deadline for completing the country's temporary constitution might not be met following a clash over the role of Islamic clerics in family law.
Mahmood Othman, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, said that several Shiite members of the council stormed out of the chambers Friday following the repeal of a proposal that would have given Islamic clerics a role in adjudicating family disputes.
The deadline for completing the constitution is Saturday. "It will not be finished," Mr. Othman said. "We need more time."
The atmosphere was so strained by the walkout of the Shiite members that L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, summoned the entire Governing Council to his residence for dinner to help ease the tension.
The debate over the temporary constitution has been strained by a number of issues, especially the role of Islam in governing the country.
The confrontation over the imposition of Islamic religious principles in family matters has been brewing since December, when the Governing Council, led by the representative of a conservative Shiite party, allowed each major religious group to apply its own traditions to family affairs.
Under many interpretations of Islamic law, a woman's right to divorce and inheritance are strictly limited. Some interpretations of Islamic law also allow polygamy, as well as permit men to marry girls.
Many Iraqi women expressed concern at the legislation, and Mr. Bremer did not sign it, preventing it from taking effect.
Some of the women on the Governing Council, however, vowed to repeal the legislation, in part to send a message to a future sovereign Iraqi government.
On Friday, the council, led by Dr. Raja Habib Khuzai, a female Shiite member of the council, voted to repeal the law. With that, according to council members, five male Shiite members of the council stormed out of the room.
"I am very proud of what we did today," said Dr. Khuzai, a physician from Diwaniya in southern Iraq. "Under this law, everyone had to go to the clerics. Women would have had very few rights."
-------- israel / palestine
A Day of Israeli-Palestinian Violence;
Civil Disorder in Nablus
February 28, 2004
By JAMES BENNET
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/middleeast/28MIDE.html
JERUSALEM, Feb. 27 - At least one Palestinian gunman shot and killed two Israelis as they drove near the southern edge of Israel's boundary with the West Bank on Friday night, the Israeli Army said.
The attack came on a day of chaotic violence, as a suicide bomber riding a bicycle blew himself up near a Gaza Strip settlement, hurting no one else, and stone-throwing Palestinians clashed with riot-equipped police officers at a Jerusalem site sacred to Muslims and Jews.
In Nablus, on the West Bank, the long-serving mayor, Ghassan W. Shakah, abruptly announced his resignation in protest against what he said was Palestinian leaders' failure to stop his city's slide into chaos.
In Nablus, the Palestinians' commercial center and home of their stock exchange, armed men presenting themselves as freedom fighters are establishing control as the governing Palestinian Authority crumbles. They have taken to seizing hostages for ransom and extorting money from local businessmen.
Last fall, gunmen killed the brother of Mr. Shakah, who once said in an interview that he had dreamed, before this conflict began more than three years ago, that his city would rank with Paris, London, or Washington. Nablus is ancient, built by Romans near the remains of a Canaanite city.
"I see my city collapsing, and I don't want to stand idly by and watch this collapse," Mr. Shakah told The Associated Press on Friday. He was also quoted as referring to the Israelis, saying, "I don't deny the role of the occupation in destroying the city through the frequent invasions, but we as an Authority and as citizens are doing nothing to protect the city."
For most of the last two years, Israeli forces have prevented armed, uniformed Palestinian policemen from working in cities like Nablus, saying they often proved to be terrorists.
Mr. Shakah is a senior member of Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement and has been a close ally of Mr. Arafat in the past. He said he would remain in his job until May 1 to finish several projects, including a shopping mall.
Seeking to hold off restive members of Al Fatah, Mr. Arafat promised Friday to call elections within a year for positions in the movement. Younger members have chafed at what they call corruption and mismanagement by longtime officials of the group. The Fatah leadership is dominated by the so-called Tunisians, officials who returned with Mr. Arafat from exile in Tunis in 1994. Fatah politicians who have lived longer in the occupied territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip feel underrepresented.
Also Friday, the Israeli Army reported finding a tunnel almost 200 feet long that it said two Palestinian gunmen used Thursday to enter an Israeli-run industrial zone in the northern Gaza Strip, where they killed an Israeli soldier. Both Palestinians were shot to death on Thursday.
The army said soldiers had found a Palestinian police uniform inside the tunnel, which it said originated near a Palestinian police outpost in a warren of dozens of Palestinian commercial stalls. Soldiers razed the stalls.
The industrial zone remained closed on Friday.
In the southern Gaza Strip near the settlement of Kfar Darom, a Palestinian on a bicycle was approaching the settlement's greenhouses when soldiers demanded that he stop, the army said. He then blew himself up.
Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for the attack.
In Jerusalem, Israeli police officers in stated pursuit of stone throwers stormed the square outside Al Aksa mosque, on the man-made plateau revered by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary and by Jews as the Temple Mount.
Palestinians said the police had not been provoked. But a police spokesman said the Israeli forces had been trying to stop a Palestinian riot and protect worshipers at the Western Wall, below the plateau. He said two rocks had landed on the plaza of the Western Wall.
The police fired rubber-coated steel balls and threw stun grenades. A few light injuries were reported on both sides.
Demonstrations continued Friday against Israel's construction of a barrier against West Bank Palestinians. On Thursday, Israeli forces shot two Palestinians to death and wounded dozens more after protesters threw stones during a demonstration at the village of Biddo.
On Friday, Israeli forces fired tear gas to disperse demonstrators in the village of Qibya and just south of there in Budrus. In both cases the Israelis acted after Palestinian teenagers threw stones toward Israeli positions at the end of peaceful demonstrations. No injuries were reported.
In the shooting on Friday night, an Israeli man and woman were driving near the so-called green line that separates Israel and the West Bank when they came under fire, an army spokesman said. He said the car had been near the settlement of Eshkolot, but on the Israeli side of the boundary. Israeli forces were searching the area late Friday night.
-------
Israeli Airstrike on Car Kills 3 in Gaza
February 28, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Palestinians-Gaza-Explosion.html
GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) -- An Israeli helicopter fired missiles at a car in the Gaza Strip on Saturday, killing three people -- including an Islamic Jihad militant -- and wounding 15 others, doctors said.
One of the dead was identified by his family as Islamic Jihad militant Ayman Dahdouh. The other two victims were not immediately identified.
The two missiles targeted a small gray Subaru traveling on a road linking Gaza City with the Jebaliya refugee camp. A thunderous explosion was heard along with the chops of helicopter blades.
Ambulances raced to the scene as a warplane flew overhead, firing flares.
The car was pulverized, and Palestinian security officials strained to keep order around the scene as surging crowds jumped on the wreckage and called for revenge.
The airstrike was carried out in a densely populated residential area, and three children were among the wounded, said doctors at Gaza's Shifa Hospital. One girl was in critical condition and another boy was seen bleeding from his head.
One of the wounded told The Associated Press from the hospital that a helicopter fired at least two missiles at the vehicle.
Hundreds of people gathered at the hospital to check on the conditions and identities of the casualties. Some gunmen at the morgue were crying.
An Israeli military spokesman said he was checking the report of the airstrike.
Israel has frequently sent helicopter gunships and warplanes to kill Palestinian militants in targeted missile strikes during more than three years of fighting.
The last such strike was Feb. 7, when an attack helicopter fired a missile that shattered a car, killing an Islamic Jihad leader in the vehicle and a 12-year-old boy on his way to school.
-------- landmines
Washington Drops Bomb on Landmine Ban
by Marty Logan
February 28, 2004
(Inter Press Service)
http://antiwar.com/ips/logan.php?articleid=2058
Groups that have fought for the elimination of anti-personnel landmines worldwide lashed out Friday at the U.S. decision to not sign the global Landmine Ban Treaty. They warned that Washington's snub could embolden nations already employing or considering use of the weapons.
The United States has not used these weapons - which have killed an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 people around the world each year - since 1991, and has not produced them since 1997. In September, anti-mine groups, which played a huge role in creating the treaty, predicted the United States would sign on to the convention by 2006.
But on Friday the administration of President George W. Bush said it would not sign the treaty, that it would push back the date to eliminate some mines to 2010, and would retain the right to use other "smart" mines indefinitely. But Washington also promised to boost funding for global anti-mine activities for 2005 by 50 percent over 2003 levels.
Since 1997, some 150 countries have signed the Mine Ban Treaty, which prohibits the use, trade, production and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines.
Washington's mine policy has been under review since 2001 but Bush's predecessor, Bill Clinton, in 1998 directed that the US military must search for alternatives to the weapon, phase out most of its use outside of the Koreas by 2003, and that the government would join the treaty by 2006.
On Friday, Assistant Secretary of State Lincoln Bloomfield rejected the convention, adding that landmines with timing devices are relatively safe and "have some continuing utility for our armed forces around the world," reported the Associated Press.
Those so-called "smart mines" are programmed to self-destruct after a certain period, unlike conventional ("persistent") landmines. The United States will begin destroying its persistent mines in 2006 with a goal to eliminate them by 2010, Bloomfield added, but will retain "smart" mines on the Korean peninsula.
Human Rights Watch (HRW) called that the most "objectionable" aspect of the new policy. It means US military forces are now free to use smart mines anywhere in the world, indefinitely, said Stephen Goose, executive director of HRW's arms division.
"So-called smart mines are not safe mines - they still pose real dangers for civilians," added Goose.
"The United States stands alone in this position that there can be a technological solution to the global landmine problem," he said in a statement.
According to the US Campaign to Ban Landmines, smart mines are particularly dangerous for a number of reasons, including that they might fail to self-destruct, and they are "planted" by air in the thousands so it is difficult to map their locations.
"(Another) problem with these mines is that they are not smart enough to tell the difference between a child and a soldier," USCBL Coordinator Gina Coplon-Newfield told IPS.
She said although the United States had not planted mines since 1991, "we do know that the US military took with them to the Gulf region about one and a half years ago tens of thousands of antipersonnel landmines for possible use."
"We're very glad that reportedly they haven't used them thus far, but especially with this new announcement we're very concerned about the possibility of future use," added Coplon-Newfield.
HRW's Mary Wareham said the announcement was a shock, given that although the United States had not signed the treaty, "in our minds (Washington) was doing all the right things."
But Friday's decision now means "they're going to keep mines indefinitely instead of working toward their elimination," she added in an interview.
It sets a bad example for the 40-odd nations that have not signed the treaty, said Wareham. "It's very difficult to influence them but one country can, and that's the United States."
According to Coplon-Newfield, "many countries may say 'if the wealthiest military in the world wants to reserve the right to use this weapon then surely we, a poor military, should be able to reserve the right.'"
Last September, anti-mine groups reported that in 2002, the use of landmines plummeted worldwide, that 12 countries had signed the Mine Ban Treaty during the year and 10 others had ratified it, meaning their national legislatures had approved it.
They said that only the governments of Burma and Russia continued to plant mines on a regular basis and that even rebel groups around the world were using fewer mines.
At the time, Campaign to Ban Landmines founder Jodie Williams speculated the United States was hesitating to join the treaty because its defense department feared the precedent of civil society forcing it to abandon one type of weapon might "snowball."
On Friday she told AP Radio that the announcement "is yet another indication of the Bush administration's total disdain for international law."
-------- spies
The espionage is unending
February 28, 2004
The Guardian
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/27/1077676972189.html
Every 60 minutes the US and British intelligence agencies intercept millions of phone calls, emails and faxes, says James Bamford, a specialist in intelligence.
Bamford, author of Body of Secrets, said of the alleged bugging of the UN Secretary-General: "I am sure they did it."
He added: "They could do it in a number of different ways. They would find out where [Kofi Annan's phone] goes in the New York exchange and do a wire tap. They would want to go into his office if he had an encrypted phone. You would want a receiver for that."
While the CIA and Britain's MI6 are better known, it is the National Security Agency, the US eavesdropping organisation, and its British counterpart, GCHQ, that produce the greatest amount of intelligence. NSA budget and staff levels far exceed the CIA's.
There is plenty of evidence that in recent years the NSA and GCHQ have listened to enemies, European allies and neutral countries. A leaked NSA memo shows they targeted six swing countries on the UN Security Council before the Iraq war last year. At least two of those countries have confirmed they were bugged.
The bulk of the intercepts are pulled from the ether by powerful listening posts round the world.
----
Australian spy circle tied to UN bugging
By Tom Allard, Andrew Darby, and Marian Wilkinson in Washington
February 28, 2004
Sydney Morning Herald
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/27/1077676969778.html
Australia was privy to the phone-tapping operation on the United Nations figures Kofi Annan and Hans Blix before the Iraq war, receiving transcripts under the intelligence-sharing arrangement with the US and Britain.
And the bugging was almost certainly undertaken - at least in part - by spy satellites linked with the Pine Gap relay station outside Alice Springs, an intelligence source told the Herald.
A diplomatic scandal has erupted over the bugging, and yesterday the former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler revealed he was the victim of clandestine phone taps and surveillance when he was working in Iraq.
The Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, declined to confirm or deny any knowledge of the operation, saying that if he did it "would destroy our intelligence services".
A British cabinet minister at the time of the Iraq war, Clare Short, triggered the scandal, which has rocked the Blair Government, when she revealed that she had read transcripts of conversations by Mr Annan, the UN Secretary-General.
"In the case of Kofi's office, it [the bugging] was being done for some time," she said.
Mr Downer joined the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in condemning her. "I think what Clare Short has done is grossly irresponsible," Mr Downer said. "She's just making a complete fool of herself."
A UN spokesman, Frank Eckhard, broke with the convention of not commenting on intelligence matters by saying: "We are throwing down a red flag and saying, if this is true, then stop it. It is not good for the United Nations' work and it is illegal."
Mr Butler, now Governor of Tasmania, told the Herald he believed the US, Britain, France and Russia had eavesdropped on him when he was the UN chief weapons inspector.
While he was at the UN headquarters in New York, he would hold sensitive meetings in whispers in a noisy basement cafe, or walk in Central Park, he said. "A hostile intelligence attack on this office is an attack on the system of objectivity of the UN, and functioning international law."
Under international treaties, UN premises are supposed to be protected from eavesdropping.
Mr Downer said Australian intelligence services never broke a domestic law but he was less forthcoming when asked if they breached international rules, saying: "We're not confirming or denying anything in relation to operational matters."
Australia shares intelligence with the US and Britain and was intimately involved in the lobbying of UN members to back the war on Iraq.
"You can be sure we saw this stuff," the Australian intelligence source said. "It would be wrong to think this type of operation necessarily involves people planting listening devices in Kofi Annan's office . . . the satellites these days suck pretty much anything and everything out of the air. Mobile calls, in particular, are quite easy to track."
The ABC reported yesterday that Mr Blix, the UN weapons inspector before the war, had his mobile phone tapped in Iraq.
A leading US intelligence expert, James Bamford, said the UN had long been a bugging target for US intelligence.
"Whatever Kofi Annan happened to be talking about, if that happened to be of interest to the Australians, they would pass it on," said Mr Bamford, who uncovered previous operations to bug the UN by America's electronic spy organisation, the National Security Agency
That agency and the US State Department refused to comment on Ms Short's revelations. "You can assume we are not going to have anything to say at all," a State Department spokesman said.
----
Why they bugged the Secretary-General
February 28, 2004
Guardian
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/27/1077676963522.html
As progress towards war on Iraq began to stall in the United Nations, Britain's spies put their ears to the wall, reports Brian Whitaker in London.
In the last few weeks before the invasion of Iraq it became clear that George Bush, with Tony Blair in tow, was bent on war - and one of the key people standing in his way was the UN Secretary-General, Kofi Annan.
While the US President was impatient to get on with the attack, regarding Saddam Hussein as a bad guy who should be ousted as soon as possible, the British PM hoped the UN would give international backing, but it was not going well.
Renewed UN inspections in Iraq had failed to find the weapons of mass destruction that Britain and the US insisted were there. Worse, chief UN inspector Hans Blix began to challenge US claims that the Iraqis were engaged in deception over the alleged weapons. The Iraqis, contrary to US and British expectations, were not provoked into a confrontation with the UN inspectors.
As far as Britain and the US were concerned, the UN was becoming an obstacle to the overthrow of Saddam, rather than a means of facilitating it.
Central to all this was Mr Annan, who made it clear he wanted to avoid war, and was determined not to let reports from his weapons inspectors provide a pretext for it.
From a British and American viewpoint, there might have been several reasons for wanting to keep an eye on Mr Annan's activities:
- To find out what was being said in his exchanges with other Security Council members that might hamper their own plans.
- To check whether he was exceeding his brief as UN chief - in which case they might take action against him.
- To discover what the weapons inspectors were telling him in private, amid suspicions that he was trying to "sex down" their reports to avoid giving Washington and London an excuse for military action.
Mr Annan was extremely active in the month or so before the war, seeking an alternative to bloodshed. In February he attended an informal EU summit and met the Pope along with senior Vatican officials, one of whom had visited Saddam days earlier.
In early March a group of Arab foreign ministers who had also been in touch with Iraq visited Mr Annan at the UN. Diplomatic contacts became even more intense in the fortnight before the war.
Britain and the US were hoping for a final Security Council resolution to legitimise the invasion. Britain became the driving force, drafting the resolution and taking charge of the diplomacy.
With the Security Council plainly divided on the issue, attention focused on six members - Angola, Cameroon, Guinea, Pakistan, Mexico and Chile - whose views were unclear. Britain desperately wanted them to swing behind its draft resolution, but could not risk defeat in a vote. It therefore needed to gather as much information as possible about their intentions.
Nobody at that stage had a better overall picture than Mr Annan, who was in regular contact with the 15 Security Council members. On the morning of March 13, for instance, he had private meetings with all but two of them.
Whatever Britain might have gleaned from any transcripts of his conversations, it was not enough. The proposed resolution had to be dropped and the war began without it.
----
'Britain and US shared transcripts after bugging Blix's mobile phone'
By Kim Sengupta and Kathy Marks in Sydney
28 February 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/story.jsp?story=495963
The controversy over alleged British and American "dirty tricks" at the United Nations deepened yesterday with claims that two chiefs of Iraq arms inspection missions had been victims of spying.
Hans Blix and Richard Butler were said to have been subjected to routine bugging while they led teams searching for Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction.
In an interview published today, Dr Blix said he suspected his UN office and New York home had been bugged by the United States in the run-up to war. He said bugging was to be expected between enemies, but "here it is between people who co-operate and it is an unpleasant feeling".
The new charges came within 24 hours of the former cabinet minister Clare Short stating British intelligence had taped the telephone calls of the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan.
As demands grew at home and abroad for Tony Blair to confirm or deny Ms Short's allegations, the British ambassador to the UN, Emyr Jones-Parry, telephoned Mr Annan on Thursday evening. The UN said Mr Jones-Parry's call has not shed any fresh light on the matter. Edward Mortimer, Mr Annan's director of communications, said: "There was a telephone call which was apologetic in tone but did not really amount to an admission of substance. Basically, the answer we got was the same as the Prime Minister gave at his press conference [on Thursday]. We are not complete innocents, we do realise these things happen but it was rather a shock to hear that the British government had been spying on the secretary general."
Charles Kennedy, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Mr Blair should make a statement to MPs on the affair.He will table a Commons motion next week demanding to know if there was an "eavesdropping operation", and if so, how extensive it was. Mr Kennedy said: "We need to know whether British intelligence took part in spying on the United Nations secretary general. This is a serious allegation, made by a member of Mr Blair's Cabinet, which cannot go unanswered. The United Kingdom was one of the founding members of the UN ... the suggestion that our security services were involved in some kind of illegal operation damages our national standing."
Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Mr Annan's predecessor as secretary general, said: "This is a violation of the United Nations charter. It complicates the work of the secretary general, of the diplomats, because they need a minimum of secrecy to reach a solution." Mr Butler, who led the UN disarmament team in Iraq in the 1990s, Unscom, said he was "well aware" that he was being bugged. But he said spying on the UN was illegal and harmed the peace-making process. "What if Kofi Annan had been bringing people together last February in a genuine attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, and the people bugging him did not want that to happen, what do you think they would do with that information?" he said.
The alleged bugging of Dr Blix, in charge of the last UN mission before the war, seen as the last chance to avoid war, is being viewed in diplomatic circles as part of a concerted effort to sabotage attempts at a peaceful solution to the Iraq crisis. Dr Blix, who retired in June, is highly critical of George Bush and Tony Blair for the claims they made about Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Washington and London, he said, had aborted the search for weapons to pave the way for an invasion.
In an interview that appears in The Guardian today, he said he had expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but the possibility that he was spied on by someone "on the same side" was "disgusting". Dr Blix said his suspicions were aroused by repeated trouble with his telephone at his New York home. His fears worsened when a member of the US administration showed him photographs that could only have come from the UN weapons office. He met John Wolf, the US assistant secretary of state for non-proliferation, two weeks before war started and was shown two pictures of Iraqi weapons. "He should not have had them. I asked him how he got them and he would not tell me and I said I resented that," he said.
Dr Blix said it was unlikely one of his staff had handed over the pictures and thought it might be that spies broke into a secure fax. In his reports to the UN, Dr Blix, and his fellow inspection team leader, Dr Mohamed ElBaradei, the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, had asked for more time to investigate Iraq's arsenal, a plea rejected by Washington and London.
The claims of espionage against Dr Blix emerged in the Australian media, sourced to a member of the country's intelligence service. Yesterday a senior UN source confirmed to The Independent that the Iraq mission, Unmovic, were convinced they were victims of spying operations. Reports say Dr Blix's mobile telephone was monitored every time he went to Iraq, and the transcripts shared between the US, Britain and their allies, Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
Yesterday, a UN official said: "While in the Canal Hotel in Baghdad [the Unmovic headquarters at the time], we never used to talk about anything sensitive in our rooms because we thought the Iraqis might be bugging us. We used to go outside to the garden.
"It is one of the ironies of life that back in New York we would sometimes take similar measures, discuss things we thought should be confidential, out of the office, in public places, sometimes the sidewalk.
"The only saving grace is that neither Dr Blix or anyone else among us would speak about sensitive matters on mobile telephones, so they would not have heard anything earth-shattering just by that. But I suspect there were other, more widespread interceptions. There were plenty of attempts to undermine us."
Dr Blix's predecessor, Mr Butler, now the governor of Tasmania, said he was shown transcripts of bugged conversations. "Those who did it would come to me and show me the recordings that they made on others. 'To try to help me to do my job in disarming Iraq', they would say. 'We're just here to help you'," Mr Butler said. But the former UN chief inspector maintained that it was not only Britain which was spying. He said: "I was utterly confident that in my attempts to have private conversations, trying to solve the problem of disarmament of Iraq, I was being listened to by the Americans, British, the French and the Russians. They also had people on my staff reporting what I was trying to do privately. Do you think that was paranoia? Absolutely not. There was abundant evidence that we were being constantly monitored."
Mr Butler said that he too had to hold sensitive conversations in the noisy cafeteria in the basement of the UN building in New York or in Central Park.
"We were brought to a situation where it was plain silly to think we could have any serious conversation in our office. No one was being paranoid, everyone had a black sense of humour about it.
"I would take a walk with the person in the park and speak in a low voice and keep moving so we could avoid directional microphones and maybe just have a private conversation."
Mr Boutros-Ghali also described the vulnerability of the organisation to espionage. "From the first day I entered my office they said, 'Beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a tradition that the member states who have the technical capacity to bug will do it without any hesitation.' That would involve members of the Security Council," he said. "The perception is that you must know in advance that your office, your residence, your car, your phone is bugged."
The targets
Richard Butler Former UN chief weapons inspector
He said he was "well aware" that he was being bugged at the UN. "How did I know? Because those who did it would come to me and show me the recordings that they had made on others to help me do my job disarming Iraq." He asked: "What if Kofi Annan had been bringing people together last February in a genuine attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, and the people bugging him did not want that to happen, what do you think they would do with that information?"
Boutros Boutros-Ghali Former UN secretary general
He said he was warned that he was likely to be bugged as soon as he started the job. "From the first day I entered my office, they said: 'Beware; your office is bugged, your residence is bugged, and it is a tradition that the member states who have the technical capacity to bug will do it without any hesitation.' That would involve members of the Security Council. The perception is that you must know in advance that your office, your residence, your car, your phone is bugged."
----
British intelligence gave Blair 'snippets of Chirac's private conversations'
By Andrew Grice, Political Editor
28 February 2004
UK Independent
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=495996
Tony Blair will be challenged next week over allegations that he received British intelligence reports about the private conversations of Jacques Chirac in the approach to the Iraq war.
Labour MPs will press the Prime Minister about a claim in a new biography which says he received "snippets of the French President's private conversations" when France and Britain were in dispute over the prospect of military action. Mr Blair accused President Chirac of scuppering a second United Nations resolution authorising a war.
Philip Stephens, a political columnist at The Financial Times, says in his book: "Blair came to believe, partly on the basis of reports from British intelligence, that the dispute over Iraq was, in fact, a proxy for a much more serious contest.
"Chirac, these reports said, had decided that Blair had usurped his own position as the natural leader of Europe. It was time for the French President to reassert himself and clip the wings of perfidious Albion. In other words, this feud was personal as well as political."
The claim has added to the controversy over Clare Short's allegation on Thursday that British intelligence spied on Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general. If the claim is true, it suggests the British operation went beyond the UN headquarters in New York.
John McDonnell, the Labour MP for Hayes and Harlington, said: "It would cause me and large numbers of Labour MPs immense anxiety if the Government has authorised this kind of spying operation against the French President."
He added: "We need clarity from the Prime Minister. We need to know the extent of these operations, so we can ask on what grounds they were conducted and whether they were appropriate.
"It does demonstrate the level of obsession, or almost panic, to ensure the UN adopted a second resolution to justify the case for war." Mr McDonnell and fellow members of the left-wing Campaign Group of Labour MPs will table written Commons questions to the Prime Minister next week on the spying allegations.
They have put down a Commons motion urging him to make a statement about the scale of the "eavesdropping operation" and to clarify whether it included Mr Annan, permanent members of the UN Security Council, other countries, organisations opposed to the war and MPs.
In his book, Tony Blair - The Making of a World Leader, published in America last month, Mr Stephens says the Prime Minister believed President Chirac was "out to get him".
The French government is not planning any diplomatic protest over the allegation. French sources have denied the French President was motivated by a desire to stop the Prime Minister becoming the leading figure in the European Union. They insist he was anxious to prevent a premature war.
There is little sign that other parties will let the matter drop. Alex Salmond, the leader of the Scottish National Party at Westminster, said: "Last year Tony Blair was lying, this year he's spying. Just when you thought Tony Blair couldn't sink any lower, he manages to plumb new depths of conduct. He has lost his moral compass."
Mr Salmond said the Crown Prosecution Service should be investigating Ms Short's allegation of illegal spying operations and uncovering who approved them.
-------- un
UNITED NATIONS
On Bugging News, Annan Had Low-Key Reaction to Old Practice
February 28, 2004
By WARREN HOGE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/28NATI.html
UNITED NATIONS, Feb. 27 - From the moment news reached Secretary General Kofi Annan that the British government had been conducting electronic surveillance of him, he was intent on presenting a calm and knowing outward reaction.
He told aides who urged him to say he was "dismayed" at the news to say instead that he was just "disappointed." And his official statement added the condition that he would be disappointed only "if this were true."
Avoiding confrontation is central to a secretary general's job, which may account for his low key public response. If, as is likely, he has harsher private judgments, he will save them for Sir Emyr Jones Parry, the British ambassador, who, calling from London on Thursday in behalf of Prime Minister Tony Blair, alerted him to the disclosure.
Mr. Annan's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, said Friday that Mr. Annan was very concerned with how the reported eavesdropping would affect his work and was expecting another talk with Sir Emyr shortly. "It is safe to say that he would like a fuller explanation," Mr. Eckhard said.
The British spying was revealed in a BBC interview on Thursday with Clare Short, an outspoken former member of the Blair cabinet who resigned last summer and has called on Mr. Blair to do the same. Ms. Short said that Britain had regularly spied on Mr. Annan and that transcripts of conversations with him had circulated freely in the cabinet.
Mr. Blair rebuked Ms. Short and said she had endangered national security with her outburst. The incident has produced a political furor, with Mr. Blair's opponents challenging him to "come clean" and arguing that the case further erodes his postwar credibility.
If the reaction at the United Nations is more subdued, it may reflect the recognition that wiretapping at the United Nations is as old as the institution itself.
"The U.N. has been monitored by bugging or surveillance from day one," said Stephen C. Schlesinger, author of "Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations," an account of the 1945 San Francisco conference that created the body.
John E. Pike, director of globalsecurity.org, a nonprofit security policy group in Alexandria, Va., was even blunter. "You could say that there are more spooks in that building than any other on the planet," he said. "Everyone knows that there is a lot of spying and eavesdropping that goes on at the U.N. and during the cold war, it was a hotbed of Soviet espionage,"
Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian ambassador, said his country was not a participant. He added, "I think it is illegal, but this shows that the British intelligence service at least technically are very professional."
Evidence of recent bugging activity emerged Friday in BBC interviews with former Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali and a former Iraq weapons inspector, Richard Butler.
Mr. Boutros-Ghali said: "From the first day I entered my office, they told me, `Beware, your office is bugged, your residence is bugged.' It is the tradition that member states that have the technical capacity to bug will do it without hesitation."
Mr. Butler said, "There was abundant evidence that we were being constantly monitored." He said that if he had something sensitive to discuss, "I had to go to the basement cafe in the U.N. where there was heaps of noise or I'd go and take a walk in Central Park."
According to Mr. Schlesinger, there were three intelligence agencies at work in San Francisco in 1945. "The Army Signal Corps was intercepting all the cable traffic among the diplomats, so we knew in advance the negotiating strategies of practically all the 46 countries coming to San Francisco," he said. "Second was the F.B.I., which was tapping the phones of many of the American visitors and observers at the conference, and there was some belief that they were also tapping the calls of the members of the U.S. delegation itself.
"The third intelligence agency was the Office of Strategic Services, the O.S.S., and they were supplying all sorts of technical equipment to the U.S. delegation to track their movements and the papers being passed around."
Mr. Pike said there were many ways to spy on someone like Mr. Annan whether he was using a land line, a cellphone or a secure phone near a window where a laser beam can reproduce speech from measuring vibrations on the glass. "Even if his office is not bugged, the person he's talking to might be," he said.
-------- venezuela
2 Killed as Troops Fight Protesters in Venezuela
February 28, 2004
By JUAN FORERO
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/international/americas/28VENE.html
LIMA, Peru, Feb. 27 - Venezuelan troops and antigovernment demonstrators clashed Friday in the streets of the capital, Caracas, leaving at least two people dead and several wounded as President Hugo Chávez convened a summit meeting of developing nations.
The confrontation, in which National Guard troops repeatedly fired tear gas at protesters and gunfire broke out, came two days before a government electoral board was to rule on the validity of signatures government opponents had collected to force a referendum on recalling Mr. Chávez from office.
Earlier this week, the Venezuelan electoral authorities said up to a third of the 3.4 million signatures submitted would require further revisions and be checked for fraud because of technical violations, leading to an outcry from the petition's organizers. A Western diplomat familiar with the electoral process said the National Electoral Council would announce Sunday a five-day "repair period" in which those who signed could verify their signatures.
Since a brief uprising in 2002 and a series of strikes failed to oust Mr. Chávez, the opposition has resorted to a binding recall referendum as allowed in the Constitution. The opposition needs 2.4 million signatures, but many political analysts warn that if the government succeeds in blocking a vote, Venezuela could become gripped in violence.
Opponents of Mr. Chávez say the government and the electoral board have increasingly put up obstacles to derail their referendum efforts. Though he was democratically elected, many Venezuelans accuse him of authoritarian rule and mismanaging the economy. The government accuses the opposition of provoking violence.
"Tensions are high, and it's an important moment for the country," the diplomat said in a telephone interview from Caracas.
The Bush administration, which has been increasingly critical of Mr. Chávez and supportive of the opposition, called on his government on Friday to respect the rights of the people. "The Venezuelan government has, at times, agreed with those rights, but often we've seen activity that we think is not consistent with that," said Richard A. Boucher, the State Department spokesman.
The Organization of American States and the Atlanta-based Carter Center, mediators in Venezuela, are working with electoral officials to streamline the signature verification process and ensure that the repair period is technically feasible.
The Caracas fire chief, Rodolfo Bricero, said 2 people had been killed and 14 wounded by gunfire, and 10 more hurt by plastic bullets, Reuters reported.
The government halted live broadcasts of the unrest, replacing them with speeches from the summit meeting, which was attended by leaders from 19 Latin American, Asian and African nations.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
INTELLIGENCE
Senator Rebuts Times Article on Panel Vote Over Subpoenas
February 28, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/politics/28INTE.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 - The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday that the panel had not reached agreement on any specific plan to compel the release of documents from any source as part of its inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq.
The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, disputed as inaccurate a report in The New York Times that the panel voted Thursday in closed session to move toward a possible subpoena unless the Bush administration produced certain documents within three weeks. Mr. Roberts and Democratic Congressional officials said Friday that there had been no vote on the issue and no agreement to any specific timetable during Thursday's meeting.
Senior Congressional officials who provided the initial account said Friday that they had misspoken. Senior Congressional officials said Friday that there had been only general discussion of a plan to compel the release of the documents by the White House and federal agencies.
A senior member of the committee's staff phoned The Times late Thursday to dispute the account, but his comments were not included in the article. [Editors' note, Page A2.]
In a statement on Friday Mr. Roberts said, "The committee does, however, possess and will exercise its authority when necessary to compel testimony or the production of documents."
Citing committee rules that forbid discussion of closed-door proceedings, neither Mr. Roberts nor other Congressional officials would discuss the specifics of Thursday's session. In his statement, Mr. Roberts also denounced what he called "the irresponsible leak of information which appeared to have produced the inaccurate New York Times report."
"This was a clear violation of the committee's rules," he said. "Unauthorized disclosures undermine the integrity of the committee and display nothing but contempt for its rules. More importantly, such leaks make the American people lose confidence in our ability to conduct their business professionally and in a nonpartisan manner."
The article quoted Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel, as saying that the committee was prepared to resort to "other means," which he said could only mean a subpoena, if the Bush administration did not end its refusal to provide the documents. The article said that Senator Rockefeller had declined to discuss the committee's deliberations in detail.
In his statement, Mr. Roberts said the committee's senior staff member who phoned The Times on Thursday night in response to a request for comment from the chairman had explained that he "could not comment on the details of an executive session of the committee, even though, apparently, someone else already had, albeit inaccurately."
A spokeswoman for Mr. Rockefeller, Wendy Morigi, said Friday that the senator "fully endorsed Senator Roberts' statement that correctly described the facts related to Thursday's meeting."
-------
Hastert, in Reversal, Backs Extension for 9/11 Panel
February 28, 2004
By PHILIP SHENON and CARL HULSE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/national/28PANE.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 - The speaker of the House, J. Dennis Hastert, reversed himself Friday and announced that he would accept a 60-day extension of the deadline for a federal commission to complete its investigation of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The Senate, as expected, unanimously approved the extension earlier in the day, and Mr. Hastert's decision appeared to clear the way for Congress to grant one, until midsummer.
The 10-member bipartisan commission had warned that if it was required to meet its original, Congressionally mandated deadline to issue a final report by May 27, it would have to curtail its investigation and cancel several public hearings.
"We are overjoyed by the speaker's decision," said Al Felzenberg, the commission's spokesman.
Mr. Hastert's announcement followed heated maneuvering on Capitol Hill, where Senators John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, had declared that unless the House agreed to legislation pushing back the deadline, they would hold up a highway bill needed to avoid the furlough of thousands of federal workers beginning Monday.
Once Mr. Hastert changed course Friday, the Senate quickly gave the highway measure final Congressional approval.
Mr. Hastert, Republican of Illinois, had previously said he was determined to block any extension, maintaining that members of the commission were leaking information from the inquiry to news organizations and that any delay in the final report would turn the findings into a "political football" in an election year.
The speaker had also said that the findings might be so valuable that they should not be delayed.
In a letter to the commission Friday, Mr. Hastert said he had been "reluctant to support this extension because I believe that the findings and recommendations that will be contained in your report may require immediate action by both the Congress and the executive branch in order to protect the American people."
But he said that he was also aware of the commission's "difficulties in obtaining clearances and in obtaining documents at the front end of the process" and that he was willing to support legislation that "removes the May 27 report deadline in current law and allows the commission to issue its report at any time until it goes out of existence on July 26, 2004."
Mr. Hastert described his offer as a "compromise," since it allows the commission's final report to be delayed until midsummer but would still require the panel to abide by the July 26 deadline to complete its administrative work and close its doors.
While that could pose extraordinary logistical problems for the commission, since it might be compelled to issue its final report and shut down its offices on the same day, the panel seemed eager to accept Mr. Hastert's offer. "Our main concern was always to get the additional 60 days to prepare the best possible report," said Mr. Felzenberg, the spokesman.
John Feehery, a spokesman for Mr. Hastert, said the speaker "is a reasonable man, and he was just trying to find a compromise."
He also suggested that despite the wording of Mr. Hastert's letter, the commission might be provided time beyond July 26 to close its offices.
On the Senate floor, Mr. McCain said it was his understanding that under the agreement reached between Mr. Hastert and other Congressional leaders, the panel would get an 60 extra days to finish the report and 30 days beyond that to wrap up, an outcome he said was satisfactory to the panel's leaders.
In other encouraging news for the commission, members said on Friday that the White House had agreed in recent days to allow its chairman, Thomas H. Kean, former Republican governor of New Jersey, and former Representative Lee H. Hamilton, Democrat of Indiana, to have access to much more information from daily intelligence briefings that reached the Oval Office in the months and years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Under an agreement with the White House last year, Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton had been permitted far narrower access to the intelligence reports. The fuller access was given only to former Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick, a Democratic member of the commission, and Philip D. Zelikow, the panel's Republican staff director.
Mr. Hamilton said in an interview that he and Mr. Kean would now be allowed to see the material that had already been shared with Ms. Gorelick and Mr. Zelikow, and that the commission was pleased that the White House had allowed greater access. "We think this is important," he said.
Until Mr. Hastert's announcement, the standoff over the highway measure had threatened to force the temporary layoff of thousands of federal transportation workers whose salaries were dependent on passage of the bill by Sunday.
The bill provides an extension of highway and mass transit money funneled through the Department of Transportation. The spending authority was due to expire Sunday night and needed to be extended temporarily because Congress has not finished work on a highway bill covering the next six years.
The prospect of the layoffs of highway and transportation safety workers had loomed as an embarrassment to both the Bush administration and the Republican Congressional leadership, and irked lawmakers responsible for the highway measure. "Stop playing politics with people's lives," said Senator Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, in demanding action on the highway bill.
--------
In Reversal, Hastert Endorses Extending 9/11 Panel's Deadline
By Helen Dewar and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A12706-2004Feb27.html
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) reversed course yesterday and agreed to give the independent commission studying the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks an additional two months to complete its report, removing the last big obstacle to the extension.
The commission and its congressional backers had requested the extra time, arguing that it was needed to ensure a complete report and avoid cutbacks in plans for hearings and other critical activities. But Hastert balked even at bringing the proposal to a vote until yesterday, when -- under pressure from the commission, the White House and the Senate -- he wrote the panel's leaders to say he would support the extension.
Hastert's agreement appears to clear the way for Congress to drop its earlier demand for a report by May 27, impose a new deadline of July 26 and provide an extra 30 days for the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the panel is formally known, to wind up its work.
The accord also averted a threatened furlough of about 5,000 Transportation Department workers on Monday, when funding for highway and transit operations was to expire. A bill to continue funding transportation-related projects for two more months had been taken hostage by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), leading Senate backers of the 9/11 commission, to force Hastert's hand. They refused to let the highway bill pass without assurances that the commission extension would be approved, and, after a day of intensive negotiations, they got their way.
After Hastert's agreement on the commission deadline, McCain and Lieberman dropped their objections to the highway funding measure, which had passed the House. It passed the Senate by voice vote and goes to President Bush for his signature.
In signaling a go-ahead for the highway bill, McCain said he was encouraged to believe the House would now take up and pass legislation to allow more time for the commission report. The measure was drafted Thursday by the Senate intelligence committee and approved earlier yesterday by the Senate.
A "just result" has been achieved, Lieberman said.
In his letter to the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former New Jersey governor, and Vice Chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former House member from Indiana, Hastert said he had been reluctant to support the extension "because I believe that the findings and recommendations . . . may require immediate action by both the Congress and the executive branch."
He noted that, under current law, the commission would not totally shut down until July 26, two months after the report was originally due. So he was willing to extend the report deadline to that date, he said. "This would give you the additional 60 days you requested to write the report," he said.
Earlier Hastert had expressed concern that a July report might get embroiled in the presidential campaign, but he made no mention of this yesterday, although the July 26 deadline falls on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.
Nor did he mention the tactics used by McCain and Lieberman to force a House vote on the commission extension, or the fact that House Republicans might be blamed if highway funds had dried up Monday.
Commission officials reacted with relief that the deadline issue was settled.
"This means we can continue forging ahead with interviews and hold the number of public hearings that we need to in order to produce a complete report," said commission spokesman Al Felzenberg. The commission plans to hold about eight more days of hearings, including a two-day session in late March that will include testimony from Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, and other senior officials from the Bush and Clinton administrations. Kean warned last week that the panel would have to narrow the scope of its inquiry and cut back on public hearings if it did not receive more time.
But officials also noted that the agreement amounts to a total extension of just 30 days.
"This is really a 30-day extension, and it remains to be seen whether we're going to have enough time to get a report to the public if there are issues regarding classification," said commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democrat and former Watergate prosecutor.
Commission leaders are scheduled to meet with Hastert on Tuesday to iron out final details of plans for House action.
Before Hastert relented, the Transportation Department mounted an offensive to warn of dire consequences if the highway funding bill was not approved before Monday.
The interim funding bill is needed because Congress has yet to approve a multiyear extension of highway and transit programs.
-------- courts
Lawyer in Two Cases Hosted Scalia Visit
By Charles Lane
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13464-2004Feb27.html
Justice Antonin Scalia faced renewed questions yesterday regarding his off-the-bench contacts with parties to cases before the Supreme Court, as a published report described his travel to Kansas to speak at a law school whose dean was serving as a lawyer for the state in two cases pending before the court.
The Los Angeles Times reported that on Nov. 15, 2001, Scalia went to Lawrence, Kan., for a long-scheduled speaking engagement at the University of Kansas Law School. At the time, the school's dean, Stephen R. McAllister, was representing Kansas. Scalia also went pheasant hunting with the state's then-governor, Bill Graves (R). McAllister declined to accompany them, citing a possible appearance of impropriety.
Scalia paid for the hunting trip and did not accept a speaking fee from the law school. But the university paid for his lodging and meals and his flight to Kansas from Washington, D.C.
Scalia's January duck-hunting trip with Vice President Cheney, who is a named party in a case before the court, has sparked controversy and a request from one of Cheney's opponents in the case, the Sierra Club, that Scalia disqualify himself. Scalia has said publicly that he will not step aside, but he has not yet formally responded to the Sierra Club motion.
A Supreme Court spokeswoman, Kathy Arberg, said that Scalia was not available for comment. The justice told the Los Angeles Times in a written statement that he did "not think that spending time at a law school in which the counsel in pending cases was the dean could reasonably cause my impartiality to be questioned. Nor could spending time with the governor of a state that had matters before the court."
Scalia said that any other view would bar all contact between justices and governors, given that states frequently have cases before the court.
-------- human rights
Jakarta accuses US over human rights report
February 28, 2004
The Age
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2004/02/27/1077676961394.html
Jakarta - The Indonesian Government says a US State Department report critical of its human rights record last year is "totally without credibility".
The Government yesterday accused the US Government of being "unwilling or unable to understand us" and said the report appeared identical to reports written a decade ago and must have relied on old material.
Indonesian Government spokesman Marty Natalegawa said the report, which highlighted human rights abuses in Aceh and Papua provinces, could have been written with information from the internet.
"It utterly fails to recognise what we are attempting (in Aceh) is a legitimate attempt to restore our sovereignty," he said.
He said the US had no right to criticise Indonesia when it locked people in Guantanamo Bay without access to justice, had great racial inequality, and had wiped out its indigenous inhabitants.
-------- justice
Handling of Terror Case Probed
'Special Attorney' Hired to Review Allegations of Misconduct
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A02
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13669-2004Feb27.html
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft took the rare step yesterday of appointing a "special attorney" to investigate prosecutors' handling of the case against members of an alleged al Qaeda terrorist cell in Detroit, which is being reviewed by a federal judge amid allegations of misconduct.
The Justice Department announced that Craig S. Morford, a federal prosecutor from Cleveland who led the corruption case against former congressman James Traficant (D-Ohio), would have the power to conduct "any kind of legal proceedings, civil or criminal," as he probes a troubled case that the government once hailed as a major victory in the war on terrorism.
In addition to investigating how prosecutors and FBI agents handled the case, Morford will handle proceedings before U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen, who is considering whether to throw out the June 2003 convictions of three men, government officials said. They declined to discuss the matter in detail because of a gag order imposed by Rosen.
Morford's appointment is the latest development in the chaotic case against four men who were arrested after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and accused of being part of an al Qaeda sleeper cell. In the first terrorism-related trial since the attacks, Karim Koubriti of Detroit and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi of Minneapolis were convicted of providing material support to terrorists and of document fraud. Ahmed Hannan of Detroit was convicted of document fraud, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud of Detroit was cleared of all charges.
Ashcroft and other U.S. officials hailed the convictions, but the case has run into serious problems since. Rosen issued a rare rebuke of Ashcroft for exhibiting "a distressing lack of care" in public statements about the case, while prosecutors admitted in December that the government had failed to turn over potential evidence to defense attorneys.
The two chief prosecutors were pulled off the case, and one -- Richard G. Convertino -- filed a lawsuit last week against Ashcroft and the Justice Department, alleging that he was the target of a smear campaign that resulted in the unmasking of a valuable informant. Convertino, who is the subject of an internal investigation, also alleged that the terrorism cases were undermined by "gross mismanagement" and a "lack of support and cooperation, lack of effective assistance, lack of resources and intradepartmental infighting."
I. Michael Greenberger, a former Justice Department official who runs the Center for Health and Homeland Security at the University of Maryland, said the move by Ashcroft is clearly meant as an attempt to regain control of a deteriorating legal situation.
"The whole thing is a mess, and what he's clearly striving to do is to bring somebody who's outside of the infighting to try and bring some control over it," Greenberger said. "You've got that U.S. attorney's office in total disarray; you've got a whistleblower suit filed against main Justice; you've got an angry judge threatening to throw out the whole thing."
Greenberger said the use of a federal statute allowing the appointment of special attorneys is relatively rare. Unlike a special counsel or outside prosecutor, who have been assigned in other cases to avoid personal or political conflicts of interest, a special attorney reports to the deputy attorney general but is vested with all the powers of a federal prosecutor.
William M. Sullivan Jr., a Washington lawyer who represents Convertino in the internal investigation, said it "will only show that Rick Convertino, a decorated and veteran prosecutor, pursued the interests of justice to the best of his ability."
A key issue in the dispute involves a letter, from a jail inmate alleging that the government's key witness lied, which Convertino and his partner did not provide to defense attorneys. The U.S. attorney's office has told Rosen that while the letter should have been turned over, it would not have changed the outcome of the case.
Morford was among three federal prosecutors who were previously assigned to review the case and determine whether other material should have been turned over to the defense.
-------- police
F.B.I. Orders an Internal Review of Oklahoma City Bombing Files
February 28, 2004
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/politics/28OKLA.html
WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered an internal review on Friday of its files to determine whether documents that might have been related to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing were improperly withheld from investigators or defense lawyers in the case, a government official said.
The move came in response to an Associated Press article this week that raised fresh questions about whether Timothy J. McVeigh, who was executed in 2001 for the bombing, may have had more than one accomplice.
The article said documents never introduced at Mr. McVeigh's trial showed that F.B.I. agents had destroyed evidence and had failed to share other information that raised the possibility that a gang of white supremacist bank robbers may have helped Mr. McVeigh.
The evidence indicated that the robbers, a group called the Aryan Republican Army, possessed explosive blasting caps similar to those Mr. McVeigh stole and a driver's license with the name of an Arkansas gun dealer who may have been robbed as part of the Oklahoma City plot.
While the Oklahoma City bombing has been a source of widespread conspiracy theories, law enforcement officials say they have seen no solid evidence that anyone other than Mr. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols, who will stand trial on state charges in Oklahoma next week, was involved in an attack, which killed more than 160 people.
Mr. Nichols's lawyer asked Thursday that his client's trial be delayed in light of the article, but the judge refused.
The government official said Friday night that the F.B.I. had acted "out of an abundance of caution" to review its records in response to questions raised in The A.P.'s article.
"If there's information out there, that needs to be looked at," the official said. "This will be a document review to ascertain whether there are documents that were relative to the investigation and that should have been reviewed during the investigation or the prosecution."
Once any additional records are identified, the results will probably be reviewed by the Justice Department to determine whether records were improperly withheld from defense lawyers in the case, the official said.
This is the second time the F.B.I. has had to pore over its records in connection with the Oklahoma City bombing. Just five days before Mr. McVeigh was originally scheduled to be executed in 2001, the Justice Department disclosed that the F.B.I. had discovered thousands of pages of interview reports and other material that had not been properly turned over to his lawyer.
Attorney General John Ashcroft delayed Mr. McVeigh's execution nearly a month as a result.
A report in 2002 by the Justice Department inspector general concluded that the the F.B.I.'s failure to disclose the documents was not intentional but was rather a result of human error as well as antiquated technology and flawed procedures at the bureau.
--------
Review Ordered on McVeigh Ties
Associated Press
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A22
The FBI ordered a formal review yesterday of some aspects of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing investigation, reopening the question of whether Timothy J. McVeigh may have had more accomplices in the worst domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history.
The FBI ordered agents to determine why some documents reached neither the bureau's Oklahoma City task force during the original investigation nor McVeigh's lawyers before he was executed in 2001, officials said.
The review of evidence and documents will also try to determine whether FBI agents in a separate investigation of white supremacist bank robbers may have failed to alert the Oklahoma City investigation of a possible link between the robbers and McVeigh, and allowed some of that evidence to be destroyed.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that documents never introduced at McVeigh's trial indicated that FBI agents destroyed evidence and failed to share other information that raised the possibility that a gang of white supremacist bank robbers may have assisted McVeigh.
The evidence includes documents showing that the Aryan Republican Army bank robbers possessed explosive blasting caps similar to those McVeigh stole and a driver's license with the name of a central player who was robbed in the Oklahoma City plot.
The documents do not prove that additional accomplices were involved -- blasting caps are plentiful, and the gang was expert in document fraud. But the FBI agent who ran the Oklahoma City investigation, Dan Defenbaugh, said his team never had a chance to investigate the evidence. He called for the probe to be reopened.
The April 19, 1995, bombing killed more than 160 people, and McVeigh was put to death for it in 2001. His co-defendant, Terry Nichols, will stand trial in Oklahoma next week on state charges that could carry the death penalty.
Nichols's attorneys asked on Thursday for the trial to be delayed in light of the AP story, but the judge refused.
FBI officials and Nichols's attorneys declined to comment last night, citing a gag order in the case.
--------
FBI's Discipline Practices Flawed, New Report Says
Associated Press
Saturday, February 28, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13516-2004Feb27.html
The FBI has a deeply flawed process for disciplining employees that leads to perceptions of favoritism and unfairness and is run by an office characterized by some as a snake pit that fails to attract top people, according to an independent review released yesterday.
The 70-page study of the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR)concluded that morale suffers throughout the bureau because of a feeling among agents that managers are treated better in disciplinary cases than are rank-and-file employees.
Although the review could not find evidence of a systemic disparity, it concluded that "the perception itself has had an enormous adverse impact" on the agency.
The inquiry was conducted by Wick Sollers, a lawyer with the Atlanta-based law firm King & Spalding; another of the firm's partners, former attorney general Griffin Bell ; and former top FBI executive Lee Colwell. It was requested by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III to deal with misgivings about the OPR raised in another internal Justice Department report. That review came after FBI agent John Roberts, in an October 2002 appearance on CBS's "60 Minutes," made allegations about a double standard in discipline.
Roberts resigned from the FBI effective yesterday, in part because he felt that the independent report glossed over deep-seated problems in the disciplinary system, said his attorney, Stephen M. Kohn.
The latest review found numerous factors that contributed to perceptions of unfairness in employee discipline, including a "vague, incomplete and deeply flawed" system of punishment guidelines; a blurring of the policy of firing anyone for lying, cheating or stealing; and the greater likelihood that senior FBI managers are allowed to resign when under investigation rather than be terminated.
-------- ENERGY AND OTHER
-------- energy
Iconoclast Gets Consultant Fees to Tell Big Oil It's Fading Fast
By BARNABY J. FEDER
February 28, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/business/28lovins.html
NOWMASS, Colo. - Today's oil industry reminds Amory B. Lovins of the whaling industry of the 19th century.
"When oil was discovered, the whalers ran out of markets before they ran out of whales," Mr. Lovins said. These days, opportunities to improve energy efficiency and meet increased needs profitably with other sources, he argues, are accumulating so rapidly that demand for oil is likely to tumble more rapidly than the industry has projected.
"When you add up all the alternatives,'' Mr. Lovins said, "the game is moving away from oil much faster than people think."
Who would pay Mr. Lovins, 57, for such unconventional opinions in an era when a former oilman is in the White House, the government routinely opposes proposals to raise mileage requirements or other energy standards and many industry officials fret about whether Saudi Arabia can pump enough oil to avoid global shortages.
Try Shell Oil, which has turned to Mr. Lovins to help figure out how the oil industry can profit from leading the transition away from today's main uses of its core product. Major companies like Shell, Coca-Cola and Texas Instruments do not always agree with Mr. Lovins, but they value his iconoclastic views enough to pay the Rocky Mountain Institute, the nonprofit consulting and research group he leads, up to $20,000 a day for his consulting services.
Mr. Lovins is hoping his scrutiny of the oil industry, which will be published as a book this summer, could provide a jolt to debate about the world's energy future. By most accounts, he remains the best-known freethinker in the energy and environmental policy world and he routinely weighs in on important issues, like the role of hydrogen in the world's energy future. But it has been a while since any of his insights have made headlines.
"Hunter once remarked that I have a good idea every five years," Mr. Lovins said, referring to his former wife, L. Hunter Lovins. "I'm due and there are several cooking."
In the Lovins lexicon, a "good idea" is not simply a technical suggestion that saves a client a lot of money. Such services have added to Mr. Lovins's credibility in the business world, but his real power comes from weaving together insights from many fields into a new perspective that can shake up how clients see their world and also how they manage energy and environmental challenges.
"Amory is not a maverick," said Thomas Feiler, a former senior executive at the Rocky Mountain Institute. "He's an enabler of mavericks."
Mr. Lovins, a balding slightly built man with a trace of middle-age paunch, pursues his grandiose goals without a hint of flamboyance. He is equally at home chatting about energy minutiae - like the proper size for a motor controlling the pump he is viewing on a tour of a chemical plant - as he is pontificating about the transformation of entire industries.
Sometimes he does more than talk and write about it. Hypercar, a venture started by the institute, is developing manufacturing machinery that Mr. Lovins hopes will hasten the replacement of steel in cars with lightweight carbon-fiber reinforced plastics.
Mr. Lovins first gained notoriety in the mid-1970's for predicting that nuclear power was doomed because of the steadily rising cost of building new plants. He warned a disbelieving Wall Street and the utility industry that it would be financially reckless to invest in large new power plants of any sort because investments in energy efficiency, or "negawatts," as he called them, would almost always be cheaper than new megawatts.
His reputation was forged in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1976, when he argued for a soft path emphasizing energy efficiency over what he called the hard path based on expectations that the nation had no choice but to build thousands of large new power plants to meet its energy needs.
"It was the most influential thing I have ever read on energy," said Ralph Cavanagh, co-director of the energy program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading environmental group.
Long before other experts worried about such things, Mr. Lovins also described the nation's reliance on big power plants and a nationwide electric grid as a brittle power structure vulnerable to terrorism and extensive blackouts.
Although harshly criticized at the time by the utility industry, his projections proved more prescient than the conventional ones. These days, energy industry executives who have never heard of Mr. Lovins are probably as rare as theologians who have never picked up a Bible. Mr. Lovins and the institute are also widely known in architecture and engineering circles as advocates of "green design."
"I view Amory as my older, much smarter brother," said Paul Westbrook, Texas Instruments' project manager for worldwide construction, who arranged for an institute team of 11 design and energy experts led by Mr. Lovins to conduct a three-day brainstorming session in December with engineers and executives responsible for planning a chip factory and office near the company's Dallas headquarters.
Among the conclusions that violated what currently passes for common sense in Texas was the proposal that a new office building, if properly designed, might not need air-conditioning - only ceiling fans.
"He's not preachy,'' Mr. Westbrook said. "He's just showing you a better path and hoping you will walk along with him. He recognizes that the devil is in the details but he doesn't let that deter him.''
Not everybody is so charmed by Mr. Lovins. Plenty of critics say many of his arguments are wrong. Even many energy experts who support much of what he proposes disagree, for example, with his conviction that there is no place for any form of nuclear energy.
More recently, his "Twenty Hydrogen Myths," published last summer on the institute's Web site (www.rmi.org), ignited arguments about whether Mr. Lovins had misleadingly played down or ignored hurdles to moving from an economy based on oil to reliance on clean-burning hydrogen, which still must be produced from some basic energy source.
Critics said the paper, among other things, glossed over the potential effect on the price of natural gas, the most obvious source for hydrogen fuel in the foreseeable future. (Mr. Lovins calculated that it would actually reduce overall gas demand and prices.)
Even more common than assertions that Mr. Lovins is wrong are complaints that he is far too optimistic. The complaint, in which many admirers join the critics, is that Mr. Lovins repeatedly fails to account realistically for the many ways that business, government and society resist change.
"He thinks that if he talks to seasoned technology people it rises to the top,'' said Ralph Nader, the consumer advocate. "He won't listen to anyone with experience to the contrary."
Mr. Nader's qualms about Mr. Lovins trace in part to the Hypercar, a vision Mr. Lovins began developing in 1991. He calculated that such a vehicle would get well over 100 miles to the gallon.
Mr. Lovins optimistically viewed Detroit's subsequent expressions of interest as genuine. Mr. Nader saw them as one of many tactics the industry adopted to put off pressure from Washington to improve mileage with more readily available technology.
In the end, Mr. Lovins was unable to find an auto company to embrace Hypercar fully. The concept was spun off as a for-profit subsidiary in 1999. This spring, Hypercar will show off a forging process for making high-quality carbon-fiber parts that Mr. Lovins contends can be done at 15 percent of the current cost.
"We have a lot of companies that want to see it," Mr. Lovins said.
Whatever becomes of Hypercar, it has been a classic example of the kind of research and demonstration program that the Rocky Mountain Institute has taken on since Amory and Hunter Lovins founded their "think-and-do tank" in 1982.
More than 70,000 people have made the journey to the 4,000-square-foot home that doubles as the institute's headquarters here, it said. Facing south and embedded in a hill, the building bristles with seven types of solar panels. Its rock faces regulate its absorption and heat loss. The centerpiece is a greenhouse where banana and other tropical fruit trees surround a fish pond fed by a small waterfall. The only heating comes from two small woodstoves that are dormant on all but the most frigid days.
"Snowmass tells you something about the values and mythology of R.M.I.," said E. Kyle Datta, a former intern who rejoined the institute in 2002 as director of research and consulting after pursing more conventional work, including a stint as head of the energy practice at Booz Allen Hamilton.
The mythology was rocked during the late 1990's by the board's desire to make the institute more businesslike and capable of surviving without Mr. Lovins. The transition added more seasoned experts to the institute's staff, many of whom do extensive work for clients with little or no input from Mr. Lovins. The added expenses, however, helped plunge the organization deeply into the red in 2001 and 2002.
It also created conflicts between Marty Pickett, the institute's executive director since 1999, and Ms. Lovins, who had continued to work both on administration of the institute and on research projects with Mr. Lovins after separating from him in 1989 and their quiet divorce 10 years later. The battle with Ms. Pickett culminated in the board's decision, unopposed by Mr. Lovins, to fire his former wife.
The firing was presented publicly as Ms. Lovins's voluntary departure to concentrate on her own pet projects. The raw reality of the transition required Mr. Lovins to pay more attention than ever before to issues like employee morale. Since then, the institute has recovered financially and life there is calmer, but it may be more Amory-centric than ever.
"There's people on staff now who complement Amory's brilliant optimism," said Adam Albright, a board member, adding that Mr. Lovins was the central processing unit. "If you don't have the rest of the computer built around it, you don't have useful output."
-------- genetics
Bush Ejects Two From Bioethics Council
Changes Renew Criticism That the President Puts Politics Ahead of Science
By Rick Weiss Wash
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13606-2004Feb27.html
President Bush yesterday dismissed two members of his handpicked Council on Bioethics -- a scientist and a moral philosopher who had been among the more outspoken advocates for research on human embryo cells.
In their places he appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported, and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the "threats of biotechnology."
The turnover immediately renewed a recent string of accusations by scientists and others that Bush is increasingly allowing politics to trump science as he seeks advice on ethically contentious issues.
Last week, a Washington-based interest group released a report detailing what it called many examples of the administration distorting the scientific process to achieve desired policy answers relating to pollution, embryo research and other topics. Some in Congress, led by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), have also been getting vocal on the topic, as have academics, scientific organizations and science journal editors.
One of the dismissed members, Elizabeth Blackburn, is a renowned biologist at the University of California at San Francisco. She said she received a call yesterday morning from someone in the White House personnel office.
"He said the White House had decided to make some changes on the council. He wanted to express his gratitude and said I'd no longer be on the council," Blackburn said.
She said she had no warning and had not heard from the council's director, University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass. She said she believed she was let go because her political views do not match those of the president and of Kass, with whom she has often been at odds at council meetings.
"I think this is Bush stacking the council with the compliant," Blackburn said.
The other dismissed member, William May, an emeritus professor of ethics at Southern Methodist University, is a highly respected scholar whose views on embryo research and other topics had also run counter to those of conservative council members. Efforts to reach him last night were unsuccessful.
Asked why Blackburn and May had been let go, White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said the two members' terms had expired in January, and they were on "holdover status." Asked whether, in fact, all the council members' terms had formally expired in January, she said they had.
Pressed on why Blackburn and May had been singled out for dismissal, she said: "We've decided to go ahead and appoint other individuals with different expertise and experience." She would not elaborate further.
Kass, who has written prolifically about biotechnology's toll on human dignity and was selected by Bush to head the council, was traveling yesterday and could not be reached.
Bush created the council by executive order in 2001 to "advise the President on bioethical issues that may emerge as a consequence of advances in biomedical science and technology." He recently renewed its commission for another two years.
The group of scholars, scientists, theologians and others has produced several reports, including ones on human cloning, stem cell research and the use of biotechnology to enhance human beings. But the council has often found it difficult to reach consensus on issues.
The three new appointees are Benjamin Carson, the high-profile director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University; Diana Schaub, chairman of the department of political science at Loyola College in Maryland; and Peter Lawler, a professor of government at Berry College in Georgia. All are respected members of their fields. And their writings suggest their tenures will be less contentious than their predecessors'.
When not performing some of the most difficult surgeries in the world, Carson is a motivational speaker who often invokes religion and the Bible and has lamented that "we live in a nation where we can't talk about God in public."
Schaub has effusively praised Kass and his work. In a 2002 public forum discussing the council's cloning report, she talked about research in which embryos are destroyed as "the evil of the willful destruction of innocent human life."
In a book review in the conservative Weekly Standard in late 2002, Lawler warned that if the United States does not soon "become clear as a nation that abortion is wrong," then women will eventually be compelled to abort genetically defective babies.
Michael Gazzaniga, a Dartmouth neuroscientist who sits on the council, said he was "upset" by Blackburn's ejection.
"She was one of the basic scientists who understood the biology of many of the issues we're talking about," Gazzaniga said. "It will be a loss for sure."
Research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.
-------- health
Lead Fears Force D.C. To Expand Response
Pipe-Coating Chemical, Blood Tests Planned
By David Nakamura and D'Vera Cohn
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 28, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13689-2004Feb27.html
District residents concerned about lead contamination can have their blood tested for free at D.C. General Hospital beginning this morning, and water filters will be distributed to hundreds of day-care centers by next week, city officials announced yesterday.
In addition, a team of water-quality experts is proposing to add a chemical to the system serving some city neighborhoods. The treatment, which would begin June 1 and expand if successful, is designed to reduce the lead content.
The combined actions represent a far more aggressive response to ongoing public health concerns related to the discovery last summer that thousands of homes have water with lead levels above the federal safety limit.
Health care workers will test blood from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. today at the D.C. General campus at 1901 E St. SE. The tests are intended for pregnant women and children younger than 6, officials said, but no one will be turned away. Testing hours might be extended if demand is high, they said.
City officials issued a health advisory this week urging pregnant women, mothers who are breast-feeding and young children not to drink unfiltered tap water if they live in a home with a lead service line. In a letter to those residents, the Health Department warns that lead can damage the developing brain of unborn babies and young children and damage kidneys and other parts of the body.
Officials said that one child and two adults who were tested for lead this month were found to have 10 to 12 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. The national standard is 10. But, health experts said, it is not clear that the high levels are related to water ingestion. People also may be exposed to lead through dust from lead paint or other sources. D.C. health officials will conduct environmental analyses to try to get more specific information in each case.
"This is a serious matter," City Administrator Robert C. Bobb said at an afternoon news conference attended by city health officials and D.C. Water and Sewer Authority leaders. "We'll do whatever it takes."
The city also has four mobile vans that will be testing blood in spots across the city over the next few weeks.
Meanwhile, the first batch of 300 water filters will arrive Wednesday and will be distributed free to day-care centers across the city, officials said. An additional 5,000 filters have been ordered for residents who live in the roughly 23,000 homes that WASA believes have lead service lines. Officials did not say how the filters would be distributed.
The united front officials presented at the news conference was designed to show that the city has used an interagency task force to coordinate the response to the lead problem. The task force, composed of city leaders, has met behind closed doors three times and will continue to meet weekly for at least another month.
Mayor Anthony A. Williams (D) has not attended the task force meetings and was absent at the news conference, but Bobb said, "The mayor is fully, fully engaged in this."
Health officials will package their letter detailing the health advisory with a letter from WASA and mail it Monday to the homes that are thought to have lead service lines.
Melody Webb, a lawyer and city resident who launched www.lobbyline.com/dcwater, a Web site to provide information about lead risks to children, said she was pleased that the city has taken action. But she said she is not satisfied.
"They need to treat it as a state of emergency and make filters available to anyone who needs them and free bottled water service to anyone who needs it," she said.
The team studying the lead problem includes officials from WASA, the Washington Aqueduct and the Environmental Protection Agency and outside consultants. The chemical that the team intends to add to the water is likely to be a phosphate, which would form a protective coating on pipes to prevent lead from leaching into water, said Thomas P. Jacobus, general manager of the two water treatment plants that serve the city and parts of Northern Virginia. The chemical is used across the country as a standard treatment.
"We know it will work," Jacobus said. "We don't know how long it will take to work."
Jacobus said that officials hope to see positive results within three months but that it could take as long as 18 months. The trial period is intended to determine whether the chemical would produce any harmful side effects, he said.
As scientists work on highly technical matters, city leaders are attempting to meet the demands of residents who have overwhelmed the water agency's hotline with requests for water tests.
More than 7,000 test kits have been distributed since the lead problems were disclosed by the media last month, and about 2,500 have been picked up by WASA. City officials said they have set up five locations at which residents can drop off water samples. Residents still can call the number on the kits and schedule a pickup, officials noted.
D.C. Council member Carol Schwartz (R-At Large), who co-chairs the interagency task force with the mayor, called on the city to conduct an independent analysis to verify the accuracy of WASA's water tests. Last summer, WASA found that 4,075 homes out of 6,118 that were tested had water with excessive lead levels.
Schwartz joined eight Democratic U.S. senators in requesting that the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee hold a hearing to investigate the performance of the EPA, which oversees WASA, and the Army Corps of Engineers, which operates the Washington Aqueduct.
A spokesman for committee Chairman James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said that the committee, already working on water-related legislation, will not hold a separate hearing. However, the House Committee on Government Reform, which is chaired by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.), will hold a hearing on the matter Friday.
Schwartz said she also sent a letter to President Bush asking for additional federal resources to help the city's response. At the White House's daily media briefing yesterday, spokesman Scott McClellan was asked by a reporter whether the president drinks D.C. tap water.
"I'm not going to get into a discussion of the president's eating or drinking habits," McClellan responded, provoking laughs.
Staff writers Craig Timberg and Carol D. Leonnig contributed to this report.
-------- ACTIVISTS
Anti-war protest at conference
Saturday, 28 February, 2004
(BBC)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/3496332.stm
The demonstration could be heard as Jack McConnell spoke Several thousand anti-war protesters converged on Scottish Labour's annual conference to voice their disapproval over the war with Iraq.
The group marched through Inverness before massing outside the Eden Court Theatre.
Labour MSP Elaine Smith urged her colleagues to rise up against "pre-emptive imperialist wars".
Green, Socialist and Scottish National Party MSPs joined Labour members in the protest.
Drums, horns and loudspeakers of the protesters could be heard inside parts of the conference venue as First Minister Jack McConnell delivered his keynote speech.
Mrs Smith said: "We heard Tony Blair making the bizarre statement in his speech to the conference that we've had the biggest ever growth in peacetime - well I think somebody ought to remind Tony that we've had various wars since he's been the prime minister.
"His idea of peacetime and my idea of peacetime are obviously quite different."
Protesters gathered outside the conference Referring to the Iraq conflict, the Coatbridge and Chryston MSP added: "I think it's absolutely atrocious and what has to happen is that members of the Labour Party have to rise up against this and get democracy back to the party.
"We were told the war was for democracy and freedom and now we see a world that is far more unstable.
"How is it that we are supposed to be living in a safer world but that world is now littered with cluster bombs, mines and depleted uranium?
"That's not a safe world. It's not the kind of world that I want to live in and it's not the kind of world that the Labour Party should be striving for."
Mrs Smith said she and other protesters would be keeping up their momentum and programme of demonstrations.
SNP Highlands and Islands MSP Rob Gibson attacked what he called the "Bush/Blair imperialism" for endangering world peace.
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