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NUCLEAR
Today in history - Nov. 13
Activists: Chernobyl Radiation Lingers
Sudanese Fearful Following Relocation
Ivory Coast Violence Breaks French Connection
Foreigners Flee Ivory Coast as Violence Lingers
Japan Protests To China Over Incursion by Nuclear Sub
China Urges Calm Over Submarine Dispute
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
US report links toxins to Gulf war syndrome
Iran Says EU Nuke Negotiations in Final Stages
Iran Says Nuclear Talks in 'Final Stages'
A Review of the Duelfer Report
South Korea Urges Atomic Talks, North Softens Tone
IAEA clears South Korea in nuke probe
DPRK rebuts US allegation on nuclear talks
S. Korean Leader Won't Tolerate Aggression
Safety at Hope Creek questioned
MILITARY
Details of anti-personnel bombs and weapons
China urges calm after Japan demands apology for submarine intrusion
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Squeezing jello in Iraq
U.S. Forces Meet Fierce Resistance In Fallujah
U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
Fallujah 101
U.S. Officers: Main Assault On Fallujah Is Over
Amid Gunfire and Chaos, Palestinians Bury Arafat
Arafat Is Buried in Chaotic Scene in the West Bank
Nicaragua Agrees to Destroy Antiaircraft Missiles
Yasser on Yasser: Martyr par excellence
CIA whistleblower sees 'long war'
Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA
The C.I.A. Versus Bush
CIA agent publicly chides White House for terror war
No. 2 CIA official McLaughlin quits
Homeless Vets Already Overload Safety Net
Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
Gulf-stress study dropped
US wounded in Falluja hits 412
Louisiana teens getting driver's license also register
Rights Lawyers See Possibility of a War Crime
POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
Airlines Must Hand Over Records
Ashcroft Decries Court Rulings
Gov't Order for Air Data Draws Protests
Hispanic gang plots to ambush Maryland cops
POLITICS
Bush vows Mideast peace effort
Analysis: Bush Facing Domestic Challenges
For the First Time Since Vietnam, the Army Prints a Guide
OTHER
Reports Point to Proof of Global Warming
WHO Meeting Warns of Flu Pandemic
FDA Bars Critic From Meeting
ACTIVISTS
"Let Them Drink Sand!"
-------- NUCLEAR
Today in history - Nov. 13
By The Associated Press
http://www.boston.com/news/history/articles/2004/11/12/today_in_history___nov_13/
Today is Saturday, Nov. 13, the 318th day of 2004. There are 48 days left in the year.
Today's Highlight in History:
On Nov. 13, 1974, Karen Silkwood, a technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron plutonium plant near Crescent, Okla., died in a car crash while on her way to meet a reporter.
-------- accidents and safety
Activists: Chernobyl Radiation Lingers
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Living-With-Chernobyl.html?oref=login
SVETILOVICHI, Belarus (AP) -- The signs say ``KEEP OUT'' and warn of radiation contamination, but the mushroom-pickers trudge right past them carrying their pails. Eighteen years after the reactor at Chernobyl in neighboring Ukraine exploded, spewing a cloud of radiation that blew north and contaminated 22 percent of this ex-Soviet republic, activists warn of a new threat facing Belarusians: the longing to return to normal life.
The government -- and many Belarusians -- are eager to put the world's worst nuclear accident behind them. President Alexander Lukashenko, branded Europe's last dictator, has made it a priority to repopulate much of the Chernobyl-infected region beyond the hardest hit areas.
But opposition parties and advocacy groups such as the Belarus-based Children of Chernobyl accuse the government of overriding warnings that radiation continues to contaminate this region of pine forests and mud-splattered farming villages.
Belarusians, many of them poor and ill-informed about radiation, are returning home to villages that still require permanent monitoring because of higher than average radiation levels. Tractors till farmland, cows graze and residents fill their yards with vegetable gardens. Others are venturing into the ``exclusion zones'' -- the worst hit areas -- to forage in the forests for berries and wild mushrooms, which are then sold throughout the region.
The critics claim that the government of this tightly controlled nation of 10 million is capitalizing on the plight of desperate jobseekers to repopulate still dangerous areas and boost agricultural production.
In the last five years, Belarus has struck 1,000 population centers from the danger list. It has boosted regional farm production by 30 percent, cut Chernobyl-related welfare funding from 14 percent of the approximately $3 billion annual budget to 4 percent, and censored health statistics of rising death and cancer rates, the opponents say.
``We must now worry about the children of the children of Chernobyl,'' said Gennady Groushevoy, head of Children of Chernobyl. ``The health danger is reaching into a second generation ... but the government has retreated into a Soviet-era attitude of silence.''
In all, 7 million people in the former Soviet republics of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine are believed to have suffered medical problems as a result of the April 25, 1986, accident. In Ukraine, more than 2.32 million people, including 452,000 children, have been treated for radiation-linked illnesses, including thyroid and blood cancer and cancerous growths, according to Ukrainian health officials.
Most villages around the plant remain off-limits today, though some Ukrainians are moving back despite government warnings.
Sixty percent of the fallout landed over Belarus, contaminating a region that was home to more than 1.5 million people. Some 125,000 families were evacuated, and large swaths of forest and farmland were declared ``exclusion zones,'' sealed by checkpoints.
Many of the evacuees still complain bitterly that household belongings, left behind during their hurried retreat, later turned up for sale in regional markets, while they lived in limbo in shabbily constructed apartment blocks. Nikolai Nagorny, director of the International Committee of the Red Cross' Chernobyl program, said that cases of thyroid cancer -- one of the few radiation-related illnesses that has been well studied around Chernobyl -- have skyrocketed among children in Belarus' affected regions, from just two cases of thyroid cancer before the accident to at least 1,000 in the 10 years after.
``I don't feel any danger, and even if I did -- what would it matter?'' said Raisa Stradayeva, 62, as she and her grandson, Andrusha, trudged home through the rain in Svetilovichi, a village just outside the highly contaminated exclusion zone.
``I have to live somewhere and this is my home,'' she said.
Besides, she said, the health risks can't be that severe because ``People are returning all the time.''
Not only Belarusians; foreigners are coming too, mostly from poorer ex-Soviet republics, seeking jobs and housing.
Yuri Kuzmich, head of Belarus' Chernobyl exclusion and monitoring zone, rejects accusations that the government is intentionally sending anyone into danger. In his office in Gomel, a city of 500,000 that has suffered increased radiation-related illnesses, Kuzmich said his staff does all it can to keep people out of the worst-hit areas and provide information to those living in the surrounding region.
But, he admits, not everyone is on the same page. State-run farms ``have plans to fulfill ... and they want to fulfill these no matter what,'' he said. Those farms need workers, and farm workers come.
``The passage of time and economic necessity take their toll,'' he said, sitting beneath a portrait of Lukashenko. ``Human memory is short. Eighteen years might as well be 100.''
Kuzmich's team oversees the exclusion zone, manning checkpoints, escorting visitors into the region and collecting scientific and medical data. Some employees are also assigned to oversee the villages under radiation monitoring.
However, a reporter visiting recently was never questioned when entering the exclusion zone, checkpoints appeared deserted and the mushroom- and berry-pickers walk through on the main road, via forest paths or on buses that still pass through the zone.
Margarita Artemyeva, who moved here from Kazakhstan, was helping her 25-year-old daughter, Natasha, wallpaper her new home -- a damp bungalow identical to its neighbors.
``I don't even think about it. I'm not scared at all. If there was a real danger, we'd know it, wouldn't we?'' said Artemyeva, 44. She rejected the claim that the poor are being used to repopulate the area.
Critics claim vegetables, milk and meat from Chernobyl-contaminated regions such as Svetilovichi are being sold throughout Belarus. But in a nation where the average monthly salary is about $150, few have the option of putting health concerns first and buying imports.
Besides, the berries and wild mushrooms supplement meager diets and also sell well.
After Artemyeva mentioned she loved mushrooms, one of Kuzmich's employees took her aside and gently warned her against collecting them in the exclusion zone.
-------- africa
Sudanese Fearful Following Relocation
Officials Call Isolated Refugee Camp 'Ideal'
By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46494-2004Nov12.html
NEW AL-JEER SUREAF, Sudan, Nov. 12 -- Hawa Khary, nine months pregnant and clutching two terrified young children, watched helplessly last week as police armed with sticks and tear gas bulldozed her flimsy grass hut in a crowded refugee camp. Within hours, the little family was herded into a truck and driven 14 miles into the countryside.
When the trucks stopped, to Khary's astonishment, she was shown to a spacious, clean white tent with a patch of grass outside for washing and cooking. It was identical to hundreds of other tents, laid out in perfect rows across a field. Latrines had been dug and food supplies stocked.
But Khary, like many of the 1,500 people now living in what the government calls an "ideal camp" for families displaced by conflict in Sudan's western Darfur region, said she was afraid to stay here and, given the choice, would quickly return to rebuild her twig shelter in the old camp near the bustling provincial capital, Nyala.
"Better tent, but much worse security. I don't trust the government to protect us," said Khary, 25, curtly summing up her new circumstances. Her son, born Thursday in her new tent, yawned in her arms.
Sudanese officials have been displaying the new camp to international visitors this week. They said it was cleaner, healthier, safer and better supplied than many of the 158 sites across Darfur where about 1.5 million people have fled a 20-month conflict between African rebels and government troops and their allied Arab militias.
They also dispute complaints made by camp occupants, aid workers and U.N. officials over the forced relocation of hundreds of families, carried out last week by Sudanese police officers and soldiers who raided Old al-Jeer Sureaf on three days, wielding sticks and teargas as they destroyed huts and rounded up families to be moved.
"We differ on the issue of the violence," said Mustafa Osman Ismail, Sudan's foreign minister, during a tour of the new camp Thursday with Jan Pronk, the U.N. envoy to Sudan. "Nobody was killed. These displaced were in the middle of the city, directly near military security, and suffering from health hazards. Now they have a clinic, water, food and services."
Ismail said the displaced families had been warned three months ago that they would be moved because the land where they were living belonged to a private owner. He also said teargas was used only on Nyala residents who impersonated the displaced people and were infiltrating the camp to collect free food.
"I'm really happy that this visit is completely different. For the first time, I can see confidence between the [displaced people] and local authorities," Ismail told journalists. "In all the camps and villages we didn't find any complaints. People really praise the police for a marvelous job they were doing" at the new camp and in villages where displaced people had been returned home.
But Pronk was tight-lipped and grim during his visit to several camps with Ismail and other Sudanese officials. Sitting next to them at a news conference, Pronk said he did not oppose the relocation in principle but criticized the government for using "too much violence." In the future, he said, "relocation should take place with dignity and without undue violence on [an] already vulnerable population."
When a Sudanese journalist suggested that the refugees had exaggerated the degree of violence, Pronk slammed his hand on the table. "When a doctor tells me that police sent him out of a clinic at gun point, I believe him," he said.
In a separate interview, Ismail said the next relocation effort would be arranged with help from Pronk, who is trying to set up talks between the government, aid groups and the displaced.
Still, the conflicting accounts of the relocation operation have highlighted a widening gap between the Khartoum government, which says it is trying to protect and help civilians in Darfur, and the growing legions of displaced war victims whose distrust of the government is growing deeper.
Aid workers said services at the camp were better, with clean latrines and regular distributions of sorghum, sugar, cooking oil, salt, pasta, rice and tomato paste.
But they also said it was close to an Arab militia camp and the homeland of Arab tribes, who tend to be hostile to displaced Africans. They said the old camp was evacuated because the government suspected it was a base for African rebels close to Nyala.
Nearly 2 million Africans live in shabby tent cities across Darfur after being driven from their farms by fighting. According to the United Nations, the government has bombed villages and armed Arab militias to retaliate against the rebels. Tens of thousands have died from hunger, disease and violence.
In the cool shade of their new tents Thursday, displaced women expressed anger at both police abuse and at being forced to move far from Nyala, where they were able to earn a little money collecting firewood or doing laundry for city residents.
A school teacher in the camp said many displaced people faced a "pattern of humiliation" because they can neither farm nor earn a living. Sadia Hidel, a midwife, said she was especially outraged that over 10 pregnant women were forced to move.
"It's hard to trust people who bomb and burn your village. Then they burn your shelter and beat you while you are living in a camp," Hidel said. "We are already off our land, and they do this to the weakest members who already have poor nutrition. I've never seen any pregnant women treated like this. It's foolish to trust."
--------
Ivory Coast Violence Breaks French Connection
Angry Mobs Rampage Through Areas and Businesses Identified With Former Colonial Ruler
By Craig Timberg
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46478-2004Nov12?language=printer
ABIDJAN, Ivory Coast, Nov. 12 -- Chanting, "We want the French!" a crowd of armed and angry young men swept past La Planta, a club owned by an Ivorian. They started to attack the nearby Byblos restaurant, then stopped when the owner pleaded, "No, no! I'm Lebanese!"
But when it came to Club Le Saint Germain, the mob showed no restraint. The elegant eatery had not only a French owner but also a predominantly French clientele, including soldiers from the nearby military base.
Last Saturday night, witnesses said, men armed with wood planks, iron rail spikes and a lust for revenge battered down the club's steel doors. They yanked bars from the windows and bashed a gaping hole through the concrete wall.
As the owner and a friend watched from an adjacent roof, the mob stole everything that could be taken and destroyed what remained, witnesses said. The posh establishment was reduced to little more than a dirt-streaked shell.
Across this shaken West African city, the pattern of selective destruction was evident Friday after two days of relative calm. Burned and battered buildings stood beside others that had been virtually untouched, with targets apparently singled out because they were identified with France, Ivory Coast's former colonial ruler.
The centuries-old relationship, which had enjoyed an extended period of calm after independence in 1960, became increasingly frayed after the current Ivorian government took power four years ago and subsequent political unrest persisted.
In recent weeks, growing tensions between President Laurent Gbagbo's camp and French peacekeeping troops finally erupted in five days of street violence, beginning when an Ivorian airstrike last Saturday killed nine French troops and a U.N. aid worker, and a retaliatory French attack wiped out several Ivorian warplanes and helicopters.
Ivorians disagree about whether to blame Gbagbo, the activists known as Young Patriots who have become the enforcers of his political will, or the French themselves, who often seemed to have everything that Ivorians did not: wealth, education, lavish homes and fancy cars.
But as hundreds of French nationals have continued to flee each day in an air evacuation to Paris, many Ivorians agree that, in the end, it is they who will suffer most from this bitter turn of events. Every one of the 38 employees at Club Le Saint Germain, for example, was Ivorian. Now, all are out of work.
"For one white person, 38 people had jobs," said Kone Ibrahim Dotoulougo, 31, a doorman at the club, referring to the French owner.
Trouble first broke out Nov. 4, when Gbagbo broke a longtime cease-fire by attacking rebels who control the largely Muslim areas in the northern half of Ivory Coast. That same day, a mob of young men arrived in two city buses at the offices of the Patriote, an opposition newspaper, said employees there.
While more than a dozen journalists scrambled to safety over an exterior wall, the frenzied crowd rammed through a padlocked steel door, overturned furniture, battered the printing press and set the building on fire. The paper has not published since.
"We are sure if they had caught some of us, we would have been killed," said Toure Moussa, the editor. He said the men who attacked his paper and two others were from the Young Patriots and acting on government orders.
"It's to make us mute, to make all opposition voices mute," Moussa said.
The Young Patriots leader, Charles Ble Goude, has insisted that the movement is nonviolent.
Two days after these attacks, the Ivorian warplane bombarded the French peacekeepers, according to French officials, and France responded by destroying Ivory Coast's tiny air force and seizing the international airport in Abidjan, the country's commercial capital.
That night, tensions boiled over. Reportedly at the urging of Ble Goude and others, the Young Patriots took to the streets. Violent clashes with the French military erupted through the weekend, and riots and looting continued for several days. An estimated 4,000 prison inmates also escaped.
Most of the damage occurred the first night, especially in sections with concentrations of French people, residents said.
Tens of thousands of French nationals once lived and worked in this country of 16 million, and Abidjan was regarded as one of Africa's most stable and prosperous cities. But after years of rising unrest, that number has dwindled to 15,000 or less. At least 2,000 have left in the past week.
Sylviane Aka, 43, was returning from a wedding last Saturday in the largely French area known as Zone 4. She described seeing mobs of young men marching down the street, wielding planks and knives and shouting, "We want white French to eat!"
As an Ivorian, Aka said she did not feel endangered, but with news of the French counterattack spreading rapidly, she sympathized with the urge for revenge.
"To French people, in their minds Ivorians are like monkeys in the trees," Aka said. "They have everything here . . . but it is from our raw materials that they get everything."
In other cases, Ivorians said, the mobs did not discriminate in choosing their targets. In one part of Zone 4, gangs destroyed and looted a pharmacy, a craft store, a lingerie shop, a hair salon, a computer center and a French restaurant. Several were owned by Ivorians.
Fatoumata Fondio, 54, said she heard the gangs moving through the neighborhood but didn't think her computer and business service was in danger. On Sunday, she learned that the uninsured business had been attacked. When she arrived to survey the damage, she said, she collapsed in tears. All that was left were a handful of documents and a pair of mouse pads.
Fondio, who said she had visited France twice, blamed the Young Patriots for the destruction. "We live with the French people," she said. "We used to live together."
--------
Foreigners Flee Ivory Coast as Violence Lingers
November 13, 2004
By LYDIA POLGREEN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/africa/13ivory.html?pagewanted=all
DAKAR, Senegal, Nov. 12 - The exodus from Ivory Coast continued Friday, prompted by reports of widespread looting and several rapes, according to a spokesman for the French military, Col. Henri Aussavy. About 900 foreigners fled Friday on three evacuation flights, and a thousand more waited to leave at a French Army base, Colonel Aussavy said.
While Westerners crowded the airport, relative quiet returned to the capital, Abidjan, as Ivoirian soldiers fanned out in the city, which had been beset by mob violence, much of it aimed at French citizens.
The show of force by Ivoirian troops was intended to reassert control, said Lt. Col. Jules Yao Yao, a spokesman for the Ivoirian Army.
"We want people to be reassured," Colonel Yao Yao said. "The situation is coming back to normal. Traffic is returning, shops have reopened and companies that were looted are cleaning up to get back to work."
Talks aimed at easing tensions are under way, but a spokesman for the rebel forces that control the northern half of Ivory Coast said Friday that the rebels had not been invited to talks led by South Africa's president, Thabo Mbeki, who met with government and opposition leaders this week.
But the rebels said that even if they were invited to take part in continuing talks, they would insist on the removal of the embattled president of Ivory Coast, Laurent Gbagbo, as a precondition to any peace deal.
"We are not going to talk to anyone about coming back to the peace process and about how to give Mr. Gbagbo a new chance," said Sidiki Konate, a spokesman for the rebel group, known as New Forces, in a telephone interview from Abidjan. "Mr. Gbagbo is the past. He cannot be included in any discussion of our future."
The rebel group's stance underscored the difficulty facing the multiple efforts to bring to a close a week of violence in Ivory Coast, once one of West Africa's most prosperous and stable nations. The turmoil has led thousands of French citizens and other foreigners to flee amid anti-French demonstrations by Mr. Gbagbo's supporters in Abidjan.
The African Union is planning to hold an emergency summit meeting in Nigeria on Sunday to seek a resolution to the current crisis, which began last Thursday when Ivoirian Air Force planes bombed some rebel towns, and intensified two days later when planes strafed French soldiers, killing nine of them and one American civilian in the rebel-held north. The tensions worsened when the French military destroyed much of the Ivoirian Air Force in retaliation.
But the talks held by Mr. Mbeki were seen to hold some promise. He met with Mr. Gbagbo (pronounced BAG-bo) in Abidjan this week, and received the former prime minister and opposition leader Alassane Ouattara - who was barred from running for president in 2002 because he was deemed not to be pure Ivoirian - in Pretoria on Wednesday, before leaving for Cairo to attend Yasir Arafat's funeral.
Bheki Khumalo, a spokesman for Mr. Mbeki, said the talks had only the modest goal of restarting conversations that could lead to fulfillment of the conditions of the most recent accord reached between the rebels and the government, in July. " We have not yet reached a stage where we could say we are in fully fledged negotiations," Mr. Khumalo said in a telephone interview from South Africa, adding that "attempts are being made" to reach the rebels and include them in the talks.
-------- asia
Japan Protests To China Over Incursion by Nuclear Sub
Associated Press
Saturday, November 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46479-2004Nov12.html
TOKYO, Nov. 12 -- Japan lodged a formal protest with the Chinese government on Friday after determining that an unidentified nuclear submarine that entered its territorial waters this week belonged to China.
Japan's navy went on a rare alert Wednesday when the sub was first spotted in Japanese waters between the southern island of Okinawa and Taiwan. The sub spent about two days in Japanese territory before heading north, and Japanese reconnaissance aircraft and naval destroyers pursued the sub for two days in an attempt to identify it.
Officials said Friday there were enough signs to believe the craft was Chinese, including the direction it traveled and the fact that it was nuclear-powered. Tokyo formally protested the incursion with the Chinese Embassy.
"It is extremely regrettable, and we've lodged a protest," said Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. "In order to prevent a recurrence, we must know why this happened, and we are awaiting a response from the Chinese."
The Chinese envoy, Cheng Yonghua, was summoned by Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura and said afterward that the incident was being investigated. In Beijing, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Zhang Qiyue, said that "the relevant parties are still trying to understand the situation."
Tokyo has been watchful of increased activity in the region, which lies near a disputed underwater gas field and a cluster of islands surrounded by rich fishing waters jointly claimed by Japan, China and Taiwan.
China has begun surveying the gas fields despite Japan's claims that they extend into its territorial waters near Okinawa.
Japan also has complained of unauthorized activity by Chinese research ships near the islands, known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.
--------
China Urges Calm Over Submarine Dispute
November 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Japan-Submarine-Chase.html
TOKYO (AP) -- Japan and China should try to resolve their differences calmly, China's ambassador to Japan said Saturday, a day after Tokyo filed a protest with Beijing over the intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine.
The incident has strained relations between two of Asia's biggest economic and military powers.
Japanese officials protested to the Chinese Embassy on Friday after Tokyo determined that the submarine, which had entered territorial waters days earlier, belonged to China.
China has yet to respond but on Saturday, Chinese Ambassador Wang Yi urged the countries to work toward improving relations.
``China and Japan have some problems, but we want both countries to respect each other and calmly find a solution,'' Wang said, avoiding specific reference to the incursion.
The nationally televised remarks came during a speech in Koya, a town in the Wakayama prefecture about 280 miles southwest of Tokyo.
Wang also said the Chinese are pained by Japanese homage to a Tokyo war shrine that Beijing says glorifies Japan's World War II atrocities in Asia. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has paid annual visits to the shrine honoring the country's war dead.
Japanese Foreign Ministry spokesman Akira Chiba said he hadn't heard Wang's remarks.
``I know of no comments from China directed to the Japanese government,'' Chiba told The Associated Press.
Relations between Japan and China have cooled in recent months as the two sides have wrangled over underwater natural gas fields and several islands -- known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China -- surrounded by rich fishing waters.
Tokyo is uneasy with China's growing military and economic might. Many Japanese worry about Beijing's military posture, which they see as increasingly hostile, amid China's booming demand for energy and marine resources and a historic rivalry with Taiwan.
Japan's navy went on alert Wednesday when the submarine was first detected in Japanese waters between the southern island of Okinawa and Taiwan. The submarine left after just two hours and headed north, and was shadowed by Japanese reconnaissance aircraft and naval destroyers.
Koizumi said Friday he did not expect long-term damage to ties with China but much depended on Beijing's response.
Japan's media have speculated that the incursion was the Chinese military's attempt to expose the Japanese navy's vulnerabilities and test its response.
On Saturday, newspaper editorials criticized Tokyo for being too soft on Beijing and urged the government to take military action against such intrusions at sea.
``It is not enough for Japan just to demand that Chinese vessel never invade Japanese waters again. Japan must make its own preparations to prevent China from repeating its violation of Japanese territory,'' the national Yomiuri newspaper said in an editorial Saturday that called Tokyo's response a ``grave error.''
``The way the Japanese government responded to China's violation of its territory was untenable,'' the paper said.
-------- china
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Radar Planes Intended For Use in Taiwan Strait
By Edward Cody
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A19
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46477-2004Nov12.html
BEIJING, Nov. 12 -- The Chinese military, undeterred by a U.S. veto that blocked the purchase of Israeli planes, has developed its own radar surveillance aircraft and is test-flying the first models for early deployment in the Taiwan Strait, according to military specialists.
The Chinese airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, uses domestically produced advanced radar mounted on a Russian-made Il-76 transport aircraft. Analysts said the AWACS marks an important step in the government's campaign to develop the modern military necessary to back up its threat to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary. Electronic weaponry -- in this case, equipment to monitor the skies and control warplanes over a wide battlefield -- has been a major focus of extensive military improvements in recent years. In particular, AWACS has long been seen by the military as an indispensable tool for air superiority over the 100-mile strait separating Taiwan from the mainland.
"You've got to have those AWACS up there or you're not going anywhere," said a foreign military attache in Beijing describing China's need for such a system in the event of conflict with Taiwan.
Chinese military technicians have been struggling to acquire AWACS-type equipment since the United States pressured Israel in 2000 to back out of a $1 billion agreement to sell China four of its Phalcon phased-array radar systems. The systems also would have used Il-76 aircraft as a platform.
The main U.S. concern in blocking the sale was that China would gain a military advantage over Taiwan. Moreover, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. government has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself against any Chinese attack, meaning U.S. forces could become involved should fighting erupt.
For the same reasons, People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force leaders were determined to acquire such a plane. "After the 2000 Israeli fiasco, the PLA made it a matter of high pride to prove to the Americans they would not be denied AWACS," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., a U.S.-based specialist on the Chinese military.
At first, China turned to Russia, its traditional source of military equipment. The Beijing government concluded a deal to buy four Beriev A-50 Mainstay radar planes, which are roughly the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Air Force's E-3 Sentry AWACS. The purchase was believed to be the first phase of an agreement for up to eight of the Russian aircraft.
At the same time, however, Chinese scientists were at work on their own radar equipment. It is not known whether any of the Russian craft were ever delivered, which would have provided a look at the technology, or whether the technicians obtained help from Israeli or Russian counterparts. In any case, the Chinese AWACS that has begun test flights bears a strong resemblance to the A-50, which also uses the Il-76.
The AWACS could be operational within one or two years assuming the tests are successful, the specialists said. It was not known how many are planned for production, but Fisher noted eight would allow for a 24-hour patrol at both ends of the Taiwan Strait.
The Defense Ministry, which treats most military subjects as secret, did not reply to a request for information on the AWACS project.
Whatever the ultimate production schedule, AWACS development fits into a steady growth in the amount and sophistication of armaments on both sides of the strait, making a confrontation between China and Taiwan potentially one of the world's most dangerous.
The leadership has steadily increased military budgets in recent years and sought to reform the manpower-heavy but technology-short PLA as swiftly as possible. According to U.S. and Taiwanese officials, the government has deployed nearly 600 short-range ballistic missiles in southern China aimed at targets in Taiwan. The number grows by about 75 a year, they say.
Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, who began a second four-year term in May, has insisted the 13,500-square mile territory is independent and should stay that way. Soon after taking office in May, his government decided on an $18.2 billion arms purchase from the United States, including 12 P-3C Orion submarine-hunting planes, eight diesel-electric submarines and six PAC-3 batteries equipped with more than 350 Patriot anti-missile missiles.
But the opposition Nationalist and People First parties, which have a majority in the legislature, declined this week to approve Chen's budget for the purchase, arguing it was too expensive and in some ways inappropriate for Taiwan's needs. The issue is unlikely to be resolved until after the next legislative elections, scheduled for Dec. 11.
In the meantime, both sides have continued individual purchases that notch up the technology level of their militaries by matching threat for threat.
China, for instance, in 2002 bought from Israel a number of Harpy anti-radar drones, which can loiter over enemy territory and drop munitions on radars turned on to guide air defenses. Meanwhile, Taiwan has obtained authorization from the Bush administration to buy high-speed anti-radiation missiles, which also can target air defenses by homing in on radar emissions, Chin Hui-chu, a Taiwanese legislator on the National Defense committee, recently told the Taiwan News.
-------- depleted uranium
US report links toxins to Gulf war syndrome
The Guardian
November 13, 2004
James Meikle, health correspondent
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1350345,00.html
Troops who have fallen ill since the first Gulf war may have fallen victim to a ticking toxic timebomb, advisers to the US government said last night.
Scientists and veterans from the 1991 conflict went further than any previous official body either side of the Atlantic in identifying a complex chemical cocktail of nerve agents, pills to protect troops from those agents and multiple pesticides as a possible cause for their health problems.
Psychiatric illness, combat experience or other stresses from deployment did not explain ill health in the "vast majority" of 100,000 sick US veterans, according to the advisers' report. On the contrary, evidence supported a "probable link" between the toxins and veterans' illness.
Many troops had been exposed to substances belonging to a class of compounds that affected the nervous system and a "growing body of research" indicated that ill veterans differed from healthy ones "on objective measures of neuropathology and impairment."
Animal studies indicated that exposure to nerve agents at levels too low to produce acute symptoms could result in "chronic adverse effects on the nervous and immune systems". In addition, research suggested that if the neurotoxins were combined, they would be more poisonous.
Lord Morris of Manchester, who has campaigned for veterans both here and in the US, said: "This is a major development in unravelling the truth about thousands of still unexplained Gulf war illnesses. Scientific opinion in the US increasingly rejects the old medical consensus attributing the illness to wartime stress and psychiatric illness. I am calling for an urgent ministerial statement here in the UK."
The report was published by the US department of veterans affairs. The committee responsible included Robert Haley, the scientist who has suggested that three types of Gulf-related cell damage exist in veterans, the worst associated with confusion and vertigo, another related to thinking problems, depression and sleep disorders, and a third to pain.
This is not accepted here although there is consideration as to whether some of the 6,000 British veterans who have complained of illness should undergo similar brain scans. The Ministry of Defence insists there is no Gulf war syndrome, and no more deaths among veterans than among troops who never went to the Gulf.
It accepts that many more veterans who served there report illness. Research led by Simon Wessley of King's College, London, has suggested that people who had a battery of vaccinations and received them in the Gulf area, rather than before deployment, were more likely to report illness.
The new report says no further research into stress as a primary cause of the illnesses should be funded under federal Gulf war programmes. Instead, more work should be done to investigate the chronic effects of exposure to pesticides and nerve gas, as well as the effects of tablets taken to protect against nerve gas.
Earlier this year, a Congressional investigation blamed the bombing of weapons dumps during the war, or their destruction aftewards, for releasing chemical agents that might have spread wider than previously thought.
It said the destruction of weapons bunkers at Khamisayah in southern Iraq in March spread into Saudia Arabia and well into Iran. This is not accepted by the British government.
The research committee also wants the health of veterans' children monitored, and will pursue further research into infections diseases, vaccines, smoke from burning oil wells and depleted uranium in anti-tank shells.
-------- iran
Iran Says EU Nuke Negotiations in Final Stages
November 13, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-nuclear-iran.html
TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran's negotiations with the European Union over a deal which would spare Tehran from possible U.N. sanctions over its nuclear program are in their final stages, Iran said Saturday.
``Negotiations with Europe were intense and important and... they are in their final stages,'' Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi told state television. ``We have given them our final response and await their final decision and we hope to pass this stage smoothly.''
Iran and the European Union's big three powers -- Britain, Germany and France -- have been negotiating a deal for the past few weeks under which Tehran would agree to freeze sensitive nuclear work such as uranium enrichment.
In return, the EU would not support U.S. calls for Iran's case to be sent to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions and would sit down with Iran to work out a lasting solution to the nuclear dispute.
Iran insists its nuclear ambitions are limited to generating electricity from atomic power plants, not making bombs.
Tehran gave its response to the EU deal Thursday but there has been no announcement yet of a final agreement. EU diplomats say Iran has been trying to change some of the terms of the deal, including the scope of the enrichment suspension.
President Bush, who has labeled Iran an ``axis of evil'' member, Friday gave public backing to the EU initiative to try to resolve the dispute through talks.
``We don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon and we're working toward that end,'' Bush said at a joint news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the White House.
``And the truth of the matter is the prime minister gets a lot of credit for working with France and Germany to convince the Iranians to get rid of the processes that would enable them to develop a nuclear weapon.''
IAEA REPORT DELAYED AGAIN
The IAEA has delayed release of its of eagerly-awaited report summarizing its two-year investigation of Iran to give the EU and Iran a chance to come to a final agreement.
``The stakes are very high on both sides,'' a Vienna-based Western diplomat who follows IAEA issues very closely told Reuters. The report was originally due Friday but will not likely reach Vienna diplomats until early next week.
The suspension of enrichment was demanded by the IAEA board of governors in September. Although the IAEA resolution called for an immediate freeze of all enrichment-related activities, Iran has continued producing centrifuge parts.
``They now have enough parts for 1100 to 1200 centrifuges,'' said one diplomat, adding that this was enough to make enough highly-enriched uranium for a weapon in two to three years.
Diplomats said IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei had told the Iranians that if the results of their negotiations with the EU were positive, he would be able to present a relatively upbeat report to the agency's 35-member board on Nov. 25.
Unlike previous reports, which were technical updates about the investigation, this report will cover the entire probe.
Diplomats said that ElBaradei plans to say that while he has found no evidence Tehran diverted resources or materials to a weapons program, Iran's nuclear fuel production capabilities are suspiciously far ahead of the rest of its atomic program.
Kharrazi said it was time for Iran's case to be closed.
``We have done all we could to cooperate with the agency. Most of the questions are addressed now. There is nothing more Iran can do... We think it is time to close Iran's case with the agency,'' he said.
--------
Iran Says Nuclear Talks in 'Final Stages'
Associated Press
By ALI AKBAR DAREINI
Nov 13, 2004
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/I/IRAN_NUCLEAR?SITE=DCTMS&SECTION=HOME
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Iran is in the "final stages" of negotiation with diplomats from the major European powers in a dispute over nuclear arms, Foreign Minister Kamal Kharrazi said Saturday. But European envoys warned that a lasting agreement remains a long way off.
Iran has been asked to make a commitment not to enrich uranium - a process that can provide material for nuclear reactors as well as bombs.
Last month, envoys from Britain, France and Germany offered Iran a deal that included a light-water research reactor if Iran pledged to abandon uranium enrichment and related activities. In a subsequent round of talks that finished in Paris on Nov. 6, a tentative agreement was reached, according to representatives from all sides.
"The negotiations we had with Europeans were very intense and important," Kharrazi said in an Iranian TV broadcast Saturday. "It's in the final stages." Washington believes Iran is secretly developing nuclear weapons under cover of a peaceful nuclear program, and President Bush has accused Iran of being part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and prewar Iraq.
In a television interview to be aired Sunday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the United States is not seeking a regime change in Iran and has no plans to invade the country.
"That is our policy: no regime change. It is up to the Iranian people to decide what they are going to do with respect to their future and how they are going to be led," Powell told CNBC's The Wall Street Journal Report. He added, however, that "we don't approve of this regime." Iran denies developing nuclear arms and has offered to provide guarantees that its program is strictly about producing electricity. "Most of the questions have been answered. There is nothing else Iran can do," said Kharrazi, who was interviewed in Cairo, where he attended the funeral of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat on Friday.
However, European diplomats in Vienna have said the Iranian government had come back this week with a version of the Paris agreement that was unacceptable.
In his comments Saturday, Kharrazi sounded optimistic about the status of the negotiations.
"We have given them our final response and we are awaiting their final response. We hope to pass this stage in a good way," Kharrazi said.
The Europeans have warned Iran that unless it ceases all enrichment activities, they will back the U.S. push to have Iran's nuclear file referred to the U.N. Security Council, which could impose sanctions on the country. The issue is to be discussed at a meeting of the U.N. nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, in Vienna on Nov. 25.
The IAEA has delayed a report on Iran's nuclear activities that had been scheduled for limited circulation Friday among diplomats accredited to the agency.
A four-person team of IAEA inspectors arrived in Tehran on Saturday, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported. It said the visit was part of routine inspections and the team would leave Nov. 23.
Iran has long argued that its signature to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty gives it the right to enrich uranium, and it wants to produce nuclear fuel rather than depend on imports.
However, Iran concealed aspects of its nuclear program until recently, and this has generated intense international pressure for it to forgo enrichment as a safeguard against the manufacture of nuclear weapons.
The nuclear program, and enrichment, enjoys wide support in Iran and is perhaps the only foreign policy issue on which all political factions agree.
Iran suspended enrichment temporarily last year, but it has refused to stop related activities such as reprocessing uranium or building centrifuges.
-------- iraq / inspections
A Review of the Duelfer Report
Forget Ernest Hemingway, Where's the RDX?
By Werther
November 13, 2004
http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/comments/c530.htm
The Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to the DCI on Iraq's WMD is commonly called "The Duelfer Report," after its director, Charles Duelfer. This long (966 page) three-volume report is the U.S. Government's final word on whether the government of Iraq under Saddam Hussein was pursuing chemical, nuclear, and biological weapons, as well as ballistic missiles of prohibited type and range.
Given the manifest political pressure from their superiors to document evidence of prohibited weapons programs, the report's authors spared no effort or expense. For 16 months, 1,500 U.S. and British inspectors searched Iraq looking for weapons of mass destruction. The team was called the Iraq Survey Group. The cost of the search by these 1,500 personnel was $600 million. [1]
As the world now knows in abundant detail, the team found no evidence of the prohibited articles. But what illuminates the policy making process in the United States Government is the elephantine manner in which the report grudgingly comes to that conclusion.
As such, the report attempts to make lemonade out of lemons by providing long-winded "context" for the absence of any actual evidence of prohibited weaponry. The document - which ought to be first and foremost a painstaking inventory of physical evidence of weaponry - takes several lengthy detours into secondary or even irrelevant matters, as will be seen below.
It also displays a symptom of what appears to be a growing tendency of government documents that attempt to rationalize away the stupidity or misfeasance of government officials: the curse of "fine writing." Like its sister effort in alibi-making, the 9/11 Commission Report, [2] the Duelfer opus swathes inconvenient facts in the soft bandages of English Lit. Therefore, the paramount question - did Saddam Hussein develop weaponry banned by United Nations resolutions - recedes before a psychoanalytic portrait of a fiend in human form who obviously intended to get those weapons, regardless of the evidence to the contrary.
The report even hilariously quotes Ernest Hemingway (more an expert on the drinking emporia of Havana than contemporary Middle Eastern developments, surely) in order to illuminate the Beast of Baghdad's singular personality. It is as if in 1945, British Intelligence had dispatched a team of technical experts to defeated Germany for a report on the state of German rocketry and received instead a character study of Hitler. [3]
Such focus on Saddam is not merely misleading to the public who had a right to expect a dispassionate inventory of facts, it is also delusory in that it confirms the American governing class's obsession with demon figures as opposed to an acceptance of the fact that the current state system inevitably involves nations with clashing interests. The American equation of [fill in the blank with favorite dictator here] with Hitler not only allows the Washington elites to dupe themselves and the public that military action is not merely necessary but morally compulsory; it also fools them into thinking the "natives" will be properly grateful for having their property invaded and their houses bombed.
Likewise one senses that the report team's innumerable interviews with Iraqi scientists, military leaders, and government bureaucrats yielded rather less than claimed. It is certainly possible that the Nuremberg Syndrome revealed itself in the witnesses' eagerness to say that they were mere putty in the hands of the capricious tyrant Saddam. If such were the case, lower level culpability would of course be conveniently removed. And since Saddam was maniacally secretive, it becomes impossible to prove he wasn't thinking about obtaining WMD. In a legal case, this would be the equivalent of the prosecutor going to enormous lengths to establish an alleged perpetrator's motives when there was no physical evidence a crime had been committed.
Another diversionary theme of the report is its hectoring reportage of the Saddam Hussein government's attempts to evade or legally end sanctions. This theme scratches numerous ideological itches, including: (1) the alleged futility of sanctions, particularly under the auspices of the U.N., as an alternative to pre-emptive military invasions; (2) the corruption of the U.N. itself as a convenient counterpoint to copious evidence of fraud and mismanagement by U.S. military contractors in Iraq; (3) the inherent perfidy of foreign governments, particularly the French. The ideological utility of these themes is apparent from Fox News's Herculean labors to make the oil for food program into the latest Whitewater scandal. Needless to say, Duelfer edited out the names of American companies that were violating sanctions in collusion with Saddam. It is certainly a refreshing precedent that, Patriot Act or no, the administration is showing a keen regard for privacy issues. [4]
So much for what the Duelfer Report covers, at numbing and Joycean length. What the report does not cover is also illuminating. It is true that Iraq's 377 metric tons of Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine [RDX] and High Melting Point Explosive [HMX] that have gone missing - presumably by looting - are not chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. They are, however, one of four or five essential components in triggering nuclear weapons: HMX was developed specifically for that purpose, because its high energy would allow both a smaller nuclear weapon package and in order to trigger fission more efficiently. Given that the insurgents in Iraq are making some pretty energetic bombs that are light and concealable (lugging low explosive to a site under cover and making a mine big enough to damage an Abrams tank is a lot more difficult than using stable, concealable plastic explosive) one can apply Occam's Razor and conclude that RDX and HMX were looted by insurgents and have been used locally ever since.
The big question is whether the explosives have leaked out internationally. The twin airplane disaster in Russia was probably plastique. If President Vladimir Putin were actually collaborating with Muslims to move plastic explosives around the world, as alleged by John Shaw, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense [5] it would be suicidally stupid of him.
One suspects that the author of the piece on Shaw's allegations, Washington Times reporter Bill Gertz, is effectively acting as Charlie McCarthy to the neoconservative faction's Edgar Bergen in a desperate attempt to muddy the waters. And Charles Duelfer's own comment that the looting of the plastic explosives was no big deal because it's only a small percentage of the explosives in pre-war Iraq is equally transparent and devoid of logic. It is the equivalent of saying the U.S. has an inventory of 10,000 nukes and who cares if a half dozen go missing
Granted, RDX and HMX are not nukes, but they are among the most energetic non-nuclear explosives. In addition to triggering fission in a nuclear warhead, they are also non-metallic, moldable, do not smell, and are stable in transport; i.e., they can probably go through most standard detectors. Less than a pound brought down the Boeing 747 over Lockerbie. The amount missing from the Iraq inventory would make approximately 800,000 Lockerbie bombs.
The reaction of the U.S. Government to the explosives looting - a mixture of nonchalant indifference, prickly defensiveness, and diversionary accusations - is particularly insulting given the security stakes involved. The government's own efforts to ban truck traffic on the streets proximate to key locations in Washington, D.C. and some other cities (in order to prevent a Tim McVeigh-style use of tons of low explosives in a truck) are potentially defeated by the availability of a much more energetic explosive, 50 lbs. of which could be hidden in a smaller vehicle.
The Duelfer Report's handling of the explosives fiasco is depressing. Volume I of the report makes on page 81 an incidental mention of RDX as one of several types of explosives that Iraqi Intelligence could use for covert assassinations. Oddly, though, the report's authors, who were otherwise so free with supposition about Iraqi intentions in other matters, did not surmise that this kind of tactic could be transferable to non-state actors, and that securing the stockpile was an urgent priority. The volume makes no mention of HMX.
In Volume II, on pages 14, 16, and 96, the report states that the composition of some Iraqi missile warheads was 30 percent RDX. There is no mention of HMX.
In Volume III on page 237 (page 11 of the glossary), the acronym RDX is defined. There is no mention in that volume of HMX.
By contrast, the much derided (or ignored) January 2003 report by the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] on the state of Iraq's WMD is a model of concision: it contains all of 16 pages. [6] Yet this report, while economizing on literary quotations and psychoanalytic portraits, contains two substantive paragraphs on plastic explosives which I reproduce in full below with paragraph numbering as in the original:
2. HMX
53. The relocation and consumption of HMX (a high explosive of potential use in nuclear weapons), as described in Iraq's backlog of semi-annual declarations, has been investigated by the IAEA. In those declarations, Iraq stated that, between 1998 and 2002, it had transferred 32 of the 228 tonnes of HMX which had been under IAEA seal as of December 1998 to other locations. In addition, Iraq stated that a very small quantity (46 kg) of HMX had been used at munitions factories for research and development. At the request of the IAEA, Iraq has provided further clarification on the movement and use of the HMX. In that clarification, Iraq indicated that the 32 tonnes of HMX had been blended with sulphur to produce industrial explosives and provided mainly to cement plants for quarrying, and that the research and development using the small quantity of HMX had been in the areas of personnel mines, explosives in civilian use, missile warhead filling and research on tanks.
54. IAEA inspectors have been able to verify and re-seal the remaining balance of approximately 196 tonnes of HMX, most of which has remained at the original storage location. The movement of the blended HMX and the other small quantity of HMX has also been documented by Iraq. However, it has not been possible to verify the use of those materials, as all of it is said to have been consumed through explosions and there are no immediately available technical means for verifying such uses. The IAEA will continue to investigate means of verifying the Iraqi statements about the use of the HMX and blended HMX.
It is nice to know that with only $600 million and a thousand pages at their disposal, the loyal servants of the American people are almost up to the standards of a 16-page U.N.-sponsored report written in haste while Saddam was still in control of Iraq.
The distressing saga of the looted plastic explosive, and the government's studied incompetence and denial in dealing with the issue, illustrate in bold, primary colors how Washington's elites squander the public's money to make us all less safe while at the same time coercing the bureaucracy to write bogus reports justifying their actions.
Postscript:
As expenditures for the conquest and occupation of Iraq approach $200 billion, Time magazine reports that the rate of illegal immigration into the United States has actually increased since September 11, 2001. [7] And now that the election is over, the administration's proposal to amnesty up to 10 million illegal aliens is back on the table - a proposal which Customs and Border Protection agents say has already stimulated an increased flow of illegal immigration.
Consider carefully what your government is doing: (1) by besieging foreign towns like a medieval army, it is providing the anti-American motive to millions of people who were heretofore favorable or indifferent to the United States and its people; (2) by following the crackpot military theories of Donald Rumsfeld - thereby providing too few troops to guard munitions depots (but not the oil ministry) - it has provided the means for those angry millions to take revenge upon us; and (3) by leaving our border open so as to reward Wal-Mart, agribusiness, and other interests who show their gratitude in the form of political contributions, it is providing the opportunity for those vengeful persons to strike in the homeland of their enemy.
If, God forbid, such a fearful scenario eventuates, we can be sure that an aspiring Tom Keane or Charles Duelfer will be summoned from the bench to explain in beautiful prose that it wasn't the government's fault.
- Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia based defense analyst.
Notes:
[1] This was the amount budgeted for the purpose in the fiscal year 2004 Iraq supplemental appropriation (P.L. 108-106).
[2] Literary connoisseurs were so taken by the 9/11 Report's description of the blue of the sky that they failed to notice that nowhere in the report's 567 pages is any individual in government condemned for nonfeasance, misfeasance, or malfeasance, nor is any removal for cause recommended.
[3] Which is in fact what the British got: MI6 operative and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper's The Last Days of Hitler has enough Wagnerian Sturm und Drang for the most jaded palate. Alas, Lord Trevor-Roper's expertise did not prevent him from pronouncing the fake Hitler diaries as genuine during the 1980s.
[4] To spare the reader the suspense, the American companies whose names were blacked out in the report are Chevron, Mobil, Texaco and Bay Oil as well as three individuals: Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. of Houston, Samir Vincent of Annandale, Virginia, and Shakir al-Khafaji of West Bloomfield, Michigan. These companies and individuals were given vouchers and got 111 million barrels of oil between them from 1996 to 2003. The vouchers allowed them to profit by selling the oil or the right to trade it.
[5] "Russia Tied to Iraq's Missing Arms," The Washington Times, 28 October 2004.
[6] The report is available online here: http://www.mideastweb.org/inspectionreports.htm
[7] "Who Left the Door Open?" Time, 20 September 2004.
Chuck Spinney
"A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." - James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, August 4, 1822
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C. 107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
-------- korea
South Korea Urges Atomic Talks, North Softens Tone
November 13, 2004
By REUTERS
http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-korea-north-roh.html
SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korea urged the United States to try talking to North Korea instead of taking a hard line over its nuclear plans, while Pyongyang said it would be ``quite possible'' to solve the crisis if Washington changed its stance.
The United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea have held three rounds of talks with the communist North since mid-2003. Pyongyang ducked an agreed meeting in September and has made clear another round would be difficult this year.
``I'm saying here that there's no other way than dialogue,'' South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said in a speech during a stopover in Los Angeles on his way to South America, where he will meet re-elected President Bush.
``A hardline policy means too much for the Korean peninsula,'' said Roh, referring to the devastation of the 1950-53 Korean War and the consequences of any new conflict.
The Bush administration is seeking the complete, verifiable and irreversible dismantling of the North's atomic projects and arsenal.
The North Korean Foreign Ministry took a sideways swipe at Bush's approach on Saturday, mixing standard but toned-down rhetoric with possible flexibility.
A ministry spokesman said U.S. media had spread nonsensical reports that the six-way talks could not succeed because the North insisted on bilateral negotiations.
``The DPRK does not feel any need to ask the United States for the bilateral talks as it is not ready to hold them,'' the North's official KCNA news agency quoted the spokesman as saying.
DPRK is short for the North's official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.
During the presidential election campaign, the difference between Bush's approach and that of Democratic rival John Kerry was boiled down to multilateral versus bilateral talks, although the gap between the two was actually more nuanced.
In the coded language of the North, the spokesman's comments were a sign Pyongyang was not closing the door on Bush.
``If the U.S. drops its hostile policy aimed at bringing down the system in the DPRK and opts for co-existing with the latter in practice, it will be quite possible to settle the issue,'' he said.
AXIS OF EVIL
North Korea has yet to comment officially on Bush's win. Diplomatic analysts say Pyongyang is waiting to see who heads North Korea policy in Bush's second administration and what changes, if any, are made to Washington's approach.
At the beginning of his first term, Bush branded North Korea part of an ``axis of evil'' along with Iran and pre-war Iraq.
Japan and China said on Thursday the North had made clear an early resumption of the six-party talks would be difficult.
Earlier, North Korea said it would step up its ``nuclear deterrence,'' saying Washington was preparing an emergency scenario to attack it using nuclear arms.
``No matter what others may say, the DPRK will as ever strive to increase its self-defensive nuclear deterrent force to cope with the U.S. moves for a nuclear war,'' KCNA quoted a spokesman for the Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of the Fatherland as saying.
The committee is North Korea's official channel for dealing with the South, the counterpart to Seoul's Unification Ministry. The Foreign Ministry deals with the six-party talks.
The latest nuclear crisis erupted two years ago when U.S. diplomats said North Korean had admitted to running a covert uranium enrichment program. Pyongyang has since denied this.
--------
IAEA clears South Korea in nuke probe
(UPI)
Nov. 13, 2006
http://washingtontimes.com/upi-breaking/20041113-073603-9604r.htm
Seoul, South Korea, Nov. 13 -- A U.N. atomic agency has cleared South Korea of military intent in laboratory experiments that produced tiny amounts of nuclear material.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Friday South Korea's recently revealed nuclear activities were not part of any secret military plan, the Korea Times reported Saturday.
The IAEA's conclusions have been circulated to the 35 member states on its board of governors, who could refer the matter to the Security Council or drop the matter at their Nov. 25 meeting.
According to the 8-page report, the average enrichment level of the 0.2-gram uranium produced during the 2000 experiment was 10.2 percent, but a very small amount was close to 77 percent. As far as the quality is concerned, uranium enriched to 90 percent is generally considered weapons grade, The Times said.
The average enrichment level of the plutonium produced during 1982 tests was about 98 percent, according to the report, but the tiny amount, 0.7 gram, was regarded as far too small to have any link to a clandestine atomic weapons program.
-----
DPRK rebuts US allegation on nuclear talks
Xinhuanet
Nov. 13, 2004
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/13/content_2214897.htm
PYONGYANG, Nov. 13 ) -- The Democratic People's Republicof Korea (DPRK) on Saturday denied a US allegation that the DPRK only wants to hold direct bilateral talks with the United States for solving the nuclear issue of the DPRK, and reiterated that thekey to solving the deadlocked issue is an end of Washington's hostile policy toward the DPRK.
A DPRK Foreign Ministry spokesman rejected some recent reports in US media that blamed the deadlock of the six-party talks on Pyongyang's demand of talks with the United Sates only.
"This is nothing but sophism making profound confusing of the right and wrong," the spokesman said.
"As for bilateral talks, the DPRK has neither expected nor waited for them as the US has been opposed to it. Accordingly, theDPRK does not feel any need to ask the US for bilateral talks. Moreover, it does not stand to reason for the DPRK to try to hold any bilateral talks with the party which is hatching plots 'to bring down the DPRK's system'", he said.
He reiterated that "for the US to make its policy switchover isthe key to finding a solution to the issue."
If the United States drops its hostile policy aimed at "bringing down the system" in the DPRK and opts for co-existing with the latter in practice, "it will be quite possible to settle the issue," he said.
The spokesman noted that the DPRK has clarified on various occasions its willingness to settle the nuclear issue through dialogue and negotiations and that "it does not stick to the form of the talks."
"The DPRK will go ahead to attain its desired goal strictly according to its independent judgment and in the state interests,"he added.
The nuclear issue of the DPRK erupted in October 2002 when US officials said DPRK was pursuing a covert uranium-enrichment program.
The DPRK, however, has since denied running such a program, andhas repeatedly demanded food and energy aid and diplomatic concessions in return for refreezing an older, plutonium-based nuclear program, mothballed in 1994.
But the US decision in November 2002 to halt offering heavy oilto the DPRK on the excuse that the DPRK was continuing its nuclearprogram escalated the situation.
The DPRK then decided to resume the operation and construction of its nuclear facilities to generate electricity. It said the steps were taken just to make up the huge power hole due to the heavy oil suspension, adding that it was the US government who violated the 1994 Agreed Framework signed by the US and the DPRK.
The accord in 1994 stipulates that the DPRK freeze its nuclear program in return for the provision of 500,000 tons of heavy oil ayear by US and for the help to build two sets of light waters reactors in the DPRK before 2003.
In August 2003, mediated by China, the United States, China, Japan and South Korea, along with Russia and the DPRK held the first round six-party talks in Beijing, aimed at realizing the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
Up to June this year, three rounds of the six-party talks have been held, all in Beijing. The fourth round scheduled for September failed to take place.
Pyongyang has said that the US turning down the proposal of "reward for freeze" advanced by the DPRK and applying "double standards" make the fourth round of the six-party talks abortive. Endit
-----
S. Korean Leader Won't Tolerate Aggression
Saturday November 13, 2004
By CHRIS T. NGUYEN
Associated Press Writer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uslatest/story/0,1282,-4612695,00.html
LOS ANGELES (AP) - South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun said Friday he will not tolerate the development of nuclear weapons by North Korea, but warned a ``hard-line policy'' against the communist country could lead to grave consequences.
``Our commitment to a denuclearized Korean peninsula is ... clear. As to our position that North Korean nuclear capability can by no means be tolerated - this issue must be resolved peacefully through the six-party talks,'' said Roh, referring to negotiations that involve both Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States.
``You might have noticed that I've been undutifully blunt and direct in terms of stressing that the fact there is no alternative left in dealing with this issue other than dialogue,'' added Roh, speaking through an interpreter.
``And it should also be noted that a hard-line policy will have very grave repercussions and implications for the Korean peninsula.''
Roh's appearance, sponsored by the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, came on the first leg of a 12-day trip that will culminate with his attendance at the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Santiago, Chile, Nov. 20-21.
At the forum, he will seek support for a peaceful solution to the dispute over North Korea's nuclear weapons program. He will also meet privately with President Bush and others.
During his speech, Roh avoided discussing a report by the United Nations atomic watchdog agency that his country's nuclear experiments produced minute amounts of plutonium and near-weapons-grade uranium.
The International Atomic Energy Agency said Thursday there was no evidence linking those experiments to an attempt to make nuclear arms. Its report urged South Korea to provide more details of its experiments.
South Korean officials confirmed the experiments, saying they were conducted by scientists who withheld their work from government officials.
The IAEA report highlighted tensions between North Korea and South Korea.
Though the countries reached an agreement in 1992 aimed at keeping the peninsula free of nuclear weapons, North Korea expelled inspectors in 2002 and said it was developing nuclear weapons.
The report said South Korea refused two requests by the IAEA to visit the Daejon government nuclear center - and even after giving inspectors access in March, initially refused to allow them to take environmental samples.
-------- u.s. nuc facilities
-------- new jersey
Safety at Hope Creek questioned
Whistle-blower says nuclear plant operator risks catastrophe
By JEFF MONTGOMERY
The News Journal (Delaware)
11/13/2004
http://www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2004/11/13safetyathopecre.html
A New Jersey woman who said she was fired from PSEG last year after continuing to press top managers on nuclear plant safety concerns says the company is risking a catastrophe if they restart the idled Hope Creek reactor along the Delaware River without an extensive safety check and overhaul.
Nancy Kymn Harvin, a communications and organization specialist who filed a "whistle-blower" complaint that is pending before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said a company focus on "earnings per share" sidetracked reforms launched after a safety crisis and self-imposed shutdown in the mid-1990s.
Harvin said documented problems at Hope Creek earlier this year were neglected, only to become factors in a sudden, costly shutdown on Oct. 10 that remains under investigation.
"We're going to do everything we can to not allow that unit to restart" until the company addresses chronic maintenance problems that compromise safety, Harvin said. "Workers have said that instead of taking a systematic and systemic view, the modus operandi is to look at finite, discrete problems and fix them as minimally as possible, not to take the broader view and find out what all the ramifications are."
Skip Sindoni, a spokesman for PSEG Nuclear, said Harvin's job was eliminated in 2003 during a reorganization of the utility, and said safety would guide the company's decisions about Hope Creek.
"Hope Creek won't restart until we're confident that we've made the necessary repairs," Sindoni said.
PSEG Nuclear operates the Hope Creek and twin Salem Units 1 and 2 reactors, which can generate more than 3,300 megawatts and together rank as the nation's second-largest nuclear complex. More than 24,000 people in Delaware live inside the plant's 10-mile-radius emergency planning zone.
Harvin, who joined PSEG in 1998, said she was given a 45-day termination notice in February 2003 and then saw her remaining time with the company abruptly cut short after she continued attempting to relay worker and manager warnings about a dangerous steam valve problem at Hope Creek to the utility's top officers.
"What they were really saying is: You know too much, and you've become a problem to us," said Harvin, who has filed a separate civil whistle-blower lawsuit against the company.
Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan confirmed the agency is investigating Harvin's complaints, but said he was unable to estimate when the commission would issue a ruling.
David Lochbaum, a nuclear safety engineer with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said his organization has been working with Harvin while conducting its own examinations of PSEG's troubles at Hope Creek and Salem. "We've been working with Kymn since September of 2003," Lochbaum said, adding that the NRC usually declines to discuss whistle-blower cases unless the individual already has become a public figure.
The NRC earlier this year issued a rare, pre-emptive order to PSEG nuclear demanding immediate efforts to reform its "safety culture," an action that came about four months after Harvin's whistle-blower action.
Harvin said she was told to leave the plant ahead of schedule in March 2003 after drawing attention to a plant director's concerns about a safety problem with a stuck valve that allowed steam to bypass a generating turbine at Hope Creek.
"The operators didn't believe it was safe to resume operations without fixing the bypass valve, yet there's this pressure coming from corporate to start back up as soon as possible," Harvin said. "One of the managers came to me and said 'Kymn, we're dangerous. If the NRC knew what we were doing, they would take the keys away.' "
In another instance, Lochbaum said pressure to maintain production led a plant supervisor to wrestle open a stuck valve without following safety precautions.
"Throwing all caution to the wind, one of the shift supervisors went in and manually used elbow grease to get the thing working, putting himself at great risk and violating all kinds of procedures," Lochbaum said. "Many of the workers were concerned that that sends the wrong message - to keep the plant on line was more important than safety."
Harvin said PSEG needs to shut down all three of its reactors and fix safety problems. She said the company also needs to investigate and repair a crucial cooling water recirculation pump at the core of Hope Creek.
NRC and company officials have acknowledged a serious vibration problem in the pump, which, if it failed, would lead to what the NRC considers a "worst case" loss-of-cooling-water accident.
"Certainly our resident inspectors have been made aware of any problems involving testing of the recirculation pump, and we're going to continue to engage them on that issue," said Sheehan.
"Starting with the vibration would be stupid," Lochbaum said. "We're not talking about a little bit of shaking. There's a whole lot of shaking going on."
Harvin said she came to PSEG as the company was emerging from a similar safety and maintenance crisis in the mid-1990s. She said the utility was making steady progress until about 2002, when pressure from the nuclear plant's parent company began to increase and tolerance for safety-related delays fell.
Under NRC pressure, PSEG this year hired an outside consultant whose findings tended to back up some of Harvin's complaints. Utilities Service Alliance, found the plants fell short of "competence" in 72 of 90 critical areas reviewed in March 2004.
A report last year noted that Hope Creek inadequately managed 20 of 33 problems that had some connections to reactor management, such as control rod drive and reactor monitoring issues.
"I wouldn't want to go to a hospital, I wouldn't want to put my parents in a nursing home, I wouldn't even want to eat in a restaurant where 72 of 90 critical areas are less than competent," Harvin said. "And yet the Salem and Hope Creek reactors were deemed safe by the NRC and the company to operate with these degraded conditions. I find that preposterous."
Hope Creek was idled on Oct. 10 after a steam line break was later traced to a support bracket that may have been missing or unattached for up to 15 years. PSEG chose to begin an ahead-of-schedule, two-month refueling operation shortly after the shutdown.
Sheehan said the NRC plans to meet in public with PSEG on Dec. 2 to review the company's progress on improving its management of safety issues. Another meeting also is planned to review the results of company and federal investigations into the Oct. 10 steam pipe break.
Meanwhile, there is no court date set for Harvin's New Jersey civil lawsuit. The NRC could take weeks or months to rule on her complaints. Under federal rules, nuclear utilities or their contractors can face fines and orders to provide back pay and reinstatement to workers if managers are found guilty of retaliatory acts against whistle-blowers.
Contact Jeff Montgomery at 678-4277 or jmontgomery@delawareonline.com
-------- MILITARY
-------- arms
Details of anti-personnel bombs and weapons
againstbombing.org
13 November 2004
http://www.againstbombing.org/Washbombs.htm
Bomb Types
2,000-pound Mark 84 JDAM -- Workhorse of U.S. Military: A Bomb With Devastating Effects
Varieties of Cluster Bombs
CBU-52B
The bomblets in the CBU-52 are softball-sized and are intended primarily to shred and dismember human bodies. The dispenser holds 220 of the bomblets and can be used against both people and light-skinned vehicles.
CBU-58A/B
This cluster bomb is also used to butcher human bodies and destroy light skinned military or civilian vehicles. The dispenser holds 650 baseball-sized bomblets to be dispersed indiscriminately over a wide area.
CBU-59B Rockeye II
A newer version of the MK-20 Rockeye cluster bomb, the CBU 59 is used against both modern armor and human bodies. Rockeye II and the older Rockeye I are dart shaped bomblets with a small fuze in the pointed end of each bomblet. The CBU-59 dispenser holds about 700 bomblets.
CBU-71/B
The CBU-71/B is very similar to the CBU-58, carrying 650 baseball-sized bomblets. The CBU-71 bomblets have what the U.S. authorities call "a random delay fuzing option."
Translation: these cluster bombs are used as land mines which will explode by themselves at random times to terrorize a local population.
CBU-72 Fuel Air Explosive
This cluster bomb is different from all the others. It's an extremely destructive incendiary bomb, rather than a shrapnel bomb, sometimes compared to a mini-nuke.
It's used to detonate minefields, to destroy aircraft parked in the open - and also to burn the occupants alive in armored vehicles, and to burn alive or suffocate people taking shelter in bunkers or over demolished city areas where people may be hiding in basements and rubble.
The bomb is made up of three separate bomblets dispensing an aerosol fuel cloud across the target area. As the fuel cloud descends to the ground it is ignited by an embedded detonator to produce what the U.S. military calls "an impressive explosion," which sucks out all the oxygen over an extended area.
The rapidly expanding wave front due to overpressure flattens all objects and burns all people alive within close proximity of the epicenter of the aerosol fuel cloud. It also produces "debilitating damage" well beyond the flattened area from oxygen deprivation.
Fuel air bombs also can be used as asphixiation weapons, without being exploded, but this is in violation of international treaties.
CBU-87 CEM Combined Effects Munition
According to the "Jane's Air-Launched Weapons" directory, the U.S.-made CBU-87 "combined effects munition" is a "free-fall cluster bomb" composed of 202 "multi-purpose bomblets." Each bomblet is capable of penetrating up to 177 mm (seven inches) of armor and has fire-starting capabilities as well.
The CEM dispenses the 202 bomblets over an area of 800 feet by 400 feet. The U.S. calls it "an area denial cluster weapon."
Translation from military-speak: the bomblets create an 800 by 400 foot mine field.
This cluster bomb is intended to destroy both lightly armored vehicles and human beings.
The CBU-87 was used extensively during the Desert Storm terror campaign.
CBU-89
The "GATOR" family of scatterable mines is another favorite body-butchering weapon used by "fighter aircrews." The dispenser holds 72 anti-armor mines and 22 anti-personnel mines. These mines arm immediately upon impact.
The GATOR has two integrated "kill mechanisms," a magnetic influence fuze to sense armor, and deployed trip wires that explode the bomb when adults, children or an animal walks on or disturbs them.
Another feature of the GATOR is the "random delay function" detonating over several days for "highly effective area denial and harassment operations."
Translation: these weapons are highly effective for the terrorization of human beings.
CBU-97 Sensor Fuzed Weapon
This "cosmic cluster munition" combines 10 bomblets with 4 "skeet type" warheads in a single dispenser, providing 40 weapons total. After release, a fuze causes the dispenser to disperse the 10 bomblets, each stabilized by a parachute.
At a preset altitude a rocket fires, propelling the bomblet in an upward vector. As the bomblet climbs, it is spun to disperse the 4 internal skeet warheads randomly by centrifugal force.
An infrared sensor in each warhead searches for a motorized vehicle or living being, and upon discovery detonates over it, firing a "kinetic fragment." The fragment drives itself through the lightly armored top of the vehicle - or warm blooded animal or human.
If no isolated victim is found, the sensor detonates the warhead above ground to spray the battlefield - or the village - with a myriad of lethal fragments.
This American weapon is very effective against armor and human bodies, covering a 4,800 square yard area.
CBU-97/B Sensor Fuzed Weapon
The CBU-97/B cluster bomb was used in the American/NATO terror campaign of 1999 to kill civilian people all over Yugoslavia. For example, this is probably the model that slaughtered the old men and women doing their shopping on the market street in the town of Nis.
This cluster bomb destroys armored vehicles like tanks, and can spray a "battlefield" (read: market square) with metal fragments, making it lethal against people and other "soft" targets. Like horses, cows, sheep and family pets.
According to Jane's Defense Weekly, which predicted its use in early April 1999 (by which time it had already been used), each sensor fuzed weapon carries forty SKEET warheads that use infrared sensors to home in on armored vehicles and people.
Each warhead is a copper-plated, 1 kg Explosively-Formed Projectile that spins at 1,600 rpm. The SFW can be dropped from 200 to 20,000 feet from B-1, B-2 and B-52 bombers, as well as from A-10 Warthog ground attack aircraft and F-15 and F-16 fighters. The SFW can cover an area the size of about 12 football fields (or 6 hectares).
A B-1B bomber can carry 30 SFWs, or 1200 individual cluster bombs, with the potential to blanket a populated area equal to 360 football fields.
Five B-1B Lancer bombers were deployed on April 1, 1999, at RAF Fairford, England, and used to terrorize the civilian men, women and children of Yugoslavia. The A-10 Warthog and F-16 can be fitted with four SFWs. At the beginning of April, only the B-1B had been "certified" for using the SFW, which suggests that any other aircraft using the weapon was conducting experiments in the so-called "combat" situations.
MK-20 Rockeye
The Rockeye is a clamshell-shaped dispenser holding 247 dart-shaped bomblets. The bomblets free fall over a 3,300 square yard area and detonate on impact. The shaped warhead charge in the bomblet is intended for use against armor and people.
British cluster bomb - the RBL755
The British, have their own version of the cluster bomb. They too used it to butcher civilian men, women and children all over Iraq and Yugoslavia.
Each RBL 755 weighs 600 lb and breaks up in the air releasing 147 bomblets. About the size of a soft-drink can, parachutes slow the bomblets' fall, and each has the explosive power to destroy a tank - if it hits it in the right place.
Of course, that's a big "IF" - considering the safe-for-the-pilot altitude from which the bombs are dropped. The high altitude delivery ensures that there will be much less accuracy. That means more dead civilians.
The 'R' BL755 uses a different fuze from the original low-level delivery variant allowing it to be dropped from a high enough altitude - above 10,000 ft (3,305 m) - where there is very little threat from hand-held, infrared-guided, surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery.
Downloaded Courtesy of http://www.humboldt1.com/~016910/DomesticOppression.html
Concrete Piercing Bombs --New technology used in Afghanistan and the DAISYCUTTER----
1 square kilometer kill range. For this and more bomb information see--- http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/dumb/blu-82.htm
See Also Bombs for Beginners from the Federation of American Scientistshttp: Lots of details and infomration.
-------- asia
China urges calm after Japan demands apology for submarine intrusion
TOKYO (AFP)
Nov 13, 2004
http://www.spacewar.com/2004/041113100032.o4jk9abv.html
China on Saturday urged Japan to stay calm in solving bilateral disputes a day after Tokyo demanded an apology for the intrusion of a Chinese nuclear submarine into Japanese waters.
"Sometimes there are problems between China and Japan, but we should respect each other and need to seek a solution in a calm manner," Chinese Ambassador Wang Yi told a meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party in western Japan.
Wang made no direct reference to the submarine incident, according to Jiji Press, but used the speech to take a new swipe at Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi over his visits to Tokyo's Yasukuni shrine which honors Japanese war dead including convicted war criminals.
If Japan "justifies class-A war criminals, who were the symbols of Japanese militarism, it not only hurts the feelings of Chinese people but reverses the foundation of Sino-Japanese relations," Wang said.
China harbors deep resentment over its brutal occupation by Japan from 1931 to 1945. Bilateral friction has been growing, including over Koizumi's visits to the shrine and a gas field disputed by the major energy importers.
Japan says the submarine violated its waters for two hours Wednesday near the disputed gas field, triggering a two-day chase on the high seas.
After initial caution about blaming its neighbor, Japan said Friday that the submarine belonged to the Chinese navy and demanded an apology. It summoned Chinese embassy number two Cheng Yonghua, as the ambassador was out of Tokyo.
Cheng told Japanese Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura he could not apologize as his government's investigation over the submarine was pending, a Japanese diplomat in Beijing said.
Japanese newspapers said Saturday the country's distrust of China had grown due to the submarine's intrusion.
"Tokyo had every reason to request an apology from Beijing for its violation of Japanese sovereignty and demand it ensure nothing like the recent incident will ever happen again," the best-selling Yomiuri Shimbun said in an editorial.
"The Chinese submarine's behavior was enough to arouse our great distrust," it said.
The Mainichi Shimbun, which is known for its liberal views, said Beijing should respond promptly to the apology demand.
"The fact is clear that (China) has entered our territorial waters," the Mainichi said in an editorial.
"China must immediately disclose the outcome of its investigation and come up with preventive measures," it said. "We demand China's honest response."
The conservative daily Sankei Shimbun called China's behavior "unforgivable."
"At least China must clarify the cause of the incident and promise us it will never do this again," the Sankei said in an editorial, adding that Japan should take unspecified "counter-measures" if China failed to show an "honest response."
"If we are soft in handling the incident, China will likely repeat illegal acts over and over," the Sankei said.
The major liberal daily Asahi Shimbun did not have an editorial on the submarine intrusion, but quoted a senior foreign ministry official as saying: "This is a game of diplomacy. We'll see how they respond and find out whether China is a country like North Korea or a country with transparency."
-------- china
China Now Test-Flying Homemade AWACS
Radar Planes Intended For Use in Taiwan Strait
The Washington Post Company
By Edward Cody
November 13, 2004
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46477-2004Nov12?language=printer
BEIJING, Nov. 12 -- The Chinese military, undeterred by a U.S. veto that blocked the purchase of Israeli planes, has developed its own radar surveillance aircraft and is test-flying the first models for early deployment in the Taiwan Strait, according to military specialists.
The Chinese airborne warning and control system, or AWACS, uses domestically produced advanced radar mounted on a Russian-made Il-76 transport aircraft. Analysts said the AWACS marks an important step in the government's campaign to develop the modern military necessary to back up its threat to reunite Taiwan with the mainland by force if necessary.
Electronic weaponry -- in this case, equipment to monitor the skies and control warplanes over a wide battlefield -- has been a major focus of extensive military improvements in recent years. In particular, AWACS has long been seen by the military as an indispensable tool for air superiority over the 100-mile strait separating Taiwan from the mainland.
"You've got to have those AWACS up there or you're not going anywhere," said a foreign military attache in Beijing describing China's need for such a system in the event of conflict with Taiwan.
Chinese military technicians have been struggling to acquire AWACS-type equipment since the United States pressured Israel in 2000 to back out of a $1 billion agreement to sell China four of its Phalcon phased-array radar systems. The systems also would have used Il-76 aircraft as a platform.
The main U.S. concern in blocking the sale was that China would gain a military advantage over Taiwan. Moreover, under the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act, the U.S. government has pledged to help Taiwan defend itself against any Chinese attack, meaning U.S. forces could become involved should fighting erupt.
For the same reasons, People's Liberation Army (PLA) air force leaders were determined to acquire such a plane. "After the 2000 Israeli fiasco, the PLA made it a matter of high pride to prove to the Americans they would not be denied AWACS," said Richard D. Fisher Jr., a U.S.-based specialist on the Chinese military.
At first, China turned to Russia, its traditional source of military equipment. The Beijing government concluded a deal to buy four Beriev A-50 Mainstay radar planes, which are roughly the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Air Force's E-3 Sentry AWACS. The purchase was believed to be the first phase of an agreement for up to eight of the Russian aircraft.
At the same time, however, Chinese scientists were at work on their own radar equipment. It is not known whether any of the Russian craft were ever delivered, which would have provided a look at the technology, or whether the technicians obtained help from Israeli or Russian counterparts. In any case, the Chinese AWACS that has begun test flights bears a strong resemblance to the A-50, which also uses the Il-76.
The AWACS could be operational within one or two years assuming the tests are successful, the specialists said. It was not known how many are planned for production, but Fisher noted eight would allow for a 24-hour patrol at both ends of the Taiwan Strait.
The Defense Ministry, which treats most military subjects as secret, did not reply to a request for information on the AWACS project.
Whatever the ultimate production schedule, AWACS development fits into a steady growth in the amount and sophistication of armaments on both sides of the strait, making a confrontation between China and Taiwan potentially one of the world's most dangerous.
The leadership has steadily increased military budgets in recent years and sought to reform the manpower-heavy but technology-short PLA as swiftly as possible. According to U.S. and Taiwanese officials, the government has deployed nearly 600 short-range ballistic missiles in southern China aimed at targets in Taiwan. The number grows by about 75 a year, they say.
Taiwan's president, Chen Shui-bian, who began a second four-year term in May, has insisted the 13,500-square mile territory is independent and should stay that way. Soon after taking office in May, his government decided on an $18.2 billion arms purchase from the United States, including 12 P-3C Orion submarine-hunting planes, eight diesel-electric submarines and six PAC-3 batteries equipped with more than 350 Patriot anti-missile missiles.
But the opposition Nationalist and People First parties, which have a majority in the legislature, declined this week to approve Chen's budget for the purchase, arguing it was too expensive and in some ways inappropriate for Taiwan's needs. The issue is unlikely to be resolved until after the next legislative elections, scheduled for Dec. 11.
In the meantime, both sides have continued individual purchases that notch up the technology level of their militaries by matching threat for threat.
China, for instance, in 2002 bought from Israel a number of Harpy anti-radar drones, which can loiter over enemy territory and drop munitions on radars turned on to guide air defenses. Meanwhile, Taiwan has obtained authorization from the Bush administration to buy high-speed anti-radiation missiles, which also can target air defenses by homing in on radar emissions, Chin Hui-chu, a Taiwanese legislator on the National Defense committee, recently told the Taiwan News.
-------- iraq
Squeezing jello in Iraq
By Scott Ritter
Saturday 13 November 2004
Aljazeera
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/718AE278-58EE-431F-8045-5A3F505021B8.htm
The much-anticipated US-led offensive to seize the Iraqi city of Falluja from anti-American Iraqi fighters has begun.
Meeting resistance that, while stiff at times, was much less than had been anticipated, US marines and soldiers, accompanied by Iraqi forces loyal to the interim government of Iyad Allawi, have moved into the heart of Falluja.
Fighting is expected to continue for a few more days, but US commanders are confident that Falluja will soon be under US control, paving the way for the establishment of order necessary for nationwide elections currently scheduled for January 2005.
But will it? American military planners expected to face thousands of Iraqi resistance fighters in the streets of Falluja, not the hundreds they are currently fighting. They expected to roll up the network of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign militants, and yet to date have found no top-tier leaders from that organisation. As American forces surge into Falluja, Iraqi fighters are mounting extensive attacks throughout the rest of Iraq.
Far from facing off in a decisive battle against the resistance fighters, it seems the more Americans squeeze Falluja, the more the violence explodes elsewhere. It is exercises in futility, akin to squeezing jello. The more you try to get a grasp on the problem, the more it slips through your fingers.
"The goal is to kick out the invaders"
Alloy, Iraq
More comments... This kind of war, while frustrating for the American soldiers and marines who wage it, is exactly the struggle envisioned by the Iraqi resistance. They know they cannot stand toe-to-toe with the world's most powerful military and expect to win.
While the US military leadership struggles to get a grip on a situation in Iraq that deteriorates each and every day, the anti-US occupation fighters continue to execute a game plan that has been in position since day one.
President Bush prematurely declared "mission accomplished" back in May 2003. For Americans, this meant that major combat operations in Iraq had come to an end, that we had won the war. But for the Iraqis, it meant something else. In Iraq, there never was a 'Missouri moment', where the government formally surrendered. The fact is, Saddam Hussein's government never surrendered, and still is very much in evidence in Iraq today in the form of the anti-US resistance.
"It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the interim government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive" While we in America were declaring victory, the government of Saddam was planning its war. The first battles were fought in March and April 2003. Token resistance, no decisive engagement. The Iraqis fought just enough to establish the principle of resistance, but not enough to squander their resources.
Since May 2003, the resistance has grown in size and sophistication. Some attribute this to the incompetence of the post-war occupation policies of the United States. While this certainly was a factor in facilitating the resistance, the fact remains that what is occurring today in Iraq is part of a well-conceived plan the goal of which is to restore the Baath Party back to power. And the policies of the Bush administration are playing right into their hands.
The terror attacks carried out against the United Nations and other international aid organisations succeeded in driving out of Iraq the vestiges of foreign involvement the Bush administration relied upon to present an international face to the US-led occupation. In the chaos and anarchy that followed, the United States was compelled to use more and more force in an attempt to restore order, creating a Catch-22 situation where the more force we used, the more resistance we generated, requiring more force in response.
The cycle of violence fed the resistance, destabilising huge areas of Iraq that are still outside the control of the Iraqi government and US military. High profile operations in Najaf, Sadr City and Samarra did little to bring these cities to bear.
"While we in America were declaring victory, the government of Saddam was planning its war" Today, fighters in Iraq operate freely, continuing their orgy of death and destruction in order to attract the inevitable heavy-handed US response. Falluja is a prime case in point. While the US is unlikely to deliver a fatal blow to the Iraqi resistance, it is succeeding in levelling huge areas of Falluja, recalling the Vietnam-era lament that we had to destroy the village in order to save it.
The images from Falluja will only fuel the anti-American sentiment in Iraq, enabling the anti-US fighters to recruit 10 new fighters for every newly-minted "martyr" it loses in the current battle against the Americans.
The battle for Falluja is supposed to be the proving ground of the new Iraq army. Instead, it may well prove to be a fatal pill. The reality is there is no Iraqi army. Of the tens of thousands recruited into its ranks, there is today only one effective unit, the 36th Battalion.
This unit has fought side by side with the Americans in Falluja, Najaf, and Samarra. By all accounts, it has performed well. But this unit can only prevail when it operates alongside overwhelming American military support. Left to fend for itself, it would be slaughtered by the resistance fighters. Worse, this unit which stands as a symbol of the ideal for the new Iraqi army is actually the antithesis of what the new Iraqi army should be.
While the Bush administration has suppressed the formation of militia units organised along ethnic and religious lines, the 36th Battalion should be recognised for what it really is - a Kurdish militia, retained by the US military because the rest of the Iraqi army is unwilling or unable to carry the fight to the Iraqi resistance fighters.
The battle for Falluja has exposed not only the fallacy of the US military strategy towards confronting the resistance in Iraq, but also the emptiness of the interim government of Iyad Allawi, which is so far incapable of building anything that resembles a viable Iraqi military capable of securing its position in Iraq void of American military support.
"The images from Falluja will only fuel the anti-American sentiment in Iraq" Falluja is probably the beginning of a very long and bloody phase of the Iraq war, one that pits an American military under orders from a rejuvenated Bush administration to achieve victory at any cost against an Iraqi resistance that is willing to allow Iraq to sink into a quagmire of death and destruction in order to bog down and eventually expel the American occupier.
It is a war the United States cannot win, and which the government of Iyad Allawi cannot survive. Unfortunately, since recent polls show that some 70% of the American people support the war in Iraq, it is a war that will rage until the American domestic political dynamic changes, and the tide of public opinion turns against the war.
Tragically, this means many more years of conflict in Iraq that will result in thousands more killed on both sides, and incomprehensible suffering for the people of Iraq, and unpredictable instability for the entire Middle East.
[Scott Ritter was a senior UN arms inspector in Iraq between 1991-1998. He is now an independent consultant.]
----
U.S. Forces Meet Fierce Resistance In Fallujah
Push South Greeted By 'Hornet's Nest'
By Jackie Spinner and Karl Vick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A45043-2004Nov12?language=printer
NEAR FALLUJAH, Iraq, Nov. 12 -- Insurgents in trenches met advancing U.S. and Iraqi forces in southern Fallujah with a burst of bullets and rockets Friday in what commanders described as one of the fiercest days of fighting since the battle to retake the city began five days ago.
Marines and soldiers said they encountered guerrillas dug into traditional defensive positions from which they could pop up, shoot and quickly take cover. The Americans said they and their Iraqi allies fought back with rifles, automatic weapons, belt-fed machine guns, mortars and hand grenades.
"It was a hornet's nest," said Capt. Erik Krivda, of Gaithersburg, the officer in charge of the Army's 1st Infantry Division Task Force 2-2 tactical operations command center.
Military officials also reported that fighting had resumed Thursday night in Fallujah's Jolan neighborhood, an insurgent stronghold in the city's northwest. Elsewhere in Iraq, intense fighting continued for a third day in the northern city of Mosul and other flash points in Iraq's Sunni Muslim heartland.
Lt. Gen. John Sattler, the Marine commander in Iraq, said 22 U.S. troops have been killed and more than 170 seriously wounded in and around Fallujah since the offensive began Monday night. An additional 40 troops suffered wounds but were able to return to duty, he said.
In addition, Sattler said, five members of the Iraqi security forces have been killed and 40 wounded.
At a Marine outpost near the city, a steady stream of ambulances carried casualties to a naval field hospital where troops lay on stretchers, their wounds covered by white gauze.
Since moving into Fallujah on Monday, U.S. forces have largely gained control of the city's northern half while driving insurgents south. The U.S. military said it now controls about 80 percent of the city.
Sattler said Friday that U.S. and Iraqi forces had broken the insurgents' "back and spirit. The goal right now is to continue to keep the heat on them. The concern now is to take care of this fight, reestablish the rule of law and return the town to the Fallujah people."
Commanders had warned, however, that insurgents might try to make a last stand in southwestern districts.
By midmorning, after reportedly taking heavy casualties, the units trying to capture the area called in artillery and air support, unleashing a barrage of shells and bombs that engulfed the southern neighborhood in flames and smoke. Witnesses reported another big battle in central Fallujah at the Rawtha Mohammediya mosque, which had served as the insurgents' headquarters but is now controlled by the Marines. About 200 to 300 fighters came from southern neighborhoods to stage the assault, but it ended after two hours with their suffering heavy losses, according to witnesses.
Insurgents had returned late Thursday to the Jolan neighborhood, where they engaged Marines for more than six hours, long enough to gather for Friday prayers in its Maathid mosque.
U.S. and Iraqi forces have detained 450 suspected insurgents. Thaer Hasen Naqib, spokesman for interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said they included men from Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and Syria.
"It really doesn't matter from which group they are," Naqib said during a news conference at a military outpost near Fallujah. "They are foreigners. They are not invited to come to Iraq. We want to get rid of them as soon as possible."
In Mosul, Iraq's third-largest city, Iraqi authorities and U.S. forces were struggling to maintain control as insurgents moved at will through large sections of the city, residents said. The military said 10 Iraqi National Guardsmen and one American soldier were killed in Mosul on Thursday.
Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, who commands U.S. forces in Mosul, said combat was "sporadic" Friday and less intense than the day before. Still, the situation was deemed sufficiently difficult that an Army light-armored unit was peeled away from Fallujah to reinforce the U.S. force in Mosul.
The provincial governor called for massive reinforcements to supplement the Mosul police force, which splintered under a wave of insurgent attacks on at least five police stations Thursday. Iraqi National Guard units were being rushed to the city from three directions, as were Kurdish forces from Irbil to the south, the Associated Press reported. The offices of Kurdish political parties were among the buildings attacked in Mosul on Friday.
"We asked the central government in Baghdad, and God willing, they should arrive today," said the provincial governor, Duraid Kashmoula.
He said insurgents had penetrated the local security forces, hastening their partial collapse. Iraq's Interior Ministry fired the city's police chief, Brig. Gen. Mohammed Kheiri Barhawi.
Ham, the American commander, said in an interview with the BBC that "some police did not perform as well as we might like." He told CNN: "It's fair to say there are some with ties to the insurgents. We'd be kidding ourselves if we thought that was not the case."
Insurgents also launched attacks this week in smaller cities across Iraq's midsection, including Baqubah, a restive provincial capital northeast of Baghdad.
Bands of armed men continued to operate in Baghdad. Clashes were reported in the suburb of Abu Ghraib and the west Baghdad neighborhood of Ghazaliya. South of Baghdad, a U.S. soldier was killed and three people were wounded when insurgents attacked a patrol with a roadside bomb, rifle fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
An overflow crowd of worshipers cheered the American setbacks at Baghdad's largest Sunni mosque, where Friday prayers ended with grenade explosions, rifle fire and cries of "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is great!"
"Maybe you are not aware that Mosul is now under the control of the resistance, and all of the province of Anbar beyond Fallujah," said Mohammed Bashar Faydhi, who delivered the sermon. "The Americans have to realize that they need 25 million soldiers to defeat this population of 25 million Iraqis. They don't realize that the more oppressive they become, the more the resistance will grow."
Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian who officials say turned Fallujah into a nerve center for terrorist attacks across Iraq, issued a five-minute audiotape urging on insurgents in Fallujah. His organization, now known as al Qaeda in Iraq, accounts for a significant share of the fighters in the city, but officials said they believed Zarqawi left Fallujah before the fighting began.
"The banner of the jihad has been raised and is waving," he said on the tape. "The arms of the heroes of Islam have grown stronger in Iraq, and the hearts of the people of Islam are pounding with joy and awaiting a growing hope."
Vick reported from Baghdad. Special correspondent Omar Fekeiki contributed to this report.
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THE INSURGENTS
U.S. Troops Set for Final Attack on Falluja Force
November 13, 2004
By DEXTER FILKINS and ROBERT F. WORTH
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13iraq.html?pagewanted=all
FALLUJA, Iraq, Nov. 12 - American forces moved into position on Friday for a decisive battle with bands of insurgents, pounding some of their remaining strongholds with airstrikes and repelling attempts by some fighters to shoot their way out through the desert countryside south of the city.
But other fighters, among the most resilient the Americans have encountered in five days of battle, seemed resigned to making a last stand in Falluja's southern residential neighborhoods.
"Right now they've got no place to go," said Col. Craig Tucker, commander of a regimental combat team encompassing several battalions of American troops. "I think they've come here to die."
Twenty-two American servicemen have been killed and 170 wounded in Falluja since the invasion began on Monday evening, said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq. Of the Iraqi forces, 5 have been killed and 40 wounded, Gen. Abdul Qader Mohammed Jassim, an Iraqi commander, said.
An audio recording posted Friday on the Internet and attributed to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian terrorist who has become the Americans' enemy No. 1 in Iraq, praised the efforts of the jihadists in Iraq and said the blood spilled in Falluja "will light the way to God's victory."
"I call for the heroes of Islam in Falluja to endure just for a short time," he said, "and victory will come soon. I want you to remember our Prophet Muhammad when he fought in the past."
In the north, Mosul remained restive on Friday as the government deployed national guardsmen from outside the area to fill a security vacuum after hundreds of Iraqi policemen fled Thursday in the face of a guerrilla uprising.
The police chief of Mosul was fired, another senior Iraqi security officer was assassinated and the top American commander in the region said the loyalty and reliability of the city's entire 4,000- to 5,000-member police force was now suspect.
On Friday morning, Al Jazeera, the Arabic satellite television network, showed a videotape of a Lebanese-American hostage who had been kidnapped earlier. Reuters also reported that a Syrian driver who had been kidnapped in August with two French journalists, Georges Malbrunot and Christian Chesnot, had turned up in Falluja. No further details were available.
One prominent member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said the increasing mayhem raised questions about whether the United States could win the fight against a wider insurgency, whatever the outcome in Falluja.
"The insurgency is not abating," the member, Senator Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who is a former officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, said in a telephone interview with reporters after he visited American forces in Iraq on Friday. "In some respects, it's becoming more pronounced in many parts of the country - not all parts of the country, but many parts of the country. It's hard to determine whether that's the last gasp or continued building momentum."
On Thursday, insurgents overran at least a half-dozen police stations in Mosul, set fire to squad cars and made off with weapons.
The crisis in Mosul has raised serious doubts about the ability of Iraqi security forces to take over policing duties anytime soon from the more than 140,000 American troops here.
"There is a struggle going on," Brig. Gen. Carter Ham, the commander charged with controlling the north, said in a telephone interview from his headquarters in Mosul. "I don't want to kid you and tell you that every neighborhood is one you can walk down the middle of," he said. "There are some very dangerous neighborhoods. It's not over."
The American military said one soldier was killed Thursday in Mosul.
General Sattler, the top Marine commander in Iraq, declared that the American military controlled 80 percent of Falluja. But many remaining insurgents waged intense gun battles and appeared determined to make a last stand in Shuhada, a neighborhood on the southern edge of the city.
There are indications that the remaining insurgents are running low on weapons, supplies and morale, military officials said. "We feel we've broken their back and spirit," General Sattler said.
Some insurgents are firing at the American military cordon to the south, in an apparent effort to fight their way out, military officials said. At the same time, insurgents in rural areas south of Falluja have begun firing more rockets on the American positions ringing the city.
Iraqi military forces have been going through houses in the city's northern half, taking prisoners and seizing weapons caches. "We are doing it very methodically, block by block, going into each room," said Lt. Col. Rod Symons, the senior advisor to the Third Brigade of the Iraqi Armed Forces. A wave of coordinated attacks across Baghdad and the area to the west appears to be a loosely organized counteroffensive to the invasion of Falluja. American commanders say insurgent leaders are likely to have fled Falluja before the invasion and are now at work elsewhere.
In one building, Iraqi troops discovered a box Thursday containing insurgent DVD's and pamphlets, along with the passport, driver's license and Defense Department identification card of Cpl. Wassef Ali Hassoun, a Lebanese-American Marine believed to have been kidnapped in June who later surfaced in Lebanon. Elsewhere in the building were a new Marine uniform and four large sacks of gunpowder and wire. In the building's basement was a room with what appeared to be blood on the walls and floor, officials said.
In at least one area of central Falluja, insurgents were already infiltrating neighborhoods that they had just been rousted from, forcing commanders to send troops to areas behind the main battle lines.
About 300 fighters surrendered to Iraqi forces on Friday in a mosque, General Jassim said at a news conference.
Elsewhere, a Blackhawk helicopter crashed after being struck by antiaircraft fire near Taji, north of Baghdad, military officials said. The three crew members were wounded but the helicopter was recovered. It was the third American helicopter forced down this week; two others crash-landed Thursday after being fired on near Falluja.
In southern Baghdad, an American soldier was killed and three others wounded Friday in an ambush.
In Baghdad, American and Iraqi forces arrested Sheik Mahdi al-Sumaydai, a prominent fundamentalist Sunni cleric, and more than a dozen of his followers after finding weapons in his sheik's mosque, officials said. Mr. Sumaydai was arrested by the Americans last winter and was released several months ago. His mosque is the largest religious sanctuary in the capital for devotees of the Salafiya branch of Sunni Islam, which Mr. Zarqawi and Osama bin Laden practice.
A cleric representing Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani gave a lukewarm condemnation of the invasion of Falluja on Friday. The ayatollah advocates following "a peaceful means of settling the security situation and restoring peace in the restive cities," said the cleric, Ahmed al-Safi.
It was the first statement attributed to Ayatollah Sistani on the fighting in Falluja. Some Sunni leaders, including Mr. Sumaydai, have criticized the ayatollah in recent days for not taking a stand on Falluja.
Though the streets were quieter in Mosul than they had been Thursday, insurgents carried out sporadic attacks against Iraqi and American forces there.
Gunmen raided the home of Brig. Gen. Mowaffak Daham, the head of the anticrime task force, and led him, his brother-in-law and a son out onto the lawn, said Salim al-Samedi, 29, a neighbor. The insurgents stood them up against a wall and shot them dead while chanting "God is great!" and then set fire to the house.
A fire engine rushed to the scene, and the gunmen shot dead two of the fire fighters, Mr. Samedi said.
The governor of Ninevah Province had his home burned down on Thursday, said Yasir Abdul-Razzaq, a relative, though the governor was still safe in the confines of the government center, which is protected by American armor and Iraqi troops.
The governor's office fired Mosul's police chief, Brig. Gen. Muhammad Kheiri Barhawi. The police chief of Samarra, Taleb Shamel, told The Associated Press that he had also been fired.
Iraqi officials said national guardsmen from near the Syrian border were being sent to Mosul to help put down the uprising. The brigades are made up of Kurdish militiamen. Kurds, Christians and Sunni Arabs are the largest population groups in Mosul, and it was unclear how the Sunni Arabs, who are leading the attacks, will take to the heavy presence of Kurdish soldiers.
Reporting for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt from Washington; Iraqi employees of The New York Times from Baghdad, Mosul and Karbala; and James Glanz and Edward Wong from Baghdad.
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Fallujah 101
A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying.
By Rashid Khalidi
November 13, 2004
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/1683/
"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops, Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the civil authorities." T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920
There is a small City on one of the bends of the Euphrates that sticks out into the great Syrian Desert. It's on an ancient trade route linking the oasis towns of the Nejd province of what is today Saudi Arabia with the great cities of Aleppo and Mosul to the north. It also is on the desert highway between Baghdad and Amman. This city is a crossroads.
For millennia people have been going up and down that north-south desert highway. The city is like a seaport on that great desert, a place that binds together people in what are today Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. People in the city are linked by tribe, family or marriage to people in all these places.
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas-those of a man named Muhammad Ibn 'Abd al-Wahhab-took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations.
This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920, before T. E. Lawrence wrote the above passage, the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari's grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and national aspects of Iraq's history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters. A change for the worse
The United States has been a major Middle Eastern power since 1933, when a group of U.S. oil companies signed an exploration deal with Saudi Arabia. The United States has been dominant in the Middle East since 1942, when American troops first landed in North Africa and Iran. American troops have not left the region since. In other words, they have been in different parts of the Middle East for 62 years.
The United States was once celebrated as a non-colonial, sometimes anti-colonial, power in the Middle East, renowned for more than a century for its educational, medical and charity efforts. Since the Cold War, however, the United States has intervened increasingly in the region's internal affairs and conflicts. Things have changed fundamentally for the worse with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, particularly with the revelation that the core pretexts offered by the administration for the invasion were false. And particularly with growing Iraqi dissatisfaction with the occupation and with the images of the hellish chaos broadcast regularly everywhere in the world except in the United States-thanks to the excellent job done by the media in keeping the real human costs of Iraq off our television screens.
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran. The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions, not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you say you are doing in Fallujah, where U.S. troops just launched an attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in Fallujah-and what people see that you are doing. Fact-free and faith-based
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East-and on their experience-to conclude that most Bush administration Middle East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking.
These experts predicted that it would be difficult to occupy a vast, complex country like Iraq, that serious resistance from a major part of the population was likely, and that the invasion and occupation would complicate U.S. relations with other countries in the region. It is clear today that all of these fears were well founded.
After 20 months of occupation, the United States continues to make the important decisions in Iraq. Instead of control being exercised through the Coalition Provisional Authority, it takes place through the largest U.S. embassy in the world and its staff of more than 3,000. You can be sure that should the Iraqis try to end the basing of U.S. troops, or try to tear up the contracts with Halliburton and other U.S. companies, or take any other steps that displease the Bush administration, they would be brought up short by the U.S. viceroy, a.k.a. Ambassador John Negroponte.
We, and even more so the Iraqi government and its people, are trapped in a nightmare with no apparent end, in part because those experts who challenged neoconservative fantasies about U.S. troops being received with rice and flowers simply were not heeded. They warned that it is impossible to impose democracy through force in Iraq. Mao Tse Tung said that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun; he did not say democracy does. And it doesn't.
The stench of hypocrisy rises when the United States, a nation supposedly com-mit-ted to democratization and reform, does not hesitate to embrace dictatorial, autocratic and undemocratic regimes like those of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia and now even Libya, simply because they act in line with U.S. security concerns or give lucrative contracts to U.S. businesses. The United States claims to be acting in favor of democracy, yet embraces Qaddhafi! People in the Middle East notice this gap between word and deed-even if Americans don't notice the things being done in our name.
The United States, in fact, has a far from sterling record in promoting democracy in the Middle East. Initially it started off on a better footing. It opposed colonial rule and -promoted self-determination, as in President Wilson's Fourteen Points after World War I. But when the United States returned to the Middle East after World War II, it soon supported anti-democratic regimes simply because they provided access to oil and military bases.
If you look carefully, what the Bush administration seems to mean by democracy in the Middle East is governments that do what the United States wants. Conquer and plunder
Middle Eastern economics is another area about which we hear very little in our media. Americans may not be aware of it, but the wholesale theft of the property of the Iraqi people through privatization was prominently reported all over the Middle East. A recent case involved the handover of Iraqi Airways to an investor group headed by a family with close ties to the Saddam Hussein regime. The airline is worth $3 billion, because in addition to valuable landing slots all over Europe and a few tattered airplanes, Iraqi Airways owns the land on which most of the airports are built.
Such cases, and there are many, cause deep anger against the United States, and evoke bitter resistance to pressures for economic liberalization that people in the region interpret as the looting of their country's assets. These privatization measures arouse deep suspicion in the Middle East, because of fears that the region's primary asset, oil, may be next.
Here, too, history is all-important. Since commercial quantities of oil were discovered in the Middle East at the turn of the 20th century, decisions over pricing, control and ownership of these valuable resources were largely in the hands of giant Western oil companies. They decided prices. They decided how much in taxes they would pay. They decided who controlled the local governments. They decided how much oil would be produced. And they decided everything else about oil, including conditions of exploration, production and labor.
In those seven decades the people of the countries where this wealth was located obtained few benefits from it. Only with the rise of OPEC and the nationalization of the Middle East oil industries and the oil price rises in the '70s did the situation change. Sadly, it was the oligarchs, the kleptocrats and Western companies that benefited most from the increased prices.
Fears that they will lose their resources shape much of the nationalism of the peoples of the Middle East. And events in Iraq only enhance these fears.
By invading, occupying and imposing a new regime on Iraq, the United States may be following, intentionally or not, in the footsteps of the old Western colonial powers-and doing so in a region that within living memory ended a lengthy struggle to expel colonial occupations. They fought from 1830 to 1962 to kick out the French from Algeria. From 1882 to 1956 they fought to get the British out of Egypt. That's within the lifetime of every person over 45 in the Middle East. Foreign troops on their soil against their will is deeply familiar. permalink email to a friend printer friendly subscribe Reader Comments
This is great for those that find it to read.
I know there is a time, and it is very near. The day's are numbered and the numbers are very small for each and every one to find their maker.
How will they be accpeted is a nother topic all together.
Surley Allah loves those that are the close to him.
Victory is and will allway's be with those that are oppresed.
Never has a bad deed been rewarded by GOOD from man nor Allah.
PEACE Posted by Abdull Rahman
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U.S. Officers: Main Assault On Fallujah Is Over
Iraqi Official Says 1,000 Insurgents Killed In Fallujah
The Associated Press
November 13, 2004
http://www.local6.com/news/3916259/detail.html
FALLUJAH, Iraq -- U.S. officers said the main assault on Fallujah militants is over, but officials said it still could take several days of fighting to clear out the last pockets of resistance.
The military said all of the city is now occupied, if not entirely subdued. Many insurgents have been captured, but Iraqi officials said terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi escaped.
At least 22 Americans have died since the battle began.
Iraq's national security adviser said Saturday the massive military operation to retake Fallujah "is accomplished," with only a few pockets of resistance remaining.
Qassem Dawoud, said about 1,000 insurgents were killed in the fighting. He told Iraqi TV that another 200 people were captured.
Meanwhile, U.S. troops continue to attack insurgents in the southern portion of the city, in what the military hopes will be the final assault followed by a house-to-house search for weapons.
A U.S. commander in Fallujah said "the rout is on." Ground troops backed by warplanes and artillery are tightening the noose around rebel fighters in the battle for control of the Iraqi city.
Iraqi insurgents targeted U.S. helicopters for a third straight day, hitting four with ground fire in the most recent attacks.
The military said the helicopters, two hit Saturday and two late Friday, were able to return to their bases. No crewmembers were injured.
Earlier Friday, an Army U-H-60 Blackhawk was shot down by anti-aircraft fire 12 miles north of Baghdad, wounding three of the four-man crew. The crew was rescued and the helicopter was also recovered.
On Thursday, two U.S. Marine helicopters were downed by rocket-propelled grenades and small arms fire in separate incidents near Fallujah. The helicopters made hard landings but the crews were rescued. One pilot was slightly injured.
70 Injured Soldiers Arrive In Germany
More than 70 Americans wounded in Iraq arrived Saturday at a U.S. military hospital in Germany. Officials said most of the soldiers were injured in the battle for Fallujah.
A hospital spokeswoman said the new arrivals bring this week's new patient count to 412. She said the number of beds at the rural hospital had to be increased.
Military officials haven't said exactly how many soldiers were wounded in Fallujah, or the nature of their injuries, but 25 of the patients had to be carried on stretchers.
Saboteurs Attack Oil Pipeline
There's word that militants attacked an oil pipeline just north of Baghdad.
Witnesses reported flames and heavy black smoke rising high into the sky. The pipeline carries crude oil to a refinery in the Iraqi capital.
Five U.S. helicopters were seen hovering nearby, but no Iraqi security forces or firefighters were spotted at the scene of the fire.
Witnesses said insurgents have virtually taken control of the town of Taji, near where the pipeline was attacked, about 12 miles north of Baghdad. They said militants have been distributing leaflets warning people not to leave their houses or open their shops.
Army Diverts Infantry Division To Mosul
The U.S. Army diverted an infantry battalion from the fighting in Fallujah and sent it back to Mosul after an uprising there by insurgents.
U.S. military officials said the 1st Battalion, 5th Infantry Regiment, a unit of the 25th Infantry Division, was ordered back to Mosul late Thursday after militants attacked bridges, police stations and government buildings.
Some U.S. officials believe the Mosul attacks were in sympathy for Sunni Muslim fighters besieged in Fallujah, 40 miles west of Baghdad.
U.S. officials estimate there are up to 2,000 insurgents in the towns and villages in the Fallujah area who were not trapped inside the city during the U.S.-Iraqi siege, which began Monday.
Three More Sunni Clerics Arrested
A Muslim scholars group said Iraqi security forces have arrested three Sunni clerics in mosque raids.
The clerics are members of The Association of Muslim Scholars, considered the most influential Sunni group in Iraq. It said 20 of the clerics' followers were also arrested in the mosques in and south of Baghdad.
The group opposes the U.S. presence in Iraq and calls for a boycott of the January elections to protest the Fallujah offensive.
A spokesman for the group said one of the clerics was beaten while being arrested in his Baghdad home.
Another cleric was found to have a large weapons cache and photos of attacks on U.S. troops.
Bush Claims 'Substantial Progress' In Iraq Fighting
President George W. Bush is claiming "substantial progress" in the battle to subdue the Iraqi insurgency.
In a news conference Friday with Britain's Tony Blair, the president maintained that U.S. and Iraqi forces have made headway against terrorists and regime holdouts.
He's also elaborating on that point in Saturday's weekly radio address,
However, Bush is warning that bloodshed could surge as elections planned for January draw closer.
He said that's because the "desperation" of terrorists will grow -- since they know a successful ballot would be a "crushing blow" to their designs.
-------- israel / palestine
Amid Gunfire and Chaos, Palestinians Bury Arafat
Thousands Storm Leader's Ramallah Compound
By Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A44374-2004Nov12?language=printer
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov. 12 -- The helicopter carrying Yasser Arafat's body touched the ground Friday, and the Palestinian leader's impassioned mourners surged forward. By the thousands, they clambered over concrete walls, burst through police lines, trampled each other and flung themselves against the chopper's metal skin.
"He's here!" a man bellowed, his face contorted as he charged the helicopter.
Desperate and angry, Palestinian security forces fired wildly into the air. Black-masked gunmen answered with louder bursts. Momentarily panicked, people closest to the aircraft dived for the ground in a tangle of sweating bodies, intertwined limbs and lost shoes. Seconds later, they were back on their feet -- chanting, screaming, cursing, demanding Arafat's coffin.
The mayhem that greeted Arafat's remains on their return to this West Bank city forced apprehensive officials to cancel a planned funeral and hasten his burial. The Palestinian leader was quickly laid to rest inside the government compound that had been his prison and refuge for the last 2 1/2 years of his life.
Arafat died early Thursday in a military hospital outside Paris, where he had been taken Oct. 29 for treatment of what doctors said were apparently digestive and blood disorders. The precise cause of death has not been released.
The chaos here contrasted starkly with the formal pomp and pageantry of Arafat's military funeral, held Friday morning near Cairo and attended by Arab leaders and other foreign dignitaries. And while Palestinian officials initially were dismayed by the public display of disorder that was beamed around the world by television networks, they conceded it was an apt farewell to the 75-year-old Arafat, who considered himself a revolutionary and a rebel.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians, many of whom had walked hours to evade Israeli military checkpoints, converged on Friday morning hoping to catch a glimpse of the coffin containing the remains of the only leader most of them had ever known. They climbed atop cars, shimmied up street lamps and packed in on rooftops for a peek over the high concrete walls of the rubble-strewn Palestinian presidential complex. Inside the compound, soldiers in pressed uniforms and a marching band practiced for the burial ceremony.
With the approach of the Egyptian helicopter carrying Arafat's body from an airfield in the Sinai Peninsula, where it had been flown by military cargo plane after the service in Cairo, hundreds of Palestinians began scaling the walls of the complex. Some were aided by the outstretched arms of Palestinian security guards atop the wall. About 30 minutes before the helicopter was scheduled to land, the undermanned security forces opened the main gates of the compound and thousands of people pushed and shoved inside.
With the helicopter pilots unable to land amid the sea of bodies, Palestinian police officers began firing into the air. People huddled against each other for cover, leaving room for the helicopter to set down at 2:18 p.m. in a burst of dust and debris. In an instant, the mob pressed forward and overpowered the security forces.
Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator and one of four Palestinian officials who flew aboard the helicopter with Arafat's body, pleaded with the mob to show respect. "Please honor him!" Erekat shouted from the door of the helicopter. "Give him the honor he deserves!"
"I was shocked and saddened because I wanted to give him a dignified burial with honors," Erekat said later. "I think the mistake was to allow people inside the compound. There were more guns in the hands of the people than in the hands of the police."
Yasib Khodir, 40, a merchant from the northern city of Nablus, was unrepentant. "This is our expression of sadness for a man we loved," Khodir said, shouting over bursts of gunfire as he was jostled by a masked militant. "He is now a part of history."
After about 20 minutes, jeeps and soldiers were able to make their way to the helicopter, remove Arafat's flag-draped coffin and rescue the passengers. But the crowd partially commandeered the casket as black-masked members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an armed wing of Arafat's Fatah political movement, led chants of "To Jerusalem! To Jerusalem!" -- a reference to Arafat's wish to be buried in what he considered the Palestinians' capital. Israel had refused the request.
Alarmed by the continuing chaos, Palestinian officials quickly abandoned plans for a formal funeral ceremony with tributes, marching band and soldiers in formation. The red carpet intended for the event remained wadded on the tarmac.
Instead, security officers slipped Arafat's body out of the coffin and quickly buried it -- draped in the Palestinian flag and the leader's signature black-and-white headdress -- in the limestone and black marble tomb that workmen had spent the previous night building beneath towering pine trees.
Bags of dirt from the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem's Old City had been sprinkled into the grave, a gesture that recalled Arafat's greatest failure -- securing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital. Even so, Palestinian officials said Arafat's tomb was constructed so that it could be moved to Jerusalem if the Palestinian dream is ever achieved.
As Arafat's remains disappeared into the tomb at about 3:05 p.m., masked militants and tearful security guards blasted the skies with gunfire, littering the grave site with spent bullet casings. Despite the stampeding crowds and the hundreds of bullets fired over the course of the afternoon, Palestinian medical officials said only nine people suffered slight injures.
Officials put Arafat's empty coffin, covered in wreaths of fall flowers, on display in the legislative chambers in the compound.
The contrasting ceremonies Friday underscored Arafat's role as a world leader on the one hand and a revolutionary icon on the other.
Even though the Palestinians do not have a state, he gave them a national identity, made them a political force on par with Arab countries in the region and transformed himself into a leader whose stature exceeded that of many Arab heads of state. He made himself and the Palestinian people a powerful force -- and often a thorn in the side -- in the neighboring states of Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, where about 2.5 million Palestinian refugees live. About 3.5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
While he symbolized the Palestinian dream of nationhood, many considered him one of its main obstacles. Arafat's refusal to tame Palestinian militant groups and disarm them, share power with his associates, implement political and security reforms and, most importantly, prevent suicide bombings against Israel led Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to refuse to negotiate with him.
With the Palestinians in full revolt against Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Sharon launched a prolonged attack on the Palestinian Authority and its institutions, particularly official security forces and Palestinian militant groups.
In the end, the man who oversaw the growth of the Palestinian movement into an international force spent his last years watching the short-term chances for an independent Palestinian state diminish and the land on which it could be created shrink.
"If you look at the record over the last 10 years, there was tremendous disappointment in Arafat's state-building and peacemaking -- Arafat did not deliver according to the expectations of most of the Palestinian public," said Kahlil Shikaki, a Palestinian pollster and political analyst. "But today, people will put this aside and remember him for his incredibly important legacy as the father of Palestinian nationalism who represents the aspirations and symbolizes and embodies the Palestinian desire for independence and statehood."
Anderson reported from Jerusalem.
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THE FUNERAL
Arafat Is Buried in Chaotic Scene in the West Bank
November 13, 2004
By STEVEN ERLANGER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13mideast.html?pagewanted=all
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov. 12 - Yasir Arafat was buried here on Friday in an extraordinary scene of grief and chaos, with thousands of Palestinians climbing the walls of his compound, surging around his coffin and trying to bear it aloft.
Despite firing volleys of gunfire into the sky, Palestinian security guards were unable to hold back a frenzied flow of mourners who poured over the internal courtyard, trampling the red carpet, trying to touch the coffin and engulfing the two Egyptian helicopters that brought Mr. Arafat and his entourage back home.
Wails and chants of "We will sacrifice our blood and souls to redeem you" and "Yasir, Yasir" competed with gunfire from scores of young militants in Mr. Arafat's Fatah movement.
For well over an hour, Palestinian security forces and political leaders struggled to bring some 20,000 mourners under control and move Mr. Arafat's coffin to a prepared burial spot of Jerusalem stone and black-and-green marble in the compound, under five conifers. Finally, it was decided to skip a mourning ceremony for dignitaries altogether, and Mr. Arafat was quickly lowered into the ground.
These passionate scenes were a remarkable contrast to the official and sterile dignity of Mr. Arafat's Cairo funeral service, earlier in the day, which was restricted to officials. But the Cairo service was a chance for Arab leaders in particular, who did not want to travel into Israeli-occupied territory, to pay homage to a man whom many had disliked over his 40-year-career and whose goal of an independent Palestinian state they were slow to embrace. And it was where Mr. Arafat's wife, Suha, paid her tearful respects, along with their daughter, Zahwa, 9.
The scenes here were a vivid reflection of the grief of a people, many of them young and angry, who had lost the only leader most of them could remember. There were tough young men with black clothes, masks and guns, thin young men with gelled hair and blue jeans and a number of young women, too, in tightly wrapped head scarves.
One of them, Nisrin Dabaka, 25, said , "I loved the rais," using the Arabic word for president. "He is like a father to me, and to me he did not die. He is in my heart, and I will never forget this day in all of my life."
But there were also people like Mazen E. Qupty, a Palestinian Israeli who lives in Jerusalem, who drives a Volvo at home but who walked most of the way here with his son, through Israeli checkpoints that stopped most car traffic. Mr. Qupty, like nearly everyone here, wanted to attend a historic moment in the life of the Palestinian people and to pay his respects, and he wanted this memory especially for his son.
"This is a sad day, it's sad to lose him, whether you agreed with him or not," Mr. Qupty said of Mr. Arafat. "But it's also a day to show all the world that Palestinians care for peace, and that it is Sharon, not Arafat, who is the real obstacle to peace." He was referring to Ariel Sharon, Israel's prime minister.
Asked about the Arafat legacy, Muhammad Halayka stopped and said: "Imagine if he didn't exist. We Palestinians would be a displaced people, dispersed among the Lebanese and the Egyptians and the Syrians. We would have been spread out among the Arabs and be part of a Palestinian minority here and there and everywhere. It was Arafat who grasped the idea of a unified identity and worked to create for us a homeland." Daoud Kuttab of Al Quds University in Jerusalem also wanted to be at the funeral even though Mr. Arafat jailed him for a week in 1997, simply for broadcasting a legislative session about corruption. "I wouldn't have missed this," Mr. Kuttab said. "His charisma and what he's done for the Palestinian people allow us to forgive him his mistakes. I have no bitterness at all."
Palestinians will remember Mr. Arafat fondly as a man who refused to yield on certain basic principles, Mr. Kuttab said. "He refused to give up on Jerusalem, on a recognition of the 1967 borders and a fair resolution of the refugee issue," Mr. Kuttab said.
Mr. Arafat's most prominent successor, Mahmoud Abbas, may have different tactics, Palestinians here agreed, especially with his condemnation of terrorism and suicide bombings, but his fundamental political goals are little different.
Palestinians here were also proud of the respect shown to Mr. Arafat by the French president, Jacques Chirac, and by the Arab and Western leaders in Egypt. "Who else had three funerals like this?" asked Hisham Abdallah. "First France, then Cairo, then here." It showed that Mr. Arafat was not irrelevant, as Israel and the United States insisted, but a global figure, Mr. Abdallah said.
The Israeli government sent no officials to the ceremonies for Mr. Arafat, whom Israel reviled as a terrorist. "I do not think we should send a representative to the funeral of somebody who killed thousands of our people," said Yosef Lapid, the Israeli justice minister, according to Reuters.
But Israeli networks carried wall-to-wall coverage. Channel 1 opened its broadcast at 8 p.m. by noting that the Palestinian security officers had struggled to restrain the throng and wondered, "Is this a sign of things to come?"
The chaos and frenzy of the event itself made it a people's funeral, suggested Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the aide who was always at Mr. Arafat's side. "It wasn't as planned," he conceded, "but I'm happy that the people here have the full right to come and say goodbye to their leader."
Israeli troops were nowhere to be seen in Ramallah on Friday but monitored checkpoints in and out of the West Bank.
Palestinians in Gaza, prevented by Israeli restrictions from coming to Ramallah, held a service of their own, marching in a symbolic funeral synchronized with the actual one in Ramallah. It began at Mr. Arafat's other battle-scarred compound on the Mediterranean coast, where members of his security service put a poster of him in the front passenger seat of his black Mercedes, his checkered kaffiyeh on the headrest.
His guards surrounded the car as it pulled out of the compound, to be joined by a small number of women. They chanted together, "We are going to Jerusalem, a million martyrs," and "Abu Ammar, you are our beloved, give us a Kalashnikov."
Some of the security guards fired intermittently into the air.
The car traveled to the Omari mosque, in the old center of the city, where thousands packed the narrow streets, including members of militant factions like Hamas. Two coffins, one draped with the Palestinian flag and the other covered with pictures of Mr. Arafat, were then carried by the crowd from the mosque to his compound.
The ceremony in Egypt that began the day was at a military mosque at Cairo's airport and restricted to kings, potentates, foreign officials and diplomats. The public was not allowed anywhere near, with traffic halted and armed security forces stationed on all rooftops and even in mosque minarets on the brief 150-yard route of the funeral march on Cairo's main airport road. Homeowners in apartments lining the road were evidently told not to even open their windows.
It was a state funeral service for a man without a state.
Speaking at the mosque prayers, Muhammad Sayed Tantawi, the grand sheik of Al Azhar and Egypt's highest religious figure, said brief prayers over the coffin as it rested on the patterned black-and-white marble floor. "He has served his people all his life, until he faced his God, with courage and honesty," the sheik said. "Let us pray for his soul."
Most of the pantheon of Arab leaders flew in for the occasion, some landing at the last minute and choosing to overlook often bitter differences Mr. Arafat. President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and King Abdullah II of Jordan, both of whose fathers had long sparred with Mr. Arafat, attended as did Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. The presidents of Algeria, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon were there, along with a host of princes from the royal houses of the Persian Gulf.
From farther afield, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa came as did the presidents of Indonesia, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe. There were a few prime ministers, though European Union nations sent their foreign ministers. The United States sent Assistant Secretary of State William J. Burns.
Yossi Beilin, a dovish Israeli politician and former peace negotiator, said of Mr. Arafat: "It's very rare, when a leader dies, that an era actually does die with him. But in this case, today, it would appear actually to be true. And the new era depends to a great extent on us, on us and on the Palestinians, and we have a great responsibility."
Shlomo Avineri, a philosopher and former Israeli Foreign Ministry official, said Mr. Arafat had failed, unlike Anwar Sadat, to "reach out to Israelis and address their fears and hopes." Mr. Arafat was more like Fidel Castro, Mr. Avineri said. "He gave his people a symbol, but he failed them in real life. "
Neil MacFarquhar contributed reporting from Cairo for this article and Greg Myre from Gaza City.
-------- latin america
Nicaragua Agrees to Destroy Antiaircraft Missiles
November 13, 2004
By THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/americas/13rumsfeld.html?pagewanted=all
MANAGUA, Nicaragua, Nov. 12 - Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, on the second day of a mission to strengthen security ties across Central and South America, received an unambiguous promise on Friday that Nicaragua would destroy all of its portable antiaircraft missiles supplied by the Soviet Union and Cuba during the 1980's.
More than 2,000 of the shoulder-fired SA-7 missiles remained in the Nicaraguan arsenal at the start of this year, a potent remnant of a time when the former Sandinista government here received military assistance from the Communist world.
After meeting with Mr. Rumsfeld, the Nicaraguan president, Enrique Bolaņos, said it was in Nicaragua's best interests to destroy the entire stockpile of missiles.
In past negotiations, the United States had pressed Nicaragua to quickly destroy its arsenal of the missiles. Pentagon officials say such missiles are prized by terrorists, who could use them to bring down a commercial airliner, a military passenger plane or helicopter ferrying government and military personnel. And they express fears that the lucrative black-market price for the missiles, which are suitcase-sized and can be easily smuggled, would be too tempting for officers who controlled the country's armory.
But Nicaraguan officials have been quoted in the local news media as saying that they planned to keep about 400 of the weapons to help defend the nation in a border dispute with Honduras, or that they would demand hefty compensation from the United States for their total destruction.
"We seek no compensation for destroying the missiles," President Bolaņos said at an afternoon news conference with Mr. Rumsfeld.
Earlier this year, Nicaragua destroyed about 600 antiaircraft missiles out of its stockpile of more than 2,000. On Friday, after issuing his pledge to complete its program of ridding Nicaragua of the weapons, President Bolaņos estimated that it would take about a year and a half more to destroy all of the missiles.
In recent weeks, American intelligence agencies have tripled their formal estimate of the number of shoulder-fired missile systems believed to be at large worldwide, since determining that at least 4,000 of the weapons in Iraq's prewar arsenals cannot be accounted for. In 2002, attackers fired two of the small Russian-made SA-7 missiles and almost hit a commercial aircraft taking off from Mombasa, Kenya.
Although Mr. Rumsfeld is journeying through Central and South America to discuss regional security issues, the war in Iraq and the current offensive in Falluja have been repeatedly raised.
Earlier Friday in El Salvador, Mr. Rumsfeld awarded American Bronze Star medals to six Salvadoran soldiers who repelled a band of 15 to 20 Iraqi insurgents attacking a convoy carrying six American officials on March 5.
El Salvador is the only other country in the Western Hemisphere with troops in Iraq. The six Salvadoran soldiers, members of the 370-strong contingent of Salvadoran special operations troops based in south-central Iraq, were guarding a convoy rolling south from Baghdad that included the American diplomat serving as the senior Coalition Provisional Authority official in Najaf.
The Salvadoran troops' defense against the ambush was an example of "courage and calm under fire," Mr. Rumsfeld said in awarding the Bronze Stars for "exceptional, meritorious service."
-------- mideast
Yasser on Yasser: Martyr par excellence
Big News Network.com
13th November, 2004
http://feeds.bignewsnetwork.com/?sid=3d338719a39829fe
The last Western news organization to interview Yasser Arafat found him steeped in conspiracy theories and devoted to nursing his image as a martyr.
His aides, for example, told a Washington Times reporter he was not to ask about Arafat's birthplace, which his birth certificate says was Cairo, the newspaper reported Friday.
Arafat wanted to be thought of as being born in Jerusalem, thus boosting Palestinian claims to the ancient city as their capital.
The leader, who died this week in a French hospital, also accused Israel's prime minister of the 1995 murder of Yitzak Rabin, a Labor prime minister, and of using depleted uranium against Palestinians.
As proof of the uranium accusation, Arafat said Palestinians were suffering from infertility and cancer at rates similar to those noted in Nagasaki and Hiroshima after U.S. aircraft dropped atomic bombs on those cities. However, none of the West Bank cancer specialists contacted by the newspaper had ever seen evidence of elevated cancer levels among Palestinians or unique fertility problems.
And rather than sleep in a large new bedroom built at his compound after a 2002 clash with Israeli forces he chose a smaller room that had been heavily damaged in such clashes -- a room he was fond of showing reporters.
-------- spies
CIA whistleblower sees 'long war'
US leaders 'missed 10 chances to avert 9/11'
Monday, 15 November, 2004
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4012839.stm
The CIA agent who headed the hunt for Osama Bin Laden in the late 1990s has called for a national debate in the US on the cost of support for Israel.
Mike Scheuer quit the CIA last week, as did CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, fuelling rumours of serious internal rifts and low morale.
In a BBC interview, Mr Scheuer said US policies risked "an extraordinarily long and bloody war" against al-Qaeda.
He said he had resigned to speak out over US government security failings.
Mr Scheuer, who has written two books anonymously, said he finally decided to leave the CIA after being told to stop publicising his worries about policy failings.
He said the CIA's executive director had presented him with ways to stay on during a "very cordial, friendly" talk, but "all of them included not speaking out any more".
Blind spot
Mr Scheuer, who began tracking Osama Bin Laden in the mid-1990s during the Clinton administration, said the White House had consistently failed to understand the threat from al-Qaeda or to take it seriously, and was still doing so.
Osama Bin Laden: 'professional' and determined
"I don't think they get it now," he told BBC Security Correspondent Gordon Corera, warning of al-Qaeda's "high degree of professionalism" in seeking out weapons of mass destruction and nuclear material.
Al-Qaeda's antagonism to the US was based on "a specific set of US policies that have been in gear for 30 years and have not been reviewed, have not been debated, have not been questioned", he said.
Instead, both contenders in the recent US presidential election had told voters that al-Qaeda was opposed to American values on women's rights or the sale of alcohol, warnings that sidestepped many major issues.
Al-Qaeda's hostility stemmed from US government's "unqualified support for Israel" and desire "to manipulate the price of oil" in favour of Western consumers, he said.
Al-Qaeda also views US-supported Arab regimes like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan as "Muslim tyrannies".
Confronting big issues
In his view, "there should be a debate over support for Israel", alternative energy and how the US manages its relationship with the Muslim world.
US backing for Israel angers Muslims
He offered no policy blueprint, saying that US citizens might decide to continue to support existing strategy, but would then be able to do so knowing the risks.
"The American people would be going into the future knowing that they were faced with an extraordinarily long and bloody war to be fought because of those policies", he said.
Mr Scheuer also lambasted US administrations for being soft on terrorism, missing chances to attack Osama Bin Laden, and being over-concerned about public opinion in Europe and the Muslim world.
Infighting
The 9/11 commission's report had shown that US intelligence services "had presented the government with at least 10 different occasions on which Osama Bin Laden could've been captured or attacked by the US military", he said.
The 9/11 report embarrassed the CIA
"The decisions were not taken on the basis of defending American citizens...(they) were always made on the basis of not offending Muslim opinion, not offending European opinion," he added.
The 9/11commission's report published in July criticised the CIA for faulty intelligence and poor co-operation with other government agencies.
Many commentators believe its revelations drove CIA director George Tenet to resign in June, ahead of publication.
His deputy, Mr McLaughlin, stepped in to run the agency on a temporary basis, until Porter Goss took over the top job two months ago. Now Mr McLaughlin has also gone, amid rumours of bitter divisions about the agency's role and future direction.
----
Deputy Chief Resigns From CIA
Agency Is Said to Be in Turmoil Under New Director Goss
By Dana Priest and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46580-2004Nov12?language=printer
The deputy director of the CIA resigned yesterday after a series of confrontations over the past week between senior operations officials and CIA Director Porter J. Goss's new chief of staff that have left the agency in turmoil, according to several current and former CIA officials.
John E. McLaughlin, a 32-year CIA veteran who was acting director for two months this summer until Goss took over, resigned after warning Goss that his top aide, former Capitol Hill staff member Patrick Murray, was treating senior officials disrespectfully and risked widespread resignations, the officials said.
Yesterday, the agency official who oversees foreign operations, Deputy Director of Operations Stephen R. Kappes, tendered his resignation after a confrontation with Murray. Goss and the White House pleaded with Kappes to reconsider and he agreed to delay his decision until Monday, the officials said.
Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said.
The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay abreast of a worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda, a growing insurgency in Iraq, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to reorganize the intelligence agencies. The agency also has been criticized for not preventing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and not accurately assessing Saddam Hussein's ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.
"It's the worst roiling I've ever heard of," said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. "There's confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive."
Current and retired senior managers have criticized Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, for not interacting with senior managers and for giving Murray too much authority over day-to-day operations. Murray was Goss's chief of staff on the intelligence committee. Transitions between CIA directors are often unsettling for career officers. Goss's arrival has been especially tense because he brought with him four former members of the intelligence committee known widely on the Hill and within the agency for their abrasive management style and for their criticism of the agency's clandestine services in a committee report.
Three are former mid-level CIA officials who left the agency disgruntled, according to former colleagues. The fourth, Murray, who also worked at the Justice Department, has a reputation for being highly partisan. When senior managers have gone to Goss to complain about his staff actions, one CIA officer said, Goss has told them: "Talk to my chief of staff. I don't do personnel."
The overall effect, said one former senior CIA official, who has kept up his contacts in the Directorate of Operations, "is that Goss doesn't seem engaged at all."
If other senior clandestine officers leave, said one former officer who maintains contacts within the Langley headquarters, "the middle-level people who move up may eventually work out, but meanwhile the level of experience and competence will go down."
The CIA declined to comment on the issues raised by the current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. A CIA spokesman said McLaughlin's retirement "was a long-planned personal decision taken at a natural transition point in the administration and not connected to any other factors."
McLaughlin issued a statement that said: "I have come to the purely personal decision that it is time to move on to other endeavors."
Goss, too, issued a statement, which applauded McLaughlin's "outstanding service."
"On a personal note," the statement continued, "I want to thank John for the kindness he has shown me as Director of Central Intelligence."
In addition to bringing in his former aides from the Hill, Goss plans to dilute the authority of the Directorate of Operations by removing the director as the central figure in appointing country station chiefs overseas and regional division chiefs at headquarters.
"I definitely think all this is disrupting people's work," one agency official said. "Everyone is waiting for the centipede to drop all his shoes."
Associates said McLaughlin was disappointed by Goss's management style and was particularly disheartened by a series of recent confrontations between Murray and senior leaders.
In one of those confrontations, on Nov. 5, Murray raised the issue of leaks with the associate deputy director of counterintelligence. Referring to previous media leaks regarding personnel, he said that if anything in the newly appointed executive director's personnel file made it into the media, the counterintelligence official "would be held responsible," according to one agency official and two former colleagues with knowledge of the conversation.
All three sources gave the following account:
The associate deputy director of counterintelligence, a highly respected case officer whose name is being withheld because she is undercover, told Michael Sulick, the associate deputy director of operations, about the threat. Sulick told his superior, Kappes, and both sought a meeting with Goss to complain.
Goss, Murray, Kappes and Sulick met to discuss the matter. After Goss left, Sulick "got in Murray's space," according to one of his associates whose account was corroborated by another. Murray then demanded that Kappes fire Sulick. Kappes refused, and told Goss that he would resign. Goss and other White House officials appealed to Kappes to delay his decision until Monday.
Goss, a former CIA case officer and Republican legislator from Florida, promised during his confirmation hearing to set aside partisan politics and work to strengthen the CIA clandestine service. But current and former officials have said that his plans have been unclear to the senior clandestine service officials who would be responsible for carrying them out. In addition, they have been concerned by the backgrounds of the senior staff Goss has hired.
Michael V. Kostiw, who was Goss's first choice for executive director -- the agency's third-ranking official -- withdrew his name after The Washington Post reported that he had left the agency 20 years ago after having been arrested for stealing a package of bacon.
More generally, Goss's aides arrived at the CIA with harsh views of the clandestine service. Their views were laid out in a House intelligence committee report in June. "There is a dysfunctional denial of any need for corrective action," the report said. The clandestine service suffers from "misallocation and redirection of resources, poor prioritization of objectives, micromanagement of field operations and a continued political aversion to operational risk."
The report was drafted primarily by Jay Jakub, whom Goss appointed to the newly created position of special assistant for operations and analysis.
The House report's critique brought on a tough response from then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and led to a near-breakdown in relations between the agency and the panel staff. It was repeatedly noted by present and past clandestine officers that Jakub had a limited career at the agency, first as an analyst and later as a case officer.
"He never distinguished himself before he left," a former boss said.
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OP-ED COLUMNIST
The C.I.A. Versus Bush
November 13, 2004
By DAVID BROOKS
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/opinion/13brooks.html?hp
Now that he's been returned to office, President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.
At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.
White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.
The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.
As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."
Nor is this feud over. C.I.A. officials are now busy undermining their new boss, Porter Goss. One senior official called one of Goss's deputies, who worked on Capitol Hill, a "Hill Puke," and said he didn't have to listen to anything the deputy said. Is this any way to run a superpower?
Meanwhile, members of Congress and people around the executive branch are wondering what President Bush is going to do to punish the mutineers. A president simply cannot allow a department or agency to go into campaign season opposition and then pay no price for it. If that happens, employees of every agency will feel free to go off and start their own little media campaigns whenever their hearts desire.
If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.
The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.
In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.
This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.
Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error.
-----
CIA agent publicly chides White House for terror war
Defying protocol, analyst Mike Scheuer criticizes the administration for Iraq war and losing focus on Al Qaeda.
November 12, 2004
By Faye Bowers
The Christian Science Monitor
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1112/p02s02-usfp.html
WASHINGTON - It's a little like yelling an obscenity at a wedding. In the etiquette of Washington, it has always been an unwritten rule that members of the CIA don't publicly criticize the people they work for - namely the US government.
From the agency's inception some 50 years ago, the mantra of top officials in particular has been to provide "hard" information - estimates and analyses - not public opinions about their bosses' policies or veracity.
Now a senior CIA official is violating the trench-coat oath - and roiling already sensitive relations between the White House and the nation's top spy agency. It comes at a time of major reform of the nation's intelligence apparatus.
Mike Scheuer, a 22-year veteran who works in the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and is a former head of its Osama bin Laden unit, is criticizing the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq and for the way it has conducted the war on terror in general. And he's doing it very publicly.
Mr. Scheuer, who says he will leave his job today after holding "cordial" talks with his superiors on Wednesday, has been granting interviews to members of the media for days - and will appear Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes."
"I have concluded that there has not been adequate national debate over the nature of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and the forces he leads and inspires, and the nature and dimensions of the intelligence reform needed to address that threat," Scheuer said yesterday. He hopes to produce "a more substantive debate."
In many respects, his mini-revolt is just the most visible sign of a tension that has existed between the White House and the CIA almost since 9/11. As the agency has been censured for its failures leading up to the Sept. 11, and for incorrect estimates about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, agency members have circulated information defending their intelligence reporting and criticizing the Bush administration for going to war in Iraq and diverting attention from Osama bin Laden. Most of the missives have been anonymous leaks.
Never before, say government officials and outside experts, have relations between the CIA and the administration been so contentious. And never, they say, has the agency so publicly crossed the line to involve itself in policy debate. A Wall Street Journal editorial went so far as to call the agency's leaks and criticisms an "insurgency."
The agency was already in tumult. In the wake of numerous investigations and fault-finding charges, former CIA director George Tenet resigned this past summer, as did James Pavitt, the man who ran the agency's day-to-day counterterrorism operations. Now, Congress is debating the recommendations of the 9/11 commission. It's not yet clear to what extent reforms - such as appointing an über director with supervisory and budgetary control over the entire intelligence community, or creating a national counterterrorism center - will be implemented. But the agency is likely to lose much of the power and prestige it has garnered over the past 50 years.
"You can't be a member of the CIA and read that as anything but the status and power of the agency is going to decline," says Jim Walsh, an expert on security at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "I think it's understandable that some people may be sick and tired of this or pretty darned mad."
That basically sums up Scheuer's take on events within the intelligence community and the administration's policies. He has published two books in the past 2-1/2 years, "Through Our Enemies Eyes," and "Imperial Hubris," under "Anonymous." The agency had to clear the books for classified information and potential mentions of sources and methods, but couldn't prevent him from exercising his First Amendment right, agency officials say. The agency also permitted Scheuer to grant media interviews about the subjects of his books.
The first book was an in-depth look at Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, and was very well received by experts on terrorism as well as policymakers . But his second, best-selling book released this past July, "Imperial Hubris," was nothing less than an indictment of the administration's war on terror. He criticized the administration for not immediately responding against bin Laden following the 9/11 attacks.
And he further wrote that the war in Iraq was "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantages."
Even Robert Baer, a retired CIA operative who has written two books that are at least somewhat critical of government positions, says he thinks Scheuer's criticisms went beyond the acceptable. "The CIA should not be in a hostile position to the president," Mr. Baer says. "And the "Imperial Hubris" book had to look that way to the White House."
But the interviews in particular have rankled government officials. Scheuer was again permitted to talk "anonymously" with the media after his latest book. But he apparently went beyond what the CIA thought he would, and agency officials squelched his speaking engagements.
The interviews he did before being reined in, however, have continued to appear, including in Vanity Fair (November) and The Atlantic Monthly (December). The Atlantic article excerpts a letter that Scheuer sent to the Senate Intelligence Committee in early September. In it, he enumerates 10 instances since 1996 in which "the decisions of senior intelligence community bureaucrats ... have been at the core of our failure against Bin Laden." Scheuer also decided, without agency approval, that he would grant interviews about the Atlantic Monthly article.
"I've presented this information to two Investigator General studies before 9/11 and to two IG [Inspector General] studies inside our building after 9/11," Scheuer said in a telephone interview. "I've testified before the 9/11 commission and the Shelby-Goss [congressional] commissions. So I've exhausted all the internal mechanisms available to an agency officer ... but I think to the average American, this is important."
It's unknown how the CIA will handle the criticisms. Some say it will likely try to work out an arrangement that would require him to curtail his critiques. Others say the agency may sue to set an example. For now, the agency refuses to comment.
"Some people will say he is crazy to publicly say these things," says Charles Battaglia, former staff director for the Senate Intelligence Committee. "But others will say he's acting on the courage of his convictions."
--------
No. 2 CIA official McLaughlin quits
washtimes
November 13, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041112-113809-5662r.htm
The veteran intelligence analyst who served as acting CIA director during a wave of criticism of the agency this past summer announced his retirement yesterday.
CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin called his resignation a "purely personal decision" and said it was time to move on to other endeavors. He has worked with the agency 32 years.
Mr. McLaughlin temporarily took over the CIA in July when former Director George J. Tenet retired, also citing personal reasons.
Mr. McLaughlin's ascension put him in line to field criticism from two reports highly critical of U.S. intelligence operations, the September 11 commission report and the Senate's investigation into the flawed prewar intelligence on Iraq.
President Bush decided in August to nominate a permanent replacement for Mr. Tenet and tapped the former chairman of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, Porter J. Goss, Florida Republican. A former CIA operative, Mr. Goss assumed the job in September.
A CIA official said Mr. McLaughlin thought the period of government transition after the election was a "logical time to move on." The director plans to take time off while considering opportunities in the private sector, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
"John is steeped in the American intelligence community, which in its care, rigor and collegiality will forever bear his stamp," Mr. Goss said.
"On a personal note, I want to thank John for the kindness he has shown me in my opening weeks as director of central intelligence," he said. "I am certain that John has a lot of good magic left in him, which he will use for the benefit of all. He closes this chapter of his service with the admiration of American intelligence officers everywhere."
Since 1972, Mr. McLaughlin has climbed gradually within the agency to become finally a part of its senior leadership. He was an analyst for European and Russian issues before rising to deputy director for intelligence in 1997. By 2000, he had become Mr. Tenet's right hand, as deputy director of central intelligence.
When Mr. Tenet resigned in July, Mr. McLaughlin temporarily headed the agency for nearly three months.
Mr. McLaughlin, a 62-year-old known as "Merlin" among his colleagues, was known for pulling off impromptu magic tricks. Among them, he can turn a $1 bill into other denominations.
-------- us
Homeless Vets Already Overload Safety Net
System Struggles With Volume of Down-and-Out Vets -- and There May Be Another Generation Coming
Nov. 13, 2004
ABC News
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=247816&page=1
"Are they or aren't they really veterans?" is a question often asked when encountering a homeless person claiming to be a vet.
There's a good chance they are.
"There is plenty of evidence to show that one-third of [homeless males] are veterans," says John Baskerville of Swords to Plowshares, a non-profit veterans support group in the San Francisco Bay area.
'Get Me Off the Street'
Nearly half of the homeless vets are from the Vietnam era. Eighty percent of them have substance abuse problems.
"I drink," says Richard Smith, a Navy vet. "I'm an Irishman. I drink heavily."
And 45 percent of them are mentally ill and unlikely to get off the streets without treatment.
Brian Roth, a Marine veteran, says he has been hopelessly addicted to drugs since he came back from Vietnam in 1969, and has never had a home of his own.
"Just get me off the street," Roth says. "I'm tired. ... I'm 55 years old.
"I'm sleeping with a guy in his van right now," he adds.
According to his records and relatives we spoke with, Roth went to college after his military service and even completed medical school at Michigan State before he started getting arrested for writing illegal prescriptions.
"I know I smell like a skunk and look like one," he says. "But for a year I've been trying to get into a program, and I will stay there if they just make it available."
'We Have to Do More'
On any given day there are an estimated 300,000 homeless vets.
"We have a system that is absolutely, positively, totally at capacity," Baskerville says. "It's a struggle every day to try and figure out where we can get services for our veterans."
----
Pentagon Envisioning a Costly Internet for War
nytimes
By TIM WEINER
November 13, 2004
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/technology/13warnet.html
The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future.
The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle.
This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds."
The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information Grid, or GIG. Conceived six years ago, its first connections were laid six weeks ago. It may take two decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build the new war net and its components.
Skeptics say the costs are staggering and the technological hurdles huge.
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet and a Pentagon consultant on the war net, said he wondered if the military's dream was realistic. "I want to make sure what we realize is vision and not hallucination," Mr. Cerf said.
"This is sort of like Star Wars, where the policy was, 'Let's go out and build this system,' and technology lagged far behind,'' he said. "There's nothing wrong with having ambitious goals. You just need to temper them with physics and reality."
Advocates say networked computers will be the most powerful weapon in the American arsenal. Fusing weapons, secret intelligence and soldiers in a globe-girdling network - what they call net-centric warfare - will, they say, change the military in the way the Internet has changed business and culture.
"Possibly the single most transforming thing in our force,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has said, "will not be a weapons system, but a set of interconnections."
The American military, built to fight nations and armies, now faces stateless enemies without jets, tanks, ships or central headquarters. Sending secret intelligence and stratagems instantly to soldiers in battle would, in theory, make the military a faster, fiercer force against a faceless foe.
Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation's biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a "highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused," shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war.
Every member of the military would have "a picture of the battle space, a God's-eye view," he said. "And that's real power."
Pentagon traditionalists, however, ask if net-centric warfare is nothing more than an expensive fad. They point to the street fighting in Falluja and Baghdad, saying firepower and armor still mean more than fiber optic cables and wireless connections.
But the biggest challenge in building a war net may be the military bureaucracy. For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built their own weapons and traditions. A network, advocates say, would cut through those old ways.
The ideals of this new warfare are driving many of the Pentagon's spending plans for the next 10 to 15 years. Some costs are secret, but billions have already been spent.
Providing the connections to run the war net will cost at least $24 billion over the next five years - more than the cost, in today's dollars, of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb. Beyond that, encrypting data will be a $5 billion project.
Hundreds of thousands of new radios are likely to cost $25 billion. Satellite systems for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and communications will be tens of billions more. The Army's program for a war net alone has a $120 billion price tag.
Over all, Pentagon documents suggest, $200 billion or more may go for the war net's hardware and software in the next decade or so. "The question is one of cost and technology," said John Hamre, a former deputy secretary of defense, now president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
"We want to know all things at all times everywhere in the world? Fine," Mr. Hamre said. "Do we know what this staring, all-seeing eye is that we're going to put in space is? Hell, no."
The military wants to know "everything of interest to us, all the time," in the words of Steven A. Cambone, the under secretary of defense for intelligence. He has told Congress that military intelligence - including secret satellite surveillance covering most of the earth - will be posted on the war net and shared with troops.
John Garing, strategic planning director at the Defense Information Security Agency, now starting to build the war net, said: "The essence of net-centric warfare is our ability to deploy a war-fighting force anywhere, anytime. Information technology is the key to that."
Military contractors - and information-technology creators not usually associated with weapons systems - formed a consortium to develop the war net on Sept. 28. The group includes an A-list of military contractors and technology powerhouses: Boeing; Cisco Systems; Factiva, a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters; General Dynamics; Hewlett-Packard; Honeywell; I.B.M.; Lockheed Martin; Microsoft; Northrop Grumman; Oracle; Raytheon; and Sun Microsystems. They are working to weave weapons, intelligence and communications into a seamless web.
The Pentagon has tried this twice before.
Its Worldwide Military Command and Control System, built in the 1960's, often failed in crises. A $25 billion successor, Milstar, was completed in 2003 after two decades of work. Pentagon officials say it is already outdated: more switchboard than server, more dial-up than broadband, it cannot support 21st-century technology.
The Pentagon's scientists and engineers, starting four decades ago, invented the systems that became the Internet. Throughout the cold war, their computer power ran far ahead of the rest of the world.
Then the world eclipsed them. The nation's military and intelligence services started falling behind when the Internet exploded onto the commercial scene a decade ago. The war net is "an attempt to catch up," Mr. Cerf said.
It has been slowly evolving for at least six years. In 1999, Pentagon officials told Congress that "this monumental task will span a quarter-century or more." This year, the vision gained focus, and Pentagon officials started explaining it in some detail to Congress.
Its scope was described in July by the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog agency for Congress.
Many new multibillion-dollar weapons and satellites are "critically dependent on the future network," the agency reported. "Despite enormous challenges and risks - many of which have not been successfully overcome in smaller-scale efforts" like missile defense, "the Pentagon is depending on the GIG to enable a fundamental transformation in the way military operations are conducted."
According to Art Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation, "What we are really talking about is a new theory of war."
Linton Wells II, the chief information officer at the Defense Department, said net-centric principles were becoming "the center of gravity" for war planners.
"The tenets are broadly accepted throughout the Defense Department," said Mr. Wells, who directs the Office of Networks and Information Integration. "Senior leadership can articulate them. We still have a way to go in terms of why we should spend X billion dollars on a certain program. In the fight between widgets and digits, widgets tend to win."
He said $24 billion would be spent in the next five years to build new war net connections. "No doubt these are expensive," Mr. Wells said. "Technology developments always are."
Advocates acknowledge that weaving American military and intelligence services into a unified system is a huge challenge.
The military is filled with "tribal representatives behind tribal workstations interpreting tribal hieroglyphics," in the words of Gen. John Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff. "What if the machines talked to each other?" he asked.
That is the vision of the new web: war machines with a common language for all military forces, instantly emitting encyclopedias of lethal information against all enemies.
To realize this vision, the military must solve a persistent problem. It all boils down to bandwidth.
Bandwidth measures how much data can flow between electronic devices. Too little for civilians means a Web page takes forever to load. Too little for soldiers means the war net will not work.
The bandwidth requirements seem bottomless. The military will need 40 or 50 times what it used at the height of the Iraq war last year, a Rand Corporation study estimates - enough to give front-line soldiers bandwidth equal to downloading three feature-length movies a second.
The Congressional Research Service said the Army, despite plans to spend $20 billion on the problem, may wind up with a tenth of the bandwidth it needs. The Army, in its "lessons learned" report from Iraq, published in May, said "there will probably never be enough resources to establish a complete and functioning network of communications, sensors, and systems everywhere in the world."
The bottleneck is already great. In Iraq, front-line commanders and troops fight frequent software freezes. "To make net-centric warfare a reality," said Tony Montemarano, the Defense Information Security Agency's bandwidth expansion chief, "we will have to precipitously enhance bandwidth."
The military must also change its own culture.
For decades, the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have built separate weapons, radios, frequencies and traditions. They guard their "rice bowls" - their turf - from rival services.
But Mr. Rumsfeld's vision depends on interoperability: warfare using all four services in joint operations.
In a net-centric world, "you would not have a Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines," but a unified force, said William Owens, a former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
For the Pentagon's visionaries, Mr. Montemarano said, "the single biggest obstacle is a cultural one.''
"Breaking these rice bowls - that's a huge job."
-----
Gulf-stress study dropped
ASSOCIATED PRESS
November 13, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041112-113808-8459r.htm
The Veterans Affairs Department said yesterday that it no longer will pay for studies that seek to show stress is the primary cause of mysterious ailments afflicting thousands of veterans of the 1991 Persian Gulf war.
For years the federal government has pointed to stress as the likely reason for the sicknesses. But VA Secretary Anthony J. Principi scheduled a press conference to announce the department will set aside up to $15 million for a year of Gulf war illness research, with the stipulation the money not pay for studies that propose stress as the only explanation for the ailments, said Stephan Fihn, the VA's acting chief research and development officer.
"More on the stress area per se isn't going to move us forward," Mr. Fihn said.
Mr. Principi's decision comes as a result of a report issued yesterday by an advisory committee he appointed.
The Research Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illness spent the past two years reviewing studies and recommended that the VA abandon stress studies and focus on toxic substances.
------
US wounded in Falluja hits 412
aljazeera.net
13 November 2004
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/B712F91B-3B45-4A45-99FF-47B6E5CF6225.htm
More than 70 US soldiers, most of them injured in Falluja, have been flown from Iraq to a military hospital in Germany. A C-141 transport plane brought the 73 newest patients to the US Air Force's Ramstein base on Saturday morning.
The 73 new patients at the US military's Landstuhl Regional Medical Centre pushed the number of arrivals this week to 412, nearly all of whom were injured in Falluja, according to a hospital spokeswoman.
Military officials could not provide an exact breakdown on the number of wounded from Falluja or the nature of their injuries.
Bed capacity at the hospital in rural western Germany has been increased to handle the influx.
Landstuhl is the biggest US military hospital overseas, and its doctors also handle soldiers with injuries and illnesses not related to combat.
It usually treats between 30 and 50 injured military personnel a day. US and Iraqi forces launched a ground assault on Falluja late on Monday.
-----
Louisiana teens getting driver's license also register for selective service
The Town Talk
Robert Morgan
November 13, 2004
http://www.thetowntalk.com/html/499F32E2-51FD-4A8E-8D9B-6A669307AA5A.shtml
There may be no "plans" for a national military draft, but that hasn't kept Louisiana from registering teenagers too young to serve in case conditions change.
During the recently concluded presidential campaigns, the major candidates repeatedly said they had no plans to resume compulsory military service.
Their promises were not reassuring, however, to Larry Chevalier of Glenmora who was alarmed when his 16-year-old son Nathan had to register with the Selective Service System in order to get a driver's license.
Selective Service is the agency charged with collecting names and information about all 18-year-old American and immigrant men for possible conscription.
"I just can't believe it. That amazes me," Chevalier said.
What "amazed" Chevalier was that his son would not be eligible to serve in the military for another two years.
And neither he nor his son knew before going to the Office of Motor Vehicles that Natan would be required to pre-register for the draft in order to get his first driver's license, he said.
After questioning the early registration, Chevalier researched the issue and learned the Legislature passed Act 373 in the 2003 session dictating that all males aged 15 up to 18 seeking a first-time driver's license or an OMV identification card must register with Selective Service.
Chevalier's concerns were not wholly shared by young men attending a YMCA-sponsored driver's education course.
After being informed of the new condition for getting a first-time license, some of the teenagers only shrugged.
"I don't care," Mark Fontenot, a 16-year-old student at Apostolic Christian Academy, said.
Pineville High School student Josh Stokes, 15, said, "I think it's good.'
But neither student would elaborate on his view.
Stephen White, 16 and a student at Alexandria Senior High School, may have summed up the feelings of others when he said, "I think it's all right. I can't do anything about it anyway."
Chevalier suggested there should be something youngsters can "do about it."
"I don't know what rights as far as civil liberties that minors have, but I think their rights are being violated," he said.
Rudy Sanchez, general counsel for the federal Selective Service System, said, "I don't know the rationale for that. Louisiana shouldn't be registering 15-year-olds. We don't even register 16-year-olds."
Sanchez pointed out federal law only provides for "early submission" of information by a young man who is at least 17 years and three months old.
That information is held until the person becomes 18 when it is forwarded to the proper database, he said.
Otherwise, young men are required by law to register as early as 30 days prior to reaching age 18 and no later than 30 days after their birthday.
Other states have passed laws requiring young men to register with Selective Service when they get a driver's license, he said.
But he said no other state requires males as young as 15 to register.
And the information is not supposed to be forwarded to the federal agency until the young men reach 18 years old.
He said there is no mechanism for collecting data on males younger than 17 years and three months.
That claim was disputed by Everett Bonner, state director of Selective Service.
"They do accept it. I can promise you. They do not process it until the young man turns 18," Bonner said, adding information collected by OMV is forwarded to a federal data management center in Chicago.
He said registering young men when they get their drivers' licenses is a convenience for the registrant and a way to help them later in life.
Many young men do not know they are required to register with SSS, particularly in the inner cities, he said.
Anyone failing to register is "considered a felon without conviction," he said, adding it can lead to future loss of opportunities and benefits.
Someone who does not register for the draft cannot get a federal government job, he said.
Chevalier questioned how the state can force a minor child to "sign on the dotted line" without his parents' consent.
"As far as a minor child, the parents are responsible for that minor child," he said.
Bonner said, however, the parents have to sign for a minor to get a driver's license and that should suffice for the draft registration as well.
"What I don't like is somebody having all this information about kids and somebody sitting up there in some private meeting discussing how many young people they have available for the draft in two years," Chevalier said.
While the U.S. may be involved in military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq now, "we have Syria, Iran and North Korea sitting out there," he said.
Bonner said, "I would venture to say the federal government has all sorts of information about us through various sources. If someone thinks it's 'Big Brother,' he'll have to deal with that."
-------- war crimes
GENEVA CONVENTIONS
Rights Lawyers See Possibility of a War Crime
November 13, 2004
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/international/middleeast/13legal.html?pagewanted=all
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - Human rights experts said Friday that American soldiers might have committed a war crime on Thursday when they sent fleeing Iraqi civilians back into Falluja.
Citing several articles of the Geneva Conventions, the experts said recognized laws of war require military forces to protect civilians as refugees and forbid returning them to a combat zone.
"This is highly problematical conduct in terms of exposing people to grave danger by returning them to an area where fighting is going on," said Jordan Paust, a law professor at the University of Houston and a former Army prosecutor.
James Ross, senior legal adviser to Human Rights Watch, said, "If that's what happened, it would be a war crime."
A stream of refugees, about 300 men, women and children, were detained by American soldiers as they left southern Falluja by car and on foot. The women and children were allowed to proceed. The men were tested for any residues left by the handling of explosives. All tested negative, but they were sent back.
A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, defended the actions of American troops in Iraq, saying: "Our forces over there are not haphazardly operating indiscriminately, targeting individuals or civilians. The rules of engagement are researched and vetted, and our forces closely follow them."
Because the United States has refused to take part in the International Criminal Court, it is unclear whether American troops could be held accountable.
-------- POLICE / PRISONERS / COURTS / JUSTICE
-------- homeland security / national intelligence
Airlines Must Hand Over Records
TSA Requests Passenger Data to Test Its Screening System
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A07
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46610-2004Nov12.html
The federal government said it will begin analyzing millions of U.S. airline passenger records by the end of the month in a first step toward creating a computerized screening system to protect the nation's airlines from terrorist attack.
The Transportation Security Administration yesterday ordered 72 carriers to turn over historical passengers records by Nov. 23 so that the agency can begin testing a program called Secure Flight. The system seeks to consolidate various government watch lists and improve the accuracy of comparing passenger names against those of suspected terrorists.
The program also aims to avoid public embarrassment and delays for hundreds of innocent travelers -- some of them members of Congress -- who were stopped by security officers in airports. The government effort has been met with skepticism by conservatives and privacy rights advocates such as the American Civil Liberties Union, who say that the government should not be regularly combing through airline passenger lists. The TSA has received more than 500 comments from people and companies about the program, most of them critical.
The TSA acknowledged yesterday that it still faces several hurdles before it can officially launch the program, including cooperation with other countries. European laws prevent airlines from sharing information about customers with the government unless it is part of a specific criminal investigation. Any U.S. carrier that shared information with the TSA about European passengers on flights overseas could be placed in a legal bind between the two continents.
Doug Wills, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, said carriers "would urge the U.S. and the E.U. to negotiate reciprocal agreements that would protect the security of passengers and the security of privacy." ATA represents the major airlines.
"It's an issue we have to work very carefully," said Justin Oberman, the assistant administrator of transportation vetting and credentialing. "There's no question we're going to have close collaboration [with the European Commission]. What form that would take at the end, we don't know yet."
U.S. airlines have raised a number of concerns with the TSA about the program in the past few months, but they publicly supported it yesterday.
TSA said it didn't believe carriers would legally challenge the order or refuse to go along.
"We're in great shape as we enter the testing phase" of the program, Oberman said. He said if all goes according to plan, the new system will go into operation in late spring or early summer of 2005.
Oberman said the TSA had not yet picked a contractor to help conduct the testing but planned to do so shortly.
United Airlines said it wondered how the airlines would be able to share information on 1.8 million daily airline travelers with the government fast enough, especially when some passengers buy tickets moments before departure. United also expressed concern about the costs and the linking of each airline's unique computer reservation system with the government system. Other carriers privately agreed to support Secure Flight if the TSA would quickly expand another program called Registered Traveler that provides a quicker pass through security for the carrier's most frequent customers, according to an aviation source who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"U.S. airlines have long-standing concerns that center on privacy and operational issues," said James C. May, chief executive of the ATA. "We hope that many of the issues will be successfully addressed during the test phase of Secure Flight."
-------- justice
Ashcroft Decries Court Rulings
'Second-Guessing' Bush on Security Raises Risk, He Says
By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A06
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46434-2004Nov12.html
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said yesterday that federal courts have endangered national security by ruling against the Bush administration on issues related to the war on terrorism.
In his first public remarks since he announced Tuesday that he would resign, Ashcroft told a meeting of conservative lawyers here that court decisions limiting President Bush's powers are part of "a profoundly disturbing trend" in which the judicial branch is injecting itself into matters that should be up to the executive branch.
"The danger I see here is that intrusive judicial oversight and second-guessing of presidential determinations in these critical areas can put at risk the very security of our nation in a time of war," Ashcroft said in a speech at the Federalist Society's national convention. He added later: "Our nation and our liberty will be all the more in jeopardy as the tendency for judicial encroachment and ideological micromanagement are applied to the sensitive domain of national defense."
Ashcroft did not identify specific cases, but his remarks appeared to be aimed at recent decisions rejecting arguments that the president should not be subject to significant judicial review in matters related to national security or interpretations of the Geneva Conventions.
On Monday, U.S. District Judge James Robertson ruled that the trials established to determine the guilt or innocence of military prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are unlawful and that the detainees may qualify as prisoners of war under the Geneva accords. The Justice Department is appealing the decision, which halted the first scheduled "military commission" for a Guantanamo Bay captive.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision rejecting the Justice Department's position that Bush may indefinitely hold and interrogate alleged al Qaeda and Taliban members captured on the battlefield without filing charges or providing them lawyers. The court ruled that the detainees were entitled to challenge their detention in U.S. courts.
Although Ashcroft has been willing to engage in rhetorical combat throughout his nearly four-year tenure, such an open attack on the judiciary by a sitting attorney general is unusual. The comments came two days after Bush nominated his chief counsel and longtime confidant, Alberto R. Gonzales, to replace Ashcroft, who has said he will remain in the job until a successor is confirmed.
Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has frequently criticized the attorney general, said the remarks were reminiscent of Ashcroft's appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee in December 2001, when he said criticism of administration antiterrorism policies "only aids terrorists."
"The idea that the attorney general would show such disdain for the rulings of the federal courts, or even the Supreme Court, is remarkable," Romero said. "This indicates why we need to fundamentally rethink Mr. Ashcroft's policies and why the Senate needs to ask tough questions of Mr. Gonzales."
Ashcroft's speech focused primarily on the argument that the Constitution and its authors intended for the president to exercise broad authority in implementing federal laws and policies, including a "primary role in the making of all treaties and other international agreements for the United States." Ashcroft said the president's interpretations of those agreements "are owed deference by the courts."
Gonzales, 49, is also known as a strong proponent of executive branch authority. He is expected to be confirmed by the Senate, but not before Democrats on the Judiciary Committee question him on his role in administration policy on detentions, torture and other terrorism-related issues.
--------
Gov't Order for Air Data Draws Protests
November 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Passenger-Screening.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Even though the move was expected, civil libertarians are protesting a directive by the government ordering airlines to turn over personal information on their customers that can include credit card numbers and addresses and even indicate a traveler's religion.
Under the system, called ``Secure Flight,'' the Transportation Security Administration will screen for possible terrorists by comparing passenger data with names on two government lists. The ``no-fly'' list comprises known or suspected terrorists, while a ``watch'' list names people who should face tighter scrutiny before boarding planes.
The TSA order issued Friday gives 72 airlines until Nov. 23 to turn over computerized data for passengers who traveled on domestic flights during June.
The data -- known as passenger name records, or PNR -- can include credit card numbers, travel itineraries, addresses, telephone numbers and meal requests. The latter can indicate a passenger's religion or ethnicity.
Barry Steinhardt, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, said a major problem is the lists include the names of many people who are not security risks.
Among those subjected to extra scrutiny in recent months was Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass. The singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, now Yusuf Islam, is trying to get off the no-fly list after he was removed from a London-to-Washington flight because the list said he had links to terrorists.
The lists are ``a hodgepodge of information, accurate and inaccurate,'' Steinhardt said. ``They're the basement of the program, and the floor is rotten.''
The government has sought to improve its process for checking passengers since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers exposed holes. The government's first attempt was scuttled because of fears the government would have access to too much personal information.
The TSA says Secure Flight differs from the previous plan because it does not compare personal data with commercial databases. The agency said, however, it will test the passenger information ``on a very limited basis'' against commercial data.
Under the current system, the government shares parts of the watchlists with airlines, which are responsible for making sure suspected terrorists don't get on planes. But the airlines don't have access to everyone who's considered a threat to aviation because some of the names of known or suspected terrorists are classified.
People within the commercial aviation industry say there are more than 100,000 names on the lists.
Under Secure Flight, the government would take responsibility for checking passengers. That was among recommendations of the commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks.
An airline industry representative said the carriers support the government's goals but remain wary of privacy concerns.
``U.S. airlines have long-standing concerns that center on privacy and operational issues,'' said James May, president of the Air Transport Association, which represents major airlines. ``We hope many of the issues will be successfully addressed during the test phase of Secure Flight.''
About 500 people formally commented on the Secure Flight plan this fall. Almost all opposed it, saying it would allow the government to monitor where people go and deprive them of the right to travel without telling them why.
In issuing the order, the TSA didn't resolve another key concern for privacy advocates: redress. There still is no formal way for people mistakenly identified as terrorists, or who have the same name as a suspected terrorist, to get off the lists.
``They've done absolutely nothing to tell us what they really intend on doing,'' said Bill Scannell, a privacy advocate who manages the www.unsecureflight.com Web site. ``Their attitude seems to be, `Trust us.'''
The TSA said it would set up a passenger advocate's office with clear policies and procedures.
On the Net:
Transportation Security Administration: http://www.tsa.gov
-------- police
Hispanic gang plots to ambush Maryland cops
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Matthew Cella
November 13, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/metro/20041112-095753-8573r.htm
Police officials in Prince George's and Montgomery counties are warning officers that a Salvadoran street gang is plotting to ambush and kill them when they respond to service calls.
The warnings have been issued based on intelligence gathered from the Langley Park area, a known base for members of the MS-13 gang, officials said. The area straddles the two counties.
Lt. Steven Yuen, a Prince George's County police spokesman, said the department would not discuss how the intelligence was gathered or the threats in detail, but he acknowledged that officials are aware of them.
"The Prince George's County Police Department receives information about crime all the time," he said. "Any information that could have an impact on our officers is disseminated to all personnel. Our officers take all information into account so they may act in the safest and most professional manner."
The department has instructed officers to ask for backup if they have suspicions about a call to which they are dispatched.
MS-13, which is among the largest and the most violent street gangs, has members in Maryland and the District, but is concentrated in Northern Virginia. In recent years, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Attorney General Jerry W. Kilgore and Rep. Frank R. Wolf have each created regional or statewide task forces to combat the growing problem of gang violence.
Authorities said gang activity has contributed to a rise in violent crime in Hispanic communities, but gang members also are branching out into drug trafficking, car-theft rings and prostitution.
In July 2002, The Washington Times reported that MS-13 had dispatched about 20 gang members from California to Fairfax County to kill a county police officer at random.
There were two confirmed cases in which MS-13 members tried to lure officers behind buildings in the Culmore area of Fairfax County to ambush them, but no officers were killed.
Officer Derek Baliles, a spokesman for the Montgomery County Police Department, said Prince George's County police are taking the lead on investigating the threats.
"We are aware of the threats and we are asking our officers to take the necessary precautions," he said.
WJLA-TV (Channel 7) reported the police warnings Thursday night.
According to a report issued in September by a gang task force set up to study the problem in Prince George's and Montgomery counties, about 3,600 gang members are believed to be in the metropolitan area.
The Joint County Gang Prevention Task Force report said Montgomery officials estimate there are 20 to 22 gangs operating in the county, with 540 to 560 active members. Gangs in Montgomery County are concentrated in Takoma Park, Wheaton, Rockville and Gaithersburg.
Prince George's officials estimate that more than 50 gangs or "crews" operate in the county. The report said most gang-related incidents were confined to a 1.4-square-mile area in Langley Park, which has the densest population of Hispanic residents in Prince George's.
Two teenage boys with ties to MS-13 were arrested last month and charged in shootings that left one teenage girl dead and another injured in an Adelphi cemetery.
Jeffrey Rene Villatoro, 16, of no fixed address, was charged with first-degree murder in the Oct. 25 incident at the George Washington Cemetery. Jesus Canales, 19, of no fixed address, was charged with attempted murder, police said.
Prince George's police said both have ties to the MS-13 gang in Langley Park.
MS-13, which stands for Mara Salvatrucha, originated in the late 1980s, when refugees with La Mara, a street gang in El Salvador, joined forces with Salvadoran guerrillas, known as "salvatruchas."
The number 13 represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, which stands for Mexico. The gang is also active in Central America, the United States and Canada.
-------- POLITICS
-------- us politics
Bush vows Mideast peace effort
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
By Bill Sammon
November 13, 2004
http://www.washtimes.com/national/20041112-113810-3717r.htm
President Bush yesterday said he will spend his second term trying to achieve peace in the Middle East now that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, whom Mr. Bush had viewed as an obstacle to peace, is dead.
"We've got a great chance to establish a Palestinian state, and I intend to use the next four years to spend the capital of the United States on such a state," Mr. Bush said during a joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
The president said he was receptive to Mr. Blair's proposal for a Middle East peace conference next year, although he cautioned that he would need assurances that such a conference would bear fruit. Mr. Bush announced that he planned to travel to Europe soon after his inauguration in January, although not for the purpose of attending such a conference.
Both leaders denied Mr. Bush's receptiveness to a Blair-sponsored peace conference, perhaps in London, amounted to "payback" for Britain's support for the United States in liberating Iraq.
Asked by a British reporter whether he considered Mr. Blair his "poodle," the president testily defended the prime minister as a "rock solid" leader who is "plenty capable of making up his own mind."
"He's a strong, capable man," Mr. Bush said in the East Room of the White House. "He's a big thinker, he's got a clear vision, and when times get tough, he doesn't wilt."
Mr. Blair initially tried to brush off the "poodle" question by making a joke.
"Don't answer 'yes' to that question," he told the president. "If you do, I would be - that would be difficult."
Turning serious, Mr. Blair disputed the notion he is seeking "payback" from Mr. Bush.
"We're not fighting the war against terrorism because we are an ally of the United States," he said. "We are an ally of the United States because we believe in fighting this war against terrorism."
Neither leader mentioned Mr. Arafat by name, although both expressed their condolences to his followers.
"Our sympathies are with the Palestinian people as they begin a period of mourning," Mr. Bush said. "Yet the months ahead offer a new opportunity to make progress toward a lasting peace."
The president, who has often been accused of disengaging from the Middle East peace process, made clear he plans to vigorously engage in the process now that Mr. Arafat is gone. As a first step, he pledged American help in facilitating Palestinian elections for a new president.
"The Palestinians may decide to elect a real strong personality," Mr. Bush said. "But we'll hold their feet to the fire to make sure that democracy prevails."
A senior administration official later explained what Mr. Bush meant when he pledged to hold the Palestinians accountable.
"Reform means that some people who have had power are going to lose some of it," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "Some people who have made a lot of money are going to find their opportunities to make money corruptly have disappeared.
"Some people who have had guns are going to have to turn in their guns," the official added. "It's going to be hard for the Palestinians."
After the elections, Mr. Bush said the United States would pour even more assistance into the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
"We'll mobilize the international community to help revive the Palestinian economy, to build up Palestinian security institutions to fight terror, to help the Palestinian government fight corruption, and to reform the Palestinian political system and build democratic institutions," he said.
A second senior administration official said Mr. Bush would refrainš from committing to a peace conference or naming a special envoy to the Middle East until Palestinian reforms were well under way.
"For right now, we don't need to think about a conference and an envoy we need to get this work done," the official said. "There may come a time when the president decides a conference would be useful now, an envoy would be useful now. Clearly, he hasn't made that judgment today."
Yet Mr. Bush did not want to send his ally home without at least a glimmer of hope that he would eventually attend a meeting.
"I'm all for conferences, just so long as the conferences produce something," he said. "We had a long discussion about whether or not a conference could produce a viable strategy."
He added: "If that conference will do that, you bet I'm a big supporter."
At the same time, Mr. Bush acknowledged his window of opportunity for effecting change will not remain open forever.
"I hate to put artificial time frames on things," he said. "Unfortunately, I've got one on my existence as president. It's not artificial; it's actually real.
"I'd like to see it done in four years," he added. "I think it is possible."
Ultimately, Mr. Bush emphasized that peace can be achieved only by the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, even with the United States acting as a broker.
"It is impossible to think that the president of the United States, or the prime minister of Great Britain, can impose our vision," he said. "It's unrealistic to say: 'Well, Bush wants it done, or Blair wants it done - therefore, it will happen.' "
Mr. Blair also offered a spirited defense of the president's doctrine of "pre-emption," which calls for removing threats like Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein before they can harm the United States and other Western countries.
"Now, that doesn't mean to say we try and interfere with every state around the world," he said. "But it does mean that there's been a shift, and I think a shift quite dramatically - since 9/11."
----
Analysis: Bush Facing Domestic Challenges
November 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Now-the-Hard-Part.html
WASHINGTON (AP) -- From his domestic policy platter, President Bush chose to serve dessert before the main course. Having now won a second term, he may find it increasingly difficult to deliver on the meatier stuff, even with the political capital he is claiming and larger GOP majorities in the House and Senate.
Bush accomplished the things that were palatable and relatively easy during his first term, and which required little sacrifice for Americans, at least on the home front: hefty tax cuts to spur a stumbling economy, education legislation that promised to leave no child behind, adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare.
Thornier issues were put off: making those tax cuts permanent and ``fundamental reform'' of the tax laws, overhauling Social Security to allow private investment accounts, easing immigration restrictions, cutting the deficit in half within five years.
Given that the federal budget was $413 billion in the red last year, Bush lacks much of the traditional capital available to spend on his priorities.
``Making the tax cuts permanent would drain about a trillion dollars of revenue, at about the same time you would need an extra trillion or more for the Social Security plan,'' said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan group advocating fiscal responsibility.
``And the plan to cut the deficit in half assumes that we don't spend any more on Iraq or Afghanistan, which is not a reasonable assumption,'' Bixby said.
Bush may discover that it isn't just outnumbered Democrats that will give him a headache.
Unless the economy takes off and conditions improve markedly in Iraq, the president may find increased restiveness among the GOP, and this only will intensify as the 2006 midterm congressional elections approach.
Republicans united to resist the candidacy of Democrat John Kerry for president. Now that the election is over, GOP majority-party strains are beginning to show even before Bush's second term begins.
Conservatives who are deficit hawks are unhappy with Bush's spending plans and his failure thus far to use his veto. Social conservatives want him to do more to advance their agenda and some are peeved about his push to liberalize immigration.
On foreign policy, extricating the United States from Iraq poses a far more daunting challenge than did the march to Baghdad. Some top Republicans, including Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana, have expressed frustration at the cost and chaos of postwar Iraq.
Right after his victory, Bush claimed ``the will of the people at my back.'' While there is no doubt that Democrats are in a state of disarray, there are practical limits to what the president can deliver, despite his optimism.
``He probably has a better chance of pushing his Social Security program than he does at tax reform,'' said Henry J. Aaron, an economics analyst at the Brookings Institution. ``I think you can move the pea around under the shell a little more readily on Social Security.''
Aaron said overhauling the tax laws is ``in essence tax redistribution. It involves taking goodies away that people now enjoy.''
Bush wants fundamental changes of ``our complicated and outdated tax code'' and says they should be ``revenue neutral.'' He has proposed a bipartisan commission to come up with recommendations, but that is about as far as he has gone.
Many conservatives would like Bush to move toward a simplified flat tax or a tax on consumption, such as a national sales tax.
There is a widespread clamor for him to ask Congress to modify the alternative minimum tax. Designed to prevent high-income people from taking too many deductions, the tax was never indexed for inflation, so it is starting to hit many middle-class families.
White House officials give little guidance or details.
``It's too premature to speculate, when an advisory panel hasn't even been appointed,'' White House spokesman Scott McClellan said. ``The president said this is going to be a top priority for him.'' On Social Security, Bush also has not said much beyond repeating his 2000 mantra that younger workers should be allowed to invest a small portion of their Social Security funds in personal retirement accounts.
Veterans of the legislative process expect it to take many months, perhaps all of Bush's second term, to get to final votes on his Social Security and tax overhaul plans.
``The schedule gets really short once you start taking out the stuff Congress has to do. A lot is going to be left on the cutting room floor,'' said conservative economist Bruce Bartlett, director of the National Center for Policy Analysis.
EDITOR'S NOTE -- Tom Raum has covered Washington for The Associated Press since 1973, including five presidencies.
--------
For the First Time Since Vietnam, the Army Prints a Guide to Fighting Insurgents
November 13, 2004
By DOUGLAS JEHL and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/politics/13army.html?pagewanted=all&position=
WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 - For the first time in decades, the Army has issued a field guide to counterinsurgency warfare, an acknowledgment that the kind of fighting under way in Iraq may become more common in the years ahead.
The Army field manual on counterinsurgency operations is the first since the early Vietnam era, and the first ever intended for the kind of regular Army units now embroiled in battles in Iraq, as opposed to the Special Operations forces who have taken the lead in previous counterinsurgencies.
Under orders issued in February, the manual was prepared on an accelerated basis by the Combined Arms Center in Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and was distributed to all officers, in Iraq and elsewhere, beginning last month. An introduction says the "aftermath of instability'' in Iraq that followed the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime underscored the need for an updated Army guide to counterinsurgency warfare.
Until now, formal American military doctrine for fighting insurgencies has been so limited that many Marines were deployed to Iraq with copies of the Marine Corps' "Small Wars Manual,'' issued in 1940. The most recent Army guides on the subject, written principally for Special Operations forces, were prepared in 1963 and 1965, in the early stages of the Vietnam War. Like the Army, the Marine Corps is also updating its manual.
The new Army guide contains instructions on such matters as searching a family car and setting up a hasty checkpoint. Other passages address the role played by "transnational insurgents,'' like the foreign fighters in Iraq, and emphasize the role of intelligence, rather than Vietnam-era search and destroy missions, in finding insurgents.
The guide also includes a stark warning about the dangers of prolonged counterinsurgency operations, saying that the longer American forces take the lead in such efforts, the greater the resentment they breed among the host-country population.
"A long-term U.S. combat role may undermine the legitimacy of the H.N. government and risks converting the conflict into a U.S.-only war," the manual says, using an abbreviation for host nation. "That combat role can also further alienate cultures that are hostile to the U.S."
In some ways, military officials said, the guide just reflects tactics, techniques and procedures that troops in Iraq and Afghanistan already use, such as armoring vehicles against improvised explosives.
But for a hierarchical organization like the Army, the distribution of the guide is a sign of the importance being attached to the issue.
Army officers who have recently returned from yearlong duty in Iraq applauded the doctrine, but said its methods were nothing new to field commanders, who have been employing and refining such tactics for months. The guide's distribution in October came nearly 18 months after the Iraq insurgency began in May 2003, following President Bush's declaration of an end to major combat operations. Army officers have acknowledged that the Army was ill-prepared to contend with the new environment.
"The important point here is that the Army has again, a bit late, recognized the importance of counterinsurgency, and is working to improve its capability to fight and win low-intensity conflicts," said an Army officer who recently returned from Iraq and demanded anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the issue.
The document is unclassified, but the Army has limited its distribution to Defense Department personnel, "to maintain operations security," the document says. A copy of the document, dated October 2004, was posted Thursday on a Web site run by the Federation of American Scientists.
Officially, the document is a "field manual interim,'' a new designation that allows the Army to accelerate its normal schedule for preparing doctrine. The guide's principal author, Lt. Col. Jan Horvath of the Army, said in a telephone interview that it was completed in just five months; the Army usually insists on developing new doctrine over a period of three years.
"The stunning victory over Saddam Hussein's army in 2003 validated U.S. conventional force T.T.P.," the document says, using an abbreviation for tactics, techniques and procedures. "But the ensuing aftermath of instability has caused review of lessons from the Army's historical experience and those of the other services and multinational partners."
According to the field manual, known as F.M.I. 3-07.22, the impetus for its creation "came from the Iraq insurgency and the realization that engagements in the Global War on Terrorism (G.W.O.T.) would likely use counterinsurgency T.T.P.'s." It says its purpose is to review "what we know about counterinsurgency" and to explain "the fundamentals of military operations in counterinsurgency environment."
Even before the document was published, military officers said that the Army's main training centers at Fort Polk, La., and Fort Irwin, Calif., had begun to consider lessons and comments from soldiers engaged in the Iraq counterinsurgency.
One purpose for the manual, Colonel Horvath said, was to update archaic language and concepts. The "Small Wars Manual," which many Marines carried to Iraq, includes sections on the "management of animals'' like mules, and assertions like a warning that mixed-race societies are "always difficult to govern, if not ungovernable, owing to the absence of a fixed character.''
The Army did issue a manual in 1990, F.M. 3-20, on the subject of military operations in low-intensity conflict, and that document included a section on counterinsurgency. But Colonel Horvath said that his commanders, including Lt. Gen. William Wallace, a top Army commander during the invasion of Iraq who now heads the Combined Arms Center, had found it to be inadequate.
Senior Army officials said that events on the ground in Iraq and in Afghanistan made it clear months ago that the service had to revamp its doctrine for fighting insurgents.
"We needed to update the counterinsurgency doctrine," General Wallace said in an interview in late summer, as the document's authors were putting on the finishing touches. "That hadn't been looked at since the post-Vietnam era."
General Wallace, who commanded the Army's V Corps during the Iraqi war, said that Army authors worked closely with the Marine Corps and with the British military, which has extensive counterinsurgency experience in places like Northern Ireland. But General Wallace cautioned that successful counterinsurgencies required calibrating the right degree of force with economic development and political institutions.
"We've got to strike the right balance," General Wallace said. "Security has to be there for the economy and government to work. But having an economy and government is essential for security."
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting for this article.
-------- OTHER
-------- health
Reports Point to Proof of Global Warming
November 13, 2004
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/science/AP-Warming-Trends.html?pagewanted=all&position=
Politicians in the nation's capital have been reluctant to set limits on the carbon dioxide pollution that is expected to warm the planet by 4 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit during the next century, citing uncertainty about the severity of the threat. But that uncertainty may have shrunk somewhat with the release last week of two scientific reports suggesting that global warming is not just a hypothetical possibility, but a real phenomenon that has already started transforming especially sensitive parts of the globe.
Overall, the reports say, Earth's climate has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit since 1900. In the Arctic, where a number of processes amplify the warming effects of carbon dioxide, most regions have experienced a temperature rise of 4 to 7 degrees in the last 50 years.
That warmth has reduced the amount of snow that falls every winter, melted away mountain glaciers and shrunk the Arctic Ocean's summer sea ice cover to its smallest extent in millennia, according to satellite measurements. Swaths of Alaskan permafrost are thawing into soggy bogs, and trees are moving northward at the expense of the tundra that rings the Arctic Ocean.
These changes seriously threaten animals such as polar bears, which live and hunt on the sea ice. The bears have already suffered a 15 percent decrease in their number of offspring and a similar decline in weight over the past 25 years. If the Arctic sea ice disappears altogether during the summer months, as some researchers expect it will by the end of the century, polar bears have little chance of survival.
Things are less serious in the lower 48, where the effects of climate change have been more subtle. In much of the United States, spring arrives about two weeks earlier than it did 50 years ago. Tropical bird species have appeared in Florida and along the Gulf Coast. Species such as Edith's checkerspot, a butterfly native to western North America, have started dying out at the southern reaches of their ranges.
``Responses to climate change are being seen across the U.S.A,'' said Camille Parmesan, a biologist at the University of Texas in Austin. She is the co-author, with Hector Galbraith of the University of Colorado in Boulder, of ``Observed Impacts of Global Climate Change in the U.S.'' The report was released Tuesday by the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, a non-partisan but not disinterested research organization dedicated to providing sound scientific information about global warming.
Parmesan and Galbraith acknowledge that nothing in the report would strike the average person as particularly alarming. They also allow that some of the past century's warming might have happened even if humans hadn't been pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But they argue that the changes they describe should be taken as a ``very clear signal'' that climate change will have significant effects in coming decades.
``The canaries in the coalmine are squawking, and we should absolutely take that seriously,'' Galbraith said.
The Bush administration has argued that not enough is known about climate change to justify major efforts at forestalling or preventing future warming.
The Arctic report, released Monday, was commissioned by the Arctic Council, an international commission of eight countries, including the United States, and six indigenous groups. It was written by a team of 300 scientists.
``The report will be a valuable contribution to the literature on potential regional impacts of climate change, and the United States government will take its findings into account as it continues to review the science,'' State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said in a statement released Tuesday.
The United States faces a potential showdown with other members of the Arctic Council on Nov. 24, when representatives of the organization's members are scheduled to meet in Iceland to consider climate change policy recommendations.
The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide has risen from 280 parts per million in 1800 to 380 parts per million today due to the combustion of fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide causes warming because it heats up more when exposed to sunlight compared to other atmospheric gases.
Scientists have always expected the Arctic to respond earlier and more intensely than other regions to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, thanks to several phenomena that make the far north especially sensitive to climate perturbations. When warmer temperatures melt snow, for example, the bare ground that is exposed absorbs more heat than the white surface did, causing yet more warming. A similar thing happens when sea ice melts, exposing open water.
In the past three Septembers the Arctic sea ice has melted back 12 percent to 15 percent beyond its normal minimum extent.
``It almost suggests that maybe we're about to reach a threshold beyond which the sea ice may not be able to recover,'' said Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
Ice in the interior of the Arctic pack normally remains frozen from year to year, growing thicker with each season. But the recent increase in melting has eaten into much of that multi-year ice. So while the Arctic Ocean still freezes over each winter, more of the solid cover now consists of thin single-year ice that melts every spring.
The Arctic is also particularly sensitive to warming because its plants and soil hold less water than more temperate environments. That means more energy reaching the ground is dedicated to heating the surface instead of evaporating water.
The atmosphere is thinner in the Arctic than it is farther south, which also intensifies warming. And while temperate zones shed some of their extra heat by shipping it north in ocean currents and meteorological fronts, the Arctic is the end of the line in that respect.
A small minority of scientists remains unconvinced that increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide can be held responsible for the recent warming, arguing that natural variability explains most if not all of the trend.
``It's very complicated and I believe people who claim they understand ... are just overestimating drastically their ability to do science,'' said Petr Chylek of the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Scientists aren't the only ones who have noticed the Arctic warming trend. Inuit hunters in Canada and Saami reindeer herders in Finland have detected shifts in the migratory behavior of animals. In some cases, people whose elders taught them decades ago how to forecast storms from wind patterns and cloud formations have lost their predictive abilities to new weather patterns.
``One of the unique things about Arctic communities is how much they're tied to the land, and that's why this is such a big deal for them,'' said Harvard University geographer Shari Fox Gearheard.
Farther south, where the changes have been far less extreme and most people live far removed from the subtleties of their climate, a warmer world remains a hypothetical realm of scientists and environmentalists. But the latest reports suggest that in some of the world's more populated places, astute observers may soon begin to noticing that the climate is changing.
--------
WHO Meeting Warns of Flu Pandemic
Experts Say Countries Have Not Done Enough to Prevent the Spread of Virus
By David Brown
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A04
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46653-2004Nov12.html
An influenza pandemic, when it arrives, will be an immediate threat to the health of nearly everyone on Earth, but very little is being done to prevent its potential devastation, say experts who met this week at the World Health Organization's headquarters in Switzerland.
A vaccine is unlikely to prevent the global spread of a pandemic strain of flu virus, but it could save millions of lives. To do so, the world must be ready to make, test, pay for, distribute and probably share what will be a scarce supply, the experts concluded.
"We have a unique window of opportunity now to get our homework done to ensure that, when it matters most, vaccine production can happen immediately," said Klaus Stohr, the leader of WHO's influenza activities, who chaired the two-day, closed-door meeting that ended yesterday. "That's our chance, and we don't want to miss that chance."
In a telephone news conference, Arlene King, an official in Canada's public health agency, said a pandemic, or global epidemic, will be "a national health/security issue. It will be the largest public health infectious-disease emergency we ever face in most countries, and certainly globally."
Avian influenza -- "bird flu" -- is the latest strain of concern. The A/H5N1 virus, which has spread widely among chickens and ducks, has infected 44 people in Thailand and Vietnam this year, killing 32. Should it adapt fully to humans and be capable of easy person-to-person transmission, it would probably spread worldwide in three to six months. "We have in Asia an H5N1 virus which is ready to cause a pandemic," Stohr said.
If the three flu pandemics in the 20th century are models, one-fifth to one-third of the world population might be infected in the next one. Even if only 1 percent were to die, as some experts predict, it would cause huge social and economic disruption. The "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 killed at least 50 million people.
The meeting, attended by about 50 people from national health ministries, drug regulatory agencies, and vaccine companies, was held to lay out the obstacles to developing a pandemic vaccine and begin the work of overcoming them.
WHO has no authority to compel countries or companies to act. There was consensus that not nearly enough money is being spent on planning for a pandemic -- and that governments must take the lead.
"Market forces have not brought companies into pandemic vaccine development. That's something that has been clearly recognized," Stohr said.
At the moment, only the United States has ordered up production of vaccine against bird flu -- a move that even on a small scale constitutes an expensive gamble. The Department of Health and Human Services has contracted with two companies to make about 2 million doses of vaccine against the currently circulating H5N1 strain, but they might not be usable when a pandemic hits. Tests of its safety and effectiveness in people will be conducted by April.
The obstacles to making an adequate supply of vaccine are immense. They span the spheres of science, technology, law, politics and ethics.
Scientists will need both widespread surveillance and rapid genetic analysis of new strains if they have a chance of catching a pandemic early enough to produce a useful vaccine. Scientists also need to know whether much smaller doses than usual might still be protective, which would stretch a limited supply of vaccine.
Vaccine companies will need to make "speculative" pandemic vaccines in small quantities while not jeopardizing their annual production of conventional flu shots, the experts said. They will also need access to techniques -- some covered by patents -- that will let them rapidly create vaccine seed through a process called "reverse genetics."
Government vaccine-licensing agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration, will need the ability to rapidly evaluate flu vaccines made elsewhere -- or agree to let them in automatically once they are approved elsewhere. Countries also must decide whether they are willing to share vaccine, and in particular send their supply to the front line of a foreign outbreak in hopes of slowing the virus's spread.
At home, governments will need to decide who will get flu shots when there are too few to go around -- and when the stakes are much higher than they are this season, when the United States is facing a similar problem.
Asked who would need to be vaccinated, Stohr answered: "Practically everybody."
A pandemic vaccine would need to protect against only one strain of flu virus -- the newly emerged one -- rather than three strains, as is the case with the annual flu shot. However, because nobody on Earth would have underlying immunity to the new strain, people would need to get two shots to be protected.
Only about a dozen companies in the world make flu vaccine. Aventis Pasteur, which has its headquarters in France, makes about half the world's production, which last year totaled 292 million doses. It will probably be less this year, as the second-largest producer, the American biotech company Chiron, lost its license to sell 48 million doses because of manufacturing problems at its plant outside Liverpool, England.
The industry's ability to make vaccine against a pandemic strain is linked to its ability to make conventional flu vaccine. Plants that make other vaccines -- such as for measles or hepatitis -- cannot be converted to make one for influenza. For that reason, many experts believe it is important that more people take yearly flu shots -- and thereby encourage companies to add production capacity.
Making seed strains and test batches of vaccine for emerging flu viruses, however, is financially risky because the pandemic strain that emerges may be substantially different from any in development.
For example, the bird flu strain being used in the experimental U.S. vaccine is different enough from H5N1 strains that killed people in Hong Kong in 1997 and 2003 that virus seed from those earlier outbreaks could not be used. It took months to make a new one that reflected the continuing evolution of the virus.
Such ongoing preparation is "an investment without any return, which costs millions of dollars or euros, which compete with other priorities in the industry," said Luc Hessel, an Aventis Pasteur executive who attended the Geneva meeting and spoke to reporters after it.
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FDA Bars Critic From Meeting
Agency Cites 'Intellectual Conflict' in Removing Safety Expert
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 13, 2004; Page A05
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46656-2004Nov12?language=printer
A prominent drug safety expert has been removed from a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel meeting on Vioxx and other arthritis drugs because of comments he made this week suggesting that the entire class of medications may be unsafe.
Curt D. Furberg, a member of the FDA's drug safety advisory committee, was told Thursday that an invitation to participate in the panel's key February meeting had to be rescinded because of an "intellectual conflict of interest."
Furberg, an acknowledged expert on assessing the risks of drug side effects, had commented earlier this week on an analysis he had just completed on possible cardiovascular risks from the arthritis drug Bextra. The drug is a COX-2 inhibitor such as Vioxx, which Merck & Co. took off the market in September because of a study showing that it increased the risk of heart attacks and strokes.
Furberg said yesterday he was concerned that "higher-ups" in the FDA wanted to silence him.
"I think they're trying to control criticism at the committee meeting," he said. "The fact that I've commented on the issue should be irrelevant. I've done research and some analysis here, and think I'm the most qualified to comment on the data, but now they're going to take me away. It doesn't make much sense."
Sandra Kweder, deputy director of the FDA Office of New Drugs, said it was not unusual for advisory panel members to be kept from participating in a meeting if they have clear financial interests or intellectual positions that could keep them from being objective.
Kweder said Furberg had said publicly this week that he thought Bextra, made by Pfizer Inc., was as bad as Vioxx or worse when it comes to cardiovascular risk. She said that made him unsuited for the advisory committee that would be weighing that question.
"For someone to be recused from a meeting because their words or their research show that their mind is made up, it happens," she said.
But she also said that "these are tough calls" and that the decision might be reconsidered, especially if the committee could not find another person with Furberg's expertise.
FDA spokeswoman Victoria Kao said the advisory committee's consultant staff first flagged Furberg's comments and raised questions about whether he should remain on the committee. Kao said their concerns were forwarded to the FDA's ethics division, which is part of the commissioner's office, for further evaluation.
Officials at Pfizer, who had called the Bextra paper by Furberg and his colleagues "unsubstantiated," said this week they played no role in his removal from the panel.
FDA advisory panels, made up of recognized experts in their fields, meet when the agency wants scientific guidance about controversial, complex or highly technical issues. The panels usually register their views about specific scientific questions by voting at the end of a meeting, and those votes carry considerable weight within the agency.
The February panel is considered an especially important one because it will examine whether the cardiovascular problems found with Vioxx are specific to that drug or a feature of the entire class of COX-2 inhibitors. Celebrex, a COX-2 drug made by Pfizer, is one of the largest-selling drugs in the world.
Furberg said he had been invited onto the COX-2 panel on Oct. 25 and had begun researching information about the drugs to prepare himself. The panel is made up primarily of arthritis specialists, and Furberg said he was brought in as a drug safety expert. News that Furberg's invitation had been rescinded was first reported by the Wall Street Journal.
Peter Pitts, who until recently was in charge of the FDA advisory committees as associate commissioner for external relations, said the decision to remove Furberg from the committee was "unusual but not unprecedented."
He said that advisory panel members are "usually trained not to be public with their opinions about matters in front of their committees," and that a decision to remove someone would be based on how outspoken he had been.
Furberg has been a member of the FDA's Drug Safety and Risk Management Advisory Committee since it was formed in 2001. A professor at Wake Forest University and former chairman of the Department of Public Health Sciences at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, he has been a vocal advocate for more aggressive monitoring of drugs already on the market.
In 1995, he and several colleagues discovered that a class of drugs used to control high blood pressure, called calcium channel blockers, sharply increased the risk of heart failure rather than preventing it, as had been widely accepted. Their work was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association and drew angry protest from the drug industry. But a large, federally funded trial that Furberg chaired confirmed a dramatic increase in heart failures with one prominent calcium channel blocker.
The issue of prescription drug safety, and whether the FDA and drug companies are properly monitoring dangerous side effects of drugs already on the market, has become a politically charged one in recent months.
The Vioxx withdrawal in particular has become a lightning rod for criticism, in part because possibly harmful side effects were first noted soon after Vioxx was approved by the FDA in 1999, and in part because aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising quickly made it a blockbuster drug.
Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a vocal critic of the FDA, plans to hold a hearing Thursday on the Vioxx withdrawal.
-------- ACTIVISTS
"Let Them Drink Sand!"
War Crimes in Fallujah; a Gutsy Campaign Against Lantos
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
November 13 / 14, 2004
Counterpunch
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11132004.html
The United States is bringing "democracy" to Iraq on the same terms that the Russians imposed its federal mandate on Chechnya, a region which has Iraq's future written in its rubble. The advocates of intervention in Iraq, the epigones of Wolfowitz , should take a walk through Grozny, and measure against its ruins the fate of their proclaimed ambition to bring democracy to Fallujah and other cities in Iraq.
In the waning weeks of the US election campaign the antiwar movement here in the US, was largely corralled into the Kerry campaign and strangled by the bizarre contradiction of supporting a candidate whose "peace plank" was continuing war. Will it now turn out that for many Kerry supporters their interest in the US war on Iraq was in fact mostly its utility as a rationale for attacking Bush? Now that the race is over, will they forget the war along with Kerry's disastrous campaign?
If there is anything that should fuel the outrage of the antiwar movement, it is surely the destruction of Fallujah and the war crimes being inflicted by US commanders on its civilian population, who are now being denied the most basic and essential source of life, water.
This is not the first time that US forces have cut water supplies, something explicitly forbidden under Article 14 of the second protocol of the Geneva Conventions, which reads as follows:
"Starvation of civilians as a method of combat is prohibited. It is therefore prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless for that purpose, objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population such as food-stuffs, agricultural areas for the production of food-stuffs, crops, livestock, drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation works."
Back in 1991 the US war planners targeted and destroyed the infrastructure of Baghdad's water supplies, and the sanctions thereafter denied new equipment necessary to repair it. In consequence civilians, particularly babies and young children died in vast numbers.
Here at CounterPunch we are in receipt of a compelling dossier of the denial of water to Iraqi civilians, assembled by Cambridge Solidarity with Iraq (CASI)], whose briefing may also be studied at http://www.casi.org.uk/
Water supplies to Tall Afar, Samarra and Fallujah have been cut off during US attacks in the past two months, affecting up to 750,000 civilians. This appears to form part of a deliberate US policy of denying water to the residents of cities under attack. If so, it has been adopted without a public debate, and without consulting Coalition partners. It is a serious breach of international humanitarian law, and is deepening Iraqi opposition to the United States, other Coalition members, and the Iraqi interim government.
On 19 September 2004, the Washington Post reported that US forces 'had turned off' water supplies to Tall Afar 'for at least three days' . Turkish television reported a statement from the Iraqi Turkoman Front that 'Tall Afar is completely surrounded. Entries and exits are banned. The water shortage is very serious'. Al-Manar television in Lebanon interviewed an aid worker who stated that 'the main problem facing the people of Tall Afar and adjacent areas is shortage of water' Relief workers reported a shortage of clean water . Moreover, the Washington Post reports that the US army failed to offer water to those fleeing Tall Afar, including children and pregnant women .
'Water and electricity [were] cut off' during the assault on Samarra on Friday 1 October 2004, according to Knight Ridder Newspapers and the Independent. The Washington Post explicitly blames 'U.S. forces' for this . Iraqi TV station Al-Sharqiyah reported that technical teams were working to 'restore the power and water supply and repair the sewage networks in Samarra' . Al Jazeera interviewed an aid worker who confirmed that 'the city is experiencing a crisis in which power and water are cut off' , as well as the commander of the Samarra Police, who reported that 'there is no electricity and no water' .
On 16 October the Washington Post reported that: 'Electricity and water were cut off to the city [Fallujah] just as a fresh wave of strikes began Thursday night, an action that U.S. forces also took at the start of assaults on Najaf and Samarra.' . Residents of Fallujah have told the UN's Integrated Regional Information Networks that 'they had no food or clean water and did not have time to store enough to hold out through the impending battle' . The water shortage has been confirmed by other civilians fleeing Fallujah, Fadhil Badrani, a BBC journalist in Fallujah, confirmed on November 8 that 'the water supply has been cut off'.
In light of the shortage of water and other supplies, the Red Cross Has attempted to deliver water to Fallujah. However the US has refused to allow shipments of water into Fallujah until it has taken control of the city.
According to the Cambridge dossier, the information reported above is more widely known in Iraq than in the US and UK, and has had become a significant political issue.
Condemnations of the tactic have been issued by several major Iraqi political groups. On October 1 the Iraqi Islamic Party issued a statement criticizing the US attack on Fallujah which 'cut off water, electricity, and medical supplies', and arguing that such an approach 'will further aggravate and complicate the security situation'. It also called for compensation for the victims .
Three days later Muqtada al-Sadr criticized both the denial of water To Samarra, and the lack of international outrage at it: 'They say that this city is experiencing the worst humanitarian situations, without water and electricity, but no-one speaks about this. If the wronged party were America, wouldn't the whole world come to its rescue and wouldn't it denounce this?'
Silver Linings: Pat Gray's Run Against Lantos
As dazed survivors of the Any But Bush campaign limp from the battlefield CounterPunch has received some encouraging accounts of stirring and unexpectedly strong campaigns. Take for example Pat Gray's gutsy run against Rep Tom Lantos, one of Israel's most fanatical representatives in the US Congress and a big booster of the Patriot Act, also of proposed legislation designed to suppress criticism of Israel on campuses here in the Homeland . We've been hearing from CounterPuncher Anne Silver of Burlingame , south of San Francisco, about Gray's congressional campaign against Lantos in California's 12th district (this includes the southwestern part of San Francisco on down the peninsula to San Carlos). Gray ran as an independent Green, and Anne worked as a volunteer for her campaign because, as she wrote to us, "I thought it was important to try to defeat (or at least expose) Lantos, a warmongering, pro-Patriot Act best friend of Israel not because I am part of the Green party."
With a tiny little budget and some volunteers, Anne reports "Gray got 19,000 votes which represents 9.3% of the total and ten times more than the registered Greens in the district. I understand she did better than any Green in the state. Gray is a retired schoolteacher and painter, raising two grandchildren, and is a strong voice for peace and justice."
We asked Anne for more details.
Gray's campaign manager is Jim Shannon 24, and a Green. He tells me that being manager of the marching band at UC Davis was his main preparation for this job. He says 'We raised and spent $40,000. All from individuals... and in mostly small dollar amounts. Only paid staff position was a part-time media consultant, who gave us the largest amount of earned-media ever garnered by a congressional candidate in CA. Bulk of the money was spent on literature for a ground-centered precinct by precinct campaign. During the last week, a few thousand dollars were spent with a target mailer and a radio buy. All in all, quite an accomplishment for a campaign up against an entrenched incumbent, in the suburbs, who raised over $2 million.' The San Francisco Bay Guardian endorsed Gray in the end, but weakly. Gray herself is from San Francisco, working class, a retired school teacher and union activist, and was a Democrat until NAFTA. She has never run for office before. Her outrage at Lantos for his support of the war compelled her to take him on.
Anne writes that Gray "is raising two grandchildren, and she talks about how much less support there is for families now than when she raised her three sons. I met her at one of the weekly protests in front of Lantos' office that began back before the war even started. I liked standing next to Pat as she always had an apt epithet for detractors and when guys would flip us off, she would flash them a peace sign and holler, 'You're almost there, just one more finger!' At the volunteer party she regaled us with tales of cops showing up at the mall to take her away from her unpermitted tabling, only to ask to register Green themselves after they heard her spiel. Her platform was a strong anti war one: bring the troops home now (and send them to college), stop military aid to Israel, revoke the Patriot Act, universal health care, invest in education, and alternate energy sources. The times that I heard her speak she was strong in her support for Palestine. "Lantos himself showed up only a few times during the campaign. A week before the election he came to a forum for the candidates sponsored by a women's group from San Bruno. He looked like a polished pink rodent and was chillingly serene as he responded to questions we submitted about the untold number of deaths in Iraq, Israel's brutality, and the loss of our civil liberties. He rattled off his legions of support and made some broad points about the difficulty of war. The room was loaded with pro-Israel people who clapped and cheered loudly when Lantos spoke approvingly of Israel's acts of violence (such as the assassination of the elderly Palestinian cleric who was in a wheelchair). It was a nasty night."
Thank you, Anne, whose final words are fragrant to our nostrils: "I don't know what anyone would do without CounterPunch."
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