From the World-Wide Resourses of the Western Australia
Reserch Senter(*)
OIL THE NEWS THAT FITS MY VIEWS #152
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In the Run-Up to World War III, Reliably Reporting the News Relevant
to Extreme Right-Wing Democratic Socialists Everywhere
(validated for RiteThink(tm) by the Office of Our Man in Can-berra).
Our Home Page:
The Undeniable Evidence:
Even More Uneniable Evidence:
US Centcom News Releases:
Iraqi Body Count: [7,968+ as at 13 Jan 2004].
UN Mailing List:
Some Of The News, Some Of The Time:
This Stuff Blogged:
Also Kindly Archived:
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Selecting latest news stories and other data for you...
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What matters is what they can do, not how they're delivered.
-- Brit govt MP, 05 Feb 2004.
45 minutes. While the Tories are calling for Blair's head after he
revealed he didn't know the 45-mins claim referred to battlefield
weapons, govt reps claim the distinction is "petty" [!!].
The issue of the delivery system was not an issue at the time.
-- Brit Def Sec Geoff Hoon, 04 Feb 2004.
Not an issue. Hoon is trying to explain why he let Tony Blair talk
about WMD being ready in 45 mins, when he also says he knew at the time
it referred only to small arms, not WMD. Blair had made the claim in
a speech to prove an "imminent threat", just before a vote on war.
The remit is not one that we think will answer the fundamental question...
-- Brit Lib Dems leader Charles Kennedy, 03 Feb 2004.
Butler doing it. Tony Blair has announced the panel of 5 snr
figures that will lay the blame for the WMD embarrassment on Brit
intel services.
Yes... in many cases it was... something not accounted for is not the
same as saying it exists.
-- Dr Hans Blix, SBS "Dateline", 04 Feb 2004.
Mis-use. Was info mis-used by the Brit and US? Blix says Brit
seemed to try to avoid a war, but the us didn't. It was almost as
though his reports were being used to justify a policy that had
been decided ys before.
... It has no antidote {smiling} or specific treatment.
-- US Senate Maj Leader Frist, 03 Feb 2004.
Ricin attack. The panic level in DC was upped today when the
Whitehouse revealed it was targeted by a ricin letter last y.
Our war is not a war against any religion... our war is a war against
[non-American] terrorists.
-- US A-G Ashcroft, Bali, 04 Feb 2004.
War on terror. No, not-a-war-on-Islam.
It's... ah... {looking to right} basically funded within the
budget.... {looking to right} we're not cutting [anything] to fund that.
-- AUS Def Min Robert Hill, 04 Feb 2004.
Global Hawks. The AUS govt has detailed a $50 bn defence budget.
What today's announcement means... is Australian taxpayers are going to
pay more, for plans announced 3 years ago.
-- AUS Opp'n Defence rep, 04 Feb 2004
Defence bill. The AUS govt announced today a range of projects are
to cost up to 2 times their original estimates.
So this is all about our sons and daughters [...] We must give them
modern equipment, based on the prediction of an uncertain future.
-- Aussie CiC Gen Cosgrove, 04 Feb 2004
Century of war. Cosgrove predicts C21 will be more of the same.
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Wed, 04 Feb 2004.
Ricin scare pushes down USD
Markets focus on ricin scare.
Sydney. The USD has fallen victim to the ricin poison scare in the US.
3 US Senate buildings were closed after the ricin powder was found in a
mail facility.
As a result, a Senate finance committee meeting where Treasury Sec
John Snow was due to testify was postponed.
With no significant economic data released overnight, markets have
focused on the ricin emergency and the possible link to terrorism.
The greenback slumped against the euro in response.
There have also been rumours out of London that the US might give
explicit approval for a softer dollar at the Group of 7 meeting
starting in Florida on Fri night.
As the USD weakened, the AUS currency got as high as 76.75 US c.
But it has since settled back.
About 7.30 am AEST, it was being quoted at 76.48 US c.
That is still up 4/10 of a c on yesterday's local close.
Traders are now waiting to see whether yesterday's board meeting at
the Reserve Bank will result in a change in interest rates today.
On equity markets, share prices on Wall Street have recovered after an
early dip on the ricin scare.
The renewed slide of the dollar and weakness in the semiconductor
sector have also weighed on sentiment.
But the DJIA has managed to close 6 pts lower at 10,505.
High-tech shares on the Nasdaq exchange have also clawed back ground.
The Nasdaq composite index has added 3 pts to 2,066.
The Brit share market has recovered a little territory in the latest session.
London's FT-100 index has gained 9 pts to finish at 4,391.
In AUS yesterday, the market fell back.
There was evidence of profit-taking ahead of this morning's interest
rate announcement.
The All Ords fell 9 pts to 3,278.
The gold price is this morning sitting at $US399.65/oz.
West Texas crude oil is at $US34.20/bbl.
Budget avoids tough steps to deflate bloated deficit
Op/Ed (USA Today). When the Bush Admin released its $2.4 trillion
budget plan for 2005 Mon, it admitted that the ballooning fed deficit
for this y would be even larger than previously feared: a record $521
bn. That means the govt would have to borrow 22 c of every
dollar it spends.
In spite of the flood of red ink, the Admin's plan for tackling the
problem is breathtakingly underwhelming. Though it promises to cut the
deficit in 1/2 in 5 y, the Admin avoids credible proposals for
spending cuts or revenue increases to achieve that goal.
No mystery surrounds how to actually put the budget back on track.
The last 2 presidents, Bill Clinton and George H W Bush, embraced
tough spending curbs and tax increases that eliminated deficits. Those
actions led to the 1st surpluses in more than a generation and
contributed to a decade-long economic boom in the 1990s.
Yet, while identifying a successful formula for shrinking deficits is
easy, implementing it is hard. Today's leaders well recall the price
their predecessors paid for showing fiscal leadership: The Democrats
lost Congress in 1994, and Bush lost re-election in 1992.
Avoiding strategies proven to restore fiscal health doesn't relieve
the pain. Instead, it leaves it for future generations to suffer in
the form of a crushing nat'l debt.
The Admin's plan to reduce the deficit falls short on 3 counts:
Unrealistic cuts. It exempts most of the budget from spending
restraint, including defence, homeland security, interest on the debt
and benefits programs such as Social Security. That leaves just 18% of
the budget -- from agriculture to transportation -- subject to a
virtual spending freeze. But Congress ignored less-severe spending
curbs proposed by the Admin in the past 3 y, and Bush refused to veto
any bloated spending bills.
Underestimated costs. The budget omits several costly items for 2005:
up to $50 bn needed for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and $20 bn
in promised aid to states. Another $8 bn sought for NASA over 5 y
is not nearly enough to finance Bush's plan to send a man to Mars.
Delayed expenses. The budget shows the deficit cut in 1/2 in 2009 by
pushing spending increases and tax cuts beyond that y. For example,
2/3 of a $534 bn Medicare prescription-drug benefit is projected to
kick in after 2009. And the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities,
which advocates more spending on the needy, says 75% of the $2 trillion
in tax cuts Bush wants to make permanent take effect after 2009.
The Admin says the tax cuts are needed to sustain a strong economy --
and the added revenue it produces will curb the deficit.
To slow govt growth, Bush is calling for a new spending-limit law;
program increases that exceed the limit would have to be offset by
cuts elsewhere.
Yet, the Admin's budget avoids that very remedy. While increases
sought for the Pentagon, Homeland Security and the FBI can be
justified by the war on terrorism, the Admin is not offering to pay
for them with offsetting domestic cuts. Nor has it shown a willingness
to cancel or postpone any of its income-tax cuts to pay for the
burgeoning prescription-drug benefit.
The fiscal recipe for what works is well known. But as long as the
Admin remains unwilling to follow it, the hard answers will be left to
future generations.
New auto sales in Canada down 11.5% in worst Jan since 1998
Toronto (CP). New-vehicle sales in Canada fell 11.5% in Jan, from the
same m a y ago, making it the worst start for car dealers since 1998
as Ford led the downturn with a 33% decline.
Last m, 82,728 vehicles were sold in Canada -- down from 93,514 in
Jan 2002, according to statistics compiled by DesRosiers Automotive
Consultants Inc. While perennial market leader General Motors eked out a
small gain over last y, as did Mazda, Toyota, Suzuki and Subaru,
virtually every other automaker saw its sales tumble -- and many
posted double-digit percentage declines.
"Canadians significantly overbought during the last few years," auto
analyst Dennis DesRosiers said in describing the lull in market demand
last m.
DesRosiers added that "the economic environment may not be able to
give the market much of a lift" as vehicle owners hang on to their
current models.
He expects the overall market will fall 3 to 5% this y. Sales in
2003 fell to 1.593 mn vehicles -- down 6.4% from the record 1.7 mn
sold in 2002.
"My main concern is that any hiccup in the economic situation could
result in a free-fall in the market," DesRosiers said. "We're not
predicting that yet, but will be keeping a very close eye on the
situation all year."
DesRosiers also said various factors that raise the cost of vehicle
ownership -- such as insurance, gas, parking and registration fees --
have left Canadians "sitting on the sidelines as far as vehicle sales
are concerned."
Last m, GM Canada had sales of 26,118 vehicles -- a 2.3% rise from
Jan 2002. GM's numbers were more than double those of its closest
competitor, DaimlerChrysler, whose sales tumbled 12% to 12,224.
Ford ranked 3rd at 10,482, down 33.2%.
And while Toyota ranked 4th with 8,416 vehicles sold -- managing a
3.5% lift over last y -- its oft-compared competitor, Honda, saw sales
plummet 27% to 5,754 vehicles.
Ranking sixth, Mazda enjoyed a 30.7% sales increase to 4,463 vehicles,
but Hyundai, in 7th place, saw its sales decrease 20.7% to 3,142 vehicles.
In 8th place was Nissan, which saw its sales decrease 17.7% to 2,747 units.
Among the few other automakers with at least 400 vehicles sold whose
sales increased were Acura (up 1.5%), Lexus (33%), Subaru (0.2%),
Suzuki (47.6%) and Volvo (3.1%).
Other decliners included Audi (down 25.8%), BMW (4.7%), Infiniti
(1.7%), Kia (36.8%), Mercedes-Benz (37%), Mitsubishi (40%) and
Volkswagen (44.2%).
In the US, sales of new cars and trucks in the world's largest auto
market fell more than expected in Jan at the country's 2 largest
automakers.
Market leader GM posted a 1.8% sales decline and rival Ford Motor
Co reported a 9.8% drop. By contrast, Toyota reported a 15.8% boost
in US sales, and DaimlerChrysler posted sales that were 9.4% higher.
GM said Tue that it was disappointed with the results but maintained
its outlook for the y. Ford, the 2nd biggest automaker in the US,
said it remained optimistic a lineup of new cars would change its fortunes.
Analysts had expected that Jan sales results in the US would be
tempered by frigid weather in parts of the country, despite brisk
business at the beginning of the m.
Paul Ballew, GM's executive director for market and industry analysis,
said he was not overly concerned about the Jan dip, calling it the
"least representative" m, coming after the usual y-end acceleration in sales.
FTA reaches critical point
Canberra. Fri is looming as the make or break day for an AUS-US FTA
deal, with talks in Washington slowing almost to a stop. Trade Min
Mark Vaile and his US counterpart Robert Zoellick have spent 6 hrs in
talks, but officials from both sides are unable to say negotiations
have progressed far. It comes as US manufacturers urge the Bush Admin
to wrap up the trade deal, with or without concessions on agriculture.
15 dead in Turkey apartment collapses
Istanbul (AFP). Top state officials condemned the notorious and
widespread lack of respect for Turkey's construction laws yesterday,
after at least 15 people were killed in a housing block collapse.
PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted by Anatolia news agency as saying
"the citizen pays with his life because there is no heavy legal
penalty for violations" of the kind which allegedly brought down an
11-storey building in the central town of Konya late on Mon.
CNN-Turk television channel reported that 2 nearby buildings had been
evacuated for fear that they too might come down while 200 rescue
workers sifted the wreckage in search for up to 100 people believed to
be missing.
Pres Ahmet Necdet Sezer sent a message of condolence to the families
of those who died, saying that "human life is so important, it must
not be sacrificed to irresponsibility and contempt for the rules."
Many commentators noted that the building, reduced to a pile of rubble
5 m high, was completed barely 6 y ago, in 1997.
"The building clearly did not comply with safety regulations," Ramazan
Bayraktar, a firefighter taking part in the rescue effort, told NTV
television. "It's as if there wasn't even any concrete, as though the
building was simply made of earth."
Nesibe Tosun, a woman resident who survived, told Anatolia news agency
it had been "full of cracks".
A 30-yo woman was found alive yesterday, some 16 hr after the building
collapsed, but 2 more corpses were unearthed soon afterwards, taking
the confirmed death toll to 15, CNN-Turk TV reported.
About 2 hr later, 4 people were rescued, alive and well, from an elevator.
Earlier, Konya city governor Ahmet Kayhan told NTV television that
"there are voices coming from the back of the building. There are
obviously people alive. We are trying to reach them."
Kayhan said the building had contained 36 flats and 144 people were
registered as living in it.
But at the time it collapsed, residents would have been celebrating
the Muslim festival of Eid Al Adha and may have had relatives and
friends visiting them.
Early reports suggested an explosion in the building's heating system
had caused the accident but officials could not confirm this.
"None of the people living around the collapsed building confirms an
explosion. That brings to mind the possibility of an engineering
fault," the govt official overseeing the search and rescue effort,
Sami Guclu, told CNN-Turk.
Shortly after the building fell, deputy Prime Min Mehmet Ali Sahin
said: "We should always look into the cause when a building collapses
in circumstances other than a natural disaster."
Although Turkey is frequently hit by earthquakes, few buildings are
built to withstand tremors and builders are rarely punished.
The trial is still going on of Veli Gocer, who was charged with
involvement in the death of 190 people in a building that collapsed
during the massive quake which killed 20,000 people on Aug.
3 people die in new Kashmir violence
Kashmir. Police say new violence has flared in revolt-racked Indian
Kashmir with suspected Islamic militants shooting dead 3 people, incl a
Muslim couple. Police say gunmen broke into the house of Abdul
Khaliq Bhat and killed him and his wife, Raja Begum, in the village of
Chewdara in the C Kashmir district of Bugdam. The murders come after
the Indian army killed a suspected member of the region's dominant
rebel group, Hizbul Mujahedin, in the couple's house last Dec.
Kerry wins 5 out of 7
Washington. US Dem presid'l front-runner John Kerry has rolled up big
victories and a pile of delegates in 5 states. And rivals John
Edwards and Wesley Clark have kept their candidacies alive with
singular triumphs in the dramatic cross-counter contest. Edwards has
easily won his native S Carolina and Clark, the former NATO cmdr and
retired General from Arkansas, tasted victory in neighbouring
Oklahoma. An analysis shows Kerry with a lead of more than 20 pts
over his nearest rival.
Kerry wins big; Edwards, Clark stay alive
Washington (Reuters). US Sen John Kerry has taken a huge stride
towards the Democratic presidential nomination with wins in 5
states, but victories to Sen John Edwards and General Wesley Clark
have kept the race alive.
Sen Kerry, the front-runner riding a huge wave of momentum since
back-to-back wins in the 1st 2 contests last m, won in Missouri,
Arizona, Delaware, N Dakota and and New Mexico as 7 states voted on
the biggest day so far in the race to find a challenger to Pres Bush Jr.
But N Carolina Sen Edwards and General Clark scored wins in S Carolina
and Oklahoma respectively to keep the race alive and put a temporary
dent in Sen Kerry's momentum.
Connecticut Sen Joseph Lieberman, the Democratic nominee for
vice-president in 2000, was shut out and quit the race in what he
called a "difficult but realistic decision".
Massachusetts Sen Kerry, who faced questions about whether he could
compete nationwide, says he had shown broad appeal with strong
showings in all 7 states.
"Now we will carry this campaign and the cause of a stronger, fairer,
more prosperous America to every part of America," he said at his
victory rally.
"We will take nothing for granted, we will compete everywhere."
Gen Clark scored a narrow win over Sen Edwards in Oklahoma, with Sen
Kerry 3rd.
Sen Edwards's result in S Carolina, which he labelled a must-win state,
positioned him to become Sen Kerry's prime challenger and boosted his
argument he would provide the strongest opponent to Mr Bush in rural
areas and in the South.
"Tonight we said that the politics of lifting people up beats the
politics of tearing people down," Sen Edwards, who emphasised a
positive message focused on the economy, told roaring supporters in
downtown Columbia, S Carolina.
* Bowing out
Sen Lieberman had been hoping for a win in Delaware, but dropped out
after meeting with staff members and conferring with his family.
"I have decided tonight to end my quest for the presidency of the
United States of America," he said at a rally nr his campaign HQ in
Arlington, Virginia.
Tue's votes offered the 1st nationwide test for the candidates, who
spent almost all of Jan battling in Iowa and New Hampshire, largely
white and rural states that hosted the 1st 2 nominating tests.
South Carolina was the 1st contest in the S and the 1st in a state
with a large black population, while Arizona and New Mexico are the
1st contests in states with large Hispanic populations.
The race moves next to Michigan and Washington on Sat, Maine on Sun
and Virginia and Tennessee next Tue.
Mr Dean, struggling to halt his downward slide after dismal finishes
in Iowa and New Hampshire, has continued his string of poor showings.
Mr Dean, who spent election night in Washington, put a brave face on
the results and looked ahead to Michigan, Washington and to a Feb 17
showdown in Wisconsin.
He promised to push ahead into Mar.
"We are going to have a tough night tonight," Mr Dean told supporters
in Tacoma, Washington, but he vowed to keep "going and going and going".
"We're going to pick up some delegates tonight and this is all about
who gets the most delegates in Boston in Jul and it's going to be
us," he said.
Kerry wins 5 states; Clark wins Oklahoma
Washington (AP). Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry
rolled up big victories and a pile of delegates in 5 states Tue
night, while rivals John Edwards and Wesley Clark kept their candidacies
alive with singular triumphs in a dramatic cross-country contest.
Edwards easily won his native S Carolina and Clark, a retired Army
general from Arkansas, eked out victory in neighbouring Oklahoma.
Howard Dean earned no wins and perhaps no delegates, his candidacy in
peril. Joe Lieberman was shut out, too, and dropped out of the race.
"It's a huge night," Kerry told The Associated Press, even as rivals
denied him a coveted sweep.
Racking up victories in Missouri, Arizona, N Dakota, New Mexico and
Delaware, Kerry suggested that his rivals were regional candidates.
"I compliment John Edwards, but I think you have to run a nat'l
campaign, and I think that's what we've shown tonight," the four-term
Massachusetts senator said. "You can't cherry-pick the presidency."
With Iowa and NH already in his pocket, Kerry boasts a record of 7-2
in primary season contests, the undisputed front-runner who had a
chance to put 2 major rivals away but barely failed.
An AP analysis showed Kerry winning 65 pledged delegates, Edwards 43,
Clark 5 and Al Sharpton one, with 155 yet to be allocated. Kerry's
wins in Missouri and Arizona were the night's biggest prizes, with 129
delegates -- nearly 1/2 of the 269 at stake.
Tue's results pushed Kerry close to 200 delegates out of 2,162 needed
for the nomination, including the super-delegates of lawmakers and
party traditionalists. Dean trailed by nearly 70, Edwards by nearly 100.
Democrats award delegates based on a candidates' showing in
congressional districts, giving Kerry's rivals a chance to grab a few
delegates even in contests they lost.
In nearly every region of the nation, the most diverse group of
Democrats yet to cast votes this primary season said they had a
singular priority: Defeat Pres Bush this fall.
"I don't care who wins" the Democratic primary, said Judy Donovan of
Tucson, Ariz. "I'd get my dog to run. I'm not kidding. I would get
Mickey Mouse in there. Anybody but Bush."
In state after state, exit polls showed Kerry dominated among voters
who want a candidate with experience or who could beat Bush.
Edwards had said he must win S Carolina, and he did by dominating
among voters who said they most value a candidate who cares about
people like them.
"It's very easy to lay out the map to get us to the nomination,"
Edwards told the AP, drawing a line from Michigan on Sat to Virginia
and Tennessee next Tue.
To the roar of his supporters, Edwards declared, "The politics of
lifting people up beats the politics of tearing people down."
As the votes were being counted in Oklahoma, Clark mused about the
future of his candidacy. "This could be over," he told reporters.
Hrs later, he had won Oklahoma and finished 2nd in Arizona and New
Mexico -- enough to fight another day.
Edwards narrowly lost to Clark in Oklahoma, missing a chance to show
his presidential mettle outside the S and emerge as Kerry's chief rival.
Dean saved his money for a last stand in Wisconsin on Feb 17, a
long-shot strategy that some of his own advisers questioned.
"We're going to have a tough night," Dean told supporters as he
promised to keep "going and going and going and going -- just like the
Energiser bunny."
Said Steve Murphy, who ran Rep Dick Gephardt's campaign: "Howard Dean
is done." The list of ex-candidates grows: Florida Sen Bob Graham
dropped out first, then Carol Moseley Braun, Gephardt and Lieberman.
"Today the voters have rendered their verdict and I accept it,"
Lieberman said.
Kerry, who just 6 wk ago was written off as a candidate, reshaped the
race with victories in Iowa and New Hampshire while Dean's candidacy
cratered. "I'll keep working and fighting until I win the nomination,
and then I'll keep working and fighting until I beat George Bush," he
told the AP.
In a speech prepared for delivery to supporters, Kerry said, "George
Bush, who speak of strength, has made America weaker -- weaker
economically, weaker in education and weaker in health care."
Kerry is racking up endorsements as he tries to unite the party behind
his front-running candidacy. To that end, the 1.2 mn-member
American Federation of Teachers, the country's 2nd largest teachers'
union, planned to back Kerry on Wed, a snr union official said on
condition of anonymity.
Even Democrats who didn't vote for Kerry appear fairly comfortable
with him. Large majorities of voters -- ranging from about 70% in
Oklahoma to more than 80% in Delaware -- said they would be somewhat
or very satisfied if Kerry wins the nomination, exit polls showed.
Nearly 1/2 the voters in S Carolina were black and nearly one in 6 in
Arizona were Hispanic, the 1st contests with sizable minority populations
in the primary campaign. In Missouri and Delaware, about 15% of the
voters were black.
Looking beyond Tue, Kerry planned visits to Washington state and
Michigan, where polls show him leading Sat's caucuses. Edwards and
Clark focused on Tennessee and Virginia. All 3 candidates planned to
air ads in the 2 S states.
Kerry plans to buy ad time in Washington, DC, to reach Demo-heavy N
Virginia, aides said. It's an expensive market, and it was unclear
whether Edwards would have the money to match Kerry ad-for-ad as he
did in Tue's states.
Dean, a former Vermont governor, ran out of cash and momentum after
finishing 3rd in Iowa and a distant 2nd in New Hampshire. He ran no TV
ads in the 7 states and intended to stay off the air for a spate of
other contests until Feb 17, when Wisconsin votes.
On a deeply divided staff, some Dean aides were focused on raising
money to cover campaign debts, an emphasis that gave a backseat to
costly political tactics such as television commercials.
Exit polls also showed that nearly 1/2 of voters in 5 states said
they made up their minds within the last wk. One in 5 waited until
Tue to pick a candidate.
Edwards scored well among whites, older people, the less-educated and
voters who called themselves moderate or conservative, according to
exit polls in S Carolina.
Kerry and Clark, both Vietnam veterans, had plenty of company. 7 in 10
Oklahoma voters, and nearly that many in S Carolina, said they had
served in the military or have somebody in their households who did,
according to exit polls conducted for The Associated Press and the
television networks by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky Internat'l.
=== ASKED: ===
How did we get it so wrong?
Credibility of war on terror has been damaged.
[Kenneth Pollack is a former CIA analyst].
With inquiries under way on both sides of the Atlantic, the failure of
western intel over Iraq is coming under intense scrutiny. Yes, the
spies got it wrong but the politicians also moulded the evidence to
fit the case for war.
Op/Ed (Guardian). Let's start with one truth: last Mar, when the US
and its coalition partners invaded Iraq, the American public and much
of the rest of the world believed that after Saddam's regime sank, a
vast flotsam of weapons of mass destruction would bob to the
surface. That, of course, has not been the case. Many people are now
asking very reasonable questions about why they were misled.
Democrats have typically accused the Bush Admin of exaggerating the
threat posed by Iraq in order to justify an unnecessary war.
Republicans have typically claimed that the fault lay with the CIA and
the rest of the US intel community, which they say overestimated the
threat from Iraq. Both sides appear to be at least partly right. The
intel community did overestimate the scope and progress of Iraq's WMD
programmes, although not to the extent that many people believe. The
Admin stretched those estimates to make a case not only for going to
war but for doing so at once, rather than taking the time to build
support for military action.
This issue has some personal relevance for me. I began my career as a
Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA, where I saw an earlier
generation of technical analysts mistakenly conclude that Saddam was
much further away from having a nuclear weapon than the post-Gulf war
inspections revealed. I later moved on to the Nat'l Sec Council, where
the intel community convinced me and the rest of the Clinton Admin
that Saddam had reconstituted his WMD programmes following the
withdrawal of the UN inspectors in 1998, and was only a matter of
ys away from having a nuclear weapon. In 2002 I wrote a book called
Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, in which I argued that
because all our other options had failed, the US would ultimately have
to go to war to remove Saddam before he acquired a functioning nuclear
weapon. Thus it was with more than a little interest that I pondered
the question of why we didn't find in Iraq what we were so certain we would.
The US intel community's belief that Saddam was aggressively pursuing
WMD was 1st advanced at the end of the 90s, at a time when Clinton was
trying to facilitate a peace agreement between Israel and the
Palestinians and was hardly seeking assessments that the threat from
Iraq was growing. In congressional testimony in Mar of 2002 Robert
Einhorn, Clinton's assistant secretary of state for nonproliferation,
summed up the intel community's conclusions at the time: "Today, or at
most within a few ms, Iraq could launch missile attacks with
chemical or biological weapons against its neighbours ... Within 4 or
5 y it could have the capability to threaten most of the Middle E
and parts of Europe with missiles armed with nuclear weapons
containing fissile material produced indigenously -- and to threaten
US territory with such weapons ... If it managed to get its hands on
sufficient quantities of already produced fissile material, these
threats could arrive much sooner."
In Oct of 2002 the Nat'l Intel Council, the highest analytical body in
the US intel community, issued a classified Nat'l Intel Estimate on
Iraq's WMD. A de-classified version was released to the public in Jul
of last y. Its principal conclusions:
* "Iraq has continued its WMD programmes in defiance of UN resolutions
and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as
well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left
unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."
(The classified version of the NIE gave an estimate of 5 to 7 y.)
* "Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical
weapons effort, energised its missile programme, and invested more
heavily in biological weapons; most analysts assess [that] Iraq is
reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme."
* "If Baghdad acquires sufficient weapons-grade fissile material from
abroad, it could make a nuclear weapon within a y ... Without such
material from abroad, Iraq probably would not be able to make a
weapon until the last 1/2 of the decade."
* "Baghdad has begun renewed production of chemical warfare agents,
probably including mustard, sarin, cyclosarin, and VX."
* "All key aspects ... of Iraq's offensive BW [biological warfare]
programme are active and most elements are larger and more advanced
than they were before the Gulf war"
US analysts were not alone in these views. In the late spring of 2002
I participated in a Washington meeting about Iraqi WMD. Those present
included nearly 20 former inspectors from the UN Special Commission
(Unscom), established in 1991 to oversee the elimination of WMD in Iraq.
One of the snr people put a question to the group: did anyone in the
room doubt that Iraq was currently operating a secret centrifuge
plant? No one did.
Other nations' intel services were similarly aligned with US views.
Somewhat remarkably, given how adamantly Germany would oppose the war,
the German Fed Intel Service held the bleakest view of all, arguing
that Iraq might be able to build a nuclear weapon within 3 y.
Israel, Russia, Brit, China, and even France held positions similar to
that of the US; Jacques Chirac told Time magazine last Feb: "There is a
problem -- the probable possession of WMD by an uncontrollable
country, Iraq." No one doubted that Iraq had WMD.
But it appears that Iraq may not have had any WMD. Caveats are in order:
we do not yet have a complete picture of Iraq's WMD programmes, and
initial US efforts to seek out WMD caches were badly lacking. Documents
relating to the programmes are known to have been destroyed. Much of
Iraq is yet to be explored. Now that Saddam is in custody, new info
may be forthcoming.
Nevertheless, the preliminary findings of the Iraq Survey Group will
probably not change dramatically. The then head of the ISG, David Kay,
summarised those findings in testimony to Congress last Oct:
* Iraq had preserved some of its technological nuclear capability from
before the Gulf war. However, no evidence suggested that Saddam had
undertaken any significant steps after 1998 towards reconstituting
the programme to build nuclear weapons or to produce fissile material.
* Little evidence surfaced that Iraq had continued to produce chemical
weapons; only a minimal amount of clandestine research had been done
on them. Nevertheless, Iraqi officials seemed to believe that they
could convert existing civilian pharmaceutical plants to
chemical-weapons production.
* Iraq made determined efforts to retain some BW capabilities. It
maintained an undeclared network of laboratories and other
facilities "suitable for preserving BW expertise ... and continuing R&D."
* Iraq seemed to have been most aggressive in pursuing proscribed
missiles. In Kay's words, "detainees and cooperative sources
indicate that beginning in 2000 Saddam ordered the development of
ballistic missiles with ranges of at least [390 km] and up to [1,000 km]
and that measures to conceal these projects from [UN inspectors] were
initiated in late 2002, ahead of the arrival of inspectors." The Iraqis
were also working on rocket engines in order to produce a longer-range
missile. Most troubling of all, the ISG uncovered evidence that from 1999
to 2002 Iraq had negotiated with N Korea to buy technology for No Dong
missiles, which have a range of 1,300 km.
Overall, these findings suggest that Iraq did retain prohibited WMD
programmes, but that they were not so extensive, advanced, or threatening
as the NIE maintained.
More cautious analysts had argued that the NIE's assessment that Iraq
had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons was unlikely,
because such munitions deteriorate rapidly and can be quickly produced
in bulk, making stockpiles unnecessary. These analysts instead believed
that Iraq had a "just-in-time" capability, but not even this more
conservative scenario was borne out by the ISG. Sources told the group
that Saddam and his son Uday had each, on separate occasions in 2001
and 2002, asked Iraqi officials how long it would take to produce
chemical agents and weapons.
One reportedly told Saddam that it would take 6 m to produce mustard
gas; another told Uday that it would take 2 m to produce mustard gas
and 2 y to produce sarin [a simple nerve agent]. The questions do not
suggest the presence of large stockpiles. The answers do not support a
just-in-time capability.
The belief that Iraq was close to acquiring nuclear weapons led me and
other Admin officials to support the idea of a full-scale invasion,
albeit not right away. The NIE's judgement to the same effect was the
linchpin of the Bush Admin's case for invasion.
What we have found in Iraq since the invasion belies that judgement.
Saddam did retain basic elements for a nuclear-weapons program and the
desire to acquire such weapons at some point, but the programme itself
was dormant.
Saddam had not ordered its resumption. In all probability Iraq was
considerably further from having a nuclear weapon than the 5 to 7 y
estimated in the NIE.
Figuring out why we overestimated Iraq's WMD capabilities involves
figuring out what the Iraqis were thinking and doing throughout the 1990s.
The story starts right after the Gulf war. An Iraqi document that fell
into the inspectors' hands revealed that in Apr 1991 a high-level
Iraqi committee had ordered many of the country's WMD activities to be
hidden from inspectors. According to Unscom's final report, one
facility "was instructed to remove evidence of the true activities at
the facility, evacuate documents to hide sites, make physical
alterations to the site to hide its true purpose [and] develop cover
stories". A great deal of other info substantiates the idea that
Saddam at 1st decided to try to keep a considerable portion of his WMD
programmes intact and hidden.
However, it became increasingly clear how difficult this would be. In
the summer of 1991 inspectors tracked down and destroyed Saddam's calutrons.
Their discoveries may have convinced him that he would have to put his
WMD programmes on hold until after the sanctions were lifted --
something he reportedly thought would happen within ms.
But the inspectors proved more tenacious and the internat'l community
more steadfast than the Iraqis expected. Accordingly, from Jun of
1991 to May of 1992 Iraq unilaterally destroyed parts of its WMD
programmes. This helped Baghdad conceal more-important elements of the
programmes, because the regime could point to the destructions as
evidence of cooperation.
In 1995 matters changed. That Aug, Hussein Kamel, Saddam's son-in-law
and the head of Iraq's WMD programmes, defected to Jordan, prompting a
panicked Baghdad to turn over 100s of 1000s of pages of new documentation
to the UN. According to the former chief UN weapons inspector Rolf
Ekeus, Kamel's statements and the Iraqi documents squared with what
Unscom had been finding: although all actual weapons had been
eliminated, either by the UN or in the earlier destructions, Iraq had
preserved production and R&D programmes. Although the Iraqis tried to
withhold any highly incriminating documents from the UN, they
overlooked several containing crucial info about previously concealed
aspects of the nuclear and biological programmes.
Other secrets were laid bare that same y. A US-UN sting operation
caught the Iraqis trying to smuggle 115 missile gyroscopes through Jordan.
Iraq was forced to admit to the existence of a facility to build
Scud-missile engines, and to destroy a hidden plant for manufacturing
modified Scuds. It was forced to admit to having made much greater
progress on its nuclear programme before the Gulf war. Most important,
it was forced to admit that a very large biological-weapons plant at
al-Hakim, whose existence had been concealed from UN inspectors, had
produced 500,000 litres of biological agents in 1989 and 1990, and
that it was still functional in 1995.
Either late in 1995 or in 1996, Saddam probably recognised that trying
to retain his just-in-time capability had become counterproductive.
The inspectors kept finding pieces of the programmes, and each
discovery pushed the lifting of the sanctions further into the future.
It's important to keep in mind that Saddam's internal position in this
period was very shaky and he probably decided to scale back his WMD
programmes, keeping only the bare minimum needed to rebuild them at
some point. So, having decided to give up so much of his WMD
capability, why didn't Saddam change his behaviour toward the UN
inspectors and demonstrate a spirit of cooperation? Even after 1996
the Iraqis took a confrontational posture toward Unscom. The world
inferred from this defiance that Saddam was still not complying with
the UN resolutions, and the sanctions therefore stayed in place.
The 1st and most obvious answer is that Saddam still had some things
to hide. Undoubtedly he did, but this answer is not entirely satisfying.
Iraq was able to conceal the minimised remnants of its WMD programmes
so well that Unscom found little incriminating evidence in 1997 and
1998. This early success should have given Saddam the confidence to
begin to cooperate more fully.
An alternative explanation, offered by Iraq's former UN ambassador,
Tariq Aziz, is that Saddam was pretending to have WMD to enhance his
prestige among Arab nations. This explanation doesn't ring completely
true either.
If prestige had been more important to him than lifting sanctions, it
would have been more logical to simply retain his WMD capabilities.
Saddam's behaviour may have been driven by completely different
considerations. He has always evinced much greater concern for his
internal position than for his external status. He has made any number
of highly foolish foreign-policy decisions in response to domestic
problems that he feared threatened his grip on power. Ever since the
Iran-Iraq war, WMD had been an important element of Saddam's strength
within Iraq. He used them against the Kurds in the late 1980s and
during revolts after the Gulf war, he sent signals that he might use
them against both the Kurds and the Shi'ites. Openly giving up his WMD
could also have jeopardised his position with crucial supporters.
Furthermore, Saddam may have felt trapped by his initial reckoning that
he could fool the UN inspectors and that the sanctions would be short-lived.
Because of this mistaken calculation he had subjected Iraq to terrible
hardships. Suddenly cooperating with the inspectors would have meant
admitting that his course of action had been a mistake.
In some respects Saddam's fortunes began to rise in 1996. Although the
CIA-backed coup attempt may have signified internal weakness, the fact
that Saddam snuffed it out signified strength. Also, to avenge the
Iraqi army's 1995 defeat at Irbil, Saddam manipulated infighting among
the Kurds to allow his Republican Guards to drive into the city, smash
the Kurd defenders, and arrest several hundred CIA-backed rebels. As
the historian Amatzia Baram has persuasively argued, these successes made
Saddam feel secure enough to swallow his pride and accept UN Resolution
986, the oil-for-food programme, which he had previously rejected.
Oil-for-food turned out to be an enormous boon for the Iraqi economy.
The oil-for-food programme itself gave Saddam clout to apply toward
lifting sanctions. Under Resolution 986 Iraq could choose to whom it
would sell its oil and from whom it would buy its food and medicine.
Baghdad could therefore reward cooperative states with contracts. Not
surprisingly, France and Russia regularly topped the list. Iraq could
set the prices -- and since Saddam did not really care whether he was
importing enough food and medicine for his people's needs, he could
sell oil on the cheap and buy food and medicine at inflated prices as
additional payoff to friendly govts.
By 1997 the internat'l environment had changed markedly, in ways that
probably convinced Saddam that he didn't need to cooperate with the
inspectors. The same internat'l outcry that prompted the oil-for-food
deal was creating momentum for lifting sanctions completely. At that
point it was reasonable for Saddam to believe that in the not-too-distant
future the sanctions either would be lifted or totally undermined, and
he would never have to reveal the remaining elements of his WMD
programmes. Only in 2002, when the Bush Admin suddenly focused its
attention on Iraq, would Saddam have had any reason to change this
view. And then, according to a variety of Iraqi sources, he simply
refused to believe that the Americans were serious.
Another explanation should be posited. This is the notion that Saddam
did not order the programme scaled down, but Iraqi scientists ensured
that it did not progress and deceived Saddam into believing that it
was much further along than it was. Numerous Iraqi scientists have
claimed this.
But many such accounts are undoubtedly self-serving, concocted in the
aftermath of his defeat.
Everyone outside Iraq missed the 1995-1996 shift in Saddam's strategy
-- that is, to scale back his WMD programmes to minimise the odds of further
discoveries -- and assumed that Iraq's earlier behaviour was continuing.
Context is crucial to understanding any intel assessment. Prior to
1991 the intel communities in the US and elsewhere believed that Iraq
was at least 5, and probably closer to 10, y away from acquiring a
nuclear weapon. After the war we learned that in 1991 Iraq had been
only 6 to 24 m away.
This revelation stunned the analysts. The lessons they took from it
were that Iraq was determined to acquire nuclear weapons and would go
to any lengths to do so; that the Iraqis were superb at concealment;
and that inspections were inherently flawed.
These lessons were strongly reinforced by the revelation of Iraq's
attempts in the 1st 4 y after the war to preserve significant parts of
its WMD programmes. By about 1994 Unscom believed, incorrectly, that
it had largely disarmed Iraq. Many intel analysts disagreed, but they
were hard-pressed to substantiate their suspicions -- until Kamel's
defection, in 1995, and subsequent Iraqi admissions. These developments
came as a profound shock to the UN inspectors, who resolved that Iraq
could never again be trusted. Thus, just when Iraq was in all likelihood
giving up efforts to maintain its just-in-time production capability,
the rest of the world became hardened in its conviction that Saddam
would never abandon or even reduce his efforts to acquire WMD.
In Dec of 1998 the inspectors withdrew from the country. Their
decision to do so came after Iraq announced, in Aug of that y, that
it would no longer cooperate with them at all, and after repeated
crises demonstrated that Baghdad's announcement was not just bluster.
The end of the UN inspections appears in retrospect to have been a
much greater problem than anyone recognised. The inspectors had been
the best source of info on Iraq and its WMD programmes. Many W intel
agencies, faced with other issues that demanded their resources,
increasingly relied on Unscom. And Unscom had something that American
intel did not -- physical access to Iraq.
When the inspectors suddenly left, intel agencies were caught off
balance. Desperate for info, they began to trust sources that they
would previously have had Unscom vet. With so little to go on, they
believed many reports that now seem deeply suspect. After 1998 many
analysts increasingly entertained worst-case scenarios -- scenarios
that gradually became mainstream estimates.
Another element that contributed to faulty assessments was Iraqi rhetoric.
Imagine that you were a CIA analyst in Jun 2000 and heard Saddam make
the following statement: "If the world tells us to abandon all our
weapons and keep only swords, we will do that ... if they destroy
their weapons. But if they keep a rifle and then tell me that I have
the right to possess only a sword, then we would say no. As long as
the rifle has become a means to defend our country against anybody who
may have designs against it, then we will try our best to acquire the
rifle." It would be very difficult not to interpret Saddam's remarks
as an announcement that he intended to reconstitute his WMD programmes.
The final element in the context for our pre-invasion analysis
involved discrepancies between how much WMD material went into Iraq
and how much Iraq could prove it had destroyed. The UN inspectors
obtained virtually all the import figures. They then asked the Iraqis
to either produce the materials or account for their destruction. In
many cases the Iraqis could not. These are the numbers that the world
regularly heard Bush Admin officials intone during the run-up to the
war. In hindsight there are legitimate reasons to question these numbers.
Saddam's Iraq was not exactly an efficient state, and many of his chief
lieutenants were semi-literate thugs with little regard for how things
should be done -- their only concern was that Saddam's demands be met.
The intel community's overestimation of Iraq's WMD capability is only
part of the story of why we went to war last y. The other part
involves how the Bush Admin handled the intel. Throughout the spring
and fall of 2002 and well into 2003 I received numerous complaints
from friends and colleagues in the intel community, and from people in
the policy community, about precisely that.
According to them, many Admin officials reacted strongly, negatively,
and aggressively when presented with info that contradicted what they
already believed about Iraq. Many of these officials believed that
Saddam was the source of virtually all the problems in the Middle E
and was an imminent danger to the US because of his perceived possession
of WMD and support of terrorism. Many also believed that CIA analysts
tended to be left-leaning cultural relativists who consistently
downplayed threats to the US. They believed that the agency, not the
Admin, was biased, and that they were acting simply to correct that bias.
Intel officers who presented analyses that were at odds with the
pre-existing views of snr Admin officials were subjected to barrages
of questions and requests for additional info, and were asked to
justify their work sentence by sentence. Reportedly, the worst fights
were over sources. The Admin gave greatest credence to accounts that
presented the most lurid picture of Iraqi activities. In many cases
intel analysts were distrustful of those sources, or knew unequivocally
that they were wrong. But when they said so, they were not heeded.
On many occasions Admin officials' requests for additional info struck
the analysts as being made merely to distract them.
Some asked for extensive historical analyses and requests were
constantly made for detailed analyses of newspaper articles that
conformed to the views of Admin officials -- pieces by conservative
newspaper columnists, who had no claim to superior insight into the
workings of Iraq.
Of course, no policymaker should accept intel estimates unquestioningly.
Any official who does less is derelict in his or her duty. However, at a
certain point curiosity and diligence become a form of pressure.
As Seymour Hersh, among others, has reported, Bush Admin officials
also took some actions that arguably crossed the line between rigorous
oversight of the intel community and an attempt to manipulate intel.
They set up their own shop in the Pentagon, called the Office of
Special Plans, to sift through the info themselves. To a great extent
OSP personnel "cherry-picked" the intel they passed on, selecting
reports that supported the Admin's pre-existing position and ignoring
all the rest.
Most problematic of all, the OSP often chose to believe reports that
trained intel officers considered unreliable or downright false. In
particular it gave great credence to reports from the Iraqi Nat'l
Congress, whose leader was the Admin-backed Ahmed Chalabi. It is true
that the intel community believed some of the material that came from
the INC -- but not most of it. One of the reasons the OSP generally
believed the INC was that they were telling it what it wanted to hear
-- giving the OSP further incentive to trust these sources over
differing, and ultimately more reliable, ones. Thus intel analysts
spent huge amounts of time fighting bad info and trying to persuade
officials not to make policy decisions based on it.
The Bush officials who created the OSP gave its reports directly to
those in the highest levels of govt, often passing raw, unverified
intel straight to the cabinet level as gospel. Snr officials made
public statements based on reports that the larger intel community
knew to be erroneous (for instance, that there was hard evidence
linking Iraq to al-Qaeda). The machinations of the OSP meant that
whenever the principals of the Nat'l Sec Council met with the president
and his staff, 2 different versions of reality were on the table.
The CIA, the state dept, and the uniformed military services would
present one version, and the Office of the Secretary of Defence and
the Office of the VP would present another. These views were too far
apart to allow for compromise. As a result, the Admin found it
difficult, if not impossible, to make important decisions. And it made
some that were fatally flawed, including many relating to postwar
planning, when the OSP's view -- that Saddam's regime simultaneously
was very threatening and could easily be replaced by a new govt -- prevailed.
The problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of
officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and
dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for
which I cannot hold officials blameless is their distortion of intel
estimates when making the public case for war.
As best I can tell, these officials were guilty not of lying but of
creative omission. They discussed only those elements of intel estimates
that served their cause. This was particularly apparent in regard to
the time frame for Iraq's acquisition of a nuclear weapon -- the issue
that most alarmed the American public and the rest of the world.
Remember that the NIE said that Iraq was likely to have a nuclear
weapon in 5 to 7 y if it had to produce the fissile material
indigenously, and that it might have one in less than a y if it could
obtain the material from a foreign source. The intel community
considered it highly unlikely that Iraq would be able to obtain
weapons-grade material from a foreign source; it had been trying to do
so for 25 y with no luck. However, time after time snr Admin officials
discussed only the worst-case, and least likely, scenario, and failed
to mention the intel community's most likely scenario. Some examples:
* In a radio address on Sep 14, 2002, Pres Bush warned, "Today Saddam
Hussein has the scientists and infrastructure for a nuclear-weapons
programme, and has illicitly sought to purchase the equipment needed
to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon. Should his regime acquire fissile
material, it would be able to build a nuclear weapon within a year."
* On Oct 7, 2002, the president told a group in Cincinnati, "If the
Iraqi regime is able to produce, buy, or steal an amount of highly
enriched uranium a little larger than a single softball, it could
have a nuclear weapon in less than a year."
* VP Cheney said on NBC's Meet the Press on Sep 14 2003:"The judgement
in the NIE was that if Saddam could acquire fissile material,
weapons-grade material, that he would have a nuclear weapon within a
few m to a year."
None of these statements in itself was untrue. However, each told only a
part of the story -- the most sensational part. These statements all
implied that the US intel community believed that Saddam would have a
nuclear weapon within a y unless the US acted at once. Some defenders
of the Admin have reportedly countered that all it did was make the
best possible case for war, playing a role similar to that of a
defence attorney who is charged with presenting the best possible case
for a client. But a defence attorney is responsible for presenting
only one side of a dispute. The president is responsible for serving
the entire nation. For the Admin to withhold or downplay some of the
info for its own purposes is a betrayal of that responsibility.
What we have learned about Iraq's WMD programmes since the fall of
Baghdad leads me to conclude that the case for war with Iraq was
considerably weaker than I believed. I had been convinced that Iraq
was only y away from having a nuclear weapon -- probably only 4 or
5 y. That estimate was clearly off, possibly by quite a bit. My
reluctant conviction that war was our only option (although not at the
time or in the manner in which the Bush Admin pursued it) was not
entirely based on the nuclear threat, but that threat was the most
important factor.
The war was not all bad. But at the very least we should recognise
that the Admin's rush to war was reckless even on the basis of what we
thought we knew in Mar 2003. It appears even more reckless in light
of what we know today.
=== AND ANSWERED AGAIN: ===
Intel chief's bombshell: "We were overruled on dossier"
London (Independent). The intel official whose revelations stunned
the Hutton inquiry has suggested that not a single defence intel
expert backed Tony Blair's most contentious claims on Iraqi WMD.
As Mr Blair set up an inquiry yesterday into intel failures before the
war, Brian Jones, the former leading expert on WMD in the Ministry of
Defence, declared that Downing Street's dossier, a key plank in
convincing the public of the case for war, was "misleading" on Saddam
Hussein's chemical and biological capability. Writing in today's
Independent, Dr Jones, who was head of the nuclear, chemical and
biological branch of the Defence Intel Staff (DIS) until he retired
last y, reveals that the experts failed in their efforts to have their
views reflected.
Dr Jones, who is expected to be a key witness at the new inquiry, says:
"In my view, the expert intel analysts of the DIS were overruled in
the preparation of the dossier in Sep 2002, resulting in a presentation
that was misleading about Iraq's capabilities."
He calls on the PM to publish the intel behind the Govt's claims that
Iraq was actively producing chemical weapons and could launch an
attack within 45 min of an order to do so. He is "extremely
doubtful" that anyone with chemical and biological weapons expertise
had seen the raw intel reports and that they would prove just how
right he and his colleagues were to be concerned about the claims.
Downing Street was triumphant last wk when Lord Hutton ruled that
Andrew Gilligan's claims that the dossier was "sexed up" were
unfounded, but Dr Jones's comments are bound to boost the case of the
BBC and others that the dossier failed to take into account the
worries of intel officials. Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State,
said yesterday that he might not have supported military action
against Baghdad if he had known that Iraq lacked WMD.
Acutely aware of the American inquiry into the war, Mr Blair said that a
committee of inquiry would investigate "intel-gathering, evaluation
and use" in the UK before the conflict in Iraq. Lord Butler of Brockwell,
the former cabinet secretary, will chair the 5-strong committee,
which will meet in private. The Liberal Democrats refused to support
the inquiry because they said that its remit was not wide enough.
Dr Jones was the man whose decision to give evidence electrified the
Hutton inquiry as he disclosed that he had formally complained about
the dossier. The Govt attempted to dismiss his complaints as part of
the normal process of "debate" within the DIS and claimed that other
sections of the intel community were better qualified to assess the
45-min and chemical production claims.
[Geoff Hoon has already admitted to the Hutton Inquiry he knew the
45-mins claim did not refer to WMD, but to ordinary battlefield
weapons. He says he didn't bother to tell the PM about the fine
distinction before Blair had used it in propaganda].
But today Dr Jones makes clear that he was not alone and declares that
the whole of the Defence Intel Staff, Brit's best qualified analysts
on WMD, agreed that the claims should have been "carefully caveated".
Furthermore, the Joint Intel Committee (JIC), which allowed the
contentious claims to go into the dossier, lacked the expertise to
make a competent judgement on them.
Dr Jones makes clear that it was John Scarlett, the chairman of the
JIC, who was responsible for including the controversial claims in the
executive summary of the dossier that was used to justify war. It was
Mr Scarlett's strong assessment that allowed Alastair Campbell to
"translate a probability into a certainty" in Mr Blair's foreword to
the document, Dr Jones adds.
He says he foresaw at the time of the Govt's dossier in Sep 2002 that
no major WMD stockpiles would be found. He made a formal complaint
about the dossier to avoid himself and his fellow experts being cast
as "scapegoats" for any such failure.
In his article, Dr Jones warns that intel analysts should not be
blamed for the lack of any significant finds in Iraq and pts out
that it was the "intel community leadership" the heads of MI6 and
MI5 and Mr Scarlett who were responsible for the dossier. It would
be a "travesty" if the DIS was criticised over the affair, he says.
Dr Jones complains that he and others were not allowed to see vital
intel supporting the 45-min and chemical production claims.
He reveals, however, that he has discovered from a colleague that the
reports from the ground did not meet his and others' concerns about
the wording of the JIC's assessments. Also, he says, the Deputy Chief
of Defence Intel, Tony Cragg, did not see the supposedly clinching
intel and took on trust assurances from MI6 that it was credible.
The Govt yesterday finally slipped out its response to the Intel and
Security Committee's report last autumn on the intel case in the
approach to war.
For the 1st time ministers conceded that they "understand the
reasoning" for the committee's criticism that the presentation of the
45-min claim in the dossier "allowed speculation as to its exact
meaning", including the firing of WMD on long-range missiles. But the
Govt said it had not linked the claim to ballistic missiles.
It also rejected the MPs' call for complaints such as that of Dr Jones
to be sent direct to the JIC chairman. "It is important to preserve
the line management authority of JIC members," it said.
"New equation" leaves Powell unsure on Iraq
Washington (ABC, John Shovelan). US Secretary of State Colin Powell
says he does not know if he would have recommended an invasion of Iraq
if he had known Saddam Hussein possessed no stockpiles of banned weapons.
But Mr Powell has defended the Bush Admin's decision to go to war.
Mr Powell says the stockpile believed to exist was the final little
piece that made Iraq more of a real and present danger.
In an interview with the Washington Post, he said: "Absence of a
stockpile changes the political calculus, it changes the answer you get."
Asked if he would have recommended an invasion if he had known Iraq
did not possess banned weapons, he said he did not know.
But he defended the decision to go to war.
"The bottom line is this -- the Pres made the right decision," Mr
Powell said.
"He made the right decision based on the history of this regime."
"We have done the right thing and history will certainly be the test
of that," he added.
Pres George W Bush has announced a commission to investigate why US
intel on Iraq's WMD was wrong.
Blair calls for UK intel probe
Blair to follow US lead, call Iraq WMD inquiry.
London (Reuters). Brit's Tony Blair will bow to growing pressure on
Tue and call an inquiry into apparent intel failings over Iraqi
weapons after Washington agreed to its own probe into the
justification given for war.
A rep for Blair's office told Reuters the PM would make a statement on
the issue when he testifies before parliament's Liaison Committee at 4
am EST.
"He will say something then," the rep said.
Until now, Blair has firmly resisted calls for an inquiry although no
banned weapons have been found m after Saddam Hussein was toppled.
But pressure has been mounting to explain apparent flaws in intel that
led Blair to state, prior to the war, that Iraq was a "serious and
current" threat and that it had continued to produce chemical and
biological weapons.
A move by Pres Bush to appoint an independent commission on US intel
-- confirmed on Mon -- turned up the heat on Blair to do the same.
"It's humiliating that we are just being an echo of the US again,"
former Cabinet minister Clare Short said.
The official govt line that evidence of weapons could yet be found has
been increasingly hard to sustain since chief US weapons hunter David
Kay quit his post last m and blew a hole in the Anglo-American argument
on Iraq.
Kay said he believed Iraq had no stockpiles of illicit weapons and
said "we were almost all wrong" in assuming it did.
John Reid, a minister in Blair's cabinet, admitted on Tue there were
issues to be addressed.
"There is another legitimate area of questioning, which is....was
there a discrepancy between not the existence of a threat...but the
level and nature of that threat at a given point in time and the intel
that was received," he told BBC TV.
The Butler Inquiry
Remit focuses on intel and excludes politicians from scrutiny over
decision to go to war in Iraq.
London (Guardian). Tony Blair risked a further loss of trust on Iraq
yesterday when he ordered a wide ranging inquiry into intel on weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq but debarred the inquiry from examining
the political and diplomatic decision to wage war, and the legal basis
for doing so.
His tortuously worded terms of reference, the product of 24 hr of
backstage Westminster wrangling, split the opp'n parties last night.
Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrat leader, said his party would not
sit on the inquiry because the narrow terms of reference prevented an
examination of "the judgements which were made by the politicians about
the intel assessments".
He added: "An inquiry which excludes politicians from scrutiny is
unlikely to command public confidence. Politicians should always be
willing to answer for their judgement and their competence to the public".
But the Conservative leader, Michael Howard, said he had negotiated
changes to the terms of reference which specifically allowed the
inquiry to look into the use the govt had made of intel.
Mr Blair confirmed this interpretation, saying: "There is no doubt
that the inquiry will be able to look into how the intel is gathered
and used by govt: I think that's entirely sensible."
In essence, the terms of reference permit the inquiry to examine the
accuracy of the intel but not whether the threat was sufficiently big
or imminent to justify war.
Mr Kennedy is risking an accusation of political irresponsibility if
the inquiry makes substantial findings, but after his recent drop in
the polls he may benefit by the re-emphasis of his anti-war stance.
Mr Blair defended the inquiry's remit by arguing that he could not
allow a political decision to go to war -- the property of parliament,
govt and country -- to be sub-contracted to an independent inquiry.
The inquiry panel of 5, which is due to report before the summer
recess, will be chaired by Lord Butler, a sometime cabinet secretary
to 3 PMs.
He will be joined by the former permanent secretary at the N Ireland
Office Sir John Chilcott, the former chief of the defence staff Field
Marshal Lord Inge, and the 2 snr Labour and Tory members of the intel
and security committee, Ann Taylor and Michael Mates, who will represent
parliament, even though the ISC has already largely endorsed the intel case.
Alan Beith, the snr Liberal Democrat on the ISC, will not sit on the
inquiry because of Mr Kennedy's decision.
Mr Kennedy said Mr Beith had accepted the decision once it was
explained to him.
The foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said the inquiry, in part modelled
on the Franks inquiry into the Falklands war, would meet in private,
but some of the evidence might be published.
Sources close to the intel agencies put a brave face on Mr Blair's decision.
In respect of MI6, the main agency involved, the key issue is what
caveats its raw intel contained before it was hardened up as a result
of pressure from Downing Street.
Lord Butler is said to take the view that snr intel officials, notably
John Scarlett, chairman of the joint intel committee, became too close
to political officials at No 10.
Another key issue is how strongly Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of
MI6, who is due to retire in the summer, will express concern about
the way in which the raw intel was handled.
MI6 is extremely vulnerable on one central claim: that Iraqi forces
could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 min.
This came from a single secondary source and was described in the
dossier as "recent intel".
The claim was sharply criticised last y by the parliamentary intel and
security committee, 2 of whose members are on the Butler committee.
Military chiefs are voicing concern about the quality of the intel
they were given, something Lord Inge is likely to sympathise with.
"Someone was misled somewhere", a snr defence source said yesterday.
The timetable is shorter than the parallel US congressional inquiry,
which is not due to report until next y, but Mr Blair is eager to draw a
line on Iraq before a general election next spring.
3 Brit official inquiries into the war have so far failed to quell the
political controversy and Mr Blair was pessimistic yesterday that this
latest effort would change minds.
He justified his volte-face on the need for an inquiry by pointing to
the startling admissions last wk by Dr David Kay, the former head of
the Iraq Survey Group.
Speaking to select committee chairmen at Westminster, he said: "I
think it is right, as a result of what David Kay has said, and the ISG
now probably won't report in the very nr term, that we have a look at
the intel we received and whether it was correct or not."
In contrast to some of the more ambiguous remarks by the US secretary
of state, Colin Powell, Mr Blair said he would have recommended the
invasion even if he had known that Saddam had no stockpiles of weapons
of mass destruction.
He insisted that the war was legally justified, since Dr Kay had
confirmed that Saddam had not cooperated with the UN inspectors.
Snr anti-war MPs ridiculed the inquiry.
The former cabinet minister Robin Cook said it was not feasible to
"separate out the intel judgements on the threat and the political
judgement to go to war on the basis of that threat".
Aussie PM rules out WMD inquiry
Perth (AAP). PM John Howard denied he was embarrassed by new doubts
over the accuracy of intel used to justify the Iraq war.
Mr Howard said he made the decision to join military action against
Iraq based on intel from AUS agencies and from his own direct talks
with Brit and US intel agencies.
"I did have a number of direct discussions with the head of Brit intel
and also with snr people in the CIA, all of which confirmed the advice
we had been receiving from our own agencies," Mr Howard told ABC radio
in Perth.
"We went to war primarily because of the WMD issue and because of the
continued non-compliance by Iraq with resolutions of the Sec Council."
Asked if he was embarrassed in the light of former chief US weapons
hunter David Kay's finding that there were no stockpiles of chemical
or biological weapons in Iraq, Mr Howard said he was not.
"I'm not embarrassed because intel is an imprecise science," he said.
"You have to make judgements on the material that you have at the time
and the material that we had available at the time very strongly
suggested the possession of WMD.
"There are differences of view and there are different conclusions
about the immediacy and the quantity but the jury is still out.
"If we had our time over again, I would not have taken a different
decision."
Mr Howard ruled out following Brit and the US in calling an inquiry
into the intel, saying Aussies should wait for the report of a
parliamentary committee inquiry into the issue.
"We actually have had a parliamentary inquiry and the 1st term of
reference ... is the nature, the accuracy, the independence of the
intel that was relied on," Mr Howard said.
"So on the merits of it, it could be said that we've already had the
inquiry and maybe the sensible thing to do is to let the public see
what is in that report.
"I have actually seen the report but I am not allowed to talk about it
because it's not my report, it's a parliamentary committee report."
Howard stands by Iraq decision
Perth. The PM says he is not embarrassed about his decision to send
troops to Iraq, even though he concedes the intel used to justify the
attack may have been wrong.
John Howard is yet to be convinced another inquiry into that intel is
warranted.
Mr Howard says before the war there was strong intel suggesting Iraq
had banned weapons.
While there are now growing doubts about that intel, he says he does
not resile from his decision to go to war.
"I am not embarrassed ... because intel is an imprecise science," he said.
Mr Howard says a parliamentary committee will soon report on the
accuracy of that pre-war intel.
He has guaranteed that report, which he says he has seen, will not be
vetted in any way.
Labor leader Mark Latham thinks a 2nd investigation may well be needed.
"If there's any doubt about the matter, if the truth hasn't been established,
if we need further inquiries then in the nat'l interest we should."
He says lessons need to be learnt from this experience, so mistakes
are not repeated.
Wilkie demands independent Iraq probe
Canberra. A former AUS intel officer has called for an independent
inquiry into the accuracy of pre-war info about Iraq's banned weapons
programs.
Andrew Wilkie quit the Office of Nat'l Assessments in Mar last y,
saying the AUS Govt had exaggerated the case for war against Iraq.
Mr Wilkie says a fed parliamentary inquiry which has examined the
issue in AUS is a whitewash.
He says there needs to be an independent investigation.
"It needs to be a genuinely independent inquiry," Mr Wilkie said.
"It needs to be an inquiry that not only looks at the intel but looks
very carefully at what the Govt did with that intel.
"I don't think the current parliamentary inquiry headed by David Jull
is the answer."
The US and the UK have announced they will hold separate independent
inquiries into intel-gathering about Iraq's supposed WMD.
PM John Howard says AUS will make its own decision on whether to hold a
similar probe.
"In the fullness of time it might be demonstrated that the [intel]
advice [on Iraq] was inaccurate but to say it was bogus is an unfair
observation," Mr Howard said.
Opp'n leader Mark Latham says AUS should have an independent inquiry
into the pre-war intel on Iraq's banned weapons, if that is needed to
get to the truth.
Mr Latham says he will know whether another investigation is needed,
after he sees the report of a parliamentary inquiry on the matter,
which is due to be released next m.
But he has accused the Govt of closing its mind to the prospect of a
2nd investigation.
"Sen Hill, the Defence Min, has said he doesn't see the need for
further inquiries," he said.
"We've got to be open-minded in ensuring that we always get it right
for AUS and mistakes that have been made in the past aren't repeated
in the future, particularly when it comes to the primary
responsibility of govt -- keeping the nation safe and secure."
Political infighting delays Italy media bill
Milan (Reuters). Italy's controversial media bill has suffered a
setback when the Govt, hit by coalition infighting, decided to delay
final voting rather than risk a parliamentary defeat.
The legislation, which critics say is tailor-made for PM Silvio
Berlusconi's business interests, is going through Parliament for a
second time after Pres Carlo Azeglio Ciampi vetoed the original
version and demanded amendments.
When the revised text went before the Lower House of Parliament on
Tue, coalition leaders swiftly decided to send it back into a
cross-party commission for further review after they struggled to win
votes on various amendments.
"The problem doesn't regard the merit of the law, but the political
picture," Communications Min Maurizio Gasparri, who has lent his name
to the law, said.
The bill, which raises limits on media ownership, was approved by
Parliament last y, but Mr Ciampi refused to approve it, saying it did
not guarantee the plurality of Italian media.
Tue's parliamentary retreat comes as Mr Berlusconi tries to resolve
rows within his four-party coalition that have raised tensions over
all areas of policy making.
In a sign of the growing friction, amendments to the media bill passed
by just a handful of votes on Tue, despite the fact that Mr Berlusconi
commands a huge parliamentary majority.
Shares in Berlusconi-controlled TV network Mediaset, which stands to
benefit from the media law, closed down 1.4% at 9.44 euros on the
Milan bourse.
The Govt says the law is necessary to allow Italian media firms to
cope with foreign competition.
Mr Berlusconi's critics say it is designed to allow Mediaset to expand
out of TV and into publishing and radio.
Gasparri made 7 amendments to the law originally rejected by Mr Ciampi
and the revised package had been expected to pass into law fairly
smoothly, with the Pres unable to veto the same bill twice.
It was not immediately clear when Parliament might approve the
new-look bill.
Ex-Bosnian Serb policy maker faces war crimes trial
The Hague (BBC/Reuters/AFP). One of the highest ranking members of
the Bosnian Serb leadership during the Bosnian civil war in the 1990s
has gone on trial in The Netherlands on war crimes charges. He was
the right-hand man of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, who is
still at large. Momcilo Krajisnik is accused of genocide for
allegedly masterminding an ethnic cleansing campaign against Bosnian
Muslims and Croats in the early 1990s. He took notes during the
opening remarks by the prosecutor, who described him as "a shrewd and
calculating man, an unrelenting nat'list" and the chief policy maker
of the Bosnian Serbs. The prosecutor said Krajisnik held the levers
of power with Radovan Karadzic, and as part of a joint criminal
enterprise, they planned to create a unified Serbian state.
DC ricin scare leaves Senate unscathed
Washington (AP). A jittery Senate faced its 2nd attack with a deadly
toxin in 28 m on Tue, this time in the form of ricin powder sent to
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. Another letter containing ricin and
bound for the Whitehouse had been intercepted in Nov, a law
enforcement official disclosed.
No illnesses were reported in either case, but dozens of Senate
workers were being monitored and work in the Senate slowed to a crawl.
Health experts expressed optimism that casualties would be averted in
the new attack. None of the dozens of congressional employees who were
nr the Tennessee Republican's office on Mon when the white powder was
discovered was believed to be sick.
"As each minute ticks by, we are less and less concerned about the
health effects," said Dr Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention.
The ricin-laced letter addressed to the Whitehouse had been detected
at an off-site mail processing facility, the law enforcement official
said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The investigation into that letter continues, and there have been no
arrests, the official said. Authorities determined the letter posed no
threat to health because of the ricin's low potency and granular form.
In Oct, officials intercepted a package containing ricin at a
Greenville, SC, postal facility.
The S Carolina package, which included a letter signed by "Fallen
Angel," and the one addressed to the Whitehouse were similar, a snr
law enforcement official said on condition of anonymity Tue. Both
contained ricin, and both complained about new regulations requiring
certain amounts of rest for truck drivers, the official said.
But it was unclear if those were connected to the substance found in
Frist's mail room, the official said.
On Capitol Hill, all 3 Senate office buildings were shut Tue and were
to be closed Wed, too. They could be closed the rest of the wk.
That included the Dirksen Senate Office Building, where the substance
was found Mon afternoon by a young worker in Frist's fourth-floor
mailroom. A sign stating "Closed" hung from one of Dirksen's main
doors. Yellow sheets cordoned off areas inside.
The Capitol building -- where heavy security and a persistent case of
nerves have reigned since the terrorist attacks of Sep 11, 2001 --
was closed to tourists.
Frist and others said tests overnight showed the substance was ricin, a
natural and potent poison made by refining castor beans.
Frist said the ricin was active, or capable of causing illness, but
tests measuring its potency were incomplete.
Health officials urged Senate staff to watch for swiftly developing
fever, coughs or fluid in the lungs over the next 2 or 3 days.
When inhaled in sufficient quantities or injected, ricin can be fatal
-- and there is no known vaccine or cure.
Frist's offices in Tennessee were also closed as investigators checked
mail there, said Frist rep Nick Smith.
In Washington, senators gave many aides the day off and brought others
to work in small Capitol offices the lawmakers normally use as private
hideaways.
The FBI and other agencies were conducting other tests. At Fort
Detrick, Md, Army scientists were using electron microscopes to
determine the size of the ricin's particles -- crucial to determining
whether any of it may have been inhaled.
Senate leaders made a show of calm and control. They said they had
refined their ability to respond to emergencies since the anthrax
attacks of late 2001 with better communications and coordination.
"Things are going very well, not perfectly, but very, well," said
Frist, a medical doctor who has advised Capitol colleagues about
potential terror attacks through the mail ever since the anthrax
letters of late 2001.
Frist said 16 potentially exposed staff workers had been quarantined
Mon night and decontaminated with showers. Rep Bob Stevenson later
raised that figure to 24, plus an uncertain number of Capitol police
officers who took precautionary showers after their shifts.
But other Senate aides, including at least one who was quarantined,
said the figure was 40 to 50, including about 10 Capitol police
officers and aides to Frist, Sen James Jeffords, I-Vt, and the Senate
Environment and Public Works Committee.
At a briefing for reporters, Frist said there was not yet info on how
dangerous this sample of ricin powder was.
Democratic leader Tom Daschle of S Dakota said tests of air filters
showed the chemical had not been circulated through the buildings'
ventilation systems.
But Sen Lindsey Graham, R-S.C, emerging from a lunch where Frist,
Capitol police chief Terrance Gainer and Capitol physician John Eisold
briefed Republican senators, said the 3 had expressed concern.
"There was something specific about this that made them worry," Graham
said. "Somebody knew what they were doing. ... Frist said the type,
the way it was presented indicated that people understood it goes into
the air and gets into lungs."
There were also questions raised about how effectively senators and
aides were told about the attack and the potential jeopardy they faced.
"We weren't notified promptly enough yesterday," said Sen Tom Harkin,
D-Iowa, who said one of his aides worked well into the evening in the
Dirksen building. "But that's OK, people make mistakes."
One aide who was quarantined -- which did not occur until 6.30 Mon
evening -- said many co-workers had already gone home. This aide said
those quarantined were asked to telephone colleagues who had left and
tell them to shower and put their clothes in a bag.
Frist and police chief Gainer said investigators were still uncertain
which, if any, piece of mail the ricin had come from.
Gainer said officials had not yet found any "visible threat," such as a
menacing letter. The ricin was found on a device that opens mail,
authorities said.
Workers began retrieving mail from all Senate and House offices as
authorities worried that contaminated mail may have been sent to other
lawmakers. In Oct 2001, anthrax-tainted letters were mailed to
then-Senate Majority Leader Daschle and to Sen Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.
Officials said there was no evidence of ricin elsewhere in the Capitol
complex, though as a precaution the postal facility that processes
Congress' mail was shut. In 2001, 2 postal workers in Washington were
among 5 people who died from anthrax exposure.
Across the Capitol, the House conducted business as usual. Senate
leaders decided to hold no votes and cancelled all committee hearings,
though senators trooped to the chamber floor to debate a highway bill.
"Terrorist attacks and criminal acts of this kind won't stop the work
of the Senate or the Congress as we have important work to be done,"
said Daschle.
Ricin letter sent to Whitehouse
Washington (AFP). US authorities intercepted a letter to the White
House 3 ma containing the toxic ricin poison, a law enforcement source said.
"In Nov, a letter addressed to the Whitehouse containing a fine,
powdery substance was intercepted at an off-site mail handling
facility," the source said on condition of anonymity.
"The substance tested positive for ricin. However, it was also
determined that there was no public health risk because of the low
potency and the granular form of the substance."
News of the letter was released in the hrs after ricin poison was also
sent to the US Senate in Washington, sparking a new bio-terrorism scare.
US Secret Service rep Tom Mazur said the Whitehouse letter "is part
of an ongoing investigation, we can't comment on the details."
The mail office where the letter was found has handled all mail for
the Whitehouse since a wave of letters containing anthrax were sent
to govt offices and media in late 2001.
Since then all correspondence addressed to the Whitehouse has been
taken to a military centre nr Washington to be checked before delivery.
Authorities closed 3 US Senate office buildings Tue after toxic ricin
powder was found in what a congressional leader called a terrorist attack.
The powder was found in the mailroom of the head of the Republican
majority in the Senate, Bill Frist, and a series of tests had confirmed
it was ricin, said Terry Gainer, the police chief for the district
which takes in the US Congress buildings.
16 people who were nr the room went through decontamination procedures
but none were believed to be harmed by the powder, officials said.
There is no known antidote to ricin poison, which normally kills
within 72 hr.
Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, said: "I believe
that it is an act of terrorism."
Wife of terror suspect Brigitte makes jail visit
[Contrary to prev reports...].
Paris. The AUS wife of deported terrorism suspect Willie Brigitte has
visited him in a French prison. Soon after arriving in Paris, Melanie
Brown was detained and questioned for several days by France's
domestic intel agency, before being granted permission to see Mr
Brigitte. The couple's AUS lawyer, Stephen Hopper, says Ms Brown is
in good spirits and has vowed to stand by her husband. "She's now of
the opinion that he's innocent, she's had a talk to him about what's
happened and that's what she believes at the moment," he said.
"Certainly it's been an emotional experience for her and ... she
really just wants to be left alone to sort her private life out. "She
feels it's nobody's business but hers."
China battles more bird flu cases
Beijing. (ABC, John Taylor). China's battle with bird flu is
intensifying, with several new outbreaks of the deadly virus reported
across the country. There are now 17 cases of suspected bird flu
across 12 provinces, or one-third of China's regions. 4 other
outbreaks have been confirmed as the deadly H5N1 virus. Tests are
being conducted to confirm the other areas. China reported its 1st
case of bird flu just a wk ago and has moved swiftly to slaughter
affected animals and quarantine surrounding areas. The World Health
Organisation says it has requested info on the surveillance and
vaccination efforts but nothing has been forthcoming. No human cases
of the virus have been reported in China.
Experts meet over bird flu crisis
Rome (BBC/AFP). Internat'l food, health and animal experts are
holding emergency talks in Rome on strategies to contain and deal with
the bird flu outbreak in South-East Asia. Tens of mn of chickens have
been killed and a deadly strain of the virus has transferred to humans
in Thailand and Vietnam. 13 people have died from the disease in
Asia. At least 25 internat'l experts from 14 countries are attending
the 2-day closed meeting, including officials from affected nations.
They hope to achieve a consensus on options for tackling the outbreak
and develop action plans for individual countries. Health officials
say that culls of poultry, if carried out safely, are the best way to
contain the disease. But animal vaccination, used alongside culling,
is another option being discussed. Experts are divided over the
benefits of giving birds flu jabs -- they are not proven to provide
protection against the virulent H5N1 strain.
[Something for Izzy and other cancer-phobes in denial].
Cancer survival improves despite more cases
London (Guardian). The cancer death rate has fallen by 18% for men
and 6% for women in a generation, the charity Cancer Research revealed
yesterday.
The overall 12% reduction in mortality between 1972 and 2002 contrasts
with recent figures showing a steady rise in new cancer cases, many of
them related to lifestyle factors, including smoking, drinking and obesity.
But better screening, treatments and quality of life care have helped
to improve the 5-y survival rate [sometimes called "cure" rates by
right-wing sociologists] for many cancers.
The lung cancer death rate in men has fallen by nearly 1/2 in 30 y,
but remains higher than for women, in whom the rate has risen by more
than 1/2 in the same period.
The number of deaths from breast cancer in every 100,000 of the
population has fallen by a fifth, and there have been significant
falls in bowel and stomach cancer mortality.
But there have been huge increases in death from liver cancers, cancer
of the oesophagus, malignant melanomas from increased exposure to the
sun, and multiple myeloma [cancer of the plasma cells in bone marrow].
There has also been a big increases in prostate cancer deaths.
Cancer Research UK is looking on the bright side as it begins a new
fundraising campaign to increase its spending on research, which
amounted to #191 mn last y. Its TV press, radio and billboard
advertising is aimed at persuading people to give #2 a m towards
further research, providing up to #16 mn for new projects.
The adverts stress that more patients are hearing the words "all
clear", both after initial treatment and later check-ups.
Prof Peter Selby, head of Cancer Research UK's unit at St James's
hospital, Leeds, said 40% of cancer patients overall now survived at
least 5 y and a 50% rate was "within reach". Between 350 and 400
new drug treatments were in the pipeline.
Iraqi Kurds vow unity as blast toll reaches 67
5 arrested in connection with attacks on US soldiers.
Arbil (AFP). Leaders of Iraqs 2 main Kurdish parties said yesterday
that recent suicide attacks would only help forge closer ties between
their once-rival groups, as the death toll from the blasts reached 67.
US military officials said the number killed in Suns coordinated
attacks had risen to 67 from an earlier estimate of 56 and those
wounded numbered 247.
Doctors in Arbil said many of the wounded were in critical condition
and feared the toll could climb further.
The attacks, the worst since a suicide car bomb killed more than 80
outside a mosque in the holy city of Najaf last Aug, killed several
snr members of the main Kurdish parties the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party.
The PUK and the KDP, whose militias fought a civil war in the 1990s,
have become more tightly aligned in recent y and are both closely allied
to the US, having staunchly backed the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Kurdish leaders said the attacks, rather than dividing the parties,
were likely to bring them closer as they push for greater autonomy for
an enlarged fed Kurdish region.
This has had a devastating effect on the Kurdish leadership because we
have lost so many valuable people, Hoshiyar Zebari, Iraqs foreign
minister and a Kurd, said in Arbil. But I also definitely believe that
this incident has brought Kurds together and strengthened their unity.
Yet that greater bond could influence US plans for the transfer of
sovereignty to an Iraqi govt ahead of a Jul 1 deadline, as tensions
between various ethnic and religious groups become increasingly visible.
Gareth Stansfield, an Iraq expert at Brits Exeter University, noted
the bombings came at a time when Kurdish demands for autonomy within a
fed system had become a sensitive issue with other Iraqis and the US.
This could be the trigger that galvanises the KDP and PUK into making a
vociferous demand for heightened autonomy, Stansfield said in London.
There could be an immediate reaction by Barzani and Talabani to
toughen their position.
The leaders of the KDP and PUK, Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani
respectively, issued statements after the blasts saying the attack
only made them more determined to remain united.
Stansfield said Kurds would see this as a defence against endemic
instability threatening to spill into the N from the rest of Iraq,
adding the KDP and PUK would take the opportunity to clamp down on
Ansar Al Islam and even moderate Islamist groups.
In Arbil, in the far N of Iraq, mourners wearing black armbands and
dressed in their smartest clothes in recognition of the Eid Al Adha
Muslim feast paid their respects to the dead at the site of the
bombings and outside the city's main mosque.
Snr figures from both the PUK and the KDP attended prayers, where
peshmerga fighters the militia for the Kurdish parties frisked
visitors as they entered.
Residents of Arbil, which many considered one of the safest cities in
Iraq, said they were worried about the city becoming a target for
insurgents and anti-American fighters.
Once it was safe here, at least safe compared to Iraq, said Saadi
Adnan, a man waiting outside the mosque.
Now its al-Qaeda, Palestinians, Arabs they have their cells here and
you can tell it was them who carried out the attack by the way they
tracked the officials.
No one had claimed responsibility for the bombings, but Kurdish
officials have said they believe it could have been the work of Ansar
Al Islam, a militant organisation with links to the al-Qaeda network
and which used to operate in N Iraq.
Zebari said that as much as being an attack on Kurds, the bombings
were also a scar on Iraqs nascent democracy.
This is an attack on democratic principles. The parties that were
targeted are the nucleus of any democratic life in Iraq. They have
legitimacy, they have won elections.
The US army yesterday arrested 5 men, including 3 suspected of
killing American servicemen in a weekend bombing in N Iraq, Iraqi
police said.
The Iraqi police chief in the N oil city of Kirkuk, Col Turhan Yusef,
said that troops from the US 4ID (ID) arrested 3 Iraqis in connection
with a bombing on Sat that killed 3 soldiers.
The 3 men Abdullah Zoba, Khodr Ali and Abdul Jabbar Riyashi were
arrested in a dawn raid on a village nr the town of Rashad, 40 km S
of Kirkuk, he said. They are suspected of planting a roadside homemade
bomb that killed 3 US soldiers, 45 km SW of Kirkuk.
A US rep could not immediately confirm the arrests of the three, but
said 2 other Iraqis had been detained yesterday for trying to detonate a
roadside bomb.
The explosive device was planted on a road as a US convoy returned
from a memorial service to its base in Kirkuk.
According to Iraqi police major Abdul Kareem Ali Al Juburi, the device
weighed 50 kgs and was hidden in a rice bag at 1.5 km from the US base.
Death toll from Iraq suicide bombs hits 101
Arbil (Reuters). US officials say the death toll from twin suicide
attacks on the offices of the main political parties in the N Iraqi
town of Arbil at the weekend has risen to 101.
Both the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan (PUK), the main parties in Iraqi Kurdistan, lost several snr
politicians when bombers attacked on Sun.
The attacks were timed to coincide with celebrations for the Muslim
Eid Al-Adha, or Feast of the Sacrifice, holiday.
A rep for the US-led authority in Iraq says the number killed had
risen to 101 from a previous estimate of 67.
He says 133 people were wounded, fewer than previous accounts of more
than 200, attributing the drop to confusion at the time of the attacks.
Kurdish television showed pictures of a man it said was responsible
for the bombing at the KDP offices and offered a reward for anyone
able to ID him.
Military officials in Iraq have said the bombings in Arbil have a
different hallmark to the hit-and-run tactics used by Saddam Hussein
loyalists fighting the US occupation across the country.
US officers said it was too early to exclude any insurgent groups from
the investigation, but said early indications suggested foreign groups
were probably involved.
"As I said 2 nights ago, no group has claimed responsibility. We
suspect that it could be any of a number of terrorist cells. It could
be Ansar Al-Islam, al-Qaeda -- we are conducting an investigation
right now," US Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt said.
"Our 1st assumptions are based on the tactics used. When you start
seeing people strap on suicide bombs and carrying out suicide bombings
your 1st inclination is to sort of look foreign rather than look here,
within Iraq."
Ansar Al-Islam, whose leadership is believed to be Kurdish, is an
Islamist group the PUK accuses of links to al-Qaeda and attacked with
US Special Forces during the US-led war on Iraq.
The bombings in the N region of Kurdistan, which split from Iraq
following an uprising after the 1991 Gulf War, were a big shock to a
community which had been relatively calm since the fall of Saddam.
US casualty numbers continue to climb in Iraq
Baghdad (KRT). Jan was the 2nd deadliest m for US soldiers in Iraq
since Pres Bush declared the end of major combat operations in May,
according to a review of military and news reports.
A roadside bomb nr the city of Kirkuk on Sat killed 3 US soldiers,
bringing the total combat deaths for Jan to 40.
The high death toll came in spite of a decline in the frequency of
attacks on US troops, suggesting that insurgents have improved their
targeting abilities.
The continuing high casualty count brings into question Bush Admin
assertions that conditions in Iraq are improving, and could provide
ammunition to Democratic presidential candidates who are critical of
the war effort.
In addition to the US death toll, 100s of Iraqis were killed or
wounded in a spate of bombings in Jan, including one on Sat in the N
city of Mosul that killed at least 9 and wounded more than 40.
US Army and civilian officials in Iraq recently have begun citing a
reduction in the number of attacks against soldiers as a sign of
progress in the war. During Nov, the high watermark for soldier deaths
when 69 were killed, there were 40 to 50 attacks a day, a figure that
has plummeted to about 20, according to military officials.
The attacks, however, are growing more deadly. Roadside bombs in Oct,
Nov and Dec, for instance, tended to kill one soldier at a time. In
Jan, there were 4 instances in which one explosive device killed 3
soldiers, the highest such totals for any m since May, according to
military reports.
The top Army rep in Iraq, Brig Gen Mark Kimmitt, acknowledged that
trend in a briefing on Tue, saying, "The overall number of attacks is
going down. That is not, sadly, stopping the number of casualties."
But when asked about the subject again on Fri, Kimmitt seemed to
reverse course. "As we've had a corresponding reduction in attacks,
there has been a corresponding reduction in killed in action as well,"
he said.
Told that the numbers in Jan suggest otherwise, Kimmitt disputed that
finding, saying: "I'm not going to get into a debate about the numbers."
In fact, an analysis of combat-related deaths showed that 40 US
soldiers were killed in Jan, second only to Nov's total of 69. The Nov
numbers were inflated by the downing of three helicopters with heavy
casualties, which added 39 deaths. If not for the catastrophic nature
of those crashes, Jan would be the deadliest m since May.
The Knight Ridder analysis of the soldier deaths began with casualty
reports from the US Central Command, and was compared to a database
that records releases from both Central Command and the US Dept of
Defence. When there were discrepancies between the 2, the names of
the soldiers in question were cross-referenced with Press reports of
deaths and funeral services.
There were also some instances where a soldier was seriously wounded
in action, and later died of those injuries. When it was not possible
to determine the date of the actual incident, the date of death was recorded.
Because the military has not made a definitive report of the deaths
public, there is some uncertainty about the numbers, which vary among
media agencies and other organisations.
For example, the total number of deaths recorded in Knight Ridder's
report was 255, 6 more than that of the Associated Press. The
discrepancies, however, are not large enough to alter the trend toward
increasing combat deaths.
Another US military rep in Baghdad, Col Bill Darley, said earlier this
wk that the smaller number of attacks has not correlated to fewer body bags.
"Here's the bottom line. There's a decrease in attacks, but I think
it's fair to say that the effective potency of the attacks that are
going on has been maintained," he said. "We have observed the same
number of coalition casualties as before."
Military cmdrs have given no explanation for the rising death toll,
but have said in the past few wk that they think the terrorist
organisation al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters are trying to make
serious inroads.
"They bring a different degree of expertise. And like anything else,
it's a different enemy tactic," Kimmitt said. "We just have to learn
what those tactics, techniques and procedures are, so that we can
fight them and beat them."
While US officials have continued to say publicly that the country is
headed for success, the concrete walls and concertina wire have been
rising higher and higher, especially in the capital. The entrance of
the HQ of the US-led coalition, which was recently bombed, now has 2
new guard towers and an even more complex set of barriers.
UN seeks to break impasse in Iraq
NY (Still The BBC). Pres Bush said the the UN had a "vital role" UN
Sec-Gen Kofi Annan has confirmed he will send a team of experts to
Baghdad to advise on the hand-over of political power in Iraq.
After meeting US Pres George W Bush, Mr Annan said he was sending a
team to Iraq to "break the impasse" over the American handover plan.
The Bush Admin wants to hand over to a transitional Iraqi govt
selected by regional meetings.
But Iraq's Shia majority wants direct elections to take place this y.
Mr Annan said the US-led coalition and the interim Iraqi Admin had
agreed to accept the UN team's findings.
After the meeting Pres Bush said that "the UN does have a vital role"
in Iraq.
Mr Annan acknowledged "some disagreement" over how to establish a
provisional govt in Baghdad.
He said his team would aim to overcome that problem.
"Everyone agrees that sovereignty should be handed over to Iraq as
soon as possible," Mr Annan told reporters.
"The date of 30 Jun has been suggested, but there is some disagreement
as to the mechanism for establishing the provisional govt.
"We've discussed ways to make sure that, by working together, the
Iraqi people can be free and the country stable and prosperous and an
example of democracy in the Middle East. And the UN does have a vital
role there."
* Sidelined
The US is hoping the UN can persuade the Shias that there is simply
not enough time to organise elections by Jun.
But Mr Annan has already made it clear that the UN wants assurances
that any team it sends to Iraq will be fully protected.
It pulled out its internat'l staff last y after a huge bomb attack on
the UN HQ in Baghdad killed more than 20 people.
It was also sidelined over the reconstruction of Iraq by the Bush Admin.
Water and life slowly return to the vast wetlands of Iraq
Hawr-al-Hawizah Marsh, Iraq (KRT/Seattle Times). Hanum Ghayyad spends
his days hacking down papyrus reeds. It takes nearly a day of hard
labour to fill his narrow boat with the fresh green stalks favoured as
feed for water buffalo. The load will fetch about $2, scant income for
this father of 8.
Ghayyad is not complaining. After 2 decades of relocation in distant
camps, he savours his time on the water. "This is the best my life has
been in years. Before, I was suffocating."
Ghayyad is a Marsh Arab, tribal people who for 5,000 y lived in the
inland waterways of SE Iraq that lap along the border with Iran.
The area ranks as the Middle East's greatest wetland and in past
centuries stretched across 11,000 km, an area far larger than the
original Florida Everglades. It is a refuge of internat'l significance
for migratory birds, and once was home to as many as 500,000 people,
some of whom built their homes on small floating islands formed of
woven reeds.
Over the past half-century, most of the Marsh Arabs were uprooted as
the Iraqi govt drained and dyked nearly 90% of the marshland in what
internat'l observers rank as a human tragedy and environmental
disaster of global importance.
Saddam Hussein's regime did much of the damage, forcibly relocating
10s of 1000s, killing others and prompting 1000s more to flee to Iran.
Today, the Marsh Arabs are a people scattered. Some live in exile in
Iran, others in camps or in the cities of S Iraq.
As many as 70,000 stayed in or nr the marshes. And others are
beginning to return as recently breached dikes and dams begin to
expand the remnant waterways.
The Iraqi Army helped a little. As soldiers retreated last y from
Basra, they blew up a road that had held back marsh water, according
to a UN memorandum. More recently, Iraqi engineers have rerouted river
flows into the marshes. The Marsh Arabs themselves have taken picks
and shovels to open additional waterways into the marsh.
In the channel that runs along Ghayyad's village, the water is rising.
The village is in a stark setting on drained land, devoid of trees,
grass or a functioning school. It's a mudhole in winter, and as the
weather warms, mosquitoes savage anything that moves. The land is
littered with un-exploded ordnance.
Yet several thousand people of the Ma'dan tribe live there. A single
hut, built of mud and woven reeds, will support a dozen people or
more. Outside, chickens, sheep, donkeys and goats freely forage.
Saddam's regime dumped the villagers at this site in 2002 after ys
of shuffling the tribe through relocation camps. Their camp life was
part of a broader assault against the Marsh Arabs. In 1980, when Iraq
began a brutal eight-y war with Iran, it viewed the waterways as a
haven for the enemy.
Saddam flushed the marsh of people and water, opening the cleared land
up to agriculture and drilling, which tapped into rich underground oil
pools. The assault intensified post-1991, when the tribe joined in an
uprising against Saddam, resulting in mass executions, as well as
forced relocations.
Even when Saddam allowed the return of the Ma'dan tribe to the marsh,
the people were not free to resume their old ways. The govt restricted
their movements and demanded they stay out of prime fishing grounds
reserved for a high-ranking member of the govt's Baath Party who lived
in an inland villa. Those who violated the ban risked death.
"They shot my son, and he was just trying to get food for his family,"
said one villager. "He was 16 y old."
* * *
Today, the villagers are eager to see more and more water flushed into
the marshes.
But the question of how far to take the marsh restoration is a matter
of internat'l debate. Much of the drained land is now encrusted with
salt, concentrated through evaporation under the fierce summer
heat. So, some of the land would need to be flushed with huge volumes
of water to support freshwater life.
UN officials last y estimated that as much as 25 to 30% of the
original marshes could eventually be restored.
Last y, the US Congress cut a proposed $100 mn aid package for
marsh restoration. Aid groups -- largely funded by the United States
Agency for Internat'l Development, which has budgeted $4 mn for
marsh restoration and management -- also have stepped in to assist the
people. They include Pacific Northwest-based Mercy Corps, which has opened
an office in Al Amarah, a city of 300,000 that's 50 km to the W.
The office is led by Gordon Kindlon, a NYer who helped to organise war
protests in Manhattan. After the US invasion in Mar, he decided to
join in the reconstruction effort.
Kindlon is teamed up with Mike Nahhal, a Lebanese Christian who was
one of the few internat'l aid workers to work in Iraq under Saddam.
Between 1991 and 2001, Nahhal shuttled back to Beirut once a m to
visit his wife and 4 daughters. While working in Baghdad, he tried to
monitor the plight of Marsh Arabs but was never allowed to visit their
waterways.
Earlier this m, he got a 1st glimpse as he joined Ghayyad for a brief
marsh cruise. They travelled in a traditional boat known as a belem.
These craft used to be made of wood, but Ghayyad had found a cheaper
alternative -- thin but tough panels of fraying asbestos.
Ghayyad sat in the stern, paddling. They passed through a thicket of
slender reeds dotted with egrets, emerging into a surprisingly vast
lake stretching E toward the border zone with Iran. In biblical times,
this area was thought to be somewhere nr the original Garden of Eden,
and naturalists today would delight in its array of birds, fish and
mammals, including wild boar.
Nahhal, tucked into the bow, was content just to glimpse the watery
horizon. "Wow! Wow! Look at this," he exclaimed. "It is an ocean of
water. You don't see the end."
* * *
That same day, at a community meeting, the Marsh Arabs made it clear
that the marsh alone can no longer sustain them. Their children, for
ys, had been denied an education. They demanded books, a blackboard
and a teacher for a primary school built by Saddam but never opened.
They wanted electricity for fans to push away the bugs. And they
figured they'd better raise the dike along the channel so that the
rising waters wouldn't eventually flood their village.
The meeting was convened in a kind of tribal lodge. It was a spacious
hut, with a high ceiling supported by thick arching pillars made of
woven reeds. More than 40 men and boys crowded onto carpets spread
across the floor. Soon, they were all talking so loudly it was
difficult for anyone to be heard.
Few women dared to attend, let alone speak up. So the women were
invited to a 2nd meeting, which was organised by Cassandra Nelson, a
former Merrill Lynch VP who now works for Mercy Corps.
Nelson shooed away the men who wanted to monitor the meeting, and she
found that the women had plenty to say. They talked about the
difficulties of childbirth, pointing out that village midwives use
reeds to cut umbilical cords. They spoke of husbands who sometimes
beat them when they complain too much. But they did agree with the men
that education and electricity ranked as the village's top priorities.
* * *
Mercy Corps already has launched aid projects for Marsh Arabs who live
in a complex of run-down three-story apartments in nearby Al Amarah.
Even amid the urban landscape, you can see the influence of the old
ways. Woven reed walls create courtyards around bottom-floor
apartments. Ducks, donkeys and sheep roam outside. And these Marsh
Arabs have a tribal chief -- Sheik Adan Amer -- who leads his people
from within the cramped confines of a 3-room unit.
But the Al Amarah complex is a mess. Last fall, when Mercy Corps
workers 1st visited, the buildings were surrounded by moats of sewage
that reached up to the knees of barefoot children. "Never, even in
Pakistan and Afghanistan, did I see anything like that," Nelson said.
Mercy Corps is committing about $600,000 to help improve the situation.
Local contractors already have cleared away a lot of the sewage ponds
and are going to re-plumb the complex to connect to a central city system.
Inside the building, they tackled another big complaint: The stairs
were built without railings, and proved treacherous in frequent
blackouts. Over the ys, dozens of children had fallen off the
stairs and been seriously injured or killed. So within a few ms,
Mercy Corps had thick concrete sidewalls added to the 58 stairwells.
Now contractors will shore up the stairs, which might otherwise collapse.
If the marshes keep expanding, some of the older men in the apartment
complex may opt to leave the city and return home. Others no longer
dream of the vast water.
"The young men, they now have jobs, and are settled. They cannot
leave," said the Sheik Amer. "They cannot."
EU opposes case against Israel barrier
Brussels (AP). The European Union has written to the world court to
express its opp'n to the opening of legal action against the W Bank
security barrier that Israel is building, diplomats said Mon.
Although the EU repeated its criticism of the barrier, the 15-nation
bloc believes the problem needs a political, rather than legal,
solution and fears the court case could further harm peace efforts.
The EU message was delivered Fri to the Internat'l Court of Justice in
The Hague, Netherlands, by the Irish govt, which holds the EU's
rotating presidency, ahead of a court deadline for such submissions,
officials said on condition of anonymity.
The court is to begin hearings on the barrier project Feb 23. In
accordance with court rules, the EU's letter was not made public,
diplomats said.
Despite the move, EU officials repeated their criticism of the barrier
itself.
"You very well know our position on the wall -- it does not contribute
to peace," Javier Solana, the EU's foreign policy representative, told
reporters.
EU External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten said, "There is, I
think, no doubt between the (EU) member states about the damage which
the security fence is doing to the prospects for a solution."
Israel says the 700 km of fences, walls and trenches are needed to
protect against suicide bombers. The Palestinians say the structure
amounts to seizure of their land because parts of it cut into the W Bank.
With Palestinian backing, the UN General Assembly has sent the case to
the court for an advisory opinion. Israel argues that the world court
is not the proper forum for the issue. The US also opposes the court action.
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat criticised nations supporting
Israel's position.
"They don't respect internat'l law ... but rather follow in this
mentality, the mentality of racist actions," Arafat said after a
meeting of Christian leaders from Jerusalem.
Although the court's decision would be non-binding, Israel and the
Palestinians see the case as an important battleground for determining
the project's fate.
Solana met Mon with the Israeli and Palestinian authors of an informal
Middle E peace plan. He voiced EU support for the so-called "Geneva
Accord" drawn up in Dec by former Israeli Justice Min Yossi Beilin and
Yasser Abed Rabbo, his Palestinian negotiating partner.
"The initiative ... is timely, is important, and we would like to help
them as much as possible," Solana said.
Sharon's motives for Gaza pullout
Jerusalem (BBC). Settlers describe the pullout as a "betrayal" by
Ariel Sharon When Israel's PM Ariel Sharon announced a plan to
evacuate virtually all of some 7,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza, a
casual observer may have found grounds for optimism.
But it is not that simple.
The loudest voices of protest have come, naturally, from the settlers
themselves.
For many y Ariel Sharon has been known as the champion of the settlers.
He encouraged them, memorably, to populate every hilltop.
The settler representatives took to the airwaves in the wake of his
announcement to denounce the plan as madness, a betrayal, a
capitulation in the face of terrorism.
Others said the evacuation would never happen, that Mr Sharon was
simply doing a bit of political manoeuvring for the benefit of the
internat'l community.
And they have a point. Ariel Sharon agreed to freeze settlements and
remove smaller outposts as part of the US-backed peace road map.
He has only dismantled a handful of outposts.
* Cool reception
But the Palestinians should be delighted, shouldn't they?
For them the settlements are hated symbols of Israeli occupation and
those in Gaza in particular have come under frequent attack.
Some say Sharon is trying to divert attention from corruption claims.
Ariel Sharon has said he is working on the assumption that there will
be no Jews in Gaza in the future.
Palestinian officials say they will believe it when they see it. And
they distrust his motives.
An opinion poll published in an Israeli newspaper suggested that 59%
of Israelis support Ariel Sharon's plan.
But members of his own right-wing coalition govt do not.
He would have to get the approval of his own cabinet and the Israeli
parliament, the Knesset, before it could go ahead.
On Mon he survived a no-confidence motion by just a single vote.
The Israeli left, meanwhile, says the plan has been announced to
distract attention from a number of corruption investigations into
Ariel Sharon.
And the Whitehouse has not given the plan a warm reception.
Officials were quoted as saying they will see how compatible it is
with the peace road map backed by the internat'l community.
* Unilateral moves
So what is his motive?
In Dec Ariel Sharon announced that unless the Palestinians clamped
down on violence, he would abandon the road map and instead begin the
unilateral disengagement of Israel from Palestinian territory.
In other words, Israel would impose its own borders with the
Palestinians, without negotiation.
And that would involve withdrawing from Gaza and the W Bank those
settlements which Israel can least afford to protect.
Later this m he is widely expected to brief Pres Bush in Washington on
his plans. And Israel's deputy PM has said the evacuation of some
settlements could begin this summer.
The Palestinians say they will not allow Israel to dictate which land
they can keep.
They see the construction of Israel's new barrier as an attempt to
impose a border that in many places goes far into Palestinian
territory, diminishing the size of any future Palestinian state.
What Ariel Sharon sees as a possible solution, they see as a reason to
continue the intifada.
Arafat gets a thrashing
[Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz snr correspondent on Palestinian affairs,
is the author of "The Mystery of Arafat].
"Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography" by Barry Rubin and Judith Colp
Rubin, Continuum, 354 pages, $11.
Book Review (Haaretz). In this well-documented but factually sloppy
biography of the Palestinian leader, everything he does is linked in
some way to Israel. Hence it is impossible to write about him while
ignoring Israeli policy -- but the authors often do.
In the last paragraph of their biography of Palestinian Authority
Chairman Arafat, Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin sum up their
protagonist as follows: "This was the ultimate irony of his life:
Arafat, the man who did more than anyone else to champion and advance
the Palestinian cause, also inflicted y of unnecessary suffering on
his people, delaying any beneficial redress of their grievances or
solutions to their problems."
While they begin by praising Arafat, as it were, for devoting his life
to his people's struggle, they end by damning him for his actions,
which have done nothing but harm. Indeed, harsh criticism of Arafat's
political path and a negative portrait of his personality are the crux
of this book.
Arafat has been the subject of over 10 biographies and the leading man
in dozens, if not 100s, of books on the Middle E and the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nearly everyone who has written about
Arafat has taken a stand. Some have portrayed him sympathetically and
others have been fiercely critical.
Perhaps the best and most objective of these to date is Andrew Gower
and Tony Walker's "Behind the Myth: Arafat and the Palestinian
Revolution," published in 1990. Of the books that condemn Arafat, the
Rubin study is the most detailed indictment (if one discounts the 1st
Arafat biography, written in 1976 by Thomas Kiernan with the help of
the Israeli Foreign Ministry, where the obvious objective was to
blacken his name and there are more errors than truth).
Despite an abundance of footnotes and an impressive bibliography, this
book is also marred by mistakes. The authors write, for example, that
Arafat's mother was a member of the Husseini family, which is not
true. She was from another Jerusalem family: the Abu Sauds. They write
that Abd al-Qader al-Husseini, the admired cmdr of the Palestinians in
the War of Independence, was a nephew of the mufti, Haj Amin, which is
also untrue. They are from different branches of this large clan.
* Unforgivable mistakes
The book is laden with sloppy factual errors: The Sinai Campaign began
on Oct 26, 1956 -- not in Sep. The terrorist attack in Kiryat Shmona
did not take place in Dec 1974, but in Apr of that y, and the
number of dead was not 52, but 18 -- and the list goes on.
On top of that, there are certain mistakes that are unforgivable in
the work of such respected researchers. They claim, for example, that
Arafat's "frequent insistence that a Palestinian state already existed
and that he was its president showed either a failure to understand
the peace process's terms of refusal to abide by them."
By way of explanation, they offer this footnote: "The Oslo agreement
defined Arafat's title as 'chairman,' not president."
The reason for making an issue over this particular matter, which is
perhaps not that important, is that anyone who has studied the Oslo
agreement, however briefly, knows that the ongoing point of contention
between the parties was over Arafat's title as head of the Palestinian
Authority. The official document is in English, and the Palestinians
insisted that Arafat be called "president." The Israeli delegates,
however, were adamant that "chairman" was enough.
A clever compromise was to leave Arafat's title in Arabic --
transliterated in the document as "ra'ees." Appendix 2 reads:
"Elections will be held for the Council, and simultaneously for the
ra'ees of the Executive Authority."
Why did they choose to leave the title in Arabic? For the simple
reason that "ra'ees" means both president and chairman. Many people
may recall how Bill Clinton, then US president, was careful to address
Arafat as "Mr Ra'ees" when he visited Gaza in Dec 1998. To all those
present at the convention hall in Gaza, it was clear that he was
sticking to the wording which had been agreed upon at Oslo. Therefore,
when the authors of this biography state that according to the Oslo
agreement, Arafat was the chairman and not the president, and then
proceed to accuse him of duplicity, they are simply wrong.
I think pointing this out is important because finding subjects in
which Arafat deserves to be castigated is no problem at all,
especially the political acrobatics, conniving tricks and wise-guy
tactics that are deliberately meant to deceive. So why invent falsehoods?
Arafat does get a thrashing in this book. The authors portray his
lengthy political career as a series of blunders, poor judgement and
lack of understanding. Arafat emerges from their analysis as a
treacherous and moody man, a terrorist who has never repudiated
violence and is responsible for the appalling bloodshed of the past
ys. They see him as a tyrant who encourages vice and corruption,
and insinuate that his brand of terrorism served as a model for bin Laden.
The question that arises from such a description of Arafat is how he
has managed to survive and win the hearts of the Palestinians. If he
is such a despicable creature and has made every mistake in the book,
why do his people continue to trust him? Are the Palestinians so
helpless and blind that they can't see what a terrible leader he is?
The Rubins are endlessly critical of Arafat, but their criticism is
often misguided. They harp on what a grievous mistake it was to
support Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War and the m leading up to it
(1990-1991), but they do not mention that King Hussein of Jordan
adopted that same policy. This ought to have been mentioned because
both the PLO and Jordan paid a heavy price for their backing of the
Iraqi leader when the war was over. But the truth is, they probably
didn't have much choice. The Palestinians on both sides of the Jordan
enthusiastically supported Saddam and the annexation of Kuwait, and if
Arafat or King Hussein had taken a different line, who knows if they
would still be in power.
* Temper tantrum
The authors continue to lash out at Arafat elsewhere in the book,
again letting King Hussein off the hook. This time, the issue is the
release of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from an Israeli jail.
The Rubins write that Arafat demanded Yassin's release, which is
correct, and that Yassin was welcomed in Gaza with hugs and kisses,
which is also correct. Then they go on to say that liberating Yassin
led to an increase in Hamas terror, which is hard to disagree with.
The problem with this account lies in what it doesn't say, which is
that the release of Yassin was orchestrated not by Arafat but by King
Hussein, who insisted that Israel let Yassin go in return for the
Mossad agents captured in Amman during the botched attempt to
assassinate Khaled Meshal.
At the time, the papers were full of reports about Arafat having a
temper tantrum and screaming at the cabinet meeting in Ramallah upon
being told that Yassin was being freed as a gesture to the king of
Jordan. So if Arafat was so upset about the circumstances of Yassin's
release, how can he be accused of ingratitude to Israel and of
ordering a new wave of terrorism in response?
The authors' negative attitude toward Arafat is more or less
explained, but there is never a bad word about Israeli policy. Their
account of the Sabra and Chatila affair (during the Lebanon War) is as
follows: "On Sep 16, 1982, receiving word of the presence of armed
Palestine Liberation Organisation units in Sabra and Chatila, the
Israel army permitted 300 Christian militiamen to enter the camps."
Later on they write that the consequences were horrifying, but that
"Arafat's response was to inflate the number of victims." The Rubins'
account of the incident would seem to imply that the Israel Defence
Forces made a mistake based on mis-info, but Arafat is blamed for
exaggerating the casualty reports.
Likewise, the book makes no mention of settlement activities in Gaza
and the W Bank. Not a word is said about the Baruch Goldstein massacre
in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, which many believe was a
turning point in the fate of the Oslo Accords. True, this is a
biography of Arafat, but everything he does is linked in some way to
Israel. Hence it is impossible to write about him while ignoring
Israeli policy.
According to this biography, Arafat's men may have helped carry out
the Shi'ite suicide bombing of the Marine HQ in Beirut that killed 241
American soldiers, and one of the most wanted Al-Qaeda terrorists,
Lebanese-born Imad Mughniyah, sprang from Arafat's midst, after
serving in his personal security unit, Force 17. Thus the Rubins drop
some heavy-handed hints that Arafat is responsible, not only for
Israel's troubles, but much more.
No one knows how long Arafat will continue to lead the Palestinian
people. In view of the political path he has chosen, he is obviously a
bitter enemy of Israel, and he has made his share of mistakes, but
those who go overboard and blame him for all our troubles today would
do well to watch what they say. Arafat's heirs could be a lot worse.
EU foreign policy chief lauds Geneva sponsors
Brussels (Haaretz). The European Union's foreign and security policy
chief Javier Solana yesterday commended the initiators of the Geneva
Accord, saying the document is in keeping with the road map and could
help to push it forward.
Solana spoke after meeting former Israeli justice minister Yossi
Beilin and former Palestinian Authority minister Yasser Abed Rabbo in
Brussels. Also present at the meeting were European Commission Pres
Romano Prodi and EU Commissioner for External Affairs Chris Patten.
"I think the Geneva initiative is perfectly compatible with the road
map and in fact I think it may help not only to implement it but to
resolve its last phases. I do not think it is fair to say there is a
contradiction," Solana said.
Beilin and Abed Rabbo then proceeded to London, where they met Prime
Min Tony Blair, For Sec Jack Straw and snr officials in Blair's
bureau. Blair later issued a statement praising the Geneva
initiative. 3 m ago, Blair said it could serve as a basis for a final
settlement between the sides.
Beilin and Abed Rabbo also appeared at a special session of the
Internat'l Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Diplomatic sources said they believed Blair's envoy to the Middle
East, Lord Michael Levy, whose son Daniel is Beilin's assistant, was
involved in setting up the meetings in 10 Downing Street.
Outbreak of violence in the W Bank
Bethlehem (Sapa-AFP). 5 Palestinians, 2 of them militant leaders,
were shot dead in clashes with the Israeli army nr the W Bank town of
Bethlehem. 5 soldiers were wounded in the incident, sources on both
sides said.
A local leader of the Islamist Hamas movement was shot dead and 4
Israeli soldiers injured during a military operation in Aida refugee
camp near the W Bank town of Bethlehem, Palestinian and Israeli
security sources said.
Palestinian security sources said 28-yo Mohamed Mahmud Abu Awda, a
local leader of Hamas's armed wing, the Ezzedine al-Qassam Brigades,
had been killed in a shootout with Israeli troops in the camp.
The army charged in a statement that he had planned the suicide bombing
on a Jerusalem bus last Thu that killed 11 passengers, apart from the
bomber, and had in the past recruited several candidates for such attacks.
Israeli medical and security sources said 4 soldiers had also been
wounded in the arrest operation, 2 of them seriously. A 3rd was in
stable condition, while the 4th was only lightly injured.
Palestinian sources said a 20-yo man was also lightly injured by
Israeli gunfire during the operation, which ended after Israeli troops
demolished Awda's house.
Earlier, more than 2 000 Palestinians, among them armed militants,
took to the streets of Rafah in the S Gaza Strip to attend the
funerals of 4 Palestinians killed during a dawn raid by Israeli troops.
Yasser Abuleish, 26, a local leader of the radical Islamic Jihad
movement, and his 38-yo brother Hussein were killed when troops raided
their house in Rafah's Hay al-Sultan neighbourhood