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Waiting for the storm in Baghdad
NBC NEWS
BAGHDAD, March 25 -- Journalist Peter Arnett, one of the last reporters affiliated with an American news organization still in Baghdad, says he does not fear for his personal safety, despite the U.S.-led bombing raids and the possibility of street fighting. But Arnett says if U.S. troops are forced to battle block by block in the Iraqi capital, they will receive a very hostile reception from average Iraqis.
ARNETT, 68, WHO IS reporting from Baghdad for NBC, MSNBC and National Geographic Explorer, answered questions by telephone for an hour Tuesday from reporters around the U.S. Below is an edited transcript of the conversation.
How will U.S. forces be greeted in Baghdad? You have to look at what has happened so far in the conflict to make a judgment. Iraqi officials are glorying in the fact that there has not been an explosion [of Iraqis against Saddam Hussein] so far. Tariq Aziz last night talked about how somebody at the Pentagon said the Americans would be welcomed into Iraq with music and flowers -- he said it would be bullets that would greet them. As far as Baghdad people are concerned, I spent a lot of time prior to the war talking to them… They said, "What can we do?" We're talking about people who don't have guns in their houses. What you'll have is passive acceptance. Will it be a situation like in Palestine against the Israelis? I don't think so. There's no history of that here of that kind of antagonism. If by some miracle some political arrangement was done without fighting, conceivably Americans could come in and they would say "Hey, how are you doing?" This is a town of business people and educated folks. But if they have to fight their way in and the buildings are demolished and there are dead in the streets, there will be no flowers and music for the Americans.
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Have you been threatened on the street? Do you feel you are in danger? I haven't had one shred of indication that I'm unwelcome here and I move around the city during the day, I get out with my team. You have several scores of antiwar protesters from around the world here, from Japan, Denmark, Scandinavians, quite a few Americans… there's a real animosity from them toward the U.S. but I don't take it personally. But there are no Iraqis around the Palestine hotel shouting anti-American sentiments. This does not mean to say that sooner or later as the battle for Baghdad develops, that there won't be danger for journalists. But right now if you have a minder with you, you are safe.
Are you worried about working from the Information Ministry Building? Since I got here six weeks ago, it has been rumored that the Information Ministry was going to be a prime target of the Pentagon. Last Friday just before "shock and awe," one news organization called and said, "The Information Ministry will be destroyed at 8 o'clock." The Info ministry people are furious. They say this is a serious, civilian operation. There are 100 journalists in town, a lot of them Arabs, along with a handful from the U.S., and some from Europe. Today I've broadcast a couple of live shots for the "Today" show from the roof of the building -- I was the only reporter on the roof. I believe the U.S. government won't target that building, certainly while journalists are there. Maybe they'll do it at 4 in the morning.
What's the difference between now and the first Gulf War? The big difference now is that every day of bombing brings a massive American ground force toward Baghdad. The first Gulf War was a different game. There was intense bombing for the first few nights, then continuing bombing for the next 40 days or so. But reporters here traveled around the country, went to Basra, Mosul, Nasiriyah, checking out what was going on. But now, there's a battle coming right through the heart of Baghdad. As far as I'm concerned, the worst is yet to come. Before "shock and awe," we were waiting with trepidation. It was horrendous, thunderous and frightening, but it was all half a mile away and there were very few casualties other than those who remained in those buildings.
Today, four days beyond that, there's not really been a bomb dropped since in Baghdad, but we know there are bombs to the south directed at the Republican Guards who will try to stop the powerful American force. Then there will be changes in this city that are totally unpredictable. The bombing we can handle. But in Gulf War II there's another whole prospect of street fighting and government change. It will be dangerous but an incredibly exciting story to cover.
I'm relying on the Iraqi authorities to be with us. Their being with us is a guarantee of our safety. They play a protective role.
I personally have been in quite a few cities where there has been mayhem. I was in Beirut, in Saigon during the Tet offensive, in Chechnya. I got through those and I think a lot of the journalists here will get through them too.
Do the people of Baghdad have any idea what's coming? They don't have a sense of what is to come. What you see on Iraqi television is patriotic dirges or biographies of Saddam Hussein, or maybe press conferences by Iraqi officials or material from the battlefield -- such as the capture of the American prisoners. But they are not aware really that this city will be invested by an American invasion. They are tuned to Arab broadcasts. But the enormity of an American occupation … Americans are actually going to be coming into this city and be sitting at intersections in tanks with a four-star American general in charge.
This is a city that has known suffering. They are inured to it in a way, they hunker down in their houses. They're frightened of it but they adjust to it. People are out in their front yards right now, they go to the corner store and hunker down with their families and say this too will pass. "Inshallah" -- It's in the hands of God… Whatever happens, he will take care of it and that's it.
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What kind of censorship are you under in your reports? This time around, they are requiring no censorship at all but what they do require is for us to attend a morning press conference or press briefing every morning.
I'm sitting here on the hotel phone. We can talk on the phone freely. The Iraqi officials may be monitoring it on some capacity, but I've never been asked about any conversation I've had or report I've given in the month I've been here. There's been no attempt to interfere with what I was saying, no attempt to monitor the news packages I was putting out.
The reason they're fairly relaxed is that they're not giving access to any locations except those that are newsworthy, which means locations where civilians have been affected by the bombing campaign, or to news conferences. We do have a minder so we can go and talk to families to ask them how they are getting along as the war progresses, and the minders are listening so these people are obviously going to frame their answers with that in mind.
Satellite phones are restricted to use in the information ministry but occasionally, such as after the Tariq Aziz press conference last night, they said we could have limited use in the hotel. In terms of live coverage on camera, it has to be done at the ministry. In terms of shooting pictures, we're allowed to shoot with the minder wherever we're taken to. But just can't get in a taxi and take pictures of the city.
Of course you have no embedded reporters with the Republican Guards, and I would not volunteer for that role. But I think we have a good opportunity to see all of the action without being impeded by Iraqi officials. I predict as things progress, there will be less and less visibility by Iraqi officials. We should be freer to talk with the families we are following. If we can survive the next few weeks, it will be an interesting journalistic picture.
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What do you think about disinformation on both sides? Saddam said we can hold the U.S. in place and force them to retreat. You have to accept that, since they're trying to build the spirit of their people. As far as Um Qasr, they were restraining the U.S. to some degree, so they're getting as much pride as they can out of it.
Another point -- the conduct of Iraqi soldiers. The U.S. media is portraying the Iraqis as unfair fighters, fighting unethically -- how can you take your uniform off and put on civilian garments and go and shoot someone. It strikes me we're looking at a guerilla war operation here. Months ago the Iraqis were telling me, when the Americans come they may get through us, but they're going to pay, we will use every way we can to kill them, we will kill them. What an Iraqi feels is a brave and noble act and what the Americans feel is a brave and noble act depends on the point of view. The type of war the Iraqis are waging is portrayed as unacceptable. But there have been three major B-52 strikes all around the perimeter of the city. One of the Iraqi officials said to me, "The Americans talk about weapons of mass destruction that we now have, but what about the B-52s?" They have destroyed in 10 minutes what Saddam spent 30 years building.
Does you believe embedded reporters are a good tthing? When you're with troops, I don't think you can get away with a lot of patriotic rubbish. You've got to tell the truth because the troops know the reality. Beyond all of the patriotism, the real reality is when you're riding in the back of a vehicle and getting shot at. Reporters are reflecting that on the front line. To that degree I am impressed with the embedding process.
Is there a danger that embedded reporters are just giving us a snapshot of what's going on ? The only way you can do it is get a snapshot -- the big picture is back at headquarters. But a lot of snapshots will add up. You get those snapshots and then you can start interpreting through your own vision of what's going on.
What did you pack that you didn't need? In the gulf war, on the first night, all of the power and water went down, all the telephones went down. Suddenly we were in the hulk of a hotel that didn't work. You needed everything. You couldn't get laundry done, you had to eat crackers and cheese. There are rooms here filled with thousands of bottles of water and all sorts of crackers and cheeses and as it turned out so far, the utilities have held up perfectly. You can go to the restaurant downstairs and have breakfast or go to one or two restaurants around town still open where you can get decent kabab.
How are you holding up? It is a long day, it's an eight-hour time difference. You get up and go to the Information Ministry and go on trips. But it's 3 p.m. here before the "Today" show starts. By the time "Nightly News" comes on it's 2:30 in the morning and "Dateline" is at 6 in the morning. You could spend 24 hours a day easily gathering news and dispensing it. And I did that -- me and my team did that -- for the first four days. I was on the phone at 4 a.m. with Tom Brokaw and could say the sirens were sounding and from then on for four days I don't think we got 40 winks. But since then, the schedule has been more reasonable.
How much are you being charged for the hotel room? The Palestine hotel is charging $40 a day, the al Rashid was about $80 a day, but it was a little better quality. The hotel rooms are seedy and sort of noisy. I can hear someone in the next room reporting to his home office. But I'm not complaining. We have a great view across the river. From this room here, these few rooms here, we were half a mile away… it was the perfect vantage point.
:: Sunday, December 22, 2002 ::
The Iraqi "Opposition Groups" have met and made plans for a post-Saddam Iraq.
I feel so much more relaxed now. My future is in good hands. Excuse me while I jump around and celebrate this.
.....According to **opposition members**, Washington wants the opposition to enhance its credibility without growing too independent, so that the United States controls Iraq's political future yet has a legitimizing Iraqi partner ready in the wings in case one is needed after any invasion.
man this is way too funny, the way everyone is so blatant about it. at least try to be a bit discreet. No need for that eh?, just a bunch of stupid arabs there, they won't notice the threads moving these puppets.
There were American officials on hand to monitor the conference, cajoling its leaders in private to meet the goals set by Washington while ensuring that they did not overstep the American-drawn boundaries
how does anyone expect that this is meeting is of any meaning or importance. the whole affair was a mess. the speeches made were embarrassing and the fighting over each party's position in this meeting was even more so (just in case anyone starts having "hey this dude is no way in baghdad, how can he watch and hear this" thoughts. I am risking a hefty $350 fine and possible prison for having sat.tv) . very early on a kurdistani sunni group threatened to withdraw from the meeting if sunni Kurds were not represented in this meeting, but nobody cared because the american organizers of this meeting (headed by Zalmay Khalilzad) had no intrest in that bunch of fools.
The result of the four days was a 25 recomendations document full of hot air dictated by the US (link to document in arabic, could not find a translation of the whole declaration in english). It does say in paragraph two that the groups appreciate, or welcome (depends how you want to translate it) the help of the international community for supporting the iraqi people in helping them end the dictatorial regime and their help in rebuilding Iraq, BUT refuse any political intervention in future iraqi affairs. I say bullshit. Let's assume they are independent enough to make their own decisions, how do they expect that anyone would give them a free lunch?
-Here, let us send you huge military backing, risk the lives of our people, spend huge amounts of money just because we like you.
If you're going to ask for favors, you'll have to give something in return. and that's a mighty big favor you're asking. But since we know they are not really that independent, and everything said in that declaration would have to be approved by the American minders first. that paragraph means nothing just like the rest of the meeting, speeches and final recomendations.
.....several senior members of some of the largest groups said privately that such statements were largely political posturing because none of the opposition groups wants to be seen as an American patsy.
poor deluded fools. seen as patsy? you ARE a patsy.
The only good thing I heard during the 4 day charade was this:
After pressure from the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (CMM), the plans envisage a referendum on whether the country should remain a republic, or restore the monarchy which was overthrown in 1958.
It is not that I particularly like the Constitutional Monarchy Movement (Raed: do me a favor check the link and tell me if there is anything worth reading, my access to it is blocked). The CMM and INC (Iraqi National Congress headed by Ahmad Chalabi) are the main puppets in the american game. see this nice photo of both of them with Under Secretary of State Thomas R. Pickering in 1999 (chalabi in the middle and king wannabe Ali bin Sharif Al Hussein on the right). here is another mugshot of Ali bin Sharif Al Hussein.
In fact Al Sharif Ali's speech in meeting was one of most embarrassing. he is the best example why I say the Iraqi Opposition groups outside Iraq are so out of it. This person who wants to be the head figure of my country can't even speak my language. he stammered and stuttered, pronounced the words as he has never seen arabic before. I was wondering whether he was reading an english transcribtion of the arabic words because they sound so wrong. He has never set foot in Iraq. Was suddenly interested in the future of this country in 1993, no one heard of him or cared about him before that. Anyway, I had a point, this is not it.
I have decided if that Referendum ever happens I will vote for a constitutional monarchy. Beside having acquired a lifetime allergy of the word President. I think a Monarch who doesn't have much say will do less harm than a president who has to fight for his position every couple of years and once there wouldn't want to leave. This might be wrong but somehow I think if we did actually reach a point where we have a multi-party system it will be better to have to deal ministers and opposition groups than a single egomaniac. oh I don't know.. I just don't want to have to say the word President for a while so give us that wimp from the CMM, better still give us Prince Ra'ad bin Zaid bin Al Sharif Al Hussein. That would be good, at least he IS Iraqi and, been living in Jordan not like that Ali, spending his time in decadant western cities and speaks Arabic.
:: salam 10:42 AM [+] ::
Guiding Principles
for
U.S. Post-Conflict Policy
in Iraq
Report of an Independent Working Group
Cosponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations
and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University
Edward P. Djerejian and Frank G. Wisner,
Co-Chairs
Rachel Bronson and Andrew S. Weiss,
Project Co-Directors
KEY RECOMMENDATIONS
Given the above analyses, the Working Group recommends:
• issuing official U.S. statements guaranteeing Iraqi sovereignty and territorial
integrity and the preservation of Iraq's full national ownership and control
over its resources;
• crafting a public diplomacy campaign that explains the need to secure oil
facilities and assures skeptical publics that the United States has no aims to
"take over" Iraqi oil assets;
• ensuring that the U.S. military has the requisite information to identify the
assets that could, if severely damaged or destroyed during military hostilities,
substantially delay resumption of the Iraqi oil export program;
• de-politicizing and preserving the UN oil-for-food distribution mechanism in
order to handle oil export programs during hostilities and immediately
thereafter;
• drawing on UNSCR 1284 to help Iraqis rationalize their oil sector and develop
strategies to access foreign oil company assistance and investment;
• leveling the playing field for awarding energy sector contracts by supporting a
transparent and competitive tendering process;
• supporting the creation of an international consortium to work with Iraqi
industrialists and create a road map for the reconstruction and expansion of
Iraq's oil sector; and
• establishing a legal framework within the UN, as early as possible, to handle
claims by oil firms holding oil field contracts in Iraq to prevent lawsuits from
delaying future development.
TIMELINE
THE THREE-PHASED APPROACH
Short-Term Medium-Term Long-Term
Emergency Transitional
Government with Iraqi Advisers
Internationally and UN- Supervised Iraqi
Government
Sovereign Iraqi Government
Duration* Up to 2 months following cessation
of hostilities
3-24 months 2 years
Led by Commander U.S./coalition forces Iraqi leadership working closely with UN secretarygeneral
representative and senior U.S. deputy
Fully sovereign Iraqi leadership
Key
Security
Objectives
WMD disarmament
Implementation of cessation of
hostilities agreement
Establishment/maintenance of law
and order
Defense of Iraq's territorial
integrity: protection of borders/key
energy production centers
Deploy coalition forces to key
population centers
Finalization of arrangements for long-term
monitoring and dismantling of WMD capabilities
Internationally supervised re-training of Iraqi
military
Internationally supervised re-training of Iraqi police
force
Iraq free of WMD
No longer threatening neighbors
Routinization of WMD disarmament
monitoring programs
Consolation of Iraqi security
arrangements
Integration into international community
Key Economic
Objectives
Open/protect key lines of
communication and transportation
Staunch decreasing oil production,
led by Iraqi experts
Clarify existing oil production
agreements
Support the establishment of an Iraqi-led
international consortium to address Iraq's oil
industry needs
Support Iraqi efforts to reach pre-1990 oil
production level
Identification and prioritization of reconstruction
and rehabilitation projects
Reschedule foreign debt
Redesign formula for reparations
An economy based on free market
principles
A rehabilitated oil sector
Key
Governance
Objectives
Obtain UNSCR outlining post-
Saddam broad objectives
Continue close consultations with
Iraqi leaders inside and outside the
country
Identification and detention of
senior-most supporters of regime
Develop criteria for de-
Saddamization
Support removal of senior Ba'ath leaders (led by
Iraqis and international community)
Support resumption of government operations
Conduct census
Preparations of legal proceedings, with Iraqi and
international participation, for those accused of
crimes against humanity
Appointment of Iraqi Consultative Assembly
Preservation of internal cohesion/territorial integrity
A government based on democratic
principles
A government representative of Iraq's
diverse population
True power- and revenue-sharing
Upholding fundamental individual and
group human rights
An all Iraqi-led government
A more binding Iraqi constitution
28
Short Term Medium Term Long Term
Emergency Transition
Government with Iraqi Advisers
Internationally and UN- Supervised Iraqi
Government
Sovereign Iraqi Government
Key
Governance
Objectives
(cont.)
Lay groundwork for the assembly
of UN-supervised Iraqi interim
administration
Establish Iraqi advisory
committees throughout Baghdad
and provinces, to include members
of the external opposition
Distribution of humanitarian
assistance
Reconfigure oil-for-food
distributive mechanism
Resumption of basic services
Protection of refugees and control
of refugee flows
Local and parliamentary elections
Security Council resolution
acknowledging completion of the process
and allowing for full re-entry into the
international community
* The Working Group advocates pursuing an objectives-driven approach to Iraq. Achieving key objectives is more important than the estimated duration.
Note: All activity must be accompanied by an active U.S. public diplomacy campaign to explain to the Iraqi people and the international community what is
happening in Iraq along with U.S. objectives and intentions.
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Iraq_TF.pdf
==================================
Saturday, December 28, 2002 ::
Word of the day:
de-Saddamization
as seen on page 34 in the "Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy in Iraq" report published by the Council on Foreign Relations [CFR]
if you don't feel like reading the whole report just take a look at the last 3 pages, "the three phased approach" the paper suggests is outlined in a chart.
there is another interesting article on that site:
Reconstruction: A Checklist for Would-be Nation-builders in Baghdad After the Fall of Saddam
It is the gist of that 35 pages paper. Some of it sounds like the list my mother would have given my baby-sitter.
Go slow, but steady, on democracy.
Strengthen Ties that Bind.
Mind the neighbors.
Reconstruction: A Checklist for Would-be Nation-builders in Baghdad After the Fall of Saddam
By Joe Siegle, Kenneth M. Pollack
Newsweek Special Edition, Issues 2003, December 05, 2002
How Iraq is rebuilt will, to a great extent, depend on how Saddam Hussein is taken down. Consider three options. First, a military coup or an assassin's bullet. Would that alleviate the suffering of the Iraqi people-or our own problems with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction? Probably not. The reason is that Saddam's
tyranny pervades Iraqi society. Virtually all senior Iraqi officials are relatives, kinsmen or close compatriots who share his vision of a repressive, tightly controlled state. They have overseen the murder
of at least 200,000 Iraqis and the torture of several hundred thousand more. Saddam's 500,000-strong security apparatus has penetrated every Iraqi organization, where access to even basic necessities-food, housing and medicine-is a reward for loyalty. Advancement under such a system requires an extraordinary capacity for violence. Yet it is from these that a coup leader, with control of Iraq's weapons, would arise.
Another temptingly easy option is to install an interim government, possibly headed by a member of the Iraqi diaspora. This approach avoids the problem of "Saddamism without Saddam." But since we know little about what the Iraqi people want it would be dangerous to assume that they would accept such a government as legitimate. Moreover, it would lack the strength to rehabilitate Iraq's deeply corrupted bureaucracy. And its very fragility would invite a series of coups or territorial seizures by warlords. Iraq could slide into chaos and civil war.
The third and hardest option, in the short term, would be to establish a viable democratic government under international auspices. That would require an occupying ground force of 100,000 to 200,000 troops, to dispose of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and create the stability for a new political structure to take root. These military forces could be scaled back significantly after the first year or two, but a substantial contingent would have to remain for anywhere from three to 10 years, and possibly even longer. Even so, this is the only prospect for a stable Iraq at peace with its neighbors.
For a hint of what might be achieved (and how to go about it) we need not look far afield. In the decade since the Persian Gulf War, the Kurds of northern Iraq have lived in quasi independence with competitive
elections, a free press, a growing economy and basic civil liberties. Their example bolsters our optimism that the reconstruction of Iraq will be difficult but hardly impossible. Drawing on lessons from other recent reconstruction efforts-Afghanistan, Kosovo, Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia and East Timor, as well as Japan and Germany after World War II-we can suggest some useful steps:
l Involve the United Nations. Doing so will help temper feelings that an intervention was a U.S. imperialist crusade or a ruse to gain control over Iraq's oil wealth. In Kosovo and East Timor, the United Nations learned much about effectively administering such trusteeships.
l Create an oil-management board. Iraq's elites will vie for control of the country's $12 billion to $27 billion in anticipated annual oil revenues. They will favor an interim government precisely because they
could control it-and ultimately corrupt it. Establishing a transparent institution to equitably disburse Iraq's oil revenues could be the single most far-reaching contribution to the country's reconstruction.
l Reconstitute Iraqi institutions. Existing ministries are so thoroughly criminalized that, in rebuilding them, all but junior staffers should be quickly replaced. (In Haiti, as in various post-communist transitions, failure to cut out institutional rot allowed core problems to fester. And it was the rehabilitation of
Germany's and Japan's civil institutions that set the stage for their postwar recovery.) Saddam's extensive intelligence services, the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard, should be dissolved. Police must be made accountable to local municipalities rather than central authorities. Because it retained some degree of professionalism, the army may be the one Iraqi institution to enjoy any degree of credibility with the population. If it is reformed so that recruiting draws proportionately on all segments of society, it could serve as the core of a rehabilitated security force.
l Go slow, but steady, on democracy. The Baath Party's 35 years of totalitarian rule have left Iraq nearly devoid of independent civil organizations. Yet free speech; the ability to express and debate priorities; participation in civic and political organizations, and the popular accountability of government officials are indispensable to democracy. Creating the norms and institutions of civil society will take time and require massive efforts by international NGOs. It would be a mistake to rush prematurely into elections.
Doing so would merely return Iraq's old elites to power. Initial steps should include a constitution,
crafted by recognized Iraqi experts under the auspices of the United Nations, as the legal and democratic foundation to the new Iraqi state. Drafts should be popularly debated and approved by national referendum following a massive public-education campaign, along the lines of what was done in East Timor. Democracy should be built from the grassroots up.
Devolving political authority from Saddam's centralized system to local leaders would give ordinary Iraqis a greater say on issues affecting their daily lives, even as they remain under international administration . A model would be the gradual process employed by the United Nations in Kosovo, say, where self-government has been delegated in stages to municipal authorities over the past three years, the most recent stage being the successful elections in October. The experience gained in this manner would help prepare a new generation of democratic Iraqi leaders to run for regional and national office. If electoral jurisdictions were properly drawn, geographically, Iraqi politicians would have to appeal to a variety of ethnic and religious groups. This would help to knit together a federal Iraq.
l Strengthen Ties that Bind. While encouraging the devolution of power to regional and local levels, we should build up those institutions that would foster national cohesion and identity. In particular, maintaining a strong central role in the administration of Iraq's oil wealth would create an incentive for cross-ethnic collaboration. A professional national media will be indispensable to creating shared Iraqi images as well as enhancing the protection of minorities. Likewise, a new Iraqi state would greatly benefit from a strong central bank capable of regulating monetary policy, federal business and trade organs responsible for facilitating internal and external commerce, and a national army representative of the entire Iraqi populace.
l Mind the neighbors. As in Liberia or Rwanda, Kosovo or Cambodia, conflict tends to spill across borders. Iraq's neighbors will have legitimate security concerns, post-Saddam. Left unaddressed, Iraq could become a battleground as each seeks to increase its influence at the expense of others. In addition, radicals in Iran and Syria may see U.S. troops in the country as an attractive target for terrorist operations, like the 1983 attack on the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon. These potential threats call for aggressive political and economic measures that boost incentives for regional cooperation.
No one needs to be reminded that these are significant challenges. But it is also important to remember that Iraq has a number of critical assets. Its tremendous oil wealth is sufficient to fund a rapid rehabilitation-an advantage no previous nation-building effort has enjoyed. The Iraqi population is among the best educated in the Arab world. Although impoverished during the past decade, Iraq still possesses a large,
capable (and mostly secular) middle class. Given its strategic position as a crossroads and the fertile river basin of the Tigris-Euphrates, the Iraqi economy possesses major building blocks to generate employment and economic dynamism. Radical Islam is not a major draw in the country. Removing Saddam is likely to unleash a more positive dynamic: the Iraqi people's native entrepreneurism.
While it is tempting to equate regime change in Iraq with simply getting rid of Saddam, the reality is more complex. By understanding this, we can avoid substituting one set of problems for another.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pollack served on the National Security Council in the Clinton White House and is the author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. Siegle is the Douglas Dillon fellow at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.
Wednesday, March 12, 2003
kindly translated by Douglas Gillison, merci mon ami, c'est tres thoughtful of you.
http://www.lemonde.fr/article/0,5987,3230--312297-,00.html
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Afternoon with Saddam
Monday 10 March 2003
(LE MONDE)
With a wave of his right hand, Saddam Hussein interrupted the briefing by the head of the Cuban Army's intelligence services on the capacities of the American military forces that were on the verge of punishing the invasion of Kuwait. "I've had several reports like this one. My ambassador at the UN sends me them and most of the time they end up in there," he said, pointing to a marble trash bin.
The comment seemed rather for the benefit of the handful of Iraqi military leaders seated on one side of the long table covered in dates and flowers. The Cubans opposite them, myself included, who had been sent by Fidel Castro to attempt to convince his ally in Baghdad of the likely outcome of a war in the gulf, understood that our afternoon at Al Qadissiyya palace would be difficult.
It was at the very beginning of November 1990. Four months earlier, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait had shocked the world and worried distant Cuba. One of the island's allies was defying at once the Arab world, of which Saddam was part, the Iranians, the Turks, the Israelis and the West in general, in deploying a crushingly superior military against a little independent neighbor. An incongruous scenario, that offered unfortunate similarities to the fears that Cuba's own big neighbor caused.
At first, Cuban diplomacy decided to play the ostrich. After all, the Kuwaitis were only distant acquaintances. One more absolute monarchy rotting in a sea of petroleum. Not allied with, of course, but having a penchant for, the United States. Saddam, however, was an old friend.
At the heart of the Communist Party's central committee, there were several of us among the old negotiators drawn from among the Cuban troops of Angola who proposed, on the contrary, that we distance ourselves from Baghdad's latest adventure. Saddam had already put us in an awkward position: we had him to thank for a number of misunderstandings with the non-Islamic clientele of Cuban policy in the third world, as with his own Arab brothers. Not to mention the numerous opponents of Iraq's bloody variation on Baathism who had ended up on the end of a rope in the Square of the Hanged, among whom were almost all of the local Communists. We needed to separate ourselves from this business to preserve Cuba's fundamental interests.
The commander in chief decided to criticize the invasion. Cuba, a non permanent member of the UN Security Council, voted in favor of resolution 660 of August 2 condemning Iraq's actions. Toward the middle of Autumn, it became obvious that the prolonged occupation of the Emirate, which Baghdad viewed as its 19th province, and the determination of the United States, heading an unprecedented international coalition, were leading to war. A conflict that, according to Cuba, would only offer the chance for a humongous display of force by the victors of the Cold War. Moscow, whose star was fading, barely attempted to limit the damage of Iraq's misstep while avoiding irritating George Bush.
For Havana, where the economy that had hitherto been propped up by the socialist countries was now beginning its free fall, things couldn't be worse. Any means would be acceptable to avoid catastrophe, including a personal appeal to Saddam. This was an idea of El Comandante's: convince the Iraqi numero uno of the enormity of the military retaliation that was then being prepared, and of which Cuba was amply informed thanks to its sources that were still in the USSR.
The mission had to be discrete. It would be led by José Ramon Fernandez, vice president of the Ministerial Council. This career officer and old-hand of the revolution, a key figure in the battles against the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, enjoyed the total confidence of the Commander in Chief. Despite his Asturian origins, he was dubbed "El Gallego" (the Galician), a name the Cubans gave to all the Spanish. Rodrigo Alvarez Cambras, the surgeon who several years earlier had removed a tumor from Saddam's spine, earning him top appointments in medicine as well as politics, was naturally part of the delegation. His presence underscored the friendly, almost intimate nature of the trip.
As for me, beyond my new responsibilities in relations outside the central committee, I had the advantage of knowing the country and its leader well, after a long stay in the Middle East. In 1975, I was the only Cuban journalist to go with the Iraqi army through the rocky and frozen cordilleras of Kurdistan to the headquarters of mullah Mustafa Barzani, a victory that had consolidated Saddam's power over Iraq's ethnic and religious mosaic.
To deliver the presentation, Raul Castro chose the young colonel Jaime Salas, who was then at the head of army intelligence. Body guards, assistants, translators, and the chancellery's vice-minister for Arab affairs made up the rest of the delegation. Fidel's personal message to Hussein gathered all the reasons for not allowing Washington to seize the opportunity to exert global hegemony. The heaviest job fell to colonel Salas: with Gorbachev's consent, the Soviet military, who were informed of this mission, had compiled highly detailed descriptions of the forces deployed on the Arabian peninsula and in Turkey. The Soviet base Torrens, just outside Havana, collected copious amounts of electronic data emitted by Florida command centers and from all over North America. The Cuban military analysts, exhausted from the study of all the armed conflicts in which the United States had ever been involved, had added their appraisals. Fidel put the finishing touch on the message: four pages of reflections in a measured and cordial tone, with the help of the Gallego Fernandez, who was to present it to Saddam. Then the Cuban expert most knowledgeable on Soviet matters was charged with editing a Russian version, with the slight modifications intended to make it acceptable in Gorbachev's eyes.
Fidel Castro took leave of us late in the evening at his office in the Palace of the Revolution. He had examined the diagrams, maps and photographs in the military dossier and reviewed its arguments one by one. He emphasized the crucial nature of the mission and the personal risks we would encounter in entering, at his request, an Iraq already besieged by allied forces. He saw us as soldiers going off to war. Before bestowing an accolade on each of us, he had a discrete aside with Fernandez, to whom he gave a sealed envelope, slipping an arm around his shoulders. "For expenses," he said. "in case anything should happen." An agreement whispered among "Gallegos."
We set out for Madrid and then for Amman, flying first class on Iberia and then Jordan Airlines. Once in Amman, we were told that Saddam's private jet would take us as far as Baghdad. To travel on board such a conspicuous aircraft, tracked by hundreds of enemy coalition radar systems, was not he best option. But there was no other. Declining our hosts offer was unthinkable and flights into Iraq were forbidden by the sanctions that were already in place.
Saddam's impeccable jet landed softly that night at Saddam international airport and we were rapidly taken to the residence prepared for the Cuban mission. The waiting began. The following day, a first attempt by the Iraqis to obtain Fidel's message met with resistance from Gallego Fernandez, who then displayed talents worthy of his studies at the Fort Silk artillery school in Oklahoma: the letter would only be submitted and explained to its addressee. This absurd game of hide-and-seek lasted several days. In vain, Alvarez Cambras called on his numerous contacts in the Iraqi political machine to obtain an audience with Saddam. With no more success, I tried to meet with Tarik Aziz, whom I had known since that distant time when he headed a press agency. But Saddam alone decided on his the use of his precious time.
On the fourth day, our hosts invited us to pass the time by visiting Babylon, the reconstruction of which was among the regime's priorities. We traveled southward. While visiting the paths in which Saddam, ever the Nebuchadnezzar, had had his name engraved in the thousands of replicated clay bricks in new constructions, we were urgently recalled to Baghdad: the meeting would take place the following day.
That evening the delegation reviewed the subjects to be touched on one last time. Toward midday, our convoy left for an unknown destination. Juan Aldama, stationed in Baghdad the previous two years, recognized the route we were taking. We were being led to the president's favorite palace: Radwaniyah, also known as Al Qadissiyya. It was one of Aldama's last meetings with Saddam. After receiving his diploma the school for foreign affairs in Moscow, he had returned to Baghdad, his first posting, in the company of a charming Russian wife, the daughter of an important Soviet functionary. One Spring evening in 1991 he would fire a bullet into his temple from the Makarov pistol that he always kept on him. His suicide was never made public and remains unexplained to this day.
Al Qadissiyya palace is one of the presidential residences suspected of housing lethal weapons laboratories. Our convoy passed quickly through the security checkpoints before arriving at one of the modern Islamic style buildings. We crossed the length of a hallway lined with Samarkand ceramic tiles and interior patios with with splendid fountains in order to arrive at the room scheduled for the meeting. Saddam appeared, followed by a half dozen high ranking army officers in field dress as impeccable as their chief's. He greeted El Gallego with a scarcely amiable gesture and the latter introduced us in turn. Without going through the usual introductions, Saddam pointed to his retinue with a vague motion and invited us to be seated around a long table in the middle of the room.
El Gallego began to speak. Our conduct was based, he said, on the solid friendship between Iraq and Cuba, Saddam and Fidel. The damage that the conflict would cause the Iraqi government worried us, as did the benefit that the United States would have in displaying their military power. The Iraqi listened, impassive. Fidel's message was then submitted to its addressee who read it attentively, with no more reaction than two or three words muttered under his breath and several movements of the head that were difficult to read.
After the long presentation by El Gallego, Saddam's impatience was palpable. It was impossible to discern among his entourage the least sign of approval for the Cuban position. I understood I had to be brief. A diplomatic outcome remained conceivable. Among the series of emissaries in Baghdad, the Soviet diplomats were struggling not to abandon an Arab ally, which would have been a first. The USSR could be counted on for a last minute effort at the Security Council that China would sign on to. The representatives of the third world would stop at nothing to arrive at an honorable solution, on the condition that Iraq agree to retreat from Kuwait. Territorial claims could be reformulated another time. The support of Javier Perez de Cuellar, UN Secretary General and close friend of Havana, was a passkey for negotiation. The presentation on diplomatic options received no comment.
Colonel Salas then approached a blackboard where there was a carefully arranged display of diagrams, maps, photographs and charts. He described the various stages of American and allied deployment since the Fall and specified the characteristics of the troops. He pointed out the latest developments in desert and amphibious combat, the high degree of readiness, the adversary's estimated strengths. He identified the points where the different units were concentrated, the foreseeable operations and likelihood of concerted action. He made a particularly overwhelming enumeration of the enemy's powerful weapons including many that would be used for the first time. The colonel spoke of a technological war, of multiple-head Tomahawk missiles that could be launched from the Red Sea of the Persian Gulf, of Apache antitank attack helicopters, of B-52 bombers, of the new F117 A Stealth fighters, undetectable to radar, Awacs command systems that would simultaneously orient hundreds of aircraft in combat, Patriot missiles, Abrams tanks equipped with 120 millimeter cannons, new GPS systems, unmanned aircraft and other smart weaponry, in addition to which there were those of US allies, all of which would assure that this war resembled no other.
The even-handed but invaluable comparison with the Iraqi forces made Saddam lose his patience. Though he had remained unmoved before the description of the capacity for resistance of his infantry, that numbered fewer than a million men, 7,000 tanks and many fewer pieces of artillery, as soon as the colonel began to describe the manifest air superiority of the enemy, Saddam ended the presentation.
After having shown us in a grave manner the place were diplomatic reports such as the one he had just heard would crash, he began a diatribe over the colonial injustice that the State of Kuwait had caused. He condemned the ingratitude of the Arab nation toward the only one of its members that had fought against Persian expansion in the Gulf. At first the victim of maneuvers on the petroleum market, he now found himself isolated in his new crusade against he West. He criticized the ingratitude of other friends, hostile to Iraq's decision not to give in before the enemy, the UN's impotence and the disloyalty of the Communist nations. He spoke of Saladin, a fellow native of Tikrit, he said, and then spoke of his date with history and of the formidable lesson that the Iraqi people, determined to be victorious, would give to any aggressor.
"You can tell comrade Fidel Castro," he said getting up, "that I thank him for his solicitude. If the troops of the United States invade Iraq, we shall crush them like that," he concluded resoundingly, stamping the carpet several times with his shining military boots... The audience had ended. Without smiling, Saddam shook the hands of each of the Cubans as we left the sumptuous hall. He bid the Gallego farewell with an Oriental embrace and asked that his greetings be sent to El Comandante.
That evening I drew up a long report. Two days later, we returned to Cuba the way we had come. At the residence of the Cuban ambassador to Madrid, Fernandez opened the envelope that Fidel had given him and gave each of us a hundred dollar bill and told us to buy souvenirs. On 12 November 1990, the official newspaper Granma reported the return from Iraq of an official delegation whose departure had never been announced. Fidel received us the same day. Without asking us to repeat what happened again, he only asked the Gallego to imitate with his own feet the gesture with which Saddam had shown how he would crush the Americans. We spoke of other things and Fernandez returned the envelope, explaining the expense from Madrid. El Comandante raised an eyebrow as if surprised but said nothing.
(Translated from the Spanish by Carmen Val Julian)
Alcibiades Hidalgo
Former Cuban ambassador to the United Nations, in July 2002 Alcibiades Hidalgo secretly left Cuba by sea for Florida. Today he lives in the United States.
posted by salam at 11:58 AM
Pearl Harbor in reverse
Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly, September 25, 2002
Richard Perle, a Pentagon official during the Reagan years, says that unseating Saddam will be "a cakewalk." Perhaps, ventured Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, Perle should join the first wave into Baghdad to experience his hypothesis. An estimated one million Iraqis are tied in with Saddam's regime or party. They face imprisonment, war-crimes trials, or reprisal murders if Saddam loses power. The collateral damage that will accompany a bombing campaign could rally even more Iraqis to Saddam, making the war more lethal and the U.S. occupation more hazardous. Regimes as cruel as Saddam's have successfully used foreign aggression to galvanize resistance. Stalin scourged the Russian people, yet he successfully appealed to their nationalism to defeat the Nazis. Pol Pot, after killing more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, was able to mobilize support against the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. Saddam's strategy will be to draw us into the cities. In the open we can target his artillery, neutralizing his capacity to deliver chemical weapons. That will be difficult to do in the streets of Baghdad. Saddam will want to make us kill civilians to get at him, knowing that the bomb blasts, the collapsing houses, the bloody faces and torn bodies will be shown throughout the Arab world by al Jazeera, exacting a potentially catastrophic political price.
Pearl Harbor in reverse
Jack Beatty, Atlantic Monthly, September 25, 2002
Richard Perle, a Pentagon official during the Reagan years, says that unseating Saddam will be "a cakewalk." Perhaps, ventured Senator Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam veteran, Perle should join the first wave into Baghdad to experience his hypothesis. An estimated one million Iraqis are tied in with Saddam's regime or party. They face imprisonment, war-crimes trials, or reprisal murders if Saddam loses power. The collateral damage that will accompany a bombing campaign could rally even more Iraqis to Saddam, making the war more lethal and the U.S. occupation more hazardous. Regimes as cruel as Saddam's have successfully used foreign aggression to galvanize resistance. Stalin scourged the Russian people, yet he successfully appealed to their nationalism to defeat the Nazis. Pol Pot, after killing more than a million of his fellow Cambodians, was able to mobilize support against the Vietnamese invasion of 1979. Saddam's strategy will be to draw us into the cities. In the open we can target his artillery, neutralizing his capacity to deliver chemical weapons. That will be difficult to do in the streets of Baghdad. Saddam will want to make us kill civilians to get at him, knowing that the bomb blasts, the collapsing houses, the bloody faces and torn bodies will be shown throughout the Arab world by al Jazeera, exacting a potentially catastrophic political price.
Thursday, March 06, 2003
The dinar is miraculously keeping its cool and still around the 2360 for a dollar, the lowest it ever got during the last 10 years was 2500 for a dollar but I think we will hit that bottom in the next couple of weeks. A relative of mine who works at a bank says that everybody who comes into the bank is complaining that "al suq waguf - the market is at a standstill". They are a "private bank" - there is no such thing as a private bank really, they are all partially owned by the state - they have been told to stock on biscuits, dates and water, can't imagine why, as if anyone is going to come to work when things start dropping on our heads. But to be fair, after GW I the banks opened pretty fast, people who lived near their work place and could walk to work did just that, the banks limited the amount you are allowed to take from your account to 100 dinars which was around $200 or so at the time, today 100 dinars buys me a pack of local chemical-flavor bubble gum. Since we are talking about money today was payday. It is amazing what the sentence "we're sorry but you know how things are at the moment blablabla" can do to your paycheck, in one single year I have gone down from $200 to $100 and hit rock bottom at $50, in retrospect deciding to go back to living with my parents was the wisest decision I have made for quite a while. My friend G. is getting half his salary in money and the rest in alcohol, really no joke, but good imported stuff which we wouldn't buy anyway. His fatcat-filthyrich boss turned seriously Muslim and is giving away his stash of the devil's beverages. Good for us, I say.
Sunday, March 02, 2003 ::
I wasn't going to write about this, but since the guardian has mentioned it I won't be giving away any state secrets.
Have you read this article on The Guardian's website:
The big match unites a country of two halves
Luke Harding, in Irbil, sees a top Baghdad soccer team take on Kurdish It's just a filler, nothing really interesting and if you did read it you probably just skimmed over this paragraph:
To reach Irbil, the Baghdad players had to travel across a reinforced Iraqi frontline, past freshly dug army trenches filled with oil, and up into the mountains of Kurdistan.
blink and you miss it. You still didn't see it? listen: Freshly. Dug. Army. Trenches. filled with oil.
Story time:
A week ago on the way to work I saw a huge column of blackest-black smoke coming from the direction of Dorah refinery which is within Baghdad city limits, thought nothing of it really. A couple of weeks earlier to that a fuel tank near the Rasheed army camp exploded and it looked the same, stuff like that happens. My father was driving thru the area later and he said it looked like they were burning excess or wasted oil. Eh, they were never the environmentalists to start with; if they didn't burn it they would have dumped it in the river or something. The smoke was there for three days the column could be seen from all over Baghdad being dragged in a line across the sky by the winds. During the same time and on the same road I take to work I see two HUGE trenches being dug, it looked like they were going to put some sort of machinery in it, wide enough for a truck to drive thru and would easily take three big trucks.
A couple of days after the smoke-show over Baghdad I and my father are going past these trenches and we see oil being dumped into the trenches, you could hear my brain going into action, my father gave me the (shutup-u-nutty-paranoid-freak) look, but I knew it was true. The last two days everybody talks about it, they are planning to make a smoke screen of some sorts using black crude oil, actually rumor has it that they have been experimenting with various fuel mixtures to see what would produce the blackest vilest smoke and the three days of smoke from Dorah was the final test. Around Baghdad they would probably go roughly along the green belt which was conceived to stop the sandstorms coming from the western deserts. I have no idea how a smoke screen can be of any use except make sure that the people in Baghdad die of asphyxiation and covered in soot. I think I will be getting those gas masks after all.
Funfact: after the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire and the whole region covered in the blackest and ugliest cloud it rained for days on Baghdad washing everything with black water from the sky, the marks took a year to wash out. I think Salman Rushdie would have found this very amusing, characters in his novels are always haunted by things past in the strangest ways, the shame of your actions following you and then washing you with it's black water, no ablutions for you Mr. H watch your city covered with the shame of your actions. We have an expression which roughly translates to "face covered with soot" (skham wijih) which is used to describe someone who has done something utterly disgraceful. Getting your city covered with "skham" once has to haunt you for the rest of your life, now we get "skham from the sky II - the return of the evil cloud". The world is just a re-run of bad movies, but Mr. W. Bush already beat me to that expression.
:: salam 12:35 PM [+] ::
http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/customer_stories/bangandolufsen.html
Hewlett-Packard enters technology deal with Innovation Lab
01.02.2003
The world's second largest IT firm, Hewlett-Packard, has according to Computerworld pumped a small fortune into the new Aarhus based IT future-factory, Innovation Lab. What's more, HP has given the Aarhusian researchers access to its own research and technology think tanks. It certainly sounds like a philanthropic dream deal, but the knowledge traffic is not all one way.
"In return, Innovation Lab can help us to identify new trends and opportunities. The more the input we receive, the more we strengthen our own development work. We expect that this will lead to the creation of concrete products" says Kasper Rørsted, HP's director for EMEA.
Meanwhile Innovation Lab's charismatic leader and IT luminary Preben Mejer has revealed that HP wasn't the only horse in the race regarding the reciprocal technology deal. Mejer comments cryptically "There was a weighty three-letter alternative but we chose HP because they are furthest ahead in the area of pervasive computing. In fact it was HP that invented the concept 15 years ago." It should be noted that Innovation Lab has already chosen a technology partner on the software side (to continue the cryptic theme, it's a 9 letter word beginning with M).
Hewlett-Packard is already under way with its first development project with Innovation Lab, a high tech "smart vest" for firefighters that enables remote monitoring of the wearer's physiological condition in the field of action. The Danish Fire Service is also involved in the project.
The example illustrates one of the strengths of Innovation Lab that made it attractive to HP - it is a place where businesses of all kinds come with their development ideas and visions. "We have access to a large number of companies' confidential plans, including Lego and Bang & Olufsen" says Preben Mejer, adding with emphasis that strict rules are in place to ensure that no company's plans are disclosed to any other party without specific prior agreement.
http://www.investindk.com/idk_frame.asp?artikelID=9160
NCAA BRACKET
FIRST ROUND
OKLAHOMA
NC STATE
MISS. STATE
LOUISVILLE
OKLA. STATE
SYRACUSE
AUBURN
WAKE FOREST
TEXAS
LSU
CONN
STANFORd
UNC-WILM
XAVIER
COLORADO
FLORIDA
ARIZONA
CINN
ND
ILLINOIS
CREIGHTON
DUKE
MEMPHIS
KANSAS
KENTUCKY
UTAH
WEBER
DAYTON
MISSOURI
MARQUETTE
ALABAMA
PITT
2nd Round
OKLAHOMA
LOUISVILLE
OKLA. STATE
WAKE FOREST
TEXAS
CONN
XAVIER
COLORADO
ARIZONA
ILLINOIS
DUKE
MEMPHIS
KENTUCKY
DAYTON
MISSOURI
PITT
REGIONALS
LOUISVILLE
WAKE FOREST
TEXAS
COLORADO
N. Korea keeps U.S. intelligence guessing
Tue Mar 11, 2003
John Diamond USA TODAY
WASHINGTON -- The tone of the CIA (news - web sites) report is confident: A North Korean invasion is ''unlikely'' unless the communist army improves significantly to match South Korean forces.
The date of the report: Jan. 13, 1950. Six months later, North Korean forces surged toward Seoul, overwhelming the South Korean military and beginning a bloody three-year war. That intelligence report, the CIA's present-day deputy director, John McLaughlin, observes dryly, ''had a fairly short shelf life.''
Half a century later, as North Korea (news - web sites) ignores U.S. protests and moves to establish a nuclear arsenal, U.S. intelligence agencies are once again assessing the risk of war on the Korean peninsula. They predict an escalating series of North Korean provocations but stop short of a firm judgment on the likelihood of war.
Though there have been no intelligence lapses in the region quite so spectacular as the CIA's overconfident 1950 war assessment, North Korea remains one of the most secretive and dangerous regimes on the planet, quite capable of catching U.S. intelligence experts off-guard.
The CIA and the Pentagon (news - web sites) have a trove of classified information on North Korean conventional forces, combat strategy and tactics, missile production and testing, nuclear weapons development, even the personality of its unpredictable dictator-playboy leader, Kim Jong Il. But despite an intense focus on North Korea and dramatic improvements in collection capabilities, U.S. intelligence struggles to extract key information and read the reclusive communist dictatorship's intentions.
For example, the CIA knows North Korea is building a uranium-enrichment plant but doesn't know where, according to two senior intelligence officials. And the CIA thinks North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, but it can't find hard proof.
The CIA has been saying publicly for two years that North Korea probably has one or two nuclear bombs. But the few human sources available to the CIA inside North Korea have been unable to confirm that, according to two U.S. intelligence officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
''This is all a guesstimate. Nobody really knows what they have,'' says Joseph Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment, a Washington-based think-tank.
Electronic noise hushed
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has complained privately that electronic eavesdropping on North Korea yields less and less because Pyongyang has installed underground fiber-optic cables for its sensitive military communications. The cables are impervious to listening systems geared to pick up radio and microwave signals.
Rumsfeld is also concerned about a scarcity of human intelligence sources inside North Korea, where tight control of information and severe repression make spying an extremely dangerous occupation.
If, as the Bush administration fears, North Korea begins reprocessing spent reactor fuel rods for nuclear weapons at its Yongbyon nuclear complex 60 miles north of the capital of Pyongyang, U.S. intelligence may have no way to keep track of the resulting plutonium or newly minted weapons.
''It is entirely implausible that we could effectively prevent a few baseball-sized lumps of plutonium from being smuggled out of Yongbyon,'' says Ashton Carter, who worked North Korea issues as a senior Pentagon official under President Clinton (news - web sites). ''Not only is a nuclear weapon-sized quantity of plutonium-239 small in size, but it is not highly radioactive and does not emit a strong signature that could be detected.''
One way to pick up traces of nuclear activity is with the special sensing equipment carried by an Air Force RC-135S ''Cobra Ball'' aircraft. But in the latest example of Pyongyang's impulsive brinkmanship, four North Korean fighter jets on March 2 intercepted a Cobra Ball aircraft in international airspace off the Korean peninsula. The fighters flew as close as 50 feet to the U.S. plane, signaled unsuccessfully for the U.S. craft to follow them to North Korea, and shadowed the plane for 20 minutes before disappearing.
The Pentagon, fearful of further confrontations, has temporarily suspended the reconnaissance flights, worsening an already considerable intelligence blind spot.
A key challenge for U.S. intelligence is determining what North Korea really wants. Is the desperately poor nation using the threat of a nuclear arsenal as a bargaining chip to get money, oil and food for its starving people and political recognition for the regime? Or does it really want nuclear weapons to dominate the peninsula and deter any U.S. pre-emptive attack?
Reluctantly, the Bush administration appears to be accepting the pessimistic assessment of top intelligence officials, who contend that Pyongyang won't negotiate away weapons acquired at great cost after decades of effort.
CIA Director George Tenet told lawmakers last month that Kim Jong Il's nuclear maneuvers ''suggest he is trying to negotiate a fundamentally different relationship with Washington, one that implicitly tolerates the North's nuclear weapons program.'' Vice Admiral Lowell E. Jacoby, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), agreed: ''Pyongyang's desire for nuclear weapons reflects a long-term strategic goal that will not be easily abandoned.''
Such assessments involve the most difficult challenge posed by North Korea: getting inside the mind of a reclusive and unpredictable dictator.
''I was in the CIA for 30 years, and I used to call (North Korea) the longest-running intelligence failure in the history of American espionage,'' says Donald Gregg, who became U.S. ambassador to South Korea (news - web sites) after retiring from the CIA. In a 1998 interview, Gregg said, ''It's an extraordinarily difficult target to go after. We have marvelous satellites and aerial photography and so forth, but it still doesn't get you inside people's heads.''
Isolation hinders spying
North Korea's diplomatic isolation makes it extremely difficult to gather intelligence there.
There is no U.S. embassy in Pyongyang, and therefore no opportunity to place CIA operatives in the country under diplomatic cover. Instead, the CIA must rely heavily on South Korean intelligence or diplomats from other countries with access to Pyongyang. Kim Jong Il limits sensitive information to a select few, and they are allowed little if any contact with U.S. diplomats. North Korea is no longer a Soviet client state, making it tougher to get secondhand information from Moscow on Kim's thinking.
Even with daily spy satellite coverage, electronic eavesdropping, a steady stream of defectors, regular feeds from South Korean intelligence and a handful of human sources inside North Korea, U.S intelligence struggles to answer such key questions as:
* Where is the enrichment plant that could soon be capable of producing weapons-grade uranium? North Korea's admission last fall that it had a uranium-enrichment program is what touched off the current crisis. Expert tunnelers, the North Koreans have likely built the plant underground. Spy satellite imagery specialists are looking for a large -- and unexplained -- electricity supply, essential for the uranium-enrichment process.
* How many tunnels have North Korean forces dug under the Demilitarized Zone that separates North and South Korea? The U.S. military command in South Korea estimates there may be 30; only four have been found, either by accident or by sophisticated ground-penetrating radars and acoustic sensors that can detect faint sounds of digging. Some are more than a mile in length.
* Assuming the CIA is correct that North Korea has one or two nuclear weapons, are they light enough to place atop a multistage Taepo Dong 2 rocket that could reach the western United States? The latest CIA assessment is no.
Last November, U.S. intelligence agencies reported to Congress that North Korea's new Taepo Dong 2 ICBM might be ready for testing at any time. Cobra Ball surveillance aircraft are equipped to collect data on missile launches or tests, and one reason for the regular missions off Korea was to be in position to collect that information.
''North Korea is a very hard target,'' says Robert Gallucci, former ambassador-at-large under President Clinton and chief U.S. negotiator of the 1994 Agreed Framework that won North Korea's now-broken pledge to freeze its nuclear program. ''The only sources were South Korean intelligence sources, and for a long time there was great suspicion of what the South Koreans were telling us.''
A concern through the latter years of the Cold War was that, depending on the changing political climate, South Korea tended to either exaggerate or to downplay the threat posed by the North.
Even in an area of strength for U.S. intelligence ---- counting enemy forces ---- there have been lapses. In 1979, when the Carter administration was considering pulling U.S. forces out of South Korea, the CIA and DIA doubled their estimate of the size of North Korea's army based on a report leaked by China, which was concerned about the instability that a U.S. pullout might entail. Again in the mid-1980s, U.S. intelligence sharply increased its estimate of the North Korean force, according to Kent Harrington, a former CIA analyst who specialized in Korea and East Asian matters until the late 1990s. ''I don't have great confidence that we have a handle today on'' the size and capability of the North Korean military, Harrington says.
In another lapse, the CIA was surprised in 1998 when North Korea launched a three-stage Taepo Dong 1 rocket. The rocket crashed into the Pacific after flying nearly 4,000 miles and failing to launch its civilian satellite payload into space. But North Korea's ability to design and launch a multistage rocket stunned U.S. intelligence officials and raised fears that Pyongyang might be able to field an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of hitting the United States.
To be sure, U.S. intelligence has scored some successes against North Korea. On Feb. 26, U.S. spy satellites captured images of a plume of steam coming from a formerly mothballed nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, enabling the CIA to alert the White House that the North Koreans had restarted the reactor, a key part of Pyongyang's plutonium operation.
And last June, information from a defector enabled U.S. intelligence to sharply increase internal warnings about the then-secret North Korean uranium-enrichment program for nuclear weapons. U.S. intelligence had information from trade records and from the Pakistani government indicating that North Korea was researching uranium enrichment. But the new intelligence indicated that North Korea was beyond research and completing work on a full-blown production facility.
Signaling defiance?
Some of the recent intelligence successes may have had more to do with North Korea's desire to send a hard-line signal to Washington than with growing U.S. intelligence skill. The point of having nuclear weapons is to deter an adversary, so it is essential for a country to demonstrate that it has them -- hence the deliberately provocative steps Pyongyang has been taking to kick out international nuclear inspectors and restart its plutonium operation.
The appearance of a truck convoy at the Yongbyon reactor last month, for example, was clearly visible to U.S. spy satellites. It set off concern in Washington that Pyongyang had ordered the reprocessing of long-stored spent reactor fuel rods into weapons-grade plutonium to make nuclear bombs. Since then, U.S. intelligence has warned that reprocessing could begin at any time.
What neither the vast array of technical intelligence nor the slight but steady flow of information from defectors can determine is how Kim Jong Il might react to a surgical strike intended to take out his nuclear facilities. The Bush administration has pointedly said that ''all options,'' including military action, are on the table to counter North Korea, but that there is ''no intention'' of attacking North Korea.
On one point there is little doubt within the U.S. intelligence community. With a million-man North Korean army poised north of the Demilitarized Zone, and a U.S.-South Korean force nearly as large on the opposite side, nowhere else on earth is the threat of catastrophic war so immediate.
''War on the peninsula,'' DIA's Jacoby says, ''would be violent, destructive and could occur with very little warning.''
S. Korea Fears More Tension if War Occurs
Tue Mar 18, 1:01 PM ET
By SANG-HUN CHOE, Associated Press Writer
SEOUL, South Korea - South Korea (news - web sites)'s prime minister warned Tuesday that high tensions over North Korea (news - web sites)'s nuclear programs could rise further with an outbreak of war in Iraq (news - web sites).
With the United States focused on Baghdad, experts say North Korea might use the opportunity to cause alarm across the heavily guarded border with South Korea in an attempt to force Washington into direct negotiations.
North Korea's tactics could include missile launches, border skirmishes or reprocessing spent nuclear fuel for atomic bombs, experts say.
The threat is even more worrying to the South because its economy is feeling the effects of the standoff with the North.
In recent days, the South Korean central bank governor has warned of the economic challenges posed by North Korea, and officials have met with global credit agencies, including Moody's, to keep Seoul's sovereign debt rating from being cut.
South Korea's economy is far better off than it was during the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, but the stock market is down 14 percent since the year started and the won has slumped to five-month lows.
"A resolution of the North Korean nuclear issue in the shortest time is urgent and pivotal for the future improvement of the South Korean economy," said Lee Sangjae, senior economist at Hyundai Securities Research Center in Seoul.
South Korean Prime Minister Goh Kun instructed Cabinet ministers Tuesday to ensure stability on the peninsula, after President Bush (news - web sites) gave Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) a 48-hour deadline to flee his country or face a U.S.-led invasion.
"Tensions are rising on the Korean Peninsula because of the North Korean nuclear issue," Goh said. "A war against Iraq could have the effect of escalating the tensions."
To guard against possible terrorist attacks, South Korea said it will tighten security in ports and airports as well as at U.S. diplomatic and military facilities.
The U.S. military keeps 37,000 U.S. troops in South Korea as a deterrent against the North and currently is staging major joint exercises with South Korean forces.
North Korea again criticized the drills as a rehearsal for invasion.
"The U.S. reckless war exercises are an escalation of its aggressive and adventurous military actions against the (North) to seek a military solution to the nuclear issue," said the North's official news agency KCNA.
North Koreans "are fully ready to go into action to wipe out the aggressors," it added.
Yang Hyong Sop, vice president of the Presidium of the North's Supreme People's Assembly, said "U.S. moves" made the current situation on the peninsula the worst since the Korean War cease-fire. He also urged all Koreans to unite and push the American troops from South Korea, according to KCNA.
A Foreign Ministry spokesman also said Japan's plan to launch two spy satellites into orbit this month "poses a grave threat" to the North that could be construed as releasing it from a vow not to test long-range missiles. That vow was contained in a joint declaration issued by the two countries' leaders in Pyongyang last September.
North Korea "is the only country to which Japan is hostile among its neighbors," the spokesman told KCNA.
In Beijing, an envoy for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (news - web sites) said the threat of war in the Persian Gulf underscores the need for peaceful dialogue between Washington and North Korea. Washington wants to resolve the issue through talks involving other countries.
"As one conflict is about to begin in the Middle East, my job is to try and ensure that the Korean situation does not have the same result," said Maurice Strong, who is on his way to Pyongyang to meet North Korean leaders.
Strong said he saw no reason to believe North Korea and the United States are headed for military confrontation.
The Korean nuclear crisis flared in October, when U.S. officials said North Korea admitted having a secret nuclear weapons program.
Powell Rejects North Korea's Talks Demand
Tue Mar 18, 1:11 PM ET Add Top Stories - Reuters to My Yahoo!
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) on Tuesday rejected North Korea (news - web sites)'s latest demand for direct talks and said North Korea would complicate diplomacy if it started a plutonium reprocessing plant.
Powell told a small group of reporters that the more he heard demands for direct talks between North Korea and the United States, the more he believed the United States was right to insist on starting talks in a multilateral forum.
North Korean state media on Monday repeated Pyongyang's rejection of any formula other than direct one-to-one talks.
"It is not multilateral talks but direct talks between the DPRK (North Korea) and the U.S. that serve as a key to settling the nuclear issue," said the Rodong Sinmun daily.
Powell said: "We're going to stick with the multilateral arrangement because we think it's best.
"The more I hear about this business of 'the United States must do it this way or else North Korea will never respond,' the more I believe that that is not the correct way to do it."
After North Korea acknowledged a secret uranium enrichment project in October, the United States initially offered talks once North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear programs.
It then changed its position to support for multilateral talks, alongside South Korea (news - web sites), Japan and other Asian countries, without stressing the precondition of dismantling programs.
Analysts said it suited Washington's purposes to delay talks with North Korea until its invasion of Iraq (news - web sites) was complete. President Bush (news - web sites) gave Iraqi President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites) an ultimatum late on Monday to leave the country in 48 hours or face war.
The North Koreans appear to have sought international attention by testing missiles in the Sea of Japan, buzzing a U.S. spy plane this month and by rhetoric hostile to the United States.
Powell said, "It should be clear to the North Koreans right now that, while we look at these provocations with concerns, they are not going to provoke us into their policy choices."
Asked about the reprocessing plant, he said: "So far they have not begun the reprocessing facility. I don't know if they will or they won't. I think it would make political dialogue and finding a diplomatic way forward much more difficult if they started a reprocessing facility."
Measured Reciprocal Policies to Resolve DPR Korea's Nuclear Crisis:
Reviving the 4-Party Peace Talks
(March 2003)
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(This is a CARE Korea working paper of the Institute for Strategic Reconciliation, part of which was published in the Korea Times and JoongAng Daily, the leading Korean daily newspapers in January and February, 2003. The ISR is the first U.S. think tank established in 1998 by Asian Americans for international conflict resolution and reconciliation research, and international relief and development programs. The views expressed in this article are personal opinions of the author and do not reflect the official positions of the Institute for Strategic Reconciliation.)
by Young Chun, President and Research Director
The Institute for Strategic Reconciliation, Inc. (ISR2020.ORG)
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The withdrawal of DPR Korea (DPRK) from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) has opened the dangerous new world for East Asia and Pacific nations. As of March 2003, DPRK is not retreating any further in its strategy for national survival based on nuclear development. What are the Bush Administration's foreign policy options for DPRK as Washington prepares for war with Baghdad including the use of strategic weapons?
First of all, Washington's option is "benign neglect," representing a stance of continuous, deliberate neglect of DPRK. In fact, since the arrival of the Bush Administration 2 years ago, Washington has deliberately been using this policy of "benign neglect." In the first year, Washington concentrated on a general evaluation of its foreign policy with DPRK without any action. The following year, the terrorism of September 11 and the war on Afghanistan took Pyongyang out of Washington's horizon of interest.
President Bush's Washington has been critical of implementing the 1994 "DPRK-U.S. Geneva Agreed Framework," signed during the Clinton Administration. The basic accord is unfortunately being nullified under the Bush administration. Following U.S.'s refusal to continue its energy supplies to DPRK, Pyongyang evicted 2 on-site inspectors who had been monitoring the Yongbyun nuclear facilities, the "Silicon Valley" of DPRK's nuclear technology. In doing this, Pyongyang signaled that it will no longer allow external parties to observe DPRK's nuclear facilities, which has recently been restarted. The larger crisis remains to be seen. That is, once DPRK restarts its plutonium reprocessing facilities, Washington can no longer deal with DPRK in terms of its policy of "benign neglect."
Indeed if left alone, Pyongyang will be able to produce at least six nuclear weapons by this summer. Responding to such a regional threat represented by Pyongyang's nuclear development, Seoul and Tokyo cannot help but entering the nuclear race for their national security; China would accelerate its build-up of military muscle for Asian security; Taiwan would spearhead its defensive posture against China by introducing more modernized weapons from U.S. The DPRK nuclear crisis coming after reprocessing of plutonium will be not only an Asian military crisis, but also an event that could very well spark the 3rd World War when regional interests of Beijing and Washington clash around the "nuclear valley" of DPRK. This scenario represents the end of the efficacy of Washington's "benign neglect."
The second plan of the Bush Administration involves a policy of "military pressure." Hawks in Washington's National Security Council see the impending nuclear crisis in DPRK as being very similar to the crisis nine years ago. In March 1994, DPRK refused to allow IAEA inspections of its 5-megawatt Yongbyun nuclear facilities. Within three months, Pyongyang declared its intention to withdraw from the IAEA. Unyielding to accept Pyongyang's production of nuclear weapons, Washington, at that time, was waiting for President Clinton's executive order for a carefully orchestrated bombing of the Yongbyun nuclear valley.
How different is the current crisis as of March 2003? The Bush Administration is going forward with a "policy of one at a time" in dealing sequentially with the war on Iraq and the DPRK nuclear threat. Doesn't the Pentagon have the capacity to rush into wars with both Iraq and DPRK at the same time? The U.S. used about 70% of its military force in the first large-scale war on Iraq a decade ago. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced that the U.S. could be involved in two wars, he must have meant the capability of the U.S. to engage in a full-scale war in one place and a limited war in another place.
Neither a war on Iraq nor a war on DPRK could be indeed restricted to a limited war. What is more, the war on terrorism is diffusing Washington's military force. Finally, compared to the situation 9 years ago, Washington has little room to do the heavy lifting, as Seoul seeks to improve inter-Korean reconciliation and cooperation under the policy of engagement with the North and more so under Roh Moo Hyun's new peace-focused administration, and as Tokyo maintains its survival policy based on a refusal to be a victim of a possible U.S.-DPRK war. The time has passed that the White House insists on furthering its own national interests, apart from considering the interests both of Seoul, a strong ally of Washington, and China emerging as a super power of the 21st century. Thus, Secretary of State Colin Powell's repeated statement to Pyongyang, that the U.S. has no plans to attack DPRK, is hardly surprising.
The third plan of the Bush Administration, espoused by the hardliners on DPRK, is "tailored containment of DPRK." Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld are supporters of this plan. This plan, as part of an isolation policy on DPRK, includes cutting off the DPRK coast from arms exports and suspending international economic aid to DPRK. However, history tells us that despite Washington's fifty-year of isolation policy towards DPRK after the Korean War, the DPRK regime has not collapsed. DPRK's humanitarian crisis since 1995 has not caused implosion of the DPRK regime. DPRK's collective society instead demonstrated solidarity and resilience, particularly when other nations were increasing pressure, and DPRK survived as a nation based on "the self-governance ideology" and "independent military-force-first policy."
It is well known that Washington's "tailored containment of Cuba" was not successful in ousting Castro from power. On the other hand, an open policy towards the former Soviet Union, once called an "evil empire," led to its dismantling; Washington policy of economic openness and free trade with China led to the incorporation of China into the international society. If a "tailored containment policy on DPRK" comes to greater specificity this year, Pyongyang would no doubt "view the economic blockade towards DPRK as a declaration of war," and it could brace itself for an all-out military campaign on the Korean peninsula and Japan as well.
In sum, in spring of 2003, Washington's persistence in "benign neglect" of DPRK will aggravate the nuclear crisis. The second plan, "military pressure" from Washington, may sink Japan as well as the entire Korean peninsula to seas of war. The third plan, "tailored containment of DPRK," will instigate an all-out war with Pyongyang. Therefore, a policy of "diplomatic battle via continuous dialogue and negotiation" represents the most realistic option for Washington to resolve the present crisis peacefully. The following three diplomacy strategies are suggested:
· Above all, to accomplish a full-scale diplomacy policy, the basic framework of the U.S.- DPRK Geneva accord must be revived. Washington and Pyongyang have been able to sustain a positive relationship prior to the Bush administration because they have complied with the crux of the Geneva agreement. Washington may now take a strategy that could bring Pyongyang to dialogue by applying a "tailored engagement policy" based on an "reciprocal rules." That is to say, Washington should ask Pyongyang to transfer the unsealed 8,000- spent fuel rods, which could be used for a rapid production of nuclear weapons, to a third country. It is a matter of course that DPRK should allow the IAEA to monitor all of its nuclear facilities, and DPRK should accept the results of inspection. The goal is to dismantle DPRK's nuclear development program. Washington should make the past of DPRK's nuclear development program transparent, and completely prevent the future of its nuclear development.
In response to these actions, Washington should reciprocally and simultaneously guarantee DPRK's entry into the international financial community, by eliminating the economic containment policy towards DPRK. The United States should provide DPRK with energy supplies to offset the loss of energy due to the delayed completion of its light water reactors, a key element in the basic framework of Geneva. That is to say, the agreed, now aborted, heavy oil shipment to DPRK of 500,000 tons per year should be increased to about 3 million tons per year for the next several years until completion since the light water reactors were not built by 2003, the year targeted in the Geneva agreement. President Bush should document his promise not to start a pre-emptive war with nuclear weapons, and thus guarantee the security of the DPRK as a sovereign state. In this reciprocal exchange, Washington would bring peace to East Asia by eliminating Pyongyang's nuclear development program and sustain nuclear nonproliferation regime. On the other hand, Pyongyang would gain desperate economic and political support for its national survival and security and be incorporated into the international community.
· However, it is very difficult for Washington and Pyongyang, who appear to be preparing for actual war beyond war of words, to engage in dialogue or negotiations face to face. Hence it is important to take advantage of diplomatic networks in Seoul, which is pursuing a relationship of cooperation with Pyongyang, and in Beijing, which stands as a friendly nation to DPRK. There is nothing more critical to DPRK's survival as a nation than Beijing's economic-military-political aid. At the same time, Beijing does not want the Korean peninsula -- not to speak of DPRK, which lies just below its national boundaries -- to come under Washington's terms. This is because if DPRK collapses, the country that would be impacted the most is not South Korea but China. Washington is regarded as a military threat by Beijing, but for economic benefit, Beijing has maintained positive relations with Washington. This is a strategic shift China has demonstrated over the past 20 years. If human psychology dictates that we listen to the advice of those we trust, then for Pyongyang, Beijing is the only trustworthy friend state. It is time for Seoul to muscle up its diplomatic relations with Beijing, which has been ambivalent to Washington's request for helping defuse the crisis on the Korean peninsula. Beijing cannot ignore Seoul, as South Korea has become increasingly a closer strategic partner to China than Washington, which doesn't buy Beijing's national interests in the Taiwan issue.
Therefore, it is urgently critical that Seoul-Washington and Beijing-Pyongyang renew quadripartite peace talks. The function of the 4-party peace talks, in which China, U.S., Republic of Korea, and DPR Korea participate, should be revived and enhanced. Reviving the quadripartite peace talks will provide Washington and Pyongyang with reasons for "dialogue and/or negotiation." Washington, which "refuses to compensate for wrongdoing," bears the obligation to accept Beijing and Seoul's invitation to the peace of Northeast Asia in a multilateral mode. Pyongyang, which claims "sovereign national existence on nuclear foundation," bears the obligation to enter into the bilateral peace talks with Washington through a multilateral mode of talks involving Seoul and Beijing.
Using this opportunity of the renewed 4-party talk, the White House should appoint a senior U.S. policy coordinator for DPRK to attend the quadripartite peace talks, showing its resolve to handle the DPRK's nuclear crisis. During the Clinton Administration, this position was strategically well assumed by Wendy Sherman. This position was forfeited during the Bush administration, while it was implementing a policy of "benign neglect." It is time for a senior U.S. policy coordinator for DPRK to open a way to resolve the nuclear crisis peacefully, as Washington is tied up with preparations for the war on Iraq.
The more we wait without diplomatic actions of bilateral talks, the sooner Washington and Pyongyang are likely to engage in serious battles beyond the interception in airspace near the Korean peninsula. South Korean citizens can be used as hostages no longer of the nuclear confrontation between U.S. and DPRK. Even republican hawks on the Hill, the allies of hawks in the National Security Council, are challenging the White House to immediately engage in the bilateral talks with Pyongyang. Isn't it past time that Pyongyang and Washington should engage in direct diplomatic negotiations to prevent a nuclear arms race in Asia? Time is really running out.
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(Young Chun, social psychologist and survey research methodologist by training at the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland, has his research done in the past 15 years mostly in public opinion formation and change, negotiation strategies, survey research methods, and international policies toward DPR Korea.
Chun has published and/or presented 82 papers since 1989 on public opinion, survey research methodology, and negotiations with DPRK in leading academic literature (e.g., The Journal of Business and Economic Statistics), books (e.g., Business Survey Methods published by John Wiley), or national/international academic conferences including American Association for Public Opinion Research, American Sociological Association, American Statistical Association, American Educational Research Association, International Conference on Improving Surveys, International Conference on Establishment Surveys, and World Association for Public Opinion Research. Chun's columns or commentaries regarding the issues of the Korean peninsula have appeared in CNN, National Public Radio, Congressional Quarterly as well as leading Korean news media.
Chun is the president of the Institute for Strategic Reconciliation, the first think tank established in 1998 by Asian Americans for international conflict resolution and reconciliation research, and relief and development programs in conflict regions. He chairs the Washington North Korea Forum, the meeting place of governmental and nongovernmental senior representatives for discussing policy options around the Korean peninsula from 1999 to present. Prior to the current think tank research and studies of his, Chun worked as Behavioral Scientist at the U.S. Department of Labor (1991 - 1999), and as a Survey Statistician at the U.S. Department of Commerce (1999 - 2000). Chun has also worked as international consultant for issues of humanitarian crisis in DPRK in the past eight years. Chun has visited DPR Korea several times to run and monitor humanitarian programs in public health.)
End of the postwar alliance pact
Francis Fukuyama Special to The Yomiuri Shimbun
The first shot of the second Gulf War has yet to be fired, but already the conflict is producing unanticipated consequences that will have a lasting impact long after the war is over. The most important result so far is the unraveling of the U.S. alliance structure, and the weakening of a series of key institutions, including the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union and the United Nations.
In planning its strategy of forcibly disarming Iraq, the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush assumed that the United States' European allies would complain and protest, but ultimately fall in line behind a new U.N. Security Council resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq. It had, after all, secured a 14-0 vote last autumn in favor of U.N. Resolution 1441, which included tough language making clear that Baghdad had one final opportunity to prove that it was actively disarming. But Washington completely miscalculated the depth of European--indeed, global--opposition to a new war.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder took the unprecedented step of running, successfully, for reelection last autumn on a platform of opposition to a U.S. war against Iraq. While his popularity has dropped precipitously since then as a result of the German economy, popular opposition to the war remains overwhelming. Schroeder represents a younger generation of Germans who, unlike their elders, do not feel an instinctive emotional gratitude to the United States. The lingering memories of World War II have created a nation of committed pacifists.
France's motives are much more complex and cynical than Germany's. Popular opposition to the war is higher there as well, but French presidents can usually ignore public opinion in making foreign policy. The French are chiefly concerned about preserving their role in two institutions that greatly magnify their otherwise modest influence in world affairs, the Security Council (of which they are a veto-bearing permanent member) and the EU (the tone of which France sets).
After U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's presentation of evidence to the Security Council on Feb. 6 of the Iraqi failure to comply with Resolution 1441, the French, rather than dropping their resistance to the U.S. initiative, escalated pressure by joining with the Germans to demand further inspections. With the Belgians, they took the unprecedented step of vetoing NATO support for one of its members, Turkey, on the ground that they did not want to lend support to the war effort.
The French-German action exposed a deep split within Europe, exacerbated by U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's flippant remark consigning the two countries to an "old Europe." There is indeed a significant difference in perspective between France and Germany, on the one hand, and the "new" European democracies such as Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, all once part of the Soviet bloc, that are much more grateful for U.S. support during the Cold War.
The not-so-secret truth about the EU is that it was initially based on a Franco-German agreement under which the French gave Germany legitimacy while the Germans allowed the French to dominate the Brussels bureaucracy and subsidized French agriculture. This agreement was already showing strain when Europe had only 12 members, but with the expected enlargement to include the states of Eastern Europe, the ability of France and Germany to control the EU was slipping fast. The willingness of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic to join Britain, Italy and Spain in signing a letter supporting U.S. policy in Iraq exposed the hollowness of the French claim to speak for the whole of Europe. This produced an unbelievable outburst of petulance from French President Jacques Chirac at the emergency E.U. summit on Feb. 17, attacking the new Eastern European democracies as children who were "badly brought up" and who had missed "an opportunity to keep quiet."
As a result of this split, NATO is likely to sustain permanent damage. With the demise of the Soviet threat that it was originally designed to contain, NATO's only remaining function is for mutual military support in regional crises such as the one brewing in the Middle East. But the organization is far too deeply split to act effectively outside Europe. U.S. anger at the "old" Europe is growing daily; France has become the butt of jokes and ridicule among ordinary Americans, not to mention high-level policymakers. The coming months may see the beginning of U.S. efforts to rebase U.S. forces out of Germany and to locate them further east, in Poland or Romania. Americans will be asking as well why they need to station troops to "defend" as anti-U.S. an ally as Germany.
The other international organization likely to be hurt by the current crisis is the United Nations. There is clearly no consensus today in the Security Council for either forcibly disarming Iraq or for extending inspections. If, as is likely, the United States goes to war either without the backing of a second resolution, or with only a weak one, the United Nations will have been bypassed in two directions. It will have proved itself unable either to enforce its own disarmament resolutions, or, as the French had hoped, to shape and constrain the policies of its most powerful member.
That the United Nations has proven to be so ineffective an organization should come as no surprise to people who have observed it over the years. Many people around the world would like to see the United Nations become the center of a global security system to deal with problems like international terrorism, but there are good reasons why this is unlikely to happen. The current crisis points to a critical weakness of the U.N. system, which is what economists call a "collective action" problem. The Security Council, with its five veto-bearing members, was deliberately designed to be a weak institution, one that must operate by consensus. During the Cold War, everyone understood that the ideological split between the United States and the Soviet Union would prevent the United Nations from intervening in disputes between the superpowers. But even in the less ideologically divided post-Cold War period, the need for consensus within the Security Council means it cannot take decisive action either for or against war. Security threats have to be overwhelmingly large and obvious before U.N. action is remotely possible, and by that time it is usually too late to do anything about them.
Let us put aside, for the moment, the question of whether Iraq really represents as great a threat as the Bush administration maintains. In the future, terrorists may buy, steal or be given nuclear weapons from a variety of places such as North Korea, Pakistan or Russia. It is easy to imagine circumstances in which the threat is actually very high, but the evidence for the threat ambiguous or incomplete. Under these circumstances, the United Nations, based on its recent behavior, will be paralyzed and unable to act decisively. Only nation-states--whether the United States acting against Iraq, Japan acting against North Korea, or India against Pakistan--can reliably fill this security vacuum.
More has happened in the past month to change international institutions and realign loyalties than in the preceding decade. When you add to the crisis in NATO the current crisis in U.S.-South Korean relations over how to handle a nuclear North Korea, it becomes clear that the United States' entire Cold War alliance structure in both Europe and Asia may collapse within the coming months or years. These alliances were not designed for the purposes to which they are now being put, and have become a greater source of irritation than help. Attitudes are changing in both Europe and the United States as well, as former allies reevaluate who is really their friend and willing to show solidarity. The alliance system may hold on if the coming war with Iraq is over quickly and with a minimum of unforeseen consequences. But if it escalates in unpredictable ways, our old institutions will quickly dissolve. In either case, it is only a matter of time before they disappear, just like the Cold War which spawned them. They will not, unfortunately, be replaced by a strong and decisive United Nations representing the broader community of nations, but by a series of ad hoc coalitions of states seeking their own security.
Fukuyama is a professor of international political economy at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University.
not that I subscribe to this; but it is interesting that Korea is heating up now as well
THE KOREAN DIVERSION
J. Adams
April 8, 1996
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Recent developments which imply extremists might soon take control in Moscow is taking place in a timely fashion for what might be an imminent North Korean invasion of South Korea. As pointed out in my article "A Global War?", Moscow is likel y planning to ignite the Korean Peninsula at the start of world war three in order to divert U.S. military forces into East Asia and tie-up the West's capacity to deliver war materials elsewhere around the world. Such a strategic diversion will leave the Middle/Near East (Europe?) open to being overrun by a Russian "Last Dash to the South" as foreshadowed in Vladimir Zhirinovsky's supposed autobiography.
There are strong indications North Korea is about to launch a surprise invasion of the South. Late last year, North Korea deployed nearly a hundred warplanes at formerly unused air-bases near the Korean border. Furthermore, the North beefe d up its artillery along the DMZ and increased combat readiness through some of the largest military exercises since the Korean War ended four decades ago. Lastly, several North Korean agents were captured or killed crossing into the South suggesting that Pyongyang ordered deep-infiltration of South Korea in preparation for an attack.
Following the North's final military preparations for a war with the South late last year, Pyongyang started making reassuring gestures and engaging in peaceful diplomacy with Seoul in order to secure the element of surprise for an eventual attack aga inst the South. North Korea quietly reached a critical nuclear agreement with the South and released South Korean fishermen that had previously been captured in the North's waters. Also, the North has recently been calling for negotiations to repla ce the Korean War Armistice with a full-fledged peace treaty.
While making peaceful overtures with the South, Pyongyang sought to further minimize the perceived North Korean military threat by feigning weakness and internal distress. During the past several months, North Korea has been making unprecede nted requests for food assistance from the outside world in response to a reported famine caused by summer flooding (the problem is not so much with the available supply as with distribution, suggesting stockpiling in anticipation of w ar). Likewise, supposedly due to a shortage of oil and food supplies, minimal North Korean military exercises occurred over the winter. Thus, an image of a weak and distressed North Korea has been projected in recent months such that the South dangerously underestimates North Korean military strength just prior to an attack.
In order to give a cover for the approaching attack, Pyongyang has been projecting the image of internal turmoil and political instability. North Korea's "Dear Leader", Kim Jong-Il, is still yet to formally assume power in the wake of Kim Il -Sung's July 1994 death. In association with this, recent rumors and signals from the North have suggested that Kim Il-Sung is incapacitated and the North Korean military has taken control of the country. Such a situation creates an ideal cover f or launching an invasion.
Since everything else is now in place, North Korea is now seeking to create a pretext for an attack. Last week, North Korea scrapped the Armistice that ended the Korean war and has since carried out three armed border intrusions along the Dem ilitarized Zone. These intrusions are flagrant violations of the cease-fire agreement between North and South Korea and are highly provocative. There are two possibilities. Either the North is seeking to provoke the South into firing the first shots of a second Korean war, or the North Koreans are seeking to desensitize the South Korean military to border incursions just prior to an actual surprise invasion. Either way, a new Korean war is imminent.
N Korea - Trouble Brewing?
Email from: J. Adams, November 16, 1996
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Looks like trouble is brewing. Please keep me updated as events warrant and I will do the same for you from my own sources. (Friday November 15 8:49 AM EST)
N.Korea Says Nuke Deal With U.S. in Jeopardy
TOKYO (Reuters) -- North Korea said Friday it can no longer keep its nuclear program "frozen" under a 1994 agreement with the United States, signaling a brewing new crisis on the tense Korean Peninsula.
Pyongyang's official Korean News Agency (KCNA) bitterly accused Washington of dragging its feet on implementing an accord that Washington hoped would head off any North Korean plans to develop nuclear weapons.
"We cannot keep the nuclear program frozen any longer only to get heavy oil, the shipments of which may be suspended any time, with no importance given to when light water reactors will be provided," KCNA said in a report monitored in Tokyo.
"The framework agreement, which was concluded by sincere efforts of the DPRK (North Korea) and the United States two years ago, marking an epoch-making occasion in ensuring peace in the (Korean) peninsula, has now been (put) at stake," Pyongyang's mouthpi ece KCNA said.
It was the second stark warning given to the United States this week by the reclusive communist state. On Monday, the North Korean Foreign Ministry also accused Washington of backing away from four-way peace talks, including China, proposed by President C linton and South Korean President Kim Young-sam in April.
"If the U.S. is interested in the implementation of the bilateral agreement even a little bit, it must take a reasonable view of the present situation and have a responsible position," KCNA said in its latest broadside. "Now we do not feel it necessary to continue wasting time since the U.S. has unilaterally delayed the implementation of the agreement, breaking its promise," it said.
After lengthy talks with the United States, North Korea agreed in October 1994 to freeze a nuclear program Washington suspects was being used to develop nuclear weapons. In return the United States agreed to arrange the provision of power-generating ligh t-water nuclear reactors that produce less weapons-grade plutonium.
"The DPRK's nuclear power development is an important sector of strategic significance in its planned socialist economic construction. What is vital to this sector is time," KCNA said. "The DPRK has paid so much for the honest implementation of the agree ment, freezing the peaceful nuclear program for a long time," it added.
In Seoul last month, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord said Washington and Seoul would press ahead with the agreement. But without referring directly to a recent submarine incursion by North Korea, he told a news conference there would be "a pause in the pace of our activities."
Tension has remained high on the divided Korean Peninsula, the world's last Cold War frontier, since a submarine landed 26 North Koreans in September off South Korea's eastern city of Kangnung. Twenty-three of the intruders have been shot dead, and the r est have either been captured or are missing.
North Korea has warned the U.S. that their nuclear pact could be jeopardized by Washington's stand on the submarine incident. Seoul, which had pledged to foot most of the $5 billion cost of building nuclear plants for the communist state, has hinted it m ight withdraw its backing for the nuclear accord because of incidents like the submarine one.
Hearts and minds' key to US Iraq strategy
By Andrew Koch
The well-publicised US strategy to create 'shock and awe' among Iraqi forces in the event of a conflict could well be the prelude to how wars of the information-age will be fought.
This strategy of fierce but swift military blows coupled with months of information warfare preparation is designed to persuade large portions of potential adversaries that co-operation with US forces is beneficial. It is also designed to signal that military resistance would bring certain failure.
Such a combination, while always a factor in war, has been brought to greater prominence in what is called 'effects-based planning', a key tool used in US war preparations for the first time on such a large scale.
As one US Central Command planner said, psychological operations (PSYOPs) will play "a crucial role ... to any conflict in Iraq and to the war on terrorism". This greater prominence and attention paid by senior US military leaders to winning hearts and minds is a marked difference from Operation 'Enduring Freedom' where operators said it took as much as 13 days to get PSYOPs through the approval process - often far too late to make a difference.
In planning the Iraq campaign strategy, senior US military officials plan to sideline large parts of Baghdad's armed forces by convincing them they will not be harmed. US PSYOP messages are telling Iraqi forces that unless they attack US troops or provide assistance in any use of weapons of mass destruction, they will be allowed to go free.
Those messages are being sent via traditional PSYOPs means such as dropping millions of leaflets over the country as well as beaming-in radio and television broadcasts from EC-130E Commando Solo aircraft. Also more innovative approaches, such as sending text messages directly to the cellphones of key Iraqi military commanders, are being used.
Yet for all its new-found prominence, Washington's ability to win 'hearts and minds' leaves much room for improvement, says Brig Gen James Parker, Director of the Center for Intelligence and Information Operations at US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM).
The US military is proficient at tactical-level PSYOPs, Gen Parker notes, but its lack of wider-ranging information campaigns "is a hole in the Department of Defense's [DoD's] capability right now". Therefore, he notes, "we are in the process of standing up a strategic PSYOPs capability". That capability, expected to replace the ill-fated Office of Strategic Influence, would address the long-term problem of winning hearts and minds.
France against the USA
France has transformed international relations. Its emergence as the USA's chief international opponent has surprised everyone. Its position is hard to understand. Yet, as seen from Paris, France finds itself in a unique set of circumstances, which President Jacques Chirac remains determined to exploit. Here are the real calculations of the French leader.
First, as Paris sees it, the internal political setting can hardly be more advantageous. Chirac's control over domestic French policy is watertight. He has just won a fresh mandate as president. The parties that support him also enjoy a crushing majority in parliament. The opposition is almost non-existent and most of the French government consists of Chirac's hand-picked appointees. The last leader to enjoy such an unlimited power in modern French history was Charles de Gaulle. His supposed disciple, Chirac is now determined to repeat de Gaulle's feat.
More importantly, there is a new Germany. France has long dictated events in Europe through an alliance with its neighbour. Nevertheless, there was one issue on which the French and the Germans historically never agreed: relations with the USA. All this has changed in the last few months. For the first time since 1945, France has a German partner prepared to criticise the USA.
France used to have large oil interests in Iraq, and a reasonable expectation of retaining some influence in the region. Chirac's current policy has put all this at risk. The French attitude has also split Europe, with Britain, Spain, Italy and the former communist countries in eastern Europe now deeply suspicious of Paris. The French leader always knew that, ultimately, he could not stop the USA from resorting to war. So why is he persisting?
Mainly because he believes that all the disadvantages pale into insignificance in comparison with the ultimate prize: a France that leads all those willing to stand up to US 'arrogance' around the world, a France that articulates Europe's distinct opinion and enjoys a good reputation in the Arab world as well.
Is the new French global policy impregnable? There are two snags. First, the USA is now determined to foil Chirac's policies; President George W Bush will do everything possible to make sure that France ultimately emerges the loser; until now the French were considered in Washington as just a nuisance, but now they are widely regarded as a real menace.
Second, Chirac assumes that Germany is now wedded to an anti-US policy. Yet Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's coalition government in Berlin is teetering, and may well collapse in a year or so.
19 September 2001 Who did it? Foreign Report presents an alternative view
Israel's military intelligence service, Aman, suspects that Iraq is the state that sponsored the suicide attacks on the New York Trade Center and the Pentagon in Washington. Directing the mission, Aman officers believe, were two of the world's foremost terrorist masterminds: the Lebanese Imad Mughniyeh, head of the special overseas operations for Hizbullah, and the Egyptian Dr Ayman Al Zawahiri, senior member of Al-Qaeda and possible successor of the ailing Osama Bin Laden.
The two men have not been seen for some time. Mughniyeh is probably the world's most wanted outlaw. Unconfirmed reports in Beirut say he has undergone plastic surgery and is unrecognisable. Zawahiri is thought to be based in Egypt. He could be Bin Laden's chief representative outside Afghanistan.
The Iraqis, who for several years paid smaller groups to do their dirty work, were quick to discover the advantages of Al-Qaeda. The Israeli sources claim that for the past two years Iraqi intelligence officers were shuttling between Baghdad and Afghanistan, meeting with Ayman Al Zawahiri. According to the sources, one of the Iraqi intelligence officers, Salah Suleiman, was captured last October by the Pakistanis near the border with Afghanistan. The Iraqis are also reported to have established strong ties with Imad Mughniyeh.
"We've only got scraps of information, not the full picture," admits one intelligence source, "but it was good enough for us to send a warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented massive terror attack was expected. One of our indications suggested that Imad Mughniyeh met with some of his dormant agents on secret trips to Germany. We believe that the operational brains behind the New-York attack were Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, who were probably financed and got some logistical support from the Iraqi Intelligence Service (SSO)."
Mughniyeh was the only one believed to have tried it before. On April 12th 1997, he was reported to be only two hours away from achieving the highest goal of any terrorist organisation (until last week): blowing up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. A man carrying a forged British passport with the name Andrew Jonathan Neumann was in a Jerusalem hotel preparing a bomb he was supposed to take on board an El-Al flight leaving Israel, when it accidentally went off. Andrew Jonathan Neumann was very badly injured but strong enough to reveal later to the Israelis that he was not British but Lebanese, and that his operation was supposed to be a special "gift" to Israel from Imad Mughniyeh.
‘A psychopath'
"Bin Laden is a schoolboy in comparison with Mughniyeh," says an Israeli who knows Mughniyeh . "The guy is a genius, someone who refined the art of terrorism to its utmost level. We studied him and reached the conclusion that he is a clinical psychopath motivated by uncontrollable psychological reasons, which we have given up trying to understand. The killing of his two brothers by the Americans only inflamed his strong motivation."
Experts on Iraq and Saddam Hussein also believe that Iraq was the state behind the two terror masterminds. "In recent months, there was a change, and Iraq decided to get into the terror business. On July 7th, they tried for the first time to send a suicide bomber, trained in Baghdad, to blow up Tel Aviv airport (Foreign Report No. 2651)."
Our sources believe that it will be very difficult to get to the bottom of this unprecedented terror operation. However, they believe the chief of the Iraqi SSO is Qusai Hussein, the dictator's son, and his organisation is the most likely to have been involved.
Mughniyeh, 48, is a "sick man", says an intelligence officer who was in charge of his file. He is considered by Western intelligence agencies as the most dangerous active terrorist today. He is wanted by several governments and the Americans have put a $2m reward on his head.
[Detailed list of Mughniyeh operations removed for Non-Subscriber Extract]
It was the assassination of one man in March 1984 that is said to have made Mughniyeh the CIA's most wanted terrorist. Mughniyeh allegedly kidnapped the head of the CIA station in Beirut, William Buckley. The kidnapping triggered what later became known as ‘Irangate', when the Americans tried to exchange Buckley (and others) with arms for Iran. However, the attempt ended in a fiasco. By one unconfirmed account, Mughniyeh tortured and killed Buckley with his own hands.
A year later, in a combined CIA/Mossad operation, a powerful car bomb went off at the entrance to the house of Hizbullah's spiritual leader, Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. Seventy-five people were killed. One of them was his brother. Hunted by the CIA and the Mossad, Mughniyeh hid in Iran.
In February 1992, Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the convoy of the then head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Abas Musawi, in South Lebanon. Musawi, his wife and children were killed and the revenge attack followed a month later. According to press reports, Mughniyeh was called back into action and, in a well-planned and devastating attack, his people blew up the Israeli embassy in Argentina. The building was demolished and 92 were killed. Only last year, after a long investigation, did Argentina issue a warrant for Mughniyeh's arrest.
The reprisal for the attack in Argentina came in December 1994, when a car bomb went off in a southern Shi'ite suburb of Beirut. Four people were killed. One of them was called Mughniyeh, but to the deep disappointment of those Israelis who planted the bomb it was the wrong one. Mughniyeh's life was saved, but his other brother Fuad was killed. Mughniyeh waited for his opportunity for revenge.
Our Israeli sources claim to see Mughniyeh's signature on the wreckage in New York and Washington. How to counter this kind of terrorism? "To fight these bastards you don't need a military attack," said an experienced Israeli commando officer. "You only need to adopt Israel's assassination policy."
THE VISIBLE HAND
The Iraqi Connection
President Bush must win the war his father started.
OpinionJournal
Wall Street Journal Online
BY RICHARD MINITER
Monday, September 24, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT
In President Bush's soaring, Reaganesque speech Thursday night, two words were missing: Saddam Hussein.
Is America's Gulf War foe behind the attacks? Secretary of State Colin Powell and other Bush administration officials say there is "no evidence" of that. Yet veteran State Department watchers say that "evidence" is a kind of Foggy Bottom shorthand for absolute proof--the kind that lawyers would need to convict the Iraqi dictator in court.
Still, there is a strong circumstantial case that Iraq has backed Osama bin Laden and has been waging a terrorist war of assassination plots and bombings that had already killed hundreds of Americans before Sept. 11--from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing to the attack on the USS Cole last year.
Israeli intelligence services reportedly met with CIA and FBI officials in August and warned of an imminent large-scale attack on the U.S. There "were strong grounds for suspecting Iraqi involvement," a senior Israeli official later told London's Daily Telegraph.
Bin Laden's Al Qaeda reportedly had representatives based in Baghdad. In 1997 he also set up training camps in Iraq, according to Canada's National Post. Iraq has also reportedly delivered small arms and money to bin Laden's organization over the past few years. Iraqi intelligence agents have met repeatedly with bin Laden or his operatives in Sudan, Turkey, Afghanistan and an undisclosed site in Europe (evidently Prague). Iraqi opposition leaders have also said that there is a long history of contact between Iraq and the archterrorist.
Bin Laden is believed to have met repeatedly with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay. Bin Laden also seems to have ties to Iraq's Mukhabarat, another one of its intelligence services.
Perhaps the most dramatic meeting occurred in December 1998, when Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in the Mukhabarat who later became ambassador to Turkey, journeyed deep into the icy Hindu Kush mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq," according to a 1999 report in the Guardian, a British newspaper.
That same year, an Arab intelligence officer, who knows Saddam personally, predicted in Newsweek: "Very soon you will be witnessing large-scale terrorist activity run by the Iraqis." The Arab official said these terror operations would be run under "false flags" --spook-speak for front groups--including bin Laden's organization. And Iraqi intelligence agents were in contact with bin Laden in the days leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence sources told the Washington Times' Bill Gertz.
A Saddam-bin Laden partnership would offer both sides advantages. The Iraqi dictator would gain an energized terrorist network, whose actions he could plausibly deny. Bin Laden would gain expertise and the world-wide logistical support that only a client state can offer. Certainly, bin Laden has need of Saddam's skills--developed with the aid of the Soviets and East Germans--for planning covert operations, forging false documents and coordinating large campaigns over vast areas. Given their personal history, several of the hijackers needed false papers and concealment skills to enter and remain in the U.S. The FBI has acknowledged that it was searching unsuccessfully for two of the hijackers two weeks before the attacks.
"It's clear that the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq," Vincent Cannistraro, former head of the CIA's counterintelligence efforts, told Knight Ridder in 1999. He added that "the Iraqis have all the technological elements, the tradecraft that bin Laden lacks, and they have Abu Nidal," the notorious Palestinian bomb expert.
Most of all, bin Laden needs money. His Al Qaeda organization operates in some 50 countries. Informed estimates put bin Laden's personal wealth at perhaps $30 million--not the $300 million usually cited in the press--and this probably is not enough to sustain a global terror network over many years. Bin Laden told an Arab reporter that he lost $150 million in Sudanese investments. What's left of his fortune is tied up in real estate in Sudan, Yemen and elsewhere or has been frozen by various governments in the past few years. Sanctions notwithstanding, Saddam is far more liquid. Forbes estimates his personal fortune at $7 billion.
Iraq doesn't shrink from financing terrorism. Baghdad has two intelligence services that have funded and planned terrorist campaigns carried out by independent organizations, starting in 1969 in eastern Iran.
Saddam and bin Laden share a powerful hate for America, and both cite the Gulf War as a turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat and subsequent sanctions crippled the Iraqi economy and stymied its buildup of nuclear and biological weapons. Upon learning of the first President Bush's 1992 election defeat, Saddam joyously fired his pistol into the sky and declared on Iraqi radio: "The mother of all battles continues and will continue."
Bin Laden called Saudi Arabia's alliance with the U.S. during the Gulf War "treason." He regards the U.S. as guilty of war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have military bases on holy sands of Arabia.
Bin Laden's Feb. 23, 1998, call for jihad lists three grievances: that U.S. warplanes use bases in Saudi Arabia to patrol the skies of Iraq, that United Nations sanctions have caused grievous suffering in Iraq, and that America's Iraq policy is designed to divert attention from Israel's treatment of Muslims. In short, bin Laden's call to arms reads as if it was issued from Baghdad.
Aside from Saddam's links to bin Laden and his known hostility to America, there is a wealth of intriguing connections between Iraq and this past week's attacks. Mohamed Atta, believed to be the commander of the hijacking crew that smashed American Airlines flight 11 into the World Trade Center, reportedly met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Europe a few months ago. U.S. intelligence reports from Southeast Asia suggest that Iraq played a role in training the hijackers who attacked America, according to Time magazine. An Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities last October.
Certainly, Iraq seems to be acting strangely. Hours after the attacks, Iraqi soldiers moved away from likely military targets, notes Neil Partrick, a London-based analyst.
And Iraq, alone among the 22 members of the Arab League, failed to condemn the atrocities of Sept. 11. Indeed, Baghdad celebrated them. Saddam's government issued a statement, quoted widely in Al-Iraq and other state-run papers, that said America deserved the attacks.
Perhaps Iraq's official response indicates nothing more than a continuing hatred of America, but Mideast leaders who are no friends of the U.S. acted differently. Iran sent its condolences. Yasser Arafat expressed sorrow and gave blood. Even Libya's Moammar Gadhafi called for Muslim aid groups to help Americans, adding that the U.S. had the "right to take revenge."
For almost a decade, Saddam has waged a secret terror campaign against Americans, according to terrorism experts, former government officials, U.S. government reports and newspaper accounts from around the world. That Iraqi-inspired terror campaign--working through Osama bin Laden and others--is believed to include foiled assassination attempts against President Bush père in Kuwait in April 1993 and against President Clinton in the Philippines in November 1994. The terror campaign seems to include the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center; a 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, that killed five American soldiers; a massive 1995 bombing of U.S. troop barracks at Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 Americans soldiers; the simultaneous bombings in 1998 of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224; and last year's attack on the USS Cole in Yemen, which killed 17 sailors and wounded 39.
Knowledgeable observers point to wide-ranging Iraqi terrorist activity. James Woolsey, who served as director of central intelligence during the Clinton administration, has repeatedly raised the issue of Iraqi involvement in last week's attacks and past terrorist assaults. Laurie Mylroie, author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" and a Clinton Iraq adviser, presents a compelling case that Iraqi agents were behind a string of bombings.
Iraq's secret war against America probably began with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Iraq became involved, Ms. Mylroie believes, after learning of the bomb plot from a terrorist holed up in Iraq who was an uncle of one of the ringleaders. One of the perpetrators placed 46 calls--some more than an hour long--to that uncle in a single month before the bombing, according to phone records collected by the FBI.
The two ringleaders both had connections to Iraq. The mastermind, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport and was known to his associates as "Rashid the Iraqi." It was he who persuaded the bombers to make their target the World Trade Center. The other man, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Baghdad, where, ABC News reported in 1994, he had been put on the government payroll. He is believed to be still at large in Iraq. "The majority of senior law-enforcement officers in New York believe that Iraq was involved," Jim Fox, who ran the FBI's investigation of the World Trade Center bombing, told Ms. Mylroie. Egyptian and Saudi intelligence sources also told U.S. officials that Iraq organized the bombing.
Iraqi agents, Ms. Mylroie persuasively argues, also supplied false passports and escape routes. They may have also provided bomb-making expertise and money. The hydrogen-cyanide gas that was supposed to be spread by the explosion--luckily it was burned up instead--probably has origins in Iraq's chemical-weapons program, Ms. Mylroie concludes. The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B.
The Iraqi terror campaign intensified in the mid-1990s, after bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence became better acquainted, most likely in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. In that dusty city, Iraq ran an extensive intelligence hub until the late 1990s, when Sudanese officials allegedly told them to leave. Bin Laden was based in Khartoum until 1996, when Sudan kicked him out at the request of the U.S. government, a representative of the Sudanese government told me. There are documented meetings that occurred between bin Laden and Iraqi agents at the time.
After a June 1996 Arab League summit--the first since the Gulf War--issued a communiqué in favor of maintaining sanctions against Iraq, Iraq's government-controlled press seethed with anger. "Before it is too late, the Arabs should rectify the sin they committed against Iraq," one state-run paper warned. Saudi Arabia was the prime mover behind the Arab League's bold statement. Two days after the meeting ended, a truck bomb exploded outside the Al Khobar towers in Saudi Arabia. The U.S government never publicly charged Iraq, but Gen. Wafiq Samarai, an Iraqi defector, did. He said Saddam had asked him to join a secret committee to commit terrorist acts against U.S. forces during the Gulf War. The Al Khobar bombing was strikingly similar to the plans of that committee, Mr. Samarai said.
Next, Iraq seems to have played a role in bin Laden's plot to bomb two U.S embassies in East Africa. Beginning on May 1, 1998, Iraq warned of "dire consequences" if the U.N. sanctions were not lifted and the weapons-inspection teams removed. Eight days later, bin Laden released another statement calling for jihad against America. Throughout the summer, Iraq's and bin Laden's threatening statements moved in lockstep. Then Iraq expelled U.N. weapons inspectors on Aug. 5. Two days later, the bombs went off in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania. Dire consequences, indeed.
Why didn't the Clinton administration follow up on the Iraqi connection? Part of the answer is bureaucratic bungling. The New Jersey FBI office released a suspect who was sought by the New York office in connection with the 1993 twin towers bomb plot. There was little communication or trust between the FBI and the National Security Agency. And the FBI turned much of its evidence in the 1993 bombings to the defendants long before America's national-security specialists saw it. During the Clinton years, America's antiterrorist units suffered from the lowest ebb of morale since the 1970s, according to a recent National Commission on Terrorism report.
Another possibility is that administration officials didn't want to see it, that they saw their job as containing Saddam, not confronting him. Sandy Berger, President Clinton's National Security Adviser, told the Los Angeles Times in 1996 that dealing with Saddam was "little bit like a Whack-a-Mole game at the circus: They bop up and you whack them down, and if they bop up again, you bop them back down again."
To avoid targeting Iraq, Clinton administration officials blamed the governments of Sudan and Afghanistan or a loose network of Islamic extremists. Both explanations seem incomplete. Sudan and Afghanistan are among the world's poorest nations; their governments cannot control sizeable sections of their own territories. While both governments are run by Islamic extremists and have long been havens for terrorists, they lack the ability to act alone. Iraq has strong ties to both of these nations.
The idea that loose networks of Islamic hardliners randomly come together to plot attacks is also hard to credit. It takes organization, money, patience and precision to carry out these attacks--qualities not usually present in volatile, itinerant extremists. Clinton officials should have noticed that the 1998 U.S. embassy bombs detonated within nine minutes of each other and the perpetrators had false papers and plane tickets for Pakistan.
They also should have grasped that the terrorists are political extremists--not Islamic zealots. This is also true of the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. Mohammed Atta slugged down vodka like a sailor, notes Time magazine. The night before the attacks, several men with knowledge of the impending attacks are reported to have had a drunken party at a Florida strip club--two major violations of Islamic law. Many of the perpetrators lacked beards, which fundamentalists believe the Koran instructs cannot be shaved. One disco-loving hijacker has been traced to another Al Qaeda terrorist plot in the Philippines, where a fellow terrorist lived with a non-Muslim girlfriend. A third terrorist boasted of his sexual conquests, on a phone tapped by the Philippine police. Audio files on the computer used by the 1993 World Trade Center bombers contain numerous obscenities. And so on.
Even overlooking the Koran's injunctions against murder and killing of women in war, the lifestyles of the Al Qaeda terrorists don't reflect orthodox Islam. But the Clinton administration kept talking about a shadowy network of Islamic extremists--not a campaign of terror by a vengeful Saddam Hussein.
The scale of last week's devastation requires a sober look at America's enemies, starting with Iraq. If Iraq is behind the Sept. 11 attacks and the terrorist assaults of the past decade, then Americans will know that they were not the victims of senseless hate, but malevolent calculation. And President Bush will know that winning the war against terrorism will require him to win the war his father began.
Mr. Miniter is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe. His column appears Fridays.
Seeking Saddam's smoking gun: Links between Iraq, Osama Bin Laden and recent major terrorist attacks
Foreign Affairs
Source: Boston Globe
Published: 7/29/2001 Author: Joe Lauria
Posted on 9/11/01 10:30 PM Pacific by Spirit Of Truth
Seeking Saddam's smoking gun
By Joe Lauria, Globe Staff, 7/29/2001
Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America
By Laurie Mylroie (email a request to join her email newsletter)
American Enterprise Institute, 321 pp.
Saddam Hussein vowed revenge earlier this year for one of President Bush's first acts in office: the Feb. 16 bombing of Iraq in response to Saddam's increased attacks on US aircraft patrolling the no-fly zone.
Conventional Washington wisdom said Saddam was too boxed in by sanctions to hit back. Instead, he called on Arabs outside Iraq to strike US interests in the region. That, according to a new book by Laurie Mylroie, a specialist on Iraq, fits Saddam's pattern of revenge since the 1991 Gulf War: masterminding terrorism through Arab fundamentalists who are left holding the bag.
Mylroie argues in "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America" that the Clinton administration erred by prosecuting such individuals in Justice Department-led criminal trials, rather than conducting national security investigations that would have singled out Saddam.
Coauthor of the 1991 national bestseller "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf," Mylroie sees Saddam's fingerprints on four terrorist attacks: the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the 1995 bombing of the US training mission for Saudi troops in Riyadh; the 1996 attack against the US base in al-Khobar, Saudi Arabia; and the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
Saddam's motive is not in doubt: continue the Gulf War through other means. Proving it is more difficult. Mylroie sets out an intriguing case for Iraq's involvement in the World Trade Center blast based on circumstantial evidence - there is no smoking bomb. But the late director of the FBI's office in New York, James Fox, believed Iraq was behind the trade center attack. Washington ignored him, believing a "loose network" of Islamic radicals intended to topple the twin towers onto each other with their bomb, releasing a cloud of cyanide gas to maximize the killing.
Mylroie's evidence, based mostly on phone, airline, and passport records entered into the trial, appears to show that mastermind Ramzi Yousef, now serving life, was an Iraqi agent who traveled to New York on an Iraqi passport to direct dupes intended to deflect attention from Saddam.
He and other conspirators placed numerous telephone calls to Iraq while in New York during the lead-up to the bombing, which occurred on the second anniversary of the Gulf War's end. Mylroie's detective work indicates Yousef later tried to change his identity with a doctored Kuwaiti passport. Another convict who fled New York a day after the bombing is living under Saddam's protection in Baghdad, she says.
But Mylroie argues that President Clinton ignored these signs because he didn't want to confront the issue of Iraq as a terrorist threat. His order to strike Iraqi intelligence headquarters in June 1993, she says, was presented as retaliation for an Iraqi attempt to kill former President Bush. But he was also seeking a gesture that would address the terrorist bombing in New York: "He believed [the strikes] would take care of the terrorism in New York. It would take care of the strong suspicions of the New York FBI that Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing and would deter Saddam from all future acts of terrorism."
Among those who support this contention is James Woolsey, who was CIA director at the time the Iraqi intelligence headquarters was hit. Woolsey says he believed Iraq may have been involved in the World Trade Center bombing, but was never asked his opinion by the Clinton White House.
Mylroie says the Riyadh bombing that killed five Americans was probably Saddam's response to a negative United Nations weapons inspectors' report and was aimed at US troops still in the region from the Gulf War. She quotes an unnamed senior Saudi official: "Of course that was Iraq. That was a professional bomb. It was not made by a bunch of Saudis sitting in a tent." She admits: "There is no proof Iraq was behind the Riyadh bombing. Yet Iraq should have been considered a prime candidate, and it was not." She says progress in the Mideast peace process at the time created a "climate of euphoria incompatible with the notion that the war with Iraq was not yet over."
The al-Khobar bombing seven months later killed 19 US servicemen who had helped enforce the Iraq no-fly zone. Mylroie constructs á scenario in which Iraqi agents in Khartoum, Sudan, worked with Osama bin Laden to plan the attack. She quotes Israeli counterintelligence sources and Saudi officials who believed Saddam was behind that bomb too.
Likewise, Mylroie believes Iraq worked with bin Laden in the African embassy bombings on Aug. 7, 1998, two days after Saddam formally suspended weapons inspections. In the planning of the attack, bin Laden's group and Saddam issued parallel warnings. In May, Baghdad warned of "dire consequences" if UN sanctions were not lifted. Because US intelligence never investigated possible links to Saddam, Mylroie says, there is no proof. Instead the US indictment stops at bin Laden and his alleged conspirators.
But Iraq was not mentioned at all during the African embassy trial in New York. Richard Murphy, an Iraqi expert at the Council on Foreign Relations think tank, sees that as sufficient proof that Mylroie is wrong. "I don't think she's found support in terms of the FBI and the CIA," he says.
Mylroie sees the tendency to not recognize the role of hostile governments in terrorist acts as dangerous. But CIA Director George Tenet told a US Senate committee in February that state-sponsored terrorism appears to have declined over the past five years. Transnational groups, he says, are emerging with fewer centrally controlled operations and more acts initiated at lower levels.
Clinton's secretary of defense, William S. Cohen, spoke of "a grave new world of terrorism" in which "perpetrators may leave no postmark or return address" and "traditional notions of deterrence and counter-response no longer apply."
Mylroie is swimming against this stream. Americans and their elected officials continue to see terrorism as the violent, random deeds of the world's lunatic fringe, not as state-sponsored acts. "According to the Clinton administration, a new terrorist threat has come into being, represented by loose networks of Muslim extremists," she writes. "It is truer to say that the Clinton administration's handling of terrorist episodes and its refusal to address the question of state sponsorship have encouraged further terrorist attacks."
Mylroie's argument that the legal threshold in a criminal trial is not necessary for intelligence agencies to prove state sponsorship is fraught with danger, however. Bombing without conclusive proof can lead to embarrassments such as Clinton's mistaken attack on a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan.
We may never know if Iraq was behind these terrorist attacks, but if the Bush administration wants to lead a more robust policy against Baghdad, it might be wise for it to find out.
The Persian Gulf Deception
***THE PERSIAN GULF DECEPTION***
By J. Adams
-Outline of Paper-
A. Introduction
B. Inconsistencies and Contradictions
C. The Deception
D. Confirmation
E. The Strategy
F. Conclusion
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The great masses of the people...
will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one."
(Adolph Hitler)
"We have no right ever to forget that psychological warfare
is a struggle for winning people's minds."
(Mikhail Gorbachev)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
THE PERSIAN GULF DECEPTION
-Introduction-
"I have a great feeling of a great victory. Anyone who dares
even imply that we did not achieve a great victory obviously
doesn't know what the hell he's talking about." (1)
{Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf}
(Gulf War Commander in Chief, U.S. Central Command)
Since Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union there have been persistent and exceptional historical contradictions in Soviet behavior. The consequence of this contradictory behavior has been the breakup of the Soviet Union and the seeming demise of the 'communist' threat.
Although on the surface the apparent, dramatic turn around in Kremlin thinking and the consequent collapse of Soviet communism may seem like positive developments for the West, there is reason to believe they may actually not be. Secular trends indicate there is a possibility that the Soviets have undermined their own political and economic power as part of a grand deception. There is reason to believe that Russia is currently misleading the world for the purpose of global military domination. An unprecedented campaign of large-scale deceptions may be underway which has totally misled the West such that the East can now successfully launch a surprise third world war. (2)
The crisis in the Persian Gulf may have been
a strategic deception engineered by Moscow.
For America and the West, the Gulf Crisis had a sensational outcome. First off, through the Gulf War the threat of Saddam Hussein was seemingly checked and Western interests in the Middle East were secured. Secondly, the U.S.-led Coalition victory in the Gulf War helped the United States overcome its disgrace in Vietnam and reinstated its position as the dominant world hegemon. Lastly, the positive resolution of the Gulf Crisis marked the beginning of a 'New World Order' in which the threat of militaristic totalitarianism appears to be dead and the superpowers are cooperating toward international peace and security.
The problem with the Gulf Crisis and its positive outcome is that it all may have been literally too good to be true. Something which the West seemed to conveniently overlook throughout the Crisis was that Iraq had been a close ally of the Soviet Union for decades prior to the Invasion of Kuwait. Consequently, the humiliating defeat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the Gulf War, like the modern defeat of Soviet communism, may have been a deception- an inherently contradictory lie. There is reason to believe that Saddam intentionally provoked the Gulf War with the sole intention of handing the West a 'great victory'. He would have done this in cooperation with Moscow as an important part of an overall strategy to mislead America, its Western allies, and the world as a whole, so that the East can successfully launch a surprise attack against the West. In other words, when it comes right down to it, the Gulf Crisis and subsequent Allied victory over Iraq may have in actuality been nothing but a seductive lie.
In the following pages I will thoroughly examine how the Persian Gulf Crisis may have been a deception. There will be four major parts. In part I, numerous inconsistencies and contradictions associated with the behavior of Iraq and the Soviets throughout the Gulf Crisis will be brought to light. In the second part, a circumstantial case will be built for a Persian Gulf deception based upon the implications of the given inconsistencies and contradictions. This case will be confirmed by directly incriminating evidence in part III. In the final part, possible strategic aims of a Persian Gulf deception will be discussed.
-Part I: Inconsistencies and Contradictions-
-Iraq-
Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait was inconsistent- it was a blatant provocation for war with the West that went against Iraq's best interest.
Going into the Gulf Crisis Iraq had become a major military threat, and potential target, for the West. During the 1980's, Saddam Hussein built-up one of the largest militaries in the world. By 1990, he commanded a million-man army equipped with a vast arsenal of modern weaponry including over 4500 tanks, almost 5000 artillery pieces, and upwards of 800 combat aircraft (3). Saddam also controlled hundreds of anti-ship missiles and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles, as well as a stockpile of chemical and possibly biolological munitions. During the 1980's Iraq developed an extensive military infrastructure involving a comprehensive command, control, communications, and intelligence (Cµ3I) network. By the summer of 1990, throughout Iraq were radar stations, anti-aircraft artillery, surface-to-air missile batteries, and weapons production plants which included facilities for the research and development of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. (4)
As Iraqi military power grew, the West became increasingly concerned about its expanding regional influence. In early May of 1990- just prior to the Gulf Crisis- 'The New Republic' warned:
"The prospect of Saddam Hussein as top man in the Arab world and dominant power in the Persian Gulf is not one that civilized people should welcome. This man is a ruthless killer with a deep paranoia about the West and grandiose ambitions to be a new Nasser and to re-create the glories that were Babylon and Mesopotamia." (5)
All in all, going into the Invasion of Kuwait, the West saw Iraq as a dangerous military threat and destabilizing force in the richest oil region of the world. Saddam's growing military power, coupled with his staunch anti-Israeli and anti-Western mindset, was becoming a major concern for the West. Iraq could someday unify the Arab world such that the West would be held hostage by its oil dependency. Even worse, Iraq could eventually unleash a major regional war involving weapons of mass destruction which could result in the destruction of Israel. By 1990, Saddam Hussein had come to embody many of "the serious security problems of the post-cold war era: aggression, terrorism, virulant tribalism, and missile, nuclear, and chemical weapons proliferation" (6).
In the weeks and months before Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait, Saddam was putting out some not-so-subtle hints as to his belligerent intentions, giving the West an opportunity to consider the possibility of a future confrontation. In a speech made on April 3rd, 1990, Saddam threatened to "make fire eat up half of Israel", a comment which drew widespread Western consternation (7). In May, U.S. officials confirmed press rumors that Saddam told Kuwait: "Iraqi security may require him to occupy Kuwaiti territory in the future" (8). Such bellicose remarks likely led Western leaders to consider possible responses should Iraq become aggressive in the near-future.
As Iraq began to blatantly threaten Kuwait in late July of 1990, the United States made it clear that it would respond forcefully if need be. The prevailing sentiment of America's leaders at that time was reflected by Republican Senator Alfonse D'Amato who denounced Saddam as: "...a butcher, a killer, a bully. Some day we're going to have to stand up to him. Why not now?" (9). The State Department announced that the United States would "remain strongly committed to supporting the individual and collective self-defence of our friends in the Gulf, with whom we have deep and long- standing ties" (10). To underscore America's willingness to use military force against Iraq should events warrant such action, a joint naval exercise with the United Arab Emirates was hastily arranged and initiated in the northern Gulf (11).
Apparently unintimidated by American posturing, on August 2nd, 1990, Saddam proved good on his word and Iraq invaded Kuwait. The West received the opportunity it needed to do something decisive about the growing Iraqi threat. Almost immediately, the United States and its Western Allies began preparing for a war against Iraq. Saddam's military empire could be forcefully checked before Iraqi regional influence grew too far or before Iraq's military might became too strong- eventually including nuclear weapons.
Saddam's provocation was ideal for a decisive Western military response. As the 1991-92 'American Defense Annual' later put it: "Saddam Hussein... proved to be a near perfect villian, and the coalition aligned against him had a compelling 'casus belli'" (12). A ruthless military dictator, infamous for gassing his own people, blitzkrieged the small, peaceful nation of Kuwait in blatant violation of international law. What's more, Saddam's Invasion resulted in Iraq's control of over a third of the world's available oil reserves and "put his forces within striking distance of one of the world's most critical resources, Saudi Arabia's oil fields, making it necessary for the United States and other nations to act to counter him, instead of just issuing protest statements" (13). As a whole, through the Kuwaiti Invasion, Saddam had come to threaten half the world's oil, a situation wholly intolerable to the oil-dependent West.
Between the Invasion and the beginning of the Gulf War, Iraq continued to behave in a seemingly irrational manner that was inconsistent with its own interests but favorable to Western interests.
In the wake of Saddam's overrun of Kuwait, international pressure, led by the West, began to build on Iraq to withdraw. Immediately, U.N. Resolution 660 was ratified which called for the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait (14). Within days, U.S. military forces began flooding into Saudi Arabia. With Saddam remaining intransigent, the United Nations decided to impose international economic sanctions against Iraq. As Iraq failed to respond, military forces from across the globe began flowing into the Gulf along side the growing American build-up. On November 29th, with a sizable Coalition force already in place, the U.N. okayed a resolution for the forceful removal of Iraq from Kuwait by a U.S.-led international Coalition should Saddam's forces not unilaterally leave by January 15, 1991. (15)
Saddam's intransigence as international pressure began to build made little sense. It was apparent, given the scale of the American-led military build-up in Saudi Arabia, that, beyond freeing Kuwait, the West was preparing to use the Invasion of Kuwait as an excuse to destroy Iraq's military potential and, in turn, the threat Saddam posed to Western interests in the Middle East. Any sort of compromise or moderation on Saddam's part could have easily undone Western attempts to organize international support for a war and, in turn, resulted in substantial Iraqi gains. In John Bulloch's and Harvey Morris' 'Saddam's War', it is pointed out that:
"Had he (Saddam) contented himself with occupying the disputed islands of Bubiyan and Warbah and that sector of the Rumeileh oilfield which he claimed as his own, it is unlikely the United Nations would have gone beyond the imposition of unenforceable sanctions, or that the United States would have dispatched a single soldier to the region... Had a puppet government been left in charge of a nominally independent Kuwait, it would eventually have received some recognition, at least from the Arab world." (16)
Instead of moderation, however, Saddam remained almost completely intransigent and belligerent toward the West. He persistently made clear his unwillingness to be persuaded by Western intimidation. He declared Kuwait to have always been a part of Iraq and let the world know that all of Iraqi sovereignty- including Kuwait- would be militarily defended against any hostile actions. Furthermore, Saddam called on moslems around the world to rise up and launch a holy war, or 'jihad', against Western imperialism. (17)
Saddam sometimes, and usually at the wrong times, failed to behave according to the belligerent image he painted of himself. Iraqi forces never preempted the build-up of the American-led Coalition in Saudi Arabia. Saddam conveniently stood back as nations from all over the world, particularly in the West, mobilized and imported a massive military force. Yet, attacking while the Coalition was incomplete and disorganized may have undermined the Coalition's ability to successfully wage a war. Unfortunately, as is pointed out in the 1991-92 'American Defense Annual': "It seems unlikely that future enemies will graciously grant U.S. forces five months to prepare for battle" (18).
Even more inconsistent than failing to preempt was Saddam's release of Western hostages. There can be little doubt that: "One act of great good fortune was Saddam Hussein's decision to release his hostages, those human shields whose continued presence in Iraq would have vastly complicated the air war" (19). Specifically, Saddam made hostages out of the thousands of Western civilians (including over 3000 Americans) who had been living in Kuwait or Iraq when the Gulf Crisis broke out. He threatened to use them as 'human shields' by placing them in strategic targets in order to deter any approaching Coalition attack. These hostages became one of Saddam's only major trump cards against a U.S.-led attack. It was apparent a Coalition bombing campaign that would cost thousands of innocent Western lives would have exceptionally high political costs for our leaders. In an act of goodwill totally uncharacteristic of the 'Butcher of Baghdad', however, Saddam released the hostages. The only major concession he made before the Gulf War was profoundly self-contradictory in that it directly undermined his stated intention to inflict as much damage and pain as possible on the West. In fact, Saddam spared the lives of Westerners at the cost of Iraqi lives later lost in unhampered Coalition bombings.
The deadline of January 15th eventually passed and the U.S.-Coalition attacked the very next day. The Gulf War was underway as well as continued inconsistencies and contradictions.
As General Powell correctly pointed out the following day, the Coalition somehow 'caught Iraq off guard' and achieved tactical surprise in its post-deadline air-attack (20). This, of course, is absurd. Going into the Gulf War, Iraq had one of the most experienced and hardened militaries in the world. It had just completed an almost decade-long, modern war with Iran. Furthermore, Iraq was equipped with a sophisticated Soviet Cµ3I network. To top it all off, Iraq had several months going into January 15th to prepare its defenses and a military response should war come. Yet, Saddam's war-machine was somehow surprised by a *deadline*-attack. Upon the initial wave of the air campaign there was little or no immediate Iraqi response: no defensive black-out of Baghdad (something they had been rehearsing), no immediate retaliatory SCUD missile strikes, and no Iraqi air- or ground-counteroffensive. Fortunately for the Coalition, all its planes ran into was well-lit targets, inept Iraqi air defenses, and some sporadic dog-fights. Tactical surprise allowed the Coalition to swiftly disable Saddam's war-machine with minimum associated costs.
During the air-campaign, the only significant counterattack from Iraq was random SCUD missile attacks against Israel and Saudi Arabia. Fortunately, however, chemical weapons were never involved. Of course, why weren't they? It was not that Saddam lacked such weapons for in the War's aftermath U.N. inspectors have found dozens of Al-Hussein chemical SCUDs which survived Coalition bombings (21). Saddam decided not to use chemical SCUDs even though such restraint contradicted both the threats he was making and the image he was conveying prior to and during the Gulf War. If Saddam really wished to spread the conflict and set-off a holy war as he persistently claimed he would, hitting Israel with chemical SCUDs would have been an ideal provocation. It is doubtful that Saddam feared Israeli retaliation given that Iraq was already stomaching over two thousand Coalition sorties a day and Israeli involvement was the intended goal. All in all, it makes little sense that Saddam failed to use chemical SCUDs during the Gulf War against Israel or any of Iraq's enemies, whereas he gassed his own people only a couple of years before. (22)
In late February, the Coalition ground-offensive got underway, but again no chemical weapons were involved. Apparently, Saddam disallowed the use of any of the tens-of-thousands of chemical artillery shells and chemical mines in the Iraqi arsenal (23). This is surprising given how these weapons were employed with great success during the Iran-Iraq War (24). The fact that chemical munitions were not used by the Iraqis is but another inconsistency on the part of Saddam which was to the benefit of the U.S. and the Coalition forces.
By March, Kuwait was repatriated and Saddam had managed to suffer a defeat that seemed beyond human reasoning. With all said and done, the U.S.-Coalition had succeeded in a total military 'rout' of Iraq's war- hardened, well-equipped, million-man army and hardly got scratched in the process. After six-weeks of Allied aerial bombardment involving upwards of 100,000 sorties and 141,000 tons of bombs, Saddam's vast war-machine was left decimated at the cost of only a few dozen Coalition planes (25). Any of Saddam's forces in Kuwait that escaped destruction during the Coalition air-campaign proceeded to be encircled and destroyed in a 100-hour Allied ground offensive. When the War was over, more than 100,000 Iraqi soldiers had been killed, 300,000 were injured, and around 150,000 had been taken prisoner (26). In causing this immense massacre, the Allies suffered only 468 casualties: 149 dead, 81 missing-in-action, and 238 wounded (27). Through the Gulf War Saddam lost some 4000 tanks, 2000 artillery pieces, 2000 armored personnel carriers (APCs), 100 aircraft, and 80 ships (28). Furthermore, Iraq's infrastructure suffered what the U.N. later described as 'near-apocalyptic' damage (29). The Allies, on the other hand, lost only 4 tanks, 1 artillery piece, 9 APCs, 44 aircraft, and 2 ships (30). All in all, Saddam's defeat at the hands of the West was so drastic and humiliating as to be utterly nonsensical.
With the Gulf War over, the West had reason to breathe a sigh of relief at home. Fortunately, there had been no major anti-Western terrorist attacks associated with the Crisis. Of course, why weren't there? The CIA "picked up all the tell-tale signs of Iraq's ability to wage chemical warfare and launch terrorist attacks around the Middle East and Europe... Intelligence analysts are still scratching their heads, wondering why these capabilities were not used (31)". In other words, Saddam refrained from launching terrorist attacks just as he failed to wage chemical attacks even though he was fully capable of and supposedly intending to do both. Thus, since there was no terrorism, Saddam acted in a contradictory manner which, once again, was favorable to the West.
In the wake of the Gulf War, one of the greatest inconsistencies of all concerning Saddam's behavior has come to light. U.N. inspections following the Gulf War ceasefire have revealed that Iraq's program to develop nuclear weapons, code-named 'Project Babylon' (32), was far larger and more successful than had ever been suspected in the West. In fact, it is today believed that Iraq may have been less than a year away from having at least a few crude nuclear weapons when it invaded Kuwait (33). Of course, if Saddam was interested in taking on the West and fighting the "Mother of All Battles", why did he make his challenge when he did? Why didn't he wait a year until he had the Bomb? Why did Saddam invade Kuwait and fight a war with the West before developing the ultimate means by which to fulfill his grandiose ambitions?
-The Soviets-
Throughout the Persian Gulf Crisis the Soviets behaved as inconsistently as Saddam's Iraq.
For the Gulf Crisis, Soviet foreign policy did an about-face. Throughout most of the United Nation's history, Moscow had tried to undermine any Western efforts to bring about international cooperation, particularly if such cooperation was to somehow serve Western interests. Yet, for the Gulf Crisis, this was not so. For the first time since World War II the Soviets cooperated with the West in organizing an international effort.
The effort they finally chose to support was blatantly in the West's interest and against their own.
The oil-shock stemming from the Gulf Crisis was devastating to Western economic vitality. The West desperately needed a way to resecure its supply of cheap oil from the Persian Gulf by freeing Kuwait and eliminating the Iraqi threat. Without the okay of the Soviets and international support this may never have been possible and the West's economy may very well have been plunged into depression.
For the Soviets, on the other hand, higher oil-prices stemming from the Gulf Crisis was a blessing. At the time, Soviet Russia was the world's largest producer and second largest exporter of oil. Hence, the sharp rise in oil prices meant windfall profits of hard foreign currency- something the Soviets greatly needed. Given the price at which oil topped-out during the Crisis, the Soviets could have hoped to increase their hard-currency earnings by nearly $40 billion a year. (34)
Beyond oil interests, Saddam Hussein's Iraq was a valuable ally and military client which the Soviets should have wanted to keep.
By 1990, the Soviets had a long-standing and deeply-vested relationship with Iraq. In 1972, Moscow and Baghdad signed a 'Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation' (35). Over the next two decades the Soviets poured thousands of military 'advisers' and other specialists into Iraq who trained Baghdad's general staff and planning officers as well as organized its intelligence services (36). Soviet involvement in Iraq became particularly deep after Saddam Hussein came to power in 1979. Guided by a Stalinist philosophy, Saddam wanted to model Iraq after the Soviet military state (37). He affirmed his commitment to Moscow when he came to power by signing an agreement with Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov on military cooperation and strategic consultation (38). After making the agreement, the Soviets helped Saddam carry out a large-scale campaign to consolidate power within Iraq and become a regional military superpower. Reflecting Moscow's involvement, eight military facilities were constructed in Iraq for Soviet use including both air bases and naval ports (39). All in all, by the Kuwaiti Invasion, the Soviet Union had invested a great deal of time, energy, and resources in the construction of Saddam's totalitarian regime and modern war-machine- an investment they likely meant to make good on.
In developing its massive war-machine, Iraq became an ideal Soviet military clientele state. During the 1980's Iraq became the world's largest importer of arms. It is estimated that between 1980 and 1990 Saddam spent some $100 billion dollars on military equipment (that compares to just under $70 billion spent on arms by Britian or France during the same period) (40). Since 90 percent of Iraq's military was bought from the Soviets, it should be apparent just how valuable a customer Saddam was to Moscow.
Since Iraq purchased most of its arms from the Soviets on credit, it was in Moscow's interest to maintain Saddam's regime and Iraq's economic vitality. Going into the Gulf Crisis, Baghdad owed Moscow some $80 billion. For 1990 alone, the Soviets were expecting to receive $2 billion from Iraq (41). Given the seeming economic distress in Soviet Russia, preserving Iraq's economic potential should have been important to them. In a nutshell, the Soviets should not have wanted to turn their back on Iraq during the Gulf Crisis. As 'Times' columnist A.M. Rosenthal pointed out at the time, doing so meant that:
"Moscow will lose its only remaining ally in the area. Also: its best customer for weapons. Also: the military and political prestige it invested in Saddam Hussein for so long." (42)
The principal reason Moscow forged a close relationship with Baghdad and made such a deep military commitment is because Iraq has tremendous geopolitical strategic value. Iraq is at the heart of the Persian Gulf and the richest oil-region in the world. Thus, it is a focal point not only of the Arab world, but also of vital Western energy interests. A foothold in Iraq enhanced Moscow's influence over other Arab nations and gave the Soviets access to the aquilles heel of the oil-dependent West.
Because of Iraq's strategic value, it was widely believed the Soviets would never let the West attack and defeat Saddam Hussein. Such a scenario entailed a shift in the regional balance of power that compromised Soviet interests and benefitted the West. Just prior to the Gulf War, 'Aviation Week and Space Technology' reported:
"...the destruction of Iraq's military, if it came to that, would augment the strategic weight of Israel and Iran. This is not in Soviet interests." (43)
At the Hoover Institute, a national defense think-tank, experts believed that the Soviets would "do everything in their power to keep that man in there... They do not want that part of the world dominated by us" (44).
All in all, Moscow had vested interests in its relationship with Baghdad such that they should have stood behind, or at least sought to protect, Saddam Hussein's Iraq during the Gulf Crisis. Yet, they did not. In fact, they opened the way for the West to launch a war against their valuable Iraqi ally:
"The importance of Soviet cooperation cannot be overstated. If the Soviets had pursued their traditional policy of blocking agreements at the United Nations and defending their prot¢g¢s in the Middle East, not only would united action have been impossible but fear of provoking a superpower confrontation might well have deterred the United States from acting." (45)
Although at least some contemplation would have been expected, the Soviets turned their back on Saddam and helped out the West immediately and without reservation. On the day of the Invasion, American Secretary of State James Baker was visiting his Soviet counterpart, Eduard Shevardnadze, in Siberia. On news of the Invasion, the two got together, and within just a couple of hours they had worked out the draft wording for U.N. Resolution 660 which called for an immediate, unconditional Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait. (46)
As Western forces began piling into the Gulf, Moscow failed to use its diplomatic leverage over Saddam to remove Iraq from Kuwait. This, of course, makes little sense given what the Soviets had to gain from preserving Iraq. Yet, while a diplomatic solution was still possible before Iraq was destroyed by Western military force, the Soviets sat on their hands. If they were interested in seeing a peaceful resolution to the Crisis they should have been able to produce one since the Soviet Union was Iraq's principal political- and military-supporter. It is apparent that: "The Soviet Union is the one power that could have brought Iraq to terms early on if Moscow had really clenched its fist" (47).
In fact, Saddam may have backed down if only the Soviets informed Baghdad of their willingness to let the U.S.-led Coalition attack. In 'Saddam's War', the authors revealed:
"In Baghdad, officials told us that they had their links to Moscow, and they were quite certain that at the Helsinki summit in mid-September the influence of Soviet military thinking made Gorbachev hold back from any endorsement of military action against Iraq if sanctions proved ineffective. Whether or not this was true, the Iraqis firmly believed that it was and that Soviet generals would prevent any attack on them. This perception undoubtedly influenced the Baghdad government's policy of brinksmanship." (48)
As war approached the Soviets actually helped prepare the U.S.-led effort to destroy Iraq. They fed the West important codes and intelligence on the Iraqi military which simplified the Coalition's offensive (49). Hence, the Soviets went extraordinarily out of their way to facilitate a Western-led attack against their valuable ally.
-Part II: The Deception-
What can be drawn from the above inconsistencies and contradictions in Iraqi and Soviet behavior? Quite simply, it appears something seriously afoul may have been underlying the Persian Gulf Crisis. 'Contra'-'diction' entails that something is contrary to what it appears to mean. This is the essence of a lie. The contradictions associated with the Gulf Crisis indicate that it may have been some sort of lie- the opposite of what it appeared to be.
There was a prevailing and consistent theme to the contradictory behavior of Saddam Hussein's Iraq and the Soviet Union during the Gulf Crisis. Both nations persistently acted in a way that facilitated a sensational Western Gulf War victory over Iraq. If, as part of a large- scale deception, Soviet Russia and Saddam's Iraq were working together to bring about the Gulf War and have Iraq decisively lose to the West, then the seemingly inconsistent and irrational behavior of Bagdhad and Moscow makes sense.
Saddam's Invasion of Kuwait was an ideal provocation to lure the West into launching a war against Iraq. By 1990, the increasing threat posed by Saddam's radical anti-Western policies, growing military power, and nuclear weapons development program, most likely had the West seeking an excuse to stop Iraq short. As Saddam began to make belligerent threats, increasingly directed at Kuwait, the West was given ample time to muse the possibility of fighting a needed war against Iraq. When Saddam actually invaded Kuwait, there was a blatant violation of international law and half of the world's known oil reserves came under an Iraqi threat- the West received both an ideal excuse and an unavoidable provocation to wage a mitigating war against Saddam's military empire.
Following the Invasion, the Soviets made it easy for the West to launch a war against Iraq. With the U.S. Secretary of State already in Russia, Moscow was able to immediately cooperate and the initial U.N. call for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait resulted. The reason the Soviets didn't take time to contemplate their response is because they had preplanned it. As the U.S. worked with the international community to set the stage for a full-scale war against Iraq, the Soviets continued to cooperate including their okay for the use of military force against their Iraqi ally. As the deadline for war approached, Moscow made sure not to use diplomatic pressure to get Saddam to back down because the intent was to make way for a Western attack.
Going into the January 15th deadline, Saddam made sure the West could go through with the War it desired by remaining intransigent and belligerent. Even as it became apparent that the Coalition force was more than large enough to overwhelm Iraq, Saddam failed to compromise on Kuwait. Saddam took steps prior to the Gulf War to open the way for a successful Coalition attack with minimum potential costs for the West. By failing to preempt the build-up of forces in Saudi Arabia, Iraq made it easy for the U.S.-led Coalition to achieve a military superiority and fully organize itself, thus facilitating Western success. On top of this, by releasing his Western 'human shield' hostages, Saddam removed a substantial mitigating factor to a Coalition air-attack and greatly reduced the potential costs the West would face in launching a war, both in terms of Western lives and consequent political costs.
For the initial Coalition air-attack, Saddam left his forces off-guard and unprepared, allowing the Allies the advantage of tactical surprise. Targets were left vulnerable, no initial military response was prepared or executed, and defensive responses were subdued, thus the door was left open for the the Allies to swiftly disable the potential of Saddam's war- machine. This gave the West an inflated sense of technical and strategic superiority, something which would be further fed throughout the War.
As the War progressed and Saddam's empire was being decimated, Iraq refrained from using chemical weapons so that the West's Gulf victory would be clean-cut and total. Saddam made sure not to hit Israel with chemical SCUDs in that such a provocation would have surely elicited a potent Israeli military response. Israeli involvement in the Gulf War could have easily led to a breakup of the Coalition and possibly spawned a larger regional conflict. By keeping chemical weapons off the battlefield, Saddam minimized Coalition casualties and kept the conflict from escalating in a way which could have led to a breakdown in international support for the War and/or threatened the Coalition's cohesion. All in all, by not using chemical weapons, Saddam minimized Western losses- both in terms of lives and associated political costs, thus insuring that the victory handed to the West was total.
Throughout the whole affair there was no associated terrorism so that the deception would go smoothly and Soviet involvement would remain undiscovered. Extensive evidence has been uncovered which indicates that Moscow has been behind much of international terrorism (50). Thus, there is reason to believe that, prior to the Gulf Crisis, the Kremlin may have put out some sort of restraining order on both Saddam and international terrorist organizations in general. This would have been done for two reasons. First off, it was important to constrain hostilities as much as possible to the Persian Gulf region. Aggravating other tensions, such as between the Arabs and Israel, would have threatened both international support for the Gulf War and the exceptional nature of the West's victory. Secondly, terrorism could have opened up linkages to Moscow that Western intelligence might discover and trace, thus leading to an uncovering of the deception.
When the Gulf War ended and Iraq had been forced from Kuwait, Saddam had managed to achieve exactly what he intended from the start. He suffered a drastic, humiliating defeat while inflicting minimal damage on the U.S.-led Coalition. Thus, the West was handed a sensational, total victory in the Gulf.
As for the surprising extent of Iraq's nuclear program, Saddam challenged the West before he had the Bomb because 'Project Babylon' was most valuable as bait for a Western attack. Should Saddam have invaded Kuwait once Iraq had nuclear weapons, the odds are that there never would have been a Gulf War, and, if there was, it wouldn't have been a 'great victory' for the West.
If it seems difficult to believe that Saddam might have staged the Gulf Crisis under Kremlin order, simply consider the alternative: How could have Saddam invaded Kuwait without Moscow's knowledge and consent?
In a New Republic article, 'Virtual Ally: What's the Soviet Game in the Gulf', which came out just after the Crisis erupted, Edward Jay Epstein, an expert on Soviet intelligence, asked the provocative question:
"Did the USSR have advance knowledge of well-designed Iraqi plans to invade Kuwait? After all, unlike the United States, the Soviet Union had military advisers in Iraq attached to the helicopter, tank, logistic, and radar units used for the invasion, and the KGB presumably had developed sources from the three generations of Iraqi staff and planning officers trained by Moscow?" (51)
As for consent, according to Claudia Wright of 'Foreign Affairs', in the 1980's the U.S. State Department thought of Saddam Hussein as "so beholden to the Soviet Union as to be incapable of autonomous foreign policy" (52). Given how dependent Iraq was on the Soviets- particularly in building up and maintaining its military strength, and given Saddam's Stalinist, pro-Soviet mind-set, it's unlikely Baghdad would have ever pulled-off a stunt as reckless and potentially costly as invading Kuwait without first seeking Moscow's approval. This is particularly true since it would have been nearly impossible to develop and carry out such plans without the Soviets noticing.
All in all, there is good reason to believe California Senator Bill Richardson who remarked, "there is little doubt that the Soviets were apprised of the invasion before it happened, helped plan it and approved it. There is no way communist puppet Saddam Hussein would have given the order to invade Kuwait if it were not sanctioned by Gorbachev (53)."
-Part III: Confirmation-
The idea that the Gulf Crisis was an intentional deception and that Moscow was fundamentally behind the whole affair is confirmed by some directly incriminating evidence.
There was strong evidence that the Soviets were involved with Iraq's Invasion of Kuwait. First off, during the six months prior to the invasion, Soviet arms deliveries to Iraq accelerated to twice the rate of the 1980's when Iraq was in an all-out war with Iran. Two weeks prior to the Invasion, the Soviets launched a military reconnaisance satellite over the Gulf and sent Colonel General Albert Makashov, former commander of the Volga-Urals Command, to Baghdad along with a small expert staff as Soviet 'military counselers' (54). Elements within U.S. intelligence determined that General Makashov and his delegation, along with the 8,000 Soviet personnel that were already in Iraq, provided direct 'Quality Edge' military assistance to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. This is substantiated by the fact that there were Soviet military advisers directly attached to the Iraqi helicopter, tank, logistic, and radar units used for the Invasion of Kuwait (55). Soviet assistance in planning and executing the invasion was made clear by the surprising similarity of the operation to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. One might also note that 1200 Iraqi military personnel were being trained by Soviet specialists at Odessa, inside the Soviet Union, around the time of the Invasion (56). Further evidence of Moscow's complicity in the Invasion stems from the fact that the Soviets sold or transferred military spare parts to Saddam for at least five days following the August 2nd Invasion (57). What's more, when the U.S. began surveillance over Kuwait in the wake of the Invasion, there were indications that Soviet technicians helped the Iraqi air force jam intelligence and eavesdropping on flights by American aircraft (58).
There was also strong evidence of Soviet complicity with Iraq throughout the Gulf War. On numerous occasions allied forces heard Russian language communiques on Iraqi military radios. Following the War, returning U.S. soldiers said they saw evidence in the field that Soviet advisers were working along with Iraqi forces. According to F. Andy Messing, executive director of the National Defense Council Foundation, there were over two dozen documented cases that showed Soviet involvement in Iraq during the Gulf War. "The Soviets were all over the place", Messing reported, Soviet advisers "continued to tune radars, fix tanks and planes and advise (Iraqi) combat units down to the battalion level". In a Senate Foreign Relations briefing paper published February 21st, 1991, it was reported that: "For two days in February, Russian language and voices were communicating over Iraqi military networks". Furthermore, the Soviets repositioned satellites over the Gulf region and were "supplying targeting information to the Iraqis for mobile missile launchers". The report outlined how Soviet advisers were "helping Iraqis fire SCUD missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia". On February 25th, two days after the ground war began, former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said during a BBC interview that the Soviet Union was still supplying arms to Iraq. Despite the strong evidence of Soviet complicity, the Kremlin denied any involvement with Iraq and assured the West that its advisers and personnel were pulled out soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait. (59)
All in all, there appears to be sufficient indirect and direct evidence to believe that the Persian Gulf Crisis was a Soviet-engineered deception. The inconsistencies and contradictions in Iraqi and Soviet behavior throughout the Gulf Crisis build a strong circumstantial case for a deception in the Gulf. Based upon the direct evidence above, there seems little doubt that the Soviets were both aware of and involved in the Invasion of Kuwait. Furthermore, it is clear that the Soviets underhandedly backed the Iraqis throughout the Gulf War. The logical explanation for the directly incriminating evidence is that the circumstantial case is correct. Moscow and Baghdad worked together to create a large-scale deception in the Persian Gulf.
-Note-
Undoubtedly, Western intelligence had some idea of Soviet involvement in the Gulf. However, their interpretation of the connection was most likely misled. Backed-up by reassuring Soviet excuses, Western analysts would downplay the importance and implications of any Soviet involvement. This is because the West would either have to accept that Saddam was a fool and they were winning or they were the fools and would end up losing in a most tragic way. Western arrogance and fear would take over from there, something the Soviets could count on. (60)
-Part IV: The Strategy-
Why would Moscow have had Iraq stage the Gulf War and its own defeat? Why would have Saddam Hussein gone along with such a humiliating plan? Because the Gulf Crisis may have served as an important deception to set the stage for a successful surprise attack by the East against the West and, in turn, totalitarian domination of the world. Because Saddam Hussein, as a reward for his current sacrifices, may eventually receive the power to 're-create the glories that were Babylon and Mesopotamia' and then have dominion over them. By accepting defeat in the "Mother of All 'Battles'", Saddam may have paved the way for totalitarianism to win the Mother of All 'Wars':
World War III.
As a deception, the Gulf Crisis would have served important military and political strategic aims of Moscow and its Eastern counterparts.
In that it is not popularly perceived or expected, Russia, in concert with other military powers of the East, may be pursuing a grand strategy for world domination which involves launching a surprise third world war against the West (61). The central idea of any such strategy would be to instill a false sense of security in the West. Such a false sense of security will minimimize the West's military potential and maximize Western vulnerability. This is true for two main reasons. First off, with no sense of a threat, the West will reduce its military preparedness. Secondly, upon attack, the East would have the advantage of surprise- a key ingredient to success in a war involving rapid mass destruction.
The principal way in which Moscow may be trying to instill a false sense of security in the West is deceit. By intentionally creating and exaggerating the image of weakness and incapacitation, along with pursuing cooperative, peace-oriented policies favorable to the West, the perceived Soviet military threat has been virtually eliminated, America has come to trust its long-time Russian foe, and Western arrogance has been inflated to blinding proportions. Consequently, a tremendous, potentially false sense of security has developed in the West entailing a high degree of vulnerability.
If, indeed, the Gulf crisis was a deception, then it was tailor-made for a strategy as outlined above. First off, by creating a serious international crisis in which critical Western interests were at stake, Moscow gave itself the opportunity to cooperate with the West in a manner that seemed to reflect a progressive, peace-oriented change of heart. This significantly fostered Western trust. Secondly, since the West was allowed such a substantial victory over Iraq, and because Saddam's military state was of Soviet-design, the West's sense of superiority to the East was significantly inflated by the Gulf War, particularly with respect to military capabilities (62). Third, since Moscow turned its back on a valuable military ally during the Gulf Crisis, the image that Russia is incapacitated and increasingly interested in peaceful coexistence was reinforced and exagerrated. Lastly, on a broader level, the isolation and utter military defeat of Saddam Hussein's Iraq served as a symbolic end to the power of military totalitarian regimes.
A provocative example of how Western trust may have been directly exploited by the Soviets for successfully waging a surprise third world war can be seen in interrelated developments surrounding the Gulf Crisis and the Conventional Forces in Europe (CFE) treaty. In November of 1990, during the middle of the Gulf Crisis, the United States signed the CFE treaty with the Soviet Union. The treaty entails major reductions in both sides' European theatre conventional forces into 1994.
The CFE treaty is highly favorable to the Soviets in the context of their initiating a third world war with a preemptive, nuclear surprise attack against the West. The reason this is so has to do with the fact that the United States is an ocean away from the European continent, whereas the Soviet Union is directly attached to it. Following a Soviet nuclear attack, America would be unable to reinforce its European allies because the necessary ports, airfields, men and equipment will have been destroyed. Consequently, it would be relatively easy for Russia to reorganize the Soviet army and march across Western Europe (63). Thus, the U.S. force withdrawals under the CFE treaty may be benefitting Russia if, indeed, a nuclear surprise attack is being planned.
The Gulf Crisis sped-up and augmented the U.S. pullout from Europe. A substantial portion of the half-million soldiers and military equipment that poured into Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War was pulled out of Western Europe (64). For instance, half of America's mechanized divisions in Europe were drawn into the Gulf. From Germany alone, more than 70,000 soldiers and 40,000 tanks, artillery pieces, and other equipment were moved to Saudi Arabia (65). Following the Gulf War, with superpower trust elevated, many of the forces pulled from Western Europe returned to the U.S. rather than the European theatre because it was to be removed by 1994 under the terms of the CFE treaty anyways (66).
The Gulf Crisis, along with technicalities in the CFE treaty, was used by the Soviets to stockpile military equipment behind the Ural mountains- an important preparatory measure prior to waging a surprise attack- without alarming the West. Just before signing the CFE agreement during the middle of the Gulf Crisis, the Soviets scurried over 70,000 pieces of military equipment east of the Ural mountains (according to Moscow's count) (67). On top of a large number of planes, helicopters, and armoured combat vehicles, 20,000 tanks and over 34,000 artillery pieces were moved. This accounts for half the tanks and two-thirds of the artillery the Soviets had prepositioned against Western Europe up to that time. Placing the equipment behind the Urals protects it from being counted under the CFE treaty limits. It also protects it from Western missile and/or air attacks and puts the equipment in a strategic position for later use in a re- conquest of Eastern Europe and offensive on Western Europe. In a Februaury opposing-editorial to the Wall Street Journal, the Deputy Director of the Arms Control Association, Jack Mendelsohn, commented that: "...placing these weapons in storage behind the Urals says something important about Soviet intentions regarding a surprise attack or general war in Europe" (68). NATO's supreme commander (retired: 6/92), General John Galvin, had this to say about the stockpile: "My concern is that this equipment is there for future use. It's big, big numbers. But I know it's just sitting there in the snow- tanks and airplanes side by side, sometimes for kilometers at a time" (69). For the most part, however, the West disregarded the provocative Soviet move. Western suspicions were minimized due to growing superpower trust, the distracting events in the Gulf, and the idea that the Soviets may have simply been seeking to circumvent the CFE treaty.
As can be readily surmised, the general idea of the Gulf Crisis and Moscow's strategy in general may involve seducing the West with lies in order to successfully wage a surprise third world war. It may be that Gorbachev and Saddam are seeking to achieve long-run victory by allowing their own short-run defeats. The West seems to have been easily seduced by what may prove to be the staged death of Eastern military totalitarianism and an illusory global victory of Western society. Such a lie is simply too tempting for indulgent, proud Westerners to refuse. As a consequence of this, Western vulnerability is at a post-war extreme and its military potential has been significantly compromised. Thus, the path may have been opened for an all-out surprise attack from the East.
-Conclusion-
Summarily, there is substantial reason to believe the Gulf Crisis was not what it appeared to be. In fact, it may have been the total opposite of what it seemed- a total lie. Instead of being a 'great victory', as General Schwarzkopf believes, the Gulf War may have been a deception which is being used toward the utter defeat of the West and global victory of Eastern totalitarianism.
A logical explanation for the pervasive inconsistencies and contradictions in Iraqi and Soviet behavior throughout the Gulf Crisis and Gulf War is that the whole affair may have been some sort of staged deception. It is possible that Saddam invaded Kuwait under Kremlin order with the sole intention of provoking a war with the West. By cooperating with the West in an unprecedented manner, the Soviets opened the way for the Gulf War. Once war came, Saddam did what it took to decisively lose. The upshot is that Moscow and Baghdad underhandedly worked together to hand the West an illusory Gulf victory.
The purpose behind such a deception would likely involve an overall Eastern strategy to dominate the world by fighting and winning a third world war. Saddam stomached a humiliating defeat in order to augment a false sense of security in the West and help Soviet Russia completely win over Western trust. This, in turn, has opened the way for Moscow to dupe the West into lowering its guard, thus creating an opportunity for the East to launch a successful surprise attack.
Due in large part to the Gulf Crisis, the world may today be on the brink of what would undoubtedly be the the Mother of All Wars. It is rather apparent that an attack from the East would today be a total surprise. Furthermore, in the wake of its Gulf 'victory', America has increasingly let down its military guard, particularly against a Russian nuclear attack. {For instance, America's strategic command has been disbanded, a sizable part of the U.S. ICBM arsenal has been deactivated, many attack-warning satellites and radar installations have been shutdown, and almost all U.S. tactical nuclear weapons abroad have been pulled home- including those which were on naval vessels (70).} All in all, the proper conditions have developed for the East to launch a successful surprise attack against the West. The Persian Gulf Crisis may have been a seductive lie which was created toward this ultimate End.
"The harvest in the Mother of Battles has succeeded... the greater harvest and its yield will be in the time to come..."
{comment by Saddam Hussein following the Gulf War}
(71)
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THE PERSIAN GULF DECEPTION: EPILOGUE
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The Persian Gulf Deception
(notes & references)
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***THE PERSIAN GULF DECEPTION***
By J. Adams
-Notes & References-
"The great masses of the people... will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one."
(Adolph Hitler)
From: 'Mein Kampf', Chapter 10.
"We have no right ever to forget that psychological warfare is a struggle for winning people's minds."
(Mikhail Gorbachev)
From: "Soviet Disinformation Chief:
A Master at Using Words as Cold-War Weapons",
'The New York Tribune': 7/27/87.
NOTES
1. General Schwarzkopf made this comment while answering questions from the press following the Gulf War.
2. This idea is covered in depth in another paper I wrote entitled: "The Total Lie".
The main purpose of a grand deception would be to set the stage for a Russian nuclear surprise attack. To understand how this could be, simply consider the following three points:
I) The seeming collapse of Soviet communism has almost completely undone Western expectations of a preemptive nuclear attack. This entails that:
a) Russia can currently launch the 10,000+ nuclear weapons it still has targetted against America and its allies, and it will be a complete surprise. In other words, because we no longer expect it, Russia can now launch a 'surprise' attack.
That this is what Moscow has been planning the whole time would explain why military spending went up under Gorbachev in stark contradiction to the supposedly peace-oriented change in Moscow's foreign policy (i). It would also explain why the Soviets concentrated on expanding and modernizing their strategic nuclear forces over the past seven years while at the same time forging and signing agreements with the West to get rid of such weapons (ii).
b) Since it is not expected, America and its allies have increasingly dropped their guard against a nuclear attack, thus the West is now most vulnerable to one (see note 70).
II) The disintegration of the Soviet empire not only has minimized Western perceptions of the Soviet military threat, it has reduced Soviet vulnerability to Western nuclear retaliation. By letting go of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Republics, Moscow has constrained its vulnerable targets to Mother Russia. Thus, roughly two-thirds of its previous empire is now safe from Western nuclear retaliation following a Russian attack- and that's not counting unconnected puppet states like Cuba (iii).
The idea that the breakup of the Soviet empire was intentional is substantiated by reports that the KGB instigated, rather than sought to repress, the popular uprisings in, at the least, the Eastern European states (iv). Furthermore, it explains why the Soviets never used military force to restore order and control in their empire as had been done throughout the previous 70 years. Lastly, an intentional breakup would explain what interest the Communist Party had in voting itself out of existence.
III) A major element of the Soviet Union's seeming demise has been an economic collapse and increasingly severe food crisis. The failure of the Soviet economy has been rather peculiar, however, in that, as production and employment remained high, the availability of goods for consumers dwindled. This has been attributed to failures in the Soviet distribution system. However, that goods have been produced but not consumed indicates that a large surplus is being lost somewhere. While Western analysts have concluded that there has been a tremendous amount of waste, in the context of a Soviet grand deception to wage a surprise nuclear war, it would make sense that the Soviets have been using an economic crisis as a cover for mass stockpiling.
This would be consistent with how Moscow has spent hundreds of billions of dollars on elaborate and comprehensive civil defense programs which have rivalled Soviet strategic arms programs in both cost and scale (v). It would also explain why shortages have persisted even though many food warehouses throughout Russia are full- partially due to generous Western aid (vi). Lastly, such an economic deception would explain why Western intelligence found that Soviet officials began systematically 'under'-estimating economic output and potential after Gorbachev came to power (vii).
i. Specifically, Soviet defense expenditures increased by 3 percent per year in real terms under Gorbachev. See:
'Soviet Military Power'. US Department of Defense; Washington, DC: (esp. 1989).
ii. See, for instance:
Cline, Ray (ed). 'Behind the Smile Are Teeth of Iron'. US Global Strategy Council; Washington, DC: 1989.
iii. In terms of population and economic potential. Regarding US and NATO retargetting activities, see:
Kruzel, Joseph. '1991-92 American Defense Annual'. Lexington Books; Lexington, MA: 1992; 76-77.
iv. Leonard, Paul. "Countdown to Destruction". 'Fatima Crusader': 10-11/90; 14.
v. See, for instance:
'Soviet Military Power': 1988.
Broder, John. "Underground Shelters Built for Soviet Leaders". 'Los Angeles Times': 4/30/88: I,16.
vi. See, for instance:
Parks, Michael. "Food Shipments Trapped in Web of Soviet Inefficiency". 'Los Angeles Times': 12/11/90; A6.
Blitz, James. "Hunger in the Heart of Plenty". 'The Sunday Times': 12/9/90.
vii. Epstein, Edward. 'Deception: The Invisible War Between the KGB and the CIA'. Simon and Schuster; New York, NY: 1989; 241.
For an overview of Soviet strategy for surprise nuclear war, see:
Douglass, Joseph D., Jr. 'Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War'. Hoover Institute Press; Stanford, CA: 1979.
Van Cleave, Dr. William R. "Soviet Strategic Nuclear Forces and Goals: Deception and Surprise". From: 'Mesmerized By The Bear' Sleeper, Raymond (ed). Dodd, Mead, & Co. New York, NY: 1987; 89-109.
For an overall idea of how and why the military powers of the East- led by Soviet Russia- may be pursuing a grand strategy to deceive and militarily conquer the West, see:
Beichman, Arnold. 'The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy from Lenin to Gorbachev'. Transaction Publishers; New Brunswick, NJ: 1991.
Cline, Ray (ed). 'Behind the Smile Are Teeth of Iron'. US Global Strategy Council; Washington, DC: 1989.
Daily, Brian and Patrick Parker (eds). 'Soviet Strategic Deception'. Lexington Books; Lexingtion, MA: 1987.
Douglass, Joseph D., Jr. 'Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War'. Hoover Institute Press; Stanford, CA: 1979.
Epstein, Edward Jay. 'Deception: The Secret War Between the KGB and the CIA'. Simon & Schuster; New York, NY: 1989.
Golitsyn, Anatoliy. 'New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation'. Dodd, Mead; New York, NY: 1984.
Kintner, William. 'Soviet Global Strategy'. Hero Books; Fairfax, VA: 1987.
Kintner, William and Harriet Scott (eds). 'The Nuclear Revolution in Soviet Military Affairs'. University of Oklahoma Press; Norman, OK: 1968.
Sleeper, Raymond (ed). 'Mesmerized By The Bear'. Dodd, Mead, & Co. New York, NY: 1987.
3. "A Slow Slide Toward War". 'Newsweek': 7/2/90; 29.
4. Information compiled from various news sources. For a thorough analysis of Saddam's military going into the Gulf War, see:
Darwish, Adel and Gregory Alexander. 'Unholy Babylon'. St. Martin's Press. New York, NY: 1991; 85-178.
5. Kondracke, Morton. "Saddamnation". 'The New Republic': 5/7/90; 10-11.
6. "The Guns of August". 'The New Republic': 9/3/90; 9.
7. "A Slow Slide Toward War".
8. Kondracke; 10.
9. Bulloch, John and Harvey Morris. 'Saddam's War'. Faber & Faber, Inc. Winchester, MA: 1991; 1-2.
10. Bulloch and Morris; 102.
11. Bulloch and Morris- also see:
"Standing up to Saddam Hussein". 'Economist': 7/28/90; 11-12.
12. Kruzel, Joseph (ed). '1991-92 American Defense Annual'. Lexington Books; Lexington, MA: 1992; 1.
13. "The Guns of August".
14. For a synopsis of Resolution 660, see: Darwish and Alexander; 308.
15. For a thorough "Diary of the Gulf Crisis", see: Darwish and Alexander; 299-307.
16. Bulloch and Morris; 5.
17. Darwish and Alexander; 299-307.
18. Kruzel; 107.
19. Kruzel; 1.
20. "US Says Early Air Attack Caught Iraq Off Guard". 'New York Times'. 1/18/91; A10.
21. Grier, Peter. "Iraq's Chemical Weapons Found to be Potent". 'Christian Science Monitor': 1/23/92; 1.
Also from Associated Press (AP) reports taken off Dow Jones News Retrieval on April 19, 1991.
22. For a thorough examination of Iraqi development and usage of chemical weapons, see: Darwish and Alexander; 101-114.
23. Grier; 1.
24. Darwish and Alexander; 112.
25. "The Fury of Desert Storm". 'U.S. News & World Report': 3/11/91; 74.
26. Tyler, Patrick E. "Iraq's War Toll Estimated by U.S.; 100,000 Killed and 300,000 hurt in Persian Gulf cited as tentative figures". 'New York Times': 6/5/91; A5.
27. "The 100-Hour War". 'U.S. News & World Report': 3/11/91; 16.
28. "The 100-Hour War".
29. "U.N. Survey Calls Iraq's War Damage Near-Apocalyptic". 'New York Times': 3/22/91; A1.
30. "The 100-Hour War".
31. "Intelligence in a World of Change (Satellites and Humans)". 'Government Executive' (serial): National Journal, Inc.; Washington, DC: 3/92.
32. For a thorough examination of Iraq's nuclear program, see: Darwish and Alexander; 178-196.
33. Widely reported in the summer of 1991.
Meisler, Stanley. "300 Iraq SCUDs Missing, U.N. Team Reports". 'Los Angeles Times': 11/2/91; A10.
(also from CNN news reports)
34. Epstein, Edward Jay. "Virtual Ally: What's the Soviet Game in the Gulf?". 'The New Republic': 9/3/90; 19-20.
35. Bulloch and Morris; 20.
-the Soviets also profitted from their huge gold, silver, and diamond exports, because precious metals and gems went up in value sharply with the Crisis.
36. Epstein; 19, 20.
37. Kondracke; 12.
38. McAlvany, Don. "Middle East Aflame: Oil Wars in the Persian Gulf". 'McAlvany Intelligence Advisor' (serial). Phoenix, AZ: 8/90.
Reprinted in:
'The Fatima Crusader' (serial). Constable, NY: 10-11/90; 5-10.
39. Morris, Robert. 'Our Globe Under Siege III'. Better Baby; Philadelphia, PA: 1988; 182.
Referenced in: 'McAlvany Intelligence Advisor' (see note 35).
Specifically, Morris quoted columnist Paul Scott who listed eight facilities which included:
1) A major naval facility at Umn Qasr at the mouth of the Shaat-al Arab which flows into the Persian Gulf. This base includes maintenance facilities for ships and basing for equipment and ammunition. There are also boarding ramps for Hovercraft that can transport naval infantry from the base.
2) The naval installations and facilities at Zubior and al Qurnah, the former on a body of water below the Euphrates River and the latter on the Tigris. Both ports can service Soviet warships.
3) There are air bases at Sulaymaniyah in the northeast mosul in the north central sector of the country.
40. Darwish and Alexander; 136.
41. "Moscow Fears Iraq Won't Pay Back Big Debt". 'Oil & Gas Journal': 9/17/90; 28.
42. Rosenthal, A. M. "Why Moscow Wants to Save Saddam".
Printed in:
Sifry, Micah and Christopher Cerf (eds). 'The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions'. Times Books; New York, NY: 1991; 346.
43. Mann, Paul. "Judging the Soviets in the Gulf: Are They as Weak as They Look?". 'Aviation Week & Space Technology': 12/3/90; 24.
44. "Iraq Hints at Flexibility; Allies Focus Bombardment". 'Gannett News Service': 2/12/91.
45. Howard, Michael and Robert Lovett. "The Burdens of Victory". 'U.S. News & World Report': 7/13/91; 48-49.
46. Darwish and Alexander; 283.
47. Mann.
48. Bulloch and Morris; 20.
49. Private source.
50. For instance, see:
Sterling, Claire. 'The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism'. Berkley Books; New York, NY: 1982.
51. Epstein; 20.
52. Kondracke; 10.
53. McAlvany.
54. Epstein.
55. Epstein.
Also see:
Johnson, Michael. "Strategic Simpletons". 'The Geopolitical Strategist': 1/1/91.
"Washington Whispers: Brothers in arms". 'U.S. News & World Report': 8/10/92; p18.
Bodansky, Yossef. "Moscow's careful juggling act in the Persian Gulf". 'Defense and Foreign Affairs' Strategic Policy': 12/90; p18.
56. Leonard, Paul. "Countdown to Destruction". 'The Fatima Crusader': 10- 11/90; 13.
57. "Iraq Hints at Flexibility; Allies Focus Bombardment".
58. 'The American Sentinel' (serial). Phillips Publishing Co.; Washington, DC: 8/90.
Quoted in: "Newspage". 'The Fatima Crusader': 10-11/90; 11.
59. Walte, Juan. "U.S. Tried to Nab Soviets Aiding Iraq". 'USA Today': 3/19/91; A4.
Also see:
"Some Secrets of Gulf War Might Never Be Told". 'Gannett News Service': 3/19/91.
"Iraq Hints at Peace Effort; Demands End to Air War; U.S. Cautious". 'USA Today': 2/13/91; A1.
60. Many people have indicated a belief that Western intelligence must be aware of the potential for a Soviet grand deception or deception in the Gulf as is spelt out in my views. However, this a false belief premised on ignorant and irrational faith. If Western intelligence had any suspicion of a deception, the West would never have dropped its guard the way it has- particularly against a nuclear surprise attack. Every indication is that Western 'intelligence' has been outsmarted by the 'intelligencia' of the East. To better understand how this could be so, see:
Epstein, Edward Jay. 'Deception: The Secret War Between the KGB and the CIA'. Simon & Schuster; New York, NY: 1989.
Golitsyn, Anatoliy. 'New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation'. Dodd, Mead; New York, NY: 1984.
It should be noted here that, if the Soviets have succeeded in misleading us, it is not due so much to their deceptions as to our own self-deceptions. Lenin once said that the best way to overcome the West was to: 'tell them what they want to hear'. It seems Gorbachev may have carried this logic one step further to: 'show them what they want to see'. The point is that Westerners have proven time and time again that they will 'hear what they want to hear' and 'see what they want to see' regardless of the truth of the matter. In other words, our selfish fears, pride, and desires, mislead us into accepting illusions- lies- rather than reality and the truth. Hitler realized this and used it to his advantage resulting in World War II and the virtual loss of free-Europe. Now it appears history may be repeating itself and the consequence will be World War III and the loss of the free-world.
61. See note 2.
62. Most of these are readily apparent points- for specific examples see: Howard; 44. Also see:
Schoenfeld, Gabriel. "The Loser of the Gulf War Is... the Soviet Military." (editorial) 'Wall Street Journal': 3/19/91; A24.
63. That the Soviets are planning to invade Europe later on would explain why they left large stocks of ammunition in Eastern Europe in the wake of their military pull-out.
See: Kruzel, 222.
64. Birnbaum, Jesse. "How Many Wars Can the U.S. Fight?". 'Time'. 3/4/91; 38-39.
65. Birnbaum; 38.
66. Montgomery, Paul L. "NATO Is Planning to Cut U.S. Forces in Europe by 50%". 'New York Times': 5/29/91; A1.
67. "Spirit of CFE Treaty Disappears East of the Urals". 'Financial Times': 11/15/90; (European News), 2.
"A Factor in the Soviet Food Crisis". 'New York Times': 1/4/91; A4.
68. Mendelsohn, Jack. "Just How Deceitful are the Soviets?" (editorial) 'Wall Street Journal': 2/26/91; A15.
69. "A Glimpse at the Troubled Soviet Army". 'U.S. News & World Report': 12/17/90; 54.
70. In late September of 1991, George Bush ordered that the U.S. strategic bomber fleet be stood-down and dismantled and that all Minuteman II ICBM's be deactivated. Furthermore, he announced that all tactical nuclear weapons were to be pulled off U.S. naval vessels and 80 percent of American nuclear defenses in Western Europe were to be removed. These goals are today complete (completion date: July 1, 1992). This information is widely available in popular press reports.
For a report on how America's guard against a Soviet nuclear sneak attack has been significantly lowered, see:
"Why America New Sentinel Works Only a 40-Hour Week". 'U.S. News & World Report': 5/20/91.
71. Comments following the Gulf War. 'The New York Times': 3/3/91; E2.
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REFERENCES
Beichman, Arnold. 'The Long Pretense: Soviet Treaty Diplomacy from Lenin to Gorbachev'. Transaction Publishers; New Brunswick, NJ: 1991.
Blitz, James. "Hunger in the Heart of Plenty". 'The Sunday Times': 12/9/90.
Bodansky, Yossef. "Moscow's careful juggling act in the Persian Gulf". 'Defense and Foreign Affairs' Strategic Policy': 12/90; p18.
Broder, John. "Underground Shelters Built for Soviet Leaders". 'Los Angeles Times': 4/30/88.
Bulloch, John and Harvey Morris. 'Saddam's War'. Faber & Faber, Inc. Winchester, MA: 1991.
Cline, Ray (ed). 'Behind the Smile Are Teeth of Iron'. US Global Strategy Council; Washington, DC: 1988.
Daily, Brian and Patrick Parker (eds). 'Soviet Strategic Deception'. Lexington Books; Lexingtion, MA: 1987.
Darwish, Adel and Gregory Alexander. 'Unholy Babylon'. St. Martin's Press. New York, NY: 1991.
Douglass, Joseph D., Jr. 'Soviet Strategy for Nuclear War'. Hoover Institute Press; Stanford, CA: 1979.
Epstein, Edward Jay. 'Deception: The Secret War Between the KGB and the CIA'. Simon & Schuster; New York, NY: 1989.
Epstein, Edward Jay. "Virtual Ally: What's the Soviet Game in the Gulf?". 'The New Republic': 9/3/90.
"A Factor in the Soviet Food Crisis". 'New York Times': 1/4/91.
"The Fury of Desert Storm". 'U.S. News & World Report': 3/11/91.
Golitsyn, Anatoliy. 'New Lies for Old: The Communist Strategy of Deception and Disinformation'. Dodd, Mead; New York, NY: 1984.
Grier, Peter. "Iraq's Chemical Weapons Found to be Potent". 'Christian Science Monitor': 1/23/92.
"The Guns of August". 'The New Republic': 9/3/90.
Howard, Michael and Robert Lovett. "The Burdens of Victory". 'U.S. News & World Report': 7/13/91.
"The 100-Hour War". 'U.S. News & World Report': 3/11/91.
"Intelligence in a World of Change (Satellites and Humans)". 'Government Executive': 3/92.
"Iraq Hints at Flexibility; Allies Focus Bombardment". 'Gannett News Service': 2/12/91.
"Iraq Hints at Peace Effort; Demands End to Air War; U.S. Cautious". 'USA Today': 2/13/91.
Johnson, Michael. "Strategic Simpletons". 'The Geopolitical Strategist': 1/1/91.
Kintner, William. 'Soviet Global Strategy'. Hero Books; Fairfax, VA: 1987.
Kintner, William and Harriet Scott (eds). 'The Nuclear Revolution in Soviet Military Affairs'. University of Oklahoma Press; Norman, OK: 1968.
Kondracke, Morton. "Saddamnation". 'The New Republic': 5/7/90.
Kruzel, Joseph (ed). '1991-92 American Defense Annual'. Lexington Books; Lexington, MA: 1992.
Leonard, Paul. "Countdown to Destruction". 'The Fatima Crusader' (serial). Constable, NY: 10-11/90.
Mann, Paul. "Judging the Soviets in the Gulf: Are They as Weak as They Look?". 'Aviation Week & Space Technology': 12/3/90.
McAlvany, Don. "Middle East Aflame: Oil Wars in the Persian Gulf". 'McAlvany Intelligence Advisor' (serial). Phoenix, AZ: 8/90.
Mendelsohn, Jack. "Just How Deceitful are the Soviets?" (editorial). 'Wall Street Journal': 2/26/91.
Meisler, Stanley. "300 Iraq SCUDs Missing, U.N. Team Reports". 'Los Angeles Times': 11/2/91.
Montgomery, Paul L. "NATO Is Planning to Cut U.S. Forces in Europe by 50%". 'New York Times': 5/29/91.
Morris, Robert. 'Our Globe Under Siege III'. Better Baby; Philadelphia, PA: 1987.
"Moscow Fears Iraq Won't Pay Back Big Debt". 'Oil & Gas Journal': 9/17/90.
"Newspage". 'The Fatima Crusader' (serial). Constable, NY: 10-11/90.
Parks, Michael. "Food Shipments Trapped in Web of Soviet Inefficiency". 'Los Angeles Times': 12/11/90.
Schoenfeld, Gabriel. "The Loser of the Gulf War Is... the Soviet Military" (editorial). 'Wall Street Journal'.
Sifry, Micah and Christopher Cerf (eds). 'The Gulf War Reader: History, Documents, Opinions'. Times Books; New York, NY: 1991.
Sleeper, Raymond (ed). 'Mesmerized By The Bear'. Dodd, Mead, & Co. New York, NY: 1987.
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'Soviet Military Power'. US Department of Defense; Washington, DC.
"Spirit of CFE Treaty Disappears East of the Urals". 'Financial Times': 11/15/90; (European News).
Sterling, Claire. 'The Terror Network: The Secret War of International Terrorism'. Berkley Books; New York, NY: 1982.
Tyler, Patrick E. "Iraq's War Toll Estimated by U.S.; 100,000 Killed and 300,000 hurt in Persian Gulf cited as tentative figures". 'New York Times': 6/5/91.
"U.N. Survey Calls Iraq's War Damage Near-Apocalyptic". 'New York Times': 3/22/91.
"U.S. Says Early Air Attack Caught Iraq Off Guard". 'New York Times'. 1/18/91.
Walte, Juan. "U.S. Tried to Nab Soviets Aiding Iraq". 'USA Today'. 3/19/91.
"Washington Whispers: Brothers in arms". 'U.S. News & World Report': 8/10/92; p18.
The National Interest, Winter, 1995/96
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB:
Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters
by Laurie Mylroie
ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned, tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.
Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy. In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water." [1] Quickly extradited, he is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial this spring.
Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States. But who is he? Is he a free-lance bomber? A deranged but highly-skilled veteran of the Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Is he an Arab, or of some other Middle Eastern ethnicity? Is there an organization--perhaps even a state--behind his work?
These questions have an obvious bearing not only on past events but on possible future ones as well. [2] It is important to know who Ramzi Yousef is and who his "friends" are, because if he is not just a bomber-for-hire, or an Islamic militant loosely connected to other Muslim fundamentalists, Yousef's "friends" could still prove very dangerous to the United States. It is of considerable interest, therefore, that a very persuasive case can be made that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his bombing conspiracies were meant as Saddam Hussein's revenge for the Gulf War. If so, and if, as U.S. officials strongly suspect, Baghdad still secretly possesses biological warfare agents, then we may still not have heard the last from Saddam Hussein.
This essay will focus on three points. First, it will argue that, as things stand now, coordination between the Justice Department and the relevant national security agencies is such that the latter--and thus national security itself gets very short shrift when it comes to dealing with terror incidents perpetrated on U.S. soil. Second, it will look afresh at the evidence from the World Trade Center bombing case and suggest that the most logical explanation of the evidence points to Iraqi state sponsorship. Third, it will assay briefly what dangers the Iraqi regime may still pose to the United States should this analysis prove correct.
A High Wall
THE SUGGESTION THAT Iraq might well have been behind Ramzi Yousef's exploits may initially strike many as implausible. Wouldn't the U.S. government investigation of the World Trade Center bombing have uncovered evidence to that effect, evidence that the press, in turn, would have broadcast far and wide? Wouldn't America's robust anti-terrorist intelligence capacities have focused on such suspicions long ago?
While these are reasonable questions, they reveal a lack of understanding about how the U.S. government works when legal and national security issues of this special sort overlap. A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions. [3]
In effect, the Justice Department puts the prosecution of individual perpetrators--with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the U.S. judicial system--above America's national security interest in determining who may be behind terrorist attacks. Questions of state sponsorship that are of pressing interest to national security agencies are typically relegated to a distant second place, or never properly addressed at all, because the national security agencies are denied critical information. In particular, whenever early arrests are made regarding a terrorist incident on American soil, the U.S. government cannot properly address both the national security question of state sponsorship and the criminal question of the guilt or innocence of individual perpetrators at the same time.
This is precisely what happened in the World Trade Center bombing. In the case of Ramzi Yousef, the perfectly reasonable questions posed above about who this man is and who may sponsor him have never been properly investigated. Instead of the appropriately trained people conducting a comprehensive investigation, the World Trade Center bombing was followed by an undercover operation, in which an informant of dubious provenance led a handful of local Muslims in a new bombing conspiracy, aimed at the United Nations and other New York landmarks. For this conspiracy Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and nine others were found guilty in early October 1995. Yet none of those in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., as it is formally called, was accused of actually participating in the World Trade Center bombing.[4] They were only charged with conspiracy regarding it. The government contended that other followers of Sheikh Omar--four fundamentalists who stood trial in 1994--were actually responsible for puffing it into effect.
But what if Ramzi Yousef, who eluded the grasp of U.S. authorities until after his second bombing conspiracy, is neither a follower of Sheikh Omar nor a Muslim fundamentalist? That if he is an Iraqi agent? From a legal perspective--as the judge in that trial advised the defense team--whether state sponsorship played a role in the World Trade Center bombing was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of Sheikh Omar et al. And indeed, the prosecution did not need to address the question of whether the World Trade Center bombing had state sponsorship in order to obtain the convictions sought against Sheikh Omar and the others.
Indeed, that state sponsorship can be irrelevant to a criminal prosecution was explained most clearly by the federal prosecutors in the New York bombing conspiracies, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., and the lead prosecutor in last year's Trade Center bombing trial, who will also prosecute Ramzi Yousef. When I put it to them that Iraq was probably behind the Trade Center bombing, they replied, "You may be right, but we don't do state sponsorship. We prosecute individuals." Asked who does "do" state sponsorship, they answered, "Washington." "Who in Washington?" No one seemed to know.[6]
Yet by responding to state-sponsored terrorism solely by arresting and trying individual perpetrators, the U.S. government, in effect, invites such states to commit acts of terror in such a way as to leave behind a few relatively minor figures to be arrested, tried, and convicted. Done adroitly, this makes it unlikely that the larger, more important, and more difficult question of state sponsorship will ever be addressed.
The problem is illustrated vividly in the case of Ramzi Yousef since his arrest in February 1995. The Justice Department has passed on very little information to other bureaucracies. The FBI's typical response to any question about Yousef is: "We can't tell you much because of the trial." [7] As a result, the State Department, which is responsible for determining whether a terrorist act had state sponsorship, lacks the most basic information-- even, for example, a point as simple as what passport Yousef was traveling on when he was arrested in Islamabad.
The details of the World Trade Center case are chilling. From the outset, the Justice Department refused to share key information with the national security agencies. The government had two sets of relevant information--foreign intelligence, gathered by the CIA from watching terrorist states such as Iran and Iraq, and evidence gathered by the FBI largely within the United Stares for use in the trial. The FBI flatly told the national security bureaucracies that there was "no evidence" of state sponsorship in the World Trade Center bombing. When the national security agencies asked to see the evidence themselves, the FBI replied, "No, this is a criminal matter. We're handling it." Thus, all that the national security agencies had available to decide the question of state sponsorship was foreign intelligence they themselves had collected.
But many cases of stare-sponsored terrorism cannot be cracked by means of intelligence alone. The crucial element linking the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to Libya, for example, was not intelligence but a piece of physical evidence--a microchip, part of the bomb's timing device, that could be tied to other bombs built by Libyan agents.
After the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI was the only bureaucracy with both the intelligence and the evidence. Even if the FBI did make a serious effort to examine the evidence for state sponsorship--and it is not clear that it did--the Bureau alone is not competent to carry out such an investigation. "They're head hunters", one official in Pentagon Counterterrorism remarked--that is, they are oriented to the arrest of individuals. A State Department expert described the FBI's new Office of Radical Fundamentalism as "a joke", bereft of any genuine Middle East expertise.
But the more fundamental problem is that the Justice Department in Washington seems not to have been interested in pursuing the question of state sponsorship. In fact, the New York FBI office suspected an Iraqi connection early on, but the Washington brass seemingly wanted to tell America that they had already cracked the case and caught most of the perpetrators. It is always easier to go after the small fry than to catch the big fish, and law enforcement is ever vulnerable to the temptation to cut off a conspiracy investigation at the most convenient point.
Thus, five weeks after the World Trade Center bombing, four Arabs were under arrest. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, had fled. Still, at that point in early April 1993, the FBI proclaimed that it had captured most of those involved. The bombing, it claimed, was the work of a loose group of fundamentalists with no ties to any state. The predictable media frenzy followed and, perhaps as a result, some obvious questions were not asked. How could the government know so early in the investigation that those it had arrested had no ties to any state? If the government knew so much so soon, then why did one of those arrested never stand trial for the bombing, and why were three others indicted much later? In short, the Justice Department determined that the bombing had no state sponsorship even before it decided definitively who had been involved.
Moreover, by April it was impossible to have conducted a sufficiently thorough investigation. Such an investigation required, at a minimum, a meticulous examination of all records associated with the defendants to insure that they had had no contact with foreign intelligence agencies--or at least that none could be found. That process simply could not have been accomplished in five weeks. And it must be kept in mind that, at the time, the mastermind of the bomb was a fugitive about whom almost nothing was known. How could anyone therefore declare confidently that he was not a foreign agent, especially in light of the fact that he had entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi"?
Ironically, this sort of problem would not have arisen had the bombing occurred abroad. In such cases there are usually two separate investigations by two different bureaucracies, one to determine state sponsorship, the other to catch the individuals responsible. After the bombing of Pan Am 103, for example, the CLA led an inter-agency intelligence investigation addressing the question of state sponsorship. There was also a separate criminal investigation, headed by the FBI, aimed at individual perpetrators.
But there was no intelligence investigation of the World Trade Center bombing. The CIA is, after all, prohibited from operating in America. Of course, a crack inter-agency team could have been established to examine the question of state sponsorship. But Clinton administration officials set up no such team.
In September 1995, the State Department forwarded to Congress the report of an independent panel, established to examine whether mistakes in security training had contributed to the March 8 assassination of two U.S. consular officials in Karachi--apparent retaliation for Ramzi Yousef's extradition. The report expressed concern about the FBI's lack of cooperation with the national security agencies. Clearly, discontent with the FBI is growing among those agencies as issues such as international crime--and with them the Bureau's international role--assume a mare prominent role in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, one State Department official described the FBI'S unwillingness to share information as "the train wreck coming"--meaning that given the FBI's lack of expertise in international politics, there may well come a time when the Bureau will be sitting on information that, in the hands of others, could have been used to avert a disaster.
One may indeed ask whether the World Trade Center bombing itself is not a harbinger of the train wreck coming. For if Saddam Hussein was behind it, then the Justice Department, in effect, has blinded the national security bureaucracies to a serious danger, namely the possibility that in the extreme Iraq might use biological agents, whether for terrorism in America or in the context of military' action in the region, possibly involving U.S. troops.
Of course, that is an important "if." It is to that issue we now turn.
Dramatis Personae
Ramzi Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim -the key man; likely Iraqi agent.
El Sayid Nosair--murderer of Rabbi Meir Kahane, bomb plot initiator.
Emad Salem--FBI informant with ties to Egyptian intelligence.
Mohammed Salameh--Palestinian fundamentalist, Nosair accomplice and early plotter; left a trail of phone calls to Iraq.
Musab Yasin--Iraqi with New Jersey apartment where Yousef first went.
Abdul Rahman Yasin--Musab's brother, led FBI to apartment where bomb was made; employee of Iraqi government; indicted fugitive, presently in Baghdad.
Nidal Ayyad--Palestinian fundamentalist convicted in the World Trade Center bombing.
Mahmud Abu Halima--Egyptian fundamentalist cab driver convicted in the World Trade Center bombing
Eyyad Ismail--Palestinian from Jordan charged with having driven the van.
Forty-Six Calls to Iraq
ALTHOUGH THE national security agencies never received the World Trade Center evidence, at the conclusion of a trial evidence becomes public. Anyone can examine it, and I did so meticulously. The raw data consist mostly of telephone records, passports, and airplane tickets. Such data reveal nothing directly about state sponsorship, but under close analysis certain facts begin to stand out and certain patterns emerge. And it helps to know the Middle East well.
The story begins in November 1990 when an Egyptian fundamentalist, El Sayid Nosair, shot and killed Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing Israeli-American, in Manhattan. A year later, in November 1991, Nosair's trial became a cause celebre among local fundamentalists, who turned out in force to support their "martyr." Planted among them was an Egyptian, Emad Salem, working as an FBI informant, even as he maintained ties to Egyptian intelligence. In December, the jury returned a bizarre verdict, acquitting Nosair of murder and finding him guilty on lesser charges. An outraged judge gave Nosair a maximum sentence on those lesser charges, and sent him to Attica.
The fundamentalists continued to support Nosair, arranging bus trips from their mosques to visit him in prison. Salem, the FBI plant, remained among them. In early June 1992, with Salem acting as an agent provocateur, Nosair convinced his friends to execute a bomb plot. He wanted them to make twelve pipe bombs, to be used for assassinating his judge and a Brooklyn assemblyman, the others to be used against Jewish targets. A cousin was to organize the plot, and Salem was to build the bombs.
A twenty-six year old Palestinian, Mohammad Salameh, was soon recruited into the plot. Salameh comes from a long line of terrorists on his mother's side. His maternal grandfather fought in the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, and even as an old man joined the PLO and managed to get himself jailed by the Israelis. A maternal uncle was arrested in 1968 for terrorism and served eighteen years in an Israeli prison before he was released and deported, making his way to Baghdad where he became number two in the "Western Sector", a PLO terrorist unit under Iraqi influence.
Despite this pedigree, Salameh himself is naive and manipulable. When one considers that he was arrested in the process of returning to collect the deposit on the van he had rented to carry the Trade Center bomb, it is not so surprising that on June 10, soon after being recruited into Nosair's plot, Salameh made the first of forty-six calls to Iraq, the vast majority to his terrorist uncle in Baghdad. We can only speculate about what Salameh told his uncle, but it seems very likely that he spoke about the bold new project Nosair was organizing, perhaps seeking his help and advice. Salameh's telephone bills suggest that the pipe bombing plot was one of the most exciting events in his life: In six weeks he ran up a bill of over four thousand dollars and lost his phone service.
Iraq is one of the few remaining Stalinist states. Iraqis routinely assume their telephones are bugged, and are even cautious about discussing sensitive issues in their own homes. The more significant the person, the greater the likelihood his activities are monitored--at least that is what Baghdadis assume. My own experience in Baghdad makes clear that when Iraqis want to be sure that a conversation is not monitored, it takes place out of doors. It is thus more than likely that Iraqi intelligence learned of Nosair's bombing plot and Salameh's participation in it through Salameh's phone calls to his uncle. In any event, key preparatory steps to the World Trade Center bombing were taken within days of Salameh's first call-including steps taken in Baghdad.
On June 21, an Iraqi living in Baghdad, Abdul Rahman Yasin (subsequently an indicted fugitive in the Trade Center bombing) appeared at the U.S. embassy in Amman asking for a U.S. passport. Born in America, Abdul Rahman received his passport, which he soon used to travel to this country.
Just at this crucial point, unfortunately, the FBI lost track of the Nosair-Salameh conspiracy. It did not fully trust its informant, Emad Salem, and Salem's ties to Egyptian intelligence; the Bureau severed relations with him in early July when he refused to follow its procedures relating to criminal investigations.
Salameh's phone bills and other evidence raise the distinct possibility that, Iraqi intelligence having learned of Nosair's plans from Salameh's calls to his uncle, Baghdad decided to help out, transforming the plot in the process. If so, the speed of the reaction suggests that Iraqi intelligence may have already been planning some operation against America, and that Salameh1s calls to his uncle provided it with a fortuitous means of carrying it out. Here probably lies the source of Ramzi Yousef s exploits in America.
Enter Ramzi Yousef
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1992, Ramzi Yousef arrived at JFK airport. He presented an Iraqi passport without a U.S. visa, was briefly detained (and fingerprinted) for illegal entry, and granted asylum pending a hearing. Yousef went to stay at the apartment of Musab Yasin, an Iraqi living in Jersey City. So too did Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab's younger brother, who arrived in America from Iraq soon after Yousef. (Musab had an unlisted telephone number under an Israeli-sounding alias, Josie Hadas.)
Musab lived in the same building as Mohammad Salameh. Many young Arab men used their two apartments, praying and eating together; relations were so close that the apartments were connected by an intercom. Once established within this group, Ramzi Yousef befriended Salameh, and the two left to share an apartment elsewhere in Jersey City. From then on, the impressionable Salameh was under Yousef s wing.
Although the principal conspirators had been in place since September, it was not until after the U.S. elections on November 3 that Yousef began to prepare the World Trade Center bomb. In mid-November the first of many calls to chemical companies appears on his phone bills. At the same time, Yousef also began calling surgical supply companies for the gloves, masks, and rubber tubing he needed to make the bomb. In the meantime, two other local fundamentalists were recruited into the plot, Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abu Halima. Ayyad, a Palestinian, was the same age as Salameh and Salameh's friend. Abu Halima, a thirty-four year old Egyptian cab driver, was a friend of Nosair. Abu Halima was older and generally savvier than the two Palestinians.
In January 1993, Yousef and Salameh moved into another Jersey City apartment where the bomb was actually built. Set well back from the street, the building provided seclusion. On February 21 a twenty-one year old Palestinian named Eyyad Ismail arrived from Dallas. Ismail is charged with having driven the bomb-laden van.[8] On February 23, Salameh went to a Ryder rental agency to rent the van to carry the bomb. On the morning of February 26, the conspirators gathered at a local Shell gas station where they topped up the tank--one last explosive touch--before driving to Manhattan. Shortly after noon, the bomb went off, on--let it be well noted--the second anniversary of the ending of the Gulf War.
That evening Salameh drove Yousef and Ismail to JFK airport; Yousef escaped to Pakistan on falsified travel documents, and Ismail flew home to Jordan. But Salameh looks to have been deliberately left behind by Yousef, not provided with money he needed for a plane ticket. Salameh had a ticket to Amsterdam on Royal Jordanian fight 262, which continues on to Amman, dated for March 5, but it was an infant ticket that had cost him only $65. While Salameh had been able to use this ticket to get himself a Dutch visa, he could not actually travel on it Needing more money for an adult fare, he tried to get his van deposit back by telling the rental agency that the van had been stolen. With either desperate or inane persistence, he returned three times before he was finally arrested on March 4.
Salameh had used Musab Yasin's phone number when renting the van, and Abdul Rahman Yasin was picked up the same day in a sweep of sites associated with Salameh. Abdul Rahman was taken to New Jersey FBI headquarters in Newark. He is reported to have been extremely cool, as a trained intelligence agent would be. He was helpful to investigators who themselves faced tremendous pressure to produce answers. He told them, for instance, the location of the apartment that was used to make the bomb, a key bit of information. They thanked him for his cooperation and let him walk out. This, although he had arrived just six months before from Iraq, and might well attempt to return there. And indeed, the very next day, Abdul Rahman Yasin boarded Royal Jordanian 262 to Amman, the same plane Salameh had hoped to catch. From Amman he went on to Baghdad. An ABC news stringer saw him there last year, outside his father's house, and learned from neighbors that he worked for the Iraqi government.
Meanwhile, as U.S. authorities searched for Abdul Rahman Yasin in March 1993, after his "helpful" session with the FBI and before they knew for certain that he had fled, an FBI agent who had worked with Emad Salem in June 1992 speculated:
"Do you ever think that Iraqi intelligence might have known of these people who were willing to do something crazy, and that Iraqi intelligence found them out and encouraged them to do this as a retaliation for the bombing of Iraq. . . . So the people who are left holding the bag here in America are Egyptian. . . or Palestinian. . . . But the other people we are looking for, Abdul Rahman, he is gone. . I hate to think what's going to happen if this guy turns out to be. . an Iraqi intelligence operative...and these people were used." [9]
Mahmud Abu Halima had similar thoughts. As he told a prison companion who later turned state's evidence:
"The planned act was not as big as what subsequently occurred. . . Yousef showed up on the scene. and escalated the initial plot. . . . Yousef used [them]. . .as pawns and then immediately after the blast left the country." [10]
That, indeed, is the most straightforward explanation of the World Trade Center bombing: that it was an Iraqi intelligence operation, led by Ramzi Yousef, with the local fundamentalists serving first as aides and then as diversionary dupes.
Since Yousef's arrest and extradition to the United States, the evidence for this explanation has, if anything, grown stronger. First of all, he is clearly no fundamentalist. According to neighbors, he had a Filipina girlfriend and enjoyed Manila's raucous night life.[11] Yousef's nationality and ethnicity have also become known: He is a Pakistani Baluch.
The Baluch are a distinct ethnic group, speaking their own language, one of several Middle Eastern peoples without their own homeland. They live in eastern Iran and western Pakistan in inhospitable desert terrain over which neither Tehran nor Islamabad exercises much control. Baluchistan is a haven for smuggling, both of drugs and of arms. The Baluch are Sunni and are at sharp odds with Tehran's Shia clerical regime. Through Iraq's many years of conflict with Iran, first in the early 1970s and then during the Iran-Iraq war a decade later, Iraqi intelligence developed close ties with the Baluch on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. Above all, it used them to carry out terrorism against Iran.
Yousef's associates in Pakistan, too, were anti-Shia. This fact, taken together with his Baluch ethnicity, make it nearly impossible that Iran could be behind Yousef. The most recent inquiries, made since Yousef's arrest, have reduced the question to two possibilities: He is a free-lancer connected to a loose network of fundamentalists; or he worked for Iraq. [12]
Of Passports and Fingerprints
THE SINGLE MOST important piece of evidence pointing to Iraq is the passport on which Yousef fled America. It was no ordinary passport.
On November 9,1992, just after the final green light for the bombing had been given, Yousef reported to Jersey City., police that he had lost his passport. He claimed to be Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani born and reared in Kuwait. Then, between December 3 and December 27, Yousef made a number of calls to Baluchistan. Several of them were conference calls to a few key numbers, a geographical plotting of which suggests that they were related to Yousef's probable escape route--through Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan--across the Arabian Sea to Oman, after which the "telephone trail" ends. After Yousef s arrest, a National Security Council staffer confirmed to me that Yousef had indeed fled from the United States through Baluchistan.
On December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports. Consistent with his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost his passport and asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his non-original documentation enough to deny him a new passport. But it did provide him a six-month, temporary passport and told him to straighten things out when he returned "home." This turned out to be good enough for the purpose at hand.
By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what happened.
But why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most intriguing and vital aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a two-year degree in computer-aided electronic engineering, he returned to a job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As Abdul Basit and his family were permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained files on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and his parents in Kuwait's Interior Ministry have been tampered with. Key documents from the Kuwaiti files on Abdul Basit and his parents are missing. There should be copies of the front pages of the passports, including a picture, a notation of height, and so forth, but that material is gone. There is also information in the file that should not be there, especially a notation stating that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26, 1990, transiting to Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.
Who put that notation into Abdul Basit's file and why? Consider the circumstances of the moment. The Kuwaiti government had ceased to exist, and Iraq was an occupation authority; bent on establishing control over a hostile population amid near-universal condemnation, as an American-led coalition threatened war. The situation was chaotic as hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing for their lives. While the citizens of Western countries were pawns in a high stakes game, held hostage by Iraq, little attention was paid to the multitude of Third World nationals bent on escape. It truly boggles the imagination to believe that under such circumstances an Iraqi bureaucrat was sitting calmly in Kuwait's Interior Ministry taking down the flight plans--including the itinerary and final destination--of otherwise non-descript Baluchis fleeing Kuwait. Rather, it looks as if Iraqi intelligence put that information into Abdul Basit's file to make it appear that he left Kuwait rather than died there, and that, like Ramzi Yousef, he too was Baluch.
Moreover, Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards, removing the original with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with one bearing those of Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators because no two people's match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so decisive makes them the perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus, after U.S. authorities learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they sent his fingerprints (taken by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at JFF airport when he was briefly detained for illegal entry) to Kuwait, asking if they matched those of Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said that they did, everyone assumed the question settled--forgetting that Kuwait's files were not secure during the Iraqi occupation.
Pakistan also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently resident abroad, at the embassy in the country in which they live. On August 9, Baghdad ordered all embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close. Most did, including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his family that should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The Pakistani government now has no record of the family.
What does all this suggest? To me it suggests that Abdul Basit and his family were in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they probably died then; and that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to create an alternative identity for Ramzi Yousef. Clearly, only Iraq could reasonably have: 1) known of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his family; 2) tampered with Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all switching the fingerprint cards; and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit and his family from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait.
Of course, the best way to verify or falsify this would be to check with people who knew Abdul Basit before August 1990. To this end, Brad White, a former Senate Judiciary Committee investigator and CBS newsman, contacted an overseas source he knew in the United Kingdom who had looked into the matter. Two people had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown photos of Yousef, were unable to make a positive identification. They both felt that while there was some similarity in looks, it was not the same person. "Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is probably not Basit", White was told.[13]
Logic and circumstance also suggest the same conclusion. Is it likely to be mere coincidence, after all, that during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait key documents were removed from Abdul Basit's and his parents files, while the same files were filched in their entirety from the Pakistani embassy? Moreover, Abdul Basit had no criminal record in Britain, nor did he or his parents have any security record in Kuwait. The first concrete knowledge we have of Ramzi Yousef/Abdul Basit comes in early 1991, around the end of the Gulf war when he showed up in the Philippines seeking contact with a Muslim group there. Introduced as "the chemist", he proposed to collaborate in
bombing conspiracies. Now, how did a young man who had led a seemingly normal life up until August 1990 suddenly become a world class terrorist six months after Iraq invaded his country of residence? Where did he get such sophisticated explosives training in just six months? (The real Abdul Basit's degree, remember, was in electronic engineering, not chemistry, which Swansea Institute does not even teach.)
And where are Abdul Basit's parents? They never returned to Kuwait after its liberation, nor have they appeared anywhere else. Did they too take up a life of crime after decades of abiding by the law?
Ramzi Yousef's arrest has made it easy enough to resolve a key question and perhaps produce important evidence implicating Iraq in the World Trade Center bombing: Is "Ramzi Yousef" really Abdul Basit or not? Let those who remember Abdul Basit from before August 1990 meet Yousef in person and tell us. It sounds simple and logical, but strangely, the Justice Department has shown no interest in arranging such a meeting. Moreover, it has decided to try, the bomber as Ramzi Yousef even though no one, including Yousef by now, maintains that that is his real name. If the government believes that Yousef is really Abdul Basit, why doesn't it try him as Abdul Basit? Why is the Justice Department uninterested even in definitively determining his identity, even though doing so might help get to the bottom of the matter. I recently asked a Justice Department official, who maintains his confident view that Yousef is indeed Abdul Basit, "Why don't you bring the people who knew Abdul Basit to the prison to meet Yousef, so they can say for sure if they are the same?" "But you", I was told, "are interested in an intelligence question." Earlier I had been told, "It does not matter what we call him. We just try a body."
And so back we come to the high wall. As before, those who have the information about Ramzi Yousef and his bombing conspiracies are not concerned with the question of state sponsorship, or at least consider it secondary to their trials; while those who are concerned with state sponsorship are denied the information that they need to investigate the question properly.
Threats From Baghdad
MOST MEMBERS OF the U.S. national security bureaucracies think that Saddam Hussein has largely lain low since the Gulf War, constrained by economic sanctions and swift American reactions to his occasional feints to the south. But if in February 1993, Saddam ordered his agents to try to topple New York's tallest tower onto its twin, and if, in January 1995, Iraq sponsored an effort to destroy eleven U.S. airplanes in the Far East, then Saddam has not been quiescent.
This, simply put, is why it is important to find out who Ramzi Yousef is and who may have put him up to his murderous work. Maybe Iraq had nothing to do with him, despite all the circumstantial evidence suggesting otherwise. But if it did, then the otherwise peculiar, bombastic, and extremely violent statements emanating from Baghdad might make more sense than they at first seem to.
In the fall of 1994, Baghdad's official press, in essence, threatened that Saddam might use his remaining unconventional agents, biological and chemical, for terrorism in America, or in missiles delivered against his enemies in the region if and when he became fed up with sanctions.[14] On September 29, 1994, following an otherwise cryptic statement of Saddam Hussein's, the government newspaper, Babil, warned: "Does the United States realize the meaning of every Iraqi becoming a missile that can cross to countries and cities?"
Other threats followed almost daily;
When peoples reach the verge of collective death, they will be able to spread death to all. [15]
When one realizes that death is one s inexorable fate, there remains nothing to deter one from taking the most risky steps to influence the course of events. [16]
We seek to tell the United States and its agents that the Iraqi patience has run out and that the perpetuation of the crime of annihilating the Iraqis will trigger crises whose nature and consequences are known only to God.[17]
These statements occurred in the context of Saddam's second and abortive lunge at Kuwait, which was thwarted by the swift U.S. deployment to the region. Saddam then turned around and formally recognized Kuwait, removing what then seemed to be the last major obstacle to lifting sanctions, and the Iraqi press soon began to call 1995, "the year of lifting sanctions."
But that was not to be. The UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) started to uncover evidence of a large, undeclared biological program. As Baghdad's disappointment grew, the Iraqi press began to repeat the threats it had made in the fall. The number two man in Iraq's information ministry warned, "Iraq's abandonment of part of its weapons-the long-range missiles and chemical weapons. . does not mean it has lost everything."[18] Al-Quds al-Arabi, a London paper financed by Baghdad and close to the Iraqi regime, cautioned. "Iraq still has options. But they are all destructive options. Yet if the Americans continue to humiliate them, they will have no option but to bring the temple down on everyone's head."19
After Baghdad succeeded in getting a clean bill of health from UNSCOM in mid-June on its chemical and missile programs, it finally acknowledged in July having had an offensive biological program and having produced anthrax and botulinim. But it denied that it had ever tried to weaponize those agents and, in any case, claimed to have destroyed them in the fall of 1990. The claim was neither credible nor verifiable, particularly as Iraq produced no documents detailing their destruction. Indeed, the Iraqi "revelations" may even have been meant as a threat, an attempt to intimidate the United Nations by hinting at what Baghdad was still capable of doing.[20]
In early August 1995, as Iraq pressed UNSCOM for a clean bill of health on its biological program, Hussein Kamil--Saddam's cousin and son-in-law, and the man responsible for overseeing the build-up of Iraq's unconventional weapons program defected. This precipitated a flood of stunning revelations from Baghdad. They included the admission that Iraq had indeed weaponized botulinim and anthrax. At the very same time that it had earlier claimed to be destroying those agents, the Iraqi regime now acknowledged that it had been stuffing them into bombs and missiles. Yet Iraq still claimed that whatever biological agents it had produced had been destroyed, even as it still failed to produce any documents to confirm their purported destruction.
It looks as if Iraq is holding on to prohibited weapons of mass destruction, even as it insists that sanctions be lifted. Why? In early September, a former adviser to Saddam Hussein predicted that Iraq would not give up any more unconventional agents. Instead, Saddam would probably employ them for blackmail and brinkmanship to get sanctions lifted. And failing that, he would use them.[21] General Wafiq Samarrai, former head of Iraqi military intelligence, told me much the same: "Tell the allies that they have to destroy Iraq's biological agents before Saddam can use them." Iraq could attack its neighbors by missile, or America through terrorism. The United Stares might retaliate with nuclear weapons, but by then "the disaster will already have happened", Samarrai warned. [22]
Would Saddam actually do such a thing? When asked about the possibility of Saddam's using biological agents for terrorism in America, UNSCOM chairman RoIf Ekeus replied, "It is obviously possible."[23] Yet such thoughts seem far from the minds of most U.S. officials, who believe that Saddam is trapped by sanctions and can do no real harm. They feel no urgency about bringing Saddam down; they sense no danger.
Unfinished Business
YET IF RAMZI YOUSEF is in fact an Iraqi intelligence agent, there obviously is a danger. Even if we cannot yet be absolutely certain of this, so many American and allied lives are potentially at stake that it seems the least a responsible government can do is to make every reasonable effort to find out. As Saddam Hussein senses his ever-increasing isolation and sees the prospects for lifting sanctions receding, his desperation may lead him to order other, and even more ghastly, deeds.
If Saddam Hussein still hungers for revenge, the question of Ramzi Yousef's terrorism is much too important to be left solely to the Justice Department, while the FBI continues to withhold critical information from the national security bureaucracies.
The following are among the steps that could and should be taken to address the issue of whether Iraq is behind Ramzi Yousef and to strengthen America's anti-terrorism efforts generally:
Bring those who knew Abdul Basit Karim before August 1990 to meet Yousef in prison and pronounce definitely if they are one and the same man.
Demand the immediate and unconditional extradition of Abdul Rahman Yasin from Baghdad.
Establish a "tiger team", drawn from the best and brightest within the national security bureaucracies, to examine all the information in the U.S. government's possession related to Yousef and his bombing conspiracies. Yousef's apparent use of chemical agents in New York and his threat to use them in the Philippines deserve special attention.
Establish appropriate procedures so that whenever a terrorist attack occurs against U.S. targets that might be state-sponsored, a qualified team will address the question of state sponsorship regardless of whether the terror occurs on U.S. soil or whether early arrests are made.
Individually, the pieces of this puzzle--the elusive identity and affiliation of the World Trade Center bomber; the series of explicit threats against the United States issuing from Baghdad; the question of Iraqi biological capabilities--raise troubling questions. Taken together, they provide the outline of a very frightening possibility. The lack of coordination between the Departments of Justice and State may have created a niche for terrorism within America's borders; while the lack of any adequate response to the two major bombing conspiracies may have already begun to undermine the credibility of the threat of deterrence. So far, State Department officials have been content to leave the issue of Iraq's possible resort to biological terrorism on the back burner, secure in the belief that the threat of nuclear retaliation will be sufficient deterrent. But Saddam has previously miscalculated the American reaction to his provocations. It would be reassuring to know that, somewhere in the policy-apparatus of the State Department, someone is looking seriously at the possibility of future terrorist acts and at the requirements of effective deterrence.
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Laurie Mylroie, formerly of Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College. is currently with the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia. She was co-author of the bestseller, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Random House 1990), and has just completed a sequel, 'Study of Revenge': Saddam's Terror Against America, January 1993-??
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1. Washington Post, October 7,1995.
2. Indeed, there is good reason to suspect an Iraqi hand in the November 13,1995 bombing of the U.S. military office in Riyadh.
3. Interview with Vincent Cannistraro, former Chief of Counterterrorism Operations for the CIA's Counterterrorism Center. There is no formal or legal reason for the FBI position and standard practice. It is largely a matter of protecting bureaucratic turf.
4. Wall Street Journal, September 22,1995. This point was repeatedly made in the New York Times--April 4,7, 9 and 26; June 22 and 28; July 26 and 30; August 2 and 22; October 2, 1995.
5. Ken Wasserman, lawyer for one of the defendants in Sheikh Omar et. al. to the author.
6 Author's meeting with federal prosecutors in New York, January, 1995, arranged by the New York District Attorney's office. Another Trade Center prosecutor, since retired, expressed his frustration with the FBI to a Yale Law School alumni gathering, complaining that they had done no "overall policy review." Allan Gerson, former Chief Counsel of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations (1981-5), to the author-
7. Sources in the State Department, CIA, and Pentagon all told me that those at the working level were not getting information from the FBI on Yousef, and were all very unhappy about it,
8. lsmail was indicted in September 1994 and arrested in August 1995 at his family home in Jordan. He was identified by comparing Yousef's telephone records to the passenger manifests of planes leaving JFK the night of the bombing. I believe that Ismail was probably an unwitting participant and meant to be caught. After Yousef was arrested in February, he mentioned the existence of another conspirator and expressed surprise that he had not yet been arrested.
9. John Anticev to FBI plant Emad Salem. Salem taped most of his phone conversations, including those with the FBI.
10. FD-302, [Proffer Session], p.3, Mohammad Abdul Haggag.
11. New York Times, February 12,1995.
12. See Charles Wallace, Los Angeles Times, May 30, 1995; David Ottaway and Steven Croll, Washington Post, June 5, 1995; Maryanne Weaver, New Yorker, June 5, 1995.
13. Brad White to the author, September 23,1995.
14. See Laurie Mylroie and James Ring Adams. "Saddam's Germs", The American Spectator, November 1995.
15. a1-Jumhuriyah, October 4, 1994.
16. al-Jumhuriyah, October 5, 1994.
17. al-Jumhuriyah, October 8, 1994.
18, Al-Iraq, April 11, 1995.
19. Al-Quds al-Arabi, June 15,1995.
20. This was suggested by Frank Gaffney in a Center for Security Policy "Decision Brief," July 7,1995.
21 "Saddam Nears End-game," The Guardian, September 4, 1995.
22. Telephone interview with Samarrai, in Damascus, September 1995.
23. McNeil-Lehrer Newshour, August 28, 1995.
February 5, 2003, 1:30 p.m.
Understated
There's more he could have said.
By Laurie Mylroie
Colin Powell made a strong case for eliminating Saddam and his regime ASAP. Indeed, in some respects, the information he presented was stronger than his conclusions; the case was understated.
Among the revelations: Iraq is moving SCUD missiles with biological warheads around Western Iraq. Presumably, Israel is the target.
Powell's disclosures suggest Baghdad's biological weapons (BW) program never stopped -- even when UNSCOM (a far more muscular organization than UNMOVIC) -- was in Iraq. As Powell noted, Iraq developed the means to produce powdered biological agents in 1998 and a BW accident occurred that killed twelve people. Most probably, Iraq is producing biological agents now, in mobile labs.
The same can be said for Iraq's chemical and nuclear programs. Iraq continued those programs after the Gulf War, but took extraordinary measures to hide them -- like using dual-use facilities to produce banned agents on Thursday night and Friday, then cleaning them up for the regular work week.
The presentation of Iraq's ties with al Qaeda was, however, weaker. Powell failed to mention that Baghdad harbors an indicted terrorist from the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Nor did he mention the two defectors who described Iraq's training of militants to hijack airplanes, testimony corroborated by a satellite photo of a plane in an area under control of Iraqi intelligence.
-- Laurie Mylroie is the author of The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks, A Study of Revenge.
Laurie Mylroie: Is Iraq involved with U.S. terror attacks?
October 29, 2001 Posted: 2:36 PM EST (1936 GMT)
Saddam Hussein
Laurie Mylroie is the author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War," which outlines her case that Iraq had a central role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She served as an adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. Mylroie is currently vice-president of "Information for Democracy," and the publisher of "Iraq News."
CNN: Thank you for joining us today, Laurie Mylroie, and welcome.
LAURIE MYLROIE: Hi, and thank you all for coming to the chat room.
CNN: You believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in both attacks the 1993 and September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Why?
MYLROIE: You can demonstrate to the high legal standard of beyond a reasonable doubt, which is used for criminal conviction, that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, by showing that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of that bomb, was an Iraqi intelligence agent. I do that in "Study of Revenge." That bomb, in 1993, aimed to topple the north tower onto the south tower. Eight years later, someone came back and finished the job. Since Iraq was behind the first attack, it is suggestive of the point that Iraq was behind the second attack.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is there any proof at all that Hussein is involved in the anthrax scares?
MYLROIE: There is no proof that Saddam is involved in the anthrax scares, but proof is different from evidence. Proof, according to the dictionary, is conclusive demonstration. Evidence is something that indicates, like your smile is evident of your affection for me. There is evidence that Iraq is behind the anthrax scares. First, it takes a highly sophisticated agency to produce anthrax in the lethal form that was in the letter sent to Senator Daschle. Not many parties can do that. Second, there is an additive in that anthrax, bentonite, which is used to cause the anthrax to not stick together, and float in the air. Iraq is the only party known to have produced anthrax with bentonite.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Should the U.S.take action against Iraq?
MYLROIE: Yes. It is necessary for the United States to take action against Iraq. The 1991 Gulf War never ended. We continue it in the form of an economic siege whose origins lie in the Gulf War. And also, we bomb Iraq on a regular basis, and Saddam continues his part of the war in the form of terrorism. It is unlikely that that anthrax will remain in letters. It is likely that it will be used at some point, for example, in the subway of a city, or in the ventilation system of a U.S. building. Saddam wants revenge against us. He wants to do to the U.S. what we've done to Iraq. One way he can do that is terrorism, particularly biological terrorism.
CHAT PARTICPANT: What is the connection between bin Ladden and Saddam?
MYLROIE: Bin Laden and Hussein work together. The contact between the two was made in the 1990s when bin Laden was based in Sudan. Iraq intelligence also had a major presence in Sudan then. There were other widely reported contacts between bin Laden and Iraq intelligence, such as in December, 1998 when Farook Hajazi traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Hajazi is a senior intelligence officer. Bin Laden provides the ideology, he recruits the foot soldiers, and he provides a smokescreen. Iraqi intelligence provides the direction and training for the terrorism.
CNN: You hold the Clinton administration responsible for Hussein's involvement in all of these attacks. Why?
MYLROIE: Iraq is a difficult problem, and has been since the Gulf War. Many mistakes have been made, because it's inevitable that in human endeavor there are mistakes. Under the Clinton administration, specifically in February 1993 with the first attack on the Trade Center, Clinton dealt with the issue dishonestly. New York FBI believed in 1993 that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. That was accepted by the White House, that New York FBI might well be right. In June, 1993, Clinton attacked Iraqi intelligence headquarters. He said that that was punishment for Saddam's attempt to kill George Bush when Bush visited Kuwait in April, but Clinton also believed that it would deter Saddam from all future attacks of terrorism, and that it would address the WTC bombing, too, so that Saddam would not think to carry out further attacks against the U.S.
And then the Clinton administration put out a false and fraudulent explanation for terrorism, saying that terrorism was no longer state-sponsored, but carried out by individuals. That false and fraudulent explanation was accepted and allowed Saddam to continue to attack the U.S. The reason Clinton dealt with terrorism in that fashion was because he did not understand the kind of threat that Saddam could pose, and by taking care of the terrorism in New York in that fashion, he avoided riling American public opinion, which might have demanded then, back in 1993, that he do a great deal more.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Do you believe this will eventually escalate into a much broader conflict as other states are identified as helping terrorist organizations?
MYLROIE: I believe that it is necessary to shift the war to Iraq and to do so as soon as possible, because Iraq is a primary threat, the primary terrorist threat to the United States, and as the anthrax shows, that threat can become very, very great. It's necessary to get rid of Saddam.
CNN: The George W. Bush administration publicly focuses on Osama bin Laden and remains internally at odds over whether to implicate Hussein and Iraq in the current war. Is that a mistake?
MYLROIE: Yes, it is a mistake to avoid implicating Iraq, or to be unable to reach a decision about that. If we do not say that we suspect Iraq in the anthrax attacks, then Saddam will have no reason not to escalate to the next step. The next step could be that anthrax used in another fashion which is more deadly, or it could be anthrax that is resistant to antibiotics. We won't be able to treat it, as we can now.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Have you spoken with officials about this information?
MYLROIE: Yes I have spoken with officials, in particular in the Pentagon. The Pentagon shares this view.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: You mentioned the bentonite in the anthrax, and yet we hear that the CIA and FBI are looking at home sources of that anthrax? Why are they not also viewing that as from Iraq rather than a U.S. source?
MYLROIE: That is a good question. Bob Bartley in the Wall Street Journal takes on that question. While one might say it is not impossible that an individual who is very knowledgeable, with access to a good lab, could have produced that in the U.S., it is also extremely unlikely. Iraq is a much more likely candidate. Bartley compares it to the situation of the elephant in the room that some people just don't want to see, including, apparently, the FBI and the CIA. But the American people can see the elephant in the room, and Iraq is a much more likely suspect than an individual in the U.S.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is it possible that perhaps Iraq is waiting for us to accuse them and then take anthrax to the next level?
MYLROIE: We are in a very, very difficult situation. If we say clearly that it is Iraq, and we're going to get Saddam, then it is likely that he will do his best to bring his enemies down with him. It is true that we face the danger then of more deadly attacks, including anthrax attacks. If we do not say it is Saddam, we will also face the danger of more deadly attacks. This is a terrible situation. Yet I prefer to deal with the losses that will come by taking on Saddam than to be subject to the losses that will occur if we remain sitting ducks. It would seem that some ambiguity in the beginning is the best thing. If we shift the focus from Afghanistan to Iraq, we are indeed at war, and during war, extreme measures may have to be taken. For example, we might think to get children and all non-essential personnel out of U.S. cities while this war goes on, which we will carry out very quickly, or to have people remaining in U.S. cities where they are a target, wearing masks pretty much all the time, in order to deal with this problem which we should address quickly rather than slowly.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Is the reason behind the government not admitting to Iraq's involvement over the oil situation?
MYLROIE: I don't think that the oil situation is a factor. I think that at least two things are at work. First, there is a great confusion because for eight years Clinton treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue, with the emphasis on arresting individuals and bringing them to justice, trying and convicting them. That had the effect of obscuring the role of states in terrorism, particularly Iraq. But in addition, those who went along with his view of terrorism are now personally invested in it, and they are reluctant to give up that view. That would include George Tenet, a Clinton appointee who still heads the CIA, and I believe, the intelligence coming from the CIA is skewed. It may also be that there is an influence of former President Bush and Bush's top advisors from the 1991 Gulf War on President Bush. Some of those people, including former President Bush, Brent Scocroft, his national security advisor, Colin Powell, have not acknowledged that it was an error to end the war in 1991 with Saddam in power, and that may color their judgment now.
CHAT PARTICIPANT: Laurie, is your book still in print? I have been trying to find it in book stores without success.
MYLROIE: The book is still in print. It is now available in hardcover as "Study of Revenge," and it will soon be available in paperback as "The War Against America." Both are listed on Amazon now.
CNN: Do you have any closing comments to share with us?
MYLROIE: I would like to thank everyone for participating in this discussion today, to remind you to emphasize that we face a very, very serious problem. We must deal correctly with it, or the loss of American lives may be very large. And again, I'd like to let people know about my book. It's currently out as "Study of Revenge," and will be available shortly as "The War Against America," published by Regan Books.
CNN: Thank you for joining us today.
MYLROIE: My pleasure. Thank you.
Laurie Mylroie joined the chat via telephone from Washington DC. CNN provided a typist for her. This is an edited transcript of the interview, which took place on Monday, October 29, 2001.
Interview with Dr. Laurie Mylroie
Terrorism Expert, Author, and Publisher of Iraq News
October 30, 2001
Note - audio file link file:
http://www.jpostradio.com/Archive/2001/10/30/asx/011030nws.asx
Mordechai Twersky: How concerned are you that the current crisis will spill over into Iraq, and perhaps, by extension, into the State of Israel?
Laurie Mylroie: Sooner or later, the United States is going to have to go to war with Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Iraq was behind the September 11th attack and Iraq is also behind the anthrax letters.
MT: Now that's a sweeping statement. How can you say that?
LM: The September 11th attacks had to be sponsored by a state. Only a state has the resources to carrry out the most massive, stupendous terrorist attack in human history. In fact, if this had occurred a decade ago, we in the United States would have recognized that a hostile state was behind what happened. A decade ago, the prevailing assumption was that major attacks against the United States were state-sponsored. That really meant Iran, Iraq, Syria or Libya. But what happened in the intervening years was that the Clinton administration treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue, with an emphasis on arresting individuals and bringing them to justice. That had the effect of obscuring the role of states, specifically Iraq, in the terrorism that hit the United States in the 1990's.
MT: So are you suggesting that it is not as much Bin-Laden who may be responsible for this act of terror, but Iraq?
LM: Iraq and Bin-Laden are working together. Bin-Laden provides the ideology, he provides the foot soldiers, and he provides a smoke screen for Iraq, while Iraq provides the direction and the expertise for these attacks.
MT: In your estimation, is it only a matter of when, not if, allied forces will target Iraq, and if so, what are the chances Saddam Hussein will target Israel, as he did during the Gulf War?
LM: If the United States does not target Iraq in the present war on terrorism, it will have to target Iraq after the next major attack against the United States. And when the U.S. targets Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam, and Saddam realizes that [he is going down], then Saddam is going to do his best to bring his enemies down--and very high among those enemies to be targeted is Israel.
MT: In your estimation, is Israel prepared to deal with the consequences of a biological or chemical attack that could emanate from Iraq?
LM: No, I don't think Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Saddam may launch against it when he is going down. There has been a tendency, over the last decade--and people I've spoken with as well, and what one reads in the press and hears privately from individuals--to focus on nuclear weapons, specifically Iran, to the exclusion of biological and chemical weapons, and to discount the kind of damage they can do, and to almost pretend as though that kind of damage is acceptable to the Israeli population.
MT: Have you been in consultation with anybody on the Israeli Home Command or military front, whereby you have information that would lead you to this conclusion?
LM: I'll give you an example. Current assumptions about Iraqi use of anthrax seem to be based on the notion that the anthrax that Iraq may use in the future against Israel or any other target can be treated with antibiotics. But it is not difficult for Iraq to develop anthrax which is resistant to all known antibiotics. What will happen then, if Iraq launches scud missiles with anthrax warheads, and the warheads explode according to the way they are supposed to explode and anthrax that is resistant to antibiotics falls on Israeli cities?
MT: As an expert on terrorism and intelligence, how can Israel effectively prepare for such an attack?
LM: The first thing I believe is that Israeli officials have to address a strategic intelligence failure that occurred in the 1990's. It's not less than the strategic intelligence failure that preceded the Yom Kippur War. It is the failure to recognize that Iraq has systematically been working with Islamic militants throughout the 1990's. That includes Islamic militants targeting the United States, as well as Egypt.
I explained this to a friend from the Dayan Center in 1998. He recognized the problem in our discussions; he was rather stunned by it. But he failed to do anything when he went back to Israel. Most, recently, early this year, I was discussing this with a very well-known Israeli journalist. He responded by saying: 'Does anyone in Israel think like this?' And I told him, 'No, I don't think so.' But that journalist then failed, again, to do anything significant that would bring this to the attention of Israeli authorities. Israeli authorities do not recognize Saddam's vengefulness and viciousness, in part because they do not recognize Saddam's role in the terrorism that has occured in the 1990's or how Saddam has been working with the militant Muslims.
MT: Are there any threats in addition to anthrax that Western Civilization, for that matter, needs to be concerned about?
LM: Iraq's VX advanced chemical agent is very dangerous. It is lethal to the touch and it does not dissipate. There need to be special procedures for dealing with VX. If it is used against Israeli cities, it requires special evacuation procedures and has to be treated entirely differently from other Iraqi known chemical agents. And again, to my knowledge, Israeli authorites have not prepared the Israeli population at all for that kind of attack and what to do about it.
MT: Tell our listeners exactly what VX is and how do we know how much VX Saddam Hussein has.
LM: In 1995, when Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamil, defected, Iraq acknowledged having the precursors to make four tons of VX. VX is an advanced chemical agent. It is lethal when someone even touches a surface that has been hit by VX. It is sticky and viscous. It does not dissipate. Following a VX attack, it will be necessary to evacuate people from that part of a city that has been hit by VX. They have to be careful not to touch any surfaces that might have been hit by the chemical agent and not to step in any puddles that might be left behind. They either have to walk out, or one would have to bring transportation from areas which have not been affected by the VX and pick them up and take them to another part of the city that has not been hit. All that requires knowledge and organization communicated to the population ahead of time.
MT: How is the US, for that matter, handling this possible threat?
LM: The United States does not face a VX threat. What it faces is biological terrorism, because Iraqi missiles can't hit the United States. Regarding biological terrorism, very unfortunately, the US officials are in a state of denial. We have had finely-milled, military-grade anthrax in the United States in the form of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and somehow, the White House cannot bring itself to say that that anthrax was produced by a state-- which is the only possibility. And therefore, we cannot warn or deter the state which almost certainly produced it, which is Iraq.
MT: Thank you for being with us today, Dr. Mylroie.
LM: My pleasure, Mordechai. Thank you very much.
After Saddam Hussein
The Kurds have set up a cohesive administration in northern Iraq, but the UN embargo is an unnecessary
thorn in their daily life -- and counterproductive to the aim of upsetting the Baghdad regime
by Laurie Mylroie
AS I PREPARED to travel to Iraqi Kurdistan last June, Peter Galbraith, a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer and a longtime champion of the Kurds, sought to alleviate my apprehensions. I would be safer there, he said, than in Washington, D.C. Although he had visited northern Iraq several times since the Gulf War, I was skeptical. Yet less than twelve hours after arriving in Iraq, I recognized that he was probably right.
Iraq's Kurds are effectively running their own affairs, administering a population of 3.5 million in a territory almost twice the size of Israel. They are doing so with considerable success, having managed the transition from authoritarian rule better than many others, including Afghans, Somalis, and the various peoples of the former Soviet Union. In fact, with little outside assistance the Kurds have accomplished what George Bush has so far failed to achieve elsewhere in Iraq -- the orderly overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime.
In Sulaimaniya, the largest and southernmost city under Kurdish control, I started to understand the remarkable social cohesion underlying the success of the Iraqi Kurds' administration. Sulaimaniya's police chief explained that there was, in fact, less crime now in northern Iraq than there had been under the Ba'ath. Thus policemen's jobs had become easier. "Before, people didn't trust the police and avoided them. Now they cooperate with us."
Return to Flashback: Who Are the Kurds? Fouad Masoum, the head of the regional Kurdish government elected last May, made a similar observation. Cheating on the high school matriculation exams was down. "Before, cheating was a good thing to do because it was against the regime. Now the students feel responsible."
The Iraqi Kurds' strong feelings of communal solidarity are rare in the Middle East, where tribal, religious, and ethnic factionalism is often fatal to social order. The Kurds were once known for such divisions, and apprehension remains that these could reemerge, particularly between the two main parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, headed by Jalal Talabani, and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, headed by Massoud Barzani, the son of the legendary Mulla Mustafa Barzani. Yet nearly two decades of increasingly genocidal repression has forged a remarkable unity among the people, and today the leadership recognizes that any split could provide Saddam Hussein with a deadly opportunity to intervene. Relief is universal among the Kurds that the Iraqi dictator is gone from their area, and even the present hard times seem good compared with the hell of the recent past. Thus internal fighting is not a significant problem among Iraq's Kurds, although Baghdad tries to provoke conflict among them. The Palestinians, in contrast, suffer from such problems.
Moreover, the Iraqi population is relatively well educated by regional standards, and its bureaucracy is relatively disciplined and effective. Iraqi Kurds share in those qualities. They are proud of what they have accomplished, and they value dignity and honor to a degree rare in the West. Despite the economic problems, I did not see a single adult begging. Of what major American city can that be said? Driving through the countryside late one afternoon, I picked up a man sitting by the road with a huge sack. He had lost his identity papers and could not get rations. He had been gleaning the fields and had more children to feed than dinars in his pocket. As I took out some money, he went through the ritual of declining it, leaving me to insist that he accept it.
Despite the Kurds' relief that Saddam Hussein was gone, Iraqi Kurdistan was a very sad place. Evidence of atrocities was everywhere. To suppress the Kurdish rebellion during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein depopulated the countryside, destroying nearly 4,000 of the 5,000 Kurdish villages. Piles of rubble where villages once stood testify to Baghdad's barbarous campaign.
Qushtapa is today home to the Barzan widows. Eight thousand of Massoud Barzani's kinsmen -- one in five of the men of the Barzani tribe -- were killed. The widows and their children settled in this concrete-block village south of Irbil, the administrative capital in the center of Iraqi Kurdistan. Qushtapa has only dirt roads and no running water, owing to Saddam Hussein's vengefulness.
The women tell of murderous persecution going back to 1975, when the Kurdish revolt, then led by Massoud Barzani's father and supported by Iran, the United States, and Israel, suddenly collapsed after the Shah of Iran reached a surprise agreement with the Iraqi leader, and the United States cut off aid to the Kurdish rebels. ("Our movement and people are being destroyed in an unbelievable way," Mustafa Barzani wrote to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, pleading for help. Kissinger did not deign to reply. Explaining in secret testimony why the United States abandoned the Kurds, Kissinger offered this pithy profile in cynicism: "Covert action should not be confused with missionary work.") In 1975 the Iraqi army came and rounded up everyone in the widows' village, taking them to a compound in the southern desert. On the walls of the huts, which were unfit for human habitation, was scrawled "Dar al-Fana" -- "House of Annihilation." Many people died. Eventually the survivors were allowed to return to the north, and ended up in Qushtapa. But in 1983, after Iraq began to lose the war with revolutionary Iran, the army returned. One night soldiers surrounded the village, seizing every grown male, including the blind and the crippled. The women and children cried and tried to follow their husbands, sons, and fathers, but Iraqi forces fired on them, forcing them back.
As this story came to an end, I asked my interlocutor, who seemed strangely emotionless, what she felt. "As long as we are all created by one God," she said, "it must be the end of days that such things happen, because all laws are reversed at the end of days." I heard many other stories of atrocities, told in the same flat voice, without anger, self-pity, or shyness. They want the world, particularly America, to know: Baghdad's use of chemical weapons was only one element of a genocidal campaign, the full dimensions of which are not yet recognized.
But while the memory of past horrors lingered, there was also a remarkable happiness, a tangible giddiness, in the clear summer air of Iraqi Kurdistan. Unlike most of the Middle East the Kurdish countryside is well watered and green. Traveling south to Sulaimaniya we passed many families marking a Muslim holiday with picnics in shady valleys by the clear streams that flow from the Kurdish mountains. My escort explained that such picnics had been forbidden under the Ba'ath, because the entire countryside had been off limits.
Similarly, when we arrived in Sulaimaniya, at dusk, we saw hundreds of people out walking. This, too -- a stroll in the cool evening air -- had been impossible under the Ba'ath. Young men had feared arrest and young women had hesitated to venture out alone.
At the summer home of the Iraqi Vice President, which now serves as the Irbil headquarters of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, a picture of a smiling, bespectacled Jalal Talabani was perched on a chair at the entrance, while guerrillas who had spent the past decade waging a difficult campaign against Baghdad from their mountain hideouts lounged comfortably about the house and grounds, taking particular pleasure in the sweet ripe apricots in the Vice President's extensive orchard.
IN OCTOBER of last year, when Saddam Hussein imposed a blockade on the north, he also halted the payment of salaries to government officials there, ordering them back to Iraqi-held territory. Arabs working in the north obeyed, but Kurdish officials remained at their posts. That is when the Kurdistan Front, the coordinating body for the various Kurdish parties, took over the administration of northern Iraq, assuming responsibility for paying the salaries of essential workers, such as policemen and garbage men, and providing subsidized rations to the population. But those in what are considered to be less essential government jobs, among them schoolteachers, are paid only sporadically, and Kurdistan Front rations have to be supplemented in the market. Many people are living off their savings, and this winter there will be shortages of food and fuel.
Truck traffic from Turkey illustrates the local ingenuity in handling otherwise daunting economic problems. Iraq offers gasoline for sale in Mosul at less than one cent a liter. Turkish trucks come with huge containers strapped to their sides to pick up the gas. They are, in turn, required to bring in food at subsidized prices. Without the essentially free oil, the flow of food into Iraq would be a trickle. Some food gets dropped off in the north, and the rest is carried into Iraq proper. That oil trade violates the UN embargo, but sensibly no one complains, because the population would otherwise starve. The Kurdistan Front generates income by taxing the trucks on their way to Mosul, although revenues fall far short of what is needed.
Many obstacles to normal economic activity exist in Iraqi Kurdistan. Because of the two embargoes -- from the UN and from Baghdad -- there is no credit or banking system. Most transactions take place in five- and ten-dinar notes, the equivalent of thirty-three and sixty-six cents. People carry huge wads of bills. Nevertheless, the supply and distribution system has not broken down, as it did in the former Soviet Union. The Middle East has a long commercial tradition.
The embargoes also interfere with private-sector activity. Kurdish peasants could not obtain seed, fertilizer, or pesticides for the last harvest. As a result, the crop was about half what it might have been. One peasant family explained to me that they had used old seed for the summer harvest. They were eating seed that was still older to supplement their rations. If they did not get supplies for the next planting season, there would be no harvest.
Similarly, kerosene for heating looked to be in seriously short supply. Reserves were largely consumed last winter, the harshest in living memory. Irbil's chief petroleum engineer explained the problem to me, using his personal circumstances as illustration. He began last winter with six barrels of kerosene. In June he had half a barrel and did not know how he would obtain more.
INCREDIBLY, the Kurds economic problems are not necessary. Rather, they are a consequence of the mindless application of the UN embargo to northern Iraq. Formally, the embargo exists to force Saddam Hussein to comply with the UN resolutions; the scarcely concealed goal is to oust him. But because he does not control the north, enforcing the embargo there does not hurt him. In fact, it strengthens his position, for the greater the prosperity of areas not under his control, the greater the dissatisfaction inside Iraq proper and the more pressure on the dictator.
Iraqi Kurdistan has oil fields that, were it not for the embargo, could be developed within a year, generating income and much-needed fuel. The reason for maintaining the embargo on northern Iraq is to conciliate traditionalists in Turkey who are nervous about an independent Kurdish state and wary of any differentiation between the north and Iraq proper.
Yet there are really two lines of thought in Turkey. Some civilian politicians are more forthcoming with the Kurds, both Iraq's and Turkey's own. Some of them believe that concessions to Kurdish sentiments are the best counter to the Marxist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), whose terrorist campaign in southeastern Turkey has escalated dramatically in the past year. They also believe that conciliating Iraq's Kurds will help relations with key European countries that have strong Kurdish constituencies, including France, Great Britain, and Germany. Some politicians, notably the Turkish President, Turgut Ozal, even believe that a humanitarian approach to the Iraqi Kurds could enhance Turkey's strategic position in the region. "Provide Comfort," the coalition operation that established the Kurdish safe haven zone, was Ozal's idea.
Turkish hard-liners, who are significantly represented in the army and other bureaucracies, would like to see Baghdad's authority reestablished over the north. But that would mean a renewal of the Kurdish genocide. Even Saddam Hussein's ouster would not solve the problem. Kurds told me that it was Hussein Kamil, the Iraqi President's son-in-law, who warned the Kurds in their abortive postwar negotiations, "How long will the United States stay? One year? Two years? Five years? Eventually they will go, and then we'll know how to take care of you." Moreover, the return of Ba'athist authority to northern Iraq would likely precipitate another Kurdish flight, recreating the crisis that resulted in the safe havens. Very hard-line elements may hope to seal the border, trapping the population between two armies. Ankara initially tried to do that in 1988, when Baghdad used chemical weapons against the Kurds immediately after the Iran-Iraq war ended, unloosing a flood of refugees. Then, international pressure obliged Turkey to open the frontier. The present risk is that Turkish hard-liners, frustrated at the PKK's continuing terrorism, will persuade themselves that it is better to ride out a wave of international protest than to continue battling the PKK under present circumstances.
They are probably wrong on two counts, however. First, letting Baghdad reassert control over the north will not solve their Kurdish problem. Turkish-Iraqi relations will not return to what they were before the Gulf War, when the two countries cooperated against Kurdish insurgents. Relations will remain strained. Saddam Hussein supports the PKK now. He will likely continue to do so as leverage against Turkey, even if he is allowed to return to the north. It would probably be easier for Turkey to reach an agreement on controlling the PKK with the Iraqi Kurds than to reach one with Baghdad -- an argument Ozal himself has made.
Second, Iraq's Kurdish leadership says it does not seek independence. The area is landlocked, surrounded by states that oppose Kurdish independence. Although the ability of a people to administer their own affairs successfully might be deemed to warrant independence, the Kurdish demand is for autonomy. The Kurds recognize that independence is practically impossible. That is why they joined with Sunni and Shiite elements last June to form the opposition Iraqi National Congress in an attempt to oust Saddam Hussein, although the immediate result, predictably enough, was to intensify Baghdad's pressure on the north.
The Kurds' overriding objective is that Saddam Hussein not return to the north. I asked what they would do if the coalition remained unwilling to make the effort necessary to oust him. Perhaps they should try to join another country? Turkey is the obvious candidate. Ordinary citizens and the Kurdish leadership both were agreeable to that suggestion. Many, including Massoud Barzani, had already been considering it, and Jalal Talabani subsequently raised the possibility publicly while he was visiting Turkey.
For now the Kurds would like to put Provide Comfort on a more durable foundation. They would like it to be open-ended, not subject to an agreement that must be renewed every six months by Turkey's parliament. The agreement is up for renewal again this month. It is critical that Provide Comfort be continued. The life of a people is at stake.
U.S. Department of State
Iraq Report on Human Rights Practices for 1997
Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, January 30, 1998.
IRAQ *
Political power in Iraq lies exclusively in a repressive one-party apparatus dominated by Saddam Hussein and members of his extended family. The provisional Constitution of 1968 stipulates that the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party (ABSP) governs Iraq through the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC), which exercises both executive and legislative authority. President Saddam Hussein, who is also Prime Minister, Chairman of the RCC, and Secretary General of the Regional Command of the ABSP, wields decisive power. Saddam Hussein and his regime continued to refer to an October 1995, nondemocratic "referendum" on his presidency in which he received 99.96 percent of the vote. This "referendum" included neither secret ballots nor opposing candidates, and many credible reports indicated that voters feared possible reprisal for a negative vote.
Ethnically and linguistically, the Iraqi population includes Arabs, Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Armenians. Historically, the religious mix is likewise varied: Shi'a and Sunni Muslims (both Arab and Kurdish), Christians (including Chaldeans and Assyrians), and Jews (most of whom have emigrated). Ethnic divisions have resulted in civil uprisings in recent years, especially in the north and the south. The Government has reacted against those who revolt with extreme repression. The judiciary is not independent, and the President can override any court decision.
The Government's security apparatus includes militias attached to the President, the Ba'ath Party, and the Interior Ministry. The security forces play a central role in maintaining the environment of intimidation and fear on which government power rests. Security forces committed widespread, serious, and systematic human rights abuses.
The Government owns all major industries and controls most of the highly centralized economy, which is based largely on oil production. The economy was damaged by the Gulf War, and Iraq has been subjected to United Nations sanctions since its 1990 invasion of Kuwait. As a result, the economy has been stagnant. Sanctions ban all exports, except for oil sales under U.N
*
The United States does not have diplomatic representation in Iraq. This report draws to a large extent on non-U.S. Government sources.
Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 986, and allow imports only of food, medicine, and other humanitarian goods for essential civilian needs. The Government's failure to comply with U.N. Security Council resolutions has resulted in the maintenance of the sanctions. In December 1996, after a nearly a year and a half of obstruction and delay, the Government began to implement UNSCR 986. A significant part of the UNSCR 986 "oil for food" program was delayed during 1997 because the Government refused to pump oil for extended periods. The Government interfered with the international community's provision of humanitarian assistance to the Iraqi people routinely by placing a higher priority on importing industrial items than on food and medicine, diverting goods to benefit the regime, and restricting the work of U.N. personnel and relief workers. U.N. and European Union observers attribute the country's poor economic conditions to the Government's actions, not to the sanctions regime.
Human rights abuse remained difficult to document because the Government's efforts to conceal the facts, including its persistent refusal to permit visits by human rights monitors and continued restrictions designed to prevent dissent. Max Van der Stoel, the Special Rapporteur for Iraq of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, based reports on interviews with recent emigres from Iraq and other sources, and opposition groups with contacts still in Iraq published reports.
There was no improvement in the Government's extremely poor human rights record. Citizens do not have the right to change their government. The Government continued to summarily execute perceived political opponents, and reports of such summary executions increased significantly during the year. More than 2,000 killings were reported. Several dozen of these reported executions followed specific allegations of coup attempts in February and August. However, reports suggest that far more people were executed merely because of their association with an opposition group or in an effort to clear out of the prisons anyone with a sentence of 15 to 20 years or more. The Government continued to kill and torture persons accused of economic crimes, military desertion, and a variety of other charges. Prison conditions are poor. The authorities routinely used arbitrary arrest and detention. The judiciary is not independent, and the President can override any court decision, and the Government continues to deny citizens the right to due process. The Government continues to deny citizens the right to privacy. The Government made use of civilians, including small children, as "human shields." The U.N. Special Rapporteur for Iraq confirmed in his November report that freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and association do not exist, except in some parts of the north under the control of Kurdish factions. The Government severely limits freedom of religion and movement, and discriminates against women, children, religious minorities, and ethnic groups. The Government also restricts worker rights.
Iraqi military operations continued to target Shi'a Arabs living in the southern marshes. The Government maintained a partial internal embargo against Iraq's northern provinces, blocking shipments of food, medicine, and other goods, except those provided by the U.N. "oil-for-food" program.
In northern Iraq, fighting continued between the two main Iraqi Kurdish groups, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). In addition, attacks on civilians by the Turkish Kurd terrorist organization, the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), resulted in many deaths, particularly among the vulnerable Assyrian minority and villagers who supported the KDP. Turkish forces entered Iraq several times during the year to combat the PKK. These separate conflicts converged in November, when Turkish air and ground elements joined the KDP to force the PUK and the PKK to return to the established intra-Kurdish ceasefire line. The fighting left over a thousand persons dead and forced thousands of civilians from their homes. A ceasefire established on November 24 ended the fighting for the remainder of the year, albeit with a few sporadic clashes.
RESPECT FOR HUMAN RIGHTS
Section 1 Respect for the Integrity of the Person, Including Freedom From:
a. Political and Other Extrajudicial Killing
The Government has a long record of executing perceived opponents. The U.N. Special Rapporteur, the international media, and other groups all reported an increased number of extrajudicial killings during the year. The Special Rapporteur has stated that "the country is run through extrajudicial measures," In a 1996 report, Amnesty International (AI) noted that various decrees expanding the use of the death penalty in 1994 and 1995 have not been sufficiently clarified to ensure fair and just applicability, a problem compounded by the lack of an independent judiciary. The list of offenses requiring a mandatory death penalty has grown substantially in recent years, and now includes forgery, smuggling cars, and "sabotaging the national economy." The Special Rapporteur noted that membership in certain political parties is punishable by death, that there is a pervasive fear of death for any act or expression of dissent, and that there are recurrent reports of the use of the death penalty for such offenses as "insulting" the President or the Ba'ath Party. These killings occur with total impunity and without due process.
The Baghdad regime periodically eliminated large numbers of political detainees en masse. In February and March, some 200 to 650 persons were said to have been executed in Abu Ghuraib prison, near Baghdad. The Special Rapporteur related in detail allegations that filtered out of Iraq about the killings. According to these reports, by order of Qusay Hussein, one of Saddam Hussein's sons and chief of Special Security, a "judges committee" drew up a timetable for killing all detainees sentenced to death. Executions were carried out on Sundays and Wednesdays.
There were many other credible reports of mass executions; on August 31, approximately 170 persons arrested by the Government during its brief 1996 occupation of Irbil were executed on the one-year anniversary of the Iraqi attack on that city; in September 600 prisoners were killed in Abu Ghuraib; on November 9, approximately 100 persons were executed at an undisclosed site; on November 12, 568 people were executed at Abu Ghuraib; on November 15, approximately 80 Iraqi officers and Iranian prisoners of war (POW's) were executed at the Mosul prison.
The total number killed at Abu Ghuraib prison and the Radwaniyah detention center in late November and early December may have reached 800 to 1,500 persons. Opposition groups alleged that all political prisoners with sentences of more than 15 to 20 years were summarily executed. Qusay Hussein again was named as instrumental in this program of executions, allegedly ordering that the prisons be "cleaned out."
As in previous years, there also were numerous credible reports that the regime executed persons allegedly involved in plotting against Saddam or the Ba'ath party, including high-ranking civilian, military, and tribal leaders. In February, eleven members of the Al-Nadha movement were killed by the Special Security forces. Fourteen intelligence and special forces officers were executed in September, allegedly for plotting to assassinate Saddam Hussein. Also in September, 10 members of the Bani-Hujaym tribe were executed after they attacked the Ba'ath party headquarters in Al-Samawah. On November 12, six or seven Wahabis (members of the conservative Sunni Islamic sect centered in Saudi Arabia) were executed at al-Anbar in the Rumadi area. Also on November 12, 11 people who allegedly attacked a Ba'athist political office were executed at Dakuk.
Economic crimes may also be punishable by death. For example, on December 7, two Iranian Kurdish refugees attempting to smuggle fuel from Kirkuk to Suleymaniyah province were arrested by Iraqi security forces at Chamchamal. While in custody--in the presence of the chief of eastern sector military security--they allegedly were killed by being doused with gasoline and set on fire. On December 8, four Jordanian students who allegedly had smuggled about $850 worth of spare auto parts from Jordan to Iraq were executed. On December 13, a group of officers and men of the 4th corps were executed on charges of smuggling weapons into Iraqi Kurdistan.
Reports of deaths due to poor conditions in prisons and detention facilities also increased during the year. According to the U.N. Special Rapporteur, many prisoners in Amarah province were reported as near death because of lack of adequate food and health care. Ten refugees returning from Saudi Arabia in May allegedly were poisoned while in jail in Baghdad. All of them reportedly died after their release in June, after suffering from paralysis and severe bleeding. In November the opposition Iraqi National Congress alleged that the regime had plotted to murder U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) executive commissioner Rolf Ekeus by poisoning him with thallium. Sixty Iranian Kurds at the Bazan refugee camp near Suleymaniyah reported that they had been poisoned with thallium in their drinking water; however, they attributed the poisoning to Iranian agents.
There are persistent reports that, even as he recovers from wounds suffered in a 1996 assassination attempt, Uday Hussein, Saddam Hussein's eldest son, has remained active in extrajudicial killings. In a July incident, he allegedly killed one of his bodyguards, for reasons that remain unclear.
Indications persist that the Government has offered "bounties" to anyone who kills United Nations or other international relief workers in northern Iraq. The Government has repeatedly charged that foreign relief organizations working in northern Iraq are engaged in espionage, making their employees liable to the death penalty.
As in previous years, the regime continued to deny totally the widespread killings of Kurds in northern Iraq during the "Anfal" Campaign of 1988 (see Sections 1.b. and 1.g.). Both the Special Rapporteur and Human Rights Watch have concluded that the Government's policies against the Kurds raise issues of crimes against humanity and violations of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Political killings and terrorist actions continued in northern Iraq. Throughout the year, elements of the PKK remained active in northern Iraq, reportedly killing local residents in an effort to control a territorial base. Assyrian groups reported several instances of mob violence by Muslims against Christians in the north, allegedly resulting in several deaths. Intra-Kurdish fighting in October and November resulted in the deaths of over 1200 fighters and an undisclosed number of civilians. On December 8, five members of an Iranian Kurdish group were killed in PUK-held territory.
b. Disappearance
During the year, the Special Rapporteur continued to receive reports of widespread disappearances. The Government continued to ignore the more than 15,000 cases conveyed to it in 1994 and 1995 by the U.N. Working Group on Enforcement on Involuntary Disappearances, as well as requests from the Governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on the whereabouts of those missing from the 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait and from Iran on the whereabouts of POW's Iraq captured in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war.
The United Nations has documented over 16,000 cases of persons who had disappeared. According to the Special Rapporteur, most of these cases occurred during the Anfal Campaign. He estimates that the total number of Kurds who disappeared during Anfal could reach the tens of thousands. Human Rights Watch estimates that the total at between 70,000 and 150,000, and Amnesty International (AI) at more than 100,000. Many individuals who disappeared in the wake of the 1996 Government attack on Irbil may have been killed late in the year, in the alleged government campaign to "cleanse the prisons" (see Section 1.a.).
In an October report, Amnesty International documented the repeated failure of the Government to respond to requests for information about persons who had disappeared. The report details unresolved cases dating from the early 1980's through the mid-1990's, particularly the disappearances of Aziz al-Sayyid Jassem, Sayyid Muhammad Sadeq Muhammad Ridha al-Qazwini, Mazin Abd al-Munim al-Samarra'i, the six al-Hashimi brothers, the four al-Sheibani brothers, and numerous persons of Iranian descent or Shi'a religious belief. The report concludes that few of these victims became targets of the regime for anything they had allegedly done. Rather, they were arrested as "hostages" in order to force a relative who may have escaped abroad to surrender, because of their family link to a political opponent, or simply for their ethnic origin.
In other cases, individuals arrested or taken prisoner in specific circumstances have disappeared while in government custody. For example, the status of six members of the Assyrian community of Baghdad, arrested in October 1996, is unknown. Hundreds are still missing in the aftermath of the brief Iraqi military occupation of Irbil in August 1996. Many of these persons may have been killed surreptitiously late in 1997, in the reported regime campaign to "cleanse the prisons" (see Section 1.a.). Thirty-three members of the Yazidi community of Mosul, who were arrested in July 1996, are still unaccounted for.
The Special Rapporteur and several human rights groups continued to request that the Government provide information about the arrest in 1991 of the late Grand Ayatollah Abdul Qasim Al-Khoei and 108 of his associates. The Ayatollah died while under house arrest in Al-Najaf. Others arrested with him have not been accounted for, and the Government refuses to respond to queries regarding their status.
The Government failed to return, or account for, a large number of Kuwaiti citizens and citizens of other countries detained during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. Government officials, including military leaders known to have been among the last to see the disappeared during the occupation, have refused to respond to the hundreds of outstanding inquiries about the missing. Of 609 cases of missing Kuwaiti citizens under review by the Quadrilateral Commission on Gulf War Missing, only two have been resolved. The Iraqi Government denies having any knowledge of the others and claims that any relevant records were lost in the aftermath of the Gulf War.
Iran reports that 5,000 Iranian POWs from the Iran-Iraq War (1981-88) are unaccounted for by Iraq. On November 26, Iran unilaterally released 500 Iraqi POWs from that war. Possibly in response, on December 4, Iraq released two Iranians who had been arrested in Iraq in 1991.
In May an Iraqi engineer seeking refuge in Western Europe reported that many Iraqi chemical and biological warfare workers had disappeared or died under mysterious circumstances, some after contracting unknown diseases.
In addition to the tens of thousands of reported disappearances, human rights groups reported in 1997 that the Government continued to hold thousands of other Iraqis in incommunicado detention (see Section 1.d.).
c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
The Constitution prohibits torture, however, the security services routinely tortured detainees. According to former detainees, torture techniques included branding, electric shocks administered to the genitals and other areas, beating, burning with hot irons, suspension from rotating ceiling fans, dripping acid on the skin, rape, breaking of limbs, denial of food and water, and threats to rape or otherwise harm relatives. The security forces killed many of their torture victims and mutilated their bodies before returning them to the victims' families. There are persistent reports that the families are made to pay for the costs of the execution, before the bodies are returned to them. Iraqi refugees arriving in Europe often reported instances of torture to the receiving governments and--as was the case with a group of refugees arriving in Italy in June--displayed scars and mutilations to substantiate their claims. Amnesty International notes that Iraqi authorities have failed to investigate these reports. There were no reports of amputations or brandings during the year.
The Special Rapporteur, human rights organizations, and opposition groups continued to receive numerous reports of women suffering severe psychological trauma after they were raped while in custody. The security forces allegedly raped women captured during the Anfal Campaign and during the occupation of Kuwait. The Government has never acknowledged these reports of rape or conducted any investigation. Although the Government made a variety of pronouncements against rape and other violent crimes during the year, it took no action against those who committed this abuse.
Prison conditions are poor. Certain prisons are notorious for routine mistreatment of prisoners. Abu Ghuraib prison west of Baghdad may hold as many as 15,000 persons, many of whom are reportedly subjected to torture. Al-Rashidiya prison, on the Tigris River north of Taji, reportedly has torture chambers. The Al-Shamma'iya prison, located in east Baghdad, holds the mentally ill and is reportedly the site of both torture and disappearances. The Radwaniyah detention center is a former prisoner-of-war facility near Baghdad and reportedly the site of torture as well as mass executions. This prison was the principal detention center for persons arrested following the civil uprisings of 1991. Human Rights Watch and others have estimated that Radwaniyah holds more than 5,000 detainees; Iraqi opposition groups say it is located within a "presidential" compound, from which the regime precludes inspections by the U.N. Special Commission charged with eliminated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Radwaniyah is where Uday Hussein is alleged to have had the Iraqi national soccer team caned on the soles of their feet after a World Cup qualifying loss to Khazakstan, a charge being investigated by the International Football Association (FIFA).
There were no details on the condition of prisoners in northern Iraq.
The Government does not permit prison visits by human rights monitors.
d. Arbitrary Arrest, Detention, or Exile
Although the Constitution and the Legal Code explicitly prohibit arbitrary arrest and detention, the authorities routinely engaged in these practices. The Special Rapporteur stated that arbitrary arrests are still common throughout the country, and many times lead to detention for often long periods of time without access to a lawyer or being brought before a court.
The military and security services, rather than the ordinary police, carried out most cases of arbitrary arrest and detention. During the year, security forces reportedly arrested hundreds of persons perceived as security threats, mainly on the basis of an individual's personal association or family connection with opponents of the Government. On July 15, in Baghdad dozens of Shi'a youths were reported to have been arrested and held incommunicado, and 84 merchants were arrested in an "anti-fraud" sweep in February. Sometimes, those arrested were reportedly killed while in custody (see Section 1.a.).
According to international human rights groups, numerous foreigners arrested arbitrarily in previous years remain in detention.
It has also been reported that there is a widespread practice of holding family members and close associates responsible for the alleged actions of others. The Special Rapporteur notes that "guilt by association" is facilitated by administrative requirements on relatives of deserters or other perceived opponents of the regime. For example, relatives who did not report deserters could lose their ration cards for purchasing government-controlled food supplies or be evicted from their residences. . Amnesty International reported in October that relatives often do not inquire about the whereabouts of arrested family members for fear of being arrested themselves.
Mass arrests are also reportedly commonplace; the Special Rapporteur learned of at least 3 such instances in southern Iraq in 1997. Twenty-five families are reported to have been interred in Al-Fajir prison in Nassariyah province; 30 persons (women, children, and old men) from Al-Ghizlah reportedly were arrested and taken to Baghdad; on April 3, a large number of persons reportedly were arrested in the Bani Said area and have yet to be released.
The Government reportedly continued to target Shi'a Muslim clergy and their supporters for arbitrary arrest and other abuses. It also reportedly continued forcibly to move Shi'a populations from the south to the north, and other minority groups such as Assyrians and Turkomen from the north to government-controlled territory.
There was no substantive evidence that the Government was implementing two "amnesty" decrees issued in 1995. Human rights monitors remain concerned that Iraqi authorities may be attempting to bring deserters and government opponents out of hiding in order to penalize them.
Although no statistics are available, observers estimate the number of political detainees in the tens of thousands.
The Government is not known to practice forced exile. However, 1 to 2 million self-exiled Iraqis are fearful of returning to Iraq.
e. Denial of Fair Public Trial
The judiciary is not independent, and there is no check on the President's power to override any court decision. The Special Rapporteur and international human rights groups all observed during the year that the repressive nature of the political and legal systems precludes any concept of rule of law. Numerous laws lend themselves to continued repression, and the Government uses extrajudicial methods to extract confessions or coerce cooperation with the regime.
There are two parallel judicial systems: the regular courts, which try common criminal offenses; and special security courts, which generally try national security cases, but may also try criminal cases. There is a Court of Appeal and the Court of Cassation, which is the highest court.
Procedures in the regular courts theoretically provide for many protections. However, the regime often assigns to the security courts cases which, on their merits, would appear to fall under the jurisdiction of the regular courts. Trials in the regular courts are public, and defendants are entitled to counsel, at government expense in the case of indigents. Defense lawyers have the right to review the charges and evidence brought against their clients. There is no jury system; panels of three judges try cases. Defendants have the right to appeal to the Court of Appeal and then to the Court of Cassation.
The Government shields certain groups from prosecution for alleged crimes. A 1992 decree grants immunity from prosecution to members of the Ba'ath Party and the security forces who kill anyone while in pursuit of army deserters. Unconfirmed but widespread reports indicate that this decree was applied in 1997 to prevent trials or punishment of government officials. Nevertheless, Saddam Hussein's personal decree clearly supersedes any legal proceedings--including those designed to shield his family. For example, in May the President reportedly seized the assets of his half brother Sabawi Ibrahim Al-Hassan. A 1990 decree grants immunity to men who commit "honor crimes," i.e., kill their female family members for a perceived lack of chastity.
Special security courts have jurisdiction in all cases involving espionage and treason, peaceful political dissent, smuggling, currency exchange violations, and drug trafficking. According to the Special Rapporteur and other sources, military officers or civil servants with no legal training head these tribunals, which hear cases in secret. Authorities often hold defendants incommunicado and do not permit contact with lawyers. The courts admit confessions extracted by torture, which often serve as the basis for conviction. There are reports that individuals who have cooperated with U.N. weapons inspectors have been subjected to secret trials.
Many cases appear to end in summary execution, although defendants may appeal to the President for clemency. Saddam Hussein may grant clemency in any case that apparently suits his political goals. There are no Shari'a, or Islamic law, courts as such. Regular courts are empowered to administer Islamic law in cases involving personal status, such as divorce and inheritance.
Because the Government rarely acknowledges arrests or imprisonments and families are afraid to talk about arrests, it is difficult to estimate the number of political prisoners. Many of the tens of thousands of persons who have disappeared or been killed in recent years were originally held as political prisoners.
f. Arbitrary Interference With Privacy, Family, Home, or Correspondence
The Government frequently disregarded the constitutional right to privacy, particularly in cases allegedly involving national security. The law defines security offenses so broadly that authorities are virtually exempt from the legal requirement to obtain search warrants. The authorities frequently conduct searches without warrants. The regime routinely ignored constitutional provisions safeguarding the confidentiality of mail, telegraphic correspondence, and telephone conversations. The Government periodically jammed news broadcasts, including those of opposition groups, from outside Iraq.
In Kirkuk the regime periodically sealed off whole districts and conducted day-long, house to house searches, evidently as part of its campaign to harass and expel ethnic Kurds and Turkomen from the city (see Section 2.d.).
The security services and the Ba'ath Party maintain pervasive networks of informers to deter dissident activity and instill fear in the public. For example, the Special Rapporteur reported that an operator was arrested and executed in 1993 for having warned a person not to use a wiretapped telephone line. The authorities also hold family members and close associates responsible for the alleged actions of others (see Section 1.d.).
In September Iraqi expatriates in Amman reported a new government effort for surveillance of university students. Worried about antigovernment pamphlets that appeared at Basrah and Qadisiyah Universities in 1996, the regime used the Ministry of Education to move undercover military intelligence and Special Security officers onto campuses around the country.
g. Use of Excessive Force and Violations of Humanitarian Law In Internal Conflicts
As in previous years, the armed forces conducted deliberate artillery attacks against Shi'a civilians in the southern marshes and against minority groups in northern Iraq. In 1992 the Gulf War allies imposed "no-fly zones" over both northern and southern Iraq. The no-fly zones continued to deter aerial attacks on the marsh dwellers in southern Iraq and residents of northern Iraq, but they did not prevent artillery attacks on villages in either area, nor the military's large-scale burning operations in the southern marshes.
For example, in April heavy artillery attacks on the towns of Al-Ghizlan in Nasseriyah province and Al-Eliwa, Abu Ashra, Al-Adil, and Al-Salam in Amarah province reportedly resulted in substantial civilian casualties, including women and children. In May the same sort of attack occurred at Al-Tar and Al-Shiukh in Nasariyah province. On November 1, a week-long operation in the marshes conducted by the Third Corps was led off by similar heavy artillery assaults. Several civilians were reportedly wounded in another shelling incident in the Al Zoor area of Naseriyah province on November 18 and 19.
During the year, Government also continued its water-diversion and other projects in the south, accelerating the process of large-scale environmental destruction. The Government claimed that the drainage is part of a land reclamation plan to increase the acreage of arable land, spur agricultural production, and reduce salt pollution in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. However, the evidence of large-scale human and ecological destruction appears to belie this claim, and other credible reports confirmed the ongoing destruction of the marshes. The Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) claimed to have obtained government documents describing its long-range plans to drain the marshes completely. The army continued to construct canals, causeways, and earthen berms to divert water from the wetlands. Hundreds of square kilometers have been burned in military operations. Moreover, the regime's diversion of supplies in the south limited the population's access to food, medicine, drinking water, and transportation.
According to the U.N. Special Rapporteur and opposition sources, thousands of persons in Nasseriyah and Basrah provinces were denied rations under UNSCR 986. In these provinces and in Amarah province, access to food is allegedly used to reward regime supporters and silence opponents. Shi'a opposition groups report that, due to the continuing fighting, the condition of the Shi'a in the south has continued to deteriorate even after the institution of the U.N.'s "oil for food" program.
The Government maintained a partial internal embargo against the three provinces in northern Iraq for most of the year. These provinces are populated primarily by Kurds, Assyrians, Turkomen, and other ethnic minorities. The embargo prevented the free movement of food, medicine, and other humanitarian supplies to that area. Beginning in 1993, the embargo also included the cutoff of electric power in specific areas, causing the disruption of water and sanitation systems, and interfering with the delivery of food and fuel. Indications of loosened restrictions for the territory controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan appeared to be tied to political concessions, such as accepting school textbooks praising Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi regime.
A multinational coalition continued enforcement of a "no-fly zone" to inhibit government aerial activity to repress citizens in northern Iraq. The Government continued to Arabize certain areas, such as the urban centers of Kirkuk and Mosul, through the forced movement of local residents from their homes and villages and their replacement by Arabs from outside the area (see Section 1.d.).
The PKK also committed numerous abuses against civilians in northern Iraq throughout the year. For example, on August 4, five persons were reportedly kidnaped from the village of Gunda Jour by a PKK band. Iraqi Kurds reported that on October 23, a PKK unit killed 14 civilians (10 of them children) and wounded 9 others in attacks on the villages of Korka, Chema, Dizo, and Selki. On December 13, seven Assyrian civilians reportedly were ambushed and killed near the village of Mangeesh. Many villagers in Dohuk and Irbil provinces, particularly those from isolated areas, were reported to have abandoned their homes and temporarily relocated to cities and lager towns to escape PKK attacks.
On several occasions in 1997, Turkish armed forces entered northern Iraq in pursuit of PKK terrorists and bases. In November Turkish and KDP forces fought pitched battles against the PUK and the PKK. These operations resulted in some civilian deaths and destruction of residences. The Government of Turkey denied allegations that Turkish forces used air-delivered incendiary bombs and intentionally targeted civilian populations in their operations; independent observers on the scene found no evidence of such actions. Turkish government authorities stressed that the operations sought to avoid civilian casualties and that much of the fighting took place in unpopulated areas.
Land mines in northern Iraq, mostly planted by the Government before 1991, continued to kill and maim civilians. Many of the mines were laid during the Iran-Iraq War, but the army failed to clear them before it abandoned the area. The mines appear to have been haphazardly planted in civilian areas. Land mines are also a problem all along the Iraq-Iran border throughout central and southern Iraq, but there is no information on civilian casualties or the efforts, if any, to clear old minefields in areas under the central Government's control. The Special Rapporteur repeatedly has reminded the Government of its obligation under the Land Mines Protocol to protect civilians from the effects of mines. Various nongovernmental organizations (NGO's) continued efforts to remove mines from the area and increase mine awareness among local residents.
After the 1991 Gulf War, victims and eyewitnesses described war crimes perpetrated by the Iraqi regime--deliberate killing, torture, rape, pillage, hostage-taking, and associated acts--directly related to the Gulf War. Many governments continue to urge the U.N. Security Council to establish an international commission to study evidence of a broader range of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity and possible genocide. Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other organizations have worked with various governments to bring a genocide case at the International Court of Justice against the Government for its conduct of the Anfal campaign against the Kurds in 1988.
In September the Iranian Air Force attacked two camps of the Iranian terrorist group Mujahedin Al-Khalq (MEK) in Iraq. There were reports of casualties among Iraqi civilians.
Section 2 Respect for Civil Liberties, Including:
a. Freedom of Speech and Press
The Constitution provides for freedom of speech and of the press, but also stipulates that " the State ensures the considerations necessary to exercise these liberties, in compliance with the revolutionary, national and progressive trend." In practice, freedom of speech and of the press do not exist, and political dissent is not tolerated in areas under the Government's control. The Special Rapporteur noted that "the people live in a climate of fear in which whatever they or their family members may say or do, particularly in the area of politics, involves the risk of arrest and interrogation by the police or military intelligence."
The Government and the Ba'ath Party own all print and broadcast media and operate them as propaganda outlets. They generally do not report opposing points of view that are expressed either domestically or abroad. According to the Special Rapporteur, journalists are under regular pressure to join the Ba'ath party and must follow the recommendations of the Iraqi Union of Journalists, headed by Uday Hussein. The Special Rapporteur reported that one journalist was sentenced to life imprisonment for telling a joke about Saddam Hussein, while another was arrested on charges of "collaboration with foreign countries," possibly a reference to a negative report on the economic situation.
The Special Rapporteur reported that the Ministry of Culture and Information periodically holds meetings at which general guidelines for the press are provided. Foreign journalists must work from offices located within the ministry building and be accompanied everywhere they go by ministry officers, who reportedly restrict the reporters' movements and make it impossible for them to interact freely with the populace. Since Western news services have not been permitted to establish permanent bureaus in Iraq, they are represented in Baghdad by Iraqi staffers who are based in the Ministry of Information and Culture.
Several statutes and decrees suppress freedom of speech and the press. These include Revolutionary Command Council decree no. 840 of November 1986, which penalizes free expression and stipulates the death penalty for anyone insulting the President or other high government officials; Section 214 of the Penal Code, which prohibits singing a song likely to cause civil strife; and the Press Act of 1968, which prohibits the writing of articles on 12 specific subjects, including those detrimental to the President, the Revolutionary Command Council, and the Ba'ath Party.
Books can be published only with the authorization of the Ministry of Culture and Information. The Ministry of Education often sends textbooks with pro-regime propaganda to Kurdish regions; the Kurds routinely remove propaganda items from the books. In October the Minister of Education "warned these cliques that we hold them responsible" for altering the books.
The Government regularly jammed foreign news broadcasts (see Section 1.f.). In an effort to interdict further any foreign reports on Iraq, the Government also banned satellite dishes. The penalty for possessing a satellite dish reportedly is an indefinite term of imprisonment in solitary confinement and confiscation of all household effects.
In northern Iraq, several newspapers have appeared over the past five years, as have opposition radio and television broadcasts. The absence of central authority permits some freedom of expression, although most journalists are influenced or controlled by various political organizations.
The Government has no respect for academic freedom, exercising strict control over academic publications. University staff is hired or fired depending on their support for the Government.
b. Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and Association
The Constitution provides for freedom of assembly, but, except in Kurdish-controlled northern areas, citizens may not assemble legally other than to express support for the regime. The Government regularly orchestrates crowds to demonstrate support for the regime and its policies through financial incentives for those who participate and threats of violence against those who do not.
The Constitution provides for freedom of association, but the Government controls the establishment of political parties, regulates their internal affairs, and monitors their activities. Several parties are specifically outlawed, and membership in them is a capital offense. A 1974 law prescribes the death penalty for anyone "infiltrating" the Ba'ath Party.
In Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, the situation is mixed. For example, 120,000 people reportedly participated in a protest march in Irbil in October, demanding that the PUK restore electrical power to the city. . On the other hand, both the KDP and the PUK intimidated, seized the property of, and forcibly expelled members and alleged supporters of the rival organization from the territory they control (see Section 2.d.).
c. Freedom of Religion
The Constitution provides for freedom of religion, but also notes that "Islam is the religion of the State." In practice, the Government severely limits freedom of religion. The Ministry of Endowments and Religious Affairs monitors places of worship, appoints the clergy, and approves the publication of religious literature.
Although Shi'a Muslim Arabs, who compose between 60 and 65 percent of the population, are the largest religious group, Sunni Arabs (composing only about 12 to 15 percent of the population) traditionally have dominated economic and political life. Despite legal protection of sectarian equality, the regime has in recent years repressed the Shi'a clergy and followers of the Shi'a faith. Security forces have desecrated Shi'a mosques and holy sites, particularly in the aftermath of the 1991 civil uprisings.
The following government restrictions on religious rights remained in effect throughout 1997: a ban on the Muslim call to prayer in certain cities; a ban on the broadcast of Shi'a programs on government radio or television; a ban on the publication of Shi'a books, including prayer books; a ban on funeral processions; and the prohibition of certain processions and public meetings commemorating Shi'a holy days. In June serious clashes were reported between Shi'a pilgrims traveling to Karbala for the Arba'in commemoration and security forces and government-backed Sunni civilians. Reports of casualties varied widely, indicating that between 40 to 500 pilgrims were killed. The Government cut off food, water, and electricity to the city of Karbala. Some pilgrims were allegedly kidnaped and their families were forced to pay a ransom to the Government to effect their release.
The Government continues to insist that its own appointee replace the late Grand Ayatollah Abul Qasim Al-Khoei, formerly the highest ranking Iraqi Shi'a clergyman, who died in government custody in 1992 (see Section 1.b.). The Shi'a religious establishment refuses to accept the Government's choice. The Government also continued to harass and threaten members of the late Ayatollah Al-Khoei's family (see Sections 1.a. and 1.b.). In Najaf on November 25, government agents allegedly attacked the house of Mohammed Rida Sistani, the son of Ayatollah Syed Ali Sistani, one of the most senior Shi'a leaders in Iraq. Sistani was wounded, a colleague was killed, and Sistani's home was ransacked, according to a SCIRI report.
As far as is known, the security forces still were encamped in the shrine to Imam Ali at Al-Najaf, one of Shi'a Islam's holiest sites, and the former Shi'a theological school in Al-Najaf.
The Special Rapporteur and others reported that the Government has engaged in various abuses against the country's 350,000 Assyrian Christians. Most Assyrians traditionally live in the northern governorates, and the Government often has suspected them of "collaborating" with Kurds. Military forces destroyed numerous Assyrian churches during the Anfal Campaign and reportedly tortured and executed many Assyrians (see Section 4). According to Human Rights Watch and Assyrian sources, the Government continues to harass and kill Assyrians throughout the country by forced relocations, terror, and artillery shelling.
d. Freedom of Movement Within the Country, Foreign Travel, Emigration, and Repatriation
The Government controls the movement within the country of citizens and foreigners. Persons who enter sensitive border areas and numerous designated security zones are subject to arrest. Police checkpoints are common on major roads and highways.
In November, at the height of the Government's defiance of U.N. resolutions requiring inspections for weapons of mass destruction, the Government announced that hundreds of patriotic citizens had volunteered to serve as "human shields" in the event of a coalition air strike on Saddam Hussein's palaces and military-industrial sites. However, reports from opposition sources in Iraq claimed that Ba'ath Party functionaries had been issued quotas of "volunteers" to recruit to serve in this capacity. When bribes of increased food rations failed to generate the required number of persons, the Ba'ath Party, in conjunction with the security services, reportedly coerced civilians to serve as "human shields."
The Government requires citizens to obtain specific government authorization and expensive exit visas for foreign travel. Citizens may not make more than two trips abroad annually. Before traveling abroad, citizens are required to post collateral with the Government, which is refundable only upon their return to Iraq. There are restrictions on the amount of currency that may be taken out of the country. Women are not permitted to travel outside Iraq alone; male relatives must escort them. Each student wishing to travel abroad must provide a guarantor who is liable if the student fails to return. Students abroad who refuse to return to Iraq are required to reimburse any of their expenses that were paid by the Government.
The Government prohibits foreign travel by journalists, authors, and all the employees of the Information Ministry. Security authorities interrogate all media employees, journalists, and writers who travel outside Iraq.
Foreign spouses of citizens who have resided in Iraq for 5 years (1 year for spouses of government employees) are required to apply for naturalization as Iraqi citizens. Many foreigners thus become subject to travel restrictions. The penalties for noncompliance include, but are not limited to, loss of the spouse's job, a substantial financial penalty, and repayment for any governmental educational expenses. The Government prevents many citizens who also hold citizenship in another country--especially the children of Iraqi fathers and foreign-born mothers--from visiting the country of their other nationality.
The Government continued to pursue its discriminatory resettlement policies, including demolition of villages and forced relocation of ethnic Kurds, Turkomen, Assyrians, and other minorities. Human rights monitors reported that the Government continued to force Kurdish and Turkomen residents of Kirkuk to move to other areas in the north or to the south. In their place, ethnic Arab families were moved in, evidently in an effort to "Arabize" this oil-rich city. Another motive may have been simple theft; the Special Rapporteur described the alleged expropriation of Turkomen agricultural land near Kirkuk by high-level regime officials and members of Saddam Hussein's family. Typically the displaced persons reported that they were given at most 1 week to leave, and that they often were not allowed to bring their belongings with them. In many cases, Iraqi security officials reportedly seized food coupons issued to displaced persons under the U.N. "oil-for-food" program. Amnesty International reported that, according to some sources, family members, including children, are sometimes taken hostage by the Government to ensure that families do not resist the order to move.
The U.N. Secretary General estimates that there are more than half a million internally displaced persons in the three northern provinces (Irbil, Dohuk, and Suleymaniyah). Well over 100,000 were added in 1997, due to expulsion by government forces, expulsion by competing Kurdish groups, and intra-Kurdish fighting. There were constant reports of forced expulsions of Kurds and Turkomen from Kirkuk and Khanaquin: 1,500 persons in April; 1,300 families in May; 440 families in July; 1,000 families in September; and 1,750 families in December. The Kurdish factions added greatly to this problem by expelling each other's political supporters from areas that they control and by their renewed fighting. The KDP estimated that 58,000 KDP supporters were expelled from Suleymaniyah and other PUK-controlled areas from October 1996 to October 1997; the PUK says that more than 49,000 of its supporters were expelled from Irbil and other KDP-controlled areas from August 1996 through December 1997. The U.N. reports that more than 10,000 persons were forced from their homes when fighting broke out between the Kurdish factions along their cease-fire line in October 1997.
According to the Special Rapporteur, security forces continued to relocate Shi'a inhabitants of the southern marshes to major southern cities. Many have been transferred to detention centers and prisons in central Iraq, primarily in Baghdad, or even to northern cities like Kirkuk as part of the Government's attempt to "Arabize" traditionally non-Arab areas.
The Government does not provide first asylum or respect the rights of refugees. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees remain abroad. Apart from those suspected of sympathizing with Iran, most fled after the Government's suppression of the civil uprising of 1991; others are Kurds who fled the Anfal Campaign of 1988.
Of the 1.5 million refugees who fled following the 1991 uprisings, the great majority, particularly Kurds, have repatriated themselves to northern Iraq in areas where the allied coalition has prohibited overflights by Iraqi aircraft. Several hundred thousand Kurds remain unsettled in northern Iraq because political circumstances do not permit them to return to their former homes in government-controlled territory. According to the Special Rapporteur, many of these families still live in tent camps under extremely harsh conditions, which result in many deaths, particularly among the elderly and young children.
Approximately 12,000 Turkish Kurds remain in the north who have fled civil strife in southeastern Turkey. The UNHCR is treating these displaced persons as refugees until it reaches an official determination of their status. The Atrush refugee camp was closed in early 1997 and about 1,000 of its residents returned to Turkey. A total of 6,000 refugees from Atrush reportedly have moved to the Ayn Sifni facility, with most of the remainder relocating to KDP-controlled areas of northern Iraq.
Section 3 Respect for Political Rights: The Right of Citizens to Change Their Government
Citizens do not have the right to change their government. Although the Government has taken steps to increase the perception of democracy, the political process still was controlled firmly by the State. The 1995 "referendum" on Saddam Hussein's presidency was not free and was dismissed as a sham by most international observers. It included neither voter privacy nor opposing candidates, and many credible reports indicated that voters feared possible reprisal for a negative vote. A total of 500 people reportedly were arrested in Karbala, Baghdad, and Ramadi provinces for casting negative ballots, and a member of the intelligence services reportedly was executed for refusing to vote for the President.
There are strict qualifications for electoral candidates; the candidates for the National Assembly, by law, must be over 25 years old and "believe in God, the principles of the July 17-30 revolution, and socialism." Out of the 250 seats, 160 deputies reportedly belong to the Ba'ath Party, 60 are independent, and Saddam Hussein appointed 30 deputies to represent the northern provinces. According to the Special Rapporteur, the Ba'ath Party allegedly instructed a number of its members to run as nominally "independent" candidates.
Full political participation at the national level is confined to members of the Arab Ba'ath Socialist Party, estimated at about 8 percent of the population. The political system is dominated by the Party, which governs through the Revolutionary Command Council, headed by President Saddam Hussein. However, the RCC exercises both executive and legislative authority. It overshadows the National Assembly, which is completely subordinate to it and the executive branch.
The President wields decisive power over all instruments of government. Almost all powerful officials are either members of his family or are family allies from his home town of Tikrit.
Opposition political organizations are illegal and severely suppressed. Membership in certain political parties is punishable by death (see Section 2.b.). In 1991 the RCC adopted a law that theoretically authorized the creation of political parties other than the Ba'ath Party; in practice the law is used to prohibit parties that do not support Saddam Hussein and the Government. New parties must be based in Baghdad and are prohibited from having any ethnic or religious character.
The Government does not recognize the various political groupings and parties that have been formed by Shi'a Muslims, as well as Kurdish, Assyrian, Turkomen, and other Iraqi communities. These political groups continued to attract support despite their illegal status.
Women and minorities are underrepresented in government and politics. The law provides for the election of women and minorities to the National Assembly, but they have only token representation.
In northern Iraq, all central government functions have been performed by local administrators, mainly Kurds, since the Government withdrew its military forces and civilian administrative personnel from the area after the 1991 uprising. A regional parliament and local government administrators were elected in 1992. This parliament last met in May 1995. Discussions among Kurdish and other northern Iraqi political groups continue on the reconvening of parliament, but fighting between the PUK and KDP continue to prevent normal parliamentary activity.
Section 4 Governmental Attitude Regarding International and Nongovernmental Investigation of Alleged Violations of Human Rights
The Government does not permit the establishment of independent human rights organizations. It operates an official human rights group that routinely denies allegations of abuses. Citizens have established several human rights groups abroad and in northern areas not under government control. Monitors from foreign and international human rights groups are not allowed in Iraq.
As in previous years, the Government did not allow the U.N. Special Rapporteur to visit Iraq, nor did it respond to his requests for information. The Government continued to defy various calls from U.N. bodies to allow the Special Rapporteur to visit the southern marshes and other regions.
For the fifth consecutive year, the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) called on the U.N. Secretary General to send human rights monitors to "help in the independent verification of reports on the human rights situation in Iraq." The U.N. Subcommission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities made a similar request. The Government has continued to ignore these calls for the entry of monitors.
The Special Rapporteur nonetheless was able to gather more evidence, in part due to interviews with current and past government officials, which shed new light on the systemic nature of human rights violations. He dispatched members of his staff to Kuwait, Jordan, and other locations to interview victims of government human rights abuses.
The Govern harassed and intimidated relief workers and U.N. personnel throughout the country, maintained a threat to arrest or kill relief workers in the north, staged protests against U.N. offices in the capital, and may have arranged for the bombing of a U.N. headquarters in Baghdad (see Sections 1.g. and 2.a.).
Section 5 Discrimination Based on Race, Sex, Religion, Disability, Language, or Social Status
The Constitution and the legal system provides for some rights for women, children, and minorities. However, in practice, the Government systematically violates these rights.
Women
Domestic violence against women occurs but little is known about its extent. Such abuse is customarily addressed within the tightly knit family structure. There is no public discussion of the subject, and the Government issues no statistics. Spousal violence constitutes grounds for divorce and criminal charges, but suits brought on these charges are believed to be rare. Men who kill female family members for "immoral deeds" may receive immunity from prosecution under a 1990 law (see Section 1.d.).
The Special Rapporteur has noted that there is an unusually high percentage of women in the Kurdish areas, purportedly caused by the disappearances of tens of thousands of Kurdish men during the Anfal Campaign. The Special Rapporteur has reported that the widows, daughters, and mothers of the Anfal Campaign victims are economically dependent on their relatives or villages because they may not inherit the property or assets of their missing family members.
Evidence concerning the Anfal Campaign indicates that the Government killed many women and children, including infants, by firing squads and in chemical attacks.
The Government claims that it is committed to equality for women, who make up about 20 percent of the work force. It has enacted laws to protect women from exploitation in the workplace and from sexual harassment; to permit women to join the regular army, Popular Army, and police forces; to require education for girls; and to equalize women's rights in divorce, land ownership, taxation, and suffrage. It is difficult to determine to what extent these protections are afforded in practice. However, reports indicate that the application of these laws has declined as Iraq's political and economic crisis persists. Women are not allowed to travel outside Iraq alone (see Section 2.d.).
Children
No information is available on whether the Government has enacted specific legislation to promote the welfare of children. However, the Special Rapporteur and several human rights groups have collected a substantial body of evidence pointing to the Government's continuing disregard for the rights and welfare of children. This may include government officials taking children from minority groups hostage in order to intimidate their families to leave cities and regions where the regime wishes to create a Sunni Arab majority (see Section 1.d.).
The Government's failure to comply with relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions has led to a continuation of economic sanctions. Exacerbating this situation, the regime's implementation of the "oil-for-food" arrangement under UNSCR 986 ensures that those who accede to the regime's policies benefit, while the need of vulnerable demographic groups are ignored. During the year, more than 3 million tons of food reached Iraq under UNSCR 986, but the quantity and nutritional content of the "food basket" that the Government sells to needy families actually was decreased by government decree. There are widespread reports that food that should have been made available for the general public was in fact stockpiled in warehouses to replenish stocks held by the military. The Government management of the program did not take into account the special requirements of children ages 1 to 5, despite the U.N. Secretary General's specific injunction that the Government modify its implementation procedures to address this vulnerable group. The Government twice refused to pump oil during 1997 (for a total of 3 months), causing major disruptions in the smooth flow of goods to Iraq. In November there were credible press reports that pharmaceutical supplies that should have been directed to sick Iraqi children instead were exported or reexported for sale in Jordan, and that $300 million in medicine and medical supplies that the Government said was needed desperately by children had been delayed because of regime members' demands for bribes from suppliers. As a result, health conditions have deteriorated and children have been particularly susceptible, except the children of regime supporters.
In August the Government announced for the fourth year a 3-week training course in weapons use, hand-to-hand fighting, rappelling from helicopters and infantry tactics for children 10 to 15 years of age. Camps for these "Saddam Cubs" operated throughout the country, with 8,000 children participating in Baghdad alone. Senior military officers who supervised the course noted that the children held up under the "physical and psychological strain" of tough training for as long as 14 hours each day.
People with Disabilities
No information is available on the Government's policy towards people with disabilities.
Religious Minorities
Iraq's cultural, religious, and linguistic diversity are not reflected in the country's political and economic structure. Various segments of the Sunni Arab community, which itself constitutes a small minority of the population, have effectively controlled the Government since independence in 1932. Shi'a Arabs, the majority of the population, have long been economically, politically, and socially disadvantaged. Like the Sunni Kurds and other ethnic and religious groups in the north, the Shi'a Arabs of the south have been targeted for particular discrimination and abuse, ostensibly because of their opposition to the Government.
National/Racial/Ethnic Minorities
Kurds, who make up approximately 20 percent of the population, historically have suffered political and economic discrimination, despite the token presence of a small number of Kurds in the national Government (see Sections 1.a., 1.b., and 1.g.).
Assyrians are an ethnic group as well as a Christian community (see Section 2.c.). They speak a distinct language--Syriac. Public instruction in Syriac, which was to have been allowed under a 1972 decree, has never been implemented. Numerous reports indicated continued systemic discrimination against Assyrians throughout 1997, especially in terms of forced movements from northern areas and repression of political rights there.
Turkomen and Assyrian volunteers form the backbone of the Peace Monitoring Force (PMF) which patroled the cease-fire line between the Kurdish factions. On January 23, the semi-official Baghdad newspaper Babel, owned by Uday Hussein, warned that the Turkomen and Assyrian communities could "suffer harm" if PMF activities continued. The PUK reported in November that families and relatives of PMF members living in government-controlled areas have been threatened directly by the regime, causing many PMF members to desert from the force. Other sources reported that PKK terrorists also had threatened members of the PMF and conducted attacks on the offices of Turkomen organizations.
Citizens considered by the Government to be of Iranian origin must carry special identification and are often precluded from desirable employment. Over the years, the Government has deported hundreds of thousands of citizens of Iranian origin.
Section 6 Worker Rights
a. The Right of Association
Trade unions independent of government control do not exist. The Trade Union Organization Law of 1987 established the Iraqi General Federation of Trade Unions (IGFTU), a government-dominated trade union structure, as the sole legal trade federation. The IGFTU is linked to the Ba'ath Party, which uses it to promote party principles and policies among union members.
Workers in private and mixed enterprises--but not public employees or workers in state enterprises--have the right to join local union committees. The committees are affiliated with individual trade unions, which in turn belong to the IGFTU.
The Labor Law of 1987 restricts the right to strike. No strike has been reported over the past two decades. According to the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, the severe restrictions on the right to strike include penal sanctions.
The IGFTU is affiliated with the International Confederation of Arab Trade Unions and the formerly Soviet-controlled World Federation of Trade Unions.
b. The Right to Organize and Bargain Collectively
The right to bargain collectively is not recognized. Salaries for public sector workers (the majority of the employed) are set by the Government. Wages in the much smaller private sector are set by employers or negotiated individually with workers. Government workers frequently are shifted from one job and work location to another to prevent them from forming close associations with other workers. The Labor Code does not protect workers from antiunion discrimination, a failure that has been criticized repeatedly by the International Labor Organization's (ILO) Committee of Experts.
There are no export processing zones.
c. Prohibition of Forced or Compulsory Labor
Compulsory labor theoretically is prohibited by law. However, the Penal Code mandates prison sentences, including compulsory labor, for civil servants and employees of state enterprises accused of breaches of labor "discipline," including resigning from a job. According to the ILO, foreign workers in Iraq have been prevented from terminating their employment to return to their native countries because of government-imposed penal sanctions on persons who do so. There is no information available on forced and bonded labor by children.
d. Status of Child Labor Practices and Minimum Age for Employment
The employment of children under age 14 is prohibited except in small-scale family enterprises. Children reportedly increasingly are encouraged to work in order to support their families, in view of the country's harsh economic conditions. The law stipulates that employees between the ages of 14 and 18 work fewer hours per week than adults. Each year the Government enrolls children as young as 10 years of age in a paramilitary training program (see Section 5). There is no information available on forced and bonded labor by children (see Section 6.c.).
e. Acceptable Conditions of Work
Theoretically, most workers in urban areas work a 6-day, 48-hour workweek. Hours for government employees are set by the head of each ministry. Working hours for agricultural workers vary according to individual employer-employee agreements. Occupational safety programs are in effect in state-run enterprises. Inspectors theoretically inspect private establishments, but enforcement varies widely. There is no information on workers' ability to remove themselves from work situation that endanger their health or safety, or on those who complain about such conditions.
U.S. Suspects Al Qaeda Got Nerve Agent From Iraqis
Analysts: Chemical May Be VX, And Was Smuggled Via Turkey
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 12, 2002; Page A01
The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic
extremists affiliated with al Qaeda took possession of a chemical weapon
in Iraq last month or late in October, according to two officials with
firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. They said government
analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and
that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey.
If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant
milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional
weapon other than cyanide by al Qaeda or a member of its network. It
also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired
for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al Qaeda terrorists
receive material assistance in Iraq. If advanced publicly by the White
House, the report could be used to rebut Iraq's assertion in a
12,000-page declaration Saturday that it had destroyed its entire stock
of chemical weapons.
On the central question whether Iraqi President Saddam Hussein knew
about or authorized such a transaction, U.S. analysts are said to have
no evidence. Because Hussein's handpicked Special Security Organization,
run by his son Qusay, has long exerted tight control over concealed
weapons programs, officials said they presume it would be difficult to
transfer a chemical agent without the president's knowledge.
Knowledgeable officials, speaking without White House permission, said
information about the transfer came from a sensitive and credible source
whom they declined to discuss. Among the hundreds of leads in the Threat
Matrix, a daily compilation by the CIA, this one has drawn the kind of
attention reserved for a much smaller number.
"The way we gleaned the information makes us feel confident it is
accurate," said one official whose responsibilities are directly
involved with the report. "I throw about 99 percent of the spot reports
away when I look at them. I didn't throw this one away."
Like most intelligence, the reported chemical weapon transfer is not
backed by definitive evidence. The intended target is unknown, with U.S.
speculation focusing on Europe and the United States.
At a time when President Bush is eager to make a public case linking
Iraq to the United States's principal terrorist enemy, authorized
national security spokesmen declined to discuss the substance of their
information about the transfer of lethal chemicals. Those who disclosed
it have no policymaking responsibilities on Iraq and expressed no strong
views on whether the United States should go to war there.
Even authorized spokesmen, with one exception, addressed the report on
the condition of anonymity. They said the principal source on the
chemical transfer was uncorroborated, and that indications it involved a
nerve agent were open to interpretation.
"We are concerned because of al Qaeda's interest in obtaining and using
weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, and we continue to seek
evidence and intelligence information with regards to their planning
activity," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for Homeland Security
Director Tom Ridge. Johndroe was the only official authorized by the
White House to discuss the matter on the record.
"Have they obtained chemical weapons?" Johndroe said. "I do not have any
hard, concrete evidence that they have." Pressed on whether the
information referred to a nerve agent, Johndroe said "there is no
specific intelligence that limits al Qaeda's interest to one particular
chemical or biological weapon over the other."
One official who spoke without permission said a sign of the
government's concern is its "ramping up opportunities to collect more,
to figure out what would be the routes, where would they be taking the
material, how would they deploy it, how are they transporting it, what
are the personnel?" The official added: "We're not just sitting back and
waiting for something to happen."
A Defense Department official, who said he had seen only the one-line
summary version of the chemical weapon report, speculated that it might
be connected to a message distributed last week to U.S. armed forces
overseas. An official elsewhere said the message resulted only from an
analyst's hypothetical concern.
Prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, last week's "Turkey Defense
Terrorism Threat Awareness Message" warned of a possible chemical
weapons attack by al Qaeda on the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey.
Incirlik is an important NATO facility from which a U.S.-led coalition
in 1991 launched thousands of bombing runs to force Iraq to withdraw its
army from Kuwait. Turkey has given conditional agreement to its use in
the event of a new war with Iraq.
According to two officials, a second related threat report was
distributed in Washington this week. The CIA message, transmitted before
the daily 3 a.m. compilation of the Threat Matrix, described a European
ally's warning that the United States might face a chemical attack in a
big-city subway if war breaks out with Iraq. A U.S. government spokesman
said the European ally offered little evidence and "the credibility of
the report has not been determined."
Among the uncertainties about the suspected weapon transfer in Iraq is
the precise relationship of the Islamic operatives to the al Qaeda
network. One official said the transaction involved Asbat al-Ansar, a
Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group that recently established an enclave
in northern Iraq. Asbat al-Ansar is affiliated with Osama bin Laden's al
Qaeda organization and receives funding from it, but officials said they
did not know whether its pursuit of chemical weapons was specifically on
al Qaeda's behalf.
The government is also uncertain whether the transaction involved a
chemical agent alone or an agent in what is known as a weaponized form
-- incorporated into a delivery system such as a rocket or a bomb. The
latter would be a more efficient killer, but chemical weapons are deadly
in either form. Among the reasons for suspecting VX was involved is that
it is the most portable of Iraq's chemical weapons, capable of
inflicting mass casualties in a quantity that a single courier could
transport.
After initial denials, Iraq admitted in the 1990s that it had
manufactured tons of VX and two less sophisticated nerve agents, Sarin
and Tabun. Its remaining chemical arsenal was limited to blister agents,
such as mustard gas, that date back to World War I.
First developed as a weapon by the U.S. Army, VX is an oily, odorless
and tasteless liquid that kills on contact with the skin or when inhaled
in aerosol form. Like other nerve agents, it is treatable in the first
minutes after exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions
and respiratory failure. The United States, a signatory to the Chemical
Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and other
chemical agents on the Johnston Atoll, 825 miles southwest of Hawaii, in
November 2000.
U.S. military forces, hazardous materials teams and some ambulance
systems carry emergency antidotes. They usually come in autoinjectors
containing atropine and an oxime -- drugs that reverse the neuromuscular
blockade of a nerve agent. Atropine-like drugs have other uses, such as
in anesthesia and in treating cardiac arrest, and are often stocked in
hospitals.
During inspections by the U.N. Special Commission, or UNSCOM, in the
1990s, Iraq denied producing any chemical weapon other than mustard gas.
Faced with contrary evidence, it eventually acknowledged the manufacture
of 3.9 tons of VX and 3,859 tons in all of lethal chemicals. The Baghdad
government also admitted filling more than 10,000 bombs, rockets and
missile warheads with Sarin. It denied having done so with its most
potent agent, VX, but an international commission of experts assembled
by UNSCOM said the scientific evidence suggested otherwise.
UNSCOM said in its final report, in January 1999, that it could not
account for 1.5 tons of the VX known to have been produced in Iraq, and
that it could not establish whether additional quantities had been made.
The U.N. Security Council ordered Iraq in April 1991 to relinquish all
capabilities to make biological, chemical and nuclear weapons as well as
long-range missiles. The declared basis for the present threat of war is
the U.S. view, shared by the Clinton and Bush administrations, that the
Baghdad government never came close to complying.
In 1998, the Clinton administration asserted that Iraq provided
technical assistance in the construction of a VX production facility in
Sudan, undertaken jointly with al Qaeda. In retaliation for al Qaeda's
August 1998 truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
President Bill Clinton ordered the destruction of the al Shifa
pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan's capital.
Clinton's advisers released scant public evidence about al Shifa, and
the Tomahawk missile attack was widely regarded as a blunder. Top
Clinton administration officials, and career analysts still in
government, maintain there was strong evidence behind the strike but
that it remains too valuable to disclose. During last year's New York
trial of the embassy bombers, prosecution witness Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a
onetime operative who broke with al Qaeda, offered limited
corroboration. He named al Qaeda and Sudanese operatives who had told
him they were working together to build a chemical weapons plant in
Khartoum. He said nothing about Iraqi support for the project and named
a site near, but not in, the al Shifa plant.
Only once has a chemical weapon been used successfully in a terrorist
attack. During the morning rush hour on March 20, 1995, the Japanese
cult Aum Shinrikyo placed packages on five subway trains converging on
Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the packages spread vaporized
Sarin through the subway cars and then into the stations as the trains
pulled in.
In all, the Sarin contaminated 15 stations of the world's busiest subway
system, putting 1,000 riders in the hospital and killing 12 of them.
Though the attack spread great terror in Japan, it took fewer lives than
its authors expected because the Sarin reached many victims in a form
that was not sufficiently concentrated.
"Psychologically, use of nerve agent in the United States would send
people over the deep end, but it probably wouldn't kill very many
people," said an official whose responsibilities have included the
assessment and disruption of the threat.
Others said the panic induced could have serious economic consequences,
rendering many Americans unwilling to enter a facility of the sort that
had suffered a chemical attack.
In general, al Qaeda's pursuit of chemical and biological weapons is
well known to U.S. intelligence. A central player in the effort has been
Midhat al Mursi, an Egyptian who is among the most-wanted al Qaeda
operatives but who remains at large. He ran a development and testing
facility for lethal chemicals in a camp -- in Derunta, Afghanistan --
that was eventually renamed "Abu Kebab" after Mursi's nom de guerre.
The Derunta operation is not thought to have progressed beyond
unsophisticated poisons, including the cyanide used in videotaped
experiments on dogs. Unconsummated plots by al Qaeda and its allies in
Jordan just before the turn of the millennium, and in Britain last
month, also involved cyanide.
C 2002 The Washington Post Company
Clintonized CIA Blocks Iraq-9/11 Evidence
The CIA is blocking critical intelligence that links Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, a former top terrorism adviser to ex-President Bill Clinton contends, and by doing so, she says, the agency is weakening President Bush's case for war against Iraq.
Asked about Salman Pak, the terrorist training camp near Baghdad where, according to a number of Iraqi defectors, al-Qaeda terrorists have practiced for years hijacking American airliners using the same methods employed on 9/11, Clinton Iraqi expert Laurie Mylroie told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg:
"There's a huge debate within the [Bush] administration. The Defense Department wants to bring out information like that. The CIA, which is responsible for dealing with terrorism, accommodated Clinton's desire not to hear about Iraq and terrorism, does not want that information to come out. It acts as Saddam's lawyer."
Mylroie served as Clinton's top adviser on Iraq during the 1992 campaign, and she has lectured on Middle Eastern terrorism and its origins at the Naval War College and Harvard University. Mylroie is also author of the book, "The War Against America," which details Baghdad's role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Just minutes before Bush's State of the Union address Tuesday night, Mylroie told Malzberg, "For any official statement to be made by the government, there is an interagency review process and the CIA blocks [the Salman Pak] information. Their response is to say, the defectors are not reliable - because they oppose Saddam you can't believe them."
What about satellite photos backing up accounts from Salman Pak defectors who describe a Boeing 707 parked on the ground, which they say serves as a classroom for Saddam's hijack trainees?
According to Mylroie, the CIA offers the bizarre alibi that the plane "could have been used by the Iraqis for counter-hijacking."
The Clinton terrorism expert says the White House is partly to blame for not forcing U.S. intelligence services to be more forthright about the information they have on Salman Pak, complaining, "Bush has failed to discipline the bureaucracy. And they have put their careers above Bush's career."
Asked to detail the precise role of Iraq in al-Qaeda operations directed against the U.S., Mylroie told WABC, "Al-Qaeda acts as a front for Iraqi intelligence. Al-Qaeda provides the ideology, the foot soldiers and the cover. And Iraqi intelligence provides the direction, training and expertise."
Commenting on reports that the White House would use the State of the Union address to reinforce the argument that Saddam has been working with al-Qaeda for years, Mylroie noted, "I'm glad [President Bush] is going to talk about Iraq and al-Qaeda. I have some concern that because powerful individuals and institutions are even now unwilling to acknowledge their error, the case is going to be a lot weaker than it could be."
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release October 23, 1995
TEXT OF A LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT
TO THE SPEAKER OF THE
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES AND THE
PRESIDENT PRO TEMPORE OF THE SENATE
October 23, 1995
Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)
Consistent with the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq
Resolution (Public Law 102-1), and as part of my effort to keep the
Congress fully informed, I am reporting on the status of efforts to obtain
Iraq's compliance with the resolutions adopted by the U.N. Security
Council.
Events in Iraq unfolded dramatically in the weeks following my August 3,
1995, letter to you on Iraq in a way that makes absolutely clear our firm
policy has been the correct one. In the first half of August, Iraqi
leaders, in both public statements and private remarks to U.N. officials,
threatened retaliation if the Security Council failed to lift sanctions by
August 31, 1995. The retaliation was not specified, but the Iraqi remarks
echoed those made before previous Iraqi acts of belligerence. Ambassador
Albright and her colleagues from the United Kingdom and France called upon
the Iraqi U.N. Ambassador, made clear that such threats were
unacceptable, and urged that Iraq implement all relevant Security Council
resolutions.
On August 9, 1995, two of Saddam Hussein's sons-in-law left Iraq and were
granted refuge in Amman. One of these men, Hussein Kamil, directed Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs while holding various high
level government positions during the 1980s and 1990s. Evidently fearful
of what the defectors might reveal, Saddam Hussein hurriedly invited U.N.
weapons inspectors to Baghdad to examine previously undisclosed
information on his weapons programs. Saddam Hussein offered the
extraordinary explanation that Hussein Kamil had hid all this information
from inspectors and Saddam Hussein himself.
While the international community had long understood that Saddam Hussein
had pursued a vigorous and extensive weapons program, the revelations were
still staggering. Ambassador Ekeus, head of the U.N. Special Commission
on Iraq, reported to the Council that, among other things, Iraq had placed
biological agents such as anthrax and botulin into bombs and missiles and
deployed these weapons of terror to military bases and airfields in
December 1990; lied about the extent of its biological weapons program as
recently as a few months ago; launched a crash program after the
invasion of Kuwait to produce nuclear weapons within a year; and continued
its weapons research and procurement activities, including work on uranium
enrichment, after the Security Council cease-fire resolutions, possibly
until quite recently.
The August 1995 revelations virtually erased what little credibility
Saddam Hussein may have had left. It seems clear that, were it not for
the defections, Iraq never would have revealed this information. Saddam
clearly planned to hide this weapons information until he could use it to
facilitate the reconstitution of his WMD programs. Saddam Hussein's
intentions are hardly peaceful. There is every reason to believe that
they are as aggressive and expansionist as they were in 1990. It is more
important than ever that the Security Council demand Iraqi compliance with
all relevant Council resolutions prior to any change to the sanctions
regime.
The August 1995 WMD program revelations have overshadowed the fact that
Iraq has done nothing to comply with its other obligations. Iraq
continues to drag its feet on its obligations to account for hundreds of
Kuwaitis and third country nationals missing since the invasion. Iraq has
not returned the millions of dollars worth of Kuwaiti property looted
during the occupation. The Iraqi Republican Guards still use a large
quantity of stolen Kuwaiti military equipment. Iraq continues to provide
safe haven for terrorist groups. Given this Iraqi track record of
disrespect for its international obligations, the Security Council
maintained the sanctions regime without change at the September 8, 1995,
review.
Saddam Hussein's unwillingness to comply with the norms of international
behavior extends to his regime's continuing threat to Iraqi citizens
throughout the country. We and our allies continue to enforce the no-fly
zones over northern and southern Iraq as part of our efforts to deter
Iraq's use of aircraft against its population. As reported by Max van der
Stoel, the Special Rapporteur of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights,
Iraq's repression of its southern Shi'a population continues, with
policies aimed at destroying the Marsh Arabs' way of life and important
environmental resources. Along with inter-national and local relief
organizations, we continue to provide humanitarian assistance to the
people of northern Iraq. We have facilitated talks between the two major
Kurdish groups in an effort to help them resolve their differences and
increase stability in northern Iraq.
The human rights situation throughout Iraq remains unchanged. Saddam
Hussein shows no signs of complying with U.N. Security Council Resolution
688, which demands that Iraq cease the repression of its own people. Iraq
announced an "amnesty" in July for all opponents of the regime, but the
announcement was seen by most Iraqis and by international human rights
observers as an ill-conceived ploy. The regime's recently announced plans
to amend the Iraqi constitution are viewed by Iraqi exiles as a
transparent effort to bless an extension of Saddam Hussein's presidency.
Last October, the U.N. Security Council adopted Resolution 949, which
demanded that Iraq not utilize its forces to threaten its neighbors or
U.N. operations, and that it not redeploy or enhance its military
capacity in southern Iraq. However, Saddam Hussein has continued to
conduct military activities that we believe are intended to threaten
Kuwait. The defections of Saddam Hussein's family members, coupled with
indications of heightened Iraqi military readiness, increased our
concerns that Iraqi leadership might lash out as it did last October when
we responded during Operation Vigilant Warrior. In this time of
uncertainty, we felt it prudent to improve the deterrence and
warfighting capability of U.S. forces within the U.S. Central Command
area of responsibility. Accordingly, the deployment of a mechanized task
force was accelerated to participate in a scheduled exercise in Kuwait
and a ground theater air control system was deployed to improve our
command and control capability within the region. Additionally, 13
prepositioning ships were moved into the Gulf to increase our deterrence
posture.
We continue to receive good support from the Gulf States in our sanctions
enforcement efforts. The Multinational Interception Force (MIF)
conducting the maritime enforcement of U.N. economic sanctions against
Iraq continues to serve magnificently. Since October 1994, the MIF has
diverted to various Gulf ports 14 sanctions-violating vessels, which were
carrying cargoes of oil or dates having an estimated cumulative value of
over $10 million. The multinational composition of the MIF has been
significantly strengthened. Ships from Belgium, New Zealand, Italy,
Canada, and the United Kingdom have been committed to participate in MIF
operations for the remainder of 1995.
The expeditious acceptance of two recently diverted sanctions-violating
vessels by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait has greatly contributed to the
deterrent effect of MIF sanctions enforcement operations and has also
freed enforcement vessels escorting the diverted vessels to return to
patrol operations. Panama and St. Vincent and the Grenadines have
deflagged three sanctions-violating vessels while Honduras has enacted
stricter sanctions enforcement measures and has continued deflagging
proceedings against vessels involved in violating Iraqi sanctions.
Security Council Resolution 687 affirmed that Iraq is liable under
international law for compensating the victims of its unlawful invasion
and occupation of Kuwait. Although the U.N. Compensation Commission
(UNCC) has approved some 355,000 individual awards against Iraq worth
about $1.39 billion, it has been able to pay only the first small awards
for serious personal injury or death (aggregating $2.7 million). The
remainder of the awards cannot be paid because the U.N. Compensation Fund
lacks sufficient funding. The awards are supposed to be financed by a
deduction from the proceeds of future Iraqi oil sales, once such sales
are permitted to resume. However, Iraq's refusal to meet the Security
Council's terms for a resumption of oil sales has left the UNCC without
adequate financial resources to pay the awards. Iraq's intransigence
means that the victims of its aggression remain uncompensated for their
losses 4 years after the end of the Gulf War.
To conclude, Iraq remains a serious threat to regional peace and
stability. I remain determined that Iraq comply fully with all its
obligations under the U.N. Security Council Resolutions. My
Administration will continue to oppose any relaxation of sanctions until
Iraq demonstrates peaceful intentions through its overall compliance with
the relevant resolutions.
I appreciate the support of the Congress for our efforts, and shall
continue to keep the Congress informed about this important issue.
Sincerely,
WILLIAM J. CLINTON
YEAH, RIGHT!!!! YADA, YADA, YADA
MP3 player? Why yes, but it's also my headset
Check out the Sony HBM-30
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted 7:19pm EST Fri Mar 14 2003 - submitted by Thomas
BLURB
Wow. This is my favorite new accessory in several years. Sony brings you the HBM-30, an MP3/ATRAC3 player (with the first drawback being that it reads Memory Stick Duo cards), but with Bluetooth. "Bluetooth?" you ask. Bluetooth. "What for?" you ask. Here's why. Picture this: you're walking down the street listening to some music. Your phone rings. The music mutes, and you look down at the display on your MP3 player to read the caller ID info. It's your boss, and you want to take the call. You press a button, and magically you take the call with the headphones you're already wearing. Sounds like one of those cool concepts you're always reading at a site like Geek.com. This time, though, it's a product. Granted, it's not out yet. I haven't known Sony to promote something like this and not follow through, though, so the vaporware chances here are slim. The second drawback to the unit is the apparent lack of options to get media onto your device. It looks like a Memory Stick drive is the only way. It's possible there may be a way to use Bluetooth, though that would take a while. The device itself doesn't have any other connectivity, though. I also can't figure out where the mic is, but I assume it's on the headphone cord. That's the final drawback--that I wouldn't even count, actually. Wireless headphones on this thing would make it quite possibly the coolest accessory ever, but it would also make it more expensive, and would mean charging the headphone regularly. I'll take a cord. The HBM-30 is due for release "in the second half of 2003." I hope that's vague enough for you. No word on price yet, but I'm guessing it won't be cheap. Check out some nice pics, and read more at Yahoo!.
USER COMMENTS 1 comment(s)
First Post (7:48pm EST Fri Mar 14 2003)
Sounds awesome
Wonder what operating systems it will be compatible with ? Knowing sony it would at least be linux and mac and of course windows - by
i believe ibiquity radio (digital terrestial radio) will be much, much more widespread than satellite (XM/Sirius) digital radio--IMHO. cksla
TEXAS INSTRUMENTS AND IBIQUITY ANNOUNCE AVAILABILITY OF INDUSTRY'S FIRST CHIP FOR HD RADIO™TECHNOLOGY
Programmable Baseband Chip and IBOC Digital Module Enable Fast Receiver Deployment
HOUSTON, TX and COLUMBIA, MD (August 12, 2002) -- The industry´s first digital baseband chip enabling HD Radio™ technology, formerly known as In Band On Channel (IBOC), is available today from Texas Instruments Incorporated (TI) (NYSE: TXN). The chip handles all of the baseband processing required for HD Radio™. The new product, which combines TI´s expertise in digital signal processing and iBiquity Digital Corporation´s patented IBOC digital AM and FM technology, trademarked HD RadioTM, will enable radio manufacturers to incorporate the new digital reception technology into home and car receivers for U.S. retail launch in 2003 and for automakers in 2004. An IBOC Digital Module (IDM), incorporating TI´s solution with all the hardware and software needed to process the HD Radio™ baseband signal, is also available from iBiquity for radio manufacturers to deploy in new digital receivers. (See www.ti.com/rd/dri200anno1).